# The King's English/Part 1/Chapter 1

CHAPTER I VOCABULARY
General
Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.
This general principle may be translated into practical rules in the domain of vocabulary as follows:—
Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
These rules are given roughly in order of merit; the last is also the least. It is true that it is often given alone, as a sort of compendium of all the others. In some sense it is that: the writer whose percentage of Saxon words is high will generally be found to have fewer words that are out of the way, long, or abstract, and fewer periphrases, than another; ​and conversely. But if, instead of his Saxon percentage's being the natural and undesigned consequence of his brevity (and the rest), those other qualities have been attained by his consciously restricting himself to Saxon, his pains will have been worse than wasted; the taint of preciosity will be over all he has written. Observing that translate is derived from Latin, and learning that the Elizabethans had another word for it, he will pull us up by englishing his quotations; he will puzzle the general reader by introducing his book with a foreword. Such freaks should be left to the Germans, who have by this time succeeded in expelling as aliens a great many words that were good enough for Goethe. And they, indeed, are very likely right, because their language is a thoroughbred one; ours is not, and can now never be, anything but a hybrid; foreword is (or may be) Saxon; we can find out in the dictionary whether it is or not; but preface is English, dictionary or no dictionary; and we want to write English, not Saxon. Add to this that, even if the Saxon criterion were a safe one, more knowledge than most of us have is needed to apply it. Few who were not deep in philology would be prepared to state that no word in the following list (extracted from the preface to the Oxford Dictionary) is English:—battle, beast, beauty, beef, bill, blue, bonnet, border, boss, bound, bowl, brace, brave, bribe, bruise, brush, butt, button. Dr. Murray observes that these 'are now no less "native", and no less important constituents of our vocabulary, than the Teutonic words'.
There are, moreover, innumerable pairs of synonyms about which the Saxon principle gives us no help. The first to hand are ere and before (both Saxon), save and except (both Romance), anent and about (both Saxon again). Here, if the 'Saxon' rule has nothing to say, the 'familiar' rule leaves no doubt. The intelligent reader whom our writer has to consider will possibly not know the linguistic facts; indeed he more likely than not takes save for a Saxon word. But ​he does know the reflections that the words, if he happens to be reading leisurely enough for reflection, excite in him. As he comes to save, he wonders, Why not except? At sight of ere he is irresistibly reminded of that sad spectacle, a mechanic wearing his Sunday clothes on a weekday. And anent, to continue the simile, is nothing less than a masquerade costume. The Oxford Dictionary says drily of the last word: 'Common in Scotch law phraseology, and affected by many English writers'; it might have gone further, and said '"affected" in any English writer'; such things are antiquarian rubbish, Wardour-Street English. Why not (as our imagined intelligent reader asked)—why not before, except, and about? Bread is the staff of life, and words like these, which are common and are not vulgar, which are good enough for the highest and not too good for the lowest, are the staple of literature. The first thing a writer must learn is, that he is not to reject them unless he can show good cause. Before and except, it must be clearly understood, have such a prescriptive right that to use other words instead is not merely not to choose these, it is to reject them. It may be done in poetry, and in the sort of prose that is half poetry: to do it elsewhere is to insult before, to injure ere (which is a delicate flower that will lose its quality if much handled), and to make one's sentence both pretentious and frigid.
It is now perhaps clear that the Saxon oracle is not infallible; it will sometimes be dumb, and sometimes lie. Nevertheless, it is not without its uses as a test. The words to be chosen are those that the probable reader is sure to understand without waste of time and thought; a good proportion of them will in fact be Saxon, but mainly because it happens that most abstract words—which are by our second rule to be avoided—are Romance. The truth is that all five rules would be often found to give the same answer about the same word or set of words. Scores of illustrations might be produced; let one suffice: In the contemplated eventuality ​(a phrase no worse than what any one can pick for himself out of his paper's leading article for the day) is at once the far-fetched, the abstract, the periphrastic, the long, and the Romance, for if so. It does not very greatly matter by which of the five roads the natural is reached instead of the monstrosity, so long as it is reached. The five are indicated because (1) they differ in directness, and (2) in any given case only one of them may be possible.
We will now proceed to a few examples of how not to write, roughly classified under the five headings, though, after what has been said, it will cause no surprise that most of them might be placed differently. Some sort of correction is suggested for each, but the reader will indulgently remember that to correct a bad sentence satisfactorily is not always possible; it should never have existed, that is all that can be said. In particular, sentences overloaded with abstract words are, in the nature of things, not curable simply by substituting equivalent concrete words; there can be no such equivalents; the structure has to be more or less changed.
1. Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
The old Imperial naval policy, which has failed conspicuously because it antagonized the unalterable supremacy of Colonial nationalism.—Times. (stood in the way of that national ambition which must always be uppermost in the Colonial mind)
Buttercups made a sunlight of their own, and in the shelter of scattered coppices the pale wind-flowers still dreamed in whiteness.—E. F. Benson.
We all know what an anemone is: whether we know what a wind-flower is, unless we happen to be Greek scholars, is quite doubtful.
The state of Poland, and the excesses committed by mobilized troops, have been of a far more serious nature than has been allowed to transpire.—Times. (come out)
Reform converses with possibilities, perchance with impossibilities; but here is sacred fact.—Emerson. (perhaps)
Tanners and users are strongly of opinion that there is no room for ​further enhancement, but on that point there is always room for doubt especially when the export phase is taken into consideration.—Times. (state of the export trade)
Witchcraft has been put a stop to by Act of Parliament; but the mysterious relations which it emblemed still continue.—Carlyle. (symbolized)
It will only have itself to thank if future disaster rewards its nescience of the conditions of successful warfare.—Outlook. (ignorance)
Continual vigilance is imperative on the public to ensure...—Times. (We must be ever on the watch)
These manoeuvres are by no means new, and their recrudescence is hardly calculated to influence the development of events.—Times. (the present use of them is not likely to be effective)
'I have no particular business at L———', said he; 'I was merely going thither to pass a day or two.'—Borrow. (there)
2. Prefer the concrete word (or rather expression) to the abstract. It may be here remarked that abstract expression and the excessive use of nouns are almost the same thing. The cure consists very much, therefore, in the clearing away of noun rubbish.
The general poverty of explanation as to the diction of particular phrases seemed to point in the same direction.—Cambridge University Reporter. (It was perhaps owing to this also that the diction of particular phrases was often so badly explained)
An elementary condition of a sound discussion is a frank recognition of the gulf severing two sets of facts.—Times. (There can be no sound discussion where the gulf severing two sets of facts is not frankly recognized)
The signs of the times point to the necessity of the modification of the system of administration.—Times. (It is becoming clear that the administrative system must be modified)
No year passes now without evidence of the truth of the statement that the work of government is becoming increasingly difficult.—Spectator. (Every year shows again how true it is that ...)
The first private conference relating to the question of the convocation of representatives of the nation took place yesterday.—Times. (on national representation)
There seems to have been an absence of attempt at conciliation between rival sects.—Daily Telegraph. (The sects seem never even to have tried mutual conciliation)
​Zeal, however, must not outrun discretion in changing abstract to concrete. Officer is concrete, and office abstract; but we do not promote to officers, as in the following quotation, but to offices—or, with more exactness in this context, to commissions.
Over 1,150 cadets of the Military Colleges were promoted to officers at the Palace of Tsarskoe Selo yesterday.—Times.
3. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. As the word case seems to lend itself particularly to abuse, we start with more than one specimen of it.
Inaccuracies were in many cases due to cramped methods of writing.—Cambridge University Reporter. (often)
The handwriting was on the whole good, with a few examples of remarkably fine penmanship in the case both of boys and girls.—Ibid. (by both boys ...)
Few candidates showed a thorough knowledge of the text of I Kings, and in many cases the answers lacked care.—Ibid. (many answers)
The matter will remain in abeyance until the Bishop has had time to become more fully acquainted with the diocese, and to ascertain which part of the city will be most desirable for residential purposes.—Times. (his residence)
M. Witte is taking active measures for the prompt preparation of material for the study of the question of the execution of the Imperial Ukase dealing with reforms.—Times. (actively collecting all information that may be needed before the Tsar's reform Ukase can be executed)
The Russian Government is at last face to face with the greatest crisis of the war, in the shape of the fact that the Siberian railway is no longer capable ...—Spectator. (for) or (:)
Mr. J—— O—— has been made the recipient of a silver medal.—Guernsey Advertiser. (received)
4. Prefer the short word to the long.
One of the most important reforms mentioned in the rescript is the unification of the organization of the judicial institutions and the guarantee for all the tribunals of the independence necessary for securing to all classes of the community equality before the law.—Times. (is that of the Courts, which need a uniform system, and the independence without which it is impossible for all men to be equal before the law)
I merely desired to point out the principal reason which I believe exists for the great exaggeration which is occasionally to be observed ​in the estimate of the importance of the contradiction between current Religion and current Science put forward by thinkers of reputation.—Balfour. (why, in my opinion, some well-known thinkers make out the contradiction between current Religion and current Science to be so much more important than it is)
Sir,—Will you permit me to homologate all you say to-day regarding that selfish minority of motorists who...—Times. (agree with)
On the Berlin Bourse to-day the prospect of a general strike was cheerfully envisaged.—Times. (faced)
5. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
Despite the unfavourable climatic conditions.—Guernsey Advertiser. (Bad as the weather has been)
By way of general rules for the choice of words, so much must suffice. And these must be qualified by the remark that what is suitable for one sort of composition may be unsuitable for another. The broadest line of this kind is that between poetry and prose; but with that we are not concerned, poetry being quite out of our subject. There are other lines, however, between the scientific and the literary styles, the dignified and the familiar. Our rendering of the passage quoted from Mr. Balfour, for instance, may be considered to fall below the dignity required of a philosophic essay. The same might, with less reason, be said of our simplified newspaper extracts; a great journal has a tone that must be kept up; if it had not been for that, we should have dealt with them yet more drastically. But a more candid plea for the journalist, and one not without weight, would be that he has not time to reduce what he wishes to say into a simple and concrete form. It is in fact as much easier for him to produce, as it is harder for his reader to understand, the slipshod abstract stuff that he does rest content with. But it may be suspected that he often thinks the length of his words and his capacity for dealing in the abstract to be signs of a superior mind. As long as that ​opinion prevails, improvement is out of the question. But if it could once be established that simplicity was the true ideal, many more writers would be found capable of coming near it than ever make any effort that way now. The fact remains, at any rate, that different kinds of composition require different treatment; but any attempt to go into details on the question would be too ambitious; the reader can only be warned that in this fact may be found good reasons for sometimes disregarding any or all of the preceding rules. Moreover, they must not be applied either so unintelligently as to sacrifice any really important shade of meaning, or so invariably as to leave an impression of monotonous and unrelieved emphasis.
The rest of this chapter will be devoted to more special and definite points—malaprops, neologisms, Americanisms, foreign words, bad formations, slang, and some particular words.
Malaprops
Before classifying, we define a malaprop as a word used in the belief that it has the meaning really belonging to another word that resembles it in some particular.
1. Words containing the same stem, but necessarily, or at least indisputably, distinguished by termination or prefix.
'She writes comprehensively enough when she writes to M. de Bassompierre: he who runs may read.' In fact, Ginevra's epistles to her wealthy kinsman were commonly business documents, unequivocal applications for cash.—C. Brontë.
The context proves that comprehensibly is meant.
The working of the staff at the agent's disposal was to a great extent voluntary, and, therefore, required all the influence of judicial management in order to avoid inevitable difficulties.—Times. (judicious)
A not uncommon blunder.
By all means let us have bright, hearty, and very reverend services.—Daily Telegraph. (reverent)
Not uncommon.
He chuckled at his own perspicuity.—Corelli.
​If the writer had a little more perspicuity he would have known that the Church Congress would do nothing of the kind.—Daily Telegraph.
Perspicuity is clearness or transparency: insight is perspicacity. -uity of style, -acity of mind. Very common.
Selected in the beginning, I know, for your great ability and trustfulness.—Dickens. (trustworthiness)
Wise, firm, faithless; secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute and insensate—withal perfectly decorous—what more could be desired?—C. Brontë.
Apparently for insensible in the meaning hardhearted. Though modern usage fluctuates, it seems to tend towards the meaning, stupidly unmoved by prudence or by facts; at any rate acute and insensate are incompatible.
In the meantime the colossal advertisement in the German Press of German aims, of German interests, and of German policy incontinently proceeds.—Times.
The idiomatic sense of incontinently is immediately; it seems here to be used for continually.
I was awaiting with real curiosity to hear the way in which M. Loubet would to-day acquit himself.—Times. (waiting)
Awaiting is always transitive.
But they too will feel the pain just where you feel it now, and they will bethink themselves the only unhappy on the earth.—Crockett.
There is no sort of authority for bethink—like think—with object and complement. To bethink oneself is to remember, or to hit upon an idea.
And Pizarro ... established the city of Arequipa, since arisen to such commercial celebrity.—Prescott.
Arethusa arose; a difficulty arises; but to greatness we can only rise—unless, indeed, we wake to find ourselves famous; then we do arise to greatness.
2. Words like the previous set, except that the differentiation may possibly be disputed.
The long drought left the torrent of which I am speaking, and such others, in a state peculiarly favourable to observance of their least action on the mountains from which they descend.—Ruskin. (observation)
​Observance is obedience, compliance, &c. The Oxford Dictionary recognizes observance in the sense of watching, but gives no authority for it later than 1732 except another passage from Ruskin; the natural conclusion is that he accidentally failed to recognize a valuable differentiation long arrived at.
It is physical science, and experience, that man ought to consult in religion, morals, legislature, as well as in knowledge and the arts.—Morley. (legislation)
Legislature is the legislative body—in England, King, Lords, and Commons. To call back the old confusion is an offence.
The apposite display of the diamonds usually stopped the tears that began to flow hereabouts; and she would remain in a complaisant state until...—Dickens. (complacent)
Our Correspondent adds that he is fully persuaded that Rozhdestvensky has nothing more to expect from the complacency of the French authorities.—Times. (complaisance)
Complaisant is over polite, flattering, subservient, &c. Complacent means contented, satisfied.
In the spring of that year the privilege was withdrawn from the four associated booksellers, and the continuance of the work strictly prohibited.—Morley.
Continuation is the noun of continue, go on with: continuance of continue, remain. With continuance the meaning would be that the already published volumes (of Diderot's Encyclopaedia) were to be destroyed; but the meaning intended is that the promised volumes were not to be gone on with—which requires continuation. Again, the next two extracts, from one page, show Mr. Morley wrongly substituting continuity, which only means continuousness, for continuance.
Having arrived at a certain conclusion with regard to the continuance ... of Mr. Parnell's leadership...—Gladstone.
The most cynical ... could not fall a prey to such a hallucination as to suppose ... that either of these communities could tolerate ... so impenitent an affront as the unruffled continuity of the stained leadership.—Morley.
The Rev. Dr. Usher said he believed the writer of the first letter to be earnest in his inquiry, and agreed with him that the topic of it was transcendentally important.—Daily Telegraph. ​Transcendently means in a superlative degree: transcendentally is a philosophic term for independently of experience, &c.
Until at last, gathered altogether again, they find their way down to the turf.—Ruskin. (all together)
At such times ... Jimmie's better angel was always in the ascendency.—Windsor Magazine.
Was in the ascendant: had an ascendency over.
The inconsistency and evasion of the attitude of the Government.—Spectator.
Evasiveness the quality: evasion a particular act.
The requisition for a life of Christianity is 'walk in love'.—Daily Telegraph.
Requisite or requirement, the thing required: requisition, the act of requiring it.
We will here merely chronicle the procession of events.—Spectator. (progress or succession)
I was able to watch the Emperor during all these interviews, and noticed the forcible manner in which he spoke, especially to the Sultan's uncle, who came from Fez especially.—Times. (specially)
As it stands, it implies that he came chiefly from Fez, but from other places in a minor degree; it is meant to imply that he came for this particular interview, and had no other motive. The differentiation of spec- and espec- is by no means complete yet, but some uses of each are already ludicrous. Roughly, spec- means particular as opposed to general, espec- particular as opposed to ordinary; but usage must be closely watched.
That it occurs in violence to police regulations is daily apparent.—Guernsey Advertiser. (violation of)
In the field it aims at efforts of unexpected and extreme violence; the research of hostile masses, their defeat by overwhelming and relentless assault, and their wholesale destruction by rigorous pursuit.—Times. (discovery)
The object of research is laws, principles, facts, &c., not concrete things or persons. Entomological research, for instance, does not look for insects, but for facts about insects.
3. Give-and-take forms, in which there are two words, with ​different constructions, that might properly be used, and one is given the construction of the other.
A few companies, comprised mainly of militiamen.—Times. (composed of? comprising?)
The Novoe Vremya thinks the Tsar's words will undoubtedly instil the Christians of Macedonia with hope.—Times. (inspire them with hope? instil hope into them?)
He appreciated the leisurely solidity, the leisurely beauty of the place, so innate with the genius of the Anglo-Saxon.—E. F. Benson. (genius innate in the place? the place instinct with genius?)
4. Words having properly no connexion with each other at all, but confused owing to superficial resemblance.
Mr. Barton walked forth in cape and boa, to read prayers at the workhouse, euphuistically called the 'College'.—Eliot. (euphemistically)
Euphemism is slurring over badness by giving it a good name: euphuism is a literary style full of antithesis and simile. A pair of extracts (Friedrich, vol. iv, pp. 5 and 36) will convince readers that these words are dangerous:
Hence Bielfeld goes to Hanover, to grin-out euphuisms, and make graceful court-bows to our sublime little Uncle there.—Carlyle.
Readers may remember, George II has been at Hanover for some weeks past; Bielfeld diligently grinning euphemisms and courtly graciosities to him.—Carlyle.
Troops capable of contesting successfully against the forces of other nations.—Times.
Though there is authority, chiefly old, for it, good general usage is against contest without an object—contest the victory, &c. And as there is no possible advantage in writing it, with contend ready to hand, it is better avoided in the intransitive sense.
In the present self-deprecatory mood in which the English people find themselves.—Spectator. (self-depreciatory)
Depreciate, undervalue: deprecate, pray against. A bad but very common blunder.
'An irreparable colleague,' Mr. Gladstone notes in his diary.—Morley. (irreplaceable)
​No dead colleague is reparable—though his loss may or may not be so—this side the Day of Judgement.
Surely he was better employed in plying the trades of tinker and smith than in having resource to vice, in running after milkmaids, for example.—Borrow. (recourse)
You may indeed have recourse to a resource, but not vice versa. You may also resort to, which makes the confusion easier.
What she would say to him, how he would take it, even the vaguest predication of their discourse, was beyond him to guess.—E. F. Benson. (prediction)
Predication has nothing to do with the future; it is a synonym, used especially in logic, for statement. The mistake is generally whipped out of schoolboys in connexion with praedīcere and praedĭcare.
5. Words whose meaning is misapprehended without apparent cause. The hankering of ignorant writers after the unfamiliar or imposing leads to much of this. We start with two uses of which correct and incorrect examples are desirable: provided, where if is required; and to eke out in wrong senses. Provided adorns every other page of George Borrow; we should have left it alone as an eccentricity of his, if we had not lately found the wrong use more than once in The Times.
Provided is a small district in the kingdom of if; it can never be wrong to write if instead of provided: to write provided instead of if will generally be wrong, but now and then an improvement in precision. So much is clear; to define the boundaries of the district is another matter; we might be wiser merely to appeal to our readers whether all the examples to be quoted, except one, are not wrong. But that would be cowardly; we lay down, then, that (a) the clause must be a stipulation, i. e., a demand yet to be fulfilled, (b) there must be a stipulator, who (c) must desire, or at least insist upon, the fulfilment of it.
​Ganganelli would never have been poisoned provided he had had nephews about to take care of his life.—Borrow.
There is no stipulator or stipulation. Grammar would have allowed Providence to say to him 'You shall not be poisoned, provided you surround yourself with nephews'.
The kicks and blows which my husband Launcelot was in the habit of giving me every night, provided I came home with less than five shillings.—Borrow.
Launcelot, the stipulator, does not desire the fulfilment. If kisses are substituted for kicks and blows, and more for less, the sentence will stand.
She and I agreed to stand by each other, and be true to old Church of England, and to give our governors warning, provided they tried to make us renegades.—Borrow.
The stipulators, she and I, do not desire the fulfilment. Not to give warning, provided they did not try, would be English. There is similar confusion between the requirements of negative and positive in the next:
A society has just been founded at Saratoff, the object being, as the members declare in a manifesto to the Liberals, to use violent methods and even bombs provided the latter do so themselves.—Times.
In these circumstances the chances are that the direction to proceed to Vladivostok at all costs, provided such instruction were ever given, may have been reconsidered.—Times. (if indeed ... was)
There is no stipulation; it is only a question of past fact.
What will the War Council at the capital decide provided the war is to continue?... The longer Linevitch can hold his position the better, provided he does not risk a serious action.—Times. (if, or assuming that)
There is no stipulation, stipulator, or desire—only a question of future fact. The second provided in this passage is quite correct. The Times writer—or the Russian War Council, his momentary client—insists that Linevitch shall not run risks, and encourages him, if that stipulation is fulfilled, to hold on.
To eke out means to increase, supplement, or add to. It may be called a synonym for any of these verbs; but it must be remembered that no synonyms are ever precise equivalents. ​The peculiarity of eke out is that it implies difficulty; in technical language, agreeing with supplement in its denotation, it has the extra connotation of difficulty. But it does not mean to make, nor to endure. From its nature, it will very seldom be used (correctly), though it conceivably might, without the source of the addition's being specified. In the first of the quotations, it is rightly used; in the second it is given the wrong meaning of make, and in the last the equally wrong one of endure.
A writer with a story to tell that is not very fresh usually ekes it out by referring as much as possible to surrounding objects.—H. James.
She had contrived, taking one year with another, to eke out a tolerably sufficient living since her husband's demise.—Dickens.
Yes, we do believe, or would the clergy eke out an existence which is not far removed from poverty?—Daily Telegraph.
Next, some isolated illustrations of our present heading:
'There are many things in the commonwealth of Nowhere, which I rather wish than hope to see adopted in our own.' It was with these words of characteristic irony that More closed the great work.—J. R. Green.
The word irony is one of the worst abused in the language; but it was surely never more gratuitously imported than in this passage. There could be no more simple, direct, and literal expression of More's actual feeling than his words. Now any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same. The only way to make out that we have irony here is to suppose that More assumed that the vulgar would think that he was speaking ironically, whereas he was really serious—a very topsy-turvy explanation. Satire, however, with which irony is often confused, would have passed.
A literary tour de force, a recrudescence, two or three generations later, of the very respectable William Lamb (afterwards Lord Melbourne), his unhappy wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Lord Byron.—Times. (reincarnation, avatar, resurrection?)
Recrudescence is becoming quite a fashionable journalistic ​word. It properly means the renewed inflammation of a wound, and so the breaking out again of an epidemic, &c. It may reasonably be used of revolutionary or silly opinions: to use it of persons or their histories is absurd.
A colonel on the General Staff, while arguing for a continuation of the struggle on metaphysical grounds, admitted to me that even if the Russians regained Manchuria they would never succeed in colonizing it.... The Bourse Gazette goes still further. It says that war for any definite purpose ceased with the fall of Mukden, and that its continuation is apparent not from any military or naval actions, but from the feeling of depression which is weighing upon all Russians and the reports of the peace overtures.—Times.
We can suggest no substitute for metaphysical. Though we have long known metaphysics for a blessed and mysterious word, this is our first meeting with it in war or politics. The 'apparent continuation', however, seems darkly to hint at the old question between phenomena and real existence, so that perhaps we actually are in metaphysics all the time.
In a word, M. Witte was always against all our aggressive measures in the Far East.... M. Witte, who was always supported by Count Lamsdorff, has no share in the responsibility of all that has transpired.—Times. (happened)
As a synonym for become known, transpire is journalistic and ugly, but may pass: as a synonym for happen, it is a bad blunder, but not uncommon.
It was, of course, Mrs. Sedley's opinion that her son would demean himself by a marriage with an artist's daughter.—Thackeray.
The actors who raddle their faces and demean themselves on the stage.—Stevenson. (lower, degrade)
To demean oneself, with adverb of manner attached, is to behave in that manner. The other use has probably arisen by a natural confusion with the adjective mean; one suspects that it has crept into literature by being used in intentional parody of vulgar speech, till it was forgotten that it was parody. But perhaps when a word has been given full citizen rights by Thackeray and Stevenson, it is too late to expel it.
​'Oxoniensis' approaches them with courage, his thoughts are expressed in plain, unmistakable language, howbeit with the touch of a master hand.—Daily Telegraph.
Albeit means though: howbeit always nevertheless, beginning not a subordinate clause, but a principal sentence. A good example of the danger attending ignorant archaism.
In a word, Count von Bülow, who took a very rosy view of the agreement last year, now suddenly discovers that he was slighted, and is indignant in the paulo-post future tense.—Times.
This jest would be pedantic in any case, since no one but schoolmasters and schoolboys knows what the paulo-post-future tense is. Being the one represented in English by I shall have been killed, it has, further, no application here; paulo-ante-past tense, if there were such a thing, might have meant something. As it is, pedantry is combined with inaccuracy.
6. Words used in unaccustomed, though not impossible, senses or applications. This is due sometimes to that avoidance of the obvious which spoils much modern writing, and sometimes to an ignorance of English idiom excusable in a foreigner, but not in a native.
No one can imagine non-intervention carried through so desperate and so consequential a war as this.—Greenwood.
If important or fateful will not do, it is better to write a war so desperate and so pregnant with consequences than to abuse a word whose idiomatic uses are particularly well marked. A consequential person is one who likes to exhibit his consequence; a consequential amendment is one that is a natural consequence or corollary of another.
Half of Mr. Roosevelt's speech deals with this double need of justice and strength, the other half being a skilled application of Washington's maxims to present circumstances.—Times. (skilful)
Idiom confines skilled, except in poetry, almost entirely to the word labour, and to craftsmen—a skilled mason, for instance.
​It is to the Convention, therefore, that reference must be made for an intelligence of the principles on which the Egyptian Government has acted during the present war.—Times. (understanding)
No one can say why intelligence should never be followed by an objective genitive, as grammarians call this; but nearly every one knows, apart from the technical term, that it never is. Idiom is an autocrat, with whom it is always well to keep on good terms.
Easier to reproduce, in its concision, is the description of the day.—H. James. (conciseness)
Concision is a term in theology, to which it may well be left. In criticism, though its use is increasing, it has still an exotic air.
7. Simple love of the long word.
The wide public importance of these proposals (customs regulations) has now been conceived in no desultory manner.—Guernsey Advertiser.
We have touched shortly upon some four dozen of what we call malaprops. Now possible malaprops, in our extended sense, are to be reckoned not by the dozen, but by the million. Moreover, out of our four dozen, not more than some half a dozen are uses that it is worth any one's while to register individually in his mind for avoidance. The conclusion of which is this: we have made no attempt at cataloguing the mistakes of this sort that must not be committed; every one must construct his own catalogue by care, observation, and the resolve to use no word whose meaning he is not sure of—even though that resolve bring on him the extreme humiliation of now and then opening the dictionary. Our aim has been, not to make a list, but to inculcate a frame of mind.
Neologisms
Most people of literary taste will say on this point 'It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh'. They are Liberal-Conservatives, their liberalism being general and theoretic, their conservatism particular and practical. And indeed, if no new words were to appear, it would be a sign that the language was moribund; ​but it is well that each new word that does appear should be severely scrutinized.
The progress of arts and sciences gives occasion for the large majority of new words; for a new thing we must have a new name; hence, for instance, motor, argon, appendicitis. It is interesting to see that the last word did not exist, or was at least too obscure to be recorded, when the Oxford Dictionary began to come out in 1888; we cannot do without it now. Nor is there in the same volume any sign of argon, which now has three pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to itself. The discoverers of it are to be thanked for having also invented for it a name that is short, intelligible to those at least who know Greek, free of barbarism, and above all pronounceable. As to barbarism, it might indeed be desired that the man of science should always call in the man of Greek composition as godfather to his gas or his process; but it is a point of less importance. Every one has been told at school how telegram ought to be telegrapheme; but by this time we have long ceased to mourn for the extra syllable, and begun seriously to consider whether the further shortening into wire has not been resisted as long as honour demands.
Among other arts and sciences, that of lexicography happens to have found convenient a neologism that may here be used to help in the very slight classification required for the new words we are more concerned with—that is, those whose object is literary or general, and not scientific. A 'nonce-word (and the use might be extended to 'nonce-phrase' and 'nonce-sense'—the latter not necessarily, though it may be sometimes, equivalent to nonsense) is one that is constructed to serve a need of the moment. The writer is not seriously putting forward his word as one that is for the future to have an independent existence; he merely has a fancy to it for this once. The motive may be laziness, avoidance of the obvious, love of precision, or desire for a brevity or pregnancy that the language as at present constituted does not seem to him ​to admit of. The first two are bad motives, the third a good, and the last a mixed one. But in all cases it may be said that a writer should not indulge in these unless he is quite sure he is a good writer.
The couch-bunk under the window to conceal the summerly recliner.—Meredith.
The adjective is a nonce-sense, summerly elsewhere meaning 'such as one expects in summer'; the noun is a nonce-word.
In Christian art we may clearly trace a parallel regenesis.—Spencer.
Opposition on the part of the loquently weaker of the pair.—Meredith.
Picturesquities.—Sladen.
The verberant twang of a musical instrument.—Meredith.
A Russian army is a solid machine, as many war-famous generals have found to their cost.—Times.
Such compounds are of course much used; but they are ugly when they are otiose; it might be worth while to talk of a war-famous brewer, or of a peace-famous general, just as we often have occasion to speak of a carpet-knight, but of a carpet-broom only if it is necessary to guard against mistake.
Russia's disposition is aggressive...Japan may conquer, but she will not aggress.—Times.
Though aggress is in the dictionary, every one will feel that it is rare enough to be practically a neologism, and here a nonce-word. The mere fact that it has never been brought into common use, though so obvious a form, is sufficient condemnation.
She did not answer at once, for, in her rather super-sensitized mood, it seemed to her...—E. F. Benson.
The word is, we imagine, a loan from photography. Expressions so redolent of the laboratory are as well left alone unless the metaphor they suggest is really valuable. Perhaps, if rather and super- were cancelled against each other, sensitive might suffice.
Notoriously and unctuously rectitudinous.—Westminster Gazette.
Some readers will remember the origin of this in Cecil Rhodes's famous remark about the unctuous rectitude of British statesmen, and the curious epidemic of words in ​-ude that prevailed for some months in the newspapers, especially the Westminster Gazette. Correctitude, a needless variant for correctness, has not perished like the rest.
We only refer to it again because Mr. Balfour clearly thinks it necessary to vindicate his claims to correctitude. This desire for correctitude is amusingly illustrated in the Outlook this week, which...— Westminster Gazette.
All these formations, whether happy or the reverse, may be assumed to be conscious ones: the few that now follow—we shall call them new even if they have a place in dictionaries, since they are certainly not current— are possibly unconscious:
The minutes to dinner-time were numbered, and they briskened their steps back to the house.— E. F. Benson. (quickened)
He was in some amazement at himself...remindful of the different nature...—Meredith. (mindful)
Remindful should surely mean 'which reminds', not 'who remembers'.
Persistent insuccess, however, did not prevent a repetition of the same question.—Times. (failure)
The best safeguard against any deplacement of the centre of gravity in the Dual Monarchy.—Times. (displacement)
Which would condemn the East to a long period of unquiet.—Times. (unrest)
Mere slips, very likely. If it is supposed that therefore they are not worth notice, the answer is that they are indeed quite unimportant in a writer who allows himself only one such slip in fifty or a hundred pages; but one who is unfortunate enough to make a second before the first has faded from the memory becomes at once a suspect. We are uneasily on the watch for his next lapse, wonder whether he is a foreigner or an Englishman not at home in the literary language, and fall into that critical temper which is the last he would choose to be read in.
The next two examples are quite distinct from these—words clearly created, or exhumed, because the writer feels that his style requires galvanizing into energy:
​A man of a cold, perseverant character.—Carlyle.
Robbed of the just fruits of her victory by the arbitrary and forceful interference of outside Powers.— Times.
All the specimens yet mentioned have been productions of individual caprice: the writer for some reason or other took a liberty, or made a mistake, with one expression; he might as well, or as ill, have done it with another, enjoying his little effect, or taking his little nap at this moment or at that. But there are other neologisms of a very different kind, which come into existence as the crystallization of a political tendency or a movement in ideas. Prime Minister, Cabinet, His Majesty's Opposition, have been neologisms of this kind in their day, all standing for particular developments of the party system, and all of them, probably, in more or less general use before they made their way into books. Such words in our day are racial, and intellectuals. The former is an ugly word, the strangeness of which is due to our instinctive feeling that the termination -al has no business at the end of a word that is not obviously Latin. Nevertheless the new importance that has been attached for the last half century to the idea of common descent as opposed to that of mere artificial nationality has made a word necessary. Racial is not the word that might have been ornamental as well as useful; but it is too well established to be now uprooted. Intellectuals is still apologized for in 1905 by The Spectator as 'a convenient neologism'. It is already familiar to all who give any time to observing continental politics, though the Index to the Encyclopaedia (1903) knows it not. A use has not yet been found for the word in home politics, as far as we have observed; but the fact that intellect in any country is recognized as a definite political factor is noteworthy; and we should hail intellectuals as a good omen for the progress of the world.
These, and the scientific, are the sort of neologism that may fairly be welcomed. But there is this distinction. With ​the strictly scientific words, writers have not the power to decide whether they shall accept them or not; they must be content to take submissively what the men of science choose to give them, they being as much within their rights in naming what they have discovered or invented as an explorer in naming a new mountain, or an American founder a new city. Minneapolis, Pikeville, and Pennsylvania, may have a barbaric sound, but there they are; so telegram, or aesthophysiology. The proud father of the latter (Herbert Spencer) confesses to having docked it of a syllable; and similarly Mr. Lecky writes of 'a eudaemometer measuring with accuracy the degrees of happiness realized by men in different ages'; consequently there will be some who will wish these long words longer, though more who will wish them shorter; but grumble as we may, the patria potestas is indefeasible. On the other hand, with such words as racial, intellectuals, it is open to any writer, if he does not like the word that threatens to occupy an obviously vacant place, to offer a substitute, or at least to avoid giving currency to what he disapproves. It will be remembered that when it was proposed to borrow from France what we now know as the closure, it seemed certain for some time that with the thing we should borrow the name, clôture; a press campaign resulted in closure, for which we may be thankful. The same might have been done for, or rather against, racial, if only some one had thought of it in time.
Americanisms
Though we take these separately from foreign words, which will follow next, the distinction is purely pro forma; Americanisms are foreign words, and should be so treated. To say this is not to insult the American language. If any one were asked to give an Americanism without a moment's delay, he would be more likely than not to mention I guess. Inquiry into it would at once bear out the American contention ​that what we are often rude enough to call their vulgarisms are in fact good old English. I gesse is a favourite expression of Chaucer's, and the sense he sometimes gives it is very finely distinguished from the regular Yankee use. But though it is good old English, it is not good new English. If we use the phrase—parenthetically, that is, like Chaucer and the Yankees—, we have it not from Chaucer, but from the Yankees, and with their, not his, exact shade of meaning. It must be recognized that they and we, in parting some hundreds of years ago, started on slightly divergent roads in language long before we did so in politics. In the details of divergence, they have sometimes had the better of us. Fall is better on the merits than autumn, in every way: it is short, Saxon (like the other three season names), picturesque; it reveals its derivation to every one who uses it, not to the scholar only, like autumn; and we once had as good a right to it as the Americans; but we have chosen to let the right lapse, and to use the word now is no better than larceny.
The other side of this is that we are entitled to protest when any one assumes that because a word of less desirable character is current American, it is therefore to be current English. There are certain American verbs that remind Englishmen of the barbaric taste illustrated by such town names as Memphis and those mentioned in the last section. A very firm stand ought to be made against placate, transpire, and antagonize, all of which have English patrons.
There is a real danger of our literature's being americanized, and that not merely in details of vocabulary—which are all that we are here directly concerned with—but in its general tone. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is a very great writer, and a patriotic; his influence is probably the strongest that there is at present in the land; but he and his school are americanizing us. His style exhibits a sort of remorseless and scientific ​efficiency in the choice of epithets and other words that suggests the application of coloured photography to description; the camera is superseding the human hand. We quote two sentences from the first page of a story, and remark that in pre-Kipling days none of the words we italicize would have been likely; now, they may be matched on nearly every page of an 'up-to-date' novelist:
Between the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-colotired rocks on the beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war bathing.—Kipling.
Far out, a three-funnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in from the deep sea.—Kipling.
The words are, as we said, extremely efficient; but the impulse that selects them is in harmony with American, not with English, methods, and we hope it may be developed in America rather than here. We cannot go more fully into the point in a digression like this. But though we have digressed, it has not been quite without purpose: any one who agrees with us in this will see in it an additional reason for jealously excluding American words and phrases. The English and the American language and literature are both good things; but they are better apart than mixed.
Fix up (organize), back of (behind), anyway (at any rate), standpoint (point of view), back-number (antiquated), right along (at once), some (to some extent), just (quite, or very——'just lovely'), may be added as typical Americanisms of a different kind from either fall or antagonize; but it is not worth while to make a large collection; every one knows an Americanism, at present, when he sees it; how long that will be true is a more anxious question.
And, back of all that, a circumstance which gave great force to all that either has ever said, the rank and file, the great mass of the people on either side, were determined...–Choate.
​Hand-power, back-number, flint-and-steel reaping machines.—Kipling.
Some of them have in secret approximated their standpoint to that laid down by Count Tisza in his programme speech.—Times.
We close the section by putting placate and antagonize in the pillory. It may be remarked that the latter fits in well enough with Emerson's curious bizarre style. Another use of just is pilloried also, because it is now in full possession of our advertisement columns, and may be expected to insinuate itself into the inside sheets before long.
When once placated the Senators will be reluctant to deprive honest creditors of their rights.—Spectator.
It is true the subject is American politics; but even so, we should have liked to see this stranger received ceremoniously as well as politely, that is, with quotation marks; the italics are ours only.
The old Imperial naval policy, which has failed conspicuously because it antagonized the unalterable supremacy of Colonial nationalism.—Times.
If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate.—Emerson.
Have you ever thought just how much it would mean to the home if...—Advertisemenets passim.
Foreign Words
The usual protest must be made, to be treated no doubt with the usual disregard. The difficulty is that some French, Latin, and other words are now also English, though the fiction that they are not is still kept up by italics and (with French words) conscientious efforts at pronunciation. Such are tête-à-tête, ennui, status quo, raison d'être, eirenicon, négligé, and perhaps hundreds more. The novice who is told to avoid foreign words, and then observes that these English words are used freely, takes the rule for a counsel of perfection—not accepted by good writers, and certainly not to be accepted by him, who is sometimes hard put to it for the ornament that he feels his matter deserves. Even with the ​best will in the world, he finds that there are many words of which he cannot say whether they are yet English or not, as gancherie, bêtise, camaraderie, soupçon, so that there is no drawing the line. He can only be told that all words not English in appearance are in English writing ugly and not pretty, and that they are only justified (1) if they afford much the shortest or clearest, if not the only way to the meaning (this is usually true of the words we have called really English), or (2) if they have some special appropriateness of association or allusion in the sentence they stand in. This will be illustrated by some of the diplomatic words given below, and by the quotation containing the word chasseur.
Some little assistance may, however, be given on details.
1. To say distrait instead of absent or absent-minded, bien entendu for of course, sans for without (it is, like I guess, good old English but not good English), quand même for anyhow, penchant for liking or fancy, rédaction for editing or edition, coûte que coûte for at all costs, Schadenfreude for malicious pleasure, œuvre for work, alma mater (except with strong extenuating circumstances) for University—is pretension and nothing else. The substitutes we have offered are not insisted upon; they may be wrong, or not the best; but English can be found for all these. Moreover, what was said of special association or allusion may apply; to call a luncheon déjeuner, however, as in the appended extract, because it is to be eaten by Frenchmen, is hardly covered by this, though it is a praiseworthy attempt at what the critics call giving an atmosphere.
It was resolved that on the occasion of the visit of the French Fleet in August the Corporation should offer the officers an appropriate reception and invite them to a déjeuner at the Guildhall.—Times.
But speaking broadly, what a writer effects by using these ornaments is to make us imagine him telling us he is a wise fellow and one that hath everything handsome about him, including a gentlemanly acquaintance with the French language. Some illustrations follow:
​Motorists lose more than they know by bêtises of this kind.—Times.
His determination to conduct them to a successful issue coûte que coûte might result in complications.—Times.
The gloom which the Russian troubles have caused at Belgrade has to some extent been lightened by a certain Schadenfreude over the difficulties with which the Hungarian crisis threatens the neighbouring Monarchy.—Times.
A recent reperusal...left the impression which is so often produced by the exhibition in bulk of the œuvre of a deceased Royal Academician—it has emphasized Schiller's deficiencies without laying equal emphasis on his merits.—Times.
The following are instances of less familiar French or Latin words used wantonly:
So, one would have thought, the fever of New York was abated here, even as the smoke of the city was but a gray tache on the horizon.—E. F. Benson.
Either we know that tache means stain, or we do not. If we do, we cannot admire our novelist's superior learning: if we do not, we must be doubtful whether we grasp the whole of his possibly valuable meaning. His calculation is perhaps that we shall know it, and shall feel complimented by his just confidence in us.
When the normal convention governing the relations between victors and vanquished is duly re-established, it will be time to chronicle the conjectures relating to peace in some other part of a journal than that devoted to faits divers.—Times.
It is true The Times does not condescend to an Odds-and-Ends, or a Miscellaneous column; but many other English newspapers do, under various titles; and the Times writer might have thrown the handkerchief to one of them.
But times have changed, and this procedure enters into the category of vieille escrime when not employed by a master hand and made to correspond superficially with facts.—Times.
In relation to military organization we are still in the flourishing region of the vieilles perruques.—Times.
The users of these two varieties, who, to judge from the title at the head of their articles, are one and the same person, must have something newer than vicux jeu. Just as that has begun to be intelligible to the rest of us, it becomes itself vieux ​jeu to them. It is like the man of highest fashion changing his hat-brim because the man of middling fashion has found the pattern of it.
The familiar gentleman burglar, who, having played wolf to his fellows qua financier, journalist, and barrister, undertakes to raise burglary from being a trade at least to the lupine level of those professions.—Times.
It is quite needless, and hardly correct, to use qua instead of as except where a sharp distinction is being made between two coexistent functions or points of view, as in the next quotation. Uganda needs quite different treatment if it is regarded as a country from what it needs as a campaigning ground:
For this point must be borne constantly in mind—the money spent to date was spent with a view only to strategy. The real development of the country qua country must begin to-day.—Times.
The reader would not care to have my impressions thereanent; and, indeed, it would not be worth while to record them, as they were the impressions of an ignorance crasse.—C. Brontë.
The writer who allows Charlotte Brontë's extraordinarily convincing power of presentment to tempt him into imitating her many literary peccadilloes will reap disaster. Thereanent is as annoying as ignorance crasse.
It was he who by doctoring the Ems dispatch in 1870 converted a chamade into a fanfaronnade and thus rendered the Franco-German war inevitable.—Times.
We can all make a shrewd guess at the meaning of fanfaronnade: how many average readers have the remotest idea of what a chamade is? and is the function of newspapers to force upon us against our will the buying of French dictionaries?
2. Among the diplomatic words, entente may pass as suggesting something a little more definite and official than good understanding; démenti because, though it denotes the same as denial or contradiction, it connotes that no more ​credence need be given to it than is usually given to the 'honest men sent to lie abroad for the good of their country'; as for ballon d'essai, we see no advantage in it over kite, and flying a kite, which are good English; it is, however, owing to foreign correspondents' perverted tastes, already more familiar. The words italicized in the following quotations are still more questionable:
The two Special Correspondents in Berlin of the leading morning newspapers, the Matin and the Écho de Paris, report a marked détente in the situation.—Times.
Entente is comprehensible to every one; but with détente many of us are in the humiliating position of not knowing whether to be glad or sorry.
All the great newspapers have insisted upon the inopportuneness of the démarche of William II.—Times. (proceeding)
The entourage and counsellors of the Sultan continue to remain sceptical.—Times.
Mere laziness, even if the word means anything different from counsellors; but the writer has at least given us an indication that it is only verbiage, by revealing his style in continue to remain.
In diplomatic circles the whole affair is looked upon as an acte de malveillance towards the Anglo-French entente.— Times.
You have been immensely amused, cyrenaically enjoying the moment for the moment's sake, but looking before and after (as you cannot help looking in the theatre) you have been disconcerted and dérouté.—Times.
In spite, however, of this denial and of other official démentis, the Italian Press still seems dissatisfied.—Times.
In this there is clearly not the distinction that we suggested between denial and démenti— the only thing that could excuse the latter. We have here merely one of those elegant variations treated of in the chapter 'Airs and Graces'.
3. It sometimes occurs to a writer that he would like to avail himself of a foreign word or phrase, whether to make a genuine point or to show that he has the gift of tongues, ​and yet not keep his less favoured readers in the dark; he accordingly uses a literal translation instead of the actual words. It may fairly be doubted whether this is ever worth while; but there is all the difference in the world, as we shall presently exemplify in a pair of contrasted quotations, between the genuine and the ostentatious use. The most familiar phrase thus treated is cela va sans dire; we have of our own I need hardly say, needless to remark, and many other varieties; and the French phrase has no wit or point in it to make it worth aping; we might just as well say, in similar German or French English (whichever of the two languages we had it from), that understands itself; each of them has to us the quaintness of being non-idiomatic, and no other merit whatever. A single word that we have taken in the same way is more defensible, because it did, when first introduced here, possess a definite meaning that no existing English word had: epochmaking is a literal translation, or transliteration almost, from German. We may regret that we took it, now; for it will always have an alien look about it; and, recent in English as it is, it has already lost its meaning; it belongs, in fact, to one of those word-series of which each member gets successively worn out. Epochmaking is now no more than remarkable, as witness this extract from a speech by the Lord Chancellor:
The banquet to M. Berryer and the banquet to Mr. Benjamin, both of them very important, and to my mind epochmaking occasions.—Lord Halsbury.
The verb to orient is a Gallicism of much the same sort, and the half-world is perhaps worse:
In his quality of eligible bachelor he had no objections at any time to conversing with a goodlooking girl. Only he wished very much that he could orient this particular one.—Crockett.
High society is represented by...Lady Beauminster, the half-world by Mrs. Montrose, loveliness and luckless innocence by her daughter Helen.—Times.
The next extract is perhaps from the pen of a ​French-speaker trying to write English: but it was not worse than what the English writer who comes below him does deliberately:
Our enveloping movement, which has been proceeding since several days.—Times.
Making every allowance for special circumstances, the manner in which these amateur soldiers of seven weeks' service acquitted themselves compels one 'furiously to think'.—Westminster Gazette.
A warning may be given that it is dangerous to translate if you do not know for certain what the original means. To ask what the devil some one was doing in that gallery is tempting, and fatal.
Appended are the passages illustrating the two different motives for translation:
If we could take this assurance at its face value and to the foot of the letter, we should have to conclude...—Times.
It will be observed (a) that literally gives the meaning previously; (b) that to the foot of the letter is absolutely unintelligible to any one not previously acquainted with au pied de la lettre; (c) that there is no wit or other admirable quality in the French itself. The writer is meanly admiring mean things; nothing could possibly be more fatuous than such half-hearted gallicizing.
I thought afterwards, but it was the spirit of the staircase, what a pity it was that I did not stand at the door with a hat, saying, 'Give an obol to Belisarius'.—Morley.
The French have had the wit to pack into the words esprit d'escalier the common experience that one's happiest retorts occur to one only when the chance of uttering them is gone, the door is closed, and one's feet are on the staircase. That is well worth introducing to an English audience; the only question is whether it is of any use to translate it without explanation. No one will know what spirit of the staircase is who is not already familiar with esprit d'escalier; and even he who is may not recognize it in disguise, seeing that esprit does not mean spirit (which suggests a goblin lurking in the hall clock), but wit.
​We cannot refrain from adding a variation that deprives an pied de la lettre even of its quaintness:
The tone of Russian official statements on the subject is not encouraging, but then, perhaps, they ought not to be taken at the letter.—Times.
4. Closely connected with this mistake of translating is the other of taking liberties with foreign phrases in their original form, dovetailing them into the construction of an English sentence when they do not lend themselves to it. In Latin words and phrases, other cases should always be changed to the nominative, whatever the government in the English sentence, unless the Latin word that accounted for the case is included in the quotation. It will be admitted that all the four passages below are ugly:
The whole party were engaged ohne Rast with a prodigious quantity of Hast in a continuous social effort.—E. F. Benson.
German, in which so few Englishmen are at their ease, is the last among the half-dozen best-known languages to play these tricks with. The facetiousness here is indescribably heavy.
The clergy in rochet, alb, and other best pontificalibus.—Carlyle.
The intention is again facetious; but the incongruity between a Latin inflected ablative and English uninflected objectives is a kind of piping to which no man can dance; that the English in and the Latin in happen to be spelt alike is no defence; it is clear that in is here English, not Latin; either in pontificalibus, or in other pontificalia.
The feeling that one is an antecedentem scelestum after whom a sure, though lame. Nemesis is hobbling....—Trollope.
Antecedens selestus is necessary.
..., which were so evident in the days of the early Church, are now non est.—Daily Telegraph.
All things considered, I wonder they were not non est long ago.—Times.
Such maltreatment of non est inventus, which seems to have amused some past generations, is surely now as stale and unprofitable as individual itself.
​5. A special caution may be given about some words and phrases that either are shams, or are used in wrong senses. Of the first kind are nom de plume, morale. The French for the name that an author chooses to write under is nom de guerre. We, in the pride of our knowledge that guerre means war, have forgotten that there is such a thing as metaphor, assumed that another phrase is required for literary campaigning, thereupon ascertained the French for pen, and so evolved nom de plume. It is unfortunate; for we now have to choose between a blunder and a pedantry; but writers who know the facts are beginning to reconcile themselves to seeming pedantic for a time, and reviving nom de guerre.
The French for what we call morale, writing it in italics under the impression that it is French, is actually moral. The other is so familiar, however, that it is doubtful whether it would not be better to drop the italics, keep the -e, and tell the French that they can spell their word as they please, and we shall do the like with ours. So Mr. Kipling:
The Gaul, ever an artist, breaks enclosure to study the morale [sic], at the present day, of the British sailorman.—Kipling.
In the second class, of phrases whose meaning is mistaken, we choose scandalum magnatum, arrière-pensée, phantasmagoria, and cui bono?
Scandalum magnatum is a favourite with the lower-class novelist who takes magnatum for a participle meaning magnified, and finds the combination less homely than a shocking affair. It is a genitive plural noun, and the amplified translation of the two words, which we borrow from the Encyclopaedia, runs: 'Slander of great men, such as peers, judges, or great officers of state, whereby discord may arise within the realm'.
Arrière-pensée we have seen used, with comic intent but sad effect, for a bustle or dress-improver; and, with sad intent but comic effect, for an afterthought; it is better confined to its real meaning of an ulterior object, if indeed we cannot be content with our own language and use those words instead.
​Phantasmagoria is a singular noun; at least the French monstrosity from which it is borrowed, fantasmagorie, is singular; and, if used at all in English, it should be so with us too. But the final -a irresistibly suggests a plural to the valorous writers who are impressed without being terrified by the unknown; so:
Not that such phantasmagoria are to be compared for a moment with such desirable things as fashion, fine clothes...—Borrow.
Cui bono? is a notorious trap for journalists. It is naturally surprising to any one who has not pushed his classics far to be told that the literal translation of it is not 'To what good (end)?' that is 'What is the good of it?' but 'Who benefited?'. The former rendering is not an absolutely impossible one on the principles of Latin grammar, which adds to the confusion. But if that were its real meaning it would be indeed astonishing that it should have become a famous phrase; the use of it instead of 'What is the good?' would be as silly and gratuitous as our above-mentioned to the foot of the letter. Every scholar knows, however, that cui bono? does deserve to be used, in its true sense. It is a shrewd and pregnant phrase like cherchez la femme or esprit d'escalier. Cherchez la femme wraps up in itself a perhaps incorrect but still interesting theory of life—that whenever anything goes wrong there is a woman at the bottom of it; find her, and all will be explained. Cui bono? means, as we said, 'Who benefited?'. It is a Roman lawyer's maxim, who held that when you were at a loss to tell where the responsibility for a crime lay, your best chance was to inquire who had reaped the benefit of it. It has been worth while to devote a few lines to this phrase, because nothing could better show at once what is worth transplanting into English, and what dangers await any one who uses Latin or French merely because he has a taste for ornament. In the following quotation the meaning, though most obscurely expressed, is probably correct; and cui bono? stands for: 'Where can the ​story have come from? why, who will profit by a misunderstanding between Italy and France? Germany, of course; so doubtless Germany invented the story'. Cui bono? is quite capable of implying all that; but a merciful writer will give his readers a little more help:
(Berlin) The news which awakens the most hopeful interest is the story of a concession to a Franco-Belgian syndicate in the harbour of Tripoli. There is a manifest desire that the statement should be confirmed and that it should have the effect of exciting the Italian people and alienating them from France. Cui bono?—Times.
6. It now only remains to add that there are French words good in some contexts, and not in others. Régime is good in the combination ancien régime, because that is the briefest way of alluding to the state of things in France before the Revolution. Further, its use in the first of the appended passages is appropriate enough, because there is an undoubted parallel between Russia now and France then. But in the second, administration ought to be the word:
Throwing a flood of light upon the proceedings of the existing régime in Russia.—Times.
He said that the goodwill and friendship of the Milner régime had resulted in the effective co-operation of the two countries.—Times.
The word employé is often a long, ugly, and unnatural substitute for men, workmen, or hands, one of which should have been used in the first two of the passages below. But it has a value where clerks or higher degrees are to be included, as in the third passage. It should be used as seldom as possible, that is all:
The warehouses of the Russian Steamship Company here have been set on fire by some dismissed employés.—Times.
The employés of the Trans-Caucasian line to-day struck work.—Times.
The new project, Article 17, ordains that all employés of the railways, whatever their rank or the nature of their employment, are to be considered as public officials.—Times.
Finally, even words that have not begun to be naturalized may be used exceptionally when a real point can be gained by ​it. To say chasseur instead of sportsman, gun, or other English word, is generally ridiculous. But our English notion of the French sportsman (right or wrong) is that he sports not because he likes sport, but because he likes the picturesque costumes it gives an excuse for. Consequently the word is quite appropriate in the following:
But the costume of the chasseurs—green velvet, very Robin-Hoody—had been most tasteful.—E. F. Benson.
False, Ugly, or Needless Formations
1. As a natural link between this section and the last, the practice of taking French words and spelling them as English may stand first. With French words that fill a definite blank in English, the time comes when that should be done if it can. With some words it cannot; no one has yet seen his way to giving ennui an English look. With dishabille, on the other hand, which appears in the dictionary with spellings to suit all tastes, many attempts have been made. This word, however, well illustrates the importance of one principle that should be observed in borrowing from French. Unless the need is a very crying one, no word should be taken that offers serious difficulties of pronunciation. In déshabillé are at least two problems (h, and ll) of which an Englishman fights shy. The consequence is that, though its English history dates back some centuries, it is very seldom heard in conversation; no word not used in conversation becomes a true native; and dishabille is therefore being gradually ousted by négligé, which can be pronounced without fear. As dishabille is really quite cut off from déshabillé, it is a pity it was not further deprived of its final -e; that would have encouraged us to call it dish-abil, and it might have made good its footing.
Naïveté is another word for which there is a clear use; and though the Englishman can pronounce it without difficulty if ​he chooses, he generally does prefer doing without it altogether to attempting a precision that strikes him as either undignified or pretentious. It is therefore to be wished that it might be disencumbered of its diaeresis, its accent, and its italics. It is true that the first sight of naivety is an unpleasant shock; but we ought to be glad that the thing has begun to be done, and in speaking sacrifice our pride of knowledge and call it navity.
The case of banality is very different. In one sense it has a stronger claim than naivety, its adjective banal being much older in English than naïve; but the old use of banal is as a legal term connected with feudalism. That use is dead, and its second life is an independent one; it is now a mere borrowing from French. Whether we are to accept it or not should be decided by whether we want it; and with common, commonplace, trite, trivial, mean, vulgar, all provided with nouns, which again can be eked out with truism and platitude, a shift can surely be made without it. It is one of those foreign feathers, like intimism, intimity, femininity, distinction and distinguished (the last pair now banalities if anything was ever banal; so do extremes meet), in which writers of literary criticism love to parade, and which ordinary persons should do their best to pluck from them, protesting when there is a chance, and at all times refusing the compliment of imitation. But perhaps the word that the critics would most of all delight their readers by forgetting is meticulous.
Before adding an example or two, we draw attention to the danger of accidentally assimilating a good English word to a French one. Amende is good French; amends is good English; but amend (noun) is neither:
Triviality and over-childishness and naivety.— H. Sweet.
Agrippa himself was primarily a paradox-monger. Many of his successors were in dead earnest, and their repetition of his ingenuities becomes banal in the extreme. Bercher himself can by no means be acquitted of this charge of banality.—Times.
​It is significant that the only authorities for banality in the Oxford Dictionary are Sala, Saintsbury, Dowden, and Browning; but the volume is dated 1888; and though the word is still used in the same overpowering proportion by literary critics as opposed to other writers, its total use has multiplied a hundredfold since then. Our hope is that the critics may before long feel that it is as banal to talk about banality as it is now felt by most wellbred people to be vulgar to talk about vulgarity.
His style, which is pleasant and diffuse without being distinguished, is more suited to the farm and the simple country life than to the complexities of the human character.—Times.
His character and that of his wife are sketched with a certain distinction.—Times.
And yet to look back over the whole is to feel that in one case only has she really achieved that perfection of intimism which is her proper goal.—Times.
The reference to the English nonconformists was a graceful amend to them for being so passionate an Oxonian and churchman.—Morley.
And in her presentation of the mode of life of the respectable middle classes, the most meticulous critic will not easily catch her tripping.—Times.
2. Formations involving grammatical blunders. Of these the possibilities are of course infinite; we must assume that our readers know the ordinary rules of grammar, and merely, not to pass over the point altogether, give one or two typical and not too trite instances:
My landlady entered bearing what she called 'her best lamp' alit.—Corelli.
This seems to be formed as a past participle from to alight, in the sense of to kindle. It will surprise most people to learn that there is, or was, such a verb; not only was there, but the form that should have been used in our sentence, alight, is probably by origin the participle of it. The Oxford Dictionary, however, after saying this, observes that it has now been assimilated to words like afire, formed from the preposition a- and a noun. Whether those two facts are true or not, it is quite certain that there is no such word as alit in the sense of ​lighted or lit, and that the use of it in our days is a grammatical blunder.
But every year pleaded stronger and stronger for the Earl's conception.—J. R. Green.
Comparative adverbs of this type must be formed only from those positive adverbs which do not use -ly, as hard, fast. We talk of going strong, and we may therefore talk of going stronger; but outside slang we have to choose between stronglier—poetical, exalted, or affected—and more strongly.
The silence that underlaid the even voice of the breakers along the sea front.—Kipling.
Lie and lay have cost us all some perplexity in childhood. The distinction is more difficult in the compounds with over and under, because in them -lie is transitive as well as -lay, but in a different sense. Any one who is not sure that he is sound on the point by instinct must take the trouble to resolve them into lie over or lay over, &c., which at once clears up the doubt. A mistake with the simple verb is surprising when made, as in the following, by a writer on grammar:
I met a lad who took a paper from a package that he carried and thrust it into my unwilling hand. I suspected him of having laid in wait for the purpose.— R. G.White.
A confusion, perhaps, between lay wait and lie in wait.
I am not sure that yours and my efforts would suffice separately; but yours and mine together cannot possibly fail.
The first yours is quite wrong; it should be your. This mistake is common. The absolute possessives, ours and yours, hers, mine and thine, (with which the poetic or euphonic use of the last two before vowels has nothing to do) are to be used only as pronouns or as predicative adjectives, not as attributes to an expressed and following noun. That they were used by old writers as in our example is irrelevant. The ​correct modern usage has now established itself. We add three sentences from Burke. The relation between no and none is the same as that between your and yours. In the first sentence, modern usage would write (as the correct no or but a few is uncomfortable) either few or no, or few if any, or no rays or but a few. For the second we might possibly tolerate to their as well as to your own; or we might write to their crown as well as to your own. The third is quite tolerable as it is; but any one who does not like the sound can write and their ancestors and ours. It must always be remembered in this as in other constructions, that the choice is not between a well-sounding blunder and an ill-sounding correctness, but between an ill and a well sounding correctness. The blunder should be ruled out, and if the first form of the correct construction that presents itself does not sound well, another way of putting it must be looked for; patience will always find it. The flexibility gained by habitual selection of this kind, which a little cultivation will make easy and instinctive, is one of the most essential elements in a good style. For a more important illustration of the same principle, the remarks on the gerund in the Syntax chapter (p. 120) may be referred to.
Black bodies, reflecting none or but a few rays.—Burke.
You altered the succession to theirs, as well as to your own crown.—Burke.
They and we, and their and our ancestors, have been happy under that system.—Burke.
3. Formations violating analogy.
And then it is its panache, its careless a-moral Renaissance romance.—Times.
But she is perfectly natural, and while perfectly amoral, no more immoral than a bird or a kitten.—Times.
A- (not) is Greek; moral is Latin. It is at least desirable that in making new words the two languages should not be mixed. The intricate needs of science may perhaps be allowed to override a literary principle of this sort; and ​accordingly the Oxford Dictionary recognizes that a- is compounded with Latin words in scientific and technical terms, as a-sexual; but purely literary workers may be expected to abstain. The obvious excuse for this formation is that the Latin negative prefix is already taken up in immoral, which means contrary to morality, while a word is wanted to mean unconcerned with morality. But with non freely prefixed to adjectives in English (though not in Latin), there can be no objection to non-moral. The second of our instances is a few weeks later than the first, and the hyphen has disappeared; so quickly has The Times convinced itself that amoral is a regular English word.
There was no social or economic jealousy between them, no racial aversion.—Times.
Concessions which, besides damaging Hungary by raising racial and language questions of all kinds, would...—Times.
The action of foreign countries as to their coastal trade.—Times.
Her riverine trade.—Westminster Gazette.
It has been already stated that -al is mainly confined to unmistakable Latin stems. There is whimsical; and there may be others that break the rule, though the Oxford Dictionary (-al suffix, -ical snffix, -ial suffix) gives no exceptions. The ugly words racial and coastal themselves might well be avoided except in the rare cases where race and coast used adjectivally will not do the work (they would in the present instances); and they should not be made precedents for new formations. If language is better than linguistic, much more race than racial; similarly, river than riverine.
What she was pleased to term their superior intelligence, and more real and reliable probity.— C. Brontë (Villette, 1853).
It is absurd at this time of day to make a fuss about the word. It is with us and will remain with us, whatever pedants and purists may say. In such cases obsta principiis is the only hope; reliable might once have been suppressed, perhaps; it cannot now. But it is so fought over, even to-day, that a short discussion of it may be looked for. The objection ​to it is obvious: you do not rely a thing; therefore the thing cannot be reliable; it should be rely-on-able (like come-at-able). Some of the analogies pleaded for it are perhaps irrelevant—as laughable, available. For these may be formed from the nouns laugh, avail, since -able is not only gerundival (capable of being laughed at), but also adjectival (connected with a laugh); this has certainly happened with seasonable; but that will not help reliable, which by analogy should be relianceable. It is more to the point to remark that with reliable must go dispensable (with indispensable) and dependable, both quite old words, and disposable (in its commoner sense); no one, as far as we know, objects to these and others like them; reliable is made into a scapegoat. The word itself, moreover, besides its wide popularity, is now of respectable antiquity, dating at least from Coleridge. It may be added that it is probably to the campaign against it that we owe such passive monstrosities as 'ready to be availed of' for available, which is, as we said, possibly not open to the same objection as reliable.
I have heretofore designated the misuse of certain words as Briticisms.— R. G. White.
Britannic, Britannicism; British, Britishism. Britic?
4. Needless, though correct formations.
The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up.—Emerson.
As candeo candor, ardeo ardor, so—we are to understand——sordeo sordor. The Romans, however, never felt that they needed the word; and it is a roundabout method first to present them with a new word and then to borrow it from them; for it will be observed that we have no living suffix -or in English, nor, if we had, anything nearer than sordid to attach it to. Perhaps Emerson thought sordor was a Latin word.
Merely nodding his head as an enjoinder to be careful.–Dickens.
As rejoin rejoinder, so enjoin enjoinder. The word is not given in the Oxford Dictionary, from which it seems likely ​that Dickens invented it, consciously or unconsciously. The only objection to such a word is that its having had to wait so long, in spite of its obviousness, before being made is a strong argument against the necessity of it. We may regret that injunction holds the field, having a much less English appearance; but it does; and in language the old-established that can still do the work is not to be turned out for the new-fangled that might do it a shade better, but must first get itself known and accepted.
Oppositely, the badness of a walk that is shuffling, and an utterance that is indistinct is alleged.—Spencer.
This, on the other hand, is an archaism, now obsolete. Why it should not have lived is a mystery; but it has not; and to write it is to give one's sentence the air of an old curiosity shop.
Again, as if to intensate the influences that are not of race, what we think of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself to a small district.—Emerson.
A favourite with those allied experimenters in words, Emerson and Carlyle. A word meaning to make intense is necessary; and there are plenty of parallels for this particular form. But Coleridge had already made intensify, introducing it with an elaborate apology in which he confessed that it sounded uncouth. It is uncouth no longer; if it had never existed, perhaps intensate would now have been so no longer, uncouthness being, both etymologically and otherwise, a matter of strangeness as against familiarity. It is better to form words only where there is a clear demand for them.
5. Long and short rivals. The following examples illustrate a foolish tendency. From the adjective perfect we form the verb to perfect, and from that again the noun perfection; to take a further step forward to a verb to perfection instead of returning to the verb to perfect is a superfluity of naughtiness. From the noun sense we make the adjective sensible; it is generally quite needless to go forward to ​sensibleness instead of back to our original noun sense. To quieten is often used by hasty writers who have not time to remember that quiet is a verb. With ex tempore ready to serve either as adverb or as adjective, why make extemporaneous or extemporaneously? As to contumacity, the writer was probably unaware that contumacy existed. Contumacity might be formed from contumax, like audacity from audax. The Romans had only the short forms audacia, contumacia, which should have given us audacy as well as contumacy; but because our ancestors burdened themselves with an extra syllable in one we need not therefore do so in the other.
The inner, religiously moral perfectioning of individuals.—Times.
She liked the quality of mind which may be broadly called sensibleness.—Times.
Broadly, or lengthily?
M. Delcassé, speaking extemporaneously but with notes, said...—Times.
And now, Mdlle St. Pierre's affected interference provoked contumacity.—C. Brontë.
It is often a very easy thing to act prudentially , but alas! too often only after we have toiled to our prudence through a forest of delusions.—De Quincey.
Prudent gives prudence, and prudence prudential; the latter has its use: prudential considerations are those in which prudence is allowed to outweigh other motives; they may be prudent without being prudential, and vice versa. But before using prudentially we should be quite sure that we mean something different from prudently. So again partially, which should be reserved as far as possible for the meaning with partiality, is now commonly used for partly:
The series of administrative reforms planned by the Convention had been partially carried into effect before the meeting of Parliament in 1654; but the work was pushed on.–J. R. Green.
​That the gravity of the situation is partially appreciated by the bureaucracy may be inferred from...—Times.
Excepting, instead of except, is to be condemned when there is no need for it. We say not excepting, or not even excepting, or without excepting; but where the exception is allowed, not rejected, the short form is the right one, as a comparison of the following examples will show:
Of all societies...not even excepting the Roman Republic, England has been the most emphatically...political.—Morley.
The Minister was obliged to present the Budget before May each year, excepting in the event of the Cortes having been dissolved.—Times.
The sojourn of belligerent ships in French waters has never been limited excepting by certain clearly defined rules.—Times.
Excepting the English, French, and Austrian journalists present, no one had been admitted.—Times.
Innumerable other needless lengthenings might be produced, from which we choose only preventative for preventive, and to experimentalize for to experiment.
On the other hand, when usage has differentiated a long and a short form either of which might originally have served, the distinction must be kept. Immovable and irremovable judges are different things; the shorter word has been wrongly chosen in:
By suspending conscription and restoring the immovability of the Judges.—Times.
6. Merely ugly formations.
Bureaucracy.
The termination -cracy is now so freely applied that it is too late to complain of this except on the ground of ugliness. It may be pointed out, however, that the very special ugliness of bureaucracy is due to the way its mongrel origin is flaunted in our faces by the telltale syllable -eau-; it is to be hoped that formations similar in this respect may be avoided.
An ordinary reader, if asked what was the main impression given by the Short History of the English People, would answer that it was the impression of picturesqueness and vividity.—Bryce.
In sound, there can be no question between vividity with its ​fourfold repetition of the same vowel sound, its two dentals to add to the ugliness of its two v's, and the comparatively inoffensive vividness.
We conclude with deprecating the addition of -ly to participles in -ed. Some people are so alive to the evil sound of it that they write determinately for determinedly; that will not do either, because determinate does not mean determined in the required sense. A periphrasis, or an adjective or Latin participle with -ly, as resolutely, should be used. Implied is as good a word as implicit, but impliedly is by no means so good as implicitly. Several instances are given, for cumulative effect. Miss Corelli makes a mannerism of this.
Dr. John and his mother were in their finest mood, contending animatedly with each other the whole way.—C. Brontë.
Where the gate opens, or the gateless path turns aside trustedly.—Ruskin.
'That's not a very kind speech,' I said somewhat vexedly.—Corelli.
However, I determinedly smothered all premonitions.—Corelli.
I saw one or two passers-by looking at me so surprisedly that I came to the conclusion...—Corelli.
I stared bewilderedly up at the stars.—Corelli.
It should be added that to really established adverbs of this form, as advisedly, assuredly, hurriedly, there is no objection whatever; but new ones are ugly.
Slang
The place of slang is in real life. There, an occasional indulgence in it is an almost necessary concession to our gregarious humanity; he who declines altogether to let his speech be influenced by his neighbours' tricks, and takes counsel only of pure reason, is setting up for more than man. Awfully nice is an expression than which few could be sillier; but to have succeeded in going through life without saying it a certain number of times is as bad as to have no redeeming vice. Further, the writer who deals in conversation may sometimes find it necessary, by way of characterizing his ​speakers, to put slang in their mouths; if he is wise he will make the least possible use of this resource; and to interlard the non-conversational parts of a book or article with slang, quotation marks or no quotation marks, is as bad as interlarding with French. Foreign words and slang are, as spurious ornaments, on the same level. The italics, but not the quotation marks, in these examples are ours:
When the madness motif was being treated on the stage, Shakespeare (as was the custom of his theatre) treated it 'for all it was worth', careless of the boundaries between feigning and reality.—Times.
But even this situation 'peters out', the wife being sent away with her fate undecided, and the husband, represented as a 'forcible-feeble' person by the dramatist and as a feeble person, tout court, by the actor....—Times.
M. Baron the younger is amusing as the 'bounder' Olivier.—Times.
Asking ourselves this question about Mr. Thurston's play, we find that it has given us a ha'porth of pleasure to an intolerable deal of boredom. With its primary postulate, 'steep' as it is, we will not quarrel.—Times.
They will find no subtlety in it, no literary art, no profundity of feeling; but they will assuredly find breadth, colour, and strength. It is a play that hits you, as the children say, 'bang in the eye'.—Times.
They derive no advantage from schemes of land settlement from which the man who has broken the land in gets 'the boot', the voter gets the land, the Government gets the vote, and the London labour market gets the risk.—Times.
The effect of using quotation marks with slang is merely to convert a mental into a moral weakness. When they are not used, we may mercifully assume that the writer does not know the difference between slang and good English, and sins in ignorance: when they are, he is telling us, I know it is naughty, but then it is nice. Most of us would rather be taken for knaves than for fools; and so the quotation marks are usually there.
With this advice—never to use slang except in dialogue, and there as little as may be—we might leave the subject, except that the suggestion we have made about the unconscious use of slang seems to require justifying. To justify it, we ​must attempt some analysis, however slight, of different sorts of slang.
To the ordinary man, of average intelligence and middle-class position, slang comes from every direction, from above, from below, and from all sides, as well as from the centre. What comes from some directions he will know for slang, what comes from others he may not. He may be expected to recognize words from below. Some of these are shortenings, by the lower classes, of words whose full form conveys no clear meaning, and is therefore useless, to them. An antiquated example is mob, for mobile vulgus. That was once slang, and is now good English. A modern one is bike, which will very likely be good English also in time. But though its brevity is a strong recommendation, and its uncouthness probably no more than subjective and transitory, it is as yet slang. Such words should not be used in print till they have become so familiar that there is not the slightest temptation to dress them up in quotation marks. Though they are the most easily detected, they are also the best slang; when the time comes, they take their place in the language as words that will last, and not, like many of the more highly descended words, die away uselessly after a brief popularity.
Another set of words that may be said to come from below, since it owes its existence to the vast number of people who are incapable of appreciating fine shades of meaning, is exemplified by nice, awful, blooming. Words of this class fortunately never make their way, in their slang senses, into literature (except, of course, dialogue). The abuse of nice has gone on at any rate for over a century; the curious reader may find an interesting page upon it in the fourteenth chapter of Northanger Abbey (1803). But even now we do not talk in books of a nice day, only of a nice distinction. On the other hand, the slang use makes us shy in different degrees of writing the words in their legitimate sense: a nice distinction ​we write almost without qualms; an awful storm we think twice about; and as to a blooming girl, we hardly venture it nowadays. The most recent sufferer of this sort is perhaps chronic. It has been adopted by the masses, as far apart at least as in Yorkshire and in London, for a mere intensive, in the sense of remarkable. The next step is for it to be taken up in parody by people who know better; after which it may be expected to succeed awful.
So much for the slang from below; the ordinary man can detect it. He is not so infallible about what comes to him from above. We are by no means sure that we shall be correct in our particular attribution of the half-dozen words now to be mentioned; but it is safe to say that they are all at present enjoying some vogue as slang, and that they all come from regions that to most of us are overhead. Phenomenal, soon, we hope, to perish unregretted, is (at least indirectly, through the abuse of phenomenon) from Metaphysics; immanence, a word often met in singular company, from Comparative Theology; epochmaking perhaps from the Philosophic Historian; true inwardness from Literary Criticism; cad (which is, it appears, Etonian for cadet) from the Upper Classes; psychological moment from Science; thrasonical and cryptic from Academic Circles; philistine from the region of culture. Among these the one that will be most generally allowed to be slang—cad—is in fact the least so; it has by this time, like mob, passed its probation and taken its place as an orthodox word, so that all who do not find adequate expression for their feelings in the orthodox have turned away to bounder and other forms that still admit the emphasis of quotation marks. As for the rest of them, they are being subjected to that use, at once over-frequent and inaccurate, which produces one kind of slang. But the average man, seeing from what exalted quarters they come, is dazzled into admiration and hardly knows them for what they are.
By the slang that comes from different sides or from the ​centre we mean especially the many words taken originally from particular professions, pursuits, or games, but extended beyond them. Among these a man is naturally less critical of what comes from his own daily concerns, that is, in his view, from the centre. Frontispiece, for face, perhaps originated in the desire of prize-ring reporters to vary the words in their descriptive flights. Negotiate (a difficulty, &c.) possibly comes from the hunting-field; people whose conversation runs much upon a limited subject feel the need of new phrases for the too familiar things. And both these words, as well as individual, which must be treated more at length in the next section, are illustrations of a tendency that we have called polysyllabic humour and discussed in the Chapter Airs and Graces. We now add a short list of slang phrases or words that can most of them be referred with more or less of certainty to particular occupations. Whether they are recognized as slang will certainly depend in part on whether the occupation is familiar, though sometimes the familiarity will disguise, and sometimes it will conceal the slanginess.
To hedge, the double event (turf); frontal attack (war); play the game, stumped (cricket); to run—the show, &c.—(engine-driving); knock out, take it lying down (prize-ring); log-rolling, slating, birrelling (literature); to tackle—a problem, &c.—(football); to take a back seat (coaching?); bedrock, to exploit, how it pans out (mining); whole-hogging, world policy (politics); floored (1. prize ring; 2. school); the under dog (dog-fighting); up to date (advertising); record—time, &c.—(athletics); euchred, going one better, going Nap. (cards); to corner—a thing—(commerce)—a person–(ratting); chic (society journalism); on your own, of sorts, climb down, globetrotter, to laze (perhaps not assignable).
Good and sufficient occasions will arise—rarely—for using most of these phrases and the rest of the slang vocabulary. To those, however, who desire that what they write may endure it is suggested that, as style is the great antiseptic, so ​slang is the great corrupting matter; it is perishable itself, and infects what is round it—the catchwords that delight one generation stink in the nostrils of the next; individual, which almost made the fortune of many a Victorian humorist, is one of the modern editor's shibboleths for detecting the unfit. And even those who regard only the present will do well to remember that in literature as elsewhere there are as many conservatives as progressives, as many who expect their writers to say things a little better than they could do themselves as who are flattered by the proof that one man is no better than another.
'Skepsey did come back to London with rather a damaged frontispiece', Victor said.—Meredith.
Henson, however, once negotiated a sprint down his wing, and put in a fine dropping shot to Aubert, who saved.—Guernsey Evening Press.
Passengers, the guild add, usually arrive at the last moment before sailing, when the master must concentrate his mind upon negotiating a safe passage.—Times.
To deal with these extensive and purely local breeding grounds in the manner suggested by Major Ross would be a very tall order.—Times.
In about twenty minutes he returned, accompanied by a highly intelligent-looking individual, dressed in blue and black, with a particularly white cravat, and without a hat on his head; this individual, whom I should have mistaken for a gentleman but for the intelligence depicted in his face, he introduced to me as the master of the inn.—Borrow.
A Sèvres vase sold yesterday at Christie's realized what is believed to be the record price of 4,000 guineas.—Times.
You could not, if you had tried, have made so perfect a place for two girls to lounge in, to laze in, to read silly novels in, or to go to sleep in on drowsy afternoons.—Crockett.
Mr. Balfour's somewhat thrasonical eulogies.—Spectator.
A quarrelsome, somewhat thrasonical fighting man.—Spectator.
The true inwardness of this statement is...—Times.
We do not know what inwardness there may be in the order of his discourses, though each of them has some articulate link with that which precedes.–Times.
Such a departure from etiquette at the psychological moment shows tact and discretion.–Times.
He asserts that about four years ago there was quite an Argentine boom in New Zealand.—Times.
​No treatment of slang, however short, should omit the reminder that slang and idiom are hard to distinguish, and yet, in literature, slang is bad, and idiom good. We said that slang was perishable; the fact is that most of it perishes; but some survives and is given the idiomatic franchise; 'when it doth prosper, none dare call it' slang. The idiomatic writer differs chiefly from the slangy in using what was slang and is now idiom; of what is still slang he chooses only that part which his insight assures him has the sort of merit that will preserve it. In a small part of their vocabulary the idiomatic and the slangy will coincide, and be therefore confused by the undiscerning. The only advice that can be given to novices uncertain of their own discrimination is to keep carefully off the debatable ground. Full idiom and full slang are as far apart as virtue and vice; and yet
They oft so mix, the difference is too nice Where ends the virtue, or begins the vice.
Any one who can confidently assign each of the following phrases to its own territory may feel that he is not in much danger:
Outrun the constable, the man in the street, kicking your heels, between two stools, cutting a loss, riding for a fall, not seeing the wood for the trees, minding your Ps and Qs, crossing the ts, begging the question, special pleading, a bone to pick, half seas over, tooth and nail, bluff, maffick, a tall order, it has come to stay.
Particular Words
Individual, mutual, unique, aggravating.
To use individual wrongly in the twentieth century stamps a writer, more definitely than almost any other single solecism, not as being generally ignorant or foolish, but as being without the literary sense. For the word has been pilloried time after time; every one who is interested in style at all—which includes every one who aspires to be readable—must at least be aware that there is some mystery about the word, even if he has not penetrated it. He has, therefore, two courses ​open to him: he may leave the word alone; or he may find out what it means; if he insists on using it without finding out, he will commit himself. The adjectival use of it presents no difficulty; the adjective, as well as the adverb individually, is always used rightly if at all; it is the noun that goes wrong. An individual is not simply a person; it is a single, separate, or private person, a person as opposed to a combination of persons; this qualification, this opposition, must be effectively present to the mind, or the word is not in place. In the nineteenth, especially the early nineteenth century, this distinction was neglected; mainly under the impulse of 'polysyllabic humour', the word, which does mean person in some sort of way, was seized upon as a facetious substitute for it; not only that; it spread even to good writers who had no facetious intention; it became the kind of slang described in the last section, which is highly popular until it suddenly turns disgusting. In reading many of these writers we feel that we must make allowances for them on this point; they only failed to be right when every one else was wrong. But we, if we do it, sin against the light.
To leave no possible doubt about the distinction, we shall give many examples, divided into (1) right uses, (2) wrong uses, (3) sentences in which, though the author has used the word rightly, a perverse reader might take it wrongly. It will be observed that in (1) to substitute man or person would distinctly weaken the sense; in the sentence from Macaulay it would be practically impossible. The words italicized are those that prove the contrast with bodies, or organizations, to have been present to the writer's mind, though it may often happen that he does not actually show it by specific mention of them. On the other hand, in (2) person or man or he might always be substituted without harm to the sense, though sometimes a more exact word (not individual) might be preferable. In (3) little difference would be made by the substitution.
​(1) Many of the constituent bodies were under the absolute control of individuals.—Macaulay.
Regarding the general effect of Lord Kitchener's proclamation, everything so far as is known here points to the conclusion that the document has failed to secure the surrender of any body of men. Merely a few individuals have yielded.—Times.
The wise Commons, considering that they are, if not a French Third Estate, at least an aggregate of individuals pretending to some title of that kind, determine...—Carlyle.
(2) That greenish-coloured individual is an advocate of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre.—Carlyle. (person)
Surely my fate is somehow strangely interwoven with that of this mysterious individual.—Scott. (person)
And, as its weight is 15 lb., nobody save an individual in no condition to distinguish a hawk from a handsaw could possibly mistake it for a saluting charge.—Times. (person)
The Secretary of State for War was sending the same man down to see what he could do in the Isle of Wight. The individual duly arrived.—Times. (he)
My own shabby clothes and deplorable aspect, as compared with this regal-looking individual.—Corelli. (person)
In the present case, however, the individual who had secured the cab had a companion.—Beaconsfield. (man)
I give my idea of the method in which Mr. Spencer and a Metaphysician would discuss the necessity and validity of the Universal Postulate. We must suppose this imaginary individual to have so far forgotten himself as to make some positive statement.—A. J. Balfour. (person)
But what made her marry that individual, who was at least as much like an oil-barrel as a man?—C. Brontë. (monstrosity)
He was a genteelly dressed individual; rather corpulent, with dark features.—Borrow. (man)
During his absence two calls were made at the parsonage—one by a very rough-looking individual who left a suspicious document in the hands of the servant.—Trollope. (man)
(3) Almost all the recent Anarchist crimes were perpetrated by isolated halfwitted individuals who aimed at universal notoriety.—Times.
Which of these two individuals, in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their king? For a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have.—Carlyle.
Some apology is due for so heaping up instances of the same thing; but here, as with other common blunders to be ​treated of later, it has seemed that an effect might be produced by mere iteration.
The word mutual requires caution. As with individual, any one who is not prepared to clear his ideas upon its meaning will do well to avoid it; it is a very telltale word, readily convicting the unwary, and on the other hand it may quite easily be done without. Every one knows by now that our mutual friend is a solecism. Mutual implies an action or relation between two or more persons or things, A doing or standing to B as B does or stands to A. Let A and B be the persons indicated by our, C the friend. No such reciprocal relation is here implied between A and B (who for all we know may be enemies), but only a separate, though similar relation between each of them and C. There is no such thing as a mutual friend in the singular; but the phrase mutual friends may without nonsense be used to describe either A and C, B and C, or, if A and B happen to be also friends, A and B and C. Our mutual friend is nonsense; mutual friends, though not nonsense, is bad English, because it is tautological. It takes two to make a friendship, as to make a quarrel; and therefore all friends are mutual friends, and friends alone means as much as mutual friends. Mutual wellwishers on the other hand is good English as well as good sense, because it is possible for me to be a man's wellwisher though he hates me. Mutual love, understanding, insurance, benefits, dislike, mutual benefactors, backbiters, abettors, may all be correct, though they are also sometimes used incorrectly, like our mutual friend, where the right word would be common.
Further, it is to be carefully observed that the word mutual is an equivalent in meaning, and sometimes a convenient one for grammatical reasons, of the pronoun each other with various prepositions. To use it as well as each other is even more clearly tautological than the already mentioned mutual friendship.
​If this be the case, much of the lost mutual understanding and unity of feeling may be restored.—Times.
Correct, if mutual is confined to understanding: they no longer understand each other.
Once their differences removed, both felt that in presence of certain incalculable factors in Europe it would be of mutual advantage to draw closer together.—Times.
Slightly clumsy; but it means that they would get advantage from each other by drawing together, and may stand.
...conversing with his Andalusian lady-love in rosy whispers about their mutual passion for Spanish chocolate all the while.—Meredith.
Surely you have heard Mrs. Toddles talking to Mrs. Doddles about their mutual maids.—Thackeray.
Indefensible.
There may be, moreover, while each has the key of the fellow breast, a mutually sensitive nerve.—Meredith.
A nerve cannot respond to each other; nerves can; a common nerve would have done; or mutually sensitive nerves.
It is now definitely announced that King Edward will meet President Loubet this afternoon near Paris. Our Paris Correspondent says the meeting will take place by mutual desire.—Times.
Right or wrong according to what is meant by desire. (1) If it means that King Edward and M. Loubet desired, that is, had a yearning for, each other, it is correct; but the writer probably did not intend so poetic a flight. (2) If it means that they merely desired a meeting, it is wrong, exactly as our mutual friend is wrong. The relation is not one between A and B; it is only that A and B hold separately the same relation to C, the meeting. It should be common desire. (3) If desire is here equivalent to request, and each is represented as having requested the other to meet him, it is again correct; but only politeness to the writer would induce any one to take this alternative.
The carpenter holds the hammer in one hand, the nail in the other, and they do their work equally well. So it is with every craftsman; the hands are mutually busy.—Times.
​Wrong. The hands are not busy with or upon each other, but with or upon the work. As commonly would be ambiguous here, equally or alike should be used, or simply both. Mutually serviceable, again, would have been right.
There were other means of communication between Claribel and her new prophet. Books were mutually lent to each other.—Beaconsfield.
This surprising sentence means that Vanity Fair was lent to Paradise Lost, and Paradise Lost to Vanity Fair. If we further assume for politeness' sake that mutually is not mere tautology with to each other, the only thing left for it to mean is by each other. The doubt then remains whether (1) Paradise Lost was lent to Vanity Fair by Paradise Lost, and Vanity Fair to Paradise Lost by Vanity Fair, or (2) Paradise Lost was lent to Vanity Fair by Vanity Fair, and Vanity Fair to Paradise Lost by Paradise Lost. This may be considered captious; but we still wish the author had said either, They lent each other books, or, Books were lent by them to each other.
A thing is unique, or not unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness; nothing is ever somewhat or rather unique, though many things are almost or in some respects unique. The word is a member of a depreciating series. Singular had once the strong meaning that unique has still in accurate but not in other writers. In consequence of slovenly use, singular no longer means singular, but merely remarkable; it is worn out; before long rather unique will be familiar; unique, that is, will be worn out in turn, and we shall have to resort to unexampled and keep that clear of qualifications as long as we can. Happily it is still admitted that sentences like the two given below are solecisms; they contain a self-contradiction. For the other regrettable use of unique, as when the advertisement columns offer us what they call unique opportunities, it may generally be assumed with safety that they are lying; but lying is not in itself a literary offence, so that with these we have nothing to do.
​Thrills which gave him rather a unique pleasure.—Hutton.
A very unique child, thought I.—C. Brontë.
...is to be translated into Russian by M. Robert Boker, of St. Petersburg. This is a somewhat unique thing to happen to an English textbook.—Westminster Gazette.
To aggravate is not to annoy or enrage (a person), but to make worse (a condition or trouble). The active participle should very rarely, and the rest of the active practically never, be used without an expressed object, and that of the right kind. In the sentence, An aggravating circumstance was that the snow was dirty, the meaning is not that the dirt was annoying, but that it added to some other misery previously expressed or implied. But, as the dirt happens to be annoying also, this use is easily misunderstood, and is probably the origin of the notorious vulgarism; since it almost inevitably lays a writer open to suspicion, it is best avoided. Of the following quotations, the first is quite correct, the other four as clearly wrong; in the last, aggrieved would be the right word.
A premature initiative would be useless and even dangerous, being calculated rather to aggravate than to simplify the situation.—Times.
Perhaps the most trying and aggravating period of the whole six months during which the siege has lasted was this period of enforced idleness waiting for the day of entry.—Times.
There is a cold formality about the average Englishman; a lack of effusive disposition to ingratiate himself, and an almost aggravating indifference to alien customs or conventions.—Times.
Mrs. Craigie may possibly be regarding him with an irony too fine for us to detect; but to the ordinary mind he appears to be conceived in the spirit of romance, and a very stupid, tiresome, aggravating man he is.—Times.
'Well, I'm sure I'm very much obliged to you. Misses Brown,' said the unfortunate youth, greatly aggravated.—Dickens.
Nevertheless, it is an aggravating book, though we are bound to admit that we have been greatly interested.—Westminster Gazette.
* ↑ The Romance languages are those whose grammatical structure, as well as part at least of their vocabulary, is directly descended from Latin—as Italian, French, Spanish. Under Romance words we include all that English has borrowed from Latin either directly or through the Romance languages. And words borrowed from Greek in general use, ranging from alms to metempsychosis, may for the purposes of this chapter be considered as Romance. The vast number of purely scientific Greek words, as oxygen, meningitis, are on a different footing, since they are usually the only words for what they denote.
* ↑ As in the second quotation from The Times on p.4.
* ↑ Even in the legitimate sense (see p. 8), originally a happy metaphor for mysterious leaking out, but now vulgarized and 'dead'.
* ↑ Not that this word calls for censure in itself; but when packed into a sentence with snow-white, green, and shrimp-pink, it contributes noticeably to that effect of brief and startling exhaustiveness which is one variety of what we have stigmatized as efficiency.
* ↑ It has. 'It would be difficult to say just how many weddings of famous people have been celebrated at St. George's Church, Hanover Square.'—Westminster Gazette.
* ↑ Readers of history are of course likely to be familiar with it; it occurs, for instance, scores of times in Carlyle's Friedrich. In such work it is legitimate, being sure, between context and repetition, to be comprehensible; but this does not apply to newspaper writing.
* ↑ The Oxford Dictionary has fourteen varieties.
* ↑ Alit is due, no doubt, to mere inadvertence or ignorance: the form litten ('red-litten windows', &c.), for which the Oxford Dictionary quotes Poe, Lytton, W. Morris, and Crockett, but no old writer, is sham archaism.
* ↑ The use deprecated has perhaps crept in from such phrases as the sun was partially eclipsed, an adaptation of a partial eclipse; and to such phrases it should be restricted. 'The case was partially heard on Oct. 17' is ambiguous; and the second example in the text is almost so, nearly enough to show that the limitation is desirable. The rule should be never to write partially without first considering the claims of partly.