The Arkansaw traveler., 1886-02-27
SUPREME ENGLISH.
tCornhill MagaIine.l

Itis the Nemesis of pedantry to be all ways wrong. Your true prig of pedant goes immensely out of his way to be vastly more correct than other people, and sue ceeds in the end in being vastly more un- grammatical, or vastly moro illogical, or both at once. The common pronuncia ton, the common idiom, the common meaning attached to a word, are not nearly good enough or 6se enough for him; he must try to get at the original sound, at the strict construction, at tho true sense. and he always manages to blunder upon something tar worse than the slight error, if error it be, which he attempts to avoid in his super6ne correct ness. There are people so fAstidious tn At instead of saying camelia, the form prac- tically sancuhed by usage and by Dumas Fils Qor even Dumas Fills can sanCtify) they must needS say cameua, a monstrous hybrid the hue but now somewhat pc dantic Latin name being really oamellia
 There arc peopte so learned that in- stead ot talking about Alfred the Great like all the rest of us, they must needs talk about K.rsd. and then pronounce the word as though tho first halt 0t it had som& hing or other % do with cells, where as tho true Anglo Saxon sound thus Clumsily expressed is simply and solely the common Alfred Thsxe arc people so grammatical that they must needs dis pute against their opponeat instead of dsputing with him, in complete ignorance of the fact that the word with itself means against in the early forms of the Eng hsh language, and still retains that meaning even nov in withstand, withhold, with draw, aad half a-dcz :n other familiar sx prsssiona To such good people sAe is tempk d to answer, in the words of Dr ParT to the inquirer who asked that great scholar whether the right propuHciation was Samaria er SaBareia, "You may thay Thamareia if yoa like, but Thamaria ith quite good enough for me"
 The fact IS, yoa1 genuine pedant falls perpetualy iAtD the immense mistake Of supposiag that eae mans individual req son is going te lead Aim far msse nsht than the sound instinct of whole natiea Haif% ducated people, like national schoslmastsrs and printers readers, are especially liable to become tAe victims of this supreme aelusion. They have their views On prsPriesy of speech. They arc always csrrscdng o<Aex peoples good sound idiomatc English inss conformity with their swn half-edacated idea of ex- trems accuracy. A complete csliscriop of ths queries and alterations made in manuscript CT prsef by the prister's reader would form a beauuful and unique mu- scum of blankly mistaken superhne Eng iAh. Under the drcum stances is never good enough for the printers reader he wants to turn it iHto In the drcam stances s"-a palid, fabby, meaningless platifude, which emasculAtes that sound and sensible popular idion of all its original force asd virllity To do thing Gin the circumstances |" is simply to do it you coai&a't possibly do 1t cat of the circumstances; the phrase becomes ab- surdly pleoa astic-a base tag of feeble and stterly insignificant verbiage, like Ehza JaAs's "sf ccurse," and in the mAnner of speaking" To de thing '' undsr the circumstances is to do it under stress ef certain conditions to do it in view of all the related facts In short, to acf q. ths cifcsnseaaccs compel you. "Undsr h this sense has genuine idio- manc messing, either in English or Latin it implies that your action Is sub ject to the circRK stances. exactly as when we say under pain of death, :" "usdsr stress of weather" under ,Aese conditions" Tke common sense of the English people has hit instiAc- lively upoa the right and expressive idiom the individual genius of the printers reader-6rsd with the proud ambition of setting right Airy generations of erring Engiishmen-blunders straight way into foolish and pedansic gamma tical nicesy, which just deprives the whole phrase of its neat and idiomatlc underly- ing meaning.
 Take once more the famous c1ux of the 1.-Two First Chapters" over which whsle holocausts q say whole holocausts ad-