summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat
-rw-r--r--.gitattributes4
-rw-r--r--75439-0.txt18540
-rw-r--r--75439-h/75439-h.htm22253
-rw-r--r--75439-h/images/cover.jpgbin0 -> 334306 bytes
-rw-r--r--LICENSE.txt11
-rw-r--r--README.md2
6 files changed, 40810 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7b82bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+*.txt text eol=lf
+*.htm text eol=lf
+*.html text eol=lf
+*.md text eol=lf
diff --git a/75439-0.txt b/75439-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..76d2e76
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75439-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,18540 @@
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75439 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+ KING’S ENGLISH
+
+ BY
+
+ H. W. FOWLER & F. G. FOWLER
+
+ COMPILERS OF THE
+ CONCISE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF CURRENT ENGLISH
+
+ No levell’d malice
+ Infects one comma in the course I hold.
+
+ _Timon of Athens_, I. i. 48.
+
+
+ SECOND EDITION
+
+
+ OXFORD
+ AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
+
+ LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK
+ TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY
+
+ HUMPHREY MILFORD
+
+ 1924
+
+
+
+
+ PRINTED IN ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+ PREFACE
+
+
+The compilers of this book would be wanting in courtesy if they
+did not expressly say what might otherwise be safely left to the
+reader’s discernment: the frequent appearance in it of any author’s or
+newspaper’s name does not mean that that author or newspaper offends
+more often than others against rules of grammar or style; it merely
+shows that they have been among the necessarily limited number chosen
+to collect instances from.
+
+The plan of the book was dictated by the following considerations.
+It is notorious that English writers seldom look into a grammar or
+composition book; the reading of grammars is repellent because, being
+bound to be exhaustive on a greater or less scale, they must give much
+space to the obvious or the unnecessary; and composition books are
+often useless because they enforce their warnings only by fabricated
+blunders against which every tiro feels himself quite safe. The
+principle adopted here has therefore been (1) to pass by all rules,
+of whatever absolute importance, that are shown by observation to be
+seldom or never broken; and (2) to illustrate by living examples, with
+the name of a reputable authority attached to each, all blunders that
+observation shows to be common. The reader, however, who is thus led to
+suspect that the only method followed has been the rejection of method
+will find, it is hoped, a practical security against inconvenience in
+the very full Index.
+
+Further, since the positive literary virtues are not to be taught by
+brief quotation, nor otherwise attained than by improving the gifts
+of nature with wide or careful reading, whereas something may really
+be done for the negative virtues by mere exhibition of what should be
+avoided, the examples collected have had to be examples of the bad
+and not of the good. To this it must be added that a considerable
+proportion of the newspaper extracts are, as is sometimes apparent,
+not from the editorial, but from the correspondence columns; the names
+attached are merely an assurance that the passages have actually
+appeared in print, and not been now invented to point a moral.
+
+The especial thanks of the compilers are offered to Dr. Bradley, joint
+editor of the _Oxford English Dictionary_, who has been good enough
+to inspect the proof sheets, and whose many valuable suggestions have
+led to the removal of some too unqualified statements, some confused
+exposition, and some positive mistakes. It is due to him, however,
+to say that his warnings have now and then been disregarded, when it
+seemed that brevity or some other advantage could be secured without
+great risk of misunderstanding.
+
+The _Oxford English Dictionary_ itself has been of much service. On all
+questions of vocabulary, even if so slightly handled as in the first
+chapter of this book, that great work is now indispensable.
+
+ H. W. F.
+ F. G. F.
+
+
+ PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
+
+In this edition new examples have been added or substituted here and
+there.
+
+
+
+
+ CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+ PAGE
+
+ CHAPTER I. VOCABULARY, pp. 1-59
+
+ General Principles 1-8
+
+ Familiar and far-fetched words 4
+
+ Concrete and abstract expression 5
+
+ Circumlocution 6
+
+ Short and long words 6
+
+ Saxon and Romance words 7
+
+ Requirements of different styles 7
+
+ Malaprops 8
+
+ Neologisms 18
+
+ Americanisms 23
+
+ Foreign words 26
+
+ Formation 37
+
+ Slang 47
+
+ _Individual_ 53
+
+ _Mutual_ 56
+
+ _Unique_ 58
+
+ _Aggravate_ 59
+
+
+ CHAPTER II. SYNTAX, pp. 60-170
+
+ Case 60
+
+ Number 65
+
+ Comparatives and superlatives 70
+
+ Relatives 75-107
+
+ Defining and non-defining relative clauses 75
+
+ _That_ and _who_ or _which_ 80
+
+ _And who_, _and which_ 85
+
+ Case of the relative 93
+
+ Miscellaneous uses of the relative 96
+
+ _It ... that_ 104
+ Participle and gerund 107
+
+ Participles 110
+
+ The gerund 116-133
+
+ Distinguishing the gerund 116
+
+ Omission of the gerund subject 125
+
+ Choice between gerund and infinitive 129
+
+ Shall and will 133-154
+
+ The pure system 134
+
+ The coloured-future system 136
+
+ The plain-future system 138
+
+ Second-person questions 139
+
+ Examples of principal sentences 141
+
+ Substantival clauses 143
+
+ Conditional clauses 149
+
+ Indefinite clauses 151
+
+ Examples of subordinate clauses 152
+
+ Perfect infinitive 154
+
+ Conditionals 156
+
+ _Doubt that_ 158
+
+ Prepositions 161
+
+
+ CHAPTER III. AIRS AND GRACES, pp. 171-218
+
+ Certain types of humor 171
+
+ Elegant variation 175
+
+ Inversion 180-193
+
+ Exclamatory 181
+
+ Balance 182
+
+ In syntactic clauses 187
+
+ Negative, and false-emphasis 190
+
+ Miscellaneous 191
+
+ Archaism 193-200
+
+ Occasional 193
+
+ Sustained 198
+
+ Metaphor 200
+
+ Repetition 209
+
+ Miscellaneous 213-218
+
+ Trite phrases 213
+
+ Irony 215
+
+ Superlatives without _the_ 216
+
+ Cheap originality 217
+
+
+ CHAPTER IV. PUNCTUATION, pp. 219-290
+
+ General difficulties 219
+
+ General principles 224
+
+ The spot plague 226
+
+ Over-stopping 231
+
+ Under-stopping 234
+
+ Grammar and punctuation 235-263
+
+ Substantival clauses 235
+
+ Subject, &c., and verb 239
+
+ Adjectival clauses 242
+
+ Adverbial clauses 244
+
+ Parenthesis 247
+
+ Misplaced commas 248
+
+ Enumeration 250
+
+ Comma between independent sentences 254
+
+ Semicolon with subordinate members 257
+
+ Exclamations and statements 258
+
+ Exclamations and questions 259
+
+ Internal question and exclamation marks 261
+
+ Unaccountable commas 262
+
+ The colon 263
+
+ Miscellaneous 264
+
+ Dashes 266-275
+
+ General abuse 266
+
+ Legitimate uses 267
+
+ Debatable questions 269
+
+ Common misuses 274
+
+ Hyphens 275
+
+ Quotation marks 280-290
+
+ Excessive use 280
+
+ Order with stops 282
+
+ Single and double 287
+
+ Misplaced 288
+
+ Half quotation 289
+
+
+ PART II. p. 291 to the end
+
+
+ EUPHONY, §§ 1-10
+
+ 1. Jingles 291
+
+ 2. Alliteration 292
+
+ 3. Repeated prepositions 293
+
+ 4. Sequence of relatives 293
+
+ 5. Sequence of _that_, &c. 294
+
+ 6. Metrical prose 295
+
+ 7. Sentence accent 295
+
+ 8. Causal _as_ clauses 298
+
+ 9. Wens and hypertrophied members 300
+
+ 10. Careless repetition 303
+
+
+ QUOTATION, &c., §§ 11-19
+
+ 11. Common misquotations 305
+
+ 12. Uncommon misquotations of well-known passages 305
+
+ 13. Misquotation of less familiar passages 306
+
+ 14. Misapplied and misunderstood quotations and phrases 306
+
+ 15. Allusion 307
+
+ 16. Incorrect allusion 308
+
+ 17. Dovetailed and adapted quotations and phrases 308
+
+ 18. Trite quotation 310
+
+ 19. Latin abbreviations, &c. 311
+
+
+ GRAMMAR, §§ 20-37
+
+ 20. Unequal yokefellows and defective double harness 311
+
+ 21. Common parts 314
+
+ 22. The wrong turning 316
+
+ 23. Ellipse in subordinate clauses 317
+
+ 24. Some illegitimate infinitives 317
+
+ 25. Split infinitives 319
+
+ 26. Compound passives 319
+
+ 27. Confusion with negatives 321
+
+ 28. Omission of _as_ 324
+
+ 29. Other liberties taken with _as_ 324
+
+ 30. Brachylogy 326
+
+ 31. Between two stools 327
+
+ 32. The impersonal _one_ 328
+
+ 33. _Between ... or_ 328
+
+ 34. _A_ placed between the adjective and its noun 329
+
+ 35. _Do_ as substitute verb 330
+
+ 36. Fresh starts 330
+
+ 37. Vulgarisms and colloquialisms 331
+
+
+ MEANING, §§ 38-48
+
+ 38. Tautology 331
+
+ 39. Redundancies 332
+
+ 40. _As to whether_ 333
+
+ 41. Superfluous _but_ and _though_ 334
+
+ 42. _If and when_ 334
+
+ 43. Maltreated idioms 336
+
+ 44. Truisms and contradictions in terms 339
+
+ 45. Double emphasis 341
+
+ 46. Split auxiliaries 342
+
+ 47. Overloading 343
+
+ 48. Demonstrative, noun, and participle or adjective 344
+
+
+ AMBIGUITY, §§ 49-52
+
+ 49. False scent 345
+
+ 50. Misplacement of words 346
+
+ 51. Ambiguous position 347
+
+ 52. Ambiguous enumeration 348
+
+
+ STYLE, § 53 to the end
+
+ 53. Antics 348
+
+ 54. Journalese 351
+
+ 55. _Somewhat_, &c. 352
+
+ 56. Clumsy patching 355
+
+ 57. Omission of the conjunction _that_ 356
+
+ 58. Meaningless _while_ 357
+
+ 59. Commercialisms 358
+
+ 60. Pet Phrases 359
+
+ 61. _Also_ as conjunction; and _&c._ 359
+
+
+
+
+ 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.[1]
+
+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 1 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 work-house, _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 _praedĩcere_ 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_,[2] _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 _aestho-physiology_. 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_[3],
+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-coloured_[4]
+ 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 (continuously),
+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[5].
+
+ 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....--_Advertisements 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 _gaucherie_, _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 justified only (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 praise-worthy 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 _vieux 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_[6] 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 is 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 perfectly;
+(_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 _au 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 scelestus_ 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 corresponding
+French monstrosity, _fantasmagorie_, is unmistakably 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[7], 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 _naivety_.
+
+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
+of 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.[8]
+
+ 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 suffix_, _-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_:[9]
+
+ 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 bring out, 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 _t_s, 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
+three 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 Böker, of St.
+ Petersburg. This is a _somewhat unique_ thing to happen to an English
+ text-book.--_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 five as clearly wrong; in the fifth,
+_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._
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 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.
+
+[2] As in the second quotation from _The Times_ on p. 4.
+
+[3] Even in the legitimate sense (see p. 16), originally a happy
+metaphor for mysterious leaking out, but now vulgarized and ‘dead’.
+
+[4] 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.
+
+[5] 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._
+
+[6] 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.
+
+[7] The _Oxford Dictionary_ has fourteen varieties.
+
+[8] _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.
+
+[9] 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_.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER II
+
+ SYNTAX
+
+
+ CASE
+
+There is not much opportunity in English for going wrong here, because
+we have shed most of our cases. The personal pronouns, and _who_ and
+its compounds, are the only words that visibly retain three--called
+subjective, objective, possessive. In nouns the first two are
+indistinguishable, and are called the common case. One result of this
+simplicity is that, the sense of case being almost lost, the few
+mistakes that can be made are made often--some of them so often that
+they are now almost right by prescription.
+
+1. In apposition.
+
+A pronoun appended to a noun, and in the same relation to the rest of
+the sentence, should be in the same case. Disregard of this is a bad
+blunder.
+
+ But to behold her mother--_she_ to whom she owed her being!--S.
+ FERRIER.
+
+2. The complement with _am_, _are_, _is_, &c., should be subjective.
+
+ I am she, she _me_, till death and beyond it.--MEREDITH.
+
+ _Whom_ would you rather be?
+
+ To how many maimed and mourning millions is the first and sole angel
+ visitant, _him_ Easterns call Azrael.--C. BRONTË.
+
+ That’s _him_.
+
+In the last but one, _him_ would no doubt have been defended by the
+writer, since the full form would be _he whom_, as an attraction to
+the vanished _whom_. But such attraction is not right; if _he_ alone
+is felt to be uncomfortable, _whom_ should not be omitted; or, in this
+exalted context, it might be _he that_.
+
+On _that’s him_, see 4, below.
+
+3. When a verb or preposition governs two pronouns united by _and_,
+&c., the second is apt to go wrong--a bad blunder. _Between you and I_
+is often heard in talk; and, in literature:
+
+ And now, my dear, let you and _I_ say a few words about this
+ unfortunate affair.--TROLLOPE.
+
+ It is kept locked up in a marble casket, quite out of reach of you or
+ _I_.--S. FERRIER.
+
+ She found everyone’s attention directed to Mary, and _she_ herself
+ entirely overlooked.--S. FERRIER.
+
+4. The interrogative _who_ is often used for _whom_, as, _Who_ did you
+see? A distinction should here be made between conversation, written or
+spoken, and formal writing. Many educated people feel that in saying
+_It is I, Whom do you mean?_ instead of _It’s me, Who do you mean?_
+they will be talking like a book, and they justifiably prefer geniality
+to grammar. But in print, unless it is dialogue, the correct forms are
+advisable.
+
+5. Even with words that have no visible distinction between subjective
+and objective case, it is possible to go wrong; for the case can always
+be inferred, though not seen. Consequently a word should never be so
+placed that it must be taken twice, once as subject and once as object.
+This is so common a blunder that it will be well to give a good number
+of examples. It occurs especially with the relative, from its early
+position in the sentence; but, as the first two examples show, it may
+result from the exceptional placing of other words also. The mere
+repetition of the relative, or insertion of _it_ or other pronoun,
+generally mends the sentence; in the first example, change _should only
+be_ to _only to be_.
+
+ _The occupation of the mouths of the Yalu_, however, his Majesty
+ considered undesirable, and should only be carried out in the last
+ resort.--_Times._
+
+ _This_ the strong sense of Lady Maclaughlan had long perceived, and
+ was the principal reason of her selecting so weak a woman as her
+ companion.--S. FERRIER.
+
+ Qualities _which_ it would cost me a great deal to acquire, and would
+ lead to nothing.--MORLEY.
+
+ A recorded saying of our Lord _which_ some higher critics of the New
+ Testament regard as of doubtful authenticity, and is certainly of
+ doubtful interpretation.
+
+ A weakness _which_ some would miscall gratitude, and is oftentimes the
+ corrupter of a heart not ignoble.--RICHARDSON.
+
+Analogous to these are the next three examples, which will require
+separate comment:
+
+ Knowledge _to_ the certainty of which no authority could add, or take
+ away, one jot or tittle.--HUXLEY.
+
+_To_ is applicable to _add_, not to _take away_. The full form is given
+by substituting for _or_ ‘and from the certainty of which no authority
+could’. This is clearly too cumbrous. Inserting _or from_ after _to_
+is the simplest correction; but the result is rather formal. Better,
+perhaps, ‘the certainty of which could not be increased or diminished
+one jot by any authority’.
+
+ From his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to
+ excel _in_ whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his
+ abilities.
+
+A second _in_ is required. This common slovenliness results from the
+modern superstition against putting a preposition at the end. The
+particular sentence may, however, be mended otherwise than by inserting
+_in_, if _excel_ is made absolute by a comma placed after it. Even
+then, the _in_ would perhaps be better at the end of the clause than at
+the beginning.
+
+ Lastly may be mentioned a principle _upon which_ Clausewitz insisted
+ with all his strength, and could never sufficiently impress upon his
+ Royal scholar.--_Times._
+
+The italicized _upon_ (we have nothing to do with the other _upon_) is
+right with _insist_, but wrong, though it must necessarily be supplied
+again, with _impress_. It is the result of the same superstition. Mend
+either by writing _upon_ after _insisted_ instead of before _which_, or
+by inserting _which he_ after _and_.
+
+6. After _as_ and _than_.
+
+These are properly conjunctions and ‘take the same case after them as
+before’. But those words must be rightly understood. (a), _I love you
+more than him_, means something different from (b), _I love you more
+than he_. It must be borne in mind that the ‘case before’ is that of
+the word that is compared with the ‘case after’, and not necessarily
+that of the word actually next before in position. In (a) _you_ is
+compared with _him_: in (b) _I_ (not _you_) is compared with _he_. The
+correct usage is therefore important, and the tendency illustrated in
+the following examples to make _than_ and _as_ prepositions should be
+resisted--though no ambiguity can actually result here.
+
+ When such as _her_ die.--SWIFT.
+
+ But there, I think, Lindore would be more eloquent than _me_.--S.
+ FERRIER.
+
+It must further be noticed that both _as_ and _than_ are conjunctions
+of the sort that can either, like _and_, &c., merely join coordinates,
+or, like _when_, &c., attach a subordinate clause to what it depends
+on. This double power sometimes affects case.
+
+ It is to him and such men as _he_ that we owe the change.--HUXLEY.
+
+This example is defensible, _as_ being here a subordinating
+conjunction, and _as he_ being equivalent to _as he is_. But it is
+distinctly felt to need defence, which _as him_ would not; _as_ would
+be a coordinating conjunction, and simply join the pronoun _him_ to the
+noun _men_. So, with _than_:
+
+ Such as have bound me, as well as others much better than _me_, by an
+ inviolable attachment to him from that time forward.--BURKE.
+
+On the other hand, we could not say indifferently, _I am as good as
+he_, and _I am as good as him_; the latter would imply that _as_ was a
+preposition, which it is not. And it is not always possible to choose
+between the coordinating and the subordinating use. In the next example
+only the coordinating will do, no verb being capable of standing after
+_he_; but the author has not observed this.
+
+ I beheld a man in the dress of a postillion, whom I instantly
+ recognized as _he_ to whom I had rendered assistance.--BORROW.
+
+A difficult question, however, arises with relatives after _than_.
+In the next two examples _whom_ is as manifestly wrong as _who_ is
+manifestly intolerable:
+
+ Dr. Dillon, than _whom_ no Englishman has a profounder acquaintance
+ with....--_Times._
+
+ It was a pleasure to hear Canon Liddon, than _whom_, in his day, there
+ was no finer preacher.
+
+The only correct solution is to recast the sentences. For instance,
+_... whose acquaintance with ... is unrivalled among Englishmen_; and
+_... unsurpassed in his day as a preacher_. But perhaps the convenience
+of _than whom_ is so great that to rule it out amounts to saying that
+man is made for grammar and not grammar for man.
+
+7. Compound possessives.
+
+This is strictly the proper place for drawing attention to a question
+that has some importance because it bears on the very common
+construction discussed at some length in the gerund section. This is
+the question whether, and to what extent, compound possessives may be
+recognized. Some people say _some one else’s_, others say _some one’s
+else_. Our own opinion is that the latter is uncalled for and pedantic.
+Of the three alternatives, _Smith the baker’s wife_, _Smith’s wife
+the baker_, _the wife of Smith the baker_, the last is unmitigated
+Ollendorff, the second thrusts its ambiguity upon us and provokes an
+involuntary smile, and the first alone is felt to be natural. It must
+be confessed, however, that it is generally avoided in print, while the
+form that we have ventured to call pedantic is not uncommon. In the
+first of the examples that follow, we should be inclined to change to
+_Nanny the maid-of-all-work’s_, and in the second to _the day of Frea,
+goddess of_, &c.
+
+ Another mind that was being wrought up to a climax was Nanny’s, the
+ maid-of-all-work, who had a warm heart.--ELIOT.
+
+ Friday is Frea’s-day, the goddess of peace and joy and
+ fruitfulness.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+
+ NUMBER
+
+Very little comment will be needed; we have only to convince readers
+that mistakes are common, and caution therefore necessary.
+
+1. The copula should always agree with the subject, not with the
+complement. These are wrong:
+
+ The _pages_ which describe how the 34th Osaka Regiment wiped out the
+ tradition that had survived since the Saigo rebellion _is_ a typical
+ _piece_ of description.--_Times._
+
+ A _boy_ dressed up as a girl _and a girl_ dressed up as a girl _is_,
+ to the eye at least, the same _thing_.--_Times._
+
+ People do not believe now as they did, but the moral _inconsistencies_
+ of our contemporaries _is_ no _proof_ thereof.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+It must be remembered that in questions the subject often comes after
+the verb and the complement before it; but the same rule must be kept.
+E. g., if the last example were put as a question instead of as a
+negative statement, ‘What proof _is_ the inconsistencies?’ would be
+wrong, and ‘What proof _are_ &c.?’ right.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Some sentences in which the subject contains _only_, a superlative,
+&c., have the peculiarity that subject and complement may almost be
+considered to have changed places; and this defence would probably be
+put in for the next three examples; but, whether actually wrong or not,
+they are unpleasant. The noun that stands before the verb should be
+regarded as the subject, and the verb be adapted to it.
+
+ The only _thing_ Siamese about the Consul, except the hatchment and
+ the flag, _were_ his _servants_.--SLADEN.
+
+ The only _difficulty_ in Finnish _are_ the _changes_ undergone by the
+ stem.--SWEET.
+
+ The most pompous _monument_ of Egyptian greatness, and _one_ of the
+ most bulky works of manual industry, _are_ the pyramids.--JOHNSON.
+
+The next example is a curious problem; the subject to _were_ is in
+sense plural, but in grammar singular (_finding_, verbal noun):
+
+ _Finding_ Miss Vernon in a place so solitary, engaged in a journey
+ so dangerous, and under the protection of one gentleman only, _were
+ circumstances_ to excite every feeling of jealousy.--SCOTT.
+
+2. Mistakes in the number of verbs are extremely common when a singular
+noun intervenes between a plural subject (or a plural noun between
+a singular subject) and its verb. It is worth while to illustrate
+the point abundantly; for it appears that real doubt can exist on
+the subject:--‘“No one but schoolmasters and schoolboys knows” is
+exceedingly poor English, _if it is not absolutely bad grammar_’ (from
+a review of this book, 1st ed.).
+
+ And do we wonder, when the _foundation_ of _politics_ _are_ in the
+ letter only, that many evils should arise?--JOWETT.
+
+ There is _much_ in these ceremonial _accretions and teachings_ of
+ the Church which _tend_ to confuse and distract, and which hinder
+ us....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+This sentence, strictly taken as it stands, would mean something that
+the writer by no means intends it to, viz., ‘Though the ceremonies are
+confusing, there is a great deal in them’.
+
+ An immense _amount_ of _confusion and indifference_ _prevail_ in these
+ days.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ They produced various _medicaments_, the lethal _power_ of _which_
+ _were_ extolled at large.--_Times._
+
+ The _partition_ which the two ministers made of the _powers_ of
+ government _were_ singularly happy.--MACAULAY.
+
+ _One_ at least of the _qualities_ which fit it for training ordinary
+ men _unfit_ it for training an extraordinary man.--BAGEHOT.
+
+ I failed to pass in the small _amount_ of _classics_ which _are_ still
+ held to be necessary.--_Times._
+
+ The Tibetans have engaged to exclude from their country those
+ dangerous _influences_ _whose appearance_ _were_ the chief cause of
+ our action.--_Times._
+
+ Sundry other reputable _persons_, I know not whom, _whose_ joint
+ _virtue_ still _keep_ the law in good odour.--EMERSON.
+
+ The practical _results_ of the recognition of this _truth_ _is_ as
+ follows.--W. H. MALLOCK.
+
+ The Ordination _services_ of the English _Church_ _states_ this to be
+ a truth.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ All special _rights_ of _voting_ in the election of members _was_
+ abolished.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ The separate _powers_ of this great _officer_ of State, who had
+ originally acted only as President of the Council when discharging its
+ judicial functions, _seems_ to have been thoroughly established under
+ Edward I.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+3. _They_, _them_, _their_, _theirs_, are often used in referring back
+to singular pronominals (as _each_, _one_, _anybody_, _everybody_), or
+to singular nouns or phrases (as _a parent_, _neither Jack nor Jill_),
+of which the doubtful or double gender causes awkwardness. It is a
+real deficiency in English that we have no pronoun, like the French
+_soi_, _son_, to stand for _him-or-her_, _his-or-her_ (for _he-or-she_
+French is no better off than English). Our view, though we admit it to
+be disputable, is clear--that _they_, _their_, &c., should never be
+resorted to, as in the examples presently to be given they are. With a
+view to avoiding them, it should be observed that (_a_) the possessive
+of _one_ (indefinite pronoun) is _one’s_, and that of _one_ (numeral
+pronoun) is either _his_, or _her_, or _its_ (One does not forget
+_one’s_ own name: I saw one of them drop _his_ cigar, _her_ muff, or
+_its_ leaves); (_b_) _he_, _his_, _him_, may generally be allowed to
+stand for the common gender; the particular aversion shown to them by
+Miss Ferrier in the examples may be referred to her sex; and, ungallant
+as it may seem, we shall probably persist in refusing women their due
+here as stubbornly as Englishmen continue to offend the Scots by saying
+_England_ instead of _Britain_. (_c_) Sentences may however easily
+be constructed (Neither John nor Mary knew _his_ own mind) in which
+_his_ is undeniably awkward. The solution is then what we so often
+recommend, to do a little exercise in paraphrase (_John and Mary were
+alike irresolute_, for instance). (_d_) Where legal precision is really
+necessary, _he or she_ may be written in full. Corrections according to
+these rules will be appended in brackets to the examples.
+
+ _Anybody_ else who _have_ only _themselves_ in view.--RICHARDSON. (has
+ ... himself)
+
+ Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte, in novel-writing as in carrying
+ _one’s_ head in _their_ hand.--S. FERRIER. (one’s ... one’s)
+
+ The feelings of the _parent_ upon committing the cherished object of
+ _their_ cares and affections to the stormy sea of life.--S. FERRIER.
+ (his)
+
+ But he never allowed _one_ to feel _their_ own deficiencies, for he
+ never appeared to be aware of them himself.--S. FERRIER. (one’s)
+
+ A difference of opinion which leaves _each_ free to act according to
+ _their_ own feelings.--S. FERRIER. (his)
+
+ Suppose _each_ of us _try our hands_ at it.--S. FERRIER. (tries his
+ hand; _or, if all of us are women_, tries her hand)
+
+ _Everybody_ is discontented with _their_ lot in life.--BEACONSFIELD.
+ (his)
+
+4. Other mistakes involving number made with such pronominals, or with
+nouns collective, personified, or abstract.
+
+ No man can read Scott without being more of a public man, whereas the
+ ordinary novel tends to make its _readers_ rather less of _one_ than
+ before.--HUTTON.
+
+ And so _each_ of his portraits _are_ not only a ‘piece of history’,
+ but....--STEVENSON.
+
+ Le Roman d’un Spahi, Azidayé and Rarahu _each_ contains the history of
+ a love affair.--H. JAMES.
+
+ He manages to interest us in the men, who _each_ in turn wishes to
+ engineer Richard Baldock’s future.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+When _each_ is appended in apposition to a plural subject, it should
+stand after the verb, or auxiliary, which should be plural; read here,
+_contain each_, _wish each in turn_ (or, _each of whom wishes in turn_).
+
+ As the leading maritime _nation_ in the world and dependent wholly
+ on the supremacy of our fleet to maintain this position, _everyone_
+ is virtually bound to accord some measure of aid to an association
+ whose time and talents are devoted to ensuring this important
+ object.--_Times._
+
+Every one is indeed a host in himself, if he is the leading maritime
+nation.
+
+ It is not in _Japan’s_ interests to allow negotiations to drag on once
+ _their_ armies are ready to deliver the final blow.--_Times._
+
+The personification of Japan must be kept up by _her_.
+
+ _Many_ of my notes, I am greatly afraid, will be thought _a
+ superfluity_.--E. V. LUCAS (quoted in _Times_ review).
+
+My notes may be a superfluity; many of my notes may be superfluous, or
+superfluities; or many a note of mine may be a superfluity; but it will
+hardly pass as it is.
+
+5. Though nouns of multitude may be freely used with either a singular
+or a plural verb, or be referred to by pronouns of singular or plural
+meaning, they should not have both (except for special reasons and upon
+deliberation) in the same sentence; and words that will rank in one
+context as nouns of multitude may be very awkward if so used in another.
+
+ _The public_ _is_ naturally much impressed by this evidence, and in
+ considering it _do_ not make the necessary allowances.--_Times._
+
+ The _Times_ Brussels correspondent ... tells us that the _committee_
+ _adds_ these words to _their_ report.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ The Grand Opera Syndicate _has_ also made an important addition to
+ _their_ German tenors.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ The only political _party_ _who_ could take office was _that_ which
+ ... had consistently opposed the American war.--BAGEHOT.
+
+ As _the race_ of man, after centuries of civilization, still _keeps_
+ some traits of _their_ barbarian fathers.--STEVENSON.
+
+ The battleship Kniaz Potemkin, of which the _crew_ _is_ said to have
+ mutinied and murdered _their_ officers.--_Times._
+
+6. _Neither_, _either_, as pronouns, should always take a singular
+verb--a much neglected rule. So also _every_.
+
+ The conception is faulty for two reasons, neither of which _are_
+ noticed by Plato.--JOWETT.
+
+ ... neither of which _are_ very amiable motives for religious
+ gratitude.--THACKERAY.
+
+ He asked the gardener whether either of the ladies _were_ at
+ home.--TROLLOPE.
+
+_Were_, however, may be meant for the subjunctive, when it would be a
+fault of style, not of grammar.
+
+ I think almost _every one_ of the Judges of the High Court _are_
+ represented here.--LORD HALSBURY.
+
+ _Every_ Warwick institution, from the corporation to the
+ schools and the almshouses, _have_ joined hands in patriotic
+ fellow-working.--_Speaker._
+
+7. For rhetorical reasons, a verb often precedes its subject; but
+enthusiasm, even if appropriate, should not be allowed to override the
+concords.
+
+ And of this emotion _was_ born all the _gods_ of antiquity.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ But unfortunately there _seems_ to be spread abroad certain
+ _misconceptions_.--_Times._
+
+ But with these suggestions _are_ joined some very good _exposition_ of
+ principles which should underlie education generally.--_Spectator._
+
+ Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has received a resolution, to which _is_
+ appended the _names_ of eight Liberal members and candidates for East
+ London....--_Times._
+
+
+ COMPARATIVES AND SUPERLATIVES
+
+The chief point that requires mention is ill treatment of _the more_.
+In this phrase _the_ is not the article, but an adverb, either relative
+or demonstrative. In _the more the merrier_ it is first relative and
+then demonstrative: by-how-much we are more, by-so-much we shall be
+merrier. When the relative _the_ is used, it should always be answered
+regularly by, or itself answer, the demonstrative _the_. Attempts to
+vary the formula are generally unhappy; for instance,
+
+ He was leaving his English business in the hands of Bilton, who seemed
+ to him, the more he knew him, extraordinarily efficient.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+This should run, perhaps: _whose efficiency impressed him the more, the
+more he knew him_--though it must be confessed that the double form
+is nearly always uncomfortable if it has not the elbowroom of a whole
+sentence to itself. That, however, is rather a question of style than
+of syntax; and other examples will accordingly be found in the section
+of the Chapter _Airs and Graces_ concerned with originality.
+
+ The farther we advance into it, we see confusion more and more unfold
+ itself into order.--CARLYLE.
+
+Most readers will feel that this is an uncomfortable compromise between
+_The farther we advance the more do we see_ and _As we advance we see
+confusion more and more unfold itself_. Similarly,
+
+ She had reflection enough to foresee, that the longer she countenanced
+ his passion, her own heart would be more and more irretrievably
+ engaged.--SMOLLETT.
+
+But it is when the demonstrative is used alone with no corresponding
+relative clause--a use in itself quite legitimate--that real blunders
+occur. It seems sometimes to be thought that _the more_ is merely a
+more imposing form of _more_, and is therefore better suited for a
+dignified or ambitious style; but it has in fact a perfectly definite
+meaning, or rather two; and there need never be any doubt whether
+_more_ or _the more_ is right. One of the meanings is a slight
+extension of the other. (1) The correlative meaning _by so much_ may
+be kept, though the relative clause, instead of formally corresponding
+and containing _the_ (meaning _by how much_) and a comparative, takes
+some possibly quite different shape. But it must still be clear from
+the context what the relative clause might be. Thus, ‘We shall be a
+huge crowd’.--‘Well, we shall be the merrier’. Or, ‘If he raises his
+demands, I grant them the more willingly’, i. e., The more he asks,
+the more willingly I give. This instance leads to the other possible
+meaning, which is wider. (2) The original meaning of the demonstrative
+_the_ is simply _by that_; this in the complete double form, and often
+elsewhere, has the interpretation, limited to quantity, of _by so
+much_, or _in that proportion_; but it may also mean _on that account_,
+when the relative clause is not present. Again, however, the context
+must answer plainly in some form the question _On what account?_ Thus,
+He has done me many good turns; but I do not like him any the better;
+i. e., any better on that account; i. e., on account of the good turns.
+
+The function of _the_, then, is to tell us that there is, just before
+or after, an answer to one of the questions, _More by what amount?_
+_More on what account?_ If there is no such answer, we may be sure
+that the comparative has no right to its _the_. We start with a
+sentence that is entitled to its _the_, but otherwise unidiomatic.
+
+ We are not a whit _the less_ depressed in spirits at the sight of all
+ this unrelieved misery on the stage _by the reminder_ that Euripides
+ was moved to depict it by certain occurrences in his own contemporary
+ Athens.--_Times._
+
+_The less_ is _less on that account_, viz., that we are reminded. But
+the preposition required when the cause is given in this construction
+by a noun is _for_, not _by_. Read _for the reminder_. The type is
+shown in _None the better for seeing you_. Our sentence is in fact a
+mixture between _Our depression is not lessened_ by _the reminder_, and
+_We are not the less depressed for the reminder_; and the confusion is
+the worse that _depressed by_ happens to be a common phrase.
+
+ The suggestion, as regarded Mr. Sowerby, was certainly true, and was
+ not the less so as regarded some of Mr. Sowerby’s friends.--TROLLOPE.
+
+_The_ tells us that we can by looking about us find an answer either to
+_Not less true by what amount?_ or to _Not less true on what account?_
+There is no answer to the first except _Not less true about the friends
+in proportion as it was truer about Mr. Sowerby_; and none to the
+second except _Not less true about the friends because it was true
+about Mr. Sowerby_. Both are meaningless, and _the_ the is superfluous
+and wrong.
+
+ Yet as his criticism is more valuable than that of other men, so it is
+ the more rarely met with.--_Spectator._
+
+This is such an odd tangle of the two formulae _as ... so_, _the more
+... the more_, that the reader is tempted to cut the knot and imagine
+what is hardly possible, that _the_ is meant for the ordinary article,
+agreeing with _kind of criticism_ understood between _the_ and _more_.
+Otherwise it must be cured either by omitting _the_, or by writing
+_The more valuable his criticism, the more rarely is it met with_. If
+the latter is done, _than that of other men_ will have to go. Which
+suggests the further observation that _the_ with a comparative is
+almost always wrong when a _than_-clause is appended. This is because
+in the full double clause there is necessarily not a fixed standard of
+comparison, but a sliding scale. The following example, not complicated
+by any _the_, will make the point clear:
+
+ My eyes are more and more averse to light than ever.--S. FERRIER.
+
+You can be more averse than ever, or more and more averse, but not
+more and more averse than ever. _Ever_ can only mean the single point
+of time in the past, whichever it was, at which you were most averse.
+But to be more and more averse is to be more averse at each stage than
+at each previous stage. Just such a sliding scale is essential with
+_the more ... the more_. And perhaps it becomes so closely associated
+with the phrase that the expression of a fixed standard of comparison,
+such as is inevitably set up by a _than_-clause, is felt to be
+impossible even when the demonstrative _the_ stands alone. In the next
+two examples, answers to the question _More on what account?_ can be
+found, though they are so far disguised that the sentences would be
+uncomfortable, even if what makes them impossible were absent. That is
+the addition of the _than_-clause in each.
+
+ But neither is that way open; nor is it any the more open in the case
+ of Canada than Australia.--F. GREENWOOD.
+
+The _the_ might pass if _than Australia_ were omitted, and there
+would be no objection to it if we read further (for _in the case_)
+_if we take the case_, and better still, placed that clause first in
+the sentence: Nor, if we take the case of Canada, is the way any the
+more open. _The_ then means _on that account_, viz., because we have
+substituted Canada.
+
+ I would humbly protest against setting up any standard of Christianity
+ by the regularity of people’s attendance at church or chapel. I am
+ certain personally that I have a far greater realization of the
+ goodness of God to all creation; I am certain that I can _the more_
+ acknowledge His unbounded love for all He has made, and our entire
+ dependence on Him, _than I could_ twenty years ago, when I attended
+ church ten times where I now go once.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+In this, the answer to _More on what account?_ is possibly implied in
+the last clause; it would perhaps be, if clearly put, Because I go to
+church seldomer. The right form would be, _I can the more acknowledge
+... for going_ (or _that I go_) _to church only once where twenty years
+ago I went ten times_. Unless the _than_-clause is got rid of, we ought
+to have _more_ without _the_.
+
+This question of _the_ is important for lucidity, is rather difficult,
+and has therefore had to be treated at length. The other points that
+call for mention are quite simple; they are illogicalities licensed by
+custom, but perhaps better avoided. Avoidance, however, that proclaims
+itself is not desirable; to set readers asking ‘Who are you, pray,
+that the things everybody says are not good enough for you?’ is bad
+policy; ‘in vitium ducit culpae fuga si caret arte.’ But if a way
+round presents itself that does not at once suggest an assumption of
+superiority, so much the better.
+
+1. _More than I can help._
+
+ Without thinking of the corresponding phrase in his native language
+ more than he can help.--H. SWEET.
+
+ We don’t haul guns through traffic more than we can help.--KIPLING.
+
+These really mean, of course, more than he (we) can_not_ help. To say
+that, however, is by this time impossible. More than he need, if (when)
+he can help it, too much, unnecessarily, and other substitutes, will
+sometimes do.
+
+2. _Most of any_ (singular).
+
+ A political despotism, the most unbounded, both in power and
+ principle, of any tyranny that ever existed so long.--GALT.
+
+ She has the most comfortable repository of stupid friends to have
+ recourse to of anybody I ever knew.--S. FERRIER.
+
+ And they had the readiest ear for a bold, honourable sentiment, of any
+ class of men the world ever produced.--STEVENSON.
+
+ Latin at any rate should be an essential ingredient in culture as the
+ best instrument of any language for clear and accurate expression of
+ thought.--_Times._
+
+ The first chapter, which from the lessons it enforces is perhaps the
+ most valuable of any in the present volume....--SIR G. T. GOLDIE.
+
+ Disraeli said that he had ‘the largest parliamentary knowledge of any
+ man he had met’.--BRYCE.
+
+Though this is extremely common, as the examples are enough to show,
+there is seldom any objection to saying either _most of all_ or _more
+than any_.
+
+3. _Most_ with words that do not admit of degrees.
+
+_Unique_ has been separately dealt with in the chapter on _Vocabulary_.
+_Ideal_ is another word of the same sort; _an ideal solution_ is one
+that could not possibly be improved upon, and _most_ is nonsense with
+it; _an ideal and most obvious_ should be read in the example:
+
+ That the transformation of the Regular Army into the general service
+ Army and of the Militia into the home service Army is a most ideal and
+ obvious solution admits, I think, of no contradiction.--_Times._
+
+
+ RELATIVES
+
+=a. Defining and non-defining relative clauses.=
+
+For the purposes of b. and c. below, all relative clauses are divided
+into defining and non-defining. The exact sense in which we use these
+terms is illustrated by the following groups, of which (i) contains
+defining clauses, (ii) non-defining.
+
+ (i) The man who called yesterday left no address.
+
+ Mr. Lovelace has seen divers apartments at Windsor: but not one, he
+ says, that he thought fit for me.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ He secured ... her sincere regard, by the feelings which he
+ manifested.--THACKERAY.
+
+ The Jones who dines with us to-night is not the Jones who was at
+ school with you.
+
+ The best novel that Trollope ever wrote was....
+
+ Any man that knows three words of Greek could settle that point.
+
+ (ii) At the first meeting, which was held yesterday, the chair....
+
+ Deputies must be elected by the Zemstvos, which must be extended and
+ popularized, but not on the basis of....--_Times._
+
+ The Emperor William, who was present ..., listened to a loyal
+ address.--_Times._
+
+ The statue of the Emperor Frederick, which is the work of the sculptor
+ Professor Uphnes, represents the Monarch on horseback.--_Times._
+
+ Jones, who should know something of the matter, thinks differently.
+
+The function of a defining relative clause is to limit the application
+of the antecedent; where that is already precise, a defining clause
+is not wanted. The limitation can be effected in more than one way,
+according to the nature of the antecedent. As a rule, the antecedent
+gives us a class to select from, the defining clause enables us to make
+the selection. Thus in our first example the antecedent leaves us to
+select from the general class of ‘men’, the defining clause fixes the
+particular man (presumably the only man, or the only man that would
+occur in the connexion) ‘who called yesterday’. Sometimes, however, the
+functions of the two are reversed. When we have an antecedent with a
+superlative, or other word of exclusive or comprehensive meaning, such
+as ‘all’, ‘only’, ‘any’, we know already how to make our selection,
+and only wait for the relative clause to tell us from what class to
+make it. We know that we are to choose ‘the best novel’: the relative
+clause limits us to the works of Trollope. We are to choose ‘any man’
+we like, provided (says our relative clause) that he ‘knows three
+words of Greek’. In either case, the work of definition is done by the
+exclusion (implied in the relative clause) of persons or things that
+the antecedent by itself might be taken to include.
+
+The point to notice is that, whichever way the defining clause does its
+work, it is essential to and inseparable from its antecedent. If for
+any reason we wish to get rid of it, we can only do so by embodying its
+contents in the antecedent: ‘The man in Paris with whom I correspond’
+must become ‘My Paris correspondent’. To remove the clause altogether
+is to leave the antecedent with either no meaning or a wrong one. Even
+in such extreme cases as ‘the wisest man that ever lived’, ‘the meanest
+flower that blows’, where the defining clause may seem otiose and
+therefore detachable, we might claim that future wise men, and past and
+future flowers, are excluded; but we shall better realize the writer’s
+intention if we admit that these clauses are only a pretence of
+limitation designed to exclude the reality; it is as if the writers,
+invited to set limits to their statements, had referred us respectively
+to Time and Space.
+
+This fact, that the removal of a defining clause destroys the meaning
+of the antecedent, supplies an infallible test for distinguishing
+between the defining and the non-defining clause: the latter can
+always, the former never, be detached without disturbing the truth of
+the main predication. A non-defining clause gives independent comment,
+description, explanation, anything but limitation of the antecedent;
+it can always be rewritten either as a parenthesis or as a separate
+sentence, and this is true, however essential the clause may be to the
+point of the main statement. ‘Jones’, in our last example above, is
+quoted chiefly as one ‘who should know something of the matter’; but
+this need not prevent us from writing: ‘Jones thinks differently; and
+he should know something of the matter’.
+
+To find, then, whether a clause defines or does not define, remove it,
+and see whether the statement of which it formed a part is unaltered:
+if not, the clause defines. This test can be applied without difficulty
+to all the examples given above. It is true that we sometimes get
+ambiguous cases: after removing the relative clause, we cannot always
+say whether the sense has been altered or not. That means, however,
+not that our test has failed, but that the clause is actually capable
+of performing either function, and that the main sentence can bear
+two distinct meanings, between which even context may not enable us
+to decide. The point is illustrated, in different degrees, by the
+following examples:
+
+ Mr. H. Lewis then brought forward an amendment, which had been put
+ down by Mr. Trevelyan and which provided for an extension of the
+ process of income-tax graduation.--_Times._
+
+ This was held to portend developments that somehow or other have not
+ followed.--_Times._
+
+The former of these is quite ambiguous. The bringing forward of an
+amendment (no matter what or whose) may be all that the writer meant
+to tell us of in the first instance; the relative clauses are then
+non-defining clauses of description. On the other hand, both clauses
+may quite well be meant to define; and it is even possible that the
+second is meant to define, and the first not, though the coordination
+is then of a kind that we shall show under c. to be improper.
+Similarly, in the second sentence, ‘to portend developments’ may
+possibly be complete in itself; the whole might then be paraphrased
+thus: ‘It was thought that the matter would not stop there: but it
+has’. More probably the clause is meant to define: ‘It was held to
+portend what have since proved to be unrealized developments’. This
+view is confirmed, as we shall see, both by the use of ‘that’ (not
+‘which’) and by the absence of a comma before it.
+
+Punctuation is a test that would not always be applicable even if all
+writers could be assumed to punctuate correctly; but it is often a
+guide to the writer’s intention. For (1) a non-defining clause should
+always be separated from the antecedent by a stop; (2) a defining
+clause should never be so separated unless it is either preceded by a
+parenthesis indicated by stops, or coordinated with a former defining
+clause or with adjectives belonging to the antecedent; as in the
+following examples:
+
+ The only circumstance, in fact, that could justify such a course....
+
+ It is he only who does this, who follows them into all their force and
+ matchless grace, that does or can feel their full value.--HAZLITT.
+
+ Perfect types, that satisfy all these requirements, are not to be
+ looked for.
+
+It will occur to the reader that our last two examples are strictly
+speaking exceptions to the rule of defining clauses, since they tell us
+only what is already implied, and could therefore be removed without
+impairing the sense. That is true to some extent of many parallel
+defining clauses: they are admissible, however, if, without actually
+giving any limitation themselves, they make more clear a limitation
+already given or implied; if, in fact, they are offered as alternative
+versions or as reminders. Our next example is of a defining clause of
+the same kind:
+
+ This estimate which he gives, is the great groundwork of his plan for
+ the national redemption.--BURKE.
+
+The limitation given by ‘this’ is repeated in another form by the
+relative clause. ‘This estimate, the one he gives, is....’
+
+The reader should bear in mind that the distinction between the two
+kinds of relative is based entirely on the closeness of their relation
+to the antecedent. The information given by a defining clause must be
+taken at once, with the antecedent, or both are useless: that given by
+a non-defining clause will keep indefinitely, the clause being complete
+in sense without the antecedent, and the antecedent without the clause.
+This is the only safe test. To ask, for instance, whether the clause
+conveys comment, explanation, or the like, is not a sufficient test
+unless the question is rightly understood; for, although we have said
+that a non-defining clause conveys comment and the like, as opposed
+to definition of the antecedent, it does not follow that a defining
+clause may not (while defining its own antecedent) _contribute_ towards
+comment; on the contrary, it is often open to a writer to throw his
+comment into such a form as will include a defining clause. It may even
+appear from a comparison of the two sentences below that this is the
+origin of the non-defining clause, (2) being an abbreviation of (1):
+
+ 1. Lewis, a man to whom hard work never came amiss, sifted the
+ question thoroughly.
+
+ 2. Lewis, to whom hard work never came amiss, sifted the question....
+
+In (1), a comment is introduced by ‘a man’ in apposition with Lewis; ‘a
+man’ is antecedent to a defining relative clause; separate them, and
+the antecedent is meaningless. But next remove the connecting words ‘a
+man’, and the relative changes at once its antecedent and its nature:
+the antecedent is ‘Lewis’; the relative is non-defining; and the
+clause _is_ a comment, and does not merely contribute to one.
+
+=b. ‘That’ and ‘who’ or ‘which’.=
+
+‘That’ is evidently regarded by many writers as nothing more than
+an ornamental variation for ‘who’ and ‘which’, to be used, not
+indeed immoderately, but quite without discrimination. The opinion
+is excusable; it is not easy to draw any distinction that is at all
+consistently supported by usage. There was formerly a tendency to use
+‘that’ for everything: the tendency now is to use ‘who’ and ‘which’
+for everything. ‘That’, from disuse, has begun to acquire an archaic
+flavour, which with some authors is a recommendation. De Quincey, for
+one, must certainly have held that in exalted prose ‘that’, in all
+connexions, was the more dignified relative; his higher flights abound
+in curious uses of the word, some instances of which are quoted below.
+
+This confusion is to be regretted; for although no distinction can
+be authoritatively drawn between the two relatives, an obvious one
+presents itself. The few limitations on ‘that’ and ‘who’ about which
+every one is agreed all point to ‘that’ as the defining relative,
+‘who’ or ‘which’ as the non-defining. We cannot say ‘My father, that
+left Berlin last night, will shortly arrive’, and an examination of
+instances would show that we can never use ‘that’ where the clause is
+unmistakably non-defining. On the other hand, we cannot say ‘All which
+I can do is useless’; this time, it is true, the generalization will
+not hold; ‘which’ can, and sometimes must, be used, and ‘who’ commonly
+is used, in defining clauses. But that is explained partly by the
+obvious inconvenience sometimes attending the use of ‘that’, and partly
+by the general tendency to exclude it from regular use, which has
+already resulted in making it seem archaic when used of persons, except
+in certain formulae.
+
+The rules given below are a modification of this principle, that
+‘that’ is the defining, ‘who’ or ‘which’ the non-defining relative;
+the reason for each modification is given in its place. We must here
+remind the reader of the distinction drawn in a. between defining and
+non-defining clauses: a defining clause limits the application of the
+antecedent, enabling us to select from the whole class to which the
+antecedent is applicable the particular individual or individuals meant.
+
+1. ‘That’ should never be used to introduce a non-defining clause; it
+is therefore improperly used in all the following examples:
+
+ But by her side was kneeling her better angel, that hid his face with
+ wings: that wept and pleaded for her: that prayed when she could not:
+ that fought with Heaven by tears for her deliverance.--DE QUINCEY.
+
+ Rendering thanks to God in the highest--that, having hid his face
+ through one generation behind thick clouds of war, once again was
+ ascending.--DE QUINCEY.
+
+ And with my own little stock of money besides, that Mrs. Hoggarty’s
+ card-parties had lessened by a good five-and-twenty shillings, I
+ calculated....--THACKERAY.
+
+ How to keep the proper balance between these two testy old wranglers,
+ that rarely pull the right way together, is as much....--MEREDITH.
+
+ Nataly promised amendment, with a steely smile, that his lips mimicked
+ fondly.--MEREDITH.
+
+ It is opposed to our Constitution, that only allows the Crown to
+ remove a Norwegian Civil servant.--NANSEN.
+
+ I cannot but feel that in my person and over my head you desire to pay
+ an unexampled honour to the great country that I represent, to its
+ Bench and Bar, that daily share your labours and keep step with your
+ progress.--CHOATE.
+
+‘That I represent’ is right: ‘that daily share’ is wrong.
+
+ As to dictionaries of the present day, that swell every few years
+ by the thousand items, the presence of a word in one of them shows
+ merely....--R. G. WHITE.
+
+ The sandy strip along the coast is fed only by a few scanty streams,
+ that furnish a remarkable contrast to the vast volumes of water which
+ roll down the Eastern sides.--PRESCOTT.
+
+‘That’ and ‘which’ should change places.
+
+ The social and economic sciences, that now specially interest me, have
+ no considerable place in such a reform.--_Times._
+
+If this is a defining clause, excluding ‘the social and economic
+sciences that’ do _not_ interest the writer, the comma after ‘sciences’
+should be removed.
+
+2. ‘Who’ or ‘which’ should not be used in defining clauses except when
+custom, euphony, or convenience is decidedly against the use of ‘that’.
+The principal exceptions will be noted below; but we shall first give
+instances in which ‘that’ is rightly used, and others in which it might
+have been used with advantage.
+
+ In those highly impressionable years that lie between six and
+ ten....--_Spectator._
+
+ The obstacles that hedge in children from Nature....--_Spectator._
+
+ The whole producing an effect that is not without a certain
+ poetry.--_Times._
+
+ He will do anything that he deems convenient.--BORROW.
+
+ The well-staffed and well-equipped ‘High Schools’ that are now at work
+ ... had not yet sprung into being.--_Times._
+
+ Then, Sir, you keep up revenue laws which are mischievous, in order to
+ preserve trade laws that are useless.--BURKE.
+
+‘That’ should have been used in both clauses.
+
+ The struggle that lay before him.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ There goes another sort of animal that is differentiating from my
+ species....--H. G. WELLS.
+
+ There are other powers, too, that could perform this grateful but
+ onerous duty.--_Times._
+
+In the following examples, ‘that’ is to be preferred to ‘which’;
+especially with antecedent ‘it’, and after a superlative or other word
+of exclusive or comprehensive meaning, such as ‘all’, ‘only’, ‘any’.
+
+ The opportunities which London has given them.--_Times._
+
+ The principles which underlay the agreement.--_Times._
+
+ One cause which surely contributes to this effect has its root in
+ early childhood.--_Spectator._
+
+ A meeting which was held yesterday, which consisted in the main of a
+ bitter personal attack.--ROSEBERY.
+
+‘Which consisted’ is right: but we should have ‘that was held’; the
+clause defines.
+
+ The first thing which the person who desires to be amiable must
+ determine to do is....--_Spectator._
+
+ The most abominable din and confusion which it is possible for a
+ reasonable person to conceive.--POE.
+
+ Reverential objections, composed of all which his unstained family
+ could protest.--MEREDITH.
+
+ He required all the solace which he could derive from literary
+ success.--MACAULAY.
+
+ All the evidence which we have ever seen tends to prove....--MACAULAY.
+
+ A battle more bloody than any which Europe saw in the long interval
+ between Malplaquet and Eylau.--MACAULAY.
+
+ The only other biography which counts for much is....--_Times._
+
+ The French Government are anxious to avoid anything which might be
+ regarded as a breach of neutrality.--_Times._
+
+ It was the ecclesiastical synods which by their example led the way to
+ our national parliaments.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ It is the little threads of which the inner substance of the nerves is
+ composed which subserve sensation.--HUXLEY.
+
+‘Of which’ in a defining clause is one of the recognized exceptions;
+but we ought to have ‘that subserve’.
+
+ It is not wages and costs of handling which fall, but profits and
+ rents.--_Times._
+
+ It has been French ports which have been chosen for the beginning and
+ for the end of his cruise.--_Times._
+
+ Who is it who talks about moral geography?--E. F. BENSON.
+
+3. We come now to the exceptions. The reader will have noticed that of
+all the instances given in (2) there is only one--the last--in which we
+recommend the substitution of ‘that’ for ‘who’; in all the others, it
+is a question between ‘that’ and ‘which’. ‘That’, used of persons, has
+in fact come to look archaic: the only cases in which it is now to be
+preferred to ‘who’ are those mentioned above as particularly requiring
+‘that’ instead of ‘which’; those, namely, in which the antecedent is
+‘it’, or has attached to it a superlative or other word of exclusive
+meaning. We should not, therefore, in the _Spectator_ instance above,
+substitute ‘the person that desires’ for ‘who desires’; but we should
+say
+
+ The most impartial critic that could be found.
+ The only man that I know of.
+ Any one that knows anything knows this.
+ It was you that said so.
+ Who is it that talks about moral geography?
+
+Outside these special types, ‘that’ used of persons is apt to sound
+archaic.
+
+4. It will also have been noticed that all the relatives in (2)
+were either in the subjective case, or in the objective without
+a preposition. ‘That’ has no possessive case, and cannot take a
+preposition before it. Accordingly ‘the man that I found the hat of’
+will of course give place to ‘the man whose hat I found’; and ‘the
+house in which this happened’ will generally be preferred to ‘the
+house that this happened in’. The latter tendency is modified in the
+spoken language by the convenient omission of ‘that’; for always in
+a defining clause, though never in a non-defining, a relative in the
+objective case, with or without a preposition, can be dropped. But few
+writers like, as a general rule, either to drop their relatives or to
+put prepositions at the end. ‘The friends I was travelling with’, ‘the
+book I got it from’, ‘the place I found it in’, will therefore usually
+appear as
+
+ The friends with whom I was travelling.
+ The book from which I got it.
+ The place in which I found it.
+
+5. Euphony demands that ‘that that’ should become ‘that which’, even
+when the words are separated; and many writers, from a feeling that
+‘which’ is the natural correlative of the demonstrative ‘that’, prefer
+the plural ‘those which’; but the first example quoted in (2) seems to
+show that ‘those ... that’ can be quite unobjectionable.
+
+6. A certain awkwardness seems to attend the use of ‘that’ when the
+relative is widely separated from its antecedent. When, for instance,
+two relative clauses are coordinate, some writers use ‘that’ in the
+first, ‘which’ in the second clause, though both define. This point
+will be illustrated in c., where we shall notice that inconsistency in
+this respect sometimes obscures the sense.
+
+It may seem to the reader that a rule with so many exceptions to it
+is not worth observing. We would remind him (i) that it is based upon
+those palpable misuses of the relatives about which every one is
+agreed; (ii) that of the exceptions the first and last result from,
+and might disappear with, the encroachment of ‘who’ and the general
+vagueness about the relatives; while the other two, being obvious and
+clearly defined, do not interfere with the remaining uses of ‘that’;
+(iii) that if we are to be at the expense of maintaining two different
+relatives, we may as well give each of them definite work to do.
+
+In the following subsections we shall not often allude to the
+distinction here laid down. The reader will find that our rules are
+quite as often violated as observed; and may perhaps conclude that if
+the vital difference between a defining and a non-defining clause were
+consistently marked, wherever it is possible, by a discriminating use
+of ‘that’ and ‘which’, false coordination and other mishandlings of the
+relatives would be less common than they are.
+
+=c. ‘And who’; ‘and which’.=
+
+The various possibilities of relative coordination, right and wrong,
+may be thus stated: (i) a relative clause may be rightly or wrongly
+coordinated with another relative clause; this we shall call ‘open’
+coordination; (ii) it may be rightly or wrongly coordinated with words
+that are equivalent to a relative clause, and for which a relative
+clause can be substituted; ‘latent’ coordination; (iii) a clause that
+has obviously no coordinate, open or latent, may yet be introduced by
+‘and’ or other word implying coordination; for such offenders, which
+cannot be coordinate and will not be subordinate, ‘insubordination’ is
+not too harsh a term.
+
+The following are ordinary types of the three classes:
+
+ (i) Men who are ambitious, and whose ambition has never been thwarted,
+ ....
+
+ Pitt, who was ambitious, but whose ambition was qualified by....
+
+ (ii) Ambitious men, and whose ambition has never been thwarted, ....
+
+ An evil now, alas! beyond our power to remedy, and for which we have
+ to thank the folly of our predecessors.
+
+ (iii) Being thus pressed, he grudgingly consented at last to a
+ redistribution, and which, I need not say, it was his duty to have
+ offered in the first instance.
+
+A coordination in which ‘and’ is the natural conjunction may also be
+indicated simply by a comma; there is safety in this course, since the
+clause following the comma may be either coordinate or subordinate. But
+we have to deal only with clauses that are committed to coordination.
+
+‘Insubordination’ will not detain us long; it is always due either to
+negligence or to gross ignorance; we shall illustrate it in its place
+with a few examples, but shall not discuss it. With regard, however,
+to open and latent coordination opinions differ; there is an optimist
+view of open coordination, and a pessimist view of latent, both of
+which seem to us incorrect. It is held by some that open coordination
+(provided that the relatives have the same antecedent) is never wrong,
+and by some--not necessarily others--that latent coordination is never
+right: we shall endeavour to show that the former is often wrong, and
+the latter, however ungainly, often right.
+
+The essential to coordination is that the coordinates should be
+performing the same function in the sentence. It is not necessary, nor
+is it enough, that they should be in the same grammatical form: things
+of the same form may have different functions, and things of different
+forms may have the same function. If we say ‘Unambitious men, and who
+have no experience’, ‘unambitious’ and ‘who have no experience’ are not
+in the same form, but they have the same function--that of specifying
+the class of men referred to. Their grammatical forms (vocabulary
+permitting) are interchangeable: a defining adjective can always take
+the form of a relative clause, and a defining relative clause can often
+take the form of an adjective: ‘inexperienced men, and who have no
+ambition’. ‘Unambitious’ is therefore the true grammatical equivalent
+of ‘who have no ambition’, and latent coordination between it and a
+relative clause is admissible.
+
+On the other hand, among things that have the same grammatical form,
+but different functions, are the defining and the non-defining relative
+clause. A non-defining clause, we know, can be removed without
+disturbing the truth of the predication; it has therefore no essential
+function; it cannot therefore have the same function as a defining
+clause, whose function we know to be essential. It follows that open
+coordination is not admissible between a defining and a non-defining
+clause; and, generally, coordination, whether open or latent, is
+admissible between two defining or two non-defining coordinates, but
+not between a defining and a non-defining.
+
+Our object, however, in pointing out what seems to be the true
+principle of relative coordination is not by any means to encourage the
+latent variety. It has seldom any advantage over full coordination;
+it is perhaps more apt to lead to actual blunders; it is usually
+awkward; and it does violence--needless violence, as often as not--to
+a very widespread and not unreasonable prejudice. Many writers may
+be suspected of using it, against their better judgement, merely for
+the purpose of asserting a right; it is their natural protest against
+the wholesale condemnation of ignorant critics, who do not see that
+latent coordination may be nothing worse than clumsy, and that open
+coordination may be a gross blunder. For the benefit of such critics it
+seems worth while to examine the correctness of various examples, both
+open and latent; on the other merits and demerits of the latent variety
+the reader will form his own judgement.
+
+(i) =Open coordination.=
+
+ A few minutes brought us to a large and busy bazaar, with the
+ localities of which the stranger appeared well acquainted, and where
+ his original demeanour again became apparent.--POE.
+
+ Mr. Lovelace has seen divers apartments at Windsor; but not one,
+ he says, that he thought fit for me, and which, at the same time,
+ answered my description.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for, are the
+ self-same thing.--EMERSON.
+
+All these are correct: in the first both clauses are non-defining, in
+the others both define.
+
+ The hills were so broken and precipitous as to afford no passage
+ except just upon the narrow line of the track which we occupied, and
+ which was overhung with rocks, from which we might have been destroyed
+ merely by rolling down stones.--SCOTT.
+
+Wrong: the first clause defines, the second not.
+
+ From doing this they were prevented by the disgraceful scene which
+ took place, and which the leader of the Opposition took no steps to
+ avert.--_Times._
+
+Wrong. The first clause defines, the second is obviously one of
+comment: the ‘scene’ is not distinguished from those that the leader
+_did_ take steps to avert.
+
+ They propose that the buildings shall belong ... to the communes
+ in which they stand, and which, it is hoped, will not permit their
+ desecration.--_Spectator._
+
+Wrong. The communes that ‘will not permit’ are not meant to be
+distinguished from those that will. The second clause is comment, the
+first defines.
+
+ The way in which she jockeyed Jos, and which she described with
+ infinite fun, carried up his delight to a pitch....--THACKERAY.
+
+ In the best French which he could muster, and which in sooth was of a
+ very ungrammatical sort....--THACKERAY.
+
+ Peggy ... would have liked to have shown her turban and bird of
+ paradise at the ball, but for the information which her husband had
+ given her, and which made her very grave.--THACKERAY.
+
+All these are wrong. Thackeray would probably have been saved from
+these false coordinations if he had observed the distinction between
+‘that’ and ‘which’: ‘In the best French (that) he could muster, which
+in sooth was...’.
+
+ There goes another sort of animal that is differentiating from my
+ species, and which I would gladly see exterminated.--H. G. WELLS.
+
+Probably the second clause, like the first, is meant to define: if so,
+the coordination is right; if not, it is wrong. We have alluded to the
+tendency to avoid ‘that’ when the relative is widely separated from its
+antecedent; here, the result is ambiguity.
+
+ And here he said in German what he wished to say, and which was of no
+ great importance, and which I translated into English.--BORROW.
+
+Wrong: ‘what (that which)’ defines, the ‘and which’ clauses do not.
+
+(ii) =Latent coordination=, between relative clause and equivalent,
+is seldom correct when the relative clause is non-defining; for the
+equivalent, with few and undesirable exceptions, is always a defining
+adjective or phrase, and can be coordinate only with a defining
+clause. The equivalent must of course be a true one; capable, that
+is, of being converted into a relative clause without altering the
+effect of the sentence. Neglect of this restriction often results in
+false coordination, especially in one particular type of sentence.
+Suppose that a historian, after describing some national calamity,
+proceeds: ‘In these distressing circumstances....’ Here we might seem
+to have two possible equivalents, ‘these’ and ‘distressing’. First
+let us expand ‘these’ into a relative clause: ‘In the distressing
+circumstances that I have described’. This, in the context, is a fair
+equivalent, and as often as not would actually appear instead of
+‘these’. But next expand ‘distressing’: ‘In these circumstances, which
+were distressing’, a non-defining clause. To this expansion no writer
+would consent; it defeats the object for which ‘distressing’ was placed
+before the antecedent. That object was to record his own sensibility
+without disparaging the reader’s by telling him in so many words (as
+our relative clause does) that the circumstances were distressing; and
+it is secured by treating ‘distressing’ not as a separate predication
+but as an inseparable part of the antecedent. ‘Distressing’, it will
+be observed, cannot give us a defining clause; it is obviously meant
+to be co-extensive with ‘these’; we are not to select from ‘these’
+circumstances those only that are ‘distressing’. Moreover, as ‘these’,
+although capable of appearing as a relative clause, can scarcely
+require another relative clause to complete the limitation of the
+antecedent, it follows that in sentences of this form coordination will
+generally be wrong. We have examples in the Cowper quotation below,
+and in the anonymous one that precedes it.
+
+ Juices ready prepared, and which can be absorbed immediately.--HUXLEY.
+
+ A deliberate attempt to frame and to verify general rules as to
+ phenomena of all kinds, and which can, therefore, be propagated by
+ argument or persuasion....--L. STEPHEN.
+
+‘Rules that shall be general, and that can....’
+
+ A painful, comprehensive survey of a very complicated matter,
+ and which requires a great variety of considerations, is to be
+ made.--BURKE.
+
+ The goldsmith to the royal household, and who, if fame spoke true,
+ oftentimes acted as their banker, ... was a person of too much
+ importance to...--SCOTT.
+
+‘The man who was goldsmith to ... and who’.
+
+ It is a compliment due, and which I willingly pay, to those who
+ administer our affairs.--BURKE.
+
+All these are correct, with defining coordinates throughout.
+
+ ‘A junior subaltern, with pronounced military and political views,
+ with no false modesty in expressing them, and who (sic) possesses the
+ ear of the public, ....’--(Quoted by the _Times_.)
+
+‘Who has ... views, and who....’ ‘Sic’ is the comment of the _Times_
+writer. The coordination is correct.
+
+ While there, she had ample opportunity afforded her of studying
+ fashionable life in all its varied and capricious moods, and which
+ have been preserved to posterity in her admirable delineations of
+ character.
+
+ I am sensible that you cannot in my uncle’s present infirm state, and
+ of which it is not possible to expect any considerable amendment,
+ indulge us with a visit.--COWPER.
+
+These are the instances of false expansion alluded to above. The former
+is based on the non-defining expansion ‘in all its moods, which are
+varied and capricious’; the true expansion being ‘in all the varied and
+capricious moods in which it reveals itself’, a defining clause, which
+will not do with the ‘and which’. Similarly, the second is based on the
+non-defining expansion ‘in my uncle’s present state, which is an infirm
+one’; the true expansion is ‘in the infirm state in which my uncle now
+is’. In both, a non-defining clause is coordinated with words that can
+only yield a defining clause.
+
+ Previous to the innovations introduced by the Tudors, and which had
+ been taken away by the bill against pressing soldiers, the King in
+ himself had no power of calling on his subjects generally to bear
+ arms.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+If the writer means us to distinguish, among the innovations introduced
+by the Tudors, those that had also been taken away, the ‘and which’
+clause defines, and the coordination is right. But more probably the
+clause conveys independent information; the coordination is then wrong.
+
+ [The various arrangements of _pueri puellam amabant_] all have the
+ same meaning--the boys loved the girl. For _puellam_ shows by its form
+ that it must be the object of the action; _amabant_ must have for
+ its subject a plural substantive, and which must therefore be, not
+ _puellam_, but _pueri_.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+Wrong. ‘A plural substantive’ can yield only the defining clause ‘a
+substantive that is plural’. Now these words contain an inference
+from a general grammatical principle (that a plural verb must have a
+plural subject); and any supplementary defining clause must also be
+general, not (like the ‘and which’ clause) particular. We might have,
+for instance, ‘Amabant, being plural, and finite, must have for its
+subject a plural substantive, and which is in the nominative case’. But
+the ‘and which’ clause is evidently non-defining; the inference ends at
+‘substantive’; then comes the application of it to the particular case.
+
+ He refused to adopt the Restrictive Theory, and impose a numerical
+ limit on the Bank’s issues, and which he again protested against in
+ 1833.--H. D. MACLEOD.
+
+Wrong. The ‘and which’ clause is non-defining; none of the three
+possible antecedents (‘Theory’, ‘limit’, ‘imposition’) will give a
+non-defining clause.
+
+ The great obstacle ... is the religion of Europe, and which has
+ unhappily been colonially introduced into America.--BEACONSFIELD.
+
+This illustrates an important point. ‘Of Europe’ gives the defining
+clause ‘that prevails in Europe’; the coordination therefore requires
+that the ‘and which’ clause should define. Now a defining clause must
+contain no word that is not meant to contribute to definition; if,
+then, the ‘and which’ clause defines, the writer wishes to distinguish
+the religion in question, not only from those European religions that
+have not been colonially introduced into America, but also from those
+European religions that have been introduced, but whose introduction
+is not a matter for regret; that is the only defining meaning that
+‘unhappily’ can bear, and unless we accept this interpretation the
+clause is non-defining.--We shall allude to this sentence again in
+d., where the possibilities of parenthesis in a defining clause are
+discussed.
+
+ It may seem strange that this important place should not have been
+ conferred on Vaca de Castro, already on the spot, and who had shown
+ himself so well qualified to fill it.--PRESCOTT.
+
+One of our ‘few and undesirable exceptions’, in which the
+clause-equivalent is non-defining (‘who was already on the spot’); for
+a person’s name can only require a defining clause to distinguish him
+from others of the same name. The sentence is an ugly one, even if we
+remove the ‘and who’ clause; but the coordination is right.
+
+(iii) =Insubordination.=
+
+ The struggler, the poor clerk, mechanic, poorer musician, artist, or
+ actor, feels no right to intrude, and who quickly falls from a first
+ transient resentment....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Such a person may reside there with absolute safety, unless it becomes
+ the object of the government to secure his person; and which purpose,
+ even then, might be disappointed by early intelligence.--SCOTT.
+
+ All this when Madame saw, and of which when she took note, her sole
+ observation was:--...--C. BRONTË.
+
+To these we may add examples in which the coordinated relatives
+have different antecedents. In practice, nothing can justify such
+coordination: in theory, it is admissible when the antecedents are
+coordinate, as in the following sentence:
+
+ We therefore delivered the supplies to those individuals, and at those
+ places, to whom the special grants had been made, and for which they
+ were originally designed.
+
+But in the following instances, one antecedent is subordinate to
+another in the same clause, or is in a clause subordinate to that of
+the other.
+
+ They marched into the apartment where the banquet was served; and
+ which, as I have promised the reader he shall enjoy it, he shall have
+ the liberty of ordering himself.--THACKERAY.
+
+ A large mineral-water firm in London, whose ordinary shares are a
+ million in value, and which shares always paid a dividend before
+ the imposition of the sugar-tax, have not paid any dividend
+ since.--_Times._
+
+ He very much doubted whether I could find it on his mine, which was
+ located some five miles from St. Austell, Cornwall, and upon whose
+ property I had never been.--_Times._
+
+ But I have besought my mother, who is apprehensive of Mr. Lovelace’s
+ visits, and for fear of whom my uncles never stir out without arms,
+ ...--RICHARDSON.
+
+It was of Mr. Lovelace that the uncles were afraid.
+
+=d. Case of the relative.=
+
+Special attention was not drawn, in the section on Case, to the gross
+error committed in the following examples:
+
+ Instinctively apprehensive of her father, whom she supposed it was,
+ she stopped in the dark.--DICKENS.
+
+ That peculiar air of contempt commonly displayed by insolent menials
+ to those whom they imagine are poor.--CORELLI.
+
+ It is only those converted by the Gospel whom we pretend are
+ influenced by it.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ We found those whom we feared might be interested to withhold the
+ settlement alert and prompt to assist us.--GALT.
+
+ Mr. Dombey, whom he now began to perceive was as far beyond human
+ recall.--DICKENS.
+
+ Those whom it was originally pronounced would be allowed to
+ go.--_Spectator._
+
+ But this looks as if he has included the original 30,000 men whom he
+ desires ‘should be in the country now’.--_Times._
+
+ We feed children whom we think are hungry.--_Times._
+
+ The only gentlemen holding this office in the island, whom, he felt
+ sure, would work for the spiritual good of the parish.--_Guernsey
+ Advertiser._
+
+These writers evidently think that in ‘whom we think are hungry’ ‘whom’
+is the object of ‘we think’. The relative is in fact the subject of
+‘are’; and the object of ‘we know’ is the clause ‘who are hungry’; the
+order of the words is a necessary result of the fact that a relative
+subject must stand at the beginning of its clause.
+
+(The same awkward necessity confronts us in clauses with ‘when’,
+‘though’, &c., in which the subject is a relative. Such clauses are
+practically recognized as impossible, though Otway, in a courageous
+moment, wrote:
+
+ Unblemished honour, and a spotless love;
+ _Which tho’_ perhaps now _know_ another flame,
+ Yet I have love and passion for their name.)
+
+Some writers, with a consistency worthy of a better cause, carry the
+blunder into the passive, renouncing the advantages of an ambiguous
+‘which’ in the active; for in the active ‘which’ of course tells no
+tales.
+
+ As to all this, the trend of events has been the reverse of
+ that which was anticipated would be the result of democratic
+ institutions.--_Times._
+
+‘Which _it_ was anticipated would be’. Similarly, the passive
+of ‘men whom we-know-are-honest’ is the impossible ‘men who
+are-known-are-honest’: ‘men who we know are honest’ gives the correct
+passive ‘men who it is known are honest’.
+
+Nor must it be supposed that ‘we know’ is parenthetic. In non-defining
+clauses (Jones, who we know is honest), we can regard the words as
+parenthetic if we choose, except when the phrase is negative (Jones,
+who I cannot think is honest); but in a defining clause they are
+anything but parenthetic. When we say ‘Choose men who you know are
+honest’, the words ‘you know’ add a new circumstance of limitation:
+it is not enough that the men should in fact be honest; you must know
+them to be honest; honest men of whose honesty you are not certain
+are excluded by the words ‘you know’. Similarly, in the _Guernsey
+Advertiser_ quotation above, the writer does not go the length of
+saying that these are the only gentlemen who would work: he says that
+they are the only ones of whom he feels sure. The commas of parenthesis
+ought therefore to go, as well as the comma at ‘island’, which is
+improper before a defining clause.
+
+The circumstances under which a parenthesis is admissible in a defining
+clause may here be noticed.
+
+(i) When the clause is too strict in its limitation, it may be modified
+by a parenthesis:
+
+ Choose men who, during their time of office, have never been suspected.
+
+A whole class, excluded by the defining clause, is made eligible by the
+parenthesis.
+
+(ii) Similarly, a parenthesis may be added to tell us that within the
+limits of the defining clause we have perfect freedom of choice:
+
+ Choose men who, at one time or another, have held office.
+
+They must have held office, that is all; it does not matter when.
+
+(iii) Words of comment, indicating the writer’s authority for his
+limitation, his recognition of the sentiments that it may arouse, and
+the like, properly stand outside the defining clause: when they are
+placed within it, they ought to be marked as parenthetic.
+
+ There are men who, so I am told, prefer a lie to truth on its own
+ merits.
+
+ The religion that obtains in Europe, and that, unhappily, has been
+ introduced into America.
+
+The latter sentence is an adaptation of one considered above on
+p. 91. ‘Unhappily’ there appeared not as a parenthesis but as
+an inseparable part of the relative clause, which was therefore
+defining or non-defining, according as ‘unhappily’ could or could
+not be considered as adding to the limitation. But with the altered
+punctuation ‘unhappily’ is separable from the relative clause, which
+may now define: ‘that obtains in Europe and (I am sorry to have to add)
+in America.’
+
+In sentences of this last type, the parenthesis is inserted in
+the defining clause only for convenience: in the others, it is an
+essential, though a negative, part of the definition. But all three
+types of parenthesis agree in this, that they do not limit the
+antecedent; they differ completely from the phrases considered above,
+which do limit the antecedent, and are not parenthetic.
+
+=e. Miscellaneous uses and abuses of the relative.=
+
+(i) A relative clause is sometimes coordinated with an independent
+sentence; such coordination is perhaps always awkward, but is not
+always incorrect. The question arises chiefly when the two have a
+common subject expressed only in the relative clause; for when the
+subject is expressed in both, the independent sentence may be taken to
+be coordinate, not with the relative clause, but with the main sentence
+to which the relative clause is attached, as in the following instance:
+
+ To begin with, he had left no message, which in itself I felt to be a
+ suspicious circumstance, and (I) was at my wits’ end how to account
+ plausibly for his departure.
+
+Retain ‘I’, and ‘I was’ may be coordinate with ‘he had left’: remove
+it, and the coordination is necessarily between ‘I was’ and ‘I felt’.
+In our next examples the writers are committed:
+
+ These beatitudes are just laws which we have been neglecting, and have
+ been receiving in ourselves the consequences that were meet.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ The idea which mankind most commonly conceive of proportion, is the
+ suitableness of means to certain ends, and, where this is not the
+ question, very seldom trouble themselves about the effect of different
+ measures of things.--BURKE.
+
+ Fictitious capital, a name of extreme inaccuracy, which too many
+ persons are in the habit of using, from the hasty assumption that what
+ is not real must necessarily be fictitious, and are more led away by a
+ jingling antithesis of words than an accurate perception of ideas.--H.
+ D. MACLEOD.
+
+The first two of these are wrongly coordinated: the third, a curiosity
+in other respects, is in this respect right. The reason is that in the
+first two we have a defining, in the third a non-defining relative
+clause. A defining clause is grammatically equivalent to an adjective
+(‘violated laws’, ‘the popular idea’), and can be coordinated only with
+another word or phrase performing the same function; now the phrase ‘we
+have been receiving’, not being attached to the antecedent by means of
+a relative, expressed or understood, is not equivalent to an adjective.
+We could have had ‘and (which we) have been properly punished _for
+neglecting_’, or we could have had the ‘and’ sentence in an adverbial
+form, ‘with the fitting result’; but coordination between the two as
+they stand is impossible.
+
+The Burke sentence is a worse offender. Coordination of this kind is
+not often attempted when the antecedent of the relative is _subject_
+of the main sentence; and when it is attempted, the two coordinates
+must of course not be separated by the predicate. If we had had ‘the
+idea which mankind most commonly conceive of proportion, and very
+seldom trouble themselves about anything further’, the coordination
+would have been similar to the other, and could have been rectified
+in the same way (‘and beyond which they very seldom ...’, or ‘to the
+exclusion of any other considerations’). But this alteration we cannot
+make; for there is a further and an essential difference. The _Daily
+Telegraph_ writer evidently _meant_ his second coordinate to do the
+work of a defining clause; he has merely failed to make the necessary
+connexion, which we supply, as above, either by turning the words into
+a second defining clause, or by embodying them, adverbially, in the
+first. Burke’s intention is different, and would not be represented by
+our proposed alteration in the order. All that a defining clause can do
+in his sentence is to tell us _what_ idea is going to be the subject.
+If we were to give a brief paraphrase of the whole, italicizing the
+words that represent the second coordinate, it would be, not ‘mankind’s
+_sole_ idea of proportion is the suitableness ...’, but ‘mankind’s idea
+of proportion is the suitableness ..., _and very little else_’; for
+the question answered is, not ‘what is mankind’s sole idea?’ but ‘what
+is mankind’s idea?’ In other words, the second coordinate belongs in
+intention not, like the relative clause, to the subject, but to the
+predicate; to rectify it, we must either make it part of the predicate
+(‘and is not concerned with ...’), or, by inserting ‘they’, coordinate
+it with the main sentence. Obvious as the latter correction is, the
+sentence repays close examination, as illustrating the incoherence of
+thought that may underlie what seems a very trifling grammatical slip.
+
+But in our third example, the relative clause is non-defining; it is
+grammatically equivalent to, and could be replaced by, an independent
+sentence: ‘Many persons are in the habit of using it’. There is nothing
+grammatically wrong in this type of coordination; it is objectionable
+only because it seems to promise what it does not fulfil. When the
+common subject of two coordinates is expressed only with the first, it
+is natural to assume that all words preceding it are also to be applied
+to both coordinates; and the violation of this principle, though not
+of course ungrammatical, is often felt to be undesirable in other than
+relative clauses.
+
+(ii) In the sentences considered above, the antecedent of the relative
+did not belong to the second coordinate, and could not have been
+represented in it without the material alterations there proposed. But
+it may also happen that the antecedent, as in the following examples,
+belongs equally to both coordinates, being represented in the first by
+a relative, in the second by some other pronoun.
+
+ There were two or three _whose_ accuracy was more scrupulous, _their_
+ judgement more uniformly sober and cautious.--BRYCE.
+
+ He renewed the old proposal, _which_ Pizarro treated as a piece of
+ contemptible shuffling, and curtly rejected _it_.
+
+ _Which_ she has it in her option either to do or to let _it_
+ alone.--RICHARDSON.
+
+In the pair of parallel coordinates from Mr. Bryce, insert the
+suppressed ‘was’, and it becomes clear that ‘whose’, not ‘their’, is
+the right pronoun.
+
+In the ‘Pizarro’ sentence, ‘it’ is not only superfluous, but disturbing
+to the reader, who assumes that ‘which’ is common to both clauses, and
+on reaching ‘it’ has to glance back and check the sentence. Here,
+as often, the pronoun seems to be added to restore an ill-balanced
+sentence; but that can be done in several other ways. In the Richardson
+sentence also the ‘it’ should go.
+
+More commonly, the repetition of the antecedent in another form results
+from the superstitious avoidance of a preposition at the end:
+
+ A demand by Norway for political separation, to which Sweden will not
+ assent, but will not go to war to prevent it.--_Times._
+
+‘To (which)’ is not common to both coordinates: accordingly the writer
+finds it necessary to give ‘it’ in the second. But, even if we respect
+our superstition, and exclude ‘which Sweden will not assent to, but
+will not go to war to prevent’, we have still the two possibilities
+of (1) complete relative coordination, ‘to ..., but which ...’; (2)
+subordination, ‘though she will not go to war to prevent it’.
+
+In our next example, Lord Rosebery, again for fear of a preposition at
+the end, falls into the trap clumsily avoided by the _Times_ writer:
+
+ That promised land for which he was to prepare, but scarcely to enter.
+
+So perhaps Bagehot, though his verb may be _conceive of_:
+
+ English trade is carried on upon borrowed capital to an extent of
+ which few foreigners have an idea, and none of our ancestors could
+ have conceived.
+
+(iii) When the relative is the subject of both coordinates, or the
+object of both, its repetition in the second is a matter of choice. But
+to omit the relative when it is in a different case from the first is a
+gross, though not uncommon, blunder. The following are instances:
+
+ A league which their posterity for many ages kept so inviolably,
+ and proved so advantageous for both the kingdoms of France and
+ Scotland.--LOCKHART.
+
+ Questions which we either do not put to ourselves, or are turned aside
+ with traditional replies.--MARK RUTHERFORD.
+
+It is just conceivable that in the last of these the subject of ‘are’
+is ‘we’: if so, the sentence is to be referred to (i) above (wrong
+coordination of an independent sentence with a defining relative
+clause).
+
+It is not easy to see why the relative more than other words should be
+mishandled in this way; few would write (but see p. 61, s. f.) ‘This
+league we kept and has proved advantageous’.
+
+The condensed antecedent-relative ‘what’ is only an apparent exception
+to this universal rule. In the sentence ‘What I hold is mine’, ‘what’
+is only object to ‘hold’, not subject to ‘is’; the subject to ‘is’ is
+the whole noun-clause ‘what I hold’. Sentences of this type, so far
+from being exceptions, often give a double illustration of the rule,
+and leave a double possibility of error. For just as a single ‘what’
+cannot stand in different relations to two coordinate verbs in its
+clause, so a single noun-clause cannot stand in different relations to
+two coordinate main verbs. We can say ‘What I have and hold’, where
+‘what’ is object to both verbs, and ‘what is mine and has been fairly
+earned by me’, where it is subject to both; but we cannot say ‘what I
+have and has been fairly earned by me’. Similarly, we can say ‘What
+I have is mine and shall remain mine’, where the noun-clause ‘what I
+have’ is subject to both verbs, and ‘What I have I mean to keep, and
+will surrender to no man’, where it is object to both; but not ‘What I
+have is mine, and I will surrender to no man’. Of the various ways of
+avoiding this error (subordination, adaptation of verbs, insertion of
+a pronoun, relative or otherwise), that chosen by Miss Brontë below is
+perhaps the least convenient. Her sentence is, however, correct; that
+from the _Spectator_ is not.
+
+ Not mere empty ideas, but what were once realities, and that I long
+ have thought decayed.--C. BRONTË.
+
+ Whatever we possessed in 1867 the British Empire possesses now, and is
+ part of the Dominion of Canada.--_Spectator._
+
+‘Things that were once realities, and that I long have thought
+decayed’; a pair of defining clauses.
+
+The condensed ‘what’ must of course be distinguished from the ‘what’
+of indirect questions, which is not relative but interrogative. In
+the following example, confusion of the two leads to an improper
+coordination.
+
+ What sums he made can only be conjectured, but must have been
+ enormous.--MACAULAY.
+
+In the first sentence, ‘what’ is an interrogative, in the second, a
+condensed antecedent-relative, standing for ‘the sums that’. It is the
+sums that were enormous: it is the answer to the question ‘What sums
+did he make?’ that can only be conjectured. The mistake is possible
+only because ‘can’ and ‘must’ do not reveal their number: ‘can’ is
+singular, ‘must’ plural.
+
+The differentiation between the two _what_s and their equivalents
+is not, indeed, complete: just as the condensed antecedent-relative
+resembles in form, though not in treatment, the unresolved
+interrogative, so the interrogative, by resolution into ‘the ... that
+(which)’, not only resembles, but is grammatically identified with,
+the uncondensed relative and antecedent. The resolution is, no doubt,
+convenient: it should be noticed, however, that the verbs with which
+alone it can be employed (verbs that may denote either perception of
+a fact or other kinds of perception) are precisely those with which
+ambiguity may result. ‘I know the house (that) you mean’: it may
+(antecedent and relative) or may not (resolved interrogative) follow
+that I have ever seen it. ‘We must first discover the scoundrel who
+did it’; antecedent and relative? then we must secure the scoundrel’s
+person; resolved interrogative? then only information is needed.
+‘I can give a good guess at the problem that is puzzling you’: and
+the solution?--I know nothing of the solution; I was resolving an
+interrogative.
+
+This, however, does not affect sentences like the Macaulay one above:
+for although the resolved or uncondensed forms (‘the ... which’) are
+grammatically identified, the condensed or unresolved forms (‘what’)
+are not.
+
+(iv) The omission of the relative in isolated clauses (as opposed to
+coordinates) is a question not of correctness but of taste, so far
+as there is any question at all. A non-defining relative can never be
+omitted. The omission of a defining relative subject is often effective
+in verse, but in prose is either an archaism or a provincialism. It
+may, moreover, result in obscurity, as in the second of our examples,
+which may possibly puzzle the reader for a moment:
+
+ Now it would be some fresh insect won its way to a temporary fatal new
+ development--H. G. WELLS.
+
+ No one finds himself planted at last in so terribly foul a morass, as
+ he would fain stand still for ever on dry ground.--TROLLOPE.
+
+But when the defining relative is object, or has a preposition, there
+is no limit to the omission, unless euphony is allowed to be one. We
+give three instances in which the reader may or may not agree that the
+relative might have been retained with advantage:
+
+ We do that in our zeal our calmer moments would be afraid to
+ answer.--SCOTT.
+
+ But did you ever see anything there you had never seen
+ before?--BAGEHOT.
+
+ These ethical judgements we pass on self-regarding acts are ordinarily
+ little emphasized.--SPENCER.
+
+(v) When a defining relative has the same preposition as its
+antecedent, it is not uncommon, in the written as well as in the
+spoken language, to omit the preposition in the relative clause. There
+is something to be said for a licence that rids us of such cumbrous
+formulae as ‘in the way in which’, ‘to the extent to which’, and the
+like; in writing, however, it should be used with caution if at all.
+
+In the first place, if the preposition is to go, the relative should
+go too, or if retained should certainly be ‘that’, not ‘which’; and if
+the verb of the relative clause is the same as in the main sentence,
+it should be represented by ‘do’, or (in a compound tense) by its
+auxiliary component.
+
+ Because they found that it touched them in a way which no book in the
+ world could touch them.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ The man who cleaned the slate in the manner which Sir E. Satow has
+ done both in Morocco and Japan might surely rank as a reflective
+ diplomatist.--_Spectator._
+
+‘In a way no other book in the world could’: ‘in the way (that) Sir E.
+Satow has done’.
+
+A further limitation is suggested by our next example:
+
+ The Great Powers, after producing this absolutely certain result, are
+ ending with what they ought to have begun,--coercion.--_Spectator._
+
+Here, of course, the relative cannot be omitted, since relative and
+antecedent are one. But that is not the principal fault, as will appear
+from a resolution of the antecedent-relative: ‘they are ending with
+the very thing (that) they ought to have begun ...’. We are now at
+liberty to omit our relative or retain it, as we please; in either
+case, the omission of ‘with’ is unbearable. The reason is that ‘with’
+does not, like the ‘in’ of our former examples, introduce a purely
+adverbial phrase: it is an inseparable component of the compound verbs
+‘end-with’ and ‘begin-with’, of which the antecedent and relative are
+respectively the objects. Similarly, we cannot say ‘He has come to the
+precise conclusion (that) I thought he would come’, because we should
+be mutilating the verb to ‘come-to’; we can, however, say ‘to the
+conclusion (that) I thought he would’, ‘come-to’ being then represented
+by ‘would’.
+
+Finally, the omission is justifiable only when antecedent and relative
+have the same preposition. Sentences like the next may pass in
+conversation, but (except with the one noun _way_) are intolerable in
+writing:
+
+ One of the greatest dangers in London is the pace that the corners in
+ the main streets are turned.--_Times._
+
+(vi) The use of ‘such ... who (which)’, ‘such ... that (defining
+relative)’, for ‘such ... as’ is sometimes an archaism, sometimes a
+vulgarism.
+
+ Till such time when we shall throw aside our earthly garment.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ Only such supplies were to be made which it would be inhuman to refuse
+ to ships in distress.--_Times._
+
+ The censorship of literature extends to such absurd prohibitions which
+ it did not reach even during the worst period of the forties.--_Times._
+
+ A God in such an abstract sense that, as I have pointed out before,
+ does not signify.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ They would find such faith, such belief, that would be a revelation to
+ them.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Swift’s plan was to offer to fulfil it on conditions so insulting that
+ no one with a grain of self-respect could accept.--L. STEPHEN.
+
+=f. ‘It ... that.’=
+
+Two constructions, closely allied, but grammatically distinct, are
+often confused: (i) Antecedent ‘=it=’ followed by a defining relative
+clause with ‘that’ (who, which); (ii) ‘=it=’ followed by a clause in
+apposition, introduced by the conjunction ‘that’. The various correct
+possibilities are represented in the set of examples given below.
+Relative clauses are marked R, conjunction clauses C. One impossible
+example is added in brackets, to mark the transition from relative to
+conjunction.
+
+ (1) It is money that I want. R.
+
+ (2) It was you that told me. R.
+
+ (3) It was you that I gave it to (or, to whom I gave it). R.
+
+ (4) It was to you that I gave it. C.
+
+ (5) It was the Romans that built this wall. R.
+
+ (6) It is the Romans that we are indebted to for this. R.
+
+ (7) It is to the Romans that we are indebted for this. C.
+
+ (8) It was Jones whose hat I borrowed. R.
+
+ (9) It was Jones’s hat that I borrowed. R.
+
+ (10) It was a knife that I cut it with. R.
+
+ (11) It was with a knife that I cut it. C.
+
+ (12) It was with difficulty that I cut it. C.
+
+ (13) (It was difficulty that I cut it with.) R.
+
+ (14) It was provisionally that I made the offer. C.
+
+ (15) It was in this spring, too, that the plague broke out. C.
+
+ (16) Accordingly, it was with much concern that I presently received a
+ note informing me of his departure. C.
+
+In the relative construction, the antecedent ‘it’ is invariable,
+whatever the number and gender of the relative. The main verb is also
+invariable in number, but in tense is usually adapted to past, though
+not (for euphony’s sake) to future circumstances: ‘it was you that
+looked foolish’, but ‘it is you that will look foolish’.
+
+In both constructions, the ‘that’ clause, supplemented or introduced
+by ‘it’, gives us the subject of a predication, the relative clause
+(with _it_) being equivalent to a pure noun, the conjunction clause to
+a verbal noun in apposition, partly retaining its verbal character. In
+both, also, the predication answers an imaginary question, recorded
+distinctly in the relative, less distinctly in the conjunction clause.
+‘What do you want?’ ‘It (the thing) that I want is money.’ ‘To whom did
+you give it?’ ‘It (the persons) that I gave it to was your friends.’
+‘As to your cutting it: give particulars.’ ‘It--that I cut it (my
+cutting it)--was with a knife.’
+
+From the above examples it will be seen that the two constructions
+largely overlap. When (as in 1, 2, 5, 8) the relative is subject or
+direct object of the clause-verb, or is in the possessive case, it
+cannot be replaced by the conjunction; but when its relation to the
+clause-verb is marked by a preposition, the conjunction always may take
+its place, and sometimes must, as in 12 and 13. For the relative clause
+can only be used when the question reflected in it is calculated to
+secure the right kind of answer. Now the natural answer to the question
+‘What did you cut it with?’ is not ‘difficulty’ but ‘a knife’. The
+misleading ‘with’ is therefore removed from the relative clause in
+13, and placed within the predicate, the definite question ‘What did
+you cut it with?’ giving place to the vague demand for particulars.
+‘With’ being removed, the relative clause falls to pieces, for want of
+a word to govern the relative, and the conjunction clause takes its
+place. In the same way, ‘it was _a cab_ (but not _high indignation_)
+that he drove away in’; ‘it was _a concert_ (but not _curiosity_) that
+I was returning from’; ‘it was a _beech-tree_ (but not _unpleasant
+circumstances_) that I found him under’. And, generally, it will be
+found that a preposition is admissible in the relative clause only when
+used in the literal or the most obvious sense.
+
+The conjunction clause is, as we have said, a verbal noun; so far a
+noun that things can be predicated of it, and so far a verb that the
+things predicated of it are verbal relations and verbal circumstances,
+indirect object, agent, instrument, means, manner, cause, attendant
+circumstances; anything but subject and direct object. ‘My giving was
+to you’; ‘my offering was provisionally’; ‘my concealing it was because
+I was ashamed’.
+
+The mistakes that constantly occur in careless writers result from
+hesitation between the two forms where both are possible. The
+confusion, however, ought not to arise; for always with a relative
+clause, and never with a conjunction, the complement of the main
+predicate (the answer to the suppressed question) is a noun or the
+grammatical equivalent of a noun. ‘A knife’, ‘Jones’, ‘you’, ‘my friend
+in Chicago’, ‘the man who lives next door’, are the answers that
+accompany the relative clause: ‘with a knife’, ‘with difficulty’, ‘to
+you’, ‘occasionally’, ‘because I was ashamed’, are those that accompany
+the conjunction.
+
+Examples 15 and 16, though quite recognized types, are really
+artificial perversions. In 15 the true question and answer in the
+circumstances would be, not, as the sentence falsely implies, ‘When did
+the plague break out?’ ‘That too happened in this same spring’, but
+‘Were there any other notable events in this spring?’ ‘Yes: the plague
+broke out’. Impressiveness is given to the announcement by the fiction
+that the reader is wondering when the plague broke out; in fact, he is
+merely waiting for whatever may turn up in the history of this spring.
+In 16 we go still further: the implied question, ‘What were your
+feelings on receiving a (not _the_) note ...?’ could not possibly be
+asked; the information that alone could prompt it is only given in the
+‘that’ clause.
+
+It has been pointed out in b. that a relative clause with antecedent
+‘it’ particularly calls for the relative ‘that’, in preference
+to ‘which’, and even to ‘who’. Even when the relative is in the
+possessive case, ‘that’, which has no possessive, is often retained
+by transferring to the main predicate the noun on which it depends; 8
+thus gives place to 9, even at the risk of ambiguity; for the relative
+clause now supplies us with the question (not ‘whose hat ...?’ but)
+but ‘what did you borrow?’ leaving us theoretically in doubt whether
+Jones’s hat is distinguished from his other property, from other
+people’s hats, or from things in general.
+
+On the other hand, the two blunders that are most frequently made
+almost invariably have the relative ‘who’ or ‘which’.
+
+ And it is to me, the original promoter of the whole scheme, to whom
+ they would deny my fair share in the profits!
+
+‘To me’ implies a conjunction clause: ‘to whom ...’ is a relative
+clause. ‘It is to me that...’.
+
+ It was _to Mrs._ Brent, the beetle-browed wife of Mr. Commissary
+ Brent, _to whom_ the General transferred his attentions
+ now.--THACKERAY.
+
+ It is to you whom I address a history which may perhaps fall into very
+ different hands.--SCOTT.
+
+‘To you that’, or ‘you to whom’.
+
+ It is not taste that is plentiful, but courage that is
+ rare.--STEVENSON.
+
+Again a common blunder; not, however, a confusion between the two
+constructions above, but between one of them (the relative) and a
+third. The sentence explains why every one seems to prefer Shakespeare
+to Ouida (they are afraid to say that they like Ouida best). ‘What is
+the explanation of this?’ ‘It is not the plentifulness of taste, but
+the rarity of courage, that explains it.’ Or, less clumsily, using the
+construction that Stevenson doubtless intended: ‘It (the inference to
+be drawn) is not that taste is plentiful, but that courage is rare.’
+
+
+ PARTICIPLE AND GERUND
+
+It is advisable to make a few remarks on the participle and gerund
+together before taking them separately. As the word _gerund_ is
+variously used, we first define it. A gerund is the verbal noun
+identical in form with any participle, simple or compound, that
+contains the termination _-ing_. Thus the verb _write_ has the active
+participles _writing_, _having written_, _being about to write_,
+_about to write_, and the passive participles _written_, _having been
+written_, _being written_, _about to be written_, _being about to
+be written_. Any of these except _written_, _about to write_, _about
+to be written_, may be a gerund also; but while the participle is
+an adjective, the gerund is a noun, differing from other nouns in
+retaining its power (if the active gerund of a transitive verb) of
+directly governing another noun.
+
+Both these are of great importance for our purpose. The participle
+itself, even when confusion with the other cannot occur, is much
+abused; and the slovenly uses of it that were good enough in Burke’s
+time are now recognized solecisms. Again, the identity between the two
+forms leads to loose and unaccountable gerund constructions that will
+probably be swept away, as so many other laxities have been, with the
+advance of grammatical consciousness. We shall have to deal with both
+these points at some length.
+
+It is indeed no wonder that the forms in _-ing_ should require close
+attention. Exactly how many old English terminations _-ing_ is heir
+to is a question debated by historical grammarians, which we are not
+competent to answer. But we may point out that _writing_ may now be (1)
+participle--I was writing; I saw him writing; writing piously, he acts
+profanely--, (2) gerund or full verbal noun--I object to your writing
+that--, (3) hybrid between gerund and participle--I do not mind you
+writing it--, (4) detached verbal noun--Writing is an acquired art--,
+(5) concrete noun--This writing is illegible. Moreover, the verbal noun
+_writing_ has the synonym _to write_, obligatory instead of it in some
+connexions, better in some, worse in some, and impossible in others;
+compare, for instance: I do not like the trouble of writing; I shall
+not take the trouble to write; the trouble of writing is too much for
+him; it is a trouble to write; writing is a trouble. The grammatical
+difficulties, that is, are complicated by considerations of idiom.
+
+In these preliminary remarks, however, it is only with the distinction
+or want of distinction between participle and gerund that we are
+concerned. The participle is an adjective, and should be in agreement
+with a noun or pronoun; the gerund is a noun, of which it should be
+possible to say clearly whether, and why, it is in the subjective,
+objective, or possessive case, as we can of other nouns. That the
+distinction is often obscured, partly in consequence of the history of
+the language, will be clear from one or two facts and examples.
+
+1. _The man is building_ contains what we should all now call, whether
+it is so or not historically, a participle or verbal adjective: _the
+house is building_ (older but still living and correct English for
+_the house is being built_) contains, as its remarkable difference of
+meaning prepares us to believe, a gerund or verbal noun, once governed
+by a now lost preposition.
+
+2. In _He stopped, laughing_ we have a participle; in _He stopped
+laughing_, a verbal noun governed directly by the verb; in _He burst
+out laughing_, a verbal noun governed by a vanished preposition.
+
+3. Present usage does not bear out the definite modern ideas of the
+distinction between participle and gerund as respectively adjective
+and noun. So long as that usage continues, there are various degrees
+of ambiguity, illustrated by the three following examples. It would
+be impossible to say, whatever the context, whether the writer of the
+first intended a gerund or a participle. In the second, a previous
+sentence would probably have decided the question. In the third, though
+grammar (again as modified by present usage) leaves the question open,
+the meaning of the sentence is practically decisive by itself.
+
+ Can he conceive _Matthew Arnold permitting_ such a book to be written
+ and published about himself?--_Times._
+
+ And no doubt that end will be secured by _the Commission sitting_ in
+ Paris.--_Times._
+
+ Those who know least of them [the virtues] know very well how much
+ they are concerned in _other people having_ them.--MORLEY.
+
+In the second of these, if _sitting_ is a participle, the meaning is
+that the end will be secured by the Commission, which is described by
+way of identification as the one sitting in Paris. If _sitting_ is
+gerund, the end will be secured by the wise choice of Paris and not
+another place for its scene. If _Commission’s_ were written, there
+could be no doubt the latter was the meaning. With _Commission_, there
+is, by present usage, absolutely no means of deciding between the two
+meanings apart from possible light in the context. In the third, common
+sense is able to tell us, though grammar gives the question up, that
+what is interesting is not the other people who have them, but the
+question whether other people have them.
+
+We shall, in the section on the gerund, take up the decided position
+that all gerunds ought to be made distinguishable from participles. We
+are quite aware, however, that in the first place a language does not
+remodel itself to suit the grammarian’s fancy for neat classification;
+that secondly the confusion is not merely wanton or ignorant, but the
+result of natural development; that thirdly the change involves some
+inconveniences, especially to hurried and careless writers. On the
+other hand it is certain that the permanent tendency in language is
+towards the correct and logical, not from it; it is merely hoped that
+the considerable number of instances here collected may attract the
+attention of some writers who have not been aware of the question,
+and perhaps convince them that the distinction is a useful one,
+that a writer ought to know and let us know whether he is using a
+participle or a gerund, and that to abandon the gerund when it cannot
+be distinguished without clumsiness need cause no difficulty to any but
+the very unskilful in handling words.
+
+
+ PARTICIPLES
+
+The unattached or wrongly attached participle is one of the blunders
+most common with illiterate or careless writers. But there are degrees
+of heinousness in the offence; our examples are arranged from 1. to 8.
+in these degrees, starting with perfect innocence.
+
+1. Participles that have passed into prepositions, conjunctions, or
+members of adverbial phrases.
+
+ _Considering_ the circumstances, _you_ may go.
+
+ _Seeing_ that it was involuntary, _he_ can hardly be blamed.
+
+ Roughly _speaking_, all _men_ are liars.
+
+ _Looking_ at it in a shortened perspective of time, those _years_ of
+ transition have the quality of a single consecutive occurrence.--H. G.
+ WELLS.
+
+ The _Bill_ ... will bring about, _assuming_ that it meets with good
+ fortune in the remaining stages of its passage through Parliament, a
+ very useful reform.--_Times._
+
+Regarded as participles, these are incorrect. It is not _you_ that
+consider, but I; not _he_ that sees, but we; not _men_ that roughly
+speak, but the moralist; not _years_ that look, but philosophic
+historians; not _the Bill_ that assumes, but the newspaper prophet.
+The development into prepositions, &c., is a natural one, however; the
+only question about any particular word of the kind is whether the vox
+populi has yet declared for it; when it has, there is no more to be
+said; but when it has not, the process should be resisted as long as
+possible, writers acting as a suspensive House of Lords; an instance
+will be found in 4.
+
+Three quotations from Burke will show that he, like others of his time,
+felt himself more at liberty than most good writers would now feel
+themselves.
+
+ _Founding_ the appeal on this basis, _it was judged_ proper to lay
+ before Parliament....--BURKE.
+
+ _Flattering_ themselves that their power is become necessary to the
+ support of all order and government, _everything_ which tends to the
+ support of that power _is sanctified_.--BURKE.
+
+ _Having considered_ terror as producing an unnatural tension and
+ certain violent emotions of the nerves; _it_ easily _follows_.--BURKE.
+
+Similar constructions may be found on almost every page of Smollett.
+
+2. Participles half justified by attachment to a pronoun implied in
+_my_, _your_, _his_, _their_. These are perhaps better avoided.
+
+ _Having_ thus _run_ through the causes of the sublime with reference
+ to all the senses, _my_ first observation will be found very nearly
+ true.--BURKE.
+
+ _Being_ much _interested_ in the correspondence bearing on the
+ question ‘Do we believe?’, the first difficulty arising in _my_ mind
+ is....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ _My_ farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land, _having
+ given_ a hundred pounds for my predecessor’s good will.--GOLDSMITH.
+
+3. Mere unattached participles for which nothing can be said, except
+that they are sometimes inoffensive if the word to be supplied is very
+vague.
+
+ _Doubling_ the point, and _running_ along the southern shore of the
+ little peninsula, the scene changes.--F. M. CRAWFORD.
+
+ The most trying ... period was this one of enforced idleness _waiting_
+ for the day of entry.--_Times._
+
+ _Having acquired_ so many tropical colonies there is the undoubted
+ duty attached to such possession of....--_Times._
+
+4. Participles that may some day become prepositions, &c.
+
+ Sir--_Referring_ to your correspondent’s (the Bishop of Croydon’s)
+ letter in to-day’s issue, _he_ quotes at the close of it the following
+ passage.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+_He_ must be the Bishop; for the immediately preceding _Sir_, marking
+the beginning of the letter, shows that no one else has been mentioned;
+but if we had given the sentence without this indication, no one
+could possibly have believed that this was so; _referring_ is not yet
+unparticipled.
+
+5. An unwary writer sometimes attaches a participle to the subject of
+a previous sentence, assuming that it will be the subject of the new
+sentence also, and then finds (or rather is not awake enough to find)
+himself mistaken. This is a trap into which good writers sometimes
+fall, and so dangerous to bad writers that we shall give many examples.
+It is important for the tiro to realize that he has not satisfied the
+elementary requirements of grammar until he has attached the participle
+to a noun in the same sentence as itself, not in another. He must also
+remember that, for instance, _I went and he came_, though often spoken
+of loosely as a sentence, is in fact as fully two sentences as if each
+half of it were ten lines long, and the two were parted by a full stop
+and not connected by a conjunction.
+
+ _They_ had now reached the airy dwelling where Mrs. Macshake
+ resided, and _having rung, the door_ was at length most deliberately
+ opened.--S. FERRIER.
+
+ _The lovers_ sought a shelter, and, mutually _charmed_ with each
+ other, _time_ flew for a while on downy pinions.--S. FERRIER.
+
+ A molecular _change_ is propagated to the muscles by which the body is
+ retracted, and _causing_ them to contract, _the act_ of retraction is
+ brought about.--HUXLEY.
+
+ _Joseph_, as they supposed, by tampering with Will, got all my
+ secrets, and was acquainted with all my motions--; and _having_ also
+ _undertaken_ to watch all those of his young lady, the wise _family_
+ were secure.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ _Miss Pinkerton_ ... in vain ... tried to overawe her. _Attempting_
+ once to scold her in public, _Rebecca_ hit upon the ... plan of
+ answering her in French, which quite routed the old woman.--THACKERAY.
+
+ But _he_ thought it derogatory to a brave knight passively to await
+ the assault, and _ordering_ his own men to charge, the hostile
+ _squadrons_, rapidly advancing against each other, met midway on the
+ plain.--PRESCOTT.
+
+ Alvarado, roused by the noise of the attack on this quarter, hastened
+ to the support of his officer, when _Almagro_, seizing the occasion,
+ pushed across the bridge, dispersed the small body left to defend it,
+ and, _falling_ on Alvarado’s rear, _that general_ saw himself hemmed
+ in on all sides.--PRESCOTT.
+
+ _Murtagh_, without a word of reply, went to the door, and _shouting_
+ into the passage something in Irish, _the room_ was instantly filled
+ with bog-trotters.--BORROW.
+
+ But, as before, _Anne_ once more made me smart, and _having equipped_
+ herself in a gown and bonnet of mine--not of the newest--off _we_
+ set.--CROCKETT.
+
+ At this I was silent for a little, and then _I_ resolved to speak
+ plainly to Anne. But not _being_ ready with my words, _she_ got in
+ first.--CROCKETT.
+
+ For many years _I_ had to contend with much opposition in the nature
+ of scepticism; but _having had_ hundreds of successful cases and
+ proofs _it_ has become such an established fact in the eastern
+ counties that many landowners, &c., would not think of sinking a well
+ without first seeking the aid of a water diviner.--_Times._
+
+6. A more obvious trap, and consequently less fatal, is a change from
+the active construction that may have been intended to a passive,
+without corresponding alterations. If the writers of the next two had
+used _we must admit_ instead of _it must be admitted_, _a policy that
+they put forward_, instead of _a policy put forward_, the participles
+_hesitating_ and _believing_ would have had owners.
+
+ While _hesitating_ to accept this terrible indictment of French
+ infancy, _it must be admitted_ that French literature in all its
+ strength and wealth is a grown-up literature.--_Spectator._
+
+ He and those with whom he acted were responsible for the policy
+ promulgated--_a policy_ put forward in all seriousness and honesty
+ _believing_ it to be essential to the obtaining of the better
+ government of Ireland.--_Times._
+
+7. Participles that seem to belong to a noun, but do not.
+
+ Letters on the constant stopping of omnibuses, thus _causing_
+ considerable suffering to the horses.
+
+Does _causing_ agree with _letters_? Then the letters annoy the horses.
+With _stopping_? Then stopping causes suffering by stopping (_thus_).
+With _omnibuses_? The horses possibly blame those innocents, but we
+can hardly suppose a human being, even the writer of the sentence, so
+illogical. The word _thus_, however, is often considered to have a kind
+of dispensing power, freeing its participle from all obligations; so:
+
+ The Prince was, by the special command of his Majesty the Emperor,
+ made the guardian of H.I.H. the Crown Prince, _thus necessitating_ the
+ Prince’s constant presence in the capital of Japan.--_Times._
+
+ A very wealthy man can never be sure even of friendship,--while the
+ highest, strongest and noblest kind of love is nearly always denied to
+ him, in this way _carrying out_ the fulfilment of those strange but
+ true words:--‘How hardly shall he that is a rich man enter the Kingdom
+ of Heaven!’--CORELLI.
+
+It is not _love_ that carries out, but the power that denies love,
+which is not mentioned.
+
+8. Really bad unattached or wrongly attached participles. The reader
+will generally find no difficulty in seeing what has led to the
+blunder, and if he will take the trouble to do this, will be less
+likely to make similar blunders himself.
+
+ And then _stooping_ to take up the key to let _myself_ into the
+ garden, _he_ started and looked as if he heard somebody near the
+ door.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ Sir--With reference to this question ‘Do we believe?’, while
+ _recognizing_ the vastness of the subject, its modern aspect has some
+ definite features.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ _Taken_ in conjunction with the splendid white and brown trout-fishing
+ of the Rosses lakes and rivers, anglers have now the opportunity of
+ fishing one of the best, if not the best, fishery to be obtained in
+ Ireland.--ADVT.
+
+ Sir--_Having read_ with much interest the letters re ‘Believe only’
+ now appearing in the _Daily Telegraph_, perhaps some of your readers
+ might be interested to know the following texts which have led some
+ great men to ‘believe only’.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ _Being pushed_ unceremoniously to one side--which was precisely what I
+ wished--he usurped my place.--C. BRONTË.
+
+ The higher forms of speech acquire a secondary strength from
+ association. _Having_, in actual life, habitually _heard_ them in
+ connexion with mental impressions, and _having been accustomed_ to
+ meet with them in the most powerful writing, they come to have in
+ themselves a species of force.--SPENCER.
+
+ _Standing_ over one of the sluices of the Aswan dam last January, not
+ only was the vibration evident to the senses....--_Times._
+
+ The following passage may be commended for use in examination
+ papers. ‘Always _beloved_ by the Imperial couple who are to-day the
+ Sovereign lord and lady of Great Britain, their Majesties have, on
+ many occasions since the Devonshire houses rejoiced in a mistress once
+ more, honoured them by visits extending over some days.’--_Times._
+
+The last, as the _Times_ reviewer has noticed, will repay analysis in
+several ways.
+
+=9. The absolute construction= is not much to be recommended, having
+generally an alien air in English; but it is sometimes useful. It must
+be observed, first, that the case used should now invariably be the
+subjective, though it was otherwise in old English. Secondly, it is
+very seldom advisable to make an absolute construction and insert a
+pronoun for the purpose when the participle might simply be attached
+in ordinary agreement to a noun already to hand. Thirdly, it is very
+bad to use the construction, but omit to give the participle a noun
+or pronoun to itself. These three transgressions will be illustrated,
+in the same order, by the next three examples. But many of the wrong
+sentences in 5 above may be regarded as absolute constructions with
+the subject omitted.
+
+ I, with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most
+ capricious, the most maddening of masters (_him_ before me always
+ excepted)....--C. BRONTË.
+
+ ‘Special’ is a much overworked word, _it_ being loosely used to mean
+ great in degree, also peculiar in kind.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+ This is said now because, _having been said_ before, I have been
+ judged as if I had made the pretensions which were then and which are
+ now again disclaimed.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+
+ THE GERUND
+
+There are three questions to be considered: whether a writer ought to
+let us know that he is using a gerund and not a participle; when a
+gerund may be used without its subject’s being expressed; when a gerund
+with preposition is to be preferred to the infinitive.
+
+=1. Is the gerund to be made recognizable?= And, in the circumstances
+that make it possible, that is, when its subject is expressed, is this
+to be done sometimes, or always?
+
+It is done by putting what we call for shortness’ sake the subject of
+the gerund (i. e., the word _me_ or _my_ in _me doing_ or _my doing_)
+in the possessive instead of in the objective or subjective case.
+
+Take the typical sentence: I dislike my best friend(’s) violating my
+privacy. It cannot be a true account of the matter to say that _friend_
+is the object of _I dislike_, and has a participle _violating_ attached
+to it. For (a) we can substitute _resent_, which never takes a personal
+object, for _dislike_, without changing the sense. (b) If we substitute
+a passive construction, also without changing the sense, we find that
+_dislike_ has quite a different object--_privacy_.--I dislike my
+privacy being violated by my friend. (c) Many of us would be willing to
+adopt the sentiment conveyed who yet would not admit for a moment that
+they disliked their best friend even when he intruded; they condemn the
+sin, but not the sinner.
+
+_Violating_ then is not an ordinary participle. It does not follow
+yet that it is a gerund. It may be an extraordinary participle, fused
+into one notion with the noun, so that _a friend violating_ means
+_the-violation-by-a-friend_. The Latin scholar here at once puts in
+the idiom of _occisus Caesar_, which does not generally mean _Caesar
+after he was killed_, as it naturally should, but the killing of
+Caesar, or the fact that Caesar had been killed. The parallel is close
+(though the use is practically confined to the passive in Latin), and
+familiar to all who know any Latin at all. But it shows not so much
+what the English construction is as how educated people have been
+able to reconcile themselves to an ambiguous and not very reasonable
+idiom--not very reasonable, that is, after language has thrown off its
+early limitations, and got over the first difficulty of accomplishing
+abstract expression of any kind. The sort of fusion assumed is
+further illustrated for the Latinist, though not so closely, by the
+Latin accusative and infinitive. This theory then takes _violating_
+for a participle fused into one notion with _friend_. There are two
+difficulties.
+
+I. The construction in English is, though in the nature of things not
+as common, yet as easy in the passive as in the active. Now the passive
+of _violating_ is either _violated_ or _being violated_. It is quite
+natural to say, Privacy violated once is no longer inviolable. Why then
+should it be most unnatural to say, The worst of privacy violated once
+is that it is no longer inviolable? No one, not purposely seeking the
+unusual for some reason or other, would omit _being_ before _violated_
+in the second. Yet as participles _violated_ and _being violated_ are
+equally good--not indeed always, but in this context, as the simpler
+Privacy sentence shows. The only difference between the two participles
+(except that in brevity, which tells against _being violated_) is that
+the longer form can also be the gerund, and the shorter cannot. The
+almost invariable choice of it is due to the instinctive feeling that
+what we are using is or ought to be the gerund. A more convincing
+instance than this mere adaptation of our original example may be added:
+
+ Many years ago I became impressed with the necessity for _our infantry
+ being taught and practised_ in the skilful use of their rifle.--LORD
+ ROBERTS.
+
+_The necessity for our infantry taught and practised_ is absolutely
+impossible. But why, _if being_ taught is participle, and not gerund?
+
+II. Assuming that the fused-participle theory is satisfactory and
+recognized, whence comes the general, though not universal impression
+among those who, without being well versed in grammar, are habitually
+careful how they speak and write, that constructions like the following
+are ignorant vulgarisms?--It is no use he (his) doing it; it is no use
+him (his) doing it; that need not prevent us (our) believing; excuse
+me (my) interrupting you; a thing (thing’s) existing does not prove
+that it ought to exist; I was annoyed by Tom (Tom’s) hesitating; the
+Tsar (Tsar’s) leaving Russia is significant; it failed through the King
+(King’s) refusing his signature; without us (our) hearing the man, the
+facts cannot be got at; without the man (man’s) telling us himself, we
+can never know. With a single exception for one (not both) of the first
+two, none of these ought to cause a moment’s uneasiness to any one who
+was consciously or unconsciously in the fused-participle frame of mind;
+and if they do cause uneasiness it shows that that frame of mind is not
+effectively present.
+
+The Fused-Participle Theory, having no sufficient answer to these
+objections, but seeing that the gerund’s case is also weak, naturally
+tries a counter-attack:--If on the other hand the gerund theory is
+satisfactory and recognized, how is it conceivable that people should
+leave out the possessive _’s_ in the reckless way they do? To which,
+however, the Gerund makes reply:--I regret that they do leave it out,
+but at least we can see how they come to; it is the combined result of
+a mistake and an inconvenience. The mistake is caused by certain types
+of sentence in which a real, not a fused participle is so used that the
+noun and its (unfused) participle give a sense hardly distinguishable
+from a possessive noun and a gerund. Examples are:
+
+ This plan has now been abandoned owing to _circumstances requiring_
+ the convocation of representatives of the people at the earliest
+ possible moment.--_Times._
+
+ ... by imposing as great difficulty as possible on _parents and
+ publicans using_ child messengers.--_Times._
+
+ Of course no obstacles should be put in the way of _charitable people
+ providing_ free or other meals if they think fit.--_Times._
+
+ The notion of _the Czar being addressed_ in such terms by the
+ nobility of his capital would have been regarded as an absolute
+ impossibility.--_Spectator._
+
+There is of course a difference. For instance, in the example about
+the Czar, as in a previous one about _conceiving Matthew Arnold
+permitting_, the participle has a pictorial effect; it invites us to
+imagine the physical appearance of these two great men under indignity
+instead of merely thinking of the abstract indignity, as we should
+have done if _Czar’s_ and _Arnold’s_ had shown that we had a gerund;
+but the difference is very fine; the possessive sign might be inserted
+without practical effect in all these four, and in hundreds like them.
+And unlearned people may be excused for deducing that the subject of
+the gerund can be used at pleasure without the possessive sign, while
+the learned comfort themselves with the fused-participle theory. That
+is the mistake. The inconvenience is this: it is easy enough to use the
+possessive adjectives (_my_, &c.), and to add the possessive sign to
+most names and many single nouns; but the subject of a gerund is often
+a long phrase, after which the sign is intolerable. So the mistake
+(that the gerund may have a subject not marked by the possessive)
+is eagerly applied to obviating the inconvenience (that long gerund
+subjects must be avoided). And that is why people drop their possessive
+_’s_, and why you, the Fused Participle, flourish, defrauding both
+me, the Gerund, and the honest participle. Thus answered, the Fused
+Participle does not continue the argument, but pleads only that there
+is room for all three forms.
+
+Before giving some examples to help in the decision, we shall summarize
+our own opinion. (1) It is not a matter to be decided by appeal
+to historical grammar. All three constructions may have separate
+legitimate descents, and yet in the interests of clear thought and
+expression it may be better for one of them to be abandoned. (2) There
+are two opposite tendencies at present: among careful writers, to
+avoid the fused participle (this, being negative, can naturally not
+be illustrated) and to put possessive signs in slightly uncomfortable
+places by way of compensation; among slovenly writers, to throw off
+all limits of length for the subject of the fused participle. (3) Long
+fused-participle phrases are a variety of abstract expression, and
+as such to be deprecated. Among the resources of civilization is the
+power of choosing between different ways of saying the same thing; and
+literary skill is very much a matter of exercising that power; a writer
+should recognize that if he cannot get round an ugly fused participle
+there is still much for him to learn. (4) Opportunities for ambiguity
+are so abundant in English, owing to the number of words whose parsing
+depends on context, that all aids to precision are valuable; and it
+is not too much to expect a writer to know and let us know whether he
+means a participle or a gerund.
+
+_a._ That the possessive of all pronouns that have the form should be
+used instead of the objective or subjective is hardly disputed. Correct
+accordingly:
+
+ You may rely upon _me_ doing all in my power.--SIR W. HARCOURT.
+
+ The confounded fetterlock clapped on my movements by old Griffiths
+ prevents _me_ repairing to England in person.--SCOTT.
+
+ But when it comes to _us_ following his life and example....--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ Nothing can prevent _it_ being the main issue at the General
+ Election.--_Spectator._
+
+ One of them, if you will pardon _me_ reminding you, is that no
+ discussion is to pass between us.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ Frederick had already accepted the crown, lest James should object to
+ _him_ doing so.--_Times._
+
+ ... notwithstanding the fact that their suspicions of ease-loving,
+ ear-tickling parsons prevent _them_ supporting the commercial churches
+ of our time.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+_b._ Examples in which the possessive of nouns might be written without
+a qualm.
+
+ Nearly a week passed over without _Mr. Fairford_ hearing a word
+ directly from his son.--SCOTT.
+
+ Mrs. Downe Wright had not forgiven the indignity of _her son_ having
+ been refused by Mary.--S. FERRIER.
+
+ In no other religion is there a thought of _man_ being saved by grace
+ and not by merit.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ And it is said that, on _a visitor_ once asking to see his library,
+ Descartes led him....--HUXLEY.
+
+ It is true that one of our objects was to prevent[10] _children_
+ ‘sipping’ the liquor they were sent for.--_Times._
+
+ Orders were sometimes issued to prohibit[1a] _soldiers_ buying and
+ eating cucumbers.--_Times._
+
+ Renewed efforts at a settlement in 1891 failed through the
+ _Swedish Government_ leading off with a flippant and offensive
+ suggestion.--NANSEN.
+
+ Hurried reading results in _the learner_ forgetting half of what he
+ reads, or in _his_ forming vague conceptions.--SWEET.
+
+_c._ All the last set involved what were either actual or virtual names
+of persons; there is more difficulty with abstract nouns, compound
+subjects, and words of which the possessive is ugly. Those that may
+perhaps bear the possessive mark will be put first, and alterations
+suggested for the others.
+
+ We look forward to _much attention_ being given.--_Times._
+
+ He affirmed that such increases were the rule in that city on _the
+ change_ being made.--_Times._
+
+ I live in hopes of _this discussion_ resulting in some modification
+ in our form of belief.--_Daily Telegraph._ (that this discussion may
+ result)
+
+The real objection to the possessive here is merely the addition to the
+crowd of sibilants.
+
+ In the event of _the passage_ being found, he will esteem it a favour
+ ... (if the passage is found)
+
+ Conceive my vexation at being told by Papa this morning that he had
+ not the least objection to _Edward and me_ marrying whenever we
+ pleased.--S. FERRIER. (our)
+
+Or, if the names are essential, _did not in the least mind how soon
+Edward and I married_.
+
+ It has been replied to the absurd taunt about _the French_ inventing
+ nothing, that at least Descartes invented German philosophy.--MORLEY.
+ (Frenchmen’s)
+
+_d._ A modern construction called the compound possessive was mentioned
+at the end of the section on Cases. It is sometimes ugly, sometimes
+inoffensive; that is a matter of degree and of knowing where to draw
+the line; there is no objection to it in principle. And the application
+of it will sometimes help out a gerund. The first quotation gives a
+compound possessive simply; the second, a gerund construction to which
+it ought to be applicable; the third and fourth, two to which it can be
+applied; and the last, one to which it cannot.
+
+ A protestation, read at Edinburgh, was followed, on _Archibald
+ Johnston of Warriston’s_ suggestion, by....--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ The retirement of Judge Stonor was made the subject of special
+ reference yesterday on the occasion of _Sir W. L. Selfe, his
+ successor_, taking his seat in Marylebone County Court.--_Times._
+
+ The mere fact of _such a premier_ being endured shows....--BAGEHOT.
+
+ There is no possibility of _the dissolution of the legislative union_
+ becoming a vital question.--_Spectator._
+
+ If some means could be devised for ... insisting upon _many English
+ guardians of the poor_ making themselves more acquainted....--_Times._
+
+The only objection to a possessive mark after _successor_ is that
+the two commas cannot be dispensed with; we must say _when ...
+took_ for _on the occasion of ... taking_. _Such a premier’s_ will
+certainly pass. In the _Spectator_ sentence, we should ourselves
+allow _union’s_; opinions will differ. But to put the _’s_ after
+_poor_ in the last sentence would be ridiculous; that sentence must be
+rewritten--insisting that many English guardians of the poor should
+make--or else _poor-law Guardians’_ must be used.
+
+_e._ Sometimes we can get over the difficulty without abandoning the
+gerund, by some slight change of order.
+
+ This incentive can only be supplied by _the nation itself_ taking the
+ matter up seriously.--LORD ROBERTS.
+
+If _itself’s_ is objected to, omit _itself_ (or shift it to the end),
+and write _nation’s_.
+
+_f._ But many types of sentence remain that will have to be completely
+changed if the gerund is to be recognizable. It will be admitted about
+most of our examples that the change is not to be regretted. The
+subject of the gerund is italicized in each, to emphasize its length.
+
+ We have to account for _the collision of two great fleets, so equal in
+ material strength that the issue was thought doubtful by many careful
+ statisticians_, ending in the total destruction of one of them and
+ in the immunity of the other from damage greater than might well be
+ incurred in a mere skirmish.--_Times._
+
+For _account for ... ending_ write _ascertain why ... ended_. The
+sentence is radically bad, because the essential construction seems
+complete at _collision_--a false scent. That, which is one of the worst
+literary sins, is the frequent result of long fused participles. It is
+quite practically possible here for readers to have supposed that they
+were going to be told why the fleets met, and not why the meeting ended
+as it did. In the remaining sentences, we shall say when there is false
+scent, but leave the reader to examine it.
+
+ The success of the negotiations depends on _the Russian Minister at
+ Tokio_ being allowed to convince Japan that....--_Times._
+
+The compound possessive--Tokio’s--is tempting, but perhaps overbold.
+Insert _whether_ after _depends on_, and write _is_ for _being_.
+
+ So far from _this_ being the case, the policy ... was actually decided
+ upon before ... the question ... was raised.--_Times._
+
+Omit _being the case_.
+
+ We are not without tokens of _an openness for this higher truth also,
+ of a keen though uncultivated sense for it_, having existed in
+ Burns.--CARLYLE.
+
+For the first _of_ write _that_, omit the second _of_, and omit
+_having_. False scent.
+
+ There is no apparent evidence of _an early peace_ being necessitated
+ by the pecuniary exigencies of the Russian Government.--SIR HOWARD
+ VINCENT.
+
+For _of ... being_ write _that ... will be_, if _peace’s_ cannot be
+endured.
+
+ The general effect of his words was to show the absurdity of _the
+ Secretary of State for War, and our military authorities generally_,
+ denouncing the Militia as useless or redundant.--_Spectator._
+
+For _the absurdity of ... denouncing_ write _how absurd it was for ...
+to denounce_. False scent, though less deceptive.
+
+ Apparently his mission was decided upon without _that of the British
+ and Spanish Ministers_ having been taken into account, or, at all
+ events, without their having been sufficiently reckoned with.--_Times._
+
+Without regard (at all events without sufficient regard) to that of....
+
+ ... capital seeking employment in foreign protected countries, in
+ consequence of _manufacturing business in many branches in which it
+ might be employed at home_ being rendered unprofitable by our system
+ of free trade.--LORD GOSCHEN.
+
+For _in consequence of ... being_ write _because ... has been_. Bad
+false scent again.
+
+ So far from _the relief given to agriculture by the State paying
+ one-half of the rates_ being inequitable, it is but a bare act of
+ justice.--_Spectator._
+
+Observe the fused participle within fused participle here; and read
+thus: So far from its being inequitable that the state should relieve,
+&c.
+
+After these specimens, chosen not as exceptional ones, but merely as
+not admitting of simple correction by insertion of the possessive mark,
+the reader will perhaps agree that the long gerund subject--or rather
+noun phrase of the fused participle--is a monstrosity, the abolition of
+which would be a relief to him, and good discipline for the writer.
+
+Two sentences are added to show the chaotic state of present practice.
+Noticing the bold use of the strict gerund in the first, we conclude
+that the author is a sound gerundite, faithful in spite of all
+temptations; but a few pages later comes the needless relapse into
+fused participle.
+
+ I remember old _Colney’s_ once, in old days, _calling_ that kind of
+ marriage a sarcophagus.--MEREDITH.
+
+ She had thought in her heart that _Mr. Barmby espousing_ the girl
+ would smoothe a troubled prospect.--MEREDITH.
+
+The following looks like a deliberate avoidance of both constructions
+by a writer who is undecided between the two. _Its being_ is what
+should have been written.
+
+ I do not say that the advice is not sound, or complain that it is
+ given. I do deprecate _that it should be_ taken.--_Times._
+
+And perhaps a shyness of _something’s being shown_ accounts for the
+next odd arrangement; it is true that entire recasting is what is
+called for.
+
+ _There being shown to be something_ radically defective in the
+ management of the Bank _led_ to the appointment of a Committee.--H. D.
+ MACLEOD.
+
+=2. When must the subject of the gerund (or infinitive) be expressed,
+and when omitted?=
+
+This is not a controversial matter like the last; the principles are
+quite simple, and will be accepted; but it is necessary to state and
+illustrate them because they are often forgotten. As the same mistakes
+are sometimes made with the infinitive, that is to be considered as
+included.
+
+Roughly, the subject of the gerund (or infinitive) should be expressed
+if it is different from, and omitted if it is the same as, the subject
+of the sentence. To omit it when different is positively wrong, and may
+produce actual ambiguity or worse, though sometimes there is only a
+slipshod effect; to insert it when the same is generally clumsy.
+
+No one would say ‘I succeeded to his property upon dying’, because, _I_
+being the subject of the sentence, _my_ is naturally suggested instead
+of the necessary _his_ as subject of the gerund; the _his_ must be
+inserted before _dying_, even though the nature of the case obviates
+ambiguity. To take an instance that will show both sides, the following
+is correct:
+
+ I shut the door and stood with my back to it. Then, instead of _his
+ philandering_ with Bess, I, Clementina MacTaggart, had some plain
+ speech with John Barnaby.--CROCKETT.
+
+Subject of the sentence, I; subject of the gerund, he; they are
+different; therefore the _he_ must be expressed, in the shape of
+_his_. Now rewrite the main sentence as--John Barnaby heard some plain
+speech from me, Clementina MacTaggart. The sense is the same; but the
+_his_ before _philandering_ at once becomes superfluous; it is not
+yet seriously in the way, because we do not know what is the subject
+of _philandering_, the name only coming later. Now rewrite it again
+as--Then John Barnaby heard some plain speech from ... instead of ...
+The _his_ is now so clumsy as to be almost impossible.
+
+The insertion of superfluous subjects is much less common than the
+omission of necessary ones; but three examples follow. The first is a
+rare and precious variety; the second has no apparent justification;
+for the third it may be said that the unusual _his_ has the same effect
+as the insertion of the parenthetic words _as he actually does_ after
+_limiting_ would have had.
+
+ You took food to him, but instead of _he reaching_ out his hand and
+ taking it, he kept asking for food.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Harsh facts: sure as she was of _her_ never _losing_ her filial hold
+ of the beloved.--MEREDITH.
+
+ I have said that Mr. Chamberlain has no warrant for _his limiting_ the
+ phrase ... to the competitive manufacture of goods.--LORD GOSCHEN.
+
+In giving the rule summarily, we used the phrase _subject of the
+sentence_. That phrase is not to be confined to the subject of the main
+sentence, but to be referred instead, when necessary, to the subject of
+the subordinate clause in which the gerund may stand. For instance:
+
+ The good, the illuminated, sit apart from the rest, censuring their
+ dullness and vices, as if they thought that, _by sitting_ very grand
+ in their chairs, the very brokers, attorneys, and congressmen would
+ see the error of their ways, and flock to them.--EMERSON.
+
+Here _by sitting_ breaks the rule, though the subject of _sitting_
+is the same as that of the main verb _sit_, because the subject of
+the clause in which _sitting_ comes is not _the good_, but _brokers,
+&c._ The right way to mend this is not to insert _their_ before
+_sitting_--which after all is clumsy, though correct--but to make _the
+good_ the subject of the clause also, by writing _as if they thought
+that by sitting ... they would make the brokers ... see the error_.
+
+And sometimes _subject of the sentence_ is to be interpreted still more
+freely as the word grammatically dominant in the part of the sentence
+that contains the gerund. For instance:
+
+ From the Bible alone was she taught the duties of morality, but
+ familiarized to her taste _by hearing_ its stories and precepts from
+ the lips she best loved.--S. FERRIER.
+
+Here the dominant word is _Bible_, to which _familiarized_ belongs. So,
+though _she_ does happen to be the main subject, _her_ must be inserted
+because the _familiarized_ phrase removes the gerund from the reach of
+the main subject.
+
+After these explanations we add miscellaneous instances. It will be
+seen that transgression of the rule, though it seldom makes a sentence
+ambiguous enough to deceive, easily makes it ambiguous enough to amuse
+the reader at wrong moments, or gives an impression of amateurish work.
+Mistakes are mended, sometimes by inserting the subject of the gerund
+(or infinitive), sometimes by changing the main subject to make it the
+same as that of the gerund, sometimes by other recasting.
+
+ ... an excellent arrangement for a breeching, which, when released,
+ remains with the carriage, so that lead or centre horses can be put in
+ the wheel _without having_ to affix a new breeching.--_Times._
+
+Lucky, reflects the reader, since horses are not good at affixing
+breechings. Write _the drivers can put ... horses ... without having to
+affix_.
+
+ I cultivated a passionless and cold exterior, for I discovered that
+ _by assuming_ such a character, certain otherwise crafty persons
+ would talk more readily before me.--CORELLI.
+
+Write _if I assumed_; or else _I should induce certain ... persons
+to talk_. It will be noticed that the mistake here, and often, is
+analogous to the most frequent form of wrongly attached participle
+(participle, 5); the writer does not observe that he has practically
+passed from the sphere of the sentence whose subject was the word that
+he still allows to operate.
+
+ _After following_ a country Church of England clergyman for a period
+ of half a century, a newly-appointed, youthful vicar, totally
+ unacquainted with rural life, comes into the parish, and at once
+ commences to alter the services of the Church, believed in by the
+ parishioners for generations.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+Grammar gives _his_, i. e., the new vicar’s, as subject of _following_;
+it is really either _my_ or _the parishioners’_. Insert _my_ or _our_,
+or write _After we (I) have followed_.
+
+ I am sensible that _by conniving_ at it it will take too deep root
+ ever to be eradicated.--_Times._
+
+Insert _our_, or write _if connived at_.
+
+ This was experienced by certain sensitive temperaments, either by
+ sensations which produced shivering, or _by seeing_ at night a
+ peculiar light in the air.--_Times._
+
+Who or what sees? Certainly not _this_, the main subject. Not even
+_temperaments_, which have no eyes. Write _Persons of sensitive
+temperament experienced this, &c._
+
+ But the commercial interests of both Great Britain and the United
+ States were too closely affected by the terms of the Russo-Chinese
+ agreement _to let_ it pass unnoticed.--_Times._
+
+It is not the interests that cannot let it pass, but the countries.
+Insert _for those countries_ before _to let_; or write _Both Great
+Britain and the United States were too closely affected in their
+interests to let...._
+
+ And it would be well for all concerned, for motor drivers and the
+ public alike, if this were made law, instead of _fixing_ a maximum
+ speed.--_Times._
+
+Write _if the law required this...._
+
+ And _in order to bring_ her to a right understanding, she underwent a
+ system of persecution.--S. FERRIER.
+
+Write _they subjected her to_ for _she underwent_.
+
+ Her friendship is too precious to me, not _to doubt_ my own merits on
+ the one hand, and not to be anxious for the preservation of it on the
+ other.--RICHARDSON.
+
+Write _I value her friendship too highly not to...._
+
+ One cannot do good to a man whose mouth has been gagged _in order not
+ to hear_ what he desires for his welfare.--_Times._
+
+Grammar suggests that his mouth--or, if indulgent, that he--is not to
+hear; but the person meant is _one_. Write _one has gagged_ for _has
+been gagged_.
+
+ Germany has, alas! victories enough _not to add_ one of the kind which
+ would have been implied in the retirement of M. Delcassé.--_Times._
+
+It is France, not Germany, that should not add. Write _without France’s
+adding_.
+
+ _In order to obtain_ peace, ordinary battles followed by ordinary
+ victories and ordinary results will only lead to a useless
+ prolongation of the struggle.--_Times._
+
+This is a triumph of inconsequence. Write _If peace is the object, it
+should be remembered that ordinary...._
+
+It will have occurred to the reader that, while most of the sentences
+quoted are to be condemned, objection to a few of them might be called
+pedantic. The fact is that every writer probably breaks the rule
+often, and escapes notice, other people’s, his own, or both. Different
+readers, however, will be critical in different degrees; and whoever
+breaks the rule does so at his own risk; if his offence is noticed,
+that is hanging evidence against him by itself; if it is not noticed,
+it is not an offence. Of saying on page 127 _Mistakes are mended
+sometimes by inserting the subject_, we plead Guilty if we were caught
+in the act, but otherwise Not Guilty.
+
+=3. Choice between the gerund with preposition and the infinitive.=
+
+It was said in the preliminary section on the Participle and Gerund
+that _writing_--the verbal noun or gerund--and _to write_--the
+infinitive--are in some sense synonyms; but phrases were given showing
+that it is by no means always indifferent which of the two is used. It
+is a matter of idiom rather than of grammar; but this seems the most
+convenient place for drawing attention to it. To give satisfactory
+rules would require many more examples and much more space than can
+be afforded. But something will be gained if students are convinced
+(1) that many of the mistakes made give sentences the appearance of
+having been written by a foreigner or one who is not at home with the
+literary language; (2) that the mistakes are nearly always on one side,
+the infinitive being the form that should only be used with caution;
+(3) that a slight change in arrangement may require a change from
+infinitive to gerund or vice versa.
+
+_a._ When the infinitive or gerund is attached to a noun, defining
+or answering the question _what_ (hope, &c.) about it, it is almost
+always better to use the gerund with of; not quite always, however; for
+instance, _an intention to return_, usually, and _a tendency to think_
+always.
+
+ The vain _hope to be understood_ by everybody possessed of a ballot
+ makes us in the United States perhaps guiltier than public men in
+ Great Britain in the use of that monstrous muddled dichotomy ‘capital
+ and labour’.--_Times._
+
+What hope?--That of being understood. Write it so, and treat all the
+following similarly:
+
+ The habitual _necessity to amass_ [of amassing] matter for the weekly
+ sermon, set him noting...--MEREDITH.
+
+ We wish to be among the first to felicitate Mr. Whitelaw Reid upon
+ his _opportunity to exercise_ [of exercising] again the distinguished
+ talents which...--_Times._
+
+ Men lie twenty times in as many hours in the _hope to propitiate_ [of
+ propitiating] you.--CORELLI.
+
+ We left the mound in the twilight, with the _design to return_ [of
+ returning] the next morning.--EMERSON.
+
+ The main duties of government were omitted--the _duty to instruct_ [of
+ instructing] the ignorant, _to supply_ [of supplying] the poor with
+ work and good guidance.--EMERSON.
+
+ Mr. Hay’s _purpose to preserve or restore_ [of preserving or
+ restoring] the integrity of the administrative entity of China has
+ never been abandoned.--_Times._
+
+ My _custom to be dressed_ [of being dressed] for the day, as
+ soon as breakfast is over, ... will make such a step less
+ suspected.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ He points out that if Russia accepted the agreement, she would not
+ attain her _object to clear_ [of clearing] the situation, inasmuch
+ as....--_Times._
+
+What accounts for these mistakes is the analogy of forms like: Our
+design was to return; it is a duty to instruct; man has power to
+interpret (but _the_ power of interpreting); it is my custom to be
+dressed.
+
+When, however, the noun thus defined is more or less closely fused into
+a single idea with the verb that governs it, the infinitive becomes
+legitimate, though seldom necessary.
+
+ The menace to have secreted Solmes, and that other, that I _had
+ thoughts to run away_ with her foolish brother, ... so much terrified
+ the dear creature....--RICHARDSON.
+
+ I passed my childhood here, and _had a weakness here to close_ my
+ life.--BEACONSFIELD.
+
+ Before ten o’clock in the evening, Gasca _had the satisfaction to see_
+ the bridge so well secured that....--PRESCOTT.
+
+ Almagro’s followers _made as little scruple to appropriate_ to their
+ own use such horses and arms as they could find.--PRESCOTT.
+
+_Had thoughts_ means _was planning_; _had a weakness_ means _desired_;
+_had the satisfaction_, _was pleased_; _made as little scruple_,
+_scrupled as little_.
+
+Again, an interval between the noun defined and the infinitive or
+gerund makes the former more tolerable.
+
+ _The necessity_ which has confronted the Tokio War Office, _to
+ enlarge_ their views of the requirements of the situation.--_Times._
+
+Or the infinitive is used to avoid a multiplication of _of_.
+
+ He had as much as any man ever had that _gift_ of a great preacher _to
+ make_ the oratorical fervour which persuades himself while it lasts
+ into the abiding conviction of his hearers.--LOWELL.
+
+ The pastures of Tartary were still remembered by the tenacious
+ _practice_ of the Norsemen _to eat_ horseflesh at religious
+ feasts.--EMERSON.
+
+If the noun has the indefinite article the infinitive is better
+sometimes.
+
+ But our recognition of it implies a corresponding _duty to make_ the
+ most of such advantages.--_Times._
+
+_A_ duty to make: _the_ duty of making. Compare _power_ and _the power_
+above.
+
+The following is probably an adaptation (not to be commended) of _it is
+necessary for Russia to secure_--_for Russia to secure_ being regarded
+as a fused infinitive like the Latin accusative and infinitive.
+
+ His views on the _necessity_ for Russia _to secure_ the command of the
+ sea....--_Times._
+
+_b._ Though the gerund with _of_ is the usual construction after nouns,
+they sometimes prefer the gerund with other prepositions also to the
+infinitive. The gerund with _in_ should be used, for instance, in the
+following. But euphony operates again in the first.
+
+ ... the extraordinary _remissness_ of the English commanders _to
+ utilize_ their preponderating strength against the Boers.--_Times._
+
+ Lord Kenyon reminded the House of the resistance met with to
+ vaccination, to [of?] the possible _effect_ of the proposal _to
+ increase_ that resistance....--_Times._
+
+ I think sculpture and painting have an _effect to teach_ us manners
+ and abolish hurry.--EMERSON.
+
+ Such a capitulation would be inconsistent with the position of any
+ Great Power, independently of the _humiliation_ there would be for
+ England and France _to submit_ their agreement for approval and
+ perhaps modification to Germany.--_Times._
+
+The humiliation there would be in submitting; or the humiliation it
+would be to submit.
+
+_c._ After verbs and adjectives the infinitive is much more common; but
+no one will use a gerund where an infinitive is required, while many
+will do the reverse.
+
+ But history _accords_ with the Japanese practice _to show_ [in
+ showing] that....--_Times._
+
+ We must necessarily appeal to the intuition, and _aim_ much
+ more _to suggest_ than _to describe_ [at suggesting than at
+ describing].--EMERSON.
+
+ But they can only highly serve us, when they _aim_ not _to drill_, but
+ _to create_ [at drilling, but at creating].--EMERSON.
+
+ So far from _aiming to be_ mistress of Europe, she was rapidly sinking
+ into the almost helpless prey of France.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+This is to avoid _aiming at be_ing; compare the avoidance of double
+_of_ above.
+
+ _Lose no time_, I pray you, _to advise_.--RICHARDSON.
+
+_In advising_ may have been avoided as ambiguous.
+
+ Egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each
+ individual _persists to be_ [in being] what he is.--EMERSON.
+
+ I do not _despair to see_ [of seeing] a motor public
+ service.--_Guernsey Advertiser._
+
+ Their journeymen are far too declamatory, and too much _addicted to
+ substitute_ [substituting] vague and puerile dissertations for solid
+ instruction.--MORLEY.
+
+In the common phrase _addicted to drink_, drink is a noun, not a verb.
+
+ His blackguard countrymen, always _averse_, as their descendants
+ are, _to give_ [giving] credit to anybody, for any valuable
+ quality.--BORROW.
+
+ Is he _to be blamed_, if he thinks a person would make a wife worth
+ having, _to endeavour_ [for endeavouring] to obtain her?--RICHARDSON.
+
+_d._ If a deferred subject, anticipated by _it_, is to be verbal, it
+must of course be either the infinitive or a gerund without preposition.
+
+ Fortune, who has generally been ready to gratify my inclinations,
+ provided _it_ cost her very little _by so doing_....--BORROW.
+
+
+ SHALL AND WILL
+
+It is unfortunate that the idiomatic use, while it comes by nature to
+southern Englishmen (who will find most of this section superfluous),
+is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly
+acquire it; and for them the section is in danger of being useless. In
+apology for the length of these remarks it must be said that the short
+and simple directions often given are worse than useless. The observant
+reader soon loses faith in them from their constant failure to take him
+right; and the unobservant is the victim of false security.
+
+Roughly speaking, _should_ follows the same rules as _shall_, and
+_would_ as _will_; in what follows, Sh. may be taken as an abbreviation
+for _shall_, _should_, and _should have_, and W. for _will_, _would_,
+and _would have_.
+
+In our usage of the Sh. and W. forms, as seen in principal sentences,
+there are elements belonging to three systems. The first of these, in
+which each form retains its full original meaning, and the two are
+not used to give different persons of the same tense, we shall call
+the pure system: the other two, both hybrids, will be called, one the
+coloured-future, the other the plain-future system. In Old English
+there was no separate future; present and future were one. _Shall_
+and _will_ were the presents of two verbs, to which belong also the
+pasts _should_ and _would_, the conditionals _should_ and _would_, and
+the past conditionals _should have_ and _would have_. _Shall_ had the
+meaning of command or obligation, and _will_ of wish. But as commands
+and wishes are concerned mainly with the future, it was natural that
+a future tense auxiliary should be developed out of these two verbs.
+The coloured future results from the application to future time of
+those forms that were practically useful in the pure system; they
+consequently retain in the coloured future, with some modifications,
+the ideas of command and wish proper to the original verbs. The plain
+future results from the taking of those forms that were practically
+out of work in the pure system to make what had not before existed,
+a simple future tense; these have accordingly not retained the ideas
+of command and wish. Which were the practically useful and which the
+superfluous forms in the pure system must now be explained.
+
+_Thou shall not steal_ is the type of _shall_ in the pure system. We
+do not ordinarily issue commands to ourselves; consequently _I shall_
+is hardly required; but we often ask for orders, and therefore _shall
+I?_ is required. The form of the _shall_ present in the pure system is
+accordingly:
+
+ Shall I? You shall. He shall. Shall we? They shall.
+
+As to the past tense, orders cannot be given, but may be asked about,
+so that, for instance, _What should I do?_ (i. e., What was I to do?)
+can be done all through interrogatively.
+
+In the conditionals, both statement and question can be done all
+through. I can give orders to my imaginary, though not to my actual
+self. I cannot say (as a command) _I shall do it_; but I can say, as a
+conditional command, _I should do it_.
+
+_I shall_ and _we shall_ are accordingly the superfluous forms of the
+present _shall_ in the pure system.
+
+Again, with _will_, _I will_ meaning _it is my will_, it is obvious
+that we can generally state this only of ourselves; we do not know the
+inside of other people’s minds, but we can ask about it. The present
+runs, then,
+
+ I will. Will you? Will he? We will. Will they?
+
+The past tense can here be done all through, both positively and
+interrogatively. For though we cannot tell other people’s present will,
+we can often infer their past will from their actions. So (I was asked,
+but) _I would not_, and _Why would I do it?_ all through. And similarly
+in the conditionals, _I would not_ (if I could), &c.
+
+The spare forms supplied by the present _will_, then, are _you will_,
+_he will_, _they will_; and these, with _I shall_, _we shall_, are
+ready, when the simple future is required, to construct it out of. We
+can now give
+
+
+Rule 1. The Pure System
+
+When Sh. and W. retain the full original meanings of command and wish,
+each of them is used in all three persons, so far as it is required.
+
+The following examples show most of what we inherit directly from the
+pure system.
+
+ Thou shalt not steal. Not required in first person.
+
+ Shall I open the door? Not required in second.
+
+ You should not say such things. In all persons.
+
+ And shall Trelawny die? Hardly required in second.
+
+ Whom should he meet but Jones? (... was it his fate....) In all.
+
+ Why should you suspect me? In all.
+
+ It should seem so. (It would apparently be incumbent on us to believe)
+ Isolated idiom with third.
+
+ I will have my way. Not required in second and third; but see below.
+
+ I (he) asked him (me) to do it, but he (I) would not. In all.
+
+ I would not have done it for the world. In all.
+
+ I would be told to wait a while (Habitual). In all.
+
+ Will you come with me? Not required in first.
+
+ I would I were dead. Not required in second and third.
+
+ He will bite his nails, whatever I say. In all.
+
+ He will often stand on his head. In all.
+
+ You will still be talking (i. e., you always are). Not required in
+ first.
+
+ A coat will last two years with care.
+
+It will be noticed that the last four forms are among those that were
+omitted as not required by the pure system. _Will_ would rarely be
+required in second and third person statements, but would of course be
+possible in favourable circumstances, as in describing habitual action,
+where the will of another may be inferred from past experience. The
+last of all is a natural extension of the idiom even to things that
+have no will. All these ‘habitual’ uses are quite different from _I
+will have my way_; and though _you will have your way_ is possible,
+it always has the ‘habitual’ meaning, which _I will have my way_ is
+usually without.
+
+All the forms in the above list, and others like them, have three
+peculiarities--that they are not practically futures as distinguished
+from presents; that they use Sh. for all persons, or W. for all
+persons, if the idea is appropriate to all persons; and that the
+ideas are simply, or with very little extension, those of command or
+obligation and wish.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The coloured-future system is so called because, while the future sense
+is more distinct, it is still coloured with the speaker’s mood; command
+and wish receive extensions and include promise, permission, menace,
+consent, assurance, intention, refusal, offer, &c.; and the forms
+used are invariably those--from both Sh. and W.--that we called the
+practically useful ones in the pure system. That is, we have always
+
+ I will, shall I? You shall, will you? He shall, will he? We will,
+ shall we? They shall, will they?
+
+And the conditionals, _should_ and _would_, _should have_ and _would
+have_, are used with exactly the same variations. It will be borne in
+mind, however, that no clear line of division can be drawn between
+the pure system and the coloured-future system, since the latter
+is developed naturally (whereas the plain-future system is rather
+developed artificially) out of the former. And especially the questions
+of the coloured future are simply those of the pure system without any
+sort of modification.
+
+
+Rule 2. The Coloured-Future System
+
+In future and conditional statements that include (without the use of
+special words for the purpose) an expression of the speaker’s (not
+necessarily of the subject’s) wish, intention, menace, assurance,
+consent, refusal, promise, offer, permission, command, &c.--in such
+sentences the first person has W., the second and third persons Sh.
+
+ I will tell you presently. My promise.
+
+ You shall repent it before long. My menace.
+
+ He shall not have any. My refusal.
+
+ We would go if we could. Our conditional intention.
+
+ You should do it if we could make you. Our conditional command.
+
+ They should have had it if they had asked. My conditional consent.
+
+The only questions possible here are the asking for orders and the
+requests already disposed of under Rule 1.
+
+Observe that _I would like_ (which is not English) is not justified by
+this rule, because the speaker’s mood is expressed by _like_, and does
+not need double expression; it ought to be _I should like_, under Rule
+3.
+
+Observe also that _I sha’n’t_, _You will go to your room and stay
+there_, are only apparent exceptions, which will be explained under
+Rule 3.
+
+The archaic literary forms _You shall find_, _A rogue shall often
+pass for an honest man_, though now affected and pretentious, are
+grammatically defensible. The speaker asks us to take the fact on his
+personal assurance.
+
+The forms little required in the pure system, and therefore ready to
+hand for making the new plain future, were _I_, and _we_, _shall_;
+_you_, _he_, and _they_, _will_. These accordingly constitute the plain
+future, and the corresponding forms of the plain conditional are used
+analogously. Questions follow the same rule, with one very important
+exception, which will be given a separate rule (4). We now give
+
+
+Rule 3. The Plain-Future System
+
+In plain statements about the future, and in the principal clause,
+result, or apodosis, of plain conditional sentences (whether the
+subordinate clause, condition, or _if_-clause, is expressed or not),
+the first person has Sh., the second and third persons W. Questions
+conform, except those of the second person, for which see Rule 4.
+
+ I shall, you will, die some day.
+
+ Shall I, will they, be here to-morrow?
+
+ We should, he would, have consented if you had asked.
+
+ Should we, would he, have missed you if you had been there?
+
+ I should, you would, like a bathe.
+
+ Should I, would he, like it myself, himself?
+
+Some apparent exceptions, already anticipated, must here be explained.
+It may be said that _I shall execute your orders_ being the speaker’s
+promise, _You will go to your room_ being the speaker’s command, and
+_Sha’n’t_ (the nursery abbreviation for _I shall not do it_) being the
+speaker’s refusal, these are all coloured futures, so that Sh. and
+W. should be reversed in each. They are such in effect, but they are
+not in form. In each, the other form would be possible and correct.
+The first is a promise only so far as the hearer chooses to take as
+a promise the plain future or impersonal prophecy; but the speaker
+emphasizes his obedience by implying that of course, since the order
+has been given, it will be executed; the matter is settled without
+his unimportant consent. The other two gain force by the opposite
+assumption that the speaker’s will and the future are absolutely
+identical, so that what he intends may be confidently stated as a
+future fact. In the first example the desired submissiveness, in the
+other two the desired imperiousness, supercilious or passionate, are
+attained by the same impersonality.
+
+Before giving the rule for second-person questions, we observe that
+questions generally follow the rule of the class of statement they
+correspond to. This was shown in the pure system (Rule 1). There are
+no questions (apart from those already accounted for by the pure
+system) belonging to the coloured future (Rule 2). In the plain future
+(Rule 3), first and third person questions are like the plain-future
+statements. But second-person questions under the plain future
+invariably use Sh. or W. according as the answer for which the speaker
+is prepared has Sh. or W. Care is necessary, however, in deciding
+what that answer is. In _Should (would) you like a bathe?_ _should_
+is almost always right, because the answer expected is almost always
+either _Yes, I should_, or _No, I should not_, the question being
+asked for real information. It is true that _Would you like?_ is very
+commonly used, like the equally wrong _I would like_; but it is only
+correct when the answer is intended to be given by the asker:--_No, of
+course you would not._ A clearer illustration of this is the following
+sentence, which requires Sh. or W. according to circumstances: _Will
+(shall) you, now so fresh and fair, be in a hundred years nothing but
+mouldering dust?_. This might possibly be asked in expectation of
+an answer from the person apostrophized--_Yes, I shall._ Much more
+probably it would be asked in expectation of the answer from the
+speaker himself to his own question--_Alas! yes, you will._ And _shall_
+ought to be used for the question only in the first case, _will_ in
+the second case. Similarly, _Ah, yes, that is all very well; but will
+(shall) you be able to do it?_ Use _will_ if the answer is meant to be
+_No, of course you will not_; _shall_, if the answer expected is _Yes,
+I shall_, or _No, I shall not_.
+
+In practice, Sh. is more commonly required, because questions asked
+for information are commoner than rhetorical ones. But observe the
+common _Would you believe it?_, Answer, _No, of course you would not._
+_Should you believe it?_, also possible, would indicate real curiosity
+about the other person’s state of mind, which is hardly ever felt.
+_Would you believe it?_, however, might also be accounted for on the
+ground that the answer would be _No, I would not_, which would be a
+coloured-future form, meaning _I should never consent to believe_.
+
+
+Rule 4. Second-person Questions
+
+Second-person questions invariably have Sh. or W. by assimilation to
+the answer expected.
+
+It may be added, since it makes the application of the rule easier,
+that the second-person questions belonging not to the plain future but
+to the pure system are also, though not because of assimilation, the
+same in regard to Sh. and W. as their answers. Thus _Will you come?_
+_Yes, I will_ (each on its merits), as well as _Shall you be there?_
+_Yes, I shall_ (assimilation). _Should you not have known?_ _Yes, I
+should_ (each on its merits; _should_ means _ought_), as well as _What
+should you think?_ _I should think you were right_ (assimilation). The
+true form for all second-person questions, then, can be ascertained by
+deciding what the expected answer is.
+
+This completes what need be said about principal sentences, with the
+exception of one important usage that might cause perplexity. If
+some one says to me ‘You would think so yourself if you were in my
+position’, I may either answer ‘No, I should not’ regularly, or may
+catch up his word, and retain the W., though the alteration of person
+requires Sh. Thus--‘Would I, though? No, I wouldn’t’. Accordingly,
+
+
+Rule 5. Echoes
+
+A speaker repeating and adapting another’s words may neglect to make
+the alteration from Sh. to W., or from W. to Sh., that an alteration of
+the person strictly requires.
+
+We have now all the necessary rules for principal sentences, and can
+put down a few examples of the right usage, noteworthy for various
+reasons, and some blunders, the latter being illustrated in proportion
+to their commonness. The number of the rule observed or broken will be
+added in brackets for reference. The passage from Johnson with which
+the correct examples begin is instructive.
+
+
+_Right._
+
+ I would (2) injure no man, and should (3) provoke no resentment;
+ I would (2) relieve every distress, and should (3) enjoy the
+ benedictions of gratitude. I would (2) choose my friends among the
+ wise, and my wife among the virtuous; and therefore should (3) be in
+ no danger from treachery or unkindness. My children should (2) by my
+ care be learned and pious, and would (3) repay to my age what their
+ childhood had received.--JOHNSON.
+
+ Chatham, it should (1) seem, ought to have taken the same
+ side.--MACAULAY.
+
+ For instance, when we allege, that it is against reason to tax a
+ people under so many restraints in trade as the Americans, the noble
+ lord in the blue riband shall (2) tell you....--BURKE.
+
+ The ‘critic fly’, if it do but alight on any plinth or single
+ cornice of a brave stately building, shall (2) be able to declare,
+ with its half-inch vision, that here is a speck, and there an
+ inequality.--CARLYLE.
+
+ John, why should you waste yourself (1) upon those ugly giggling
+ girls?--R. G. WHITE.
+
+ It wouldn’t be quite proper to take her alone, would it? What should
+ (4) you say?--R. G. WHITE.
+
+ Whether I have attained this, the future shall decide (2. I consent to
+ accept the verdict of the future).--_Times._
+
+
+_Wrong._
+
+We give first many examples of the mistake that is out of all
+proportion the commonest--using the coloured future when the speaker’s
+mood is sufficiently given by a separate word. In the second example,
+for instance, _I would ask the favour_ would be quite right, and would
+mean _I should like to ask_. As it stands, it means _I should like to
+like to ask_. The same applies to the other instances, which are only
+multiplied to show how dangerous this particular form is.
+
+
+ Among these ... I would be inclined to place (3) those who acquiesce
+ in the phenomenalism of Mr. Herbert Spencer.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ As one of the founders of the Navy League, I would like (3) to ask the
+ favour of your well-known courtesy....--_Times._
+
+ I would be glad (3) to have some account of his behaviour.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ I would like (3) also to talk with you about the thing which has come
+ to pass.--JOWETT.
+
+ But give your definition of romance. I would like to hear it (3).--F.
+ M. CRAWFORD.
+
+ These are typical of thousands of paragraphs in the newspaper.... We
+ would (3) wish for brighter news.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ I have already had some offers of assistance, and I would be glad (3)
+ to receive any amount towards the object.--_Times._
+
+Some examples follow that have not this excuse; and the first two
+deserve comment--the first because it results in serious ambiguity, the
+second because it is possibly not wrong.
+
+ The two fleets present seven Russian battleships against four
+ Japanese--less than two to one; two Russian armoured cruisers against
+ eight, and seven Russian torpedo-boat destroyers against an indefinite
+ number of the enemy. Here we will (3) not exaggerate in attributing to
+ the Japanese three or four to one.--MAHAN.
+
+With _will_, the meaning must be: We won’t call them three or four to
+one, because that would be exaggeration. But the meaning is intended to
+be: We will call them that, and it will be no exaggeration. _Shall_ is
+absolutely necessary, however, to make it bear that interpretation.
+
+ This character who delights us may commit murder like Macbeth, or fly
+ the battle for his sweetheart as did Antony, or betray his country
+ like Coriolanus, and yet we will rejoice (3) in every happiness that
+ comes to him.--W. B. YEATS.
+
+It is possible that this is the use of _will_ described as the
+‘habitual’ use--he will often stand on his head--under Rule 1. But this
+is very rare, though admissible, in the first person of the present.
+_We shall rejoice_, or simply _we rejoice_, would be the plain way of
+saying it.
+
+ If this passion was simply painful, we would (3) shun with the
+ greatest care all persons and places that could excite such a
+ passion.--BURKE.
+
+ What would (3) we be without our appetites?--S. FERRIER.
+
+ If I was ever to be detected, I would (3) have nothing for it but to
+ drown myself.--S. FERRIER.
+
+ I will (3) never forget, in the year 1858, one notorious
+ revivalist.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ As long as I am free from all resentment, hardness, and scorn, I would
+ (3) be able to face the life with much more calm and confidence than I
+ would....--WILDE.
+
+In the next two, if ‘I think’, and the _if_-clause, were removed, the
+_shall_ and _will_ would stand, expressing resolve according to Rule 2.
+But with those additions it is clear that prophecy or pure future is
+meant; and _shall_ and _will_ should be _will_ and _shall_.
+
+ Nothing, I think, shall ever make me (3) forgive him.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ We were victorious in 1812, and we will (3) be victorious now at any
+ cost, if we are strong in an alliance between the governing class and
+ the governed.--_Times._
+
+=We now proceed to Subordinate Clauses, and first to the Substantival.=
+The word ‘reported’ will mean ‘made indirect’ or ‘subordinated
+substantivally’, not always actually reported.
+
+=Reported statement= is quite simple when it is of the pure system
+or the coloured future; the Sh. or W. of the original statement is
+retained in the reported form, unaffected by any change of person that
+the reporting involves. Thus: (Pure system) _He forgave me_ (_you_,
+or _her_), _though he said I_ (_you_, or _she_) _should not have
+left him in the lurch like that._ (Coloured future) _You said I_ (or
+_he_) _should repent it_; either of these is a report of either _You
+shall repent it_ or _He shall repent it_. (Coloured future) _You said
+you_ (or _I said I_) _would apologize_; both are reports of _I will
+apologize_.
+
+But with the plain-future system there is difficulty and some
+inconsistency. The change of person sometimes required by reported
+speech has almost always the effect here of introducing Sh. if _I_
+or _we_ appears in the words as reported, and usually the effect of
+introducing W. if _you_, _he_, or _they_, appears. The following are
+all the types in which doubt can arise, except that each of these may
+occur in either number, and in past or present. The form that would be
+required by analogy (keeping the original Sh. or W.) is given first,
+and the one generally used instead is added in brackets. Reporting _I
+shall never succeed_, we get
+
+ You said you should (would) never succeed.
+
+ He says he shall (will) never succeed.
+
+Reporting _you will_ (or _he will_) _never succeed_, we get
+
+ You say I will (shall) never succeed.
+
+ He said I would (should) never succeed.
+
+Even those persons who have generally a just confidence in their own
+correctness about Sh. and W. will allow that they have some doubt about
+the first pair; and nearly every one will find W. in the second pair,
+however reasonable and consistent, intolerable.
+
+If the reader will now go through the four sentences again, and
+substitute for _succeed_ the phrase _do it_ (which may or may not mean
+_succeed_), he will see that the orthodox _should_ and _shall_ of the
+first pair become actually more natural than the commoner _would_ and
+_will_; and that even in the second pair _will_ and _would_ are now
+tolerable. The reason is that with _do it_ there is risk of confusion
+with the reported forms of _I will never do it_ and _you shall never
+do it_, which are not plain futures, but coloured futures meaning
+something quite different.
+
+=Reported questions= present the same difficulties. Again those only
+are doubtful that belong to the plain future. There, for instance,
+reporting _Shall you do it?_ we can say by the correct analogy _I asked
+him whether he should_; and we generally do so if the verb, as here,
+lends itself to ambiguity: _I asked him whether he would do it_ is
+liable to be mistaken for the report of _Will you do it?_--a request.
+If on the other hand (as in reporting _Shall you be there?_) there is
+little risk of misunderstanding, _I asked him whether he would_ is
+commoner. And again it is only in extreme cases, if even then, that
+the original W. can be kept when the report introduces _I_ in place
+of the original question’s _you_ or _he_. For instance, the original
+question being _How will he be treated?_, it may be just possible
+to say _You had made up your mind how I would be treated_, because
+_You had made up your mind how I should be treated_ almost inevitably
+suggests (assisted by the ambiguity of _making up your mind_, which may
+imply either resolve or inference) that the original question was _How
+shall he be treated?_
+
+It would be well, perhaps, if writers who take their responsibilities
+seriously would stretch a point sometimes to keep the more consistent
+and less ambiguous usage alive; but for practical purposes the rule
+must run:
+
+
+Rule 6. Substantival Clauses.
+
+In these (whether ‘reported’ strictly or otherwise subordinated)
+pure-system or coloured-future forms invariably keep the Sh. or W. of
+the original statement or question, unaffected by any change of person.
+Reports of plain-future forms do this also, if there would be serious
+danger of ambiguity, but almost always have Sh. in the first person,
+and usually W. in the second and third persons.
+
+As the division of substantival clauses into indirect (or reported
+or subordinate or oblique) statements, questions, _and commands_,
+is familiar, it may be well to explain that in English the reported
+command strictly so called hardly exists. In what has the force of
+a reported command it is in fact a statement that is reported. For
+instance, _He said I was to go_, though used as the indirect form of
+_Go_, is really the indirect of the statement _You are to go_. _He
+ordered that they should be released_ (though the actual words were _Be
+they_, or _Let them be, released_) is formed on the coloured-future
+statement, _They shall be released_. It is therefore unnecessary to
+give special rules for reported command. But there are one or two types
+of apparent indirect command about which, though there is no danger of
+error, the reader may feel curious.
+
+a. _I stipulate that I shall, you shall, he shall, do it._ Why _shall_
+in all persons? because the original form is: _I_ (_you_, _he_) _shall
+do it_, _I stipulate that_, where _shall_ means _am to_, _are to_, _is
+to_; that is, it is a pure-system form.
+
+b. _I beg that you_ (or _he_) _will do it._ _He begs that I will do
+it._ Again the original is pure-system: _You_ (or _he_) _will_ (i. e.,
+you consent to) _do it: that is what I beg._ _I will_ (i. e., I consent
+to) _do it: that is what he begs._
+
+c. _I beg that I_ (or _he_) _shall not suffer for it._ _You begged that
+I should not suffer for it._ Observe that b. has _will_ and a. and c.
+_shall_, because it is only in b. that the volition of the subject of
+_shall_ or _will_ is concerned.
+
+d. _I wish you would not sneeze._ Before subordination this is: _You
+will not sneeze: that is what I wish._ W. remains, but _will_ becomes
+_would_ to give the remoteness always connected with wish, which is
+seen also, for instance, in _I wish I were_ instead of _I wish I be_.
+
+Before going on to examples of substantival clauses, we also register,
+again rather for the curious than for the practical reader, the
+peculiar but common use of _should_ contained in the following:
+
+ It is not strange that his admiration for those writers should have
+ been unbounded.--MACAULAY.
+
+In this use _should_ goes through all persons and is equivalent to
+a gerund with possessive: _that a man should be_ is the same as _a
+man’s being_. We can only guess at its origin; our guess is that (1)
+_should_ is the remote form for _shall_, as _would_ for _will_ in d.
+above, substituted in order to give an effect of generality; and (2)
+the use of _shall_ is the archaic one seen in _You shall find_, &c. So:
+a man shall be afraid of his shadow; that a man should be afraid (as a
+generally observed fact) is strange.
+
+After each of the substantival clauses, of which examples now follow,
+we shall say whether it is a reported (subordinated) statement, or
+question, and give what we take to be the original form of the
+essential words, even when further comment is unnecessary.
+
+
+Examples of Sh. and W. in Substantival clauses.
+
+
+_Right._
+
+ You, my dear, believe you shall be unhappy, if you have Mr. Solmes:
+ your parents think the contrary; and that you will be undoubtedly so,
+ were you to have Mr. Lovelace.--RICHARDSON.
+
+Statement. The original of the first is _I shall be_; of the second,
+_she will be_. In this and the next three the strictly analogical form
+that we recommended is kept.
+
+ I have heard the Princess declare that she should not willingly die in
+ a crowd.--JOHNSON.
+
+Statement. I should not.
+
+ People imagine they should be happy in circumstances which they would
+ find insupportably burthensome in less than a week.--COWPER.
+
+Statement. We should. _They would_ is not ‘reported’.
+
+ Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to your
+ correspondent, if he had been damning you all the time for your
+ importunity?--STEVENSON.
+
+Statement. I should be.
+
+ The nation had settled the question that it would not have
+ conscription.--_Times._
+
+Statement. We will not. The blundering insertion of _the
+question_--perhaps due to some hazy notion of ‘putting the
+question’--may be disregarded.
+
+ When the war will end still depends on Japan.--_Times._
+
+Question. When will it end?
+
+ Shaftesbury’s anger vented itself in threats that the advisers of this
+ dissolution should pay for it with their heads.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+Statement. You shall pay.
+
+ He [i. e., James II] regarded his ecclesiastical supremacy as a
+ weapon.... Under Henry and Elizabeth it had been used to turn the
+ Church of England from Catholic to Protestant. Under James it should
+ be used to turn it back again.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+Statement. Under me it shall be. The reporting word not expressed.
+
+ She could not bear the sight of all these things that reminded her of
+ Anthony and of her sin. Perhaps she should die soon; she felt very
+ feeble.--ELIOT.
+
+Statement. I shall. Again the reporting word absent.
+
+ There will never perhaps be a time when every question between London
+ and Washington shall be laid at rest.--_Times._
+
+This is not properly speaking reported speech. But the _shall_ is
+accounted for by a sort of allusion to a supposed prophecy--every
+_question shall one day be laid at rest_. In that prophecy, _shall_
+would convey that the prophet gave his personal guarantee for it, and
+would come under Rule 2. This is not to be confused with the use of
+_shall_ in indefinite clauses that will be noticed later.
+
+
+_Wrong._
+
+ The four began their descent, not knowing at what step they should
+ meet death nor which of them should reach the shore alive.--F. M.
+ CRAWFORD.
+
+Questions. At what step shall we meet? Which of us will reach? The
+first is accordingly right, the second wrong. The modern writer--who
+has been at the pains to use the strictly correct _should_ in the first
+place rather than the now common _would_--has not seen, as Richardson
+did in the first of the right examples, that his two clauses are
+dissimilar.
+
+ I hope that our sympathy shall survive these little revolutions
+ undiminished.--STEVENSON.
+
+Statement. Will survive. It is possible, however, that the original
+was thought of, or rather felt, as Our sympathy shall survive. But as
+the effect of that is to give the speaker’s personal guarantee for
+the truth of the thing, it is clearly not a proper statement to make
+dependent on the doubtful word _hope_.
+
+ After mentioning the advance made in reforms of the military force of
+ the country he [Lord Lansdowne] announced that the Government should
+ not oppose the motion, readily availing themselves of Lord Wemyss’s
+ suggestion that....--_Times._
+
+Statement. We shall not, or the Government will not. Probably Lord
+Lansdowne said _we_, and that accounts for _should_. But if _The
+Times_ chooses to represent _we_ by _the Government_, it must also
+represent _shall_ by _would_.
+
+ It came with a strange stunning effect upon us all--the consciousness
+ that never again would we hear the grind of those positive boot-heels
+ on the gravel.--CROCKETT.
+
+Statement. We shall never.
+
+ I think that if the matter were handed over to the parish councils ...
+ we would within a twelvemonth have exactly such a network of rifle
+ clubs as is needed.--CONAN DOYLE.
+
+Statement. We should. Of these two instances it may be thought that
+the writers would have made the mistake in the original unsubordinated
+sentence, instead of its arising in the process of subordination;
+our experience is, however, that many people do in fact go wrong in
+subordinate clauses who are alive to the danger in simple sentences.
+
+ The Prime Minister ... would at once have asked the Opposition if
+ they could suggest any further means for making the inquiry more
+ drastic and complete, with the assurance that if they could suggest
+ any such means, they would at once be incorporated in the Government
+ scheme.--_Spectator._
+
+Statement. They shall be incorporated. We have classed this as wrong
+on the assumption, supported by the word _assurance_, that the Prime
+Minister gave a promise, and therefore used the coloured future, and
+did not state a fact and use the plain future.
+
+Another type of subordinate clause important for Sh. and W. is =the
+conditional protasis or if-clause=. It is not necessary, nor with
+modern writers usual, to mark the future or conditional force of this
+separately, since it is sufficiently indicated by the apodosis. For
+instance, _If you come I shall be glad_; _if you came I should be
+glad_; _if you had come I should have been glad_. But in formal style
+or with a slight difference of meaning, it is often superfluously done
+in the protasis too. Sh. is then used for all persons, as, _If he
+should come, you would learn how the matter stands_. So:
+
+ Japan will adhere to her pledge of neutrality unless Russia shall
+ first violate hers.--_Times._
+
+But to the rule that the protasis takes _shall_ there are three
+exceptions, real or apparent; W. is found under the following
+circumstances:
+
+(1.) An original pure-system or coloured-future W. is not changed
+to Sh. by being used in subordination to _if_ (or _unless_). It is
+retained with its full original force instead of some verb like _wish_
+or _choose_. In _If we would believe we might move mountains_, the
+meaning is _If we chose to believe_, different from that of _If we
+believed_ or _should believe_. So
+
+ It would be much better if you would not be so hypocritical, Captain
+ Wybrow.--ELIOT.
+
+If you consented not to be, or did not insist on being.
+
+ It would be valuable if he would somewhat expand his ideas regarding
+ local defence by Volunteers.--_Times._
+
+If he consented to.
+
+(2.) When the _if_-clause (though a genuine condition) is incorrectly
+expressed for the sake of brevity and compresses two verbs into one,
+the W. proper to the retained verb is sometimes necessarily used
+instead of the Sh. proper to the verb that, though it contains in
+strict logic the essential protasis, has been crushed out. Thus:
+_If it will be useless I shall prefer not to do it._ It is not the
+uselessness that is the condition of the preference; for the use or
+uselessness is subsequent to the decision; it is my conviction of the
+uselessness; so that the full form would be _If I shall be_ (or _am_ in
+ordinary speech) _convinced that it will be useless, I shall prefer_,
+&c. The following example can be defended on this ground, _if never
+again will he_ standing for _if he shall realize that he will never_;
+the feebleness that decides his not wishing is subsequent to it, and
+can only condition it if taken in the sense of his anticipation of
+feebleness.
+
+ And if there is to be no recovery, _if never again will he_ be young
+ and strong and passionate, if the actual present shall be to him
+ always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the far-away
+ past; he will not greatly wish for the continuance of a twilight
+ that....--STEVENSON.
+
+The next is more difficult only because, besides the compression, the
+_if_-clause is protasis not to the expressed main sentence, but to
+another that is suppressed.
+
+ I shall wait for fine weather, if that will ever come.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+Given fully, this would run: I shall wait for fine weather; (at least I
+should say so) if (I were sure that) that will ever come.
+
+(3.) When an _if_-clause is not a condition at all, as for instance
+where it expresses contrast, and is almost equivalent to _although_,
+the ordinary plain-future use prevails. Thus: _If annihilation will
+end our joys it will also end our griefs._ Contrast with this the real
+condition, in: _If annihilation shall end_ (or _ends_) _our joys, we
+shall never regret the loss of them._
+
+=Indefinite clauses, relative or other=, bearing the same relation to
+a conditional or future principal sentence that a conditional protasis
+bears to its apodosis follow the same rules. Thus _Whoever compares
+the two will find_ is equivalent to _If any one compares_; _When we
+have won the battle we can decide that question_ is equivalent to _If
+ever we have won_. Accordingly we can if we choose write _Whoever shall
+compare_, and _When we shall have won_; but we cannot write _When
+we will have won_, and must only write _Whoever will compare_ if we
+distinctly mean _Whoever chooses to compare_. As there is sometimes
+difficulty in analysing indefinite clauses of this sort, one or two
+instances had better be considered.
+
+ The candidate who should have distinguished himself most was to be
+ chosen.
+
+This is clear enough; it is equivalent to _if any one should have ...
+he was...._
+
+ We must ask ourselves what victory will cost the Russian people when
+ at length it will become possible to conclude the peace so ardently
+ desired.--_Times._
+
+Equivalent to _If ever it at length becomes_. _Will_ is therefore
+wrong; either _becomes_, or _shall become_.
+
+ Nothing can now prevent it from continuing to distil upwards
+ until there shall be no member of the legislature who shall not
+ know....--HUXLEY.
+
+This is a complicated example. The _shalls_ will be right if it appears
+that each _shall_-clause is equivalent to a conditional protasis. We
+may show it by starting at the end as with the house that Jack built
+and constructing the sentence backwards, subordinating by stages, and
+changing _will_ to _shall_ as the protases come in; it will be allowed
+that _until_ means _to the time when_, and that _when_ may be resolved
+into _if ever_. Thus we get: _a._ One will know. _b._ None will be a
+member of the legislature unless one shall know. _c._ It will distil to
+the time if ever none shall be a member unless one shall know.
+
+ Think what I will about them, I must take them for politeness’
+ sake.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+Although _think what I will_ is an indefinite relative clause, meaning
+practically _whatever I think_, _will_ here is right, the strict sense
+being _whatever I choose to think_. Indeed the time of _think_ is
+probably not, at any rate need not be, future at all; compare _Think
+what I will, I do not tell my thoughts._
+
+We now give
+
+=Rule 7. Conditional protasis and Indefinite Clauses=
+
+In the protasis or _if_-clause of conditional sentences Sh. may be used
+with all persons. Generally neither Sh. nor W. is used. W. is only used
+(1) when the full meaning of _wish_ is intended; it may then be used
+with all persons; (2) when the protasis is elliptically expressed; W.
+may then be necessary with the second and third persons; (3) when the
+_if_-clause is not a real conditional protasis; there is then no reason
+for Sh. with second and third persons. Indefinite classes of similar
+character follow the same rules.
+
+A few right but exceptional, and some wrong subordinate clauses may now
+be added.
+
+
+Examples of Sh. and W. in Subordinate Clauses.
+
+
+_Right._
+
+ As an opiate, or spirituous liquors, shall suspend the operation of
+ grief....--BURKE.
+
+ We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the
+ conversation that should thereupon ensue.--STEVENSON.
+
+ She is such a spare, straight, dry old lady--such a pew of a
+ woman--that you should find as many individual sympathies in a
+ chip.--DICKENS.
+
+In these three we have the archaic _shall_ of personal assurance that
+comes under Rule 2, and its corresponding conditional, appearing in
+subordinate clauses. There is no objection to it except that, in modern
+writers, its context must be such as to exonerate it from the charge of
+affectation.
+
+ The longing of the army for a fresh struggle which should restore its
+ glory.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+This use of Sh. after final relatives is seen, if the compound sentence
+is resolved, to point to an original coloured future: We long for a
+fresh struggle; a fresh struggle shall restore (that is, we intend it
+to restore) our glory.
+
+ He was tormented by that restless jealousy which should seem to belong
+ only to minds burning with the desire of fame.--MACAULAY.
+
+This is the _should seem_ explained under Rule 1 appearing also as
+subordinate.
+
+
+_Wrong._
+
+It should never be, but often is, forgotten that when the apodosis
+of a conditional sentence (with or without expressed protasis) is
+subordinate it is nevertheless still an apodosis, and has still Sh. in
+the first, W. in the second and third persons.
+
+ In ‘he struck him a blow’, we do not feel the first object to be
+ datival, as we would in ‘he gave him a blow’.--H. SWEET.
+
+ I cannot let the moment pass at which I would have been enjoying
+ a visit to you after your severe illness without one word of
+ sympathy.--GLADSTONE.
+
+ It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense
+ of disgrace.--WILDE.
+
+ But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I
+ do not set the same store by them.--STEVENSON.
+
+ We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can
+ do.--_Times._
+
+All these are wrong; in the last two the mistake is perhaps accounted
+for by the presence of _willingly_ and _like_. _I would not willingly_
+can indeed be defended at the cost of admitting that _willingly_ is
+mere tautology, and saying that _I would not_ means _I should not
+consent to_, according to Rule 2.
+
+It may be worth while to add that the subordinate apodosis still
+follows the rule even if it is subordinated to _if_, so that it is part
+of the protasis of another conditional sentence. The following, which
+is of course quite correct, seems, but only seems, to break the rules
+both for protasis and apodosis: If you would be patient for yourself,
+you should be patient for me. But we have W. with second person in the
+protasis because _would be patient_ is also apodosis to the implied
+protasis _if occasion should arise_; and the _should_ with second
+person in the apodosis is not a conditional _should_ at all, but a
+pure-system _should_, which would be the same with any person; it means
+simply _you ought_, or _it would be your duty_.
+
+ The result in part of a genuine anxiety lest the Chinese would
+ gradually grow until they monopolized the country.--_Times._
+
+We have purposely refrained until now from invoking the subjunctive,
+because the word is almost meaningless to Englishmen, the thing having
+so nearly perished. But on this instance it must be remarked that
+when conjunctions like _lest_, which could once or still can take a
+subjunctive (as _lest he die_), use a compound form instead, they use
+the Sh. forms for all persons. It is a matter of little importance,
+since hardly any one would go wrong in such a sentence.
+
+
+ THE PERFECT INFINITIVE
+
+This has its right and its wrong uses. The right are obvious, and can
+be left alone. Even of the wrong some are serviceable, if not strictly
+logical. _I hoped to have succeeded_, for instance, means _I hoped
+to succeed, but I did not succeed_, and has the advantage of it in
+brevity; it is an idiom that it would be a pity to sacrifice on the
+altar of Reason. So:
+
+ Philosophy began to congratulate herself upon such a proselyte from
+ the world of business, and hoped to have extended her power under the
+ auspices of such a leader.--BURKE.
+
+ And here he cannot forbear observing, that it was the duty of
+ that publisher to have rebutted a statement which he knew to be a
+ calumny.--BORROW.
+
+ I was going to have asked, when....--SLADEN.
+
+But other perfects, while they are still more illogical than these,
+differ as little in meaning from the present as the _deposuisse_, dear
+to the hearts of elegiac writers ancient and modern, differs from
+_deponere_. And whereas there is at least metre, and very useful metre,
+in _deposuisse_, there is in our corresponding perfect infinitive
+neither rhyme nor reason. Thus,
+
+ With whom on those golden summer evenings I should have liked to have
+ taken a stroll in the hayfield.--THACKERAY.
+
+_To have taken_ means simply to take; the implication of non-fulfilment
+that justified the perfects above is here needless, being already given
+in _I should have liked_; and the doubled _have_ is ugly in sound.
+Similar are
+
+ If my point had not been this, I should not have endeavoured to have
+ shown the connexion.--_Times._
+
+ The author can only wish it had been her province to have raised
+ plants of nobler growth.--S. FERRIER.
+
+ Had you given your advice in any determined or positive manner, I had
+ been ready to have been concluded by it.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ Jim Scudamore would have been the first man to have acknowledged the
+ anomaly.--CROCKETT.
+
+ Though certainly before she commenced her mystic charms she would have
+ liked to have known who he was.--BEACONSFIELD.
+
+ Peggy would have liked to have shown her turban and bird of paradise
+ at the ball.--THACKERAY.
+
+ It might have been thought to be a question of bare alternatives, and
+ to have been susceptible of no compromise.--BAGEHOT.
+
+The less excusable that Bagehot has started with the correct _to be_.
+
+Another very common form, still worse, occurs especially after _seem_
+and _appear_, and results from the writer’s being too lazy to decide
+whether he means _He seems to have been_, or _He seemed to be_. The
+mistake may be in either verb or both.
+
+ [Repudiating the report of an interview] I warned him when he spoke
+ to me that I could not speak to him at all if I was to be quoted as
+ an authority. _He seemed to have taken_ this as applying only to the
+ first question he asked me.--_Westminster Gazette._ (seems)
+
+ They, as it has been said of Sterne, seemed to have wished, every
+ now and then, to have thrown their wigs into the faces of their
+ auditors.--I. DISRAELI. (seem to have wished ... to throw)
+
+ Lady Austen’s fashionable friends occasioned no embarrassment; they
+ _seemed to have preferred_ some more fashionable place for summering
+ in, for they _are_ not again spoken of.--SOUTHEY. (seem)
+
+Sometimes _have_ is even transferred from the verb with which it would
+make sense to the other with which it makes nonsense.
+
+ On the point of church James was obdurate.... He would like to have
+ insisted on the other grudging items.--SLADEN.
+
+In the next, the perfect is wanted; for a child that has been flogged
+cannot be left unflogged--not, that is, in the past; and the future is
+not meant.
+
+ A child flogged left-handedly had better be left unflogged.--POE.
+
+We add, for the reader’s refreshment rather than for practical
+purposes, an illustration of where careless treatment of _have_ may end:
+
+ Oh, Burgo, hadst thou not have been a very child, thou shouldst have
+ known that now, at this time of day--after all that thy gallant steed
+ had done for thee--it was impossible for thee or him.--TROLLOPE.
+
+
+ CONDITIONALS
+
+These, which cost the schoolboy at his Latin and Greek some weary
+hours, need not detain us long. The reader passes lightly and
+unconsciously in his own language over mixtures that might have caused
+him searchings of heart in a dead one.
+
+But there is one corrupt and meaningless form, apparently gaining
+ground, that calls for protest. When a clause begins with _as if_, it
+must be remembered that there is an ellipse. _I treat her as tenderly
+as if she were my daughter_ would be in full _I treat her as tenderly
+as I should if she were_, &c. If this is forgotten, there is danger in
+some sentences, though not in this one, of using a present indicative
+in the place where the verb _were_ stands. So:
+
+ We will not appear like fools in this matter, and as if we _have_ no
+ authority over our own daughter.--RICHARDSON.
+
+This may be accounted for, but not justified, as an attempt to express
+what should be merely implied, our actual possession of authority.
+
+ As if the fruit or the flower not only _depends_ on a root as one
+ of the conditions among others of its development, but _is_ itself
+ actually the root.--MORLEY.
+
+This is absolutely indefensible so far as _is_ is concerned; _depends_
+has the same motive as _have_ in the Richardson.
+
+ But this looks as if he _has_ included the original 30,000
+ men.--_Times._
+
+ There have been rumours lately, as if the present state of the nation
+ _may_ seem to this species of agitators a favourable period for
+ recommencing their intrigues.--SCOTT.
+
+This is a place where _as if_ should not have been used at all. If it
+is used, the verb should be _seemed_, not _may seem_, the full form
+being _as there would be_ (_rumours_). Read _suggesting that_ for _as
+if_, and _seems_ for _may seem_.
+
+ General Linevitch reports that the army is concentrating as if it
+ _intends_ to make a stand.--_Times._
+
+A mixture between _it apparently intends_ and _as if it intended_.
+
+ As if the same end _may_ not, and must not, be compassed, according to
+ its circumstances, by a great diversity of ways.--BURKE.
+
+_May_ should be _might_. _As if it may not_ is made to do the work of
+_as if it might not, as of course it may_.
+
+The same rule applies to _as though_.
+
+The use of true subjunctive forms (if he be, though it happen) in
+conditional sentences is for various reasons not recommended. These
+forms, with the single exception of _were_, are perishing so rapidly
+that an experienced word-actuary[11] puts their expectation of life at
+one generation. As a matter of style, they should be avoided, being
+certain to give a pretentious air when handled by any one except the
+skilful and practised writers who need no advice from us. And as a
+matter of grammar, the instinct for using subjunctives rightly is
+dying with the subjunctive, so that even the still surviving _were_ is
+often used where it is completely wrong. So
+
+ It would be advisable to wait for fuller details before making any
+ attempt to appraise the significance of the raid from the military
+ point of view, if, indeed, the whole expedition _were_ not planned
+ with an eye to effect.--_Times._
+
+Here the last clause means _though perhaps it was only planned with
+an eye to effect_ (_and therefore has no military significance_). But
+_if_ followed by _were not_ necessarily means that it certainly is.
+The mistake here results in making the clause look as if it were the
+protasis to _It would be advisable_, with which it has in fact nothing
+whatever to do; it is a note on the words _military significance_.
+Write _was_ for _were_.
+
+ ... and who, taking my offered hand, bade me ‘Good morning’--nightfall
+ though it _were_.--_Times._
+
+The sentence describes a meeting with a person who knew hardly any
+English; he said good morning, though it _was_ nightfall. A single
+example may be added of the intrusion of _were_ for _was_ in a sentence
+that is not conditional.
+
+ Dr. Chalmers was a believer in an Establishment as he conceived an
+ Establishment should be. Whether such an Establishment _were_ possible
+ or not it is not for me now to discuss.--LORD ROSEBERY.
+
+_Were_, however, is often right and almost necessary: other
+subjunctives are never necessary, often dangerous, and in most writers
+unpleasantly formal. The tiro had much better eschew them.
+
+
+ ‘DOUBT THAT’ AND ‘DOUBT WHETHER’
+
+Instances will be found in Part II of verbs constructed with wrong
+prepositions or conjunctions. Most mistakes of this kind are
+self-evident; but the verb ‘doubt’, which is constructed with ‘that’
+or ‘whether’ according to the circumstances under which the doubt is
+expressed, requires special notice. The broad distinction is between
+the positive, ‘I doubt whether (that)’ and the negative, ‘I do not
+doubt that (whether)’; and the rule, in order to include implied as
+well as expressed negatives, questions as well as statements, will run
+thus:
+
+The word used depends upon the writer’s or speaker’s opinion as to the
+reasonableness of the doubt, no matter in whose mind it is said to
+exist or not to exist.
+
+1. If there is nothing to show that the writer considers the doubt an
+unreasonable one, the word is always ‘whether’, which reminds us that
+there is a suppressed alternative:
+
+ I doubt whether this is true (or not).
+
+ Every one is at liberty to doubt whether ... (or not).
+
+To this part of the rule there is no exception.
+
+2. If it is evident that the writer disapproves of the doubt, the words
+introducing it amount to an affirmation on his part that the thing
+doubted is undoubtedly true; the alternative is no longer offered;
+‘that’ is therefore the word:
+
+ I do not doubt that (i. e., I am sure that)....
+
+ Who can doubt that...?
+
+This, however, is modified by 3.
+
+3. The ‘vivid’ use of ‘whether’. When the writer’s point is rather
+the extravagance of the doubt than the truth of the thing doubted,
+‘whether’ is often retained:
+
+ It is as if a man should doubt whether he has a head on his shoulders.
+
+ Can we imagine any man seriously doubting whether...?
+
+Here, according to 2., we ought to have ‘that’, since the writer
+evidently regards the doubt as absurd. But in the first sentence it
+is necessary for the force of the illustration that the deplorable
+condition of the doubter’s mind should be vividly portrayed:
+accordingly, he is represented to us as actually handling the two
+alternatives. Similarly, in the second, we are invited to picture
+to ourselves, if we can, a hesitation so ludicrous in the writer’s
+opinion. We shall illustrate this point further by a couple of
+sentences in which again the state of mind of the doubter, not the
+truth of the thing doubted, is clearly the point, but in which ‘that’
+has been improperly substituted for the vivid ‘whether’:
+
+ She found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that
+ another would follow.--MEREDITH.
+
+ I am afraid that you will become so afraid of men’s motives as to
+ doubt that any one can be honest.--TROLLOPE.
+
+The mistake commonly made is to use ‘that’ for ‘whether’ in violation
+of 1. ‘Whether’ is seldom used in place of ‘that’, and apparent
+violations of 2. often prove to be legitimate exceptions of the ‘vivid’
+kind. Some of our examples may suggest that when the dependent clause
+is placed before the verb, ‘that’ appears because the writer had not
+decided what verb of doubt or denial to use. This is probably the true
+explanation of many incorrect _thats_, but is not a sufficient defence.
+It supplies, on the contrary, an additional reason for adhering to
+‘whether’: the reader is either actually misled or at any rate kept in
+needless suspense as to what is going to be said, because the writer
+did not make up his mind at the right time how to say it. ‘Whether’
+at the beginning at once proclaims an open question: after ‘that’ we
+expect (or ought to expect) ‘I have _no_ reason to doubt’.
+
+In all the following, ‘whether’ should have been used.
+
+ There is nothing for it but to doubt such diseases exist.--H. G. WELLS.
+
+‘Whether’ is never suppressed.
+
+ I do not think it would have pleased Mr. Thackeray; and to doubt that
+ he would have wished to see it carried out determines my view of the
+ matter.--GREENWOOD.
+
+ That the movement is as purely industrial as the leaders of the strike
+ claim may be doubted.--_Times._
+
+ And I must be allowed to doubt that there is any class who
+ deliberately omit....--_Times._
+
+ He may doubt that his policy will be any more popular in England a
+ year or two hence than it is now.--GREENWOOD.
+
+ I doubt the correctness of the assertion.... I doubt, I say, that
+ Becky would have selected either of these young men.--THACKERAY.
+
+ But that his army, if it retreats, will carry with it all its guns ...
+ we are inclined to doubt.--_Times._
+
+ It was generally doubted that France would permit the use of her
+ port.--_Times._
+
+
+ PREPOSITIONS
+
+In an uninflected language like ours these are ubiquitous, and it is
+quite impossible to write tolerably without a full knowledge, conscious
+or unconscious, of their uses. Misuse of them, however, does not
+often result in what may be called in the fullest sense blunders of
+syntax, but mostly in offences against idiom. It is often impossible
+to convince a writer that the preposition he has used is a wrong one,
+because there is no reason in the nature of things, in logic, or in
+the principles of universal grammar (whichever way it may be put), why
+that preposition should not give the desired meaning as clearly as the
+one that we tell him he should have used. Idioms are special forms of
+speech that for some reason, often inscrutable, have proved congenial
+to the instinct of a particular language. To neglect them shows a
+writer, however good a logician he may be, to be no linguist--condemns
+him, from that point of view, more clearly than grammatical blunders
+themselves. But though the subject of prepositions is thus very
+important, the idioms in which they appear are so multitudinous that it
+is hopeless to attempt giving more than the scantiest selection; this
+may at least put writers on their guard. Usages of this sort cannot be
+acquired from dictionaries and grammars, still less from a treatise
+like the present, not pretending to be exhaustive; good reading with
+the idiomatic eye open is essential. We give a few examples of what to
+avoid.
+
+1. After adjectives and adverbs.
+
+ Another stroke of palsy soon rendered Sir Sampson _unconscious_ even
+ _to_ the charms of Grizzy’s conversation.--S. FERRIER.
+
+ Being _oblivious to_ the ill feeling it would be certain to
+ engender.--_Cheltenham Examiner._
+
+ To me it is incredible that the British people, who own one-half of
+ the world’s sea-going ships, should be so _oblivious to_ the manner in
+ which....--_Times._
+
+Insensible to, but unconscious of; indifferent to, but oblivious of
+
+The adjectives _different_ and _averse_, with their adverbs or nouns,
+_differently_, _difference_, _aversion_, _averseness_, call for a few
+words of comment. There is no essential reason whatever why either set
+should not be as well followed by _to_ as by _from_. But _different
+to_ is regarded by many newspaper editors and others in authority
+as a solecism, and is therefore better avoided by those to whom the
+approval of such authorities is important. It is undoubtedly gaining
+ground, and will probably displace _different from_ in no long time;
+perhaps, however, the conservatism that still prefers _from_ is
+not yet to be named pedantry. It is at any rate defensive, and not
+offensive pedantry, _different to_ (though ‘found in writers of all
+ages’--_Oxford Dictionary_) being on the whole the aggressor. With
+_averse_, on the other hand, though the _Oxford Dictionary_ gives a
+long roll of good names on each side, the use of _from_ may perhaps
+be said to strike most readers as a distinct protest against the more
+natural _to_, so that _from_ is here the aggressor, and the pedantry,
+if it is pedantry, is offensive. Our advice is to write _different
+from_ and _averse to_. We shall give a few examples, and add to them
+two sentences in which the incorrect use of _from_ with other words
+looks like the result of insisting on the slightly artificial use of it
+after different and averse.
+
+ My experience caused me to make quite _different_ conclusions _to_
+ those of the Coroner for Westminster.--_Times._
+
+It will be noticed that _to_ is more than usually uncomfortable when it
+does not come next to _different_.
+
+ We must feel charitably towards those who think _differently to_
+ ourselves.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Why should these profits be employed _differently to_ the profits made
+ by capitalists at home?--LORD GOSCHEN.
+
+ Ah, how _different_ were my feelings as I sat proudly there on the box
+ _to_ those I had the last time I mounted that coach!--THACKERAY.
+
+ What is the great _difference_ of the one _to_ the other?--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+_From_ would in this last be clearly better than _to_; but _between the
+two_ would be better than either.
+
+ The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely _averse to_ meddling
+ with the council.--MORLEY.
+
+ Perhaps he is not _averse from_ seeing democrats on this, as on
+ railway rates, range themselves with him.--_Times._
+
+ In all democratic circles _aversion from_ the Empire of the Tsar may
+ be intensified by the events of the last few days.--_Times._
+
+ _To_ no kind of begging are people so _averse_ as _to_ begging
+ pardon.--_Guesses at Truth._
+
+ This _averseness_ in the dissenting churches _from_ all that looks
+ like absolute government.--BURKE.
+
+ I deeply regret the _aversion to_ ‘conscience clauses’.--GLADSTONE.
+
+ But she had no sort of _aversion for_ either Puritan or Papist.--J. R.
+ GREEN.
+
+_Disagree from_ (for _with_), and _adverse from_ (for _to_), seem to
+have resulted from the superstition against _averse_ and _different to_.
+
+ A general proposition, which applies just as much to those who
+ _disagree from_ me as to those who agree with me.--LORD ROSEBERY.
+
+ There were politicians in this country who had been very _adverse
+ from_ the Suez Canal scheme altogether.--F. GREENWOOD.
+
+2. After verbs.
+
+ I _derive_ an unholy pleasure _in_ noting.--_Guernsey Evening Press._
+
+ We must _content ourselves_ for the moment _by_ observing that from
+ the juridical standpoint the question is a doubtful one.--_Times._
+
+ The petition which now reaches us from Bloemfontein ... _contents
+ itself by_ begging that the isolation laws may be carried out nearer
+ to the homes of the patients.--_Times._
+
+I content you _by_ submitting: I content myself _with_ saying.
+
+ ‘Doing one’s duty’ generally _consists of_ being moral, kind and
+ charitable.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ The external world which is dealt with by natural science _consisted_,
+ according to Berkeley, _in_ ideas. According to Mr. Mill it _consists
+ of_ sensations and permanent possibilities of sensation.--BALFOUR.
+
+The moon consists _of_ green cheese: virtue consists _in_ being good.
+_Consist of_ gives a material, _consist in_ a definition. Mr. Balfour’s
+‘elegant variation’ (see _Airs and Graces_) is certainly wrong, though
+nominalists and realists will perhaps differ about which should
+have been used in both sentences, and no one below the degree of a
+metaphysician can pretend to decide between them.
+
+ A scholar _endowed by_ [with] an ample knowledge and persuasive
+ eloquence to cite and instance.--MEREDITH.
+
+ I say to you plainly there is no end _to_ [at] which your practical
+ faculty can _aim_....--EMERSON.
+
+ He urged that it was an undesirable thing to be always _tinkering
+ with_ this particular trade.--_Times._
+
+We tamper _with_, but tinker _at_, the thing that is to be operated on.
+
+ You may hunt the alien from his overcrowded tenement, you may _forbid_
+ him, if you like, _from toiling_ ten hours a day for a wage of a few
+ shillings.--_Times._
+
+_His toiling_, or _him to toil_.
+
+ His readiness, not only at catching a point, but at making the most of
+ it _on a moment’s notice_, was amazing.--BRYCE.
+
+_On_ the spur of the moment, but _at_ a moment’s notice. The motive
+was, no doubt, to avoid repeating _at_; but such devices are sins if
+they are detected.
+
+ Nataly had her sense of safety in _acquiescing to_ such a
+ voice.--MEREDITH.
+
+We acquiesce _in_, not _to_, though either phrase is awkward enough
+with _a voice_; _to_ is probably accounted for again by the desire to
+avoid repeating _in_.
+
+3. After nouns.
+
+ There can be no _fault found to_ her manners or sentiments.--SCOTT.
+
+I find fault _with_: I find a fault _in_. Write _in_ or _with_, as one
+or the other phrase is meant.
+
+ The Diet should leave to the Tsar _the initiative of_ taking such
+ measures as may be necessary.--_Times._
+
+ M. Delcassé took _the initiative of_ turning the conversation to
+ Moroccan affairs.--_Times._
+
+We assume the _right of_ turning, we take the _initiative in_ turning.
+
+ Those, who are urging with most ardour what are called the greatest
+ _benefits_ of mankind.--EMERSON.
+
+Benefits _of_ the benefactor, but _to_ the beneficiary.
+
+ A power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can only come from an
+ _insight of_ [into] their whole connection.--EMERSON.
+
+ From its driving energy, its personal weight, its invincible _oblivion
+ to_ [of] certain things, there sprang up in Redwood’s mind the most
+ grotesque and strange of images.--H. G. WELLS.
+
+4. Superfluous prepositions, whether due to ignorance of idiom,
+negligence, or mistaken zeal for accuracy.
+
+ _As to_ Mr. Lovelace’s approbation of your assumption-scheme, I wonder
+ not _at_.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ A something _of_ which the sense can in no way assist the mind to form
+ a conception _of_.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ The Congress could occupy itself with no more important question than
+ _with_ this.--HUXLEY.
+
+This is due to confusion with ‘could occupy itself with no question
+more profitably than with this’.
+
+5. Necessary prepositions omitted.
+
+ The Lady Henrietta ... _wrote him_ regularly through his bankers, and
+ once in a while he _wrote her_.--BARONESS VON HUTTEN.
+
+_Write_ without _to_ will now pass in commercial letters only;
+elsewhere, we can say ‘I write you a report, a letter’, but neither ‘I
+will write you’ simply, nor ‘I wrote you that there was danger’. That
+is, we must only omit the _to_ when _you_ not only is the indirect
+object, but is unmistakably so at first sight. It may be said that
+_I write you_ is good old English. So is _he was a-doing of it_; _I
+guess_ is good Chaucerian. But in neither case can the appeal to a dead
+usage--dead in polite society, or in England--justify what is a modern
+vulgarism.
+
+6. Compound prepositions and conjunctions.
+
+The increasing use of these is much to be regretted. They, and the
+love for abstract expression with which they are closely allied, are
+responsible for much of what is flaccid, diffuse, and nerveless, in
+modern writing. They are generally, no doubt, invented by persons who
+want to express a more precise shade of meaning than they can find in
+anything already existing; but they are soon caught up by others who
+not only do not need the new delicate instrument, but do not understand
+it. _Inasmuch_ as, for instance, originally expressed that the truth
+of its clause gave the exact measure of the truth that belonged to the
+main sentence. So (from the _Oxford Dictionary_):
+
+ God is only God inasmuch as he is the Moral Governor of the
+ world.--SIR W. HAMILTON.
+
+But long before Hamilton’s day the word passed, very naturally, into
+the meaning, for which it need never have been invented, of _since_ or
+_because_. Consequently most people who need the original idea have
+not the courage to use _inasmuch as_ for it, like Sir W. Hamilton,
+but resort to new combinations with _far_. Those new combinations,
+however, as will be shown, fluctuate and are confused with one another.
+The best thing we can now do with _inasmuch_ as is to get it decently
+buried; when it means _since_, _since_ is better; when it means what it
+once meant, no one understands it. The moral we wish to draw is that
+these compounds should be left altogether alone except in passages
+where great precision is wanted. Just as a word like _save_ (except)
+is ruined for the poet by being used on every page of ordinary prose
+(which it disfigures in revenge for its own degradation), so _inasmuch_
+as is spoilt for the logician.
+
+We shall first illustrate the absurd prevailing abuse of the compound
+preposition _as to_. In each of the following sentences, if _as to_
+is simply left out, no difference whatever is made in the meaning.
+It is only familiarity with unnecessary circumlocution that makes
+such a state of things tolerable to any one with a glimmering of
+literary discernment. _As to_ flows from the pen now at every possible
+opportunity, till many writers seem quite unaware that such words as
+_question_ or _doubt_ can bear the weight of a _whether_-clause without
+help from this offensive parasite.
+
+ With the idea of endeavouring to ascertain as to this, I
+ invited....--_Times._
+
+ Confronted with the simple question as to in what way other people’s
+ sisters, wives and daughters differ from theirs....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ It is not quite clear as to what happened.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ Doubt is expressed as to whether the fall of Port Arthur will
+ materially affect the situation.--_Times._
+
+ I feel tempted to narrate one that occurred to me, leaving it
+ to your judgment as to whether it is worthy of notice in your
+ paper.--_Spectator._
+
+ I was entirely indifferent as to the results of the game, caring
+ nothing at all _as to_ whether I had losses or gains.--CORELLI.
+
+The first _as to_ in this may pass, though plain _to_ is better.
+
+ German anticipations with regard to the future are apparently based
+ upon the question as to how far the Sultan will....--_Times._
+
+ But you are dying to know what brings me here, and even if you find
+ nothing new in it you will perhaps think _it_ makes some difference
+ _as to_ who says a thing.--GREENWOOD.
+
+This is the worst of all. The subject of _makes_ (anticipated in the
+ordinary way by _it_) is _who says a thing_; but the construction
+is obscured by the insertion of _as to_. We are forced to suppose,
+wrongly, that _it_ means _what brings me here_. Worse than the worst,
+however, at least more aggressively wrong, is an instance that we find
+while correcting this sheet for the press:
+
+ ... Although it is open to doubt as to what extent individual saving
+ through more than one provident institution prevails.--_Westminster
+ Gazette._
+
+Another objection to the compound prepositions and conjunctions is
+that they are frequently confused with one another or miswritten. We
+illustrate from two sets. (_a_) The word _view_ is common in the forms
+_in view of_, _with a view to_, _with the view of_. The first expresses
+external circumstances, existing or likely to occur, that must be taken
+into account; as, _In view of these doubts about the next dividend, we
+do not recommend_.... The other two both express the object aimed at,
+but must not have the correspondence, _a_ view _to_, _the_ view _of_,
+upset.
+
+ A Resolution was moved and carried _in favour of_ giving facilities
+ to the public vaccination officers of the Metropolis to enter the
+ schools of the Board _for the purpose of_ examining the arms of the
+ children _with a view to_ advising the parents to allow their children
+ to be vaccinated.--_Spectator._
+
+ The Sultan ... will seek to obtain money by contracting loans with
+ private firms _in view of_ beginning for himself the preliminary
+ reforms.--_Times._
+
+ If Germany has anything to propose _in view of_ the safeguarding
+ of her own interests, it will certainly meet with that courteous
+ consideration which is traditional in French diplomacy.--_Times._
+
+ Its execution is being carefully prepared _with a view of_ avoiding
+ any collision with the natives.--_Times._
+
+ My company has been approached by several firms _with a view of_
+ overcoming the difficulty.--_Times._
+
+Of these the first is correct; but the sentence it comes in is so
+typical of the compound-prepositional style that no one who reads it
+will be surprised that its patrons should sometimes get mixed; how
+should people who write like that keep their ideas clear? The second
+should have _with a view to_. Still more should the third, which is
+ambiguous as well as unidiomatic; the words used ought to mean _seeing
+that her interests are safeguarded already_. The fourth and fifth
+should again have _with a view to_ (or _with the view of_).
+
+(_b_) The combinations with _far_--_as far as_, _so far as_, _so
+far that_, _in so far as_, _in so far that_, of which the last
+is certainly, and the last but one probably needless--have some
+distinctions and limitations often neglected. For instance, _as far as_
+must not be followed by a mere noun except in the literal sense, _as
+far as London_. _So far as_ and _so far that_ are distinguished by good
+writers in being applied, the first to clauses that contain a doubtful
+or varying fact, the other to clauses containing an ascertained or
+positive fact. _So far as_ (and _in so far as_), that is, means _to
+whatever extent_, and _so far that_ means _to this extent, namely that_.
+
+ The question of the Capitulations and of the Mixed Tribunals is not in
+ any way essentially British, save _in so far as_ the position of Great
+ Britain in Egypt makes her primarily responsible.--_Times._
+
+Correct; but _except that_ would be much better than _save in so far
+as_.
+
+ Previous to 1895, when a separate constitution existed for the Bombay
+ and Madras armies, possibly a military department and a military
+ member were necessary in order to focus at the seat of government
+ the general military situation in India, but in the judgment of many
+ officers well qualified to form an opinion, no such department under
+ present conditions is really requisite, _in so far as_ the action of
+ the Commander-in-Chief is thwarted in cases where he should be the
+ best judge of what is necessary.--_Times._
+
+Entirely wrong. It is confused with _inasmuch as_, and _since_ should
+be written.
+
+ The officials have done their utmost to enforce neutrality, and
+ have _in so far_ succeeded _as_ the Baltic fleet keeps outside the
+ three-mile limit.--_Times._
+
+Should be _so far succeeded that_; we are meant to understand that the
+fleet does keep outside, though it does not go right away as might be
+wished.
+
+ The previous appeal made by M. Delcassé was _so far_ successful _as_
+ the Tsar himself sent orders to Admiral Rozhdestvensky to comply with
+ the injunctions of the French colonial authorities.--_Times._
+
+_As_ should be _that_. It is not doubtful to what extent or whether the
+Tsar sent. He did send; that is the only point.
+
+ They are exceptional in character, _in so far as_ they do not appear
+ to be modifications of the epidermis.--HUXLEY.
+
+Should probably be _so far exceptional that_. The point is that
+there _is_ this amount of the exceptional in them, not that their
+irregularity depends on the doubtful fact of their not being
+modifications; the word _appear_ ought otherwise to have been
+parenthetically arranged.
+
+ This influence was _so far_ indirect _in that_ it was greatly
+ furthered by Le Sage, who borrowed the form of his Spanish
+ contemporaries.--_Times._
+
+A mixture of _was so far indirect that_ and _was indirect in that_.
+
+ He seemed quickly to give up first-hand observation and to be content
+ to reproduce and re-reproduce his early impressions, always trusting
+ to his own invention, and the reading public’s inveterate preference
+ for symmetry and satisfaction, to pull him through. They have
+ pulled him through _in so far as_ they have made his name popular;
+ but an artist and a realist--possibly even a humourist--have been
+ lost.--_Times._
+
+_In so far as_ leaves the popularity and the pulling through doubtful,
+which they are clearly not meant to be. It should be _so far that_.
+
+ A man can get help from above to do what _as far as_ human possibility
+ has proved out of his power.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+This is a whole sentence, not a fragment, as might be supposed. But
+_as far as_ (except in the local sense) must have a verb, finite or
+infinite. Supply _goes_.
+
+ The large majority would reply in the affirmative, _in so far as_ to
+ admit that there is a God.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+_So far as to admit_, or _in so far as they would admit_; not the
+mixture. And this distinction is perhaps the only justification for the
+existence of _in so far as_ by the side of _so far as_; the first is
+only conjunction, the second can be preposition as well.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] The reason why many who as a rule use the possessive are willing
+to do without it after verbs like _prevent_ is perhaps this: in _I
+prevented him going_ they consciously or unconsciously regard both
+_him_ and _going_ as nouns, one the indirect, one the direct object, as
+in _I refused him leave_.
+
+[11] Dr. Henry Bradley, _The Making of English_, p. 53.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER III
+
+ AIRS AND GRACES
+
+Certain types of humour--Elegant
+variation--Inversion--Archaism--Metaphor--Repetition--Miscellaneous.
+
+
+Certain Types of Humour
+
+Some of the more obvious devices of humorous writers, being fatally
+easy to imitate, tend to outlive their natural term, and to become a
+part of the injudicious novice’s stock-in-trade. _Olfactory organ_,
+once no doubt an agreeable substitute for ‘nose’, has ceased to
+be legal tender in literature, and is felt to mark a low level in
+conversation. No amount of classical authority can redeem a phrase that
+has once reached this stage. The warmest of George Eliot’s admirers,
+called upon to swallow some tough morsel of polysyllabic humour in a
+twentieth-century novel, will refuse to be comforted with parallel
+passages from _Adam Bede_. Loyalty may smother the ejaculation that
+‘George Eliot knew no better’: it is none the less clear to him that we
+know better now. A few well-worn types are illustrated below.
+
+a. Polysyllabic humour.
+
+ He was a boy whom Mrs. Hackit had pronounced stocky (a word that
+ etymologically, in all probability, conveys some allusion to an
+ instrument of punishment for the refractory).--ELIOT.
+
+ Tommy was a saucy boy, impervious to all impressions of reverence,
+ and excessively addicted to humming-tops and marbles, with which
+ recreative resources he was in the habit of immoderately distending
+ the pockets of his corduroys.--ELIOT.
+
+ No one save an individual not in a condition to distinguish a hawk
+ from a handsaw....--_Times._
+
+ And an observer of Miss Tox’s proceedings might have inferred so much
+ without declaratory confirmation.--DICKENS.
+
+ But it had its little inconveniences at other times, among which
+ may be enumerated the occasional appearance of the river in the
+ drawing-room, and the contemporaneous disappearance of the lawn and
+ shrubbery.--DICKENS.
+
+ They might be better employed in composing their quarrels and
+ preparing a policy than in following the rather lugubrious occupations
+ indicated by Mr. Asquith.--_Times._
+
+ Or perhaps, from a presentiment of calves’ brains, you refrain
+ from any lacteal addition, and rasp your tongue with unmitigated
+ bohea.--ELIOT.
+
+ The rooks were cawing with many-voiced monotony, apparently--by
+ a remarkable approximation to human intelligence--finding great
+ conversational resources in the change of weather.--ELIOT.
+
+ I had been terribly shaken by my fall, and had subsequently, owing to
+ the incision of the surgeon’s lancet, been deprived of much of the
+ vital fluid.--BORROW.
+
+ An elderly man stood near me, and a still more elderly female was
+ holding a phial of very pungent salts to my olfactory organ.--BORROW.
+
+ The minister, honest man, was getting on his boots in the kitchen to
+ see us home.... Well, this preparation ministerial being finished, we
+ stepped briskly out.--CROCKETT.
+
+ We have ourselves been reminded of the deficiencies of our femoral
+ habiliments, and exhorted upon that score to fit ourselves more
+ beseemingly.--SCOTT.
+
+b. Playful repetition.
+
+ When she had banged out the tune slowly, she began a different manner
+ of ‘Gettin’ up Stairs’, and did so with a fury and swiftness quite
+ incredible. She spun up stairs; she whirled up stairs; she galloped up
+ stairs; she rattled up stairs.... Then Miss Wirt played the ‘Gettin’
+ up Stairs’ with the most pathetic and ravishing solemnity.... Miss
+ Wirt’s hands seemed to faint and wail and die in variations: again,
+ and she went up with a savage clang and rush of trumpets, as if Miss
+ Wirt was storming a breach.--THACKERAY.
+
+ My mind was, to a certain extent, occupied with the marks on the
+ teapot; it is true that the mournful idea strove hard with the marks
+ on the teapot for the mastery in my mind, and at last the painful idea
+ drove the marks of the teapot out.--BORROW.
+
+ The pastrycook is hard at work in the funereal room in Brook Street,
+ and the very tall young men are busy looking on. One of the very tall
+ young men already smells of sherry, and his eyes have a tendency to
+ become fixed in his head, and to stare at objects without seeing them.
+ The very tall young man is conscious of this failing in himself; and
+ informs his comrade that it’s his ‘exciseman’. The very tall young man
+ would say excitement, but his speech is hazy.--DICKENS.
+
+ Busy is Mrs. Miff this morning at the church-door, beating and dusting
+ the altar-cloth, the carpet and the cushions; and much has Mrs. Miff
+ to say about the wedding they are going to have. Mrs. Miff is told
+ that the new furniture and alterations in the house cost full five
+ thousand pound, if they cost a penny; and Mrs. Miff has heard, upon
+ the best authority, that the lady hasn’t got a sixpence wherewithal to
+ bless herself. Mrs. Miff remembers, likewise, as if it had happened
+ yesterday, the first wife’s funeral, and then the christening, and
+ then the other funeral; and Mrs. Miff says, By-the-bye, she’ll
+ soap-and-water that ’ere tablet presently, against the company
+ arrive.--DICKENS.
+
+ Mr. Dombey was a grave sight, behind the decanters, in a state of
+ dignity; and the East India Director was a forlorn sight, near the
+ unoccupied end of the table, in a state of solitude; and the major
+ was a military sight, relating stories of the Duke of York to six of
+ the seven mild men (the ambitious one was utterly quenched); and the
+ Bank Director was a lowly sight, making a plan of his little attempt
+ at a pinery, with dessert knives, for a group of admirers; and Cousin
+ Feenix was a thoughtful sight, as he smoothed his long wristbands and
+ stealthily adjusted his wig.--DICKENS.
+
+The author is very much at his ease in the last example; the novice
+who should yawn in our faces with such engaging candour would render
+himself liable to misinterpretation.
+
+c. The well-worn ‘flood-of-tears-and-sedan-chair’ pleasantry.
+
+ Phib Cook left her evening wash-tub and appeared at her door in
+ soap-suds, a bonnet-poke, and general dampness.--ELIOT.
+
+ Sir Charles, of course, rescues her from the clutches of the Italian,
+ and they return together in triumph and a motor-car.--_Times._
+
+ Miss Nipper ... shook her head and a tin-canister, and began unasked
+ to make the tea.--DICKENS.
+
+ And for the rest it is not hard to be a stoic in eight-syllable metre
+ and a travelling-carriage.--LOWELL.
+
+ But what the bare-legged men were doing baffled conjecture and the
+ best glasses.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+d. Other worn-out phrases of humorous tendency.
+
+ For, tell it not in Gath, the Bishop had arrived on a bicycle.--D.
+ SLADEN.
+
+ Tell it not in Smith-st., but....--_Guernsey Evening Press._
+
+ Sleeping the sleep of the just.
+
+ The gallant sons of Mars.--_Times._
+
+ Mr. Mackenzie, with a white hat ... and long brown leather gaiters
+ buttoned upon his nether anatomy.--LOCKHART.
+
+ Looking for all the world like....--D. SLADEN.
+
+ Too funny for words.
+
+These two phrases are commonly employed to carry off a humorous
+description of which the success is doubted. They are equivalents,
+in light literature, of the encouragement sometimes offered by the
+story-teller whose joke from _Punch_ has fallen flat: ‘You should have
+seen the illustration’. _Worthy_ and _gallant_ are similarly used:
+
+ To hear the worthy and gallant Major resume his favourite topic is
+ like law-business, or a person who has a suit in Chancery going
+ on.--HAZLITT.
+
+ _Home._--I would implore God to survey with an eye of mercy their
+ unoffending bairns. _Hume._--And would not you be disposed to behold
+ them with an eye _of the same materials_?--LANDOR.
+
+ Two or three haggard, ragged drawers ran to and fro.... Guided by one
+ of these blinking _Ganymedes_, they entered....--SCOTT.
+
+ The ancient _Hebe_ who acted as Lord Glenvarloch’s cup-bearer took his
+ part against the intrusion of the still more antiquated _Ganymede_,
+ and insisted on old Trapbois leaving the room instantly.--SCOTT.
+
+It may be doubted whether any resemblance or contrast, however
+striking, can make it worth a modern writer’s while to call waiters
+Ganymedes, waitresses Hebes, postmen Mercuries, cabmen Automedons or
+Jehus. In Scott’s time, possibly, these phrases had still an agreeable
+novelty: they are now so hackneyed as to have fallen into the hands of
+writers who are not quite certain who Ganymede and Hebe were. Thus,
+there are persons who evidently think that it is rather complimentary
+to one’s host than otherwise to call him an Amphitryon; and others who
+are fond of using the phrase ‘l’Amphitryon où l’on dîne’ altogether
+without point, apparently under the impression that ‘où l’on dîne’ is
+an alternative version for the use of the uninitiated (‘Amphitryon’,
+that is to say, ‘one’s host’).
+
+ Japan, says M. Balet, can always borrow money so long as she can
+ provide two things--guarantees and victories. She has guarantees
+ enough and victories _galore_.--_Times._
+
+ The English people has insisted on its preference for a married
+ clergy, and Dr. Ingram’s successor may have ‘arrows in the hand of a
+ giant’.--_Times._
+
+The inverted commas seem to implore the reader’s acceptance of this
+very battered ornament. One could forgive it more easily, if there were
+the slightest occasion for its appearance here.
+
+ The only change ever known in his outward man was....--DICKENS.
+
+ Rob the Grinder, thus transformed as to his outer man....--DICKENS.
+
+ One hundred parishioners and friends partaking of tea.--_Guernsey
+ Advertiser._
+
+ But that’s another story.--KIPLING.
+
+ But that is ‘another story’.--_Times._
+
+ It was all that Anne could do to keep from braining him with the poker
+ for daring to call her ‘Little One’,--and Anne’s arm is no joke when
+ she hits to hurt. Once John Barnaby--but the tale of John Barnaby can
+ wait.--CROCKETT.
+
+ Nevertheless, some folk like it so, and even now the Captain, when his
+ pipe draws well and his grog is to his liking, says--But there is no
+ use in bringing the Captain into the story.--CROCKETT.
+
+The notion that Mr. Kipling, left to himself, is not competent to bring
+out all the latent possibilities of this phrase is a mistaken one, and
+argues an imperfect acquaintance with his works.
+
+ Many heads in England, I find, are shaken doubtfully over the
+ politics, or what are thought to be the politics, of Australia.
+ They--the politics, not the heads--are tangled, they are
+ unsatisfactory in a high degree.--W. H. FITCHETT.
+
+
+ ELEGANT VARIATION
+
+We include under this head all substitutions of one word for another
+for the sake of variety, and some miscellaneous examples will be found
+at the end of the section. But we are chiefly concerned with what may
+be called pronominal variation, in which the word avoided is either a
+noun or its obvious pronoun substitute. The use of pronouns is itself
+a form of variation, designed to avoid ungainly repetition; and we
+are only going one step further when, instead of either the original
+noun or the pronoun, we use some new equivalent. ‘Mr. Gladstone’,
+for instance, having already become ‘he,’ presently appears as ‘that
+statesman’. Variation of this kind is often necessary in practice; so
+often, that it should never be admitted except when it is necessary.
+Many writers of the present day abound in types of variation that are
+not justified by expediency, and have consequently the air of cheap
+ornament. It is impossible to lay down hard and fast rules, but two
+general principles may be suggested: (1) Variation should take place
+only when there is some awkwardness, such as ambiguity or noticeable
+monotony, in the word avoided. (2) The substitute should be of a purely
+pronominal character, a substitute and nothing more; there should be no
+killing of two birds with one stone. Even when these two requirements
+are satisfied, the variation is often worse, because more noticeable,
+than the monotony it is designed to avoid.
+
+The examples in our first group do not offend against (2): how far
+they offend against (1), and how far they are objectionable on other
+grounds, we shall consider in detail.
+
+ Mr. Wolff, the well-known mining engineer, yesterday paid a visit to
+ the scene of the disaster. _The expert_ gave it as his opinion that no
+ blame attached....
+
+_The expert_ is gratuitous: _He_ would have done quite well.
+
+ None the less Mrs. Scott [Sir Walter’s mother] was a motherly
+ comfortable woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well stored,
+ vivid memory. Sir Walter, writing of her, after _his mother’s_ death,
+ to Lady Louisa Stewart, says....--HUTTON.
+
+_His mother’s_ is not only unnecessary, but misleading: there is a
+difficulty in realizing that _her_ and _his mother_, so placed, can be
+meant to refer to the same person.
+
+ Mr. J. Hays Hammond, a friend of President Roosevelt, lecturing before
+ the American Political Science Association, quoted a recent utterance
+ of the President of the Japanese House of Peers. _That dignitary_
+ said: ....--_Spectator._
+
+_That dignitary said_ might have been omitted, with the full stop
+before it.
+
+ Mr. Sidney Lee’s study of the Elizabethan Sonnets, the late Mr.
+ Charles Elton’s book on Shakespeare’s Family and Friends, and
+ Professor Bradley’s on Shakespearean Tragedy--a work which may
+ be instructively read with Professor Campbell’s ‘Tragic Drama in
+ Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare’--remind us that _the dramatist_
+ still holds his own with the publishers. The last two or three weeks
+ have seen two new editions of him.--_Times._
+
+The writer has thoroughly puzzled himself. He cannot call Shakespeare
+Shakespeare, because there is a Shakespeare just before: he cannot call
+him _he_, because six other persons in the sentence have claims upon
+_he_: and he ought not to call him _the dramatist_, because Aeschylus
+and Sophocles were dramatists too. We know, of course, which dramatist
+is meant, just as we should have known which _he_ was meant; but the
+appropriation is awkward in either case. _The dramatist_ is no doubt
+the best thing under the circumstances; but when matters are brought
+to such a pass that we can neither call a man by his own name, nor use
+a pronoun, nor identify him by means of his profession, it is time to
+remodel the sentence.
+
+ If Mr. Chamberlain has been injured by the fact that till now Mr.
+ Balfour has clung to him, Mr. Balfour has been equally injured by the
+ fact that Mr. Chamberlain has persistently locked his arm in _that of
+ the Prime Minister_.--_Spectator._
+
+Elegant variation is the last thing we should expect here. For what
+is the writer’s principal object? Clearly, to emphasize the idea of
+reciprocity by the repetition of names, and by their arrangement. Mr.
+Chamberlain, Mr. Balfour: Mr. Balfour, Mr. Chamberlain. It is easy
+enough, so far: ‘If Mr. Chamberlain has been injured by the persistent
+attachment of Mr. Balfour, Mr. Balfour has been equally injured by
+that of Mr. Chamberlain’. But that is not all that is required: there
+is to be the graphic touch; arm is to be locked in arm. Now comes the
+difficulty: in whose arm are we to lock Mr. Chamberlain’s? in ‘his’?
+in ‘_his_’? in ‘his own’? in ‘Mr. Balfour’s’? in ‘that of the Prime
+Minister’? As the locking of arms is perhaps after all only an elegant
+variation for clinging, remodelling seems again to be the best way out
+of the difficulty. Perhaps our simplified form above might serve.
+
+ On Thursday evening last, as a horse and cart were standing at Mr.
+ Brown’s shop, the animal bolted.
+
+‘The horse’.--An unconscious satirist, of tender years but ripe
+discernment, parsed ‘animal’ in this sentence as a personal pronoun;
+‘it replaced the subject of the sentence’. Journalists (it was
+explained to her) are equipped with many more personal pronouns than
+ever get into the grammars.
+
+ _The King_ yesterday morning made a close inspection of the Cruiser
+ Drake at Portsmouth, and afterwards made a tour of the harbour on
+ board the Admiral’s launch. _His Majesty_ then landed and drove
+ to Southsea, where he inspected the Royal Garrison Artillery at
+ Clarence Barracks. _The King_ returned to London in the course of the
+ afternoon.--_Times._
+
+This is, no doubt, a difficult case. The royal pronoun (His Majesty)
+does not lend itself to repetition: on the other hand, it is felt that
+_he_s, if indulged in at all, must be kept a respectful distance apart;
+hence _The King_ in the third sentence. We can get rid of it by reading
+‘... at Clarence Barracks; returning ...’. But of course that solution
+would not always be possible.
+
+ _The Emperor_ received yesterday and to-day General Baron von Beck....
+ It may therefore be assumed with some confidence that the terms of
+ a feasible solution are maturing themselves in _His Majesty’s_ mind
+ and may form the basis of further negotiations with Hungarian party
+ leaders when _the Monarch_ goes again to Budapest.--_Times._
+
+ If _the Emperor of Austria_ should disappear from the scene, war,
+ according to this authority, is to be feared, as _the Emperor Francis
+ Joseph_ alone controls....--_Times._
+
+There is no excuse either for _the Monarch_ or for the _Emperor Francis
+Joseph_. ‘He’ could scarcely have been misinterpreted even in the
+latter sentence.
+
+ _Sir Charles Edward Bernard_ had a long and distinguished career in
+ the Indian Civil Service.... Five years later _Sir Charles Bernard_
+ was appointed Commissioner of Nagpur.... In 1876 _Sir Edward Bernard_
+ returned to Nagpur.--_Times._
+
+It is natural that _Sir Charles Edward Bernard_ should be introduced
+to us under his full name; natural, also, that an abbreviation should
+be chosen for working purposes. But why two abbreviations? If _Sir
+Charles_ and _he_ are judiciously employed, they will last out to the
+end of the longest article, without any assistance from _Sir Edward_.
+
+Among the instances here given, there is scarcely one in which
+variation might not have been avoided with a little trouble. There are
+some, indeed, in which it is not gratuitous; and if in these the effect
+upon the reader were as negative as the writer’s intention, there would
+be nothing to complain of. But it is not; the artistic concealment
+of art is invariably wanting. These elephantine shifts distract our
+attention from the matter in hand; we cannot follow His Majesty’s
+movements, for wondering what the King will be called next time; will
+it be plain Edward VII? or will something be done, perhaps, with ‘the
+Emperor of India’? When the choice lies between monotonous repetition
+on the one hand and clumsy variation on the other, it may fairly be
+laid down that of two undesirable alternatives the natural is to be
+preferred to the artificial.
+
+But variation of this kind is, at the worst, less offensive than
+that which, in violation of our second principle above, is employed
+as a medium for the conveyance of sprightly allusion, mild humour or
+(commonest of all) parenthetic information.
+
+ When people looked at his head, they felt he ought to have been a
+ giant, but he was far from _rivalling the children of Anak_.--H. CAINE.
+
+‘Far from it’, in fact.
+
+ He never fuddled himself with rum-and-water in his son’s presence, and
+ only talked to his servants in a very reserved and polite manner; and
+ _those persons_ remarked....--THACKERAY.
+
+ ‘What made ye sae late?’ said Mr. Jarvie, as I entered the
+ dining-parlour of _that honest gentleman_.--SCOTT.
+
+The parlour was Mr. Jarvie’s.
+
+ At the sixth round, there were almost as many _fellows shouting
+ out_ ‘Go it, Figs’, as there were _youths exclaiming_ ‘Go it,
+ Cuff’.--THACKERAY.
+
+ Great advances in the education of women ... are likely, perhaps, to
+ find more congenial soil in Universities less bound by time-honoured
+ traditions and by social conventions than Oxford or Cambridge.
+ Whatever may be the case _by Isis or Cam_, ....--_Times._
+
+ Our representative yesterday ran down to Brighton to interview the
+ Cambridge Captain. _The weight-putter and high-jumper_ received him
+ with his usual cordiality.
+
+This is a favourite newspaper type.
+
+The miscellaneous examples given below (except ‘the former of the last
+two’) are connected with pronominal variation only so far as they
+illustrate the same principle of false elegance.
+
+ ... hardly calculated to impress _at this juncture_ more than _upon
+ any former occasion_ the audience....--_Times._
+
+ His mother _possessed_ a good development of benevolence, but he
+ _owned_ a better and larger.--C. BRONTË.
+
+ In the subjoined official record of ‘business done’, transactions
+ _marked_ thus * relate to small bonds, those _signalized_ thus †
+ to small bonds free of stamp and fee, and those _distinguished_
+ thus + to an exceptional amount at special rates. Stocks and shares
+ marked thus †† have paid no dividend for the last two half-years and
+ upwards.--_Times._
+
+The return to _marked_ is humiliating; we would respectfully suggest
+_characterized_.
+
+ One might be more intelligible in such moods if one wrote in
+ _waving lines_, and accordingly the question ‘Why do you not
+ ask Alfred Tennyson to your home?’ is written in _undulating
+ script_.--_Spectator._
+
+ Eighty-three volumes are _required for_ letter “M,” seventy-seven are
+ _demanded by_ “L,” and seventy-six are perforce _conceded to_ “B”; but
+ _the former of the last two_....--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ I must _ask_ the reader to _use_ the same twofold procedure that I
+ before _requested_ him to _employ_ in considering....--H. SIDGWICK.
+
+We have not room to record at length, from the _Westminster Gazette_,
+the elegant variety of fortune that attended certain pictures, which
+(within twenty lines) made, fetched, changed hands for, went for,
+produced, elicited, drew, fell at, accounted for, realized, and were
+knocked down for, various sums.
+
+
+ INVERSION
+
+Of all the types of inversion used by modern writers, there is perhaps
+not one that could not be shown to exist in older English. Ordinary
+modern usage, however, has retained those forms only in which ancient
+authority combines with practical convenience; and not all of those.
+To set aside the verdict of time in this respect is to be archaic.
+Before using inversion, therefore, the novice should ask himself two
+questions: is there any solid, practical reason (ornamental reasons
+will not do) for tampering with the normal order of subject and verb?
+and does the inversion sound natural?
+
+Throughout this section it must be borne in mind that in all questions
+of right and wrong inversion the final appeal is not to history, but
+to the reader’s perception: what sounds right to most modern ears is
+right for modern purposes. When, under balance inversion, we speak of
+a true and a false principle, we do not mean to imply that the ‘true’
+principle was, historically, the origin of this kind of inversion, or
+that the ‘false’ is a mistaken analogy from it: all that is meant is
+that if we examine a collection of instances, those that sound natural
+will prove to be based upon the ‘true’ principle, and those that do not
+on the ‘false’.
+
+=a. Exclamatory inversion.=
+
+This may be regarded as an abbreviated form of exclamation, as if
+the word ‘How’ had dropped out at the beginning, and a note of
+exclamation at the end. The inverted order, which is normal in the
+complete exclamation, sounds natural also in the abbreviated form. The
+requirements for this kind of inversion are these: (1) The intention
+must be genuinely exclamatory, so that the full form of exclamation
+could be substituted without extravagance. (2) The word placed first
+must be that which would bear the chief emphasis in the uninverted
+form. It should be observed that this is the only kind of inversion in
+which the emphatic word, as such, stands at the beginning.
+
+Our first three examples satisfy these conditions, and are
+unobjectionable. The fourth does not: we could not substitute ‘With
+what difficulty...!’; nor are the first words emphatic; the emphasis
+is on ‘conceive’. Yet the inversion is inoffensive, being in fact not
+exclamatory at all, but a licensed extension of negative inversion,
+which is treated below.
+
+ Bitterly did I regret the perverse, superstitious folly that had
+ induced me to neglect so obvious a precaution.
+
+ But in these later times, with so many disillusions, with fresh
+ problems confronting science as it advances, rare must be the spirit
+ of faith with which Haeckel regards his work.--_Times._
+
+ Gladly would he now have consented to the terms....
+
+ With difficulty can I conceive of a mental condition in which....
+
+Exclamatory inversion, like everything else that is exclamatory, should
+of course be used sparingly.
+
+=b. Balance inversion.=
+
+The following are familiar and legitimate types:
+
+ First on our list stands the question of local option.
+
+ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
+
+ To this cause may be attributed....
+
+ Among the guests were A, B, C, ... Z.
+
+We give the name of ‘balance’ to this kind of inversion because,
+although the writer, in inverting the sentence, may not be distinctly
+conscious of rectifying its balance, the fact that it was ill-balanced
+before is the true cause of inversion. It is a mistake to say that the
+words placed first in the above examples are so placed for the sake
+of emphasis; that is a very common impression, and is responsible for
+many unlawful inversions. It is not emphasis that is given to these
+words, it is protection; they are placed there to protect them from
+being virtually annihilated, as they would have been if left at the
+end. Look at the last of our examples: how can we call the words ‘Among
+the guests were’ emphatic, or say that they were placed there for
+emphasis? They are essential words, they show the connexion, nor could
+the sentence be a sentence without them; but they are as unemphatic as
+words could well be.--Why, then (it may be asked), are they put at the
+beginning? is not this an emphatic position? and does not any unusual
+position give emphasis?--No: it gives not emphasis but prominence,
+which is another thing.
+
+Put the sentence back into its original form, and we shall see why
+inversion was desirable. ‘A, B, C, D, E, F ... Z were among the
+guests.’ Observe how miserably the sentence tails off; it has no
+balance. By inverting it, we introduce several improvements. First, we
+give prominence to the unemphatic predicate, and enable it to discharge
+its humble office, that of a sign-post, indicating the connexion with
+what has gone before. Secondly, by giving prominence to the predicate,
+we give balance to the sentence, which before was top-heavy. Thirdly,
+we give prominence to the subject, by placing it in an unusual position.
+
+Next take the ‘local option’ sentence. Are the words ‘First on our
+list’ emphatic? Not if the inverter knows his business. How did it run
+originally? ‘The question of local option stands first on our list.’
+These words might be meant to tell us either of two things: what stood
+first on the list, or where local option stood. If the inversion is
+right, they are meant to tell us what stood first. If the other had
+been meant, then ‘First on the list’ would have been emphatic, and the
+writer would have left it in its place; but as it is not emphatic, and
+the other words are, the sentence is top-heavy; he therefore inverts
+it, thus balancing the sentence, and placing the unemphatic words in
+a prominent position, where they continue to be unemphatic, but are
+sure to be noticed. In spoken language, the relative importance of the
+different parts of a sentence can be indicated merely by the inflexion
+of the voice; but the balance of the sentence is best maintained, even
+then, by means of inversion.
+
+It is the same with the other examples. If we restore the St. Matthew
+quotation to the uninverted form, again we have an answer to either of
+two questions: What is the basis of the law? and What is the importance
+of these two commandments? Obviously it is meant as an answer to
+the latter, and therefore the words that convey that answer are the
+emphatic words; the others are not emphatic, but merely essential to
+the connexion; the general importance of the ‘two commandments’,
+as forming the subject-matter of the whole context, does not in the
+slightest degree affect their relation to the other words in this
+particular sentence.
+
+It follows from what has been said that true balance inversion is
+employed not for the sake of impressiveness, but with the purely
+negative object of avoiding a bad balance. The data required for its
+justification are (i) An emphatic subject, carrying in itself the point
+of the sentence, (ii) Unemphatic ‘sign-post’ words, essential to the
+connexion, standing originally at the end of the sentence, and there
+felt to be inadequately placed. The results of the inversion must be
+(iii) That the sign-post stands at the beginning, (iv) That the subject
+stands absolutely at the end.
+
+When these four conditions are fulfilled, the inversion, far from being
+objectionable, may tend greatly to vigour and lucidity. It is liable,
+of course, to be overdone, but there are several ways of avoiding
+that: sometimes it is possible to place the sign-post at the beginning
+without inversion; or the uninverted sentence may be reconstructed, so
+that the subject no longer carries the emphasis; and, as often as not,
+a sentence of which the accentuation is theoretically doubtful may in
+practice be left to the reader’s discernment.
+
+One occasional limitation remains to be mentioned, before we proceed
+to instances. It applies to those sentences only that have a compound
+verb: if the compound verb cannot be represented simply by its
+auxiliary component, the inversion may have to be abandoned, on account
+of the clumsiness of compound verbs in the middle of an inverted
+sentence, for to carry the other component to the end would be to
+violate our fourth rule. Take the type sentence ‘To these causes may
+be attributed ...’, and first let the subject be ‘our disasters’. The
+clumsiness of the verb is then distinctly felt; and ‘To these causes
+may our disasters be attributed’ is ugly enough to show the importance
+of the rule it violates. But next let the subject be ‘every one of
+the disasters that have come upon us’. This time the inversion is
+satisfactory; whence we conclude that if the verb is compound, the
+subject must be long as well as emphatic, or the inversion will not do.
+
+ On the answer to this question depends entirely every decision
+ concerning the goodness or badness of conduct.--SPENCER.
+
+ Just as, after contact, some molecules of a mass of food are absorbed
+ by the part touched, and excite the act of prehension, so are absorbed
+ such of its molecules as, spreading through the water, reach the
+ organism.--SPENCER.
+
+These are both formed on the right principle, but the second suffers
+from the awkwardness of the auxiliary.
+
+ Still more when considered in the concrete than when considered in
+ the abstract do the views of Hobbes and his disciples prove to be
+ inconsistent.--SPENCER.
+
+Here we have neither the data that justify balance inversion, nor the
+results that should follow from it. It is due to the false principle
+of ‘emphasis’ dealt with below in d. and reads as awkwardly as such
+inversions usually read. The sentence is, no doubt, cumbrous in the
+uninverted form; but it wants reconstruction, not inversion.
+
+ Much deeper down than the history of the human race must we go to find
+ the beginnings of these connections.--SPENCER.
+
+Wrong again, for the same reasons, but not with the same excuse; for
+the original form is unobjectionable. The emphasis is not on the
+problem (_to find_ ...), but on the clue to it (_much deeper down_),
+which, being emphatic, can maintain its position at the end of the
+sentence. The compound verb is only a secondary objection: we do not
+mend matters much by substituting _lie_ for _must we go to find_.
+
+ You say he is selfish. Well, so is every one.
+
+ You say he is selfish. Well, so is every one selfish.
+
+_So is every one_ is a correct inversion: _so_ is too weak to stand at
+the end, and at the beginning it is a good enough sign-post to tell us
+that selfishness is going to be defended. But _so is every one selfish_
+is wrong: for if _selfish_ is repeated at all, it is repeated with
+rhetorical effect, and is strong enough to take care of itself. Our
+second rule is thus violated; and so is our fourth--the subject does
+not come at the end.
+
+ All three methods had their charm. So may have Mr. Yeats’s notion
+ of....--_Times._
+
+This time, the compound verb is fatal. ‘So, perhaps, has ...’ would do.
+
+ The arrival of the Hartmanns created no little excitement in the
+ Falconet family, both among the sons and the daughters. Especially was
+ there no lack of speculation as to the character and appearance of
+ Miss Hartmann.--BEACONSFIELD.
+
+Right or wrong in principle, this does not read comfortably; but that
+may seem to be due to the cumbrous phrase ‘was there no lack of’, which
+for practical purposes is a compound verb. That difficulty we can
+remove without disturbing the accentuation of the sentence: ‘Especially
+numerous were the speculations as to the character of Miss Hartmann’.
+This resembles in form our old type ‘Among the guests were ...’, but
+with the important difference that ‘especially numerous’ is emphatic,
+and can therefore stand at the end. The inversion is rather explained
+than justified by the still stronger emphasis on ‘Miss Hartmann’.
+Sentences in which both subject and predicate are independently
+emphatic should be avoided, quite apart from the question of inversion:
+italics are more or less necessary to secure the inferior emphasis, and
+italics are a confession of weakness.
+
+ Somewhat lightened was the _provincial_ panic by this proof that
+ the murderer had not condescended to sneak into the country, or to
+ abandon for a moment, under any motion of caution or fear, the great
+ metropolitan _castra stativa_ of gigantic crime seated for ever on the
+ Thames.--DE QUINCEY (the italics are his).
+
+Not a happy attempt. We notice, for one thing, that the subject does
+not come at the end; the inversion is not complete. Let us complete
+it. To do so, we must convey our huge sign-post to the beginning: ‘By
+this proof ... Thames, was somewhat lightened the _provincial_ panic.’
+Worse than ever; is the compound verb to blame? Remove it, and see:
+‘In consequence of this proof ... Thames, subsided in some degree the
+_provincial_ panic’. This is not much better. There is another and
+a worse flaw: condition number one is not satisfied; we want ‘an
+emphatic subject that carries in itself the point of the sentence’. Now
+we must not assume that because ‘provincial’ is italicized, therefore
+the subject (however emphatic) carries in itself the point of the
+sentence. What is that point? what imaginary question does the sentence
+answer? Can it be meant to answer the question ‘What limitations were
+there upon the comfort derived from the intelligence that the murderer
+was still in London?’? No; that question could not be asked; we have
+not yet been told that any comfort at all was derived. The question
+it answers is ‘What effect did this intelligence produce upon the
+general panic?’. This question can be asked; for the reader evidently
+knows that a panic had prevailed, and that the intelligence had come.
+If, then, we are to use balance inversion, we must so reconstruct
+the sentence that the words containing the essential answer to this
+question become the subject; we must change ‘somewhat lightened’
+into ‘some alleviation’. ‘From this proof ... Thames, resulted some
+alleviation of the _provincial_ panic.’ That is the best that inversion
+will do for us; it is not quite satisfactory, and the reason is that
+the sentence is made to do too much. When the essential point is
+subject to an emphatic limitation (an unemphatic one like ‘somewhat’
+does not matter), the limitation ought to be conveyed in a separate
+sentence; otherwise the sentence is overworked, and either shirks its
+work, with the result of obscurity, or protests by means of italics.
+We ought therefore to have: ‘From ... resulted some alleviation of the
+general panic; this, however, was confined to the provinces’. But,
+except for this incidental fault, the sentence can be mended without
+inversion: ‘By this proof ... Thames, the _provincial_ panic was
+somewhat lightened’.
+
+=c. Inversion in syntactic clauses.=
+
+In clauses introduced by _as_, _than_, or a relative (pronoun or
+adverb), we have only a special case of balance inversion. They differ
+from the instances considered above in this important respect, that
+their relation to the preceding words is no longer paratactic, but
+syntactic, with the result that the sign-post indicating this relation
+is necessarily placed at the beginning. This will be seen from a
+comparison of the paratactic and syntactic forms in the following pairs
+of examples:
+
+ He was quick-tempered: so are most Irishmen. (Paratactic.)
+
+ He was quick-tempered, as are most Irishmen. (Syntactic.)
+
+ Several difficulties now arose: among them was....
+
+ Several difficulties now arose, among which was....
+
+Now in each of these sentences there are the same inducements to
+inversion in the syntactic form as in the paratactic; and added to
+these is the necessity for placing the sign-post at the beginning. We
+might expect, therefore, that inversion of syntactic clauses would
+be particularly common. But (i) We have already seen that inversion
+does not necessarily follow from the fact that the sign-post is placed
+at the beginning. And (ii) The verb in _as_ and _than_ clauses will
+probably, from the nature of the case, be the same as in the preceding
+clause. If it is in the same mood and tense, it can usually be omitted,
+unless effective repetition is required, in which case it will go to
+the end: a change of mood or tense, on the other hand, will often be
+marked by an auxiliary (itself perhaps compound), which again will
+usually preclude inversion.
+
+The result is this:
+
+i. Relative clauses, uninfluenced by the position of the sign-post,
+remain subject to precisely the same conditions as the corresponding
+paratactic sentences. Thus ‘Among whom were....’ is right, just
+as ‘Among the guests were....’ was right; ‘Among which would I
+mention....’ is of course impossible, because the subject does not
+carry the point; and ‘To which may be attributed....’ is right or
+wrong, according as the subject is or is not long enough to balance the
+compound verb.
+
+ii. Inversion of an _as_ or _than_ clause, having become unusual for
+the reason mentioned above, is almost certain to look either archaic
+or clumsy; clumsy when the reason for it is apparent, archaic when it
+is not. The practical rule is this: if you cannot omit the verb, put
+it at the end; and if you can neither omit it nor put it at the end,
+reconstruct the sentence.
+
+ The German government was as anxious to upset M. Delcassé as have been
+ his bitterest opponents in France.--_Times._
+
+The verb is preserved to avoid ambiguity. But it should go to the end,
+especially as it is compound.
+
+ Relishing humour more than does any other people, the Americans could
+ not be seriously angry.--BRYCE.
+
+Ambiguity cannot fairly be pleaded here; the verb should be omitted.
+
+ If France remains as firm as did England at that time, she will
+ probably have as much reason as had England to congratulate
+ herself.--_Times._
+
+Either ‘as England did’, or, since the parallel is significant, ‘as
+England then remained’. Also, ‘as England had’.
+
+ St. Paul’s writings are as full of apparent paradoxes as sometimes
+ seems the Sermon on the Mount.--_Spectator._
+
+The verb must be retained, for the sake of _sometimes_; but it should
+go to the end.
+
+ But he has performed as have few, if any, in offices similar to his
+ the larger, benigner functions of an Ambassador.--_Times._
+
+‘As few ... have performed them.’
+
+ Her impropriety was no more improper than is the natural instinct of a
+ bird or animal improper.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+This is like the case considered in b. ‘so is every one selfish’. If
+_improper_ is repeated with rhetorical effect, there is no need of
+inversion: if not, it should be left out.
+
+ There had been from time to time a good deal of interest over Mrs.
+ Emsworth’s career, the sort of interest which does more for a time in
+ filling a theatre than would acting of a finer quality than hers have
+ done.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+Either ‘would have done’ at the end, or (perhaps better) no verb at all.
+
+ All must join with me in the hope you express--that ... as also must
+ all hope that some good will come of....--_Times._
+
+Like the indiscriminate use of _while_, this ungainly _as_ connexion is
+popular with slovenly writers, and is always aggravated by inversion.
+‘All, too, must hope....’
+
+=d. Negative inversion, and false ‘emphasis’ inversion.=
+
+The connexion here suggested between certain forms of inversion must
+be taken to represent, not by any means the historical order of
+development, with which we are not directly concerned, but the order
+in which a modern writer may be supposed, more or less unconsciously,
+to adopt them. Starting from an isolated case of necessary inversion,
+we proceed to extensions of it that seem natural and are sanctioned
+by modern usage; and from these to other extensions, based probably
+on a misunderstanding, and producing in modern writers the effect of
+archaism.
+
+_Nor_, except when used in conjunction with _neither_, always stands
+first; and if the subject appears at all, the sentence is always
+inverted. This requires no illustration.
+
+On the analogy of _nor_, many other negative words and phrases are
+thrown to the beginning of the sentence, and again inversion is the
+result.
+
+ Never had the Cardinal’s policy been more triumphantly vindicated.
+
+ Nowhere is this so noticeable as in the South of France.
+
+ In no case can such a course be justified merely by success.
+
+ Systems, neither of which can be regarded as philosophically
+ established, but neither of which can we consent to
+ surrender.--BALFOUR.
+
+ Two sorts of judgments, neither of which can be deduced from the
+ other, and of neither of which can any proof be given.--BALFOUR.
+
+It is at this stage that misconception creeps in. Most of these
+negative phrases are in themselves emphatic; and from their being
+placed first (really on the analogy of _nor_) comes the mistaken idea
+that they derive emphasis from their position. This paves the way for
+wholesale inversion: any words, other than the subject, are placed at
+the beginning; and this not always in order to emphasize the words
+so placed, but merely to give an impressive effect to the whole. The
+various steps are marked by the instances that follow. In the first
+two, inversion may be on the analogy of negatives, or may be designed
+for emphasis; in the third, emphasis is clearly the motive; and in the
+rest we have mere impressiveness--not to say mere mannerism.
+
+ With difficulty could he be persuaded....
+
+ Disputes were rife in both cases, but in both cases have the disputes
+ been arranged.--_Times._
+
+ Almost unanimously do Americans assume that....--_Times._
+
+ They hardly resembled real ships, so twisted and burnt were the
+ funnels and superstructure; rather did they resemble the ghosts of a
+ long departed squadron....--_Times._
+
+ His love of romantic literature was as far as possible from that of a
+ mind which only feeds on romantic excitements. Rather was it that of
+ one who was so moulded....--HUTTON.
+
+ There is nothing to show that the Asclepiads took any prominent
+ share in the work of founding anatomy, physiology, zoology,
+ and botany. Rather do these seem to have sprung from the early
+ philosophers.--HUXLEY.
+
+ His works were ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. Yet was the
+ multitude still true to him.--MACAULAY.
+
+ Henry Fox, or nobody, could weather the storm which was about to
+ burst. Yet was he a person to whom the court, even in that extremity,
+ was unwilling to have recourse.--MACAULAY.
+
+ A book of ‘levities and gravities’, it would seem from the author’s
+ dedication, is this set of twelve essays, named after the twelve
+ months.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ The set epistolary pieces, one might say, were discharged before the
+ day of Elia. Yet is there certainly no general diminution of sparkle
+ or interest....--_Times._
+
+ Futile were the endeavor to trace back to Pheidias’ varied originals,
+ as we are tempted to do, many of the later statues....--L. M. MITCHELL.
+
+ Inevitably critical was the attitude that he adopted towards
+ religion.... Odious to him were, on the one hand, ....--_Journal of
+ Education._
+
+ Finely conceived is this poem, and not less admirable in
+ execution.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ ‘The Rainbow and the Rose’, by E. Nisbet, is a little book that will
+ not disappoint those who know the writer’s ‘Lays and Legends’. Facile
+ and musical, sincere and spontaneous, are these lyrics.--_Westminster
+ Gazette._
+
+ Then to the resident Medical Officer at the Brompton Hospital for
+ Consumption for an authoritative opinion on the subject went the
+ enquirer.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+In view of the rapidly increasing tendency to causeless inversion of
+all kinds, it is far from certain that this last is intentional satire.
+
+=e. Miscellaneous.=
+
+(i) In narrated dialogue, the demand for variations of ‘he said’, &c.,
+excuse considerable freedom in the matter of inversion. One or two
+points, however, may be noticed.
+
+When the subject is a personal pronoun, _say_ is perhaps the only verb
+with which inversion is advisable. ‘Said I, he, they’, and ‘retorted
+Jones’: but not ‘enquired I’, ‘rejoined he’, ‘suggested they’.
+
+Compound verbs, as usual, do not lend themselves to inversion:
+
+ ‘I won’t plot anything extra against Tom,’ had said Isaac.--M.
+ MAARTENS.
+
+ ‘At any rate, then,’ may rejoin our critic, ‘it is clearly
+ useless....’--SPENCER.
+
+ ‘I am the lover of a queen,’ had often sung the steward in his pantry
+ below.--R. ELLIOT.
+
+ ‘The cook and the steward are always quarrelling, it is quite
+ unbearable,’ had explained Mrs. Tuggy to the chief mate.--R. ELLIOT.
+
+Inverted _said_ at the beginning is one of the first pitfalls that
+await the novice who affects sprightliness. It is tolerable, if
+anywhere, only in light playful verse.
+
+ Said a friend to me the other day, ‘I should like to be able to run
+ well across country, but have never taken part in a paper-chase, for
+ I have always been beaten so easily when trying a hundred yards or so
+ against my acquaintances....’--S. THOMAS.
+
+ Mr. Takahira and Count Cassini continue to exchange repartees through
+ friends or through the public press. Said the Japanese Minister
+ yesterday evening:--_Times._
+
+ It is inferred here officially and unofficially that neutral rights
+ are unlikely to suffer from any derangement in Morocco to which
+ England is a consenting party. Said a Minister:--‘American interests
+ are not large enough in Morocco to induce us to....’--_Times._
+
+With verbs other than _said_, this form of inversion is still more
+decidedly a thing to be left to the poets. ‘Appears Verona’; ‘Rose a
+nurse of ninety years’; but not
+
+ Comes a new translation ... in four neat olive-green
+ volumes.--_Journal of Education._
+
+(ii) The inverted conditionals _should_, _had_, _could_, _would_,
+_were_, _did_, being recommended by brevity and a certain neatness, are
+all more or less licensed by modern usage. It is worth while, however,
+to name them in what seems to be their order of merit. _Should I_,
+from its frequency, is without taint of archaism; but _could_ and
+_would_, and, in a less degree, _had_, are apt to betray their archaic
+character by the addition of _but_ (‘would he but consent’); and _were_
+and _did_ are felt to be slightly out of date, even without this hint.
+
+ I should be, therefore, worse than a fool, did I object.--SCOTT.
+
+ Did space allow, I could give you startling proof of this.--_Times._
+
+(iii) Always, after performing inversion of any kind, the novice
+should go his rounds, and see that all is shipshape. For want of this
+precaution, a writer who was no novice, particularly in the matter of
+inversion, produces such curiosities as these:
+
+ Be this a difference of inertia, of bulk or of form, matters not to
+ the argument.--SPENCER.
+
+ It is true that, disagreeing with M. Comte, though I do, in all those
+ fundamental views that are peculiar to him, I agree with him in sundry
+ minor views.--SPENCER.
+
+We shall venture on removing the comma before ‘though’; but must leave
+it to connoisseurs in inversion to decide between the rival attractions
+of ‘disagree with M. Comte though I do’ and ‘disagreeing ... though I
+am’. ‘Though I do’, in spite of the commas, can scarcely be meant to be
+parenthetic; that would give (by resolution of the participle) ‘though
+I disagree with M. Comte, though I do, ....’
+
+
+ ARCHAISM
+
+=a. Occasional.=
+
+We have implied in former sections, and shall here take it for granted,
+that occasional archaism is always a fault, conscious or unconscious.
+There are, indeed, a few writers--Lamb is one of them--whose
+uncompromising terms, ‘Love me, love my archaisms’, are generally
+accepted; but they are taking risks that a novice will do well not to
+take.
+
+As to unconscious archaism, it might be thought that such a thing could
+scarcely exist: to employ unconsciously a word that has been familiar,
+and is so no longer, can happen to few. Yet charitable readers
+will believe that in the following sentence _demiss_ has slipped
+unconsciously from a learned pen:
+
+ He perceived that the Liberal ministry had offended certain
+ influential sections by appearing too demiss or too unenterprising in
+ foreign affairs.--BRYCE.
+
+The guilt of such peccadilloes as this may be said to vary inversely
+as the writer’s erudition; for in this matter the learned may plead
+ignorance, where the novice knows too well what he is doing. It is
+conscious archaism that offends, above all the conscious archaisms of
+the illiterate: the historian’s _It should seem_, even the essayist’s
+_You shall find_, is less odious, though not less deliberate, than
+the _ere_, _oft_, _aught_, _thereanent_, _I wot_, _I trow_, and
+similar ornaments, with which amateurs are fond of tricking out their
+sentences. This is only natural. An educated writer’s choice falls
+upon archaisms less hackneyed than the amateur’s; he uses them, too,
+with more discretion, limiting his favourites to a strict allowance,
+say, of once in three essays. The amateur indulges us with his whole
+repertoire in a single newspaper letter of twenty or thirty lines,
+and--what is worse--cannot live up to the splendours of which he is so
+lavish: charmed with the discovery of some antique order of words, he
+selects a modern slang phrase to operate upon; he begins a sentence
+with _ofttimes_, and ends it with a grammatical blunder; aspires to
+_albeit_, and achieves _howbeit_. Our list begins with the educated
+specimens, but lower down the reader will find several instances of
+this fatal incongruity of style; fatal, because the culprit proves
+himself unworthy of what is worthless. For the vilest of trite
+archaisms has this latent virtue, that it might be worse; to use it,
+and by using it to make it worse, is to court derision.
+
+ A coiner or a smuggler _shall_ get off tolerably well.--LAMB.
+
+ The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which _shall_ render
+ another very serious.--LAMB.
+
+ You _shall_ hear the same persons say that George Barnwell is very
+ natural, and Othello is very natural.--LAMB.
+
+ Don Quixote _shall_ last you a month for breakfast
+ reading.--_Spectator._
+
+ Take them as they come, you _shall_ find in the common people a surly
+ indifference.--EMERSON.
+
+The worst of making a mannerism of this _shall_ is that, after the
+first two or three times, the reader is certain to see it coming; for
+its function is nearly always the same--to bring in illustrations of a
+point already laid down.
+
+ Some of us, like Mr. Andrew Lang for instance, _cannot away with_ a
+ person who does not care for Scott or Dickens.--_Spectator._
+
+ One _needs_ not praise their courage.--EMERSON.
+
+ What turn things are likely to take if this version _be_ persisted in
+ is a matter for speculation.--_Times._
+
+ If Mr. Hobhouse’s analysis of the vices of popular government _be_
+ correct, much more would seem to be needed.--_Times._
+
+ Mr. Bowen has been, not recalled, but ordered to Washington, and will
+ be expected to produce proof, if any he _have_, of his charges against
+ Mr. Loomis.--_Times._
+
+ It _were_ futile to attempt to deprive it of its real
+ meaning.--_Times._
+
+ It _were_ idle to deny that the revolutionary movement in Russia is
+ nowhere followed with keener interest than in this country.--_Times._
+
+ It _were_ idle to deny that coming immediately after the
+ Tangier demonstration it assumes special and unmistakable
+ significance.--_Times._
+
+ He is putting poetic ‘frills’, if the phrase _be_ not too mean, on
+ what is better stated in the prose summary of the argument.--_Times._
+
+Regarded as a counter-irritant to slang, archaism is a failure.
+_Frills_ is ten times more noticeable for the prim and pompous _be_.
+
+ Under them the land is being rapidly frivolled away, and,
+ unless immediate action _be_ taken, the country will be so tied
+ that....--_Times._
+
+ That will depend a good deal on whether he _be_ shocked by the
+ cynicism of the most veracious of all possible representations....--H.
+ JAMES.
+
+ We _may_ not quote the lengthy passage here: it is probably familiar
+ to many readers.--_Times._
+
+‘We must not’. Similarly, the modern prose English for _if I be, it
+were_, is _if I am, it would be_.
+
+ ‘I have no particular business at L.,’ said he; ‘I was merely going
+ _thither_ to pass a day or two.’--BORROW.
+
+ I am afraid you will hardly be able to ride your horse _thither_ in
+ time to dispose of him.--BORROW.
+
+ It will necessitate my recurring _thereto_ in the House of
+ Commons.--_Spectator._
+
+ The Scottish Free Church had _theretofore_ prided itself upon the
+ rigidity of its orthodoxy.--BRYCE.
+
+ The special interests of France in Morocco, _whereof_ the recognition
+ by Great Britain and Spain forms the basis of the international
+ agreements concluded last year by the French Government.--_Times._
+
+ To what extent has any philosophy or any revelation assured us
+ _hereof_ till now?--F. W. H. MYERS.
+
+ On the concert I need not dwell; the reader would not care to have my
+ impressions _thereanent_.--C. BRONTË.
+
+_There_, not _thither_, is the modern form; _to it_, not _thereto_;
+_of which_, _of this_, not _whereof_, _hereof_; _till then_, or _up to
+that time_, not _theretofore_. So, in the following examples, _except_,
+_perhaps_, _before_, _though_; not _save_, _perchance_, _ere_, _albeit_.
+
+ Nobody _save_ an individual in no condition to distinguish a hawk from
+ a handsaw....--_Times._
+
+ My ignorance as to ‘figure of merit’ is of no moment _save_ to
+ myself.--_Times._
+
+ This we obtain by allowing imports to go untaxed _save_ only for
+ revenue purposes.--_Spectator._
+
+ Who now reads Barry Cornwall or Talfourd _save_ only in connexion with
+ their memorials of the rusty little man in black?--_Times._
+
+ In my opinion the movements may be attributed to unconscious
+ cerebration, _save_ in those cases in which it is provoked
+ wilfully.--_Times._
+
+ When Mr. Roosevelt was but barely elected Governor of New York, when
+ Mr. Bryan was once and again by mounting majorities excused from
+ service at the White House, _perchance_ neither correctly forecasted
+ the actual result.--_Times._
+
+ Dr. Bretton was a cicerone after my own heart; he would take me
+ betimes _ere_ the galleries were filled.--C. BRONTË.
+
+ He is certainly not cruising on a trade route, or his presence would
+ long _ere_ this have been reported.--_Times._
+
+ Mr. Shaynor unlocked a drawer, and _ere_ he began to write, took out a
+ meagre bundle of letters.--KIPLING.
+
+ Fortifications are fixed, immobile defences, and, in time of war, must
+ await the coming of an enemy _ere_ they can exercise their powers of
+ offence.--_Times._
+
+ ‘It is something in this fashion’, she cried out _ere_ long; ‘the man
+ is too romantic and devoted.’--C. BRONTË.
+
+ _Ere_ departing, however, I determined to stroll about and examine the
+ town.--BORROW.
+
+The use of _ere_ with a gerund is particularly to be avoided.
+
+ And that she should force me, by the magic of her pen to
+ mentally acknowledge, _albeit_ with wrath and shame, my own
+ inferiority!--CORELLI.
+
+ Such things as our modern newspapers chronicle, _albeit_ in different
+ form.--CORELLI.
+
+ It is thought by experts that there could be no better use of
+ the money, _albeit_ the best American colleges, with perhaps one
+ exception, have very strong staffs of professors at incredibly low
+ salaries.--_Times._
+
+ ‘Oxoniensis’ approaches them with courage, his thoughts are expressed
+ in plain, unmistakable language, _howbeit_ with the touch of a master
+ hand.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+The writer means _albeit_; he would have been safer with _though_.
+
+ Living in a coterie, he seems to have read the laudations and not to
+ have noticed _aught_ else.--_Times._
+
+ Hence, if higher criticism, or _aught_ besides, compels any man
+ to question, say, the historic accuracy of the fall....--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ Many a true believer _owned not up_ to his faith.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ The controversy now going on in your columns _anent_ ‘Do we believe?’
+ throws a somewhat strange light upon the religion of to-day.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ It is because the world has not accepted the religion of Jesus
+ Christ our Lord, that the world is _in the parlous state we see it
+ still_.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ A discussion in which _well nigh_ every trade, profession and calling
+ have been represented.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Why not? Because we have _well-nigh bordering on_ 300 different
+ interpretations of the message Christ bequeathed us.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ It is quite a common thing to see ladies with their hymn-books in
+ their hands, _ere_ returning home from church enter shops and make
+ purchases which might _every whit_ as well have been effected on the
+ Saturday.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ How _oft_ do those who train young minds need to urge the necessity of
+ being in earnest....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ I _trow_ not.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ The clerk, as I conjectured him to be from his appearance, was also
+ commoved; for, sitting opposite to Mr. Morris, that honest gentleman’s
+ terror communicated itself to him, though he _wotted_ not why.--SCOTT.
+
+ I should be _right_ glad if the substance could be made known to
+ clergy and ministers of all denominations.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ So sordid are the lives of such natures, who are not only not heroic
+ to their valets and waiting-women, but have neither valets nor
+ waiting-women to be heroic to _withal_.--DICKENS.
+
+=b. Sustained archaism in narrative and dialogue.=
+
+A novelist who places his story in some former age may do so for
+the sake of a purely superficial variety, without any intention of
+troubling himself or his readers with temporal colour more than is
+necessary to avoid glaring absurdities; he is then not concerned with
+archaism at all. More commonly, however, it is part of his plan to
+present a living picture of the time of which he writes. When this
+is the case, he naturally feels bound to shun anachronism not only
+in externals, but in thought and the expression of thought. Now with
+regard to the language of his characters, it would be absurd for him
+to pretend to anything like consistent realism: he probably has no
+accurate knowledge of the language as his characters would speak it;
+and if he had this knowledge, and used it, he would be unintelligible
+to most of his readers, and burdensome to the rest. Accordingly, if he
+is wise, he will content himself with keeping clear of such modes of
+expression as are essentially modern and have only modern associations,
+such as would jar upon the reader’s sense of fitness and destroy the
+time illusion. He will aim, that is to say, at a certain archaic
+directness and simplicity; but with the archaic vocabulary, which
+instead of preserving the illusion only reminds us that there is an
+illusion to be preserved, he will have little to do. This we may call
+negative archaism. _Esmond_ is an admirable example of it, and the
+‘Dame Gossip’ part of Mr. Meredith’s _Amazing Marriage_ is another. It
+hardly occurs to us in these books that the language is archaic; it
+is appropriate, that is all. The same may be said, on the whole, of
+_Treasure Island_, and of one or two novels of Besant’s.
+
+Only the novelist who is not wise indulges in positive archaism. He
+is actuated by the determination to have everything in character at
+all costs. He does not know very much about old English of any period;
+very few people do, and those who know most of it would be the last to
+attempt to write a narrative in it. He gives us, however, all that
+he knows, without much reference to particular periods; it may not be
+good ancient English, but, come what may, it shall not be good modern.
+This, it need scarcely be said, is not fair play: the recreation is
+all on the writer’s side. Archaism is, no doubt, very seductive to the
+archaist. Well done (that is, negatively done), it looks easy; and to
+do it badly is perhaps even easier than it looks. No very considerable
+stock-in-trade is required; the following will do quite well:
+Prithee--quotha--perchance--peradventure--i’ faith--sirrah--beshrew
+me--look ye--sith that--look to it--leave prating--it shall go hard
+but--I tell you, but--the more part--fair cold water--to me-ward--I
+am shrewdly afeared--it is like to go stiff with me--y’ are--y’
+have--it irks me sorely--benison--staunch--gyves--yarely--this same
+villain--drink me this--you were better go; to these may be added
+the indiscriminate use of ‘Nay’ and ‘Now (by the rood, &c.)’; free
+inversion; and verb terminations in _-st_ and _-th_. Our list is
+largely drawn from Stevenson, who, having tried negative archaism with
+success in _Treasure Island_, chose to give us a positive specimen in
+_The Black Arrow_. How vexatious these reach-me-down archaisms can
+become, even in the hands of an able writer, will be seen from the
+following examples of a single trick, all taken from _The Black Arrow_.
+
+ An I had not been a thief, I could not have painted _me_ your face.
+
+ Put _me_ your hand into the corner, and see what ye find there.
+
+ Bring _me_ him down like a ripe apple. And keep ever forward, Master
+ Shelton; turn _me_ not back again, an ye love your life.
+
+ Selden, take _me_ this old shrew softly to the nearest elm, and hang
+ _me_ him tenderly by the neck, where I may see him at my riding.
+
+ Mark _me_ this old villain on the piebald.
+
+ ‘Sirrah, no more words,’ said Dick. ‘Bend _me_ your back.’
+
+ ‘Here is a piece of forest that I know not’, Dick remarked. ‘Where
+ goeth _me_ this track?’
+
+ ‘I slew him fair. I ran _me_ in upon his bow,’ he cried.
+
+ ‘Swallow _me_ a good draught of this,’ said the knight.
+
+It is like a child with a new toy.
+
+But there is the opposite fault. The judicious archaist, as we
+have said, will abstain from palpable modernisms, especially from
+modern slang. The following extracts are taken from an old woman’s
+reminiscences of days in which a ‘faultless attire’ included ‘half high
+boots, knee-breeches very tight above the calf (as the fashion was
+then), a long-tailed cutaway coat, ...’:
+
+ But the Captain, who, of course, lacks bowels of mercy for this kind
+ of thing, says that if he had been Caesar, ‘Caius would have _got
+ the great chuck_. Yes, madam, I would have broke Mister Caius on the
+ spot’.--CROCKETT.
+
+ But if you once go in for _having a good time_ (as Miss Anne in her
+ innocence used to remark) you must be prepared to....--CROCKETT.
+
+ ... as all girls love to do when they are content with the way they
+ have _put in their time_.--CROCKETT.
+
+
+ METAPHOR
+
+Strictly speaking, metaphor occurs as often as we take a word out of
+its original sphere and apply it to new circumstances. In this sense
+almost all words can be shown to be metaphorical when they do not bear
+a physical meaning; for the original meaning of almost all words can
+be traced back to something physical; in our first sentence above, for
+instance, there are eight different metaphors. Words had to be found to
+express mental perceptions, abstract ideas, and complex relations, for
+which a primitive vocabulary did not provide; and the obvious course
+was to convey the new idea by means of the nearest physical parallel.
+The commonest Latin verb for _think_ is a metaphor from vine-pruning;
+‘seeing’ of the mind is borrowed from literal sight; ‘pondering’ is
+metaphorical ‘weighing’. Evidently these metaphors differ in intention
+and effect from such a phrase as ‘smouldering’ discontent; the former
+we may call, for want of a better word, ‘natural’ metaphor, as opposed
+to the latter, which is artificial. The word metaphor as ordinarily
+used suggests only the artificial kind: but in deciding on the merits
+or demerits of a metaphorical phrase we are concerned as much with the
+one class as the other; for in all doubtful cases our first questions
+will be, what was the writer’s intention in using the metaphor? is
+it his own, or is it common property? if the latter, did he use it
+consciously or unconsciously?
+
+This distinction, however, is useful only as leading up to another.
+We cannot use it directly as a practical test: artificial metaphors,
+as well as natural ones, often end by becoming a part of ordinary
+language; when this has happened, there is no telling to which class
+they belong, and in English the question is complicated by the fact
+that our metaphorical vocabulary is largely borrowed from Latin in the
+metaphorical state. Take such a word as _explain_: its literal meaning
+is ‘spread out flat’: how are we to say now whether necessity or
+picturesqueness first prompted its metaphorical use? And the same doubt
+might arise centuries hence as to the origin of a phrase so obviously
+artificial to us as ‘glaring inconsistency’.
+
+Our practical distinction will therefore be between conscious or
+‘living’ and unconscious or ‘dead’ metaphor, whether natural or
+artificial in origin: and again, among living metaphors, we shall
+distinguish between the intentional, which are designed for effect,
+and the unintentional, which, though still felt to be metaphors, are
+used merely as a part of the ordinary vocabulary. It may seem at
+first sight that this classification leaves us where we were: how can
+we know whether a writer uses a particular metaphor consciously or
+unconsciously? We cannot know for certain: it is enough if we think
+that he used it consciously, and know that we should have used it
+consciously ourselves; experience will tell us how far our perceptions
+in this respect differ from other people’s. Most readers, we think,
+will agree in the main with our classification of the following
+instances; they are taken at random from a couple of pages of the
+_Spectator_.
+
+These we should call dead: ‘his _views_ were personal’; ‘_carry out_
+his policy’; ‘not _acceptable_ to his _colleagues_’; ‘the Chancellor
+_proposed_’; ‘some _grounds_ for _complaint_’; ‘_refrain_ from talking
+about them’; ‘the _remission_ of the Tea-duty’; ‘_sound_ policy’; ‘a
+speech almost entirely _composed_ of _extracts_’; ‘_reduction_ of
+taxation’; ‘_discussion_’; ‘the _low_ price of Consols’; ‘_falls_
+due’; ‘_succeeded_’; ‘will _approach_ their task’; ‘_delivered_ a
+speech’; ‘_postponing_ to a future year’. The next are living, but not
+intentional metaphor; the writer is aware that his phrase is still
+picturesque in effect, but has not chosen it for that reason: ‘a
+Protestant _atmosphere_’; ‘this would leave a _margin_ of £122,000’;
+‘the loss of _elasticity_’ in the Fund; ‘_recasting_ our whole Fiscal
+system’; ‘to _uphold_ the unity of the Empire’; ‘to _strengthen_ the
+Exchequer balances’; ‘all _dwelt_ on the grave injury’; ‘his somewhat
+_shattered_ authority’; ‘the policy of evasion now _pursued_’;
+‘_throws_ new _light_ on the situation’; ‘a _gap_ in our fiscal
+system’. Intentional metaphors are of course less plentiful: ‘the
+home-rule motion designed to “_draw_” Sir Henry’; ‘a _dissolving view_
+of General Elections’; ‘this reassuring declaration _knocks the bottom
+out of_ the plea of urgency’; ‘the _scattered remnants_ of that party
+might _rally after the disastrous defeat_’.
+
+One or two general remarks may be made before we proceed to instances.
+It is scarcely necessary to warn any one against over-indulgence in
+intentional metaphor; its effects are too apparent. The danger lies
+rather in the use of live metaphor that is not intentional. The many
+words and phrases that fall under this class are all convenient; as
+often as not they are the first that occur, and it is laborious,
+sometimes impossible, to hit upon an equivalent; the novice will find
+it worth while, however, to get one whenever he can. We may read a
+newspaper through without coming upon a single metaphor of this kind
+that is at all offensive in itself; it is in the aggregate that they
+offend. ‘Cries aloud for’, ‘drop the curtain on’, ‘goes hand in hand
+with’, ‘a note of warning’, leaves its impress’, ‘paves the way for’,
+‘heralds the advent of’, ‘opens the door to’, are not themselves
+particularly noisy phrases; but writers who indulge in them generally
+end by being noisy.
+
+Unintentional metaphor is the source, too, of most actual blunders.
+Every one is on his guard when his metaphor is intentional; the
+nonsense that is talked about mixed metaphor, and the celebrity of one
+or two genuine instances of it that come down to us from the eighteenth
+century, have had that good effect. There are few obvious faults a
+novice is more afraid of committing than this of mixed metaphor. His
+fears are often groundless; many a sentence that might have stood has
+been altered from a misconception of what mixed metaphor really is. The
+following points should be observed.
+
+1. If only one of the metaphors is a live one, the confusion is not a
+confusion for practical purposes.
+
+2. Confusion can only exist between metaphors that are grammatically
+inseparable; parallel metaphors between which there is no grammatical
+dependence cannot result in confusion. The novice must beware, however,
+of being misled either by punctuation or by a parallelism that does not
+secure grammatical independence. Thus, no amount of punctuation can
+save the time-honoured example ‘I smell a rat: I see him hovering in
+the air: ... I will nip him in the bud’. _Him_ is inseparable from the
+later metaphors, and refers to the rat. But there is no confusion in
+the following passage; any one of the metaphors can be removed without
+affecting the grammar:
+
+ This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
+ This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, ...
+ This fortress built by Nature for herself ...
+ This happy breed of men, this little world,
+ This precious stone set in the silver sea, ...
+ This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
+ This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, ...
+
+3. Metaphor within metaphor is dangerous. Here there is a grammatical
+dependence between the metaphors, and if the combination is unsuitable
+confusion will result. But combination is one thing, and confusion
+is another: if the internal metaphor is not inconsistent with the
+external, there is no confusion, though there may be ugliness. To adapt
+one of our examples below, ‘The Empire’s butcher (i. e. New Zealand)
+has not all his eggs in one basket’ is not a confusion, because a
+metaphorical butcher can have his eggs in one basket as well as any one
+else. What does lead to confusion is the choice of an internal metaphor
+applicable not to the words of the external metaphor, but to the
+literal words for which it is substituted. In the following example,
+the confusion is doubtless intended.
+
+ This pillar of the state
+ Hath swallowed hook and bait.
+
+The swallowing is applicable only to the person metaphorically called a
+pillar.
+
+4. Confusion of metaphor is sometimes alleged against sentences that
+contain only one metaphor--a manifest absurdity. These are really
+cases of a clash between the metaphorical and the non-metaphorical.
+A striking or original metaphor is apt to appear violent, and a
+commonplace one impertinent, if not adequately borne out by the rest of
+the sentence. This we may label ‘unsustained metaphor’. It sometimes
+produces much the same effect as mixed metaphor; but the remedy for
+it, as well as the cause, is different. Mixed metaphor is the result
+of negligence, and can generally be put right by a simple adaptation
+of the language to whichever metaphor is to be retained. Unsustained
+metaphor is rather an error of judgement: it is unsustained either
+because it was difficult to sustain, or because it was not worth
+sustaining; in either case abandonment is the simplest course.
+
+ This diverting incident contributed in a high degree to the general
+ merriment.
+
+Here we have four different metaphors; but as they are all dead, there
+is no real confusion.
+
+ This, as you know, was a burning question; and its unseasonable
+ introduction threw a chill on the spirits of all our party.
+
+_Burning_ and _chill_ are both live metaphors, they are grammatically
+connected by _its_, and they are inconsistent; there is therefore
+confusion.
+
+ The uncertainty which hangs over every battle extends in a special
+ degree to battles at sea.--_Spectator._
+
+_Extends_ is usually dead; and if in this case it is living, it is also
+suitable.
+
+ A centre and nucleus round which the scattered remnants of that party
+ might rally after the disastrous defeat.--_Spectator._
+
+The main or external metaphor is that of an army. Now any metaphor that
+is applicable to a literal army is also applicable to a metaphorical
+one: but ‘rally round a nucleus’ is a confusion of metaphor, to
+whichever it is applied; it requires us to conceive of the army at the
+same time as animal and vegetable, _nucleus_ being literally the kernel
+of a nut, and metaphorically a centre about which growth takes place.
+An army can have a nucleus, but cannot rally round it.
+
+ Sir W. Laurier had claimed for Canada that she would be the granary
+ and baker of the Empire, and Sir Edmund Barton had claimed for
+ Australia that she would be the Empire’s butcher; but in New Zealand
+ they had not all their eggs in one basket, and they could claim a
+ combination of the three.
+
+This is quoted in a newspaper as an example of mixed metaphor. It
+is nothing of the kind: _they_ in New Zealand are detached from the
+metaphor.
+
+ We move slowly and cautiously from old moorings in our English life,
+ that is our laudable constitutional habit; but my belief is that the
+ great majority of moderate churchmen, to whatever political party they
+ may belong, desirous as they are to lift this question of popular
+ education out of the party rut, ....
+
+‘A rut’, says the same newspaper, ‘is about the very last thing we
+should expect to find at sea, despite the fact that it is ploughed’.
+There is no mention of ruts at sea; the two metaphors are independent.
+If the speaker had said ‘Moderate churchmen, moving at length from
+their old moorings, are beginning to lift this question out of the
+party rut’, we should have had a genuine confusion, the _moorings_ and
+the _rut_ being then inseparable. Both this sentence and the preceding
+one, the reader may think, would have been better without the second
+metaphor; we agree, but it is a question of taste, not of correctness.
+
+ ... the keenest incentive man can feel to remedy ignorance and
+ abolish guilt. It is under the impelling force of this incentive that
+ civilization progresses.--_Spectator._
+
+This illustrates the danger of deciding hastily on the deadness of a
+metaphor, however common it may be. Probably any one would have said
+that the musical idea in _incentive_ had entirely vanished: but the
+successive attributes _keenness_ and _impelling force_ are too severe
+a test; the dead metaphor is resuscitated, and a perceptible confusion
+results.
+
+ Her forehand drive--her most trenchant asset.--_Daily Mail._
+
+Another case of resuscitation. _Trenchant_ turns in its grave; and
+_asset_, ready to succumb under the violence of athletic reporters, has
+yet life enough to resent the imputation of a keen edge. As the critic
+of ‘ruts at sea’ might have observed, the more blunt, the better the
+assets.
+
+ And the very fact that the past is beyond recall imposes upon the
+ present generation a continual stimulus to strive for the prevention
+ of such woes.--_Spectator._
+
+We _impose_ a burden, we apply a _stimulus_. It looks as if the writer
+had meant by a short cut to give us both ideas; if so, his guilt is
+clear; and if we call _impose_ a mere slip in idiom, the confusion is
+none the less apparent.
+
+ Sword of the devil, running with the blood of saints, poisoned adder,
+ thy work is done.
+
+These are independent metaphors; and, as _thy work is done_ is
+applicable to each of them, there is no confusion.
+
+ In the hope that something might be done, even at the eleventh hour,
+ to stave off the brand of failure from the hide of our military
+ administration.--_Times._
+
+To _stave off a brand_ is not, perhaps, impossible; but we suspect
+that it would be a waste of energy. The idea of bulk is inseparable
+from the process of staving off. The metaphor is usually applied
+to literal abstract nouns, not to metaphorical concretes: ruin and
+disaster one can suppose to be of a tolerable size; but a metaphorical
+brand does not present itself to the imagination as any larger than a
+literal one. We assume that by _brand_ the instrument is meant: the
+eleventh hour is all too early to set about staving off the mark.
+
+This is a good example of mixed metaphor of the more pronounced type;
+it differs only in degree from some of those considered above. We
+suggested that _impose a stimulus_ was perhaps a short cut to the
+expression of two different metaphors, and the same might be said of
+_staving off the brand_. But we shall get a clearer idea of the nature
+of mixed metaphor if we regard all these as violations of the following
+simple rule: When a live metaphor (intentional or unintentional) has
+once been chosen, the words grammatically connected with it must be
+either (a) recognizable parts of the same metaphorical idea, or one
+consistent with it, or (b) unmetaphorical, or dead metaphor; literal
+abstract nouns, for instance, instead of metaphorical concretes.
+Thus, we shall impose not the stimulus, but either (a) the burden
+of resistance, or (b) the duty of resistance; and we shall stave
+off not the ‘brand’ but the ‘ignominy of failure from our military
+administration’.
+
+But from our remarks in 4 above, it will be clear that (b), though it
+cannot result in confusion of metaphor, may often leave the metaphor
+unsustained. Our examples illustrate several common types.
+
+ Is it not a little difficult to ask for Liberal votes for Unionist
+ Free-traders, if we put party interests in the front of the
+ consideration?--_Spectator._
+
+ May I be allowed to add a mite of experience of an original Volunteer
+ in a good City regiment?--_Spectator._
+
+ But also in Italy many ancient edifices have been recently coated with
+ stucco and masked by superfluous repairs.--_Spectator._
+
+ The elementary schools are hardly to be blamed for this failure. Their
+ aim and their achievement have to content themselves chiefly with
+ moral rather than with mental success.--_Spectator._
+
+ The scourge of tyranny had breathed his last.
+
+ The means of education at the disposal of the Protestants and
+ Presbyterians of the North were stunted and sterilized.--BALFOUR.
+
+ I once heard a Spaniard shake his head over the present Queen of
+ Spain.--(Quoted by _Spectator_.)
+
+ But, apart from all that, we see two pinching dilemmas even in this
+ opium case--dilemmas that screw like a vice--which tell powerfully in
+ favour of our Tory views.--DE QUINCEY.
+
+The reader who is uncharitable enough to insist upon the natural
+history of dilemmas will call this not unsustained metaphor, but a
+gross confusion; horns cannot be said to _screw_. We prefer to believe
+that De Quincey was not thinking of the horns at all; they are a
+gratuitous metaphorical ornament; _dilemma_, in English at any rate,
+is a literal word, and means an argument that presents two undesirable
+alternatives. The circumstances of a dilemma are, indeed, such as to
+prompt metaphorical language, but the word itself is incorrigibly
+literal; we confess as much by clapping horns on its head and making
+them do the metaphorical work.
+
+ These remarks have been dictated in order that the importance
+ of recognizing the difference and the value of soils may be
+ understood.--J. LONG.
+
+This metaphor always requires that the dictator--usually a personified
+abstract--should be mentioned. ‘Dictated by the importance’.
+
+The opposite fault of over-conscientiousness must also be noticed.
+Elaborate poetical metaphor has perhaps gone out of fashion; but
+technical metaphor is apt to be overdone, and something of the same
+tendency appears in the inexorable working-out of popular catchword
+metaphors:
+
+ Tost to and fro by the high winds of passionate control, I behold the
+ desired port, the single state, into which I would fain steer; but am
+ kept off by the foaming billows of a brother’s and sister’s envy, and
+ by the raging winds of a supposed invaded authority; while I see in
+ Lovelace, the rocks on the one hand, and in Solmes, the sands on the
+ other; and tremble, lest I should split upon the former or strike
+ upon the latter. But you, my better pilot,...--RICHARDSON.
+
+ Such phases of it as we did succeed in mentally kodaking are hardly to
+ be ‘developed’ in cold print.--_Times._
+
+We are not photographers enough to hazard a comment on _cold_ print.
+
+ The leading planks of the Opposition policy are declared to be the
+ proper audit of public accounts,...--_Times._
+
+
+ REPETITION
+
+‘Rhetorical’ or--to use at once a wider and a more intelligible
+term--‘significant’ repetition is a valuable element in modern style;
+used with judgement, it is as truly a good thing as clumsy repetition,
+the result of negligence, is bad. But there are some writers who, from
+the fact that all good repetition is intentional, rashly infer that
+all intentional repetition is good; and others who may be suspected of
+making repetitions from negligence, and retaining them from a misty
+idea that to be aware of a thing is to have intended it. Even when
+the repetition is a part of the writer’s original plan, consideration
+is necessary before it can be allowed to pass: it is implied in the
+terms ‘rhetorical’ or significant repetition that the words repeated
+would ordinarily be either varied or left out; the repetition, that
+is to say, is more or less abnormal, and whatever is abnormal may be
+objectionable in a single instance, and is likely to become so if it
+occurs frequently.
+
+The writers who have most need of repetition, and are most justified
+in using it, are those whose chief business it is to appeal not to
+the reader’s emotions, but to his understanding; for, in spite of
+the term ‘rhetorical’, the object ordinarily is not impressiveness
+for impressiveness’ sake, but emphasis for the sake of clearness. It
+may seem, indeed, that a broad distinction ought to be drawn between
+the rhetorical and the non-rhetorical: they differ in origin and in
+aim, one being an ancient rhetorical device to secure impressiveness,
+the other a modern development, called forth by the requirements of
+popular writers on subjects that demand lucidity; and there is the
+further difference, that rhetorical repetition often dictates the whole
+structure of the sentence, whereas the non-rhetorical, in its commonest
+form, is merely the completion of a sentence that need not have been
+completed. But in practice the two things become inseparable, and we
+shall treat them together; only pointing out to the novice that of the
+two motives, impressiveness and lucidity, the latter is far the more
+likely to seem justifiable in the reader’s eyes.
+
+We shall illustrate both the good and bad points of repetition almost
+exclusively from a few pages of Bagehot, one of its most successful
+exponents, in whom nevertheless it degenerates into mannerism. To a
+writer who has so much to say that is worth hearing, almost anything
+can be forgiven that makes for clearness; and in him clearness, vigour,
+and a certain pleasant rapidity, all result from the free use of
+repetition. It will be seen that his repetitions are not of the kind
+properly called rhetorical; it is the spontaneous fullness of a writer
+who, having a clear point to make, is determined to make it clearly,
+elegance or no elegance. Yet the growth of mannerism is easily seen in
+him; the justifiable repetitions are too frequent, and he has some that
+do not seem justifiable.
+
+ He analysed not a particular government, but what is common to
+ all governments; not one law, but what is common to all laws; not
+ political communities in their features of diversity, but political
+ communities in their features of necessary resemblance. He gave
+ politics not an interesting aspect, but a new aspect: for by giving
+ men a steady view of what political communities must be, he nipped in
+ the bud many questions as to what they ought to be. As a gymnastic of
+ the intellect, and as a purifier, Mr. Austin’s philosophy is to this
+ day admirable--even in its imperfect remains; a young man who will
+ study it will find that he has gained something which he wanted, but
+ something which he did not know that he wanted: he has clarified a
+ part of his mind which he did not know needed clarifying.
+
+ All these powers were states of some magnitude, and some were states
+ of great magnitude. They would be able to go on as they had always
+ gone on--to shift for themselves as they had always shifted.
+
+ Without Spanish and without French, Walpole would have made a good
+ peace; Bolingbroke could not do so with both.
+
+ Cold men may be wild in life and not wild in mind. But warm and eager
+ men, fit to be the favourites of society, and fit to be great orators,
+ will be erratic not only in conduct but in judgement.
+
+ A man like Walpole, or a man like Louis Napoleon, is protected by an
+ unsensitive nature from intellectual destruction.
+
+ After a war which everyone was proud of, we concluded a peace which
+ nobody was proud of, in a manner that everyone was ashamed of.
+
+ He hated the City because they were Whigs, and he hated the Dutch
+ because he had deserted them.
+
+ But he professed to know nothing of commerce, and did know nothing.
+
+ The fierce warlike disposition of the English people would not have
+ endured such dishonour. We may doubt if it would have endured any
+ peace. It certainly would not have endured the best peace, unless it
+ were made with dignity and with honesty.
+
+ Using the press without reluctance and without cessation.
+
+ He ought to have been able to bear anything, yet he could bear
+ nothing. He prosecuted many more persons than it was usual to
+ prosecute then, and far more than have been prosecuted since.... He
+ thought that everything should be said for him, and that nothing
+ should be said against him.
+
+ Between these fluctuated the great mass of the Tory party, who did not
+ like the House of Hanover because it had no hereditary right, who did
+ not like the Pretender because he was a Roman Catholic.
+
+ He had no popularity; little wish for popularity; little respect for
+ popular judgement.
+
+Here is a writer who, at any rate, has not the vice of ‘elegant
+variation’. Most of the possibilities of repetition, for good and
+for evil, are here represented. As Bagehot himself might have said,
+‘we have instances of repetition that are good in themselves; we
+have instances of repetition that are bad in themselves; and we
+have instances of repetition that are neither particularly good nor
+particularly bad in themselves, but that offend simply by recurrence’.
+The ludicrous appearance presented by our collection as a whole
+necessarily obscures the merit of individual cases; but if the reader
+will consider each sentence by itself, he will see that repetition
+is often a distinct improvement. The point best illustrated here, no
+doubt, is that it impossible to have too much of a good thing; but it
+is a good thing for all that. As instances of unjustifiable mannerism,
+we may select ‘fit to be the favourites ..., and fit to be great
+orators’; ‘not political communities ..., but political communities
+...’; ‘something which he wanted, but something which he did not know
+that he wanted’; ‘a man like Walpole, or a man like Louis Napoleon’;
+‘without reluctance and without cessation’; ‘who did not like ...,
+who did not like ...’; and ‘without Spanish and without French’. We
+have mentioned clearness as the ultimate motive for repetition of this
+kind: in this last sentence, we get not clearness, but obscurity.
+Any one would suppose that there was some point in the distinction
+between Spanish and French: there is none; the point is, simply, that
+languages do not make a statesman. Again, there is sometimes virtue in
+half-measures: from ‘something which he did not know that he wanted’
+remove the first three words, and there remains quite repetition
+enough. ‘Wild in life and not wild in mind’ is a repetition that is
+clearly called for; but it is followed by the wholly gratuitous ‘fit
+... and fit ...’, and the result is disastrous. Finally, in ‘who did
+not like ..., who did not like ...’, mannerism gets the upper hand
+altogether: instead of the appearance of natural vigour that ordinarily
+characterizes the writer, we have stiff, lumbering artificiality.
+
+Writers like Bagehot do not tend at all to impressive repetition:
+their motive is always the business-like one of lucidity, though it is
+sometimes lucidity run mad. Repetition of this kind, not being designed
+to draw the reader’s attention to itself, wears much better in practice
+than the more pronounced types of rhetorical repetition. The latter
+should be used very sparingly. As the spontaneous expression of strong
+feeling in the writer, it is sometimes justified by circumstances:
+employed as a deliberate artifice to impress the reader, it is likely
+to be frigid, and to fail in its object; and the term ‘rhetorical’
+should remind us in either case that what may be spoken effectively
+will not always bear the test of writing.
+
+Rhetorical repetition, when it is clearly distinguishable from the
+non-rhetorical, is too obvious to require much illustration. Of the
+three instances given, the last is an excellent test case for the
+principle that ‘whatever is intentional is good’.
+
+ I have summoned you here to witness your own work. I have summoned you
+ here to witness it, because I know it will be gall and wormwood to
+ you. I have summoned you here to witness it, because I know the sight
+ of everybody here must be a dagger in your mean false heart!--DICKENS.
+
+ As the lark rose higher, he sank deeper into thought. As the lark
+ poured out her melody clearer and stronger, he fell into a graver and
+ profounder silence. At length, when the lark came headlong down ... he
+ sprang up from his reverie.--DICKENS.
+
+ Russia may split into fragments, or Russia may become a
+ volcano.--_Spectator._
+
+
+ MISCELLANEOUS
+
+a. Some more trite phrases.
+
+The worn-out phrases considered in a former section were of a humorous
+tendency: we may add here some expressions of another kind, all of
+them calculated in one way or another to save the writer trouble; the
+trouble of description, or of producing statistics, or of thinking what
+he means. Such phrases naturally die hard; even ‘more easily imagined
+than described’ still survives the rough handling it has met with, and
+flourishes in writers of a certain class. ‘Depend upon it’, ‘you may
+take my word for it’, ‘in a vast majority of cases’, ‘no thinking man
+will believe’, ‘all candid judges must surely agree’, ‘it would be a
+slaying of the slain’, ‘I am old-fashioned enough to think’, are all
+apt to damage the cause they advocate.
+
+The shrill formula ‘It stands to reason’ is one of the worst offenders.
+Originally harmless, and still no doubt often used in quite rational
+contexts, the phrase has somehow got a bad name for prefacing
+fallacies and for begging questions; it lacks the delicious candour of
+its feminine equivalent--‘Kindly allow me to know best’--, but appeals
+perhaps not less irresistibly to the generosity of an opponent. Apart
+from this, there is a correct and an incorrect use of the words. It is
+of course the conclusion drawn from certain premisses that stands to
+reason; the premisses do not stand to reason; they are assumed to be
+a matter of common knowledge, and ought to be distinguished from the
+conclusion by _if_ or a causal participle, not co-ordinated with it by
+_and_.
+
+ My dear fellow, it stands to reason that if the square of _a_ is _a_
+ squared, and the square of _b_ is _b_ squared, then the square of _a_
+ minus _b_ is _a_ squared minus _b_ squared. You may argue till we are
+ both tired, you will never alter that.
+
+ It stands to reason that a thick tumbler, having a larger body of cold
+ matter for the heat to distribute itself over, is less liable to crack
+ when boiling water is poured into it than a thin one would be.
+
+ It stands to reason that my men have their own work to attend to,
+ and cannot be running about London all day rectifying other people’s
+ mistakes.
+
+ It stands to reason that Russia, though vast, is a poor country,
+ that the war must cost immense sums, and that there must come a
+ time....--_Spectator._
+
+Just as ‘stands to reason’ is not an argument, but an invitation to
+believe, ‘the worthy Major’ not amusing, but an invitation to smile, so
+the sentimental or sensational novelist has his special vocabulary of
+the impressive, the tender, the tragic, and the horrible. One or two of
+the more obvious catch-phrases may be quoted. In the ‘strong man’ of
+fiction the reader may have observed a growing tendency to ‘sob like a
+child’; the right-minded hero to whom temptation comes decides, with
+archaic rectitude, that he ‘will not do _this thing_’; the villain,
+taught by incessant ridicule to abstain from ‘muffled curses’, finds
+a vent in ‘discordant laughs, that somehow jarred unpleasantly upon
+my nerves’; this laugh, _mutatis mutandis_ (‘cruel little laugh, that
+somehow ...’), he shares with the heroine, who for her exclusive
+perquisite has ‘this man who had somehow come into her life’. _Somehow_
+and _half-dazed_ are invaluable for throwing a mysterious glamour over
+situations and characters that shun the broad daylight of common sense.
+
+b. Elementary irony.
+
+A well-known novelist speaks of the resentment that children feel
+against those elders who insist upon addressing them in a jocular
+tone, as if serious conversation between the two were out of the
+question. Irony is largely open to the same objection: the writer
+who uses it is taking our intellectual measure; he forgets our _ex
+officio_ perfection in wisdom. Theoretically, indeed, the reader is
+admitted to the author’s confidence; _he_ is not the _corpus vile_ on
+which experiment is made: that, however, is scarcely more convincing
+than the two-edged formula ‘present company excepted’. For minute,
+detailed illustration of truths that have had the misfortune to become
+commonplaces without making their due impression, sustained irony has
+its legitimate use: tired of being told, and shown by direct methods,
+that only the virtuous man is admirable, we are glad enough to go off
+with Fielding on a brisk _reductio ad absurdum_: ‘for if not, let some
+other kind of man be admirable; as Jonathan Wild’. But the _reductio_
+process should be kept for emergencies, as Euclid kept it, with whom
+it is a confession that direct methods are not available. The isolated
+snatches of irony quoted below have no such justification: they are
+for ornament, not for utility; and it is a kind of ornament that is
+peculiarly un-English--a way of shrugging one’s shoulders in print.
+
+ He had also the comfortable reflection that, by the violent quarrel
+ with Lord Dalgarno, he must now forfeit the friendship and good
+ offices of that nobleman’s father and sister.--SCOTT.
+
+ Naturally that reference was received with laughter by the Opposition,
+ who are, or profess to be, convinced that our countrymen in the
+ Transvaal do not intend to keep faith with us. They are very welcome
+ to the monopoly of that unworthy estimate, which must greatly endear
+ them to all our kindred beyond seas.--_Times._
+
+ The whole of these proceedings were so agreeable to Mr. Pecksniff,
+ that he stood with his eyes fixed upon the floor ..., as if a host of
+ penal sentences were being passed upon him.--DICKENS.
+
+ The time comes when the banker thinks it prudent to contract some of
+ his accounts, and this may be one which he thinks it expedient to
+ reduce: and then perhaps he makes the pleasant discovery, that there
+ are no such persons at all as the acceptors, and that the funds for
+ meeting all these bills have been got from himself!--H. D. MACLEOD.
+
+_Pleasant_ is put for _unpleasant_ because the latter seemed dull and
+unnecessary; the writer should have taken the hint, and put nothing at
+all.
+
+The climax is reached by those pessimists who, regarding the reader’s
+case as desperate, assist him with punctuation, italics, and the like:
+
+ And this honourable (?) proposal was actually made in the presence of
+ two at least of the parties to the former transaction!
+
+ These so-called _gentlemen_ seem to forget....
+
+ I was content to be snubbed and harassed and worried a hundred times a
+ day by one or other of the ‘great’ personages who wandered at will all
+ over my house and grounds, and accepted my lavish hospitality. Many
+ people imagine that it must be an ‘honour’ to entertain a select party
+ of aristocrats, but I....--CORELLI.
+
+ The much-prated-of ‘kindness of heart’ and ‘generosity’ possessed by
+ millionaires, generally amounts to this kind of thing.--CORELLI.
+
+ Was I about to discover that the supposed ‘woman-hater’ had been tamed
+ and caught at last?--CORELLI.
+
+ That should undoubtedly have been your ‘great’ career--you were born
+ for it--made for it! You would have been as brute-souled as you are
+ now....--CORELLI.
+
+c. Superlatives without _the_.
+
+The omission of _the_ with superlatives is limited by ordinary prose
+usage to (1) Superlatives after a possessive: ‘Your best plan’. (2)
+Superlatives with _most_: ‘in most distressing circumstances’, but not
+‘in saddest circumstances’. (3) Superlatives in apposition, followed
+by _of_: ‘I took refuge with X., kindliest of hosts’; ‘We are now
+at Weymouth, dingiest of decayed watering-places’. Many writers of
+the present day affect the omission of _the_ in all cases where the
+superlative only means _very_. No harm will be done if they eventually
+have their way: in the meantime, the omission of _the_ with inflected
+superlatives has the appearance of gross mannerism.
+
+ Our enveloping movements since some days proved successful, and
+ fiercest battle is now proceeding.--_Times._
+
+ In which, too, so many noblest men have ... both made and been what
+ will be venerated to all time.--CARLYLE.
+
+ Struggling with objects which, though it cannot master them, are
+ essentially of richest significance.--CARLYLE.
+
+ The request was urged with every kind suggestion, and every assurance
+ of aid and comfort, by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, in the
+ sequel, amply redeemed their word.--EMERSON.
+
+ In Darkest Africa.--STANLEY.
+
+ Delos furnishes, not only quaintest tripods, crude bronze oxen and
+ horses like those found at Olympia, but....--L. M. MITCHELL.
+
+ The scene represents in crudest forms the combat of gods and giants, a
+ subject which should attain long afterwards fullest expression in the
+ powerful frieze of the Great Altar at Pergamon.--L. M. MITCHELL.
+
+ A world of highest and noblest thought in dramas of perfect form.--L.
+ M. MITCHELL.
+
+ From earliest times such competitive games had been celebrated.--L. M.
+ MITCHELL.
+
+ When fullest, freest forms had not yet been developed.--L. M. MITCHELL.
+
+d. Cheap originality.
+
+Just as ‘elegant variation’ is generally a worse fault than monotony,
+so the avoidance of trite phrases is sometimes worse than triteness
+itself. Children have been known to satisfy an early thirst for
+notoriety by merely turning their coats inside out; and ‘distinction’
+of style has been secured by some writers on the still easier terms
+of writing a common expression backwards. By this simplest of all
+possible expedients, ‘wear and tear’ ceases to be English, and becomes
+Carlylese, and Emerson acquires an exclusive property (so at least
+one hopes) in ‘nothing or little’. The novice need scarcely be warned
+against infringing these writers’ patents; it would be as unpardonable
+as stealing the idea of a machine for converting clean knives into
+dirty ones. Hackneyed phrases become hackneyed because they are
+useful, in the first instance; but they derive a new efficiency from
+the very fact that they are hackneyed. Their precise form grows to
+be an essential part of the idea they convey, and all that a writer
+effects by turning such a phrase backwards, or otherwise tampering
+with it, is to give us our triteness at secondhand; we are put to the
+trouble of translating ‘tear and wear’, only to arrive at our old
+friend ‘wear and tear’, hackneyed as ever.
+
+ How beautiful is noble-sentiment; like gossamer-gauze beautiful and
+ cheap, which will stand no _tear and wear_.--CARLYLE.
+
+ Bloated promises, which end in _nothing or little_.--EMERSON.
+
+ The universities also are _parcel_ of the ecclesiastical
+ system.--EMERSON.
+
+ Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce, Sheridan, Romilly,
+ or _whatever national man_, were by this means sent to
+ Parliament.--EMERSON.
+
+ And the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker.--EMERSON.
+
+ The faster the ball falls to the sun, the force to fly off is by so
+ much augmented.--EMERSON.
+
+ The friction in nature is so enormous that we cannot spare any power.
+ _It is not question_ to express our thought, to elect our way, but to
+ overcome resistances.--EMERSON.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER IV
+
+ PUNCTUATION
+
+
+In this chapter we shall adhere generally to our plan of not giving
+systematic positive directions, or attempting to cover all ground
+familiar and unfamiliar, important or not, but drawing attention only
+to the most prevalent mistakes. On so technical a subject, however, a
+few preliminary remarks may be made; and to those readers who would
+prefer a systematic treatise Beadnell’s _Spelling and Punctuation_
+(Wyman’s Technical Series, Menken, 2/6) may be recommended. We shall
+refer to it occasionally in what follows; and the examples to which
+--B. is attached instead of an author’s name are taken from it; these
+are all given in Beadnell (unless the contrary is stated) as examples
+of correct punctuation. It should be added that the book is written
+rather from the compositor’s than from the author’s point of view, and
+illustrates the compositor’s natural weaknesses; it is more important
+to him, for instance, that a page should not be unsightly (the
+unsightliness being quite imaginary, and the result of professional
+conservatism) than that quotation marks and stops, or dashes and stops,
+should be arranged in their true significant order; but, as the right
+and unsightly is candidly given as well as the wrong and beautiful,
+this does not matter; the student can take his choice.
+
+We shall begin by explaining how it is that punctuation is a difficult
+matter, and worth a writer’s serious attention. There are only six
+stops, comma, semicolon, colon, full stop, question mark, exclamation
+mark; or, with the dash, seven. The work of three of them, full stop,
+question, exclamation, is so clear that mistakes about their use can
+hardly occur without gross carelessness; and it might be thought that
+with the four thus left it ought to be a very simple matter to exhaust
+all possibilities in a brief code of rules. It is not so, however.
+Apart from temporary disturbing causes--of which two now operative are
+(1) the gradual disappearance of the colon in its old use with the
+decay of formal periodic arrangement, and (2) the encroachments of the
+dash as a saver of trouble and an exponent of emotion--there are also
+permanent difficulties.
+
+Before mentioning these we observe that the four stops in the strictest
+acceptation of the word (,) (;) (:) (.)--for (!) and (?) are tones
+rather than stops--form a series (it might be expressed also by 1, 2,
+3, 4), each member of which directs us to pause for so many units of
+time before proceeding. There is essentially nothing but a quantitative
+time relation between them.
+
+The first difficulty is that this single distinction has to convey to
+the reader differences of more than one kind, and not commensurable; it
+has to do both logical and rhetorical work. Its logical work is helping
+to make clear the grammatical relations between parts of a sentence
+or paragraph and the whole or other parts: its rhetorical work is
+contributing to emphasis, heightening effect, and regulating pace. It
+is in vain that Beadnell lays it down: ‘The variation of pause between
+the words of the same thought is a matter of rhetoric and feeling, but
+punctuation depends entirely upon the variation of relations--upon
+logical and grammatical principles’. The difference between these two:
+
+ The master beat the scholar with a strap.--B.
+ The master beat the scholar, with a strap.
+
+is in logic nothing; but in rhetoric it is the difference between
+matter-of-fact statement and indignant statement: a strap, we are to
+understand from the comma, is a barbarous instrument.
+
+Again, in the two following examples, so far as logic goes, commas
+would be used in both, or semicolons in both. But the writer of the
+second desires to be slow, staccato, and impressive: the writer of the
+first desires to be rapid and flowing, or rather, perhaps, does not
+desire to be anything other than natural.
+
+ Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, philosophers in
+ systems, logicians in subtilties, and metaphysicians in sounds.--B.
+
+ In the eclogue there must be nothing rude or vulgar; nothing fanciful
+ or affected; nothing subtle or abstruse.--B.
+
+The difference is rhetorical, not logical. It is true, however, that
+modern printers make an effort to be guided by logic or grammar alone;
+it is impossible for them to succeed entirely; but any one who will
+look at an Elizabethan book with the original stopping will see how far
+they have moved: the old stopping was frankly to guide the voice in
+reading aloud, while the modern is mainly to guide the mind in seeing
+through the grammatical construction.
+
+A perfect system of punctuation, then, that should be exact and
+uniform, would require separate rhetorical and logical notations in
+the first place. Such a system is not to be desired; the point is only
+that, without it, usage must fluctuate according as one element is
+allowed to interfere with the other. But a second difficulty remains,
+even if we assume that rhetoric could be eliminated altogether. Our
+stop series, as explained above, provides us with four degrees; but the
+degrees of closeness and remoteness between the members of sentence
+or paragraph are at the least ten times as many. It is easy to show
+that the comma, even in its purely logical function, has not one, but
+many tasks to do, which differ greatly in importance. Take the three
+examples:
+
+ His method of handling the subject was ornate, learned, and
+ perspicuous.--B.
+
+The removal of the comma after _learned_ makes so little difference
+that it is an open question among compositors whether it should be used
+or not.
+
+ The criminal, who had betrayed his associates, was a prey to remorse.
+
+With the commas, the criminal is necessarily a certain person already
+known to us: without them, we can only suppose a past state of society
+to be described, in which all traitors were ashamed of themselves--a
+difference of some importance.
+
+ Colonel Hutchinson, the Governor whom the King had now appointed,
+ having hardened his heart, resolved on sterner measures.
+
+Omission of the comma after _appointed_ gives us two persons instead
+of one, and entirely changes the meaning, making the central words
+into, what they could not possibly be with the comma, an absolute
+construction.
+
+These commas, that is, have very different values; many intermediate
+degrees might be added. Similarly the semicolon often separates
+grammatically complete sentences, but often also the mere items of a
+list, and between these extremes it marks other degrees of separation.
+A perfect system for the merely logical part of punctuation, then,
+would require some scores of stops instead of four. This again is not
+a thing to be desired; how little, is clear from the fact that one of
+our scanty supply, the colon, is now practically disused as a member
+of the series, and turned on to useful work at certain odd jobs that
+will be mentioned later. A series of stops that should really represent
+all gradations might perhaps be worked by here and there a writer
+consistently with himself; but to persuade all writers to observe the
+same distinctions would be hopeless.
+
+A third difficulty is this: not only must many tasks be performed by
+one stop; the same task is necessarily performed by different stops
+according to circumstances; as if polygamy were not bad enough, it
+is complicated by an admixture of polyandry. We have already given
+two sentences of nearly similar pattern, one of which had its parts
+separated by commas, the other by semicolons, and we remarked that
+the difference was there accounted for by the intrusion of rhetoric.
+But the same thing occurs even when logic or grammar (it should be
+explained that grammar is sometimes defined as logic applied to
+speech, so that for our purposes the two are synonymous) is free from
+the disturbing influence; or when that influence acts directly, not on
+the stop itself that is in question, but only on one of its neighbours.
+To illustrate the first case, when the stops are not affected by
+rhetoric, but depend on grammar alone, we may take a short sentence
+as a nucleus, elaborate it by successive additions, and observe how a
+particular stop has to go on increasing its power, though it continues
+to serve only the same purpose, because it must keep its predominance.
+
+ When ambition asserts the monstrous doctrine of millions made for
+ individuals, is not the good man indignant?
+
+The function of the comma is to mark the division between the
+subordinate and the main clauses.
+
+ When ambition asserts the monstrous doctrine of millions made for
+ individuals, their playthings, to be demolished at their caprice; is
+ not the good man indignant?
+
+The semicolon is doing now exactly what the comma did before; but, as
+commas have intruded into the clause to do the humble yet necessary
+work of marking two appositions, the original comma has to dignify its
+relatively more important office by converting itself into a semicolon.
+
+ When ambition asserts the monstrous doctrine of millions made for
+ individuals, their playthings, to be demolished at their caprice;
+ sporting wantonly with the rights, the peace, the comforts, the
+ existence, of nations, as if their intoxicated pride would, if
+ possible, make God’s earth their football: is not the good man
+ indignant?--B.
+
+The new insertion is also an apposition, like the former ones; but,
+as it contains commas within itself, it must be raised above their
+level by being allowed a semicolon to part it from them. The previous
+semicolon, still having the same supreme task to do, and challenged
+by an upstart rival, has nothing for it but to change the regal for
+the imperial crown, and become a colon. A careful observer will now
+object that, on these principles, our new insertion ought to have had
+an internal semicolon, to differentiate the subordinate clause, _as
+if_, &c., from the mere enumeration commas that precede: in which
+case the semi-colon after _caprice_ should be raised to a colon; and
+then what is the newly created emperor to do? There is no papal tiara
+for him to assume, the full stop being confined to the independent
+sentence. The objection is quite just, and shows how soon the powers
+of the four stops are exhausted if relentlessly worked. But we are
+concerned only to notice that the effect of stops, even logically
+considered, is relative, not absolute. It is also true that many modern
+writers, if they put down a sentence like this, would be satisfied
+with using commas throughout; the old-fashioned air of the colon will
+hardly escape notice. But the whole arrangement is according to the
+compositor’s art in its severer form.
+
+A specimen of the merely indirect action of rhetoric may be more
+shortly disposed of. In a sentence already quoted--
+
+ Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, philosophers in
+ systems, logicians in subtilties, and metaphysicians in sounds--
+
+suppose the writer to have preferred for impressive effect, as we said
+he might have, to use semicolons instead of commas. The immediate
+result of that would be that what before could be left to the reader
+to do for himself (i. e., the supplying of the words _have sought
+knowledge_ in each member) will in presence of the semicolon require to
+be done to the eye by commas, and the sentence will run:
+
+ Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures; philosophers, in
+ systems; logicians, in subtilties; and metaphysicians, in sounds.
+
+But, lest we should be thought too faithful followers of the logicians,
+we will now assume that our point has been sufficiently proved: the
+difficulties of punctuation, owing to the interaction of different
+purposes, and the inadequacy of the instruments, are formidable enough
+to be worth grappling with.
+
+We shall now only make three general remarks before proceeding to
+details. The first is implied in what has been already said: the work
+of punctuation is mainly to show, or hint at, the grammatical relation
+between words, phrases, clauses, and sentences; but it must not be
+forgotten that stops also serve to regulate pace, to throw emphasis
+on particular words and give them significance, and to indicate tone.
+These effects are subordinate, and must not be allowed to conflict with
+the main object; but as the grammatical relation may often be shown in
+more than one way, that way can be chosen which serves another purpose
+best.
+
+Secondly, it is a sound principle that as few stops should be used as
+will do the work. There is a theory that scientific or philosophic
+matter should be punctuated very fully and exactly, whereas mere
+literary work can do with a much looser system. This is a mistake,
+except so far as scientific and philosophic writers may desire to give
+an impressive effect by retarding the pace; that is legitimate; but
+otherwise, all that is printed should have as many stops as help the
+reader, and not more. A resolution to put in all the stops that can be
+correctly used is very apt to result in the appearance of some that can
+only be used incorrectly; some of our quotations from Huxley and Mr.
+Balfour may be thought to illustrate this. And whereas slight stopping
+may venture on small irregularities, full stopping that is incorrect
+is also unpardonable. The objection to full stopping that is correct
+is the discomfort inflicted upon readers, who are perpetually being
+checked like a horse with a fidgety driver.
+
+Thirdly, every one should make up his mind not to depend on his stops.
+They are to be regarded as devices, not for saving him the trouble of
+putting his words into the order that naturally gives the required
+meaning, but for saving his reader the moment or two that would
+sometimes, without them, be necessarily spent on reading the sentence
+twice over, once to catch the general arrangement, and again for the
+details. It may almost be said that what reads wrongly if the stops are
+removed is radically bad; stops are not to alter meaning, but merely
+to show it up. Those who are learning to write should make a practice
+of putting down all they want to say without stops first. What then,
+on reading over, naturally arranges itself contrary to the intention
+should be not punctuated, but altered; and the stops should be as few
+as possible, consistently with the recognized rules. At this point
+those rules should follow; but adequately explained and illustrated,
+they would require a volume; and we can only speak of common abuses and
+transgressions of them.
+
+First comes what may be called for short the spot-plague--the tendency
+to make full-stops do all the work. The comma, most important, if
+slightest, of all stops, cannot indeed be got rid of, though even for
+that the full-stop is substituted when possible; but the semicolon
+is now as much avoided by many writers as the colon (in its old use)
+by most. With the semicolon go most of the conjunctions. Now there
+is something to be said for the change, or the two changes: the
+old-fashioned period, or long complex sentence, carefully worked out
+with a view to symmetry, balance, and degrees of subordination, though
+it has a dignity of its own, is formal, stiff, and sometimes frigid;
+the modern newspaper vice of long sentences either rambling or involved
+(far commoner in newspapers than the spot-plague) is inexpressibly
+wearisome and exasperating. Simplification is therefore desirable. But
+journalists now and then, and writers with more literary ambition than
+ability generally, overdo the thing till it becomes an affectation;
+it is then little different from Victor Hugo’s device of making every
+sentence a paragraph, and our last state is worse than our first.
+Patronizing archness, sham ingenuousness, spasmodic interruption,
+scrappy argument, dry monotony, are some of the resulting impressions.
+We shall have to trouble the reader with at least one rather long
+specimen; the spot-plague in its less virulent form, that is, when it
+is caused not by pretentiousness or bad taste, but merely by desire
+to escape from the period, does not declare itself very rapidly. What
+follows is a third or so of a literary review, of which the whole is
+in exactly the same style, and which might have been quoted entire
+for the same purpose. It will be seen that it shows twenty full-stops
+to one semicolon and no colons. Further, between no two of the twenty
+sentences is there a conjunction.
+
+ The life of Lord Chatham, which has just appeared in three volumes,
+ by Dr. Albert v. Ruville of the University of Halle deserves special
+ notice. It is much the most complete life which has yet appeared of
+ one of the most commanding figures in English history. It exhibits
+ that thoroughness of method which characterized German historical
+ writings of other days, and which has not lately been conspicuous.
+ It is learned without being dull, and is free from that uncritical
+ spirit of hostility to England which impairs the value of so many
+ recent German histories. That portion which deals with the closing
+ years of George II and with events following the accession of George
+ III is exceptionally interesting. One of the greatest misfortunes that
+ ever happened to England was the resignation of Pitt in 1761. It was
+ caused, as we all know, by difference of opinion with his colleagues
+ on the Spanish question. Ferdinand VI of Spain died in 1759, and was
+ succeeded by King Charles III, one of the most remarkable princes of
+ the House of Bourbon. This sovereign was an enthusiastic adherent of
+ the policy which found expression in the celebrated family compact.
+ On August 15, 1761, a secret convention was concluded between
+ France and Spain, under which Spain engaged to declare war against
+ England in May, 1762. Pitt quite understood the situation. He saw
+ that instant steps should be taken to meet the danger, and proposed
+ at a Cabinet held on October 2 that war should be declared against
+ Spain. Newcastle, Hardwicke, Anson, Bute, and Mansfield combated this
+ proposal, which was rejected, and two days afterwards Pitt resigned.
+ His scheme was neither immature nor ill-considered. He had made his
+ preparations to strike a heavy blow at the enemy, to seize the Isthmus
+ of Panama, thereby securing a port in the Pacific, and separating the
+ Spanish provinces of Mexico and Peru. He had planned an expedition
+ against Havana and the Philippine Islands, where no adequate
+ resistance could have been made; and, had he remained in office, there
+ is but little doubt that the most precious possessions of Spain in the
+ New World would have been incorporated in the British Empire. When he
+ left the Cabinet all virility seems to have gone out of it with him.
+ As he had foreseen, Spain declared war on England at a suitable moment
+ for herself, and the unfortunate negotiations were opened leading to
+ the Peace of Paris in 1763, which was pregnant with many disastrous
+ results for England. The circumstances which led to the resignation
+ of Pitt are dealt with by Dr. v. Ruville much more lucidly than by
+ most historians. This portion of his work is the more interesting
+ because of the pains he takes to clear George III from the charge of
+ conspiring against his great Minister.--_Times._
+
+The reader’s experience has probably been that the constant fresh
+starts are at first inspiriting, that about half-way he has had
+quite enough of the novelty, and that he is intensely grateful, when
+the solitary semicolon comes into sight, for a momentary lapse into
+ordinary gentle progress. Writers like this may almost be suspected of
+taking literally a summary piece of advice that we have lately seen
+in a book on English composition: _Never use a semicolon when you can
+employ a full-stop._ Beadnell lays down a law that at first sight seems
+to amount to the same thing: _The notion of parting short independent
+sentences otherwise than by a full-stop, rests upon no rational
+foundation, and leads to endless perplexities._ But his practice
+clears him of the imputation: he is saved by the ambiguity of the word
+_independent_. There are grammatical dependence, and dependence of
+thought. Of all those ‘little hard round unconnected things’, in the
+_Times_ review, that ‘seem to come upon one as shot would descend from
+a shot-making tower’ (Sir Arthur Helps), hardly one is not dependent
+on its neighbours in the more liberal sense, though each is a complete
+sentence and independent in grammar. Now one important use of stops
+is to express the degrees of thought dependence. A style that groups
+several complete sentences together, by the use of semicolons, because
+they are more closely connected in thought, is far more restful and
+easy--for the reader, that is--than the style that leaves him to do
+the grouping for himself; and yet it is free from the formality of the
+period, which consists, not of grammatically independent sentences, but
+of a main sentence with many subordinate clauses. We have not space for
+a long example of the group system rightly applied; most good modern
+writers free from the craving to be up to date will supply them on
+every page; but a very short quotation may serve to emphasize the
+difference between group and spot-plague principles. The essence of the
+latter is that almost the only stops used are full-stops and commas,
+that conjunctions are rare, and that when a conjunction does occur the
+comma is generally used, not the full-stop. What naturally follows is
+an arrangement of this kind:
+
+ The sheil of Ravensnuik was, for the present at least, at his
+ disposal. The foreman or ‘grieve’ at the Home Farm was anxious to be
+ friendly, but even if he lost that place, Dan Weir knew that there was
+ plenty of others.--CROCKETT.
+
+(To save trouble, let it be stated that the sheil is a dependency of
+the Home Farm, and not contrasted with or opposed to it.) Here there
+are three grammatically independent sentences, between the two latter
+of which the conjunction _but_ is inserted. It follows from spot-plague
+principles that there will be a full-stop at the end of the first,
+and a comma at the end of the second. With the group system it is not
+so simple a matter; before we can place the stops, we have to inquire
+how the three sentences are connected in thought. It then appears
+that the friendliness of the grieve is mentioned to account for the
+sheil’s being at disposal; that is, there is a close connexion, though
+no conjunction, between the first and the second sentences. Further,
+the birds in the bush of the third sentence are contrasted, not with
+the second sentence’s friendliness, but with the first sentence’s
+bird in the hand (which, however, is accounted for by the second
+sentence’s friendliness). To group rightly, then, we must take care,
+quite reversing the author’s punctuation, that the first and second
+are separated by a stop of less power than that which separates the
+third from them. Comma, semicolon, would do it, if the former were
+sufficient between two grammatically independent sentences not joined
+by a conjunction; it obviously is not sufficient here (though in some
+such pairs it might be); so, instead of comma, semicolon, we must use
+semicolon, full-stop; and the sentence will run, with its true meaning
+much more clearly given:
+
+ The sheil of Ravensnuik was, for the present at least, at his
+ disposal; the foreman or ‘grieve’ at the Home Farm was anxious to be
+ friendly. But even if he lost that place, Dan Weir knew that there was
+ plenty of others.
+
+The group system gives more trouble to the writer or compositor, and
+less to the reader; the compositor cannot be expected to like it, if
+the burden falls on him; inferior writers cannot be expected to choose
+it either, perhaps; but the good writers who do choose it no doubt find
+that after a short time the work comes to do itself by instinct.
+
+We need now only add two or three short specimens, worse, though
+from their shortness less remarkable, than the _Times_ extract. They
+are not specially selected as bad; but it may be hoped that by their
+juxtaposition they may have some deterrent effect.
+
+ So Dan opened the door a little and the dog came out as if nothing had
+ happened. It was now clear. The light was that of late evening. The
+ air hardly more than cool. A gentle fanning breeze came from the North
+ and....--CROCKETT.
+
+ Allies must have common sentiments, a common policy, common interests.
+ Russia’s disposition is aggressive. Her policy is the closed door.
+ Her interests lie in monopoly. With our country it is precisely the
+ opposite. Japan may conquer, but she will not aggress. Russia may be
+ defeated, but she will not abandon her aggression. With such a country
+ an alliance is beyond the conception even of a dream.--_Times._
+
+ Upon a hillside, a great swelling hillside, high up near the clouds,
+ lay a herd lad. Little more than a boy he was. He did not know much,
+ but he wanted to know more. He was not very good, but he wanted to be
+ better. He was lonely, but of that he was not aware. On the whole he
+ was content up there on his great hillside.--CROCKETT.
+
+ To be popular you have to be interested, or appear to be interested,
+ in other people. And there are so many in this world in whom it
+ is impossible to be interested. So many for whom the most skilful
+ hypocrisy cannot help us to maintain a semblance of interest.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ Of course a girl so pretty as my Miss Anne could not escape having
+ many suitors, especially as all over the countryside Sir Tempest had
+ the name of being something of a skinflint. And skinflints are always
+ rich, as is well known.--CROCKETT.
+
+The last sentence here is a mere comment on what is itself only an
+appendage, the clause introduced by _especially_; it has therefore
+no right to the dignity of a separate sentence. But it can hardly be
+mended without some alteration of words as well as stops; for instance,
+put a semicolon after suitors, write _moreover_ for _especially as_,
+and put only a comma after _skinflint_; the right proportion would then
+be secured.
+
+The spot-plague, as we have shown, sometimes results in illogicality;
+it need not do so, however; when it does, the fault lies with the
+person who, accepting its principles, does not arrange his sentences
+to suit them. It is a new-fashioned and, in our opinion, unpleasant
+system, but quite compatible with correctness.
+
+Over-stopping, to which we now proceed, is on the contrary
+old-fashioned; but it is equally compatible with correctness. Though
+old-fashioned, it still lingers obstinately enough to make some slight
+protest desirable; the superstition that every possible stop should be
+inserted in scientific and other such writing misleads compositors,
+and their example affects literary authors who have not much ear. Any
+one who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another
+should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable, and question his
+conscience, as severely as we ought to do about disagreeable conduct in
+real life, whether it is necessary. He will find that the parenthetic
+or emphatic effect given to an adverbial phrase by putting a comma
+at each end of it is often of no value whatever to his meaning; in
+other words, that he can make himself agreeable by merely putting off
+a certain pompous solemnity; erasing a pair of commas may make the
+difference in writing that is made in conversation by a change of tone
+from the didactic to the courteous. Sometimes the abundance of commas
+is not so easily reduced; a change in the order of words, the omission
+of a needless adverb or conjunction, even the recasting of a sentence,
+may be necessary. But it is a safe statement that a gathering of commas
+(except on certain lawful occasions, as in a list) is a suspicious
+circumstance. The sentence should at least be read aloud, and if it
+halts or jolts some change or other should be made.
+
+ The smallest portion possible of curious interest had been
+ awakened within me, and, at last, I asked myself, within my own
+ mind....--BORROW.
+
+None of the last three commas is wanted; those round _at last_ are very
+unpleasant, and they at least should be omitted.
+
+ In questions of trade and finance, questions which, owing, perhaps, to
+ their increasing intricacy, seem....--BRYCE.
+
+_Perhaps_ can do very well without commas.
+
+ It is, however, already plain enough that, unless, indeed, some great
+ catastrophe should upset all their calculations, the authorities have
+ very little intention....--_Times._
+
+_Indeed_ can do without commas, if it cannot itself be done without.
+
+ Jeannie, too, is, just occasionally, like a good girl out of a book by
+ a sentimental lady-novelist.--_Times._
+
+If _just_ is omitted, there need be no commas round _occasionally_.
+There may be a value in _just_; but hardly enough to compensate for the
+cruel jerking at the bit to which the poor reader is subjected by a
+remorseless driver.
+
+ Thus, their work, however imperfect and faulty, judged by modern
+ lights, it may have been, brought them face to face with....--HUXLEY.
+
+The comma after _thus_ is nothing if not pompous. And another can be
+got rid of by putting _it may have been_ before _judged by modern
+lights_.
+
+ Lilias suggested the advice which, of all others, seemed most suited
+ to the occasion, that, yielding, namely, to the circumstances of their
+ situation, they should watch....--SCOTT.
+
+Omit _namely_ and its commas.
+
+ Shakespeare, it is true, had, as I have said, as respects England, the
+ privilege which only first-comers enjoy.--LOWELL.
+
+A good example of the warning value of commas. None of these can
+be dispensed with, since there are no less than three parenthetic
+qualifications to the sentence. But the crowd of commas ought to have
+told the writer how bad his sentence was; it is like an obstacle race.
+It should begin, It is true that ..., which disposes of one obstacle.
+_As I have said_ can be given a separate sentence afterwards--So much
+has been said before.
+
+ Private banks and capitalists constitute the main bulk of the
+ subscribers, and, apparently, they are prepared to go on subscribing
+ indefinitely.--_Times._
+
+Putting commas round _apparently_ amounts to the insertion of a
+further clause, such as, Though you would not think they could be such
+fools. But what the precise contents of the further clause may be is
+problematic. At any rate, a writer should not invite us to read between
+the lines unless he is sure of two things: what he wants to be read
+there; and that we are likely to be willing and able readers of it. The
+same is true of many words that are half adverbs and half conjunctions,
+like _therefore_. We have the right to comma them off if we like; but,
+unless it is done with a definite purpose, it produces perplexity as
+well as heaviness. In the first of the next two examples, there is
+no need whatever for the commas. In the second, the motive is clear:
+having the choice between commas and no commas, the reporter uses them
+because he so secures a pause after _he_, and gives the word that
+emphasis which in the speech as delivered doubtless made the _I_ that
+it represents equivalent to _I for my part_.
+
+ Both Tom and John knew this; and, therefore, John--the soft-hearted
+ one--kept out of the way.--TROLLOPE.
+
+ It would not be possible to sanction an absolutely unlimited
+ expenditure on the Volunteers; the burden on the tax-payers would be
+ too great. He, therefore, wished that those who knew most about the
+ Volunteers would make up their minds as to the direction in which
+ there should be development.--_Times._
+
+After _for_ and _and_ beginning a sentence commas are often used
+that are hardly even correct. It may be suspected that writers allow
+themselves to be deceived by the false analogy of sentences in which
+the _and_ or _for_ is immediately followed by a subordinate clause
+or phrase that has a right to its two commas. When there is no such
+interruption, the only possible plea for the comma is that it is not
+logical but rhetorical, and conveys some archness or other special
+significance such as is hardly to be found in our two examples:
+
+ The lawn, the soft, smooth slope, the ... bespeak an amount of elegant
+ comfort within, that would serve for a palace. This indication is
+ not without warrant; for, within it is a house of refinement and
+ luxury.--DICKENS.
+
+ And, it is true that these were the days of mental and moral
+ fermentation.--HUTTON.
+
+We shall class here also, assuming for the present that the rhetorical
+plea may be allowed even when there is no logical justification for a
+stop, two sentences in which the copula _is_, standing between subject
+and complement, has commas on each side of it. Impressiveness is what
+is aimed at; it seems to us a tawdry device for giving one’s sentence
+an _ex cathedra_ air:
+
+ The reason why the world lacks unity, is, because man is disunited
+ with himself.--EMERSON.
+
+ The charm in Nelson’s history, is, the unselfish greatness.--EMERSON.
+
+Many other kinds of over-stopping might be illustrated; but we have
+intentionally confined ourselves here to specimens in which grammatical
+considerations do not arise, and the sentence is equally correct
+whether the stops are inserted or not. Sentences in which over-stopping
+outrages grammar more or less decidedly will be incidentally treated
+later on. Meanwhile we make the general remark that ungrammatical
+insertion of stops is a high crime and misdemeanour, whereas
+ungrammatical omission of them is often venial, and in some cases
+even desirable. Nevertheless the over-stopping that offends against
+nothing but taste has its counterpart in under-stopping of the same
+sort. And it must be added that nothing so easily exposes a writer
+to the suspicion of being uneducated as omission of commas against
+nearly universal custom. In the examples that follow, every one will
+see at the first glance where commas are wanting. When it is remembered
+that, as we have implied, an author has the right to select the degree
+of intensity, or scale, of his punctuation, it can hardly be said
+that grammar actually demands any stops in these sentences taken by
+themselves. Yet the effect, unless we choose to assume misprints, as we
+naturally do in isolated cases, is horrible.
+
+ It may be asked can further depreciation be afforded.--_Times._
+
+ I believe you used to live in Warwickshire at Willowsmere Court did
+ you not?--CORELLI.
+
+ The hills slope gently to the cliffs which overhang the bay of Naples
+ and they seem to bear on their outstretched arms a rich offering
+ of Nature’s fairest gifts for the queen city of the south.--F. M.
+ CRAWFORD.
+
+ ‘You made a veritable sensation Lucio!’ ‘Did I?’ He laughed. ‘You
+ flatter me Geoffrey.’--CORELLI.
+
+ I like your swiftness of action Geoffrey.--CORELLI.
+
+ Good heavens man, there are no end of lords and ladies who
+ will....--CORELLI.
+
+Although we are, when we turn from taste to grammar, on slightly firmer
+ground, it will be seen that there are many debatable questions; and
+we shall have to use some technical terms. As usual, only those points
+will be attended to which our observation has shown to be important.
+
+1. The substantival clause.
+
+Subordinate clauses are sentences containing a subject and predicate,
+but serving the purpose in the main sentence (to which they are
+sometimes joined by a subordinating conjunction or relative pronoun,
+but sometimes without any separate and visible link) of single words,
+namely, of noun, adjective, or adverb; they are called respectively
+substantival, adjectival, or adverbial clauses. Examples:
+
+Substantival. He asked _what I should do_. (_my plan_, noun)
+
+Adjectival. The man _who acts honestly_ is respected. (_honest_,
+adjective)
+
+Adverbial. I shall see you _when the sun next rises_. (_to-morrow_,
+adverb)
+
+Now there is no rule that subordinate clauses must be separated from
+the main sentence by a stop; that depends on whether they are essential
+parts of the proposition (when stops are generally wrong), or more or
+less separable accidents (when commas are more or less required). But
+what we wish to draw attention to is a distinction in this respect,
+very generally disregarded, between the substantival clause and the two
+other kinds. When the others are omitted, though the desired meaning
+may be spoilt, the grammar generally remains uninjured; a complete,
+though not perhaps valuable sentence is left. _The man is respected_,
+_I shall see you_, are as much sentences alone as they were with the
+adjectival and adverbial clauses. With substantival clauses this is
+seldom true; they are usually the subjects, objects, or complements,
+of the verbs, that is, are grammatically essential. _He asked_ is
+meaningless by itself. (Even if the point is that he asked and did not
+answer, _things_, or _something_, has to be supplied in thought.) Now
+it is a principle, not without exceptions, but generally sound, that
+the subject, object, or complement, is not to be separated from its
+verb even by a comma (though _two_ commas belonging to an inserted
+parenthetic clause or phrase or word may intervene). It follows that
+there is no logical or grammatical justification, though there may
+be a rhetorical one, for the comma so frequently placed before the
+_that_ of an indirect statement. Our own opinion (which is, however,
+contrary to the practice of most compositors) is that this should
+always be omitted except when the writer has a very distinct reason for
+producing rhetorical impressiveness by an unusual pause. Some very ugly
+overstopping would thus be avoided.
+
+ Yet there, too, we find, that character has its problems to
+ solve.--MEREDITH.
+
+ We know, that, in the individual man, consciousness grows.--HUXLEY.
+
+ And it is said, that, on a visitor once asking to see his library,
+ Descartes led him....--HUXLEY.
+
+ The general opinion however was, that, if Bute had been early
+ practised in debate, he might have become an impressive
+ speaker.--MACAULAY.
+
+The comma before _whether_ in the next is actually misleading; we are
+tempted to take as adverbial what is really a substantival clause,
+object to the verbal noun _indifference_:
+
+ The book ... had merits due to the author’s indifference, whether he
+ showed bad taste or not, provided he got nearer to the impression he
+ wished to convey.--_Speaker._
+
+Grammar, however, would afford some justification for distinguishing
+between the substantival clause as subject, object, or complement, and
+the substantival clause in apposition with one of these. Though there
+should decidedly be no comma in _He said that ..._, it is strictly
+defensible in _It is said, that...._ The _that_-clause in the latter
+is explanatory of, and in apposition with, _it_; and the ordinary
+sign of apposition is a comma. Similarly, _My opinion is that_: _It
+is my opinion, that_. But as there seems to be no value whatever in
+the distinction, our advice is to do without the comma in all ordinary
+cases of either kind. A useful and reasonable exception is made in
+some manuals; for instance, in Bigelow’s _Manual of Punctuation_ we
+read: ‘Clauses like “It is said”, introducing several propositions
+or quotations, each preceded by the word _that_, should have a comma
+before the first _that_. But if a single proposition or quotation only
+is given, no comma is necessary. Example:
+
+ Philosophers assert, that Nature is unlimited in her operations, that
+ she has inexhaustible treasures in reserve, that....’
+
+Anything that shows the reader what he is to expect, and so saves
+him the trouble of coming back to revise his first impressions, is
+desirable if there is no strong reason against it.
+
+A more important distinction is this: _He said_, &c., may have
+for its object, and _It is said_, &c., for its (virtual) subject,
+either the actual words said, or a slight rearrangement of them (not
+necessarily to the eye, but at least to the mind), which makes them
+more clearly part of the grammatical construction, and turns them
+into true subordinate clauses. Thus _He told her, You are in danger_
+may be kept, but is usually altered to _He told her that she was in
+danger_, or to _He told her she was in danger_. In the first, _You
+are in danger_ is not properly a subordinate clause, but a sentence,
+which may be said to be in apposition with _these words_ understood.
+In the second and third alike, the altered words are a subordinate
+substantival clause, the object to _told_. It follows that when the
+actual words are given as such (this is sometimes only to be known by
+the tone: compare _I tell you, I will come_, and _I tell you I will
+come_), a comma should be inserted; whereas, when they are meant as
+mere reported or indirect speech, it should be omitted. Actual words
+given as such should also be begun with a capital letter; and if they
+consist of a compound sentence, or of several sentences, a comma will
+not suffice for their introduction; a colon, a colon and dash, or a
+full stop, with quotation marks always in the last case, and usually in
+the others, will be necessary; but these are distinctions that need not
+be considered here in detail.
+
+Further, it must be remembered that substantival clauses include
+indirect questions as well as indirect statements, and that the same
+rules will apply to them. The two following examples are very badly
+stopped:
+
+ (_a_) Add to all this that he died in his thirty-seventh year: and
+ then ask, If it be strange that his poems are imperfect?--CARLYLE.
+
+Accommodation of the stops to the words would give:
+
+ and then ask if it be strange that his poems are imperfect.
+
+And accommodation of the words to the stops would give:
+
+ and then ask, Is it strange that his poems are imperfect?
+
+ (_b_) It may be asked can further depreciation be afforded.--_Times._
+
+The two correct alternatives here are similarly:
+
+ It may be asked, Can further depreciation be afforded?
+
+ It may be asked whether further depreciation can be afforded.
+
+As the sentences stood originally, we get in the Carlyle a most
+theatrical, and in the _Times_ a most slovenly effect.
+
+2. The verb and its subject, object, or complement.
+
+Our argument against the common practice of placing a comma before
+substantival _that_-clauses and others like them was, in brief: This
+sort of _that_-clause is simply equivalent to a noun; that noun is,
+with few exceptions, the subject, object, or complement, to a verb;
+and between things so closely and essentially connected as the verb
+and any of these no stop should intervene (unless for very strong and
+special rhetorical reasons). This last principle, that the verb and its
+essential belongings must not be parted, was merely assumed. We think
+it will be granted by any one who reads the next two examples. It is
+felt at once that a writer who will break the principle with so little
+excuse as here will shrink from nothing.
+
+ So poor Byron was dethroned, as I had prophesied he would be, though I
+ had little idea that his humiliation, would be brought about by one,
+ whose sole strength consists in setting people to sleep.--BORROW.
+
+ He was, moreover, not an unkind man; but the crew of the _Bounty_,
+ mutinied against him, and set him half naked in an open boat.--BORROW.
+
+Very little better than these, but each with some perceptible motive,
+are the next six:
+
+ Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the glittering armies of
+ her enthusiasm.--MEREDITH.
+
+ Opposition to him, was comparable to the stand of blocks of timber
+ before a flame.--MEREDITH.
+
+In each of these the comma acts as an accent upon _him_, and is purely
+rhetorical and illogical.
+
+ Such women as you, are seldom troubled with remorse.--CORELLI.
+
+Here the comma guards us from taking _you are_ together. We have
+already said that this device is illegitimate. Such sentences should be
+recast; for instance, Women like you are seldom, &c.
+
+ The thick foliage of the branching oaks and elms in my grounds
+ afforded grateful shade and repose to the tired body, while the
+ tranquil loveliness of the woodland and meadow scenery, comforted and
+ soothed the equally tired mind.--CORELLI.
+
+ With them came young boys and little children, while on either side,
+ maidens white-veiled and rose-wreathed, paced demurely, swinging
+ silver censers to and fro.--CORELLI.
+
+ Swift’s view of human nature, is too black to admit of any hopes of
+ their millennium.--L. STEPHEN.
+
+_Loveliness_, _maidens_, _view_, the strict subjects, have adjectival
+phrases attached after them. The temptation to insert the comma is
+comprehensible, but slight, and should have been resisted.
+
+In the three that come next, the considerable length of the subject,
+it must be admitted, makes a comma comforting; it gives us a sort of
+assurance that we have kept our hold on the sentence. It is illogical,
+however, and, owing to the importance of not dividing subject from
+verb, unpleasantly illogical. In each case the comfort would be equally
+effective if it were legitimized by the insertion of a comma before
+as well as after the clause or phrase at the end of which the present
+comma stands. The extra commas would be after _earth_, _victims_,
+_Schleiden_.
+
+ To see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth when such as her
+ die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing.--SWIFT.
+
+ An order of the day expressing sympathy with the families of the
+ victims and confidence in the Government, was adopted.--_Times._
+
+ The famous researches of Schwann and Schleiden in 1837 and the
+ following years, founded the modern science of histology.--HUXLEY.
+
+It may be said that it is ‘fudging’ to find an excuse, as we have
+proposed to do, for a stop that we mean really to do something
+different from its ostensible work. But the answer is that with few
+tools and many tasks to do much fudging is in fact necessary.
+
+A special form of this, in protest against which we shall give five
+examples, each from a different well-known author, is when the subject
+includes and ends with a defining relative clause, after which an
+illogical comma is placed. As the relative clause is of the defining
+kind (a phrase that has been explained[12]), it is practically
+impossible to fudge in these sentences by putting a comma before the
+relative pronoun. Even in the first sentence the length of the relative
+clause is no sufficient excuse; and in all the others we should abolish
+the comma without hesitation.
+
+ The same quickness of sympathy which had served him well in his work
+ among the East End poor, enabled him to pour feeling into the figures
+ of a bygone age.--BRYCE.
+
+ One of its agents is our will, but that which expresses itself in our
+ will, is stronger than our will.--EMERSON.
+
+ The very interesting class of objects to which these belong, do not
+ differ from the rest of the material universe.--BALFOUR.
+
+ And thus, the great men who were identified with the war, began slowly
+ to edge over to the party....--L. STEPHEN.
+
+ In becoming a merchant-gild the body of citizens who formed the
+ ‘town’, enlarged their powers of civic legislation.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+In the two sentences that now follow from Mr. Morley, the offending
+comma of the first parts _centre_, which is what grammarians call the
+oblique complement, from its verb _made_; the offending comma of the
+second parts the direct object _groups_ from its verb _drew_. Every one
+will allow that the sentences are clumsy; most people will allow that
+the commas are illogical. As for us, we do not say that, if the words
+are to be kept as they are, the commas should be omitted; but we do say
+that a good writer, when he found himself reduced to illogical commas,
+should have taken the trouble to rearrange his words.
+
+ De Maistre was never more clear-sighted than when he made a vigorous
+ and deliberate onslaught upon Bacon, the centre of his movement
+ against revolutionary principles.--MORLEY.
+
+ In saying that the Encyclopaedists began a political work, what
+ is meant is that they drew into the light of new ideas, groups of
+ institutions, usages, and arrangements which affected the well-being
+ of France, as closely as nutrition affected the health and strength of
+ an individual Frenchman.--MORLEY.
+
+It may be added, by way of concluding this section, that the insertion
+of a comma in the middle of an absolute construction, which is capable,
+as was shown in the sentence about Colonel Hutchinson and the governor,
+of having very bad results indeed, is only a particular instance
+and _reductio ad absurdum_ of inserting a comma between subject and
+verb. The comma in the absolute construction is so recognized a trap
+that it might have been thought needless to mention it; the following
+instances, however, will show that a warning is even now necessary.
+
+ Sir E. Seymour, having replied for the Navy, the Duke of Connaught, in
+ replying for the Army, said....--_Times._
+
+ Thus _got_, having been by custom poorly substituted for _gat_,
+ so that we say He got away, instead of He gat away, many persons
+ abbreviate _gotten_ into _got_, saying He had got, for He had
+ gotten.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+ The garrison, having been driven from the outer line of defences
+ on July 30, Admiral Witoft considered it high time to make a
+ sortie.--_Times._
+
+ But that didn’t last long; for Dr. Blimber, happening to change the
+ position of his tight plump legs, as if he were going to get up, Toots
+ swiftly vanished.--DICKENS.
+
+3. The adjectival clause.
+
+This, strictly speaking, does the work of an adjective in the sentence.
+It usually begins with a relative pronoun, but sometimes with a
+relative adverb. The man _who does not breathe_ dies, is equivalent to
+The _unbreathing_ man dies. The place _where we stand_ is holy ground,
+is equivalent to _This_ place is holy ground. But we shall include
+under the phrase all clauses that begin with a relative, though some
+relative clauses are not adjectival, because a division of all into
+defining clauses on the one hand, and non-defining or commenting on the
+other, is more easily intelligible than the division into adjectival
+and non-adjectival. This distinction is more fully gone into in the
+chapter on Syntax, where it is suggested that _that_, when possible,
+is the appropriate relative for defining, and _which_ for non-defining
+clauses. That, however, is a debatable point, and quite apart from the
+question of stopping that arises here. Examples of the two types are:
+
+(Defining) The river that (which) runs through London is turbid.
+
+(Commenting) The Thames, which runs through London, is turbid.
+
+It will be seen that in the first the relative clause is an answer to
+the imaginary question, ‘Which river?’; that is, it defines the noun
+to which it belongs. In the second, such a question as ‘Which Thames?’
+is hardly conceivable; the relative clause gives us a piece of extra
+and non-essential information, an independent comment. The two types
+are not always so easily distinguished as in these examples constructed
+for the purpose. What we wish here to say is that it would contribute
+much to clearness of style if writers would always make up their minds
+whether they intend a definition or a comment, and would invariably use
+no commas with a defining clause, and two commas with a non-defining.
+All the examples that follow are in our opinion wrong. The first
+three are of defining relative clauses wrongly preceded by commas;
+the second three of commenting relative clauses wrongly not preceded
+by commas. The last of all there may be a doubt about. If the long
+clause beginning with _which_ is intended merely to show how great the
+weariness is, and _which_ is practically equivalent to _so great that_,
+it may be called a defining clause, and the omission of the comma is
+right. But if the _which_ really acts as a mere connexion to introduce
+a new fact that the correspondent wishes to record, the clause is
+non-defining, and the comma ought according to our rule to be inserted
+before it.
+
+ The man, _who_ thinketh in his heart and hath the power straightway
+ (very straightway) to go and do it, is not so common in any
+ country.--CROCKETT.
+
+ Now everyone must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these
+ must. The question, _which_ a wise man and a student of modern history
+ will ask, is, what that kind is.--EMERSON.
+
+ Those, _who_ are urging with most ardour what are called the
+ greatest benefits of mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited
+ men.--EMERSON.
+
+ A reminder is being sent to all absent members of the Nationalist
+ party that their attendance at Westminster is urgently required next
+ week _when_ the Budget will be taken on Monday.--_Times._
+
+ The Marshall Islands will pass from the control of the Jaluit Company
+ under that of the German colonial authorities _who_ will bear the cost
+ of administration and will therefore collect all taxes.--_Times._
+
+ The causes of this popularity are, no doubt, in part, the extreme
+ simplicity of the reasoning on which the theory rests, in part its
+ extreme plausibility, in part, perhaps, the nature of the result
+ _which_ is commonly thought to be speculatively interesting without
+ being practically inconvenient.--BALFOUR.
+
+ Naval critics ... are showing signs of weariness _which_ even the
+ reported appearance of Admiral Nebogatoff in the Malacca Strait is
+ unable to remove.--_Times._
+
+4. The adverb, adverbial phrase, and adverbial clause.
+
+In writing of substantival and adjectival clauses, our appeal was for
+more logical precision than is usual. We said that the comma habitual
+before substantival clauses was in most cases unjustifiable, and should
+be omitted even at the cost of occasional slight discomfort. We said
+that with one division of adjectival, or rather relative clauses,
+commas should always be used, and with another they should always be
+omitted. With the adverbial clauses, phrases, and words, on the other
+hand, our appeal is on the whole for less precision; we recommend that
+less precision should be aimed at, at least, though more attained, than
+at present. Certain kinds of laxity here are not merely venial, but
+laudable: certain other kinds are damning evidence of carelessness or
+bad taste or bad education. It is not here a mere matter of choosing
+between one right and one wrong way; there are many degrees.
+
+_Now_ is an adverb; _in the house_ is usually an adverbial phrase; _if
+I know it_ is an adverbial clause. Logic and grammar never prohibit the
+separating of any such expressions from the rest of their sentence--by
+two commas if they stand in the middle of it, by one if they begin or
+end it. But use of the commas tends, especially with a single word,
+but also with a phrase or clause, though in inverse proportion to its
+length, to modify the meaning. _I cannot do it now_ means no more than
+it says: _I cannot do it, now_ conveys a further assurance that the
+speaker would have been delighted to do it yesterday or will be quite
+willing tomorrow. This distinction, generally recognized with the
+single word, applies also to clauses; and writers of judgement should
+take the fullest freedom in such matters, allowing no superstition
+about ‘subordinate clauses’ to force upon them commas that they feel to
+be needless, but inclining always when in doubt to spare readers the
+jerkiness of overstopping. It is a question for rhetoric alone, not for
+logic, so long as the proper allowance of commas, if any, is given;
+what the proper allowance is, has been explained a few lines back. We
+need not waste time on exemplifying this simple principle; there is so
+far no real laxity; the writer is simply free.
+
+Laxity comes in when we choose, guided by nothing more authoritative
+than euphony, to stop an adverbial phrase or adverbial clause, but
+not to stop it at both ends, though it stands in the middle of its
+sentence. This is an unmistakable offence against logic, and lays one
+open to the condemnation of examiners and precisians. But the point we
+wish to make is that in a very large class of sentences the injury to
+meaning is so infinitesimal, and the benefit to sound so considerable,
+that we do well to offend. The class is so large that only one example
+need be given:
+
+ But with their triumph over the revolt, Cranmer and his colleagues
+ advanced yet more boldly.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+The adverbial phrase is _with their triumph over the revolt_. _But_
+does not belong to it, but to the whole sentence. The writer has no
+defence whatever as against the logician; nevertheless, his reader will
+be grateful to him. The familiar intrusion of a comma after initial
+_And_ and _For_ where there is no intervening clause to justify it, of
+which we gave examples when we spoke of overstopping, comes probably by
+false analogy from the unpleasant pause that rigid punctuation has made
+common in sentences of this type.
+
+Laxity once introduced, however, has to be carefully kept within
+bounds. It may be first laid down absolutely that when an adverbial
+clause is to be stopped, but incompletely stopped, the omitted stop
+must always be the one at the beginning, and never the one at the end.
+Transgression of this is quite intolerable; we shall give several
+instances at the end of the section to impress the fact. But it is also
+true that even the omission of the beginning comma looks more and more
+slovenly the further we get from the type of our above cited sentence.
+The quotations immediately following are arranged from the less to the
+more slovenly.
+
+ His health gave way, and _at the age of fifty-six_, he died
+ prematurely in harness at Quetta.--_Times._
+
+ If mankind was in the condition of believing nothing, and _without a
+ bias in any particular direction_, was merely on the look-out for some
+ legitimate creed, it would not, I conceive, be possible....--BALFOUR.
+
+ The party _then_, consisted of a man and his wife, of his
+ mother-in-law and his sister.--F. M. CRAWFORD.
+
+ These men _in their honorary capacity_, already have sufficient work
+ to perform.--_Guernsey Evening Press._
+
+It will be observed that in the sentence from Mr. Balfour the chief
+objection to omitting the comma between _and_ and _without_ is that we
+are taken off on a false scent, it being natural at first to suppose
+that we are to supply _was_ again; this can only happen when we are in
+the middle of a sentence, and not at the beginning as in the pattern
+Cranmer sentence.
+
+The gross negligence or ignorance betrayed by giving the first and
+omitting the second comma will be convincingly shown by this array of
+sentences from authors of all degrees.
+
+ It is not strange that the sentiment of loyalty should, _from the day
+ of his accession_ have begun to revive.--MACAULAY.
+
+ Was it possible that having loved she should not so rejoice, or that,
+ _rejoicing_ she should not be proud of her love?--TROLLOPE.
+
+ I venture to suggest that, _had Lord Hugh himself been better informed
+ in the matter_ he would scarcely have placed himself....--_Times._
+
+ The necessary consequence being that the law, _to uphold the
+ restraints of which such unusual devices are employed_ is in practice
+ destitute of the customary sanctions.--_Times._
+
+ The view held ... is that, _owing to the constant absence of the
+ Commander-in-Chief on tour_ it is necessary that....--_Times._
+
+ The master of the house, to whom, _as in duty bound_ I communicated my
+ intention....--BORROW.
+
+ After this victory, Hunyadi, _with his army_ entered Belgrade, to the
+ great joy of the Magyars.--BORROW.
+
+ M. Kossuth declares that, _until the King calls on the majority to
+ take office with its own programme_ chaos will prevail.--_Times._
+
+ A love-affair, _to be conducted with spirit and enterprise_ should
+ always bristle with opposition and difficulty.--CORELLI.
+
+ And that she should force me, _by the magic of her pen_ to
+ mentally acknowledge ..., albeit with wrath and shame, my own
+ inferiority!--CORELLI.
+
+ She is a hard-working woman dependant on her literary success for a
+ livelihood, and you, _rolling in wealth_ do your best to deprive her
+ of the means of existence.--CORELLI.
+
+ Although three trainings of the local militia have been conducted
+ under the new regime, Alderney, _despite the fact that it is a portion
+ of the same military command_ has not as yet been affected.--_Guernsey
+ Evening Press._
+
+5. Parenthesis.
+
+In one sense, everything that is adverbial is parenthetic: it can be
+inserted or removed, that is, without damaging the grammar, though not
+always without damaging the meaning, of the sentence. But the adverbial
+parenthesis, when once inserted, forms a part of the sentence; we have
+sufficiently dealt with the stops it requires in the last section; the
+use of commas emphasizes its parenthetic character, and is therefore
+sometimes desirable, sometimes not; no more need be said about it.
+
+Another kind of parenthesis is that whose meaning practically governs
+the sentence in the middle of which it is nevertheless inserted as an
+alien element that does not coalesce in grammar with the rest. The
+type is--But, you will say, Caesar is not an aristocrat. This kind is
+important for our purpose because of the muddles often made, chiefly by
+careless punctuation, between the real parenthesis and words that give
+the same meaning, but are not, like it, grammatically separable. We
+shall start with an indisputable example of this muddle:
+
+ Where, do you imagine, she would lay it?--MEREDITH.
+
+These commas cannot possibly indicate anything but parenthesis; but, if
+the comma’d words were really a parenthesis, we ought to have _would
+she_ instead of _she would_. The four sentences that now follow are all
+of one pattern. The bad stopping is probably due to this same confusion
+between the parenthetic and the non-parenthetic. But it is possible
+that in each the two commas are independent, the first being one of
+those that are half rhetorical and half caused by false analogy, which
+have been mentioned as common after initial _And_ and _For_; and the
+second being the comma wrongly used, as we have maintained, before
+substantival _that_-clauses.
+
+ Whence, it would appear, that he considers that all deliverances of
+ consciousness are original judgments.--BALFOUR.
+
+ Hence, he reflected, that if he could but use his literary
+ instinct to feed some commercial undertaking, he might gain a
+ considerable....--HUTTON.
+
+ But, depend upon it, that no Eastern difficulty needs our intervention
+ so seriously as....--HUXLEY.
+
+ And yet, it has been often said, that the party issues were hopelessly
+ confused.--L. STEPHEN.
+
+A less familiar form of this mistake, and one not likely to occur
+except in good writers, since inferior ones seldom attempt the
+construction that leads to it, is sometimes found when a subordinating
+conjunction is placed late in its clause, after the object or other
+member. In the Thackeray sentence, it will be observed that the first
+comma would be right (1) if _them_ had stood after _discovered_ instead
+of where it does, (2) if _them_ had been omitted, and _any_ had served
+as the common object to both verbs.
+
+ And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an adventitious idea of
+ terror, they become without comparison greater.--BURKE.
+
+ Any of which peccadilloes, if Miss Sharp discovered, she did not tell
+ them to Lady Crawley.--THACKERAY.
+
+6. The misplaced comma.
+
+Some authors would seem to have an occasional feeling that here or
+hereabouts is the place for a comma, just as in handwriting some
+persons are well content if they get a dot in somewhere within
+measurable distance of its _i_. The dot is generally over the right
+word at any rate, and the comma is seldom more than one word off its
+true place.
+
+ All true science begins with empiricism--though all true science is
+ such exactly, in so far as it strives to pass out of the empirical
+ stage.--HUXLEY.
+
+_Exactly_ qualifies and belongs to _in so far_, &c., not _such_. The
+comma should be before it.
+
+ This, they for the most part, throw away as worthless.--CORELLI.
+
+_For the most part_, alone, is the adverbial parenthesis.
+
+But this fault occurs, perhaps nine times out of ten, in combination
+with the _that_-clause comma so often mentioned. It may be said, when
+our instances have been looked into, that in each of them, apart from
+the _that_-clause comma, which is recognized by many authorities, there
+is merely the licence that we have ourselves allowed, omission of the
+first, without omission of the last, comma of an adverbial parenthesis.
+But we must point out that Huxley, Green, and Mr. Balfour, man of
+science, historian, and philosopher, all belong to that dignified class
+of writers which is supposed to, and in most respects does, insist on
+full logical stopping; they, in view of their general practice, are not
+entitled to our slovenly and merely literary licences.
+
+ And the second is, that for the purpose of attaining culture,
+ an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual
+ as....--HUXLEY.
+
+ But the full discussion which followed over the various claims showed,
+ that while exacting to the full what he believed to be his right,
+ Edward desired to do justice to the country.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ The one difference between these gilds in country and town was, that
+ in the latter case, from their close local neighbourhood, they tended
+ to coalesce.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ It follows directly from this definition, that however restricted the
+ range of possible knowledge may be, philosophy can never be excluded
+ from it.--BALFOUR.
+
+ But the difficulty here, as it seems to me, is, that if you start from
+ your idea of evolution, these assumptions are....--BALFOUR.
+
+ He begged me to give over all unlawful pursuits, saying,
+ that if persisted in, they were sure of bringing a person to
+ destruction.--BORROW.
+
+7. Enumeration.
+
+This name, liberally interpreted, is meant to include several more
+or less distinct questions. They are difficult, and much debated by
+authorities on punctuation, but are of no great importance. We shall
+take the liberty of partly leaving them undecided, and partly giving
+arbitrary opinions; to argue them out would take more space than it
+is worth while to give. But it _is_ worth while to draw attention to
+them, so that each writer may be aware that they exist, and at least be
+consistent with himself. Typical sentences (from Beadnell) are:
+
+ _a._ Industry, honesty, and temperance, are essential to happiness.--B.
+
+ _b._ Let us freely drink in the soul of love and beauty and wisdom,
+ from all nature and art and history.--B.
+
+ _c._ Plain honest truth wants no colouring.--B.
+
+ _d._ Many states are in alliance with, and under the protection of
+ France.--B.
+
+Common variants for (_a_) are (1) Industry, honesty and temperance
+are essential ... (2) Industry, honesty and temperance, are essential
+... (3) Industry, honesty, and temperance are essential.... We
+unhesitatingly recommend the original and fully stopped form, which
+should be used irrespective of style, and not be interfered with by
+rhetorical considerations; it is the only one to which there is never
+any objection. Of the examples that follow, the first conforms to the
+correct type, but no serious harm would be done if it did not. The
+second also conforms; and, if this had followed variant (1) or (2),
+here indistinguishable, we should have been in danger of supposing
+that Education and Police were one department instead of two. The
+third, having no comma after _interests_, follows variant (3), and,
+as it happens, with no bad effect on the meaning. All three variants,
+however, may under different conditions produce ambiguity or worse.
+
+ But those that remain, the women, the youths, the children, and the
+ elders, work all the harder.--_Times._
+
+ Japanese advisers are now attached to the departments of the
+ Household, War, Finance, Education, and Police.--_Times._
+
+ An American, whose patience, tact, and ability in
+ reconciling conflicting interests have won the praise of all
+ nationalities.--_Times._
+
+Sometimes enumerations are arranged in pairs; it is then most
+unpleasant to have the comma after the last pair omitted, as in:
+
+ The orange and the lemon, the olive and the walnut elbow each other
+ for a footing in the fat dark earth.--F. M. CRAWFORD.
+
+There is a bastard form of enumeration against which warning is
+seriously needed. It is viewed as, but is not really, a legitimate case
+of type (_a_); and a quite unnecessary objection to the repetition of
+_and_ no doubt supplies the motive. Examples are:
+
+ He kept manœuvring upon Neipperg, who counter-manœuvred with
+ vigilance, good judgment, and would not come to action.--CARLYLE.
+
+ Moltke had recruited, trained, and knew by heart all the men under
+ him.--_Times._
+
+ Hence loss of time, of money, and sore trial of patience.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+The principle is this: in an enumeration given by means of a comma or
+commas, the last comma being replaced by or combined with _and_--our
+type (_a_), that is--, there must not be anything that is common to
+two members (as here, _counter-manœuvred with_, _had_, _loss_) without
+being common to all. We may say, Moltke had recruited and trained and
+knew, Moltke had recruited, had trained, and knew, or, Moltke had
+recruited, trained, and known; but we must not say what the _Times_
+says. The third sentence may run, Loss of time and money, and sore
+trial, or, Loss of time, of money, and of patience; but not as it does.
+
+So much for type (_a_). Type (_b_) can be very shortly disposed of. It
+differs in that the conjunction (_and_, _or_, _nor_, &c.) is expressed
+every time, instead of being represented except in the last place by
+a comma. It is logically quite unnecessary, but rhetorically quite
+allowable, to use commas as well as conjunctions. The only caution
+needed is that, if commas are used at all, and if the enumeration does
+not end the sentence, and is not concluded by a stronger stop, a comma
+must be inserted after the last member as well as after the others.
+In the type sentence, which contains two enumerations, it would be
+legitimate to use commas as well as _and_s with one set and not with
+the other, if it were desired either to avoid monotony or to give one
+list special emphasis. The three examples now to be added transgress
+the rule about the final comma. We arrange them from bad to worse; in
+the last of them, the apparently needless though not necessarily wrong
+comma after _fall_ suggests that the writer has really felt a comma to
+be wanting to the enumeration, but has taken a bad shot with it, as in
+the examples of section 6 on the misplaced comma.
+
+ Neither the Court, nor society, nor Parliament, nor the older men in
+ the Army have yet recognized the fundamental truth that....--_Times._
+
+ A subordinate whose past conduct in the post he fills, and whose known
+ political sympathies make him wholly unfitted, however loyal his
+ intentions may be, to give that....--_Times._
+
+ But there are uninstructed ears on whom the constant abuse, and
+ imputation of low motives may fall, with a mischievous and misleading
+ effect.--_Times._
+
+Of type (_c_) the characteristic is that we have two or more adjectives
+attached to a following noun; are there to be commas between the
+adjectives, or not? The rule usually given is that there should be,
+unless the last adjective is more intimately connected with the noun,
+so that the earlier one qualifies, not the noun, but the last adjective
+and the noun together; it will be noticed that we strictly have no
+enumeration then at all. This is sometimes useful; and so is the more
+practical and less theoretic direction to ask whether _and_ could be
+inserted, and if so use the comma, but not otherwise. These both sound
+sufficient in the abstract. But that there are doubts left in practice
+is shown by the type sentence, which Beadnell gives as correct, though
+either test would rather require the comma. He gives also as correct,
+Can flattery soothe the dull, cold ear of death?--which is not very
+clearly distinguishable from the other. Our advice is to use these
+tests when in doubt, but with a leaning to the omission of the comma.
+If it happens that a comma of this particular class is the only stop in
+a sentence, it has a false appearance of dividing the sentence into two
+parts that is very unpleasant, and may make the reader go through it
+twice to make sure that all is right--an inconvenience that should by
+all means be spared him.
+
+Type (_d_) is one in which the final word or phrase of a sentence has
+two previous expressions standing in the same grammatical relation to
+it, but their ending with different prepositions, or the fact that one
+is to be substituted for the other, or the length of the expressions,
+or some other cause, obscures this identity of relation. Add to the
+type sentence the following:
+
+ His eloquence was the main, one might almost say the sole, source of
+ his influence.--BRYCE.
+
+ To dazzle people more, he learned or pretended to learn, the Spanish
+ language.--BAGEHOT.
+
+ ... apart from philosophical and sometimes from theological,
+ theories.--BALFOUR.
+
+The rules we lay down are: (1) If possible use no stops at all. (2)
+Never use the second comma and omit the first. (3) Even when the first
+is necessary, the second may often be dispensed with. (4) Both commas
+may be necessary if the phrases are long.
+
+We should correct all the examples, including the type: the type under
+rule (1); the Bryce (which is strictly correct) under rule (3); the
+Bagehot under rules (2) and (1); and the Balfour under rules (2) and
+(3); the list two are clearly wrong. The four would then stand as
+follows:
+
+ Many states are in alliance with and under the protection of France.
+
+ His eloquence was the main, one might almost say the sole source of
+ his influence.
+
+ To dazzle people more, he learned or pretended to learn the Spanish
+ language.
+
+ ... apart from philosophical, and sometimes from theological theories.
+
+Learners will be inclined to say: all this is very indefinite; do
+give us a clear rule that will apply to all cases. Such was the view
+with which, on a matter of even greater importance than punctuation,
+Procrustes identified himself; but it brought him to a bad end. The
+clear rule, Use all logical commas, would give us:
+
+ He was born, in, or near, London, on December 24th, 1900.
+
+No one would write this who was not suffering from bad hypertrophy of
+the grammatical conscience. The clear rule, Use no commas in this sort
+of enumeration, would give:
+
+ If I have the queer ways you accuse me of, that is because but I
+ should have thought a man of your perspicacity might have been
+ expected to see that it was also why I live in a hermitage all by
+ myself.
+
+No one would write this without both commas (after _because_ and _why_)
+who was not deeply committed to an anti-comma crusade. Between the two
+extremes lie cases calling for various treatment; the ruling principle
+should be freedom within certain limits.
+
+8. The comma between independent sentences.
+
+Among the signs that more particularly betray the uneducated writer is
+inability to see when a comma is not a sufficient stop. Unfortunately
+little more can be done than to warn beginners that any serious slip
+here is much worse than they will probably suppose, and recommend them
+to observe the practice of good writers.
+
+It is roughly true that grammatically independent sentences should be
+parted by at least a semicolon; but in the first place there are very
+large exceptions to this; and secondly, the writer who really knows a
+grammatically independent sentence when he sees it is hardly in need of
+instruction; this must be our excuse for entering here into what may
+be thought too elementary an explanation. Let us take the second point
+first; it may be of some assistance to remark that a sentence joined
+to the previous one by a coordinating conjunction is grammatically
+independent, as well as one not joined to it at all. But the difference
+between a coordinating and a subordinating conjunction is itself in
+English rather fine. Every one can see that ‘I will not try; it is
+dangerous’ is two independent sentences--independent in grammar, though
+not in thought. But it is a harder saying that ‘I will not try, for it
+is dangerous’ is also two sentences, while ‘I will not try, because it
+is dangerous’ is one only. The reason is that _for_ coordinates, and
+_because_ subordinates; instead of giving lists, which would probably
+be incomplete, of the two kinds of conjunction, we mention that a
+subordinating conjunction may be known from the other kind by its
+being possible to place it and its clause before the previous sentence
+instead of after, without destroying the sense: we can say ‘Because it
+is dangerous, I will not try’, but not ‘For it is dangerous, I will
+not try’. This test cannot always be applied in complicated sentences;
+simple ones must be constructed for testing the conjunction in question.
+
+Assuming that it is now understood (1) what a subordinating and what
+a coordinating conjunction is, (2) that a member joined on by no
+more than a coordinating conjunction is a grammatically independent
+sentence, or simply a sentence in the proper meaning of the word,
+and not a subordinate clause, we return to the first point. This was
+that, though independent sentences are regularly parted by at least
+a semicolon, there are large exceptions to the rule. These we shall
+only be able to indicate very loosely. There are three conditions
+that may favour the reduction of the semicolon to a comma: (1) Those
+coordinating conjunctions which are most common tend in the order of
+their commonness to be humble, and to recognize a comma as sufficient
+for their dignity. The order may perhaps be given as: _and_, _or_,
+_but_, _so_, _nor_, _for_; conjunctions less common than these should
+scarcely ever be used with less than a semicolon; and many good
+writers would refuse to put a mere comma before _for_. (2) Shortness
+and lightness of the sentence joined on helps to lessen the need for
+a heavy stop. (3) Intimate connexion in thought with the preceding
+sentence has the same effect. Before giving our examples, which are
+all of undesirable commas, we point out that in the first two there
+are independent signs of the writers’ being uneducated; and such signs
+will often be discoverable. It will be clear from what we have said
+why the others are bad--except perhaps the third; it is particularly
+disagreeable to have two successive independent sentences tagged on
+with commas, as those beginning with _nor_ and _for_ are in that
+example.
+
+ No peace at night he enjoys, _for_ he lays awake.--_Guernsey
+ Advertiser._
+
+ Now accepted, nominal Christendom believes this, and strives to attain
+ unto it, _then_ why the inconsistency of creed and deed?--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ But who is responsible to Government for the efficiency of the Army?
+ The Commander-in-Chief and no one else, _nor_ has anyone questioned
+ the fact, _for_ it is patent.--_Times._
+
+ But even on this theory the formula above stated holds good, _for_
+ such systems, so far from being self-contained (as it were) and
+ sufficient evidence for themselves, are really....--BALFOUR.
+
+ Some banks on the Nevsky Prospect are having iron shutters fitted,
+ _otherwise_ there is nothing apparently to justify General Trepoff’s
+ proclamation.--_Times._
+
+ Everybody knows where his own shoe pinches, and, if people find
+ drawbacks in the places they inhabit, they must also find advantages,
+ _otherwise_ they would not be there.--_Times._
+
+ We have suffered many things at the hands of the Russian Navy during
+ the war, _nevertheless_ the news that Admiral Rozhdestvensky ... will
+ send a thrill of admiration....--_Times._
+
+ I think that on the whole we may be thankful for the architectural
+ merits of the Gaiety block, it has breadth and dignity of design and
+ groups well on the angular site.--_Times._
+
+It will not be irrelevant to add here, though the point has been
+touched upon in Understopping, that though a light _and_-clause may be
+introduced by no more than a comma, it does not follow that it need not
+be separated by any stop at all, as in:
+
+ When the Motor Cars Act was before the House it was suggested that
+ these authorities should be given the right to make recommendations to
+ the central authorities and that right was conceded.--_Times._
+
+9. The semicolon between subordinate members.
+
+Just as the tiro will be safer if he avoids commas before independent
+sentences, so he will generally be wise not to use a semicolon before
+a mere subordinate member. We have explained, indeed, that it is
+sometimes quite legitimate for rhetorical reasons, and is under certain
+circumstances almost required by proportion. This is when the sentence
+contains commas doing less important work than the one about which the
+question arises. But the tiro’s true way out of the difficulty is to
+simplify his sentences so that they do not need such differentiation.
+Even skilful writers, as the following two quotations will show,
+sometimes come to grief over this.
+
+ One view called me to another; one hill to its fellow, half across the
+ county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping
+ forward of a lever, I let the county flow under my wheels.--KIPLING.
+
+ Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues and all human vices;
+ the passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in
+ stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual
+ bosom?--CARLYLE.
+
+In the first of these the second comma and the semicolon clearly ought
+to change places. In the second it looks as if Carlyle had thought
+it dull to have so many commas about; but the remedy was much worse
+than dullness. Avoidance of what a correspondent supposes to be dull,
+but what would in fact be natural and right, accounts also for the
+following piece of vicarious rhetoric; the writer is not nearly so
+excited, it may be suspected, as his semicolons would make him out.
+The ordinary sensible man would have (1) used commas, and (2) either
+omitted the third and fourth _denies_ (reminding us of Zola’s famous
+_j’accuse_, not vicarious, and on an adequate occasion), or else
+inserted an _and_ before the last repetition.
+
+ Mr. Loomis denies all three categorically. He denies that the
+ Asphalt Company paid him £2,000 or any other sum; denies that he
+ purchased a claim against the Venezuelan Government and then used his
+ influence when Minister at Caracas to collect the claim; denies that
+ he agreed with Mr. Meyers or anybody else to use his influence for
+ money.--_Times._
+
+10. The exclamation mark when there is no exclamation.
+
+ My friend! this conduct amazes me!--B.
+
+We must differ altogether from Beadnell’s rule that ‘This point is
+used to denote any sudden emotion of the mind, whether of joy, grief,
+surprise, fear, or any other sensation’--at least as it is exemplified
+in his first instance, given above. The exclamation mark after _friend_
+is justifiable, not the other. The stop should be used, with one
+exception, only after real exclamations. Real exclamations include
+(1) the words recognized as interjections, as _alas_, (2) fragmentary
+expressions that are not complete sentences, as _My friend_ in the
+example, and (3) complete statements that contain an exclamatory word,
+as:
+
+ What a piece of work is man!--B.
+
+The exception mentioned above is this: when the writer wishes to
+express his own incredulity or other feeling about what is not his own
+statement, but practically a quotation from some one else, he is at
+liberty to do it with a mark of exclamation; in the following example,
+the epitaph-writer expresses either his wonder or his incredulity about
+what Fame says.
+
+ Entomb’d within this vault a lawyer lies
+ Who, Fame assureth us, was just and wise!--B.
+
+The exclamation mark is a neat and concise sneer at the legal
+profession.
+
+Outside these narrow limits the exclamation mark must not be used. We
+shall quote a very instructive saying of Landor’s: ‘I read warily;
+and whenever I find the writings of a lady, the first thing I do
+is to cast my eye along her pages, to see whether I am likely to be
+annoyed by the traps and spring-guns of interjections; and if I happen
+to espy them I do not leap the paling’. To this we add that when the
+exclamation mark is used after mere statements it deserves the name,
+by which it is sometimes called, mark of admiration; we feel that the
+writer is indeed lost in admiration of his own wit or impressiveness.
+But this use is mainly confined to lower-class authors; when a grave
+historian stoops to it, he gives us quite a different sort of shock
+from what he designed.
+
+ The unfortunate commander was in the situation of some bold,
+ high-mettled cavalier, rushing to battle on a warhorse whose tottering
+ joints threaten to give way at every step, and leave his rider to the
+ mercy of his enemies!--PRESCOTT.
+
+ The road now struck into the heart of a mountain region, where
+ woods, precipices, and ravines were mingled together in a sort of
+ chaotic confusion, with here and there a green and sheltered valley,
+ glittering like an island of verdure amidst the wild breakers of a
+ troubled ocean!--PRESCOTT.
+
+11. Confusion between question and exclamation.
+
+ Fortunate man!--who would not envy you! Love!--who would, who could
+ exist without it--save me!--CORELLI.
+
+ What wonder that the most docile of Russians should be crying out ‘how
+ long’!--_Times._
+
+We have started with three indisputable instances of the exclamation
+mark used for the question mark. It is worth notice that the correct
+stopping for the end of the second quotation (though such accuracy
+is seldom attempted) would be:--long?’? To have fused two questions
+into an exclamation is an achievement. But these are mere indefensible
+blunders, not needing to be thought twice about, such as author and
+compositor incline to put off each on the other’s shoulders.
+
+The case is not always so clear. In the six sentences lettered for
+reference, _a_-_d_ have the wrong stop; in _e_ the stop implied by _he
+exclaims_ is also wrong; in _f_, though the stop is right assuming
+that the form of the sentence is what was really meant, we venture to
+question this point, as we do also in some of the earlier sentences.
+Any one who agrees with the details of this summary can save himself
+the trouble of reading the subsequent discussion.
+
+ _a._ In that interval what had I not lost!--LAMB.
+
+ _b._ And what will not the discontinuance cost me!--RICHARDSON.
+
+ _c._ A streak of blue below the hanging alders is certainly a
+ characteristic introduction to the kingfisher. How many people first
+ see him so?--_Times._
+
+ _d._ Does the reading of history make us fatalists? What courage does
+ not the opposite opinion show!--EMERSON.
+
+ _e._ What economy of life and money, he exclaims, would not have been
+ spared the empire of the Tsars had it not rendered war certain by
+ devoting itself so largely to the works of peace.--_Times._
+
+ _f._ How many, who think no otherwise than the young painter, have we
+ not heard disbursing secondhand hyperboles?--STEVENSON.
+
+It will be noticed that in all these sentences except _c_ there is a
+negative, which puts them, except _f_, wrong; while in _c_ it is the
+absence of the negative that makes the question wrong. It will be
+simplest to start with _c_. The writer clearly means to let us know
+that many people see the kingfisher first as a blue streak. He might
+give this simply so, as a statement. He might (artificially) give it
+as an exclamation--_How many first see him so!_ Or he might (very
+artificially) give it as a question--_How many do not first see him
+so?_--a ‘rhetorical question’ in which _How many_ interrogative is
+understood to be equivalent to _Few_ positive. He has rejected the
+simple statement; vaulting ambition has o’erleapt, and he has ended in
+a confusion between the two artificial ways of saying the thing, taking
+the words of the possible exclamation and the stop of the possible
+question. In _a_, _b_, _d_, and implicitly in _e_, we have the converse
+arrangement, or derangement. But as a little more clear thinking is
+required for them, we point out that the origin of the confusion
+(though the careless printing of fifty or a hundred years ago no doubt
+helped to establish it) lies in the identity between the words used
+for questions and for exclamations. It will be enough to suggest the
+process that accounts for _a_; the ambiguity is easily got rid of by
+inserting a noun with _what_.
+
+ _Question_: What amount had I lost?
+
+ _Exclamation_: What an amount I had lost!
+
+That is the first stage; the resemblance is next increased by inverting
+subject and verb in the exclamation, which is both natural enough in
+that kind of sentence, and particularly easy after _In that interval_.
+So we get
+
+ _Question_: In that interval, what (amount) had I lost?
+
+ _Exclamation_: In that interval, what (an amount) had I lost!
+
+The words, when the bracketed part of each sentence is left out, are
+now the same; but the question is of course incapable of giving the
+required meaning. The writer, seeing this, but deceived by the order
+of words into thinking the exclamation a question, tries to mend it
+by inserting _not_; _what ... not_, in rhetorical questions, being
+equivalent to _everything_. At this stage some writers stick, as
+Stevenson in _f_. Others try to make a right out of two wrongs by
+restoring to the quondam exclamation, which has been wrongly converted
+with the help of _not_ into a question, the exclamation mark to which
+it has after conversion no right. Such is the genesis of _a_, _b_, _d_.
+The proper method, when the simple statement is rejected, as it often
+reasonably may be, is to use the exclamation, not the Stevensonian
+question[13], to give the exclamation its right mark, and not to insert
+the illogical negative.
+
+12. Internal question and exclamation marks.
+
+By this name we do not mean that insertion of a bracketed stop of which
+we shall nevertheless give one example. That is indeed a confession of
+weakness and infallible sign of the prentice hand, and further examples
+will be found in _Airs and Graces_, _miscellaneous_; but it is outside
+grammar, with which these sections are concerned.
+
+ Under these circumstances, it would be interesting to ascertain
+ the exact position of landlords whose tenants decline to pay rent,
+ and whose only asset (!) from their property is the income-tax now
+ claimed.--_Times._
+
+What is meant is the ugly stop in the middle of a sentence, unbracketed
+and undefended by quotation marks, of which examples follow. To
+novelists, as in the first example, it may be necessary for the purpose
+of avoiding the nuisance of perpetual quotation marks. But elsewhere
+it should be got rid of by use of the indirect question or otherwise.
+Excessive indulgence in direct questions or exclamations where there
+is no need for them whatever is one of the sensational tendencies of
+modern newspapers.
+
+ Why be scheming? Victor asked.--MEREDITH.
+
+ What will Japan do? is thought the most pressing question of
+ all.--_Times._ (What Japan will do is thought, &c.)
+
+ What next? is the next question which the American Press
+ discusses.--_Times._ (‘What next?’ is, &c. Or, What will come next is,
+ &c.)
+
+Amusing efforts are shown below at escaping the ugliness of the
+internal question mark. Observe that the third quotation has a worse
+blunder, since we have here two independent sentences.
+
+ Can it be that the Government will still persist in continuing the now
+ hopeless struggle is the question on every lip?--_Times._
+
+ Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of
+ their youth, yet what of it, they ask?--MORLEY.
+
+ Yet we remember seeing l’Abbé Constantin some sixteen years ago or
+ more at the Royalty, with that fine old actor Lafontaine in the
+ principal part, and seeing it with lively interest. Was it distinctly
+ ‘dates’, for nothing wears so badly as the namby-pamby?--_Times._
+
+13. The unaccountable comma.
+
+We shall now conclude these grammatical sections with a single example
+of those commas about which it is only possible to say that they are
+repugnant to grammar. It is as difficult to decide what principle they
+offend against as what impulse can possibly have dictated them. They
+are commonest in the least educated writers of all; and, next to
+these, in the men of science whose overpowering conscientiousness has
+made the mechanical putting in of commas so habitual that it perhaps
+becomes with them a sort of reflex action, and does itself at wrong
+moments without their volition.
+
+ The Rector, lineal representative of the ancient monarchs of the
+ University, though now, little more than a ‘king of shreds and
+ patches.’--HUXLEY.
+
+
+ THE COLON
+
+It was said in the general remarks at the beginning of this chapter
+that the systematic use of the colon as one of the series (,), (;),
+(:), (.), had died out with the decay of formal periods. Many people
+continue to use it, but few, if we can trust our observation, with any
+nice regard to its value. Some think it a prettier or more impressive
+stop than the semicolon, and use it instead of that; some like variety,
+and use the two indifferently, or resort to one when they are tired
+of the other. As the abandonment of periodic arrangement really makes
+the colon useless, it would be well (though of course any one who
+still writes in formal periods should retain his rights over it) if
+ordinary writers would give it up altogether except in the special
+uses, independent of its quantitative value, to which it is being more
+and more applied by common consent. These are (1) between two sentences
+that are in clear antithesis, but not connected by an adversative
+conjunction; (2) introducing a short quotation; (3) introducing a
+list; (4) introducing a sentence that comes as fulfilment of a promise
+expressed or implied in the previous sentence; (5) introducing an
+explanation or proof that is not connected with the previous sentence
+by _for_ or the like. Examples are:
+
+ (1) Man proposes: God disposes.
+
+ (2) Always remember the ancient maxim: Know thyself.--B.
+
+ (3) Chief rivers: Thames, Severn, Humber....
+
+ (4) Some things we can, and others we cannot do: we can walk, but we
+ cannot fly.--BIGELOW.
+
+ (5) Rebuke thy son in private: public rebuke hardens the heart.--B.
+
+In the following clear case of antithesis a colon would have been more
+according to modern usage than the semicolon.
+
+ As apart from our requirements Mr. Arnold-Forster’s schemes have many
+ merits; in relation to them they have very few.--_Times._
+
+It now only remains, before leaving actual stops for the dash, hyphen,
+quotation mark, and bracket, to comment on a few stray cases of
+ambiguity, false scent, and ill-judged stopping. We have not hunted
+up, and shall not manufacture, any of the patent absurdities that
+are amusing but unprofitable. The sort of ambiguity that most needs
+guarding against is that which allows a sleepy reader to take the words
+wrong when the omission or insertion of a stop would have saved him.
+
+ The chief agitators of the League, who have--not unnaturally
+ considering the favours showered upon them in the past--a high sense
+ of their own importance....--_Times._
+
+With no comma after _unnaturally_ the first thought is that the
+agitators not unnaturally consider; second thoughts put it right; but
+second thoughts should never be expected from a reader.
+
+ Simultaneously extensive reclamation of land and harbour improvements
+ are in progress at Chemulpo and Fusan.--_Times._
+
+With no comma after the first word, the sleepy reader is set wondering
+what _simultaneously extensive_ means, and whether it is journalese for
+_equally extensive_.
+
+ But Anne and I did, for we had played there all our lives--at least,
+ all the years we had spent together and the rest do not count in the
+ story. When Anne and I came together we began to live.--CROCKETT.
+
+A comma after _together_ would save us from adding the two sets
+of years to each other. In the next piece, on the other hand, the
+uncomfortable comma after _gold_ is apparently meant to warn us quite
+unnecessarily that _here and there_ belongs to the verb.
+
+ Flecks of straw-coloured gold, here and there lay upon it, where the
+ sunshine touched the bent of last year.--CROCKETT.
+
+ After that, having once fallen off from their course, they at length
+ succeeded in crossing the Aegean, and beating up in the teeth of the
+ Etesian winds, only yesterday, seventy days out from Egypt, put in at
+ the Piraeus.--S. T. IRWIN.
+
+The omission of the comma between _and_ and _beating_ would ordinarily
+be quite legitimate. Here, it puts us off on a false scent, because
+it allows _beating_ to seem parallel with _crossing_ and object to
+_succeeded in_; we have to go back again when we get to the end, and
+work it out.
+
+ The French demurring to the conditions which the English commander
+ offered, again commenced the action.--B.
+
+The want of a comma between _French_ and _demurring_ makes us assume
+an absolute construction and expect another subject, of which we are
+disappointed.
+
+The next two pairs of examples illustrate the effect of mere accidental
+position on stopping. This is one of the numberless small disturbing
+elements that make cast-iron rules impossible in punctuation.
+
+ I must leave you to discover what the answer is.
+
+ What the answer is, I must leave you to discover.
+
+That is, a substantival clause out of its place is generally allowed
+the comma that all but the straitest sect of punctuators would refuse
+it in its place.
+
+ In the present dispute, therefore, the local politicians have had to
+ choose between defence of the principle of authority and espousing the
+ cause of the local police.--_Times._
+
+ Of its forty-four commissioners however few actually took any part in
+ its proceedings; and the powers of the Commission....--J. R. GREEN.
+
+The half adverbs half conjunctions of which _therefore_ and _however_
+are instances occupy usually the second place in the sentence. When
+there, it is of little importance whether they are stopped or not,
+though we have indicated our preference for no stops. But when it
+happens that they come later (or earlier), the commas are generally
+wanted. _Therefore_ in the first of these sentences would be as
+uncomfortable if stripped as _however_ actually is in the second.
+
+
+ DASHES
+
+Moved beyond his wont by our English ill-treatment of the dash,
+Beadnell permits himself a wail as just as it is pathetic.
+
+ ‘The dash is frequently employed in a very capricious and arbitrary
+ manner, as a substitute for all sorts of points, by writers whose
+ thoughts, although, it may be, sometimes striking and profound, are
+ thrown together without order or dependence; also by some others, who
+ think that they thereby give prominence and emphasis to expressions
+ which in themselves are very commonplace, and would, without this
+ fictitious assistance, escape the observation of the reader, or be
+ deemed by him hardly worthy of notice.’
+
+It is all only too true; these are the realms of Chaos, and the lord
+of them is Sterne, from whom modern writers of the purely literary
+kind have so many of their characteristics. Wishing for an example,
+we merely opened the first volume of _Tristram Shandy_ at a venture,
+and ‘thus the Anarch old With faltering speech and visage incomposed
+Answered’:
+
+ --Observe, I determine nothing upon this.--My way is ever to point
+ out to the curious, different tracts of investigation, to come at the
+ first springs of the events I tell;--not with a pedantic fescue,--or
+ in the decisive manner of Tacitus, who outwits himself and his
+ reader;--but with the officious humility of a heart devoted to the
+ assistance merely of the inquisitive;--to them I write,--and by them I
+ shall be read,--if any such reading as this could be supposed to hold
+ out so long,--to the very end of the world.--STERNE.
+
+The modern newspaper writer who overdoes the use of dashes is seldom as
+incorrect as Sterne, but is perhaps more irritating:
+
+ There are also a great number of people--many of them not in the
+ least tainted by militarism--who go further and who feel that a man
+ in order to be a complete man--that is, one capable of protecting
+ his life, his country, and his civil and political rights--should
+ acquire as a boy and youth the elements of military training,--that
+ is, should be given a physical training of a military character,
+ including....--_Spectator._
+
+It must be added, however, that Beadnell himself helps to make things
+worse, by countenancing the strange printer’s superstition that (,--)
+is beautiful to look upon, and (--,) ugly.
+
+Under these circumstances we shall have to abandon our usual practice
+of attending only to common mistakes, and deal with the matter a
+little more systematically. We shall first catalogue, with examples,
+the chief uses of the dash; next state the debatable questions that
+arise; and end with the more definite misuses. It will be convenient
+to number all examples for reference; and, as many or most of the
+quotations contain some minor violation of what we consider the true
+principles, these will be corrected in brackets.
+
+1. Chief common uses.
+
+_a._ Adding to a phrase already used an explanation, example, or
+preferable substitute.
+
+ 1. Nicholas Copernicus was instructed in that seminary where it is
+ always happy when any one can be well taught,--the family circle.--B.
+ (Omit the comma)
+
+ 2. Anybody might be an accuser,--a personal enemy, an infamous person,
+ a child, parent, brother, or sister.--LOWELL. (Omit the comma)
+
+ 3. That the girls were really possessed seemed to Stoughton and his
+ colleagues the most rational theory,--a theory in harmony with the
+ rest of their creed.--LOWELL. (Omit the comma)
+
+_b._ Inviting the reader to pause and collect his forces against the
+shock of an unexpected word that is to close the sentence. It is
+generally, but not always, better to abstain from this device; the
+unexpected, if not drawn attention to, is often more effective because
+less theatrical.
+
+ 4. To write imaginatively a man should have--imagination.--LOWELL.
+
+_c._ Assuring the reader that what is coming, even if not unexpected,
+is witty. Writers should be exceedingly sparing of this use; good wine
+needs no bush.
+
+ 5. Misfortune in various forms had overtaken the county families, from
+ high farming to a taste for the junior stage, and--the proprietors
+ lived anywhere else except on their own proper estates.--CROCKETT.
+
+_d._ Marking arrival at the principal sentence or the predicate after a
+subordinate clause or a subject that is long or compound.
+
+ 6. As soon as the queen shall come to London, and the houses of
+ Parliament shall be opened, and the speech from the throne be
+ delivered,--then will begin the great struggle of the contending
+ factions.--B.
+
+_e._ Resuming after a parenthesis or long phrase, generally with
+repetition of some previous words in danger of being forgotten.
+
+ 7. It is now idle to attempt to hide the fact that never was the
+ Russian lack of science, of the modern spirit, or, to speak frankly,
+ of intelligence--never was the absence of training or of enthusiasm
+ which retards the efforts of the whole Empire displayed in a more
+ melancholy fashion than in the Sea of Japan.--_Times._ (Add a comma
+ after _intelligence_)
+
+_f._ Giving the air of an afterthought to a final comment that would
+spoil the balance of the sentence if preceded only by an ordinary stop.
+Justifiable when really wanted, that is, when it is important to keep
+the comment till the end; otherwise it is slightly insulting to the
+reader, implying that he was not worth working out the sentence for
+before it was put down.
+
+ 8. As they parted, she insisted on his giving the most solemn
+ promises that he would not expose himself to danger--which was quite
+ unnecessary.
+
+_g._ Marking a change of speakers when quotation marks and ‘he said’,
+&c., are not used; or, in a single speech, a change of subject or
+person addressed.
+
+ 9. Who created you?--God.--B.
+
+ 10. ... And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
+ The fair Ophelia!
+
+_h._ With colon or other stop before a quotation.
+
+ 11. Hear Milton:--How charming is divine Philosophy!
+
+ 12. What says Bacon?--Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
+
+_i._ Introducing a list.
+
+ 13. The four greatest names in English literature are almost the first
+ we come to,--Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.--B. (Omit the
+ comma before the dash)
+
+_k._ Confessing an anacoluthon, or substitution of a new construction
+for the one started with.
+
+ 14. Then the eye of a child,--who can look unmoved into that well
+ undefiled, in which heaven itself seems to be reflected?--BIGELOW.
+ (Omit the comma)
+
+_l._ Breaking off a sentence altogether.
+
+ 15. Oh, how I wish--! But what is the use of wishing?
+
+_m._ Doubled to serve the purpose of brackets. It gives a medium
+between the light comma parenthesis and the heavy bracket parenthesis.
+It also has the advantage over brackets that when the parenthesis
+ends only with the sentence the second dash need not be given; this
+advantage, however, may involve ambiguity, as will be shown.
+
+ 16. In every well regulated community--such as that of England,--the
+ laws own no superior.--B. (The comma should either be omitted or
+ placed after instead of before the second dash).
+
+These are a dozen distinct uses of more or less value or importance,
+to which others might no doubt be added; but they will suffice both to
+show that the dash is a hard-worked symbol, and to base our remarks
+upon.
+
+2. Debatable questions.
+
+There are several questions that must be answered before we can use
+the dash with confidence. First, is the dash to supersede stops at the
+place where it is inserted, or to be added to them? Secondly, what is
+its relation to the stops in the part of the sentence (or group of
+sentences) that follows it? Does its authority, that is, extend to the
+end of the sentence or group, or where does it cease? Thirdly, assuming
+that it is or can be combined with stops, what is the right order as
+between the two?
+
+Beadnell’s answer to the first question is: _The dash does not dispense
+with the use of the ordinary points at the same time, when the
+grammatical construction of the sentence requires them._ But inasmuch
+as a dash implies some sort of break, irregular pause, or change of
+intention, it seems quite needless to insert the stop that would have
+been used if it had not been decided that a stop was inadequate. The
+dash is a confession that the stop will not do; then let the stop go.
+The reader, who is the person to be considered, generally neither
+knows nor cares to know how the sentence might, with inferior effect,
+have been written; he only feels that the stop is otiose, and that
+his author had better have been off with the old love before he was
+on with the new. There are exceptions to this: obviously in examples
+9, 10, 11, 12, and 15, where the dash is at the end or beginning of a
+sentence; and perhaps also in sentences of which the reader can clearly
+foresee the grammatical development. In example 7, for instance, it
+is clear that a participle (_displayed_ or another) is due after
+_never was_ &c.; a comma after _intelligence_ is therefore definitely
+expected. So in example 6 we are expecting either another continuation
+of _as soon as_, or the principal sentence, before either of which
+a comma is looked for. In examples 2 and 3, on the other hand, the
+sentence may for all we know be complete at the place where the dash
+stands, so that no expectation is disappointed by omitting the comma.
+The rule, then, should be that a dash is a substitute for any internal
+stop, and not an addition to it, except when, from the reader’s point
+of view, a particular stop seemed inevitable.
+
+It must be admitted that that conclusion is not very certain, and also
+that the matter is of no great importance, provided that the stops,
+if inserted, are the right ones. More certainty is possible about
+the combination of stops with the double dash, which we have not yet
+considered. The probable origin of the double dash will be touched
+upon when we come to the second question; but whatever its origin,
+it is now simply equivalent to a pair of brackets, except that it is
+slightly less conspicuous, and sometimes preferred on that account.
+Consequently, the same rule about stops will apply to both, and as
+there is no occasion to treat of brackets separately, it may here be
+stated for both. The use of a parenthesis being to insert, without
+damage to the rest of the sentence, something that is of theoretically
+minor importance, it is necessary that we should be able simply to
+remove the two dashes or brackets with everything enclosed by them, and
+after their removal find the sentence complete and rightly punctuated.
+Further, there is no reason for using inside the parenthesis any stop
+that has not an internal value; that is, no stop can possibly be
+needed just before the second dash except an exclamation or question
+mark, and none at all just after the first; but stops may be necessary
+to divide up the parenthesis itself if it is compound. Three examples
+follow, with the proper corrections in brackets:
+
+ 17. Garinet cites the case of a girl near Amiens possessed by three
+ demons,--Mimi, Zozo, and Crapoulet,--in 1816.--LOWELL. (Omit both
+ commas; the first is indeed just possible, though not required, in
+ the principal sentence; the last is absolutely meaningless in the
+ parenthesis)
+
+ 18. Its visions and its delights are too penetrating,--too
+ living,--for any white-washed object or shallow fountain long to
+ endure or to supply.--RUSKIN. (Omit both commas; this time the
+ first is as impossible in the principal sentence as the second is
+ meaningless in the parenthesis)
+
+ 19. The second carries us on from 1625 to 1714--less than a
+ century--yet the walls of the big hall in the Examination Schools are
+ not only well covered....--_Times._ (Insert a comma, as necessary
+ to the principal sentence, outside the dashes; whether before the
+ first or after the last will be explained in our answer to the third
+ question)
+
+The second question is, how far the authority of the dash extends.
+There is no reason, in the nature of things, why we should not on
+the one hand be relieved of it by the next stop, or on the other be
+subject to it till the paragraph ends. The three following examples,
+which we shall correct in brackets by anticipation, but which we shall
+also assume not to be mere careless blunders, seem to go on the first
+hypothesis.
+
+ 20. The Moral Nature, that Law of laws, whose revelations
+ introduce greatness--yea, God himself, into the open soul, is not
+ explored.--EMERSON. (Substitute a dash for the comma after _himself_.
+ Here, however, Emerson expects us to terminate the authority at the
+ right comma rather than at the first that comes, making things worse)
+
+ 21. I ... there complained of the common notions of the special
+ virtues--justice, &c., as too vague to furnish exact determinations of
+ the actions enjoined under them.--H. SIDGWICK. (Substitute a dash for
+ the comma after _&c._)
+
+ 22. There are vicars and vicars, and of all sorts I love an innovating
+ vicar--a piebald progressive professional reactionary, the least.--H.
+ G. WELLS. (Substitute a dash for the comma after _reactionary_)
+
+It needs no further demonstration, however, that commas are frequently
+used after a dash without putting an end to its influence; and if they
+are to be sometimes taken, nevertheless, as doing so, confusion is sure
+to result. Unless the author of the next example is blind to the danger
+that two neighbouring but independent dashes may be mistaken for a
+parenthetic pair, he must have assumed that the authority of a dash is
+terminated at any rate by a semicolon; that, if true, would obviate the
+danger.
+
+ 23. It is a forlorn hope, however excellent the translation--and Mr.
+ Hankin’s could not be bettered; or however careful the playing--and
+ the playing at the Stage Society performance was meticulously
+ careful.--_Times._ (Insert a dash between _bettered_ and the
+ semicolon, which then need not be more than a comma)
+
+But that it is not true will probably be admitted on the strength of
+sentences like:
+
+ 24. There may be differences of opinion on the degrees--no one takes
+ white for black: most people sometimes take blackish for black--, but
+ that is not fatal to my argument.
+
+On the other hand, we doubt whether a full stop is ever allowed to
+stand in the middle of a dash parenthesis, as it of course may in a
+bracket parenthesis. The reason for the distinction is clear. When we
+have had a left-hand bracket we know for certain that a right-hand
+one is due, full stops or no full stops; but when we have had a dash,
+we very seldom know for certain that it is one of a pair; and the
+appearance of a full stop would be too severe a trial of our faith.
+It seems natural to suppose that the double-dash parenthesis is thus
+accounted for: the construction started with a single dash; but as it
+was often necessary to revert to the main construction, the second
+dash was resorted to as a declaration that the close time, or state of
+siege, was over. The rule we deduce is: All that follows a dash is to
+be taken as under its influence until either a second dash terminates
+it, or a full stop is reached.
+
+Our answer to the third question has already been given by
+implication; but it may be better to give it again explicitly. We first
+refer to examples 1, 2, 3, 6, 13, 14, 24, in all of which the stop, if
+one is to be used, though our view is that in most of these sentences
+it should not, is in the right place; and to example 16, in which it is
+in the wrong place. We next add two new examples of wrong order, with
+corrections as usual; the rules for stops with brackets are the same as
+with double dashes.
+
+ 25. Throughout the parts which they are intended to make most
+ personally their own, (the Psalms,) it is always the Law which is
+ spoken of with chief joy.--RUSKIN. (Remove both commas, and use
+ according to taste either none at all, or one after the second bracket)
+
+ 26. What is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds
+ revolve and intermingle without number or end,--deep yawning under
+ deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space,--or,
+ whether....--EMERSON. (Remove both commas, and place one after the
+ second dash)
+
+A protest must next be made against the compositor’s superstition
+embodied in Beadnell’s words: _As the dash in this case supplies the
+place of the parenthesis, strictly speaking, the grammatical point
+should follow the last dash; but as this would have an unsightly
+appearance, it is always placed before it._ This unsightliness is
+either imaginary or at most purely conventional, and should be entirely
+disregarded. The rules will be (1) For the single dash: Since the dash
+is on any view either a correction of or an addition to the stop that
+would have been used if dashes had not existed, the dash will always
+stand after the stop. (2) For the double dash or brackets: There will
+be one stop or none according to the requirements of the principal
+sentence only; there will never be two stops (apart, of course, from
+internal ones); if there is one, it will stand before the first or
+after the last dash or bracket according as the parenthesis belongs to
+the following or the preceding part of the principal sentence. It may
+be added that it is extremely rare for the parenthesis to belong to
+the last part, and therefore for the stop to be rightly placed before
+it. In the following example constructed for the occasion it does so
+belong; but for practical purposes the rule might be that if a stop is
+required it stands after the second dash or bracket.
+
+ 27. When I last saw him, (a singular fact) his nose was pea-green.
+
+3. Common misuses.
+
+_a._ If two single independent dashes are placed near each other, still
+more if they are in the same sentence, the reader naturally takes
+them for a pair constituting a parenthesis, and has to reconsider the
+sentence when he finds that his first reading gives nonsense. We refer
+back to example 23. But this indiscretion is so common that it is well
+to add some more. The sentences should be read over without the two
+dashes and what they enclose.
+
+ Then there is also Miss Euphemia, long deposed from her office
+ of governess, but pensioned and so driven to good works and the
+ manufacture of the most wonderful crazy quilts--for which, to her
+ credit be it said, she shows a remarkable aptitude--as I should have
+ supposed.--CROCKETT.
+
+ The English came mainly from the Germans, whom Rome found hard to
+ conquer in 210 years--say, impossible to conquer--when one remembers
+ the long sequel.--EMERSON.
+
+ As for Anne--well, Anne was Anne--never more calm than when others
+ were tempestuous.--CROCKETT.
+
+_b._ The first dash is inserted and the second forgotten. It will
+suffice to refer back to examples 20, 21, 22.
+
+_c._ Brackets and dashes are combined. It is a pity from the
+collector’s point of view that Carlyle, being in the mood, did not
+realize the full possibilities, and add a pair of commas, closing up
+the parenthesis in _robur et aes triplex_.
+
+ How much would I give to have my mother--(though both my wife and I
+ have of late times lived wholly for her, and had much to endure on her
+ account)--how much would I give to have her back to me.--CARLYLE.
+
+_d._ Like the comma, the dash is sometimes misplaced by a word or two.
+In the first example, the first dash should be one place later; and in
+the second, unless we misread the sentence and this is another case of
+two single dashes, the second dash should be two places earlier, and
+itself be replaced by a comma.
+
+ Here she is perhaps at her best--and in the best sense--her most
+ feminine, as a woman sympathizing with the sorrows peculiar to
+ women.--_Times._
+
+ The girl he had dreamed about--the girl with the smile was there--near
+ him, in his hut.--CROCKETT.
+
+_e._ Dashes are sometimes used when an ordinary stop would serve
+quite well. In the Lowell sentences, the reason why a comma is not
+used is that the members are themselves broken up by commas, and
+therefore demand a heavier stop to divide them from each other; this,
+as explained in the early part of the chapter, is the place for a
+semicolon. In the Corelli sentence, it is a question between comma and
+semicolon, either of which would do quite well.
+
+ Shakespeare found a language already to a certain extent established,
+ but not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mongers,--a
+ versification harmonized, but which had not yet....--LOWELL.
+
+ While I believe that our language had two periods of culmination
+ in poetic beauty,--one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the
+ ballads, which deal only with narrative and feeling,--another of
+ Art....--LOWELL.
+
+ We were shown in,--and Mavis, who had expected our visit did not keep
+ us waiting long.--CORELLI.
+
+
+ HYPHENS
+
+We return here to our usual practice of disregarding everything
+not necessary for dealing with common mistakes. But some general
+principles, most of which will probably find acceptance, will be useful
+to start from.
+
+1. Hyphens are regrettable necessities, and to be done without when
+they reasonably may.
+
+2. There are three degrees of intimacy between words, of which the
+first and loosest is expressed by their mere juxtaposition as separate
+words, the second by their being hyphened, and the third or closest
+by their being written continuously as one word. Thus, hand workers,
+hand-workers, handworkers.
+
+3. It is good English usage to place a noun or other non-adjectival
+part of speech before a noun, printing it as a separate word, and to
+regard it as serving the purpose of an adjective in virtue of its
+position; for instance, _war expenditure_; but there are sometimes
+special objections to its being done. Thus, words in _-ing_ may be
+actual adjectives (participles), or nouns (gerunds), used in virtue of
+their position as adjectives; and a visible distinction is needed. A
+_walking stick_ is a stick that walks, and the phrase might occur as a
+metaphorical description of a stiffly behaved person: a _walking-stick_
+or _walkingstick_ is a stick for walking; the difference may sometimes
+be important, and consistency may be held to require that all compounds
+with gerunds should be hyphened or made into single words.
+
+4. Not only can a single word in ordinary circumstances be thus treated
+as an adjective, but the same is true of a phrase; the words of the
+phrase, however, must then be hyphened, or ambiguity may result. Thus:
+Covent Garden; Covent-Garden Market; Covent-Garden-Market salesmen.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The prevailing method of giving railway and street names, besides its
+ungainliness, is often misleading and contrary to common sense. For
+one difficulty we suggest recurrence to the old-fashioned formula with
+commas, and _and_, as in _The London, Chatham, and Dover_. On another,
+it is to be observed that _New York-street_ should mean the new part of
+York Street, but _New-York Street_ the street named after New York. The
+set of examples includes some analogous cases, besides the railway and
+street names.
+
+ It is stated that the train service on the
+ Hsin-min-tun-Kau-pan-tse-Yingkau section of the Imperial Chinese
+ Railway will be restored within a few days.--_Times._
+
+Hsinmintun, Kaupantse, and Yingkau. These places can surely do without
+their internal hyphens in an English newspaper; and one almost
+suspects, from the absence of a hyphen between _Ying_ and _kau_, that
+the _Times’s_ stock must have run short.
+
+ Even third-class carriages are scarce on the Dalny-Port Arthur
+ line.--_Times._
+
+The Dalny and Port-Arthur line. By general principle 4, though _Port
+Arthur_ needs no hyphen by itself, it does as soon as it stands for an
+adjective with _line_: the Port-Arthur line. Also, by 2, the _Times_
+version implies that _Dalny_ is more closely connected with _Port_ than
+_Port_ with _Arthur_. We do indeed most of us know at present that
+there is no Dalny Port so called, and that there is a Port Arthur. But
+in the next example, who would know that there was a Brest Litovski,
+but for the sentence that follows?
+
+ A general strike has been declared on the Warsaw-Brest Litovski
+ railway. The telegraph stations at Praga, Warsaw, and Brest Litovski
+ have been damaged.--_Times._
+
+The Warsaw and Brest-Litovski railway. By 4, the hyphen between _Brest_
+and _Litovski_ is necessary. If we write _Warsaw-Brest-Litovski_, it is
+natural to suppose that three places are meant; the _and_ solution is
+accordingly the best.
+
+ At Bow-street, Robert Marsh, greengrocer, of Great Western-road,
+ Harrow-road, was charged....--_Times._
+
+Great-Western Road, Harrow Road. Bow-street, as _at_ (not _in_) shows,
+is a compound epithet for _police-court_ understood, and has a right to
+its hyphen. By 3, there is no need for a hyphen after _Harrow_, and by
+1, if unnecessary, it is undesirable. As to the other road, there are
+three possibilities. The _Times_ is right if there is a _Western Road_
+of which one section is called _Great_, and the other _Little_. If the
+name means literally the great road that runs west, there should be no
+hyphen at all. If the road is named from the Great Western Railway, or
+from the Great-Western Hotel, our version is right.
+
+ Cochin China waters.--_Times._
+
+By 4, _Cochin China_ gives _Cochin-China_ waters.
+
+ Within the last ten days two Anglo-South Americans have been in my
+ office arranging for passages to New Zealand.--_Times._
+
+_Anglo-South-Americans_ is the best that can be done. What is really
+wanted is _Anglo-SouthAmericans_, to show that _South_ goes more
+closely with _America_. But it is too hopelessly contrary to usage at
+present.
+
+ The proceeds of the recent London-New York loan.--_Times._ (London and
+ New-York loan.)
+
+ A good, generous, King Mark-like sort of man.--_Times._
+
+_King-Mark-like_, in default of _KingMark-like_. But the addition of
+_-like_ to compound names should be avoided.
+
+ The Fugitive Slave-law in America before the rebellion.---H. SIDGWICK.
+ (Fugitive-Slave law.)
+
+ The steam-cars will have 16-horse power engines.--_Times._
+
+_Steam cars_ is better, by 3, and 1. And 16-horsepower engines. We can
+do this time what the capitals of _American_ and _Mark_ prevented in
+the previous compounds.
+
+Entirely gratuitous hyphens.
+
+ One had a male-partner, who hopped his loutish burlesque.--MEREDITH.
+
+ Gluttony is the least-generous of the vices.--MEREDITH.
+
+ A little china-box, bearing the motto ‘Though lost to sight, to memory
+ dear,’ which Dorcas sent her as a remembrance.--ELIOT.
+
+This evidently means a box made of china. A box to hold china would
+have the hyphen properly, and there are many differentiations of this
+kind, of which _black bird_, as opposed to _black-bird_ or _blackbird_,
+is the type.
+
+ Bertie took up a quantity of waste-papers, and thrust them down into
+ the basket.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+This is probably formed by a mistaken step backwards from _waste-paper
+basket_, where the hyphen is correct, as explained in 3.
+
+In phrases like _wet and dry fly fishing_, compounded of _wet-fly
+fishing_ and _dry-fly fishing_, methods vary. For instance:
+
+ A low door, leading through a moss and ivy-covered wall.--SCOTT.
+
+ A language ... not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar
+ mongers.--LOWELL.
+
+ Those who take human or womankind for their study.--THACKERAY.
+
+The single phrases would have the hyphen for different reasons
+(_moss-covered_, &c.), all but _human kind_. The only quite
+satisfactory plan is the Germans’, who would write _moss-_ and
+_ivy-covered_. This is imitated in English, as:
+
+ In old woods and on fern-and gorse-covered hilltops they do no harm
+ whatever.--_Spectator._
+
+ Refreshment-, boarding-, and lodging-house keepers have suffered
+ severely too.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+But imitations of foreign methods are not much to be recommended;
+failing that, Lowell’s method seems the best--to use no hyphens, and
+keep the second compound separate.
+
+Adverbs that practically form compounds with verbs, but stand after,
+and not necessarily next after them, need not be hyphened unless
+they would be ambiguous in the particular sentence if they were
+not hyphened. This may often happen, since most of them are also
+prepositions; but even then, it is better to rearrange the sentence
+than to hyphen.
+
+ He gratefully hands-over the establishment to his country.--MEREDITH.
+
+ Thoughtful persons, unpledged to shore-up tottering dogmas.--HUXLEY.
+
+It is a much commoner fault to over-hyphen than to under-hyphen. But
+in the next example _malaria-infected_ must be written, by 3. And
+in the next again, one of the differentiations we have spoken of is
+disregarded; _the fifty first_ means the fifty that come first: _the
+fifty-first_ is the one after fifty. The ambiguity in the third example
+is obvious.
+
+ The demonstration that a malaria infected mosquito, transported a
+ great distance to a non-malarial country, can....--_Times._
+
+ ‘Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?’ ‘In fifty different
+ ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first.’--KIPLING.
+
+ The Cockney knew what the Lord of Session knew not, that the British
+ public is gentility crazy.--BORROW.
+
+There comes a time when compound words that have long had a hyphen
+should drop it; this is when they have become quite familiar. It seems
+absurd to keep any longer the division in _to-day_ and _to-morrow_;
+there are no words in the language that are more definitely single
+and not double words; so much so that the ordinary man can give no
+explanation of the _to_. On the other hand, the word italicized in the
+next example may well puzzle a good many readers without its hyphen;
+it has quite lately come into use in this country (‘Chiefly U.S.’ says
+the _Oxford Dictionary_, which prints the hyphen, whereas Webster does
+not), and is in danger of being taken at first sight for a foreign word
+and pronounced in strange ways.
+
+ The soldiers ... have been building _dugouts_ throughout
+ April.--_Times._
+
+There is a tendency to write certain familiar combinations
+irrationally, which may be mentioned here, though it does not
+necessarily involve the hyphen. With _in no wise_ and _at any rate_,
+the only rational possibilities are to treat them like _nevertheless_
+as one word, or like _none the less_ as three words (the right way, by
+usage), or give them two hyphens. _Nowise_ and _anyrate_ are not nouns
+that can be governed by _in_ and _at_.
+
+ Don McTaggart was the only man on his estate whom Sir Tempest could in
+ nowise make afraid.--CROCKETT.
+
+ French rules of neutrality are in nowise infringed by the
+ squadron.--_Times._
+
+ At anyrate.--CORELLI, _passim_.
+
+
+ QUOTATION MARKS
+
+Quotation marks, like hyphens, should be used only when necessary.
+The degree of necessity will vary slightly with the mental state of
+the audience for whom a book is intended. To an educated man it is
+an annoyance to find his author warning him that something written
+long ago, and quoted every day almost ever since, is not an original
+remark now first struck out. On the other hand, writers who address
+the uneducated may find their account in using all the quotation
+marks they can; their readers may be gratified by seeing how well read
+the author is, or may think quotation marks decorative. The following
+examples start with the least justifiable uses, and stop at the point
+where quotation marks become more or less necessary.
+
+ John Smith, Esq., ‘Chatsworth’, Melton Road, Leamington.
+
+The implication seems to be: living in the house that sensible people
+call 164 Melton Road, but one fool likes to call Chatsworth.
+
+ How is it that during the year in which that scheme has been, so to
+ speak, ‘in the pillory’, no alternative has, at any rate, been made
+ public?--_Times._
+
+Every metaphor ought to be treated as a quotation, if _in the pillory_
+is to be. Here, moreover, quotation marks are a practical tautology,
+after _so to speak_.
+
+ Robert Brown and William Marshall, convicted of robbery with
+ violence, were sentenced respectively to five years’ penal servitude
+ and eighteen strokes with the ‘cat’, and seven years’ penal
+ servitude.--_Times._
+
+There is by this time no danger whatever of confusion with the cat of
+one tail.
+
+ ... not forgetful of how soon ‘things Japanese’ would be things of the
+ past for her.--SLADEN.
+
+This may be called the propitiatory use, analogous in print to the
+tentative air with which, in conversation, the Englishman not sure of
+his pronunciation offers a French word. So trifling a phrase is not
+worth using at the cost of quotation marks. If it could pass without,
+well and good.
+
+ So that the prince and I were able to avoid that ‘familiarity
+ that breeds contempt’ by keeping up our own separate
+ establishments.--CORELLI.
+
+ ... the Rector, lineal representative of the ancient monarchs of
+ the University, though now, little more than a ‘king of shreds and
+ patches’.--HUXLEY.
+
+ We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits--yet so, as ‘with a
+ difference’.--LAMB.
+
+_With a difference_ (_Ophelia_: O, you must wear your rue with a
+difference) might escape notice as a quotation if attention were not
+drawn to it. A reader fit to appreciate Lamb, however, could scarcely
+fail to be sufficiently warned by the odd turn of the preceding words.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+A question of some importance to writers who trouble themselves about
+accuracy, though no doubt the average reader is profoundly indifferent,
+is that of the right order as between quotation marks and stops.
+Besides the conflict in which we shall again find ourselves with the
+aesthetic compositor, it is really difficult to arrive at a completely
+logical system. Before laying down what seems the best attainable, we
+must warn the reader that it is not the system now in fashion; but
+there are signs that printers are feeling their way towards better
+things, and this is an attempt to anticipate what they will ultimately
+come to. We shall make one or two postulates, deduce rules, and give
+examples. After the examples (in order that readers who are content
+either to go on with the present compromise or to accept our rules
+may be able to skip the discussion), we shall consider some possible
+objections.
+
+No stop is ever required at the end of a quotation to separate the
+quotation, as such, from what follows; that is sufficiently done by the
+quotation mark.
+
+A stop is required to separate the containing sentence, which may go
+on beyond the quotation’s end, but more commonly does not, from what
+follows.
+
+An exclamation or question mark--which are not true stops, but tone
+symbols--may be an essential part of the quotation.
+
+When a quotation is broken by such insertions as _he said_, any stop or
+tone symbol may be an essential part of the first fragment of quotation.
+
+No stop is needed at either end of such insertions as _he said_ to
+part them from the quotation, that being sufficiently done by the
+quotation marks.
+
+From these considerations we deduce the following rules:
+
+1. The true stops should never stand before the second quotation mark
+except
+
+(_a_) when, as in dialogue given without framework, complete sentences
+entirely isolated and independent in grammar are printed as quotations.
+Even in these, it must be mentioned that the true stops are strictly
+unnecessary; but if the full stop (which alone can here be in question)
+is used in deference to universal custom, it should be before the
+quotation mark.
+
+(_b_) when a stop is necessary to divide the first fragment of an
+interrupted quotation from the second.
+
+2. Words that interrupt quotations should never be allowed stops to
+part them from the quotation.
+
+3. The tone symbols should be placed before or after the second
+quotation mark according as they belong to the quotation or to the
+containing sentence. If both quotation and containing sentence need a
+tone symbol, both should be used, with the quotation mark between them.
+
+The bracketed numbers before the examples repeat the numbers of the
+rules.
+
+ (1) Views advocated by Dr. Whately in his well-known ‘Essays’;
+
+ It is enough for us to reflect that ‘Such shortlived wits do wither as
+ they grow’.
+
+ We hear that ‘whom the gods love die young’, and thenceforth we
+ collect the cases that illustrate it.
+
+ (1 _a_) ‘You are breaking the rules.’ ‘Well, the rules are silly.’
+
+ (1 _b_) ‘Certainly not;’ he exclaimed ‘I would have died rather’.
+
+ (2) ‘I cannot guess’ he retorted ‘what you mean’.
+
+ (3) But ‘why drag in Velasquez?’
+
+ But what is the use of saying ‘Call no man happy till he dies’?
+
+ Is the question ‘Where was he?’ or ‘What was he doing?’?
+
+ How absurd to ask ‘Can a thing both be and not be?’!
+
+If indignation is excited by the last two monstrosities, we can only
+say what has been implied many other times in this book, that the
+right substitute for correct ugliness is not incorrect prettiness,
+but correct prettiness. There is never any difficulty in rewriting
+sentences like these. (Is the question where he was, &c.?) (‘Can a
+thing both be and not be?’ The question is absurd.) But it should be
+recognized that, if such sentences are to be written, there is only one
+way to punctuate them.
+
+It may be of interest to show how these sentences stand in the books.
+1st sentence (‘Essays;’); 2nd (grow.’); 3rd (young,’); 4th, as here;
+5th (not,’ he exclaimed;) (rather.’); 6th (guess,’ he retorted,)
+(mean.’); 7th (Velasquez’?); 8th (saying,) (dies?’). The last two are
+fabricated.
+
+The objections may now be considered.
+
+ ‘The passing crowd’ is a phrase coined in the spirit of indifference.
+ Yet, to a man of what Plato calls ‘universal sympathies,’ and even
+ to the plain, ordinary denizens of this world, what can be more
+ interesting than ‘the passing crowd’?--B.
+
+After giving this example, Beadnell says:--‘The reason is clear: the
+words quoted are those of another, but the _question_ is the writer’s
+own. Nevertheless, for the sake of neatness, the ordinary points, such
+as the comma, semicolon, colon, and full stop, _precede_ the quotation
+marks in instances analogous to the one quoted; but the exclamation
+follows the same rule as the interrogation’.
+
+Singularly enough, the stops that are according to this always to
+precede the quotation mark (for the ‘analogous cases’ are the only
+cases in which the outside position would be so much as considered) are
+just the ones that by our rules ought hardly ever to do so, whereas the
+two that are sometimes allowed the outside position are the two that we
+admit to be as often necessary inside as outside. Neatness is the sole
+consideration; just as the ears may be regarded as not hearing organs,
+but ‘handsome volutes of the human capital’, so quotation marks may be
+welcomed as giving a good picturesque finish to a sentence; those who
+are of this way of thinking must feel that, if they allowed outside
+them anything short of fine handsome stops like the exclamation and
+question marks, they would be countenancing an anticlimax. But they
+are really mere conservatives, masquerading only as aesthetes; and
+their conservatism will soon have to yield. Argument on the subject is
+impossible; it is only a question whether the printer’s love for the
+old ways that seem to him so neat, or the writer’s and reader’s desire
+to be understood and to understand fully, is to prevail.
+
+Another objector takes a stronger position. He admits that logic, and
+not beauty, must decide: ‘but before we give up the old, let us be
+sure we are giving it up for a new that is logical’. He invites our
+attention to the recent paragraph containing Beadnell’s views. ‘Why,
+in the last sentence of that paragraph, is the full stop outside?
+“But the exclamation follows the same rule as the interrogation” is
+a complete sentence, quoted; why should its full stop be separated
+from it?’ The answer is that the full stop is not _its_ full stop;
+_it_ needs no stop, having its communications forward absolutely
+cut off by the quotation mark. It is a delusion to suppose that any
+sentence has proprietary rights in a stop, though it may have in a
+tone symbol; a stop is placed after it merely to separate it from what
+follows, if necessary.--‘And the full stop after every last sentence
+(not a question or exclamation) of a paragraph, chapter, or book?’--Is
+illogical, and only to be allowed, like those in the isolated
+quotations mentioned in rule (1 _a_), in deference to universal custom.
+Our full stop belongs, not to the last sentence of the quotation,
+but to the paragraph, which is all one sentence, the whole quotation
+simply playing the part, helped by the quotation marks, of object to
+_says_.--‘But _says_ is followed by a colon, and a colon between verb
+and object breaks your own rules.’--No; (:--) is something different
+from a stop; it is an extra quotation mark, as much a conventional
+symbol as the full stop in M.A. and other abbreviations.--‘Well, then,
+instead of _says_, read _continues_, to which the quotation clearly
+cannot be object; will that affect our full stop?’--No; the quotation
+will still be part of the sentence; not indeed a noun, as before,
+and object to the verb; but an adverb, simply equivalent to _thus_,
+attached to the verb.
+
+Satisfied on that point, the objector takes up our statement that
+the quotation mark cuts communications; a similar statement was made
+in the _Dashes_ section about brackets and double dashes. He submits
+a quotation:--Some people ‘grunt and sweat under’ very easy burdens
+indeed; and a pair of brackets:--It is (not a little learning, but)
+much conceit that is a dangerous thing. ‘It is surely not true that
+either quotation mark or bracket cuts the communications there;
+_under_ in the quotation, _but_ in the brackets, are in very active
+communication with _burdens_ and _conceit_, outside.’ The answer
+is that these are merely convenient misuses of quotation marks
+and brackets. A quotation and a parenthesis should be complete
+in themselves, and instances that are not so may be neglected in
+arguing out principles. Special rules might indeed be required in
+consequence for the abnormal cases; but in practice this is not so with
+quotations.--‘A last point. To adapt one of your instances, here are
+two sets of sentences, stopped as I gather you would stop them:--(1) He
+asked me “Can a thing both be and not be?” The question is absurd. (2)
+He said “A thing cannot both be and not be”. I at once agreed. Now, if
+the full stop is required after the quotation mark in the second, it
+must be required after that in the first, in each case to part, not the
+quotation, but the containing sentence, from the next sentence. What
+right have you to omit the full stop in the first?’--None whatever; it
+will not be omitted.--‘So we have an addition of some importance to the
+monstrosities you said we should have to avoid.’--Well, sentences of
+this type are not common except in a style of affected simplicity.--‘Or
+real simplicity. He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of
+Jonas, lovest thou me? And is there any particular simplicity, real or
+affected, about this:--(Richmond looked at him with an odd smile for a
+moment or two before asking, as if it were the most natural question in
+the world, “But is it true?”.)?’--In the Bible quotation there is, as
+you say, real simplicity--or rather there was. That sort of simplicity
+now would not be real, but artificial. Any one who has good reason to
+imitate primitive style may imitate primitive punctuation too. But one
+step forward in precision we have definitely taken from the biblical
+typography: we should insist on quotation marks in such a sentence.
+They do not seem pedantic or needless now; nor will a further step in
+precision seem so when once it has been taken. And as to your Richmond
+sentence, and ‘monstrosities’ in general, it may be confessed here,
+as we are out of hearing in this discussion of all but those who are
+really interested, that the word was used for the benefit only of those
+who are indifferent. A sentence with two stops is not a monstrosity, if
+it wants them; and that will be realized, if once sensible punctuation
+gets the upper hand of neatness.
+
+These are the most plausible objections on principle to a system of
+using quotation marks with stops that would be in the main logical.
+It may be thought, however, that it was our business to be practical
+and opportunist, and suggest nothing that could not be acted on at
+once. But general usage, besides being illogical, is so inconsistent,
+different writers improving upon it in special details that appeal to
+them, that it seemed simpler to give our idea of what would be the best
+attainable, and trust to the tiro’s adopting any parts of it that may
+not frighten him by their unaccustomed look.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+There are single and double quotation marks, and, apart from minor
+peculiarities, two ways of utilizing the variety. The prevailing one is
+to use double marks for most purposes, and single ones for quotations
+within quotations, as:--“Well, so he said to me ‘What do you mean by
+it?’ and I said ‘I didn’t mean anything’”. Some of those who follow
+this system also use the single marks for isolated words, short
+phrases, and anything that can hardly be called a formal quotation;
+this avoids giving much emphasis to such expressions, which is an
+advantage. The more logical method is that adopted, for instance, by
+the Oxford University Press, of reserving the double marks exclusively
+for quotations within quotations. Besides the loss of the useful
+degrees in emphasis (sure, however, to be inconsistently utilized),
+there is a certain lack of full-dress effect about important quotations
+when given this way; but that is probably a mere matter of habituation.
+It should be mentioned that most of the quoted quotations in this
+section had originally the double marks, but have been altered to
+suit the more logical method; and the unpleasantness of the needless
+quotation marks with which we started has so been slightly toned down.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+A common mistake, of no great importance, but resulting in more or less
+discomfort or perplexity to the reader, is the placing of the first
+quotation mark earlier than the place where quotation really begins.
+The commonest form of it is the including of the quoter’s introductory
+_that_, which it is often obvious that the original did not contain.
+Generally speaking, if _that_ is used the quotation marks may be
+dispensed with; not, however, if the exact phraseology is important;
+but at least the mark should be in the right place.
+
+ I remember an old scholastic aphorism, which says, ‘that the man
+ who lives wholly detached from others, must be either an angel or a
+ devil.’--BURKE.
+
+As the aphorism descends through Latin from Aristotle (ἢ θηρίον
+ἢ θεός), the precise English Words are of no importance, and the
+quotation marks might as well be away; at least the first should be
+after _that_.
+
+ Then, with ‘a sarvant, sir’ to me, he took himself into the
+ kitchen.--BORROW.
+
+Clearly _a_ is not included in the quotation.
+
+ They make it perfectly clear and plain, he informed the House, that
+ ‘Sir Antony MacDonnell was invited by him, rather as a colleague than
+ as a mere Under-Secretary, to register my will.’--_Times._
+
+The change from _him_ to _my_ would be quite legitimate if the first
+quotation mark stood before _rather_ instead of where it does; as it
+stands, it is absurd.
+
+ It is long since he partook of the Holy Communion, though there was an
+ Easterday, of which he writes, when ‘he might have remained quietly in
+ (his) corner during the office, if...’.--_Times._
+
+The (_his_) is evidently bracketed to show that it is substituted for
+the original writer’s _my_. This is very conscientious; but it follows
+that either the same should have been done for _he_, or the quotation
+mark should be after _he_.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+We began this section by saying that quotation marks should be used
+only when necessary. A question that affects the decision to some
+extent is the difference between direct, indirect, and half-and-half
+quotation. We can say (1) He said ‘I will go’. (2) He said he would go.
+(3) He said ‘he would go’. The first variety is often necessary for the
+sake of vividness. The third is occasionally justified when, though
+there is no occasion for vividness, there is some turn of phrase that
+it is important for the reader to recognize as actually originating,
+not with the writer, but with the person quoted; otherwise, that
+variety is to be carefully avoided; how disagreeable it is will appear
+in the example below. For ordinary purposes the second variety, which
+involves no quotation marks, is the best.
+
+ He then followed my example, declared he never felt more refreshed in
+ his life, and, giving a bound, said, ‘he would go and look after his
+ horses.’--BORROW.
+
+Further, there may be quotation, not of other people’s words, but of
+one’s own thoughts. In this case the method prevailing at present is
+that exemplified in the _Times_ extract below. Taken by itself, there
+is no objection to it. We point out, however, that it is irreconcilable
+with the principles explained in this section, which demand the
+addition of a full stop (derived?.). That would be a worse monstrosity
+than the one in the first of the three legitimate alternatives that we
+add. We recommend that the _Times_ method should be abandoned, and the
+first or second of the others used according to circumstances.
+
+ The next question is, Whence is this income derived?--_Times._
+
+ The next question is ‘Whence is this income derived?’. (Full direct
+ quotation. Observe the ‘monstrosity’ stop)
+
+ The next question is whence this income is derived. (Indirect
+ quotation)
+
+ The next question is ‘Whence this income is derived’. (Indirect
+ quotation with quotation marks, or half-and-half quotation, like the
+ Borrow sentence)
+
+In concluding the chapter on Punctuation we may make the general remark
+that the effect of our recommendations, whether advocating as in the
+last section more strictness, or as in other parts more liberty, would
+be, certainly, a considerable reduction in the number of diacritical
+marks cutting up and disfiguring the text; and, as we think, a practice
+in most respects more logical and comprehensible.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] See chapter _Syntax_, section _Relatives_.
+
+[13] Of course, however, the rhetorical question is often not, as here,
+the result of a confusion, nor to be described as ‘very artificial’. E.
+g., _What would I not give to be there?_ _To what subterfuge has he not
+resorted?_
+
+
+
+
+ PART II
+
+
+Some less important chapters had been designed on Euphony, Ambiguity,
+Negligence, and other points. But as the book would with them have run
+to too great length, some of the examples have been simply grouped here
+in independent sections, with what seemed the minimum of comment.
+
+
+1. JINGLES
+
+ To read his tales is a bapt_ism_ of optim_ism_.--_Times._
+
+ Sensation is the dir_ect_ eff_ect_ of the _mo_de of _mo_tion of the
+ sensorium.--HUXLEY.
+
+ There have been no periodi_cal_ gener_al_ physi_cal_
+ catastrophes.--HUXLEY.
+
+ It is con_tended_, indeed, that these preparations are in_tended_
+ only....--_Times._
+
+ It is in_tend_ed to ex_tend_ the system to this country.--_Times._
+
+ M. Sphakianakis con_ducted_ pro_tracted_ negotiations.--_Times._
+
+ Those inalienable rights of life, liber_ty_ and proper_ty_ upon which
+ the safe_ty_ of socie_ty_ depends.--CHOATE.
+
+ He served his apprenticeship to statesmanship.--BRYCE.
+
+ Ap_par_ently pre_par_ed to hold its ground.--_Times._
+
+ I awaited a belated train.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+ Hand them on silver salvers to the server.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ ... adjourned the discus_sion_ of the ques_tion_ of dela_tion_ until
+ to-day.--_Times._
+
+ In this house of pover_ty_ and digni_ty_, of past grandeur and present
+ simplici_ty_, the brothers lived together in uni_ty_.--H. CAINE.
+
+ Their invalidi_ty_ was caused by a technicali_ty_.--_Times._
+
+ ... had for consola_tion_ the expan_sion_ of its
+ domin_ion_.--_Spectator._
+
+ The essential founda_tion_ of all the organiza_tion_ needed for the
+ promo_tion_ of educa_tion_.--HUXLEY.
+
+ The projects of M. Witte _re_lative to the _re_gul_ation_ of the
+ _re_l_ations_ between capital and labour.--_Times._
+
+The remaining instances are of consecutive adverbs in _-ly_. Parallel
+adverbs, qualifying the same word simultaneously, do not result in
+a jingle; but in all our instances the two adverbs either qualify
+different words, or qualify the same word at different times. Thus,
+in the Huxley sentence, _unquestionably_ either qualifies _is_, or
+qualifies _true_ only after _largely_ has qualified it: it is not the
+(universal) truth, but the partial truth, of the proposition that is
+unquestionable.
+
+ When the traffic in our streets becomes entirely mechanically
+ propelled.--_Times._
+
+ He lived practically exclusively on milk.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ Critics would probably decidedly disagree.--HUTTON.
+
+ The children are functionally mentally defective.--_Times._
+
+ What is practically wholly and entirely the British commerce and
+ trade.--_Times._
+
+ ... who answered, usually monosyllabically, ....--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ The policy of England towards Afghanistan is, as formerly, entirely
+ friendly.--_Times._
+
+ Money spent possibly unwisely, probably illegally, and certainly
+ hastily.--_Times._
+
+ The deer are necessarily closely confined to definite areas.--_Times._
+
+ We find Hobbes’s view ... tolerably effectively combated.--MORLEY.
+
+ Great mental endowments do not, unhappily, necessarily involve a
+ passion for obscurity.--H. G. WELLS.
+
+ The proposition of Descartes is unquestionably largely true.--HUXLEY.
+
+
+2. ALLITERATION
+
+Alliteration is not much affected by modern prose writers of any
+experience; it is a novice’s toy. The antithetic variety has probably
+seen its best days, and the other instances quoted are doubtless to be
+attributed to negligence.
+
+ I must needs trudge at every old _beldam’s bidding_ and every young
+ _minx’s maggot_.--SCOTT.
+
+ Onward _gl_ided Dame Ursula, now in _gl_immer and now in
+ _gl_oom.--SCOTT.
+
+ I have seen her in the same day as changeful as a _m_armozet, and as
+ stubborn as a _m_ule.--SCOTT.
+
+ Thus, in _con_sequence of the _con_tinuance of that grievance,
+ the means of education at the disposal of the _Pr_otestants and
+ _Pr_esbyterians were _st_unted and _st_erilized.--BALFOUR.
+
+ A gaunt well with a shattered pent-house _dw_arfed the _dw_elling.--H.
+ G. WELLS.
+
+ It shall be lawful to _p_icket _p_remises for the _p_urpose of
+ _p_eacefully _p_ersuading any _p_erson to....--_Times._
+
+
+3. REPEATED PREPOSITIONS
+
+ The founders _of_ the study _of_ the origin _of_ human
+ culture.--MORLEY.
+
+ After the manner _of_ the author _of_ the immortal speeches _of_
+ Pericles.--MORLEY.
+
+ Togo’s announcement _of_ the destruction _of_ the fighting power _of_
+ Russia’s Pacific squadron.--_Times._
+
+ The necessity _of_ the modification _of_ the system _of_
+ administration.--_Times._
+
+ An exaggeration _of_ the excesses _of_ the epoch _of_
+ sentimentalism.--MORLEY.
+
+ Hostile to the justice _of_ the principle _of_ the taxing _of_ those
+ values which....--LORD ROSEBERY.
+
+ The observation _of_ the facts _of_ the geological succession _of_ the
+ forms _of_ life.--HUXLEY.
+
+ Devoid _of_ any accurate knowledge _of_ the mode _of_ development _of_
+ many groups _of_ plants and animals.--HUXLEY.
+
+ One uniform note _of_ cordial recognition _of_ the complete success
+ _of_ the experiment.--_Times._
+
+ The first fasciculus _of_ the second volume _of_ the Bishop _of_
+ Salisbury’s critical edition _of_ St. Jerome’s Revision _of_ the Latin
+ New Testament.--_Times._
+
+ The appreciation _of_ the House _of_ the benefits derived _by_
+ the encouragement afforded _by_ the Government to the operations
+ _of_....--_Times._
+
+ The study _of_ the perfectly human theme _of_ the affection _of_ a man
+ _of_ middle age.--_Times._
+
+ His conviction _of_ the impossibility _of_ the proposal either _of_
+ the creation _of_ elective financial boards....--_Daily Express._
+
+ Representative _of_ the mind _of_ the age _of_ literature.--RUSKIN.
+
+ Indignation _against_ the worst offenders _against_....--_Times._
+
+ A belief _in_ language _in_ harmony with....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ The opposition ... _to_ the submission _to_ the claims.--_Times._
+
+ Taken up _with_ warfare _with_ an enemy....--FREEMAN.
+
+ Palmerston wasted the strength derived _by_ England _by_ the great war
+ _by_ his brag.--GRANVILLE.
+
+ Unpropitious _for_ any project _for_ the reduction....--_Times._
+
+ Called _upon_ to decide _upon_ the reduction....--_Times._
+
+
+4. SEQUENCE OF RELATIVES
+
+ A garret, in _which_ were two small beds, in one of _which_ she gave
+ me to understand another gentleman slept.--BORROW.
+
+ Still no word of enlightenment had come _which_ should pierce the
+ thick clouds of doubt _which_ hid the face of the future.--E. F.
+ BENSON.
+
+ The ideal of a general alphabet ... is one _which_ gives a basis
+ _which_ is generally acceptable.--H. SWEET.
+
+ He enjoyed a lucrative practice, _which_ enabled him to maintain and
+ educate a family with all the advantages _which_ money can give in
+ this country.--TROLLOPE.
+
+ The clown _who_ views the pandemonium of red brick _which_ he has
+ built on the estate _which_ he has purchased.--BORROW.
+
+ The main thread of the book, _which_ is a daring assault upon that
+ serious kind of pedantry _which_ utters itself in....--L. STEPHEN.
+
+ Practical reasons _which_ combine to commend this architectural
+ solution of a problem _which_ so many of us dread....--_Times._
+
+ The teachers, _who_ took care that the weaker, _who_ might otherwise
+ be driven to the wall, had ... their fair share.--_Times._
+
+ Let the heads and rulers of free peoples tell this truth to
+ a Tsar _who_ seeks to dominate a people _who_ will not and
+ cannot....--_Times._
+
+ He made a speech ... _which_ contained a passage on the conditions of
+ modern diplomacy _which_ attracted some attention.--_Times._
+
+There is of course no objection to the recurrence when the relatives
+are parallel.
+
+
+5. SEQUENCE OF ‘THAT’ OR OTHER CONJUNCTIONS
+
+Here, as with relatives, the recurrence is objectionable only when one
+of the clauses is subordinate to the other.
+
+ I do not forget _that_ some writers have held _that_ a system is to be
+ inferred.--BALFOUR.
+
+ I say _that_ there is a real danger _that_ we may run to the other
+ extreme.--HUXLEY.
+
+ It is clear ... _that_ the opinion was _that_ it is not
+ incompatible.--NANSEN.
+
+ I find _that_ the view _that_ Japan has now a splendid opportunity ...
+ is heartily endorsed.--_Times._
+
+ I must point out _that_ it is a blot on our national education _that_
+ we have serving....--_Times._
+
+ The Chairman replied to the allegation made by the Radical press to
+ the effect _that_ the statement _that_ the British workman will not
+ work as an unskilled labourer in the mines is inaccurate.--_Times._
+
+ An official telegram states _that_ General Nogi reports
+ _that_....--_Times._
+
+ The conviction _that_ the Tsar must realize _that_ the prestige of
+ Russia is at stake.--_Times._
+
+ He was so carried away by his discovery _that_ he ventured on the
+ assertion _that_ the similarity between the two languages was so great
+ _that_ an educated German could understand whole strophes of Persian
+ poetry.--H. SWEET.
+
+ I may fairly claim to have no personal interest in defending
+ the council, _although_ I believe, _though_ I am not certain,
+ that....--_Times._
+
+
+6. METRICAL PROSE
+
+The novice who is conscious of a weakness for the high-flown and the
+inflated should watch narrowly for metrical snatches in his prose; they
+are a sure sign that the fit is on him.
+
+ Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness / and self-respect, innate in
+ every sphere / of life, and shedding light on every grain / of dust
+ in God’s highway, so smooth below / your carriage-wheels, so rough
+ beneath the tread / of naked feet, bethink yourselves / in looking
+ on the swift descent / of men who _have_ lived in their own esteem,
+ / that there are scores of thousands breathing now, / and breathing
+ thick with painful toil, who in / that high respect have never lived
+ at all, / nor had a chance of life! Go ye, who rest / so placidly upon
+ the sacred Bard / who had been young, and when he strung his harp /
+ was old, ... / go, Teachers of content and honest pride, / into the
+ mine, the mill, the forge, / the squalid depths of deepest ignorance,
+ / and uttermost abyss of man’s neglect, / and say can any hopeful
+ plant spring up / in air so foul that it extinguishes / the soul’s
+ bright torch as fast as it is kindled! /--DICKENS.
+
+ But now,--now I have resolved to stand alone,--/ fighting my battle
+ as a man should fight, / seeking for neither help nor sympathy, / and
+ trusting not in self....--CORELLI.
+
+ And the gathering orange stain / upon the edge of yonder western peak,
+ / reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.--RUSKIN.
+
+ His veins were opened; but he talked on still / while life was slowly
+ ebbing, and was calm / through all the agony of lingering death.--W.
+ W. CAPES.
+
+ Can I then trust the evidence of sense? / And art thou really to my
+ wish restored? / Never, oh never, did thy beauty shine / with such
+ bewitching grace, as that which now / confounds and captivates my
+ view! / ... Where hast thou lived? where borrowed this perfection? /
+ ... Oh! I am all amazement, joy and fear! / Thou wilt not leave me!
+ No! we must not part / again. By this warm kiss! a thousand times
+ / more sweet than all the fragrance of the East! / we never more
+ will part. O! this is rapture! / ecstasy! and what no language will
+ explain--SMOLLETT.
+
+
+7. SENTENCE ACCENT
+
+It is only necessary to read aloud any one of the sentences quoted
+below, to perceive at once that there is something wrong with its
+accentuation. To lay down rules on this point would be superfluous,
+even if it were practicable; for in all doubtful cases the ear can
+and should decide. A writer who cannot trust himself to balance his
+sentences properly should read aloud all that he writes. It is useless
+for him to argue that readers will not read his work aloud, and that
+therefore the fault of which we are speaking will escape notice. For,
+although the fault may appear to be exclusively one of sound, it
+is always in fact a fault of sense: unnatural accentuation is only
+the outward sign of an unnatural combination of thought. Thus, nine
+readers out of ten would detect in a moment, without reading aloud,
+the ill-judged structure in our first example: the writer has tried
+to do two incompatible things at the same time, to describe in some
+detail the appearance of his characters, and to begin a conversation;
+the result is that any one reading the sentence aloud is compelled to
+maintain, through several lines of new and essential information, the
+tone that is appropriate only to what is treated as a matter of course.
+The interrogative tone protests more loudly than any other against this
+kind of mismanagement; but our examples will show that other tones are
+liable to the same abuse.
+
+The accentuation of each clause or principal member of a sentence
+is primarily fixed by its relation to the other members: when the
+internal claims of its own component parts clash with this fixed
+accentuation--when, for instance, what should be read with a uniformly
+declining accentuation requires for its own internal purposes a marked
+rise and fall of accent--reconstruction is necessary to avoid a badly
+balanced sentence. The passage from Peacock will illustrate this: after
+_pupils_, and still more after _counterpoint_, the accentuation should
+steadily decline to the end of the passage; but, conflicting with this
+requirement, we have the exorbitant claims of a complete anecdote,
+containing within itself an elaborately accented speech. To represent
+the anecdote as an insignificant appendage to _pupils_ was a fault of
+sense; it is revealed to the few who would not have perceived it by the
+impossibility of reading the passage naturally.
+
+ ‘Are Japanese Aprils always as lovely as this?’ asked the man in the
+ light tweed suit of two others in immaculate flannels with crimson
+ sashes round their waists and puggarees folded in cunning plaits round
+ their broad Terai hats.--D. SLADEN.
+
+ ‘Here we are’, he said presently, after they had turned off the main
+ road for a while and rattled along a lane between high banks topped
+ with English shrubs, and looking for all the world like an outskirt of
+ Tunbridge Wells.--D. SLADEN.
+
+ I doubt if Haydn would have passed as a composer before a committee of
+ lords like one of his own pupils, who insisted on demonstrating to him
+ that he was continually sinning against the rules of counterpoint; on
+ which Haydn said to him, ‘I thought I was to teach you, but it seems
+ you are to teach me, and I do not want a preceptor’, and thereon he
+ wished his lordship a good morning.--PEACOCK.
+
+ She wondered at having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person
+ resembling in her repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry
+ tower, down among those districts of suburban London or appalling
+ provincial towns passed now and then with a shudder, where the
+ funereal square bricks-up the church, that Arctic hen-mother sits
+ on the square, and the moving dead are summoned to their round of
+ penitential exercise by a monosyllabic tribulation-bell.--MEREDITH.
+
+The verb _wonder_ presupposes the reader’s familiarity with the
+circumstance wondered at; it will not do the double work of announcing
+both the wonder and the thing wondered at. ‘I wondered at Smith’s being
+there’ implies that my hearer knew that Smith was there; if he did
+not, I should say ‘I was surprised to find...’. Accordingly, in this
+very artificial sentence, the writer presupposes the inconceivable
+question: ‘What were her feelings on finding that she had drifted
+... tribulation-bell?’. To read a sentence of minute and striking
+description with the declining accentuation that necessarily follows
+the verb _wondered_ is of course impossible.
+
+ How doth the earth terrifie and oppress us with terrible earthquakes,
+ which are most frequent in China, Japan, and those eastern climes,
+ swallowing up sometimes six cities at once!--BURTON.
+
+Of the many possible violations of sentence accent, one--common in
+inferior writers--is illustrated in the next section.
+
+
+8. CAUSAL ‘AS’ CLAUSES
+
+There are two admissible kinds of causal ‘as’ clauses--the pure and the
+mixed. The pure clause assigns as a cause some fact that is already
+known to the reader and is sure to occur to him in the connexion: the
+mixed assigns as a cause what is not necessarily known to the reader
+or present in his mind; it has the double function of conveying a
+new fact, and indicating its relation to the main sentence. Context
+will usually decide whether an _as_ clause is pure or mixed; in the
+following examples, it is clear from the nature of the two clauses that
+the first is pure, the second mixed:
+
+ I have an edition with German notes; but that is of no use, as you do
+ not read German.
+
+ I caught the train, but afterwards wished I had not, as I presently
+ discovered that my luggage was left behind.
+
+The second of these, it will be noticed, is unreadable, unless we slur
+the _as_ to such an extent as practically to acknowledge that it ought
+not to be there. The reason is that, although a pure clause may stand
+at any point in the sentence, a mixed one must always precede the
+main statement. The pure clause, having only the subordinate function
+normally indicated by _as_, is subordinate in sense as well as in
+grammar; and the declining accentuation with which it is accordingly
+pronounced will not be interfered with wherever we may place it.
+But the mixed clause has another function, that of conveying a new
+fact, for which _as_ does not prepare us, and which entitles it to an
+accentuation as full and as varied as that of the main statement. To
+neutralize the subordinating effect of _as_, and secure the proper
+accentuation, we must place the clause at the beginning; where this
+is not practicable, _as_ should be removed, and a colon or semi-colon
+used instead of a comma. Persistent usage tends of course to remove
+this objection by weakening the subordinating power of conjunctions:
+_because_, _while_, _whereas_, _since_, can be used where _as_ still
+betrays a careless or illiterate writer. There is the same false ring
+in all the following sentences:
+
+ I myself saw in the estate office of a large landed proprietor a
+ procession of peasant women begging for assistance, as owing to
+ the departure of the bread-winners the families were literally
+ starving.--_Times._
+
+Remove _as_, and use a heavier stop.
+
+ Very true, Jasper; but you really ought to learn to read, as, by so
+ doing, you might learn your duty towards yourselves.--BORROW.
+
+To read; by so doing, ....
+
+ There was a barber and hairdresser, who had been at Paris, and talked
+ French with a cockney accent, the French sounding all the better, as
+ no accent is so melodious as the Cockney.--BORROW.
+
+Use a semicolon and ‘for’; the assertion requires all the support that
+vigorous accentuation can lend.
+
+ One of the very few institutions for which the Popish Church
+ entertains any fear, and consequently respect, as it respects nothing
+ which it does not fear.--BORROW.
+
+_For_ instead of _as_ will best suit this illogical and falsely
+coordinated sentence.
+
+ Everybody likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed to
+ air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, ... but to
+ superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.--EMERSON.
+
+Again the clause is a mixed one. The point of view it suggests is,
+indeed, sufficiently obvious; but (unlike our typical pure clause
+above--‘you do not know German’) it depends for its existence upon the
+circumstances of the main sentence, which may or may not have occurred
+to the reader before. The full accentuation with which the clause must
+inevitably be read condemns it at once; use a colon, and remove _as_.
+
+Pure clauses, being from their nature more or less otiose, belong
+rather to the spoken than to the written language. It follows that a
+good writer will seldom have a causal _as_ clause of any kind at the
+end of a sentence. Two further limitations remain to be noticed:
+
+i. When the cause, not the effect, is obviously the whole point of the
+sentence, _because_, not _as_, should be used; the following is quite
+impossible English:
+
+ I make these remarks as quick shooting at short ranges has lately been
+ so strongly recommended.--_Times._
+
+ii. _As_ should be used only to give the cause of the thing asserted,
+not the cause of the assertion, nor an illustration of its truth, as in
+the following instances:
+
+ You refer me to the Encyclopaedia: you are mistaken, as I find the
+ Encyclopaedia exactly confirms my view.
+
+ The Oxford Coxswain did not steer a very good course here, as he kept
+ too close in to the Middlesex shore to obtain full advantage of the
+ tide; it made little difference, however, as his crew continued to
+ gain.--_Times._
+
+My finding the Encyclopaedia’s confirmation was not the cause of
+mistake, nor the keeping too close the cause of bad steering.
+
+
+9. WENS AND HYPERTROPHIED MEMBERS
+
+No sentence is to be condemned for mere length; a really skilful writer
+can fill a page with one and not tire his reader, though a succession
+of long sentences without the relief of short ones interspersed is
+almost sure to be forbidding. But the tiro, and even the good writer
+who is not prepared to take the trouble of reading aloud what he has
+written, should confine himself to the easily manageable. The tendency
+is to allow some part of a sentence to develop unnatural proportions,
+or a half parenthetic insertion to separate too widely the essential
+parts. The cure, indispensable for every one who aims at a passable
+style, and infallible for any one who has a good ear, is reading aloud
+after writing.
+
+1. Disproportionate insertions.
+
+ Some simple eloquence distinctly heard, though only uttered in her
+ eyes, unconscious that he read them, as, ‘By the death-beds I have
+ tended, by the childhood I have suffered, by our meeting in this
+ dreary house at midnight, by the cry wrung from me in the anguish of
+ my heart, O father, turn to me and seek a refuge in my love before it
+ is too late!’ may have arrested them.--DICKENS.
+
+ Captain Cuttle, though no sluggard, did not turn so early on the
+ morning after he had seen Sol Gills, through the shopwindow, writing
+ in the parlour, with the Midshipman upon the counter, and Rob the
+ Grinder making up his bed below it, but that the clocks struck six
+ as he raised himself on his elbow, and took a survey of his little
+ chamber.--DICKENS.
+
+ A perpetual consequent warfare of her spirit and the nature subject
+ to the thousand sensational hypocrisies invoked for concealment of
+ its reviled brutish baseness, held the woman suspended from her
+ emotions.--MEREDITH.
+
+ Yesterday, before Dudley Sowerby’s visit, Nataly would have been
+ stirred where the tears which we shed for happiness or repress
+ at a flattery dwell when seeing her friend Mrs. John Cormyn
+ enter....--MEREDITH.
+
+ ‘It takes’, it is said that Sir Robert Peel observed, ‘three
+ generations to make a gentleman’.--BAGEHOT.
+
+ Behind, round the windows of the lower story, clusters of clematis,
+ like large purple sponges, blossomed, miraculously fed through their
+ thin, dry stalks.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ It is a striking exhibition of the power which the groups, hostile
+ in different degrees to a democratic republic, have of Parliamentary
+ combination.--_Spectator._
+
+ Sir,--With reference to the custom among some auctioneers and
+ surveyors of receiving secret commissions, which was recently brought
+ to light in a case before the Lord Chief Justice and Justices Kennedy
+ and Ridley (King’s Bench Division), when the L. C. J. in giving
+ judgment for the defendants said:--Unfortunately in commercial
+ circles, in which prominent men played a part, extraordinary mistakes
+ occurred. But a principal who employed an agent to do work for him
+ employed him upon terms that the agent was not liable to get secret
+ commissions. The sooner secret commissions were not approved by an
+ honourable profession, the better it would be for commerce in all its
+ branches. I desire to take this opportunity....--_Times._
+
+ In the course of a conversation with a representative of the
+ _Gaulois_, Captain Klado, after repeating his views on the necessity
+ for Russia to secure the command of the sea which have already
+ appeared in the _Times_, replied as follows to a question as to
+ whether, after the new squadron in the course of formation at
+ Libau has reinforced Admiral Rozhdestvensky’s fleet, the Russian
+ and Japanese naval forces will be evenly balanced: [here follows
+ reply]--_Times._
+
+2. Sentences of which the end is allowed to trail on to unexpected
+length.
+
+ But though she could trust his word, the heart of the word went out
+ of it when she heard herself thanked by Lady Blachington (who could
+ so well excuse her at such a time for not returning her call, that
+ she called in a friendly way a second time, warmly to thank her)
+ for throwing open the Concert Room at Lakelands in August, to an
+ entertainment in assistance of the funds for the purpose of erecting
+ an East London Clubhouse, where the children of the poor by day could
+ play, and their parents pass a disengaged evening.--MEREDITH.
+
+ How to commence the ceremony might have been a difficulty, but for the
+ zeal of the American Minister, who, regardless of the fact that he
+ was the representative of a sister Power, did not see any question of
+ delicacy arise in his taking a prominent part in proceedings regarded
+ as entirely irregular by the representatives of the Power to which the
+ parties concerned belonged.--D. SLADEN.
+
+ The style holds the attention, but perhaps the most subtle charm of
+ the work lies in the inextricable manner in which fact is interwoven
+ with something else that is not exactly fiction, but rather fancy bred
+ of the artist’s talent in projecting upon his canvas his own view
+ of things seen and felt and lived through by those whose thoughts,
+ motives, and actions, he depicts.--_Times._
+
+ The cock-bustard that, having preened himself, paces before the hen
+ birds on the plains that he can scour when his wings, which are slow
+ in the air, join with his strong legs to make nothing of grassy
+ leagues on leagues.--_Times._
+
+ I don’t so much wonder at his going away, because, leaving out of
+ consideration that spice of the marvellous which was always in his
+ character, and his great affection for me, before which every other
+ consideration of his life became nothing, as no one ought to know
+ so well as I who had the best of fathers in him--leaving that out
+ of consideration, I say, I have often read and heard of people who,
+ having some near and dear relative, who was supposed to be shipwrecked
+ at sea, have gone down to live on that part of the seashore where any
+ tidings of the missing ship might be expected to arrive, though only
+ an hour or two sooner than elsewhere, or have even gone upon her track
+ to the place whither she was bound, as if their going would create
+ intelligence.--DICKENS.
+
+ What he had to communicate was the contents of despatches from Tokio
+ containing information received by the Japanese Government respecting
+ infringements of neutrality by the Baltic Fleet in Indo-Chinese waters
+ outside what are, strictly speaking, the territorial limits, and
+ principally by obtaining provisions from the shore.--_Times._
+
+3. Decapitable sentences.
+
+Perhaps the most exasperating form is that of the sentence that keeps
+on prolonging itself by additional phrases, each joint of which gives
+the reader hopes of a full stop.
+
+ It was only after the weight of evidence against the economic
+ success of the endeavour became overwhelming that our firm withdrew
+ its support /, and in conjunction with almost the entire British
+ population of the country concentrated its efforts on endeavouring to
+ obtain permission to increase the coloured unskilled labour supply
+ of the mines / so as to be in a position to extend mining operations
+ /, and thus assist towards re-establishing the prosperity of the
+ country /, while at the same time attracting a number of skilled
+ British artisans / who would receive not merely the bare living wage
+ of the white unskilled labourer, but a wage sufficient to enable these
+ artisans to bring their families to the country / and to make their
+ permanent home there.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ Here may still be seen by the watchful eye the Louisiana heron and
+ smaller egret, all that rapacious plume-hunters have left of their
+ race, tripping like timid fairies in and out the leafy screen / that
+ hides the rank jungle of sawgrass and the grisly swamp where dwells
+ the alligator /, which lies basking, its nostrils just level with the
+ dirty water of its bath, or burrows swiftly in the soft earth to evade
+ the pursuit of those who seek to dislodge it with rope and axe / that
+ they may sell its hide to make souvenirs for the tourists / who, at
+ the approach of summer, hie them north or east with grateful memories
+ of that fruitful land.--F. G. AFLALO.
+
+ Running after milkmaids is by no means an ungenteel rural diversion;
+ but let any one ask some respectable casuist (the Bishop of London,
+ for instance), whether Lavengro was not far better employed, when in
+ the country, at tinkering and smithery than he would have been in
+ running after all the milkmaids in Cheshire /, though tinkering is in
+ general considered a very ungenteel employment /, and smithery little
+ better /, notwithstanding that an Orcadian poet, who wrote in Norse
+ about 800 years ago, reckons the latter among nine noble arts which he
+ possessed /, naming it along with playing at chess, on the harp, and
+ ravelling runes /, or as the original has it, ‘treading runes’ /--that
+ is, compressing them into small compass by mingling one letter with
+ another /, even as the Turkish caligraphists ravel the Arabic letters
+ /, more especially those who write talismans.--BORROW.
+
+
+10. CARELESS REPETITION
+
+Conscious repetition of a word or phrase has been discussed in Part
+I (Airs and Graces): in the following examples the repetition is
+unconscious, and proves only that the writer did not read over what he
+had written.
+
+ ... a man ... who directly _impresses_ one with the
+ _impression_....--_Times._
+
+ For most _of them_ get rid _of them_ more or less completely.--H.
+ SWEET.
+
+ The most important distinction between dialogue on the one hand and
+ _purely_ descriptive and narrative pieces on the other hand is a
+ _purely_ grammatical one.--H. SWEET.
+
+ And it _may_ be that from a growing familiarity with Canadian winter
+ amusements _may_ in time spring an even warmer regard....--_Times._
+
+ It _may_ well induce the uncomfortable reflection that these
+ historical words _may_ prove....--_Times._
+
+ The inclusion of _adherents_ would be _adhered_ to.--_Times._
+
+ The _remainder remaining_ loyal, fierce fighting
+ commenced.--_Spectator._
+
+ Every subordinate shortcoming, every incidental defect, will be
+ _pardoned_. ‘Save us’ is the cry of the moment; and, in the confident
+ hope of safety, any deficiency will be overlooked, and any frailty
+ _pardoned_.--BAGEHOT.
+
+ They were _followed_ by jinrikshas _containing_ young girls with very
+ carefully-dressed hair, _carrying_ large bunches of real flowers on
+ their laps, _followed_ in turn by two more coolies _carrying_ square
+ white wooden jars, _containing_ huge silver tinsel flowers.--D. SLADEN.
+
+ It can do so, in all reasonable probability, _provided_ its militia
+ character is maintained. But in any case it will _provide_ us at home
+ with the second line army of our needs.--_Times._
+
+ _Dressed_ in a subtly ill-_dressed_, expensive mode.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ Toodle being the _family_ name of the apple-faced _family_.--DICKENS.
+
+ Artillery firing _extends_ along the whole front, _extending_ for
+ eighty miles.--_Times._
+
+ I regard the action and conduct of the Ministry _as_ a whole _as_ of
+ far greater importance.--_Times._
+
+ The fleet passed the port _on its way_ through the Straits _on the
+ way_ to the China Sea.--_Times._
+
+ Much of his popularity he owed, we believe, to _that_ very timidity
+ _which_ his friends lamented. _That_ timidity often prevented him
+ from exhibiting his talents to the best advantage. But it propitiated
+ Nemesis. It averted _that_ envy _which_ would otherwise have been
+ excited....--MACAULAY.
+
+ I will lay down _a pen_ I am so little able to govern.--And I will try
+ to subdue _an impatience which_ ... may otherwise lead me into still
+ more punishable errors.--I will return to _a subject which_ I cannot
+ fly from for ten minutes together.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ At the same time it was largely _owing to_ his careful training that
+ so many great Etonian cricketers _owed_ their success.--_Times._
+
+
+11. COMMON MISQUOTATIONS
+
+These are excusable in talk, but not in print. A few pieces are given
+correctly, with the usual wrong words in brackets.
+
+ An _ill-favoured_ thing, sir, but mine own. (poor)
+
+ _Fine_ by degrees and beautifully less. (small)
+
+ _That_ last infirmity of noble _mind_. (the: minds)
+
+ Make assurance _double_ sure. (doubly)
+
+ To-morrow to fresh _woods_ and pastures new. (fields)
+
+ The devil can _cite_ Scripture for his purpose. (quote)
+
+ Chewing the _food_ of sweet and bitter fancy. (cud)
+
+ When _Greeks joined Greeks_, then _was_ the tug of war. (Greek meets
+ Greek: comes)
+
+ A goodly apple rotten at the _heart_. (core)
+
+
+12. UNCOMMON MISQUOTATIONS OF WELL-KNOWN PASSAGES OR PHRASES
+
+It is still worse to misquote what is usually given right, however
+informal the quotation. The true reading is here added in brackets.
+
+ Now for the trappings and the _weeds_ of woe.--_S. Ferrier._ (suits)
+
+ She had an instinctive knowledge that she knew her, and she felt her
+ genius _repressed_ by her, as _Julius Caesar’s_ was by _Cassius_.--S.
+ FERRIER. (My genius is _rebuked_ as, it is said, _Mark Antony’s_ was
+ by _Caesar_)
+
+ The new drama represented the very age and body of the time, his form
+ and _feature_.--_J. R. Green._ (pressure)
+
+ He lifts the veil from the sanguinary affair at Kinchau, and we are
+ allowed glimpses of blockade-running, train-wrecking and cavalry
+ reconnaissance, and of many other moving _incidents_ by flood and
+ field.--_Times._ (accidents)
+
+ To him this _rough_ world was but too literally a rack.--LOWELL. (who
+ would, upon the rack of this _tough_ world, stretch him out longer)
+
+ Having once begun, they found returning more tedious than _giving_
+ o’er.--LOWELL. (returning were as tedious as _go_ o’er)
+
+ _Posthaec_ [_sic_] meminisse juvabit.--HAZLITT. (et haec olim)
+
+ _Quid_ vult valde vult. What they do, they do with a will.--EMERSON.
+ (quod) Quid is not translatable.
+
+ Then that wonderful esprit _du_ corps, by which we adopt into our
+ self-love everything we touch.--EMERSON. (de)
+
+ Let not him that _putteth_ on his _armour boast_ as _him_ that
+ _taketh_ it off.--_Westminster Gazette._ (girdeth, harness, boast
+ himself, he, putteth)
+
+ Elizabeth herself, says Spenser, ‘to mine _open_ pipe inclined her
+ ear’.--J. R. GREEN. (oaten)
+
+ He could join the crew of Mirth, and look pleasantly on at a village
+ fair, ‘where the _jolly_ rebecks sound to many a youth and many a
+ maid, dancing in the chequered shade’.--J. R. GREEN. (jocund)
+
+ Heathen Kaffirs, et hoc genero, &c.: ....--_Daily Mail._ (genus omne)
+
+ If she takes her husband _au pied de lettre_.--_Westm. Gaz._ (de la
+ lettre)
+
+
+13. Misquotation of Less Familiar Passages
+
+But the greatest wrong is done to readers when a passage that may not
+improbably be unknown to them is altered.
+
+ It was at Dublin or in his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from
+ Doneraile, ‘under the _fall_ of Mole, that mountain hoar’, that he
+ spent the memorable years in which....--J. R. GREEN. (foot)
+
+ _Petty_ spites of the village _squire_.--_Spectator._ (pigmy: spire)
+
+
+14. Misapplied and Misunderstood Quotations and Phrases
+
+Before _leading question or the exception proves the rule_ is written,
+a lawyer should be consulted; before _cui bono_, Cicero; before _more
+honoured in the breach than the observance_, Hamlet. A leading question
+is one that unfairly helps a witness to the desired answer; cui bono
+has been explained on p. 35; _the exception_, &c., is not an absurdity
+when understood, but it is as generally used; _more honoured_, &c.,
+means not that the rule is generally broken, but that it is better
+broken. A familiar line of Shakespeare, on the other hand, gains by
+being misunderstood: ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin’
+merely means ‘In one respect, all men are alike’.
+
+ But _cui bono_ all this detail of our debt? Has the author given
+ a single light towards any material reduction of it? Not a
+ glimmering.--BURKE.
+
+ A rule dated March 3, 1801, which has never been abrogated, lays it
+ down that, to obtain formal leave of absence, a member must show some
+ sufficient cause, such as ... but this rule is more honoured in the
+ breach than in the observance.--_Times._
+
+ Every one knows that the Governor-General in Council is invested
+ by statute with the supreme command of the Army and that it would
+ be disastrous to subvert that power. But ‘why drag in Velasquez’?
+ If any one wishes us to infer that Lord Kitchener has, directly or
+ indirectly, proposed to subvert this unquestioned and unquestionable
+ authority, they are very much mistaken.--_Times._ (Why indeed? no
+ worse literary treason than to spoil other people’s wit by dragging it
+ in where it is entirely pointless. Velasquez here outrages those who
+ know the story, and perplexes those who do not)
+
+ The Nationalist, M. Archdeacon, and M. Meslier put to the Prime
+ Minister several _leading questions_, such as, ‘Why were you so
+ willing promptly to part with M. Delcassé, and why, by going to the
+ conference, did you agree to revive the debate as to the unmistakable
+ rights...?’ To these pertinent inquiries M. Rouvier did not
+ reply.--_Times._ (Leading questions are necessarily not hostile, as
+ these clearly were)
+
+ The happy phrase that an Ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to
+ lie for his country.--_Westminster Gazette._ (Happier when correctly
+ quoted: sent to lie abroad for the good of)
+
+
+15. ALLUSION
+
+A writer who abounds in literary allusions necessarily appeals to a
+small audience, to those acquainted with about the same set of books
+as himself; they like his allusions, others dislike them. Writers
+should decide whether it is not wise to make their allusions explain
+themselves. In the first two instances quoted, though the reader who
+knows the original context has a slight additional pleasure, any one
+can see what the point is. In the last two, those who have not the
+honour of the wetnurse’s and Rosamund’s acquaintance feel that the
+author and the other readers with whom he is talking aside are guilty
+of bad manners.
+
+ The select academy, into whose sacred precincts the audacious Becky
+ Sharp flung back her leaving present of the ‘Dixonary’, survives here
+ and there, but with a different curriculum and a much higher standard
+ of efficiency.--_Times._
+
+ Why can’t they stay quietly at home till they marry, instead of
+ trying to earn their living by unfeminine occupations? So croaks Mrs.
+ Partington, twirling her mop; but the tide comes on.--_Times._
+
+ Sir,--Were it not for M. Kokovtsoff’s tetchiness in the matter of
+ metaphors, I should feel inclined to see in his protest against my
+ estimates of the decline in the Russian gold reserve and of the
+ increase of the note issue a variant of the classic excuse of Mrs.
+ Easy’s wetnurse for the unlawfulness of her baby.--LUCIEN WOLF.
+
+ Three superb glass jars--red, green, and blue--of the sort that led
+ Rosamund to parting with her shoes--blazed in the broad plate-glass
+ windows.--KIPLING.
+
+
+16. INCORRECT ALLUSION
+
+Every one who detects a writer pretending to more knowledge than he
+has jumps to the conclusion that the detected must know less than the
+detective, and cannot be worth his reading. Incorrect allusion of this
+kind is therefore fatal.
+
+ Homer would have seemed arrogantly superior to his audience if he
+ had not called Hebe ‘white-armed’ or ‘ox-eyed’.--_Times._ (He seldom
+ mentions her, and calls her neither)
+
+ My access to fortune had not, so far, brought me either much joy or
+ distinction,--but it was not too late for me yet to pluck the golden
+ apples of Hesperides.--CORELLI. (It is hardly possible for any one who
+ knows what the Hesperides were to omit _the_)
+
+ My publisher, John Morgeson ... was not like Shakespeare’s Cassio
+ strictly ‘an honourable man’.--CORELLI. (Cassio was an honourable man,
+ but was never called so. Even Cassius has only his share in _So are
+ they all, all honourable men._ Brutus, perhaps?)
+
+ A sturdy Benedict to propose a tax on bachelors.--_Westminster
+ Gazette._ (Benedick. In spite of the _Oxford Dictionary_, the
+ differentiation between the saint, Benedict, and the converted
+ bachelor, Benedick, is surely not now to be given up)
+
+ But impound the car for a longer or shorter period according to the
+ offence, and that, as the French say, ‘will give them reason to
+ think’.--_Times._ (The French do not say _give reason to think_; and
+ if they did the phrase would hardly be worth treating as not English;
+ they say _give to think_, which is often quoted because it is unlike
+ English)
+
+
+17. DOVETAILED AND ADAPTED QUOTATIONS AND PHRASES
+
+The fitting into a sentence of refractory quotations, the making of
+facetious additions to them, and the constructing of Latin cases with
+English governing words, have often intolerably ponderous effects.
+
+ Though his denial of any steps in that direction may be true in his
+ official capacity, _there is probably some smoke in the fire of
+ comment_ to which his personal relations with German statesmen have
+ given rise.--_Times._ (The reversal of smoke and fire may be a slip of
+ the pen or a joke; but the correction of it mends matters little)
+
+ It remains to be seen whether ... the pied à terre which Germany
+ hopes she has won by her preliminary action in the Morocco question
+ will form the starting-point for further achievements or will merely
+ represent, like so many other German enterprises, _the end of the
+ beginning_.--_Times._ (The reversal this time is clearly facetious)
+
+ But they had gone on adding misdeed to misdeed, they had _blundered
+ after blunder_.--L. COURTNEY.
+
+ Germany has, it would appear, yet another card in her hand, a card _of
+ the kind which is useful to players when in doubt_.--_Times._
+
+ But the problem of inducing _a refractory camel_ to squeeze
+ himself through the eye of _an inconvenient needle_ is and remains
+ insoluble.--_Times._
+
+ But these unsoldierlike recriminations among the Russian officers as
+ well as their luxurious lives and their complete insouciance in the
+ presence of their country’s misfortunes, seems to have _set back the
+ hand on the dial of Japanese rapprochement_.--_Times._
+
+ Is there no spiritual purge to make the eye of the camel easier for a
+ South-African millionaire?--_Times._
+
+ And so it has come to pass that, not only _where invalids do
+ congregate_, but in places hitherto reserved for the summer recreation
+ of the tourist or the mountaineer there is a growing influx of winter
+ pleasure-seekers.--_Times._
+
+ Salmasius alone was not _unworthy sublimi flagello_.--LANDOR.
+
+ Even if a change were desirable _with Kitchener duce et
+ auspice_.--_Times._
+
+ Charged with carrying out the Military Member’s orders, but having,
+ _pace Sir Edwin Collen_, no authority of his own.--_Times._
+
+ It is not in the interests of the Japanese to close the book of the
+ war, until they have placed themselves in the position of beati
+ possidentes.--_Times._ (_Beati possidentes_ is a sentence, meaning
+ _Blessed are those who are in possession_; to fit it into another
+ sentence is most awkward)
+
+ Resignation became a virtue of necessity for Sweden in hopes that
+ a better understanding might in time grow out of the new order of
+ things.--_Times._ (In the original phrase, _of necessity_ does not
+ depend on _virtue_, but on _make_; and it is intolerable without the
+ word that gives it its meaning)
+
+ Many of the celebrities who in that most frivolous of watering-places
+ do congregate.--BARONESS VON HUTTEN.
+
+ If misbehaviour be not checked in an effectual manner before long,
+ there is every prospect that the whips of the existing Motor Act
+ will be transformed into the scorpions of the Motor Act of the
+ future.--_Times._
+
+A special protest should be made against the practice of introducing a
+quotation in two or three instalments of a word or two, each with its
+separate suit of quotation marks. The only quotations that should be
+cut up are those that are familiar enough to need no quotation marks,
+so that the effect is not so jerky.
+
+
+ The ‘pigmy body’ seemed ‘fretted to decay’ by the ‘fiery soul’ within
+ it.--J. R. GREEN. (The original is:--
+
+ A fiery soul which, working out its way,
+ Fretted the pygmy-body to decay.--DRYDEN.)
+
+
+18. Trite Quotation
+
+Quotation may be material or formal. With the first, the writer quotes
+to support himself by the authority (or to impugn the authority) of the
+person quoted; this does not concern us. With the second, he quotes
+to add some charm of striking expression or of association to his own
+writing. To the reader, those quotations are agreeable that neither
+strike him as hackneyed, nor rebuke his ignorance by their complete
+novelty, but rouse dormant memories. Quotation, then, should be adapted
+to the probable reader’s cultivation. To deal in trite quotations and
+phrases therefore amounts to a confession that the writer either is
+uncultivated himself, or is addressing the uncultivated. All who would
+not make this confession are recommended to avoid (unless in some
+really new or perverted application--notum si callida verbum reddiderit
+junctura novum) such things as:
+
+ Chartered libertine; balm in Gilead; my prophetic soul; harmless
+ necessary; e pur si muove; there’s the rub; the curate’s egg; hinc
+ illae lacrimae; fit audience though few; a consummation devoutly to
+ be wished; more in sorrow than in anger; metal more attractive; heir
+ of all the ages; curses not loud but deep; more sinned against than
+ sinning; the irony of fate; the psychological moment; the man in the
+ street; the sleep of the just; a work of supererogation; the pity of
+ it; the scenes he loved so well; in her great sorrow; all that was
+ mortal of--; few equals and no superior; leave severely alone; suffer
+ a sea-change.
+
+ The plan partook of the nature of that of those ingenious islanders
+ who lived entirely by taking in each other’s washing.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ For he was but moderately given to ‘the cups that cheer but not
+ inebriate’, and had already finished his tea.--ELIOT.
+
+ Austria forbids children to smoke in public places; and in German
+ schools and military colleges there are laws upon the subject;
+ France, Spain, Greece, and Portugal _leave_ the matter _severely
+ alone_.--_Westminster Gazette._ (_Severely_ is much worse than
+ pointless here)
+
+ They carried compulsory subdivision and restriction of all kinds
+ of skilled labour down to a degree _that would have been laughable
+ enough, if it had only been less destructive_.--MORLEY.
+
+ If Diderot had visited ... Rome, even the mighty painter of the Last
+ Judgment ... would have found an interpreter worthy of him. _But it
+ was not to be._--MORLEY.
+
+ Mr. de Sélincourt has, of course, _the defects of his
+ qualities_.--_Times._
+
+ The beloved _lustige Wien_ [Vienna, that is] of his youth had
+ _suffered a sea-change_. The green glacis down which Sobieski drove
+ the defeated besieging army of Kara Mustafa was blocked by ranges of
+ grand new buildings.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+
+19. LATIN ABBREVIATIONS, &c.
+
+No one should use these who is not sure that he will not expose his
+ignorance by making mistakes with them. Confusion is very common, for
+instance, between _i. e._ and _e g._ Again, _sic_ should never be used
+except when a reader might really suppose that there was a misprint or
+garbling; to insert it simply by way of drawing attention and conveying
+a sneer is a very heavy assumption of superiority. _Vide_ is only in
+place when a book or dictionary article is being referred to.
+
+ Shaliapine, first bass at the same opera, has handed in his
+ resignation in consequence of this affair, and also because of affairs
+ in general, vide imprisonment of his great friend Gorki.--_Times._
+
+ The industrialist organ is inclined to regret that the league did not
+ fix some definite date such as the year 1910 (sic) or the year 1912,
+ for the completion of this programme.--_Times._ (This is the true use
+ of _sic_; as the years mentioned are not consecutive, a reader might
+ suppose that something was wrong; sic tells him that it is not so)
+
+ The _Boersen Courier_ ... maintains that ‘nothing remains for M.
+ Delcassé but to cry Pater peccavi to Germany and to retrieve as
+ quickly as possible his diplomatic mistake (_sic_)’.--_Times._
+
+ Let your principal stops be the full stop and comma, with a
+ judicious use of the semicolon and of the other stops where they are
+ absolutely necessary (_i. e._ you could not dispense with the note
+ of interrogation in asking questions).--BYGOTT & JONES. (_e. g._ is
+ wanted, not _i. e._)
+
+
+20. UNEQUAL YOKEFELLOWS AND DEFECTIVE DOUBLE HARNESS
+
+When a word admits of two constructions, to use both may not be
+positively incorrect, but is generally as ugly as to drive a horse and
+a mule in double harness.
+
+ They did not _linger in_ the long scarlet colonnades of the temple
+ itself, nor gazing at the dancing for which it is famous.--SLADEN.
+
+ This undoubtedly caused prices to rise; but did it not also _cause_
+ all _Lancashire to work_ short time, many _mills to close_, and a
+ great _restriction_ in the purchases of all our customers for cotton
+ goods?--_Times._
+
+ ... _set herself_ quietly down _to the care_ of her own household, and
+ _to assist_ Benjamin in the concerns of his trade.--SCOTT.
+
+ This correspondent says that not only did the French Government
+ _know that Germany recognized_ the privileges resulting for France
+ from her position in Algeria, but also her general _views_ on the
+ work of reform which it would be the task of the conference to
+ examine.--_Times._
+
+ _Teach_ them the ‘_character_ of God’ through the ‘Son’s Life of
+ Love’, _that conscience_ must not be outraged, not because they would
+ be punished if they did, or because they would be handsomely rewarded
+ if they didn’t, but simply because they know a thing is right or
+ wrong....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+And any one who permits himself this incongruity is likely to be
+betrayed into actual blunders.
+
+ The popularity of the parlements was surely due to the detestation
+ felt for the absolute Monarchy, and because they seemed to
+ half-informed men to be the champions of....--_Times._ (Here _because
+ they seemed_ does not really fit _the popularity ... was_, but
+ _parlements were popular_)
+
+ A difference, this, which was not much considered where and when the
+ end of the war was thought to be two or three years off, and that the
+ last blow would be Russia’s.--F. GREENWOOD. (The last clause does not
+ fit _the end of the war was thought_, but _it was thought_)
+
+ Attila and his armies, he said, came and disappeared in a very
+ mysterious manner, and _that_ nothing could be said with positiveness
+ about them.--BORROW.
+
+ Save him accordingly she did: but no sooner _is he dismissed_, and
+ _Faust has made_ a remark on the multitude of arrows which she is
+ darting forth on all sides, than Lynceus returns.--CARLYLE.
+
+ The short drives at the beginning of the course of instruction were
+ intended gradually _to accustom_ the novice to the speed, and _of
+ giving_ him in the pauses an opportunity to fix well in his mind the
+ principles of the automobile.--_Times._
+
+ The predecessors of Sir Antony MacDonnell ... were, to use the words
+ of the Prime Minister, ‘the aiders, advisers, and suggesters of their
+ official chiefs’.--_Times._ (Though a chief can have a suggester as
+ well as an adviser, _adviser_ is naturally followed by an objective
+ genitive, but _suggester_ can only be followed by a possessive
+ genitive--except of the suggestion made)
+
+ My assiduities expose me rather to her scorn ... than to the treatment
+ due to a man.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ One worthy gentleman, who is, perhaps, _better known than popular_ in
+ City restaurants, is never known to have lavished even the humblest
+ copper coin on a waiter.--_Titbits._
+
+ Its hands require strengthening and its resources increased.--_Times._
+
+Analogous, but always incorrect, though excusable in various degrees,
+is the equipping of pairs that should obviously be in double harness
+with conjunctions or prepositions that do not match--following
+_neither_ by _or_, _both_ by _as well as_, and the like.
+
+ Diderot presented a bouquet which was _neither_ well _or_ ill
+ received.--MORLEY.
+
+ Like the Persian noble of old, I ask, ‘that I may _neither_ command
+ _or_ obey’.--EMERSON.
+
+ She would hear _nothing_ of a declaration of war, _or_ give any
+ judgment on....--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ It appears, then, that _neither_ the mixed and incomplete empiricism
+ considered in the third chapter, _still less_ the pure empiricism
+ considered in the second chapter, affords us....--BALFOUR.
+
+ _Scarcely_ was the nice new drain finished _than_ several of the
+ children sickened with diphtheria.--_Spectator._
+
+ Which differs from that and who in being used _both_ as an adjective
+ _as well as_ a noun.--H. SWEET.
+
+ M. Shipoff _in one and the same breath_ denounces innovations, _yet_
+ bases the whole electoral system on the greatest innovation in Russian
+ history.--_Times._
+
+ It would be _equally_ absurd to attend to all the other parts of
+ an engine and to neglect the principal source of its energy--the
+ firebox--_as_ it is ridiculous to pay particular attention
+ to the cleanliness of the body and to neglect the mouth and
+ teeth.--_Advertisement._
+
+ The conception of God in their minds was not _that of_ a Father, but
+ _as_ a dealer out of rewards and punishments.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Dr. Dillon, than whom no Englishman has a profounder and more accurate
+ acquaintance _with_ the seamy side--as, indeed, _of_ all aspects of
+ Russian life--assumes....--_Times._
+
+ Sir,--_In view of_ the controversy which has arisen concerning the 12
+ in. Mark VIII guns in the Navy, and especially _to_ the suggestion
+ which might give rise to some doubt as to the efficiency of the wire
+ system of construction....--_Times._
+
+We add three sentences, in the first of which double harness should not
+have been used because it is too cumbrous, in the second of which it
+is not correctly possible, and in the third of which the failure to use
+it is very slovenly.
+
+ The odd part of it is that this childish confusion does not only not
+ take from our pleasure, but does not even take from our sense of the
+ author’s talent.--H. JAMES. (far from diminishing our pleasure, does
+ not....)
+
+ As to the duration of the Austro-Russian mandate, there seems _little
+ disposition_ here to treat the question in a hard-and-fast spirit,
+ _but rather_ to regard it as....--_Times._ (... spirit; it is rather
+ regarded as....)
+
+ To the student of the history of religious opinions in England
+ _few contrasts are more striking when he compares_ the assurance
+ and complacency with which men made profession of their beliefs
+ at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the diffidence and
+ hesitation with which the same are recited at the beginning of the
+ twentieth.--_Daily Telegraph._ (more striking than that between the
+ assurance....)
+
+
+21. COMMON PARTS
+
+When two sentences coupled by a conjunction (whether coordinating or
+subordinating) have one or more parts in common, there are two ways
+of avoiding the full repetition of the common parts. (_a_) ‘I see
+through your villany and I detest your villany’ can become ‘I see
+through and detest your villany’; ‘I have at least tried to bring
+about a reconciliation, though I may have failed to bring about a
+reconciliation’ can become ‘I have at least tried, though I may have
+failed, to bring about, &c.’ (_b_) By substitution or ellipse, the
+sentences become ‘I see through your villany, and detest it’ and ‘I
+have at least tried to bring about a reconciliation, though I may have
+failed (to do so)’. Of these, the (_a_) form requires careful handling:
+a word that is not common to both sentences must not be treated as
+common; and one that is common, and whose position declares that it
+is meant to do double duty, must not be repeated. Violations of these
+rules are always more or less unsightly, and are excusable only when
+the precise (_a_) form is intolerably stiff and the (_b_) form not
+available. In our examples below, the words placed in brackets are
+the two variants, each of which, when the other is omitted, should,
+with the common or unbracketed parts, form a complete sentence; the
+conjunctions being of course ignored for this purpose.
+
+ What other power (could) or (ever has) produced such changes?--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ Things temporal (had) and (would) alter.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ (It had), as (all houses should), been in tune with the pleasant,
+ mediocre charm of the island.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+This type will almost always admit of the emphatic repetition of the
+verb: ‘could produce or ever has produced’.
+
+ Those of us who still believe in Greek as (one of the finest), if not
+ (the finest) instruments....--_Times._
+
+ (One of the noblest), if not (the noblest), feelings an Englishman
+ could possess.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+Use (_b_): ‘One of the finest instruments, if not the finest’.
+
+ The games were looked upon as being (quite as important) or (perhaps
+ more important) than drill.--_Times._
+
+ The railway has done (all) and (more) than was expected of
+ it.--_Spectator._
+
+Use (_b_): ‘as important as drill, if not more so’; ‘all that was
+expected of it, and more’.
+
+All words that precede the first of two correlatives, such as ‘not ...
+but’, ‘both ... and’, ‘neither ... nor’, are declared by their position
+to be common; we bracket accordingly in the next examples:
+
+ The pamphlet forms (not only a valuable addition to our works on
+ scientific subjects), but (is also of deep interest to German
+ readers).--_Times._ (not only forms ..., but is ...)
+
+ Forty-five per cent of the old Rossallians ... received (either
+ decorations) (or were mentioned in despatches).--_Daily Telegraph._
+ (Either received ... or were)
+
+ The Senate, however, has (either passed) (or will pass) amendments to
+ every clause.--_Spectator._ (either has passed or will pass)
+
+ Cloth of gold (neither seems to elate) (nor cloth of frieze to
+ depress) him.--LAMB.
+
+A curious extension, not to be mended in the active; for _neither_
+cannot well precede the first of two subjects when they have different
+verbs.
+
+On the other hand, words placed between the two correlatives are
+declared by their position not to be common:
+
+ Which neither (suits one purpose) (nor the other).--_Times._ (suits
+ neither ... nor)
+
+ Not only (against my judgment), (but my inclination).--RICHARDSON.
+
+ Not only (in the matter of malaria), (but also beriberi).--_Times._
+ (In the matter not of malaria only, but of ...)
+
+
+22. THE WRONG TURNING
+
+It is not very uncommon, on regaining the high road after a divergent
+clause or phrase, to get confused between the two, and continue quite
+wrongly the subordinate construction instead of that actually required.
+
+ I feel, however, that there never was a time when the people of this
+ country were more ready to believe than they are today, and would
+ openly believe if Christianity, with ‘doctrine’ subordinated, were
+ presented to them in the most convincing of all forms, viz....--_Daily
+ Telegraph._ (_Would believe_ is made parallel to _they are today_; it
+ is really parallel to _there never was a time_; and we should read
+ _and that they would openly believe_)
+
+ In the face of this statement either proofs should be adduced to show
+ that Coroner Troutbeck has stated facts ‘soberly judged’, and that
+ they contain ‘warrant for the accusation of wholesale’ ignorance on
+ the part of a trusted and eminently useful class of the community,
+ or failing this, that the offensive and unjust charge should be
+ withdrawn.--_Times._ (_The charge should be withdrawn_ is made
+ parallel to _Coroner Troutbeck has stated_ and _they contain_; it is
+ really parallel to _proofs should be adduced_; and we should omit
+ _that_, and read _or failing this, the offensive_....)
+
+ We cannot part from Prof. Bury’s work without expressing our unfeigned
+ admiration for his complete control of the original authorities on
+ which his narrative is based, and of the sound critical judgment he
+ exhibits....--_Spectator._ (The judgment is admired, not controlled)
+
+Sometimes the confusion is not merely of the pen, but is in the
+writer’s thought; and it is then almost incurable.
+
+ ... the privilege by which the mind, like the lamps of a mailcoach,
+ moving rapidly through the midnight woods, illuminate, for one
+ instant, the foliage or sleeping umbrage of the thickets, and, in the
+ next instant, have quitted them, to carry their radiance forward upon
+ endless successions of objects.--DE QUINCEY.
+
+
+23. ELLIPSE IN SUBORDINATE CLAUSES
+
+The missing subject and (with one exception) the missing verb of a
+subordinate clause can be supplied only from the sentence to which
+it is subordinate. The exception is the verb ‘to be’. We can say
+‘The balls, when wet, do not bounce’, ‘When in doubt, play trumps’,
+because the verb to be supplied is _are_, and the subject is that of
+the principal sentence. Other violations of the rule occur, but are
+scarcely tolerable even in the spoken language. The following are
+undesirable instances:
+
+ For, though summer, I knew ... Mr. Rochester would like to see a
+ cheerful hearth.--C. BRONTË.
+
+We can supply _was_, but not _it_; the natural subject is _I_.
+
+ I have now seen him, and though not for long, he is a man who speaks
+ with Bismarckian frankness.--_Times._
+
+‘Though I did not see him for long’, we are meant to understand. But
+the _though_ clause is not subordinate to the sentence containing that
+subject and verb: _and_ always joins coordinates and announces the
+transition from one coordinate to another. Consequently, the _though_
+clause must be a part (a subordinate part) of the second coordinate,
+and must draw from that its subject and verb: ‘though he is not a man
+of Bismarckian frankness for long, ...’. Even if we could supply _I
+saw_ with the clause in its present place, we should still have the
+absurd implication that the man’s habitual frankness (not the writer’s
+perception of it) depended on the duration of the interview. We offer
+three conjectural emendations: ‘I have now seen him, though not for
+long; and he is a man who ...’; ‘I have now seen him, and though I did
+not see him for long, I perceived that he was a man who ...’; ‘I have
+now seen him, and though I did not see him for long, I found out what
+he thought; for he is a man who...’.
+
+
+24. SOME ILLEGITIMATE INFINITIVES
+
+_Claim_ is not followed by an infinitive except when the subject of
+_claim_ is also that of the infinitive. Thus, _I claim to be honest_,
+but not _I claim this to be honest_. The _Oxford Dictionary_ (1893)
+does not mention the latter use even to condemn it, but it is now
+becoming very common, and calls for strong protest. The corresponding
+passive use is equally wrong. The same applies to _pretend_.
+
+ ‘This entirely new experiment’ which you claim to have ‘solved the
+ problem of combining....’--_Times._
+
+ Usage, therefore, is not, as it is often claimed to be, the absolute
+ law of language.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+ The gun which made its first public appearance on Saturday is
+ claimed to be the most serviceable weapon of its kind in use in any
+ army.--_Times._
+
+ The constant failure to live up to what we claim to be our most
+ serious convictions proves that we do not hold them at all.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ The anonymous and masked delators whose creation the Opposition
+ pretends to be an abuse of power on the part of M. Combes.--_Times._
+
+_Possible_ and _probable_ are not to be completed by an infinitive. For
+_are possible to_ read _can_; and for _probable_ read _likely_.
+
+ But no such questions are possible, as it seems to me, to arise
+ between your nation and ours.--CHOATE.
+
+ Should Germany meditate anything of the kind it would look uncommonly
+ like a deliberate provocation of France, and for that reason it seems
+ scarcely probable to be borne out by events.--_Times._
+
+_Prefer_ has two constructions: I prefer this (living) _to_ that
+(dying), and I prefer to do this _rather than_ that. The infinitive
+construction must not be used without _rather_ (unless, of course, the
+second alternative is suppressed altogether).
+
+ Other things being equal, I should prefer to marry a rich man than a
+ poor one.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+The following infinitives are perhaps by false analogy from those that
+might follow _forbade_, _seen_, _ask_. It may be noticed generally that
+slovenly and hurried writers find the infinitive a great resource.
+
+ Marshal Oyama strictly _prohibited_ his troops _to take_ quarter
+ within the walls.--_Times._
+
+ The Chinese held a chou-chou, during which the devil was exorcised and
+ duly _witnessed_ by several believers _to take_ his flight in divers
+ guises.--_Times._
+
+ Third, they might _demand_ from Germany, all flushed as she was with
+ military pride, _to tell_ us plainly whether....--MORLEY.
+
+
+25. ‘SPLIT’ INFINITIVES
+
+The ‘split’ infinitive has taken such hold upon the consciences of
+journalists that, instead of warning the novice against splitting his
+infinitives, we must warn him against the curious superstition that the
+splitting or not splitting makes the difference between a good and a
+bad writer. The split infinitive is an ugly thing, as will be seen from
+our examples below; but it is one among several hundred ugly things,
+and the novice should not allow it to occupy his mind exclusively. Even
+that mysterious quality, ‘distinction’ of style, may in modest measure
+be attained by a splitter of infinitives: ‘The book is written with a
+distinction (save in the matter of split infinitives) unusual in such
+works.’--_Times._
+
+ The time has come to once again voice the general discontent.--_Times._
+
+ It should be authorized to immediately put in hand such work.--_Times._
+
+ Important negotiations are even now proceeding to further cement trade
+ relations.--_Times._
+
+ We were not as yet strong enough in numbers to seriously influence the
+ poll.--_Times._
+
+ Keep competition with you unless you wish to once more see
+ a similar state of things to those prevalent prior to the
+ inauguration....--_Guernsey Evening Press._
+
+ And that she should force me, by the magic of her pen to mentally
+ acknowledge, albeit with wrath and shame, my own inferiority.--CORELLI.
+
+ The oil lamp my landlady was good enough to still allow me the use
+ of.--CORELLI.
+
+ The ‘persistent agitation’ ... is to so arouse public opinion on the
+ subject as to....--_Times._
+
+ In order to slightly extend that duration in the case of a
+ few.--_Times._
+
+ To thus prevent a constant accretion to the Jewish population of
+ Russia from this country would be nobler work....--_Times._
+
+
+26. COMPOUND PASSIVES
+
+Corresponding to the active construction ‘... have attempted to justify
+this step’, we get two passive constructions: (1) ‘This step has been
+attempted to be justified’, (2) ‘It has been attempted to justify this
+step’. Of these (1), although licensed by usage, is an incorrect and
+slovenly makeshift: ‘this step’ is not the object of ‘have attempted’,
+and cannot be the subject of the corresponding passive. The true object
+of ‘have attempted’ is the whole phrase ‘to justify this step’, which
+in (2) rightly appears as the subject, in apposition to an introductory
+‘it’.--In point of clumsiness, there is perhaps not much to choose
+between the two passive constructions, neither of which should be used
+when it can be avoided. When the subject of the active verb ‘have
+attempted’ is definite, and can conveniently be stated, the active
+form should always be retained; to write ‘it had been attempted by the
+founders of the study to supply’ instead of ‘the founders had attempted
+to supply’ is mere perversity. When, as in some of our examples below,
+the subject of the active verb ‘have attempted’ is indefinite, the
+passive turn is sometimes difficult to avoid; but unless the object
+of ‘justify’ is a relative, and therefore necessarily placed at the
+beginning, ‘an attempt has been made’ can often be substituted for ‘it
+has been attempted’, and is less stiff and ugly.
+
+ The cutting down of ‘saying lessons’, by which it had been attempted
+ by the founders of the study to supply the place of speech in the
+ learning of Greek.--_Times._
+
+ But when it was attempted to give practical effect to the popular
+ exasperation, serious obstacles arose.--_Times._ (When an attempt was
+ made to....)
+
+ He and his friends would make the government of Ireland a sheer
+ impossibility, and it would be the duty of the Irish party to make it
+ so if it was attempted to be run on the lines of....--_Times._ (if an
+ attempt was made to run it on the....)
+
+ It is not however attempted to be denied.--HAZLITT. (No one attempts
+ to deny)
+
+ As to the audience, we imagine that a large part of it,
+ certainly all that part of it whose sympathies it was desired to
+ enlist,...--_Times._ (whose sympathies were to be enlisted)
+
+ He will see the alterations that were proposed to be made, but
+ rejected.--_Times._ (proposed, but rejected)
+
+ The argument by which this difficulty is sought to be evaded.--BALFOUR.
+
+This and the following instances are not easily mended, unless we may
+supply the subject of ‘seek’, &c. (‘some writers’).
+
+ The arguments by which the abolition was attempted to be supported
+ were founded on the rights of man.--_Times._
+
+ Some mystery in regard to her birth, which, she was well informed,
+ was assiduously, though vainly, endeavoured to be discovered.--FANNY
+ BURNEY.
+
+ The close darkness of the shut-up house (forgotten to be
+ opened, though it was long since day) yielded to the unexpected
+ glare.--DICKENS.
+
+ Those whose hours of employment are proposed to be limited.--_Times._
+
+ The insignificant duties proposed to be placed on food.--_Times._
+
+ The anti-liberal principles which it was long ago attempted to embody
+ in the Holy Alliance.--_Times._
+
+ Considerable support was managed to be raised for Waldemar.--CARLYLE.
+
+We may notice here a curious blunder that is sometimes made with the
+reflexive verb ‘I avail myself of’. The passive of this is never used,
+because there is no occasion for it: ‘I was availed of this by myself’
+would mean exactly the same as the active, and would be intolerably
+clumsy. The impossible passives quoted below imply that _it_ and
+_staff_ would be the direct objects of the active verb.
+
+ Watt and Fulton bethought themselves that, where was power was not
+ devil, but was God; that it must be availed of and not by any means
+ let off and wasted.--EMERSON.
+
+_Used_ or _employed_, and so in the next:
+
+ No salvage appliances or staff could have been availed of in time to
+ save the lives of the men.--_Times._
+
+
+27. CONFUSION WITH NEGATIVES
+
+This is extraordinarily common. The instances are arranged in order of
+obviousness.
+
+ Yezd is not only the refuge of the most ancient of Persian religions,
+ but it is one of the headquarters of the modern Babi propaganda,
+ the far-reaching effects of which it is probably difficult to
+ underestimate.--_Spectator._
+
+ Not a whit undeterred by the disaster which overtook them at
+ Cavendish-square last week ... the suffragettes again made themselves
+ prominent.--_Daily Mail._
+
+ So far as medicine is concerned, I am not sure that physiology,
+ such as it was down to the time of Harvey, might as well not have
+ existed.--HUXLEY.
+
+ The generality of his countrymen are far more careful not to
+ transgress the customs of what they call gentility, than to violate
+ the laws of honour or morality.--BORROW.
+
+ France and Russia are allies, as are England and Japan. Is it
+ impossible to imagine that, in consequence of the growing friendship
+ between the two great peoples on both sides of the Channel,
+ an agreement might not one day be realized between the four
+ Powers?--_Times._
+
+ I do not of course deny that in this, as in all moral principles,
+ there may not be found, here and there, exceptional cases which may
+ amuse a casuist.--L. STEPHEN.
+
+ In view of the doubts among professed theologians regarding the
+ genuineness and authenticity of the Gospels in whole or in part, he is
+ unable to say how much of the portraiture of Christ may not be due to
+ the idealization of His life and character.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Is it quite inconceivable that if the smitten had always turned the
+ other cheek the smiters would not long since have become so ashamed
+ that their practice would have ceased?--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ I do not think it is possible that the traditions and doctrines of
+ these two institutions should not fail to create rival, and perhaps
+ warring, schools.--_Times._
+
+ Any man--runs this terrible statute--denying the doctrine of the
+ Trinity or of the Divinity of Christ, or that the books of Scripture
+ are not the ‘Word of God’, or ..., ‘shall suffer the pain of
+ death’.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ But it would not be at all surprising if, by attempting too much,
+ and, it must be added, by indulging too much in a style the strained
+ preciosity of which occasionally verges on rant and even hysteria, Mr.
+ Sichel has not to some extent defeated his own object.--_Spectator._
+
+ No one scarcely really believes.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to
+ differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of
+ difference?--STEVENSON.
+
+ Lastly, how can Mr. Balfour tell but that two years hence he may not
+ be too tired of official life to begin any new conflict?--F. GREENWOOD.
+
+ What sort of impression would it be likely to make upon the Boers?
+ They could hardly fail to regard it as anything but an expression of
+ want of confidence in our whole South-African policy.--_Times._
+
+ My friend Mr. Bounderby could never see any difference between leaving
+ the Coketown ‘hands’ exactly as they were and requiring them to be fed
+ with turtle soup and venison out of gold spoons.--DICKENS.
+
+ But it is one thing to establish these conditions [the Chinese
+ Ordinance], and another to remove them suddenly.--_Westminster
+ Gazette._
+
+ What economy of life and money would not have been spared the empire
+ of the Tsars had it not rendered war certain.--_Times._ (_It_ is the
+ empire. The instance is not quoted for _not_, though that too is
+ wrong, but for the confusion between loss and economy)
+
+ The question of ‘raids’ is one which necessarily comes home to every
+ human being living within at least thirty miles of our enormously long
+ coast line.--LONSDALE HALE. (An odd puzzle. _Within thirty_ means less
+ than thirty; _at least thirty_ means not less than thirty. The meaning
+ is clear enough, however, and perhaps the expression is defensible;
+ but it would have been better to say: within a strip at least thirty
+ miles broad along our enormous coast line)
+
+The fact that a negative idea can often be either included in a word
+or kept separate from it leads to a special form of confusion, the
+construction proper to the resolved form being used with the compound
+and _vice versa_.
+
+ My feelings, Sir, are moderately unspeakable, and that is a
+ fact.--American. (not moderately speakable: _moderately_ belongs only
+ to half of _unspeakable_)
+
+ ... who did not aim, like the Presbyterians, at a change in Church
+ government, but rejected the notion of a national Church at all.--J.
+ R. GREEN. (_Reject_ is equivalent to _will not have_. I reject
+ altogether: I will not have at all)
+
+ And your correspondent does not seem to know, or not to realize, the
+ conditions of the problem.--_Times._ (_Seems_, not _does not seem_,
+ has to be supplied in the second clause)
+
+ I confess myself altogether unable to formulate such a principle, much
+ less to prove it.--_Balfour._ (_Less_ does not suit _unable_, but
+ _able_; but the usage of _much less_ and _much more_ is hopelessly
+ chaotic)
+
+ War between these two great nations would be an inexplicable
+ impossibility.--CHOATE. (_Inexplicable_ does not qualify the whole of
+ _impossibility_; to make sense we must divide _impossibility_ into
+ _impossible event_, and take _inexplicable_ only with _event_)
+
+ And the cry has this justification,--that no age can see itself in a
+ proper perspective, and is therefore incapable of giving its virtues
+ and vices their relative places.--_Spectator._ (_No age_ is equivalent
+ to _not any age_, and out of this we have to take _any age_ as subject
+ to the last sentence; this is a common, but untidy and blameworthy
+ device)
+
+
+28. OMISSION OF ‘AS’
+
+This is very common, but quite contrary to good modern usage, after the
+verb _regard_, and others like it. In the first three instances the
+motive of the omission is obvious, but does not justify it; all that
+was necessary was to choose another verb, as _consider_, that does not
+require _as_. In the later instances the omission is gratuitous.
+
+ I regard it as important as anything.
+
+ Lord Bombie had run away with Lady Bombie ‘in her sark’. This I
+ could not help regarding both a most improper as well as a most
+ uncomfortable proceeding.--CROCKETT.
+
+ So vital is this suggestion regarded.
+
+ Rare early editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems--editions which
+ had long been regarded among the national heirlooms.--S. LEE.
+
+ The latter may now be expected to regard himself absolved from such
+ obligation as he previously felt.--_Times._
+
+ A memoir which was justly regarded of so much merit and importance
+ that....--HUXLEY.
+
+ ... what might be classed a ‘horizontal’ European triplice.--_Times._
+
+ You would look upon yourself amply revenged if you knew what they have
+ cost me.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ He also alluded to the bayonet, and observed that its main use
+ was no longer a defence against cavalry, but it was for the final
+ charge.--_Times._
+
+ ... I was rewarded with such a conception of the God-like majesty and
+ infinite divinity which everywhere loomed up behind and shone through
+ the humanity of the Son of Man that no false teaching or any power on
+ earth or in hell itself will ever shake my firm faith in the combined
+ divinity and humanity in the person of the Son of God, and _as sure
+ am I_ that I eat and drink and live to-day, so certain am I that this
+ mysterious Divine Redeemer is in living....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+The last example is of a different kind. Read _as sure as I am_ for _as
+sure am I_ as the least possible correction. Unpractised writers should
+beware of correlative clauses except in their very simplest forms.
+
+
+29. OTHER LIBERTIES TAKEN WITH ‘AS’
+
+_As_ must not be expected to do by itself the work of _such as_.
+
+ There were not two dragon sentries keeping ward before the gate of
+ this abode, _as_ in magic legend are usually found on duty over the
+ wronged innocence imprisoned.--DICKENS.
+
+ The specialist is naturally best for his particular job; but if the
+ particular specialist required is not on the spot, as must often
+ be the case, the best substitute for him is not another specialist
+ but the man trained to act for himself in all circumstances, _as_
+ it has been the glory of our nation to produce both in the Army and
+ elsewhere.--_Times._
+
+ We question if throughout the French Revolution there was a single
+ case of six or seven thousand insurgents blasted away by cannon
+ shot, _as_ is believed to have happened in Odessa.--_Spectator._
+ (This is much more defensible than the previous two; but when a
+ definite noun--as here _case_--can be naturally supplied for the verb
+ introduced by _as_, _such as_ is better).
+
+ The decision of the French Government to send a special mission to
+ represent France at the marriage of the German Crown Prince is not
+ intended as anything more than a mere act of international courtesy,
+ _as_ is customary on such occasions.--_Times._
+
+Neither _as_ nor _such as_ should be made to do the work of the
+relative pronoun where there would be no awkwardness in using the
+pronoun itself.
+
+ With a speed of eight knots, _as_ [which] has been found practicable
+ in the case of the Suez Canal, the passage would occupy five
+ days.--_Times._
+
+ The West Indian atmosphere is not of the limpid brightness and
+ transparent purity _such as_ [that] are found in the sketch entitled
+ ‘A Street in Kingston’.--_Times._
+
+ The ideal statues and groups in this room and the next are scarcely so
+ interesting as we have sometimes seen.--_Times._ (_As_ is clearly here
+ a relative adverb, answering to _so_; nevertheless the construction
+ can be theoretically justified, the full form being _as we have
+ sometimes seen groups interesting_. But it is very ugly; why not say
+ instead _as some that we have seen_?)
+
+The idiom _as who should say_ must not be used unless the sentence
+to which it is appended has for subject a person to whom the person
+implied in _who_ is compared. This seems reasonable, and is borne out,
+for instance, by all the Shakespeare passages--a dozen--that we have
+looked at. The type is: The cloudy messenger turns me his back, and
+hums, as who should say:--&c.
+
+ To think of the campaign without the scene is as who should read a
+ play by candle-light among the ghosts of an empty theatre.--MORLEY.
+
+
+30. BRACHYLOGY
+
+1. Omission of a dependent noun in the second of two parallel series:
+‘The brim of my hat is wider than yours’. For this there is some
+justification: an ugly string of words is avoided, and the missing word
+is easily supplied from the first series; it has usually the effect,
+however, of attaching a preposition to the wrong noun:
+
+ I should be proud to lay an obligation upon my charmer to the amount
+ of half, nay, to the whole of my estate.--RICHARDSON.
+
+ There is as much of the pure gospel in their teachings as in any other
+ community of Christians in our land.
+
+ There cannot be the same reason for a prohibition of correspondence
+ with me, as there was of mine with Mr. Lovelace.--RICHARDSON.
+
+Here the right preposition is retained.
+
+ A man holding such a responsible position as Minister of the United
+ States.--D. SLADEN.
+
+2. A preposition is sometimes left out, quite unwarrantably, from a
+mistaken idea of euphony:
+
+ Without troubling myself as to what such self-absorption might lead in
+ the future.--CORELLI. (lead to)
+
+ He chose to fancy that she was not suspicious of what all his
+ acquaintance were perfectly aware--namely, that....--THACKERAY. (aware
+ of)
+
+3. Impossible compromises between two possible alternatives.
+
+ To be a Christian means to us one who has been regenerated.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._ (‘A Christian means one who has’: ‘to be a Christian means
+ to have been’)
+
+ To do what as far as human possibility has proved out of his
+ power.--_Daily Telegraph._ (‘As a matter of human possibility’: ‘as
+ far as human possibility goes’)
+
+One compromise of this kind has come to be generally recognized:
+
+ So far from being annoyed, he agreed at once. (‘So far was he from
+ being annoyed that ...’: ‘far from being annoyed, he agreed’)
+
+
+31. BETWEEN TWO STOOLS
+
+The commonest form of indecision is that between statement and
+question. But the examples of this are followed by a few miscellaneous
+ones.
+
+ May I ask _that_ if care should be taken of remains of buildings a
+ thousand years old, _ought not_ care to be taken of ancient British
+ earth-works several thousand years old?--_Times._
+
+ Can I not make you understand that you are ruining yourself and me,
+ and _that_ if you don’t get reconciled to your father _what is_ to
+ become of you?--S. FERRIER.
+
+ We will only say _that_ if it was undesirable for a private member to
+ induce the Commons to pass a vote against Colonial Preference, _why
+ was it_ not undesirable for a private member....--_Spectator._
+
+ _Surely_, then, if I am not claiming too much for our efforts at that
+ time to maintain the Union, _am I_ exaggerating our present ability
+ to render him effectual aid in the contest that will be fought at the
+ next election if I say that prudence alone should dictate to him the
+ necessity for doing everything in his power to revive the spirit which
+ the policy of Sir Antony MacDonnell, Lord Dudley, and Mr. Wyndham has
+ done so much to weaken?--_Times._
+
+ I then further observed _that_ China having observed the laws of
+ neutrality, _how could he_ believe in the possibility of an alliance
+ with Russia?--_Times._
+
+The next two use both the relative and the participle construction,
+instead of choosing between them.
+
+ Thus it befell that our high and low labour vote, _which_ (if one
+ might say so in the hearing of M. Jaurès and Herr Bebel) _being_
+ vertical rather than horizontal, and quite unhindered in the United
+ States, of course by an overwhelming majority elected President
+ Roosevelt.--_Times._
+
+ He replied to Mr. Chamberlain’s Limehouse speech, the only part of
+ _which_ that he could endorse _being_, he said, the suggestion that
+ the electorate should go to the root of the question at the next
+ general election.--_Times._
+
+ Who, in Europe, at least, would _forego_ the delights of
+ kissing,--(which the Japanese by-the-by consider a disgusting
+ habit),--_without_ embraces,--and all those other endearments which
+ are supposed to dignify the progress of true love!--CORELLI.
+
+ Poor, bamboozled, patient public!--no wonder it is beginning to think
+ _that_ a halfpenny spent on a newspaper which is purchased to be
+ thrown away, _enough_ and more than enough.--CORELLI.
+
+ But hurriedly dismissing _whatever_ shadow of earnestness, or
+ faint confession of a purpose, laudable or wicked, _that_ her
+ face, or voice, or manner, had, for the moment betrayed, she
+ lounged....--DICKENS.
+
+ _At_ the Épée Team Competition for Dr. Savage’s Challenge Cup, held on
+ the 25th and 27th February last, _was won_ by the Inns of Court team,
+ consisting of....--_14th Middlesex Battalion Orders._
+
+
+32. THE IMPERSONAL ‘ONE’
+
+This should never be mixed up with other pronouns. Its possessive is
+_one’s_, not _his_, and _one_ should be repeated, if necessary, not
+be replaced by _him_, &c. Those who doubt their ability to handle
+it skilfully under these restrictions should only use it where no
+repetition or substitute is needed. The older experimental usage,
+which has now been practically decided against, is shown in the Lowell
+examples.
+
+ That inequality and incongruousness in his writing which makes _one_
+ revise _his_ judgment at every tenth page.--LOWELL.
+
+ As one grows older, _one_ loses many idols, perhaps comes at last
+ to have none at all, although _he_ may honestly enough uncover in
+ deference to the worshippers at any shrine.--LOWELL.
+
+ There are many passages which _one_ is rather inclined to like than
+ sure _he_ would be right in liking.--LOWELL.
+
+ He is a man who speaks with Bismarckian frankness, and who directly
+ impresses _one_ with the impression that _you_ are speaking to a man
+ and not to an incarnate bluebook.--_Times._
+
+ The merit of the book, and it is not a small one, is that it discusses
+ every problem with fairness, with no perilous hankering after
+ originality, and with a disposition to avail _oneself_ of what has
+ been done by _his_ predecessors.--_Times._
+
+ If _one_ has an opinion on any subject, it is of little use to read
+ books or papers which tell _you_ what you know already.--_Times._
+
+ ... are all creations which make _one_ laugh inwardly as _we_
+ read.--HUTTON.
+
+_One’s_, on the other hand, is not the right possessive for the generic
+_man_; _man’s_ or _his_ is required according to circumstances; _his_
+in the following example:
+
+ There is a natural desire in the mind of _man_ to sit for _one’s_
+ picture.--HAZLITT.
+
+
+33. BETWEEN ... OR
+
+This is a confusion between two ways of giving alternatives--_between
+... and_, and _either ... or_. It is always wrong.
+
+
+ The choice Russia has is between payment for damages in money _or_ in
+ kind.--_Times._
+
+ Forced to choose between the sacrifice of important interests on the
+ one hand _or_ the expansion of the Estimates on the other.--_Times._
+
+ We have in that substance the link between organic _or_ inorganic
+ matter which abolishes the distinction between living _and_ dead
+ matter.--_Westminster Gazette._ (Observe the ‘elegant variation’)
+
+ The question lies between a God and a creed, _or_ a God in such an
+ abstract sense that does not signify.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+The author of the last has been perplexed by the _and_ in one of his
+alternatives. _He_ should have used _on the one hand_, &c.
+
+
+34. ‘A’ PLACED BETWEEN THE ADJECTIVE AND ITS NOUN
+
+This is ugly when not necessary. Types of phrase in which it is
+necessary are: Many a youth; What a lie! How dreadful _a_ fate! So lame
+an excuse. But there is no difficulty in placing a before ordinary
+qualifications of the adjective like _quite_, _more_, _much less_. In
+the following, read _quite a sufficient_, _a more valuable_, _a more
+glorious_, _a more serviceable_, _no different position_, _a_ greater
+_or less degree_.
+
+ ... adding that there was no suggestion of another raid against the
+ Japanese flank, which was _quite sufficient an indication_ of coming
+ events for those capable of reading between the lines.--_Times._
+
+ Can any one choose _more glorious an exit_ than to die fighting for
+ one’s own country?--_Times._
+
+ Of sympathy, of ... Mr. Baring has a full measure, which, in his
+ case, is _more valuable an asset_ than familiarity with military
+ textbooks.--_Times._
+
+ No great additional expenditure is required in order to make Oxford
+ _more serviceable a part_ of our educational system.--_Westminster
+ Gazette._
+
+ And young undergraduates are in this respect in no different a
+ position from that of any other Civil Servant.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ The thousand and one adjuncts to devotion finding place _in more or
+ less a degree_ in all churches, are all....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+The odd arrangement in the following will not do; we should have _a_
+either before _so_ or before _degree_.
+
+ But what I do venture to protest against is the sacrificing of the
+ interests of the country districts in _so ridiculously an unfair
+ degree_ to those of a small borough.--_Times._
+
+
+35. _DO_ AS SUBSTITUTE VERB
+
+_Do_ cannot represent (1) _be_, (2) an active verb supplied from a
+passive, (3) an active verb in a compound tense, gerund, or infinitive;
+You made the very mistake that I _did_, but _have made_, _was afraid of
+making_, _expected to make_, _shall_ (_make_).
+
+ It ... ought to have been satisfying to the young man. And so, in a
+ manner of speaking, it did.--CROCKETT.
+
+ It may justly be said, as Mr. Paul does, that....--_Westminster
+ Gazette._
+
+ To inflict upon themselves a disability which one day they will find
+ the mistake and folly of doing.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+We can of course say He lost his train, which I had warned him not to
+_do_; because _lose_ is then represented not by _do_, but by _which_
+(thing).
+
+
+36. FRESH STARTS
+
+The trick of taking breath in the middle of a sentence by means of a
+resumptive _that_ or the like should be avoided; especially when it
+is a confession rather of the writer’s short-windedness than of the
+unwieldy length of his sentence.
+
+ It does not follow (as I pointed out by implication above) that if,
+ according to the account of their origin given by the system, those
+ fundamental beliefs are true, that therefore they are true.--BALFOUR.
+
+ Sir--Might I suggest that while this interesting question is being
+ discussed that the hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ be sung in every church and
+ chapel...?--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+A very short-winded correspondent.
+
+ It seems to be a fair deduction that when the Japanese gained their
+ flank position immediately West of Mukden, and when, further, they
+ took no immediate advantage of the fact, but, on the contrary, began
+ to hold the villages in the plain as defensive positions, that a much
+ more ambitious plan was in operation.--_Times._
+
+If the writer means what he says, and the grounds of the deduction are
+not included in the sentence, reconstruction is not obvious, and _that_
+is perhaps wanted to pick up the thread; but if, as may be suspected,
+the _when_ clauses contain the grounds of the deduction, we may
+reconstruct as follows: ‘When the Japanese ..., and when ..., it was
+natural to infer that ...’.
+
+
+37. VULGARISMS AND COLLOQUIALISMS
+
+_Like_ for _as_:
+
+ Sins that were degrading me, like they have many others.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ They should not make a mad, reckless, frontal attack like General
+ Buller made at the battle of Colenso.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Coming to God the loving Father for pardon, like the poor prodigal
+ did.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ There is no moral force in existence ... which enlarges our outlook
+ like suffering does.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+_What ever ...?_ is a colloquialism; _whatever ...?_ a vulgarism:
+
+ Whatever reason have we to suppose, as the vast majority of professing
+ Christians appear to do, that the public worship of Almighty God
+ ...?--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Whatever is the good in wrangling about bones when one is hungry and
+ has nutritious food at hand?--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+‘Those sort’:
+
+ I know many of those sort of girls whom you call conjurors.--TROLLOPE.
+
+ Those sort of writers would merely take it as a first-class
+ advertisement.--CORELLI.
+
+
+38. TAUTOLOGY
+
+ Lord Rosebery has not budged from his position--splendid, no doubt--of
+ (lonely) isolation.--_Times._
+
+ Counsel admitted that that was a grave suggestion to make,
+ but he submitted that it was borne out by the (surrounding)
+ circumstances.--_Times._
+
+ One can feel first the characteristics which men have in common
+ and only afterward those which distinguish them (apart) from one
+ another.--_Times._
+
+ A final friendly agreement with Japan, which would be very welcome
+ to Russia, is only possible if Japan (again) regains her liberty of
+ action.--_Times._
+
+ Miss Tox was (often) in the habit of assuring Mrs. Chick that
+ ...--DICKENS.
+
+ He had come up one morning, as was now (frequently) his
+ wont.--TROLLOPE.
+
+ The counsellors of the Sultan (continue to) remain
+ sceptical.--_Times._
+
+ The Peresviet lost both her fighting-tops and (in appearance) looked
+ the most damaged of all the ships.--_Times._
+
+ They would, however, strengthen their position if they returned
+ the (temporary) loan of Sir A. MacDonnell to his owners with
+ thanks.--_Times._
+
+ The score was taken to 136 when Mr. MacLaren, who had (evidently)
+ seemed bent on hitting Mr. Armstrong off, was bowled.--_Times._
+
+ ... cannot prevent the diplomacy of the two countries from lending
+ each other (mutual) support.--_Times._
+
+ However, I judged that they would soon (mutually) find each other
+ out.--CROCKETT.
+
+ Notwithstanding which, (however,) poor Polly embraced them all
+ round.--DICKENS.
+
+ If any real remedy is to be found, we must first diagnose the true
+ nature of the disease; (but) that, however, is not hard.--_Times._
+
+ M. Delcassé contemplated an identical answer for France, Great
+ Britain, and Spain, refusing, of course, the proposed conference, but
+ his colleagues of the Cabinet were (, however,) opposed to identical
+ replies.--_Times._
+
+ The strong currents frequently shifted the mines, to the equal danger
+ (both) of friend and foe.--_Times._
+
+ And persecution on the part of the Bishops and the Presbyterians, to
+ (both of) whom their opinions were equally hateful, drove flocks of
+ refugees over sea.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ But to the ordinary English Protestant (both) Latitudinarian and High
+ Churchmen were equally hateful.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ Seriously, (and apart from jesting,) this is no light matter.--BAGEHOT.
+
+ To go back to your own country ... with (the consciousness that you go
+ back with) the sense of duty done.--LORD HALSBURY.
+
+ No doubt my efforts were clumsy enough, but Togo had a capacity for
+ taking pains, by which (said) quality genius is apt to triumph over
+ early obstacles.--_Times._
+
+ ... as having created a (joint) partnership between the two Powers in
+ the Morocco question.--_Times._
+
+ Sir--As a working man it appears to me that to the question ‘Do we
+ believe?’ the only sensible position (there seems to be) is to frankly
+ acknowledge our ignorance of what lies beyond.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+
+39. REDUNDANCIES
+
+ Dr. Redmond told his constituents that _by_ reducing the National
+ vote in the House of Commons they would not _thereby_ get rid of
+ obstruction.--_Times._
+
+ It is not a thousand years _ago since_ municipalities in Scotland were
+ by no means free from the suspicion of corruption.--LORD ROSEBERY.
+
+ Some substance equally _as_ yielding.--_Daily Mail._
+
+ Had another expedition reached the Solomon Islands, who knows _but_
+ that the Spaniards might _not_ have gone on to colonize Australia and
+ so turned the current of history?--_Spectator._
+
+ As one _being_ able to give full consent ... I am yours
+ faithfully....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ But _to_ where shall I look for some small ray of light that will
+ illumine the darkness surrounding the mystery of my being?--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ It is quite _possible_ that if they do that it _may_ be _possible_ to
+ amend it in certain particulars.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ Men and women who _professed to call_ themselves Christians.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._ (An echo, no doubt, of ‘profess and call themselves
+ Christians’)
+
+ The correspondence that you have published _abundantly_ throws out
+ into _bold_ relief the false position assumed....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ In the course of the _day_, _yesterday_, M. Rouvier was able to assure
+ M. Delcassé....--_Times._
+
+ _Moreover_, _too_, do we not all feel...?--J. C. COLLINS.
+
+ The doing nothing for a length of days after the first shock he
+ sustained was _the reason of how it came that_ Nesta knitted closer
+ her acquaintance....--MEREDITH.
+
+ When the public adopt new inventions wholesale, ... _some obligation
+ is due_ to lessen, so far as is possible, the hardships in
+ which....--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+
+40. ‘AS TO WHETHER’
+
+This is a form that is seldom necessary, and should be reserved for
+sentences in which it is really difficult to find a substitute.
+Abstract nouns that cannot be followed immediately by _whether_ should
+if possible be replaced by the corresponding verbs. Many writers seem
+to delight in this hideous combination, and employ it not only with
+abstracts that can be followed by _whether_, but even with verbs.
+
+ The Court declined to express any opinion _as to_ whether the Russian
+ Ambassador was justified in giving the assurances in question and _as
+ to_ whether the offences with which the accused were charged were
+ punishable by German law.--_Times._ (Perhaps ‘declined to say whether
+ in their opinion’; but this is less easily mended than most)
+
+ The difficulties of this task were so great that I was in doubt _as
+ to_ whether it was possible.--_Times._
+
+ His whole interest is concentrated on the question _as to_ how his
+ mission will affect his own fortunes.--_Times._
+
+ A final decision has not yet been arrived at _as to_ whether or not
+ the proceedings shall be public.--_Times._ (It has not yet been
+ finally decided whether)
+
+ You raise the question _as to_ whether Admiral Rozhdestvensky will not
+ return.--_Times._
+
+ I have much pleasure in informing Rear Admiral Mather Byles _as to_
+ where he could inspect a rifle of the type referred to.
+
+ The interesting question which such experiments tend to suggest is as
+ to how far science may....--_Outlook._
+
+ When we come to consider the question _as to_ whether, upon the
+ dissolution of the body, the spirit flies to some far-distant
+ celestial realm....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ He never told us to judge by the lives of professing Christians _as
+ to_ whether Christianity is true.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ M. Delcassé did not allude to the debated question _as to_ whether
+ any official communication ... was made by the French Government to
+ Germany. It is also pointed out that he did not let fall the slightest
+ intimation _as to_ whether the French Government expected....--_Times._
+
+
+41. SUPERFLUOUS ‘BUT’ AND ‘THOUGH’
+
+Where there is a natural opposition between two sentences, adversative
+conjunctions may yet be made impossible by something in one of the
+sentences that does the work unaided. Thus if _in vain_, _only_, and
+_reserves_ and _sole_, had not been used in the following sentences,
+_but_ and _though_ would have been right; as it is, they are wrong.
+
+ (The author dreams that he is a horse being ridden) _In vain_ did I
+ rear and kick, attempting to get rid of my foe; _but_ the surgeon
+ remained as saddle-fast as ever.--BORROW.
+
+ But the substance of the story is probably true, _though_ Voltaire has
+ _only_ made a slip in a name.--MORLEY.
+
+ Germany, it appears, _reserves_ for herself the _sole_ privilege
+ of creating triple alliances and ‘purely defensive’ combinations
+ of that character, _but_ when the interests of other Powers
+ bring them together their action is reprobated as aggressive and
+ menacing.--_Times._
+
+Such mistakes probably result from altering the plan of a sentence in
+writing; and the cure is simply to read over every sentence after it is
+written.
+
+42. ‘IF AND WHEN’
+
+This formula has enjoyed more popularity than it deserves; either
+‘when’ or ‘if’ by itself would almost always give the meaning. Even
+where ‘if’ seems required to qualify ‘when’ (which by itself might
+be taken to exclude the possibility of the event’s never happening
+at all), ‘if’ and ‘when’ are clearly not coordinate, though both are
+subordinate to the main sentence: ‘if and when he comes, I will write’
+means ‘if he comes, I will write when he comes’, or ‘when he comes
+(if he comes at all), I will write’, and the ‘if’ clause, whether
+parenthetic or not, is subordinate to the whole sentence ‘I will write
+when he comes’. Our Gladstone instance below differs from the rest:
+‘when’ with a past tense, unqualified by ‘if’, would make an admission
+that the writer does not choose to make; on the other hand, the time
+reference given by ‘when’ is essential; ‘on the occasion on which it
+was done (if it really was done) it was done judicially’. The faulty
+coordination may be overlooked where there is real occasion for its
+use; but many writers seem to have persuaded themselves that neither
+‘if’ nor ‘when’ is any longer capable of facing its responsibilities
+without the other word to keep it in countenance.
+
+ No doubt it will accept the experimental proof here alleged, if and
+ when it is repeated under conditions....--_Times._
+
+ The latter will include twelve army corps, six rifle brigades, and
+ nine divisions or brigades of mounted troops, units which, if and when
+ complete, will more than provide....--_Times._
+
+ Unless and until we pound hardest we shall never beat the
+ Boers.--_Spectator._
+
+ It is only if, and when, our respective possessions become
+ conterminous with those of great military states on land that we
+ each....--_Times._
+
+ If and when it was done, it was done so to speak
+ judicially.--GLADSTONE.
+
+ No prudent seaman would undertake an invasion unless or until he had
+ first disposed of the force preparing ... to impeach him.--_Times._
+
+ Its leaders decline to take office unless and until the 90 or 100
+ German words of command used ... are replaced....--_Times._
+
+ If and when employment is abundant....--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ It means nothing less, if Mr. Chamberlain has his way, than the final
+ committal of one of the two great parties to a return to Protection,
+ if and when it has the opportunity.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ It is clear, however, that the work will gain much if and when she
+ plays faster.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+
+43. MALTREATED IDIOMS
+
+1. Two existing idioms are fused into a non-existent one.
+
+ It did not take him much trouble.--SLADEN. (I take: it costs me)
+
+ An opportunity should be afforded the enemy of retiring northwards,
+ more or less _of_ their own _account_.--_Times._ (of my own accord: on
+ my own account)
+
+ Dr. Kuyper admitted that his opinion had been consulted.--_Times._ (I
+ consult you: take your opinion)
+
+ But it was in vain with the majority to attempt it.--BAGEHOT. (I
+ attempt in vain: it is vain to attempt)
+
+ The captain got out the shutter of the door, shut it up, made it all
+ fast, and locked the door itself.--DICKENS. (make it fast: make all
+ fast)
+
+ The provisioning of the Russian Army would practically have to be
+ drawn exclusively from the mother country.--_Times._ (draw provisions:
+ do provisioning)
+
+ It gives me the greatest pleasure in adding my testimony.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._ (I have pleasure in adding: it gives me pleasure to add)
+
+ And if we rejected a similar proposition made to us, was it
+ not too much to expect that Canada might not turn in another
+ direction?--CHAMBERLAIN (reported). (Might not Canada turn?... to
+ expect that Canada would not turn)
+
+ I can speak from experience that ... ‘conversion’ ... was a very real
+ and powerful thing.--_Daily Telegraph._ (speak to conversion’s being:
+ say that conversion was)
+
+ He certainly possessed, though in no great degree, the means of
+ affording them more relief than he practised.--SCOTT. (preached more
+ than he practised: had means of affording more than he did afford)
+
+ My position is one of a clerk, thirty-eight years of age, and
+ married.--_Daily Telegraph._ (one that no one would envy: that of a
+ clerk)
+
+ Abbot, indeed, had put the finishing stroke on all attempts at a
+ higher ceremonial. Neither he nor his household would bow at the name
+ of Christ.--J. R. GREEN. (put the finishing touches on: given the
+ finishing stroke to)
+
+ In this chapter some of these words will be considered, and also some
+ others against which purism has raised objections which do not seem
+ to be well taken.--R. G. WHITE. (exceptions well taken: objections
+ rightly made. _To take an objection well_ can only mean to keep your
+ temper when it is raised)
+
+ A woman would instinctively draw her cloak or dress closer to her, and
+ a man leave by far an unnecessary amount of room for fear of coming
+ into contact with those to whom....--_Daily Telegraph._ (by far too
+ great: quite an unnecessary)
+
+ The fines inflicted for excess of the legal speed.--_Times._ (excess
+ of speed: exceeding the legal speed)
+
+ Notwithstanding the no inconsiderable distance by sea.--_Guernsey
+ Advertiser._ (it is no inconsiderable distance: the--or a--not
+ inconsiderable distance)
+
+ His whim had been gratified at a trifling cost of ten thousand
+ pounds.--CRAWFORD. (a trifling cost--unspecified: a trifle of ten
+ thousand _or so_: the trifling cost of ten thousand. So in the next)
+
+ Dying at a ripe old age of eighty-three.--_Westminster Gazette._
+
+ That question is the present solvency or insolvency of the Russian
+ State. The answer to it depends not upon the fact whether Russia has
+ or has not....--_Times._ (the fact that: the question whether. But
+ _depends not upon whether_ would be best here)
+
+ To all those who had thus so self-sacrificingly and energetically
+ promoted the organization of this fund he desired to accord in the
+ name of the diocese their deep obligation.--_Guernsey Advertiser._
+ (accord thanks: acknowledge obligation)
+
+ The allies frittered away in sieges the force which was ready for an
+ advance into the heart of France until the revolt of the West and
+ South was alike drowned in blood.--_Times._ (the revolts were alike
+ drowned: the revolt was drowned)
+
+2. Of two distinct idioms the wrong is chosen.
+
+ When, too, it was my pleasure to address a public meeting of more than
+ 2,000 at the Royal Theatre the organized opposition numbered less than
+ seven score.--_Times._
+
+ It is our pleasure to present to you the enclosed notification of the
+ proportion of profits which has been placed to the credit of your
+ account.--Company circular. (I had, we have, the pleasure of--. The
+ form chosen is proper to royal personages expressing their gracious
+ will)
+
+ In the face of it the rule appears a most advisable one.--_Guernsey
+ Advertiser._ (_On the face of it_ means prima facie: the other means
+ in spite of)
+
+3. The form of an idiom is distorted, without confusion with another.
+
+ However, towards evening the wind and the waves subsided and the night
+ became quiet and starlight.--_Times._ (_Starlight_ is a noun, which
+ can be used as an adjective immediately before another noun only; a
+ starlight night)
+
+ Russia is now bitterly expiating her share in the infamy then visited
+ upon Japan.--_Times._ (We visit upon a person his sins, or something
+ for which he is responsible, and not we; or again, we may visit our
+ indignation upon him)
+
+ He anticipated much towards Mary’s recovery in her return to
+ Japan.--SLADEN. (anticipate ... from)
+
+ But both Governments have now requested Washington to be chosen as the
+ place of meeting.--_Times._ (requested that Washington should)
+
+ For as its author in later years told the writer of this article,
+ he had studied war for nine years before he put the pen to the
+ paper.--_Times._ (Put pen to paper. This looks like imitation French;
+ it is certainly not English)
+
+4. The meaning of an idiom is mistaken without confusion with another.
+
+ For days and days, in such moods, he would stay within his cottage,
+ never darkening the door or seeing other face than his own
+ inmates.--TROLLOPE. (To darken the door is always to enter as a
+ visitor, never to go out)
+
+5. Some miscellaneous and unclassified violations are added, mostly
+without further comment than italics, to remind sanguine learners that
+there are small pitfalls in every direction.
+
+ If I _did not have_ the most thorough dependence on your good sense
+ and high principles, I should not speak to you in this way.--TROLLOPE.
+
+ Japan, while desiring the massacre of her own and Russia’s subjects to
+ be brought to an end, _has_ nevertheless _every interest that_ the war
+ should go on.--_Times._
+
+ The unpublished state, of which only _an extremely few_ examples are
+ in existence.--_Times._
+
+ Once I _jested her_ about it.--CROCKETT.
+
+ It is _significant to add_ that when Mrs. Chesnut died in 1886 her
+ servants were with her.--_Times._
+
+ Herring boats, the drapery of whose black suspended nets _contrasted_
+ with picturesque effect _the white sails_ of the larger vessels.--S.
+ FERRIER.
+
+ It is at least incumbent to be scrupulously accurate.--_Times._
+ (The metaphor in _incumbent_ is so much alive that _upon_--is never
+ dispensed with)
+
+ A measure _according Roman Catholic clergymen_ who have passed through
+ the local seminaries but have not yet passed the prescribed Russian
+ language test _to hold_ clerical appointments.--_Times._
+
+ There will be established in this free England a commercial tyranny
+ _the like of which_ will not be inferior to the tyrannical Inquisition
+ of the Dark Ages.--_Spectator._
+
+
+44. TRUISMS AND CONTRADICTIONS IN TERMS
+
+A contradiction in terms is often little more than a truism turned
+inside out; we shall therefore group the two together, and with them
+certain other illogical expressions, due to a similar confusion of
+thought.
+
+ Praise which perhaps was scarcely meant to be taken _too_
+ literally.--BAGEHOT.
+
+Where no standard of literalness is mentioned, _too literally_ is ‘more
+literally than was meant’. We may safely affirm, without the cautious
+reservations _perhaps_ and _scarcely_, that the praise was not meant to
+be taken more literally than it was meant to be taken. Omit _too_.
+
+ He found what was _almost quite_ as interesting.--_Times._
+
+If it was almost as interesting, we do not want _quite_: if quite, we
+do not want _almost_.
+
+ Splendid and elegant, but _somewhat bordering on_ the antique
+ fashion.--SCOTT.
+
+_Bordering on_ means not ‘like’ but ‘very like’; ‘somewhat very like’.
+
+ A _very unique_ child, thought I.--C. BRONTË.
+
+ A _somewhat unique_ gathering of our great profession.--HALSBURY.
+
+There are no degrees in uniqueness.
+
+ Steady, respectable labouring men--_one and all, with rare
+ exceptions_, married.--_Times._ (all without exception, with rare
+ exceptions)
+
+ To _name_ only a _few_, _take_ Lord Rosebery, Lord Rendel, Lord ...,
+ ..., ..., and _many_ others.--_Times._
+
+_Take_ in this context means ‘consider as instances’; we cannot
+consider them as instances unless we have their names; _take_ must
+therefore mean ‘let me name for your consideration’. Thus we get: ‘To
+_name_ only a _few_, let me _name_ ... and _many_ others (whom I do
+_not_ name)’.
+
+ More _led away_ by a jingling antithesis of words than _an accurate
+ perception_ of ideas.--H. D. MACLEOD.
+
+‘Guided by an accurate perception’ is what is meant. To be ‘led
+away by accurate perception’ is a misfortune that could happen only
+in a special sense, the sense in which it has happened, possibly, to
+the writer, whom sheer force of accurate perception may have hurried
+into inaccurate expression; but more probably he too is the victim of
+‘jingling antithesis’.
+
+ _Long before_ the appointed hour for the commencement of the
+ recital, standing room only fell to the lot of those who arrived
+ _just previous_ to Mr. K.’s appearance on the platform.--_Guernsey
+ Advertiser._
+
+The necessary inference--that Mr. K., the reciter, appeared on the
+platform long before the appointed hour--is probably not in accordance
+with the facts.
+
+ The weather this week has for the most part been of that quality which
+ the month of March so _strikingly_ characterizes in the _ordinary_
+ course of events.--_Guernsey Advertiser._
+
+What happens in the ordinary course of events can scarcely continue
+to be striking. Whether the month characterizes the weather, or the
+weather the month, we need not consider here.
+
+ He _forgot_ that it was possible, that from a brief period of
+ tumultuous disorder, there might issue a military despotism more
+ compact, more disciplined, and more overpowering than any which had
+ preceded it, or any which _has_ followed it.--BAGEHOT.
+
+_He_ could not forget, because he could not know, anything about the
+despotisms which _have_ in fact followed. He might know and forget
+something about all the despotisms that had preceded or _should_ follow
+(in direct speech, ‘that have preceded or shall follow’): ‘this may
+result in the most compact despotism in all history, past and future’.
+But probably Bagehot does not even mean this: the last clause seems to
+contain a reflection of his own, falsely presented as a part of what
+_he_ ought to have reflected.
+
+ Some people would say that my present manner of travelling is much
+ the _most preferable_, riding as I do now, instead of leading my
+ horse.--BORROW.
+
+Only two modes of travelling are compared: _the most preferable_
+implies four, three of them preferable in different degrees to the
+fourth. A not uncommon vulgarism.
+
+
+45. DOUBLE EMPHASIS
+
+Attempts at packing double emphasis into a single sentence are apt to
+result in real weakening.
+
+ No government ever plunged _more_ rapidly into a _deeper_
+ quagmire.--_Outlook._ (From the writer’s evident wish to state the
+ matter strongly, we infer that several Governments have plunged more
+ rapidly into as deep quagmires, and as rapidly into deeper ones)
+
+ Mr. Justice Neville ... will now have the very rare experience of
+ joining on the Bench a colleague whom he defeated on the polls _just
+ fourteen years ago_.--_Westminster Gazette._ (The _experience_,
+ with exact time-interval, is probably unique, like any individual
+ thumb-print; that does not make the _coincidence_ more remarkable; and
+ it is the coincidence that we are to admire)
+
+ Nothing has brought out more strongly than motor-driving the
+ over-bearing, selfish nature of too many motor-drivers and their utter
+ want of consideration for their fellow men.--LORD WEMYSS. (The attempt
+ to kill drivers and driving with one stone leaves both very slightly
+ wounded. For what should show up the drivers more than the driving?
+ and whom should the driving show up more than the drivers?)
+
+The commonest form of this is due to conscientious but mistaken zeal
+for correctness, which prefers, for instance, _without oppressing or
+without plundering_ to _without oppressing or plundering_. The first
+form excludes only one of the offences, and is therefore, though
+probably meant to be twice as emphatic, actually much weaker than the
+second, which excludes both. With _and_ instead of _or_, it is another
+matter.
+
+ Actual experience has shown that a gun constructed on the wire
+ system can still be utilized effectively without the destruction of
+ the weapon or without dangerous effects, even with its inner tube
+ split.--_Times._
+
+ The Union must be maintained without pandering to such prejudices on
+ the one hand, _or without_ giving way on the other to the ... schemes
+ of the Nationalists.--_Spectator._
+
+ He inhibited him, on pain of excommunication, from seeking a divorce
+ in his own English Courts, _or from_ contracting a new marriage.--J.
+ R. GREEN. (Half excused by the negative sense of _inhibit_)
+
+
+46. ‘SPLIT’ AUXILIARIES.
+
+Some writers, holding that there is the same objection to split
+compound verbs as to split infinitives, prefer to place any adverb or
+qualifying phrase not between the auxiliary and the other component,
+but before both. Provided that the adverb is then separated from the
+auxiliary, no harm is done: ‘Evidently he was mistaken’ is often as
+good as ‘He was evidently mistaken’, and suits all requirements of
+accentuation. But the placing of the adverb immediately before or
+after the auxiliary depends, according to established usage, upon
+the relative importance of the two components. When the main accent
+is to fall upon the second component, the normal place of the adverb
+is between the two; it is only when the same verb is repeated with a
+change in the tense or mood of the auxiliary, that the adverb should
+come first. ‘He evidently was deceived’ implies, or should imply, that
+the verb _deceived_ has been used before, and that the point of the
+sentence depends upon the emphatic auxiliary; accordingly we should
+write ‘The possibility of his being deceived had never occurred to
+me; but he evidently was deceived’, but ‘I relied implicitly on his
+knowledge of the facts; but he was evidently deceived’. In our first
+two examples below the adverb is rightly placed first to secure the
+emphasis on the auxiliary: in all the others the above principle of
+accentuation is violated. The same order of words is required by the
+copula with whatever kind of complement.
+
+ I recognize this truth, and always have recognized it.
+
+ Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be
+ so, as long as the world endures.--BURKE.
+
+ They never are suffered to succeed in their opposition.--BURKE.
+
+ She had received the homage of ... and occasionally had deigned to
+ breathe forth....--BEACONSFIELD.
+
+ He ordered breakfast as calmly as if he never had left his
+ home.--BEACONSFIELD.
+
+ Miss Becky, whose sympathetic powers never had been called into action
+ before.--FERRIER.
+
+ They now were bent on taking the work into their own hands.--MORLEY.
+
+ There may have been a time when a king was a god, but he now is pretty
+ much on a level with his subjects.--JOWETT.
+
+ They both are contradicted by all positive evidence.--W. H. MALLOCK.
+
+ Religious art at once complete and sincere never yet has
+ existed.--RUSKIN.
+
+ Not mere empty ideas, but what were once realities, and that I long
+ have thought decayed.--C. BRONTË.
+
+ So that he might assist at a Bible class, from which he never had been
+ absent.--BEACONSFIELD.
+
+ If we would write an essay, we necessarily must have something to
+ say.--BYGOTT & JONES.
+
+ The protectionists lately have been affirming that the autumn session
+ will be devoted to railway questions.--_Times._
+
+ Visitors no longer can drive in open carriages along the
+ littoral.--_Times._
+
+ It still is the fact that his mind ... was essentially the mind of a
+ poet.--_Times._
+
+ To whom in any case its style would have not appealed.--_Times._
+
+To go wrong with _not_ is an achievement possible only with triple
+compounds, where the principal division is of course between the finite
+(_would_) and the infinitive with participle (_have appealed_). ‘Would
+not have appealed’ must be written, though at an enormous sacrifice of
+‘distinction’.
+
+ This enhanced value of old English silver may be due partly to the
+ increase in the number of collectors; but it also has been largely
+ influenced by the publication....--_Times._
+
+ Mr. Fry showed to a very great extent his power of defence.... To-day,
+ if runs are to be of importance, he very likely will show his powers
+ of hitting.--_Times._
+
+
+47. OVERLOADING
+
+A single sentence is sometimes made to carry a double burden:
+
+ So unique a man as Sir George Lewis has, in truth, rarely been lost to
+ this country.--BAGEHOT.
+
+The meaning is not ‘Men like Sir G. Lewis have seldom been lost’, but
+‘Men like the late Sir G. Lewis have seldom been found’. But instead
+of _the late_ a word was required that should express proper concern;
+_lost_ is a short cut to ‘men so unique as he whose loss we now
+deplore’.
+
+ There are but few men whose lives abound in such wild and romantic
+ adventure, and, for the most part, crowned with success.--PRESCOTT.
+
+The writer does not mean ‘adventures so wild, so romantic, and so
+successful in the main’; that is shown by the qualifying parenthesis,
+which is obviously one of comment on the individual case. What he does
+mean ought to have been given in two sentences: ‘There are but few ...
+adventure;--’s, moreover, was for the most part crowned with success’.
+
+ The Sultan regrets that the distance and the short notice alone
+ prevent him from coming in person.--_Times._
+
+This is as much as to say that the Sultan wishes there were more
+obstacles. Read: ‘The Sultan regrets that he cannot come in person;
+nothing but the distance and the short notice could prevent him’.
+
+
+48. DEMONSTRATIVE, NOUN, AND PARTICIPLE OR ADJECTIVE
+
+Of the forms, _persons interested_, _the persons interested_, _those
+interested_, _those who are interested_, one or another may better suit
+a particular phrase or context. _Those interested_ is the least to be
+recommended, especially with an active participle or adjective. The
+form _those persons interested_ is a hybrid, and is very seldom used by
+any good writer; but it is becoming so common in inferior work that it
+is thought necessary to give many examples. The first two, of the form
+_those interested_, will pass, though _those who were concerned_, _all
+who drive_, would be better. In the others _that_ and _those_ should be
+either replaced by _the_ or (sometimes) simply omitted.
+
+ The idea of a shortage had hardly entered the heads even of _those_
+ most immediately _concerned_.--_Times._
+
+ They are the terror of all _those driving_ or riding spirited
+ horses.--_Times._
+
+ At every time and in every place throughout _that_ very limited
+ _portion_ of time and space _open_ to human observation.--BALFOUR.
+
+ _That part_ of the regular army _quartered_ at home should be grouped
+ by divisions.--_Times._
+
+ Here they beheld acres of _that_ stupendous _growth seen_ only in the
+ equinoctial regions.--PRESCOTT.
+
+ It is not likely that General Kuropatkine has amassed _those
+ reserves_ of military stores and supplies plainly _required_ by the
+ circumstances of his situation.--_Times._
+
+ The insurrection had been general throughout the country, at least
+ _that portion_ of it _occupied_ by the Spaniards.--PRESCOTT.
+
+ My amendment would be that _that part_ of the report _dealing_ with
+ the dividend on the ‘A’ shares ... be not adopted.--Company report.
+
+ We shall fail to secure _that unanimity_ of thought and doctrine so
+ _indispensable_ both for....--_Times._
+
+ ... in order to minimize the effect produced by _that portion_ of the
+ Admirals’ report _favourable_ to England.--_Times._
+
+ A struggle ... which our nation must be prepared to face in the last
+ resort, or else give way to _those countries_ not _afraid_ to accept
+ the responsibilities and sacrifices inseparable from Empire.--_Times._
+
+ Civil servants will not, nay, cannot, work with _that freedom_ of
+ action so _essential_ to good work in the case of such persons, so
+ long as....--_Times._
+
+ To _those Colonies unable_ to concur with these suggestions a warning
+ should be addressed.--_Times._
+
+
+49. FALSE SCENT
+
+It is most annoying to a reader to be misled about the construction,
+and therefore most foolish in a writer to mislead him. In the sentences
+that follow, _facilities_ and _excesses_ are naturally taken as in the
+same construction, and similarly _influences_ and _nature_, until the
+ends of the sentences show us that we have gone wrong. These are very
+bad cases; but minor offences of the kind are very common, and should
+be carefully guarded against.
+
+ He gloats over the facilities the excesses and the blunders of the
+ authorities have given his comrades for revolutionary action among the
+ masses.--_Times._
+
+ The influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature,
+ to say nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it
+ more than usually difficult for him to cast aside or rightly
+ subordinate.--CARLYLE.
+
+That there is no comma between _facilities_ and _the excesses_ is no
+defence, seeing how often commas go wrong; indeed the comma after _age_
+in the second piece, which is strictly wrong, is a proof how little
+reliance is to be placed on such signs.
+
+
+50. MISPLACEMENT OF WORDS
+
+Generous interpretation will generally get at a writer’s meaning; but
+for him to rely on that is to appeal _ad misericordiam_. Appended to
+the sentences, when necessary, is the result of supposing them to mean
+what they say.
+
+ It is with grief and pain, that, _as admirers of the British
+ aristocracy_, we find ourselves obliged to admit the existence of so
+ many ill qualities in a person whose name is in Debrett.--THACKERAY.
+ (implies that admirers must admit this more than other people)
+
+ It is from this fate that the son of a commanding prime minister is
+ _at any rate_ preserved.--BAGEHOT. (implies that _preserved_ is a weak
+ word used instead of a stronger)
+
+ And even if we could suppose it to be our duty, it is not one which,
+ _as was shown in the last chapter_, we are practically competent to
+ perform.--BALFOUR.
+
+ The chairman said there was no sadder sight in the world than to
+ see women drunk, because they seemed to lose _complete_ control of
+ themselves. (implies that losing complete control leaves you with less
+ than if you lost incomplete control)
+
+ The soldiers are deeply chagrined at having had to give up positions,
+ _in obedience to orders_, which the Japanese could not take.--_Times._
+
+ Great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information
+ than by the printed page. I _only_ would say, that it needs a strong
+ head to bear that diet.--EMERSON. (implies that no one else would say
+ it)
+
+ Yes, the laziest of human beings, through the providence of God, _a
+ being, too, of rather inferior capacity_, acquires the written part of
+ a language so difficult that....--BORROW.
+
+ Right or wrong as his hypothesis may be, no one that knows him will
+ suspect that he himself had not seen it, and seen over it.... Neither,
+ _as we often hear_, is there any superhuman faculty required to follow
+ him.--CARLYLE. (implies that we often hear there is not)
+
+ This, we say to ourselves, may be all very true (for have we, _too_,
+ not browsed in the Dictionary of National Biography?); but why does
+ Tanner say it all, just at that moment, to....--_Times._ (implies
+ that others have refrained from browsing)
+
+ But in 1798 the Irish rising was crushed in a defeat of the insurgents
+ at Vinegar Hill; and Tippoo’s death in the storm of his own capital,
+ Seringapatam, _only_ saved him from witnessing the English conquest of
+ Mysore.--J. R. GREEN. (implies that that was all it saved him from)
+
+
+51. AMBIGUOUS POSITION
+
+In this matter judgement is required. A captious critic might find
+examples on almost every page of almost any writer; but most of
+them, though they may strictly be called ambiguous, would be quite
+justifiable. On the other hand a careless writer can nearly always
+plead, even for a bad offence, that an attentive reader would take
+the thing the right way. That is no defence; a rather inattentive and
+sleepy reader is the true test; if the run of the sentence is such that
+he at first sight refers whatever phrase is in question to the wrong
+government, then the ambiguity is to be condemned.
+
+ Louis XVIII, dying in 1824, was succeeded, as Charles X, by his
+ brother the Count d’Artois.--E. SANDERSON. (The sleepy reader,
+ assisted by memories of James the First and Sixth, concludes, though
+ not without surprise, which perhaps finally puts him on the right
+ track, that Louis XVIII of France was also Charles X of some other
+ country)
+
+ In 1830 Paris overthrew monarchy by divine right.--MORLEY. (_By divine
+ right_ looks so much more like an adverbial than an adjectival phrase
+ that the sleepy reader takes it with _overthrew_)
+
+ (From review of a book on ambidexterity) Two kinds of emphatic
+ type are used, and both are liberally sprinkled about the pages
+ on some principle which is not at all obvious. The practice may
+ have its merits, like ambidexterity, but it is generally eschewed
+ by good writers who know their business, although they are not
+ ambidextrous.--_Times._ (The balance of the sentence is extremely bad
+ if the _although_ clause is subordinated to _who_; and the sleepy
+ reader accordingly does not take it so, but with _is eschewed_, and so
+ makes nonsense)
+
+ It was a temper not only legal, but pedantic in its legality,
+ intolerant from its very sense of a moral order and law _of_ the
+ lawlessness and disorder of a personal tyranny.--J. R. GREEN.
+
+ The library over the porch of the church, which is large and handsome,
+ contains one thousand printed books.--R. CURZON. (A large and handsome
+ library, or porch, or church?)
+
+Both these last are very unkind to the poor sleepy reader; it is true
+that in one of them he is inexcusable if he goes wrong, but we should
+for our own sakes give him as few chances of going wrong as possible.
+
+ Luck and dexterity always give more pleasure than intellect and
+ knowledge; because they fill up what they fall _on to_ the brim at
+ once, and people run to them with acclamation at the splash.--LANDOR.
+ (_On_ and _to_ so regularly belong together now, though they did
+ not in Landor’s time, that it is disconcerting to be asked to pause
+ between them)
+
+
+52. AMBIGUOUS ENUMERATION
+
+In comma’d enumerations, care should be taken not to insert appositions
+that may be taken, even if only at first sight, for separate members.
+
+ Some high officials of the Headquarter Staff, including the officer
+ who is primus inter pares, the Director of Military Operations, and
+ the Director of Staff duties....--_Times._ (Two, or three, persons?
+ Probably two; but those who can be sure of this do not need the
+ descriptive clause, and those who need it cannot be sure)
+
+ Lord Curzon, Sir Edmond Elles, the present Military Member, and
+ the Civilian Members of Council traverse the most material of Lord
+ Kitchener’s statements of fact.--_Times._ (Is Sir E. Elles the
+ Military Member? No need to tell any one who knows; and any one who
+ does not know is not told)
+
+ I here wish to remark that Lord Dufferin first formed the Mobilization
+ Committee, of which the Commander-in-Chief is President, and the
+ Military Member, Secretary, Military Department, and the heads of
+ departments both at Army Headquarters and under the Government of
+ India, are members with the express intention of....--_Times._ (Is the
+ Military Member Secretary of the Mobilization Committee? Well, he may
+ be, but a certain amount of patience shows us that the sentence we are
+ reading does not tell us so)
+
+
+53. ANTICS
+
+A small selection must suffice. Straining after the dignified, the
+unusual, the poignant, the high-flown, the picturesque, the striking,
+often turns out badly. It is not worth while to attain any of these
+aims at the cost of being unnatural.
+
+1. Use of stiff, full-dress, literary, or out-of-the-way words.
+
+ And in no direction was the slightest concern _evinced_.--_Times._
+
+ The majority display _scant_ anxiety for news.--_Times._
+
+ ... treating his characters on broader lines, occupying himself with
+ more elemental emotions and types, and forsaking altogether his
+ almost _meticulous_ analysis of motive and temperament.--_Westminster
+ Gazette._ (We recommend to this reviewer a more meticulous use of the
+ dictionary)
+
+ And most probably he is voted a fool for not doing as many men in
+ similar positions are doing--viz., making up for a lack of principle
+ by an abundance of _bawbees_ easily extracted from a large class of
+ contractors who are only too willing....--_Times._
+
+ It is Victor Hugo’s people, the motives on which they act, the means
+ they take to carry out their objects, their relations to one another,
+ that strike us as so _monumentally_ droll.--_Times._
+
+ Nothing definite has been decided upon as to the exact date of the
+ visits, the _venue_ of the visits, the....--_Times._
+
+2. Pretentious circumlocution.
+
+ That life was brought to a close in November 1567, at an age,
+ probably, not far from _the one fixed by the sacred writer as the term
+ of human existence_.--PRESCOTT.
+
+ She skated extremely badly, but with an enjoyment that was almost
+ pathetic, _in consideration of the persistence of ‘frequent
+ fall’_.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ The question of an extension of the Zemstvos to the southwest
+ provinces is believed to be under consideration. It is understood that
+ the visit of General Kleigels to St. Petersburg is _not unconnected
+ therewith_.--_Times._
+
+3. Poetic phraseology, especially the Carlylese superlative. Almost any
+page of Milton’s prose will show whence Carlyle had this; but it is
+most offensive in ordinary modern writing.
+
+ A period when, as she puts it, men and women of fashion ‘tried not to
+ be themselves, yet never so successfully displayed _the naked hearts
+ of them_’.--_Times._
+
+ The last week in February was harnessing her seven bright steeds in
+ shining tandem in the silent courtyard of the time to be.--_The Lamp._
+
+ Our enveloping movements since some days prove successful, and
+ fiercest battle is now proceeding.--_Times._
+
+ The unhappy man persuades himself that he has in truth become a new
+ creature, of the wonderfullest symmetry.--CARLYLE.
+
+4. Patronizing superiority expressed by describing simple things in
+long words.
+
+ The skating-rink, where happy folk all day slide with set purpose on
+ the elusive material, and with great content perform mystic evolutions
+ of the most complicated order.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+5. The determined picturesque.
+
+ Across the street blank shutters flung back the gaslight in cold
+ smears.--KIPLING.
+
+ The outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman
+ not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed rope-purfled sails
+ bulging sideways like insolent cheeks.--KIPLING.
+
+ An under-carry of grey woolly spindrift of a slaty colour flung
+ itself noiselessly in the opposite direction, a little above the tree
+ tops.--CROCKETT.
+
+ Then for a space the ground was more clayey, and a carpet of green
+ water-weeds were combed and waved by the woven ropes of water.--E. F.
+ BENSON.
+
+ At some distance off, in Winchester probably, which pricked the
+ blue haze of heat with dim spires, a church bell came muffled and
+ languid.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ A carriage drive lay in long curves like a flicked whip lash,
+ surmounting terrace after terrace set with nugatory nudities.--E. F.
+ BENSON.
+
+6. Recherché epithets.
+
+ Perhaps both Milton and Beethoven would live in our memories as
+ writers of idylls, had not a _brusque_ infirmity dreadfully shut them
+ off from their fellow men.--_Times._
+
+ The high _canorous_ note of the north-easter.--STEVENSON.
+
+ By specious and _clamant_ exceptions.--STEVENSON.
+
+7. Formal antithesis or parallel. This particular form of artificiality
+is perhaps too much out of fashion to be dangerous at present. The
+great storehouse of it is in Macaulay.
+
+ He had neither the qualities which make dulness respectable, nor the
+ qualities which make libertinism attractive.--MACAULAY.
+
+ The first two kings of the House of Hanover had neither those
+ hereditary rights which have often supplied the place of merit, nor
+ those personal qualities which have often supplied the defect of
+ title.--MACAULAY.
+
+ But he was indolent and dissolute, and had early impaired a
+ fine estate with the dice-box, and a fine constitution with the
+ bottle.--MACAULAY.
+
+ The disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the
+ revolution of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of
+ Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the Reformation.--J. R.
+ GREEN.
+
+8. Author’s self-consciousness.
+
+ ‘You mean it is,’ she said--‘about Bertie’. Charlie made the noise
+ usually written ‘Pshaw’.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+9. Intrusive smartness--another form of self-consciousness.
+
+ Round her lay piles of press notices, which stripped the American
+ variety of the English language bare of epithets.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+ Income-tax payers are always treated to the fine words which butter
+ no parsnips, and are always assured that it is really a danger to the
+ State to go on skinning them in time of peace to such an extent as to
+ leave little integument to remove in time of war.--_Times._
+
+ Yet in the relentless city, where no one may pause for a moment unless
+ he wishes to be left behind in the great universal race for gold which
+ begins as soon as a child can walk, and ceases not until he is long
+ past walking, the climbing of the thermometer into the nineties _is
+ an acrobatic feat which concerns the thermometer only_, and at the
+ junction of Sixth Avenue and Broadway there was no slackening in the
+ tides of the affairs of men.--E. F. BENSON.
+
+
+54. MISCELLANEOUS TYPES OF JOURNALESE
+
+ Mr. Lionel Phillips maintained that it was impossible to introduce
+ white unskilled _labour_ on a large scale _as a payable proposition_
+ without lowering the position of the white man.--_Times._
+
+How _labour_ can be a _proposition_, and how a _proposition_ can be
+_payable_ it is not easy to say. The sentence seems to mean: ‘to
+introduce ... labour on a large scale and make it pay’. This is what
+comes of a fondness for abstracts.
+
+ They have not hitherto discovered the formula for the intelligent
+ use of our unrivalled resources for the _satisfaction of our
+ security_.--_Times._
+
+This perhaps means: ‘They have not yet discovered how our unrivalled
+resources may be made to ensure our safety’.
+
+ An attempt to efface the ill-effects of the Czar’s refusal to see the
+ workmen has been made _by_ the grant _of_ an interview _by_ the Czar
+ _at_ Tsarkoe Selo _to_ a body _of_ workmen officially selected to
+ represent the masses.--_Spectator._
+
+ The powerful and convincing article on the question of War Office
+ administration as it affects the Volunteers to be found in this
+ month’s National.--_Spectator._
+
+ 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....--_Spectator._
+
+ No year passes now without evidence of the truth of the
+ statement that the work of government is becoming increasingly
+ difficult.--_Spectator._
+
+ It has taken a leading part in protesting against the Congo State’s
+ treatment of natives controlled by it, and in procuring the pressure
+ which the House of Commons has put upon our Government with a view to
+ international insistence on fulfilment of the obligations entered upon
+ by the Congo Government as regards native rights.--_Times._
+
+ The outcome of a desire to convince the Government of the expediency
+ of granting the return recently ordered by the House with regard to
+ the names, ....--_Times._
+
+ In default of information of the result of the deliberations which
+ it has been stated the Imperial Defence Committee have been engaged
+ in....--_Times._
+
+ The volunteer does not volunteer to be compelled to suffer long,
+ filthy, and neglected illnesses and too often death, yet such was
+ South Africa on a vast scale, and is inevitable in war under the
+ present official indifference.--_Times._
+
+
+55. SOMEWHAT, &c.
+
+Indulgence in qualifying adverbs, as _perhaps_, _possibly_, _probably_,
+_rather_, _a little_, _somewhat_, amounts with English journalists
+to a disease; the intemperate orgy of moderation is renewed every
+morning. As _somewhat_ is rapidly swallowing up the rest, we shall
+almost confine our attention to it; and it is useless to deprecate the
+use without copious illustration. Examples will be classified under
+headings, though these are not quite mutually exclusive.
+
+1. _Somewhat_ clearly illogical.
+
+ A number of questions to the Prime Minister have been put upon the
+ paper with the object of eliciting information as to the personnel of
+ the proposed Royal Commission and the scope of their inquiry. These
+ are now _somewhat belated_ in view of the official announcement made
+ this morning.--_Times._ (The announcement contained both the list of
+ members and the full reference)
+
+ Thrills which gave him _rather a unique_ pleasure.--HUTTON.
+
+ Russian despatches are _somewhat inconsistent_, one of them stating
+ that there is no change in the position of the armies, while another
+ says that the Japanese advance continues.--_Times._
+
+ Being faint with hunger I was _somewhat in a listless condition_
+ bordering on stupor.--CORELLI.
+
+In the light of these, it would be hard to say what full belatedness,
+inconsistency, and listlessness may be.
+
+2. _Somewhat_ with essentially emphatic words.
+
+We may call a thing dirty, or filthy; if we choose the latter, we mean
+to be emphatic; it is absurd to use the emphatic word and take away its
+emphasis with _somewhat_, when we might use the gentler word by itself.
+
+ A member of the Legislative Council is allowed now to speak in
+ Dutch if he cannot express himself clearly in English; under the
+ proposed arrangement he will be able to decide for himself in which
+ medium he can express himself the more clearly. Surely a _somewhat
+ infinitesimal_ point.--_Times._
+
+ Thirdly, it is _rather agonizing_ at times to the
+ philologist.--_Times._
+
+ The distances at which the movements are being conducted receive a
+ _somewhat startling_ illustration from the statement that....--_Times._
+
+ Under these circumstances it is _somewhat extraordinary_ to endeavour
+ to save the Government from blame.--_Times._
+
+ In various evidently ‘well-informed’ journals the _somewhat amazing_
+ proposition is set up that....--_Times._
+
+ But unfortunately the word ‘duties’ got accidentally substituted
+ for ‘bounties’ in two places, and made the utterance _somewhat
+ unintelligible_ to the general reader.--_Times._
+
+ The songs are sung by students to the accompaniment of a _somewhat
+ agonizing_ band.--_Times._
+
+ There is a mysterious man-killing orchid, a great Eastern jewel of
+ State, and many other properties, some of them _a little well worn_,
+ suitable for the staging of a tale of mystery.--_Spectator._
+
+Some of the instances in these two classes would be defended as
+humorous under-statement. But if this hackneyed trick is an example of
+the national humour, we had better cease making reflections on German
+want of humour.
+
+3. _Somewhat_ shyly announcing an epigrammatic or well-chosen phrase.
+
+ There is a very pretty problem awaiting the decision of Prince
+ Bülow, and one which is entirely worthy of his _somewhat acrobatic_
+ diplomacy.--_Times._
+
+ Gaston engaged in a controversy on the origin of evil, which
+ terminated by his _somewhat abruptly quitting his Alma
+ Mater_.--BEACONSFIELD.
+
+ Why even Tennyson became an amateur milkman to _somewhat conceal and
+ excuse the shame and degradation of writing verse_.--CORELLI.
+
+ The virtuous but _somewhat unpleasing_ type of the Roman
+ nation.--_Times._
+
+ The sight of these soldiers and sailors sitting round camp-fires in
+ the midst of the snow in fashionable thoroughfares, transforming the
+ city into an armed camp, is _somewhat weird_.--_Times._
+
+ While Mary was trying to decipher these _somewhat mystic_ lines.--S.
+ FERRIER.
+
+4. _Somewhat_ conveying a sneer.
+
+ It is somewhat strange that any one connected with this institution
+ should be so unfamiliar with its regulations.--_Times._
+
+ ... that the conclusion arrived at by the shortest route is
+ to be accepted--a somewhat extravagant doctrine, according to
+ which....--BALFOUR.
+
+ But very few points of general interest have been elicited in any
+ quarter by these somewhat academic reflections.--_Times._
+
+ This somewhat glowing advertisement of the new loan.--_Times._
+
+5. The genuine _somewhat_, merely tame, timid, undecided, conciliatory,
+or polite.
+
+ It is somewhat pitiful to see the efforts of a foreign State directed,
+ not to the pursuit of its own aims by legitimate means, but to the
+ gratification of personal hostility to a great public servant of
+ France.--_Times._
+
+ I am certain that the clergy themselves only too gladly acquiesce in
+ this somewhat illogical division of labour.--_Times._
+
+ This, no doubt, is what Professor Ray Lankester is driving at in his
+ somewhat intemperate onslaught.--Times.
+
+ The _rather mysterious_ visit of S. Tittoni, the Italian Foreign
+ Minister, to Germany.--_Times._
+
+ These are of _rather remarkable_ promise; the head shows an unusual
+ power of realizing character under a purely ideal conception.--_Times._
+
+ The _rather finely_ conceived statuette called ‘The Human Task’ by Mr.
+ Oliver Wheatley.--_Times._
+
+ It is somewhat the fashion to say that in these days....--_Times._
+
+ A letter from one whose learning and experience entitle him to be
+ heard, conceived, as I think, in a spirit of somewhat exaggerated
+ pessimism.--_Times._
+
+ The statement made by the writer is somewhat open to doubt.--_Times._
+
+ I have read with much interest the letters on the subject of
+ hush-money, especially as they account to me somewhat for the
+ difficulties I have experienced.--_Times._
+
+ It would be valuable if he would somewhat expand his ideas regarding
+ local defence by Volunteers.--_Times._
+
+ Sir,--I have been somewhat interested in the recent correspondence in
+ your columns.--_Times._
+
+ So many persons of undoubted integrity believe in ‘dowsing’ that he is
+ a somewhat rash man who summarily dismisses the matter.--_Times._
+
+ Sir Francis Bertie, whose dislike of unnecessary publicity is somewhat
+ pronounced.--_Times._
+
+It is not too much to say that any one who hopes to write well had
+better begin by abjuring _somewhat_ altogether.
+
+We cannot tell whether this long list will have a dissuasive effect, or
+will be referred to foolish individual prejudice against an unoffending
+word. But on the first assumption we should like to add that a not
+less dissuasive collection might easily be made of the intensifier
+_distinctly_ than of the qualifier _somewhat_. The use meant is that
+seen in:
+
+ The effect as the procession careers through the streets of Berlin is
+ described as distinctly interesting.
+
+_Distinctly_ gives the patronizing interest, as _somewhat_ gives
+the contemptuous indifference, with which a superior person is to
+be conceived surveying life; and context too often reveals that the
+superiority is imaginary.
+
+
+56. CLUMSY PATCHING
+
+When a writer detects a fault in what he has written or thought of
+writing, his best course is to recast the whole sentence. The next best
+is to leave it alone. The worst is to patch it in such a way that the
+reader has his attention drawn, works out the original version, and
+condemns his author for carelessness aggravated by too low an estimate
+of his own intelligence.
+
+ Numerous allegations, too, were made of prejudiced treatment _measured
+ out against_ motorists by rural magistrates.--_Times._ (avoidance of
+ the jingle in _meted_ out to _motor_ists)
+
+ No crew proved to be of the very highest class; but this, perhaps,
+ _led the racing to be_ on the whole close and exciting.--_Times._
+ (avoidance of the jingle in led to the rac_ing_ be_ing_)
+
+ The Lord Mayor last night entertained the Judges _to_ a banquet at the
+ Mansion House.--_Times._ (avoidance of double _at_)
+
+ The occupants talked, inspected the cars _of one another_,
+ interchanged tales of....--_Times._ (avoidance, in grammatical
+ pusillanimity, of _one another’s cars_)
+
+ ... who have only themselves in view _by_ breaking through
+ it.--RICHARDSON. (avoidance of double _in_)
+
+ He nodded, _as one who would say_, ‘I have already thought of
+ that’.--CROCKETT. (avoidance of the archaism, which however is the
+ only natural form, _as who should say_)
+
+ It is now practically certain that the crews of Nebogatoff’s squadron
+ were in a state of mutiny, and that this is the explanation _for_ the
+ surrender _of_ these vessels.--_Times._ (avoidance of double _of_)
+
+ And _for_ the first time _after_ twenty years the Whigs saw themselves
+ again in power.--J. R. GREEN. (Avoidance of double _for_; if _after_
+ had been originally intended, we should have had _at last_ instead of
+ _for the first time_)
+
+ And oppressive laws forced even these _few_ with _scant_ exceptions to
+ profess Protestantism.--J. R. GREEN. (To avoid the repetition of _few_
+ the affected word _scant_ has been admitted)
+
+ Given competition, any line would vie with the others in mirrors
+ and gilded furniture; but if there is none, why spend a penny? Not
+ a passenger the less will travel because the mode of transit is
+ _bestial_.--E. F. BENSON. (To avoid the overdone word _beastly_--which
+ however happens to be the right one here; _bestial_ describes
+ character or conduct)
+
+ There is, indeed, a kind of timorous atheism in the man who dares not
+ trust God to _render_ all efforts to interpret his Word--and what is
+ criticism but interpretation?--work together for good.--_Spectator._
+ (_Render_ is substituted for _make_ because _make efforts_ might
+ be taken as complete without the _work together_ that is due.
+ Unfortunately, _to render efforts work together_ is not even English
+ at all)
+
+
+57. OMISSION OF THE CONJUNCTION ‘THAT’
+
+This is quite legitimate, but often unpleasant. It is partly a matter
+of idiom, as, _I presume you know_, but _I assume that you know_;
+partly of avoiding false scent, as in the sixth example below, where
+_scheme_ might be object to _discover_. In particular it is undesirable
+to omit _that_ when a long clause or phrase intervenes between it and
+the subject and verb it introduces, as in the first four examples.
+
+ And it is to be hoped, _as the tree-planting season has arrived_,
+ Stepney will now put its scheme in hand.--_Times._
+
+ Sir,--We notice _in a leading article in your issue to-day on
+ the subject of the carriage of Australian mails_ you imply that
+ the increased price demanded by the Orient Pacific Line was due
+ to....--_Times._
+
+ Lord Balfour ... moved that it is necessary, _before the
+ constituencies are asked to determine upon the desirability of such
+ conference_, they should be informed first....--_Times._
+
+ Lord Spencer held that it was impossible _with regard to a question
+ which had broken up the Government and disturbed the country_ they
+ could go into a conference which....--_Times._
+
+ If the Australian is to be convinced that is an unreasonable wish, it
+ will not be by arguments about taxation.--_Times._
+
+ I think he would discover the scheme unfolded and explained in them is
+ a perfectly intelligible and comprehensive one.--_Times._
+
+ It is not till He cometh the ideal will be seen.--_Times._
+
+ And it is only by faith the evils you mention as productive of war can
+ be cast out of our hearts.--_Times._
+
+ I do not wish it to be understood that I consider all those who
+ applied for work during the past two winters and who are now seeking
+ employment are impostors.--_Times._
+
+ I assume Turkey would require such a cash payment of at least
+ £500,000.--_Times._
+
+ Tawno leaped into the saddle, where he really looked like Gunnar of
+ Hlitharend, save and except the complexion of Gunnar was florid,
+ whereas that of Tawno was of nearly Mulatto darkness.--BORROW.
+
+In some of these the motive is obvious, to avoid one _that_-clause
+depending on another; the end was good, but the means bad; a more
+thorough recasting was called for.
+
+
+58. MEANINGLESS ‘WHILE’
+
+_While_, originally temporal, has a legitimate use also in contrasts.
+The further colourless use of it, whether with verb or with participle,
+as a mere elegant variation for _and_ is very characteristic of
+journalese, and much to be deprecated.
+
+ Of its value there can be no question. The editor’s article on
+ ‘Constitutions’, for example, and that of Mr. W. Wyse on ‘Law’ both
+ well repay most careful study; _while_ when Sir R. Jebb writes
+ on ‘Literature’, Dr. Henry Jackson on ‘Philosophy’, or Professor
+ Waldstein on ‘Sculpture’, their contributions must be regarded as
+ authoritative.--_Spectator._
+
+ The fireman was killed on the spot, and the driver as well as the
+ guard of the passenger train was slightly injured; _while_ the up-line
+ was blocked for some time with débris from broken trucks of the goods
+ train.--_Times._
+
+ The deer on the island took some interest in the proceeding, while the
+ peacocks on the lawn screamed at the right time.--_Birmingham Daily
+ Post._
+
+ It cannot be contended that it is more profitable to convey a
+ passenger the twenty-four miles to Yarmouth for payment than to
+ accept the same payment without performing the service; _while_, if
+ the company wish to discourage the use of cheap week-end tickets, why
+ issue them at all?--_Times._
+
+
+59. COMMERCIALISMS
+
+Certain uses of _such_, _the same_, and other words, redolent of
+commerce and the law, should be reserved for commercial and legal
+contexts. _Anent_, which has been noticed in Part I, is a legalism of
+this kind. In the Brontë instances quoted, a twang of flippancy will be
+observed; the other writers are probably unconscious.
+
+ This gentleman’s state of mind was very harrowing, and I was glad when
+ he wound up his exposition of the same.--C. BRONTË.
+
+ The present was no occasion for showy array; my dun mist crape would
+ suffice, and I sought the same in the great oak wardrobe in the
+ dormitory.--C. BRONTË.
+
+ There are certain books that almost defy classification, and this
+ volume ... is one of such.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ I am pleased to read the correspondence in your paper, and hope that
+ good will be the result of the same.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ The man who has approached nearest to the teaching of the Master, and
+ carried the same to its logical and practical conclusion is General
+ Booth.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ Do I believe that by not having had the hands of a bishop laid upon my
+ head I cannot engage in the outward and visible commemoration of the
+ Lord’s Supper as not being fit to receive the same?--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ But do the great majority of people let their belief in the hereafter
+ affect their conduct with regard to the same. I think not.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ Let us hope, Sir, that it may be possible in your own interests to
+ continue the same till the subject has had a good innings.--_Daily
+ Telegraph._
+
+ I believe, and have believed since, a tiny child, made miserable by
+ the loss of a shilling, I prayed my Heavenly Father to help me to
+ recover the same.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+It is of course possible, in this connexion, that the Prayer Book is
+responsible for ‘the same’.
+
+ If I am refused the Sacrament I do not believe that I shall have
+ less chance of entering the Kingdom of God than if I received such
+ Sacrament.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ But when it comes to us following his life and example, in all
+ its intricate details, all will, I think, agree that such is
+ impossible.--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ An appeal to philanthropy is hardly necessary, the grounds for such
+ being so self-evident.--_Times._
+
+ ... such a desire it should be the purpose of a Unionist Government
+ to foster; but such will not be attained under the present regime in
+ Dublin.--_Times._
+
+ ... regaling themselves on half-pints at the said village
+ hostelries.--BORROW.
+
+ Having read with much interest the letters re ‘believe only’ now
+ appearing in the _Daily Telegraph_....--_Daily Telegraph._
+
+ He ruined himself and family by his continued experiments for the
+ benefit of the British nation.--_Times._
+
+
+60. PET PHRASES
+
+Vivid writers must be careful not to repeat any conspicuous phrase so
+soon that a reader of ordinary memory has not had time to forget it
+before it invites his attention again. Whatever its merits, to use it
+twice (unless deliberately and with point) is much worse than never
+to have thought of it. The pages below are those of Green’s _Short
+History_ (1875).
+
+ The temper of the first [King George] was that of a gentleman usher.
+ p. 704.
+
+ Bute was a mere court favourite, with the abilities of a gentleman
+ usher. p. 742.
+
+ ‘For weeks’, laughs Horace Walpole, ‘it rained gold boxes’. p. 729.
+
+ ‘We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is’, laughed
+ Horace Walpole. p. 737.
+
+The two following passages occur on pp. 6 and 81 of _The Bride of
+Lammermoor_ (Standard Edition).
+
+ In short, Dick Tinto’s friends feared that he had acted like the
+ animal called the sloth, which, having eaten up the last green leaf
+ upon the tree where it has established itself, ends by tumbling down
+ from the top, and dying of inanition.
+
+ ‘... but as for us, Caleb’s excuses become longer as his diet turns
+ more spare, and I fear we shall realise the stories they tell of
+ the sloth: we have almost eaten up the last green leaf on the plant,
+ and have nothing left for it but to drop from the tree and break our
+ necks.’
+
+
+61. ‘ALSO’ AS CONJUNCTION; AND ‘&c.’
+
+_Also_ is an adverb; the use of it as a conjunction is slovenly, if not
+illiterate.
+
+ We are giving these explanations gently as friends, also patiently as
+ becomes neighbours.--_Times._
+
+ ‘Special’ is a much overworked word, it being used to mean great in
+ degree, also peculiar in kind.--R. G. WHITE.
+
+ Mr. Sonnenschein’s volume will show by parallel passages Shakespeare’s
+ obligations to the ancients, also the obligations of modern writers to
+ Shakespeare.--_Times._
+
+The use of _&c._, except in business communications and such contexts,
+has often the same sort of illiterate effect. This is very common, but
+one example must suffice.
+
+ There are others with faults of temper, &c., evident enough, beside
+ whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good.--C. BRONTË.
+
+
+
+
+ INDEX
+
+
+_In this index all references are to pages. Small italics are used
+for words and phrases; small roman type for subjects incidentally
+mentioned; capitals for subjects expressly, even if not fully, treated._
+
+
+ A
+
+ _A-_, 41-2.
+
+ _A_ BETWEEN ADJECTIVE AND NOUN, 329-30.
+
+ ABSOLUTE CONSTRUCTION, 115-6.
+
+ Absolute construction and stops, 222, 241-2, 265.
+
+ ABSTRACT WORDS, 4, 5-6.
+
+ ACCENT, SENTENCE, 296-8.
+
+ _Acquiesce to_, 164.
+
+ _Acte de malveillance_, 30.
+
+ Adjectival clause, 235.
+
+ ADJECTIVAL CLAUSE IN PUNCTUATION, 242-4.
+
+ ADVERB AND ADVERBIAL CLAUSE IN PUNCTUATION, 244-7.
+
+ Adverbial clause, 236.
+
+ _Adverse from_, 163.
+
+ _Aesthophysiology_, 23.
+
+ _Aggravate_, 59.
+
+ _Aggress_, 20.
+
+ _Aim to_, 132-3, 164.
+
+ AIRS AND GRACES, Cap. III.
+
+ _-al_, 22, 42.
+
+ _Albeit_, 17, 194, 196-7.
+
+ _Alit_, 39-40.
+
+ ALLITERATION, 292.
+
+ ALLUSION, 307-8.
+
+ _Alma mater_, 27.
+
+ _Almost quite_, 339.
+
+ _ALSO_, CONJ., AND _&C._, 360.
+
+ _Altogether_, 11.
+
+ Amateurs, 127, 194.
+
+ AMBIGUITY, 345-8.
+
+ Ambiguity, 88, 109, 117, 120, 127, 142, 144-5, 250, 264-5.
+
+ Ambiguity and punctuation, 264-5.
+
+ AMBIGUOUS ENUMERATION, 348.
+
+ AMBIGUOUS POSITION, 347-8.
+
+ _Amend_, n., 38-9.
+
+ AMERICANISMS, 23-6.
+
+ _A-moral_, 41-2.
+
+ _Amphitryon_, 174.
+
+ Anachronism in thought, 198, 200.
+
+ _And_, 233-4, 245.
+
+ _AND WHICH_, 85-93.
+
+ _AND WHO_, 85-93.
+
+ _Anent_, 3.
+
+ _Animatedly_, 47.
+
+ _Another story_, 175.
+
+ _Antagonize_, 4, 24, 26.
+
+ _Antecedentem scelestum_, 33.
+
+ ANTICS, 348-51.
+
+ Antithesis, 292, 350.
+
+ _Anyway_, 25.
+
+ _Appendicitis_, 19.
+
+ ARCHAISM, 193-200.
+
+ Archaism, 17, 83, 103, 137.
+
+ Archaism, positive and negative, 198-200.
+
+ ARCHAISM, SUSTAINED, 198-9.
+
+ _Argon_, 19.
+
+ _Arise_, 9.
+
+ _Arrière pensée_, 34.
+
+ _As also_, 189.
+
+ _As_ and _while_ clauses, slovenly, 189.
+
+ _AS_, CASE, 62-4.
+
+ _AS_ CLAUSE, CAUSAL, 298-300.
+
+ _As far as, that_, 168-70.
+
+ _As if_, 156-7.
+
+ _AS_, LIBERTIES WITH, 324-6.
+
+ _AS_, OMISSION OF, 324.
+
+ _As to_, 166-7.
+
+ _AS TO WHETHER_, 333-4.
+
+ _As who should say_, 325-6.
+
+ _At anyrate_, 280.
+
+ _At the letter_, 33.
+
+ _Aught_, 194, 197.
+
+ _Au pied de la lettre_, 32.
+
+ _Automedon_, 174.
+
+ AUXILIARIES, SPLIT, 342-3.
+
+ _Avail_, 321.
+
+ _Available_, 43.
+
+ _Averse from_, 162-3.
+
+ Avoidance, clumsy, 17, 74, 125, 179, 277, 355-6, 357.
+
+ _Await_, 9.
+
+ _Awful_, 49-50.
+
+
+ B
+
+ _Back-number_, 25.
+
+ _Back of_, 25.
+
+ Bagehot, 210-2.
+
+ BALANCE INVERSION, 182-7.
+
+ Balfour, 225, 249.
+
+ _Ballon d’essai_, 30.
+
+ _Banal_, 38-9.
+
+ _Banality_, 38-9.
+
+ _Bang in the eye_, 48.
+
+ Bastard enumeration, 251.
+
+ _BE_ AND _DO_, 330.
+
+ Beadnell, 219.
+
+ _Bedrock_, 51.
+
+ _Benefits of_, 165.
+
+ Besant, 198.
+
+ _Bethink_, 9.
+
+ _Bêtise_, 27.
+
+ _BETWEEN ... OR_, 328-9.
+
+ BETWEEN TWO STOOLS, 327-8.
+
+ _Between you and I_, 61.
+
+ _Bewilderedly_, 47.
+
+ _Bien entendu_, 27.
+
+ _Bike_, 49.
+
+ _Birrelling_, 51.
+
+ _Blooming_, 49-50.
+
+ _Boom_, 52.
+
+ Borrow, G., 13.
+
+ _Both ... as well as_, 313.
+
+ _Bounder_, 48, 50.
+
+ _Bow-street_, 277.
+
+ BRACHYLOGY, 326.
+
+ Brackets & double dashes, 272, 286.
+
+ BRACKETS AND STOPS, 270-1.
+
+ _Brisken_, 21.
+
+ _Briticism_, 43.
+
+ Brontë, C., 29, 358.
+
+ _Bureaucracy_, 46.
+
+ Burke, E., 111.
+
+ _BUT_, SUPERFLUOUS, 334.
+
+
+ C
+
+ _Cad_, 50.
+
+ _Camaraderie_, 27.
+
+ CARELESS REPETITION, 303-4.
+
+ Carlyle, 44, 349.
+
+ CASE, 60-4.
+
+ _Case_, 6.
+
+ CASE AFTER _as_ AND _than_, 62-4.
+
+ CASE, COMPOUND POSSESSIVE, 64.
+
+ CASE CONFUSION, 61-2.
+
+ Case in absolute construction, 115-6.
+
+ CASE IN APPOSITION, 60.
+
+ CASE OF COMPLEMENT, 60.
+
+ CASE OF RELATIVES, 93-4, 99-100.
+
+ CAUSAL _as_ CLAUSE, 298-300.
+
+ _Cela va sans dire_, 31.
+
+ _Chamade_, 29.
+
+ _Chasseur_, 27, 37.
+
+ _Cherchez la femme_, 35.
+
+ _Chic_, 51.
+
+ CIRCUMLOCUTION, 6.
+
+ Circumlocution, 165-70, 349.
+
+ _Claim_, 317-8.
+
+ _Climb down_, 51.
+
+ _Closure_, 23.
+
+ CLUMSY PATCHING, 355-6.
+
+ _Coastal_, 42.
+
+ COLLOQUIALISMS, 331.
+
+ COLON, 263-4.
+
+ Colon, changed usage of, 220, 222.
+
+ _Come into her life_, 215.
+
+ Comma before _that_, 236-7, 249-50.
+
+ COMMA BETWEEN INDEPENDENT SENTENCES, 254-7.
+
+ Comma, distinct functions, 221-2.
+
+ COMMA MISPLACED, 248-50.
+
+ COMMA, UNACCOUNTABLE, 262-3.
+
+ Commas, illogical, 241.
+
+ Commas, unnecessary, 232.
+
+ _Commercialisms_, 358-9.
+
+ Common case, 60.
+
+ COMMON PARTS, 314-6.
+
+ COMPARATIVES, 70-4.
+
+ _Complacent_, 10.
+
+ _Complaisant_, 10.
+
+ Compositors, 219, 230, 266, 273, 282.
+
+ COMPOUND PASSIVES, 319-21.
+
+ Compound possessive, 64, 122-3.
+
+ Compound verbs and inversion, 184-6.
+
+ Compound words, 20.
+
+ _Comprehensively_, 8.
+
+ _Comprise_, 12.
+
+ _Concision_, 18.
+
+ CONDITIONALS, 156-8.
+
+ CONDITIONALS, SUBJUNCTIVE, 157-8.
+
+ Conditionals, subjunctive, 192-3, 195.
+
+ CONFUSION WITH NEGATIVES, 321-3.
+
+ CONJUNCTIONS, COMPOUND, 165-70.
+
+ Conjunctions, coordinating and subordinating, 63, 255.
+
+ _Consequential_, 17.
+
+ _Consist of_ or _in_, 163-4.
+
+ _Content myself by_, 163.
+
+ _Contest_, vb, 12.
+
+ _Continuance_, 10.
+
+ _Continuation_, 10.
+
+ _Continuity_, 10.
+
+ CONTRADICTIONS IN TERMS, 339-41.
+
+ _Contumacity_, 45.
+
+ COORDINATION OF RELATIVES, 85-100.
+
+ COPULA, NUMBER, 65-7.
+
+ Corelli, 47.
+
+ _Cornering_, 51.
+
+ _Correctitude_, 21.
+
+ _Coûte que coûte_, 27-8.
+
+ Criterion of rightness, 3, 8, 41, 42, 165, 181, 347.
+
+ Crockett, 200.
+
+ _Cryptic_, 50.
+
+ _Cui bono?_, 35-6, 306.
+
+
+ D
+
+ _Dans cette galère_, 32.
+
+ DASHES, 266-75.
+
+ DASHES AND STOPS, 269-75.
+
+ DASHES, DEBATABLE QUESTIONS, 269-74.
+
+ DASHES, DOUBLE, 270-1.
+
+ DASHES, MISUSES, 274-5.
+
+ DASHES, TYPES, 267-9.
+
+ Dead metaphors, 201-9.
+
+ DECAPITABLE SENTENCES, 303.
+
+ DEFINING RELATIVES, 75-85.
+
+ Defining relatives in punctuation, 240-1, 242-4.
+
+ _Déjeuner_, 27.
+
+ _Démarche_, 30.
+
+ _Demean_, 16.
+
+ _Démenti_, 29-30.
+
+ DEMONSTRATIVE, NOUN, AND PARTICIPLE OR ADJECTIVE, 344-5.
+
+ _Depend upon it_, 213.
+
+ _Dependable_, 43.
+
+ _Deplacement_, 21.
+
+ _Deprecate_, 12.
+
+ _Depreciate_, 12.
+
+ De Quincey, 80.
+
+ _Desultory_, 18.
+
+ _Détente_, 30.
+
+ _Determinedly_, 47.
+
+ Differentiation, 10, 11, 46, 85.
+
+ _Different to_, 162.
+
+ _Dilemma_, 208.
+
+ DIPLOMATIC FRENCH, 29-30.
+
+ _Disagree from_, 163.
+
+ _Dishabille_, 37.
+
+ _Dispensable_, 43.
+
+ _Disposable_, 43.
+
+ _Distinction_, 38-9.
+
+ Distinction, 217, 319.
+
+ _Distinctly_, 355.
+
+ _Distinguished_, 38-9.
+
+ _Distrait_, 27.
+
+ _DO_ AS SUBSTITUTE VERB, 330.
+
+ Double dashes & brackets, 272, 286.
+
+ DOUBLE EMPHASIS, 341.
+
+ _Double event_, 51.
+
+ DOUBLE HARNESS, 311-4.
+
+ Doubtful gender, 67.
+
+ _Doubt that_, 158-60.
+
+ DOVETAILING, 33, 308-10.
+
+
+ E
+
+ _Each_, 68.
+
+ _-edly_, 47.
+
+ _E.g._, 311.
+
+ _Eirenicon_, 26.
+
+ _EITHER_, 69.
+
+ _Eke out_, 14-5.
+
+ ELEGANT VARIATION, 175-80.
+
+ Elegant variation, 30, 163, 211, 357.
+
+ Eliot, George, 171.
+
+ ELLIPSE IN SUBORDINATE CLAUSES, 317.
+
+ _Emblem_, vb, 5.
+
+ Emerson, 26, 43, 44, 217.
+
+ EMPHASIS, DOUBLE, 341.
+
+ EMPHATIC INVERSION, 190-1.
+
+ _Employé_, 36.
+
+ _Endowed by_, 164.
+
+ _English_, vb, 2.
+
+ _Enjoinder_, 43-4.
+
+ _Ennui_, 26, 37.
+
+ _Entente_, 29-30.
+
+ _Entourage_, 30.
+
+ ENUMERATION, 250-4.
+
+ ENUMERATION, AMBIGUOUS, 348.
+
+ _Envisage_, 7.
+
+ Epithets, recherché, 350.
+
+ _Epoch-making_, 31, 50.
+
+ _Equally as_, 332.
+
+ _Ere_, 2, 194, 196-7.
+
+ _Especial_, 11.
+
+ _Esprit d’escalier_, 32.
+
+ _ETC._, SLOVENLY, 360.
+
+ _Euchred_, 51.
+
+ _Eudaemometer_, 23.
+
+ _Euphemism_, 12.
+
+ EUPHONY, 291-304.
+
+ Euphony, 46-7, 102, 104, 122, 132, 326;
+ and punctuation, 245.
+
+ Euphony with relatives, 84.
+
+ _Euphuism_, 12.
+
+ _Evasion_, 11.
+
+ _Excepting_, 46.
+
+ EXCLAMATION AND QUESTION, 259-61.
+
+ EXCLAMATION MARK, 258-62.
+
+ EXCLAMATION MARK, INTERNAL, 261-2.
+
+ EXCLAMATORY INVERSION, 181-2.
+
+ EX-PARTICIPLES, 110-1.
+
+ _Experimentalize_, 46.
+
+ _Exploit_, vb, 51.
+
+ _Extemporaneous_, 45.
+
+
+ F
+
+ _Faits divers_, 28.
+
+ _Fall_ (autumn), 24.
+
+ FALSE SCENT, 345-6.
+
+ False scent, 93, 123-4, 246, 264-5, 274, 356.
+
+ _Fanfaronnade_, 29.
+
+ FAR-FETCHED WORDS, 4-5.
+
+ _Femininity_, 38.
+
+ Ferrier, S., 67.
+
+ Fielding, 215.
+
+ _Find fault to_, 164.
+
+ _Fix up_, 25.
+
+ Flexibility, 41, 120.
+
+ FLOOD-OF-TEARS-AND-SEDAN-CHAIR, 173.
+
+ _Floored_, 51.
+
+ _For_, 233-4, 245.
+
+ _For all it is worth_, 48.
+
+ _Forbid from_, 164.
+
+ _Forceful_, 21-2.
+
+ FOREIGN WORDS, 26-39.
+
+ FOREIGN WORDS, ADAPTATION OF, 37-9.
+
+ FOREIGN WORDS, BLUNDERS, 34-6.
+
+ FOREIGN WORDS TRANSLATED, 30-3.
+
+ _Foreword_, 2.
+
+ FORMATION AND ANALOGY, 41-3.
+
+ FORMATION BLUNDERS, 39-41.
+
+ FORMATION, UGLY, 46-7.
+
+ FRESH STARTS, 330-1.
+
+ _Frills_, 195.
+
+ _Frontal attack_, 51.
+
+ _Frontispiece_, 51-2.
+
+ Fudging in punctuation, 240-1.
+
+ FUSED PARTICIPLE, 117-25.
+
+
+ G
+
+ _Gallant_, 174.
+
+ _Galore_, 174.
+
+ _Ganymede_, 174.
+
+ _Gaucherie_, 27.
+
+ George Eliot, 171.
+
+ GERUND, 116-33.
+
+ GERUND AND INFINITIVE, 129-33.
+
+ GERUND AND PARTICIPLE, 107-10, 119.
+
+ GERUND AND POSSESSIVE, 116-25.
+
+ GERUND, COMPOUND SUBJECT, 123-4.
+
+ GERUND, OMISSION OF SUBJECT, 125-9.
+
+ _Get the boot_, 48.
+
+ _Globetrotter_, 51.
+
+ _Go Nap_, 51.
+
+ _Go one better_, 51.
+
+ GRAMMAR, 311-31.
+
+ GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION, 220-5, 235-63.
+
+ Green, J. R., 249, 359.
+
+ GROUP SYSTEM IN PUNCTUATION, 228-30.
+
+
+ H
+
+ _Half-world_, 31.
+
+ _Hebe_, 174.
+
+ _Hedge_, vb., 51.
+
+ He-or-she, 67.
+
+ _Hereof_, 196.
+
+ _He said_, 282.
+
+ _Homologate_, 7.
+
+ _Honey-coloured_, 25.
+
+ _Howbeit_, 17, 194, 197.
+
+ _However_, 265.
+
+ _How it pans out_, 51.
+
+ Hugo, 226.
+
+ HUMOUR, POLYSYLLABIC, 171-2.
+
+ HUMOUR, TYPES, 171-5.
+
+ Huxley, 225, 249.
+
+ Hybrid words, 41-2, 46.
+
+ HYPHENS, 275-80.
+
+ Hyphens, 42.
+
+
+ I
+
+ _Ideal_, 75.
+
+ Idiom, 53, 161, 356.
+
+ IDIOMS, MALTREATED, 336-8.
+
+ _I. e._, 311.
+
+ _IF AND WHEN_, 334-5.
+
+ _Ignorance crasse_, 29.
+
+ _I guess_, 24.
+
+ ILLEGITIMATE INFINITIVES, 317-8.
+
+ _Immanence_, 50.
+
+ _Immovability_, 46.
+
+ IMPERSONAL _one_, 328.
+
+ _Impliedly_, 47.
+
+ _Inasmuch as_, 166.
+
+ _Incentive_, 206.
+
+ Incongruity, 194.
+
+ _Incontinently_, 9.
+
+ Indirect question and punctuation, 238.
+
+ _Individual_, 52, 53-6.
+
+ INFINITIVE AND GERUND, 129-33.
+
+ INFINITIVE, OMISSION OF SUBJECT, 125-9.
+
+ INFINITIVE PERFECT, 154-6.
+
+ INFINITIVES, ILLEGITIMATE, 317-8.
+
+ INFINITIVE, SPLIT, 319.
+
+ _-ing_, 107-10.
+
+ _Initiative of_, 164.
+
+ _Innate_, 12.
+
+ _In nowise_, 280.
+
+ _Insensate_, 9.
+
+ _In so far as, that_, 168-70.
+
+ _Instil_, 12.
+
+ _Insuccess_, 21.
+
+ _Intellectuals_, 22-3.
+
+ _Intelligence_, 18.
+
+ _Intensate_, 44.
+
+ Intervening-noun error in number, 66-7.
+
+ _Intimism_, 38-9.
+
+ _Intimity_, 38.
+
+ INVERSION, 180-93.
+
+ Inversion and compound verbs, 184-6.
+
+ Inversion and emphasis, 182, 184.
+
+ INVERSION, BALANCE, 182-7.
+
+ INVERSION, EMPHATIC, 190-1.
+
+ INVERSION, EXCLAMATORY, 181-2.
+
+ Inversion in _as_ or _than_ clauses, 188-9.
+
+ Inversion in relative clauses, 188.
+
+ INVERSION IN SYNTACTIC CLAUSES, 187-9.
+
+ INVERSION, MISCELLANEOUS, 191-3.
+
+ INVERSION, NEGATIVE, 190-1.
+
+ _In view of_, 167-8.
+
+ _Inwardness_, 50, 52.
+
+ IRONY, 215-6.
+
+ _Irony_, 15.
+
+ _Irreparable_, 12.
+
+ Italics, 186.
+
+ Italics and irony, 216.
+
+ _It should seem_, 194.
+
+ _It’s me_, 61.
+
+ _It ... that_, 104-7.
+
+ _It were_, 195.
+
+
+ J
+
+ _Jehu_, 174.
+
+ JINGLES, 291-2.
+
+ Jonathan Wild, 215.
+
+ JOURNALESE, 351-2.
+
+ Journalese, 7, 352, 357.
+
+ _Judicial_, 8.
+
+ _Just_, 25.
+
+
+ K
+
+ Kipling 24-5, 175.
+
+ _Knock out_, 51.
+
+
+ L
+
+ Lamb, Charles, 193.
+
+ Lapsus calami, 21.
+
+ LATIN ABBREVIATIONS, &c., 311.
+
+ _Laughable_, 43.
+
+ Laxity, disappearance of, 108, 110-1.
+
+ Laxity in punctuation, 235, 244-7.
+
+ _Laze_, 51-2.
+
+ _Leading question_, 306-7.
+
+ _Legislature_, 10.
+
+ _Lie_ and _lay_, 40.
+
+ _Like_, 331.
+
+ _-like_, 278.
+
+ Literary critics’ words, 38-9.
+
+ LOGIC AND PUNCTUATION, 220-5.
+
+ Logic and rhetoric in punctuation, 252.
+
+ _Log-rolling_, 51.
+
+ LONG AND SHORT DERIVATIVES, 44-6.
+
+ Long sentences, 226, 300.
+
+ Long words, 349-50.
+
+ _Loquently_, 20.
+
+ _-ly_, 47, 291.
+
+
+ M
+
+ Macaulay, 350.
+
+ MALAPROPS, 8-18.
+
+ MALTREATED IDIOMS, 336-8.
+
+ Mannerism, 47, 190, 195, 210, 212, 217.
+
+ MEANING, 331-45.
+
+ MEANINGLESS _while_, 357-8.
+
+ _Me_, ethic, 199.
+
+ _Mercury_, 174.
+
+ Meredith, 198.
+
+ METAPHOR, 200-9.
+
+ Metaphor, live and dead, 201-9.
+
+ _Metaphysical_, 16.
+
+ _Meticulous_, 38-9, 349.
+
+ METRICAL PROSE, 295.
+
+ MISPLACEMENT OF WORDS, 346-7.
+
+ MISQUOTATION, 305-7.
+
+ Mixed metaphor, 203-9.
+
+ _Mob_, 49.
+
+ Monstrosity stops, 259, 283, 286-7, 290.
+
+ _Morale_, 34.
+
+ _More and more than ever_, 73.
+
+ _More easily imagined than described_, 213.
+
+ _More honoured in the breach_, 306.
+
+ _More than I can help_, 74.
+
+ _Most_, 75.
+
+ _Most of any_, 74-5.
+
+ _Mutual_, 56-8.
+
+ _My_ and _mine_, 40-1.
+
+
+ N
+
+ _Naïveté_, 37-8.
+
+ _Naivety_, 38.
+
+ Native words, 2, 37.
+
+ NEGATIVE CONFUSION, 321-3.
+
+ NEGATIVE INVERSION, 190-1.
+
+ Negatives, resolved and compound, 323.
+
+ _Négligé_, 26, 37.
+
+ _Negotiate_, 51-2.
+
+ _Neither_, 69.
+
+ _Neither ... or_, 313.
+
+ NEOLOGISMS, 18-23.
+
+ Neologisms, scientific, 23.
+
+ Newspaper style, 162, 178, 180, 226, 262, 266, 351-2.
+
+ _Nice_, 49.
+
+ _No_ and _none_, 41.
+
+ Noisiness, 202-3.
+
+ _Nom de guerre_, 34.
+
+ _Nom de plume_, 34.
+
+ Nonce-words, 19-20.
+
+ NON-DEFINING RELATIVES, 75-85.
+
+ _Non est_, 33.
+
+ Nouns and abstract expression, 5.
+
+ NOUNS OF MULTITUDE, 69.
+
+ Nouns used adjectivally, 42, 276.
+
+ NUMBER, 65-70.
+
+ NUMBER OF COPULA, 65-7.
+
+
+ O
+
+ _Oblivion to_, 165.
+
+ _Oblivious to_, 161.
+
+ _Observance_, 9.
+
+ _Œuvre_, 27-8.
+
+ _Of sorts_, 51.
+
+ _Oft_, 194.
+
+ _Oft-times_, 194.
+
+ _Ohne Hast ohne Rast_, 33.
+
+ _Old-fashioned enough to_, 213.
+
+ _Olfactory organ_, 171.
+
+ OMISSION OF _as_, 324.
+
+ OMISSION OF RELATIVES, 101-2.
+
+ Omission of relatives, 84.
+
+ OMISSION OF _that_, CONJ., 356-7.
+
+ _On a moment’s notice_, 164.
+
+ _One_, 67.
+
+ _ONE_, IMPERSONAL, 328.
+
+ _One’s_ and _his_, 328.
+
+ _One’s_ or _his_, 67.
+
+ _On your own_, 51.
+
+ _Oppositely_, 44.
+
+ _Orient_, vb., 31.
+
+ ORIGINALITY, CHEAP, 217-8.
+
+ Ornament, 35, 215.
+
+ Ostentation, 27, 31, 349.
+
+ _Our_ and _ours_, 40-1.
+
+ OVERLOADING, 343-4.
+
+ OVER-STOPPING, 231-4.
+
+ Over-stopping, 245, 262-3.
+
+
+ P
+
+ Parenthesis, 269, 270.
+
+ PARENTHESIS, 247-50.
+
+ PARENTHESIS IN RELATIVE CLAUSES, 94-5.
+
+ _Partially_, 45-6.
+
+ PARTICIPLE AND GERUND, 107-10, 119.
+
+ PARTICIPLES, 110-6.
+
+ PARTICIPLES ABSOLUTE, 115-6.
+
+ PARTICIPLES UNATTACHED, 112-5.
+
+ PARTICIPLES WITH _my_, &c., 111-2.
+
+ Passive monstrosities, 43.
+
+ PASSIVES, COMPOUND, 319-21.
+
+ PATCHING, CLUMSY, 355-6.
+
+ _Paulo-post future_, 17.
+
+ Pedantry, 34, 42, 64, 129, 162.
+
+ _Penchant_, 27.
+
+ _Perchance_, 4, 196.
+
+ PERFECT INFINITIVE, 154-6.
+
+ _Perfection_, vb., 44-5.
+
+ Period, 226.
+
+ _Perseverant_, 21-2.
+
+ Personification, 68.
+
+ _Perspicuity_, 8-9.
+
+ _Peter out_, 48.
+
+ PET PHRASES, 359-60.
+
+ _Phantasmagoria_, 35.
+
+ _Phase_, 5.
+
+ _Phenomenal_, 50.
+
+ _Philistine_, 50.
+
+ Picturesque, 350.
+
+ _Picturesquities_, 20.
+
+ _Placate_, 24, 26.
+
+ PLAYFUL REPETITION, 172-3.
+
+ _Play the game_, 51.
+
+ Pleonasm, v. Redundancies.
+
+ Poetic words, 3, 349.
+
+ Polysyllabic humour, 51, 54.
+
+ POLYSYLLABIC HUMOUR, 171-2.
+
+ _Pontificalibus_, 33.
+
+ Possessive, absolute, 40-1.
+
+ POSSESSIVE AND GERUND, 116-25.
+
+ POSSESSIVE, COMPOUND, 64.
+
+ Possessive, compound, 122-3.
+
+ _Possible_, 318.
+
+ Preciosity, 2.
+
+ _Predication_, 13.
+
+ _Prediction_, 13.
+
+ _Preface_, 2.
+
+ _Prefer_, 318.
+
+ Preposition at end of clause, 62, 84, 99.
+
+ PREPOSITIONS, 161-70.
+
+ PREPOSITIONS, COMPOUND, 165-70;
+ OMITTED, 165;
+ REPEATED, 293;
+ SUPERFLUOUS, 165.
+
+ _Pretend_, 318.
+
+ _Preventative_, 46.
+
+ _Probable_, 318.
+
+ _Procession_, 11.
+
+ _Promote_, 6.
+
+ Pronominal variation, 175.
+
+ Proportion, 300-3.
+
+ _Provided_, 13-4.
+
+ _Prudential_, 45.
+
+ _Psychological moment_, 50, 52.
+
+ PUNCTUATION, Cap. IV.
+
+ Punctuation and ambiguity, 264-5.
+
+ Punctuation and neatness, 284.
+
+ Punctuation and relatives, 78, 242-4.
+
+ PUNCTUATION, DIFFICULTIES, 219-24.
+
+ Punctuation, full and slight, 225.
+
+ Punctuation, group system, 228-31.
+
+ Punctuation in scientific and philosophic work, 225, 231.
+
+ PUNCTUATION, LOGIC, AND RHETORIC, 220-5.
+
+ PUNCTUATION, SPOT PLAGUE, 226-31.
+
+
+ Q
+
+ _Qua_, 29.
+
+ _Quand même_, 27.
+
+ QUESTION AND EXCLAMATION, 259-61.
+
+ QUESTION-MARK, INTERNAL, 261-62.
+
+ _Quieten_, 45
+
+ QUOTATION, 305-11.
+
+ Quotation, half-and-half, 237-8, 289.
+
+ QUOTATION MARKS, 280-90.
+
+ Quotation marks and irony, 216.
+
+ Quotation marks and slang, 48, 49, 50.
+
+ QUOTATION MARKS AND STOPS, 282-8.
+
+ Quotation marks misplaced, 288-9.
+
+ QUOTATION MARKS, SINGLE AND DOUBLE, 287-8.
+
+ Quotation marks, superfluous, 280-82.
+
+ QUOTATION, TRITE, 310-1.
+
+ Quotations cut up, 309-10.
+
+
+ R
+
+ _Racial_, 22-3, 42.
+
+ Railway names, 276-7.
+
+ _Raison d’être_, 26.
+
+ Reader, 2-3, 7, 36, 98, 210, 225, 228, 230, 231-3, 253, 268, 269,
+ 280-1, 310, 347-8, 355.
+
+ Reading aloud, 296, 300.
+
+ Recasting, 64, 67, 120, 125, 177-8, 185, 226, 231, 232-3, 239, 241,
+ 257, 284, 330, 355-6, 357.
+
+ _Recliner_, 20.
+
+ _Record_, adj., 51-2.
+
+ _Recrudescence_, 5, 15-6.
+
+ _Rectitudinous_, 20.
+
+ _Rédaction_, 27.
+
+ REDUNDANCIES, 332-3.
+
+ _Regard_, 324.
+
+ _Regenesis_, 20.
+
+ _Régime_, 36.
+
+ Relative and participle, 327.
+
+ Relative clauses and inversion, 188.
+
+ RELATIVE COORDINATION, 85-100.
+
+ RELATIVE, MISCELLANEOUS USES AND ABUSES, 96-107.
+
+ RELATIVE, OMISSION OF PREPOSITION, 102-3.
+
+ RELATIVE OMITTED, 101-2.
+
+ RELATIVES, 75-107.
+
+ Relatives and punctuation, 78, 242-4.
+
+ RELATIVES, CASE, 93-4, 99-100.
+
+ RELATIVES DEFINING AND NON-DEFINING, 75-85.
+
+ RELATIVES, PARENTHESIS, 94-5.
+
+ RELATIVES, SEQUENCE OF, 293-4.
+
+ _Reliable_, 42-3.
+
+ _Remindful_, 21.
+
+ REPETITION, 209-13.
+
+ REPETITION, CARELESS, 303-4.
+
+ REPETITION, PLAYFUL, 172-3.
+
+ _Requisition_, 11.
+
+ _Research_, 11.
+
+ _Resource_, 13.
+
+ _Reverend_, 8.
+
+ Rhetoric, 234, 236.
+
+ Rhetorical repetition, 209, 213.
+
+ RHETORIC AND PUNCTUATION, 220-5.
+
+ _Right along_, 25.
+
+ ROMANCE WORDS, 1, 3.
+
+ Royal pronoun, 178.
+
+ _Run the show_, 51.
+
+
+ S
+
+ _Said_ with inversion, 192.
+
+ _Same, the_, 358.
+
+ _Sans_, 27.
+
+ _Save_, 2-3, 196.
+
+ SAXON WORDS, 1, 2-3, 7.
+
+ _Scandalum magnatum_, 34.
+
+ _Schadenfreude_, 27-8.
+
+ Scott, 174.
+
+ _Seasonable_, 43.
+
+ Self-consciousness, 351.
+
+ Semicolon and independent sentences, 255.
+
+ SEMICOLON AND SUBORDINATE CLAUSES, 257-8.
+
+ Semicolon, distinct functions of, 222.
+
+ Sense and sound, 296.
+
+ _Sensibleness_, 44-5.
+
+ Sentence, 112, 254-5.
+
+ SENTENCE ACCENT, 296-8.
+
+ _SHALL_ AND _WILL_, 133-54.
+
+ _Shall_, archaic and literary, 137, 153, 194-5.
+
+ SHORT AND LONG WORDS, 6-7.
+
+ _Shrimp-pink_, 25.
+
+ _Sic_, 90, 311.
+
+ Signpost connexion, 183, 184.
+
+ _Since several days_, 32.
+
+ _Skilled_, 17.
+
+ SLANG, 47-53.
+
+ Slang and idiom, 53.
+
+ SLANG, VARIOUS ORIGINS, 49-51.
+
+ Slang with quotation marks, 48.
+
+ _Slating_, 51.
+
+ Smartness, 351.
+
+ Smollett, 111.
+
+ _So far as, that_, 168-70.
+
+ _SOMEWHAT_, &c., 352-5.
+
+ _Sordor_, 43.
+
+ Sound and sense, 296.
+
+ _Soupçon_, 27.
+
+ _Special_, 11.
+
+ Spencer, 193.
+
+ _Spirit of the staircase_, 32.
+
+ SPLIT AUXILIARIES, 342-3.
+
+ SPLIT INFINITIVE, 319.
+
+ SPOT-PLAGUE, 226-31.
+
+ _Standpoint_, 25.
+
+ _Stands to reason_, 213-4.
+
+ _Status quo_, 26.
+
+ _Stave off_, 206-7.
+
+ _Steep_ (slang), 48.
+
+ Sterne, 266.
+
+ Stevenson, 198-9.
+
+ Stops and tone symbols, 220, 285.
+
+ Street names, 276-7.
+
+ _Stronger_, adv., 40.
+
+ _Stumped_, 51.
+
+ STYLE, 348-end.
+
+ Styles, various, 7-8.
+
+ SUBJECT, &c., and VERB IN PUNCTUATION, 239-42.
+
+ Subjunctive, 154, 157-8.
+
+ Subjunctive conditionals, 195.
+
+ SUBSTANTIVAL CLAUSE IN PUNCTUATION, 235-8, 265.
+
+ _Such_, 358-9.
+
+ _Such who_, _which_, and _that_, 103-4.
+
+ _Summerly_, 20.
+
+ SUPERFLUOUS _but_ AND _though_, 334.
+
+ SUPERLATIVES, 74-5.
+
+ Superlatives, Carlylese, 349.
+
+ SUPERLATIVES WITHOUT _the_, 216-17.
+
+ _Super-sensitized_, 20.
+
+ Superstitions, 62, 99, 245, 266, 273, 319.
+
+ _Surprisedly_, 47.
+
+ SYNTAX, Cap. II.
+
+
+ T
+
+ _Tache_, 28.
+
+ _Tackle_, 51.
+
+ _Take a back seat_, 51.
+
+ _Take it lying down_, 51.
+
+ _Take my word for it_, 213.
+
+ TAUTOLOGY, 331-2.
+
+ Tautology, 56.
+
+ _Tear and wear_, 217-8.
+
+ _Telegram_, 19, 23.
+
+ Tell-tale errors, 21, 53, 56, 235, 254, 261, 308.
+
+ _Tête-à-tête_, 26.
+
+ Thackeray, 88, 198.
+
+ _THAN_, CASE, 62-4.
+
+ _Than whom_, 64.
+
+ _That_ and _which_, 242-3.
+
+ _THAT_ AND _WHICH_ (_WHO_), 80-5.
+
+ _THAT_ (CONJUNCTION), OMISSION OF, 356-7.
+
+ _THAT_ (RELATIVE) OF PERSONS, 83-4.
+
+ _That_ resumptive, 330-1.
+
+ _THAT_, SEQUENCE OF, 294-5.
+
+ _That’s him_, 60.
+
+ _The exception proves_, &c., 306.
+
+ _Their_, 67.
+
+ _THE MORE_, 70-4.
+
+ _The more_, 218.
+
+ _Thereanent_, 29, 194.
+
+ _Therefore_, 265.
+
+ _Thereto_, 196.
+
+ _Theretofore_, 196.
+
+ _The same_, 358.
+
+ _The ... that_ (resolved interrogative), 101.
+
+ _Thither_, 5, 196.
+
+ _Those interested_, 344-5.
+
+ _Those sort_, 331.
+
+ _THOUGH_ SUPERFLUOUS, 334.
+
+ _Thrasonical_, 50, 52.
+
+ _Tinker with_, 164.
+
+ _Today_, 280.
+
+ _To have ..._, 154-6.
+
+ _Tomorrow_, 280.
+
+ Tone symbols and stops, 285.
+
+ _To the foot of the letter_, 32.
+
+ _Transcendentally_, 10-11.
+
+ _Translate_, 2.
+
+ TRANSLATION OF FOREIGN WORDS, 30-3.
+
+ _Transpire_, 4, 16, 24.
+
+ TRITE PHRASES, 213-5.
+
+ TRITE QUOTATION, 310-1.
+
+ _Trow_, 194.
+
+ TRUISMS, 339-41.
+
+ _Trustedly_, 47.
+
+ _Trustfulness_, 9.
+
+ TYPES OF HUMOUR, 171-5.
+
+
+ U
+
+ _-ude_, 21.
+
+ _Unconscious to_, 161.
+
+ _Under dog_, 51.
+
+ UNDER-STOPPING, 234-5.
+
+ UNEQUAL YOKEFELLOWS, &c., 311-14.
+
+ _Unique_, 58-9, 339.
+
+ _Unquiet_, n., 21.
+
+ _Up to date_, 51.
+
+
+ V
+
+ Verbal noun, 108.
+
+ _Verberant_, 20.
+
+ _Vexedly_, 47.
+
+ _Vide_, 311.
+
+ _Vieille escrime_, 28.
+
+ _Vieilles perruques_, 28.
+
+ _Vieux jeu_, 28.
+
+ _Violence_, 11.
+
+ _Vividity_, 46-7.
+
+ VOCABULARY, Cap. I.
+
+ VOCABULARY, GENERAL RULES, 1-4.
+
+ Vocabulary, prose and poetry, 3.
+
+ Vulgarism, 103, 118.
+
+ VULGARISMS, 331.
+
+
+ W
+
+ _Waddle_, 25.
+
+ _Walking stick_, 276.
+
+ _War-famous_, 20.
+
+ WENS AND HYPERTROPHIED MEMBERS, 300-3.
+
+ _Were_, 157-8.
+
+ _What_, antecedent-relative, 100-1.
+
+ _What ever...?_, 331.
+
+ _Whatever...?_, 331.
+
+ _What_, relative and interrogative, 100-1.
+
+ _Whereof_, 196.
+
+ _While_ and _as_, clauses, slovenly 189.
+
+ _WHILE_, MEANINGLESS, 357-8.
+
+ _Whimsical_, 42.
+
+ _WHO_ AND _WHOM_, 61.
+
+ _Whole-hogging_, 51.
+
+ _WILL_ AND _SHALL_, 133-54.
+
+ _Will not do this thing_, 214.
+
+ _Wind-flower_, 4.
+
+ _Wire_, vb., 19.
+
+ _With a view to_, 167-8.
+
+ _With the view of_, 167, 168.
+
+ WORD-FORMATION, 37-47.
+
+ _World policy_, 51.
+
+ WORN-OUT HUMOROUS PHRASES, 173-5.
+
+ _Worthy_, 174, 214.
+
+ _Wot_, 194.
+
+ _Write you_, 165.
+
+ WRONG TURNING, 316.
+
+
+ Y
+
+ _Your_ and _yours_, 40-1.
+
+ _You shall find_, 194.
+
+
+ Printed in England at the Oxford University Press
+
+
+
+
+ Some Oxford Books
+ on
+ ENGLISH
+
+
+ ¶ _General._
+
+THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH, by W. S. TOMKINSON. Pp. 230. 5s. 6d. net.
+
+‘It is full of good things.’
+
+ _Educational Times_
+
+
+THE RUDIMENTS OF CRITICISM, by E. A. G. LAMBORN. Pp. 192. 3s. 6d. net.
+
+‘A valuable book for teachers, showing how children may be taught to
+appreciate poetry and verbal melody.’
+
+ _Athenaeum._
+
+
+EXPRESSION IN SPEECH AND WRITING, by E. A. G. LAMBORN. Pp. 120. 4s. 6d.
+net.
+
+‘It is hard to over praise this inspiring little book, written with
+all the author’s raciness, humour, and enthusiasm. It deals in five
+chapters with oral and written composition, verse making, original
+music, and the rendering of poetry.’
+
+ _AMA._
+
+
+ ¶ _Phonetics._
+
+THE SOUNDS OF ENGLISH, by HENRY SWEET. Pp. 140. 3s 6d. n.
+
+An elementary introduction to Phonetics with particular reference to
+Standard English.
+
+
+A PRIMER OF SPOKEN ENGLISH. Introduction, Analysis, Synthesis, by HENRY
+SWEET. 4th edition revised. 1911. Pp. 110. 3s. 6d. net.
+
+
+PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTIONS OF ENGLISH PROSE, by DANIEL JONES. Pp. 60. 2s.
+6d. net.
+
+
+EXAMINATION PAPERS IN PHONETICS, by DANIEL JONES. Pp. 52. 2s. 6d. net.
+
+Designed to furnish practice for Oxford, Cambridge, and London
+Certificates.
+
+
+ ¶ _English Grammar, Descriptive._
+
+ELEMENTARY GRAMMAR AND EXERCISE BOOK, by O. W. TANCOCK. Third edition.
+Pp. 92. 2s.
+
+
+AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR AND READING BOOK. For lower forms in Classical
+Schools, by O. W. TANCOCK. Pp. 332. 3s. 6d.
+
+
+ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR, by H. C. WYLD. Pp. 224. 2s. 6d.
+net.
+
+
+A NEW ENGLISH GRAMMAR based on the recommendations of the Joint
+Committee on Grammatical Terminology by E. A. SONNENSCHEIN, with
+exercises by E. ARCHIBALD. Part I, 1s. 6d. net; Part II, 2s. net; Part
+III, 2s. 6d. net. Also in one volume. Pp. 426. 5s. net.
+
+
+SENTENCE ANALYSIS for the Lower Forms of Public Schools, by H. W.
+FOWLER. Pp. 68. 2s. net.
+
+‘A clear, simple, and exact practical exposition of the subject,
+produced in typographical form which leaves nothing to be desired.’
+
+ _Pitman’s Journal._
+
+
+For books marked with a dagger, thus †, teachers’ Keys are available.
+Prices and conditions may be had on application to the publisher.
+
+
+ ¶ _English Historical Grammar._
+
+A PRIMER OF HISTORICAL ENGLISH GRAMMAR, by HENRY SWEET. Second edition.
+Pp. 120. 3s. net.
+
+
+A SHORT HISTORICAL ENGLISH GRAMMAR, by HENRY SWEET. Corrected
+impression. 1924. Pp. 276. 4s. 6d. net.
+
+
+NEW ENGLISH GRAMMAR: Logical and Historical, in two parts, by HENRY
+SWEET.
+
+Part I: Introduction, Phonology, and Accidence. Pp. 524. 10s. 6d. n.
+Part II: Syntax. Pp. 148. 5s. net.
+
+
+A PRIMER OF ENGLISH ETYMOLOGY, by W. W. SKEAT. Sixth edition, revised.
+1923. Pp. 120. 2s. 6d. net.
+
+Chapters on the Sources of the Language; the History, Symbols and
+Sounds; Modern English Spelling; Words of Native Origin; Vowel Mutation
+and Gradation, &c.
+
+
+STANDARD ENGLISH, by T. NICKLIN. (World’s Manuals.) Pp. 102. 2s. 6d.
+net.
+
+‘The author pleads that all children of whatever birth shall be
+carefully taught the “standard dialect”--the English, that is to say,
+of the educated class, and often hitherto regarded as a prerogative of
+that class.’
+
+ _Journal of Education._
+
+
+ON THE RELATIONS BETWEEN SPOKEN AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE, by HENRY BRADLEY.
+Pp. 36. 2s. net.
+
+An examination of the difficulties of spelling reform.
+
+
+ ¶ _Dictionaries._
+
+¶ THE POCKET OXFORD DICTIONARY OF CURRENT ENGLISH, compiled by H. W.
+and F. G. FOWLER. Pp. 1016. Cloth, 3s. 6d. net. India Paper, 6s. net.
+
+An authoritative guide to the latest and best English usage. Over 2,000
+columns of clear type; yet the volume is small enough to be carried in
+the pocket of a traveller or holiday maker.
+
+
+¶ THE CONCISE OXFORD DICTIONARY, compiled by H. W. and F. G. FOWLER.
+Eleventh impression. 1923. Pp. 1076. Cloth, 7s. 6d. net.
+
+‘We strongly recommend every one to secure this Dictionary. Whatever
+they may possess this will be a distinct acquisition, and daily use
+will make it more and more indispensable.’
+
+ _London Quarterly Review._
+
+
+¶ The _Pocket Oxford Dictionary_ and the _Concise Oxford Dictionary_
+are of unrivalled authority because they alone among one-volume
+dictionaries are based on the great OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, edited
+by Sir James Murray, Dr. Bradley, Dr. Craigie, and Mr. Onions. Of
+this great work Vol. I was published in 1888 after many years of
+preparation. Vol. X (the last) is now appearing in sections. The
+complete work will contain articles on about 425,000 words and will
+extend to over 15,000 large pages, each of three columns. For details
+see the General Catalogue.
+
+
+A CONCISE ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY, by W. W. SKEAT; new and corrected
+impression. 1911. Pp. 680. 6s. net; on thin paper, 7s. 6d. net.
+
+
+ ¶ _English Composition._
+
+EXERCISES IN PROSE LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION, by G. CLIFFORD DENT. Pp.
+300. 4s.
+
+Also separately. Part I (Ages 8-10),Text, 9d., Text and Exercises, 1s.
+Part II (Ages 11-14), Text, 1s., Text and Exercises, 1s. 6d. Part III
+(Ages 15-18), Text, 1s. 3d., Text and Exercises, 2s.
+
+
+ENGLISH COMPOSITION, based on the study of literary models, by A.
+CRUSE. Pp. 200. 2s. 6d.
+
+CONTENTS:--The History of the Essay, Writing an Essay, Types of Essay,
+Style, Letter Writing, Paraphrasing, Verse Writing.
+
+
+ENGLISH COMPOSITION, Progressive Exercises (A Two-Years’ Course for
+upper forms), by C. E. L. HAMMOND. With an introduction by J. C. SMITH.
+Pp. 176. 3s. 6d. Also in two parts: Part I, pp. 80. 2s.; Part II, pp.
+112, 2s. 6d.
+
+‘These books are truly admirable. We have not seen a more interesting
+or more suggestive treatment of English, and we cordially recommend
+them to all teachers of English.’
+
+ _Scottish Educational Journal._
+
+
+EXERCISES IN DICTATION AND COMPOSITION, with selected examination
+papers and a vocabulary of all difficult words, by N. NOTMAN. Pp. 168.
+2s. 6d. net.
+
+Standard of Oxford and Cambridge Locals.
+
+
+† SHORT ESSAYS FOR FOURTH AND FIFTH FORMS, with specimen analyses, by
+S. E. WINBOLT. Pp. 292. 3s. 6d.
+
+
+THE WRITING OF ENGLISH, by P. J. HARTOG, assisted by Mrs. AMY H.
+LANGDON. Third edition. Pp. 176. 4s. net.
+
+The authors explain how it is that French boys write French so well
+while English boys write English so indifferently; and apply to
+English, with acknowledged practical success, the French method of
+teaching the mother tongue.
+
+
+_By H. W. and F. G. Fowler._
+
+
+THE KING’S ENGLISH, ABRIDGED for School use. Pp. 160. 3s. net.
+
+‘For the young writer we know of no better work since the appearance of
+Hodgson’s _Errors in English_.’
+
+ _Literary World._
+
+‘If freely used, it would do much to arrest the degradation of the
+English language.’
+
+ _The Scotsman._
+
+
+THE KING’S ENGLISH. Second edition. Pp. 380. 6s. net.
+
+‘To author and journalists _The King’s English_ should be invaluable.’
+
+ _The Author._
+
+‘This is the best book of its kind we have ever seen.’
+
+ _Glasgow Herald._
+
+
+ ¶ _Précis Writing._
+
+† A PROGRESSIVE COURSE OF PRÉCIS WRITING. Part I for beginners, Part
+II Official Correspondence, Minutes, &c., pp. 146, graduated, by F. E.
+ROBESON. 2s. 6d.
+
+
+HISTORICAL PASSAGES FOR PRÉCIS WRITING, by F. E. ROBESON. Pp. 118. 2s.
+6d.
+
+
+PRÉCIS WRITING. The two books in one volume. Pp. 264. 4s. 6d.
+
+
+
+
+OXFORD SERIES OF TEXTS OR TRANSLATIONS FOR SCHOOLS
+
+
+DR. LOWE’S POPULAR READERS, with Notes, Maps, Vocabularies, English
+Exercises, and many illustrations. Each book proceeds from simple
+sentences to compound sentences; then to short paragraphs; and finally
+to a slightly adapted version of the original text. 2s. each.
+
+
+LINGUA LATINA. The Direct Method. Edited by W. H. D. ROUSE and S.
+O. ANDREW. Crown 8vo. Eight text-books, a Teacher’s book, and a
+wall-picture.
+
+
+OXFORD JUNIOR LATIN SERIES. Under the General Editorship of C. E.
+FREEMAN. Fcap 8vo. 2s. each. The series includes the following
+volumes:--
+
+_Virgil, Aeneid I, II, IV, V, VI, X; Catullus; Horace, Select Odes;
+Selections from Ovid; Livy I, XXI, XXII._
+
+
+THE CLARENDON LATIN AND GREEK SERIES. Partly in the Original and partly
+in Translation. Under the general editorship of R. W. LIVINGSTONE. Each
+volume with introduction, notes, and vocabulary. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net
+each. The series includes the following Latin volumes:--
+
+_Apuleius, Cupid and Psyche; Caesar, Civil War I-II, III; Caesar,
+Gallic War IV (20-38) and V, VI-VII; Cicero the Advocate; The
+Catilinarian Conspiracy; Livy, XXI-XXII; Sallust, The Jugurthine War;
+Virgil, Aeneid I-III, IV-VI, VII-IX, The Georgics._
+
+
+OXFORD CLASSICAL TEXTS. Crown 8vo. The series includes the following
+Latin volumes:--
+
+_Asconius; Caesar, Commentarii; Catullus; Cicero, Epistulae; Cicero,
+Orationes; Cicero, Rhetorica; Horace; Isidori Etymologiae, Livy;
+Lucretius; Martial; Nepos; Ovid; Persius and Juvenal; Phaedrus;
+Plautus; Propertius; Statius; Tacitus; Terence; Tibullus; Vergil;
+Appendix Vergiliana._
+
+OXFORD LIBRARY OF TRANSLATIONS. These Oxford Translations have not
+been written to order, but produced for the delight of the writers
+themselves by students of their favourite authors. Uniform volumes.
+Fcap 8vo. From 5s. net each.
+
+ Lists of the above series and of other annotated editions may
+ be had on application to the
+
+ OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+ Amen House, Warwick Square, E.C. 4
+
+
+
+
+ Transcriber’s Notes
+
+Missing and incorrect punctuation marks have been corrected without
+note.
+
+Inconsistencies that did not affect understanding were left as per the
+original text.
+
+Page 38: “call it _navity_” changed to “call it _naivety_”
+
+Page 213: “aud flourishes in” changed to “and flourishes in”
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75439 ***
diff --git a/75439-h/75439-h.htm b/75439-h/75439-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..be471c5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75439-h/75439-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,22253 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+ <meta charset="UTF-8">
+ <title>
+ The King’s English | Project Gutenberg
+ </title>
+ <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+ <style> /* <![CDATA[ */
+
+body {
+ margin-left: 10%;
+ margin-right: 10%;
+}
+
+ h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+ text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+ clear: both;
+}
+
+p {
+ margin-top: 1em;
+ text-align: justify;
+ margin-bottom: .49em;
+}
+
+.p2 {margin-top: 2em;}
+.p4 {margin-top: 4em;}
+.p5 {text-indent: 5em;}
+
+hr {
+ width: 33%;
+ margin-top: 2em;
+ margin-bottom: 2em;
+ margin-left: 33.5%;
+ margin-right: 33.5%;
+ clear: both;
+}
+
+hr.tb {width: 45%; margin-left: 27.5%; margin-right: 27.5%;}
+hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;}
+@media print { hr.chap {display: none; visibility: hidden;} }
+
+div.chapter {page-break-before: always;}
+h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;}
+
+ul.index { list-style-type: none; }
+li.ifrst {
+ margin-top: 1.5em;
+ text-indent: -2em;
+ padding-left: 1em;
+}
+li.indx {
+ margin-top: .5em;
+ text-indent: -2em;
+ padding-left: 1em;
+}
+li.isub2 {
+ text-indent: -2em;
+ padding-left: 3em;
+}
+li.isub4 {
+ text-indent: -2em;
+ padding-left: 5em;
+}
+
+
+table {
+ margin-left: auto;
+ margin-right: auto;
+}
+table.autotable { border-collapse: collapse; width: 60%;}
+table.autotable td,
+table.autotable th { padding: 4px; }
+.x-ebookmaker table {width: 95%;}
+
+.tdc {text-align: center; vertical-align: top;}
+.tdr {text-align: right; vertical-align: top;}
+
+.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+ /* visibility: hidden; */
+ position: absolute;
+ left: 92%;
+ font-size: smaller;
+ text-align: right;
+ font-style: normal;
+ font-weight: normal;
+ font-variant: normal;
+ text-indent: 0;
+}
+
+.blockquot {
+ margin-left: 5%;
+ margin-right: 5%;
+}
+.center {text-align: center; text-indent: 0em;}
+
+.right {text-align: right; text-indent: 0em;}
+
+.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;}
+
+/* Footnotes */
+.footnotes {border: 1px dashed; margin-top: 1em;}
+
+.footnote {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+
+.footnote .label {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+
+.fnanchor {
+ vertical-align: super;
+ font-size: .8em;
+ text-decoration:
+ none;
+}
+
+/* Poetry */
+
+.poetry {
+ display: block;
+ text-align: left;
+ margin-left: 0
+ }
+/* uncomment the next line for centered poetry in browsers */
+/* .poetry {display: inline-block;} */
+/* large inline blocks don't split well on paged devices */
+@media print { .poetry {display: block;} }
+
+.x-ebookmaker .poetry {
+ margin-left: 5%;
+ margin-right: 5%
+ }
+.poetry-container {
+ margin: 1.5em auto;
+ text-align: center;
+ font-size: 98%;
+ display: flex;
+ justify-content: center
+ }
+.poetry .stanza {
+ padding: 0.5em 0;
+ page-break-inside: avoid
+ }
+.poetry .verse {
+ text-indent: -3em;
+ padding-left: 3em
+ }
+
+/* Transcriber's notes */
+.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA;
+ color: black;
+ font-size:smaller;
+ padding:0.5em;
+ margin-bottom:5em;
+ font-family:sans-serif, serif; }
+
+.big {font-size: 1.3em;}
+.small {font-size: 0.8em;}
+
+abbr[title] {
+ text-decoration: none;
+}
+
+/* Poetry indents */
+.poetry .indent0 {text-indent: -3em;}
+.poetry .indent12 {text-indent: 3em;}
+.poetry .indent23 {text-indent: 8.5em;}
+.poetry .indent8 {text-indent: 1em;}
+
+
+ /* ]]> */ </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75439 ***</div>
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_i">[Pg i]</span></p>
+
+<h1><span class="small">THE</span><br>
+KING’S ENGLISH</h1>
+
+<p class="center p2">
+BY<br>
+<br>
+<span class="big">H. W. FOWLER &amp; F. G. FOWLER</span><br>
+<br><span class="small">
+COMPILERS OF THE
+CONCISE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF CURRENT ENGLISH</span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent23">No levell’d malice</div>
+ <div class="verse indent12">Infects one comma in the course I hold.</div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent23"><i>Timon of Athens</i>, I. i. 48.</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center p4">
+SECOND EDITION<br>
+</p>
+
+<p class="center p4">
+OXFORD<br>
+AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
+<br><span class="small">
+LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK<br>
+TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY<br></span>
+HUMPHREY MILFORD<br>
+1924<br>
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_ii">[Pg ii]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center">PRINTED IN ENGLAND</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="PREFACE">PREFACE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The compilers of this book would be wanting in courtesy if they
+did not expressly say what might otherwise be safely left to the
+reader’s discernment: the frequent appearance in it of any author’s or
+newspaper’s name does not mean that that author or newspaper offends
+more often than others against rules of grammar or style; it merely
+shows that they have been among the necessarily limited number chosen
+to collect instances from.</p>
+
+<p>The plan of the book was dictated by the following considerations.
+It is notorious that English writers seldom look into a grammar or
+composition book; the reading of grammars is repellent because, being
+bound to be exhaustive on a greater or less scale, they must give much
+space to the obvious or the unnecessary; and composition books are
+often useless because they enforce their warnings only by fabricated
+blunders against which every tiro feels himself quite safe. The
+principle adopted here has therefore been (1) to pass by all rules,
+of whatever absolute importance, that are shown by observation to be
+seldom or never broken; and (2) to illustrate by living examples, with
+the name of a reputable authority attached to each, all blunders that
+observation shows to be common. The reader, however, who is thus led to
+suspect that the only method followed has been the rejection of method
+will find, it is hoped, a practical security against inconvenience in
+the very full Index.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</span></p>
+
+<p>Further, since the positive literary virtues are not to be taught by
+brief quotation, nor otherwise attained than by improving the gifts
+of nature with wide or careful reading, whereas something may really
+be done for the negative virtues by mere exhibition of what should be
+avoided, the examples collected have had to be examples of the bad
+and not of the good. To this it must be added that a considerable
+proportion of the newspaper extracts are, as is sometimes apparent,
+not from the editorial, but from the correspondence columns; the names
+attached are merely an assurance that the passages have actually
+appeared in print, and not been now invented to point a moral.</p>
+
+<p>The especial thanks of the compilers are offered to Dr. Bradley, joint
+editor of the <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i>, who has been good
+enough to inspect the proof sheets, and whose many valuable suggestions
+have led to the removal of some too unqualified statements, some
+confused exposition, and some positive mistakes. It is due to him,
+however, to say that his warnings have now and then been disregarded,
+when it seemed that brevity or some other advantage could be secured
+without great risk of misunderstanding.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i> itself has been of much service.
+On all questions of vocabulary, even if so slightly handled as in the
+first chapter of this book, that great work is now indispensable.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+H. W. F.<br>
+F. G. F.<br>
+</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION</h2>
+</div>
+<p>In this edition new examples have been added or substituted here and
+there.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr><th></th><th class="tdr">PAGE</th></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">PART I
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">CHAPTER I. VOCABULARY, pp.<a href="#Page_1">1</a>-<a href="#Page_59">59</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+General Principles </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a>-<a href="#Page_8">8</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Familiar and far-fetched words </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_4">4</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Concrete and abstract expression </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_5">5</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Circumlocution </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_6">6</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Short and long words </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_6">6</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Saxon and Romance words </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Requirements of different styles </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Malaprops </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_8">8</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Neologisms </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Americanisms </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_23">23</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Foreign words </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Formation </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_37">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Slang </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+<i>Individual</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+<i>Mutual</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_56">56</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+<i>Unique</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+<i>Aggravate</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+CHAPTER II. SYNTAX, pp. <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-<a href="#Page_170">170</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Case </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Number </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_65">65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Comparatives and superlatives </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Relatives </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Defining and non-defining relative clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+<i>That</i> and <i>who</i> or <i>which</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+<i>And who</i>, <i>and which</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Case of the relative </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Miscellaneous uses of the relative </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+<i>It ... that</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_104">104</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+Participle and gerund </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Participles </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_110">110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+The gerund </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_116">116</a>-<a href="#Page_133">133</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Distinguishing the gerund </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Omission of the gerund subject </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Choice between gerund and infinitive </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Shall and will </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_133">133</a>-<a href="#Page_154">154</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+The pure system </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_134">134</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+The coloured-future system </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+The plain-future system </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Second-person questions </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_139">139</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Examples of principal sentences </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Substantival clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_143">143</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Conditional clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Indefinite clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Examples of subordinate clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Perfect infinitive </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_154">154</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Conditionals </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+<i>Doubt that</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Prepositions </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_161">161</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+
+CHAPTER III. AIRS AND GRACES, pp. <a href="#Page_171">171</a>-<a href="#Page_218">218</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Certain types of humor </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_171">171</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Elegant variation </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_175">175</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Inversion </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_180">180</a>-<a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Exclamatory </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Balance </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_182">182</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+In syntactic clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_187">187</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Negative, and false-emphasis </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Miscellaneous </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Archaism </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_193">193</a>-<a href="#Page_200">200</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Occasional </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Sustained </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Metaphor </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_200">200</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Repetition </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_209">209</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Miscellaneous </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_213">213</a>-<a href="#Page_218">218</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Trite phrases </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Irony </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Superlatives without <i>the</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_216">216</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Cheap originality </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_217">217</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+
+CHAPTER IV. PUNCTUATION, pp. <a href="#Page_219">219</a>-<a href="#Page_290">290</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+General difficulties </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_219">219</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+General principles </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_224">224</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+The spot plague </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Over-stopping </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Under-stopping </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Grammar and punctuation </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_235">235</a>-<a href="#Page_263">263</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Substantival clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Subject, &amp;c., and verb </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_239">239</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Adjectival clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_242">242</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Adverbial clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Parenthesis </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_247">247</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Misplaced commas </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_248">248</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Enumeration </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Comma between independent sentences </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Semicolon with subordinate members </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_257">257</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Exclamations and statements </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Exclamations and questions </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_259">259</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Internal question and exclamation marks </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Unaccountable commas </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_262">262</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+The colon </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_263">263</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Miscellaneous </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_264">264</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Dashes </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_266">266</a>-<a href="#Page_275">275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+General abuse </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_266">266</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Legitimate uses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_267">267</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Debatable questions </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_269">269</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Common misuses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_274">274</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Hyphens </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_275">275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+Quotation marks </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_280">280</a>-<a href="#Page_290">290</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Excessive use </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_280">280</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</span>
+
+Order with stops </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_282">282</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Single and double </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_287">287</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Misplaced </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_288">288</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="p5">
+
+Half quotation </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_289">289</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+PART II. p. <a href="#Page_291">291</a>
+to the end</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+<span class="smcap">Euphony</span>, §§ 1-10
+</td></tr><tr><td>
+1. Jingles </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_291">291</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+2. Alliteration </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_292">292</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+3. Repeated prepositions </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+4. Sequence of relatives </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+5. Sequence of <i>that</i>, &amp;c. </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_294">294</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+6. Metrical prose </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_295">295</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+7. Sentence accent </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_295">295</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+8. Causal <i>as</i> clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_298">298</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+9. Wens and hypertrophied members </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_300">300</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+10. Careless repetition </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_303">303</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+<span class="smcap">Quotation</span>, &amp;c., §§ 11-19
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+11. Common misquotations </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_305">305</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+12. Uncommon misquotations of well-known passages </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_305">305</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+13. Misquotation of less familiar passages </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_306">306</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+14. Misapplied and misunderstood quotations and phrases </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_306">306</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+15. Allusion </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_307">307</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+16. Incorrect allusion </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_308">308</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+17. Dovetailed and adapted quotations and phrases </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_308">308</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+18. Trite quotation </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_310">310</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+19. Latin abbreviations, &amp;c. </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_311">311</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+<span class="smcap">Grammar</span>, §§ 20-37
+</td></tr><tr><td>
+20. Unequal yokefellows and defective double harness </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_311">311</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+21. Common parts </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_314">314</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+22. The wrong turning </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_316">316</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+23. Ellipse in subordinate clauses </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_317">317</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+24. Some illegitimate infinitives </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_317">317</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+25. Split infinitives </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_319">319</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+26. Compound passives </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_319">319</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+27. Confusion with negatives </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_321">321</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+28. Omission of <i>as</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_324">324</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+29. Other liberties taken with <i>as</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_324">324</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+30. Brachylogy </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_326">326</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+31. Between two stools </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_327">327</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+32. The impersonal <i>one</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_328">328</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+33. <i>Between ... or</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_328">328</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+34. <i>A</i> placed between the adjective and its noun </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_329">329</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+35. <i>Do</i> as substitute verb </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_330">330</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+36. Fresh starts </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_330">330</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+37. Vulgarisms and colloquialisms </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_331">331</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+<span class="smcap">Meaning</span>, §§ 38-48
+</td></tr><tr><td>
+38. Tautology </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_331">331</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+39. Redundancies </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_332">332</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+40. <i>As to whether</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_333">333</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+41. Superfluous <i>but</i> and <i>though</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_334">334</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+42. <i>If and when</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_334">334</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+43. Maltreated idioms </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_336">336</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+44. Truisms and contradictions in terms </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_339">339</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+45. Double emphasis </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_341">341</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+46. Split auxiliaries </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_342">342</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+47. Overloading </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_343">343</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+48. Demonstrative, noun, and participle or adjective </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_344">344</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+<span class="smcap">Ambiguity</span>, §§ 49-52
+</td></tr><tr><td>
+49. False scent </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_345">345</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+50. Misplacement of words </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_346">346</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+51. Ambiguous position </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_347">347</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+52. Ambiguous enumeration </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_348">348</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdc" colspan="2">
+
+<span class="smcap">Style</span>, § 53 to the end
+</td></tr><tr><td>
+53. Antics </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_348">348</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+54. Journalese </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_351">351</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+55. <i>Somewhat</i>, &amp;c. </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_352">352</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+56. Clumsy patching </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_355">355</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+57. Omission of the conjunction <i>that</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_356">356</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+58. Meaningless <i>while</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_357">357</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+59. Commercialisms </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_358">358</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+60. Pet Phrases </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_359">359</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>
+
+61. <i>Also</i> as conjunction; and <i>&amp;c.</i> </td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_359">359</a></td></tr>
+
+</table>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I<br><span class="small">VOCABULARY</span></h2></div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">General</span></h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This general principle may be translated into practical rules in the
+domain of vocabulary as follows:—</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Prefer the short word to the long.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span> 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 <i>translate</i> is derived from Latin,
+and learning that the Elizabethans had another word for it, he will
+pull us up by <i>englishing</i> his quotations; he will puzzle the
+general reader by introducing his book with a <i>foreword</i>. 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; <i>foreword</i> is (or may be) Saxon; we can
+find out in the dictionary whether it is or not; but <i>preface</i> 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
+<i>Oxford Dictionary</i>) is English:—<i>battle</i>, <i>beast</i>,
+<i>beauty</i>, <i>beef</i>, <i>bill</i>, <i>blue</i>, <i>bonnet</i>,
+<i>border</i>, <i>boss</i>, <i>bound</i>, <i>bowl</i>, <i>brace</i>,
+<i>brave</i>, <i>bribe</i>, <i>bruise</i>, <i>brush</i>, <i>butt</i>,
+<i>button</i>. Dr. Murray observes that these ‘are now no less
+“native”, and no less important constituents of our vocabulary, than
+the Teutonic words’.</p>
+
+<p>There are, moreover, innumerable pairs of synonyms about which the
+Saxon principle gives us no help. The first to hand are <i>ere</i>
+and <i>before</i> (both Saxon), <i>save</i> and <i>except</i> (both
+Romance), <i>anent</i> and <i>about</i> (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 <i>save</i> for a Saxon word. But<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span> 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 <i>save</i>, he wonders, Why
+not <i>except</i>? At sight of <i>ere</i> he is irresistibly reminded
+of that sad spectacle, a mechanic wearing his Sunday clothes on a
+weekday. And <i>anent</i>, to continue the simile, is nothing less
+than a masquerade costume. The <i>Oxford Dictionary</i> 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 <i>before</i>, <i>except</i>, and <i>about</i>? 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.
+<i>Before</i> and <i>except</i>, 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 <i>before</i>, to injure <i>ere</i> (which is a delicate flower
+that will lose its quality if much handled), and to make one’s sentence
+both pretentious and frigid.</p>
+
+<p>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:
+<i>In the contemplated eventuality</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span> (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 <i>if so</i>. It does not very greatly
+matter by which of the five roads the natural is reached instead of the
+monstrosity, so long as it <i>is</i> reached. The five are indicated
+because (1) they differ in directness, and (2) in any given case only
+one of them may be possible.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>1. <b>Prefer the familiar word</b> to the far-fetched.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The old Imperial naval policy, which has failed conspicuously
+because it <i>antagonized the unalterable supremacy of Colonial
+nationalism</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (stood in the way of that national
+ambition which must always be uppermost in the Colonial mind)</p>
+
+<p>Buttercups made a sunlight of their own, and in the shelter of
+scattered coppices the pale <i>wind-flowers</i> still dreamed in
+whiteness.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We all know what an <i>anemone</i> is: whether we know what a
+<i>wind-flower</i> is, unless we happen to be Greek scholars, is quite
+doubtful.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The state of Poland, and the excesses committed by mobilized troops,
+have been of a far more serious nature than has been allowed to
+<i>transpire</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (come out)</p>
+
+<p>Reform converses with possibilities, <i>perchance</i> with
+impossibilities; but here is sacred fact.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span> (perhaps)</p>
+
+<p>Tanners and users are strongly of opinion that there is no room
+for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span> further enhancement, but on that point there is always room
+for doubt especially when the <i>export phase</i> is taken into
+consideration.—<i>Times.</i> (state of the export trade)</p>
+
+<p>Witchcraft has been put a stop to by Act of Parliament; but
+the mysterious relations which it <i>emblemed</i> still
+continue.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span> (symbolized)</p>
+
+<p>It will only have itself to thank if future disaster rewards
+its <i>nescience</i> of the conditions of successful
+warfare.—<i>Outlook.</i> (ignorance)</p>
+
+<p><i>Continual vigilance is imperative on the public</i> to
+ensure....—<i>Times.</i> (We must be ever on the watch)</p>
+
+<p>These manoeuvres are by no means new, and <i>their recrudescence
+is hardly calculated to influence the development of
+events</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (the present use of them is not likely to
+be effective)</p>
+
+<p>‘I have no particular business at L——’, said he; ‘I was merely going
+<i>thither</i> to pass a day or two.’—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span> (there)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>2. <b>Prefer the concrete word</b> (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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>The general poverty of explanation as to the diction of particular
+phrases seemed to point in the same direction.</i>—<i>Cambridge
+University Reporter.</i> (It was perhaps owing to this also that the
+diction of particular phrases was often so badly explained)</p>
+
+<p><i>An elementary condition of a sound discussion is a frank
+recognition of the gulf severing two sets of facts.</i>—<i>Times.</i>
+(There can be no sound discussion where the gulf severing two sets of
+facts is not frankly recognized)</p>
+
+<p><i>The signs of the times point to the necessity of the modification
+of the system of administration.</i>—<i>Times.</i> (It is becoming
+clear that the administrative system must be modified)</p>
+
+<p><i>No year passes now without evidence of the truth of the
+statement that</i> the work of government is becoming increasingly
+difficult.—<i>Spectator.</i> (Every year shows again how true it is
+that....)</p>
+
+<p>The first private conference <i>relating to the question of the
+convocation of representatives of the nation</i> took place
+yesterday.—<i>Times.</i> (on national representation)</p>
+
+<p><i>There seems to have been an absence of attempt at conciliation
+between rival sects.</i>—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (The sects seem
+never even to have tried mutual conciliation)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span></p>
+
+<p>Zeal, however, must not outrun discretion in changing abstract to
+concrete. <i>Officer</i> is concrete, and <i>office</i> abstract; but
+we do not <i>promote to officers</i>, as in the following quotation,
+but to <i>offices</i>—or, with more exactness in this context, to
+<i>commissions</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Over 1,150 cadets of the Military Colleges were <i>promoted to
+officers</i> at the Palace of Tsarskoe Selo yesterday.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. <b>Prefer the single word</b> to the circumlocution. As the word
+<i>case</i> seems to lend itself particularly to abuse, we start with
+more than one specimen of it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Inaccuracies were <i>in many cases</i> due to cramped methods of
+writing.—<i>Cambridge University Reporter.</i> (often)</p>
+
+<p>The handwriting was on the whole good, with a few examples of
+remarkably fine penmanship <i>in the case both of</i> boys and
+girls.—<i>Ibid.</i> (by both boys....)</p>
+
+<p>Few candidates showed a thorough knowledge of the text of 1 Kings,
+and <i>in many cases the answers</i> lacked care.—<i>Ibid.</i> (many
+answers)</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>residential
+purposes</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (his residence)</p>
+
+<p>M. Witte is <i>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</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (actively
+collecting all information that may be needed before the Tsar’s reform
+Ukase can be executed)</p>
+
+<p>The Russian Government is at last face to face with the greatest
+crisis of the war, <i>in the shape of the fact that</i> the Siberian
+railway is no longer capable....—<i>Spectator.</i> (for) or (:)</p>
+
+<p>Mr. J—— O—— has <i>been made the recipient of</i> a silver
+medal.—<i>Guernsey Advertiser.</i> (received)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. <b>Prefer the short word</b> to the long.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>One of the most important reforms mentioned in the rescript <i>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</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (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)</p>
+
+<p>I merely desired to point out <i>the principal reason which I
+believe exists for the great exaggeration which is occasionally to
+be observed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span> in the estimate of the importance of the contradiction
+between current Religion and current Science put forward by thinkers
+of reputation</i>.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span> (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)</p>
+
+<p>Sir,—Will you permit me to <i>homologate</i> all you say to-day
+regarding that selfish minority of motorists who....—<i>Times.</i>
+(agree with)</p>
+
+<p>On the Berlin Bourse to-day the prospect of a general strike was
+cheerfully <i>envisaged</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (faced)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>5. <b>Prefer the Saxon word</b> to the Romance.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Despite the unfavourable climatic conditions.</i>—<i>Guernsey
+Advertiser.</i> (Bad as the weather has been)</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Malaprops</span></h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>1. <b>Words containing the same stem, but necessarily, or at least
+indisputably, distinguished by termination or prefix.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘She writes <i>comprehensively</i> 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.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The context proves that <i>comprehensibly</i> is meant.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The working of the staff at the agent’s disposal was to a great
+extent voluntary, and, therefore, required all the influence
+of <i>judicial</i> management in order to avoid inevitable
+difficulties.—<i>Times.</i> (judicious)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A not uncommon blunder.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>By all means let us have bright, hearty, and very <i>reverend</i>
+services.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (reverent)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Not uncommon.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span></p><div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He chuckled at his own <i>perspicuity</i>.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>If the writer had a little more <i>perspicuity</i> he would have known
+that the Church Congress would do nothing of the kind.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Perspicuity</i> is clearness or transparency: insight is
+<i>perspicacity</i>. <i>-uity</i> of style, <i>-acity</i> of mind. Very
+common.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Selected in the beginning, I know, for your great ability and
+<i>trustfulness</i>.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span> (trustworthiness)</p>
+
+<p>Wise, firm, faithless; secret, crafty, passionless; watchful
+and inscrutable; acute and <i>insensate</i>—withal perfectly
+decorous—what more could be desired?—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Apparently for <i>insensible</i> in the meaning <i>hardhearted</i>.
+Though modern usage fluctuates, it seems to tend towards the meaning,
+<i>stupidly unmoved by prudence or by facts</i>; at any rate
+<i>acute</i> and <i>insensate</i> are incompatible.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In the meantime the colossal advertisement in the German Press
+of German aims, of German interests, and of German policy
+<i>incontinently</i> proceeds.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The idiomatic sense of <i>incontinently</i> is <i>immediately</i>; it
+seems here to be used for <i>continually</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I was <i>awaiting</i> with real curiosity to hear the way in which M.
+Loubet would to-day acquit himself.—<i>Times.</i> (waiting)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Awaiting</i> is always transitive.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But they too will feel the pain just where you feel it now, and
+they will <i>bethink</i> themselves the only unhappy on the
+earth.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is no sort of authority for <i>bethink</i>—like
+<i>think</i>—with object and complement. <i>To bethink oneself</i> is
+to remember, or to hit upon an idea.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And Pizarro ... established the city of Arequipa, since <i>arisen</i>
+to such commercial celebrity.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>2. <b>Words like the previous set, except that the differentiation may
+possibly be disputed.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The long drought left the torrent of which I am speaking, and such
+others, in a state peculiarly favourable to <i>observance</i>
+of their least action on the mountains from which they
+descend.—<span class="smcap">Ruskin.</span> (observation)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Observance</i> is obedience, compliance, &amp;c. The <i>Oxford
+Dictionary</i> recognizes <i>observance</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is physical science, and experience, that man ought to consult in
+religion, morals, <i>legislature</i>, as well as in knowledge and the
+arts.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span> (legislation)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Legislature</i> is the legislative body—in England, King, Lords,
+and Commons. To call back the old confusion is an offence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The apposite display of the diamonds usually stopped the tears that
+began to flow hereabouts; and she would remain in a <i>complaisant</i>
+state until....—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span> (complacent)</p>
+
+<p>Our Correspondent adds that he is fully persuaded that Rozhdestvensky
+has nothing more to expect from the <i>complacency</i> of the French
+authorities.—<i>Times.</i> (complaisance)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Complaisant</i> is over polite, flattering, subservient, &amp;c.
+<i>Complacent</i> means contented, satisfied.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In the spring of that year the privilege was withdrawn from the
+four associated booksellers, and the <i>continuance</i> of the work
+strictly prohibited.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Continuation</i> is the noun of continue, go on with:
+<i>continuance</i> of continue, remain. With <i>continuance</i> the
+meaning would be that the already published volumes (of Diderot’s
+<i>Encyclopaedia</i>) were to be destroyed; but the meaning intended is
+that the promised volumes were not to be gone on with—which requires
+<i>continuation</i>. Again, the next two extracts, from one page, show
+Mr. Morley wrongly substituting <i>continuity</i>, which only means
+continuousness, for <i>continuance</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Having arrived at a certain conclusion with regard
+to the <i>continuance</i> ... of Mr. Parnell’s
+leadership....—<span class="smcap">Gladstone.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>continuity</i> of the
+stained leadership.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>transcendentally</i> important.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Transcendently</i> means in a superlative degree:
+<i>transcendentally</i> is a philosophic term for independently of
+experience, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Until at last, gathered <i>altogether</i> again, they find their way
+down to the turf.—<span class="smcap">Ruskin.</span> (all together)</p>
+
+<p>At such times ... Jimmie’s better angel was always in the
+ascendency.—<i>Windsor Magazine.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Was in the <i>ascendant</i>: had an <i>ascendency</i> over.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The inconsistency and <i>evasion</i> of the attitude of the
+Government.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Evasiveness</i> the quality: <i>evasion</i> a particular act.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The <i>requisition</i> for a life of Christianity is ‘walk in
+love’.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Requisite</i> or <i>requirement</i>, the thing required:
+<i>requisition</i>, the act of requiring it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We will here merely chronicle the <i>procession</i> of
+events.—<i>Spectator.</i> (progress or succession)</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>especially</i>.—<i>Times.</i>
+(specially)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 <i>spec-</i> and <i>espec-</i> is by no means complete yet, but
+some uses of each are already ludicrous. Roughly, <i>spec-</i> means
+particular as opposed to general, <i>espec-</i> particular as opposed
+to ordinary; but usage must be closely watched.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>That it occurs in <i>violence to</i> police regulations is daily
+apparent.—<i>Guernsey Advertiser.</i> (violation of)</p>
+
+<p>In the field it aims at efforts of unexpected and extreme violence;
+the <i>research</i> of hostile masses, their defeat by overwhelming
+and relentless assault, and their wholesale destruction by rigorous
+pursuit.—<i>Times.</i> (discovery)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The object of research is laws, principles, facts, &amp;c., not concrete
+things or persons. Entomological research, for instance, does not look
+for insects, but for facts about insects.</p>
+
+<p>3. <b>Give-and-take forms</b>, in which there are two words, with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>
+different constructions, that might properly be used, and one is given
+the construction of the other.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A few companies, <i>comprised</i> mainly <i>of</i>
+militiamen.—<i>Times.</i> (composed of? comprising?)</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Novoe Vremya</i> thinks the Tsar’s words will undoubtedly
+<i>instil</i> the Christians of Macedonia <i>with</i>
+hope.—<i>Times.</i> (inspire them with hope? instil hope into them?)</p>
+
+<p>He appreciated the leisurely solidity, the leisurely beauty of the
+place, so <i>innate with</i> the genius of the Anglo-Saxon.—<span class="smcap">E.
+F. Benson.</span> (genius innate in the place? the place instinct with
+genius?)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. <b>Words having properly no connexion</b> with each other at all,
+but confused owing to superficial resemblance.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mr. Barton walked forth in cape and boa, to read prayers
+at the work-house, <i>euphuistically</i> called the
+‘College’.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span> (euphemistically)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Euphemism</i> is slurring over badness by giving it a good name:
+<i>euphuism</i> is a literary style full of antithesis and simile.
+A pair of extracts (<i>Friedrich</i>, vol. iv, pp. 5 and 36) will
+convince readers that these words are dangerous:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Hence Bielfeld goes to Hanover, to grin-out <i>euphuisms</i>,
+and make graceful court-bows to our sublime little Uncle
+there.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>Readers may remember, George II has been at Hanover for some weeks
+past; Bielfeld diligently grinning <i>euphemisms</i> and courtly
+graciosities to him.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>Troops capable of <i>contesting</i> successfully against the forces of
+other nations.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Though there is authority, chiefly old, for it, good general usage is
+against <i>contest</i> without an object—contest the victory, &amp;c. And
+as there is no possible advantage in writing it, with <i>contend</i>
+ready to hand, it is better avoided in the intransitive sense.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In the present <i>self-deprecatory</i> mood in which the English
+people find themselves.—<i>Spectator.</i> (self-depreciatory)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Depreciate</i>, undervalue: <i>deprecate</i>, pray against. A bad
+but very common blunder.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘An irreparable colleague,’ Mr. Gladstone notes in his
+diary.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span> (irreplaceable)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span></p>
+
+<p>No dead colleague is reparable—though his loss may or may not be
+so—this side the Day of Judgement.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Surely he was better employed in plying the trades of tinker and smith
+than in having <i>resource</i> to vice, in running after milkmaids,
+for example.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span> (recourse)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>You may indeed have recourse to a resource, but not vice versa. You may
+also resort to, which makes the confusion easier.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>What she would say to him, how he would take it, even the
+vaguest <i>predication</i> of their discourse, was beyond him to
+guess.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span> (prediction)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Predication</i> has nothing to do with the future; it is a synonym,
+used especially in logic, for <i>statement</i>. The mistake is
+generally whipped out of schoolboys in connexion with <i>praedĩcere</i>
+and <i>praedĭcare</i>.</p>
+
+<p>5. <b>Words whose meaning is misapprehended without apparent cause.</b>
+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: <i>provided</i>, where <i>if</i> is
+required; and <i>to eke out</i> in wrong senses. <i>Provided</i> 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 <i>The Times</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Provided</i> is a small district in the kingdom of <i>if</i>; it can
+never be wrong to write <i>if</i> instead of <i>provided</i>: to write
+<i>provided</i> instead of <i>if</i> 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
+(<i>a</i>) the clause must be a stipulation, i. e., a demand yet to be
+fulfilled, (<i>b</i>) there must be a stipulator, who (<i>c</i>) must
+desire, or at least insist upon, the fulfilment of it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Ganganelli would never have been poisoned <i>provided</i> he had had
+nephews about to take care of his life.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The kicks and blows which my husband Launcelot was in the habit of
+giving me every night, <i>provided</i> I came home with less than five
+shillings.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Launcelot, the stipulator, does not desire the fulfilment. If
+<i>kisses</i> are substituted for <i>kicks and blows</i>, and
+<i>more</i> for <i>less</i>, the sentence will stand.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>She and I agreed to stand by each other, and be true to old Church of
+England, and to give our governors warning, <i>provided</i> they tried
+to make us renegades.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The stipulators, she and I, do not desire the fulfilment. <i>Not</i> to
+give warning, provided they did <i>not</i> try, would be English. There
+is similar confusion between the requirements of negative and positive
+in the next:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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 <i>provided</i> the latter do so
+themselves.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In these circumstances the chances are that the direction to proceed
+to Vladivostok at all costs, <i>provided</i> such instruction
+<i>were</i> ever given, may have been reconsidered.—<i>Times.</i> (if
+indeed ... was)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is no stipulation; it is only a question of past fact.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>What will the War Council at the capital decide <i>provided</i> the
+war is to continue?... The longer Linevitch can hold his position the
+better, provided he does not risk a serious action.—<i>Times.</i>
+(if, or assuming that)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is no stipulation, stipulator, or desire—only a question of
+future fact. The second <i>provided</i> in this passage is quite
+correct. The <i>Times</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>To <i>eke out</i> 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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span> The peculiarity of <i>eke
+out</i> is that it implies difficulty; in technical language, agreeing
+with <i>supplement</i> 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 <i>make</i>, and in the last the equally wrong one
+of <i>endure</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A writer with a story to tell that is not very fresh usually
+<i>ekes</i> it <i>out</i> by referring as much as possible to
+surrounding objects.—<span class="smcap">H. James.</span></p>
+
+<p>She had contrived, taking one year with another, to <i>eke
+out</i> a tolerably sufficient living since her husband’s
+demise.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>Yes, we do believe, or would the clergy <i>eke out</i> an existence
+which is not far removed from poverty?—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Next, some isolated illustrations of our present heading:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘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 <i>irony</i> that More closed the great work.—<span class="smcap">J.
+R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The word <i>irony</i> 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. <i>Satire</i>, however, with which
+<i>irony</i> is often confused, would have passed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A literary tour de force, a <i>recrudescence</i>, two or three
+generations later, of the very respectable William Lamb (afterwards
+Lord Melbourne), his unhappy wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Lord
+Byron.—<i>Times.</i> (reincarnation, avatar, resurrection?)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Recrudescence</i> is becoming quite a fashionable journalistic<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>
+word. It properly means the renewed inflammation of a wound, and so
+the breaking out again of an epidemic, &amp;c. It may reasonably be used
+of revolutionary or silly opinions: to use it of persons or their
+histories is absurd.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A colonel on the General Staff, while arguing for a continuation of
+the struggle on <i>metaphysical</i> grounds, admitted to me that
+even if the Russians regained Manchuria they would never succeed
+in colonizing it.... The <i>Bourse Gazette</i> goes still further.
+It says that war for any definite purpose ceased with the fall
+of Mukden, and that its <i>continuation is apparent</i> 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.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We can suggest no substitute for <i>metaphysical</i>. Though we have
+long known <i>metaphysics</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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
+<i>transpired</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (happened)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As a synonym for <i>become known</i>,<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> <i>transpire</i> is
+journalistic and ugly, but may pass: as a synonym for <i>happen</i>, it
+is a bad blunder, but not uncommon.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It was, of course, Mrs. Sedley’s opinion that her son
+would <i>demean</i> himself by a marriage with an artist’s
+daughter.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>The actors who raddle their faces and <i>demean</i> themselves on the
+stage.—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span> (lower, degrade)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>To <i>demean</i> 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 <i>mean</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘Oxoniensis’ approaches them with courage, his thoughts are expressed
+in plain, unmistakable language, <i>howbeit</i> with the touch of a
+master hand.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Albeit</i> means <i>though</i>: <i>howbeit</i> always
+<i>nevertheless</i>, beginning not a subordinate clause, but a
+principal sentence. A good example of the danger attending ignorant
+archaism.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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 <i>in the paulo-post future tense</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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>I shall have been killed</i>, it has,
+further, no application here; <i>paulo-ante-past tense</i>, if there
+were such a thing, might have meant something. As it is, pedantry is
+combined with inaccuracy.</p>
+
+<p>6. <b>Words used in unaccustomed, though not impossible, senses or
+applications.</b> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>No one can imagine non-intervention carried through so desperate and
+so <i>consequential</i> a war as this.—<span class="smcap">Greenwood.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If <i>important</i> or <i>fateful</i> will not do, it is better to
+write <i>a war so desperate and so pregnant with consequences</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Half of Mr. Roosevelt’s speech deals with this double need of justice
+and strength, the other half being a <i>skilled</i> application of
+Washington’s maxims to present circumstances.—<i>Times.</i> (skilful)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Idiom confines <i>skilled</i>, except in poetry, almost entirely to the
+word <i>labour</i>, and to craftsmen—a skilled mason, for instance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is to the Convention, therefore, that reference must be made for an
+<i>intelligence</i> of the principles on which the Egyptian Government
+has acted during the present war.—<i>Times.</i> (understanding)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>No one can say why <i>intelligence</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Easier to reproduce, in its <i>concision</i>, is the description of
+the day.—<span class="smcap">H. James.</span> (conciseness)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Concision</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>7. <b>Simple love of the long word.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The wide public importance of these proposals (customs regulations)
+has now been conceived in no <i>desultory</i> manner.—<i>Guernsey
+Advertiser.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Neologisms</span></h3>
+
+<p>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;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span> but it is well that each new word that does appear should be
+severely scrutinized.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>motor</i>, <i>argon</i>, <i>appendicitis</i>. It is
+interesting to see that the last word did not exist, or was at least
+too obscure to be recorded, when the <i>Oxford Dictionary</i> began
+to come out in 1888; we cannot do without it now. Nor is there in
+the same volume any sign of <i>argon</i>, which now has three pages
+of the <i>Encyclopaedia Britannica</i> 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
+<i>telegram</i> ought to be <i>telegrapheme</i>; but by this time we
+have long ceased to mourn for the extra syllable, and begun seriously
+to consider whether the further shortening into <i>wire</i> has not
+been resisted as long as honour demands.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The couch-bunk under the window to conceal the <i>summerly
+recliner</i>.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The adjective is a nonce-sense, <i>summerly</i> elsewhere meaning ‘such
+as one expects in summer’; the noun is a nonce-word.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In Christian art we may clearly trace a parallel
+<i>regenesis</i>.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+
+<p>Opposition on the part of the <i>loquently</i> weaker of the
+pair.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>Picturesquities.—<span class="smcap">Sladen.</span></p>
+
+<p>The <i>verberant</i> twang of a musical instrument.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>A Russian army is a solid machine, as many <i>war-famous</i> generals
+have found to their cost.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Russia’s disposition is aggressive.... Japan may conquer, but she will
+not aggress.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Though <i>aggress</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>She did not answer at once, for, in her rather <i>super-sensitized</i>
+mood, it seemed to her....—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 <i>rather</i> and
+<i>super-</i> were cancelled against each other, <i>sensitive</i> might
+suffice.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Notoriously and unctuously <i>rectitudinous</i>.—<i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span> <i>-ude</i> that prevailed for some
+months in the newspapers, especially the <i>Westminster Gazette</i>.
+<i>Correctitude</i>, a needless variant for <i>correctness</i>, has not
+perished like the rest.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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 <i>Outlook</i> this week,
+which....—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The minutes to dinner-time were numbered, and they <i>briskened</i>
+their steps back to the house.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span> (quickened)</p>
+
+<p>He was in some amazement at himself ... <i>remindful</i> of the
+different nature....—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span> (mindful)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Remindful</i> should surely mean ‘which reminds’, not ‘who
+remembers’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Persistent <i>insuccess</i>, however, did not prevent a repetition of
+the same question.—<i>Times.</i> (failure)</p>
+
+<p>The best safeguard against any <i>deplacement</i> of the centre of
+gravity in the Dual Monarchy.—<i>Times.</i> (displacement)</p>
+
+<p>Which would condemn the East to a long period of
+<i>unquiet</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (unrest)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A man of a cold, <i>perseverant</i> character.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>Robbed of the just fruits of her victory by the arbitrary and
+<i>forceful</i> interference of outside Powers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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. <i>Prime Minister</i>,
+<i>Cabinet</i>, <i>His Majesty’s Opposition</i>, 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
+<i>racial</i>, and <i>intellectuals</i>. The former is an ugly word,
+the strangeness of which is due to our instinctive feeling that the
+termination <i>-al</i> 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 <i>a</i>
+word necessary. Racial is not <i>the</i> word that might have been
+ornamental as well as useful; but it is too well established to be
+now uprooted. <i>Intellectuals</i> is still apologized for in 1905
+by <i>The Spectator</i> as ‘a convenient neologism’. It is already
+familiar to all who give any time to observing continental politics,
+though the Index to the <i>Encyclopaedia</i> (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
+<i>intellectuals</i> as a good omen for the progress of the world.</p>
+
+<p>These, and the scientific, are the sort of neologism that may fairly be
+welcomed. But there is this distinction. With<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span> 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. <i>Minneapolis</i>,
+<i>Pikeville</i>, and <i>Pennsylvania</i>, may have a barbaric sound,
+but there they are; so <i>telegram</i>, or <i>aestho-physiology</i>.
+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 <i>patria potestas</i> is indefeasible. On
+the other hand, with such words as <i>racial</i>, <i>intellectuals</i>,
+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, <i>clôture</i>; a press campaign resulted in
+<i>closure</i>, for which we may be thankful. The same might have
+been done for, or rather against, <i>racial</i>, if only some one had
+thought of it in time.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Americanisms</span></h3>
+
+<p>Though we take these separately from foreign words, which will follow
+next, the distinction is purely <i>pro forma</i>; 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>I guess</i>. Inquiry into it would at once bear out
+the American contention<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span> that what we are often rude enough to call
+their vulgarisms are in fact good old English. <i>I gesse</i> 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. <i>Fall</i> is
+better on the merits than <i>autumn</i>, 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
+<i>autumn</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>placate</i>,
+<i>transpire</i><a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>, and <i>antagonize</i>, all of which have English
+patrons.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Between the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped,
+<i>honey-coloured</i><a id="FNanchor_4" href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> rocks on the beach the green water
+was troubled with <i>shrimp-pink</i> prisoners-of-war
+bathing.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+
+<p>Far out, a three-funnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and
+stern <i>waddled</i> in from the deep sea.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Fix up (organize), back of (behind), anyway (at any rate), standpoint
+(point of view), back-number (antiquated), right along (continuously),
+some (to some extent), just (quite, or very—‘just lovely’), may
+be added as typical Americanisms of a different kind from either
+<i>fall</i> or <i>antagonize</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And, <i>back of</i> 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....—<span class="smcap">Choate.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Hand-power, <i>back-number</i>, flint-and-steel reaping
+machines.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+
+<p>Some of them have in secret approximated their <i>standpoint</i> to
+that laid down by Count Tisza in his programme speech.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We close the section by putting <i>placate</i> and <i>antagonize</i>
+in the pillory. It may be remarked that the latter fits in well enough
+with Emerson’s curious bizarre style. Another use of <i>just</i>
+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<a id="FNanchor_5" href="#Footnote_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When once <i>placated</i> the Senators will be reluctant to deprive
+honest creditors of their rights.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The old Imperial naval policy, which has failed conspicuously
+because it <i>antagonized</i> the unalterable supremacy of Colonial
+nationalism.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and <i>antagonizes</i>
+Fate.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Have you ever thought <i>just how much</i> it would mean to the home
+if....—<i>Advertisements passim.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Foreign Words</span></h3>
+
+<p>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 <i>tête-à-tête</i>, <i>ennui</i>, <i>status
+quo</i>, <i>raison d’être</i>, <i>eirenicon</i>, <i>négligé</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
+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 <i>gaucherie</i>,
+<i>bêtise</i>, <i>camaraderie</i>, <i>soupçon</i>, 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 justified only (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 <i>chasseur</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Some little assistance may, however, be given on details.</p>
+
+<p>1. To say <i>distrait</i> instead of <i>absent</i> or
+<i>absent-minded</i>, <i>bien entendu</i> for <i>of course</i>,
+<i>sans</i> for <i>without</i> (it is, like <i>I guess</i>, good old
+English but not good English), <i>quand même</i> for <i>anyhow</i>,
+<i>penchant</i> for <i>liking</i> or <i>fancy</i>, <i>rédaction</i>
+for <i>editing</i> or <i>edition</i>, <i>coûte que coûte</i> for <i>at
+all costs</i>, <i>Schadenfreude</i> for <i>malicious pleasure</i>,
+<i>œuvre</i> for <i>work</i>, <i>alma mater</i> (except with strong
+extenuating circumstances) for <i>University</i>—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 <i>déjeuner</i>, however, as in the appended
+extract, because it is to be eaten by Frenchmen, is hardly covered by
+this, though it is a praise-worthy attempt at what the critics call
+giving an atmosphere.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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 <i>déjeuner</i> at the
+Guildhall.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Motorists lose more than they know by <i>bêtises</i> of this
+kind.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>His determination to conduct them to a successful issue <i>coûte que
+coûte</i> might result in complications.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The gloom which the Russian troubles have caused at Belgrade has
+to some extent been lightened by a certain <i>Schadenfreude</i>
+over the difficulties with which the Hungarian crisis threatens the
+neighbouring Monarchy.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A recent reperusal ... left the impression which is so often produced
+by the exhibition in bulk of the <i>œuvre</i> of a deceased Royal
+Academician—it has emphasized Schiller’s deficiencies without laying
+equal emphasis on his merits.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The following are instances of less familiar French or Latin words used
+wantonly:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>So, one would have thought, the fever of New York was abated here,
+even as the smoke of the city was but a gray <i>tache</i> on the
+horizon.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Either we know that <i>tache</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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 <i>faits divers</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is true <i>The Times</i> does not condescend to an Odds-and-Ends,
+or a Miscellaneous column; but many other English newspapers do, under
+various titles; and the <i>Times</i> writer might have thrown the
+handkerchief to one of them.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But times have changed, and this procedure enters into the category of
+<i>vieille escrime</i> when not employed by a master hand and made to
+correspond superficially with facts.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In relation to military organization we are still in the flourishing
+region of the <i>vieilles perruques</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 <i>vieux jeu</i>. Just as that has begun to be intelligible
+to the rest of us, it becomes itself <i>vieux<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span> jeu</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The familiar gentleman burglar, who, having played wolf to his fellows
+<i>qua</i> financier, journalist, and barrister, undertakes to raise
+burglary from being a trade at least to the lupine level of those
+professions.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is quite needless, and hardly correct, to use <i>qua</i> instead
+of <i>as</i> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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 <i>qua</i> country must begin to-day.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>ignorance crasse</i>.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The writer who allows Charlotte Brontë’s extraordinarily convincing
+power of presentment to tempt him into imitating her many literary
+peccadilloes will reap disaster. <i>Thereanent</i> is as annoying as
+<i>ignorance crasse</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It was he who by doctoring the Ems dispatch in 1870 converted a
+<i>chamade</i> into a <i>fanfaronnade</i> and thus rendered the
+Franco-German war inevitable.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We can all make a shrewd guess at the meaning of <i>fanfaronnade</i>:
+how many average readers have the remotest idea of what a
+<i>chamade</i><a id="FNanchor_6" href="#Footnote_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> is? and is the function of newspapers to force upon
+us against our will the buying of French dictionaries?</p>
+
+<p>2. Among the diplomatic words, <i>entente</i> may pass as suggesting
+something a little more definite and official than <i>good
+understanding</i>; <i>démenti</i> because, though it denotes the same
+as <i>denial</i> or <i>contradiction</i>, it connotes that no more<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>
+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 <i>ballon
+d’essai</i>, we see no advantage in it over <i>kite</i>, and <i>flying
+a kite</i>, 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The two Special Correspondents in Berlin of the leading morning
+newspapers, the <i>Matin</i> and the <i>Écho de Paris</i>, report a
+marked <i>détente</i> in the situation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Entente</i> is comprehensible to every one; but with <i>détente</i>
+many of us are in the humiliating position of not knowing whether to be
+glad or sorry.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>All the great newspapers have insisted upon the inopportuneness of the
+<i>démarche</i> of William II.—<i>Times.</i> (proceeding)</p>
+
+<p>The <i>entourage</i> and counsellors of the Sultan continue to remain
+sceptical.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mere laziness, even if the word means anything different from
+<i>counsellors</i>; but the writer has at least given us an indication
+that it is only verbiage, by revealing his style in <i>continue to
+remain</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In diplomatic circles the whole affair is looked upon as
+an <i>acte de malveillance</i> towards the Anglo-French
+<i>entente</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>dérouté</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In spite, however, of this denial and of other official
+<i>démentis</i>, the Italian Press still seems
+dissatisfied.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In this there is clearly not the distinction that we suggested between
+<i>denial</i> and <i>démenti</i>—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’.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span> 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 <i>cela va sans dire</i>; we have of our own <i>I need hardly
+say</i>, <i>needless to remark</i>, 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), <i>that understands itself</i>;
+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:
+<i>epochmaking</i> 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.
+<i>Epochmaking</i> is now no more than <i>remarkable</i>, as witness
+this extract from a speech by the Lord Chancellor:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The banquet to M. Berryer and the banquet to Mr. Benjamin,
+both of them very important, and to my mind <i>epochmaking</i>
+occasions.—<span class="smcap">Lord Halsbury.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The verb <i>to orient</i> is a Gallicism of much the same sort, and
+<i>the half-world</i> is perhaps worse:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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 <i>orient</i> this particular one.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>High society is represented by ... Lady Beauminster, the half-world
+by Mrs. Montrose, loveliness and luckless innocence by her daughter
+Helen.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The next extract is perhaps from the pen of a French-speaker<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span> trying
+to write English: but it is not worse than what the English writer who
+comes below him does deliberately:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Our enveloping movement, which has been proceeding <i>since several
+days</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Making every allowance for special circumstances, the manner in which
+these amateur soldiers of seven weeks’ service acquitted themselves
+compels one ‘furiously to think’.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 <i>gallery</i> is tempting, and fatal.</p>
+
+<p>Appended are the passages illustrating the two different motives for
+translation:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>If we could take this assurance at its face value and <i>to the foot
+of the letter</i>, we should have to conclude....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It will be observed (<i>a</i>) that <i>literally</i> gives the
+meaning perfectly; (<i>b</i>) that <i>to the foot of the letter</i>
+is absolutely unintelligible to any one not previously acquainted
+with <i>au pied de la lettre</i>; (<i>c</i>) 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I thought afterwards, but it was <i>the spirit of the staircase</i>,
+what a pity it was that I did not stand at the door with a hat,
+saying, ‘Give an obol to Belisarius’.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The French have had the wit to pack into the words <i>esprit
+d’escalier</i> 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 <i>spirit of the staircase</i> is who is not already familiar
+with <i>esprit d’escalier</i>; and even he who is may not recognize
+it in disguise, seeing that <i>esprit</i> does not mean spirit (which
+suggests a goblin lurking in the hall clock), but wit.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span></p>
+
+<p>We cannot refrain from adding a variation that deprives <i>au pied de
+la lettre</i> even of its quaintness:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The tone of Russian official statements on the subject is not
+encouraging, but then, perhaps, they ought not to be taken at the
+letter.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The whole party were engaged <i>ohne Rast</i> with a prodigious
+quantity of <i>Hast</i> in a continuous social effort.—<span class="smcap">E. F.
+Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The clergy in rochet, alb, and other best
+<i>pontificalibus</i>.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 <i>in</i>
+and the Latin <i>in</i> happen to be spelt alike is no defence; it
+is clear that <i>in</i> is here English, not Latin; either <i>in
+pontificalibus</i>, or <i>in other pontificalia</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The feeling that one is an <i>antecedentem scelestum</i> after whom a
+sure, though lame, Nemesis is hobbling....—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Antecedens scelestus</i> is necessary.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>..., which were so evident in the days of the early Church, are now
+<i>non est</i>.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>All things considered, I wonder they were not <i>non est</i> long
+ago.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Such maltreatment of <i>non est inventus</i>, which seems to have
+amused some past generations, is surely now as stale and unprofitable
+as <i>individual</i> itself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span></p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>nom de plume</i>, <i>morale</i>. The French for the name that an
+author chooses to write under is <i>nom de guerre</i>. We, in the
+pride of our knowledge that <i>guerre</i> 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 <i>nom de plume</i>. 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 <i>nom de guerre</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The French for what we call <i>morale</i>, writing it in italics under
+the impression that it is French, is actually <i>moral</i>. The other
+is so familiar, however, that it is doubtful whether it would not be
+better to drop the italics, keep the <i>-e</i>, and tell the French
+that they can spell their word as they please, and we shall do the like
+with ours. So Mr. Kipling:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Gaul, ever an artist, breaks enclosure to study the
+morale [<i>sic</i>], at the present day, of the British
+sailorman.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the second class, of phrases whose meaning is mistaken,
+we choose <i>scandalum magnatum</i>, <i>arrière-pensée</i>,
+<i>phantasmagoria</i>, and <i>cui bono?</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Scandalum magnatum</i> is a favourite with the lower-class novelist
+who takes <i>magnatum</i> for a participle meaning <i>magnified</i>,
+and finds the combination less homely than <i>a shocking affair</i>.
+It is a genitive plural noun, and the amplified translation of the two
+words, which we borrow from the <i>Encyclopaedia</i>, runs: ‘Slander of
+great men, such as peers, judges, or great officers of state, whereby
+discord may arise within the realm’.</p>
+
+<p><i>Arrière-pensée</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Phantasmagoria</i> is a singular noun; at least the corresponding
+French monstrosity, <i>fantasmagorie</i>, is unmistakably singular;
+and, if used at all in English, it should be so with us too. But the
+final <i>-a</i> irresistibly suggests a plural to the valorous writers
+who are impressed without being terrified by the unknown; so:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Not that such <i>phantasmagoria are</i> to be compared
+for a moment with such desirable things as fashion, fine
+clothes....—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Cui bono?</i> 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 <i>to the foot of the letter</i>.
+Every scholar knows, however, that <i>cui bono?</i> does deserve to
+be used, in its true sense. It is a shrewd and pregnant phrase like
+<i>cherchez la femme</i> or <i>esprit d’escalier</i>. <i>Cherchez la
+femme</i> 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. <i>Cui bono?</i>
+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
+<i>cui bono?</i> stands for: ‘Where can the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span> story have come from?
+why, who will profit by a misunderstanding between Italy and France?
+Germany, of course; so doubtless Germany invented the story’. <i>Cui
+bono?</i> is quite capable of implying all that; but a merciful writer
+will give his readers a little more help:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>(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. <i>Cui bono?</i>—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>6. It now only remains to add that there are French words good in some
+contexts, and not in others. <i>Régime</i> is good in the combination
+<i>ancien régime</i>, 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, <i>administration</i> ought to be the word:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Throwing a flood of light upon the proceedings of the existing
+<i>régime</i> in Russia.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He said that the goodwill and friendship of the Milner
+<i>régime</i> had resulted in the effective co-operation of the two
+countries.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The word <i>employé</i> is often a long, ugly, and unnatural substitute
+for <i>men</i>, <i>workmen</i>, or <i>hands</i>, 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The warehouses of the Russian Steamship Company here have been set on
+fire by some dismissed <i>employés</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The <i>employés</i> of the Trans-Caucasian line to-day struck
+work.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The new project, Article 17, ordains that all <i>employés</i> of the
+railways, whatever their rank or the nature of their employment, are
+to be considered as public officials.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Finally, even words that have not begun to be naturalized may be
+used exceptionally when a real point can be gained by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span> it. To say
+<i>chasseur</i> instead of <i>sportsman</i>, <i>gun</i>, 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But the costume of the <i>chasseurs</i>—green velvet, very
+Robin-Hoody—had been most tasteful.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">False, Ugly, or Needless Formations</span></h3>
+
+<p>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 <i>ennui</i> an English look.
+With <i>dishabille</i>, on the other hand, which appears in the
+dictionary with spellings to suit all tastes<a id="FNanchor_7" href="#Footnote_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>, 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 <i>déshabillé</i> are at
+least two problems (<i>h</i>, and <i>ll</i>) 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 <i>dishabille</i>
+is therefore being gradually ousted by <i>négligé</i>, which can be
+pronounced without fear. As <i>dishabille</i> is really quite cut
+off from <i>déshabillé</i>, it is a pity it was not further deprived
+of its final <i>-e</i>; that would have encouraged us to call it
+<i>dish-abil</i>, and it might have made good its footing.</p>
+
+<p><i>Naïveté</i> is another word for which there is a clear use;
+and though the Englishman can pronounce it without difficulty if<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
+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 <i>naivety</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The case of <i>banality</i> is very different. In one sense it has
+a stronger claim than <i>naivety</i>, its adjective <i>banal</i>
+being much older in English than <i>naïve</i>; but the old use of
+<i>banal</i> 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 <i>common</i>,
+<i>commonplace</i>, <i>trite</i>, <i>trivial</i>, <i>mean</i>,
+<i>vulgar</i>, all provided with nouns, which again can be eked
+out with <i>truism</i> and <i>platitude</i>, a shift can surely
+be made without it. It is one of those foreign feathers, like
+<i>intimism</i>, <i>intimity</i>, <i>femininity</i>, <i>distinction</i>
+and <i>distinguished</i> (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
+<i>meticulous</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Before adding an example or two, we draw attention to the danger
+of accidentally assimilating a good English word to a French one.
+<i>Amende</i> is good French; <i>amends</i> is good English; but
+<i>amend</i> (noun) is neither:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Triviality and over-childishness and naivety.—<span class="smcap">H. Sweet.</span></p>
+
+<p>Agrippa himself was primarily a paradox-monger. Many of his successors
+were in dead earnest, and their repetition of his ingenuities becomes
+<i>banal</i> in the extreme. Bercher himself can by no means be
+acquitted of this charge of <i>banality</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is significant that the only authorities for <i>banality</i> in the
+<i>Oxford Dictionary</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>His style, which is pleasant and diffuse without being
+<i>distinguished</i>, is more suited to the farm and the
+simple country life than to the complexities of the human
+character.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>His character and that of his wife are sketched with a certain
+<i>distinction</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>And yet to look back over the whole is to feel that in one case only
+has she really achieved that perfection of <i>intimism</i> which is
+her proper goal.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The reference to the English nonconformists was a graceful
+<i>amend</i> to them for being so passionate an Oxonian and
+churchman.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>And in her presentation of the mode of life of the respectable middle
+classes, the most <i>meticulous</i> critic will not easily catch her
+tripping.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>2. <b>Formations involving grammatical blunders.</b> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>My landlady entered bearing what she called ‘her best lamp’
+<i>alit</i>.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This seems to be formed as a past participle from <i>to alight</i>,
+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, <i>alight</i>, is probably by
+origin the participle of it. The <i>Oxford Dictionary</i>, however,
+after saying this, observes that it has now been assimilated to words
+like <i>afire</i>, formed from the preposition <i>a-</i> and a noun.
+Whether those two facts are true of not, it is quite certain that there
+is no such word as <i>alit</i> in the sense of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span> lighted or lit, and
+that the use of it in our days is a grammatical blunder.<a id="FNanchor_8" href="#Footnote_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But every year pleaded <i>stronger</i> and <i>stronger</i> for the
+Earl’s conception.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Comparative adverbs of this type must be formed only from those
+positive adverbs, which do not use <i>-ly</i>, as <i>hard</i>,
+<i>fast</i>. We talk of <i>going strong</i>, and we may therefore
+talk of <i>going stronger</i>; but outside slang we have to choose
+between <i>stronglier</i>—poetical, exalted, or affected—and <i>more
+strongly</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The silence that <i>underlaid</i> the even voice of the breakers along
+the sea front.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Lie</i> and <i>lay</i> have cost us all some perplexity in
+childhood. The distinction is more difficult in the compounds with
+<i>over</i> and <i>under</i>, because in them <i>-lie</i> is transitive
+as well as <i>-lay</i>, 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 <i>lie over</i> or <i>lay over</i>, &amp;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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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 <i>laid</i> in
+wait for the purpose.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A confusion, perhaps, between <i>lay wait</i> and <i>lie in wait</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I am not sure that <i>yours</i> and my efforts would suffice
+separately; but yours and mine together cannot possibly fail.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The first <i>yours</i> is quite wrong; it should be <i>your</i>.
+This mistake is common. The absolute possessives, <i>ours</i> and
+<i>yours</i>, <i>hers</i>, <i>mine</i> and <i>thine</i>, (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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span> correct
+modern usage has now established itself. We add three sentences from
+Burke. The relation between <i>no</i> and <i>none</i> is the same as
+that between <i>your</i> and <i>yours</i>. In the first sentence,
+modern usage would write (as the correct <i>no or but a few</i> is
+uncomfortable) either <i>few or no</i>, or <i>few if any</i>, or <i>no
+rays or but a few</i>. For the second we might possibly tolerate <i>to
+their as well as to your own</i>; or we might write <i>to their crown
+as well as to your own</i>. The third is quite tolerable as it is; but
+any one who does not like the sound can write <i>and their ancestors
+and ours</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Black bodies, reflecting <i>none</i> or but a few
+rays.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>You altered the succession to <i>theirs</i>, as well as to your own
+crown.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>They and we, and <i>their</i> and our ancestors, have been happy under
+that system.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. <b>Formations violating analogy.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And then it is its panache, its careless <i>a-moral</i> Renaissance
+romance.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But she is perfectly natural, and while perfectly <i>amoral</i>, no
+more immoral than a bird or a kitten.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>A-</i> (not) is Greek; <i>moral</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span> accordingly the
+<i>Oxford Dictionary</i> recognizes that <i>a-</i> is compounded with
+Latin words in scientific and technical terms, as <i>a-sexual</i>; 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 <i>immoral</i>, which means contrary to morality, while a word is
+wanted to mean unconcerned with morality. But with <i>non</i> freely
+prefixed to adjectives in English (though not in Latin), there can be
+no objection to <i>non-moral</i>. The second of our instances is a few
+weeks later than the first, and the hyphen has disappeared; so quickly
+has <i>The Times</i> convinced itself that <i>amoral</i> is a regular
+English word.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There was no social or economic jealousy between them, no
+<i>racial</i> aversion.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Concessions which, besides damaging Hungary by raising <i>racial</i>
+and <i>language</i> questions of all kinds, would....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The action of foreign countries as to their <i>coastal</i>
+trade.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Her riverine trade.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It has been already stated that <i>-al</i> is mainly confined to
+unmistakable Latin stems. There is <i>whimsical</i>; and there may
+be others that break the rule, though the <i>Oxford Dictionary</i>
+(<i>-al suffix</i>, <i>-ical suffix</i>, <i>-ial suffix</i>) gives no
+exceptions. The ugly words <i>racial</i> and <i>coastal</i> themselves
+might well be avoided except in the rare cases where <i>race</i> and
+<i>coast</i> used adjectivally will not do the work (they would in
+the present instances); and they should not be made precedents for
+new formations. If <i>language</i> is better than <i>linguistic</i>,
+much more <i>race</i> than <i>racial</i>; similarly, <i>river</i> than
+<i>riverine</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>What she was pleased to term their superior intelligence, and
+more <i>real</i> and <i>reliable</i> probity.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë</span>
+(<i>Villette</i>, 1853).</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 <i>obsta principiis</i> is the only hope; <i>reliable</i>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span> to it is obvious: you do not rely a thing;
+therefore the thing cannot be reliable; it should be rely-on-able
+(like <i>come-at-able</i>). Some of the analogies pleaded for it are
+perhaps irrelevant—as <i>laughable</i>, <i>available</i>. For these
+<i>may</i> be formed from the nouns <i>laugh</i>, <i>avail</i>, since
+<i>-able</i> is not only gerundival (capable of being laughed at), but
+also adjectival (connected with a laugh); this has certainly happened
+with <i>seasonable</i>; but that will not help <i>reliable</i>, which
+by analogy should be <i>relianceable</i>. It is more to the point to
+remark that with <i>reliable</i> must go <i>dispensable</i> (with
+<i>indispensable</i>) and <i>dependable</i>, both quite old words, and
+<i>disposable</i> (in its commoner sense); no one, as far as we know,
+objects to these and others like them; <i>reliable</i> 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 <i>available</i>,
+which is, as we said, possibly not open to the same objection as
+<i>reliable</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I have heretofore designated the misuse of certain words as
+<i>Briticisms</i>.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Britannic, Britannicism; British, Britishism. Britic?</p>
+
+<p>4. <b>Needless, though correct formations.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The <i>sordor</i> and filths of nature, the sun shall dry
+up.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As <i>candeo candor</i>, <i>ardeo ardor</i>, so—we are to
+understand—<i>sordeo sordor</i>. 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 <i>-or</i> in English, nor, if
+we had, anything nearer than <i>sordid</i> to attach it to. Perhaps
+Emerson thought <i>sordor</i> was a Latin word.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Merely nodding his head as an <i>enjoinder</i> to be
+careful.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As <i>rejoin rejoinder</i>, so <i>enjoin enjoinder</i>. The word is not
+given in the <i>Oxford Dictionary</i>, from which it seems likely<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span> 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 <i>injunction</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Oppositely</i>, the badness of a walk that is shuffling, and an
+utterance that is indistinct is alleged.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Again, as if to <i>intensate</i> the influences that are not of race,
+what we think of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself
+to a small district.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A favourite with those allied experimenters in words, Emerson and
+Carlyle. A word meaning <i>to make intense</i> is necessary; and there
+are plenty of parallels for this particular form. But Coleridge had
+already made <i>intensify</i>, 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 <i>intensate</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>5. <b>Long and short rivals.</b> The following examples illustrate a
+foolish tendency. From the adjective <i>perfect</i> we form the verb
+<i>to perfect</i>, and from that again the noun <i>perfection</i>;
+to take a further step forward to a verb <i>to perfection</i>
+instead of returning to the verb <i>to perfect</i> is a superfluity
+of naughtiness. From the noun <i>sense</i> we make the adjective
+<i>sensible</i>; it is generally quite needless to go forward to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
+<i>sensibleness</i> instead of back to our original noun <i>sense</i>.
+To <i>quieten</i> is often used by hasty writers who have not time to
+remember that <i>quiet</i> is a verb. With <i>ex tempore</i> ready to
+serve either as adverb or as adjective, why make <i>extemporaneous</i>
+or <i>extemporaneously</i>? As to <i>contumacity</i>, the writer was
+probably unaware that <i>contumacy</i> existed. <i>Contumacity</i>
+might be formed from <i>contumax</i>, like <i>audacity</i> from
+<i>audax</i>. The Romans had only the short forms <i>audacia</i>,
+<i>contumacia</i>, which should have given us <i>audacy</i> as well as
+<i>contumacy</i>; but because our ancestors burdened themselves with an
+extra syllable in one we need not therefore do so in the other.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The inner, religiously moral <i>perfectioning</i> of
+individuals.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>She liked the quality of mind which may be broadly called
+<i>sensibleness</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Broadly, or lengthily?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>M. Delcassé, speaking <i>extemporaneously</i> but with notes,
+said....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>And now, Mdlle St. Pierre’s affected interference provoked
+<i>contumacity</i>.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is often a very easy thing to act <i>prudentially</i>, but alas!
+too often only after we have toiled to our prudence through a forest
+of delusions.—<span class="smcap">De Quincey.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Prudent</i> gives <i>prudence</i>, and <i>prudence</i>
+<i>prudential</i>; 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 <i>prudentially</i> we should be quite sure that we mean
+something different from <i>prudently</i>. So again <i>partially</i>,
+which should be reserved as far as possible for the meaning <i>with
+partiality</i>, is now commonly used for <i>partly</i>:<a id="FNanchor_9" href="#Footnote_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The series of administrative reforms planned by the Convention had
+been <i>partially</i> carried into effect before the meeting of
+Parliament in 1654; but the work was pushed on.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span></p>
+
+<p>That the gravity of the situation is <i>partially</i> appreciated by
+the bureaucracy may be inferred from....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Excepting</i>, instead of <i>except</i>, is to be condemned when
+there is no need for it. We say <i>not excepting</i>, or <i>not even
+excepting</i>, or <i>without excepting</i>; but where the exception is
+allowed, not rejected, the short form is the right one, as a comparison
+of the following examples will show:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Of all societies ... <i>not even excepting</i> the Roman Republic,
+England has been the most emphatically ... political.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Minister was obliged to present the Budget before May each
+year, <i>excepting</i> in the event of the Cortes having been
+dissolved.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The sojourn of belligerent ships in French waters has never
+been limited <i>excepting</i> by certain clearly defined
+rules.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Excepting</i> the English, French, and Austrian journalists
+present, no one had been admitted.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Innumerable other needless lengthenings might be produced, from which
+we choose only <i>preventative</i> for <i>preventive</i>, and <i>to
+experimentalize</i> for <i>to experiment</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>Immovable</i> and <i>irremovable</i> judges are different
+things; the shorter word has been wrongly chosen in:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>By suspending conscription and restoring the <i>immovability</i> of
+the Judges.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>6. <b>Merely ugly formations.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Bureaucracy.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The termination <i>-cracy</i> 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
+<i>bureaucracy</i> is due to the way its mongrel origin is flaunted in
+our faces by the telltale syllable <i>-eau-</i>; it is to be hoped that
+formations similar in this respect may be avoided.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>An ordinary reader, if asked what was the main impression given by the
+<i>Short History of the English People</i>, would answer that it was
+the impression of picturesqueness and <i>vividity</i>.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In sound, there can be no question between <i>vividity</i> with its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
+fourfold repetition of the same vowel sound, its two dentals to add to
+the ugliness of its two <i>v</i>’s, and the comparatively inoffensive
+<i>vividness</i>.</p>
+
+<p>We conclude with deprecating the addition of <i>-ly</i> to participles
+in <i>-ed</i>. Some people are so alive to the evil sound of it
+that they write <i>determinately</i> for <i>determinedly</i>;
+that will not do either, because <i>determinate</i> does not mean
+<i>determined</i> in the required sense. A periphrasis, or an adjective
+or Latin participle with <i>-ly</i>, as <i>resolutely</i>, should
+be used. <i>Implied</i> is as good a word as <i>implicit</i>, but
+<i>impliedly</i> is by no means so good as <i>implicitly</i>. Several
+instances are given, for cumulative effect. Miss Corelli makes a
+mannerism of this.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Dr. John and his mother were in their finest mood, contending
+<i>animatedly</i> with each other the whole way.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>Where the gate opens, or the gateless path turns aside
+<i>trustedly</i>.—<span class="smcap">Ruskin.</span></p>
+
+<p>‘That’s not a very kind speech,’ I said somewhat
+<i>vexedly</i>.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>However, I <i>determinedly</i> smothered all
+premonitions.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>I saw one or two passers-by looking at me so <i>surprisedly</i> that I
+came to the conclusion....—<i>Corelli.</i></p>
+
+<p>I stared <i>bewilderedly</i> up at the stars.—<i>Corelli.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It should be added that to really established adverbs of this form,
+as <i>advisedly</i>, <i>assuredly</i>, <i>hurriedly</i>, there is no
+objection whatever; but new ones are ugly.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Slang</span></h3>
+
+<p>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. <i>Awfully nice</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When the madness motif was being treated on the stage, Shakespeare
+(as was the custom of his theatre) treated it ‘<i>for all it
+was worth</i>’, careless of the boundaries between feigning and
+reality.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But even this situation ‘<i>peters out</i>’, 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....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>M. Baron the younger is amusing as the ‘<i>bounder</i>’
+Olivier.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>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, ‘<i>steep</i>’ as it is, we will
+not quarrel.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>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, ‘<i>bang in the
+eye</i>’.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>They derive no advantage from schemes of land settlement from which
+the man who has broken the land in <i>gets ‘the boot’</i>, the voter
+gets the land, the Government gets the vote, and the London labour
+market gets the risk.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span> must attempt some analysis,
+however slight, of different sorts of slang.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>mob</i>, for <i>mobile vulgus</i>. That was once slang,
+and is now good English. A modern one is <i>bike</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>nice</i>,
+<i>awful</i>, <i>blooming</i>. Words of this class fortunately never
+make their way, in their slang senses, into literature (except, of
+course, dialogue). The abuse of <i>nice</i> 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 <i>Northanger Abbey</i> (1803). But
+even now we do not talk in books of <i>a nice day</i>, only of <i>a
+nice distinction</i>. On the other hand, the slang use makes us shy
+in different degrees of writing the words in their legitimate sense:
+<i>a nice distinction</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span> we write almost without qualms; <i>an awful
+storm</i> we think twice about; and as to <i>a blooming girl</i>, we
+hardly venture it nowadays. The most recent sufferer of this sort is
+perhaps <i>chronic</i>. 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 <i>remarkable</i>. 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 <i>awful</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+<i>Phenomenal</i>, soon, we hope, to perish unregretted, is (at least
+indirectly, through the abuse of <i>phenomenon</i>) from Metaphysics;
+<i>immanence</i>, a word often met in singular company, from
+Comparative Theology; <i>epochmaking</i> perhaps from the Philosophic
+Historian; <i>true inwardness</i> from Literary Criticism; <i>cad</i>
+(which is, it appears, Etonian for <i>cadet</i>) from the Upper
+Classes; <i>psychological moment</i> from Science; <i>thrasonical</i>
+and <i>cryptic</i> from Academic Circles; <i>philistine</i> from the
+region of culture. Among these the one that will be most generally
+allowed to be slang—<i>cad</i>—is in fact the least so; it has by
+this time, like <i>mob</i>, 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 <i>bounder</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>By the slang that comes from different sides or from the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span> 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. <i>Frontispiece</i>,
+for face, perhaps originated in the desire of prize-ring reporters
+to vary the words in their descriptive flights. <i>Negotiate</i>
+(a difficulty, &amp;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 <i>individual</i>, 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 <i>Airs and
+Graces</i>. 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 bring out, the
+slanginess.</p>
+
+<p><i>To hedge</i>, <i>the double event</i> (turf); <i>frontal
+attack</i> (war); <i>play the game</i>, <i>stumped</i> (cricket);
+<i>to run</i>—the show, &amp;c.—(engine-driving); <i>knock out</i>,
+<i>take it lying down</i> (prize-ring); <i>log-rolling</i>,
+<i>slating</i>, <i>birrelling</i> (literature); <i>to tackle</i>—a
+problem, &amp;c.—(football); <i>to take a back seat</i> (coaching?);
+<i>bedrock</i>, <i>to exploit</i>, <i>how it pans out</i> (mining);
+<i>whole-hogging</i>, <i>world policy</i> (politics); <i>floored</i>
+(1. prize ring; 2. school); <i>the under dog</i> (dog-fighting); <i>up
+to date</i> (advertising); <i>record</i>—time, &amp;c.—(athletics);
+<i>euchred</i>, <i>going one better</i>, <i>going Nap.</i> (cards);
+<i>to corner</i>—a thing—(commerce)—a person—(ratting); <i>chic</i>
+(society journalism); <i>on your own</i>, <i>of sorts</i>, <i>climb
+down</i>, <i>globetrotter</i>, <i>to laze</i> (perhaps not assignable).</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span> 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; <i>individual</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘Skepsey did come back to London with rather a damaged
+<i>frontispiece</i>’, Victor said.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>Henson, however, once <i>negotiated</i> a sprint down his wing, and
+put in a fine dropping shot to Aubert, who saved.—<i>Guernsey Evening
+Press.</i></p>
+
+<p>Passengers, the guild add, usually arrive at the last moment
+before sailing, when the master must concentrate his mind upon
+<i>negotiating</i> a safe passage.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>To deal with these extensive and purely local breeding grounds
+in the manner suggested by Major Ross would be a very <i>tall
+order</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In about twenty minutes he returned, accompanied by a highly
+intelligent-looking <i>individual</i>, dressed in blue and black,
+with a particularly white cravat, and without a hat on his head; this
+<i>individual</i>, 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.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>A Sèvres vase sold yesterday at Christie’s <i>realized</i> what is
+believed to be the <i>record</i> price of 4,000 guineas.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>You could not, if you had tried, have made so perfect a place for two
+girls to lounge in, to <i>laze</i> in, to read silly novels in, or to
+go to sleep in on drowsy afternoons.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Balfour’s somewhat <i>thrasonical</i> eulogies.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>A quarrelsome, somewhat <i>thrasonical</i> fighting
+man.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The <i>true inwardness</i> of this statement is....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>We do not know what <i>inwardness</i> there may be in the order of his
+discourses, though each of them has some articulate link with that
+which precedes.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Such a departure from etiquette at the <i>psychological moment</i>
+shows tact and discretion.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He asserts that about four years ago there was quite an Argentine
+<i>boom</i> in New Zealand.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span></p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">They oft so mix, the difference is too nice</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Where ends the virtue, or begins the vice.</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Any one who can confidently assign each of the following phrases to its
+own territory may feel that he is not in much danger:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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 <i>t</i>s,
+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.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Particular Words</span></h3>
+
+<p>Individual, mutual, unique, aggravating.</p>
+
+<p>To use <i>individual</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span> 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 <i>individually</i>, is always used
+rightly if at all; it is the noun that goes wrong. An <i>individual</i>
+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 <i>person</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>man</i> or <i>person</i> 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) <i>person</i> or <i>man</i> or
+<i>he</i> might always be substituted without harm to the sense,
+though sometimes a more exact word (not <i>individual</i>) might be
+preferable. In (3) little difference would be made by the substitution.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>(1) Many of the <i>constituent bodies</i> were under the absolute
+control of individuals.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>body of men</i>.
+Merely a few individuals have yielded.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The wise Commons, considering that they are, if not a French <i>Third
+Estate</i>, at least an aggregate of individuals pretending to some
+title of that kind, determine....—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>(2) That greenish-coloured individual is an advocate of Arras; his
+name is Maximilien Robespierre.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span> (person)</p>
+
+<p>Surely my fate is somehow strangely interwoven with that of this
+mysterious individual.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span> (person)</p>
+
+<p>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.—<i>Times.</i> (person)</p>
+
+<p>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.—<i>Times.</i> (he)</p>
+
+<p>My own shabby clothes and deplorable aspect, as compared with this
+regal-looking individual.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span> (person)</p>
+
+<p>In the present case, however, the individual who had secured the cab
+had a companion.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span> (man)</p>
+
+<p>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—<span class="smcap">A. J. Balfour.</span>
+(person)</p>
+
+<p>But what made her marry that individual, who was at least as much like
+an oil-barrel as a man?—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span> (monstrosity)</p>
+
+<p>He was a genteelly dressed individual; rather corpulent, with dark
+features.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span> (man)</p>
+
+<p>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.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span> (man)</p>
+
+<p>(3) Almost all the recent Anarchist crimes were perpetrated by
+<i>isolated</i> halfwitted individuals who aimed at universal
+notoriety.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>bodies of men</i>, must
+have.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Some apology is due for so heaping up instances of the same thing; but
+here, as with other common blunders to be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span> treated of later, it has
+seemed that an effect might be produced by mere iteration.</p>
+
+<p>The word <i>mutual</i> requires caution. As with <i>individual</i>,
+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 <i>our mutual friend</i> is a solecism.
+<i>Mutual</i> 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 <i>our</i>, C the <i>friend</i>. 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 <i>mutual friends</i> 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. <i>Our mutual friend</i> is
+nonsense; <i>mutual friends</i>, 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 <i>friends</i> alone means as much as <i>mutual friends</i>.
+<i>Mutual wellwishers</i> 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 <i>our mutual
+friend</i>, where the right word would be <i>common</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Further, it is to be carefully observed that the word <i>mutual</i>
+is an equivalent in meaning, and sometimes a convenient one for
+grammatical reasons, of the pronoun <i>each other</i> with various
+prepositions. To use it as well as <i>each other</i> is even
+more clearly tautological than the already mentioned <i>mutual
+friendship</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>If this be the case, much of the lost mutual understanding and unity
+of feeling may be restored.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Correct, if <i>mutual</i> is confined to <i>understanding</i>: they no
+longer understand <i>each other</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Slightly clumsy; but it means that they would get advantage <i>from
+each other</i> by drawing together, and may stand.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... conversing with his Andalusian lady-love in rosy whispers
+about their mutual passion for Spanish chocolate all the
+while.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>Surely you have heard Mrs. Toddles talking to Mrs. Doddles about their
+mutual maids.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Indefensible.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There may be, moreover, while each has the key of the fellow breast, a
+mutually sensitive nerve.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A nerve cannot respond to each other; nerves can; <i>a common nerve</i>
+would have done; or <i>mutually sensitive nerves</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Right or wrong according to what is meant by <i>desire</i>. (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 <i>our mutual friend</i> 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 <i>common desire</i>.
+(3) If <i>desire</i> is here equivalent to <i>request</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>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.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span></p>
+
+<p>Wrong. The hands are not <i>busy</i> with or <i>upon each other</i>,
+but with or upon the work. As <i>commonly</i> would be ambiguous here,
+<i>equally</i> or <i>alike</i> should be used, or simply <i>both</i>.
+<i>Mutually serviceable</i>, again, would have been right.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There were other means of communication between Claribel
+and her new prophet. Books were mutually lent to each
+other.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 <i>mutually</i> is not mere tautology with <i>to
+each other</i>, the only thing left for it to mean is <i>by each
+other</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>A thing is <i>unique</i>, 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. <i>Singular</i> had once the strong meaning
+that <i>unique</i> has still in accurate but not in other writers. In
+consequence of slovenly use, <i>singular</i> no longer means singular,
+but merely remarkable; it is worn out; before long <i>rather unique</i>
+will be familiar; <i>unique</i>, that is, will be worn out in turn,
+and we shall have to resort to <i>unexampled</i> and keep that clear
+of qualifications as long as we can. Happily it is still admitted that
+sentences like the three given below are solecisms; they contain a
+self-contradiction. For the other regrettable use of <i>unique</i>,
+as when the advertisement columns offer us what they call <i>unique
+opportunities</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Thrills which gave him <i>rather</i> a <i>unique</i>
+pleasure.—<span class="smcap">Hutton.</span></p>
+
+<p>A <i>very unique</i> child, thought I.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>... is to be translated into Russian by M. Robert Böker, of St.
+Petersburg. This is a <i>somewhat unique</i> thing to happen to an
+English text-book.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>To <i>aggravate</i> 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, <i>An
+aggravating circumstance was that the snow was dirty</i>, 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 five as clearly
+wrong; in the fifth, <i>aggrieved</i> would be the right word.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A premature initiative would be useless and even dangerous,
+being calculated rather to aggravate than to simplify the
+situation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>‘Well, I’m sure I’m very much obliged to you, Misses Brown,’ said the
+unfortunate youth, greatly aggravated.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, it is an aggravating book, though we are bound to admit
+that we have been greatly interested.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[1]</a> 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 <i>alms</i> to <i>metempsychosis</i>, may for the
+purposes of this chapter be considered as Romance. The vast number of
+purely scientific Greek words, as <i>oxygen</i>, <i>meningitis</i>, are
+on a different footing, since they are usually the only words for what
+they denote.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[2]</a> As in the second quotation from <i>The Times</i> on <a href="#Page_4">p. 4</a>.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[3]</a> Even in the legitimate sense (see <a href="#Page_16">p. 16</a>), originally a
+happy metaphor for mysterious leaking out, but now vulgarized and
+‘dead’.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_4" href="#FNanchor_4" class="label">[4]</a> Not that this word calls for censure in itself; but when
+packed into a sentence with <i>snow-white</i>, <i>green</i>, and
+<i>shrimp-pink</i>, it contributes noticeably to that effect of brief
+and startling exhaustiveness which is one variety of what we have
+stigmatized as efficiency.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_5" href="#FNanchor_5" class="label">[5]</a> 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.’—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_6" href="#FNanchor_6" class="label">[6]</a> Readers of history are of course likely to be familiar
+with it; it occurs, for instance, scores of times in Carlyle’s
+<i>Friedrich</i>. In such work it is legitimate, being sure, between
+context and repetition, to be comprehensible; but this does not apply
+to newspaper writing.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_7" href="#FNanchor_7" class="label">[7]</a> The <i>Oxford Dictionary</i> has fourteen varieties.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_8" href="#FNanchor_8" class="label">[8]</a> <i>Alit</i> is due, no doubt, to mere inadvertence or
+ignorance: the form <i>litten</i> (‘red-litten windows’, &amp;c.), for
+which the <i>Oxford Dictionary</i> quotes Poe, Lytton, W. Morris, and
+Crockett, but no old writer, is sham archaism.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_9" href="#FNanchor_9" class="label">[9]</a> The use deprecated has perhaps crept in from such phrases
+as <i>the sun was partially eclipsed</i>, an adaptation of <i>a partial
+eclipse</i>; 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 <i>partially</i> without
+first considering the claims of <i>partly</i>.</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II<br><span class="small">SYNTAX</span></h2></div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Case</span></h3>
+
+<p>There is not much opportunity in English for going wrong here,
+because we have shed most of our cases. The personal pronouns, and
+<i>who</i> and its compounds, are the only words that visibly retain
+three—called subjective, objective, possessive. In nouns the first two
+are indistinguishable, and are called the common case. One result of
+this simplicity is that, the sense of case being almost lost, the few
+mistakes that can be made are made often—some of them so often that
+they are now almost right by prescription.</p>
+
+<p>1. In apposition.</p>
+
+<p>A pronoun appended to a noun, and in the same relation to the rest of
+the sentence, should be in the same case. Disregard of this is a bad
+blunder.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But to behold her mother—<i>she</i> to whom she owed her
+being!—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>2. The complement with <i>am</i>, <i>are</i>, <i>is</i>, &amp;c., should be
+subjective.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I am she, she <i>me</i>, till death and beyond it.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Whom</i> would you rather be?</p>
+
+<p>To how many maimed and mourning millions is the first and sole angel
+visitant, <i>him</i> Easterns call Azrael.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>That’s <i>him</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the last but one, <i>him</i> would no doubt have been defended
+by the writer, since the full form would be <i>he whom</i>, as an
+attraction to the vanished <i>whom</i>. But such attraction is not
+right; if <i>he</i> alone is felt to be uncomfortable, <i>whom</i>
+should not be omitted; or, in this exalted context, it might be <i>he
+that</i>.</p>
+
+<p>On <i>that’s him</i>, see 4, below.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span></p>
+
+<p>3. When a verb or preposition governs two pronouns united by
+<i>and</i>, &amp;c., the second is apt to go wrong—a bad blunder.
+<i>Between you and I</i> is often heard in talk; and, in literature:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And now, my dear, let you and <i>I</i> say a few words about this
+unfortunate affair.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is kept locked up in a marble casket, quite out of reach of you or
+<i>I</i>.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>She found everyone’s attention directed to Mary, and <i>she</i>
+herself entirely overlooked.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. The interrogative <i>who</i> is often used for <i>whom</i>, as,
+<i>Who</i> did you see? A distinction should here be made between
+conversation, written or spoken, and formal writing. Many educated
+people feel that in saying <i>It is I, Whom do you mean?</i> instead of
+<i>It’s me, Who do you mean?</i> they will be talking like a book, and
+they justifiably prefer geniality to grammar. But in print, unless it
+is dialogue, the correct forms are advisable.</p>
+
+<p>5. Even with words that have no visible distinction between subjective
+and objective case, it is possible to go wrong; for the case can always
+be inferred, though not seen. Consequently a word should never be so
+placed that it must be taken twice, once as subject and once as object.
+This is so common a blunder that it will be well to give a good number
+of examples. It occurs especially with the relative, from its early
+position in the sentence; but, as the first two examples show, it may
+result from the exceptional placing of other words also. The mere
+repetition of the relative, or insertion of <i>it</i> or other pronoun,
+generally mends the sentence; in the first example, change <i>should
+only be</i> to <i>only to be</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>The occupation of the mouths of the Yalu</i>, however, his Majesty
+considered undesirable, and should only be carried out in the last
+resort.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>This</i> the strong sense of Lady Maclaughlan had long perceived,
+and was the principal reason of her selecting so weak a woman as her
+companion.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Qualities <i>which</i> it would cost me a great deal to acquire, and
+would lead to nothing.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>A recorded saying of our Lord <i>which</i> some higher critics of the
+New Testament regard as of doubtful authenticity, and is certainly of
+doubtful interpretation.</p>
+
+<p>A weakness <i>which</i> some would miscall gratitude, and is
+oftentimes the corrupter of a heart not ignoble.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Analogous to these are the next three examples, which will require
+separate comment:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Knowledge <i>to</i> the certainty of which no authority could add, or
+take away, one jot or tittle.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>To</i> is applicable to <i>add</i>, not to <i>take away</i>.
+The full form is given by substituting for <i>or</i> ‘and from the
+certainty of which no authority could’. This is clearly too cumbrous.
+Inserting <i>or from</i> after <i>to</i> is the simplest correction;
+but the result is rather formal. Better, perhaps, ‘the certainty of
+which could not be increased or diminished one jot by any authority’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>From his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to
+excel <i>in</i> whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his
+abilities.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A second <i>in</i> is required. This common slovenliness results from
+the modern superstition against putting a preposition at the end. The
+particular sentence may, however, be mended otherwise than by inserting
+<i>in</i>, if <i>excel</i> is made absolute by a comma placed after
+it. Even then, the <i>in</i> would perhaps be better at the end of the
+clause than at the beginning.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Lastly may be mentioned a principle <i>upon which</i> Clausewitz
+insisted with all his strength, and could never sufficiently impress
+upon his Royal scholar.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The italicized <i>upon</i> (we have nothing to do with the other
+<i>upon</i>) is right with <i>insist</i>, but wrong, though it must
+necessarily be supplied again, with <i>impress</i>. It is the result
+of the same superstition. Mend either by writing <i>upon</i> after
+<i>insisted</i> instead of before <i>which</i>, or by inserting
+<i>which he</i> after <i>and</i>.</p>
+
+<p>6. After <i>as</i> and <i>than</i>.</p>
+
+<p>These are properly conjunctions and ‘take the same case<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span> after them
+as before’. But those words must be rightly understood. (a), <i>I
+love you more than him</i>, means something different from (b), <i>I
+love you more than he</i>. It must be borne in mind that the ‘case
+before’ is that of the word that is compared with the ‘case after’,
+and not necessarily that of the word actually next before in position.
+In (a) <i>you</i> is compared with <i>him</i>: in (b) <i>I</i> (not
+<i>you</i>) is compared with <i>he</i>. The correct usage is therefore
+important, and the tendency illustrated in the following examples to
+make <i>than</i> and <i>as</i> prepositions should be resisted—though
+no ambiguity can actually result here.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When such as <i>her</i> die.—<span class="smcap">Swift.</span></p>
+
+<p>But there, I think, Lindore would be more eloquent than
+<i>me</i>.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It must further be noticed that both <i>as</i> and <i>than</i> are
+conjunctions of the sort that can either, like <i>and</i>, &amp;c., merely
+join coordinates, or, like <i>when</i>, &amp;c., attach a subordinate
+clause to what it depends on. This double power sometimes affects case.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is to him and such men as <i>he</i> that we owe the
+change.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This example is defensible, <i>as</i> being here a subordinating
+conjunction, and <i>as he</i> being equivalent to <i>as he is</i>. But
+it is distinctly felt to need defence, which <i>as him</i> would not;
+<i>as</i> would be a coordinating conjunction, and simply join the
+pronoun <i>him</i> to the noun <i>men</i>. So, with <i>than</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Such as have bound me, as well as others much better than
+<i>me</i>, by an inviolable attachment to him from that time
+forward.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>On the other hand, we could not say indifferently, <i>I am as good as
+he</i>, and <i>I am as good as him</i>; the latter would imply that
+<i>as</i> was a preposition, which it is not. And it is not always
+possible to choose between the coordinating and the subordinating
+use. In the next example only the coordinating will do, no verb being
+capable of standing after <i>he</i>; but the author has not observed
+this.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I beheld a man in the dress of a postillion, whom I
+instantly recognized as <i>he</i> to whom I had rendered
+assistance.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span></p>
+
+<p>A difficult question, however, arises with relatives after <i>than</i>.
+In the next two examples <i>whom</i> is as manifestly wrong as
+<i>who</i> is manifestly intolerable:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Dr. Dillon, than <i>whom</i> no Englishman has a profounder
+acquaintance with....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It was a pleasure to hear Canon Liddon, than <i>whom</i>, in his day,
+there was no finer preacher.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The only correct solution is to recast the sentences. For instance,
+<i>... whose acquaintance with ... is unrivalled among Englishmen</i>;
+and <i>... unsurpassed in his day as a preacher</i>. But perhaps the
+convenience of <i>than whom</i> is so great that to rule it out amounts
+to saying that man is made for grammar and not grammar for man.</p>
+
+<p>7. Compound possessives.</p>
+
+<p>This is strictly the proper place for drawing attention to a question
+that has some importance because it bears on the very common
+construction discussed at some length in the gerund section. This is
+the question whether, and to what extent, compound possessives may be
+recognized. Some people say <i>some one else’s</i>, others say <i>some
+one’s else</i>. Our own opinion is that the latter is uncalled for and
+pedantic. Of the three alternatives, <i>Smith the baker’s wife</i>,
+<i>Smith’s wife the baker</i>, <i>the wife of Smith the baker</i>, the
+last is unmitigated Ollendorff, the second thrusts its ambiguity upon
+us and provokes an involuntary smile, and the first alone is felt to be
+natural. It must be confessed, however, that it is generally avoided
+in print, while the form that we have ventured to call pedantic is
+not uncommon. In the first of the examples that follow, we should be
+inclined to change to <i>Nanny the maid-of-all-work’s</i>, and in the
+second to <i>the day of Frea, goddess of</i>, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Another mind that was being wrought up to a climax was Nanny’s, the
+maid-of-all-work, who had a warm heart.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+
+<p>Friday is Frea’s-day, the goddess of peace and joy and
+fruitfulness.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span></p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Number</span></h3>
+
+<p>Very little comment will be needed; we have only to convince readers
+that mistakes are common, and caution therefore necessary.</p>
+
+<p>1. The copula should always agree with the subject, not with the
+complement. These are wrong:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The <i>pages</i> which describe how the 34th Osaka Regiment wiped out
+the tradition that had survived since the Saigo rebellion <i>is</i> a
+typical <i>piece</i> of description.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A <i>boy</i> dressed up as a girl <i>and a girl</i> dressed
+up as a girl <i>is</i>, to the eye at least, the same
+<i>thing</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>People do not believe now as they did, but the moral
+<i>inconsistencies</i> of our contemporaries <i>is</i> no <i>proof</i>
+thereof.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It must be remembered that in questions the subject often comes after
+the verb and the complement before it; but the same rule must be kept.
+E. g., if the last example were put as a question instead of as a
+negative statement, ‘What proof <i>is</i> the inconsistencies?’ would
+be wrong, and ‘What proof <i>are</i> &amp;c.?’ right.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Some sentences in which the subject contains <i>only</i>, a
+superlative, &amp;c., have the peculiarity that subject and complement may
+almost be considered to have changed places; and this defence would
+probably be put in for the next three examples; but, whether actually
+wrong or not, they are unpleasant. The noun that stands before the verb
+should be regarded as the subject, and the verb be adapted to it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The only <i>thing</i> Siamese about the Consul, except the hatchment
+and the flag, <i>were</i> his <i>servants</i>.—<span class="smcap">Sladen.</span></p>
+
+<p>The only <i>difficulty</i> in Finnish <i>are</i> the <i>changes</i>
+undergone by the stem.—<span class="smcap">Sweet.</span></p>
+
+<p>The most pompous <i>monument</i> of Egyptian greatness, and
+<i>one</i> of the most bulky works of manual industry, <i>are</i> the
+pyramids.—<span class="smcap">Johnson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The next example is a curious problem; the subject to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span> <i>were</i> is
+in sense plural, but in grammar singular (<i>finding</i>, verbal noun):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Finding</i> Miss Vernon in a place so solitary, engaged in a
+journey so dangerous, and under the protection of one gentleman
+only, <i>were circumstances</i> to excite every feeling of
+jealousy.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>2. Mistakes in the number of verbs are extremely common when a singular
+noun intervenes between a plural subject (or a plural noun between
+a singular subject) and its verb. It is worth while to illustrate
+the point abundantly; for it appears that real doubt can exist on
+the subject:—‘“No one but schoolmasters and schoolboys knows” is
+exceedingly poor English, <i>if it is not absolutely bad grammar</i>’
+(from a review of this book, 1st ed.).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And do we wonder, when the <i>foundation</i> of <i>politics</i>
+<i>are</i> in the letter only, that many evils should
+arise?—<span class="smcap">Jowett.</span></p>
+
+<p>There is <i>much</i> in these ceremonial <i>accretions and
+teachings</i> of the Church which <i>tend</i> to confuse and distract,
+and which hinder us....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This sentence, strictly taken as it stands, would mean something that
+the writer by no means intends it to, viz., ‘Though the ceremonies are
+confusing, there is a great deal in them’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>An immense <i>amount</i> of <i>confusion and indifference</i>
+<i>prevail</i> in these days.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>They produced various <i>medicaments</i>, the lethal <i>power</i> of
+<i>which</i> <i>were</i> extolled at large.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The <i>partition</i> which the two ministers made of the <i>powers</i>
+of government <i>were</i> singularly happy.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>One</i> at least of the <i>qualities</i> which fit it for
+training ordinary men <i>unfit</i> it for training an extraordinary
+man.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+
+<p>I failed to pass in the small <i>amount</i> of <i>classics</i> which
+<i>are</i> still held to be necessary.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Tibetans have engaged to exclude from their country those
+dangerous <i>influences</i> <i>whose appearance</i> <i>were</i> the
+chief cause of our action.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Sundry other reputable <i>persons</i>, I know not whom,
+<i>whose</i> joint <i>virtue</i> still <i>keep</i> the law in good
+odour.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The practical <i>results</i> of the recognition of this <i>truth</i>
+<i>is</i> as follows.—<span class="smcap">W. H. Mallock.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>The Ordination <i>services</i> of the English <i>Church</i>
+<i>states</i> this to be a truth.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>All special <i>rights</i> of <i>voting</i> in the election of members
+<i>was</i> abolished.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>The separate <i>powers</i> of this great <i>officer</i> of State, who
+had originally acted only as President of the Council when discharging
+its judicial functions, <i>seems</i> to have been thoroughly
+established under Edward I.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. <i>They</i>, <i>them</i>, <i>their</i>, <i>theirs</i>, are often
+used in referring back to singular pronominals (as <i>each</i>,
+<i>one</i>, <i>anybody</i>, <i>everybody</i>), or to singular nouns
+or phrases (as <i>a parent</i>, <i>neither Jack nor Jill</i>),
+of which the doubtful or double gender causes awkwardness. It is
+a real deficiency in English that we have no pronoun, like the
+French <i>soi</i>, <i>son</i>, to stand for <i>him-or-her</i>,
+<i>his-or-her</i> (for <i>he-or-she</i> French is no better off than
+English). Our view, though we admit it to be disputable, is clear—that
+<i>they</i>, <i>their</i>, &amp;c., should never be resorted to, as in the
+examples presently to be given they are. With a view to avoiding them,
+it should be observed that (<i>a</i>) the possessive of <i>one</i>
+(indefinite pronoun) is <i>one’s</i>, and that of <i>one</i> (numeral
+pronoun) is either <i>his</i>, or <i>her</i>, or <i>its</i> (One does
+not forget <i>one’s</i> own name: I saw one of them drop <i>his</i>
+cigar, <i>her</i> muff, or <i>its</i> leaves); (<i>b</i>) <i>he</i>,
+<i>his</i>, <i>him</i>, may generally be allowed to stand for the
+common gender; the particular aversion shown to them by Miss Ferrier
+in the examples may be referred to her sex; and, ungallant as it may
+seem, we shall probably persist in refusing women their due here
+as stubbornly as Englishmen continue to offend the Scots by saying
+<i>England</i> instead of <i>Britain</i>. (<i>c</i>) Sentences may
+however easily be constructed (Neither John nor Mary knew <i>his</i>
+own mind) in which <i>his</i> is undeniably awkward. The solution is
+then what we so often recommend, to do a little exercise in paraphrase
+(<i>John and Mary were alike irresolute</i>, for instance). (<i>d</i>)
+Where legal precision is really necessary, <i>he or she</i> may be
+written in full. Corrections according to these rules will be appended
+in brackets to the examples.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Anybody</i> else who <i>have</i> only <i>themselves</i> in
+view.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span> (has ... himself)</p>
+
+<p>Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte, in novel-writing as in carrying
+<i>one’s</i> head in <i>their</i> hand.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span> (one’s
+... one’s)</p>
+
+<p>The feelings of the <i>parent</i> upon committing the cherished
+object of <i>their</i> cares and affections to the stormy sea of
+life.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span> (his)</p>
+
+<p>But he never allowed <i>one</i> to feel <i>their</i> own deficiencies,
+for he never appeared to be aware of them himself.—<span class="smcap">S.
+Ferrier.</span> (one’s)</p>
+
+<p>A difference of opinion which leaves <i>each</i> free to act according
+to <i>their</i> own feelings.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span> (his)</p>
+
+<p>Suppose <i>each</i> of us <i>try our hands</i> at it.—<span class="smcap">S.
+Ferrier.</span> (tries his hand; <i>or, if all of us are women</i>,
+tries her hand)</p>
+
+<p><i>Everybody</i> is discontented with <i>their</i> lot in
+life.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span> (his)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. Other mistakes involving number made with such pronominals, or with
+nouns collective, personified, or abstract.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>No man can read Scott without being more of a public man, whereas
+the ordinary novel tends to make its <i>readers</i> rather less of
+<i>one</i> than before.—<span class="smcap">Hutton.</span></p>
+
+<p>And so <i>each</i> of his portraits <i>are</i> not only a ‘piece of
+history’, but....—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Le Roman d’un Spahi, Azidayé and Rarahu <i>each</i> contains the
+history of a love affair.—<span class="smcap">H. James.</span></p>
+
+<p>He manages to interest us in the men, who <i>each</i> in turn wishes
+to engineer Richard Baldock’s future.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When <i>each</i> is appended in apposition to a plural subject, it
+should stand after the verb, or auxiliary, which should be plural; read
+here, <i>contain each</i>, <i>wish each in turn</i> (or, <i>each of
+whom wishes in turn</i>).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>As the leading maritime <i>nation</i> in the world and dependent
+wholly on the supremacy of our fleet to maintain this position,
+<i>everyone</i> is virtually bound to accord some measure of aid to
+an association whose time and talents are devoted to ensuring this
+important object.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Every one is indeed a host in himself, if he is the leading maritime
+nation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is not in <i>Japan’s</i> interests to allow negotiations to
+drag on once <i>their</i> armies are ready to deliver the final
+blow.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The personification of Japan must be kept up by <i>her</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Many</i> of my notes, I am greatly afraid, will be thought <i>a
+superfluity</i>.—<span class="smcap">E. V. Lucas</span> (quoted in <i>Times</i> review).</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>My notes may be a superfluity; many of my notes may be superfluous, or
+superfluities; or many a note of mine may be a superfluity; but it will
+hardly pass as it is.</p>
+
+<p>5. Though nouns of multitude may be freely used with either a singular
+or a plural verb, or be referred to by pronouns of singular or plural
+meaning, they should not have both (except for special reasons and upon
+deliberation) in the same sentence; and words that will rank in one
+context as nouns of multitude may be very awkward if so used in another.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>The public</i> <i>is</i> naturally much impressed by this
+evidence, and in considering it <i>do</i> not make the necessary
+allowances.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The <i>Times</i> Brussels correspondent ... tells us that
+the <i>committee</i> <i>adds</i> these words to <i>their</i>
+report.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Grand Opera Syndicate <i>has</i> also made an important addition
+to <i>their</i> German tenors.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>The only political <i>party</i> <i>who</i> could take office
+was <i>that</i> which ... had consistently opposed the American
+war.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+
+<p>As <i>the race</i> of man, after centuries of civilization,
+still <i>keeps</i> some traits of <i>their</i> barbarian
+fathers.—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The battleship Kniaz Potemkin, of which the <i>crew</i> <i>is</i> said
+to have mutinied and murdered <i>their</i> officers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>6. <i>Neither</i>, <i>either</i>, as pronouns, should always take a
+singular verb—a much neglected rule. So also <i>every</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The conception is faulty for two reasons, neither of which <i>are</i>
+noticed by Plato.—<span class="smcap">Jowett.</span></p>
+
+<p>... neither of which <i>are</i> very amiable motives for religious
+gratitude.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>He asked the gardener whether either of the ladies <i>were</i> at
+home.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Were</i>, however, may be meant for the subjunctive, when it would
+be a fault of style, not of grammar.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I think almost <i>every one</i> of the Judges of the High Court
+<i>are</i> represented here.—<span class="smcap">Lord Halsbury.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Every</i> Warwick institution, from the corporation to the
+schools and the almshouses, <i>have</i> joined hands in patriotic
+fellow-working.—<i>Speaker.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span></p>
+
+<p>7. For rhetorical reasons, a verb often precedes its subject; but
+enthusiasm, even if appropriate, should not be allowed to override the
+concords.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And of this emotion <i>was</i> born all the <i>gods</i> of
+antiquity.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>But unfortunately there <i>seems</i> to be spread abroad certain
+<i>misconceptions</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But with these suggestions <i>are</i> joined some very good
+<i>exposition</i> of principles which should underlie education
+generally.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has received a resolution, to which
+<i>is</i> appended the <i>names</i> of eight Liberal members and
+candidates for East London....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Comparatives and Superlatives</span></h3>
+
+<p>The chief point that requires mention is ill treatment of <i>the
+more</i>. In this phrase <i>the</i> is not the article, but an adverb,
+either relative or demonstrative. In <i>the more the merrier</i> it
+is first relative and then demonstrative: by-how-much we are more,
+by-so-much we shall be merrier. When the relative <i>the</i> is used,
+it should always be answered regularly by, or itself answer, the
+demonstrative <i>the</i>. Attempts to vary the formula are generally
+unhappy; for instance,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He was leaving his English business in the hands of Bilton, who seemed
+to him, the more he knew him, extraordinarily efficient.—<span class="smcap">E. F.
+Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This should run, perhaps: <i>whose efficiency impressed him the more,
+the more he knew him</i>—though it must be confessed that the double
+form is nearly always uncomfortable if it has not the elbowroom of
+a whole sentence to itself. That, however, is rather a question of
+style than of syntax; and other examples will accordingly be found
+in the section of the Chapter <i>Airs and Graces</i> concerned with
+originality.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The farther we advance into it, we see confusion more and more unfold
+itself into order.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Most readers will feel that this is an uncomfortable compromise between
+<i>The farther we advance the more do we see</i> and <i>As<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span> we advance
+we see confusion more and more unfold itself</i>. Similarly,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>She had reflection enough to foresee, that the longer she countenanced
+his passion, her own heart would be more and more irretrievably
+engaged.—<span class="smcap">Smollett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But it is when the demonstrative is used alone with no corresponding
+relative clause—a use in itself quite legitimate—that real blunders
+occur. It seems sometimes to be thought that <i>the more</i> is merely
+a more imposing form of <i>more</i>, and is therefore better suited
+for a dignified or ambitious style; but it has in fact a perfectly
+definite meaning, or rather two; and there need never be any doubt
+whether <i>more</i> or <i>the more</i> is right. One of the meanings is
+a slight extension of the other. (1) The correlative meaning <i>by so
+much</i> may be kept, though the relative clause, instead of formally
+corresponding and containing <i>the</i> (meaning <i>by how much</i>)
+and a comparative, takes some possibly quite different shape. But it
+must still be clear from the context what the relative clause might be.
+Thus, ‘We shall be a huge crowd’.—‘Well, we shall be the merrier’. Or,
+‘If he raises his demands, I grant them the more willingly’, i. e., The
+more he asks, the more willingly I give. This instance leads to the
+other possible meaning, which is wider. (2) The original meaning of the
+demonstrative <i>the</i> is simply <i>by that</i>; this in the complete
+double form, and often elsewhere, has the interpretation, limited to
+quantity, of <i>by so much</i>, or <i>in that proportion</i>; but it
+may also mean <i>on that account</i>, when the relative clause is not
+present. Again, however, the context must answer plainly in some form
+the question <i>On what account?</i> Thus, He has done me many good
+turns; but I do not like him any the better; i. e., any better on that
+account; i. e., on account of the good turns.</p>
+
+<p>The function of <i>the</i>, then, is to tell us that there is, just
+before or after, an answer to one of the questions, <i>More by what
+amount?</i> <i>More on what account?</i> If there is no such<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span> answer,
+we may be sure that the comparative has no right to its <i>the</i>. We
+start with a sentence that is entitled to its <i>the</i>, but otherwise
+unidiomatic.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We are not a whit <i>the less</i> depressed in spirits at the sight of
+all this unrelieved misery on the stage <i>by the reminder</i> that
+Euripides was moved to depict it by certain occurrences in his own
+contemporary Athens.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>The less</i> is <i>less on that account</i>, viz., that we are
+reminded. But the preposition required when the cause is given in
+this construction by a noun is <i>for</i>, not <i>by</i>. Read <i>for
+the reminder</i>. The type is shown in <i>None the better for seeing
+you</i>. Our sentence is in fact a mixture between <i>Our depression
+is not lessened</i> by <i>the reminder</i>, and <i>We are not the less
+depressed for the reminder</i>; and the confusion is the worse that
+<i>depressed by</i> happens to be a common phrase.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The suggestion, as regarded Mr. Sowerby, was certainly true,
+and was not the less so as regarded some of Mr. Sowerby’s
+friends.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>The</i> tells us that we can by looking about us find an answer
+either to <i>Not less true by what amount?</i> or to <i>Not less true
+on what account?</i> There is no answer to the first except <i>Not
+less true about the friends in proportion as it was truer about Mr.
+Sowerby</i>; and none to the second except <i>Not less true about
+the friends because it was true about Mr. Sowerby</i>. Both are
+meaningless, and <i>the</i> the is superfluous and wrong.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Yet as his criticism is more valuable than that of other men, so it is
+the more rarely met with.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is such an odd tangle of the two formulae <i>as ... so</i>,
+<i>the more ... the more</i>, that the reader is tempted to cut the
+knot and imagine what is hardly possible, that <i>the</i> is meant
+for the ordinary article, agreeing with <i>kind of criticism</i>
+understood between <i>the</i> and <i>more</i>. Otherwise it must be
+cured either by omitting <i>the</i>, or by writing <i>The more valuable
+his criticism, the more rarely is it met with</i>. If the latter is
+done, <i>than that of other men</i> will have to go. Which suggests
+the further observation that <i>the</i> with a comparative is almost
+always wrong<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span> when a <i>than</i>-clause is appended. This is because
+in the full double clause there is necessarily not a fixed standard of
+comparison, but a sliding scale. The following example, not complicated
+by any <i>the</i>, will make the point clear:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>My eyes are more and more averse to light than ever.—<span class="smcap">S.
+Ferrier.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>You can be more averse than ever, or more and more averse, but not more
+and more averse than ever. <i>Ever</i> can only mean the single point
+of time in the past, whichever it was, at which you were most averse.
+But to be more and more averse is to be more averse at each stage
+than at each previous stage. Just such a sliding scale is essential
+with <i>the more ... the more</i>. And perhaps it becomes so closely
+associated with the phrase that the expression of a fixed standard of
+comparison, such as is inevitably set up by a <i>than</i>-clause, is
+felt to be impossible even when the demonstrative <i>the</i> stands
+alone. In the next two examples, answers to the question <i>More on
+what account?</i> can be found, though they are so far disguised
+that the sentences would be uncomfortable, even if what makes them
+impossible were absent. That is the addition of the <i>than</i>-clause
+in each.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But neither is that way open; nor is it any the more open in the case
+of Canada than Australia.—<span class="smcap">F. Greenwood.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The <i>the</i> might pass if <i>than Australia</i> were omitted, and
+there would be no objection to it if we read further (for <i>in the
+case</i>) <i>if we take the case</i>, and better still, placed that
+clause first in the sentence: Nor, if we take the case of Canada,
+is the way any the more open. <i>The</i> then means <i>on that
+account</i>, viz., because we have substituted Canada.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I would humbly protest against setting up any standard of Christianity
+by the regularity of people’s attendance at church or chapel. I am
+certain personally that I have a far greater realization of the
+goodness of God to all creation; I am certain that I can <i>the
+more</i> acknowledge His unbounded love for all He has made, and our
+entire dependence on Him, <i>than I could</i> twenty years ago, when I
+attended church ten times where I now go once.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span></p>
+
+<p>In this, the answer to <i>More on what account?</i> is possibly implied
+in the last clause; it would perhaps be, if clearly put, Because I
+go to church seldomer. The right form would be, <i>I can the more
+acknowledge ... for going</i> (or <i>that I go</i>) <i>to church
+only once where twenty years ago I went ten times</i>. Unless the
+<i>than</i>-clause is got rid of, we ought to have <i>more</i> without
+<i>the</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This question of <i>the</i> is important for lucidity, is rather
+difficult, and has therefore had to be treated at length. The other
+points that call for mention are quite simple; they are illogicalities
+licensed by custom, but perhaps better avoided. Avoidance, however,
+that proclaims itself is not desirable; to set readers asking ‘Who are
+you, pray, that the things everybody says are not good enough for you?’
+is bad policy; ‘in vitium ducit culpae fuga si caret arte.’ But if a
+way round presents itself that does not at once suggest an assumption
+of superiority, so much the better.</p>
+
+<p>1. <i>More than I can help.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Without thinking of the corresponding phrase in his native language
+more than he can help.—<span class="smcap">H. Sweet.</span></p>
+
+<p>We don’t haul guns through traffic more than we can
+help.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These really mean, of course, more than he (we) can<i>not</i> help. To
+say that, however, is by this time impossible. More than he need, if
+(when) he can help it, too much, unnecessarily, and other substitutes,
+will sometimes do.</p>
+
+<p>2. <i>Most of any</i> (singular).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A political despotism, the most unbounded, both in power and
+principle, of any tyranny that ever existed so long.—<span class="smcap">Galt.</span></p>
+
+<p>She has the most comfortable repository of stupid friends to have
+recourse to of anybody I ever knew.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>And they had the readiest ear for a bold, honourable sentiment, of any
+class of men the world ever produced.—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Latin at any rate should be an essential ingredient in culture as the
+best instrument of any language for clear and accurate expression of
+thought.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The first chapter, which from the lessons it enforces is perhaps
+the most valuable of any in the present volume....—<span class="smcap">Sir G. T.
+Goldie.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Disraeli said that he had ‘the largest parliamentary knowledge of any
+man he had met’.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Though this is extremely common, as the examples are enough to show,
+there is seldom any objection to saying either <i>most of all</i> or
+<i>more than any</i>.</p>
+
+<p>3. <i>Most</i> with words that do not admit of degrees.</p>
+
+<p><i>Unique</i> has been separately dealt with in the chapter on
+<i>Vocabulary</i>. <i>Ideal</i> is another word of the same sort; <i>an
+ideal solution</i> is one that could not possibly be improved upon,
+and <i>most</i> is nonsense with it; <i>an ideal and most obvious</i>
+should be read in the example:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>That the transformation of the Regular Army into the general service
+Army and of the Militia into the home service Army is a most ideal and
+obvious solution admits, I think, of no contradiction.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Relatives</span></h3>
+
+<p><b>a. Defining and non-defining relative clauses.</b></p>
+
+<p>For the purposes of b. and c. below, all relative clauses are divided
+into defining and non-defining. The exact sense in which we use these
+terms is illustrated by the following groups, of which (i) contains
+defining clauses, (ii) non-defining.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>(i) The man who called yesterday left no address.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lovelace has seen divers apartments at Windsor: but not one, he
+says, that he thought fit for me.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>He secured ... her sincere regard, by the feelings which he
+manifested.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Jones who dines with us to-night is not the Jones who was at
+school with you.</p>
+
+<p>The best novel that Trollope ever wrote was....</p>
+
+<p>Any man that knows three words of Greek could settle that point.</p>
+
+<p>(ii) At the first meeting, which was held yesterday, the chair....</p>
+
+<p>Deputies must be elected by the Zemstvos, which must be extended and
+popularized, but not on the basis of....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Emperor William, who was present ..., listened to a loyal
+address.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The statue of the Emperor Frederick, which is the work of the sculptor
+Professor Uphnes, represents the Monarch on horseback.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Jones, who should know something of the matter, thinks differently.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span></p>
+
+<p>The function of a defining relative clause is to limit the application
+of the antecedent; where that is already precise, a defining clause
+is not wanted. The limitation can be effected in more than one way,
+according to the nature of the antecedent. As a rule, the antecedent
+gives us a class to select from, the defining clause enables us to make
+the selection. Thus in our first example the antecedent leaves us to
+select from the general class of ‘men’, the defining clause fixes the
+particular man (presumably the only man, or the only man that would
+occur in the connexion) ‘who called yesterday’. Sometimes, however, the
+functions of the two are reversed. When we have an antecedent with a
+superlative, or other word of exclusive or comprehensive meaning, such
+as ‘all’, ‘only’, ‘any’, we know already how to make our selection,
+and only wait for the relative clause to tell us from what class to
+make it. We know that we are to choose ‘the best novel’: the relative
+clause limits us to the works of Trollope. We are to choose ‘any man’
+we like, provided (says our relative clause) that he ‘knows three
+words of Greek’. In either case, the work of definition is done by the
+exclusion (implied in the relative clause) of persons or things that
+the antecedent by itself might be taken to include.</p>
+
+<p>The point to notice is that, whichever way the defining clause does its
+work, it is essential to and inseparable from its antecedent. If for
+any reason we wish to get rid of it, we can only do so by embodying its
+contents in the antecedent: ‘The man in Paris with whom I correspond’
+must become ‘My Paris correspondent’. To remove the clause altogether
+is to leave the antecedent with either no meaning or a wrong one. Even
+in such extreme cases as ‘the wisest man that ever lived’, ‘the meanest
+flower that blows’, where the defining clause may seem otiose and
+therefore detachable, we might claim that future wise men, and past and
+future flowers, are excluded; but we shall better realize the writer’s
+intention if we admit that these clauses are only a pretence of
+limitation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span> designed to exclude the reality; it is as if the writers,
+invited to set limits to their statements, had referred us respectively
+to Time and Space.</p>
+
+<p>This fact, that the removal of a defining clause destroys the meaning
+of the antecedent, supplies an infallible test for distinguishing
+between the defining and the non-defining clause: the latter can
+always, the former never, be detached without disturbing the truth of
+the main predication. A non-defining clause gives independent comment,
+description, explanation, anything but limitation of the antecedent;
+it can always be rewritten either as a parenthesis or as a separate
+sentence, and this is true, however essential the clause may be to the
+point of the main statement. ‘Jones’, in our last example above, is
+quoted chiefly as one ‘who should know something of the matter’; but
+this need not prevent us from writing: ‘Jones thinks differently; and
+he should know something of the matter’.</p>
+
+<p>To find, then, whether a clause defines or does not define, remove it,
+and see whether the statement of which it formed a part is unaltered:
+if not, the clause defines. This test can be applied without difficulty
+to all the examples given above. It is true that we sometimes get
+ambiguous cases: after removing the relative clause, we cannot always
+say whether the sense has been altered or not. That means, however,
+not that our test has failed, but that the clause is actually capable
+of performing either function, and that the main sentence can bear
+two distinct meanings, between which even context may not enable us
+to decide. The point is illustrated, in different degrees, by the
+following examples:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mr. H. Lewis then brought forward an amendment, which had been put
+down by Mr. Trevelyan and which provided for an extension of the
+process of income-tax graduation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>This was held to portend developments that somehow or other have not
+followed.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The former of these is quite ambiguous. The bringing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span> forward of an
+amendment (no matter what or whose) may be all that the writer meant
+to tell us of in the first instance; the relative clauses are then
+non-defining clauses of description. On the other hand, both clauses
+may quite well be meant to define; and it is even possible that the
+second is meant to define, and the first not, though the coordination
+is then of a kind that we shall show under c. to be improper.
+Similarly, in the second sentence, ‘to portend developments’ may
+possibly be complete in itself; the whole might then be paraphrased
+thus: ‘It was thought that the matter would not stop there: but it
+has’. More probably the clause is meant to define: ‘It was held to
+portend what have since proved to be unrealized developments’. This
+view is confirmed, as we shall see, both by the use of ‘that’ (not
+‘which’) and by the absence of a comma before it.</p>
+
+<p>Punctuation is a test that would not always be applicable even if all
+writers could be assumed to punctuate correctly; but it is often a
+guide to the writer’s intention. For (1) a non-defining clause should
+always be separated from the antecedent by a stop; (2) a defining
+clause should never be so separated unless it is either preceded by a
+parenthesis indicated by stops, or coordinated with a former defining
+clause or with adjectives belonging to the antecedent; as in the
+following examples:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The only circumstance, in fact, that could justify such a course....</p>
+
+<p>It is he only who does this, who follows them into all their
+force and matchless grace, that does or can feel their full
+value.—<span class="smcap">Hazlitt.</span></p>
+
+<p>Perfect types, that satisfy all these requirements, are not to be
+looked for.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It will occur to the reader that our last two examples are strictly
+speaking exceptions to the rule of defining clauses, since they tell us
+only what is already implied, and could therefore be removed without
+impairing the sense. That is true to some extent of many parallel
+defining clauses: they are admissible, however, if, without actually
+giving any<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span> limitation themselves, they make more clear a limitation
+already given or implied; if, in fact, they are offered as alternative
+versions or as reminders. Our next example is of a defining clause of
+the same kind:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This estimate which he gives, is the great groundwork of his plan for
+the national redemption.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The limitation given by ‘this’ is repeated in another form by the
+relative clause. ‘This estimate, the one he gives, is....’</p>
+
+<p>The reader should bear in mind that the distinction between the two
+kinds of relative is based entirely on the closeness of their relation
+to the antecedent. The information given by a defining clause must be
+taken at once, with the antecedent, or both are useless: that given by
+a non-defining clause will keep indefinitely, the clause being complete
+in sense without the antecedent, and the antecedent without the clause.
+This is the only safe test. To ask, for instance, whether the clause
+conveys comment, explanation, or the like, is not a sufficient test
+unless the question is rightly understood; for, although we have said
+that a non-defining clause conveys comment and the like, as opposed to
+definition of the antecedent, it does not follow that a defining clause
+may not (while defining its own antecedent) <i>contribute</i> towards
+comment; on the contrary, it is often open to a writer to throw his
+comment into such a form as will include a defining clause. It may even
+appear from a comparison of the two sentences below that this is the
+origin of the non-defining clause, (2) being an abbreviation of (1):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>1. Lewis, a man to whom hard work never came amiss, sifted the
+question thoroughly.</p>
+
+<p>2. Lewis, to whom hard work never came amiss, sifted the question....</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In (1), a comment is introduced by ‘a man’ in apposition with Lewis; ‘a
+man’ is antecedent to a defining relative clause; separate them, and
+the antecedent is meaningless. But next remove the connecting words ‘a
+man’, and the relative changes at once its antecedent and its nature:
+the antecedent is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span> ‘Lewis’; the relative is non-defining; and the
+clause <i>is</i> a comment, and does not merely contribute to one.</p>
+
+<p><b>b. ‘That’ and ‘who’ or ‘which’.</b></p>
+
+<p>‘That’ is evidently regarded by many writers as nothing more than
+an ornamental variation for ‘who’ and ‘which’, to be used, not
+indeed immoderately, but quite without discrimination. The opinion
+is excusable; it is not easy to draw any distinction that is at all
+consistently supported by usage. There was formerly a tendency to use
+‘that’ for everything: the tendency now is to use ‘who’ and ‘which’
+for everything. ‘That’, from disuse, has begun to acquire an archaic
+flavour, which with some authors is a recommendation. De Quincey, for
+one, must certainly have held that in exalted prose ‘that’, in all
+connexions, was the more dignified relative; his higher flights abound
+in curious uses of the word, some instances of which are quoted below.</p>
+
+<p>This confusion is to be regretted; for although no distinction can
+be authoritatively drawn between the two relatives, an obvious one
+presents itself. The few limitations on ‘that’ and ‘who’ about which
+every one is agreed all point to ‘that’ as the defining relative,
+‘who’ or ‘which’ as the non-defining. We cannot say ‘My father, that
+left Berlin last night, will shortly arrive’, and an examination of
+instances would show that we can never use ‘that’ where the clause is
+unmistakably non-defining. On the other hand, we cannot say ‘All which
+I can do is useless’; this time, it is true, the generalization will
+not hold; ‘which’ can, and sometimes must, be used, and ‘who’ commonly
+is used, in defining clauses. But that is explained partly by the
+obvious inconvenience sometimes attending the use of ‘that’, and partly
+by the general tendency to exclude it from regular use, which has
+already resulted in making it seem archaic when used of persons, except
+in certain formulae.</p>
+
+<p>The rules given below are a modification of this principle, that
+‘that’ is the defining, ‘who’ or ‘which’ the non-defining<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span> relative;
+the reason for each modification is given in its place. We must here
+remind the reader of the distinction drawn in a. between defining and
+non-defining clauses: a defining clause limits the application of the
+antecedent, enabling us to select from the whole class to which the
+antecedent is applicable the particular individual or individuals meant.</p>
+
+<p>1. ‘That’ should never be used to introduce a non-defining clause; it
+is therefore improperly used in all the following examples:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But by her side was kneeling her better angel, that hid his face with
+wings: that wept and pleaded for her: that prayed when she could
+not: that fought with Heaven by tears for her deliverance.—<span class="smcap">De
+Quincey.</span></p>
+
+<p>Rendering thanks to God in the highest—that, having hid his face
+through one generation behind thick clouds of war, once again was
+ascending.—<span class="smcap">De Quincey.</span></p>
+
+<p>And with my own little stock of money besides, that Mrs. Hoggarty’s
+card-parties had lessened by a good five-and-twenty shillings, I
+calculated....—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>How to keep the proper balance between these two testy old
+wranglers, that rarely pull the right way together, is as
+much....—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nataly promised amendment, with a steely smile, that his lips mimicked
+fondly.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is opposed to our Constitution, that only allows the Crown to
+remove a Norwegian Civil servant.—<span class="smcap">Nansen.</span></p>
+
+<p>I cannot but feel that in my person and over my head you desire to pay
+an unexampled honour to the great country that I represent, to its
+Bench and Bar, that daily share your labours and keep step with your
+progress.—<span class="smcap">Choate.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘That I represent’ is right: ‘that daily share’ is wrong.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>As to dictionaries of the present day, that swell every few years
+by the thousand items, the presence of a word in one of them shows
+merely....—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+
+<p>The sandy strip along the coast is fed only by a few scanty streams,
+that furnish a remarkable contrast to the vast volumes of water which
+roll down the Eastern sides.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘That’ and ‘which’ should change places.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The social and economic sciences, that now specially interest me, have
+no considerable place in such a reform.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If this is a defining clause, excluding ‘the social and economic<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
+sciences that’ do <i>not</i> interest the writer, the comma after
+‘sciences’ should be removed.</p>
+
+<p>2. ‘Who’ or ‘which’ should not be used in defining clauses except when
+custom, euphony, or convenience is decidedly against the use of ‘that’.
+The principal exceptions will be noted below; but we shall first give
+instances in which ‘that’ is rightly used, and others in which it might
+have been used with advantage.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In those highly impressionable years that lie between six and
+ten....—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The obstacles that hedge in children from Nature....—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The whole producing an effect that is not without a certain
+poetry.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He will do anything that he deems convenient.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>The well-staffed and well-equipped ‘High Schools’ that are now at work
+... had not yet sprung into being.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Then, Sir, you keep up revenue laws which are mischievous, in order to
+preserve trade laws that are useless.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘That’ should have been used in both clauses.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The struggle that lay before him.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>There goes another sort of animal that is differentiating from my
+species....—<span class="smcap">H. G. Wells.</span></p>
+
+<p>There are other powers, too, that could perform this grateful but
+onerous duty.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the following examples, ‘that’ is to be preferred to ‘which’;
+especially with antecedent ‘it’, and after a superlative or other word
+of exclusive or comprehensive meaning, such as ‘all’, ‘only’, ‘any’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The opportunities which London has given them.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The principles which underlay the agreement.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>One cause which surely contributes to this effect has its root in
+early childhood.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>A meeting which was held yesterday, which consisted in the main of a
+bitter personal attack.—<span class="smcap">Rosebery.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Which consisted’ is right: but we should have ‘that was held’; the
+clause defines.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The first thing which the person who desires to be amiable must
+determine to do is....—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span></p>
+
+<p>The most abominable din and confusion which it is possible for a
+reasonable person to conceive.—<span class="smcap">Poe.</span></p>
+
+<p>Reverential objections, composed of all which his unstained family
+could protest.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>He required all the solace which he could derive from literary
+success.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>All the evidence which we have ever seen tends to
+prove....—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>A battle more bloody than any which Europe saw in the long interval
+between Malplaquet and Eylau.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>The only other biography which counts for much is....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The French Government are anxious to avoid anything which might be
+regarded as a breach of neutrality.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It was the ecclesiastical synods which by their example led the way to
+our national parliaments.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is the little threads of which the inner substance of the nerves is
+composed which subserve sensation.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Of which’ in a defining clause is one of the recognized exceptions;
+but we ought to have ‘that subserve’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is not wages and costs of handling which fall, but profits and
+rents.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It has been French ports which have been chosen for the beginning and
+for the end of his cruise.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Who is it who talks about moral geography?—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. We come now to the exceptions. The reader will have noticed that of
+all the instances given in (2) there is only one—the last—in which we
+recommend the substitution of ‘that’ for ‘who’; in all the others, it
+is a question between ‘that’ and ‘which’. ‘That’, used of persons, has
+in fact come to look archaic: the only cases in which it is now to be
+preferred to ‘who’ are those mentioned above as particularly requiring
+‘that’ instead of ‘which’; those, namely, in which the antecedent is
+‘it’, or has attached to it a superlative or other word of exclusive
+meaning. We should not, therefore, in the <i>Spectator</i> instance
+above, substitute ‘the person that desires’ for ‘who desires’; but we
+should say</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">The most impartial critic that could be found.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">The only man that I know of.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Any one that knows anything knows this.</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
+ <div class="verse indent0">It was you that said so.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Who is it that talks about moral geography?</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Outside these special types, ‘that’ used of persons is apt to sound
+archaic.</p>
+
+<p>4. It will also have been noticed that all the relatives in (2)
+were either in the subjective case, or in the objective without
+a preposition. ‘That’ has no possessive case, and cannot take a
+preposition before it. Accordingly ‘the man that I found the hat of’
+will of course give place to ‘the man whose hat I found’; and ‘the
+house in which this happened’ will generally be preferred to ‘the
+house that this happened in’. The latter tendency is modified in the
+spoken language by the convenient omission of ‘that’; for always in
+a defining clause, though never in a non-defining, a relative in the
+objective case, with or without a preposition, can be dropped. But few
+writers like, as a general rule, either to drop their relatives or to
+put prepositions at the end. ‘The friends I was travelling with’, ‘the
+book I got it from’, ‘the place I found it in’, will therefore usually
+appear as</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">The friends with whom I was travelling.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">The book from which I got it.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">The place in which I found it.</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>5. Euphony demands that ‘that that’ should become ‘that which’, even
+when the words are separated; and many writers, from a feeling that
+‘which’ is the natural correlative of the demonstrative ‘that’, prefer
+the plural ‘those which’; but the first example quoted in (2) seems to
+show that ‘those ... that’ can be quite unobjectionable.</p>
+
+<p>6. A certain awkwardness seems to attend the use of ‘that’ when the
+relative is widely separated from its antecedent. When, for instance,
+two relative clauses are coordinate, some writers use ‘that’ in the
+first, ‘which’ in the second clause, though both define. This point
+will be illustrated in c., where we shall notice that inconsistency in
+this respect sometimes obscures the sense.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span></p>
+
+<p>It may seem to the reader that a rule with so many exceptions to it
+is not worth observing. We would remind him (i) that it is based upon
+those palpable misuses of the relatives about which every one is
+agreed; (ii) that of the exceptions the first and last result from,
+and might disappear with, the encroachment of ‘who’ and the general
+vagueness about the relatives; while the other two, being obvious and
+clearly defined, do not interfere with the remaining uses of ‘that’;
+(iii) that if we are to be at the expense of maintaining two different
+relatives, we may as well give each of them definite work to do.</p>
+
+<p>In the following subsections we shall not often allude to the
+distinction here laid down. The reader will find that our rules are
+quite as often violated as observed; and may perhaps conclude that if
+the vital difference between a defining and a non-defining clause were
+consistently marked, wherever it is possible, by a discriminating use
+of ‘that’ and ‘which’, false coordination and other mishandlings of the
+relatives would be less common than they are.</p>
+
+<p><b>c. ‘And who’; ‘and which’.</b></p>
+
+<p>The various possibilities of relative coordination, right and wrong,
+may be thus stated: (i) a relative clause may be rightly or wrongly
+coordinated with another relative clause; this we shall call ‘open’
+coordination; (ii) it may be rightly or wrongly coordinated with words
+that are equivalent to a relative clause, and for which a relative
+clause can be substituted; ‘latent’ coordination; (iii) a clause that
+has obviously no coordinate, open or latent, may yet be introduced by
+‘and’ or other word implying coordination; for such offenders, which
+cannot be coordinate and will not be subordinate, ‘insubordination’ is
+not too harsh a term.</p>
+
+<p>The following are ordinary types of the three classes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>(i) Men who are ambitious, and whose ambition has never been thwarted,
+....</p>
+
+<p>Pitt, who was ambitious, but whose ambition was qualified by....</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span></p>
+
+<p>(ii) Ambitious men, and whose ambition has never been thwarted, ....</p>
+
+<p>An evil now, alas! beyond our power to remedy, and for which we have
+to thank the folly of our predecessors.</p>
+
+<p>(iii) Being thus pressed, he grudgingly consented at last to a
+redistribution, and which, I need not say, it was his duty to have
+offered in the first instance.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A coordination in which ‘and’ is the natural conjunction may also be
+indicated simply by a comma; there is safety in this course, since the
+clause following the comma may be either coordinate or subordinate. But
+we have to deal only with clauses that are committed to coordination.</p>
+
+<p>‘Insubordination’ will not detain us long; it is always due either to
+negligence or to gross ignorance; we shall illustrate it in its place
+with a few examples, but shall not discuss it. With regard, however,
+to open and latent coordination opinions differ; there is an optimist
+view of open coordination, and a pessimist view of latent, both of
+which seem to us incorrect. It is held by some that open coordination
+(provided that the relatives have the same antecedent) is never wrong,
+and by some—not necessarily others—that latent coordination is never
+right: we shall endeavour to show that the former is often wrong, and
+the latter, however ungainly, often right.</p>
+
+<p>The essential to coordination is that the coordinates should be
+performing the same function in the sentence. It is not necessary, nor
+is it enough, that they should be in the same grammatical form: things
+of the same form may have different functions, and things of different
+forms may have the same function. If we say ‘Unambitious men, and who
+have no experience’, ‘unambitious’ and ‘who have no experience’ are not
+in the same form, but they have the same function—that of specifying
+the class of men referred to. Their grammatical forms (vocabulary
+permitting) are interchangeable: a defining adjective can always take
+the form of a relative clause, and a defining relative clause can often
+take the form of an adjective: ‘inexperienced men, and who have no
+ambition’. ‘Unambitious’ is therefore the true grammatical<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span> equivalent
+of ‘who have no ambition’, and latent coordination between it and a
+relative clause is admissible.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, among things that have the same grammatical form,
+but different functions, are the defining and the non-defining relative
+clause. A non-defining clause, we know, can be removed without
+disturbing the truth of the predication; it has therefore no essential
+function; it cannot therefore have the same function as a defining
+clause, whose function we know to be essential. It follows that open
+coordination is not admissible between a defining and a non-defining
+clause; and, generally, coordination, whether open or latent, is
+admissible between two defining or two non-defining coordinates, but
+not between a defining and a non-defining.</p>
+
+<p>Our object, however, in pointing out what seems to be the true
+principle of relative coordination is not by any means to encourage the
+latent variety. It has seldom any advantage over full coordination;
+it is perhaps more apt to lead to actual blunders; it is usually
+awkward; and it does violence—needless violence, as often as not—to
+a very widespread and not unreasonable prejudice. Many writers may
+be suspected of using it, against their better judgement, merely for
+the purpose of asserting a right; it is their natural protest against
+the wholesale condemnation of ignorant critics, who do not see that
+latent coordination may be nothing worse than clumsy, and that open
+coordination may be a gross blunder. For the benefit of such critics it
+seems worth while to examine the correctness of various examples, both
+open and latent; on the other merits and demerits of the latent variety
+the reader will form his own judgement.</p>
+
+<p>(i) <b>Open coordination.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A few minutes brought us to a large and busy bazaar, with the
+localities of which the stranger appeared well acquainted, and where
+his original demeanour again became apparent.—<span class="smcap">Poe.</span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lovelace has seen divers apartments at Windsor; but not one,
+he says, that he thought fit for me, and which, at the same time,
+answered my description.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for, are the
+self-same thing.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>All these are correct: in the first both clauses are non-defining, in
+the others both define.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The hills were so broken and precipitous as to afford no passage
+except just upon the narrow line of the track which we occupied, and
+which was overhung with rocks, from which we might have been destroyed
+merely by rolling down stones.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Wrong: the first clause defines, the second not.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>From doing this they were prevented by the disgraceful scene which
+took place, and which the leader of the Opposition took no steps to
+avert.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Wrong. The first clause defines, the second is obviously one of
+comment: the ‘scene’ is not distinguished from those that the leader
+<i>did</i> take steps to avert.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>They propose that the buildings shall belong ... to the communes
+in which they stand, and which, it is hoped, will not permit their
+desecration.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Wrong. The communes that ‘will not permit’ are not meant to be
+distinguished from those that will. The second clause is comment, the
+first defines.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The way in which she jockeyed Jos, and which she
+described with infinite fun, carried up his delight to a
+pitch....—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>In the best French which he could muster, and which in sooth was of a
+very ungrammatical sort....—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>Peggy ... would have liked to have shown her turban and bird of
+paradise at the ball, but for the information which her husband had
+given her, and which made her very grave.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>All these are wrong. Thackeray would probably have been saved from
+these false coordinations if he had observed the distinction between
+‘that’ and ‘which’: ‘In the best French (that) he could muster, which
+in sooth was...’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There goes another sort of animal that is differentiating from my
+species, and which I would gladly see exterminated.—<span class="smcap">H. G.
+Wells.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Probably the second clause, like the first, is meant to define: if so,
+the coordination is right; if not, it is wrong. We have alluded to the
+tendency to avoid ‘that’ when the relative is widely separated from its
+antecedent; here, the result is ambiguity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And here he said in German what he wished to say, and which
+was of no great importance, and which I translated into
+English.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Wrong: ‘what (that which)’ defines, the ‘and which’ clauses do not.</p>
+
+<p>(ii) <b>Latent coordination</b>, between relative clause and
+equivalent, is seldom correct when the relative clause is non-defining;
+for the equivalent, with few and undesirable exceptions, is always
+a defining adjective or phrase, and can be coordinate only with a
+defining clause. The equivalent must of course be a true one; capable,
+that is, of being converted into a relative clause without altering
+the effect of the sentence. Neglect of this restriction often results
+in false coordination, especially in one particular type of sentence.
+Suppose that a historian, after describing some national calamity,
+proceeds: ‘In these distressing circumstances....’ Here we might seem
+to have two possible equivalents, ‘these’ and ‘distressing’. First
+let us expand ‘these’ into a relative clause: ‘In the distressing
+circumstances that I have described’. This, in the context, is a fair
+equivalent, and as often as not would actually appear instead of
+‘these’. But next expand ‘distressing’: ‘In these circumstances, which
+were distressing’, a non-defining clause. To this expansion no writer
+would consent; it defeats the object for which ‘distressing’ was placed
+before the antecedent. That object was to record his own sensibility
+without disparaging the reader’s by telling him in so many words (as
+our relative clause does) that the circumstances were distressing; and
+it is secured by treating ‘distressing’ not as a separate predication
+but as an inseparable part of the antecedent. ‘Distressing’, it will
+be observed, cannot give us a defining clause; it is obviously meant
+to be co-extensive with ‘these’; we are not to select from ‘these’
+circumstances those only that are ‘distressing’. Moreover, as ‘these’,
+although capable of appearing as a relative clause, can scarcely
+require another relative clause to complete the limitation of the
+antecedent, it follows that in sentences of this form coordination will
+generally be wrong. We have examples in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span> Cowper quotation below,
+and in the anonymous one that precedes it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Juices ready prepared, and which can be absorbed
+immediately.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>A deliberate attempt to frame and to verify general rules as to
+phenomena of all kinds, and which can, therefore, be propagated by
+argument or persuasion....—<span class="smcap">L. Stephen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Rules that shall be general, and that can....’</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A painful, comprehensive survey of a very complicated matter,
+and which requires a great variety of considerations, is to be
+made.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>The goldsmith to the royal household, and who, if fame spoke true,
+oftentimes acted as their banker, ... was a person of too much
+importance to...—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘The man who was goldsmith to ... and who’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is a compliment due, and which I willingly pay, to those who
+administer our affairs.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>All these are correct, with defining coordinates throughout.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘A junior subaltern, with pronounced military and political views,
+with no false modesty in expressing them, and who (sic) possesses the
+ear of the public, ....’—(Quoted by the <i>Times</i>.)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Who has ... views, and who....’ ‘Sic’ is the comment of the
+<i>Times</i> writer. The coordination is correct.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>While there, she had ample opportunity afforded her of studying
+fashionable life in all its varied and capricious moods, and which
+have been preserved to posterity in her admirable delineations of
+character.</p>
+
+<p>I am sensible that you cannot in my uncle’s present infirm state, and
+of which it is not possible to expect any considerable amendment,
+indulge us with a visit.—<span class="smcap">Cowper.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These are the instances of false expansion alluded to above. The former
+is based on the non-defining expansion ‘in all its moods, which are
+varied and capricious’; the true expansion being ‘in all the varied and
+capricious moods in which it reveals itself’, a defining clause, which
+will not do with the ‘and which’. Similarly, the second is based on the
+non-defining expansion ‘in my uncle’s present state, which is an infirm
+one’; the true expansion is ‘in the infirm state in which my uncle now
+is’. In both, a non-defining clause is coordinated with words that can
+only yield a defining clause.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Previous to the innovations introduced by the Tudors, and which had
+been taken away by the bill against pressing soldiers, the King in
+himself had no power of calling on his subjects generally to bear
+arms.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If the writer means us to distinguish, among the innovations introduced
+by the Tudors, those that had also been taken away, the ‘and which’
+clause defines, and the coordination is right. But more probably the
+clause conveys independent information; the coordination is then wrong.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>[The various arrangements of <i>pueri puellam amabant</i>] all have
+the same meaning—the boys loved the girl. For <i>puellam</i> shows by
+its form that it must be the object of the action; <i>amabant</i> must
+have for its subject a plural substantive, and which must therefore
+be, not <i>puellam</i>, but <i>pueri</i>.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Wrong. ‘A plural substantive’ can yield only the defining clause ‘a
+substantive that is plural’. Now these words contain an inference
+from a general grammatical principle (that a plural verb must have a
+plural subject); and any supplementary defining clause must also be
+general, not (like the ‘and which’ clause) particular. We might have,
+for instance, ‘Amabant, being plural, and finite, must have for its
+subject a plural substantive, and which is in the nominative case’. But
+the ‘and which’ clause is evidently non-defining; the inference ends at
+‘substantive’; then comes the application of it to the particular case.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He refused to adopt the Restrictive Theory, and impose a numerical
+limit on the Bank’s issues, and which he again protested against in
+1833.—<span class="smcap">H. D. Macleod.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Wrong. The ‘and which’ clause is non-defining; none of the three
+possible antecedents (‘Theory’, ‘limit’, ‘imposition’) will give a
+non-defining clause.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The great obstacle ... is the religion of Europe, and
+which has unhappily been colonially introduced into
+America.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This illustrates an important point. ‘Of Europe’ gives the defining
+clause ‘that prevails in Europe’; the coordination therefore requires
+that the ‘and which’ clause should define. Now a defining clause must
+contain no word that is not meant<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span> to contribute to definition; if,
+then, the ‘and which’ clause defines, the writer wishes to distinguish
+the religion in question, not only from those European religions that
+have not been colonially introduced into America, but also from those
+European religions that have been introduced, but whose introduction
+is not a matter for regret; that is the only defining meaning that
+‘unhappily’ can bear, and unless we accept this interpretation the
+clause is non-defining.—We shall allude to this sentence again in
+d., where the possibilities of parenthesis in a defining clause are
+discussed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It may seem strange that this important place should not have been
+conferred on Vaca de Castro, already on the spot, and who had shown
+himself so well qualified to fill it.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>One of our ‘few and undesirable exceptions’, in which the
+clause-equivalent is non-defining (‘who was already on the spot’); for
+a person’s name can only require a defining clause to distinguish him
+from others of the same name. The sentence is an ugly one, even if we
+remove the ‘and who’ clause; but the coordination is right.</p>
+
+<p>(iii) <b>Insubordination.</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The struggler, the poor clerk, mechanic, poorer musician, artist, or
+actor, feels no right to intrude, and who quickly falls from a first
+transient resentment....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Such a person may reside there with absolute safety, unless
+it becomes the object of the government to secure his person;
+and which purpose, even then, might be disappointed by early
+intelligence.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>All this when Madame saw, and of which when she took note, her sole
+observation was:—...—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>To these we may add examples in which the coordinated relatives
+have different antecedents. In practice, nothing can justify such
+coordination: in theory, it is admissible when the antecedents are
+coordinate, as in the following sentence:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We therefore delivered the supplies to those individuals, and at those
+places, to whom the special grants had been made, and for which they
+were originally designed.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But in the following instances, one antecedent is subordinate to
+another in the same clause, or is in a clause subordinate to that of
+the other.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>They marched into the apartment where the banquet was served; and
+which, as I have promised the reader he shall enjoy it, he shall have
+the liberty of ordering himself.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>A large mineral-water firm in London, whose ordinary shares are a
+million in value, and which shares always paid a dividend before
+the imposition of the sugar-tax, have not paid any dividend
+since.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He very much doubted whether I could find it on his mine, which was
+located some five miles from St. Austell, Cornwall, and upon whose
+property I had never been.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But I have besought my mother, who is apprehensive of Mr. Lovelace’s
+visits, and for fear of whom my uncles never stir out without arms,
+...—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was of Mr. Lovelace that the uncles were afraid.</p>
+
+<p><b>d. Case of the relative.</b></p>
+
+<p>Special attention was not drawn, in the section on Case, to the gross
+error committed in the following examples:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Instinctively apprehensive of her father, whom she supposed it was,
+she stopped in the dark.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>That peculiar air of contempt commonly displayed by insolent menials
+to those whom they imagine are poor.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is only those converted by the Gospel whom we pretend are
+influenced by it.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>We found those whom we feared might be interested to withhold the
+settlement alert and prompt to assist us.—<span class="smcap">Galt.</span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Dombey, whom he now began to perceive was as far beyond human
+recall.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>Those whom it was originally pronounced would be allowed to
+go.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>But this looks as if he has included the original 30,000 men whom he
+desires ‘should be in the country now’.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>We feed children whom we think are hungry.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The only gentlemen holding this office in the island, whom, he felt
+sure, would work for the spiritual good of the parish.—<i>Guernsey
+Advertiser.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These writers evidently think that in ‘whom we think are hungry’ ‘whom’
+is the object of ‘we think’. The relative is in fact the subject of
+‘are’; and the object of ‘we know’ is the clause ‘who are hungry’; the
+order of the words is a necessary result of the fact that a relative
+subject must stand at the beginning of its clause.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span></p>
+
+<p>(The same awkward necessity confronts us in clauses with ‘when’,
+‘though’, &amp;c., in which the subject is a relative. Such clauses are
+practically recognized as impossible, though Otway, in a courageous
+moment, wrote:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">Unblemished honour, and a spotless love;</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0"><i>Which tho’</i> perhaps now <i>know</i> another flame,</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Yet I have love and passion for their name.)</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Some writers, with a consistency worthy of a better cause, carry the
+blunder into the passive, renouncing the advantages of an ambiguous
+‘which’ in the active; for in the active ‘which’ of course tells no
+tales.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>As to all this, the trend of events has been the reverse of
+that which was anticipated would be the result of democratic
+institutions.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Which <i>it</i> was anticipated would be’. Similarly, the passive
+of ‘men whom we-know-are-honest’ is the impossible ‘men who
+are-known-are-honest’: ‘men who we know are honest’ gives the correct
+passive ‘men who it is known are honest’.</p>
+
+<p>Nor must it be supposed that ‘we know’ is parenthetic. In non-defining
+clauses (Jones, who we know is honest), we can regard the words as
+parenthetic if we choose, except when the phrase is negative (Jones,
+who I cannot think is honest); but in a defining clause they are
+anything but parenthetic. When we say ‘Choose men who you know are
+honest’, the words ‘you know’ add a new circumstance of limitation:
+it is not enough that the men should in fact be honest; you must know
+them to be honest; honest men of whose honesty you are not certain
+are excluded by the words ‘you know’. Similarly, in the <i>Guernsey
+Advertiser</i> quotation above, the writer does not go the length of
+saying that these are the only gentlemen who would work: he says that
+they are the only ones of whom he feels sure. The commas of parenthesis
+ought therefore to go, as well as the comma at ‘island’, which is
+improper before a defining clause.</p>
+
+<p>The circumstances under which a parenthesis is admissible in a defining
+clause may here be noticed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span></p>
+
+<p>(i) When the clause is too strict in its limitation, it may be modified
+by a parenthesis:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Choose men who, during their time of office, have never been suspected.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A whole class, excluded by the defining clause, is made eligible by the
+parenthesis.</p>
+
+<p>(ii) Similarly, a parenthesis may be added to tell us that within the
+limits of the defining clause we have perfect freedom of choice:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Choose men who, at one time or another, have held office.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>They must have held office, that is all; it does not matter when.</p>
+
+<p>(iii) Words of comment, indicating the writer’s authority for his
+limitation, his recognition of the sentiments that it may arouse, and
+the like, properly stand outside the defining clause: when they are
+placed within it, they ought to be marked as parenthetic.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There are men who, so I am told, prefer a lie to truth on its own
+merits.</p>
+
+<p>The religion that obtains in Europe, and that, unhappily, has been
+introduced into America.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The latter sentence is an adaptation of one considered above on
+p. 91. ‘Unhappily’ there appeared not as a parenthesis but as
+an inseparable part of the relative clause, which was therefore
+defining or non-defining, according as ‘unhappily’ could or could
+not be considered as adding to the limitation. But with the altered
+punctuation ‘unhappily’ is separable from the relative clause, which
+may now define: ‘that obtains in Europe and (I am sorry to have to add)
+in America.’</p>
+
+<p>In sentences of this last type, the parenthesis is inserted in
+the defining clause only for convenience: in the others, it is an
+essential, though a negative, part of the definition. But all three
+types of parenthesis agree in this, that they do not limit the
+antecedent; they differ completely from the phrases considered above,
+which do limit the antecedent, and are not parenthetic.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span></p>
+
+<p><b>e. Miscellaneous uses and abuses of the relative.</b></p>
+
+<p>(i) A relative clause is sometimes coordinated with an independent
+sentence; such coordination is perhaps always awkward, but is not
+always incorrect. The question arises chiefly when the two have a
+common subject expressed only in the relative clause; for when the
+subject is expressed in both, the independent sentence may be taken to
+be coordinate, not with the relative clause, but with the main sentence
+to which the relative clause is attached, as in the following instance:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>To begin with, he had left no message, which in itself I felt to be a
+suspicious circumstance, and (I) was at my wits’ end how to account
+plausibly for his departure.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Retain ‘I’, and ‘I was’ may be coordinate with ‘he had left’: remove
+it, and the coordination is necessarily between ‘I was’ and ‘I felt’.
+In our next examples the writers are committed:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>These beatitudes are just laws which we have been neglecting, and have
+been receiving in ourselves the consequences that were meet.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>The idea which mankind most commonly conceive of proportion, is the
+suitableness of means to certain ends, and, where this is not the
+question, very seldom trouble themselves about the effect of different
+measures of things.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>Fictitious capital, a name of extreme inaccuracy, which too many
+persons are in the habit of using, from the hasty assumption that
+what is not real must necessarily be fictitious, and are more led
+away by a jingling antithesis of words than an accurate perception of
+ideas.—<span class="smcap">H. D. Macleod.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The first two of these are wrongly coordinated: the third, a curiosity
+in other respects, is in this respect right. The reason is that in the
+first two we have a defining, in the third a non-defining relative
+clause. A defining clause is grammatically equivalent to an adjective
+(‘violated laws’, ‘the popular idea’), and can be coordinated only with
+another word or phrase performing the same function; now the phrase ‘we
+have been receiving’, not being attached to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span> antecedent by means of
+a relative, expressed or understood, is not equivalent to an adjective.
+We could have had ‘and (which we) have been properly punished <i>for
+neglecting</i>’, or we could have had the ‘and’ sentence in an
+adverbial form, ‘with the fitting result’; but coordination between the
+two as they stand is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>The Burke sentence is a worse offender. Coordination of this kind
+is not often attempted when the antecedent of the relative is
+<i>subject</i> of the main sentence; and when it is attempted, the two
+coordinates must of course not be separated by the predicate. If we
+had had ‘the idea which mankind most commonly conceive of proportion,
+and very seldom trouble themselves about anything further’, the
+coordination would have been similar to the other, and could have
+been rectified in the same way (‘and beyond which they very seldom
+...’, or ‘to the exclusion of any other considerations’). But this
+alteration we cannot make; for there is a further and an essential
+difference. The <i>Daily Telegraph</i> writer evidently <i>meant</i>
+his second coordinate to do the work of a defining clause; he has
+merely failed to make the necessary connexion, which we supply, as
+above, either by turning the words into a second defining clause, or
+by embodying them, adverbially, in the first. Burke’s intention is
+different, and would not be represented by our proposed alteration in
+the order. All that a defining clause can do in his sentence is to tell
+us <i>what</i> idea is going to be the subject. If we were to give a
+brief paraphrase of the whole, italicizing the words that represent
+the second coordinate, it would be, not ‘mankind’s <i>sole</i> idea of
+proportion is the suitableness ...’, but ‘mankind’s idea of proportion
+is the suitableness ..., <i>and very little else</i>’; for the question
+answered is, not ‘what is mankind’s sole idea?’ but ‘what is mankind’s
+idea?’ In other words, the second coordinate belongs in intention not,
+like the relative clause, to the subject, but to the predicate; to
+rectify it, we must either make it part of the predicate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span> (‘and is not
+concerned with ...’), or, by inserting ‘they’, coordinate it with the
+main sentence. Obvious as the latter correction is, the sentence repays
+close examination, as illustrating the incoherence of thought that may
+underlie what seems a very trifling grammatical slip.</p>
+
+<p>But in our third example, the relative clause is non-defining; it is
+grammatically equivalent to, and could be replaced by, an independent
+sentence: ‘Many persons are in the habit of using it’. There is nothing
+grammatically wrong in this type of coordination; it is objectionable
+only because it seems to promise what it does not fulfil. When the
+common subject of two coordinates is expressed only with the first, it
+is natural to assume that all words preceding it are also to be applied
+to both coordinates; and the violation of this principle, though not
+of course ungrammatical, is often felt to be undesirable in other than
+relative clauses.</p>
+
+<p>(ii) In the sentences considered above, the antecedent of the relative
+did not belong to the second coordinate, and could not have been
+represented in it without the material alterations there proposed. But
+it may also happen that the antecedent, as in the following examples,
+belongs equally to both coordinates, being represented in the first by
+a relative, in the second by some other pronoun.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There were two or three <i>whose</i> accuracy was more
+scrupulous, <i>their</i> judgement more uniformly sober and
+cautious.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+
+<p>He renewed the old proposal, <i>which</i> Pizarro treated as a piece
+of contemptible shuffling, and curtly rejected <i>it</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Which</i> she has it in her option either to do or to let <i>it</i>
+alone.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the pair of parallel coordinates from Mr. Bryce, insert the
+suppressed ‘was’, and it becomes clear that ‘whose’, not ‘their’, is
+the right pronoun.</p>
+
+<p>In the ‘Pizarro’ sentence, ‘it’ is not only superfluous, but disturbing
+to the reader, who assumes that ‘which’ is common to both clauses, and
+on reaching ‘it’ has to glance back and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span> check the sentence. Here,
+as often, the pronoun seems to be added to restore an ill-balanced
+sentence; but that can be done in several other ways. In the Richardson
+sentence also the ‘it’ should go.</p>
+
+<p>More commonly, the repetition of the antecedent in another form results
+from the superstitious avoidance of a preposition at the end:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A demand by Norway for political separation, to which Sweden will not
+assent, but will not go to war to prevent it.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘To (which)’ is not common to both coordinates: accordingly the writer
+finds it necessary to give ‘it’ in the second. But, even if we respect
+our superstition, and exclude ‘which Sweden will not assent to, but
+will not go to war to prevent’, we have still the two possibilities
+of (1) complete relative coordination, ‘to ..., but which ...’; (2)
+subordination, ‘though she will not go to war to prevent it’.</p>
+
+<p>In our next example, Lord Rosebery, again for fear of a preposition
+at the end, falls into the trap clumsily avoided by the <i>Times</i>
+writer:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>That promised land for which he was to prepare, but scarcely to enter.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>So perhaps Bagehot, though his verb may be <i>conceive of</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>English trade is carried on upon borrowed capital to an extent of
+which few foreigners have an idea, and none of our ancestors could
+have conceived.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>(iii) When the relative is the subject of both coordinates, or the
+object of both, its repetition in the second is a matter of choice. But
+to omit the relative when it is in a different case from the first is a
+gross, though not uncommon, blunder. The following are instances:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A league which their posterity for many ages kept so inviolably,
+and proved so advantageous for both the kingdoms of France and
+Scotland.—<span class="smcap">Lockhart.</span></p>
+
+<p>Questions which we either do not put to ourselves, or are turned aside
+with traditional replies.—<span class="smcap">Mark Rutherford.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is just conceivable that in the last of these the subject of ‘are’
+is ‘we’: if so, the sentence is to be referred to (i) above<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span> (wrong
+coordination of an independent sentence with a defining relative
+clause).</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy to see why the relative more than other words should be
+mishandled in this way; few would write (but see p. 61, s. f.) ‘This
+league we kept and has proved advantageous’.</p>
+
+<p>The condensed antecedent-relative ‘what’ is only an apparent exception
+to this universal rule. In the sentence ‘What I hold is mine’, ‘what’
+is only object to ‘hold’, not subject to ‘is’; the subject to ‘is’ is
+the whole noun-clause ‘what I hold’. Sentences of this type, so far
+from being exceptions, often give a double illustration of the rule,
+and leave a double possibility of error. For just as a single ‘what’
+cannot stand in different relations to two coordinate verbs in its
+clause, so a single noun-clause cannot stand in different relations to
+two coordinate main verbs. We can say ‘What I have and hold’, where
+‘what’ is object to both verbs, and ‘what is mine and has been fairly
+earned by me’, where it is subject to both; but we cannot say ‘what I
+have and has been fairly earned by me’. Similarly, we can say ‘What
+I have is mine and shall remain mine’, where the noun-clause ‘what I
+have’ is subject to both verbs, and ‘What I have I mean to keep, and
+will surrender to no man’, where it is object to both; but not ‘What I
+have is mine, and I will surrender to no man’. Of the various ways of
+avoiding this error (subordination, adaptation of verbs, insertion of
+a pronoun, relative or otherwise), that chosen by Miss Brontë below is
+perhaps the least convenient. Her sentence is, however, correct; that
+from the <i>Spectator</i> is not.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Not mere empty ideas, but what were once realities, and that I long
+have thought decayed.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>Whatever we possessed in 1867 the British Empire possesses now, and is
+part of the Dominion of Canada.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Things that were once realities, and that I long have thought
+decayed’; a pair of defining clauses.</p>
+
+<p>The condensed ‘what’ must of course be distinguished from the ‘what’
+of indirect questions, which is not relative<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span> but interrogative. In
+the following example, confusion of the two leads to an improper
+coordination.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>What sums he made can only be conjectured, but must have been
+enormous.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the first sentence, ‘what’ is an interrogative, in the second, a
+condensed antecedent-relative, standing for ‘the sums that’. It is the
+sums that were enormous: it is the answer to the question ‘What sums
+did he make?’ that can only be conjectured. The mistake is possible
+only because ‘can’ and ‘must’ do not reveal their number: ‘can’ is
+singular, ‘must’ plural.</p>
+
+<p>The differentiation between the two <i>what</i>s and their equivalents
+is not, indeed, complete: just as the condensed antecedent-relative
+resembles in form, though not in treatment, the unresolved
+interrogative, so the interrogative, by resolution into ‘the ... that
+(which)’, not only resembles, but is grammatically identified with,
+the uncondensed relative and antecedent. The resolution is, no doubt,
+convenient: it should be noticed, however, that the verbs with which
+alone it can be employed (verbs that may denote either perception of
+a fact or other kinds of perception) are precisely those with which
+ambiguity may result. ‘I know the house (that) you mean’: it may
+(antecedent and relative) or may not (resolved interrogative) follow
+that I have ever seen it. ‘We must first discover the scoundrel who
+did it’; antecedent and relative? then we must secure the scoundrel’s
+person; resolved interrogative? then only information is needed.
+‘I can give a good guess at the problem that is puzzling you’: and
+the solution?—I know nothing of the solution; I was resolving an
+interrogative.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, does not affect sentences like the Macaulay one above:
+for although the resolved or uncondensed forms (‘the ... which’) are
+grammatically identified, the condensed or unresolved forms (‘what’)
+are not.</p>
+
+<p>(iv) The omission of the relative in isolated clauses (as opposed to
+coordinates) is a question not of correctness<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span> but of taste, so far
+as there is any question at all. A non-defining relative can never be
+omitted. The omission of a defining relative subject is often effective
+in verse, but in prose is either an archaism or a provincialism. It
+may, moreover, result in obscurity, as in the second of our examples,
+which may possibly puzzle the reader for a moment:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Now it would be some fresh insect won its way to a temporary fatal new
+development—<span class="smcap">H. G. Wells.</span></p>
+
+<p>No one finds himself planted at last in so terribly foul a morass, as
+he would fain stand still for ever on dry ground.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But when the defining relative is object, or has a preposition, there
+is no limit to the omission, unless euphony is allowed to be one. We
+give three instances in which the reader may or may not agree that the
+relative might have been retained with advantage:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We do that in our zeal our calmer moments would be afraid to
+answer.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>But did you ever see anything there you had never seen
+before?—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+
+<p>These ethical judgements we pass on self-regarding acts are ordinarily
+little emphasized.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>(v) When a defining relative has the same preposition as its
+antecedent, it is not uncommon, in the written as well as in the
+spoken language, to omit the preposition in the relative clause. There
+is something to be said for a licence that rids us of such cumbrous
+formulae as ‘in the way in which’, ‘to the extent to which’, and the
+like; in writing, however, it should be used with caution if at all.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, if the preposition is to go, the relative should
+go too, or if retained should certainly be ‘that’, not ‘which’; and if
+the verb of the relative clause is the same as in the main sentence,
+it should be represented by ‘do’, or (in a compound tense) by its
+auxiliary component.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Because they found that it touched them in a way which no book in the
+world could touch them.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>The man who cleaned the slate in the manner which Sir E. Satow has
+done both in Morocco and Japan might surely rank as a reflective
+diplomatist.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span></p>
+
+<p>‘In a way no other book in the world could’: ‘in the way (that) Sir E.
+Satow has done’.</p>
+
+<p>A further limitation is suggested by our next example:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Great Powers, after producing this absolutely
+certain result, are ending with what they ought to have
+begun,—coercion.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here, of course, the relative cannot be omitted, since relative and
+antecedent are one. But that is not the principal fault, as will appear
+from a resolution of the antecedent-relative: ‘they are ending with
+the very thing (that) they ought to have begun ...’. We are now at
+liberty to omit our relative or retain it, as we please; in either
+case, the omission of ‘with’ is unbearable. The reason is that ‘with’
+does not, like the ‘in’ of our former examples, introduce a purely
+adverbial phrase: it is an inseparable component of the compound verbs
+‘end-with’ and ‘begin-with’, of which the antecedent and relative are
+respectively the objects. Similarly, we cannot say ‘He has come to the
+precise conclusion (that) I thought he would come’, because we should
+be mutilating the verb to ‘come-to’; we can, however, say ‘to the
+conclusion (that) I thought he would’, ‘come-to’ being then represented
+by ‘would’.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the omission is justifiable only when antecedent and relative
+have the same preposition. Sentences like the next may pass in
+conversation, but (except with the one noun <i>way</i>) are intolerable
+in writing:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>One of the greatest dangers in London is the pace that the corners in
+the main streets are turned.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>(vi) The use of ‘such ... who (which)’, ‘such ... that (defining
+relative)’, for ‘such ... as’ is sometimes an archaism, sometimes a
+vulgarism.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Till such time when we shall throw aside our earthly
+garment.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Only such supplies were to be made which it would be inhuman to refuse
+to ships in distress.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The censorship of literature extends to such absurd prohibitions
+which it did not reach even during the worst period of the
+forties.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A God in such an abstract sense that, as I have pointed out before,
+does not signify.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span></p>
+
+<p>They would find such faith, such belief, that would be a revelation to
+them.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Swift’s plan was to offer to fulfil it on conditions so insulting that
+no one with a grain of self-respect could accept.—<span class="smcap">L. Stephen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><b>f. ‘It ... that.’</b></p>
+
+<p>Two constructions, closely allied, but grammatically distinct, are
+often confused: (i) Antecedent ‘<b>it</b>’ followed by a defining
+relative clause with ‘that’ (who, which); (ii) ‘<b>it</b>’ followed
+by a clause in apposition, introduced by the conjunction ‘that’. The
+various correct possibilities are represented in the set of examples
+given below. Relative clauses are marked R, conjunction clauses C. One
+impossible example is added in brackets, to mark the transition from
+relative to conjunction.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>(1) It is money that I want. R.</p>
+
+<p>(2) It was you that told me. R.</p>
+
+<p>(3) It was you that I gave it to (or, to whom I gave it). R.</p>
+
+<p>(4) It was to you that I gave it. C.</p>
+
+<p>(5) It was the Romans that built this wall. R.</p>
+
+<p>(6) It is the Romans that we are indebted to for this. R.</p>
+
+<p>(7) It is to the Romans that we are indebted for this. C.</p>
+
+<p>(8) It was Jones whose hat I borrowed. R.</p>
+
+<p>(9) It was Jones’s hat that I borrowed. R.</p>
+
+<p>(10) It was a knife that I cut it with. R.</p>
+
+<p>(11) It was with a knife that I cut it. C.</p>
+
+<p>(12) It was with difficulty that I cut it. C.</p>
+
+<p>(13) (It was difficulty that I cut it with.) R.</p>
+
+<p>(14) It was provisionally that I made the offer. C.</p>
+
+<p>(15) It was in this spring, too, that the plague broke out. C.</p>
+
+<p>(16) Accordingly, it was with much concern that I presently received a
+note informing me of his departure. C.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the relative construction, the antecedent ‘it’ is invariable,
+whatever the number and gender of the relative. The main verb is also
+invariable in number, but in tense is usually adapted to past, though
+not (for euphony’s sake) to future circumstances: ‘it was you that
+looked foolish’, but ‘it is you that will look foolish’.</p>
+
+<p>In both constructions, the ‘that’ clause, supplemented or introduced by
+‘it’, gives us the subject of a predication, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span> relative clause (with
+<i>it</i>) being equivalent to a pure noun, the conjunction clause to
+a verbal noun in apposition, partly retaining its verbal character. In
+both, also, the predication answers an imaginary question, recorded
+distinctly in the relative, less distinctly in the conjunction clause.
+‘What do you want?’ ‘It (the thing) that I want is money.’ ‘To whom did
+you give it?’ ‘It (the persons) that I gave it to was your friends.’
+‘As to your cutting it: give particulars.’ ‘It—that I cut it (my
+cutting it)—was with a knife.’</p>
+
+<p>From the above examples it will be seen that the two constructions
+largely overlap. When (as in 1, 2, 5, 8) the relative is subject or
+direct object of the clause-verb, or is in the possessive case, it
+cannot be replaced by the conjunction; but when its relation to the
+clause-verb is marked by a preposition, the conjunction always may take
+its place, and sometimes must, as in 12 and 13. For the relative clause
+can only be used when the question reflected in it is calculated to
+secure the right kind of answer. Now the natural answer to the question
+‘What did you cut it with?’ is not ‘difficulty’ but ‘a knife’. The
+misleading ‘with’ is therefore removed from the relative clause in
+13, and placed within the predicate, the definite question ‘What did
+you cut it with?’ giving place to the vague demand for particulars.
+‘With’ being removed, the relative clause falls to pieces, for want
+of a word to govern the relative, and the conjunction clause takes
+its place. In the same way, ‘it was <i>a cab</i> (but not <i>high
+indignation</i>) that he drove away in’; ‘it was <i>a concert</i>
+(but not <i>curiosity</i>) that I was returning from’; ‘it was a
+<i>beech-tree</i> (but not <i>unpleasant circumstances</i>) that I
+found him under’. And, generally, it will be found that a preposition
+is admissible in the relative clause only when used in the literal or
+the most obvious sense.</p>
+
+<p>The conjunction clause is, as we have said, a verbal noun; so far a
+noun that things can be predicated of it, and so far a verb that the
+things predicated of it are verbal relations and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span> verbal circumstances,
+indirect object, agent, instrument, means, manner, cause, attendant
+circumstances; anything but subject and direct object. ‘My giving was
+to you’; ‘my offering was provisionally’; ‘my concealing it was because
+I was ashamed’.</p>
+
+<p>The mistakes that constantly occur in careless writers result from
+hesitation between the two forms where both are possible. The
+confusion, however, ought not to arise; for always with a relative
+clause, and never with a conjunction, the complement of the main
+predicate (the answer to the suppressed question) is a noun or the
+grammatical equivalent of a noun. ‘A knife’, ‘Jones’, ‘you’, ‘my friend
+in Chicago’, ‘the man who lives next door’, are the answers that
+accompany the relative clause: ‘with a knife’, ‘with difficulty’, ‘to
+you’, ‘occasionally’, ‘because I was ashamed’, are those that accompany
+the conjunction.</p>
+
+<p>Examples 15 and 16, though quite recognized types, are really
+artificial perversions. In 15 the true question and answer in the
+circumstances would be, not, as the sentence falsely implies, ‘When did
+the plague break out?’ ‘That too happened in this same spring’, but
+‘Were there any other notable events in this spring?’ ‘Yes: the plague
+broke out’. Impressiveness is given to the announcement by the fiction
+that the reader is wondering when the plague broke out; in fact, he is
+merely waiting for whatever may turn up in the history of this spring.
+In 16 we go still further: the implied question, ‘What were your
+feelings on receiving a (not <i>the</i>) note ...?’ could not possibly
+be asked; the information that alone could prompt it is only given in
+the ‘that’ clause.</p>
+
+<p>It has been pointed out in b. that a relative clause with antecedent
+‘it’ particularly calls for the relative ‘that’, in preference
+to ‘which’, and even to ‘who’. Even when the relative is in the
+possessive case, ‘that’, which has no possessive, is often retained
+by transferring to the main predicate the noun on which it depends; 8
+thus gives place to 9, even at the risk<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span> of ambiguity; for the relative
+clause now supplies us with the question (not ‘whose hat ...?’ but)
+but ‘what did you borrow?’ leaving us theoretically in doubt whether
+Jones’s hat is distinguished from his other property, from other
+people’s hats, or from things in general.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the two blunders that are most frequently made
+almost invariably have the relative ‘who’ or ‘which’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And it is to me, the original promoter of the whole scheme, to whom
+they would deny my fair share in the profits!</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘To me’ implies a conjunction clause: ‘to whom ...’ is a relative
+clause. ‘It is to me that...’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It was <i>to Mrs.</i> Brent, the beetle-browed wife of Mr. Commissary
+Brent, <i>to whom</i> the General transferred his attentions
+now.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is to you whom I address a history which may perhaps fall into very
+different hands.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘To you that’, or ‘you to whom’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is not taste that is plentiful, but courage that is
+rare.—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Again a common blunder; not, however, a confusion between the two
+constructions above, but between one of them (the relative) and a
+third. The sentence explains why every one seems to prefer Shakespeare
+to Ouida (they are afraid to say that they like Ouida best). ‘What is
+the explanation of this?’ ‘It is not the plentifulness of taste, but
+the rarity of courage, that explains it.’ Or, less clumsily, using the
+construction that Stevenson doubtless intended: ‘It (the inference to
+be drawn) is not that taste is plentiful, but that courage is rare.’</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Participle and Gerund</span></h3>
+
+<p>It is advisable to make a few remarks on the participle and gerund
+together before taking them separately. As the word <i>gerund</i>
+is variously used, we first define it. A gerund is the verbal noun
+identical in form with any participle, simple or compound, that
+contains the termination <i>-ing</i>. Thus the verb <i>write</i> has
+the active participles <i>writing</i>, <i>having written</i>, <i>being
+about to write</i>, <i>about to write</i>, and the passive participles
+<i>written</i>, <i>having been written</i>, <i>being written</i>,
+<i>about to be written</i>, <i>being about to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span> be written</i>. Any
+of these except <i>written</i>, <i>about to write</i>, <i>about to
+be written</i>, may be a gerund also; but while the participle is
+an adjective, the gerund is a noun, differing from other nouns in
+retaining its power (if the active gerund of a transitive verb) of
+directly governing another noun.</p>
+
+<p>Both these are of great importance for our purpose. The participle
+itself, even when confusion with the other cannot occur, is much
+abused; and the slovenly uses of it that were good enough in Burke’s
+time are now recognized solecisms. Again, the identity between the two
+forms leads to loose and unaccountable gerund constructions that will
+probably be swept away, as so many other laxities have been, with the
+advance of grammatical consciousness. We shall have to deal with both
+these points at some length.</p>
+
+<p>It is indeed no wonder that the forms in <i>-ing</i> should require
+close attention. Exactly how many old English terminations <i>-ing</i>
+is heir to is a question debated by historical grammarians, which we
+are not competent to answer. But we may point out that <i>writing</i>
+may now be (1) participle—I was writing; I saw him writing; writing
+piously, he acts profanely—, (2) gerund or full verbal noun—I object
+to your writing that—, (3) hybrid between gerund and participle—I
+do not mind you writing it—, (4) detached verbal noun—Writing is an
+acquired art—, (5) concrete noun—This writing is illegible. Moreover,
+the verbal noun <i>writing</i> has the synonym <i>to write</i>,
+obligatory instead of it in some connexions, better in some, worse
+in some, and impossible in others; compare, for instance: I do not
+like the trouble of writing; I shall not take the trouble to write;
+the trouble of writing is too much for him; it is a trouble to write;
+writing is a trouble. The grammatical difficulties, that is, are
+complicated by considerations of idiom.</p>
+
+<p>In these preliminary remarks, however, it is only with the distinction
+or want of distinction between participle and gerund that we are
+concerned. The participle is an adjective, and should be in agreement
+with a noun or pronoun; the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span> gerund is a noun, of which it should be
+possible to say clearly whether, and why, it is in the subjective,
+objective, or possessive case, as we can of other nouns. That the
+distinction is often obscured, partly in consequence of the history of
+the language, will be clear from one or two facts and examples.</p>
+
+<p>1. <i>The man is building</i> contains what we should all now
+call, whether it is so or not historically, a participle or verbal
+adjective: <i>the house is building</i> (older but still living and
+correct English for <i>the house is being built</i>) contains, as its
+remarkable difference of meaning prepares us to believe, a gerund or
+verbal noun, once governed by a now lost preposition.</p>
+
+<p>2. In <i>He stopped, laughing</i> we have a participle; in <i>He
+stopped laughing</i>, a verbal noun governed directly by the verb; in
+<i>He burst out laughing</i>, a verbal noun governed by a vanished
+preposition.</p>
+
+<p>3. Present usage does not bear out the definite modern ideas of the
+distinction between participle and gerund as respectively adjective
+and noun. So long as that usage continues, there are various degrees
+of ambiguity, illustrated by the three following examples. It would
+be impossible to say, whatever the context, whether the writer of the
+first intended a gerund or a participle. In the second, a previous
+sentence would probably have decided the question. In the third, though
+grammar (again as modified by present usage) leaves the question open,
+the meaning of the sentence is practically decisive by itself.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Can he conceive <i>Matthew Arnold permitting</i> such a book to be
+written and published about himself?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>And no doubt that end will be secured by <i>the Commission sitting</i>
+in Paris.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Those who know least of them [the virtues] know very well
+how much they are concerned in <i>other people having</i>
+them.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the second of these, if <i>sitting</i> is a participle, the
+meaning is that the end will be secured by the Commission, which is
+described by way of identification as the one sitting in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span> Paris. If
+<i>sitting</i> is gerund, the end will be secured by the wise choice
+of Paris and not another place for its scene. If <i>Commission’s</i>
+were written, there could be no doubt the latter was the meaning. With
+<i>Commission</i>, there is, by present usage, absolutely no means of
+deciding between the two meanings apart from possible light in the
+context. In the third, common sense is able to tell us, though grammar
+gives the question up, that what is interesting is not the other people
+who have them, but the question whether other people have them.</p>
+
+<p>We shall, in the section on the gerund, take up the decided position
+that all gerunds ought to be made distinguishable from participles. We
+are quite aware, however, that in the first place a language does not
+remodel itself to suit the grammarian’s fancy for neat classification;
+that secondly the confusion is not merely wanton or ignorant, but the
+result of natural development; that thirdly the change involves some
+inconveniences, especially to hurried and careless writers. On the
+other hand it is certain that the permanent tendency in language is
+towards the correct and logical, not from it; it is merely hoped that
+the considerable number of instances here collected may attract the
+attention of some writers who have not been aware of the question,
+and perhaps convince them that the distinction is a useful one,
+that a writer ought to know and let us know whether he is using a
+participle or a gerund, and that to abandon the gerund when it cannot
+be distinguished without clumsiness need cause no difficulty to any but
+the very unskilful in handling words.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Participles</span></h3>
+
+<p>The unattached or wrongly attached participle is one of the blunders
+most common with illiterate or careless writers. But there are degrees
+of heinousness in the offence; our examples are arranged from 1. to 8.
+in these degrees, starting with perfect innocence.</p>
+
+<p>1. Participles that have passed into prepositions, conjunctions, or
+members of adverbial phrases.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Considering</i> the circumstances, <i>you</i> may go.</p>
+
+<p><i>Seeing</i> that it was involuntary, <i>he</i> can hardly be blamed.</p>
+
+<p>Roughly <i>speaking</i>, all <i>men</i> are liars.</p>
+
+<p><i>Looking</i> at it in a shortened perspective of time, those
+<i>years</i> of transition have the quality of a single consecutive
+occurrence.—<span class="smcap">H. G. Wells.</span></p>
+
+<p>The <i>Bill</i> ... will bring about, <i>assuming</i> that it meets
+with good fortune in the remaining stages of its passage through
+Parliament, a very useful reform.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Regarded as participles, these are incorrect. It is not <i>you</i>
+that consider, but I; not <i>he</i> that sees, but we; not <i>men</i>
+that roughly speak, but the moralist; not <i>years</i> that look, but
+philosophic historians; not <i>the Bill</i> that assumes, but the
+newspaper prophet. The development into prepositions, &amp;c., is a natural
+one, however; the only question about any particular word of the kind
+is whether the vox populi has yet declared for it; when it has, there
+is no more to be said; but when it has not, the process should be
+resisted as long as possible, writers acting as a suspensive House of
+Lords; an instance will be found in 4.</p>
+
+<p>Three quotations from Burke will show that he, like others of his time,
+felt himself more at liberty than most good writers would now feel
+themselves.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Founding</i> the appeal on this basis, <i>it was judged</i> proper
+to lay before Parliament....—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Flattering</i> themselves that their power is become necessary to
+the support of all order and government, <i>everything</i> which tends
+to the support of that power <i>is sanctified</i>.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Having considered</i> terror as producing an unnatural tension
+and certain violent emotions of the nerves; <i>it</i> easily
+<i>follows</i>.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Similar constructions may be found on almost every page of Smollett.</p>
+
+<p>2. Participles half justified by attachment to a pronoun implied in
+<i>my</i>, <i>your</i>, <i>his</i>, <i>their</i>. These are perhaps
+better avoided.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Having</i> thus <i>run</i> through the causes of the sublime with
+reference to all the senses, <i>my</i> first observation will be found
+very nearly true.—<span class="smcap">Burke.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Being</i> much <i>interested</i> in the correspondence bearing
+on the question ‘Do we believe?’, the first difficulty arising in
+<i>my</i> mind is....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>My</i> farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land,
+<i>having given</i> a hundred pounds for my predecessor’s good
+will.—<span class="smcap">Goldsmith.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. Mere unattached participles for which nothing can be said, except
+that they are sometimes inoffensive if the word to be supplied is very
+vague.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Doubling</i> the point, and <i>running</i> along the southern shore
+of the little peninsula, the scene changes.—<span class="smcap">F. M. Crawford.</span></p>
+
+<p>The most trying ... period was this one of enforced idleness
+<i>waiting</i> for the day of entry.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Having acquired</i> so many tropical colonies there is the
+undoubted duty attached to such possession of....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. Participles that may some day become prepositions, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Sir—<i>Referring</i> to your correspondent’s (the Bishop of
+Croydon’s) letter in to-day’s issue, <i>he</i> quotes at the close of
+it the following passage.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>He</i> must be the Bishop; for the immediately preceding <i>Sir</i>,
+marking the beginning of the letter, shows that no one else has been
+mentioned; but if we had given the sentence without this indication, no
+one could possibly have believed that this was so; <i>referring</i> is
+not yet unparticipled.</p>
+
+<p>5. An unwary writer sometimes attaches a participle to the subject of
+a previous sentence, assuming that it will be the subject of the new
+sentence also, and then finds (or rather is not awake enough to find)
+himself mistaken. This is a trap into which good writers sometimes
+fall, and so dangerous to bad writers that we shall give many examples.
+It is important for the tiro to realize that he has not satisfied the
+elementary requirements of grammar until he has attached the participle
+to a noun in the same sentence as itself, not in another. He must also
+remember that, for instance, <i>I went and he came</i>, though often
+spoken of loosely as a sentence, is in fact as fully two sentences as
+if each half of it were ten lines long, and the two were parted by a
+full stop and not connected by a conjunction.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>They</i> had now reached the airy dwelling where Mrs. Macshake
+resided, and <i>having rung, the door</i> was at length most
+deliberately opened.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>The lovers</i> sought a shelter, and, mutually <i>charmed</i> with
+each other, <i>time</i> flew for a while on downy pinions.—<span class="smcap">S.
+Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>A molecular <i>change</i> is propagated to the muscles by which the
+body is retracted, and <i>causing</i> them to contract, <i>the act</i>
+of retraction is brought about.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Joseph</i>, as they supposed, by tampering with Will, got all my
+secrets, and was acquainted with all my motions—; and <i>having</i>
+also <i>undertaken</i> to watch all those of his young lady, the wise
+<i>family</i> were secure.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Miss Pinkerton</i> ... in vain ... tried to overawe her.
+<i>Attempting</i> once to scold her in public, <i>Rebecca</i> hit upon
+the ... plan of answering her in French, which quite routed the old
+woman.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>But <i>he</i> thought it derogatory to a brave knight passively to
+await the assault, and <i>ordering</i> his own men to charge, the
+hostile <i>squadrons</i>, rapidly advancing against each other, met
+midway on the plain.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+
+<p>Alvarado, roused by the noise of the attack on this quarter, hastened
+to the support of his officer, when <i>Almagro</i>, seizing the
+occasion, pushed across the bridge, dispersed the small body left to
+defend it, and, <i>falling</i> on Alvarado’s rear, <i>that general</i>
+saw himself hemmed in on all sides.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Murtagh</i>, without a word of reply, went to the door, and
+<i>shouting</i> into the passage something in Irish, <i>the room</i>
+was instantly filled with bog-trotters.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>But, as before, <i>Anne</i> once more made me smart, and <i>having
+equipped</i> herself in a gown and bonnet of mine—not of the
+newest—off <i>we</i> set.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>At this I was silent for a little, and then <i>I</i> resolved to speak
+plainly to Anne. But not <i>being</i> ready with my words, <i>she</i>
+got in first.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>For many years <i>I</i> had to contend with much opposition in the
+nature of scepticism; but <i>having had</i> hundreds of successful
+cases and proofs <i>it</i> has become such an established fact in the
+eastern counties that many landowners, &amp;c., would not think of sinking
+a well without first seeking the aid of a water diviner.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>6. A more obvious trap, and consequently less fatal, is a change from
+the active construction that may have been intended to a passive,
+without corresponding alterations. If the writers of the next two had
+used <i>we must admit</i> instead of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span> <i>it must be admitted</i>,
+<i>a policy that they put forward</i>, instead of <i>a policy put
+forward</i>, the participles <i>hesitating</i> and <i>believing</i>
+would have had owners.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>While <i>hesitating</i> to accept this terrible indictment of French
+infancy, <i>it must be admitted</i> that French literature in all its
+strength and wealth is a grown-up literature.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>He and those with whom he acted were responsible for the policy
+promulgated—<i>a policy</i> put forward in all seriousness and
+honesty <i>believing</i> it to be essential to the obtaining of the
+better government of Ireland.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>7. Participles that seem to belong to a noun, but do not.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Letters on the constant stopping of omnibuses, thus <i>causing</i>
+considerable suffering to the horses.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Does <i>causing</i> agree with <i>letters</i>? Then the letters annoy
+the horses. With <i>stopping</i>? Then stopping causes suffering by
+stopping (<i>thus</i>). With <i>omnibuses</i>? The horses possibly
+blame those innocents, but we can hardly suppose a human being, even
+the writer of the sentence, so illogical. The word <i>thus</i>,
+however, is often considered to have a kind of dispensing power,
+freeing its participle from all obligations; so:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Prince was, by the special command of his Majesty the
+Emperor, made the guardian of H.I.H. the Crown Prince, <i>thus
+necessitating</i> the Prince’s constant presence in the capital of
+Japan.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A very wealthy man can never be sure even of friendship,—while the
+highest, strongest and noblest kind of love is nearly always denied to
+him, in this way <i>carrying out</i> the fulfilment of those strange
+but true words:—‘How hardly shall he that is a rich man enter the
+Kingdom of Heaven!’—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is not <i>love</i> that carries out, but the power that denies love,
+which is not mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>8. Really bad unattached or wrongly attached participles. The reader
+will generally find no difficulty in seeing what has led to the
+blunder, and if he will take the trouble to do this, will be less
+likely to make similar blunders himself.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And then <i>stooping</i> to take up the key to let <i>myself</i> into
+the garden, <i>he</i> started and looked as if he heard somebody near
+the door.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Sir—With reference to this question ‘Do we believe?’, while
+<i>recognizing</i> the vastness of the subject, its modern aspect has
+some definite features.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Taken</i> in conjunction with the splendid white and brown
+trout-fishing of the Rosses lakes and rivers, anglers have now the
+opportunity of fishing one of the best, if not the best, fishery to be
+obtained in Ireland.—<span class="smcap">Advt.</span></p>
+
+<p>Sir—<i>Having read</i> with much interest the letters re ‘Believe
+only’ now appearing in the <i>Daily Telegraph</i>, perhaps some of
+your readers might be interested to know the following texts which
+have led some great men to ‘believe only’.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Being pushed</i> unceremoniously to one side—which was precisely
+what I wished—he usurped my place.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>The higher forms of speech acquire a secondary strength from
+association. <i>Having</i>, in actual life, habitually <i>heard</i>
+them in connexion with mental impressions, and <i>having been
+accustomed</i> to meet with them in the most powerful writing, they
+come to have in themselves a species of force.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Standing</i> over one of the sluices of the Aswan dam last January,
+not only was the vibration evident to the senses....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The following passage may be commended for use in examination papers.
+‘Always <i>beloved</i> by the Imperial couple who are to-day the
+Sovereign lord and lady of Great Britain, their Majesties have, on
+many occasions since the Devonshire houses rejoiced in a mistress once
+more, honoured them by visits extending over some days.’—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The last, as the <i>Times</i> reviewer has noticed, will repay analysis
+in several ways.</p>
+
+<p><b>9. The absolute construction</b> is not much to be recommended,
+having generally an alien air in English; but it is sometimes useful.
+It must be observed, first, that the case used should now invariably be
+the subjective, though it was otherwise in old English. Secondly, it
+is very seldom advisable to make an absolute construction and insert a
+pronoun for the purpose when the participle might simply be attached
+in ordinary agreement to a noun already to hand. Thirdly, it is very
+bad to use the construction, but omit to give the participle a noun
+or pronoun to itself. These three transgressions will be illustrated,
+in the same order, by the next three examples. But many of the wrong
+sentences in 5<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span> above may be regarded as absolute constructions with
+the subject omitted.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I, with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most
+capricious, the most maddening of masters (<i>him</i> before me always
+excepted)....—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>‘Special’ is a much overworked word, <i>it</i> being loosely used to
+mean great in degree, also peculiar in kind.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+
+<p>This is said now because, <i>having been said</i> before, I have been
+judged as if I had made the pretensions which were then and which are
+now again disclaimed.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Gerund</span></h3>
+
+<p>There are three questions to be considered: whether a writer ought to
+let us know that he is using a gerund and not a participle; when a
+gerund may be used without its subject’s being expressed; when a gerund
+with preposition is to be preferred to the infinitive.</p>
+
+<p><b>1. Is the gerund to be made recognizable?</b> And, in the
+circumstances that make it possible, that is, when its subject is
+expressed, is this to be done sometimes, or always?</p>
+
+<p>It is done by putting what we call for shortness’ sake the subject of
+the gerund (i. e., the word <i>me</i> or <i>my</i> in <i>me doing</i>
+or <i>my doing</i>) in the possessive instead of in the objective or
+subjective case.</p>
+
+<p>Take the typical sentence: I dislike my best friend(’s) violating
+my privacy. It cannot be a true account of the matter to say
+that <i>friend</i> is the object of <i>I dislike</i>, and has
+a participle <i>violating</i> attached to it. For (a) we can
+substitute <i>resent</i>, which never takes a personal object, for
+<i>dislike</i>, without changing the sense. (b) If we substitute a
+passive construction, also without changing the sense, we find that
+<i>dislike</i> has quite a different object—<i>privacy</i>.—I dislike
+my privacy being violated by my friend. (c) Many of us would be willing
+to adopt the sentiment conveyed who yet would not admit for a moment
+that they disliked their best friend even when he intruded; they
+condemn the sin, but not the sinner.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Violating</i> then is not an ordinary participle. It does not
+follow yet that it is a gerund. It may be an extraordinary participle,
+fused into one notion with the noun, so that <i>a friend violating</i>
+means <i>the-violation-by-a-friend</i>. The Latin scholar here at once
+puts in the idiom of <i>occisus Caesar</i>, which does not generally
+mean <i>Caesar after he was killed</i>, as it naturally should, but
+the killing of Caesar, or the fact that Caesar had been killed. The
+parallel is close (though the use is practically confined to the
+passive in Latin), and familiar to all who know any Latin at all.
+But it shows not so much what the English construction is as how
+educated people have been able to reconcile themselves to an ambiguous
+and not very reasonable idiom—not very reasonable, that is, after
+language has thrown off its early limitations, and got over the first
+difficulty of accomplishing abstract expression of any kind. The sort
+of fusion assumed is further illustrated for the Latinist, though not
+so closely, by the Latin accusative and infinitive. This theory then
+takes <i>violating</i> for a participle fused into one notion with
+<i>friend</i>. There are two difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>I. The construction in English is, though in the nature of things not
+as common, yet as easy in the passive as in the active. Now the passive
+of <i>violating</i> is either <i>violated</i> or <i>being violated</i>.
+It is quite natural to say, Privacy violated once is no longer
+inviolable. Why then should it be most unnatural to say, The worst of
+privacy violated once is that it is no longer inviolable? No one, not
+purposely seeking the unusual for some reason or other, would omit
+<i>being</i> before <i>violated</i> in the second. Yet as participles
+<i>violated</i> and <i>being violated</i> are equally good—not indeed
+always, but in this context, as the simpler Privacy sentence shows. The
+only difference between the two participles (except that in brevity,
+which tells against <i>being violated</i>) is that the longer form
+can also be the gerund, and the shorter cannot. The almost invariable
+choice of it is due to the instinctive feeling that what we are using
+is or ought to be the gerund. A more<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span> convincing instance than this
+mere adaptation of our original example may be added:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Many years ago I became impressed with the necessity for <i>our
+infantry being taught and practised</i> in the skilful use of their
+rifle.—<span class="smcap">Lord Roberts.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>The necessity for our infantry taught and practised</i> is
+absolutely impossible. But why, <i>if being</i> taught is participle,
+and not gerund?</p>
+
+<p>II. Assuming that the fused-participle theory is satisfactory and
+recognized, whence comes the general, though not universal impression
+among those who, without being well versed in grammar, are habitually
+careful how they speak and write, that constructions like the following
+are ignorant vulgarisms?—It is no use he (his) doing it; it is no use
+him (his) doing it; that need not prevent us (our) believing; excuse
+me (my) interrupting you; a thing (thing’s) existing does not prove
+that it ought to exist; I was annoyed by Tom (Tom’s) hesitating; the
+Tsar (Tsar’s) leaving Russia is significant; it failed through the King
+(King’s) refusing his signature; without us (our) hearing the man, the
+facts cannot be got at; without the man (man’s) telling us himself, we
+can never know. With a single exception for one (not both) of the first
+two, none of these ought to cause a moment’s uneasiness to any one who
+was consciously or unconsciously in the fused-participle frame of mind;
+and if they do cause uneasiness it shows that that frame of mind is not
+effectively present.</p>
+
+<p>The Fused-Participle Theory, having no sufficient answer to these
+objections, but seeing that the gerund’s case is also weak, naturally
+tries a counter-attack:—If on the other hand the gerund theory is
+satisfactory and recognized, how is it conceivable that people should
+leave out the possessive <i>’s</i> in the reckless way they do? To
+which, however, the Gerund makes reply:—I regret that they do leave
+it out, but at least we can see how they come to; it is the combined
+result of a mistake and an inconvenience. The mistake is caused by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>
+certain types of sentence in which a real, not a fused participle is
+so used that the noun and its (unfused) participle give a sense hardly
+distinguishable from a possessive noun and a gerund. Examples are:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This plan has now been abandoned owing to <i>circumstances
+requiring</i> the convocation of representatives of the people at the
+earliest possible moment.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... by imposing as great difficulty as possible on <i>parents and
+publicans using</i> child messengers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Of course no obstacles should be put in the way of <i>charitable
+people providing</i> free or other meals if they think
+fit.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The notion of <i>the Czar being addressed</i> in such terms by the
+nobility of his capital would have been regarded as an absolute
+impossibility.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is of course a difference. For instance, in the example about
+the Czar, as in a previous one about <i>conceiving Matthew Arnold
+permitting</i>, the participle has a pictorial effect; it invites
+us to imagine the physical appearance of these two great men under
+indignity instead of merely thinking of the abstract indignity, as
+we should have done if <i>Czar’s</i> and <i>Arnold’s</i> had shown
+that we had a gerund; but the difference is very fine; the possessive
+sign might be inserted without practical effect in all these four,
+and in hundreds like them. And unlearned people may be excused for
+deducing that the subject of the gerund can be used at pleasure without
+the possessive sign, while the learned comfort themselves with the
+fused-participle theory. That is the mistake. The inconvenience is
+this: it is easy enough to use the possessive adjectives (<i>my</i>,
+&amp;c.), and to add the possessive sign to most names and many single
+nouns; but the subject of a gerund is often a long phrase, after which
+the sign is intolerable. So the mistake (that the gerund may have a
+subject not marked by the possessive) is eagerly applied to obviating
+the inconvenience (that long gerund subjects must be avoided). And that
+is why people drop their possessive <i>’s</i>, and why you, the Fused
+Participle, flourish, defrauding both me, the Gerund,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span> and the honest
+participle. Thus answered, the Fused Participle does not continue the
+argument, but pleads only that there is room for all three forms.</p>
+
+<p>Before giving some examples to help in the decision, we shall summarize
+our own opinion. (1) It is not a matter to be decided by appeal
+to historical grammar. All three constructions may have separate
+legitimate descents, and yet in the interests of clear thought and
+expression it may be better for one of them to be abandoned. (2) There
+are two opposite tendencies at present: among careful writers, to
+avoid the fused participle (this, being negative, can naturally not
+be illustrated) and to put possessive signs in slightly uncomfortable
+places by way of compensation; among slovenly writers, to throw off
+all limits of length for the subject of the fused participle. (3) Long
+fused-participle phrases are a variety of abstract expression, and
+as such to be deprecated. Among the resources of civilization is the
+power of choosing between different ways of saying the same thing; and
+literary skill is very much a matter of exercising that power; a writer
+should recognize that if he cannot get round an ugly fused participle
+there is still much for him to learn. (4) Opportunities for ambiguity
+are so abundant in English, owing to the number of words whose parsing
+depends on context, that all aids to precision are valuable; and it
+is not too much to expect a writer to know and let us know whether he
+means a participle or a gerund.</p>
+
+<p><i>a.</i> That the possessive of all pronouns that have the form should
+be used instead of the objective or subjective is hardly disputed.
+Correct accordingly:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>You may rely upon <i>me</i> doing all in my power.—<span class="smcap">Sir W.
+Harcourt.</span></p>
+
+<p>The confounded fetterlock clapped on my movements by old Griffiths
+prevents <i>me</i> repairing to England in person.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>But when it comes to <i>us</i> following his life and
+example....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Nothing can prevent <i>it</i> being the main issue at the General
+Election.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span></p>
+
+<p>One of them, if you will pardon <i>me</i> reminding you, is that no
+discussion is to pass between us.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Frederick had already accepted the crown, lest James should object to
+<i>him</i> doing so.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... notwithstanding the fact that their suspicions of ease-loving,
+ear-tickling parsons prevent <i>them</i> supporting the commercial
+churches of our time.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>b.</i> Examples in which the possessive of nouns might be written
+without a qualm.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Nearly a week passed over without <i>Mr. Fairford</i> hearing a word
+directly from his son.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Downe Wright had not forgiven the indignity of <i>her son</i>
+having been refused by Mary.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>In no other religion is there a thought of <i>man</i> being saved by
+grace and not by merit.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>And it is said that, on <i>a visitor</i> once asking to see his
+library, Descartes led him....—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is true that one of our objects was to prevent<a id="FNanchor_10" href="#Footnote_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> <i>children</i>
+‘sipping’ the liquor they were sent for.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Orders were sometimes issued to prohibit[1a] <i>soldiers</i> buying
+and eating cucumbers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Renewed efforts at a settlement in 1891 failed through the
+<i>Swedish Government</i> leading off with a flippant and offensive
+suggestion.—<span class="smcap">Nansen.</span></p>
+
+<p>Hurried reading results in <i>the learner</i> forgetting half of what
+he reads, or in <i>his</i> forming vague conceptions.—<span class="smcap">Sweet.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>c.</i> All the last set involved what were either actual or virtual
+names of persons; there is more difficulty with abstract nouns,
+compound subjects, and words of which the possessive is ugly. Those
+that may perhaps bear the possessive mark will be put first, and
+alterations suggested for the others.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We look forward to <i>much attention</i> being given.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He affirmed that such increases were the rule in that city on <i>the
+change</i> being made.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I live in hopes of <i>this discussion</i> resulting in some
+modification in our form of belief.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (that
+this discussion may result)</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span></p>
+<p>The real objection to the possessive here is merely the addition to the
+crowd of sibilants.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In the event of <i>the passage</i> being found, he will esteem it a
+favour ... (if the passage is found)</p>
+
+<p>Conceive my vexation at being told by Papa this morning that he had
+not the least objection to <i>Edward and me</i> marrying whenever we
+pleased.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span> (our)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Or, if the names are essential, <i>did not in the least mind how soon
+Edward and I married</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It has been replied to the absurd taunt about <i>the French</i>
+inventing nothing, that at least Descartes invented German
+philosophy.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span> (Frenchmen’s)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>d.</i> A modern construction called the compound possessive was
+mentioned at the end of the section on Cases. It is sometimes ugly,
+sometimes inoffensive; that is a matter of degree and of knowing where
+to draw the line; there is no objection to it in principle. And the
+application of it will sometimes help out a gerund. The first quotation
+gives a compound possessive simply; the second, a gerund construction
+to which it ought to be applicable; the third and fourth, two to which
+it can be applied; and the last, one to which it cannot.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A protestation, read at Edinburgh, was followed, on <i>Archibald
+Johnston of Warriston’s</i> suggestion, by....—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>The retirement of Judge Stonor was made the subject of special
+reference yesterday on the occasion of <i>Sir W. L. Selfe,
+his successor</i>, taking his seat in Marylebone County
+Court.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The mere fact of <i>such a premier</i> being endured
+shows....—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+
+<p>There is no possibility of <i>the dissolution of the legislative
+union</i> becoming a vital question.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>If some means could be devised for ... insisting upon <i>many
+English guardians of the poor</i> making themselves more
+acquainted....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The only objection to a possessive mark after <i>successor</i> is
+that the two commas cannot be dispensed with; we must say <i>when
+... took</i> for <i>on the occasion of ... taking</i>. <i>Such a
+premier’s</i> will certainly pass. In the <i>Spectator</i> sentence,
+we should ourselves allow <i>union’s</i>; opinions will differ. But
+to put the <i>’s</i> after <i>poor</i> in the last sentence would
+be ridiculous; that sentence must be rewritten—insisting that many
+English<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span> guardians of the poor should make—or else <i>poor-law
+Guardians’</i> must be used.</p>
+
+<p><i>e.</i> Sometimes we can get over the difficulty without abandoning
+the gerund, by some slight change of order.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This incentive can only be supplied by <i>the nation itself</i> taking
+the matter up seriously.—<span class="smcap">Lord Roberts.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If <i>itself’s</i> is objected to, omit <i>itself</i> (or shift it to
+the end), and write <i>nation’s</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>f.</i> But many types of sentence remain that will have to be
+completely changed if the gerund is to be recognizable. It will
+be admitted about most of our examples that the change is not to
+be regretted. The subject of the gerund is italicized in each, to
+emphasize its length.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We have to account for <i>the collision of two great fleets, so equal
+in material strength that the issue was thought doubtful by many
+careful statisticians</i>, ending in the total destruction of one of
+them and in the immunity of the other from damage greater than might
+well be incurred in a mere skirmish.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For <i>account for ... ending</i> write <i>ascertain why ... ended</i>.
+The sentence is radically bad, because the essential construction seems
+complete at <i>collision</i>—a false scent. That, which is one of the
+worst literary sins, is the frequent result of long fused participles.
+It is quite practically possible here for readers to have supposed that
+they were going to be told why the fleets met, and not why the meeting
+ended as it did. In the remaining sentences, we shall say when there is
+false scent, but leave the reader to examine it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The success of the negotiations depends on <i>the Russian Minister at
+Tokio</i> being allowed to convince Japan that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The compound possessive—Tokio’s—is tempting, but perhaps overbold.
+Insert <i>whether</i> after <i>depends on</i>, and write <i>is</i> for
+<i>being</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>So far from <i>this</i> being the case, the policy ... was actually
+decided upon before ... the question ... was raised.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Omit <i>being the case</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We are not without tokens of <i>an openness for this higher truth
+also, of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span> a keen though uncultivated sense for it</i>, having existed
+in Burns.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For the first <i>of</i> write <i>that</i>, omit the second <i>of</i>,
+and omit <i>having</i>. False scent.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There is no apparent evidence of <i>an early peace</i> being
+necessitated by the pecuniary exigencies of the Russian
+Government.—<span class="smcap">Sir Howard Vincent.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For <i>of ... being</i> write <i>that ... will be</i>, if
+<i>peace’s</i> cannot be endured.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The general effect of his words was to show the absurdity
+of <i>the Secretary of State for War, and our military
+authorities generally</i>, denouncing the Militia as useless or
+redundant.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For <i>the absurdity of ... denouncing</i> write <i>how absurd it was
+for ... to denounce</i>. False scent, though less deceptive.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Apparently his mission was decided upon without <i>that of the
+British and Spanish Ministers</i> having been taken into account,
+or, at all events, without their having been sufficiently reckoned
+with.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Without regard (at all events without sufficient regard) to that of....</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... capital seeking employment in foreign protected countries, in
+consequence of <i>manufacturing business in many branches in which
+it might be employed at home</i> being rendered unprofitable by our
+system of free trade.—<span class="smcap">Lord Goschen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For <i>in consequence of ... being</i> write <i>because ... has
+been</i>. Bad false scent again.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>So far from <i>the relief given to agriculture by the State paying
+one-half of the rates</i> being inequitable, it is but a bare act of
+justice.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Observe the fused participle within fused participle here; and read
+thus: So far from its being inequitable that the state should relieve,
+&amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>After these specimens, chosen not as exceptional ones, but merely as
+not admitting of simple correction by insertion of the possessive mark,
+the reader will perhaps agree that the long gerund subject—or rather
+noun phrase of the fused participle—is a monstrosity, the abolition of
+which would be a relief to him, and good discipline for the writer.</p>
+
+<p>Two sentences are added to show the chaotic state of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span> present practice.
+Noticing the bold use of the strict gerund in the first, we conclude
+that the author is a sound gerundite, faithful in spite of all
+temptations; but a few pages later comes the needless relapse into
+fused participle.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I remember old <i>Colney’s</i> once, in old days, <i>calling</i> that
+kind of marriage a sarcophagus.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>She had thought in her heart that <i>Mr. Barmby espousing</i> the girl
+would smoothe a troubled prospect.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The following looks like a deliberate avoidance of both constructions
+by a writer who is undecided between the two. <i>Its being</i> is what
+should have been written.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I do not say that the advice is not sound, or complain that it is
+given. I do deprecate <i>that it should be</i> taken.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And perhaps a shyness of <i>something’s being shown</i> accounts for
+the next odd arrangement; it is true that entire recasting is what is
+called for.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>There being shown to be something</i> radically defective in
+the management of the Bank <i>led</i> to the appointment of a
+Committee.—<span class="smcap">H. D. Macleod.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><b>2. When must the subject of the gerund (or infinitive) be expressed,
+and when omitted?</b></p>
+
+<p>This is not a controversial matter like the last; the principles are
+quite simple, and will be accepted; but it is necessary to state and
+illustrate them because they are often forgotten. As the same mistakes
+are sometimes made with the infinitive, that is to be considered as
+included.</p>
+
+<p>Roughly, the subject of the gerund (or infinitive) should be expressed
+if it is different from, and omitted if it is the same as, the subject
+of the sentence. To omit it when different is positively wrong, and may
+produce actual ambiguity or worse, though sometimes there is only a
+slipshod effect; to insert it when the same is generally clumsy.</p>
+
+<p>No one would say ‘I succeeded to his property upon dying’, because,
+<i>I</i> being the subject of the sentence, <i>my</i> is naturally
+suggested instead of the necessary <i>his</i> as subject of the gerund;
+the <i>his</i> must be inserted before <i>dying</i>, even though<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span> the
+nature of the case obviates ambiguity. To take an instance that will
+show both sides, the following is correct:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I shut the door and stood with my back to it. Then, instead of <i>his
+philandering</i> with Bess, I, Clementina MacTaggart, had some plain
+speech with John Barnaby.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Subject of the sentence, I; subject of the gerund, he; they are
+different; therefore the <i>he</i> must be expressed, in the shape of
+<i>his</i>. Now rewrite the main sentence as—John Barnaby heard some
+plain speech from me, Clementina MacTaggart. The sense is the same; but
+the <i>his</i> before <i>philandering</i> at once becomes superfluous;
+it is not yet seriously in the way, because we do not know what is the
+subject of <i>philandering</i>, the name only coming later. Now rewrite
+it again as—Then John Barnaby heard some plain speech from ... instead
+of ... The <i>his</i> is now so clumsy as to be almost impossible.</p>
+
+<p>The insertion of superfluous subjects is much less common than the
+omission of necessary ones; but three examples follow. The first is a
+rare and precious variety; the second has no apparent justification;
+for the third it may be said that the unusual <i>his</i> has the same
+effect as the insertion of the parenthetic words <i>as he actually
+does</i> after <i>limiting</i> would have had.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>You took food to him, but instead of <i>he reaching</i> out his hand
+and taking it, he kept asking for food.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Harsh facts: sure as she was of <i>her</i> never <i>losing</i> her
+filial hold of the beloved.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>I have said that Mr. Chamberlain has no warrant for <i>his
+limiting</i> the phrase ... to the competitive manufacture of
+goods.—<span class="smcap">Lord Goschen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In giving the rule summarily, we used the phrase <i>subject of the
+sentence</i>. That phrase is not to be confined to the subject of the
+main sentence, but to be referred instead, when necessary, to the
+subject of the subordinate clause in which the gerund may stand. For
+instance:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The good, the illuminated, sit apart from the rest, censuring their
+dullness and vices, as if they thought that, <i>by sitting</i>
+very grand in their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span> chairs, the very brokers, attorneys, and
+congressmen would see the error of their ways, and flock to
+them.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here <i>by sitting</i> breaks the rule, though the subject of
+<i>sitting</i> is the same as that of the main verb <i>sit</i>, because
+the subject of the clause in which <i>sitting</i> comes is not <i>the
+good</i>, but <i>brokers, &amp;c.</i> The right way to mend this is not to
+insert <i>their</i> before <i>sitting</i>—which after all is clumsy,
+though correct—but to make <i>the good</i> the subject of the clause
+also, by writing <i>as if they thought that by sitting ... they would
+make the brokers ... see the error</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And sometimes <i>subject of the sentence</i> is to be interpreted still
+more freely as the word grammatically dominant in the part of the
+sentence that contains the gerund. For instance:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>From the Bible alone was she taught the duties of morality, but
+familiarized to her taste <i>by hearing</i> its stories and precepts
+from the lips she best loved.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here the dominant word is <i>Bible</i>, to which <i>familiarized</i>
+belongs. So, though <i>she</i> does happen to be the main subject,
+<i>her</i> must be inserted because the <i>familiarized</i> phrase
+removes the gerund from the reach of the main subject.</p>
+
+<p>After these explanations we add miscellaneous instances. It will be
+seen that transgression of the rule, though it seldom makes a sentence
+ambiguous enough to deceive, easily makes it ambiguous enough to amuse
+the reader at wrong moments, or gives an impression of amateurish work.
+Mistakes are mended, sometimes by inserting the subject of the gerund
+(or infinitive), sometimes by changing the main subject to make it the
+same as that of the gerund, sometimes by other recasting.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... an excellent arrangement for a breeching, which, when
+released, remains with the carriage, so that lead or centre horses
+can be put in the wheel <i>without having</i> to affix a new
+breeching.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lucky, reflects the reader, since horses are not good at affixing
+breechings. Write <i>the drivers can put ... horses ... without having
+to affix</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I cultivated a passionless and cold exterior, for I discovered that
+<i>by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span> assuming</i> such a character, certain otherwise crafty persons
+would talk more readily before me.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Write <i>if I assumed</i>; or else <i>I should induce certain ...
+persons to talk</i>. It will be noticed that the mistake here, and
+often, is analogous to the most frequent form of wrongly attached
+participle (participle, 5); the writer does not observe that he has
+practically passed from the sphere of the sentence whose subject was
+the word that he still allows to operate.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>After following</i> a country Church of England clergyman for a
+period of half a century, a newly-appointed, youthful vicar, totally
+unacquainted with rural life, comes into the parish, and at once
+commences to alter the services of the Church, believed in by the
+parishioners for generations.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Grammar gives <i>his</i>, i. e., the new vicar’s, as subject
+of <i>following</i>; it is really either <i>my</i> or <i>the
+parishioners’</i>. Insert <i>my</i> or <i>our</i>, or write <i>After we
+(I) have followed</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I am sensible that <i>by conniving</i> at it it will take too deep
+root ever to be eradicated.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Insert <i>our</i>, or write <i>if connived at</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This was experienced by certain sensitive temperaments, either by
+sensations which produced shivering, or <i>by seeing</i> at night a
+peculiar light in the air.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Who or what sees? Certainly not <i>this</i>, the main subject. Not even
+<i>temperaments</i>, which have no eyes. Write <i>Persons of sensitive
+temperament experienced this, &amp;c.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But the commercial interests of both Great Britain and the United
+States were too closely affected by the terms of the Russo-Chinese
+agreement <i>to let</i> it pass unnoticed.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is not the interests that cannot let it pass, but the countries.
+Insert <i>for those countries</i> before <i>to let</i>; or write
+<i>Both Great Britain and the United States were too closely affected
+in their interests to let....</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And it would be well for all concerned, for motor drivers and the
+public alike, if this were made law, instead of <i>fixing</i> a
+maximum speed.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Write <i>if the law required this....</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And <i>in order to bring</i> her to a right understanding, she
+underwent a system of persecution.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Write <i>they subjected her to</i> for <i>she underwent</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Her friendship is too precious to me, not <i>to doubt</i> my own
+merits on the one hand, and not to be anxious for the preservation of
+it on the other.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Write <i>I value her friendship too highly not to....</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>One cannot do good to a man whose mouth has been gagged <i>in order
+not to hear</i> what he desires for his welfare.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Grammar suggests that his mouth—or, if indulgent, that he—is not to
+hear; but the person meant is <i>one</i>. Write <i>one has gagged</i>
+for <i>has been gagged</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Germany has, alas! victories enough <i>not to add</i> one of
+the kind which would have been implied in the retirement of M.
+Delcassé.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is France, not Germany, that should not add. Write <i>without
+France’s adding</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>In order to obtain</i> peace, ordinary battles followed by
+ordinary victories and ordinary results will only lead to a useless
+prolongation of the struggle.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is a triumph of inconsequence. Write <i>If peace is the object, it
+should be remembered that ordinary....</i></p>
+
+<p>It will have occurred to the reader that, while most of the sentences
+quoted are to be condemned, objection to a few of them might be called
+pedantic. The fact is that every writer probably breaks the rule
+often, and escapes notice, other people’s, his own, or both. Different
+readers, however, will be critical in different degrees; and whoever
+breaks the rule does so at his own risk; if his offence is noticed,
+that is hanging evidence against him by itself; if it is not noticed,
+it is not an offence. Of saying on page 127 <i>Mistakes are mended
+sometimes by inserting the subject</i>, we plead Guilty if we were
+caught in the act, but otherwise Not Guilty.</p>
+
+<p><b>3. Choice between the gerund with preposition and the infinitive.</b></p>
+
+<p>It was said in the preliminary section on the Participle and
+Gerund that <i>writing</i>—the verbal noun or gerund—and <i>to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span>
+write</i>—the infinitive—are in some sense synonyms; but phrases
+were given showing that it is by no means always indifferent which of
+the two is used. It is a matter of idiom rather than of grammar; but
+this seems the most convenient place for drawing attention to it. To
+give satisfactory rules would require many more examples and much more
+space than can be afforded. But something will be gained if students
+are convinced (1) that many of the mistakes made give sentences the
+appearance of having been written by a foreigner or one who is not
+at home with the literary language; (2) that the mistakes are nearly
+always on one side, the infinitive being the form that should only be
+used with caution; (3) that a slight change in arrangement may require
+a change from infinitive to gerund or vice versa.</p>
+
+<p><i>a.</i> When the infinitive or gerund is attached to a noun, defining
+or answering the question <i>what</i> (hope, &amp;c.) about it, it is
+almost always better to use the gerund with of; not quite always,
+however; for instance, <i>an intention to return</i>, usually, and <i>a
+tendency to think</i> always.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The vain <i>hope to be understood</i> by everybody possessed of a
+ballot makes us in the United States perhaps guiltier than public
+men in Great Britain in the use of that monstrous muddled dichotomy
+‘capital and labour’.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>What hope?—That of being understood. Write it so, and treat all the
+following similarly:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The habitual <i>necessity to amass</i> [of amassing] matter for the
+weekly sermon, set him noting...—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>We wish to be among the first to felicitate Mr. Whitelaw Reid upon his
+<i>opportunity to exercise</i> [of exercising] again the distinguished
+talents which...—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Men lie twenty times in as many hours in the <i>hope to propitiate</i>
+[of propitiating] you.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>We left the mound in the twilight, with the <i>design to return</i>
+[of returning] the next morning.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The main duties of government were omitted—the <i>duty to
+instruct</i> [of instructing] the ignorant, <i>to supply</i> [of
+supplying] the poor with work and good guidance.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hay’s <i>purpose to preserve or restore</i> [of preserving or
+restoring] the integrity of the administrative entity of China has
+never been abandoned.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>My <i>custom to be dressed</i> [of being dressed] for the day,
+as soon as breakfast is over, ... will make such a step less
+suspected.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>He points out that if Russia accepted the agreement, she would not
+attain her <i>object to clear</i> [of clearing] the situation,
+inasmuch as....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>What accounts for these mistakes is the analogy of forms like: Our
+design was to return; it is a duty to instruct; man has power to
+interpret (but <i>the</i> power of interpreting); it is my custom to be
+dressed.</p>
+
+<p>When, however, the noun thus defined is more or less closely fused into
+a single idea with the verb that governs it, the infinitive becomes
+legitimate, though seldom necessary.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The menace to have secreted Solmes, and that other, that I <i>had
+thoughts to run away</i> with her foolish brother, ... so much
+terrified the dear creature....—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>I passed my childhood here, and <i>had a weakness here to close</i> my
+life.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span></p>
+
+<p>Before ten o’clock in the evening, Gasca <i>had the satisfaction to
+see</i> the bridge so well secured that....—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+
+<p>Almagro’s followers <i>made as little scruple to appropriate</i>
+to their own use such horses and arms as they could
+find.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Had thoughts</i> means <i>was planning</i>; <i>had a weakness</i>
+means <i>desired</i>; <i>had the satisfaction</i>, <i>was pleased</i>;
+<i>made as little scruple</i>, <i>scrupled as little</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Again, an interval between the noun defined and the infinitive or
+gerund makes the former more tolerable.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>The necessity</i> which has confronted the Tokio War Office,
+<i>to enlarge</i> their views of the requirements of the
+situation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Or the infinitive is used to avoid a multiplication of <i>of</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He had as much as any man ever had that <i>gift</i> of a great
+preacher <i>to make</i> the oratorical fervour which persuades
+himself while it lasts into the abiding conviction of his
+hearers.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+
+<p>The pastures of Tartary were still remembered by the tenacious
+<i>practice</i> of the Norsemen <i>to eat</i> horseflesh at religious
+feasts.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If the noun has the indefinite article the infinitive is better
+sometimes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But our recognition of it implies a corresponding <i>duty to make</i>
+the most of such advantages.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>A</i> duty to make: <i>the</i> duty of making. Compare <i>power</i>
+and <i>the power</i> above.</p>
+
+<p>The following is probably an adaptation (not to be commended) of <i>it
+is necessary for Russia to secure</i>—<i>for Russia to secure</i>
+being regarded as a fused infinitive like the Latin accusative and
+infinitive.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>His views on the <i>necessity</i> for Russia <i>to secure</i> the
+command of the sea....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>b.</i> Though the gerund with <i>of</i> is the usual construction
+after nouns, they sometimes prefer the gerund with other prepositions
+also to the infinitive. The gerund with <i>in</i> should be used, for
+instance, in the following. But euphony operates again in the first.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... the extraordinary <i>remissness</i> of the English commanders
+<i>to utilize</i> their preponderating strength against the
+Boers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Lord Kenyon reminded the House of the resistance met with to
+vaccination, to [of?] the possible <i>effect</i> of the proposal <i>to
+increase</i> that resistance....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I think sculpture and painting have an <i>effect to teach</i> us
+manners and abolish hurry.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Such a capitulation would be inconsistent with the position of any
+Great Power, independently of the <i>humiliation</i> there would be
+for England and France <i>to submit</i> their agreement for approval
+and perhaps modification to Germany.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The humiliation there would be in submitting; or the humiliation it
+would be to submit.</p>
+
+<p><i>c.</i> After verbs and adjectives the infinitive is much more
+common; but no one will use a gerund where an infinitive is required,
+while many will do the reverse.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But history <i>accords</i> with the Japanese practice <i>to show</i>
+[in showing] that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>We must necessarily appeal to the intuition, and <i>aim</i> much more
+<i>to suggest</i> than <i>to describe</i> [at suggesting than at
+describing].—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>But they can only highly serve us, when they <i>aim</i> not
+<i>to drill</i>, but <i>to create</i> [at drilling, but at
+creating].—<span class="smcap">Emerson.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>So far from <i>aiming to be</i> mistress of Europe, she was rapidly
+sinking into the almost helpless prey of France.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is to avoid <i>aiming at be</i>ing; compare the avoidance of
+double <i>of</i> above.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Lose no time</i>, I pray you, <i>to
+advise</i>.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>In advising</i> may have been avoided as ambiguous.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which
+each individual <i>persists to be</i> [in being] what he
+is.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>I do not <i>despair to see</i> [of seeing] a motor public
+service.—<i>Guernsey Advertiser.</i></p>
+
+<p>Their journeymen are far too declamatory, and too much <i>addicted
+to substitute</i> [substituting] vague and puerile dissertations for
+solid instruction.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the common phrase <i>addicted to drink</i>, drink is a noun, not a
+verb.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>His blackguard countrymen, always <i>averse</i>, as their descendants
+are, <i>to give</i> [giving] credit to anybody, for any valuable
+quality.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>Is he <i>to be blamed</i>, if he thinks a person would make a wife
+worth having, <i>to endeavour</i> [for endeavouring] to obtain
+her?—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>d.</i> If a deferred subject, anticipated by <i>it</i>, is to be
+verbal, it must of course be either the infinitive or a gerund without
+preposition.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Fortune, who has generally been ready to gratify my
+inclinations, provided <i>it</i> cost her very little <i>by so
+doing</i>....—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Shall and Will</span></h3>
+
+<p>It is unfortunate that the idiomatic use, while it comes by nature to
+southern Englishmen (who will find most of this section superfluous),
+is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly
+acquire it; and for them the section is in danger of being useless. In
+apology for the length of these remarks it must be said that the short
+and simple directions often given are worse than useless. The observant
+reader soon loses faith in them from their constant failure to take him
+right; and the unobservant is the victim of false security.</p>
+
+<p>Roughly speaking, <i>should</i> follows the same rules as
+<i>shall</i>,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span> and <i>would</i> as <i>will</i>; in what follows, Sh.
+may be taken as an abbreviation for <i>shall</i>, <i>should</i>, and
+<i>should have</i>, and W. for <i>will</i>, <i>would</i>, and <i>would
+have</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In our usage of the Sh. and W. forms, as seen in principal sentences,
+there are elements belonging to three systems. The first of these,
+in which each form retains its full original meaning, and the two
+are not used to give different persons of the same tense, we shall
+call the pure system: the other two, both hybrids, will be called,
+one the coloured-future, the other the plain-future system. In Old
+English there was no separate future; present and future were one.
+<i>Shall</i> and <i>will</i> were the presents of two verbs, to which
+belong also the pasts <i>should</i> and <i>would</i>, the conditionals
+<i>should</i> and <i>would</i>, and the past conditionals <i>should
+have</i> and <i>would have</i>. <i>Shall</i> had the meaning of command
+or obligation, and <i>will</i> of wish. But as commands and wishes are
+concerned mainly with the future, it was natural that a future tense
+auxiliary should be developed out of these two verbs. The coloured
+future results from the application to future time of those forms that
+were practically useful in the pure system; they consequently retain
+in the coloured future, with some modifications, the ideas of command
+and wish proper to the original verbs. The plain future results from
+the taking of those forms that were practically out of work in the pure
+system to make what had not before existed, a simple future tense;
+these have accordingly not retained the ideas of command and wish.
+Which were the practically useful and which the superfluous forms in
+the pure system must now be explained.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thou shall not steal</i> is the type of <i>shall</i> in the pure
+system. We do not ordinarily issue commands to ourselves; consequently
+<i>I shall</i> is hardly required; but we often ask for orders, and
+therefore <i>shall I?</i> is required. The form of the <i>shall</i>
+present in the pure system is accordingly:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Shall I? You shall. He shall. Shall we? They shall.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As to the past tense, orders cannot be given, but may be asked<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</span> about,
+so that, for instance, <i>What should I do?</i> (i. e., What was I to
+do?) can be done all through interrogatively.</p>
+
+<p>In the conditionals, both statement and question can be done all
+through. I can give orders to my imaginary, though not to my actual
+self. I cannot say (as a command) <i>I shall do it</i>; but I can say,
+as a conditional command, <i>I should do it</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>I shall</i> and <i>we shall</i> are accordingly the superfluous
+forms of the present <i>shall</i> in the pure system.</p>
+
+<p>Again, with <i>will</i>, <i>I will</i> meaning <i>it is my will</i>, it
+is obvious that we can generally state this only of ourselves; we do
+not know the inside of other people’s minds, but we can ask about it.
+The present runs, then,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I will. Will you? Will he? We will. Will they?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The past tense can here be done all through, both positively and
+interrogatively. For though we cannot tell other people’s present will,
+we can often infer their past will from their actions. So (I was asked,
+but) <i>I would not</i>, and <i>Why would I do it?</i> all through. And
+similarly in the conditionals, <i>I would not</i> (if I could), &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>The spare forms supplied by the present <i>will</i>, then, are <i>you
+will</i>, <i>he will</i>, <i>they will</i>; and these, with <i>I
+shall</i>, <i>we shall</i>, are ready, when the simple future is
+required, to construct it out of. We can now give</p>
+
+
+<p>Rule 1. The Pure System</p>
+
+<p>When Sh. and W. retain the full original meanings of command and wish,
+each of them is used in all three persons, so far as it is required.</p>
+
+<p>The following examples show most of what we inherit directly from the
+pure system.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Thou shalt not steal. Not required in first person.</p>
+
+<p>Shall I open the door? Not required in second.</p>
+
+<p>You should not say such things. In all persons.</p>
+
+<p>And shall Trelawny die? Hardly required in second.</p>
+
+<p>Whom should he meet but Jones? (... was it his fate....) In all.</p>
+
+<p>Why should you suspect me? In all.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span></p>
+
+<p>It should seem so. (It would apparently be incumbent on us to believe)
+Isolated idiom with third.</p>
+
+<p>I will have my way. Not required in second and third; but see below.</p>
+
+<p>I (he) asked him (me) to do it, but he (I) would not. In all.</p>
+
+<p>I would not have done it for the world. In all.</p>
+
+<p>I would be told to wait a while (Habitual). In all.</p>
+
+<p>Will you come with me? Not required in first.</p>
+
+<p>I would I were dead. Not required in second and third.</p>
+
+<p>He will bite his nails, whatever I say. In all.</p>
+
+<p>He will often stand on his head. In all.</p>
+
+<p>You will still be talking (i. e., you always are). Not required in
+first.</p>
+
+<p>A coat will last two years with care.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It will be noticed that the last four forms are among those that were
+omitted as not required by the pure system. <i>Will</i> would rarely
+be required in second and third person statements, but would of course
+be possible in favourable circumstances, as in describing habitual
+action, where the will of another may be inferred from past experience.
+The last of all is a natural extension of the idiom even to things
+that have no will. All these ‘habitual’ uses are quite different from
+<i>I will have my way</i>; and though <i>you will have your way</i> is
+possible, it always has the ‘habitual’ meaning, which <i>I will have my
+way</i> is usually without.</p>
+
+<p>All the forms in the above list, and others like them, have three
+peculiarities—that they are not practically futures as distinguished
+from presents; that they use Sh. for all persons, or W. for all
+persons, if the idea is appropriate to all persons; and that the
+ideas are simply, or with very little extension, those of command or
+obligation and wish.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The coloured-future system is so called because, while the future sense
+is more distinct, it is still coloured with the speaker’s mood; command
+and wish receive extensions and include promise, permission, menace,
+consent, assurance, intention, refusal, offer, &amp;c.; and the forms
+used are invariably those—from both Sh. and W.—that we called the
+practically useful ones in the pure system. That is, we have always</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I will, shall I? You shall, will you? He shall, will he? We will,
+shall we? They shall, will they?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And the conditionals, <i>should</i> and <i>would</i>, <i>should
+have</i> and <i>would have</i>, are used with exactly the same
+variations. It will be borne in mind, however, that no clear line of
+division can be drawn between the pure system and the coloured-future
+system, since the latter is developed naturally (whereas the
+plain-future system is rather developed artificially) out of the
+former. And especially the questions of the coloured future are simply
+those of the pure system without any sort of modification.</p>
+
+
+<p>Rule 2. The Coloured-Future System</p>
+
+<p>In future and conditional statements that include (without the use of
+special words for the purpose) an expression of the speaker’s (not
+necessarily of the subject’s) wish, intention, menace, assurance,
+consent, refusal, promise, offer, permission, command, &amp;c.—in such
+sentences the first person has W., the second and third persons Sh.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I will tell you presently. My promise.</p>
+
+<p>You shall repent it before long. My menace.</p>
+
+<p>He shall not have any. My refusal.</p>
+
+<p>We would go if we could. Our conditional intention.</p>
+
+<p>You should do it if we could make you. Our conditional command.</p>
+
+<p>They should have had it if they had asked. My conditional consent.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The only questions possible here are the asking for orders and the
+requests already disposed of under Rule 1.</p>
+
+<p>Observe that <i>I would like</i> (which is not English) is not
+justified by this rule, because the speaker’s mood is expressed by
+<i>like</i>, and does not need double expression; it ought to be <i>I
+should like</i>, under Rule 3.</p>
+
+<p>Observe also that <i>I sha’n’t</i>, <i>You will go to your room and
+stay there</i>, are only apparent exceptions, which will be explained
+under Rule 3.</p>
+
+<p>The archaic literary forms <i>You shall find</i>, <i>A rogue shall
+often pass for an honest man</i>, though now affected and pretentious,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span>
+are grammatically defensible. The speaker asks us to take the fact on
+his personal assurance.</p>
+
+<p>The forms little required in the pure system, and therefore ready to
+hand for making the new plain future, were <i>I</i>, and <i>we</i>,
+<i>shall</i>; <i>you</i>, <i>he</i>, and <i>they</i>, <i>will</i>.
+These accordingly constitute the plain future, and the corresponding
+forms of the plain conditional are used analogously. Questions follow
+the same rule, with one very important exception, which will be given a
+separate rule (4). We now give</p>
+
+
+<p>Rule 3. The Plain-Future System</p>
+
+<p>In plain statements about the future, and in the principal clause,
+result, or apodosis, of plain conditional sentences (whether the
+subordinate clause, condition, or <i>if</i>-clause, is expressed
+or not), the first person has Sh., the second and third persons W.
+Questions conform, except those of the second person, for which see
+Rule 4.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">I shall, you will, die some day.</div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">Shall I, will they, be here to-morrow?</div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">We should, he would, have consented if you had asked.</div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">Should we, would he, have missed you if you had been there?</div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">I should, you would, like a bathe.</div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">Should I, would he, like it myself, himself?</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Some apparent exceptions, already anticipated, must here be explained.
+It may be said that <i>I shall execute your orders</i> being the
+speaker’s promise, <i>You will go to your room</i> being the speaker’s
+command, and <i>Sha’n’t</i> (the nursery abbreviation for <i>I shall
+not do it</i>) being the speaker’s refusal, these are all coloured
+futures, so that Sh. and W. should be reversed in each. They are such
+in effect, but they are not in form. In each, the other form would be
+possible and correct. The first is a promise only so far as the hearer
+chooses to take as a promise the plain future or impersonal prophecy;
+but the speaker emphasizes his obedience by implying that of course,
+since the order has been given, it will be executed; the matter is
+settled without his unimportant consent. The other two gain force by
+the opposite assumption that the speaker’s will<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</span> and the future are
+absolutely identical, so that what he intends may be confidently stated
+as a future fact. In the first example the desired submissiveness, in
+the other two the desired imperiousness, supercilious or passionate,
+are attained by the same impersonality.</p>
+
+<p>Before giving the rule for second-person questions, we observe that
+questions generally follow the rule of the class of statement they
+correspond to. This was shown in the pure system (Rule 1). There are
+no questions (apart from those already accounted for by the pure
+system) belonging to the coloured future (Rule 2). In the plain future
+(Rule 3), first and third person questions are like the plain-future
+statements. But second-person questions under the plain future
+invariably use Sh. or W. according as the answer for which the speaker
+is prepared has Sh. or W. Care is necessary, however, in deciding
+what that answer is. In <i>Should (would) you like a bathe?</i>
+<i>should</i> is almost always right, because the answer expected is
+almost always either <i>Yes, I should</i>, or <i>No, I should not</i>,
+the question being asked for real information. It is true that <i>Would
+you like?</i> is very commonly used, like the equally wrong <i>I would
+like</i>; but it is only correct when the answer is intended to be
+given by the asker:—<i>No, of course you would not.</i> A clearer
+illustration of this is the following sentence, which requires Sh. or
+W. according to circumstances: <i>Will (shall) you, now so fresh and
+fair, be in a hundred years nothing but mouldering dust?</i>. This
+might possibly be asked in expectation of an answer from the person
+apostrophized—<i>Yes, I shall.</i> Much more probably it would be
+asked in expectation of the answer from the speaker himself to his own
+question—<i>Alas! yes, you will.</i> And <i>shall</i> ought to be used
+for the question only in the first case, <i>will</i> in the second
+case. Similarly, <i>Ah, yes, that is all very well; but will (shall)
+you be able to do it?</i> Use <i>will</i> if the answer is meant to be
+<i>No, of course you will not</i>; <i>shall</i>, if the answer expected
+is <i>Yes, I shall</i>, or <i>No, I shall not</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In practice, Sh. is more commonly required, because<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</span> questions asked
+for information are commoner than rhetorical ones. But observe the
+common <i>Would you believe it?</i>, Answer, <i>No, of course you
+would not.</i> <i>Should you believe it?</i>, also possible, would
+indicate real curiosity about the other person’s state of mind, which
+is hardly ever felt. <i>Would you believe it?</i>, however, might also
+be accounted for on the ground that the answer would be <i>No, I would
+not</i>, which would be a coloured-future form, meaning <i>I should
+never consent to believe</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>Rule 4. Second-person Questions</p>
+
+<p>Second-person questions invariably have Sh. or W. by assimilation to
+the answer expected.</p>
+
+<p>It may be added, since it makes the application of the rule easier,
+that the second-person questions belonging not to the plain future
+but to the pure system are also, though not because of assimilation,
+the same in regard to Sh. and W. as their answers. Thus <i>Will you
+come?</i> <i>Yes, I will</i> (each on its merits), as well as <i>Shall
+you be there?</i> <i>Yes, I shall</i> (assimilation). <i>Should you not
+have known?</i> <i>Yes, I should</i> (each on its merits; <i>should</i>
+means <i>ought</i>), as well as <i>What should you think?</i> <i>I
+should think you were right</i> (assimilation). The true form for all
+second-person questions, then, can be ascertained by deciding what the
+expected answer is.</p>
+
+<p>This completes what need be said about principal sentences, with the
+exception of one important usage that might cause perplexity. If
+some one says to me ‘You would think so yourself if you were in my
+position’, I may either answer ‘No, I should not’ regularly, or may
+catch up his word, and retain the W., though the alteration of person
+requires Sh. Thus—‘Would I, though? No, I wouldn’t’. Accordingly,</p>
+
+
+<p>Rule 5. Echoes</p>
+
+<p>A speaker repeating and adapting another’s words may neglect to make
+the alteration from Sh. to W., or from W. to Sh., that an alteration of
+the person strictly requires.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span></p>
+
+<p>We have now all the necessary rules for principal sentences, and can
+put down a few examples of the right usage, noteworthy for various
+reasons, and some blunders, the latter being illustrated in proportion
+to their commonness. The number of the rule observed or broken will be
+added in brackets for reference. The passage from Johnson with which
+the correct examples begin is instructive.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Right.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I would (2) injure no man, and should (3) provoke no resentment;
+I would (2) relieve every distress, and should (3) enjoy the
+benedictions of gratitude. I would (2) choose my friends among the
+wise, and my wife among the virtuous; and therefore should (3) be in
+no danger from treachery or unkindness. My children should (2) by my
+care be learned and pious, and would (3) repay to my age what their
+childhood had received.—<span class="smcap">Johnson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Chatham, it should (1) seem, ought to have taken the same
+side.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>For instance, when we allege, that it is against reason to tax a
+people under so many restraints in trade as the Americans, the noble
+lord in the blue riband shall (2) tell you....—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>The ‘critic fly’, if it do but alight on any plinth or single
+cornice of a brave stately building, shall (2) be able to declare,
+with its half-inch vision, that here is a speck, and there an
+inequality.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>John, why should you waste yourself (1) upon those ugly giggling
+girls?—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+
+<p>It wouldn’t be quite proper to take her alone, would it? What should
+(4) you say?—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+
+<p>Whether I have attained this, the future shall decide (2. I consent to
+accept the verdict of the future).—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><i>Wrong.</i></p>
+
+<p>We give first many examples of the mistake that is out of all
+proportion the commonest—using the coloured future when the speaker’s
+mood is sufficiently given by a separate word. In the second example,
+for instance, <i>I would ask the favour</i> would be quite right,
+and would mean <i>I should like to ask</i>. As it stands, it means
+<i>I should like to like to ask</i>. The same applies to the other
+instances, which are only multiplied to show how dangerous this
+particular form is.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Among these ... I would be inclined to place (3) those who acquiesce
+in the phenomenalism of Mr. Herbert Spencer.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>As one of the founders of the Navy League, I would like (3) to ask the
+favour of your well-known courtesy....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I would be glad (3) to have some account of his
+behaviour.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>I would like (3) also to talk with you about the thing which has come
+to pass.—<span class="smcap">Jowett.</span></p>
+
+<p>But give your definition of romance. I would like to hear it
+(3).—<span class="smcap">F. M. Crawford.</span></p>
+
+<p>These are typical of thousands of paragraphs in the newspaper.... We
+would (3) wish for brighter news.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>I have already had some offers of assistance, and I would be glad (3)
+to receive any amount towards the object.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Some examples follow that have not this excuse; and the first two
+deserve comment—the first because it results in serious ambiguity, the
+second because it is possibly not wrong.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The two fleets present seven Russian battleships against four
+Japanese—less than two to one; two Russian armoured cruisers against
+eight, and seven Russian torpedo-boat destroyers against an indefinite
+number of the enemy. Here we will (3) not exaggerate in attributing to
+the Japanese three or four to one.—<span class="smcap">Mahan.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>With <i>will</i>, the meaning must be: We won’t call them three or
+four to one, because that would be exaggeration. But the meaning is
+intended to be: We will call them that, and it will be no exaggeration.
+<i>Shall</i> is absolutely necessary, however, to make it bear that
+interpretation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This character who delights us may commit murder like Macbeth, or fly
+the battle for his sweetheart as did Antony, or betray his country
+like Coriolanus, and yet we will rejoice (3) in every happiness that
+comes to him.—<span class="smcap">W. B. Yeats.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is possible that this is the use of <i>will</i> described as the
+‘habitual’ use—he will often stand on his head—under Rule 1. But this
+is very rare, though admissible, in the first person of the present.
+<i>We shall rejoice</i>, or simply <i>we rejoice</i>, would be the
+plain way of saying it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>If this passion was simply painful, we would (3) shun with the
+greatest care all persons and places that could excite such a
+passion.—<span class="smcap">Burke.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>What would (3) we be without our appetites?—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>If I was ever to be detected, I would (3) have nothing for it but to
+drown myself.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>I will (3) never forget, in the year 1858, one notorious
+revivalist.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>As long as I am free from all resentment, hardness, and scorn, I would
+(3) be able to face the life with much more calm and confidence than I
+would....—<span class="smcap">Wilde.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the next two, if ‘I think’, and the <i>if</i>-clause, were removed,
+the <i>shall</i> and <i>will</i> would stand, expressing resolve
+according to Rule 2. But with those additions it is clear that prophecy
+or pure future is meant; and <i>shall</i> and <i>will</i> should be
+<i>will</i> and <i>shall</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Nothing, I think, shall ever make me (3) forgive
+him.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>We were victorious in 1812, and we will (3) be victorious now at any
+cost, if we are strong in an alliance between the governing class and
+the governed.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><b>We now proceed to Subordinate Clauses, and first to the
+Substantival.</b> The word ‘reported’ will mean ‘made indirect’ or
+‘subordinated substantivally’, not always actually reported.</p>
+
+<p><b>Reported statement</b> is quite simple when it is of the pure
+system or the coloured future; the Sh. or W. of the original statement
+is retained in the reported form, unaffected by any change of person
+that the reporting involves. Thus: (Pure system) <i>He forgave me</i>
+(<i>you</i>, or <i>her</i>), <i>though he said I</i> (<i>you</i>, or
+<i>she</i>) <i>should not have left him in the lurch like that.</i>
+(Coloured future) <i>You said I</i> (or <i>he</i>) <i>should repent
+it</i>; either of these is a report of either <i>You shall repent
+it</i> or <i>He shall repent it</i>. (Coloured future) <i>You said
+you</i> (or <i>I said I</i>) <i>would apologize</i>; both are reports
+of <i>I will apologize</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But with the plain-future system there is difficulty and some
+inconsistency. The change of person sometimes required by reported
+speech has almost always the effect here of introducing Sh. if <i>I</i>
+or <i>we</i> appears in the words as reported, and usually the effect
+of introducing W. if <i>you</i>, <i>he</i>, or <i>they</i>, appears.
+The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</span> following are all the types in which doubt can arise, except that
+each of these may occur in either number, and in past or present. The
+form that would be required by analogy (keeping the original Sh. or
+W.) is given first, and the one generally used instead is added in
+brackets. Reporting <i>I shall never succeed</i>, we get</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>You said you should (would) never succeed.</p>
+
+<p>He says he shall (will) never succeed.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Reporting <i>you will</i> (or <i>he will</i>) <i>never succeed</i>, we
+get</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>You say I will (shall) never succeed.</p>
+
+<p>He said I would (should) never succeed.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Even those persons who have generally a just confidence in their own
+correctness about Sh. and W. will allow that they have some doubt about
+the first pair; and nearly every one will find W. in the second pair,
+however reasonable and consistent, intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>If the reader will now go through the four sentences again, and
+substitute for <i>succeed</i> the phrase <i>do it</i> (which may or may
+not mean <i>succeed</i>), he will see that the orthodox <i>should</i>
+and <i>shall</i> of the first pair become actually more natural than
+the commoner <i>would</i> and <i>will</i>; and that even in the second
+pair <i>will</i> and <i>would</i> are now tolerable. The reason is that
+with <i>do it</i> there is risk of confusion with the reported forms
+of <i>I will never do it</i> and <i>you shall never do it</i>, which
+are not plain futures, but coloured futures meaning something quite
+different.</p>
+
+<p><b>Reported questions</b> present the same difficulties. Again those
+only are doubtful that belong to the plain future. There, for instance,
+reporting <i>Shall you do it?</i> we can say by the correct analogy
+<i>I asked him whether he should</i>; and we generally do so if the
+verb, as here, lends itself to ambiguity: <i>I asked him whether he
+would do it</i> is liable to be mistaken for the report of <i>Will you
+do it?</i>—a request. If on the other hand (as in reporting <i>Shall
+you be there?</i>) there is little risk of misunderstanding, <i>I asked
+him whether he would</i> is commoner. And again it is only in extreme
+cases,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span> if even then, that the original W. can be kept when the report
+introduces <i>I</i> in place of the original question’s <i>you</i> or
+<i>he</i>. For instance, the original question being <i>How will he be
+treated?</i>, it may be just possible to say <i>You had made up your
+mind how I would be treated</i>, because <i>You had made up your mind
+how I should be treated</i> almost inevitably suggests (assisted by
+the ambiguity of <i>making up your mind</i>, which may imply either
+resolve or inference) that the original question was <i>How shall he be
+treated?</i></p>
+
+<p>It would be well, perhaps, if writers who take their responsibilities
+seriously would stretch a point sometimes to keep the more consistent
+and less ambiguous usage alive; but for practical purposes the rule
+must run:</p>
+
+
+<p>Rule 6. Substantival Clauses.</p>
+
+<p>In these (whether ‘reported’ strictly or otherwise subordinated)
+pure-system or coloured-future forms invariably keep the Sh. or W. of
+the original statement or question, unaffected by any change of person.
+Reports of plain-future forms do this also, if there would be serious
+danger of ambiguity, but almost always have Sh. in the first person,
+and usually W. in the second and third persons.</p>
+
+<p>As the division of substantival clauses into indirect (or reported or
+subordinate or oblique) statements, questions, <i>and commands</i>,
+is familiar, it may be well to explain that in English the reported
+command strictly so called hardly exists. In what has the force of
+a reported command it is in fact a statement that is reported. For
+instance, <i>He said I was to go</i>, though used as the indirect form
+of <i>Go</i>, is really the indirect of the statement <i>You are to
+go</i>. <i>He ordered that they should be released</i> (though the
+actual words were <i>Be they</i>, or <i>Let them be, released</i>) is
+formed on the coloured-future statement, <i>They shall be released</i>.
+It is therefore unnecessary to give special rules for reported command.
+But there are one or two types of apparent indirect command about
+which, though there is no danger of error, the reader may feel curious.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span></p>
+
+<p>a. <i>I stipulate that I shall, you shall, he shall, do it.</i> Why
+<i>shall</i> in all persons? because the original form is: <i>I</i>
+(<i>you</i>, <i>he</i>) <i>shall do it</i>, <i>I stipulate that</i>,
+where <i>shall</i> means <i>am to</i>, <i>are to</i>, <i>is to</i>;
+that is, it is a pure-system form.</p>
+
+<p>b. <i>I beg that you</i> (or <i>he</i>) <i>will do it.</i> <i>He begs
+that I will do it.</i> Again the original is pure-system: <i>You</i>
+(or <i>he</i>) <i>will</i> (i. e., you consent to) <i>do it: that is
+what I beg.</i> <i>I will</i> (i. e., I consent to) <i>do it: that is
+what he begs.</i></p>
+
+<p>c. <i>I beg that I</i> (or <i>he</i>) <i>shall not suffer for it.</i>
+<i>You begged that I should not suffer for it.</i> Observe that b. has
+<i>will</i> and a. and c. <i>shall</i>, because it is only in b. that
+the volition of the subject of <i>shall</i> or <i>will</i> is concerned.</p>
+
+<p>d. <i>I wish you would not sneeze.</i> Before subordination this
+is: <i>You will not sneeze: that is what I wish.</i> W. remains,
+but <i>will</i> becomes <i>would</i> to give the remoteness always
+connected with wish, which is seen also, for instance, in <i>I wish I
+were</i> instead of <i>I wish I be</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Before going on to examples of substantival clauses, we also register,
+again rather for the curious than for the practical reader, the
+peculiar but common use of <i>should</i> contained in the following:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is not strange that his admiration for those writers should have
+been unbounded.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In this use <i>should</i> goes through all persons and is equivalent
+to a gerund with possessive: <i>that a man should be</i> is the same
+as <i>a man’s being</i>. We can only guess at its origin; our guess
+is that (1) <i>should</i> is the remote form for <i>shall</i>, as
+<i>would</i> for <i>will</i> in d. above, substituted in order to give
+an effect of generality; and (2) the use of <i>shall</i> is the archaic
+one seen in <i>You shall find</i>, &amp;c. So: a man shall be afraid of his
+shadow; that a man should be afraid (as a generally observed fact) is
+strange.</p>
+
+<p>After each of the substantival clauses, of which examples now follow,
+we shall say whether it is a reported (subordinated) statement, or
+question, and give what we take to be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span> the original form of the
+essential words, even when further comment is unnecessary.</p>
+
+
+<p>Examples of Sh. and W. in Substantival clauses.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Right.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>You, my dear, believe you shall be unhappy, if you have Mr. Solmes:
+your parents think the contrary; and that you will be undoubtedly so,
+were you to have Mr. Lovelace.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. The original of the first is <i>I shall be</i>; of the
+second, <i>she will be</i>. In this and the next three the strictly
+analogical form that we recommended is kept.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I have heard the Princess declare that she should not willingly die in
+a crowd.—<span class="smcap">Johnson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. I should not.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>People imagine they should be happy in circumstances which they would
+find insupportably burthensome in less than a week.—<span class="smcap">Cowper.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. We should. <i>They would</i> is not ‘reported’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to your
+correspondent, if he had been damning you all the time for your
+importunity?—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. I should be.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The nation had settled the question that it would not have
+conscription.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. We will not. The blundering insertion of <i>the
+question</i>—perhaps due to some hazy notion of ‘putting the
+question’—may be disregarded.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When the war will end still depends on Japan.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Question. When will it end?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Shaftesbury’s anger vented itself in threats that the advisers of this
+dissolution should pay for it with their heads.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. You shall pay.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He [i. e., James II] regarded his ecclesiastical supremacy as a
+weapon.... Under Henry and Elizabeth it had been used to turn the
+Church of England from Catholic to Protestant. Under James it should
+be used to turn it back again.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. Under me it shall be. The reporting word not expressed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>She could not bear the sight of all these things that reminded her of
+Anthony and of her sin. Perhaps she should die soon; she felt very
+feeble.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. I shall. Again the reporting word absent.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There will never perhaps be a time when every question between London
+and Washington shall be laid at rest.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is not properly speaking reported speech. But the <i>shall</i>
+is accounted for by a sort of allusion to a supposed prophecy—every
+<i>question shall one day be laid at rest</i>. In that prophecy,
+<i>shall</i> would convey that the prophet gave his personal guarantee
+for it, and would come under Rule 2. This is not to be confused with
+the use of <i>shall</i> in indefinite clauses that will be noticed
+later.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wrong.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The four began their descent, not knowing at what step they should
+meet death nor which of them should reach the shore alive.—<span class="smcap">F. M.
+Crawford.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Questions. At what step shall we meet? Which of us will reach? The
+first is accordingly right, the second wrong. The modern writer—who
+has been at the pains to use the strictly correct <i>should</i> in the
+first place rather than the now common <i>would</i>—has not seen, as
+Richardson did in the first of the right examples, that his two clauses
+are dissimilar.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I hope that our sympathy shall survive these little revolutions
+undiminished.—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. Will survive. It is possible, however, that the original
+was thought of, or rather felt, as Our sympathy shall survive. But as
+the effect of that is to give the speaker’s personal guarantee for
+the truth of the thing, it is clearly not a proper statement to make
+dependent on the doubtful word <i>hope</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>After mentioning the advance made in reforms of the military force of
+the country he [Lord Lansdowne] announced that the Government should
+not oppose the motion, readily availing themselves of Lord Wemyss’s
+suggestion that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. We shall not, or the Government will not. Probably Lord
+Lansdowne said <i>we</i>, and that accounts for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</span> <i>should</i>.
+But if <i>The Times</i> chooses to represent <i>we</i> by <i>the
+Government</i>, it must also represent <i>shall</i> by <i>would</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It came with a strange stunning effect upon us all—the consciousness
+that never again would we hear the grind of those positive boot-heels
+on the gravel.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. We shall never.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I think that if the matter were handed over to the parish councils ...
+we would within a twelvemonth have exactly such a network of rifle
+clubs as is needed.—<span class="smcap">Conan Doyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. We should. Of these two instances it may be thought that
+the writers would have made the mistake in the original unsubordinated
+sentence, instead of its arising in the process of subordination;
+our experience is, however, that many people do in fact go wrong in
+subordinate clauses who are alive to the danger in simple sentences.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Prime Minister ... would at once have asked the Opposition if
+they could suggest any further means for making the inquiry more
+drastic and complete, with the assurance that if they could suggest
+any such means, they would at once be incorporated in the Government
+scheme.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Statement. They shall be incorporated. We have classed this as wrong on
+the assumption, supported by the word <i>assurance</i>, that the Prime
+Minister gave a promise, and therefore used the coloured future, and
+did not state a fact and use the plain future.</p>
+
+<p>Another type of subordinate clause important for Sh. and W. is <b>the
+conditional protasis or if-clause</b>. It is not necessary, nor with
+modern writers usual, to mark the future or conditional force of
+this separately, since it is sufficiently indicated by the apodosis.
+For instance, <i>If you come I shall be glad</i>; <i>if you came I
+should be glad</i>; <i>if you had come I should have been glad</i>.
+But in formal style or with a slight difference of meaning, it is
+often superfluously done in the protasis too. Sh. is then used for
+all persons, as, <i>If he should come, you would learn how the matter
+stands</i>. So:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Japan will adhere to her pledge of neutrality unless Russia shall
+first violate hers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</span></p>
+
+<p>But to the rule that the protasis takes <i>shall</i> there are
+three exceptions, real or apparent; W. is found under the following
+circumstances:</p>
+
+<p>(1.) An original pure-system or coloured-future W. is not changed to
+Sh. by being used in subordination to <i>if</i> (or <i>unless</i>).
+It is retained with its full original force instead of some verb like
+<i>wish</i> or <i>choose</i>. In <i>If we would believe we might move
+mountains</i>, the meaning is <i>If we chose to believe</i>, different
+from that of <i>If we believed</i> or <i>should believe</i>. So</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It would be much better if you would not be so hypocritical, Captain
+Wybrow.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If you consented not to be, or did not insist on being.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It would be valuable if he would somewhat expand his ideas regarding
+local defence by Volunteers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If he consented to.</p>
+
+<p>(2.) When the <i>if</i>-clause (though a genuine condition) is
+incorrectly expressed for the sake of brevity and compresses two verbs
+into one, the W. proper to the retained verb is sometimes necessarily
+used instead of the Sh. proper to the verb that, though it contains
+in strict logic the essential protasis, has been crushed out. Thus:
+<i>If it will be useless I shall prefer not to do it.</i> It is not
+the uselessness that is the condition of the preference; for the use
+or uselessness is subsequent to the decision; it is my conviction of
+the uselessness; so that the full form would be <i>If I shall be</i>
+(or <i>am</i> in ordinary speech) <i>convinced that it will be useless,
+I shall prefer</i>, &amp;c. The following example can be defended on this
+ground, <i>if never again will he</i> standing for <i>if he shall
+realize that he will never</i>; the feebleness that decides his not
+wishing is subsequent to it, and can only condition it if taken in the
+sense of his anticipation of feebleness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And if there is to be no recovery, <i>if never again will he</i> be
+young and strong and passionate, if the actual present shall be to him
+always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the far-away
+past; he will not greatly wish for the continuance of a twilight
+that....—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span></p>
+
+<p>The next is more difficult only because, besides the compression, the
+<i>if</i>-clause is protasis not to the expressed main sentence, but to
+another that is suppressed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I shall wait for fine weather, if that will ever come.—<span class="smcap">R. G.
+White.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Given fully, this would run: I shall wait for fine weather; (at least I
+should say so) if (I were sure that) that will ever come.</p>
+
+<p>(3.) When an <i>if</i>-clause is not a condition at all, as for
+instance where it expresses contrast, and is almost equivalent to
+<i>although</i>, the ordinary plain-future use prevails. Thus: <i>If
+annihilation will end our joys it will also end our griefs.</i>
+Contrast with this the real condition, in: <i>If annihilation shall
+end</i> (or <i>ends</i>) <i>our joys, we shall never regret the loss of
+them.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>Indefinite clauses, relative or other</b>, bearing the same
+relation to a conditional or future principal sentence that a
+conditional protasis bears to its apodosis follow the same rules. Thus
+<i>Whoever compares the two will find</i> is equivalent to <i>If any
+one compares</i>; <i>When we have won the battle we can decide that
+question</i> is equivalent to <i>If ever we have won</i>. Accordingly
+we can if we choose write <i>Whoever shall compare</i>, and <i>When we
+shall have won</i>; but we cannot write <i>When we will have won</i>,
+and must only write <i>Whoever will compare</i> if we distinctly mean
+<i>Whoever chooses to compare</i>. As there is sometimes difficulty in
+analysing indefinite clauses of this sort, one or two instances had
+better be considered.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The candidate who should have distinguished himself most was to be
+chosen.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is clear enough; it is equivalent to <i>if any one should have ...
+he was....</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We must ask ourselves what victory will cost the Russian people when
+at length it will become possible to conclude the peace so ardently
+desired.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Equivalent to <i>If ever it at length becomes</i>. <i>Will</i> is
+therefore wrong; either <i>becomes</i>, or <i>shall become</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Nothing can now prevent it from continuing to distil upwards
+until there shall be no member of the legislature who shall not
+know....—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</span></p>
+
+<p>This is a complicated example. The <i>shalls</i> will be right if it
+appears that each <i>shall</i>-clause is equivalent to a conditional
+protasis. We may show it by starting at the end as with the house that
+Jack built and constructing the sentence backwards, subordinating by
+stages, and changing <i>will</i> to <i>shall</i> as the protases come
+in; it will be allowed that <i>until</i> means <i>to the time when</i>,
+and that <i>when</i> may be resolved into <i>if ever</i>. Thus we
+get: <i>a.</i> One will know. <i>b.</i> None will be a member of the
+legislature unless one shall know. <i>c.</i> It will distil to the time
+if ever none shall be a member unless one shall know.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Think what I will about them, I must take them for politeness’
+sake.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Although <i>think what I will</i> is an indefinite relative clause,
+meaning practically <i>whatever I think</i>, <i>will</i> here is right,
+the strict sense being <i>whatever I choose to think</i>. Indeed the
+time of <i>think</i> is probably not, at any rate need not be, future
+at all; compare <i>Think what I will, I do not tell my thoughts.</i></p>
+
+<p>We now give</p>
+
+<p><b>Rule 7. Conditional protasis and Indefinite Clauses</b></p>
+
+<p>In the protasis or <i>if</i>-clause of conditional sentences Sh. may
+be used with all persons. Generally neither Sh. nor W. is used. W. is
+only used (1) when the full meaning of <i>wish</i> is intended; it may
+then be used with all persons; (2) when the protasis is elliptically
+expressed; W. may then be necessary with the second and third persons;
+(3) when the <i>if</i>-clause is not a real conditional protasis; there
+is then no reason for Sh. with second and third persons. Indefinite
+classes of similar character follow the same rules.</p>
+
+<p>A few right but exceptional, and some wrong subordinate clauses may now
+be added.</p>
+
+
+<p>Examples of Sh. and W. in Subordinate Clauses.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Right.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>As an opiate, or spirituous liquors, shall suspend the operation of
+grief....—<span class="smcap">Burke.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the
+conversation that should thereupon ensue.—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+
+<p>She is such a spare, straight, dry old lady—such a pew of a
+woman—that you should find as many individual sympathies in a
+chip.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In these three we have the archaic <i>shall</i> of personal assurance
+that comes under Rule 2, and its corresponding conditional, appearing
+in subordinate clauses. There is no objection to it except that, in
+modern writers, its context must be such as to exonerate it from the
+charge of affectation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The longing of the army for a fresh struggle which should restore its
+glory.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This use of Sh. after final relatives is seen, if the compound sentence
+is resolved, to point to an original coloured future: We long for a
+fresh struggle; a fresh struggle shall restore (that is, we intend it
+to restore) our glory.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He was tormented by that restless jealousy which should seem to belong
+only to minds burning with the desire of fame.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is the <i>should seem</i> explained under Rule 1 appearing also as
+subordinate.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wrong.</i></p>
+
+<p>It should never be, but often is, forgotten that when the apodosis
+of a conditional sentence (with or without expressed protasis) is
+subordinate it is nevertheless still an apodosis, and has still Sh. in
+the first, W. in the second and third persons.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In ‘he struck him a blow’, we do not feel the first object to be
+datival, as we would in ‘he gave him a blow’.—<span class="smcap">H. Sweet.</span></p>
+
+<p>I cannot let the moment pass at which I would have been enjoying
+a visit to you after your severe illness without one word of
+sympathy.—<span class="smcap">Gladstone.</span></p>
+
+<p>It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense
+of disgrace.—<span class="smcap">Wilde.</span></p>
+
+<p>But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I
+do not set the same store by them.—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+
+<p>We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can
+do.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>All these are wrong; in the last two the mistake is perhaps accounted
+for by the presence of <i>willingly</i> and <i>like</i>. <i>I would not
+willingly</i> can indeed be defended at the cost of admitting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</span> that
+<i>willingly</i> is mere tautology, and saying that <i>I would not</i>
+means <i>I should not consent to</i>, according to Rule 2.</p>
+
+<p>It may be worth while to add that the subordinate apodosis still
+follows the rule even if it is subordinated to <i>if</i>, so that it is
+part of the protasis of another conditional sentence. The following,
+which is of course quite correct, seems, but only seems, to break the
+rules both for protasis and apodosis: If you would be patient for
+yourself, you should be patient for me. But we have W. with second
+person in the protasis because <i>would be patient</i> is also apodosis
+to the implied protasis <i>if occasion should arise</i>; and the
+<i>should</i> with second person in the apodosis is not a conditional
+<i>should</i> at all, but a pure-system <i>should</i>, which would be
+the same with any person; it means simply <i>you ought</i>, or <i>it
+would be your duty</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The result in part of a genuine anxiety lest the Chinese would
+gradually grow until they monopolized the country.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We have purposely refrained until now from invoking the subjunctive,
+because the word is almost meaningless to Englishmen, the thing having
+so nearly perished. But on this instance it must be remarked that when
+conjunctions like <i>lest</i>, which could once or still can take a
+subjunctive (as <i>lest he die</i>), use a compound form instead, they
+use the Sh. forms for all persons. It is a matter of little importance,
+since hardly any one would go wrong in such a sentence.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Perfect Infinitive</span></h3>
+
+<p>This has its right and its wrong uses. The right are obvious, and can
+be left alone. Even of the wrong some are serviceable, if not strictly
+logical. <i>I hoped to have succeeded</i>, for instance, means <i>I
+hoped to succeed, but I did not succeed</i>, and has the advantage of
+it in brevity; it is an idiom that it would be a pity to sacrifice on
+the altar of Reason. So:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Philosophy began to congratulate herself upon such a proselyte from
+the world of business, and hoped to have extended her power under the
+auspices of such a leader.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>And here he cannot forbear observing, that it was the duty of
+that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span> publisher to have rebutted a statement which he knew to be a
+calumny.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>I was going to have asked, when....—<span class="smcap">Sladen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But other perfects, while they are still more illogical than these,
+differ as little in meaning from the present as the <i>deposuisse</i>,
+dear to the hearts of elegiac writers ancient and modern, differs from
+<i>deponere</i>. And whereas there is at least metre, and very useful
+metre, in <i>deposuisse</i>, there is in our corresponding perfect
+infinitive neither rhyme nor reason. Thus,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>With whom on those golden summer evenings I should have liked to have
+taken a stroll in the hayfield.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>To have taken</i> means simply to take; the implication of
+non-fulfilment that justified the perfects above is here needless,
+being already given in <i>I should have liked</i>; and the doubled
+<i>have</i> is ugly in sound. Similar are</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>If my point had not been this, I should not have endeavoured to have
+shown the connexion.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The author can only wish it had been her province to have raised
+plants of nobler growth.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>Had you given your advice in any determined or positive manner, I had
+been ready to have been concluded by it.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Jim Scudamore would have been the first man to have acknowledged the
+anomaly.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>Though certainly before she commenced her mystic charms she would have
+liked to have known who he was.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span></p>
+
+<p>Peggy would have liked to have shown her turban and bird of paradise
+at the ball.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>It might have been thought to be a question of bare alternatives, and
+to have been susceptible of no compromise.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The less excusable that Bagehot has started with the correct <i>to
+be</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Another very common form, still worse, occurs especially after
+<i>seem</i> and <i>appear</i>, and results from the writer’s being too
+lazy to decide whether he means <i>He seems to have been</i>, or <i>He
+seemed to be</i>. The mistake may be in either verb or both.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>[Repudiating the report of an interview] I warned him when he spoke to
+me that I could not speak to him at all if I was to be quoted as an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span>
+authority. <i>He seemed to have taken</i> this as applying only to the
+first question he asked me.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i> (seems)</p>
+
+<p>They, as it has been said of Sterne, seemed to have wished, every
+now and then, to have thrown their wigs into the faces of their
+auditors.—<span class="smcap">I. Disraeli.</span> (seem to have wished ... to throw)</p>
+
+<p>Lady Austen’s fashionable friends occasioned no embarrassment;
+they <i>seemed to have preferred</i> some more fashionable
+place for summering in, for they <i>are</i> not again spoken
+of.—<span class="smcap">Southey.</span> (seem)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sometimes <i>have</i> is even transferred from the verb with which it
+would make sense to the other with which it makes nonsense.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>On the point of church James was obdurate.... He would like to have
+insisted on the other grudging items.—<span class="smcap">Sladen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the next, the perfect is wanted; for a child that has been flogged
+cannot be left unflogged—not, that is, in the past; and the future is
+not meant.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A child flogged left-handedly had better be left
+unflogged.—<span class="smcap">Poe.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We add, for the reader’s refreshment rather than for practical
+purposes, an illustration of where careless treatment of <i>have</i>
+may end:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Oh, Burgo, hadst thou not have been a very child, thou shouldst
+have known that now, at this time of day—after all that thy
+gallant steed had done for thee—it was impossible for thee or
+him.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Conditionals</span></h3>
+
+<p>These, which cost the schoolboy at his Latin and Greek some weary
+hours, need not detain us long. The reader passes lightly and
+unconsciously in his own language over mixtures that might have caused
+him searchings of heart in a dead one.</p>
+
+<p>But there is one corrupt and meaningless form, apparently gaining
+ground, that calls for protest. When a clause begins with <i>as if</i>,
+it must be remembered that there is an ellipse. <i>I treat her as
+tenderly as if she were my daughter</i> would be in full <i>I treat
+her as tenderly as I should if she were</i>, &amp;c. If this is forgotten,
+there is danger in some sentences, though not in this one, of using a
+present indicative in the place where the verb <i>were</i> stands. So:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We will not appear like fools in this matter, and as if we <i>have</i>
+no authority over our own daughter.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This may be accounted for, but not justified, as an attempt to express
+what should be merely implied, our actual possession of authority.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>As if the fruit or the flower not only <i>depends</i> on a root as
+one of the conditions among others of its development, but <i>is</i>
+itself actually the root.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is absolutely indefensible so far as <i>is</i> is concerned;
+<i>depends</i> has the same motive as <i>have</i> in the Richardson.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But this looks as if he <i>has</i> included the original 30,000
+men.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>There have been rumours lately, as if the present state of the nation
+<i>may</i> seem to this species of agitators a favourable period for
+recommencing their intrigues.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is a place where <i>as if</i> should not have been used at all.
+If it is used, the verb should be <i>seemed</i>, not <i>may seem</i>,
+the full form being <i>as there would be</i> (<i>rumours</i>). Read
+<i>suggesting that</i> for <i>as if</i>, and <i>seems</i> for <i>may
+seem</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>General Linevitch reports that the army is concentrating as if it
+<i>intends</i> to make a stand.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A mixture between <i>it apparently intends</i> and <i>as if it
+intended</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>As if the same end <i>may</i> not, and must not, be compassed,
+according to its circumstances, by a great diversity of
+ways.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>May</i> should be <i>might</i>. <i>As if it may not</i> is made to
+do the work of <i>as if it might not, as of course it may</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The same rule applies to <i>as though</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The use of true subjunctive forms (if he be, though it happen) in
+conditional sentences is for various reasons not recommended. These
+forms, with the single exception of <i>were</i>, are perishing so
+rapidly that an experienced word-actuary<a id="FNanchor_11" href="#Footnote_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> puts their expectation
+of life at one generation. As a matter of style, they should be
+avoided, being certain to give a pretentious air when handled by any
+one except the skilful and practised writers who need no advice from
+us. And as a matter of grammar, the instinct for using subjunctives<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span>
+rightly is dying with the subjunctive, so that even the still surviving
+<i>were</i> is often used where it is completely wrong. So</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It would be advisable to wait for fuller details before making any
+attempt to appraise the significance of the raid from the military
+point of view, if, indeed, the whole expedition <i>were</i> not
+planned with an eye to effect.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here the last clause means <i>though perhaps it was only planned
+with an eye to effect</i> (<i>and therefore has no military
+significance</i>). But <i>if</i> followed by <i>were not</i>
+necessarily means that it certainly is. The mistake here results in
+making the clause look as if it were the protasis to <i>It would be
+advisable</i>, with which it has in fact nothing whatever to do; it is
+a note on the words <i>military significance</i>. Write <i>was</i> for
+<i>were</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... and who, taking my offered hand, bade me ‘Good morning’—nightfall
+though it <i>were</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The sentence describes a meeting with a person who knew hardly any
+English; he said good morning, though it <i>was</i> nightfall. A single
+example may be added of the intrusion of <i>were</i> for <i>was</i> in
+a sentence that is not conditional.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Dr. Chalmers was a believer in an Establishment as he conceived an
+Establishment should be. Whether such an Establishment <i>were</i>
+possible or not it is not for me now to discuss.—<span class="smcap">Lord
+Rosebery.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Were</i>, however, is often right and almost necessary: other
+subjunctives are never necessary, often dangerous, and in most writers
+unpleasantly formal. The tiro had much better eschew them.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">‘Doubt that’ and ‘doubt whether’</span></h3>
+
+<p>Instances will be found in Part II of verbs constructed with wrong
+prepositions or conjunctions. Most mistakes of this kind are
+self-evident; but the verb ‘doubt’, which is constructed with ‘that’
+or ‘whether’ according to the circumstances under which the doubt is
+expressed, requires special notice. The broad distinction is between
+the positive, ‘I doubt whether (that)’ and the negative, ‘I do not
+doubt that (whether)’;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span> and the rule, in order to include implied as
+well as expressed negatives, questions as well as statements, will run
+thus:</p>
+
+<p>The word used depends upon the writer’s or speaker’s opinion as to the
+reasonableness of the doubt, no matter in whose mind it is said to
+exist or not to exist.</p>
+
+<p>1. If there is nothing to show that the writer considers the doubt an
+unreasonable one, the word is always ‘whether’, which reminds us that
+there is a suppressed alternative:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I doubt whether this is true (or not).</p>
+
+<p>Every one is at liberty to doubt whether ... (or not).</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>To this part of the rule there is no exception.</p>
+
+<p>2. If it is evident that the writer disapproves of the doubt, the words
+introducing it amount to an affirmation on his part that the thing
+doubted is undoubtedly true; the alternative is no longer offered;
+‘that’ is therefore the word:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I do not doubt that (i. e., I am sure that)....</p>
+
+<p>Who can doubt that...?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This, however, is modified by 3.</p>
+
+<p>3. The ‘vivid’ use of ‘whether’. When the writer’s point is rather
+the extravagance of the doubt than the truth of the thing doubted,
+‘whether’ is often retained:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is as if a man should doubt whether he has a head on his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>Can we imagine any man seriously doubting whether...?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here, according to 2., we ought to have ‘that’, since the writer
+evidently regards the doubt as absurd. But in the first sentence it
+is necessary for the force of the illustration that the deplorable
+condition of the doubter’s mind should be vividly portrayed:
+accordingly, he is represented to us as actually handling the two
+alternatives. Similarly, in the second, we are invited to picture
+to ourselves, if we can, a hesitation so ludicrous in the writer’s
+opinion. We shall illustrate this point further by a couple of
+sentences in which again the state of mind of the doubter, not the
+truth of the thing doubted, is clearly the point, but in which ‘that’
+has been improperly substituted for the vivid ‘whether’:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>She found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that
+another would follow.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>I am afraid that you will become so afraid of men’s motives as to
+doubt that any one can be honest.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The mistake commonly made is to use ‘that’ for ‘whether’ in violation
+of 1. ‘Whether’ is seldom used in place of ‘that’, and apparent
+violations of 2. often prove to be legitimate exceptions of the ‘vivid’
+kind. Some of our examples may suggest that when the dependent clause
+is placed before the verb, ‘that’ appears because the writer had not
+decided what verb of doubt or denial to use. This is probably the true
+explanation of many incorrect <i>thats</i>, but is not a sufficient
+defence. It supplies, on the contrary, an additional reason for
+adhering to ‘whether’: the reader is either actually misled or at any
+rate kept in needless suspense as to what is going to be said, because
+the writer did not make up his mind at the right time how to say it.
+‘Whether’ at the beginning at once proclaims an open question: after
+‘that’ we expect (or ought to expect) ‘I have <i>no</i> reason to
+doubt’.</p>
+
+<p>In all the following, ‘whether’ should have been used.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There is nothing for it but to doubt such diseases exist.—<span class="smcap">H. G.
+Wells.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Whether’ is never suppressed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I do not think it would have pleased Mr. Thackeray; and to doubt that
+he would have wished to see it carried out determines my view of the
+matter.—<span class="smcap">Greenwood.</span></p>
+
+<p>That the movement is as purely industrial as the leaders of the strike
+claim may be doubted.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>And I must be allowed to doubt that there is any class who
+deliberately omit....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He may doubt that his policy will be any more popular in England a
+year or two hence than it is now.—<span class="smcap">Greenwood.</span></p>
+
+<p>I doubt the correctness of the assertion.... I doubt, I
+say, that Becky would have selected either of these young
+men.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>But that his army, if it retreats, will carry with it all its guns ...
+we are inclined to doubt.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It was generally doubted that France would permit the use of her
+port.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</span></p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Prepositions</span></h3>
+
+<p>In an uninflected language like ours these are ubiquitous, and it is
+quite impossible to write tolerably without a full knowledge, conscious
+or unconscious, of their uses. Misuse of them, however, does not
+often result in what may be called in the fullest sense blunders of
+syntax, but mostly in offences against idiom. It is often impossible
+to convince a writer that the preposition he has used is a wrong one,
+because there is no reason in the nature of things, in logic, or in
+the principles of universal grammar (whichever way it may be put), why
+that preposition should not give the desired meaning as clearly as the
+one that we tell him he should have used. Idioms are special forms of
+speech that for some reason, often inscrutable, have proved congenial
+to the instinct of a particular language. To neglect them shows a
+writer, however good a logician he may be, to be no linguist—condemns
+him, from that point of view, more clearly than grammatical blunders
+themselves. But though the subject of prepositions is thus very
+important, the idioms in which they appear are so multitudinous that it
+is hopeless to attempt giving more than the scantiest selection; this
+may at least put writers on their guard. Usages of this sort cannot be
+acquired from dictionaries and grammars, still less from a treatise
+like the present, not pretending to be exhaustive; good reading with
+the idiomatic eye open is essential. We give a few examples of what to
+avoid.</p>
+
+<p>1. After adjectives and adverbs.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Another stroke of palsy soon rendered Sir Sampson <i>unconscious</i>
+even <i>to</i> the charms of Grizzy’s conversation.—<span class="smcap">S.
+Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>Being <i>oblivious to</i> the ill feeling it would be certain to
+engender.—<i>Cheltenham Examiner.</i></p>
+
+<p>To me it is incredible that the British people, who own one-half of
+the world’s sea-going ships, should be so <i>oblivious to</i> the
+manner in which....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Insensible to, but unconscious of; indifferent to, but oblivious of</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</span></p>
+
+<p>The adjectives <i>different</i> and <i>averse</i>, with their adverbs
+or nouns, <i>differently</i>, <i>difference</i>, <i>aversion</i>,
+<i>averseness</i>, call for a few words of comment. There is no
+essential reason whatever why either set should not be as well followed
+by <i>to</i> as by <i>from</i>. But <i>different to</i> is regarded
+by many newspaper editors and others in authority as a solecism, and
+is therefore better avoided by those to whom the approval of such
+authorities is important. It is undoubtedly gaining ground, and will
+probably displace <i>different from</i> in no long time; perhaps,
+however, the conservatism that still prefers <i>from</i> is not yet
+to be named pedantry. It is at any rate defensive, and not offensive
+pedantry, <i>different to</i> (though ‘found in writers of all
+ages’—<i>Oxford Dictionary</i>) being on the whole the aggressor. With
+<i>averse</i>, on the other hand, though the <i>Oxford Dictionary</i>
+gives a long roll of good names on each side, the use of <i>from</i>
+may perhaps be said to strike most readers as a distinct protest
+against the more natural <i>to</i>, so that <i>from</i> is here the
+aggressor, and the pedantry, if it is pedantry, is offensive. Our
+advice is to write <i>different from</i> and <i>averse to</i>. We
+shall give a few examples, and add to them two sentences in which the
+incorrect use of <i>from</i> with other words looks like the result
+of insisting on the slightly artificial use of it after different and
+averse.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>My experience caused me to make quite <i>different</i> conclusions
+<i>to</i> those of the Coroner for Westminster.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It will be noticed that <i>to</i> is more than usually uncomfortable
+when it does not come next to <i>different</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We must feel charitably towards those who think <i>differently to</i>
+ourselves.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Why should these profits be employed <i>differently to</i> the profits
+made by capitalists at home?—<span class="smcap">Lord Goschen.</span></p>
+
+<p>Ah, how <i>different</i> were my feelings as I sat proudly there
+on the box <i>to</i> those I had the last time I mounted that
+coach!—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>What is the great <i>difference</i> of the one <i>to</i> the
+other?—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>From</i> would in this last be clearly better than <i>to</i>; but
+<i>between the two</i> would be better than either.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely <i>averse to</i>
+meddling with the council.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps he is not <i>averse from</i> seeing democrats on this, as on
+railway rates, range themselves with him.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In all democratic circles <i>aversion from</i> the Empire of the Tsar
+may be intensified by the events of the last few days.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>To</i> no kind of begging are people so <i>averse</i> as <i>to</i>
+begging pardon.—<i>Guesses at Truth.</i></p>
+
+<p>This <i>averseness</i> in the dissenting churches <i>from</i> all that
+looks like absolute government.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>I deeply regret the <i>aversion to</i> ‘conscience
+clauses’.—<span class="smcap">Gladstone.</span></p>
+
+<p>But she had no sort of <i>aversion for</i> either Puritan or
+Papist.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Disagree from</i> (for <i>with</i>), and <i>adverse from</i> (for
+<i>to</i>), seem to have resulted from the superstition against
+<i>averse</i> and <i>different to</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A general proposition, which applies just as much to those who
+<i>disagree from</i> me as to those who agree with me.—<span class="smcap">Lord
+Rosebery.</span></p>
+
+<p>There were politicians in this country who had been very <i>adverse
+from</i> the Suez Canal scheme altogether.—<span class="smcap">F. Greenwood.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>2. After verbs.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I <i>derive</i> an unholy pleasure <i>in</i> noting.—<i>Guernsey
+Evening Press.</i></p>
+
+<p>We must <i>content ourselves</i> for the moment <i>by</i> observing
+that from the juridical standpoint the question is a doubtful
+one.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The petition which now reaches us from Bloemfontein ... <i>contents
+itself by</i> begging that the isolation laws may be carried out
+nearer to the homes of the patients.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I content you <i>by</i> submitting: I content myself <i>with</i> saying.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘Doing one’s duty’ generally <i>consists of</i> being moral, kind and
+charitable.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>The external world which is dealt with by natural science
+<i>consisted</i>, according to Berkeley, <i>in</i> ideas. According to
+Mr. Mill it <i>consists of</i> sensations and permanent possibilities
+of sensation.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The moon consists <i>of</i> green cheese: virtue consists <i>in</i>
+being good. <i>Consist of</i> gives a material, <i>consist in</i>
+a definition. Mr. Balfour’s ‘elegant variation’ (see <i>Airs and
+Graces</i>) is certainly wrong, though nominalists and realists will
+perhaps differ about which should have been used in both sentences,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span>
+and no one below the degree of a metaphysician can pretend to decide
+between them.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A scholar <i>endowed by</i> [with] an ample knowledge and persuasive
+eloquence to cite and instance.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>I say to you plainly there is no end <i>to</i> [at] which your
+practical faculty can <i>aim</i>....—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>He urged that it was an undesirable thing to be always <i>tinkering
+with</i> this particular trade.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We tamper <i>with</i>, but tinker <i>at</i>, the thing that is to be
+operated on.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>You may hunt the alien from his overcrowded tenement, you may
+<i>forbid</i> him, if you like, <i>from toiling</i> ten hours a day
+for a wage of a few shillings.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>His toiling</i>, or <i>him to toil</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>His readiness, not only at catching a point, but at making the most of
+it <i>on a moment’s notice</i>, was amazing.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>On</i> the spur of the moment, but <i>at</i> a moment’s notice. The
+motive was, no doubt, to avoid repeating <i>at</i>; but such devices
+are sins if they are detected.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Nataly had her sense of safety in <i>acquiescing to</i> such a
+voice.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We acquiesce <i>in</i>, not <i>to</i>, though either phrase is awkward
+enough with <i>a voice</i>; <i>to</i> is probably accounted for again
+by the desire to avoid repeating <i>in</i>.</p>
+
+<p>3. After nouns.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There can be no <i>fault found to</i> her manners or
+sentiments.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I find fault <i>with</i>: I find a fault <i>in</i>. Write <i>in</i> or
+<i>with</i>, as one or the other phrase is meant.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Diet should leave to the Tsar <i>the initiative of</i> taking such
+measures as may be necessary.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>M. Delcassé took <i>the initiative of</i> turning the conversation to
+Moroccan affairs.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We assume the <i>right of</i> turning, we take the <i>initiative in</i>
+turning.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Those, who are urging with most ardour what are called the greatest
+<i>benefits</i> of mankind.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Benefits <i>of</i> the benefactor, but <i>to</i> the beneficiary.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can only come from an
+<i>insight of</i> [into] their whole connection.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>From its driving energy, its personal weight, its invincible
+<i>oblivion to</i> [of] certain things, there sprang up in Redwood’s
+mind the most grotesque and strange of images.—<span class="smcap">H. G. Wells.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. Superfluous prepositions, whether due to ignorance of idiom,
+negligence, or mistaken zeal for accuracy.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>As to</i> Mr. Lovelace’s approbation of your assumption-scheme, I
+wonder not <i>at</i>.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>A something <i>of</i> which the sense can in no way assist the mind to
+form a conception <i>of</i>.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Congress could occupy itself with no more important question than
+<i>with</i> this.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is due to confusion with ‘could occupy itself with no question
+more profitably than with this’.</p>
+
+<p>5. Necessary prepositions omitted.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Lady Henrietta ... <i>wrote him</i> regularly through his bankers,
+and once in a while he <i>wrote her</i>.—<span class="smcap">Baroness von Hutten.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Write</i> without <i>to</i> will now pass in commercial letters
+only; elsewhere, we can say ‘I write you a report, a letter’, but
+neither ‘I will write you’ simply, nor ‘I wrote you that there was
+danger’. That is, we must only omit the <i>to</i> when <i>you</i> not
+only is the indirect object, but is unmistakably so at first sight.
+It may be said that <i>I write you</i> is good old English. So is
+<i>he was a-doing of it</i>; <i>I guess</i> is good Chaucerian. But in
+neither case can the appeal to a dead usage—dead in polite society, or
+in England—justify what is a modern vulgarism.</p>
+
+<p>6. Compound prepositions and conjunctions.</p>
+
+<p>The increasing use of these is much to be regretted. They, and the
+love for abstract expression with which they are closely allied, are
+responsible for much of what is flaccid, diffuse, and nerveless, in
+modern writing. They are generally,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</span> no doubt, invented by persons who
+want to express a more precise shade of meaning than they can find in
+anything already existing; but they are soon caught up by others who
+not only do not need the new delicate instrument, but do not understand
+it. <i>Inasmuch</i> as, for instance, originally expressed that the
+truth of its clause gave the exact measure of the truth that belonged
+to the main sentence. So (from the <i>Oxford Dictionary</i>):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>God is only God inasmuch as he is the Moral Governor of the
+world.—<span class="smcap">Sir W. Hamilton.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But long before Hamilton’s day the word passed, very naturally,
+into the meaning, for which it need never have been invented, of
+<i>since</i> or <i>because</i>. Consequently most people who need
+the original idea have not the courage to use <i>inasmuch as</i>
+for it, like Sir W. Hamilton, but resort to new combinations with
+<i>far</i>. Those new combinations, however, as will be shown,
+fluctuate and are confused with one another. The best thing we can
+now do with <i>inasmuch</i> as is to get it decently buried; when it
+means <i>since</i>, <i>since</i> is better; when it means what it
+once meant, no one understands it. The moral we wish to draw is that
+these compounds should be left altogether alone except in passages
+where great precision is wanted. Just as a word like <i>save</i>
+(except) is ruined for the poet by being used on every page of ordinary
+prose (which it disfigures in revenge for its own degradation), so
+<i>inasmuch</i> as is spoilt for the logician.</p>
+
+<p>We shall first illustrate the absurd prevailing abuse of the compound
+preposition <i>as to</i>. In each of the following sentences, if <i>as
+to</i> is simply left out, no difference whatever is made in the
+meaning. It is only familiarity with unnecessary circumlocution that
+makes such a state of things tolerable to any one with a glimmering
+of literary discernment. <i>As to</i> flows from the pen now at every
+possible opportunity, till many writers seem quite unaware that such
+words as <i>question</i> or <i>doubt</i> can bear the weight of a
+<i>whether</i>-clause without help from this offensive parasite.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>With the idea of endeavouring to ascertain as to this, I
+invited....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Confronted with the simple question as to in what way other people’s
+sisters, wives and daughters differ from theirs....—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is not quite clear as to what happened.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>Doubt is expressed as to whether the fall of Port Arthur will
+materially affect the situation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I feel tempted to narrate one that occurred to me, leaving it
+to your judgment as to whether it is worthy of notice in your
+paper.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>I was entirely indifferent as to the results of the game,
+caring nothing at all <i>as to</i> whether I had losses or
+gains.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The first <i>as to</i> in this may pass, though plain <i>to</i> is
+better.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>German anticipations with regard to the future are apparently based
+upon the question as to how far the Sultan will....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But you are dying to know what brings me here, and even if you
+find nothing new in it you will perhaps think <i>it</i> makes some
+difference <i>as to</i> who says a thing.—<span class="smcap">Greenwood.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is the worst of all. The subject of <i>makes</i> (anticipated in
+the ordinary way by <i>it</i>) is <i>who says a thing</i>; but the
+construction is obscured by the insertion of <i>as to</i>. We are
+forced to suppose, wrongly, that <i>it</i> means <i>what brings me
+here</i>. Worse than the worst, however, at least more aggressively
+wrong, is an instance that we find while correcting this sheet for the
+press:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... Although it is open to doubt as to what extent individual saving
+through more than one provident institution prevails.—<i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Another objection to the compound prepositions and conjunctions is
+that they are frequently confused with one another or miswritten. We
+illustrate from two sets. (<i>a</i>) The word <i>view</i> is common
+in the forms <i>in view of</i>, <i>with a view to</i>, <i>with the
+view of</i>. The first expresses external circumstances, existing or
+likely to occur, that must be taken into account; as, <i>In view of
+these doubts about the next dividend, we do not recommend</i>.... The
+other two both express the object aimed at, but must not have the
+correspondence, <i>a</i> view <i>to</i>, <i>the</i> view <i>of</i>,
+upset.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A Resolution was moved and carried <i>in favour of</i> giving
+facilities to the public vaccination officers of the Metropolis to
+enter the schools<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</span> of the Board <i>for the purpose of</i> examining
+the arms of the children <i>with a view to</i> advising the parents to
+allow their children to be vaccinated.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Sultan ... will seek to obtain money by contracting loans with
+private firms <i>in view of</i> beginning for himself the preliminary
+reforms.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>If Germany has anything to propose <i>in view of</i> the safeguarding
+of her own interests, it will certainly meet with that courteous
+consideration which is traditional in French diplomacy.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Its execution is being carefully prepared <i>with a view of</i>
+avoiding any collision with the natives.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>My company has been approached by several firms <i>with a view of</i>
+overcoming the difficulty.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of these the first is correct; but the sentence it comes in is so
+typical of the compound-prepositional style that no one who reads it
+will be surprised that its patrons should sometimes get mixed; how
+should people who write like that keep their ideas clear? The second
+should have <i>with a view to</i>. Still more should the third, which
+is ambiguous as well as unidiomatic; the words used ought to mean
+<i>seeing that her interests are safeguarded already</i>. The fourth
+and fifth should again have <i>with a view to</i> (or <i>with the view
+of</i>).</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) The combinations with <i>far</i>—<i>as far as</i>, <i>so
+far as</i>, <i>so far that</i>, <i>in so far as</i>, <i>in so far
+that</i>, of which the last is certainly, and the last but one probably
+needless—have some distinctions and limitations often neglected. For
+instance, <i>as far as</i> must not be followed by a mere noun except
+in the literal sense, <i>as far as London</i>. <i>So far as</i> and
+<i>so far that</i> are distinguished by good writers in being applied,
+the first to clauses that contain a doubtful or varying fact, the other
+to clauses containing an ascertained or positive fact. <i>So far as</i>
+(and <i>in so far as</i>), that is, means <i>to whatever extent</i>,
+and <i>so far that</i> means <i>to this extent, namely that</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The question of the Capitulations and of the Mixed Tribunals is not in
+any way essentially British, save <i>in so far as</i> the position of
+Great Britain in Egypt makes her primarily responsible.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Correct; but <i>except that</i> would be much better than <i>save in so
+far as</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Previous to 1895, when a separate constitution existed for the Bombay
+and Madras armies, possibly a military department and a military
+member were necessary in order to focus at the seat of government
+the general military situation in India, but in the judgment of many
+officers well qualified to form an opinion, no such department under
+present conditions is really requisite, <i>in so far as</i> the action
+of the Commander-in-Chief is thwarted in cases where he should be the
+best judge of what is necessary.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Entirely wrong. It is confused with <i>inasmuch as</i>, and
+<i>since</i> should be written.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The officials have done their utmost to enforce neutrality, and have
+<i>in so far</i> succeeded <i>as</i> the Baltic fleet keeps outside
+the three-mile limit.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Should be <i>so far succeeded that</i>; we are meant to understand that
+the fleet does keep outside, though it does not go right away as might
+be wished.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The previous appeal made by M. Delcassé was <i>so far</i>
+successful <i>as</i> the Tsar himself sent orders to Admiral
+Rozhdestvensky to comply with the injunctions of the French colonial
+authorities.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>As</i> should be <i>that</i>. It is not doubtful to what extent or
+whether the Tsar sent. He did send; that is the only point.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>They are exceptional in character, <i>in so far as</i> they do not
+appear to be modifications of the epidermis.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Should probably be <i>so far exceptional that</i>. The point is that
+there <i>is</i> this amount of the exceptional in them, not that
+their irregularity depends on the doubtful fact of their not being
+modifications; the word <i>appear</i> ought otherwise to have been
+parenthetically arranged.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This influence was <i>so far</i> indirect <i>in that</i> it was
+greatly furthered by Le Sage, who borrowed the form of his Spanish
+contemporaries.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A mixture of <i>was so far indirect that</i> and <i>was indirect in
+that</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He seemed quickly to give up first-hand observation and to be content
+to reproduce and re-reproduce his early impressions, always trusting
+to his own invention, and the reading public’s inveterate preference
+for symmetry and satisfaction, to pull him through. They have pulled
+him through <i>in so far as</i> they have made his name popular;
+but an artist and a realist—possibly even a humourist—have been
+lost.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</span></p>
+
+<p><i>In so far as</i> leaves the popularity and the pulling through
+doubtful, which they are clearly not meant to be. It should be <i>so
+far that</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A man can get help from above to do what <i>as far as</i> human
+possibility has proved out of his power.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is a whole sentence, not a fragment, as might be supposed. But
+<i>as far as</i> (except in the local sense) must have a verb, finite
+or infinite. Supply <i>goes</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The large majority would reply in the affirmative, <i>in so far as</i>
+to admit that there is a God.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>So far as to admit</i>, or <i>in so far as they would admit</i>; not
+the mixture. And this distinction is perhaps the only justification for
+the existence of <i>in so far as</i> by the side of <i>so far as</i>;
+the first is only conjunction, the second can be preposition as well.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_10" href="#FNanchor_10" class="label">[10]</a> The reason why many who as a rule use the possessive are
+willing to do without it after verbs like <i>prevent</i> is perhaps
+this: in <i>I prevented him going</i> they consciously or unconsciously
+regard both <i>him</i> and <i>going</i> as nouns, one the indirect, one
+the direct object, as in <i>I refused him leave</i>.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_11" href="#FNanchor_11" class="label">[11]</a> Dr. Henry Bradley, <i>The Making of English</i>, p. 53.</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III<br><span class="small">AIRS AND GRACES</span></h2></div>
+
+<p class="blockquot">Certain types of humour—Elegant
+variation—Inversion—Archaism—Metaphor—Repetition—Miscellaneous.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Certain Types of Humour</span></h3>
+
+<p>Some of the more obvious devices of humorous writers, being fatally
+easy to imitate, tend to outlive their natural term, and to become
+a part of the injudicious novice’s stock-in-trade. <i>Olfactory
+organ</i>, once no doubt an agreeable substitute for ‘nose’, has ceased
+to be legal tender in literature, and is felt to mark a low level in
+conversation. No amount of classical authority can redeem a phrase that
+has once reached this stage. The warmest of George Eliot’s admirers,
+called upon to swallow some tough morsel of polysyllabic humour in a
+twentieth-century novel, will refuse to be comforted with parallel
+passages from <i>Adam Bede</i>. Loyalty may smother the ejaculation
+that ‘George Eliot knew no better’: it is none the less clear to him
+that we know better now. A few well-worn types are illustrated below.</p>
+
+<p>a. Polysyllabic humour.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He was a boy whom Mrs. Hackit had pronounced stocky (a word that
+etymologically, in all probability, conveys some allusion to an
+instrument of punishment for the refractory).—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+
+<p>Tommy was a saucy boy, impervious to all impressions of reverence,
+and excessively addicted to humming-tops and marbles, with which
+recreative resources he was in the habit of immoderately distending
+the pockets of his corduroys.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+
+<p>No one save an individual not in a condition to distinguish a hawk
+from a handsaw....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>And an observer of Miss Tox’s proceedings might have inferred so much
+without declaratory confirmation.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>But it had its little inconveniences at other times, among which
+may be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</span> enumerated the occasional appearance of the river in the
+drawing-room, and the contemporaneous disappearance of the lawn and
+shrubbery.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>They might be better employed in composing their quarrels and
+preparing a policy than in following the rather lugubrious occupations
+indicated by Mr. Asquith.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Or perhaps, from a presentiment of calves’ brains, you refrain
+from any lacteal addition, and rasp your tongue with unmitigated
+bohea.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+
+<p>The rooks were cawing with many-voiced monotony, apparently—by
+a remarkable approximation to human intelligence—finding great
+conversational resources in the change of weather.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+
+<p>I had been terribly shaken by my fall, and had subsequently, owing to
+the incision of the surgeon’s lancet, been deprived of much of the
+vital fluid.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>An elderly man stood near me, and a still more elderly female
+was holding a phial of very pungent salts to my olfactory
+organ.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>The minister, honest man, was getting on his boots in the kitchen to
+see us home.... Well, this preparation ministerial being finished, we
+stepped briskly out.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>We have ourselves been reminded of the deficiencies of our femoral
+habiliments, and exhorted upon that score to fit ourselves more
+beseemingly.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>b. Playful repetition.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When she had banged out the tune slowly, she began a different manner
+of ‘Gettin’ up Stairs’, and did so with a fury and swiftness quite
+incredible. She spun up stairs; she whirled up stairs; she galloped up
+stairs; she rattled up stairs.... Then Miss Wirt played the ‘Gettin’
+up Stairs’ with the most pathetic and ravishing solemnity.... Miss
+Wirt’s hands seemed to faint and wail and die in variations: again,
+and she went up with a savage clang and rush of trumpets, as if Miss
+Wirt was storming a breach.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>My mind was, to a certain extent, occupied with the marks on the
+teapot; it is true that the mournful idea strove hard with the marks
+on the teapot for the mastery in my mind, and at last the painful idea
+drove the marks of the teapot out.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>The pastrycook is hard at work in the funereal room in Brook Street,
+and the very tall young men are busy looking on. One of the very tall
+young men already smells of sherry, and his eyes have a tendency to
+become fixed in his head, and to stare at objects without seeing them.
+The very tall young man is conscious of this failing in himself; and
+informs his comrade that it’s his ‘exciseman’. The very tall young man
+would say excitement, but his speech is hazy.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Busy is Mrs. Miff this morning at the church-door, beating and dusting
+the altar-cloth, the carpet and the cushions; and much has Mrs. Miff
+to say about the wedding they are going to have. Mrs. Miff is told
+that the new furniture and alterations in the house cost full five
+thousand pound, if they cost a penny; and Mrs. Miff has heard, upon
+the best authority, that the lady hasn’t got a sixpence wherewithal to
+bless herself. Mrs. Miff remembers, likewise, as if it had happened
+yesterday, the first wife’s funeral, and then the christening, and
+then the other funeral; and Mrs. Miff says, By-the-bye, she’ll
+soap-and-water that ’ere tablet presently, against the company
+arrive.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Dombey was a grave sight, behind the decanters, in a state of
+dignity; and the East India Director was a forlorn sight, near the
+unoccupied end of the table, in a state of solitude; and the major
+was a military sight, relating stories of the Duke of York to six of
+the seven mild men (the ambitious one was utterly quenched); and the
+Bank Director was a lowly sight, making a plan of his little attempt
+at a pinery, with dessert knives, for a group of admirers; and Cousin
+Feenix was a thoughtful sight, as he smoothed his long wristbands and
+stealthily adjusted his wig.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The author is very much at his ease in the last example; the novice
+who should yawn in our faces with such engaging candour would render
+himself liable to misinterpretation.</p>
+
+<p>c. The well-worn ‘flood-of-tears-and-sedan-chair’ pleasantry.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Phib Cook left her evening wash-tub and appeared at her door in
+soap-suds, a bonnet-poke, and general dampness.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+
+<p>Sir Charles, of course, rescues her from the clutches of the Italian,
+and they return together in triumph and a motor-car.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Miss Nipper ... shook her head and a tin-canister, and began unasked
+to make the tea.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>And for the rest it is not hard to be a stoic in eight-syllable metre
+and a travelling-carriage.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+
+<p>But what the bare-legged men were doing baffled conjecture and the
+best glasses.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>d. Other worn-out phrases of humorous tendency.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>For, tell it not in Gath, the Bishop had arrived on a bicycle.—<span class="smcap">D.
+Sladen.</span></p>
+
+<p>Tell it not in Smith-st., but....—<i>Guernsey Evening Press.</i></p>
+
+<p>Sleeping the sleep of the just.</p>
+
+<p>The gallant sons of Mars.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mackenzie, with a white hat ... and long brown leather gaiters
+buttoned upon his nether anatomy.—<span class="smcap">Lockhart.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Looking for all the world like....—<span class="smcap">D. Sladen.</span></p>
+
+<p>Too funny for words.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These two phrases are commonly employed to carry off a humorous
+description of which the success is doubted. They are equivalents,
+in light literature, of the encouragement sometimes offered by the
+story-teller whose joke from <i>Punch</i> has fallen flat: ‘You should
+have seen the illustration’. <i>Worthy</i> and <i>gallant</i> are
+similarly used:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>To hear the worthy and gallant Major resume his favourite topic is
+like law-business, or a person who has a suit in Chancery going
+on.—<span class="smcap">Hazlitt.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Home.</i>—I would implore God to survey with an eye of mercy their
+unoffending bairns. <i>Hume.</i>—And would not you be disposed to
+behold them with an eye <i>of the same materials</i>?—<span class="smcap">Landor.</span></p>
+
+<p>Two or three haggard, ragged drawers ran to and fro.... Guided by one
+of these blinking <i>Ganymedes</i>, they entered....—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>The ancient <i>Hebe</i> who acted as Lord Glenvarloch’s cup-bearer
+took his part against the intrusion of the still more antiquated
+<i>Ganymede</i>, and insisted on old Trapbois leaving the room
+instantly.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It may be doubted whether any resemblance or contrast, however
+striking, can make it worth a modern writer’s while to call waiters
+Ganymedes, waitresses Hebes, postmen Mercuries, cabmen Automedons or
+Jehus. In Scott’s time, possibly, these phrases had still an agreeable
+novelty: they are now so hackneyed as to have fallen into the hands of
+writers who are not quite certain who Ganymede and Hebe were. Thus,
+there are persons who evidently think that it is rather complimentary
+to one’s host than otherwise to call him an Amphitryon; and others who
+are fond of using the phrase ‘l’Amphitryon où l’on dîne’ altogether
+without point, apparently under the impression that ‘où l’on dîne’ is
+an alternative version for the use of the uninitiated (‘Amphitryon’,
+that is to say, ‘one’s host’).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Japan, says M. Balet, can always borrow money so long as she can
+provide two things—guarantees and victories. She has guarantees
+enough and victories <i>galore</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</span></p>
+
+<p>The English people has insisted on its preference for a married
+clergy, and Dr. Ingram’s successor may have ‘arrows in the hand of a
+giant’.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The inverted commas seem to implore the reader’s acceptance of this
+very battered ornament. One could forgive it more easily, if there were
+the slightest occasion for its appearance here.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The only change ever known in his outward man
+was....—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>Rob the Grinder, thus transformed as to his outer
+man....—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>One hundred parishioners and friends partaking of tea.—<i>Guernsey
+Advertiser.</i></p>
+
+<p>But that’s another story.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+
+<p>But that is ‘another story’.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It was all that Anne could do to keep from braining him with the poker
+for daring to call her ‘Little One’,—and Anne’s arm is no joke when
+she hits to hurt. Once John Barnaby—but the tale of John Barnaby can
+wait.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, some folk like it so, and even now the Captain, when his
+pipe draws well and his grog is to his liking, says—But there is no
+use in bringing the Captain into the story.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The notion that Mr. Kipling, left to himself, is not competent to bring
+out all the latent possibilities of this phrase is a mistaken one, and
+argues an imperfect acquaintance with his works.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Many heads in England, I find, are shaken doubtfully over the
+politics, or what are thought to be the politics, of Australia.
+They—the politics, not the heads—are tangled, they are
+unsatisfactory in a high degree.—<span class="smcap">W. H. Fitchett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Elegant Variation</span></h3>
+
+<p>We include under this head all substitutions of one word for another
+for the sake of variety, and some miscellaneous examples will be found
+at the end of the section. But we are chiefly concerned with what may
+be called pronominal variation, in which the word avoided is either a
+noun or its obvious pronoun substitute. The use of pronouns is itself
+a form of variation, designed to avoid ungainly repetition; and we
+are only going one step further when, instead of either the original
+noun or the pronoun, we use some new equivalent.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</span> ‘Mr. Gladstone’,
+for instance, having already become ‘he,’ presently appears as ‘that
+statesman’. Variation of this kind is often necessary in practice; so
+often, that it should never be admitted except when it is necessary.
+Many writers of the present day abound in types of variation that are
+not justified by expediency, and have consequently the air of cheap
+ornament. It is impossible to lay down hard and fast rules, but two
+general principles may be suggested: (1) Variation should take place
+only when there is some awkwardness, such as ambiguity or noticeable
+monotony, in the word avoided. (2) The substitute should be of a purely
+pronominal character, a substitute and nothing more; there should be no
+killing of two birds with one stone. Even when these two requirements
+are satisfied, the variation is often worse, because more noticeable,
+than the monotony it is designed to avoid.</p>
+
+<p>The examples in our first group do not offend against (2): how far
+they offend against (1), and how far they are objectionable on other
+grounds, we shall consider in detail.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mr. Wolff, the well-known mining engineer, yesterday paid a visit to
+the scene of the disaster. <i>The expert</i> gave it as his opinion
+that no blame attached....</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>The expert</i> is gratuitous: <i>He</i> would have done quite well.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>None the less Mrs. Scott [Sir Walter’s mother] was a motherly
+comfortable woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well stored,
+vivid memory. Sir Walter, writing of her, after <i>his mother’s</i>
+death, to Lady Louisa Stewart, says....—<span class="smcap">Hutton.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>His mother’s</i> is not only unnecessary, but misleading: there is
+a difficulty in realizing that <i>her</i> and <i>his mother</i>, so
+placed, can be meant to refer to the same person.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mr. J. Hays Hammond, a friend of President Roosevelt, lecturing before
+the American Political Science Association, quoted a recent utterance
+of the President of the Japanese House of Peers. <i>That dignitary</i>
+said: ....—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>That dignitary said</i> might have been omitted, with the full stop
+before it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mr. Sidney Lee’s study of the Elizabethan Sonnets, the late Mr.
+Charles Elton’s book on Shakespeare’s Family and Friends, and
+Professor Bradley’s on Shakespearean Tragedy—a work which may
+be instructively read with Professor Campbell’s ‘Tragic Drama
+in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare’—remind us that <i>the
+dramatist</i> still holds his own with the publishers. The last two or
+three weeks have seen two new editions of him.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The writer has thoroughly puzzled himself. He cannot call Shakespeare
+Shakespeare, because there is a Shakespeare just before: he cannot call
+him <i>he</i>, because six other persons in the sentence have claims
+upon <i>he</i>: and he ought not to call him <i>the dramatist</i>,
+because Aeschylus and Sophocles were dramatists too. We know, of
+course, which dramatist is meant, just as we should have known which
+<i>he</i> was meant; but the appropriation is awkward in either
+case. <i>The dramatist</i> is no doubt the best thing under the
+circumstances; but when matters are brought to such a pass that we can
+neither call a man by his own name, nor use a pronoun, nor identify him
+by means of his profession, it is time to remodel the sentence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>If Mr. Chamberlain has been injured by the fact that till now Mr.
+Balfour has clung to him, Mr. Balfour has been equally injured by the
+fact that Mr. Chamberlain has persistently locked his arm in <i>that
+of the Prime Minister</i>.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Elegant variation is the last thing we should expect here. For what
+is the writer’s principal object? Clearly, to emphasize the idea of
+reciprocity by the repetition of names, and by their arrangement. Mr.
+Chamberlain, Mr. Balfour: Mr. Balfour, Mr. Chamberlain. It is easy
+enough, so far: ‘If Mr. Chamberlain has been injured by the persistent
+attachment of Mr. Balfour, Mr. Balfour has been equally injured by
+that of Mr. Chamberlain’. But that is not all that is required: there
+is to be the graphic touch; arm is to be locked in arm. Now comes the
+difficulty: in whose arm are we to lock Mr. Chamberlain’s? in ‘his’? in
+‘<i>his</i>’? in ‘his own’? in ‘Mr. Balfour’s’? in ‘that of the Prime<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</span>
+Minister’? As the locking of arms is perhaps after all only an elegant
+variation for clinging, remodelling seems again to be the best way out
+of the difficulty. Perhaps our simplified form above might serve.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>On Thursday evening last, as a horse and cart were standing at Mr.
+Brown’s shop, the animal bolted.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘The horse’.—An unconscious satirist, of tender years but ripe
+discernment, parsed ‘animal’ in this sentence as a personal pronoun;
+‘it replaced the subject of the sentence’. Journalists (it was
+explained to her) are equipped with many more personal pronouns than
+ever get into the grammars.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>The King</i> yesterday morning made a close inspection of the
+Cruiser Drake at Portsmouth, and afterwards made a tour of the harbour
+on board the Admiral’s launch. <i>His Majesty</i> then landed and
+drove to Southsea, where he inspected the Royal Garrison Artillery at
+Clarence Barracks. <i>The King</i> returned to London in the course of
+the afternoon.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is, no doubt, a difficult case. The royal pronoun (His Majesty)
+does not lend itself to repetition: on the other hand, it is felt that
+<i>he</i>s, if indulged in at all, must be kept a respectful distance
+apart; hence <i>The King</i> in the third sentence. We can get rid of
+it by reading ‘... at Clarence Barracks; returning ...’. But of course
+that solution would not always be possible.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>The Emperor</i> received yesterday and to-day General Baron von
+Beck.... It may therefore be assumed with some confidence that the
+terms of a feasible solution are maturing themselves in <i>His
+Majesty’s</i> mind and may form the basis of further negotiations
+with Hungarian party leaders when <i>the Monarch</i> goes again to
+Budapest.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>If <i>the Emperor of Austria</i> should disappear from the scene,
+war, according to this authority, is to be feared, as <i>the Emperor
+Francis Joseph</i> alone controls....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is no excuse either for <i>the Monarch</i> or for the <i>Emperor
+Francis Joseph</i>. ‘He’ could scarcely have been misinterpreted even
+in the latter sentence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Sir Charles Edward Bernard</i> had a long and distinguished career
+in the Indian Civil Service.... Five years later <i>Sir Charles
+Bernard</i> was appointed Commissioner of Nagpur.... In 1876 <i>Sir
+Edward Bernard</i> returned to Nagpur.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is natural that <i>Sir Charles Edward Bernard</i> should be
+introduced to us under his full name; natural, also, that an
+abbreviation should be chosen for working purposes. But why two
+abbreviations? If <i>Sir Charles</i> and <i>he</i> are judiciously
+employed, they will last out to the end of the longest article, without
+any assistance from <i>Sir Edward</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Among the instances here given, there is scarcely one in which
+variation might not have been avoided with a little trouble. There are
+some, indeed, in which it is not gratuitous; and if in these the effect
+upon the reader were as negative as the writer’s intention, there would
+be nothing to complain of. But it is not; the artistic concealment
+of art is invariably wanting. These elephantine shifts distract our
+attention from the matter in hand; we cannot follow His Majesty’s
+movements, for wondering what the King will be called next time; will
+it be plain Edward VII? or will something be done, perhaps, with ‘the
+Emperor of India’? When the choice lies between monotonous repetition
+on the one hand and clumsy variation on the other, it may fairly be
+laid down that of two undesirable alternatives the natural is to be
+preferred to the artificial.</p>
+
+<p>But variation of this kind is, at the worst, less offensive than
+that which, in violation of our second principle above, is employed
+as a medium for the conveyance of sprightly allusion, mild humour or
+(commonest of all) parenthetic information.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When people looked at his head, they felt he ought to have
+been a giant, but he was far from <i>rivalling the children of
+Anak</i>.—<span class="smcap">H. Caine.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Far from it’, in fact.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He never fuddled himself with rum-and-water in his son’s presence, and
+only talked to his servants in a very reserved and polite manner; and
+<i>those persons</i> remarked....—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+
+<p>‘What made ye sae late?’ said Mr. Jarvie, as I entered the
+dining-parlour of <i>that honest gentleman</i>.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The parlour was Mr. Jarvie’s.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>At the sixth round, there were almost as many <i>fellows shouting
+out</i> ‘Go it, Figs’, as there were <i>youths exclaiming</i> ‘Go it,
+Cuff’.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Great advances in the education of women ... are likely, perhaps, to
+find more congenial soil in Universities less bound by time-honoured
+traditions and by social conventions than Oxford or Cambridge.
+Whatever may be the case <i>by Isis or Cam</i>, ....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Our representative yesterday ran down to Brighton to interview the
+Cambridge Captain. <i>The weight-putter and high-jumper</i> received
+him with his usual cordiality.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is a favourite newspaper type.</p>
+
+<p>The miscellaneous examples given below (except ‘the former of the last
+two’) are connected with pronominal variation only so far as they
+illustrate the same principle of false elegance.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... hardly calculated to impress <i>at this juncture</i> more than
+<i>upon any former occasion</i> the audience....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>His mother <i>possessed</i> a good development of benevolence, but he
+<i>owned</i> a better and larger.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>In the subjoined official record of ‘business done’, transactions
+<i>marked</i> thus * relate to small bonds, those <i>signalized</i>
+thus † to small bonds free of stamp and fee, and those
+<i>distinguished</i> thus + to an exceptional amount at special rates.
+Stocks and shares marked thus †† have paid no dividend for the last
+two half-years and upwards.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The return to <i>marked</i> is humiliating; we would respectfully
+suggest <i>characterized</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>One might be more intelligible in such moods if one wrote in
+<i>waving lines</i>, and accordingly the question ‘Why do you not
+ask Alfred Tennyson to your home?’ is written in <i>undulating
+script</i>.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>Eighty-three volumes are <i>required for</i> letter “M,” seventy-seven
+are <i>demanded by</i> “L,” and seventy-six are perforce <i>conceded
+to</i> “B”; but <i>the former of the last two</i>....—<i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>I must <i>ask</i> the reader to <i>use</i> the same twofold
+procedure that I before <i>requested</i> him to <i>employ</i> in
+considering....—<span class="smcap">H. Sidgwick.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We have not room to record at length, from the <i>Westminster
+Gazette</i>, the elegant variety of fortune that attended certain
+pictures, which (within twenty lines) made, fetched, changed hands for,
+went for, produced, elicited, drew, fell at, accounted for, realized,
+and were knocked down for, various sums.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Inversion</span></h3>
+
+<p>Of all the types of inversion used by modern writers, there is perhaps
+not one that could not be shown to exist in older<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</span> English. Ordinary
+modern usage, however, has retained those forms only in which ancient
+authority combines with practical convenience; and not all of those.
+To set aside the verdict of time in this respect is to be archaic.
+Before using inversion, therefore, the novice should ask himself two
+questions: is there any solid, practical reason (ornamental reasons
+will not do) for tampering with the normal order of subject and verb?
+and does the inversion sound natural?</p>
+
+<p>Throughout this section it must be borne in mind that in all questions
+of right and wrong inversion the final appeal is not to history, but
+to the reader’s perception: what sounds right to most modern ears is
+right for modern purposes. When, under balance inversion, we speak of
+a true and a false principle, we do not mean to imply that the ‘true’
+principle was, historically, the origin of this kind of inversion, or
+that the ‘false’ is a mistaken analogy from it: all that is meant is
+that if we examine a collection of instances, those that sound natural
+will prove to be based upon the ‘true’ principle, and those that do not
+on the ‘false’.</p>
+
+<p><b>a. Exclamatory inversion.</b></p>
+
+<p>This may be regarded as an abbreviated form of exclamation, as if
+the word ‘How’ had dropped out at the beginning, and a note of
+exclamation at the end. The inverted order, which is normal in the
+complete exclamation, sounds natural also in the abbreviated form. The
+requirements for this kind of inversion are these: (1) The intention
+must be genuinely exclamatory, so that the full form of exclamation
+could be substituted without extravagance. (2) The word placed first
+must be that which would bear the chief emphasis in the uninverted
+form. It should be observed that this is the only kind of inversion in
+which the emphatic word, as such, stands at the beginning.</p>
+
+<p>Our first three examples satisfy these conditions, and are
+unobjectionable. The fourth does not: we could not substitute ‘With
+what difficulty...!’; nor are the first words<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</span> emphatic; the emphasis
+is on ‘conceive’. Yet the inversion is inoffensive, being in fact not
+exclamatory at all, but a licensed extension of negative inversion,
+which is treated below.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Bitterly did I regret the perverse, superstitious folly that had
+induced me to neglect so obvious a precaution.</p>
+
+<p>But in these later times, with so many disillusions, with fresh
+problems confronting science as it advances, rare must be the spirit
+of faith with which Haeckel regards his work.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Gladly would he now have consented to the terms....</p>
+
+<p>With difficulty can I conceive of a mental condition in which....</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Exclamatory inversion, like everything else that is exclamatory, should
+of course be used sparingly.</p>
+
+<p><b>b. Balance inversion.</b></p>
+
+<p>The following are familiar and legitimate types:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>First on our list stands the question of local option.</p>
+
+<p>On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.</p>
+
+<p>To this cause may be attributed....</p>
+
+<p>Among the guests were A, B, C, ... Z.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We give the name of ‘balance’ to this kind of inversion because,
+although the writer, in inverting the sentence, may not be distinctly
+conscious of rectifying its balance, the fact that it was ill-balanced
+before is the true cause of inversion. It is a mistake to say that the
+words placed first in the above examples are so placed for the sake
+of emphasis; that is a very common impression, and is responsible for
+many unlawful inversions. It is not emphasis that is given to these
+words, it is protection; they are placed there to protect them from
+being virtually annihilated, as they would have been if left at the
+end. Look at the last of our examples: how can we call the words ‘Among
+the guests were’ emphatic, or say that they were placed there for
+emphasis? They are essential words, they show the connexion, nor could
+the sentence be a sentence without them; but they are as unemphatic as
+words could well be.—Why, then (it may be asked), are they put at the
+beginning? is not this an emphatic position? and does not any unusual
+position give emphasis?—No: it gives not emphasis but prominence,
+which is another thing.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</span></p>
+
+<p>Put the sentence back into its original form, and we shall see why
+inversion was desirable. ‘A, B, C, D, E, F ... Z were among the
+guests.’ Observe how miserably the sentence tails off; it has no
+balance. By inverting it, we introduce several improvements. First, we
+give prominence to the unemphatic predicate, and enable it to discharge
+its humble office, that of a sign-post, indicating the connexion with
+what has gone before. Secondly, by giving prominence to the predicate,
+we give balance to the sentence, which before was top-heavy. Thirdly,
+we give prominence to the subject, by placing it in an unusual position.</p>
+
+<p>Next take the ‘local option’ sentence. Are the words ‘First on our
+list’ emphatic? Not if the inverter knows his business. How did it run
+originally? ‘The question of local option stands first on our list.’
+These words might be meant to tell us either of two things: what stood
+first on the list, or where local option stood. If the inversion is
+right, they are meant to tell us what stood first. If the other had
+been meant, then ‘First on the list’ would have been emphatic, and the
+writer would have left it in its place; but as it is not emphatic, and
+the other words are, the sentence is top-heavy; he therefore inverts
+it, thus balancing the sentence, and placing the unemphatic words in
+a prominent position, where they continue to be unemphatic, but are
+sure to be noticed. In spoken language, the relative importance of the
+different parts of a sentence can be indicated merely by the inflexion
+of the voice; but the balance of the sentence is best maintained, even
+then, by means of inversion.</p>
+
+<p>It is the same with the other examples. If we restore the St. Matthew
+quotation to the uninverted form, again we have an answer to either of
+two questions: What is the basis of the law? and What is the importance
+of these two commandments? Obviously it is meant as an answer to
+the latter, and therefore the words that convey that answer are the
+emphatic words; the others are not emphatic, but merely essential to
+the connexion; the general importance of the ‘two commandments’,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</span>
+as forming the subject-matter of the whole context, does not in the
+slightest degree affect their relation to the other words in this
+particular sentence.</p>
+
+<p>It follows from what has been said that true balance inversion is
+employed not for the sake of impressiveness, but with the purely
+negative object of avoiding a bad balance. The data required for its
+justification are (i) An emphatic subject, carrying in itself the point
+of the sentence, (ii) Unemphatic ‘sign-post’ words, essential to the
+connexion, standing originally at the end of the sentence, and there
+felt to be inadequately placed. The results of the inversion must be
+(iii) That the sign-post stands at the beginning, (iv) That the subject
+stands absolutely at the end.</p>
+
+<p>When these four conditions are fulfilled, the inversion, far from being
+objectionable, may tend greatly to vigour and lucidity. It is liable,
+of course, to be overdone, but there are several ways of avoiding
+that: sometimes it is possible to place the sign-post at the beginning
+without inversion; or the uninverted sentence may be reconstructed, so
+that the subject no longer carries the emphasis; and, as often as not,
+a sentence of which the accentuation is theoretically doubtful may in
+practice be left to the reader’s discernment.</p>
+
+<p>One occasional limitation remains to be mentioned, before we proceed
+to instances. It applies to those sentences only that have a compound
+verb: if the compound verb cannot be represented simply by its
+auxiliary component, the inversion may have to be abandoned, on account
+of the clumsiness of compound verbs in the middle of an inverted
+sentence, for to carry the other component to the end would be to
+violate our fourth rule. Take the type sentence ‘To these causes may
+be attributed ...’, and first let the subject be ‘our disasters’. The
+clumsiness of the verb is then distinctly felt; and ‘To these causes
+may our disasters be attributed’ is ugly enough to show the importance
+of the rule it violates. But next let the subject be ‘every one of
+the disasters that have come upon us’. This time the inversion is
+satisfactory; whence we<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</span> conclude that if the verb is compound, the
+subject must be long as well as emphatic, or the inversion will not do.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>On the answer to this question depends entirely every decision
+concerning the goodness or badness of conduct.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+
+<p>Just as, after contact, some molecules of a mass of food are absorbed
+by the part touched, and excite the act of prehension, so are absorbed
+such of its molecules as, spreading through the water, reach the
+organism.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These are both formed on the right principle, but the second suffers
+from the awkwardness of the auxiliary.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Still more when considered in the concrete than when considered in
+the abstract do the views of Hobbes and his disciples prove to be
+inconsistent.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here we have neither the data that justify balance inversion, nor the
+results that should follow from it. It is due to the false principle
+of ‘emphasis’ dealt with below in d. and reads as awkwardly as such
+inversions usually read. The sentence is, no doubt, cumbrous in the
+uninverted form; but it wants reconstruction, not inversion.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Much deeper down than the history of the human race must we go to find
+the beginnings of these connections.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Wrong again, for the same reasons, but not with the same excuse; for
+the original form is unobjectionable. The emphasis is not on the
+problem (<i>to find</i> ...), but on the clue to it (<i>much deeper
+down</i>), which, being emphatic, can maintain its position at the end
+of the sentence. The compound verb is only a secondary objection: we do
+not mend matters much by substituting <i>lie</i> for <i>must we go to
+find</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>You say he is selfish. Well, so is every one.</p>
+
+<p>You say he is selfish. Well, so is every one selfish.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>So is every one</i> is a correct inversion: <i>so</i> is too weak to
+stand at the end, and at the beginning it is a good enough sign-post to
+tell us that selfishness is going to be defended. But <i>so is every
+one selfish</i> is wrong: for if <i>selfish</i> is repeated at all, it
+is repeated with rhetorical effect, and is strong enough to take care
+of itself. Our second rule is thus violated; and so is our fourth—the
+subject does not come at the end.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>All three methods had their charm. So may have Mr. Yeats’s notion
+of....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This time, the compound verb is fatal. ‘So, perhaps, has ...’ would do.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The arrival of the Hartmanns created no little excitement in the
+Falconet family, both among the sons and the daughters. Especially was
+there no lack of speculation as to the character and appearance of
+Miss Hartmann.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Right or wrong in principle, this does not read comfortably; but that
+may seem to be due to the cumbrous phrase ‘was there no lack of’, which
+for practical purposes is a compound verb. That difficulty we can
+remove without disturbing the accentuation of the sentence: ‘Especially
+numerous were the speculations as to the character of Miss Hartmann’.
+This resembles in form our old type ‘Among the guests were ...’, but
+with the important difference that ‘especially numerous’ is emphatic,
+and can therefore stand at the end. The inversion is rather explained
+than justified by the still stronger emphasis on ‘Miss Hartmann’.
+Sentences in which both subject and predicate are independently
+emphatic should be avoided, quite apart from the question of inversion:
+italics are more or less necessary to secure the inferior emphasis, and
+italics are a confession of weakness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Somewhat lightened was the <i>provincial</i> panic by this proof that
+the murderer had not condescended to sneak into the country, or to
+abandon for a moment, under any motion of caution or fear, the great
+metropolitan <i>castra stativa</i> of gigantic crime seated for ever
+on the Thames.—<span class="smcap">De Quincey</span> (the italics are his).</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Not a happy attempt. We notice, for one thing, that the subject does
+not come at the end; the inversion is not complete. Let us complete it.
+To do so, we must convey our huge sign-post to the beginning: ‘By this
+proof ... Thames, was somewhat lightened the <i>provincial</i> panic.’
+Worse than ever; is the compound verb to blame? Remove it, and see:
+‘In consequence of this proof ... Thames, subsided in some degree the
+<i>provincial</i> panic’. This is not much better. There is another
+and a worse flaw: condition number one is not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</span> satisfied; we want ‘an
+emphatic subject that carries in itself the point of the sentence’. Now
+we must not assume that because ‘provincial’ is italicized, therefore
+the subject (however emphatic) carries in itself the point of the
+sentence. What is that point? what imaginary question does the sentence
+answer? Can it be meant to answer the question ‘What limitations were
+there upon the comfort derived from the intelligence that the murderer
+was still in London?’? No; that question could not be asked; we have
+not yet been told that any comfort at all was derived. The question
+it answers is ‘What effect did this intelligence produce upon the
+general panic?’. This question can be asked; for the reader evidently
+knows that a panic had prevailed, and that the intelligence had come.
+If, then, we are to use balance inversion, we must so reconstruct
+the sentence that the words containing the essential answer to this
+question become the subject; we must change ‘somewhat lightened’
+into ‘some alleviation’. ‘From this proof ... Thames, resulted some
+alleviation of the <i>provincial</i> panic.’ That is the best that
+inversion will do for us; it is not quite satisfactory, and the reason
+is that the sentence is made to do too much. When the essential point
+is subject to an emphatic limitation (an unemphatic one like ‘somewhat’
+does not matter), the limitation ought to be conveyed in a separate
+sentence; otherwise the sentence is overworked, and either shirks its
+work, with the result of obscurity, or protests by means of italics.
+We ought therefore to have: ‘From ... resulted some alleviation of the
+general panic; this, however, was confined to the provinces’. But,
+except for this incidental fault, the sentence can be mended without
+inversion: ‘By this proof ... Thames, the <i>provincial</i> panic was
+somewhat lightened’.</p>
+
+<p><b>c. Inversion in syntactic clauses.</b></p>
+
+<p>In clauses introduced by <i>as</i>, <i>than</i>, or a relative (pronoun
+or adverb), we have only a special case of balance inversion. They
+differ from the instances considered above in this important respect,
+that their relation to the preceding words is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</span> no longer paratactic,
+but syntactic, with the result that the sign-post indicating this
+relation is necessarily placed at the beginning. This will be seen from
+a comparison of the paratactic and syntactic forms in the following
+pairs of examples:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">He was quick-tempered: so are most Irishmen. (Paratactic.)</div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">He was quick-tempered, as are most Irishmen. (Syntactic.)</div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">Several difficulties now arose: among them was....</div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">Several difficulties now arose, among which was....</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Now in each of these sentences there are the same inducements to
+inversion in the syntactic form as in the paratactic; and added to
+these is the necessity for placing the sign-post at the beginning. We
+might expect, therefore, that inversion of syntactic clauses would be
+particularly common. But (i) We have already seen that inversion does
+not necessarily follow from the fact that the sign-post is placed at
+the beginning. And (ii) The verb in <i>as</i> and <i>than</i> clauses
+will probably, from the nature of the case, be the same as in the
+preceding clause. If it is in the same mood and tense, it can usually
+be omitted, unless effective repetition is required, in which case it
+will go to the end: a change of mood or tense, on the other hand, will
+often be marked by an auxiliary (itself perhaps compound), which again
+will usually preclude inversion.</p>
+
+<p>The result is this:</p>
+
+<p>i. Relative clauses, uninfluenced by the position of the sign-post,
+remain subject to precisely the same conditions as the corresponding
+paratactic sentences. Thus ‘Among whom were....’ is right, just
+as ‘Among the guests were....’ was right; ‘Among which would I
+mention....’ is of course impossible, because the subject does not
+carry the point; and ‘To which may be attributed....’ is right or
+wrong, according as the subject is or is not long enough to balance the
+compound verb.</p>
+
+<p>ii. Inversion of an <i>as</i> or <i>than</i> clause, having become
+unusual for the reason mentioned above, is almost certain to look
+either archaic or clumsy; clumsy when the reason for it is apparent,
+archaic when it is not. The practical rule is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</span> this: if you cannot omit
+the verb, put it at the end; and if you can neither omit it nor put it
+at the end, reconstruct the sentence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The German government was as anxious to upset M. Delcassé as have been
+his bitterest opponents in France.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The verb is preserved to avoid ambiguity. But it should go to the end,
+especially as it is compound.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Relishing humour more than does any other people, the Americans could
+not be seriously angry.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Ambiguity cannot fairly be pleaded here; the verb should be omitted.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>If France remains as firm as did England at that time, she will
+probably have as much reason as had England to congratulate
+herself.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Either ‘as England did’, or, since the parallel is significant, ‘as
+England then remained’. Also, ‘as England had’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>St. Paul’s writings are as full of apparent paradoxes as sometimes
+seems the Sermon on the Mount.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The verb must be retained, for the sake of <i>sometimes</i>; but it
+should go to the end.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But he has performed as have few, if any, in offices similar to his
+the larger, benigner functions of an Ambassador.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘As few ... have performed them.’</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Her impropriety was no more improper than is the natural instinct of a
+bird or animal improper.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is like the case considered in b. ‘so is every one selfish’. If
+<i>improper</i> is repeated with rhetorical effect, there is no need of
+inversion: if not, it should be left out.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There had been from time to time a good deal of interest over Mrs.
+Emsworth’s career, the sort of interest which does more for a time in
+filling a theatre than would acting of a finer quality than hers have
+done.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Either ‘would have done’ at the end, or (perhaps better) no verb at all.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>All must join with me in the hope you express—that ... as also must
+all hope that some good will come of....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Like the indiscriminate use of <i>while</i>, this ungainly <i>as</i>
+connexion is popular with slovenly writers, and is always aggravated by
+inversion. ‘All, too, must hope....’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</span></p>
+
+<p><b>d. Negative inversion, and false ‘emphasis’ inversion.</b></p>
+
+<p>The connexion here suggested between certain forms of inversion must
+be taken to represent, not by any means the historical order of
+development, with which we are not directly concerned, but the order
+in which a modern writer may be supposed, more or less unconsciously,
+to adopt them. Starting from an isolated case of necessary inversion,
+we proceed to extensions of it that seem natural and are sanctioned
+by modern usage; and from these to other extensions, based probably
+on a misunderstanding, and producing in modern writers the effect of
+archaism.</p>
+
+<p><i>Nor</i>, except when used in conjunction with <i>neither</i>, always
+stands first; and if the subject appears at all, the sentence is always
+inverted. This requires no illustration.</p>
+
+<p>On the analogy of <i>nor</i>, many other negative words and phrases are
+thrown to the beginning of the sentence, and again inversion is the
+result.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Never had the Cardinal’s policy been more triumphantly vindicated.</p>
+
+<p>Nowhere is this so noticeable as in the South of France.</p>
+
+<p>In no case can such a course be justified merely by success.</p>
+
+<p>Systems, neither of which can be regarded as philosophically
+established, but neither of which can we consent to
+surrender.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>Two sorts of judgments, neither of which can be deduced
+from the other, and of neither of which can any proof be
+given.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is at this stage that misconception creeps in. Most of these
+negative phrases are in themselves emphatic; and from their being
+placed first (really on the analogy of <i>nor</i>) comes the mistaken
+idea that they derive emphasis from their position. This paves the way
+for wholesale inversion: any words, other than the subject, are placed
+at the beginning; and this not always in order to emphasize the words
+so placed, but merely to give an impressive effect to the whole. The
+various steps are marked by the instances that follow. In the first
+two, inversion may be on the analogy of negatives, or may be designed
+for emphasis; in the third, emphasis is clearly the motive; and in the
+rest we have mere impressiveness—not to say mere mannerism.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>With difficulty could he be persuaded....</p>
+
+<p>Disputes were rife in both cases, but in both cases have the disputes
+been arranged.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Almost unanimously do Americans assume that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>They hardly resembled real ships, so twisted and burnt were the
+funnels and superstructure; rather did they resemble the ghosts of a
+long departed squadron....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>His love of romantic literature was as far as possible from that of a
+mind which only feeds on romantic excitements. Rather was it that of
+one who was so moulded....—<span class="smcap">Hutton.</span></p>
+
+<p>There is nothing to show that the Asclepiads took any prominent
+share in the work of founding anatomy, physiology, zoology,
+and botany. Rather do these seem to have sprung from the early
+philosophers.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>His works were ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. Yet was the
+multitude still true to him.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>Henry Fox, or nobody, could weather the storm which was about to
+burst. Yet was he a person to whom the court, even in that extremity,
+was unwilling to have recourse.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>A book of ‘levities and gravities’, it would seem from the author’s
+dedication, is this set of twelve essays, named after the twelve
+months.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>The set epistolary pieces, one might say, were discharged before the
+day of Elia. Yet is there certainly no general diminution of sparkle
+or interest....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Futile were the endeavor to trace back to Pheidias’ varied originals,
+as we are tempted to do, many of the later statues....—<span class="smcap">L. M.
+Mitchell.</span></p>
+
+<p>Inevitably critical was the attitude that he adopted towards
+religion.... Odious to him were, on the one hand, ....—<i>Journal of
+Education.</i></p>
+
+<p>Finely conceived is this poem, and not less admirable in
+execution.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>‘The Rainbow and the Rose’, by E. Nisbet, is a little book
+that will not disappoint those who know the writer’s ‘Lays and
+Legends’. Facile and musical, sincere and spontaneous, are these
+lyrics.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>Then to the resident Medical Officer at the Brompton Hospital for
+Consumption for an authoritative opinion on the subject went the
+enquirer.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In view of the rapidly increasing tendency to causeless inversion of
+all kinds, it is far from certain that this last is intentional satire.</p>
+
+<p><b>e. Miscellaneous.</b></p>
+
+<p>(i) In narrated dialogue, the demand for variations of ‘he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</span> said’, &amp;c.,
+excuse considerable freedom in the matter of inversion. One or two
+points, however, may be noticed.</p>
+
+<p>When the subject is a personal pronoun, <i>say</i> is perhaps the
+only verb with which inversion is advisable. ‘Said I, he, they’, and
+‘retorted Jones’: but not ‘enquired I’, ‘rejoined he’, ‘suggested they’.</p>
+
+<p>Compound verbs, as usual, do not lend themselves to inversion:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘I won’t plot anything extra against Tom,’ had said Isaac.—<span class="smcap">M.
+Maartens.</span></p>
+
+<p>‘At any rate, then,’ may rejoin our critic, ‘it is clearly
+useless....’—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+
+<p>‘I am the lover of a queen,’ had often sung the steward in his pantry
+below.—<span class="smcap">R. Elliot.</span></p>
+
+<p>‘The cook and the steward are always quarrelling, it is quite
+unbearable,’ had explained Mrs. Tuggy to the chief mate.—<span class="smcap">R.
+Elliot.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Inverted <i>said</i> at the beginning is one of the first pitfalls
+that await the novice who affects sprightliness. It is tolerable, if
+anywhere, only in light playful verse.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Said a friend to me the other day, ‘I should like to be able to run
+well across country, but have never taken part in a paper-chase, for
+I have always been beaten so easily when trying a hundred yards or so
+against my acquaintances....’—<span class="smcap">S. Thomas.</span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Takahira and Count Cassini continue to exchange repartees through
+friends or through the public press. Said the Japanese Minister
+yesterday evening:—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is inferred here officially and unofficially that neutral rights
+are unlikely to suffer from any derangement in Morocco to which
+England is a consenting party. Said a Minister:—‘American interests
+are not large enough in Morocco to induce us to....’—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>With verbs other than <i>said</i>, this form of inversion is still more
+decidedly a thing to be left to the poets. ‘Appears Verona’; ‘Rose a
+nurse of ninety years’; but not</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Comes a new translation ... in four neat olive-green
+volumes.—<i>Journal of Education.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>(ii) The inverted conditionals <i>should</i>, <i>had</i>, <i>could</i>,
+<i>would</i>, <i>were</i>, <i>did</i>, being recommended by brevity
+and a certain neatness, are all more or less licensed by modern usage.
+It is worth while, however, to name them in what seems to be their
+order<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</span> of merit. <i>Should I</i>, from its frequency, is without taint
+of archaism; but <i>could</i> and <i>would</i>, and, in a less degree,
+<i>had</i>, are apt to betray their archaic character by the addition
+of <i>but</i> (‘would he but consent’); and <i>were</i> and <i>did</i>
+are felt to be slightly out of date, even without this hint.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I should be, therefore, worse than a fool, did I
+object.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>Did space allow, I could give you startling proof of
+this.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>(iii) Always, after performing inversion of any kind, the novice
+should go his rounds, and see that all is shipshape. For want of this
+precaution, a writer who was no novice, particularly in the matter of
+inversion, produces such curiosities as these:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Be this a difference of inertia, of bulk or of form, matters not to
+the argument.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is true that, disagreeing with M. Comte, though I do, in all those
+fundamental views that are peculiar to him, I agree with him in sundry
+minor views.—<span class="smcap">Spencer.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We shall venture on removing the comma before ‘though’; but must leave
+it to connoisseurs in inversion to decide between the rival attractions
+of ‘disagree with M. Comte though I do’ and ‘disagreeing ... though I
+am’. ‘Though I do’, in spite of the commas, can scarcely be meant to be
+parenthetic; that would give (by resolution of the participle) ‘though
+I disagree with M. Comte, though I do, ....’</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Archaism</span></h3>
+
+<p><b>a. Occasional.</b></p>
+
+<p>We have implied in former sections, and shall here take it for granted,
+that occasional archaism is always a fault, conscious or unconscious.
+There are, indeed, a few writers—Lamb is one of them—whose
+uncompromising terms, ‘Love me, love my archaisms’, are generally
+accepted; but they are taking risks that a novice will do well not to
+take.</p>
+
+<p>As to unconscious archaism, it might be thought that such a thing could
+scarcely exist: to employ unconsciously a word that has been familiar,
+and is so no longer, can happen to few.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</span> Yet charitable readers will
+believe that in the following sentence <i>demiss</i> has slipped
+unconsciously from a learned pen:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He perceived that the Liberal ministry had offended certain
+influential sections by appearing too demiss or too unenterprising in
+foreign affairs.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The guilt of such peccadilloes as this may be said to vary inversely
+as the writer’s erudition; for in this matter the learned may plead
+ignorance, where the novice knows too well what he is doing. It is
+conscious archaism that offends, above all the conscious archaisms
+of the illiterate: the historian’s <i>It should seem</i>, even
+the essayist’s <i>You shall find</i>, is less odious, though not
+less deliberate, than the <i>ere</i>, <i>oft</i>, <i>aught</i>,
+<i>thereanent</i>, <i>I wot</i>, <i>I trow</i>, and similar ornaments,
+with which amateurs are fond of tricking out their sentences. This is
+only natural. An educated writer’s choice falls upon archaisms less
+hackneyed than the amateur’s; he uses them, too, with more discretion,
+limiting his favourites to a strict allowance, say, of once in three
+essays. The amateur indulges us with his whole repertoire in a single
+newspaper letter of twenty or thirty lines, and—what is worse—cannot
+live up to the splendours of which he is so lavish: charmed with the
+discovery of some antique order of words, he selects a modern slang
+phrase to operate upon; he begins a sentence with <i>ofttimes</i>,
+and ends it with a grammatical blunder; aspires to <i>albeit</i>, and
+achieves <i>howbeit</i>. Our list begins with the educated specimens,
+but lower down the reader will find several instances of this fatal
+incongruity of style; fatal, because the culprit proves himself
+unworthy of what is worthless. For the vilest of trite archaisms has
+this latent virtue, that it might be worse; to use it, and by using it
+to make it worse, is to court derision.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A coiner or a smuggler <i>shall</i> get off tolerably
+well.—<span class="smcap">Lamb.</span></p>
+
+<p>The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which <i>shall</i>
+render another very serious.—<span class="smcap">Lamb.</span></p>
+
+<p>You <i>shall</i> hear the same persons say that George Barnwell is
+very natural, and Othello is very natural.—<span class="smcap">Lamb.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Don Quixote <i>shall</i> last you a month for breakfast
+reading.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>Take them as they come, you <i>shall</i> find in the common people a
+surly indifference.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The worst of making a mannerism of this <i>shall</i> is that, after the
+first two or three times, the reader is certain to see it coming; for
+its function is nearly always the same—to bring in illustrations of a
+point already laid down.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Some of us, like Mr. Andrew Lang for instance, <i>cannot away with</i>
+a person who does not care for Scott or Dickens.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>One <i>needs</i> not praise their courage.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>What turn things are likely to take if this version <i>be</i>
+persisted in is a matter for speculation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>If Mr. Hobhouse’s analysis of the vices of popular government
+<i>be</i> correct, much more would seem to be needed.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bowen has been, not recalled, but ordered to Washington, and will
+be expected to produce proof, if any he <i>have</i>, of his charges
+against Mr. Loomis.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It <i>were</i> futile to attempt to deprive it of its real
+meaning.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It <i>were</i> idle to deny that the revolutionary movement in
+Russia is nowhere followed with keener interest than in this
+country.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It <i>were</i> idle to deny that coming immediately after the
+Tangier demonstration it assumes special and unmistakable
+significance.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He is putting poetic ‘frills’, if the phrase <i>be</i> not too
+mean, on what is better stated in the prose summary of the
+argument.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Regarded as a counter-irritant to slang, archaism is a failure.
+<i>Frills</i> is ten times more noticeable for the prim and pompous
+<i>be</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Under them the land is being rapidly frivolled away, and, unless
+immediate action <i>be</i> taken, the country will be so tied
+that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>That will depend a good deal on whether he <i>be</i> shocked
+by the cynicism of the most veracious of all possible
+representations....—<span class="smcap">H. James.</span></p>
+
+<p>We <i>may</i> not quote the lengthy passage here: it is probably
+familiar to many readers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘We must not’. Similarly, the modern prose English for <i>if I be, it
+were</i>, is <i>if I am, it would be</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘I have no particular business at L.,’ said he; ‘I was merely going
+<i>thither</i> to pass a day or two.’—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>I am afraid you will hardly be able to ride your horse <i>thither</i>
+in time to dispose of him.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>It will necessitate my recurring <i>thereto</i> in the House of
+Commons.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Scottish Free Church had <i>theretofore</i> prided itself upon the
+rigidity of its orthodoxy.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+
+<p>The special interests of France in Morocco, <i>whereof</i> the
+recognition by Great Britain and Spain forms the basis of the
+international agreements concluded last year by the French
+Government.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>To what extent has any philosophy or any revelation assured us
+<i>hereof</i> till now?—<span class="smcap">F. W. H. Myers.</span></p>
+
+<p>On the concert I need not dwell; the reader would not care to have my
+impressions <i>thereanent</i>.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>There</i>, not <i>thither</i>, is the modern form; <i>to it</i>, not
+<i>thereto</i>; <i>of which</i>, <i>of this</i>, not <i>whereof</i>,
+<i>hereof</i>; <i>till then</i>, or <i>up to that time</i>, not
+<i>theretofore</i>. So, in the following examples, <i>except</i>,
+<i>perhaps</i>, <i>before</i>, <i>though</i>; not <i>save</i>,
+<i>perchance</i>, <i>ere</i>, <i>albeit</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Nobody <i>save</i> an individual in no condition to distinguish a hawk
+from a handsaw....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>My ignorance as to ‘figure of merit’ is of no moment <i>save</i> to
+myself.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>This we obtain by allowing imports to go untaxed <i>save</i> only for
+revenue purposes.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>Who now reads Barry Cornwall or Talfourd <i>save</i> only in connexion
+with their memorials of the rusty little man in black?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In my opinion the movements may be attributed to unconscious
+cerebration, <i>save</i> in those cases in which it is provoked
+wilfully.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Roosevelt was but barely elected Governor of New York,
+when Mr. Bryan was once and again by mounting majorities excused
+from service at the White House, <i>perchance</i> neither correctly
+forecasted the actual result.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Dr. Bretton was a cicerone after my own heart; he would take me
+betimes <i>ere</i> the galleries were filled.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>He is certainly not cruising on a trade route, or his presence would
+long <i>ere</i> this have been reported.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Shaynor unlocked a drawer, and <i>ere</i> he began to write, took
+out a meagre bundle of letters.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+
+<p>Fortifications are fixed, immobile defences, and, in time of war, must
+await the coming of an enemy <i>ere</i> they can exercise their powers
+of offence.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>‘It is something in this fashion’, she cried out <i>ere</i> long; ‘the
+man is too romantic and devoted.’—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Ere</i> departing, however, I determined to stroll about and
+examine the town.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</span></p>
+
+<p>The use of <i>ere</i> with a gerund is particularly to be avoided.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And that she should force me, by the magic of her pen to
+mentally acknowledge, <i>albeit</i> with wrath and shame, my own
+inferiority!—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>Such things as our modern newspapers chronicle, <i>albeit</i> in
+different form.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is thought by experts that there could be no better use of the
+money, <i>albeit</i> the best American colleges, with perhaps one
+exception, have very strong staffs of professors at incredibly low
+salaries.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>‘Oxoniensis’ approaches them with courage, his thoughts are expressed
+in plain, unmistakable language, <i>howbeit</i> with the touch of a
+master hand.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The writer means <i>albeit</i>; he would have been safer with
+<i>though</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Living in a coterie, he seems to have read the laudations and not to
+have noticed <i>aught</i> else.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Hence, if higher criticism, or <i>aught</i> besides, compels any man
+to question, say, the historic accuracy of the fall....—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Many a true believer <i>owned not up</i> to his faith.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>The controversy now going on in your columns <i>anent</i> ‘Do we
+believe?’ throws a somewhat strange light upon the religion of
+to-day.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is because the world has not accepted the religion of Jesus
+Christ our Lord, that the world is <i>in the parlous state we see it
+still</i>.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>A discussion in which <i>well nigh</i> every trade, profession and
+calling have been represented.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Why not? Because we have <i>well-nigh bordering on</i> 300 different
+interpretations of the message Christ bequeathed us.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is quite a common thing to see ladies with their hymn-books in
+their hands, <i>ere</i> returning home from church enter shops and
+make purchases which might <i>every whit</i> as well have been
+effected on the Saturday.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>How <i>oft</i> do those who train young minds need to urge the
+necessity of being in earnest....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>I <i>trow</i> not.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>The clerk, as I conjectured him to be from his appearance, was also
+commoved; for, sitting opposite to Mr. Morris, that honest gentleman’s
+terror communicated itself to him, though he <i>wotted</i> not
+why.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>I should be <i>right</i> glad if the substance could be made known to
+clergy and ministers of all denominations.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>So sordid are the lives of such natures, who are not only not heroic
+to their valets and waiting-women, but have neither valets nor
+waiting-women to be heroic to <i>withal</i>.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</span></p>
+
+<p><b>b. Sustained archaism in narrative and dialogue.</b></p>
+
+<p>A novelist who places his story in some former age may do so for
+the sake of a purely superficial variety, without any intention of
+troubling himself or his readers with temporal colour more than is
+necessary to avoid glaring absurdities; he is then not concerned with
+archaism at all. More commonly, however, it is part of his plan to
+present a living picture of the time of which he writes. When this
+is the case, he naturally feels bound to shun anachronism not only
+in externals, but in thought and the expression of thought. Now with
+regard to the language of his characters, it would be absurd for him
+to pretend to anything like consistent realism: he probably has no
+accurate knowledge of the language as his characters would speak it;
+and if he had this knowledge, and used it, he would be unintelligible
+to most of his readers, and burdensome to the rest. Accordingly, if he
+is wise, he will content himself with keeping clear of such modes of
+expression as are essentially modern and have only modern associations,
+such as would jar upon the reader’s sense of fitness and destroy the
+time illusion. He will aim, that is to say, at a certain archaic
+directness and simplicity; but with the archaic vocabulary, which
+instead of preserving the illusion only reminds us that there is an
+illusion to be preserved, he will have little to do. This we may call
+negative archaism. <i>Esmond</i> is an admirable example of it, and
+the ‘Dame Gossip’ part of Mr. Meredith’s <i>Amazing Marriage</i> is
+another. It hardly occurs to us in these books that the language is
+archaic; it is appropriate, that is all. The same may be said, on the
+whole, of <i>Treasure Island</i>, and of one or two novels of Besant’s.</p>
+
+<p>Only the novelist who is not wise indulges in positive archaism. He
+is actuated by the determination to have everything in character at
+all costs. He does not know very much about old English of any period;
+very few people do, and those who know most of it would be the last to
+attempt<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</span> to write a narrative in it. He gives us, however, all that
+he knows, without much reference to particular periods; it may not be
+good ancient English, but, come what may, it shall not be good modern.
+This, it need scarcely be said, is not fair play: the recreation is
+all on the writer’s side. Archaism is, no doubt, very seductive to the
+archaist. Well done (that is, negatively done), it looks easy; and to
+do it badly is perhaps even easier than it looks. No very considerable
+stock-in-trade is required; the following will do quite well:
+Prithee—quotha—perchance—peradventure—i’ faith—sirrah—beshrew
+me—look ye—sith that—look to it—leave prating—it shall go hard
+but—I tell you, but—the more part—fair cold water—to me-ward—I
+am shrewdly afeared—it is like to go stiff with me—y’ are—y’
+have—it irks me sorely—benison—staunch—gyves—yarely—this same
+villain—drink me this—you were better go; to these may be added
+the indiscriminate use of ‘Nay’ and ‘Now (by the rood, &amp;c.)’; free
+inversion; and verb terminations in <i>-st</i> and <i>-th</i>. Our list
+is largely drawn from Stevenson, who, having tried negative archaism
+with success in <i>Treasure Island</i>, chose to give us a positive
+specimen in <i>The Black Arrow</i>. How vexatious these reach-me-down
+archaisms can become, even in the hands of an able writer, will be seen
+from the following examples of a single trick, all taken from <i>The
+Black Arrow</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>An I had not been a thief, I could not have painted <i>me</i> your
+face.</p>
+
+<p>Put <i>me</i> your hand into the corner, and see what ye find there.</p>
+
+<p>Bring <i>me</i> him down like a ripe apple. And keep ever forward,
+Master Shelton; turn <i>me</i> not back again, an ye love your life.</p>
+
+<p>Selden, take <i>me</i> this old shrew softly to the nearest elm, and
+hang <i>me</i> him tenderly by the neck, where I may see him at my
+riding.</p>
+
+<p>Mark <i>me</i> this old villain on the piebald.</p>
+
+<p>‘Sirrah, no more words,’ said Dick. ‘Bend <i>me</i> your back.’</p>
+
+<p>‘Here is a piece of forest that I know not’, Dick remarked. ‘Where
+goeth <i>me</i> this track?’</p>
+
+<p>‘I slew him fair. I ran <i>me</i> in upon his bow,’ he cried.</p>
+
+<p>‘Swallow <i>me</i> a good draught of this,’ said the knight.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is like a child with a new toy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</span></p>
+
+<p>But there is the opposite fault. The judicious archaist, as we
+have said, will abstain from palpable modernisms, especially from
+modern slang. The following extracts are taken from an old woman’s
+reminiscences of days in which a ‘faultless attire’ included ‘half high
+boots, knee-breeches very tight above the calf (as the fashion was
+then), a long-tailed cutaway coat, ...’:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But the Captain, who, of course, lacks bowels of mercy for this kind
+of thing, says that if he had been Caesar, ‘Caius would have <i>got
+the great chuck</i>. Yes, madam, I would have broke Mister Caius on
+the spot’.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>But if you once go in for <i>having a good time</i> (as Miss
+Anne in her innocence used to remark) you must be prepared
+to....—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>... as all girls love to do when they are content with the way they
+have <i>put in their time</i>.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Metaphor</span></h3>
+
+<p>Strictly speaking, metaphor occurs as often as we take a word out of
+its original sphere and apply it to new circumstances. In this sense
+almost all words can be shown to be metaphorical when they do not bear
+a physical meaning; for the original meaning of almost all words can
+be traced back to something physical; in our first sentence above, for
+instance, there are eight different metaphors. Words had to be found
+to express mental perceptions, abstract ideas, and complex relations,
+for which a primitive vocabulary did not provide; and the obvious
+course was to convey the new idea by means of the nearest physical
+parallel. The commonest Latin verb for <i>think</i> is a metaphor from
+vine-pruning; ‘seeing’ of the mind is borrowed from literal sight;
+‘pondering’ is metaphorical ‘weighing’. Evidently these metaphors
+differ in intention and effect from such a phrase as ‘smouldering’
+discontent; the former we may call, for want of a better word,
+‘natural’ metaphor, as opposed to the latter, which is artificial. The
+word metaphor as ordinarily used suggests only the artificial kind: but
+in deciding on the merits or demerits of a metaphorical phrase we are
+concerned as much<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</span> with the one class as the other; for in all doubtful
+cases our first questions will be, what was the writer’s intention in
+using the metaphor? is it his own, or is it common property? if the
+latter, did he use it consciously or unconsciously?</p>
+
+<p>This distinction, however, is useful only as leading up to another.
+We cannot use it directly as a practical test: artificial metaphors,
+as well as natural ones, often end by becoming a part of ordinary
+language; when this has happened, there is no telling to which class
+they belong, and in English the question is complicated by the fact
+that our metaphorical vocabulary is largely borrowed from Latin in the
+metaphorical state. Take such a word as <i>explain</i>: its literal
+meaning is ‘spread out flat’: how are we to say now whether necessity
+or picturesqueness first prompted its metaphorical use? And the same
+doubt might arise centuries hence as to the origin of a phrase so
+obviously artificial to us as ‘glaring inconsistency’.</p>
+
+<p>Our practical distinction will therefore be between conscious or
+‘living’ and unconscious or ‘dead’ metaphor, whether natural or
+artificial in origin: and again, among living metaphors, we shall
+distinguish between the intentional, which are designed for effect,
+and the unintentional, which, though still felt to be metaphors, are
+used merely as a part of the ordinary vocabulary. It may seem at
+first sight that this classification leaves us where we were: how can
+we know whether a writer uses a particular metaphor consciously or
+unconsciously? We cannot know for certain: it is enough if we think
+that he used it consciously, and know that we should have used it
+consciously ourselves; experience will tell us how far our perceptions
+in this respect differ from other people’s. Most readers, we think,
+will agree in the main with our classification of the following
+instances; they are taken at random from a couple of pages of the
+<i>Spectator</i>.</p>
+
+<p>These we should call dead: ‘his <i>views</i> were personal’; ‘<i>carry
+out</i> his policy’; ‘not <i>acceptable</i> to his <i>colleagues</i>’;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</span>
+‘the Chancellor <i>proposed</i>’; ‘some <i>grounds</i> for
+<i>complaint</i>’; ‘<i>refrain</i> from talking about them’; ‘the
+<i>remission</i> of the Tea-duty’; ‘<i>sound</i> policy’; ‘a speech
+almost entirely <i>composed</i> of <i>extracts</i>’; ‘<i>reduction</i>
+of taxation’; ‘<i>discussion</i>’; ‘the <i>low</i> price of Consols’;
+‘<i>falls</i> due’; ‘<i>succeeded</i>’; ‘will <i>approach</i> their
+task’; ‘<i>delivered</i> a speech’; ‘<i>postponing</i> to a future
+year’. The next are living, but not intentional metaphor; the writer
+is aware that his phrase is still picturesque in effect, but has
+not chosen it for that reason: ‘a Protestant <i>atmosphere</i>’;
+‘this would leave a <i>margin</i> of £122,000’; ‘the loss of
+<i>elasticity</i>’ in the Fund; ‘<i>recasting</i> our whole
+Fiscal system’; ‘to <i>uphold</i> the unity of the Empire’; ‘to
+<i>strengthen</i> the Exchequer balances’; ‘all <i>dwelt</i> on the
+grave injury’; ‘his somewhat <i>shattered</i> authority’; ‘the policy
+of evasion now <i>pursued</i>’; ‘<i>throws</i> new <i>light</i> on
+the situation’; ‘a <i>gap</i> in our fiscal system’. Intentional
+metaphors are of course less plentiful: ‘the home-rule motion designed
+to “<i>draw</i>” Sir Henry’; ‘a <i>dissolving view</i> of General
+Elections’; ‘this reassuring declaration <i>knocks the bottom out
+of</i> the plea of urgency’; ‘the <i>scattered remnants</i> of that
+party might <i>rally after the disastrous defeat</i>’.</p>
+
+<p>One or two general remarks may be made before we proceed to instances.
+It is scarcely necessary to warn any one against over-indulgence in
+intentional metaphor; its effects are too apparent. The danger lies
+rather in the use of live metaphor that is not intentional. The many
+words and phrases that fall under this class are all convenient; as
+often as not they are the first that occur, and it is laborious,
+sometimes impossible, to hit upon an equivalent; the novice will find
+it worth while, however, to get one whenever he can. We may read a
+newspaper through without coming upon a single metaphor of this kind
+that is at all offensive in itself; it is in the aggregate that they
+offend. ‘Cries aloud for’, ‘drop the curtain on’, ‘goes hand in hand
+with’, ‘a note of warning’, leaves its impress’, ‘paves the way for’,
+‘heralds the advent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</span> of’, ‘opens the door to’, are not themselves
+particularly noisy phrases; but writers who indulge in them generally
+end by being noisy.</p>
+
+<p>Unintentional metaphor is the source, too, of most actual blunders.
+Every one is on his guard when his metaphor is intentional; the
+nonsense that is talked about mixed metaphor, and the celebrity of one
+or two genuine instances of it that come down to us from the eighteenth
+century, have had that good effect. There are few obvious faults a
+novice is more afraid of committing than this of mixed metaphor. His
+fears are often groundless; many a sentence that might have stood has
+been altered from a misconception of what mixed metaphor really is. The
+following points should be observed.</p>
+
+<p>1. If only one of the metaphors is a live one, the confusion is not a
+confusion for practical purposes.</p>
+
+<p>2. Confusion can only exist between metaphors that are grammatically
+inseparable; parallel metaphors between which there is no grammatical
+dependence cannot result in confusion. The novice must beware, however,
+of being misled either by punctuation or by a parallelism that does not
+secure grammatical independence. Thus, no amount of punctuation can
+save the time-honoured example ‘I smell a rat: I see him hovering in
+the air: ... I will nip him in the bud’. <i>Him</i> is inseparable from
+the later metaphors, and refers to the rat. But there is no confusion
+in the following passage; any one of the metaphors can be removed
+without affecting the grammar:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, ...</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">This fortress built by Nature for herself ...</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">This happy breed of men, this little world,</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">This precious stone set in the silver sea, ...</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, ...</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. Metaphor within metaphor is dangerous. Here there is a grammatical
+dependence between the metaphors, and if the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</span> combination is unsuitable
+confusion will result. But combination is one thing, and confusion
+is another: if the internal metaphor is not inconsistent with the
+external, there is no confusion, though there may be ugliness. To adapt
+one of our examples below, ‘The Empire’s butcher (i. e. New Zealand)
+has not all his eggs in one basket’ is not a confusion, because a
+metaphorical butcher can have his eggs in one basket as well as any one
+else. What does lead to confusion is the choice of an internal metaphor
+applicable not to the words of the external metaphor, but to the
+literal words for which it is substituted. In the following example,
+the confusion is doubtless intended.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">This pillar of the state</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Hath swallowed hook and bait.</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The swallowing is applicable only to the person metaphorically called a
+pillar.</p>
+
+<p>4. Confusion of metaphor is sometimes alleged against sentences that
+contain only one metaphor—a manifest absurdity. These are really
+cases of a clash between the metaphorical and the non-metaphorical.
+A striking or original metaphor is apt to appear violent, and a
+commonplace one impertinent, if not adequately borne out by the rest of
+the sentence. This we may label ‘unsustained metaphor’. It sometimes
+produces much the same effect as mixed metaphor; but the remedy for
+it, as well as the cause, is different. Mixed metaphor is the result
+of negligence, and can generally be put right by a simple adaptation
+of the language to whichever metaphor is to be retained. Unsustained
+metaphor is rather an error of judgement: it is unsustained either
+because it was difficult to sustain, or because it was not worth
+sustaining; in either case abandonment is the simplest course.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This diverting incident contributed in a high degree to the general
+merriment.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here we have four different metaphors; but as they are all dead, there
+is no real confusion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This, as you know, was a burning question; and its unseasonable
+introduction threw a chill on the spirits of all our party.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Burning</i> and <i>chill</i> are both live metaphors, they are
+grammatically connected by <i>its</i>, and they are inconsistent; there
+is therefore confusion.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The uncertainty which hangs over every battle extends in a special
+degree to battles at sea.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Extends</i> is usually dead; and if in this case it is living, it is
+also suitable.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A centre and nucleus round which the scattered remnants of that party
+might rally after the disastrous defeat.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The main or external metaphor is that of an army. Now any metaphor that
+is applicable to a literal army is also applicable to a metaphorical
+one: but ‘rally round a nucleus’ is a confusion of metaphor, to
+whichever it is applied; it requires us to conceive of the army at the
+same time as animal and vegetable, <i>nucleus</i> being literally the
+kernel of a nut, and metaphorically a centre about which growth takes
+place. An army can have a nucleus, but cannot rally round it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Sir W. Laurier had claimed for Canada that she would be the granary
+and baker of the Empire, and Sir Edmund Barton had claimed for
+Australia that she would be the Empire’s butcher; but in New Zealand
+they had not all their eggs in one basket, and they could claim a
+combination of the three.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is quoted in a newspaper as an example of mixed metaphor. It is
+nothing of the kind: <i>they</i> in New Zealand are detached from the
+metaphor.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We move slowly and cautiously from old moorings in our English life,
+that is our laudable constitutional habit; but my belief is that the
+great majority of moderate churchmen, to whatever political party they
+may belong, desirous as they are to lift this question of popular
+education out of the party rut, ....</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘A rut’, says the same newspaper, ‘is about the very last thing we
+should expect to find at sea, despite the fact that it is ploughed’.
+There is no mention of ruts at sea; the two metaphors are independent.
+If the speaker had said<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</span> ‘Moderate churchmen, moving at length from
+their old moorings, are beginning to lift this question out of the
+party rut’, we should have had a genuine confusion, the <i>moorings</i>
+and the <i>rut</i> being then inseparable. Both this sentence and the
+preceding one, the reader may think, would have been better without
+the second metaphor; we agree, but it is a question of taste, not of
+correctness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... the keenest incentive man can feel to remedy ignorance and
+abolish guilt. It is under the impelling force of this incentive that
+civilization progresses.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This illustrates the danger of deciding hastily on the deadness of a
+metaphor, however common it may be. Probably any one would have said
+that the musical idea in <i>incentive</i> had entirely vanished: but
+the successive attributes <i>keenness</i> and <i>impelling force</i>
+are too severe a test; the dead metaphor is resuscitated, and a
+perceptible confusion results.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Her forehand drive—her most trenchant asset.—<i>Daily Mail.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Another case of resuscitation. <i>Trenchant</i> turns in its grave;
+and <i>asset</i>, ready to succumb under the violence of athletic
+reporters, has yet life enough to resent the imputation of a keen edge.
+As the critic of ‘ruts at sea’ might have observed, the more blunt, the
+better the assets.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And the very fact that the past is beyond recall imposes upon the
+present generation a continual stimulus to strive for the prevention
+of such woes.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We <i>impose</i> a burden, we apply a <i>stimulus</i>. It looks as if
+the writer had meant by a short cut to give us both ideas; if so, his
+guilt is clear; and if we call <i>impose</i> a mere slip in idiom, the
+confusion is none the less apparent.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Sword of the devil, running with the blood of saints, poisoned adder,
+thy work is done.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These are independent metaphors; and, as <i>thy work is done</i> is
+applicable to each of them, there is no confusion.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In the hope that something might be done, even at the eleventh hour,
+to stave off the brand of failure from the hide of our military
+administration.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>To <i>stave off a brand</i> is not, perhaps, impossible; but we
+suspect<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</span> that it would be a waste of energy. The idea of bulk is
+inseparable from the process of staving off. The metaphor is usually
+applied to literal abstract nouns, not to metaphorical concretes:
+ruin and disaster one can suppose to be of a tolerable size; but a
+metaphorical brand does not present itself to the imagination as
+any larger than a literal one. We assume that by <i>brand</i> the
+instrument is meant: the eleventh hour is all too early to set about
+staving off the mark.</p>
+
+<p>This is a good example of mixed metaphor of the more pronounced type;
+it differs only in degree from some of those considered above. We
+suggested that <i>impose a stimulus</i> was perhaps a short cut to
+the expression of two different metaphors, and the same might be said
+of <i>staving off the brand</i>. But we shall get a clearer idea of
+the nature of mixed metaphor if we regard all these as violations
+of the following simple rule: When a live metaphor (intentional or
+unintentional) has once been chosen, the words grammatically connected
+with it must be either (a) recognizable parts of the same metaphorical
+idea, or one consistent with it, or (b) unmetaphorical, or dead
+metaphor; literal abstract nouns, for instance, instead of metaphorical
+concretes. Thus, we shall impose not the stimulus, but either (a) the
+burden of resistance, or (b) the duty of resistance; and we shall stave
+off not the ‘brand’ but the ‘ignominy of failure from our military
+administration’.</p>
+
+<p>But from our remarks in 4 above, it will be clear that (b), though it
+cannot result in confusion of metaphor, may often leave the metaphor
+unsustained. Our examples illustrate several common types.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Is it not a little difficult to ask for Liberal votes for Unionist
+Free-traders, if we put party interests in the front of the
+consideration?—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>May I be allowed to add a mite of experience of an original Volunteer
+in a good City regiment?—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>But also in Italy many ancient edifices have been recently coated with
+stucco and masked by superfluous repairs.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</span></p>
+
+<p>The elementary schools are hardly to be blamed for this failure. Their
+aim and their achievement have to content themselves chiefly with
+moral rather than with mental success.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The scourge of tyranny had breathed his last.</p>
+
+<p>The means of education at the disposal of the Protestants
+and Presbyterians of the North were stunted and
+sterilized.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>I once heard a Spaniard shake his head over the present Queen of
+Spain.—(Quoted by <i>Spectator</i>.)</p>
+
+<p>But, apart from all that, we see two pinching dilemmas even in this
+opium case—dilemmas that screw like a vice—which tell powerfully in
+favour of our Tory views.—<span class="smcap">De Quincey.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The reader who is uncharitable enough to insist upon the natural
+history of dilemmas will call this not unsustained metaphor, but a
+gross confusion; horns cannot be said to <i>screw</i>. We prefer to
+believe that De Quincey was not thinking of the horns at all; they
+are a gratuitous metaphorical ornament; <i>dilemma</i>, in English
+at any rate, is a literal word, and means an argument that presents
+two undesirable alternatives. The circumstances of a dilemma are,
+indeed, such as to prompt metaphorical language, but the word itself is
+incorrigibly literal; we confess as much by clapping horns on its head
+and making them do the metaphorical work.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>These remarks have been dictated in order that the importance
+of recognizing the difference and the value of soils may be
+understood.—<span class="smcap">J. Long.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This metaphor always requires that the dictator—usually a personified
+abstract—should be mentioned. ‘Dictated by the importance’.</p>
+
+<p>The opposite fault of over-conscientiousness must also be noticed.
+Elaborate poetical metaphor has perhaps gone out of fashion; but
+technical metaphor is apt to be overdone, and something of the same
+tendency appears in the inexorable working-out of popular catchword
+metaphors:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Tost to and fro by the high winds of passionate control, I behold the
+desired port, the single state, into which I would fain steer; but am
+kept off by the foaming billows of a brother’s and sister’s envy, and
+by the raging winds of a supposed invaded authority; while I see in
+Lovelace, the rocks on the one hand, and in Solmes, the sands on the
+other; and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</span> tremble, lest I should split upon the former or strike
+upon the latter. But you, my better pilot,...—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Such phases of it as we did succeed in mentally kodaking are hardly to
+be ‘developed’ in cold print.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We are not photographers enough to hazard a comment on <i>cold</i>
+print.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The leading planks of the Opposition policy are declared to be the
+proper audit of public accounts,...—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Repetition</span></h3>
+
+<p>‘Rhetorical’ or—to use at once a wider and a more intelligible
+term—‘significant’ repetition is a valuable element in modern style;
+used with judgement, it is as truly a good thing as clumsy repetition,
+the result of negligence, is bad. But there are some writers who, from
+the fact that all good repetition is intentional, rashly infer that
+all intentional repetition is good; and others who may be suspected of
+making repetitions from negligence, and retaining them from a misty
+idea that to be aware of a thing is to have intended it. Even when
+the repetition is a part of the writer’s original plan, consideration
+is necessary before it can be allowed to pass: it is implied in the
+terms ‘rhetorical’ or significant repetition that the words repeated
+would ordinarily be either varied or left out; the repetition, that
+is to say, is more or less abnormal, and whatever is abnormal may be
+objectionable in a single instance, and is likely to become so if it
+occurs frequently.</p>
+
+<p>The writers who have most need of repetition, and are most justified
+in using it, are those whose chief business it is to appeal not to
+the reader’s emotions, but to his understanding; for, in spite of
+the term ‘rhetorical’, the object ordinarily is not impressiveness
+for impressiveness’ sake, but emphasis for the sake of clearness. It
+may seem, indeed, that a broad distinction ought to be drawn between
+the rhetorical and the non-rhetorical: they differ in origin and in
+aim, one being an ancient rhetorical device to secure impressiveness,
+the other a modern development, called forth by the requirements of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</span>
+popular writers on subjects that demand lucidity; and there is the
+further difference, that rhetorical repetition often dictates the whole
+structure of the sentence, whereas the non-rhetorical, in its commonest
+form, is merely the completion of a sentence that need not have been
+completed. But in practice the two things become inseparable, and we
+shall treat them together; only pointing out to the novice that of the
+two motives, impressiveness and lucidity, the latter is far the more
+likely to seem justifiable in the reader’s eyes.</p>
+
+<p>We shall illustrate both the good and bad points of repetition almost
+exclusively from a few pages of Bagehot, one of its most successful
+exponents, in whom nevertheless it degenerates into mannerism. To a
+writer who has so much to say that is worth hearing, almost anything
+can be forgiven that makes for clearness; and in him clearness, vigour,
+and a certain pleasant rapidity, all result from the free use of
+repetition. It will be seen that his repetitions are not of the kind
+properly called rhetorical; it is the spontaneous fullness of a writer
+who, having a clear point to make, is determined to make it clearly,
+elegance or no elegance. Yet the growth of mannerism is easily seen in
+him; the justifiable repetitions are too frequent, and he has some that
+do not seem justifiable.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He analysed not a particular government, but what is common to
+all governments; not one law, but what is common to all laws; not
+political communities in their features of diversity, but political
+communities in their features of necessary resemblance. He gave
+politics not an interesting aspect, but a new aspect: for by giving
+men a steady view of what political communities must be, he nipped in
+the bud many questions as to what they ought to be. As a gymnastic of
+the intellect, and as a purifier, Mr. Austin’s philosophy is to this
+day admirable—even in its imperfect remains; a young man who will
+study it will find that he has gained something which he wanted, but
+something which he did not know that he wanted: he has clarified a
+part of his mind which he did not know needed clarifying.</p>
+
+<p>All these powers were states of some magnitude, and some were states
+of great magnitude. They would be able to go on as they had always
+gone on—to shift for themselves as they had always shifted.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</span></p>
+
+<p>Without Spanish and without French, Walpole would have made a good
+peace; Bolingbroke could not do so with both.</p>
+
+<p>Cold men may be wild in life and not wild in mind. But warm and eager
+men, fit to be the favourites of society, and fit to be great orators,
+will be erratic not only in conduct but in judgement.</p>
+
+<p>A man like Walpole, or a man like Louis Napoleon, is protected by an
+unsensitive nature from intellectual destruction.</p>
+
+<p>After a war which everyone was proud of, we concluded a peace which
+nobody was proud of, in a manner that everyone was ashamed of.</p>
+
+<p>He hated the City because they were Whigs, and he hated the Dutch
+because he had deserted them.</p>
+
+<p>But he professed to know nothing of commerce, and did know nothing.</p>
+
+<p>The fierce warlike disposition of the English people would not have
+endured such dishonour. We may doubt if it would have endured any
+peace. It certainly would not have endured the best peace, unless it
+were made with dignity and with honesty.</p>
+
+<p>Using the press without reluctance and without cessation.</p>
+
+<p>He ought to have been able to bear anything, yet he could bear
+nothing. He prosecuted many more persons than it was usual to
+prosecute then, and far more than have been prosecuted since.... He
+thought that everything should be said for him, and that nothing
+should be said against him.</p>
+
+<p>Between these fluctuated the great mass of the Tory party, who did not
+like the House of Hanover because it had no hereditary right, who did
+not like the Pretender because he was a Roman Catholic.</p>
+
+<p>He had no popularity; little wish for popularity; little respect for
+popular judgement.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here is a writer who, at any rate, has not the vice of ‘elegant
+variation’. Most of the possibilities of repetition, for good and
+for evil, are here represented. As Bagehot himself might have said,
+‘we have instances of repetition that are good in themselves; we
+have instances of repetition that are bad in themselves; and we
+have instances of repetition that are neither particularly good nor
+particularly bad in themselves, but that offend simply by recurrence’.
+The ludicrous appearance presented by our collection as a whole
+necessarily obscures the merit of individual cases; but if the reader
+will consider each sentence by itself, he will see that repetition
+is often a distinct improvement. The point best illustrated here, no
+doubt, is that it impossible to have too much of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</span> a good thing; but it
+is a good thing for all that. As instances of unjustifiable mannerism,
+we may select ‘fit to be the favourites ..., and fit to be great
+orators’; ‘not political communities ..., but political communities
+...’; ‘something which he wanted, but something which he did not know
+that he wanted’; ‘a man like Walpole, or a man like Louis Napoleon’;
+‘without reluctance and without cessation’; ‘who did not like ...,
+who did not like ...’; and ‘without Spanish and without French’. We
+have mentioned clearness as the ultimate motive for repetition of this
+kind: in this last sentence, we get not clearness, but obscurity.
+Any one would suppose that there was some point in the distinction
+between Spanish and French: there is none; the point is, simply, that
+languages do not make a statesman. Again, there is sometimes virtue in
+half-measures: from ‘something which he did not know that he wanted’
+remove the first three words, and there remains quite repetition
+enough. ‘Wild in life and not wild in mind’ is a repetition that is
+clearly called for; but it is followed by the wholly gratuitous ‘fit
+... and fit ...’, and the result is disastrous. Finally, in ‘who did
+not like ..., who did not like ...’, mannerism gets the upper hand
+altogether: instead of the appearance of natural vigour that ordinarily
+characterizes the writer, we have stiff, lumbering artificiality.</p>
+
+<p>Writers like Bagehot do not tend at all to impressive repetition:
+their motive is always the business-like one of lucidity, though it is
+sometimes lucidity run mad. Repetition of this kind, not being designed
+to draw the reader’s attention to itself, wears much better in practice
+than the more pronounced types of rhetorical repetition. The latter
+should be used very sparingly. As the spontaneous expression of strong
+feeling in the writer, it is sometimes justified by circumstances:
+employed as a deliberate artifice to impress the reader, it is likely
+to be frigid, and to fail in its object; and the term ‘rhetorical’
+should remind us in either case<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</span> that what may be spoken effectively
+will not always bear the test of writing.</p>
+
+<p>Rhetorical repetition, when it is clearly distinguishable from the
+non-rhetorical, is too obvious to require much illustration. Of the
+three instances given, the last is an excellent test case for the
+principle that ‘whatever is intentional is good’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I have summoned you here to witness your own work. I have summoned
+you here to witness it, because I know it will be gall and wormwood
+to you. I have summoned you here to witness it, because I know
+the sight of everybody here must be a dagger in your mean false
+heart!—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>As the lark rose higher, he sank deeper into thought. As the lark
+poured out her melody clearer and stronger, he fell into a graver and
+profounder silence. At length, when the lark came headlong down ... he
+sprang up from his reverie.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>Russia may split into fragments, or Russia may become a
+volcano.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Miscellaneous</span></h3>
+
+<p>a. Some more trite phrases.</p>
+
+<p>The worn-out phrases considered in a former section were of a humorous
+tendency: we may add here some expressions of another kind, all of
+them calculated in one way or another to save the writer trouble; the
+trouble of description, or of producing statistics, or of thinking what
+he means. Such phrases naturally die hard; even ‘more easily imagined
+than described’ still survives the rough handling it has met with, and
+flourishes in writers of a certain class. ‘Depend upon it’, ‘you may
+take my word for it’, ‘in a vast majority of cases’, ‘no thinking man
+will believe’, ‘all candid judges must surely agree’, ‘it would be a
+slaying of the slain’, ‘I am old-fashioned enough to think’, are all
+apt to damage the cause they advocate.</p>
+
+<p>The shrill formula ‘It stands to reason’ is one of the worst offenders.
+Originally harmless, and still no doubt often used in quite rational
+contexts, the phrase has somehow got a bad<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</span> name for prefacing
+fallacies and for begging questions; it lacks the delicious candour of
+its feminine equivalent—‘Kindly allow me to know best’—, but appeals
+perhaps not less irresistibly to the generosity of an opponent. Apart
+from this, there is a correct and an incorrect use of the words. It is
+of course the conclusion drawn from certain premisses that stands to
+reason; the premisses do not stand to reason; they are assumed to be
+a matter of common knowledge, and ought to be distinguished from the
+conclusion by <i>if</i> or a causal participle, not co-ordinated with
+it by <i>and</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>My dear fellow, it stands to reason that if the square of <i>a</i>
+is <i>a</i> squared, and the square of <i>b</i> is <i>b</i> squared,
+then the square of <i>a</i> minus <i>b</i> is <i>a</i> squared minus
+<i>b</i> squared. You may argue till we are both tired, you will never
+alter that.</p>
+
+<p>It stands to reason that a thick tumbler, having a larger body of cold
+matter for the heat to distribute itself over, is less liable to crack
+when boiling water is poured into it than a thin one would be.</p>
+
+<p>It stands to reason that my men have their own work to attend to,
+and cannot be running about London all day rectifying other people’s
+mistakes.</p>
+
+<p>It stands to reason that Russia, though vast, is a poor country,
+that the war must cost immense sums, and that there must come a
+time....—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Just as ‘stands to reason’ is not an argument, but an invitation to
+believe, ‘the worthy Major’ not amusing, but an invitation to smile,
+so the sentimental or sensational novelist has his special vocabulary
+of the impressive, the tender, the tragic, and the horrible. One or
+two of the more obvious catch-phrases may be quoted. In the ‘strong
+man’ of fiction the reader may have observed a growing tendency to ‘sob
+like a child’; the right-minded hero to whom temptation comes decides,
+with archaic rectitude, that he ‘will not do <i>this thing</i>’; the
+villain, taught by incessant ridicule to abstain from ‘muffled curses’,
+finds a vent in ‘discordant laughs, that somehow jarred unpleasantly
+upon my nerves’; this laugh, <i>mutatis mutandis</i> (‘cruel little
+laugh, that somehow ...’), he shares with the heroine, who for her
+exclusive<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</span> perquisite has ‘this man who had somehow come into her
+life’. <i>Somehow</i> and <i>half-dazed</i> are invaluable for throwing
+a mysterious glamour over situations and characters that shun the broad
+daylight of common sense.</p>
+
+<p>b. Elementary irony.</p>
+
+<p>A well-known novelist speaks of the resentment that children feel
+against those elders who insist upon addressing them in a jocular tone,
+as if serious conversation between the two were out of the question.
+Irony is largely open to the same objection: the writer who uses it
+is taking our intellectual measure; he forgets our <i>ex officio</i>
+perfection in wisdom. Theoretically, indeed, the reader is admitted to
+the author’s confidence; <i>he</i> is not the <i>corpus vile</i> on
+which experiment is made: that, however, is scarcely more convincing
+than the two-edged formula ‘present company excepted’. For minute,
+detailed illustration of truths that have had the misfortune to become
+commonplaces without making their due impression, sustained irony has
+its legitimate use: tired of being told, and shown by direct methods,
+that only the virtuous man is admirable, we are glad enough to go off
+with Fielding on a brisk <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>: ‘for if not,
+let some other kind of man be admirable; as Jonathan Wild’. But the
+<i>reductio</i> process should be kept for emergencies, as Euclid kept
+it, with whom it is a confession that direct methods are not available.
+The isolated snatches of irony quoted below have no such justification:
+they are for ornament, not for utility; and it is a kind of ornament
+that is peculiarly un-English—a way of shrugging one’s shoulders in
+print.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He had also the comfortable reflection that, by the violent quarrel
+with Lord Dalgarno, he must now forfeit the friendship and good
+offices of that nobleman’s father and sister.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>Naturally that reference was received with laughter by the Opposition,
+who are, or profess to be, convinced that our countrymen in the
+Transvaal do not intend to keep faith with us. They are very welcome
+to the monopoly of that unworthy estimate, which must greatly endear
+them to all our kindred beyond seas.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</span></p>
+
+<p>The whole of these proceedings were so agreeable to Mr. Pecksniff,
+that he stood with his eyes fixed upon the floor ..., as if a host of
+penal sentences were being passed upon him.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>The time comes when the banker thinks it prudent to contract some
+of his accounts, and this may be one which he thinks it expedient
+to reduce: and then perhaps he makes the pleasant discovery, that
+there are no such persons at all as the acceptors, and that the funds
+for meeting all these bills have been got from himself!—<span class="smcap">H. D.
+Macleod.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Pleasant</i> is put for <i>unpleasant</i> because the latter seemed
+dull and unnecessary; the writer should have taken the hint, and put
+nothing at all.</p>
+
+<p>The climax is reached by those pessimists who, regarding the reader’s
+case as desperate, assist him with punctuation, italics, and the like:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And this honourable (?) proposal was actually made in the presence of
+two at least of the parties to the former transaction!</p>
+
+<p>These so-called <i>gentlemen</i> seem to forget....</p>
+
+<p>I was content to be snubbed and harassed and worried a hundred times a
+day by one or other of the ‘great’ personages who wandered at will all
+over my house and grounds, and accepted my lavish hospitality. Many
+people imagine that it must be an ‘honour’ to entertain a select party
+of aristocrats, but I....—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>The much-prated-of ‘kindness of heart’ and ‘generosity’
+possessed by millionaires, generally amounts to this kind of
+thing.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>Was I about to discover that the supposed ‘woman-hater’ had been tamed
+and caught at last?—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>That should undoubtedly have been your ‘great’ career—you were born
+for it—made for it! You would have been as brute-souled as you are
+now....—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>c. Superlatives without <i>the</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The omission of <i>the</i> with superlatives is limited by ordinary
+prose usage to (1) Superlatives after a possessive: ‘Your best plan’.
+(2) Superlatives with <i>most</i>: ‘in most distressing circumstances’,
+but not ‘in saddest circumstances’. (3) Superlatives in apposition,
+followed by <i>of</i>: ‘I took refuge with X., kindliest of hosts’;
+‘We are now at Weymouth, dingiest of decayed watering-places’. Many
+writers of the present day affect the omission of <i>the</i> in all
+cases where<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</span> the superlative only means <i>very</i>. No harm will be
+done if they eventually have their way: in the meantime, the omission
+of <i>the</i> with inflected superlatives has the appearance of gross
+mannerism.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Our enveloping movements since some days proved successful, and
+fiercest battle is now proceeding.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In which, too, so many noblest men have ... both made and been what
+will be venerated to all time.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>Struggling with objects which, though it cannot master them, are
+essentially of richest significance.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>The request was urged with every kind suggestion, and every assurance
+of aid and comfort, by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, in the
+sequel, amply redeemed their word.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>In Darkest Africa.—<span class="smcap">Stanley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Delos furnishes, not only quaintest tripods, crude bronze oxen and
+horses like those found at Olympia, but....—<span class="smcap">L. M. Mitchell.</span></p>
+
+<p>The scene represents in crudest forms the combat of gods and giants,
+a subject which should attain long afterwards fullest expression
+in the powerful frieze of the Great Altar at Pergamon.—<span class="smcap">L. M.
+Mitchell.</span></p>
+
+<p>A world of highest and noblest thought in dramas of perfect
+form.—<span class="smcap">L. M. Mitchell.</span></p>
+
+<p>From earliest times such competitive games had been
+celebrated.—<span class="smcap">L. M. Mitchell.</span></p>
+
+<p>When fullest, freest forms had not yet been developed.—<span class="smcap">L. M.
+Mitchell.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>d. Cheap originality.</p>
+
+<p>Just as ‘elegant variation’ is generally a worse fault than monotony,
+so the avoidance of trite phrases is sometimes worse than triteness
+itself. Children have been known to satisfy an early thirst for
+notoriety by merely turning their coats inside out; and ‘distinction’
+of style has been secured by some writers on the still easier terms
+of writing a common expression backwards. By this simplest of all
+possible expedients, ‘wear and tear’ ceases to be English, and becomes
+Carlylese, and Emerson acquires an exclusive property (so at least
+one hopes) in ‘nothing or little’. The novice need scarcely be warned
+against infringing these writers’ patents; it would be as unpardonable
+as stealing the idea of a machine for converting clean knives into
+dirty ones. Hackneyed phrases<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</span> become hackneyed because they are
+useful, in the first instance; but they derive a new efficiency from
+the very fact that they are hackneyed. Their precise form grows to
+be an essential part of the idea they convey, and all that a writer
+effects by turning such a phrase backwards, or otherwise tampering
+with it, is to give us our triteness at secondhand; we are put to the
+trouble of translating ‘tear and wear’, only to arrive at our old
+friend ‘wear and tear’, hackneyed as ever.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>How beautiful is noble-sentiment; like gossamer-gauze beautiful and
+cheap, which will stand no <i>tear and wear</i>.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>Bloated promises, which end in <i>nothing or
+little</i>.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The universities also are <i>parcel</i> of the ecclesiastical
+system.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce, Sheridan, Romilly,
+or <i>whatever national man</i>, were by this means sent to
+Parliament.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>And the stronger these are, the individual is so much
+weaker.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The faster the ball falls to the sun, the force to fly off is by so
+much augmented.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The friction in nature is so enormous that we cannot spare any power.
+<i>It is not question</i> to express our thought, to elect our way,
+but to overcome resistances.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV<br><span class="small">PUNCTUATION</span></h2></div>
+
+
+<p>In this chapter we shall adhere generally to our plan of not giving
+systematic positive directions, or attempting to cover all ground
+familiar and unfamiliar, important or not, but drawing attention only
+to the most prevalent mistakes. On so technical a subject, however, a
+few preliminary remarks may be made; and to those readers who would
+prefer a systematic treatise Beadnell’s <i>Spelling and Punctuation</i>
+(Wyman’s Technical Series, Menken, 2/6) may be recommended. We shall
+refer to it occasionally in what follows; and the examples to which
+—B. is attached instead of an author’s name are taken from it; these
+are all given in Beadnell (unless the contrary is stated) as examples
+of correct punctuation. It should be added that the book is written
+rather from the compositor’s than from the author’s point of view, and
+illustrates the compositor’s natural weaknesses; it is more important
+to him, for instance, that a page should not be unsightly (the
+unsightliness being quite imaginary, and the result of professional
+conservatism) than that quotation marks and stops, or dashes and stops,
+should be arranged in their true significant order; but, as the right
+and unsightly is candidly given as well as the wrong and beautiful,
+this does not matter; the student can take his choice.</p>
+
+<p>We shall begin by explaining how it is that punctuation is a difficult
+matter, and worth a writer’s serious attention. There are only six
+stops, comma, semicolon, colon, full stop, question mark, exclamation
+mark; or, with the dash, seven. The work of three of them, full stop,
+question, exclamation, is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</span> so clear that mistakes about their use can
+hardly occur without gross carelessness; and it might be thought that
+with the four thus left it ought to be a very simple matter to exhaust
+all possibilities in a brief code of rules. It is not so, however.
+Apart from temporary disturbing causes—of which two now operative are
+(1) the gradual disappearance of the colon in its old use with the
+decay of formal periodic arrangement, and (2) the encroachments of the
+dash as a saver of trouble and an exponent of emotion—there are also
+permanent difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>Before mentioning these we observe that the four stops in the strictest
+acceptation of the word (,) (;) (:) (.)—for (!) and (?) are tones
+rather than stops—form a series (it might be expressed also by 1, 2,
+3, 4), each member of which directs us to pause for so many units of
+time before proceeding. There is essentially nothing but a quantitative
+time relation between them.</p>
+
+<p>The first difficulty is that this single distinction has to convey to
+the reader differences of more than one kind, and not commensurable; it
+has to do both logical and rhetorical work. Its logical work is helping
+to make clear the grammatical relations between parts of a sentence
+or paragraph and the whole or other parts: its rhetorical work is
+contributing to emphasis, heightening effect, and regulating pace. It
+is in vain that Beadnell lays it down: ‘The variation of pause between
+the words of the same thought is a matter of rhetoric and feeling, but
+punctuation depends entirely upon the variation of relations—upon
+logical and grammatical principles’. The difference between these two:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">The master beat the scholar with a strap.—B.</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">The master beat the scholar, with a strap.</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>is in logic nothing; but in rhetoric it is the difference between
+matter-of-fact statement and indignant statement: a strap, we are to
+understand from the comma, is a barbarous instrument.</p>
+
+<p>Again, in the two following examples, so far as logic goes, commas
+would be used in both, or semicolons in both. But<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</span> the writer of the
+second desires to be slow, staccato, and impressive: the writer of the
+first desires to be rapid and flowing, or rather, perhaps, does not
+desire to be anything other than natural.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, philosophers in
+systems, logicians in subtilties, and metaphysicians in sounds.—B.</p>
+
+<p>In the eclogue there must be nothing rude or vulgar; nothing fanciful
+or affected; nothing subtle or abstruse.—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The difference is rhetorical, not logical. It is true, however, that
+modern printers make an effort to be guided by logic or grammar alone;
+it is impossible for them to succeed entirely; but any one who will
+look at an Elizabethan book with the original stopping will see how far
+they have moved: the old stopping was frankly to guide the voice in
+reading aloud, while the modern is mainly to guide the mind in seeing
+through the grammatical construction.</p>
+
+<p>A perfect system of punctuation, then, that should be exact and
+uniform, would require separate rhetorical and logical notations in
+the first place. Such a system is not to be desired; the point is only
+that, without it, usage must fluctuate according as one element is
+allowed to interfere with the other. But a second difficulty remains,
+even if we assume that rhetoric could be eliminated altogether. Our
+stop series, as explained above, provides us with four degrees; but the
+degrees of closeness and remoteness between the members of sentence
+or paragraph are at the least ten times as many. It is easy to show
+that the comma, even in its purely logical function, has not one, but
+many tasks to do, which differ greatly in importance. Take the three
+examples:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>His method of handling the subject was ornate, learned, and
+perspicuous.—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The removal of the comma after <i>learned</i> makes so little
+difference that it is an open question among compositors whether it
+should be used or not.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The criminal, who had betrayed his associates, was a prey to remorse.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</span></p>
+
+<p>With the commas, the criminal is necessarily a certain person already
+known to us: without them, we can only suppose a past state of society
+to be described, in which all traitors were ashamed of themselves—a
+difference of some importance.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Colonel Hutchinson, the Governor whom the King had now appointed,
+having hardened his heart, resolved on sterner measures.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Omission of the comma after <i>appointed</i> gives us two persons
+instead of one, and entirely changes the meaning, making the central
+words into, what they could not possibly be with the comma, an absolute
+construction.</p>
+
+<p>These commas, that is, have very different values; many intermediate
+degrees might be added. Similarly the semicolon often separates
+grammatically complete sentences, but often also the mere items of a
+list, and between these extremes it marks other degrees of separation.
+A perfect system for the merely logical part of punctuation, then,
+would require some scores of stops instead of four. This again is not
+a thing to be desired; how little, is clear from the fact that one of
+our scanty supply, the colon, is now practically disused as a member
+of the series, and turned on to useful work at certain odd jobs that
+will be mentioned later. A series of stops that should really represent
+all gradations might perhaps be worked by here and there a writer
+consistently with himself; but to persuade all writers to observe the
+same distinctions would be hopeless.</p>
+
+<p>A third difficulty is this: not only must many tasks be performed by
+one stop; the same task is necessarily performed by different stops
+according to circumstances; as if polygamy were not bad enough, it
+is complicated by an admixture of polyandry. We have already given
+two sentences of nearly similar pattern, one of which had its parts
+separated by commas, the other by semicolons, and we remarked that
+the difference was there accounted for by the intrusion of rhetoric.
+But the same thing occurs even when logic or grammar (it should be
+explained that grammar is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</span> sometimes defined as logic applied to
+speech, so that for our purposes the two are synonymous) is free from
+the disturbing influence; or when that influence acts directly, not on
+the stop itself that is in question, but only on one of its neighbours.
+To illustrate the first case, when the stops are not affected by
+rhetoric, but depend on grammar alone, we may take a short sentence
+as a nucleus, elaborate it by successive additions, and observe how a
+particular stop has to go on increasing its power, though it continues
+to serve only the same purpose, because it must keep its predominance.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When ambition asserts the monstrous doctrine of millions made for
+individuals, is not the good man indignant?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The function of the comma is to mark the division between the
+subordinate and the main clauses.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When ambition asserts the monstrous doctrine of millions made for
+individuals, their playthings, to be demolished at their caprice; is
+not the good man indignant?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The semicolon is doing now exactly what the comma did before; but, as
+commas have intruded into the clause to do the humble yet necessary
+work of marking two appositions, the original comma has to dignify its
+relatively more important office by converting itself into a semicolon.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When ambition asserts the monstrous doctrine of millions made for
+individuals, their playthings, to be demolished at their caprice;
+sporting wantonly with the rights, the peace, the comforts, the
+existence, of nations, as if their intoxicated pride would, if
+possible, make God’s earth their football: is not the good man
+indignant?—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The new insertion is also an apposition, like the former ones; but,
+as it contains commas within itself, it must be raised above their
+level by being allowed a semicolon to part it from them. The previous
+semicolon, still having the same supreme task to do, and challenged
+by an upstart rival, has nothing for it but to change the regal for
+the imperial crown, and become a colon. A careful observer will now
+object that, on these principles, our new insertion ought to have
+had an internal semicolon, to differentiate the subordinate clause,
+<i>as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</span> if</i>, &amp;c., from the mere enumeration commas that precede: in
+which case the semi-colon after <i>caprice</i> should be raised to a
+colon; and then what is the newly created emperor to do? There is no
+papal tiara for him to assume, the full stop being confined to the
+independent sentence. The objection is quite just, and shows how soon
+the powers of the four stops are exhausted if relentlessly worked.
+But we are concerned only to notice that the effect of stops, even
+logically considered, is relative, not absolute. It is also true that
+many modern writers, if they put down a sentence like this, would be
+satisfied with using commas throughout; the old-fashioned air of the
+colon will hardly escape notice. But the whole arrangement is according
+to the compositor’s art in its severer form.</p>
+
+<p>A specimen of the merely indirect action of rhetoric may be more
+shortly disposed of. In a sentence already quoted—</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, philosophers in
+systems, logicians in subtilties, and metaphysicians in sounds—</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>suppose the writer to have preferred for impressive effect, as we said
+he might have, to use semicolons instead of commas. The immediate
+result of that would be that what before could be left to the reader
+to do for himself (i. e., the supplying of the words <i>have sought
+knowledge</i> in each member) will in presence of the semicolon require
+to be done to the eye by commas, and the sentence will run:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures; philosophers, in
+systems; logicians, in subtilties; and metaphysicians, in sounds.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But, lest we should be thought too faithful followers of the logicians,
+we will now assume that our point has been sufficiently proved: the
+difficulties of punctuation, owing to the interaction of different
+purposes, and the inadequacy of the instruments, are formidable enough
+to be worth grappling with.</p>
+
+<p>We shall now only make three general remarks before proceeding to
+details. The first is implied in what has been already said: the work
+of punctuation is mainly to show, or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</span> hint at, the grammatical relation
+between words, phrases, clauses, and sentences; but it must not be
+forgotten that stops also serve to regulate pace, to throw emphasis
+on particular words and give them significance, and to indicate tone.
+These effects are subordinate, and must not be allowed to conflict with
+the main object; but as the grammatical relation may often be shown in
+more than one way, that way can be chosen which serves another purpose
+best.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, it is a sound principle that as few stops should be used as
+will do the work. There is a theory that scientific or philosophic
+matter should be punctuated very fully and exactly, whereas mere
+literary work can do with a much looser system. This is a mistake,
+except so far as scientific and philosophic writers may desire to give
+an impressive effect by retarding the pace; that is legitimate; but
+otherwise, all that is printed should have as many stops as help the
+reader, and not more. A resolution to put in all the stops that can be
+correctly used is very apt to result in the appearance of some that can
+only be used incorrectly; some of our quotations from Huxley and Mr.
+Balfour may be thought to illustrate this. And whereas slight stopping
+may venture on small irregularities, full stopping that is incorrect
+is also unpardonable. The objection to full stopping that is correct
+is the discomfort inflicted upon readers, who are perpetually being
+checked like a horse with a fidgety driver.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, every one should make up his mind not to depend on his stops.
+They are to be regarded as devices, not for saving him the trouble of
+putting his words into the order that naturally gives the required
+meaning, but for saving his reader the moment or two that would
+sometimes, without them, be necessarily spent on reading the sentence
+twice over, once to catch the general arrangement, and again for the
+details. It may almost be said that what reads wrongly if the stops are
+removed is radically bad; stops are not to alter meaning, but merely
+to show it up. Those who are learning<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</span> to write should make a practice
+of putting down all they want to say without stops first. What then,
+on reading over, naturally arranges itself contrary to the intention
+should be not punctuated, but altered; and the stops should be as few
+as possible, consistently with the recognized rules. At this point
+those rules should follow; but adequately explained and illustrated,
+they would require a volume; and we can only speak of common abuses and
+transgressions of them.</p>
+
+<p>First comes what may be called for short the spot-plague—the tendency
+to make full-stops do all the work. The comma, most important, if
+slightest, of all stops, cannot indeed be got rid of, though even for
+that the full-stop is substituted when possible; but the semicolon
+is now as much avoided by many writers as the colon (in its old use)
+by most. With the semicolon go most of the conjunctions. Now there
+is something to be said for the change, or the two changes: the
+old-fashioned period, or long complex sentence, carefully worked out
+with a view to symmetry, balance, and degrees of subordination, though
+it has a dignity of its own, is formal, stiff, and sometimes frigid;
+the modern newspaper vice of long sentences either rambling or involved
+(far commoner in newspapers than the spot-plague) is inexpressibly
+wearisome and exasperating. Simplification is therefore desirable. But
+journalists now and then, and writers with more literary ambition than
+ability generally, overdo the thing till it becomes an affectation;
+it is then little different from Victor Hugo’s device of making every
+sentence a paragraph, and our last state is worse than our first.
+Patronizing archness, sham ingenuousness, spasmodic interruption,
+scrappy argument, dry monotony, are some of the resulting impressions.
+We shall have to trouble the reader with at least one rather long
+specimen; the spot-plague in its less virulent form, that is, when it
+is caused not by pretentiousness or bad taste, but merely by desire
+to escape from the period, does not declare itself very rapidly. What
+follows is a third or so<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</span> of a literary review, of which the whole is
+in exactly the same style, and which might have been quoted entire
+for the same purpose. It will be seen that it shows twenty full-stops
+to one semicolon and no colons. Further, between no two of the twenty
+sentences is there a conjunction.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The life of Lord Chatham, which has just appeared in three volumes,
+by Dr. Albert v. Ruville of the University of Halle deserves special
+notice. It is much the most complete life which has yet appeared of
+one of the most commanding figures in English history. It exhibits
+that thoroughness of method which characterized German historical
+writings of other days, and which has not lately been conspicuous.
+It is learned without being dull, and is free from that uncritical
+spirit of hostility to England which impairs the value of so many
+recent German histories. That portion which deals with the closing
+years of George II and with events following the accession of George
+III is exceptionally interesting. One of the greatest misfortunes that
+ever happened to England was the resignation of Pitt in 1761. It was
+caused, as we all know, by difference of opinion with his colleagues
+on the Spanish question. Ferdinand VI of Spain died in 1759, and was
+succeeded by King Charles III, one of the most remarkable princes of
+the House of Bourbon. This sovereign was an enthusiastic adherent of
+the policy which found expression in the celebrated family compact.
+On August 15, 1761, a secret convention was concluded between
+France and Spain, under which Spain engaged to declare war against
+England in May, 1762. Pitt quite understood the situation. He saw
+that instant steps should be taken to meet the danger, and proposed
+at a Cabinet held on October 2 that war should be declared against
+Spain. Newcastle, Hardwicke, Anson, Bute, and Mansfield combated this
+proposal, which was rejected, and two days afterwards Pitt resigned.
+His scheme was neither immature nor ill-considered. He had made his
+preparations to strike a heavy blow at the enemy, to seize the Isthmus
+of Panama, thereby securing a port in the Pacific, and separating the
+Spanish provinces of Mexico and Peru. He had planned an expedition
+against Havana and the Philippine Islands, where no adequate
+resistance could have been made; and, had he remained in office, there
+is but little doubt that the most precious possessions of Spain in the
+New World would have been incorporated in the British Empire. When he
+left the Cabinet all virility seems to have gone out of it with him.
+As he had foreseen, Spain declared war on England at a suitable moment
+for herself, and the unfortunate negotiations were opened leading to
+the Peace of Paris in 1763, which was pregnant with many disastrous
+results for England. The circumstances which led to the resignation
+of Pitt are dealt with by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</span> Dr. v. Ruville much more lucidly than by
+most historians. This portion of his work is the more interesting
+because of the pains he takes to clear George III from the charge of
+conspiring against his great Minister.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The reader’s experience has probably been that the constant fresh
+starts are at first inspiriting, that about half-way he has had
+quite enough of the novelty, and that he is intensely grateful, when
+the solitary semicolon comes into sight, for a momentary lapse into
+ordinary gentle progress. Writers like this may almost be suspected of
+taking literally a summary piece of advice that we have lately seen in
+a book on English composition: <i>Never use a semicolon when you can
+employ a full-stop.</i> Beadnell lays down a law that at first sight
+seems to amount to the same thing: <i>The notion of parting short
+independent sentences otherwise than by a full-stop, rests upon no
+rational foundation, and leads to endless perplexities.</i> But his
+practice clears him of the imputation: he is saved by the ambiguity
+of the word <i>independent</i>. There are grammatical dependence, and
+dependence of thought. Of all those ‘little hard round unconnected
+things’, in the <i>Times</i> review, that ‘seem to come upon one as
+shot would descend from a shot-making tower’ (Sir Arthur Helps), hardly
+one is not dependent on its neighbours in the more liberal sense,
+though each is a complete sentence and independent in grammar. Now one
+important use of stops is to express the degrees of thought dependence.
+A style that groups several complete sentences together, by the use
+of semicolons, because they are more closely connected in thought, is
+far more restful and easy—for the reader, that is—than the style
+that leaves him to do the grouping for himself; and yet it is free
+from the formality of the period, which consists, not of grammatically
+independent sentences, but of a main sentence with many subordinate
+clauses. We have not space for a long example of the group system
+rightly applied; most good modern writers free from the craving to be
+up to date will supply<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</span> them on every page; but a very short quotation
+may serve to emphasize the difference between group and spot-plague
+principles. The essence of the latter is that almost the only stops
+used are full-stops and commas, that conjunctions are rare, and that
+when a conjunction does occur the comma is generally used, not the
+full-stop. What naturally follows is an arrangement of this kind:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The sheil of Ravensnuik was, for the present at least, at his
+disposal. The foreman or ‘grieve’ at the Home Farm was anxious to be
+friendly, but even if he lost that place, Dan Weir knew that there was
+plenty of others.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>(To save trouble, let it be stated that the sheil is a dependency
+of the Home Farm, and not contrasted with or opposed to it.) Here
+there are three grammatically independent sentences, between the two
+latter of which the conjunction <i>but</i> is inserted. It follows
+from spot-plague principles that there will be a full-stop at the end
+of the first, and a comma at the end of the second. With the group
+system it is not so simple a matter; before we can place the stops,
+we have to inquire how the three sentences are connected in thought.
+It then appears that the friendliness of the grieve is mentioned to
+account for the sheil’s being at disposal; that is, there is a close
+connexion, though no conjunction, between the first and the second
+sentences. Further, the birds in the bush of the third sentence are
+contrasted, not with the second sentence’s friendliness, but with the
+first sentence’s bird in the hand (which, however, is accounted for by
+the second sentence’s friendliness). To group rightly, then, we must
+take care, quite reversing the author’s punctuation, that the first and
+second are separated by a stop of less power than that which separates
+the third from them. Comma, semicolon, would do it, if the former were
+sufficient between two grammatically independent sentences not joined
+by a conjunction; it obviously is not sufficient here (though in some
+such pairs it might be); so, instead of comma, semicolon, we must use
+semicolon, full-stop;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</span> and the sentence will run, with its true meaning
+much more clearly given:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The sheil of Ravensnuik was, for the present at least, at his
+disposal; the foreman or ‘grieve’ at the Home Farm was anxious to be
+friendly. But even if he lost that place, Dan Weir knew that there was
+plenty of others.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The group system gives more trouble to the writer or compositor, and
+less to the reader; the compositor cannot be expected to like it, if
+the burden falls on him; inferior writers cannot be expected to choose
+it either, perhaps; but the good writers who do choose it no doubt find
+that after a short time the work comes to do itself by instinct.</p>
+
+<p>We need now only add two or three short specimens, worse, though from
+their shortness less remarkable, than the <i>Times</i> extract. They
+are not specially selected as bad; but it may be hoped that by their
+juxtaposition they may have some deterrent effect.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>So Dan opened the door a little and the dog came out as if nothing had
+happened. It was now clear. The light was that of late evening. The
+air hardly more than cool. A gentle fanning breeze came from the North
+and....—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>Allies must have common sentiments, a common policy, common interests.
+Russia’s disposition is aggressive. Her policy is the closed door.
+Her interests lie in monopoly. With our country it is precisely the
+opposite. Japan may conquer, but she will not aggress. Russia may be
+defeated, but she will not abandon her aggression. With such a country
+an alliance is beyond the conception even of a dream.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Upon a hillside, a great swelling hillside, high up near the clouds,
+lay a herd lad. Little more than a boy he was. He did not know much,
+but he wanted to know more. He was not very good, but he wanted to be
+better. He was lonely, but of that he was not aware. On the whole he
+was content up there on his great hillside.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>To be popular you have to be interested, or appear to be
+interested, in other people. And there are so many in this world
+in whom it is impossible to be interested. So many for whom the
+most skilful hypocrisy cannot help us to maintain a semblance of
+interest.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Of course a girl so pretty as my Miss Anne could not escape having
+many suitors, especially as all over the countryside Sir Tempest had
+the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</span> name of being something of a skinflint. And skinflints are always
+rich, as is well known.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The last sentence here is a mere comment on what is itself only an
+appendage, the clause introduced by <i>especially</i>; it has therefore
+no right to the dignity of a separate sentence. But it can hardly be
+mended without some alteration of words as well as stops; for instance,
+put a semicolon after suitors, write <i>moreover</i> for <i>especially
+as</i>, and put only a comma after <i>skinflint</i>; the right
+proportion would then be secured.</p>
+
+<p>The spot-plague, as we have shown, sometimes results in illogicality;
+it need not do so, however; when it does, the fault lies with the
+person who, accepting its principles, does not arrange his sentences
+to suit them. It is a new-fashioned and, in our opinion, unpleasant
+system, but quite compatible with correctness.</p>
+
+<p>Over-stopping, to which we now proceed, is on the contrary
+old-fashioned; but it is equally compatible with correctness. Though
+old-fashioned, it still lingers obstinately enough to make some slight
+protest desirable; the superstition that every possible stop should be
+inserted in scientific and other such writing misleads compositors,
+and their example affects literary authors who have not much ear. Any
+one who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another
+should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable, and question his
+conscience, as severely as we ought to do about disagreeable conduct in
+real life, whether it is necessary. He will find that the parenthetic
+or emphatic effect given to an adverbial phrase by putting a comma
+at each end of it is often of no value whatever to his meaning; in
+other words, that he can make himself agreeable by merely putting off
+a certain pompous solemnity; erasing a pair of commas may make the
+difference in writing that is made in conversation by a change of tone
+from the didactic to the courteous. Sometimes the abundance of commas
+is not so easily reduced; a change in the order of words, the omission
+of a needless<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</span> adverb or conjunction, even the recasting of a sentence,
+may be necessary. But it is a safe statement that a gathering of commas
+(except on certain lawful occasions, as in a list) is a suspicious
+circumstance. The sentence should at least be read aloud, and if it
+halts or jolts some change or other should be made.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The smallest portion possible of curious interest had been
+awakened within me, and, at last, I asked myself, within my own
+mind....—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>None of the last three commas is wanted; those round <i>at last</i> are
+very unpleasant, and they at least should be omitted.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In questions of trade and finance, questions which, owing, perhaps, to
+their increasing intricacy, seem....—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Perhaps</i> can do very well without commas.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is, however, already plain enough that, unless, indeed, some great
+catastrophe should upset all their calculations, the authorities have
+very little intention....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Indeed</i> can do without commas, if it cannot itself be done
+without.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Jeannie, too, is, just occasionally, like a good girl out of a book by
+a sentimental lady-novelist.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If <i>just</i> is omitted, there need be no commas round
+<i>occasionally</i>. There may be a value in <i>just</i>; but hardly
+enough to compensate for the cruel jerking at the bit to which the poor
+reader is subjected by a remorseless driver.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Thus, their work, however imperfect and faulty, judged by
+modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face
+with....—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The comma after <i>thus</i> is nothing if not pompous. And another can
+be got rid of by putting <i>it may have been</i> before <i>judged by
+modern lights</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Lilias suggested the advice which, of all others, seemed most suited
+to the occasion, that, yielding, namely, to the circumstances of their
+situation, they should watch....—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Omit <i>namely</i> and its commas.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Shakespeare, it is true, had, as I have said, as respects England, the
+privilege which only first-comers enjoy.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</span></p>
+
+<p>A good example of the warning value of commas. None of these can
+be dispensed with, since there are no less than three parenthetic
+qualifications to the sentence. But the crowd of commas ought to have
+told the writer how bad his sentence was; it is like an obstacle race.
+It should begin, It is true that ..., which disposes of one obstacle.
+<i>As I have said</i> can be given a separate sentence afterwards—So
+much has been said before.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Private banks and capitalists constitute the main bulk of the
+subscribers, and, apparently, they are prepared to go on subscribing
+indefinitely.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Putting commas round <i>apparently</i> amounts to the insertion of a
+further clause, such as, Though you would not think they could be such
+fools. But what the precise contents of the further clause may be is
+problematic. At any rate, a writer should not invite us to read between
+the lines unless he is sure of two things: what he wants to be read
+there; and that we are likely to be willing and able readers of it. The
+same is true of many words that are half adverbs and half conjunctions,
+like <i>therefore</i>. We have the right to comma them off if we like;
+but, unless it is done with a definite purpose, it produces perplexity
+as well as heaviness. In the first of the next two examples, there is
+no need whatever for the commas. In the second, the motive is clear:
+having the choice between commas and no commas, the reporter uses them
+because he so secures a pause after <i>he</i>, and gives the word that
+emphasis which in the speech as delivered doubtless made the <i>I</i>
+that it represents equivalent to <i>I for my part</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Both Tom and John knew this; and, therefore, John—the soft-hearted
+one—kept out of the way.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+
+<p>It would not be possible to sanction an absolutely unlimited
+expenditure on the Volunteers; the burden on the tax-payers would be
+too great. He, therefore, wished that those who knew most about the
+Volunteers would make up their minds as to the direction in which
+there should be development.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>After <i>for</i> and <i>and</i> beginning a sentence commas are often<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</span>
+used that are hardly even correct. It may be suspected that writers
+allow themselves to be deceived by the false analogy of sentences
+in which the <i>and</i> or <i>for</i> is immediately followed by a
+subordinate clause or phrase that has a right to its two commas. When
+there is no such interruption, the only possible plea for the comma is
+that it is not logical but rhetorical, and conveys some archness or
+other special significance such as is hardly to be found in our two
+examples:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The lawn, the soft, smooth slope, the ... bespeak an amount of elegant
+comfort within, that would serve for a palace. This indication is
+not without warrant; for, within it is a house of refinement and
+luxury.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>And, it is true that these were the days of mental and moral
+fermentation.—<span class="smcap">Hutton.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We shall class here also, assuming for the present that the rhetorical
+plea may be allowed even when there is no logical justification for a
+stop, two sentences in which the copula <i>is</i>, standing between
+subject and complement, has commas on each side of it. Impressiveness
+is what is aimed at; it seems to us a tawdry device for giving one’s
+sentence an <i>ex cathedra</i> air:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The reason why the world lacks unity, is, because man is disunited
+with himself.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The charm in Nelson’s history, is, the unselfish
+greatness.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Many other kinds of over-stopping might be illustrated; but we have
+intentionally confined ourselves here to specimens in which grammatical
+considerations do not arise, and the sentence is equally correct
+whether the stops are inserted or not. Sentences in which over-stopping
+outrages grammar more or less decidedly will be incidentally treated
+later on. Meanwhile we make the general remark that ungrammatical
+insertion of stops is a high crime and misdemeanour, whereas
+ungrammatical omission of them is often venial, and in some cases
+even desirable. Nevertheless the over-stopping that offends against
+nothing but taste has its counterpart in under-stopping of the same
+sort. And it must be added that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</span> nothing so easily exposes a writer
+to the suspicion of being uneducated as omission of commas against
+nearly universal custom. In the examples that follow, every one will
+see at the first glance where commas are wanting. When it is remembered
+that, as we have implied, an author has the right to select the degree
+of intensity, or scale, of his punctuation, it can hardly be said
+that grammar actually demands any stops in these sentences taken by
+themselves. Yet the effect, unless we choose to assume misprints, as we
+naturally do in isolated cases, is horrible.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It may be asked can further depreciation be afforded.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I believe you used to live in Warwickshire at Willowsmere Court did
+you not?—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>The hills slope gently to the cliffs which overhang the bay of Naples
+and they seem to bear on their outstretched arms a rich offering of
+Nature’s fairest gifts for the queen city of the south.—<span class="smcap">F. M.
+Crawford.</span></p>
+
+<p>‘You made a veritable sensation Lucio!’ ‘Did I?’ He laughed. ‘You
+flatter me Geoffrey.’—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>I like your swiftness of action Geoffrey.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>Good heavens man, there are no end of lords and ladies who
+will....—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Although we are, when we turn from taste to grammar, on slightly firmer
+ground, it will be seen that there are many debatable questions; and
+we shall have to use some technical terms. As usual, only those points
+will be attended to which our observation has shown to be important.</p>
+
+<p>1. The substantival clause.</p>
+
+<p>Subordinate clauses are sentences containing a subject and predicate,
+but serving the purpose in the main sentence (to which they are
+sometimes joined by a subordinating conjunction or relative pronoun,
+but sometimes without any separate and visible link) of single words,
+namely, of noun, adjective, or adverb; they are called respectively
+substantival, adjectival, or adverbial clauses. Examples:</p>
+
+<p>Substantival. He asked <i>what I should do</i>. (<i>my plan</i>, noun)</p>
+
+<p>Adjectival. The man <i>who acts honestly</i> is respected.
+(<i>honest</i>, adjective)</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</span></p>
+
+<p>Adverbial. I shall see you <i>when the sun next rises</i>.
+(<i>to-morrow</i>, adverb)</p>
+
+<p>Now there is no rule that subordinate clauses must be separated from
+the main sentence by a stop; that depends on whether they are essential
+parts of the proposition (when stops are generally wrong), or more or
+less separable accidents (when commas are more or less required). But
+what we wish to draw attention to is a distinction in this respect,
+very generally disregarded, between the substantival clause and the
+two other kinds. When the others are omitted, though the desired
+meaning may be spoilt, the grammar generally remains uninjured; a
+complete, though not perhaps valuable sentence is left. <i>The man is
+respected</i>, <i>I shall see you</i>, are as much sentences alone as
+they were with the adjectival and adverbial clauses. With substantival
+clauses this is seldom true; they are usually the subjects, objects,
+or complements, of the verbs, that is, are grammatically essential.
+<i>He asked</i> is meaningless by itself. (Even if the point is that he
+asked and did not answer, <i>things</i>, or <i>something</i>, has to be
+supplied in thought.) Now it is a principle, not without exceptions,
+but generally sound, that the subject, object, or complement, is not
+to be separated from its verb even by a comma (though <i>two</i>
+commas belonging to an inserted parenthetic clause or phrase or word
+may intervene). It follows that there is no logical or grammatical
+justification, though there may be a rhetorical one, for the comma so
+frequently placed before the <i>that</i> of an indirect statement.
+Our own opinion (which is, however, contrary to the practice of
+most compositors) is that this should always be omitted except when
+the writer has a very distinct reason for producing rhetorical
+impressiveness by an unusual pause. Some very ugly overstopping would
+thus be avoided.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Yet there, too, we find, that character has its problems to
+solve.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>We know, that, in the individual man, consciousness
+grows.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>And it is said, that, on a visitor once asking to see his library,
+Descartes led him....—<span class="smcap">Huxley.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>The general opinion however was, that, if Bute had been early
+practised in debate, he might have become an impressive
+speaker.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The comma before <i>whether</i> in the next is actually misleading; we
+are tempted to take as adverbial what is really a substantival clause,
+object to the verbal noun <i>indifference</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The book ... had merits due to the author’s indifference, whether he
+showed bad taste or not, provided he got nearer to the impression he
+wished to convey.—<i>Speaker.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Grammar, however, would afford some justification for distinguishing
+between the substantival clause as subject, object, or complement, and
+the substantival clause in apposition with one of these. Though there
+should decidedly be no comma in <i>He said that ...</i>, it is strictly
+defensible in <i>It is said, that....</i> The <i>that</i>-clause in
+the latter is explanatory of, and in apposition with, <i>it</i>; and
+the ordinary sign of apposition is a comma. Similarly, <i>My opinion
+is that</i>: <i>It is my opinion, that</i>. But as there seems to be
+no value whatever in the distinction, our advice is to do without the
+comma in all ordinary cases of either kind. A useful and reasonable
+exception is made in some manuals; for instance, in Bigelow’s <i>Manual
+of Punctuation</i> we read: ‘Clauses like “It is said”, introducing
+several propositions or quotations, each preceded by the word
+<i>that</i>, should have a comma before the first <i>that</i>. But if a
+single proposition or quotation only is given, no comma is necessary.
+Example:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Philosophers assert, that Nature is unlimited in her operations, that
+she has inexhaustible treasures in reserve, that....’</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Anything that shows the reader what he is to expect, and so saves
+him the trouble of coming back to revise his first impressions, is
+desirable if there is no strong reason against it.</p>
+
+<p>A more important distinction is this: <i>He said</i>, &amp;c., may have
+for its object, and <i>It is said</i>, &amp;c., for its (virtual) subject,
+either the actual words said, or a slight rearrangement of them (not
+necessarily to the eye, but at least to the mind), which makes them
+more clearly part of the grammatical construction, and turns them into
+true subordinate clauses.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</span> Thus <i>He told her, You are in danger</i>
+may be kept, but is usually altered to <i>He told her that she was in
+danger</i>, or to <i>He told her she was in danger</i>. In the first,
+<i>You are in danger</i> is not properly a subordinate clause, but a
+sentence, which may be said to be in apposition with <i>these words</i>
+understood. In the second and third alike, the altered words are a
+subordinate substantival clause, the object to <i>told</i>. It follows
+that when the actual words are given as such (this is sometimes only
+to be known by the tone: compare <i>I tell you, I will come</i>, and
+<i>I tell you I will come</i>), a comma should be inserted; whereas,
+when they are meant as mere reported or indirect speech, it should be
+omitted. Actual words given as such should also be begun with a capital
+letter; and if they consist of a compound sentence, or of several
+sentences, a comma will not suffice for their introduction; a colon,
+a colon and dash, or a full stop, with quotation marks always in the
+last case, and usually in the others, will be necessary; but these are
+distinctions that need not be considered here in detail.</p>
+
+<p>Further, it must be remembered that substantival clauses include
+indirect questions as well as indirect statements, and that the same
+rules will apply to them. The two following examples are very badly
+stopped:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) Add to all this that he died in his thirty-seventh
+year: and then ask, If it be strange that his poems are
+imperfect?—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Accommodation of the stops to the words would give:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>and then ask if it be strange that his poems are imperfect.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And accommodation of the words to the stops would give:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>and then ask, Is it strange that his poems are imperfect?</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) It may be asked can further depreciation be
+afforded.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The two correct alternatives here are similarly:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It may be asked, Can further depreciation be afforded?</p>
+
+<p>It may be asked whether further depreciation can be afforded.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As the sentences stood originally, we get in the Carlyle a most
+theatrical, and in the <i>Times</i> a most slovenly effect.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</span></p>
+
+<p>2. The verb and its subject, object, or complement.</p>
+
+<p>Our argument against the common practice of placing a comma before
+substantival <i>that</i>-clauses and others like them was, in brief:
+This sort of <i>that</i>-clause is simply equivalent to a noun; that
+noun is, with few exceptions, the subject, object, or complement, to a
+verb; and between things so closely and essentially connected as the
+verb and any of these no stop should intervene (unless for very strong
+and special rhetorical reasons). This last principle, that the verb and
+its essential belongings must not be parted, was merely assumed. We
+think it will be granted by any one who reads the next two examples.
+It is felt at once that a writer who will break the principle with so
+little excuse as here will shrink from nothing.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>So poor Byron was dethroned, as I had prophesied he would be,
+though I had little idea that his humiliation, would be brought
+about by one, whose sole strength consists in setting people to
+sleep.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>He was, moreover, not an unkind man; but the crew of the
+<i>Bounty</i>, mutinied against him, and set him half naked in an open
+boat.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Very little better than these, but each with some perceptible motive,
+are the next six:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the glittering armies of
+her enthusiasm.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>Opposition to him, was comparable to the stand of blocks of timber
+before a flame.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In each of these the comma acts as an accent upon <i>him</i>, and is
+purely rhetorical and illogical.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Such women as you, are seldom troubled with remorse.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here the comma guards us from taking <i>you are</i> together. We have
+already said that this device is illegitimate. Such sentences should be
+recast; for instance, Women like you are seldom, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The thick foliage of the branching oaks and elms in my grounds
+afforded grateful shade and repose to the tired body, while the
+tranquil loveliness of the woodland and meadow scenery, comforted and
+soothed the equally tired mind.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>With them came young boys and little children, while on either side,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</span>
+maidens white-veiled and rose-wreathed, paced demurely, swinging
+silver censers to and fro.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>Swift’s view of human nature, is too black to admit of any hopes of
+their millennium.—<span class="smcap">L. Stephen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Loveliness</i>, <i>maidens</i>, <i>view</i>, the strict subjects,
+have adjectival phrases attached after them. The temptation to insert
+the comma is comprehensible, but slight, and should have been resisted.</p>
+
+<p>In the three that come next, the considerable length of the subject,
+it must be admitted, makes a comma comforting; it gives us a sort of
+assurance that we have kept our hold on the sentence. It is illogical,
+however, and, owing to the importance of not dividing subject from
+verb, unpleasantly illogical. In each case the comfort would be
+equally effective if it were legitimized by the insertion of a comma
+before as well as after the clause or phrase at the end of which the
+present comma stands. The extra commas would be after <i>earth</i>,
+<i>victims</i>, <i>Schleiden</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>To see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth when such
+as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a
+blessing.—<span class="smcap">Swift.</span></p>
+
+<p>An order of the day expressing sympathy with the families of the
+victims and confidence in the Government, was adopted.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The famous researches of Schwann and Schleiden in 1837
+and the following years, founded the modern science of
+histology.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It may be said that it is ‘fudging’ to find an excuse, as we have
+proposed to do, for a stop that we mean really to do something
+different from its ostensible work. But the answer is that with few
+tools and many tasks to do much fudging is in fact necessary.</p>
+
+<p>A special form of this, in protest against which we shall give five
+examples, each from a different well-known author, is when the subject
+includes and ends with a defining relative clause, after which an
+illogical comma is placed. As the relative clause is of the defining
+kind (a phrase that has been explained<a id="FNanchor_12" href="#Footnote_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a>), it is practically
+impossible to fudge in these<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</span> sentences by putting a comma before the
+relative pronoun. Even in the first sentence the length of the relative
+clause is no sufficient excuse; and in all the others we should abolish
+the comma without hesitation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The same quickness of sympathy which had served him well in his work
+among the East End poor, enabled him to pour feeling into the figures
+of a bygone age.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+
+<p>One of its agents is our will, but that which expresses itself in our
+will, is stronger than our will.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The very interesting class of objects to which these belong, do not
+differ from the rest of the material universe.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>And thus, the great men who were identified with the war, began slowly
+to edge over to the party....—<span class="smcap">L. Stephen.</span></p>
+
+<p>In becoming a merchant-gild the body of citizens who formed the
+‘town’, enlarged their powers of civic legislation.—<span class="smcap">J. R.
+Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the two sentences that now follow from Mr. Morley, the offending
+comma of the first parts <i>centre</i>, which is what grammarians call
+the oblique complement, from its verb <i>made</i>; the offending comma
+of the second parts the direct object <i>groups</i> from its verb
+<i>drew</i>. Every one will allow that the sentences are clumsy; most
+people will allow that the commas are illogical. As for us, we do not
+say that, if the words are to be kept as they are, the commas should
+be omitted; but we do say that a good writer, when he found himself
+reduced to illogical commas, should have taken the trouble to rearrange
+his words.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>De Maistre was never more clear-sighted than when he made a vigorous
+and deliberate onslaught upon Bacon, the centre of his movement
+against revolutionary principles.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>In saying that the Encyclopaedists began a political work, what
+is meant is that they drew into the light of new ideas, groups of
+institutions, usages, and arrangements which affected the well-being
+of France, as closely as nutrition affected the health and strength of
+an individual Frenchman.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It may be added, by way of concluding this section, that the insertion
+of a comma in the middle of an absolute construction, which is capable,
+as was shown in the sentence about Colonel Hutchinson and the governor,
+of having very bad<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</span> results indeed, is only a particular instance and
+<i>reductio ad absurdum</i> of inserting a comma between subject and
+verb. The comma in the absolute construction is so recognized a trap
+that it might have been thought needless to mention it; the following
+instances, however, will show that a warning is even now necessary.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Sir E. Seymour, having replied for the Navy, the Duke of Connaught, in
+replying for the Army, said....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Thus <i>got</i>, having been by custom poorly substituted for
+<i>gat</i>, so that we say He got away, instead of He gat away, many
+persons abbreviate <i>gotten</i> into <i>got</i>, saying He had got,
+for He had gotten.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+
+<p>The garrison, having been driven from the outer line of defences
+on July 30, Admiral Witoft considered it high time to make a
+sortie.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But that didn’t last long; for Dr. Blimber, happening to change the
+position of his tight plump legs, as if he were going to get up, Toots
+swiftly vanished.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. The adjectival clause.</p>
+
+<p>This, strictly speaking, does the work of an adjective in the
+sentence. It usually begins with a relative pronoun, but sometimes
+with a relative adverb. The man <i>who does not breathe</i> dies, is
+equivalent to The <i>unbreathing</i> man dies. The place <i>where we
+stand</i> is holy ground, is equivalent to <i>This</i> place is holy
+ground. But we shall include under the phrase all clauses that begin
+with a relative, though some relative clauses are not adjectival,
+because a division of all into defining clauses on the one hand, and
+non-defining or commenting on the other, is more easily intelligible
+than the division into adjectival and non-adjectival. This distinction
+is more fully gone into in the chapter on Syntax, where it is suggested
+that <i>that</i>, when possible, is the appropriate relative for
+defining, and <i>which</i> for non-defining clauses. That, however, is
+a debatable point, and quite apart from the question of stopping that
+arises here. Examples of the two types are:</p>
+
+<p>(Defining) The river that (which) runs through London is turbid.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</span></p>
+
+<p>(Commenting) The Thames, which runs through London, is turbid.</p>
+
+<p>It will be seen that in the first the relative clause is an answer to
+the imaginary question, ‘Which river?’; that is, it defines the noun
+to which it belongs. In the second, such a question as ‘Which Thames?’
+is hardly conceivable; the relative clause gives us a piece of extra
+and non-essential information, an independent comment. The two types
+are not always so easily distinguished as in these examples constructed
+for the purpose. What we wish here to say is that it would contribute
+much to clearness of style if writers would always make up their minds
+whether they intend a definition or a comment, and would invariably use
+no commas with a defining clause, and two commas with a non-defining.
+All the examples that follow are in our opinion wrong. The first three
+are of defining relative clauses wrongly preceded by commas; the
+second three of commenting relative clauses wrongly not preceded by
+commas. The last of all there may be a doubt about. If the long clause
+beginning with <i>which</i> is intended merely to show how great the
+weariness is, and <i>which</i> is practically equivalent to <i>so great
+that</i>, it may be called a defining clause, and the omission of the
+comma is right. But if the <i>which</i> really acts as a mere connexion
+to introduce a new fact that the correspondent wishes to record, the
+clause is non-defining, and the comma ought according to our rule to be
+inserted before it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The man, <i>who</i> thinketh in his heart and hath the power
+straightway (very straightway) to go and do it, is not so common in
+any country.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>Now everyone must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these
+must. The question, <i>which</i> a wise man and a student of modern
+history will ask, is, what that kind is.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Those, <i>who</i> are urging with most ardour what are called the
+greatest benefits of mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited
+men.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>A reminder is being sent to all absent members of the Nationalist
+party that their attendance at Westminster is urgently required next
+week <i>when</i> the Budget will be taken on Monday.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Marshall Islands will pass from the control of the Jaluit
+Company under that of the German colonial authorities <i>who</i>
+will bear the cost of administration and will therefore collect all
+taxes.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The causes of this popularity are, no doubt, in part, the extreme
+simplicity of the reasoning on which the theory rests, in part its
+extreme plausibility, in part, perhaps, the nature of the result
+<i>which</i> is commonly thought to be speculatively interesting
+without being practically inconvenient.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>Naval critics ... are showing signs of weariness <i>which</i> even the
+reported appearance of Admiral Nebogatoff in the Malacca Strait is
+unable to remove.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. The adverb, adverbial phrase, and adverbial clause.</p>
+
+<p>In writing of substantival and adjectival clauses, our appeal was for
+more logical precision than is usual. We said that the comma habitual
+before substantival clauses was in most cases unjustifiable, and should
+be omitted even at the cost of occasional slight discomfort. We said
+that with one division of adjectival, or rather relative clauses,
+commas should always be used, and with another they should always be
+omitted. With the adverbial clauses, phrases, and words, on the other
+hand, our appeal is on the whole for less precision; we recommend that
+less precision should be aimed at, at least, though more attained, than
+at present. Certain kinds of laxity here are not merely venial, but
+laudable: certain other kinds are damning evidence of carelessness or
+bad taste or bad education. It is not here a mere matter of choosing
+between one right and one wrong way; there are many degrees.</p>
+
+<p><i>Now</i> is an adverb; <i>in the house</i> is usually an adverbial
+phrase; <i>if I know it</i> is an adverbial clause. Logic and grammar
+never prohibit the separating of any such expressions from the rest of
+their sentence—by two commas if they stand in the middle of it, by
+one if they begin or end it. But use of the commas tends, especially
+with a single word, but also with a phrase or clause, though in inverse
+proportion to its length, to modify the meaning. <i>I cannot do it
+now</i> means no more than it says: <i>I cannot do it, now</i> conveys
+a further assurance that the speaker would have been delighted to do<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</span>
+it yesterday or will be quite willing tomorrow. This distinction,
+generally recognized with the single word, applies also to clauses; and
+writers of judgement should take the fullest freedom in such matters,
+allowing no superstition about ‘subordinate clauses’ to force upon them
+commas that they feel to be needless, but inclining always when in
+doubt to spare readers the jerkiness of overstopping. It is a question
+for rhetoric alone, not for logic, so long as the proper allowance
+of commas, if any, is given; what the proper allowance is, has been
+explained a few lines back. We need not waste time on exemplifying this
+simple principle; there is so far no real laxity; the writer is simply
+free.</p>
+
+<p>Laxity comes in when we choose, guided by nothing more authoritative
+than euphony, to stop an adverbial phrase or adverbial clause, but
+not to stop it at both ends, though it stands in the middle of its
+sentence. This is an unmistakable offence against logic, and lays one
+open to the condemnation of examiners and precisians. But the point we
+wish to make is that in a very large class of sentences the injury to
+meaning is so infinitesimal, and the benefit to sound so considerable,
+that we do well to offend. The class is so large that only one example
+need be given:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But with their triumph over the revolt, Cranmer and his colleagues
+advanced yet more boldly.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The adverbial phrase is <i>with their triumph over the revolt</i>.
+<i>But</i> does not belong to it, but to the whole sentence. The writer
+has no defence whatever as against the logician; nevertheless, his
+reader will be grateful to him. The familiar intrusion of a comma after
+initial <i>And</i> and <i>For</i> where there is no intervening clause
+to justify it, of which we gave examples when we spoke of overstopping,
+comes probably by false analogy from the unpleasant pause that rigid
+punctuation has made common in sentences of this type.</p>
+
+<p>Laxity once introduced, however, has to be carefully kept within
+bounds. It may be first laid down absolutely that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</span> when an adverbial
+clause is to be stopped, but incompletely stopped, the omitted stop
+must always be the one at the beginning, and never the one at the end.
+Transgression of this is quite intolerable; we shall give several
+instances at the end of the section to impress the fact. But it is also
+true that even the omission of the beginning comma looks more and more
+slovenly the further we get from the type of our above cited sentence.
+The quotations immediately following are arranged from the less to the
+more slovenly.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>His health gave way, and <i>at the age of fifty-six</i>, he died
+prematurely in harness at Quetta.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>If mankind was in the condition of believing nothing, and <i>without
+a bias in any particular direction</i>, was merely on the
+look-out for some legitimate creed, it would not, I conceive, be
+possible....—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>The party <i>then</i>, consisted of a man and his wife, of his
+mother-in-law and his sister.—<span class="smcap">F. M. Crawford.</span></p>
+
+<p>These men <i>in their honorary capacity</i>, already have sufficient
+work to perform.—<i>Guernsey Evening Press.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It will be observed that in the sentence from Mr. Balfour the chief
+objection to omitting the comma between <i>and</i> and <i>without</i>
+is that we are taken off on a false scent, it being natural at first to
+suppose that we are to supply <i>was</i> again; this can only happen
+when we are in the middle of a sentence, and not at the beginning as in
+the pattern Cranmer sentence.</p>
+
+<p>The gross negligence or ignorance betrayed by giving the first and
+omitting the second comma will be convincingly shown by this array of
+sentences from authors of all degrees.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is not strange that the sentiment of loyalty should, <i>from the
+day of his accession</i> have begun to revive.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>Was it possible that having loved she should not so rejoice,
+or that, <i>rejoicing</i> she should not be proud of her
+love?—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+
+<p>I venture to suggest that, <i>had Lord Hugh himself been better
+informed in the matter</i> he would scarcely have placed
+himself....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The necessary consequence being that the law, <i>to uphold the
+restraints of which such unusual devices are employed</i> is in
+practice destitute of the customary sanctions.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The view held ... is that, <i>owing to the constant absence of the
+Commander-in-Chief on tour</i> it is necessary that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</span></p>
+
+<p>The master of the house, to whom, <i>as in duty bound</i> I
+communicated my intention....—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>After this victory, Hunyadi, <i>with his army</i> entered Belgrade, to
+the great joy of the Magyars.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>M. Kossuth declares that, <i>until the King calls on the
+majority to take office with its own programme</i> chaos will
+prevail.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A love-affair, <i>to be conducted with spirit and
+enterprise</i> should always bristle with opposition and
+difficulty.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>And that she should force me, <i>by the magic of her pen</i> to
+mentally acknowledge ..., albeit with wrath and shame, my own
+inferiority!—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>She is a hard-working woman dependant on her literary success for a
+livelihood, and you, <i>rolling in wealth</i> do your best to deprive
+her of the means of existence.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>Although three trainings of the local militia have been conducted
+under the new regime, Alderney, <i>despite the fact that it is
+a portion of the same military command</i> has not as yet been
+affected.—<i>Guernsey Evening Press.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>5. Parenthesis.</p>
+
+<p>In one sense, everything that is adverbial is parenthetic: it can be
+inserted or removed, that is, without damaging the grammar, though not
+always without damaging the meaning, of the sentence. But the adverbial
+parenthesis, when once inserted, forms a part of the sentence; we have
+sufficiently dealt with the stops it requires in the last section; the
+use of commas emphasizes its parenthetic character, and is therefore
+sometimes desirable, sometimes not; no more need be said about it.</p>
+
+<p>Another kind of parenthesis is that whose meaning practically governs
+the sentence in the middle of which it is nevertheless inserted as an
+alien element that does not coalesce in grammar with the rest. The
+type is—But, you will say, Caesar is not an aristocrat. This kind is
+important for our purpose because of the muddles often made, chiefly by
+careless punctuation, between the real parenthesis and words that give
+the same meaning, but are not, like it, grammatically separable. We
+shall start with an indisputable example of this muddle:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Where, do you imagine, she would lay it?—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</span></p>
+
+<p>These commas cannot possibly indicate anything but parenthesis; but, if
+the comma’d words were really a parenthesis, we ought to have <i>would
+she</i> instead of <i>she would</i>. The four sentences that now follow
+are all of one pattern. The bad stopping is probably due to this same
+confusion between the parenthetic and the non-parenthetic. But it
+is possible that in each the two commas are independent, the first
+being one of those that are half rhetorical and half caused by false
+analogy, which have been mentioned as common after initial <i>And</i>
+and <i>For</i>; and the second being the comma wrongly used, as we have
+maintained, before substantival <i>that</i>-clauses.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Whence, it would appear, that he considers that all deliverances of
+consciousness are original judgments.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>Hence, he reflected, that if he could but use his literary
+instinct to feed some commercial undertaking, he might gain a
+considerable....—<span class="smcap">Hutton.</span></p>
+
+<p>But, depend upon it, that no Eastern difficulty needs our intervention
+so seriously as....—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>And yet, it has been often said, that the party issues were hopelessly
+confused.—<span class="smcap">L. Stephen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A less familiar form of this mistake, and one not likely to occur
+except in good writers, since inferior ones seldom attempt the
+construction that leads to it, is sometimes found when a subordinating
+conjunction is placed late in its clause, after the object or
+other member. In the Thackeray sentence, it will be observed that
+the first comma would be right (1) if <i>them</i> had stood after
+<i>discovered</i> instead of where it does, (2) if <i>them</i> had been
+omitted, and <i>any</i> had served as the common object to both verbs.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an adventitious idea of
+terror, they become without comparison greater.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>Any of which peccadilloes, if Miss Sharp discovered, she did not tell
+them to Lady Crawley.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>6. The misplaced comma.</p>
+
+<p>Some authors would seem to have an occasional feeling that here or
+hereabouts is the place for a comma, just as in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</span> handwriting some
+persons are well content if they get a dot in somewhere within
+measurable distance of its <i>i</i>. The dot is generally over the
+right word at any rate, and the comma is seldom more than one word off
+its true place.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>All true science begins with empiricism—though all true science is
+such exactly, in so far as it strives to pass out of the empirical
+stage.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Exactly</i> qualifies and belongs to <i>in so far</i>, &amp;c., not
+<i>such</i>. The comma should be before it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This, they for the most part, throw away as
+worthless.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>For the most part</i>, alone, is the adverbial parenthesis.</p>
+
+<p>But this fault occurs, perhaps nine times out of ten, in combination
+with the <i>that</i>-clause comma so often mentioned. It may be said,
+when our instances have been looked into, that in each of them,
+apart from the <i>that</i>-clause comma, which is recognized by many
+authorities, there is merely the licence that we have ourselves
+allowed, omission of the first, without omission of the last, comma of
+an adverbial parenthesis. But we must point out that Huxley, Green, and
+Mr. Balfour, man of science, historian, and philosopher, all belong
+to that dignified class of writers which is supposed to, and in most
+respects does, insist on full logical stopping; they, in view of their
+general practice, are not entitled to our slovenly and merely literary
+licences.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And the second is, that for the purpose of attaining culture,
+an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual
+as....—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the full discussion which followed over the various claims showed,
+that while exacting to the full what he believed to be his right,
+Edward desired to do justice to the country.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>The one difference between these gilds in country and town was, that
+in the latter case, from their close local neighbourhood, they tended
+to coalesce.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>It follows directly from this definition, that however restricted the
+range of possible knowledge may be, philosophy can never be excluded
+from it.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the difficulty here, as it seems to me, is, that if you start from
+your idea of evolution, these assumptions are....—<span class="smcap">Balfour.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>He begged me to give over all unlawful pursuits, saying,
+that if persisted in, they were sure of bringing a person to
+destruction.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>7. Enumeration.</p>
+
+<p>This name, liberally interpreted, is meant to include several more
+or less distinct questions. They are difficult, and much debated by
+authorities on punctuation, but are of no great importance. We shall
+take the liberty of partly leaving them undecided, and partly giving
+arbitrary opinions; to argue them out would take more space than it is
+worth while to give. But it <i>is</i> worth while to draw attention to
+them, so that each writer may be aware that they exist, and at least be
+consistent with himself. Typical sentences (from Beadnell) are:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>a.</i> Industry, honesty, and temperance, are essential to
+happiness.—B.</p>
+
+<p><i>b.</i> Let us freely drink in the soul of love and beauty and
+wisdom, from all nature and art and history.—B.</p>
+
+<p><i>c.</i> Plain honest truth wants no colouring.—B.</p>
+
+<p><i>d.</i> Many states are in alliance with, and under the protection
+of France.—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Common variants for (<i>a</i>) are (1) Industry, honesty and temperance
+are essential ... (2) Industry, honesty and temperance, are essential
+... (3) Industry, honesty, and temperance are essential.... We
+unhesitatingly recommend the original and fully stopped form, which
+should be used irrespective of style, and not be interfered with by
+rhetorical considerations; it is the only one to which there is never
+any objection. Of the examples that follow, the first conforms to the
+correct type, but no serious harm would be done if it did not. The
+second also conforms; and, if this had followed variant (1) or (2),
+here indistinguishable, we should have been in danger of supposing that
+Education and Police were one department instead of two. The third,
+having no comma after <i>interests</i>, follows variant (3), and, as
+it happens, with no bad effect on the meaning. All three variants,
+however, may under different conditions produce ambiguity or worse.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But those that remain, the women, the youths, the children, and the
+elders, work all the harder.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Japanese advisers are now attached to the departments of the
+Household, War, Finance, Education, and Police.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>An American, whose patience, tact, and ability in
+reconciling conflicting interests have won the praise of all
+nationalities.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sometimes enumerations are arranged in pairs; it is then most
+unpleasant to have the comma after the last pair omitted, as in:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The orange and the lemon, the olive and the walnut elbow each other
+for a footing in the fat dark earth.—<span class="smcap">F. M. Crawford.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is a bastard form of enumeration against which warning is
+seriously needed. It is viewed as, but is not really, a legitimate case
+of type (<i>a</i>); and a quite unnecessary objection to the repetition
+of <i>and</i> no doubt supplies the motive. Examples are:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He kept manœuvring upon Neipperg, who counter-manœuvred
+with vigilance, good judgment, and would not come to
+action.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>Moltke had recruited, trained, and knew by heart all the men under
+him.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Hence loss of time, of money, and sore trial of patience.—<span class="smcap">R. G.
+White.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The principle is this: in an enumeration given by means of a comma
+or commas, the last comma being replaced by or combined with
+<i>and</i>—our type (<i>a</i>), that is—, there must not be anything
+that is common to two members (as here, <i>counter-manœuvred with</i>,
+<i>had</i>, <i>loss</i>) without being common to all. We may say,
+Moltke had recruited and trained and knew, Moltke had recruited, had
+trained, and knew, or, Moltke had recruited, trained, and known; but we
+must not say what the <i>Times</i> says. The third sentence may run,
+Loss of time and money, and sore trial, or, Loss of time, of money, and
+of patience; but not as it does.</p>
+
+<p>So much for type (<i>a</i>). Type (<i>b</i>) can be very shortly
+disposed of. It differs in that the conjunction (<i>and</i>,
+<i>or</i>, <i>nor</i>, &amp;c.) is expressed every time, instead of being
+represented except in the last place by a comma. It is logically
+quite<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</span> unnecessary, but rhetorically quite allowable, to use commas
+as well as conjunctions. The only caution needed is that, if commas
+are used at all, and if the enumeration does not end the sentence, and
+is not concluded by a stronger stop, a comma must be inserted after
+the last member as well as after the others. In the type sentence,
+which contains two enumerations, it would be legitimate to use commas
+as well as <i>and</i>s with one set and not with the other, if it
+were desired either to avoid monotony or to give one list special
+emphasis. The three examples now to be added transgress the rule about
+the final comma. We arrange them from bad to worse; in the last of
+them, the apparently needless though not necessarily wrong comma after
+<i>fall</i> suggests that the writer has really felt a comma to be
+wanting to the enumeration, but has taken a bad shot with it, as in the
+examples of section 6 on the misplaced comma.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Neither the Court, nor society, nor Parliament, nor the older
+men in the Army have yet recognized the fundamental truth
+that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A subordinate whose past conduct in the post he fills, and whose known
+political sympathies make him wholly unfitted, however loyal his
+intentions may be, to give that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But there are uninstructed ears on whom the constant abuse, and
+imputation of low motives may fall, with a mischievous and misleading
+effect.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of type (<i>c</i>) the characteristic is that we have two or more
+adjectives attached to a following noun; are there to be commas between
+the adjectives, or not? The rule usually given is that there should be,
+unless the last adjective is more intimately connected with the noun,
+so that the earlier one qualifies, not the noun, but the last adjective
+and the noun together; it will be noticed that we strictly have no
+enumeration then at all. This is sometimes useful; and so is the more
+practical and less theoretic direction to ask whether <i>and</i>
+could be inserted, and if so use the comma, but not otherwise. These
+both sound sufficient in the abstract. But that there are doubts left
+in practice is shown by the type sentence,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</span> which Beadnell gives
+as correct, though either test would rather require the comma. He
+gives also as correct, Can flattery soothe the dull, cold ear of
+death?—which is not very clearly distinguishable from the other. Our
+advice is to use these tests when in doubt, but with a leaning to the
+omission of the comma. If it happens that a comma of this particular
+class is the only stop in a sentence, it has a false appearance of
+dividing the sentence into two parts that is very unpleasant, and may
+make the reader go through it twice to make sure that all is right—an
+inconvenience that should by all means be spared him.</p>
+
+<p>Type (<i>d</i>) is one in which the final word or phrase of a sentence
+has two previous expressions standing in the same grammatical relation
+to it, but their ending with different prepositions, or the fact
+that one is to be substituted for the other, or the length of the
+expressions, or some other cause, obscures this identity of relation.
+Add to the type sentence the following:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>His eloquence was the main, one might almost say the sole, source of
+his influence.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+
+<p>To dazzle people more, he learned or pretended to learn, the Spanish
+language.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+
+<p>... apart from philosophical and sometimes from theological,
+theories.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The rules we lay down are: (1) If possible use no stops at all. (2)
+Never use the second comma and omit the first. (3) Even when the first
+is necessary, the second may often be dispensed with. (4) Both commas
+may be necessary if the phrases are long.</p>
+
+<p>We should correct all the examples, including the type: the type under
+rule (1); the Bryce (which is strictly correct) under rule (3); the
+Bagehot under rules (2) and (1); and the Balfour under rules (2) and
+(3); the list two are clearly wrong. The four would then stand as
+follows:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</span></p><div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Many states are in alliance with and under the protection of France.</p>
+
+<p>His eloquence was the main, one might almost say the sole source of
+his influence.</p>
+
+<p>To dazzle people more, he learned or pretended to learn the Spanish
+language.</p>
+
+<p>... apart from philosophical, and sometimes from theological theories.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Learners will be inclined to say: all this is very indefinite; do
+give us a clear rule that will apply to all cases. Such was the view
+with which, on a matter of even greater importance than punctuation,
+Procrustes identified himself; but it brought him to a bad end. The
+clear rule, Use all logical commas, would give us:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He was born, in, or near, London, on December 24th, 1900.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>No one would write this who was not suffering from bad hypertrophy of
+the grammatical conscience. The clear rule, Use no commas in this sort
+of enumeration, would give:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>If I have the queer ways you accuse me of, that is because but I
+should have thought a man of your perspicacity might have been
+expected to see that it was also why I live in a hermitage all by
+myself.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>No one would write this without both commas (after <i>because</i> and
+<i>why</i>) who was not deeply committed to an anti-comma crusade.
+Between the two extremes lie cases calling for various treatment; the
+ruling principle should be freedom within certain limits.</p>
+
+<p>8. The comma between independent sentences.</p>
+
+<p>Among the signs that more particularly betray the uneducated writer is
+inability to see when a comma is not a sufficient stop. Unfortunately
+little more can be done than to warn beginners that any serious slip
+here is much worse than they will probably suppose, and recommend them
+to observe the practice of good writers.</p>
+
+<p>It is roughly true that grammatically independent sentences should be
+parted by at least a semicolon; but in the first place there are very
+large exceptions to this; and secondly, the writer who really knows a
+grammatically independent sentence when he sees it is hardly in need of
+instruction;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</span> this must be our excuse for entering here into what may
+be thought too elementary an explanation. Let us take the second point
+first; it may be of some assistance to remark that a sentence joined
+to the previous one by a coordinating conjunction is grammatically
+independent, as well as one not joined to it at all. But the difference
+between a coordinating and a subordinating conjunction is itself in
+English rather fine. Every one can see that ‘I will not try; it is
+dangerous’ is two independent sentences—independent in grammar,
+though not in thought. But it is a harder saying that ‘I will not try,
+for it is dangerous’ is also two sentences, while ‘I will not try,
+because it is dangerous’ is one only. The reason is that <i>for</i>
+coordinates, and <i>because</i> subordinates; instead of giving lists,
+which would probably be incomplete, of the two kinds of conjunction,
+we mention that a subordinating conjunction may be known from the
+other kind by its being possible to place it and its clause before
+the previous sentence instead of after, without destroying the sense:
+we can say ‘Because it is dangerous, I will not try’, but not ‘For it
+is dangerous, I will not try’. This test cannot always be applied in
+complicated sentences; simple ones must be constructed for testing the
+conjunction in question.</p>
+
+<p>Assuming that it is now understood (1) what a subordinating and what
+a coordinating conjunction is, (2) that a member joined on by no
+more than a coordinating conjunction is a grammatically independent
+sentence, or simply a sentence in the proper meaning of the word,
+and not a subordinate clause, we return to the first point. This was
+that, though independent sentences are regularly parted by at least
+a semicolon, there are large exceptions to the rule. These we shall
+only be able to indicate very loosely. There are three conditions
+that may favour the reduction of the semicolon to a comma: (1) Those
+coordinating conjunctions which are most common tend in the order of
+their commonness to be humble, and to recognize a comma as sufficient
+for their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</span> dignity. The order may perhaps be given as: <i>and</i>,
+<i>or</i>, <i>but</i>, <i>so</i>, <i>nor</i>, <i>for</i>; conjunctions
+less common than these should scarcely ever be used with less than
+a semicolon; and many good writers would refuse to put a mere comma
+before <i>for</i>. (2) Shortness and lightness of the sentence joined
+on helps to lessen the need for a heavy stop. (3) Intimate connexion
+in thought with the preceding sentence has the same effect. Before
+giving our examples, which are all of undesirable commas, we point
+out that in the first two there are independent signs of the writers’
+being uneducated; and such signs will often be discoverable. It will
+be clear from what we have said why the others are bad—except perhaps
+the third; it is particularly disagreeable to have two successive
+independent sentences tagged on with commas, as those beginning with
+<i>nor</i> and <i>for</i> are in that example.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>No peace at night he enjoys, <i>for</i> he lays awake.—<i>Guernsey
+Advertiser.</i></p>
+
+<p>Now accepted, nominal Christendom believes this, and strives to
+attain unto it, <i>then</i> why the inconsistency of creed and
+deed?—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>But who is responsible to Government for the efficiency of the
+Army? The Commander-in-Chief and no one else, <i>nor</i> has anyone
+questioned the fact, <i>for</i> it is patent.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But even on this theory the formula above stated holds good,
+<i>for</i> such systems, so far from being self-contained
+(as it were) and sufficient evidence for themselves, are
+really....—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>Some banks on the Nevsky Prospect are having iron shutters fitted,
+<i>otherwise</i> there is nothing apparently to justify General
+Trepoff’s proclamation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Everybody knows where his own shoe pinches, and, if people find
+drawbacks in the places they inhabit, they must also find advantages,
+<i>otherwise</i> they would not be there.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>We have suffered many things at the hands of the Russian Navy during
+the war, <i>nevertheless</i> the news that Admiral Rozhdestvensky ...
+will send a thrill of admiration....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I think that on the whole we may be thankful for the architectural
+merits of the Gaiety block, it has breadth and dignity of design and
+groups well on the angular site.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It will not be irrelevant to add here, though the point has been
+touched upon in Understopping, that though a light<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</span> <i>and</i>-clause
+may be introduced by no more than a comma, it does not follow that it
+need not be separated by any stop at all, as in:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When the Motor Cars Act was before the House it was suggested that
+these authorities should be given the right to make recommendations to
+the central authorities and that right was conceded.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>9. The semicolon between subordinate members.</p>
+
+<p>Just as the tiro will be safer if he avoids commas before independent
+sentences, so he will generally be wise not to use a semicolon before
+a mere subordinate member. We have explained, indeed, that it is
+sometimes quite legitimate for rhetorical reasons, and is under certain
+circumstances almost required by proportion. This is when the sentence
+contains commas doing less important work than the one about which the
+question arises. But the tiro’s true way out of the difficulty is to
+simplify his sentences so that they do not need such differentiation.
+Even skilful writers, as the following two quotations will show,
+sometimes come to grief over this.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>One view called me to another; one hill to its fellow, half across
+the county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than
+the snapping forward of a lever, I let the county flow under my
+wheels.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues and all human vices;
+the passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in
+stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual
+bosom?—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the first of these the second comma and the semicolon clearly ought
+to change places. In the second it looks as if Carlyle had thought
+it dull to have so many commas about; but the remedy was much worse
+than dullness. Avoidance of what a correspondent supposes to be dull,
+but what would in fact be natural and right, accounts also for the
+following piece of vicarious rhetoric; the writer is not nearly so
+excited, it may be suspected, as his semicolons would make him out.
+The ordinary sensible man would have (1) used commas, and (2) either
+omitted the third and fourth <i>denies</i> (reminding us<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</span> of Zola’s
+famous <i>j’accuse</i>, not vicarious, and on an adequate occasion), or
+else inserted an <i>and</i> before the last repetition.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mr. Loomis denies all three categorically. He denies that the
+Asphalt Company paid him £2,000 or any other sum; denies that he
+purchased a claim against the Venezuelan Government and then used his
+influence when Minister at Caracas to collect the claim; denies that
+he agreed with Mr. Meyers or anybody else to use his influence for
+money.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>10. The exclamation mark when there is no exclamation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>My friend! this conduct amazes me!—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We must differ altogether from Beadnell’s rule that ‘This point is
+used to denote any sudden emotion of the mind, whether of joy, grief,
+surprise, fear, or any other sensation’—at least as it is exemplified
+in his first instance, given above. The exclamation mark after
+<i>friend</i> is justifiable, not the other. The stop should be used,
+with one exception, only after real exclamations. Real exclamations
+include (1) the words recognized as interjections, as <i>alas</i>,
+(2) fragmentary expressions that are not complete sentences, as <i>My
+friend</i> in the example, and (3) complete statements that contain an
+exclamatory word, as:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>What a piece of work is man!—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The exception mentioned above is this: when the writer wishes to
+express his own incredulity or other feeling about what is not his own
+statement, but practically a quotation from some one else, he is at
+liberty to do it with a mark of exclamation; in the following example,
+the epitaph-writer expresses either his wonder or his incredulity about
+what Fame says.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">Entomb’d within this vault a lawyer lies</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Who, Fame assureth us, was just and wise!—B.</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The exclamation mark is a neat and concise sneer at the legal
+profession.</p>
+
+<p>Outside these narrow limits the exclamation mark must not be used. We
+shall quote a very instructive saying of Landor’s: ‘I read warily;
+and whenever I find the writings<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</span> of a lady, the first thing I do
+is to cast my eye along her pages, to see whether I am likely to be
+annoyed by the traps and spring-guns of interjections; and if I happen
+to espy them I do not leap the paling’. To this we add that when the
+exclamation mark is used after mere statements it deserves the name,
+by which it is sometimes called, mark of admiration; we feel that the
+writer is indeed lost in admiration of his own wit or impressiveness.
+But this use is mainly confined to lower-class authors; when a grave
+historian stoops to it, he gives us quite a different sort of shock
+from what he designed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The unfortunate commander was in the situation of some bold,
+high-mettled cavalier, rushing to battle on a warhorse whose tottering
+joints threaten to give way at every step, and leave his rider to the
+mercy of his enemies!—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+
+<p>The road now struck into the heart of a mountain region, where
+woods, precipices, and ravines were mingled together in a sort of
+chaotic confusion, with here and there a green and sheltered valley,
+glittering like an island of verdure amidst the wild breakers of a
+troubled ocean!—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>11. Confusion between question and exclamation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Fortunate man!—who would not envy you! Love!—who would, who could
+exist without it—save me!—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>What wonder that the most docile of Russians should be crying out ‘how
+long’!—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We have started with three indisputable instances of the exclamation
+mark used for the question mark. It is worth notice that the correct
+stopping for the end of the second quotation (though such accuracy
+is seldom attempted) would be:—long?’? To have fused two questions
+into an exclamation is an achievement. But these are mere indefensible
+blunders, not needing to be thought twice about, such as author and
+compositor incline to put off each on the other’s shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>The case is not always so clear. In the six sentences lettered for
+reference, <i>a</i>-<i>d</i> have the wrong stop; in <i>e</i> the
+stop implied by <i>he exclaims</i> is also wrong; in <i>f</i>, though
+the stop is right assuming that the form of the sentence is what was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</span>
+really meant, we venture to question this point, as we do also in
+some of the earlier sentences. Any one who agrees with the details of
+this summary can save himself the trouble of reading the subsequent
+discussion.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>a.</i> In that interval what had I not lost!—<span class="smcap">Lamb.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>b.</i> And what will not the discontinuance cost
+me!—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>c.</i> A streak of blue below the hanging alders is certainly a
+characteristic introduction to the kingfisher. How many people first
+see him so?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>d.</i> Does the reading of history make us fatalists? What courage
+does not the opposite opinion show!—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>e.</i> What economy of life and money, he exclaims, would not have
+been spared the empire of the Tsars had it not rendered war certain by
+devoting itself so largely to the works of peace.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>f.</i> How many, who think no otherwise than the
+young painter, have we not heard disbursing secondhand
+hyperboles?—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It will be noticed that in all these sentences except <i>c</i> there is
+a negative, which puts them, except <i>f</i>, wrong; while in <i>c</i>
+it is the absence of the negative that makes the question wrong. It
+will be simplest to start with <i>c</i>. The writer clearly means to
+let us know that many people see the kingfisher first as a blue streak.
+He might give this simply so, as a statement. He might (artificially)
+give it as an exclamation—<i>How many first see him so!</i> Or he
+might (very artificially) give it as a question—<i>How many do not
+first see him so?</i>—a ‘rhetorical question’ in which <i>How many</i>
+interrogative is understood to be equivalent to <i>Few</i> positive. He
+has rejected the simple statement; vaulting ambition has o’erleapt, and
+he has ended in a confusion between the two artificial ways of saying
+the thing, taking the words of the possible exclamation and the stop of
+the possible question. In <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>d</i>, and implicitly
+in <i>e</i>, we have the converse arrangement, or derangement. But as
+a little more clear thinking is required for them, we point out that
+the origin of the confusion (though the careless printing of fifty
+or a hundred years ago no doubt helped to establish it) lies in the
+identity between the words used for questions and for exclamations. It
+will be enough to suggest<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</span> the process that accounts for <i>a</i>; the
+ambiguity is easily got rid of by inserting a noun with <i>what</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Question</i>: What amount had I lost?</p>
+
+<p><i>Exclamation</i>: What an amount I had lost!</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That is the first stage; the resemblance is next increased by inverting
+subject and verb in the exclamation, which is both natural enough
+in that kind of sentence, and particularly easy after <i>In that
+interval</i>. So we get</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Question</i>: In that interval, what (amount) had I lost?</p>
+
+<p><i>Exclamation</i>: In that interval, what (an amount) had I lost!</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The words, when the bracketed part of each sentence is left out, are
+now the same; but the question is of course incapable of giving the
+required meaning. The writer, seeing this, but deceived by the order
+of words into thinking the exclamation a question, tries to mend it by
+inserting <i>not</i>; <i>what ... not</i>, in rhetorical questions,
+being equivalent to <i>everything</i>. At this stage some writers
+stick, as Stevenson in <i>f</i>. Others try to make a right out of two
+wrongs by restoring to the quondam exclamation, which has been wrongly
+converted with the help of <i>not</i> into a question, the exclamation
+mark to which it has after conversion no right. Such is the genesis
+of <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>d</i>. The proper method, when the simple
+statement is rejected, as it often reasonably may be, is to use the
+exclamation, not the Stevensonian question<a id="FNanchor_13" href="#Footnote_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a>, to give the exclamation
+its right mark, and not to insert the illogical negative.</p>
+
+<p>12. Internal question and exclamation marks.</p>
+
+<p>By this name we do not mean that insertion of a bracketed stop of which
+we shall nevertheless give one example. That is indeed a confession of
+weakness and infallible sign of the prentice hand, and further examples
+will be found in <i>Airs and Graces</i>, <i>miscellaneous</i>; but it
+is outside grammar, with which these sections are concerned.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Under these circumstances, it would be interesting to ascertain
+the exact position of landlords whose tenants decline to pay rent,
+and whose only asset (!) from their property is the income-tax now
+claimed.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>What is meant is the ugly stop in the middle of a sentence, unbracketed
+and undefended by quotation marks, of which examples follow. To
+novelists, as in the first example, it may be necessary for the purpose
+of avoiding the nuisance of perpetual quotation marks. But elsewhere
+it should be got rid of by use of the indirect question or otherwise.
+Excessive indulgence in direct questions or exclamations where there
+is no need for them whatever is one of the sensational tendencies of
+modern newspapers.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Why be scheming? Victor asked.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>What will Japan do? is thought the most pressing question of
+all.—<i>Times.</i> (What Japan will do is thought, &amp;c.)</p>
+
+<p>What next? is the next question which the American Press
+discusses.—<i>Times.</i> (‘What next?’ is, &amp;c. Or, What will come
+next is, &amp;c.)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Amusing efforts are shown below at escaping the ugliness of the
+internal question mark. Observe that the third quotation has a worse
+blunder, since we have here two independent sentences.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Can it be that the Government will still persist in continuing the now
+hopeless struggle is the question on every lip?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of
+their youth, yet what of it, they ask?—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Yet we remember seeing l’Abbé Constantin some sixteen years ago or
+more at the Royalty, with that fine old actor Lafontaine in the
+principal part, and seeing it with lively interest. Was it distinctly
+‘dates’, for nothing wears so badly as the namby-pamby?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>13. The unaccountable comma.</p>
+
+<p>We shall now conclude these grammatical sections with a single example
+of those commas about which it is only possible to say that they are
+repugnant to grammar. It is as difficult to decide what principle they
+offend against as what impulse can possibly have dictated them. They
+are commonest in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</span> the least educated writers of all; and, next to
+these, in the men of science whose overpowering conscientiousness has
+made the mechanical putting in of commas so habitual that it perhaps
+becomes with them a sort of reflex action, and does itself at wrong
+moments without their volition.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Rector, lineal representative of the ancient monarchs of the
+University, though now, little more than a ‘king of shreds and
+patches.’—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Colon</span></h3>
+
+<p>It was said in the general remarks at the beginning of this chapter
+that the systematic use of the colon as one of the series (,), (;),
+(:), (.), had died out with the decay of formal periods. Many people
+continue to use it, but few, if we can trust our observation, with any
+nice regard to its value. Some think it a prettier or more impressive
+stop than the semicolon, and use it instead of that; some like variety,
+and use the two indifferently, or resort to one when they are tired
+of the other. As the abandonment of periodic arrangement really makes
+the colon useless, it would be well (though of course any one who
+still writes in formal periods should retain his rights over it) if
+ordinary writers would give it up altogether except in the special
+uses, independent of its quantitative value, to which it is being more
+and more applied by common consent. These are (1) between two sentences
+that are in clear antithesis, but not connected by an adversative
+conjunction; (2) introducing a short quotation; (3) introducing a
+list; (4) introducing a sentence that comes as fulfilment of a promise
+expressed or implied in the previous sentence; (5) introducing an
+explanation or proof that is not connected with the previous sentence
+by <i>for</i> or the like. Examples are:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>(1) Man proposes: God disposes.</p>
+
+<p>(2) Always remember the ancient maxim: Know thyself.—B.</p>
+
+<p>(3) Chief rivers: Thames, Severn, Humber....</p>
+
+<p>(4) Some things we can, and others we cannot do: we can walk, but we
+cannot fly.—<span class="smcap">Bigelow.</span></p>
+
+<p>(5) Rebuke thy son in private: public rebuke hardens the heart.—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the following clear case of antithesis a colon would have been more
+according to modern usage than the semicolon.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>As apart from our requirements Mr. Arnold-Forster’s schemes have many
+merits; in relation to them they have very few.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It now only remains, before leaving actual stops for the dash, hyphen,
+quotation mark, and bracket, to comment on a few stray cases of
+ambiguity, false scent, and ill-judged stopping. We have not hunted
+up, and shall not manufacture, any of the patent absurdities that
+are amusing but unprofitable. The sort of ambiguity that most needs
+guarding against is that which allows a sleepy reader to take the words
+wrong when the omission or insertion of a stop would have saved him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The chief agitators of the League, who have—not unnaturally
+considering the favours showered upon them in the past—a high sense
+of their own importance....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>With no comma after <i>unnaturally</i> the first thought is that the
+agitators not unnaturally consider; second thoughts put it right; but
+second thoughts should never be expected from a reader.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Simultaneously extensive reclamation of land and harbour improvements
+are in progress at Chemulpo and Fusan.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>With no comma after the first word, the sleepy reader is set wondering
+what <i>simultaneously extensive</i> means, and whether it is
+journalese for <i>equally extensive</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But Anne and I did, for we had played there all our lives—at
+least, all the years we had spent together and the rest do not
+count in the story. When Anne and I came together we began to
+live.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A comma after <i>together</i> would save us from adding the two sets
+of years to each other. In the next piece, on the other hand, the
+uncomfortable comma after <i>gold</i> is apparently meant to warn us
+quite unnecessarily that <i>here and there</i> belongs to the verb.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Flecks of straw-coloured gold, here and there lay upon it, where the
+sunshine touched the bent of last year.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>After that, having once fallen off from their course, they at length
+succeeded in crossing the Aegean, and beating up in the teeth of the
+Etesian winds, only yesterday, seventy days out from Egypt, put in at
+the Piraeus.—<span class="smcap">S. T. Irwin.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The omission of the comma between <i>and</i> and <i>beating</i> would
+ordinarily be quite legitimate. Here, it puts us off on a false scent,
+because it allows <i>beating</i> to seem parallel with <i>crossing</i>
+and object to <i>succeeded in</i>; we have to go back again when we get
+to the end, and work it out.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The French demurring to the conditions which the English commander
+offered, again commenced the action.—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The want of a comma between <i>French</i> and <i>demurring</i> makes us
+assume an absolute construction and expect another subject, of which we
+are disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>The next two pairs of examples illustrate the effect of mere accidental
+position on stopping. This is one of the numberless small disturbing
+elements that make cast-iron rules impossible in punctuation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I must leave you to discover what the answer is.</p>
+
+<p>What the answer is, I must leave you to discover.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That is, a substantival clause out of its place is generally allowed
+the comma that all but the straitest sect of punctuators would refuse
+it in its place.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In the present dispute, therefore, the local politicians have had to
+choose between defence of the principle of authority and espousing the
+cause of the local police.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Of its forty-four commissioners however few actually took any part
+in its proceedings; and the powers of the Commission....—<span class="smcap">J. R.
+Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The half adverbs half conjunctions of which <i>therefore</i> and
+<i>however</i> are instances occupy usually the second place in the
+sentence. When there, it is of little importance whether they are
+stopped or not, though we have indicated our preference for no stops.
+But when it happens that they come later (or earlier), the commas are
+generally wanted. <i>Therefore</i> in the first of these sentences
+would be as uncomfortable if stripped as <i>however</i> actually is in
+the second.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</span></p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Dashes</span></h3>
+
+<p>Moved beyond his wont by our English ill-treatment of the dash,
+Beadnell permits himself a wail as just as it is pathetic.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘The dash is frequently employed in a very capricious and arbitrary
+manner, as a substitute for all sorts of points, by writers whose
+thoughts, although, it may be, sometimes striking and profound, are
+thrown together without order or dependence; also by some others, who
+think that they thereby give prominence and emphasis to expressions
+which in themselves are very commonplace, and would, without this
+fictitious assistance, escape the observation of the reader, or be
+deemed by him hardly worthy of notice.’</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is all only too true; these are the realms of Chaos, and the lord
+of them is Sterne, from whom modern writers of the purely literary
+kind have so many of their characteristics. Wishing for an example, we
+merely opened the first volume of <i>Tristram Shandy</i> at a venture,
+and ‘thus the Anarch old With faltering speech and visage incomposed
+Answered’:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>—Observe, I determine nothing upon this.—My way is ever to point
+out to the curious, different tracts of investigation, to come at the
+first springs of the events I tell;—not with a pedantic fescue,—or
+in the decisive manner of Tacitus, who outwits himself and his
+reader;—but with the officious humility of a heart devoted to the
+assistance merely of the inquisitive;—to them I write,—and by them I
+shall be read,—if any such reading as this could be supposed to hold
+out so long,—to the very end of the world.—<span class="smcap">Sterne.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The modern newspaper writer who overdoes the use of dashes is seldom as
+incorrect as Sterne, but is perhaps more irritating:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There are also a great number of people—many of them not in the
+least tainted by militarism—who go further and who feel that a man
+in order to be a complete man—that is, one capable of protecting
+his life, his country, and his civil and political rights—should
+acquire as a boy and youth the elements of military training,—that
+is, should be given a physical training of a military character,
+including....—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It must be added, however, that Beadnell himself helps to make things
+worse, by countenancing the strange printer’s superstition that (,—)
+is beautiful to look upon, and (—,) ugly.</p>
+
+<p>Under these circumstances we shall have to abandon our usual practice
+of attending only to common mistakes, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</span> deal with the matter a
+little more systematically. We shall first catalogue, with examples,
+the chief uses of the dash; next state the debatable questions that
+arise; and end with the more definite misuses. It will be convenient
+to number all examples for reference; and, as many or most of the
+quotations contain some minor violation of what we consider the true
+principles, these will be corrected in brackets.</p>
+
+<p>1. Chief common uses.</p>
+
+<p><i>a.</i> Adding to a phrase already used an explanation, example, or
+preferable substitute.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>1. Nicholas Copernicus was instructed in that seminary where it is
+always happy when any one can be well taught,—the family circle.—B.
+(Omit the comma)</p>
+
+<p>2. Anybody might be an accuser,—a personal enemy, an infamous person,
+a child, parent, brother, or sister.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span> (Omit the comma)</p>
+
+<p>3. That the girls were really possessed seemed to Stoughton and his
+colleagues the most rational theory,—a theory in harmony with the
+rest of their creed.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span> (Omit the comma)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>b.</i> Inviting the reader to pause and collect his forces against
+the shock of an unexpected word that is to close the sentence. It is
+generally, but not always, better to abstain from this device; the
+unexpected, if not drawn attention to, is often more effective because
+less theatrical.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>4. To write imaginatively a man should
+have—imagination.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>c.</i> Assuring the reader that what is coming, even if not
+unexpected, is witty. Writers should be exceedingly sparing of this
+use; good wine needs no bush.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>5. Misfortune in various forms had overtaken the county families,
+from high farming to a taste for the junior stage, and—the
+proprietors lived anywhere else except on their own proper
+estates.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>d.</i> Marking arrival at the principal sentence or the predicate
+after a subordinate clause or a subject that is long or compound.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>6. As soon as the queen shall come to London, and the houses of
+Parliament shall be opened, and the speech from the throne be
+delivered,—then will begin the great struggle of the contending
+factions.—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>e.</i> Resuming after a parenthesis or long phrase, generally<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</span> with
+repetition of some previous words in danger of being forgotten.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>7. It is now idle to attempt to hide the fact that never was the
+Russian lack of science, of the modern spirit, or, to speak frankly,
+of intelligence—never was the absence of training or of enthusiasm
+which retards the efforts of the whole Empire displayed in a more
+melancholy fashion than in the Sea of Japan.—<i>Times.</i> (Add a
+comma after <i>intelligence</i>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>f.</i> Giving the air of an afterthought to a final comment that
+would spoil the balance of the sentence if preceded only by an ordinary
+stop. Justifiable when really wanted, that is, when it is important to
+keep the comment till the end; otherwise it is slightly insulting to
+the reader, implying that he was not worth working out the sentence for
+before it was put down.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>8. As they parted, she insisted on his giving the most solemn
+promises that he would not expose himself to danger—which was quite
+unnecessary.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>g.</i> Marking a change of speakers when quotation marks and ‘he
+said’, &amp;c., are not used; or, in a single speech, a change of subject
+or person addressed.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>9. Who created you?—God.—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">10. ... And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!</div>
+ <div class="verse indent8">The fair Ophelia!</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>h.</i> With colon or other stop before a quotation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>11. Hear Milton:—How charming is divine Philosophy!</p>
+
+<p>12. What says Bacon?—Revenge is a kind of wild justice.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>i.</i> Introducing a list.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>13. The four greatest names in English literature are almost the first
+we come to,—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.—B. (Omit the
+comma before the dash)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>k.</i> Confessing an anacoluthon, or substitution of a new
+construction for the one started with.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>14. Then the eye of a child,—who can look unmoved into
+that well undefiled, in which heaven itself seems to be
+reflected?—<span class="smcap">Bigelow.</span> (Omit the comma)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>l.</i> Breaking off a sentence altogether.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>15. Oh, how I wish—! But what is the use of wishing?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</span></p>
+
+<p><i>m.</i> Doubled to serve the purpose of brackets. It gives a medium
+between the light comma parenthesis and the heavy bracket parenthesis.
+It also has the advantage over brackets that when the parenthesis
+ends only with the sentence the second dash need not be given; this
+advantage, however, may involve ambiguity, as will be shown.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>16. In every well regulated community—such as that of England,—the
+laws own no superior.—B. (The comma should either be omitted or
+placed after instead of before the second dash).</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These are a dozen distinct uses of more or less value or importance,
+to which others might no doubt be added; but they will suffice both to
+show that the dash is a hard-worked symbol, and to base our remarks
+upon.</p>
+
+<p>2. Debatable questions.</p>
+
+<p>There are several questions that must be answered before we can use
+the dash with confidence. First, is the dash to supersede stops at the
+place where it is inserted, or to be added to them? Secondly, what is
+its relation to the stops in the part of the sentence (or group of
+sentences) that follows it? Does its authority, that is, extend to the
+end of the sentence or group, or where does it cease? Thirdly, assuming
+that it is or can be combined with stops, what is the right order as
+between the two?</p>
+
+<p>Beadnell’s answer to the first question is: <i>The dash does not
+dispense with the use of the ordinary points at the same time, when
+the grammatical construction of the sentence requires them.</i> But
+inasmuch as a dash implies some sort of break, irregular pause, or
+change of intention, it seems quite needless to insert the stop that
+would have been used if it had not been decided that a stop was
+inadequate. The dash is a confession that the stop will not do; then
+let the stop go. The reader, who is the person to be considered,
+generally neither knows nor cares to know how the sentence might,
+with inferior effect, have been written; he only feels that the stop
+is otiose, and that his author had better have been off with the old
+love<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</span> before he was on with the new. There are exceptions to this:
+obviously in examples 9, 10, 11, 12, and 15, where the dash is at the
+end or beginning of a sentence; and perhaps also in sentences of which
+the reader can clearly foresee the grammatical development. In example
+7, for instance, it is clear that a participle (<i>displayed</i>
+or another) is due after <i>never was</i> &amp;c.; a comma after
+<i>intelligence</i> is therefore definitely expected. So in example
+6 we are expecting either another continuation of <i>as soon as</i>,
+or the principal sentence, before either of which a comma is looked
+for. In examples 2 and 3, on the other hand, the sentence may for all
+we know be complete at the place where the dash stands, so that no
+expectation is disappointed by omitting the comma. The rule, then,
+should be that a dash is a substitute for any internal stop, and not
+an addition to it, except when, from the reader’s point of view, a
+particular stop seemed inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>It must be admitted that that conclusion is not very certain, and also
+that the matter is of no great importance, provided that the stops,
+if inserted, are the right ones. More certainty is possible about
+the combination of stops with the double dash, which we have not yet
+considered. The probable origin of the double dash will be touched
+upon when we come to the second question; but whatever its origin,
+it is now simply equivalent to a pair of brackets, except that it is
+slightly less conspicuous, and sometimes preferred on that account.
+Consequently, the same rule about stops will apply to both, and as
+there is no occasion to treat of brackets separately, it may here be
+stated for both. The use of a parenthesis being to insert, without
+damage to the rest of the sentence, something that is of theoretically
+minor importance, it is necessary that we should be able simply to
+remove the two dashes or brackets with everything enclosed by them, and
+after their removal find the sentence complete and rightly punctuated.
+Further, there is no reason for using inside the parenthesis any stop
+that has not an internal value; that is, no stop can possibly be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</span>
+needed just before the second dash except an exclamation or question
+mark, and none at all just after the first; but stops may be necessary
+to divide up the parenthesis itself if it is compound. Three examples
+follow, with the proper corrections in brackets:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>17. Garinet cites the case of a girl near Amiens possessed by three
+demons,—Mimi, Zozo, and Crapoulet,—in 1816.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span> (Omit
+both commas; the first is indeed just possible, though not required,
+in the principal sentence; the last is absolutely meaningless in the
+parenthesis)</p>
+
+<p>18. Its visions and its delights are too penetrating,—too
+living,—for any white-washed object or shallow fountain long to
+endure or to supply.—<span class="smcap">Ruskin.</span> (Omit both commas; this time
+the first is as impossible in the principal sentence as the second is
+meaningless in the parenthesis)</p>
+
+<p>19. The second carries us on from 1625 to 1714—less than a
+century—yet the walls of the big hall in the Examination Schools are
+not only well covered....—<i>Times.</i> (Insert a comma, as necessary
+to the principal sentence, outside the dashes; whether before the
+first or after the last will be explained in our answer to the third
+question)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The second question is, how far the authority of the dash extends.
+There is no reason, in the nature of things, why we should not on
+the one hand be relieved of it by the next stop, or on the other be
+subject to it till the paragraph ends. The three following examples,
+which we shall correct in brackets by anticipation, but which we shall
+also assume not to be mere careless blunders, seem to go on the first
+hypothesis.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>20. The Moral Nature, that Law of laws, whose revelations
+introduce greatness—yea, God himself, into the open soul, is not
+explored.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span> (Substitute a dash for the comma after
+<i>himself</i>. Here, however, Emerson expects us to terminate the
+authority at the right comma rather than at the first that comes,
+making things worse)</p>
+
+<p>21. I ... there complained of the common notions of the special
+virtues—justice, &amp;c., as too vague to furnish exact determinations of
+the actions enjoined under them.—<span class="smcap">H. Sidgwick.</span> (Substitute a
+dash for the comma after <i>&amp;c.</i>)</p>
+
+<p>22. There are vicars and vicars, and of all sorts I love an
+innovating vicar—a piebald progressive professional reactionary, the
+least.—<span class="smcap">H. G. Wells.</span> (Substitute a dash for the comma after
+<i>reactionary</i>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It needs no further demonstration, however, that commas<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</span> are frequently
+used after a dash without putting an end to its influence; and if they
+are to be sometimes taken, nevertheless, as doing so, confusion is sure
+to result. Unless the author of the next example is blind to the danger
+that two neighbouring but independent dashes may be mistaken for a
+parenthetic pair, he must have assumed that the authority of a dash is
+terminated at any rate by a semicolon; that, if true, would obviate the
+danger.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>23. It is a forlorn hope, however excellent the translation—and Mr.
+Hankin’s could not be bettered; or however careful the playing—and
+the playing at the Stage Society performance was meticulously
+careful.—<i>Times.</i> (Insert a dash between <i>bettered</i> and the
+semicolon, which then need not be more than a comma)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But that it is not true will probably be admitted on the strength of
+sentences like:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>24. There may be differences of opinion on the degrees—no one takes
+white for black: most people sometimes take blackish for black—, but
+that is not fatal to my argument.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>On the other hand, we doubt whether a full stop is ever allowed to
+stand in the middle of a dash parenthesis, as it of course may in a
+bracket parenthesis. The reason for the distinction is clear. When we
+have had a left-hand bracket we know for certain that a right-hand
+one is due, full stops or no full stops; but when we have had a dash,
+we very seldom know for certain that it is one of a pair; and the
+appearance of a full stop would be too severe a trial of our faith.
+It seems natural to suppose that the double-dash parenthesis is thus
+accounted for: the construction started with a single dash; but as it
+was often necessary to revert to the main construction, the second
+dash was resorted to as a declaration that the close time, or state of
+siege, was over. The rule we deduce is: All that follows a dash is to
+be taken as under its influence until either a second dash terminates
+it, or a full stop is reached.</p>
+
+<p>Our answer to the third question has already been given by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</span>
+implication; but it may be better to give it again explicitly. We first
+refer to examples 1, 2, 3, 6, 13, 14, 24, in all of which the stop, if
+one is to be used, though our view is that in most of these sentences
+it should not, is in the right place; and to example 16, in which it is
+in the wrong place. We next add two new examples of wrong order, with
+corrections as usual; the rules for stops with brackets are the same as
+with double dashes.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>25. Throughout the parts which they are intended to make most
+personally their own, (the Psalms,) it is always the Law which is
+spoken of with chief joy.—<span class="smcap">Ruskin.</span> (Remove both commas, and
+use according to taste either none at all, or one after the second
+bracket)</p>
+
+<p>26. What is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds
+revolve and intermingle without number or end,—deep yawning under
+deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space,—or,
+whether....—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span> (Remove both commas, and place one
+after the second dash)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A protest must next be made against the compositor’s superstition
+embodied in Beadnell’s words: <i>As the dash in this case supplies the
+place of the parenthesis, strictly speaking, the grammatical point
+should follow the last dash; but as this would have an unsightly
+appearance, it is always placed before it.</i> This unsightliness is
+either imaginary or at most purely conventional, and should be entirely
+disregarded. The rules will be (1) For the single dash: Since the dash
+is on any view either a correction of or an addition to the stop that
+would have been used if dashes had not existed, the dash will always
+stand after the stop. (2) For the double dash or brackets: There will
+be one stop or none according to the requirements of the principal
+sentence only; there will never be two stops (apart, of course, from
+internal ones); if there is one, it will stand before the first or
+after the last dash or bracket according as the parenthesis belongs to
+the following or the preceding part of the principal sentence. It may
+be added that it is extremely rare for the parenthesis to belong to
+the last part, and therefore for the stop to be rightly placed before
+it. In<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</span> the following example constructed for the occasion it does so
+belong; but for practical purposes the rule might be that if a stop is
+required it stands after the second dash or bracket.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>27. When I last saw him, (a singular fact) his nose was pea-green.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. Common misuses.</p>
+
+<p><i>a.</i> If two single independent dashes are placed near each other,
+still more if they are in the same sentence, the reader naturally takes
+them for a pair constituting a parenthesis, and has to reconsider the
+sentence when he finds that his first reading gives nonsense. We refer
+back to example 23. But this indiscretion is so common that it is well
+to add some more. The sentences should be read over without the two
+dashes and what they enclose.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Then there is also Miss Euphemia, long deposed from her office
+of governess, but pensioned and so driven to good works and the
+manufacture of the most wonderful crazy quilts—for which, to her
+credit be it said, she shows a remarkable aptitude—as I should have
+supposed.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>The English came mainly from the Germans, whom Rome found hard to
+conquer in 210 years—say, impossible to conquer—when one remembers
+the long sequel.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>As for Anne—well, Anne was Anne—never more calm than when others
+were tempestuous.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>b.</i> The first dash is inserted and the second forgotten. It will
+suffice to refer back to examples 20, 21, 22.</p>
+
+<p><i>c.</i> Brackets and dashes are combined. It is a pity from the
+collector’s point of view that Carlyle, being in the mood, did not
+realize the full possibilities, and add a pair of commas, closing up
+the parenthesis in <i>robur et aes triplex</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>How much would I give to have my mother—(though both my wife
+and I have of late times lived wholly for her, and had much to
+endure on her account)—how much would I give to have her back to
+me.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>d.</i> Like the comma, the dash is sometimes misplaced by a word or
+two. In the first example, the first dash should be one place later;
+and in the second, unless we misread the sentence and this is another
+case of two single dashes, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</span> second dash should be two places
+earlier, and itself be replaced by a comma.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Here she is perhaps at her best—and in the best sense—her most
+feminine, as a woman sympathizing with the sorrows peculiar to
+women.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The girl he had dreamed about—the girl with the smile was there—near
+him, in his hut.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>e.</i> Dashes are sometimes used when an ordinary stop would serve
+quite well. In the Lowell sentences, the reason why a comma is not
+used is that the members are themselves broken up by commas, and
+therefore demand a heavier stop to divide them from each other; this,
+as explained in the early part of the chapter, is the place for a
+semicolon. In the Corelli sentence, it is a question between comma and
+semicolon, either of which would do quite well.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Shakespeare found a language already to a certain extent established,
+but not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mongers,—a
+versification harmonized, but which had not yet....—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+
+<p>While I believe that our language had two periods of culmination
+in poetic beauty,—one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the
+ballads, which deal only with narrative and feeling,—another of
+Art....—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+
+<p>We were shown in,—and Mavis, who had expected our visit did not keep
+us waiting long.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Hyphens</span></h3>
+
+<p>We return here to our usual practice of disregarding everything
+not necessary for dealing with common mistakes. But some general
+principles, most of which will probably find acceptance, will be useful
+to start from.</p>
+
+<p>1. Hyphens are regrettable necessities, and to be done without when
+they reasonably may.</p>
+
+<p>2. There are three degrees of intimacy between words, of which the
+first and loosest is expressed by their mere juxtaposition as separate
+words, the second by their being hyphened, and the third or closest
+by their being written continuously as one word. Thus, hand workers,
+hand-workers, handworkers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</span></p>
+
+<p>3. It is good English usage to place a noun or other non-adjectival
+part of speech before a noun, printing it as a separate word, and to
+regard it as serving the purpose of an adjective in virtue of its
+position; for instance, <i>war expenditure</i>; but there are sometimes
+special objections to its being done. Thus, words in <i>-ing</i> may
+be actual adjectives (participles), or nouns (gerunds), used in virtue
+of their position as adjectives; and a visible distinction is needed.
+A <i>walking stick</i> is a stick that walks, and the phrase might
+occur as a metaphorical description of a stiffly behaved person: a
+<i>walking-stick</i> or <i>walkingstick</i> is a stick for walking; the
+difference may sometimes be important, and consistency may be held to
+require that all compounds with gerunds should be hyphened or made into
+single words.</p>
+
+<p>4. Not only can a single word in ordinary circumstances be thus treated
+as an adjective, but the same is true of a phrase; the words of the
+phrase, however, must then be hyphened, or ambiguity may result. Thus:
+Covent Garden; Covent-Garden Market; Covent-Garden-Market salesmen.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The prevailing method of giving railway and street names, besides its
+ungainliness, is often misleading and contrary to common sense. For
+one difficulty we suggest recurrence to the old-fashioned formula with
+commas, and <i>and</i>, as in <i>The London, Chatham, and Dover</i>.
+On another, it is to be observed that <i>New York-street</i> should
+mean the new part of York Street, but <i>New-York Street</i> the street
+named after New York. The set of examples includes some analogous
+cases, besides the railway and street names.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is stated that the train service on the
+Hsin-min-tun-Kau-pan-tse-Yingkau section of the Imperial Chinese
+Railway will be restored within a few days.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Hsinmintun, Kaupantse, and Yingkau. These places can surely do without
+their internal hyphens in an English newspaper; and one almost
+suspects, from the absence of a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</span> hyphen between <i>Ying</i> and
+<i>kau</i>, that the <i>Times’s</i> stock must have run short.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Even third-class carriages are scarce on the Dalny-Port Arthur
+line.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Dalny and Port-Arthur line. By general principle 4, though <i>Port
+Arthur</i> needs no hyphen by itself, it does as soon as it stands
+for an adjective with <i>line</i>: the Port-Arthur line. Also, by 2,
+the <i>Times</i> version implies that <i>Dalny</i> is more closely
+connected with <i>Port</i> than <i>Port</i> with <i>Arthur</i>. We
+do indeed most of us know at present that there is no Dalny Port so
+called, and that there is a Port Arthur. But in the next example, who
+would know that there was a Brest Litovski, but for the sentence that
+follows?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A general strike has been declared on the Warsaw-Brest Litovski
+railway. The telegraph stations at Praga, Warsaw, and Brest Litovski
+have been damaged.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Warsaw and Brest-Litovski railway. By 4, the hyphen between
+<i>Brest</i> and <i>Litovski</i> is necessary. If we write
+<i>Warsaw-Brest-Litovski</i>, it is natural to suppose that three
+places are meant; the <i>and</i> solution is accordingly the best.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>At Bow-street, Robert Marsh, greengrocer, of Great Western-road,
+Harrow-road, was charged....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Great-Western Road, Harrow Road. Bow-street, as <i>at</i> (not
+<i>in</i>) shows, is a compound epithet for <i>police-court</i>
+understood, and has a right to its hyphen. By 3, there is no need
+for a hyphen after <i>Harrow</i>, and by 1, if unnecessary, it is
+undesirable. As to the other road, there are three possibilities. The
+<i>Times</i> is right if there is a <i>Western Road</i> of which one
+section is called <i>Great</i>, and the other <i>Little</i>. If the
+name means literally the great road that runs west, there should be no
+hyphen at all. If the road is named from the Great Western Railway, or
+from the Great-Western Hotel, our version is right.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Cochin China waters.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>By 4, <i>Cochin China</i> gives <i>Cochin-China</i> waters.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Within the last ten days two Anglo-South Americans have been in my
+office arranging for passages to New Zealand.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Anglo-South-Americans</i> is the best that can be done. What is
+really wanted is <i>Anglo-SouthAmericans</i>, to show that <i>South</i>
+goes more closely with <i>America</i>. But it is too hopelessly
+contrary to usage at present.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The proceeds of the recent London-New York loan.—<i>Times.</i>
+(London and New-York loan.)</p>
+
+<p>A good, generous, King Mark-like sort of man.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>King-Mark-like</i>, in default of <i>KingMark-like</i>. But the
+addition of <i>-like</i> to compound names should be avoided.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Fugitive Slave-law in America before the rebellion.—-<span class="smcap">H.
+Sidgwick.</span> (Fugitive-Slave law.)</p>
+
+<p>The steam-cars will have 16-horse power engines.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Steam cars</i> is better, by 3, and 1. And 16-horsepower engines. We
+can do this time what the capitals of <i>American</i> and <i>Mark</i>
+prevented in the previous compounds.</p>
+
+<p>Entirely gratuitous hyphens.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>One had a male-partner, who hopped his loutish
+burlesque.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>Gluttony is the least-generous of the vices.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>A little china-box, bearing the motto ‘Though lost to sight, to memory
+dear,’ which Dorcas sent her as a remembrance.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This evidently means a box made of china. A box to hold china would
+have the hyphen properly, and there are many differentiations of this
+kind, of which <i>black bird</i>, as opposed to <i>black-bird</i> or
+<i>blackbird</i>, is the type.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Bertie took up a quantity of waste-papers, and thrust them down into
+the basket.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is probably formed by a mistaken step backwards from
+<i>waste-paper basket</i>, where the hyphen is correct, as explained in
+3.</p>
+
+<p>In phrases like <i>wet and dry fly fishing</i>, compounded of
+<i>wet-fly fishing</i> and <i>dry-fly fishing</i>, methods vary. For
+instance:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A low door, leading through a moss and ivy-covered
+wall.—<span class="smcap">Scott.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>A language ... not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar
+mongers.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+
+<p>Those who take human or womankind for their study.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The single phrases would have the hyphen for different reasons
+(<i>moss-covered</i>, &amp;c.), all but <i>human kind</i>. The only quite
+satisfactory plan is the Germans’, who would write <i>moss-</i> and
+<i>ivy-covered</i>. This is imitated in English, as:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In old woods and on fern-and gorse-covered hilltops they do no harm
+whatever.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>Refreshment-, boarding-, and lodging-house keepers have suffered
+severely too.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But imitations of foreign methods are not much to be recommended;
+failing that, Lowell’s method seems the best—to use no hyphens, and
+keep the second compound separate.</p>
+
+<p>Adverbs that practically form compounds with verbs, but stand after,
+and not necessarily next after them, need not be hyphened unless
+they would be ambiguous in the particular sentence if they were
+not hyphened. This may often happen, since most of them are also
+prepositions; but even then, it is better to rearrange the sentence
+than to hyphen.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He gratefully hands-over the establishment to his
+country.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>Thoughtful persons, unpledged to shore-up tottering
+dogmas.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is a much commoner fault to over-hyphen than to under-hyphen. But
+in the next example <i>malaria-infected</i> must be written, by 3. And
+in the next again, one of the differentiations we have spoken of is
+disregarded; <i>the fifty first</i> means the fifty that come first:
+<i>the fifty-first</i> is the one after fifty. The ambiguity in the
+third example is obvious.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The demonstration that a malaria infected mosquito, transported a
+great distance to a non-malarial country, can....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>‘Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?’ ‘In fifty different
+ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first.’—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Cockney knew what the Lord of Session knew not, that the British
+public is gentility crazy.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There comes a time when compound words that have long had a hyphen
+should drop it; this is when they have become<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</span> quite familiar. It
+seems absurd to keep any longer the division in <i>to-day</i> and
+<i>to-morrow</i>; there are no words in the language that are more
+definitely single and not double words; so much so that the ordinary
+man can give no explanation of the <i>to</i>. On the other hand, the
+word italicized in the next example may well puzzle a good many readers
+without its hyphen; it has quite lately come into use in this country
+(‘Chiefly U.S.’ says the <i>Oxford Dictionary</i>, which prints the
+hyphen, whereas Webster does not), and is in danger of being taken at
+first sight for a foreign word and pronounced in strange ways.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The soldiers ... have been building <i>dugouts</i> throughout
+April.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is a tendency to write certain familiar combinations
+irrationally, which may be mentioned here, though it does not
+necessarily involve the hyphen. With <i>in no wise</i> and <i>at
+any rate</i>, the only rational possibilities are to treat them
+like <i>nevertheless</i> as one word, or like <i>none the less</i>
+as three words (the right way, by usage), or give them two hyphens.
+<i>Nowise</i> and <i>anyrate</i> are not nouns that can be governed by
+<i>in</i> and <i>at</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Don McTaggart was the only man on his estate whom Sir Tempest could in
+nowise make afraid.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>French rules of neutrality are in nowise infringed by the
+squadron.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>At anyrate.—<span class="smcap">Corelli</span>, <i>passim</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Quotation Marks</span></h3>
+
+<p>Quotation marks, like hyphens, should be used only when necessary.
+The degree of necessity will vary slightly with the mental state of
+the audience for whom a book is intended. To an educated man it is
+an annoyance to find his author warning him that something written
+long ago, and quoted every day almost ever since, is not an original
+remark now first struck out. On the other hand, writers who address
+the uneducated may find their account in using all the quotation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</span>
+marks they can; their readers may be gratified by seeing how well read
+the author is, or may think quotation marks decorative. The following
+examples start with the least justifiable uses, and stop at the point
+where quotation marks become more or less necessary.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>John Smith, Esq., ‘Chatsworth’, Melton Road, Leamington.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The implication seems to be: living in the house that sensible people
+call 164 Melton Road, but one fool likes to call Chatsworth.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>How is it that during the year in which that scheme has been, so to
+speak, ‘in the pillory’, no alternative has, at any rate, been made
+public?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Every metaphor ought to be treated as a quotation, if <i>in the
+pillory</i> is to be. Here, moreover, quotation marks are a practical
+tautology, after <i>so to speak</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Robert Brown and William Marshall, convicted of robbery with
+violence, were sentenced respectively to five years’ penal servitude
+and eighteen strokes with the ‘cat’, and seven years’ penal
+servitude.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is by this time no danger whatever of confusion with the cat of
+one tail.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... not forgetful of how soon ‘things Japanese’ would be things of the
+past for her.—<span class="smcap">Sladen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This may be called the propitiatory use, analogous in print to the
+tentative air with which, in conversation, the Englishman not sure of
+his pronunciation offers a French word. So trifling a phrase is not
+worth using at the cost of quotation marks. If it could pass without,
+well and good.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>So that the prince and I were able to avoid that ‘familiarity
+that breeds contempt’ by keeping up our own separate
+establishments.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>... the Rector, lineal representative of the ancient monarchs of
+the University, though now, little more than a ‘king of shreds and
+patches’.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits—yet so, as ‘with a
+difference’.—<span class="smcap">Lamb.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</span></p>
+
+<p><i>With a difference</i> (<i>Ophelia</i>: O, you must wear your rue
+with a difference) might escape notice as a quotation if attention
+were not drawn to it. A reader fit to appreciate Lamb, however,
+could scarcely fail to be sufficiently warned by the odd turn of the
+preceding words.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>A question of some importance to writers who trouble themselves about
+accuracy, though no doubt the average reader is profoundly indifferent,
+is that of the right order as between quotation marks and stops.
+Besides the conflict in which we shall again find ourselves with the
+aesthetic compositor, it is really difficult to arrive at a completely
+logical system. Before laying down what seems the best attainable, we
+must warn the reader that it is not the system now in fashion; but
+there are signs that printers are feeling their way towards better
+things, and this is an attempt to anticipate what they will ultimately
+come to. We shall make one or two postulates, deduce rules, and give
+examples. After the examples (in order that readers who are content
+either to go on with the present compromise or to accept our rules
+may be able to skip the discussion), we shall consider some possible
+objections.</p>
+
+<p>No stop is ever required at the end of a quotation to separate the
+quotation, as such, from what follows; that is sufficiently done by the
+quotation mark.</p>
+
+<p>A stop is required to separate the containing sentence, which may go
+on beyond the quotation’s end, but more commonly does not, from what
+follows.</p>
+
+<p>An exclamation or question mark—which are not true stops, but tone
+symbols—may be an essential part of the quotation.</p>
+
+<p>When a quotation is broken by such insertions as <i>he said</i>, any
+stop or tone symbol may be an essential part of the first fragment of
+quotation.</p>
+
+<p>No stop is needed at either end of such insertions as <i>he said</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</span>
+to part them from the quotation, that being sufficiently done by the
+quotation marks.</p>
+
+<p>From these considerations we deduce the following rules:</p>
+
+<p>1. The true stops should never stand before the second quotation mark
+except</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) when, as in dialogue given without framework, complete
+sentences entirely isolated and independent in grammar are printed as
+quotations. Even in these, it must be mentioned that the true stops are
+strictly unnecessary; but if the full stop (which alone can here be in
+question) is used in deference to universal custom, it should be before
+the quotation mark.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) when a stop is necessary to divide the first fragment of an
+interrupted quotation from the second.</p>
+
+<p>2. Words that interrupt quotations should never be allowed stops to
+part them from the quotation.</p>
+
+<p>3. The tone symbols should be placed before or after the second
+quotation mark according as they belong to the quotation or to the
+containing sentence. If both quotation and containing sentence need a
+tone symbol, both should be used, with the quotation mark between them.</p>
+
+<p>The bracketed numbers before the examples repeat the numbers of the
+rules.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>(1) Views advocated by Dr. Whately in his well-known ‘Essays’;</p>
+
+<p>It is enough for us to reflect that ‘Such shortlived wits do wither as
+they grow’.</p>
+
+<p>We hear that ‘whom the gods love die young’, and thenceforth we
+collect the cases that illustrate it.</p>
+
+<p>(1 <i>a</i>) ‘You are breaking the rules.’ ‘Well, the rules are silly.’</p>
+
+<p>(1 <i>b</i>) ‘Certainly not;’ he exclaimed ‘I would have died rather’.</p>
+
+<p>(2) ‘I cannot guess’ he retorted ‘what you mean’.</p>
+
+<p>(3) But ‘why drag in Velasquez?’</p>
+
+<p>But what is the use of saying ‘Call no man happy till he dies’?</p>
+
+<p>Is the question ‘Where was he?’ or ‘What was he doing?’?</p>
+
+<p>How absurd to ask ‘Can a thing both be and not be?’!</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If indignation is excited by the last two monstrosities, we can only
+say what has been implied many other times in this book, that the
+right substitute for correct ugliness is not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</span> incorrect prettiness,
+but correct prettiness. There is never any difficulty in rewriting
+sentences like these. (Is the question where he was, &amp;c.?) (‘Can a
+thing both be and not be?’ The question is absurd.) But it should be
+recognized that, if such sentences are to be written, there is only one
+way to punctuate them.</p>
+
+<p>It may be of interest to show how these sentences stand in the books.
+1st sentence (‘Essays;’); 2nd (grow.’); 3rd (young,’); 4th, as here;
+5th (not,’ he exclaimed;) (rather.’); 6th (guess,’ he retorted,)
+(mean.’); 7th (Velasquez’?); 8th (saying,) (dies?’). The last two are
+fabricated.</p>
+
+<p>The objections may now be considered.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘The passing crowd’ is a phrase coined in the spirit of indifference.
+Yet, to a man of what Plato calls ‘universal sympathies,’ and even
+to the plain, ordinary denizens of this world, what can be more
+interesting than ‘the passing crowd’?—B.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>After giving this example, Beadnell says:—‘The reason is clear:
+the words quoted are those of another, but the <i>question</i>
+is the writer’s own. Nevertheless, for the sake of neatness, the
+ordinary points, such as the comma, semicolon, colon, and full stop,
+<i>precede</i> the quotation marks in instances analogous to the one
+quoted; but the exclamation follows the same rule as the interrogation’.</p>
+
+<p>Singularly enough, the stops that are according to this always to
+precede the quotation mark (for the ‘analogous cases’ are the only
+cases in which the outside position would be so much as considered) are
+just the ones that by our rules ought hardly ever to do so, whereas the
+two that are sometimes allowed the outside position are the two that we
+admit to be as often necessary inside as outside. Neatness is the sole
+consideration; just as the ears may be regarded as not hearing organs,
+but ‘handsome volutes of the human capital’, so quotation marks may be
+welcomed as giving a good picturesque finish to a sentence; those who
+are of this way of thinking must feel that, if they allowed outside
+them anything<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</span> short of fine handsome stops like the exclamation and
+question marks, they would be countenancing an anticlimax. But they
+are really mere conservatives, masquerading only as aesthetes; and
+their conservatism will soon have to yield. Argument on the subject is
+impossible; it is only a question whether the printer’s love for the
+old ways that seem to him so neat, or the writer’s and reader’s desire
+to be understood and to understand fully, is to prevail.</p>
+
+<p>Another objector takes a stronger position. He admits that logic, and
+not beauty, must decide: ‘but before we give up the old, let us be
+sure we are giving it up for a new that is logical’. He invites our
+attention to the recent paragraph containing Beadnell’s views. ‘Why,
+in the last sentence of that paragraph, is the full stop outside?
+“But the exclamation follows the same rule as the interrogation” is a
+complete sentence, quoted; why should its full stop be separated from
+it?’ The answer is that the full stop is not <i>its</i> full stop;
+<i>it</i> needs no stop, having its communications forward absolutely
+cut off by the quotation mark. It is a delusion to suppose that any
+sentence has proprietary rights in a stop, though it may have in a
+tone symbol; a stop is placed after it merely to separate it from
+what follows, if necessary.—‘And the full stop after every last
+sentence (not a question or exclamation) of a paragraph, chapter,
+or book?’—Is illogical, and only to be allowed, like those in the
+isolated quotations mentioned in rule (1 <i>a</i>), in deference to
+universal custom. Our full stop belongs, not to the last sentence
+of the quotation, but to the paragraph, which is all one sentence,
+the whole quotation simply playing the part, helped by the quotation
+marks, of object to <i>says</i>.—‘But <i>says</i> is followed by a
+colon, and a colon between verb and object breaks your own rules.’—No;
+(:—) is something different from a stop; it is an extra quotation
+mark, as much a conventional symbol as the full stop in M.A. and
+other abbreviations.—‘Well, then, instead of <i>says</i>, read
+<i>continues</i>, to which the quotation clearly cannot be object; will
+that affect<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</span> our full stop?’—No; the quotation will still be part of
+the sentence; not indeed a noun, as before, and object to the verb; but
+an adverb, simply equivalent to <i>thus</i>, attached to the verb.</p>
+
+<p>Satisfied on that point, the objector takes up our statement that
+the quotation mark cuts communications; a similar statement was made
+in the <i>Dashes</i> section about brackets and double dashes. He
+submits a quotation:—Some people ‘grunt and sweat under’ very easy
+burdens indeed; and a pair of brackets:—It is (not a little learning,
+but) much conceit that is a dangerous thing. ‘It is surely not true
+that either quotation mark or bracket cuts the communications there;
+<i>under</i> in the quotation, <i>but</i> in the brackets, are in
+very active communication with <i>burdens</i> and <i>conceit</i>,
+outside.’ The answer is that these are merely convenient misuses of
+quotation marks and brackets. A quotation and a parenthesis should be
+complete in themselves, and instances that are not so may be neglected
+in arguing out principles. Special rules might indeed be required in
+consequence for the abnormal cases; but in practice this is not so with
+quotations.—‘A last point. To adapt one of your instances, here are
+two sets of sentences, stopped as I gather you would stop them:—(1) He
+asked me “Can a thing both be and not be?” The question is absurd. (2)
+He said “A thing cannot both be and not be”. I at once agreed. Now, if
+the full stop is required after the quotation mark in the second, it
+must be required after that in the first, in each case to part, not the
+quotation, but the containing sentence, from the next sentence. What
+right have you to omit the full stop in the first?’—None whatever; it
+will not be omitted.—‘So we have an addition of some importance to the
+monstrosities you said we should have to avoid.’—Well, sentences of
+this type are not common except in a style of affected simplicity.—‘Or
+real simplicity. He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of
+Jonas, lovest thou me? And is there any particular simplicity, real or
+affected,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</span> about this:—(Richmond looked at him with an odd smile for a
+moment or two before asking, as if it were the most natural question in
+the world, “But is it true?”.)?’—In the Bible quotation there is, as
+you say, real simplicity—or rather there was. That sort of simplicity
+now would not be real, but artificial. Any one who has good reason to
+imitate primitive style may imitate primitive punctuation too. But one
+step forward in precision we have definitely taken from the biblical
+typography: we should insist on quotation marks in such a sentence.
+They do not seem pedantic or needless now; nor will a further step in
+precision seem so when once it has been taken. And as to your Richmond
+sentence, and ‘monstrosities’ in general, it may be confessed here,
+as we are out of hearing in this discussion of all but those who are
+really interested, that the word was used for the benefit only of those
+who are indifferent. A sentence with two stops is not a monstrosity, if
+it wants them; and that will be realized, if once sensible punctuation
+gets the upper hand of neatness.</p>
+
+<p>These are the most plausible objections on principle to a system of
+using quotation marks with stops that would be in the main logical.
+It may be thought, however, that it was our business to be practical
+and opportunist, and suggest nothing that could not be acted on at
+once. But general usage, besides being illogical, is so inconsistent,
+different writers improving upon it in special details that appeal to
+them, that it seemed simpler to give our idea of what would be the best
+attainable, and trust to the tiro’s adopting any parts of it that may
+not frighten him by their unaccustomed look.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There are single and double quotation marks, and, apart from minor
+peculiarities, two ways of utilizing the variety. The prevailing one is
+to use double marks for most purposes, and single ones for quotations
+within quotations, as:—“Well, so he said to me ‘What do you mean by
+it?’ and I said ‘I didn’t mean anything’”. Some of those who follow
+this<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</span> system also use the single marks for isolated words, short
+phrases, and anything that can hardly be called a formal quotation;
+this avoids giving much emphasis to such expressions, which is an
+advantage. The more logical method is that adopted, for instance, by
+the Oxford University Press, of reserving the double marks exclusively
+for quotations within quotations. Besides the loss of the useful
+degrees in emphasis (sure, however, to be inconsistently utilized),
+there is a certain lack of full-dress effect about important quotations
+when given this way; but that is probably a mere matter of habituation.
+It should be mentioned that most of the quoted quotations in this
+section had originally the double marks, but have been altered to
+suit the more logical method; and the unpleasantness of the needless
+quotation marks with which we started has so been slightly toned down.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>A common mistake, of no great importance, but resulting in more or less
+discomfort or perplexity to the reader, is the placing of the first
+quotation mark earlier than the place where quotation really begins.
+The commonest form of it is the including of the quoter’s introductory
+<i>that</i>, which it is often obvious that the original did not
+contain. Generally speaking, if <i>that</i> is used the quotation
+marks may be dispensed with; not, however, if the exact phraseology is
+important; but at least the mark should be in the right place.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I remember an old scholastic aphorism, which says, ‘that the man
+who lives wholly detached from others, must be either an angel or a
+devil.’—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As the aphorism descends through Latin from Aristotle (ἢ θηρίον
+ἢ θεός), the precise English Words are of no importance, and the
+quotation marks might as well be away; at least the first should be
+after <i>that</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Then, with ‘a sarvant, sir’ to me, he took himself into the
+kitchen.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Clearly <i>a</i> is not included in the quotation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>They make it perfectly clear and plain, he informed the House, that
+‘Sir Antony MacDonnell was invited by him, rather as a colleague than
+as a mere Under-Secretary, to register my will.’—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The change from <i>him</i> to <i>my</i> would be quite legitimate if
+the first quotation mark stood before <i>rather</i> instead of where it
+does; as it stands, it is absurd.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is long since he partook of the Holy Communion, though there was an
+Easterday, of which he writes, when ‘he might have remained quietly in
+(his) corner during the office, if...’.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The (<i>his</i>) is evidently bracketed to show that it is substituted
+for the original writer’s <i>my</i>. This is very conscientious; but it
+follows that either the same should have been done for <i>he</i>, or
+the quotation mark should be after <i>he</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>We began this section by saying that quotation marks should be used
+only when necessary. A question that affects the decision to some
+extent is the difference between direct, indirect, and half-and-half
+quotation. We can say (1) He said ‘I will go’. (2) He said he would go.
+(3) He said ‘he would go’. The first variety is often necessary for the
+sake of vividness. The third is occasionally justified when, though
+there is no occasion for vividness, there is some turn of phrase that
+it is important for the reader to recognize as actually originating,
+not with the writer, but with the person quoted; otherwise, that
+variety is to be carefully avoided; how disagreeable it is will appear
+in the example below. For ordinary purposes the second variety, which
+involves no quotation marks, is the best.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He then followed my example, declared he never felt more refreshed in
+his life, and, giving a bound, said, ‘he would go and look after his
+horses.’—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Further, there may be quotation, not of other people’s words, but of
+one’s own thoughts. In this case the method prevailing at present
+is that exemplified in the <i>Times</i> extract below. Taken by
+itself, there is no objection to it. We point out, however, that it
+is irreconcilable with the principles<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</span> explained in this section,
+which demand the addition of a full stop (derived?.). That would be a
+worse monstrosity than the one in the first of the three legitimate
+alternatives that we add. We recommend that the <i>Times</i> method
+should be abandoned, and the first or second of the others used
+according to circumstances.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The next question is, Whence is this income derived?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The next question is ‘Whence is this income derived?’. (Full direct
+quotation. Observe the ‘monstrosity’ stop)</p>
+
+<p>The next question is whence this income is derived. (Indirect
+quotation)</p>
+
+<p>The next question is ‘Whence this income is derived’. (Indirect
+quotation with quotation marks, or half-and-half quotation, like the
+Borrow sentence)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In concluding the chapter on Punctuation we may make the general remark
+that the effect of our recommendations, whether advocating as in the
+last section more strictness, or as in other parts more liberty, would
+be, certainly, a considerable reduction in the number of diacritical
+marks cutting up and disfiguring the text; and, as we think, a practice
+in most respects more logical and comprehensible.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_12" href="#FNanchor_12" class="label">[12]</a> See <a href="#Page_60">chapter <i>Syntax</i></a>, section <i>Relatives</i>.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_13" href="#FNanchor_13" class="label">[13]</a> Of course, however, the rhetorical question is often
+not, as here, the result of a confusion, nor to be described as ‘very
+artificial’. E. g., <i>What would I not give to be there?</i> <i>To
+what subterfuge has he not resorted?</i></p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="PART_II">PART II</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Some less important chapters had been designed on Euphony, Ambiguity,
+Negligence, and other points. But as the book would with them have run
+to too great length, some of the examples have been simply grouped here
+in independent sections, with what seemed the minimum of comment.</p>
+
+
+<p>1. <span class="smcap">Jingles</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>To read his tales is a bapt<i>ism</i> of
+optim<i>ism</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Sensation is the dir<i>ect</i> eff<i>ect</i> of the <i>mo</i>de of
+<i>mo</i>tion of the sensorium.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>There have been no periodi<i>cal</i> gener<i>al</i> physi<i>cal</i>
+catastrophes.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is con<i>tended</i>, indeed, that these preparations are
+in<i>tended</i> only....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is in<i>tend</i>ed to ex<i>tend</i> the system to this
+country.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>M. Sphakianakis con<i>ducted</i> pro<i>tracted</i>
+negotiations.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Those inalienable rights of life, liber<i>ty</i> and
+proper<i>ty</i> upon which the safe<i>ty</i> of socie<i>ty</i>
+depends.—<span class="smcap">Choate.</span></p>
+
+<p>He served his apprenticeship to statesmanship.—<span class="smcap">Bryce.</span></p>
+
+<p>Ap<i>par</i>ently pre<i>par</i>ed to hold its ground.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I awaited a belated train.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+
+<p>Hand them on silver salvers to the server.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>... adjourned the discus<i>sion</i> of the ques<i>tion</i> of
+dela<i>tion</i> until to-day.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In this house of pover<i>ty</i> and digni<i>ty</i>, of past grandeur
+and present simplici<i>ty</i>, the brothers lived together in
+uni<i>ty</i>.—<span class="smcap">H. Caine.</span></p>
+
+<p>Their invalidi<i>ty</i> was caused by a
+technicali<i>ty</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... had for consola<i>tion</i> the expan<i>sion</i> of its
+domin<i>ion</i>.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The essential founda<i>tion</i> of all the organiza<i>tion</i> needed
+for the promo<i>tion</i> of educa<i>tion</i>.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>The projects of M. Witte <i>re</i>lative to the
+<i>re</i>gul<i>ation</i> of the <i>re</i>l<i>ations</i> between
+capital and labour.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The remaining instances are of consecutive adverbs in <i>-ly</i>.
+Parallel adverbs, qualifying the same word simultaneously, do<span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</span> not
+result in a jingle; but in all our instances the two adverbs either
+qualify different words, or qualify the same word at different times.
+Thus, in the Huxley sentence, <i>unquestionably</i> either qualifies
+<i>is</i>, or qualifies <i>true</i> only after <i>largely</i> has
+qualified it: it is not the (universal) truth, but the partial truth,
+of the proposition that is unquestionable.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When the traffic in our streets becomes entirely mechanically
+propelled.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He lived practically exclusively on milk.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Critics would probably decidedly disagree.—<span class="smcap">Hutton.</span></p>
+
+<p>The children are functionally mentally defective.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>What is practically wholly and entirely the British commerce and
+trade.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... who answered, usually monosyllabically, ....—<span class="smcap">E. F.
+Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The policy of England towards Afghanistan is, as formerly, entirely
+friendly.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Money spent possibly unwisely, probably illegally, and certainly
+hastily.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The deer are necessarily closely confined to definite
+areas.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>We find Hobbes’s view ... tolerably effectively
+combated.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Great mental endowments do not, unhappily, necessarily involve a
+passion for obscurity.—<span class="smcap">H. G. Wells.</span></p>
+
+<p>The proposition of Descartes is unquestionably largely
+true.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>2. <span class="smcap">Alliteration</span></p>
+
+<p>Alliteration is not much affected by modern prose writers of any
+experience; it is a novice’s toy. The antithetic variety has probably
+seen its best days, and the other instances quoted are doubtless to be
+attributed to negligence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I must needs trudge at every old <i>beldam’s bidding</i> and every
+young <i>minx’s maggot</i>.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>Onward <i>gl</i>ided Dame Ursula, now in <i>gl</i>immer and now in
+<i>gl</i>oom.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>I have seen her in the same day as changeful as a <i>m</i>armozet, and
+as stubborn as a <i>m</i>ule.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>Thus, in <i>con</i>sequence of the <i>con</i>tinuance of that
+grievance, the means of education at the disposal of the
+<i>Pr</i>otestants and <i>Pr</i>esbyterians were <i>st</i>unted and
+<i>st</i>erilized.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>A gaunt well with a shattered pent-house <i>dw</i>arfed the
+<i>dw</i>elling.—<span class="smcap">H. G. Wells.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>It shall be lawful to <i>p</i>icket <i>p</i>remises for the
+<i>p</i>urpose of <i>p</i>eacefully <i>p</i>ersuading any
+<i>p</i>erson to....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>3. <span class="smcap">Repeated Prepositions</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The founders <i>of</i> the study <i>of</i> the origin <i>of</i> human
+culture.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>After the manner <i>of</i> the author <i>of</i> the immortal speeches
+<i>of</i> Pericles.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Togo’s announcement <i>of</i> the destruction <i>of</i> the fighting
+power <i>of</i> Russia’s Pacific squadron.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The necessity <i>of</i> the modification <i>of</i> the system
+<i>of</i> administration.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>An exaggeration <i>of</i> the excesses <i>of</i> the epoch <i>of</i>
+sentimentalism.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Hostile to the justice <i>of</i> the principle <i>of</i> the taxing
+<i>of</i> those values which....—<span class="smcap">Lord Rosebery.</span></p>
+
+<p>The observation <i>of</i> the facts <i>of</i> the geological
+succession <i>of</i> the forms <i>of</i> life.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Devoid <i>of</i> any accurate knowledge <i>of</i> the mode
+<i>of</i> development <i>of</i> many groups <i>of</i> plants and
+animals.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>One uniform note <i>of</i> cordial recognition <i>of</i> the complete
+success <i>of</i> the experiment.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The first fasciculus <i>of</i> the second volume <i>of</i> the Bishop
+<i>of</i> Salisbury’s critical edition <i>of</i> St. Jerome’s Revision
+<i>of</i> the Latin New Testament.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The appreciation <i>of</i> the House <i>of</i> the benefits derived
+<i>by</i> the encouragement afforded <i>by</i> the Government to the
+operations <i>of</i>....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The study <i>of</i> the perfectly human theme <i>of</i> the affection
+<i>of</i> a man <i>of</i> middle age.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>His conviction <i>of</i> the impossibility <i>of</i> the proposal
+either <i>of</i> the creation <i>of</i> elective financial
+boards....—<i>Daily Express.</i></p>
+
+<p>Representative <i>of</i> the mind <i>of</i> the age <i>of</i>
+literature.—<span class="smcap">Ruskin.</span></p>
+
+<p>Indignation <i>against</i> the worst offenders
+<i>against</i>....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A belief <i>in</i> language <i>in</i> harmony with....—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>The opposition ... <i>to</i> the submission <i>to</i> the
+claims.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Taken up <i>with</i> warfare <i>with</i> an
+enemy....—<span class="smcap">Freeman.</span></p>
+
+<p>Palmerston wasted the strength derived <i>by</i> England <i>by</i> the
+great war <i>by</i> his brag.—<span class="smcap">Granville.</span></p>
+
+<p>Unpropitious <i>for</i> any project <i>for</i> the
+reduction....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Called <i>upon</i> to decide <i>upon</i> the
+reduction....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>4. <span class="smcap">Sequence of Relatives</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A garret, in <i>which</i> were two small beds, in one of <i>which</i>
+she gave me to understand another gentleman slept.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Still no word of enlightenment had come <i>which</i> should pierce the
+thick clouds of doubt <i>which</i> hid the face of the future.—<span class="smcap">E.
+F. Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The ideal of a general alphabet ... is one <i>which</i> gives a basis
+<i>which</i> is generally acceptable.—<span class="smcap">H. Sweet.</span></p>
+
+<p>He enjoyed a lucrative practice, <i>which</i> enabled him to maintain
+and educate a family with all the advantages <i>which</i> money can
+give in this country.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+
+<p>The clown <i>who</i> views the pandemonium of red brick
+<i>which</i> he has built on the estate <i>which</i> he has
+purchased.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>The main thread of the book, <i>which</i> is a daring assault
+upon that serious kind of pedantry <i>which</i> utters itself
+in....—<span class="smcap">L. Stephen.</span></p>
+
+<p>Practical reasons <i>which</i> combine to commend this
+architectural solution of a problem <i>which</i> so many of us
+dread....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The teachers, <i>who</i> took care that the weaker, <i>who</i>
+might otherwise be driven to the wall, had ... their fair
+share.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Let the heads and rulers of free peoples tell this truth to a Tsar
+<i>who</i> seeks to dominate a people <i>who</i> will not and
+cannot....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He made a speech ... <i>which</i> contained a passage on the
+conditions of modern diplomacy <i>which</i> attracted some
+attention.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is of course no objection to the recurrence when the relatives
+are parallel.</p>
+
+
+<p>5. <span class="smcap">Sequence of ‘that’ or other Conjunctions</span></p>
+
+<p>Here, as with relatives, the recurrence is objectionable only when one
+of the clauses is subordinate to the other.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I do not forget <i>that</i> some writers have held <i>that</i> a
+system is to be inferred.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>I say <i>that</i> there is a real danger <i>that</i> we may run to the
+other extreme.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is clear ... <i>that</i> the opinion was <i>that</i> it is not
+incompatible.—<span class="smcap">Nansen.</span></p>
+
+<p>I find <i>that</i> the view <i>that</i> Japan has now a splendid
+opportunity ... is heartily endorsed.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I must point out <i>that</i> it is a blot on our national education
+<i>that</i> we have serving....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Chairman replied to the allegation made by the Radical press
+to the effect <i>that</i> the statement <i>that</i> the British
+workman will not work as an unskilled labourer in the mines is
+inaccurate.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>An official telegram states <i>that</i> General Nogi reports
+<i>that</i>....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The conviction <i>that</i> the Tsar must realize <i>that</i> the
+prestige of Russia is at stake.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</span></p>
+
+<p>He was so carried away by his discovery <i>that</i> he ventured on the
+assertion <i>that</i> the similarity between the two languages was so
+great <i>that</i> an educated German could understand whole strophes
+of Persian poetry.—<span class="smcap">H. Sweet.</span></p>
+
+<p>I may fairly claim to have no personal interest in defending the
+council, <i>although</i> I believe, <i>though</i> I am not certain,
+that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>6. <span class="smcap">Metrical Prose</span></p>
+
+<p>The novice who is conscious of a weakness for the high-flown and the
+inflated should watch narrowly for metrical snatches in his prose; they
+are a sure sign that the fit is on him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness / and self-respect, innate in
+every sphere / of life, and shedding light on every grain / of dust
+in God’s highway, so smooth below / your carriage-wheels, so rough
+beneath the tread / of naked feet, bethink yourselves / in looking on
+the swift descent / of men who <i>have</i> lived in their own esteem,
+/ that there are scores of thousands breathing now, / and breathing
+thick with painful toil, who in / that high respect have never lived
+at all, / nor had a chance of life! Go ye, who rest / so placidly upon
+the sacred Bard / who had been young, and when he strung his harp /
+was old, ... / go, Teachers of content and honest pride, / into the
+mine, the mill, the forge, / the squalid depths of deepest ignorance,
+/ and uttermost abyss of man’s neglect, / and say can any hopeful
+plant spring up / in air so foul that it extinguishes / the soul’s
+bright torch as fast as it is kindled! /—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>But now,—now I have resolved to stand alone,—/ fighting my battle
+as a man should fight, / seeking for neither help nor sympathy, / and
+trusting not in self....—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>And the gathering orange stain / upon the edge of yonder western peak,
+/ reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.—<span class="smcap">Ruskin.</span></p>
+
+<p>His veins were opened; but he talked on still / while life was
+slowly ebbing, and was calm / through all the agony of lingering
+death.—<span class="smcap">W. W. Capes.</span></p>
+
+<p>Can I then trust the evidence of sense? / And art thou really to my
+wish restored? / Never, oh never, did thy beauty shine / with such
+bewitching grace, as that which now / confounds and captivates my
+view! / ... Where hast thou lived? where borrowed this perfection? /
+... Oh! I am all amazement, joy and fear! / Thou wilt not leave me!
+No! we must not part / again. By this warm kiss! a thousand times
+/ more sweet than all the fragrance of the East! / we never more
+will part. O! this is rapture! / ecstasy! and what no language will
+explain—<span class="smcap">Smollett.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>7. <span class="smcap">Sentence Accent</span></p>
+
+<p>It is only necessary to read aloud any one of the sentences quoted
+below, to perceive at once that there is something wrong with its
+accentuation. To lay down rules on this point would be superfluous,
+even if it were practicable; for in all doubtful cases the ear can
+and should decide. A writer who cannot trust himself to balance his
+sentences properly should read aloud all that he writes. It is useless
+for him to argue that readers will not read his work aloud, and that
+therefore the fault of which we are speaking will escape notice. For,
+although the fault may appear to be exclusively one of sound, it
+is always in fact a fault of sense: unnatural accentuation is only
+the outward sign of an unnatural combination of thought. Thus, nine
+readers out of ten would detect in a moment, without reading aloud,
+the ill-judged structure in our first example: the writer has tried
+to do two incompatible things at the same time, to describe in some
+detail the appearance of his characters, and to begin a conversation;
+the result is that any one reading the sentence aloud is compelled to
+maintain, through several lines of new and essential information, the
+tone that is appropriate only to what is treated as a matter of course.
+The interrogative tone protests more loudly than any other against this
+kind of mismanagement; but our examples will show that other tones are
+liable to the same abuse.</p>
+
+<p>The accentuation of each clause or principal member of a sentence
+is primarily fixed by its relation to the other members: when the
+internal claims of its own component parts clash with this fixed
+accentuation—when, for instance, what should be read with a uniformly
+declining accentuation requires for its own internal purposes a marked
+rise and fall of accent—reconstruction is necessary to avoid a badly
+balanced sentence. The passage from Peacock will illustrate this:
+after <i>pupils</i>, and still more after <i>counterpoint</i>, the
+accentuation should steadily decline to the end of the passage; but,
+conflicting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</span> with this requirement, we have the exorbitant claims of
+a complete anecdote, containing within itself an elaborately accented
+speech. To represent the anecdote as an insignificant appendage to
+<i>pupils</i> was a fault of sense; it is revealed to the few who would
+not have perceived it by the impossibility of reading the passage
+naturally.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘Are Japanese Aprils always as lovely as this?’ asked the man in the
+light tweed suit of two others in immaculate flannels with crimson
+sashes round their waists and puggarees folded in cunning plaits round
+their broad Terai hats.—<span class="smcap">D. Sladen.</span></p>
+
+<p>‘Here we are’, he said presently, after they had turned off the main
+road for a while and rattled along a lane between high banks topped
+with English shrubs, and looking for all the world like an outskirt of
+Tunbridge Wells.—<span class="smcap">D. Sladen.</span></p>
+
+<p>I doubt if Haydn would have passed as a composer before a committee of
+lords like one of his own pupils, who insisted on demonstrating to him
+that he was continually sinning against the rules of counterpoint; on
+which Haydn said to him, ‘I thought I was to teach you, but it seems
+you are to teach me, and I do not want a preceptor’, and thereon he
+wished his lordship a good morning.—<span class="smcap">Peacock.</span></p>
+
+<p>She wondered at having drifted into the neighbourhood of a
+person resembling in her repellent formal chill virtuousness
+a windy belfry tower, down among those districts of suburban
+London or appalling provincial towns passed now and then with a
+shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the church, that
+Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead are
+summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic
+tribulation-bell.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The verb <i>wonder</i> presupposes the reader’s familiarity with the
+circumstance wondered at; it will not do the double work of announcing
+both the wonder and the thing wondered at. ‘I wondered at Smith’s being
+there’ implies that my hearer knew that Smith was there; if he did
+not, I should say ‘I was surprised to find...’. Accordingly, in this
+very artificial sentence, the writer presupposes the inconceivable
+question: ‘What were her feelings on finding that she had drifted
+... tribulation-bell?’. To read a sentence of minute and striking
+description with the declining accentuation that necessarily follows
+the verb <i>wondered</i> is of course impossible.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>How doth the earth terrifie and oppress us with terrible earthquakes,
+which are most frequent in China, Japan, and those eastern climes,
+swallowing up sometimes six cities at once!—<span class="smcap">Burton.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of the many possible violations of sentence accent, one—common in
+inferior writers—is illustrated in the next section.</p>
+
+
+<p>8. <span class="smcap">Causal ‘as’ Clauses</span></p>
+
+<p>There are two admissible kinds of causal ‘as’ clauses—the pure and the
+mixed. The pure clause assigns as a cause some fact that is already
+known to the reader and is sure to occur to him in the connexion: the
+mixed assigns as a cause what is not necessarily known to the reader
+or present in his mind; it has the double function of conveying a new
+fact, and indicating its relation to the main sentence. Context will
+usually decide whether an <i>as</i> clause is pure or mixed; in the
+following examples, it is clear from the nature of the two clauses that
+the first is pure, the second mixed:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I have an edition with German notes; but that is of no use, as you do
+not read German.</p>
+
+<p>I caught the train, but afterwards wished I had not, as I presently
+discovered that my luggage was left behind.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The second of these, it will be noticed, is unreadable, unless we slur
+the <i>as</i> to such an extent as practically to acknowledge that it
+ought not to be there. The reason is that, although a pure clause may
+stand at any point in the sentence, a mixed one must always precede the
+main statement. The pure clause, having only the subordinate function
+normally indicated by <i>as</i>, is subordinate in sense as well as in
+grammar; and the declining accentuation with which it is accordingly
+pronounced will not be interfered with wherever we may place it. But
+the mixed clause has another function, that of conveying a new fact,
+for which <i>as</i> does not prepare us, and which entitles it to an
+accentuation as full and as varied as that of the main statement. To
+neutralize the subordinating effect of <i>as</i>, and secure the proper
+accentuation, we must place the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</span> clause at the beginning; where this is
+not practicable, <i>as</i> should be removed, and a colon or semi-colon
+used instead of a comma. Persistent usage tends of course to remove
+this objection by weakening the subordinating power of conjunctions:
+<i>because</i>, <i>while</i>, <i>whereas</i>, <i>since</i>, can be used
+where <i>as</i> still betrays a careless or illiterate writer. There is
+the same false ring in all the following sentences:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I myself saw in the estate office of a large landed proprietor a
+procession of peasant women begging for assistance, as owing to
+the departure of the bread-winners the families were literally
+starving.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Remove <i>as</i>, and use a heavier stop.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Very true, Jasper; but you really ought to learn to read, as, by so
+doing, you might learn your duty towards yourselves.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>To read; by so doing, ....</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There was a barber and hairdresser, who had been at Paris, and talked
+French with a cockney accent, the French sounding all the better, as
+no accent is so melodious as the Cockney.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Use a semicolon and ‘for’; the assertion requires all the support that
+vigorous accentuation can lend.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>One of the very few institutions for which the Popish Church
+entertains any fear, and consequently respect, as it respects nothing
+which it does not fear.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>For</i> instead of <i>as</i> will best suit this illogical and
+falsely coordinated sentence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Everybody likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed
+to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, ...
+but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to
+him.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Again the clause is a mixed one. The point of view it suggests is,
+indeed, sufficiently obvious; but (unlike our typical pure clause
+above—‘you do not know German’) it depends for its existence upon the
+circumstances of the main sentence, which may or may not have occurred
+to the reader before. The full accentuation with which the clause
+must inevitably be read condemns it at once; use a colon, and remove
+<i>as</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Pure clauses, being from their nature more or less otiose,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</span> belong
+rather to the spoken than to the written language. It follows that a
+good writer will seldom have a causal <i>as</i> clause of any kind at
+the end of a sentence. Two further limitations remain to be noticed:</p>
+
+<p>i. When the cause, not the effect, is obviously the whole point of the
+sentence, <i>because</i>, not <i>as</i>, should be used; the following
+is quite impossible English:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I make these remarks as quick shooting at short ranges has lately been
+so strongly recommended.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>ii. <i>As</i> should be used only to give the cause of the thing
+asserted, not the cause of the assertion, nor an illustration of its
+truth, as in the following instances:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>You refer me to the Encyclopaedia: you are mistaken, as I find the
+Encyclopaedia exactly confirms my view.</p>
+
+<p>The Oxford Coxswain did not steer a very good course here, as he kept
+too close in to the Middlesex shore to obtain full advantage of the
+tide; it made little difference, however, as his crew continued to
+gain.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>My finding the Encyclopaedia’s confirmation was not the cause of
+mistake, nor the keeping too close the cause of bad steering.</p>
+
+
+<p>9. <span class="smcap">Wens and Hypertrophied Members</span></p>
+
+<p>No sentence is to be condemned for mere length; a really skilful writer
+can fill a page with one and not tire his reader, though a succession
+of long sentences without the relief of short ones interspersed is
+almost sure to be forbidding. But the tiro, and even the good writer
+who is not prepared to take the trouble of reading aloud what he has
+written, should confine himself to the easily manageable. The tendency
+is to allow some part of a sentence to develop unnatural proportions,
+or a half parenthetic insertion to separate too widely the essential
+parts. The cure, indispensable for every one who aims at a passable
+style, and infallible for any one who has a good ear, is reading aloud
+after writing.</p>
+
+<p>1. Disproportionate insertions.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Some simple eloquence distinctly heard, though only uttered in her
+eyes, unconscious that he read them, as, ‘By the death-beds I have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</span>
+tended, by the childhood I have suffered, by our meeting in this
+dreary house at midnight, by the cry wrung from me in the anguish of
+my heart, O father, turn to me and seek a refuge in my love before it
+is too late!’ may have arrested them.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>Captain Cuttle, though no sluggard, did not turn so early on the
+morning after he had seen Sol Gills, through the shopwindow, writing
+in the parlour, with the Midshipman upon the counter, and Rob the
+Grinder making up his bed below it, but that the clocks struck six
+as he raised himself on his elbow, and took a survey of his little
+chamber.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>A perpetual consequent warfare of her spirit and the nature subject
+to the thousand sensational hypocrisies invoked for concealment of
+its reviled brutish baseness, held the woman suspended from her
+emotions.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>Yesterday, before Dudley Sowerby’s visit, Nataly would have been
+stirred where the tears which we shed for happiness or repress
+at a flattery dwell when seeing her friend Mrs. John Cormyn
+enter....—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>‘It takes’, it is said that Sir Robert Peel observed, ‘three
+generations to make a gentleman’.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+
+<p>Behind, round the windows of the lower story, clusters of clematis,
+like large purple sponges, blossomed, miraculously fed through their
+thin, dry stalks.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is a striking exhibition of the power which the groups, hostile
+in different degrees to a democratic republic, have of Parliamentary
+combination.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>Sir,—With reference to the custom among some auctioneers and
+surveyors of receiving secret commissions, which was recently brought
+to light in a case before the Lord Chief Justice and Justices Kennedy
+and Ridley (King’s Bench Division), when the L. C. J. in giving
+judgment for the defendants said:—Unfortunately in commercial
+circles, in which prominent men played a part, extraordinary mistakes
+occurred. But a principal who employed an agent to do work for him
+employed him upon terms that the agent was not liable to get secret
+commissions. The sooner secret commissions were not approved by an
+honourable profession, the better it would be for commerce in all its
+branches. I desire to take this opportunity....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In the course of a conversation with a representative of the
+<i>Gaulois</i>, Captain Klado, after repeating his views on the
+necessity for Russia to secure the command of the sea which have
+already appeared in the <i>Times</i>, replied as follows to a question
+as to whether, after the new squadron in the course of formation at
+Libau has reinforced Admiral Rozhdestvensky’s fleet, the Russian
+and Japanese naval forces will be evenly balanced: [here follows
+reply]—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</span></p>
+
+<p>2. Sentences of which the end is allowed to trail on to unexpected
+length.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But though she could trust his word, the heart of the word went out
+of it when she heard herself thanked by Lady Blachington (who could
+so well excuse her at such a time for not returning her call, that
+she called in a friendly way a second time, warmly to thank her)
+for throwing open the Concert Room at Lakelands in August, to an
+entertainment in assistance of the funds for the purpose of erecting
+an East London Clubhouse, where the children of the poor by day could
+play, and their parents pass a disengaged evening.—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>How to commence the ceremony might have been a difficulty, but for the
+zeal of the American Minister, who, regardless of the fact that he
+was the representative of a sister Power, did not see any question of
+delicacy arise in his taking a prominent part in proceedings regarded
+as entirely irregular by the representatives of the Power to which the
+parties concerned belonged.—<span class="smcap">D. Sladen.</span></p>
+
+<p>The style holds the attention, but perhaps the most subtle charm of
+the work lies in the inextricable manner in which fact is interwoven
+with something else that is not exactly fiction, but rather fancy bred
+of the artist’s talent in projecting upon his canvas his own view
+of things seen and felt and lived through by those whose thoughts,
+motives, and actions, he depicts.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The cock-bustard that, having preened himself, paces before the hen
+birds on the plains that he can scour when his wings, which are slow
+in the air, join with his strong legs to make nothing of grassy
+leagues on leagues.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I don’t so much wonder at his going away, because, leaving out of
+consideration that spice of the marvellous which was always in his
+character, and his great affection for me, before which every other
+consideration of his life became nothing, as no one ought to know
+so well as I who had the best of fathers in him—leaving that out
+of consideration, I say, I have often read and heard of people who,
+having some near and dear relative, who was supposed to be shipwrecked
+at sea, have gone down to live on that part of the seashore where any
+tidings of the missing ship might be expected to arrive, though only
+an hour or two sooner than elsewhere, or have even gone upon her track
+to the place whither she was bound, as if their going would create
+intelligence.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>What he had to communicate was the contents of despatches from Tokio
+containing information received by the Japanese Government respecting
+infringements of neutrality by the Baltic Fleet in Indo-Chinese waters
+outside what are, strictly speaking, the territorial limits, and
+principally by obtaining provisions from the shore.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</span></p>
+
+<p>3. Decapitable sentences.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the most exasperating form is that of the sentence that keeps
+on prolonging itself by additional phrases, each joint of which gives
+the reader hopes of a full stop.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It was only after the weight of evidence against the economic
+success of the endeavour became overwhelming that our firm withdrew
+its support /, and in conjunction with almost the entire British
+population of the country concentrated its efforts on endeavouring to
+obtain permission to increase the coloured unskilled labour supply
+of the mines / so as to be in a position to extend mining operations
+/, and thus assist towards re-establishing the prosperity of the
+country /, while at the same time attracting a number of skilled
+British artisans / who would receive not merely the bare living wage
+of the white unskilled labourer, but a wage sufficient to enable these
+artisans to bring their families to the country / and to make their
+permanent home there.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>Here may still be seen by the watchful eye the Louisiana heron and
+smaller egret, all that rapacious plume-hunters have left of their
+race, tripping like timid fairies in and out the leafy screen / that
+hides the rank jungle of sawgrass and the grisly swamp where dwells
+the alligator /, which lies basking, its nostrils just level with the
+dirty water of its bath, or burrows swiftly in the soft earth to evade
+the pursuit of those who seek to dislodge it with rope and axe / that
+they may sell its hide to make souvenirs for the tourists / who, at
+the approach of summer, hie them north or east with grateful memories
+of that fruitful land.—<span class="smcap">F. G. Aflalo.</span></p>
+
+<p>Running after milkmaids is by no means an ungenteel rural diversion;
+but let any one ask some respectable casuist (the Bishop of London,
+for instance), whether Lavengro was not far better employed, when in
+the country, at tinkering and smithery than he would have been in
+running after all the milkmaids in Cheshire /, though tinkering is in
+general considered a very ungenteel employment /, and smithery little
+better /, notwithstanding that an Orcadian poet, who wrote in Norse
+about 800 years ago, reckons the latter among nine noble arts which he
+possessed /, naming it along with playing at chess, on the harp, and
+ravelling runes /, or as the original has it, ‘treading runes’ /—that
+is, compressing them into small compass by mingling one letter with
+another /, even as the Turkish caligraphists ravel the Arabic letters
+/, more especially those who write talismans.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>10. <span class="smcap">Careless Repetition</span></p>
+
+<p>Conscious repetition of a word or phrase has been discussed in Part
+I (Airs and Graces): in the following examples the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</span> repetition is
+unconscious, and proves only that the writer did not read over what he
+had written.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... a man ... who directly <i>impresses</i> one with the
+<i>impression</i>....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>For most <i>of them</i> get rid <i>of them</i> more or less
+completely.—<span class="smcap">H. Sweet.</span></p>
+
+<p>The most important distinction between dialogue on the one hand and
+<i>purely</i> descriptive and narrative pieces on the other hand is a
+<i>purely</i> grammatical one.—<span class="smcap">H. Sweet.</span></p>
+
+<p>And it <i>may</i> be that from a growing familiarity with Canadian
+winter amusements <i>may</i> in time spring an even warmer
+regard....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It <i>may</i> well induce the uncomfortable reflection that these
+historical words <i>may</i> prove....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The inclusion of <i>adherents</i> would be <i>adhered</i>
+to.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The <i>remainder remaining</i> loyal, fierce fighting
+commenced.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>Every subordinate shortcoming, every incidental defect, will be
+<i>pardoned</i>. ‘Save us’ is the cry of the moment; and, in the
+confident hope of safety, any deficiency will be overlooked, and any
+frailty <i>pardoned</i>.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+
+<p>They were <i>followed</i> by jinrikshas <i>containing</i> young girls
+with very carefully-dressed hair, <i>carrying</i> large bunches of
+real flowers on their laps, <i>followed</i> in turn by two more
+coolies <i>carrying</i> square white wooden jars, <i>containing</i>
+huge silver tinsel flowers.—<span class="smcap">D. Sladen.</span></p>
+
+<p>It can do so, in all reasonable probability, <i>provided</i>
+its militia character is maintained. But in any case it will
+<i>provide</i> us at home with the second line army of our
+needs.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Dressed</i> in a subtly ill-<i>dressed</i>, expensive mode.—<span class="smcap">E.
+F. Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Toodle being the <i>family</i> name of the apple-faced
+<i>family</i>.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>Artillery firing <i>extends</i> along the whole front,
+<i>extending</i> for eighty miles.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I regard the action and conduct of the Ministry <i>as</i> a whole
+<i>as</i> of far greater importance.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The fleet passed the port <i>on its way</i> through the Straits <i>on
+the way</i> to the China Sea.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Much of his popularity he owed, we believe, to <i>that</i> very
+timidity <i>which</i> his friends lamented. <i>That</i> timidity often
+prevented him from exhibiting his talents to the best advantage. But
+it propitiated Nemesis. It averted <i>that</i> envy <i>which</i> would
+otherwise have been excited....—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>I will lay down <i>a pen</i> I am so little able to govern.—And
+I will try to subdue <i>an impatience which</i> ... may otherwise
+lead me into still more punishable errors.—I will return
+to <i>a subject which</i> I cannot fly from for ten minutes
+together.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>At the same time it was largely <i>owing to</i> his careful
+training that so many great Etonian cricketers <i>owed</i> their
+success.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>11. <span class="smcap">Common Misquotations</span></p>
+
+<p>These are excusable in talk, but not in print. A few pieces are given
+correctly, with the usual wrong words in brackets.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>An <i>ill-favoured</i> thing, sir, but mine own. (poor)</p>
+
+<p><i>Fine</i> by degrees and beautifully less. (small)</p>
+
+<p><i>That</i> last infirmity of noble <i>mind</i>. (the: minds)</p>
+
+<p>Make assurance <i>double</i> sure. (doubly)</p>
+
+<p>To-morrow to fresh <i>woods</i> and pastures new. (fields)</p>
+
+<p>The devil can <i>cite</i> Scripture for his purpose. (quote)</p>
+
+<p>Chewing the <i>food</i> of sweet and bitter fancy. (cud)</p>
+
+<p>When <i>Greeks joined Greeks</i>, then <i>was</i> the tug of war.
+(Greek meets Greek: comes)</p>
+
+<p>A goodly apple rotten at the <i>heart</i>. (core)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>12. <span class="smcap">Uncommon Misquotations of Well-known Passages or Phrases</span></p>
+
+<p>It is still worse to misquote what is usually given right, however
+informal the quotation. The true reading is here added in brackets.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Now for the trappings and the <i>weeds</i> of woe.—<i>S. Ferrier.</i>
+(suits)</p>
+
+<p>She had an instinctive knowledge that she knew her, and she felt her
+genius <i>repressed</i> by her, as <i>Julius Caesar’s</i> was by
+<i>Cassius</i>.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span> (My genius is <i>rebuked</i> as,
+it is said, <i>Mark Antony’s</i> was by <i>Caesar</i>)</p>
+
+<p>The new drama represented the very age and body of the time, his form
+and <i>feature</i>.—<i>J. R. Green.</i> (pressure)</p>
+
+<p>He lifts the veil from the sanguinary affair at Kinchau, and we are
+allowed glimpses of blockade-running, train-wrecking and cavalry
+reconnaissance, and of many other moving <i>incidents</i> by flood and
+field.—<i>Times.</i> (accidents)</p>
+
+<p>To him this <i>rough</i> world was but too literally a
+rack.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span> (who would, upon the rack of this <i>tough</i>
+world, stretch him out longer)</p>
+
+<p>Having once begun, they found returning more tedious than
+<i>giving</i> o’er.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span> (returning were as tedious as
+<i>go</i> o’er)</p>
+
+<p><i>Posthaec</i> [<i>sic</i>] meminisse juvabit.—<span class="smcap">Hazlitt.</span> (et
+haec olim)</p>
+
+<p><i>Quid</i> vult valde vult. What they do, they do with a
+will.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span> (quod) Quid is not translatable.</p>
+
+<p>Then that wonderful esprit <i>du</i> corps, by which we adopt into our
+self-love everything we touch.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span> (de)</p>
+
+<p>Let not him that <i>putteth</i> on his <i>armour boast</i> as
+<i>him</i> that <i>taketh</i> it off.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i>
+(girdeth, harness, boast himself, he, putteth)</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</span></p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth herself, says Spenser, ‘to mine <i>open</i> pipe inclined
+her ear’.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (oaten)</p>
+
+<p>He could join the crew of Mirth, and look pleasantly on at a village
+fair, ‘where the <i>jolly</i> rebecks sound to many a youth and many a
+maid, dancing in the chequered shade’.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (jocund)</p>
+
+<p>Heathen Kaffirs, et hoc genero, &amp;c.: ....—<i>Daily Mail.</i> (genus
+omne)</p>
+
+<p>If she takes her husband <i>au pied de lettre</i>.—<i>Westm. Gaz.</i>
+(de la lettre)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>13. Misquotation of Less Familiar Passages</p>
+
+<p>But the greatest wrong is done to readers when a passage that may not
+improbably be unknown to them is altered.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It was at Dublin or in his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from
+Doneraile, ‘under the <i>fall</i> of Mole, that mountain hoar’, that
+he spent the memorable years in which....—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (foot)</p>
+
+<p><i>Petty</i> spites of the village <i>squire</i>.—<i>Spectator.</i>
+(pigmy: spire)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>14. Misapplied and Misunderstood Quotations and Phrases</p>
+
+<p>Before <i>leading question or the exception proves the rule</i> is
+written, a lawyer should be consulted; before <i>cui bono</i>, Cicero;
+before <i>more honoured in the breach than the observance</i>, Hamlet.
+A leading question is one that unfairly helps a witness to the desired
+answer; cui bono has been explained on p. 35; <i>the exception</i>,
+&amp;c., is not an absurdity when understood, but it is as generally used;
+<i>more honoured</i>, &amp;c., means not that the rule is generally broken,
+but that it is better broken. A familiar line of Shakespeare, on the
+other hand, gains by being misunderstood: ‘One touch of nature makes
+the whole world kin’ merely means ‘In one respect, all men are alike’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But <i>cui bono</i> all this detail of our debt? Has the author
+given a single light towards any material reduction of it? Not a
+glimmering.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>A rule dated March 3, 1801, which has never been abrogated, lays it
+down that, to obtain formal leave of absence, a member must show some
+sufficient cause, such as ... but this rule is more honoured in the
+breach than in the observance.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Every one knows that the Governor-General in Council is invested
+by statute with the supreme command of the Army and that it would
+be disastrous to subvert that power. But ‘why drag in Velasquez’?
+If any one wishes us to infer that Lord Kitchener has, directly or
+indirectly,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</span> proposed to subvert this unquestioned and unquestionable
+authority, they are very much mistaken.—<i>Times.</i> (Why indeed? no
+worse literary treason than to spoil other people’s wit by dragging it
+in where it is entirely pointless. Velasquez here outrages those who
+know the story, and perplexes those who do not)</p>
+
+<p>The Nationalist, M. Archdeacon, and M. Meslier put to the Prime
+Minister several <i>leading questions</i>, such as, ‘Why were you so
+willing promptly to part with M. Delcassé, and why, by going to the
+conference, did you agree to revive the debate as to the unmistakable
+rights...?’ To these pertinent inquiries M. Rouvier did not
+reply.—<i>Times.</i> (Leading questions are necessarily not hostile,
+as these clearly were)</p>
+
+<p>The happy phrase that an Ambassador is an honest man sent abroad
+to lie for his country.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i> (Happier when
+correctly quoted: sent to lie abroad for the good of)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>15. <span class="smcap">Allusion</span></p>
+
+<p>A writer who abounds in literary allusions necessarily appeals to a
+small audience, to those acquainted with about the same set of books
+as himself; they like his allusions, others dislike them. Writers
+should decide whether it is not wise to make their allusions explain
+themselves. In the first two instances quoted, though the reader who
+knows the original context has a slight additional pleasure, any one
+can see what the point is. In the last two, those who have not the
+honour of the wetnurse’s and Rosamund’s acquaintance feel that the
+author and the other readers with whom he is talking aside are guilty
+of bad manners.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The select academy, into whose sacred precincts the audacious Becky
+Sharp flung back her leaving present of the ‘Dixonary’, survives here
+and there, but with a different curriculum and a much higher standard
+of efficiency.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Why can’t they stay quietly at home till they marry, instead of
+trying to earn their living by unfeminine occupations? So croaks Mrs.
+Partington, twirling her mop; but the tide comes on.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Sir,—Were it not for M. Kokovtsoff’s tetchiness in the matter of
+metaphors, I should feel inclined to see in his protest against
+my estimates of the decline in the Russian gold reserve and of
+the increase of the note issue a variant of the classic excuse of
+Mrs. Easy’s wetnurse for the unlawfulness of her baby.—<span class="smcap">Lucien
+Wolf.</span></p>
+
+<p>Three superb glass jars—red, green, and blue—of the sort that led
+Rosamund to parting with her shoes—blazed in the broad plate-glass
+windows.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>16. <span class="smcap">Incorrect Allusion</span></p>
+
+<p>Every one who detects a writer pretending to more knowledge than he
+has jumps to the conclusion that the detected must know less than the
+detective, and cannot be worth his reading. Incorrect allusion of this
+kind is therefore fatal.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Homer would have seemed arrogantly superior to his audience if he had
+not called Hebe ‘white-armed’ or ‘ox-eyed’.—<i>Times.</i> (He seldom
+mentions her, and calls her neither)</p>
+
+<p>My access to fortune had not, so far, brought me either much joy or
+distinction,—but it was not too late for me yet to pluck the golden
+apples of Hesperides.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span> (It is hardly possible for
+any one who knows what the Hesperides were to omit <i>the</i>)</p>
+
+<p>My publisher, John Morgeson ... was not like Shakespeare’s Cassio
+strictly ‘an honourable man’.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span> (Cassio was an
+honourable man, but was never called so. Even Cassius has only his
+share in <i>So are they all, all honourable men.</i> Brutus, perhaps?)</p>
+
+<p>A sturdy Benedict to propose a tax on bachelors.—<i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i> (Benedick. In spite of the <i>Oxford Dictionary</i>,
+the differentiation between the saint, Benedict, and the converted
+bachelor, Benedick, is surely not now to be given up)</p>
+
+<p>But impound the car for a longer or shorter period according to
+the offence, and that, as the French say, ‘will give them reason
+to think’.—<i>Times.</i> (The French do not say <i>give reason to
+think</i>; and if they did the phrase would hardly be worth treating
+as not English; they say <i>give to think</i>, which is often quoted
+because it is unlike English)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>17. <span class="smcap">Dovetailed and Adapted Quotations and Phrases</span></p>
+
+<p>The fitting into a sentence of refractory quotations, the making of
+facetious additions to them, and the constructing of Latin cases with
+English governing words, have often intolerably ponderous effects.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Though his denial of any steps in that direction may be true in his
+official capacity, <i>there is probably some smoke in the fire of
+comment</i> to which his personal relations with German statesmen have
+given rise.—<i>Times.</i> (The reversal of smoke and fire may be a
+slip of the pen or a joke; but the correction of it mends matters
+little)</p>
+
+<p>It remains to be seen whether ... the pied à terre which Germany
+hopes she has won by her preliminary action in the Morocco question
+will form the starting-point for further achievements or will merely
+represent,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</span> like so many other German enterprises, <i>the end of the
+beginning</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (The reversal this time is clearly
+facetious)</p>
+
+<p>But they had gone on adding misdeed to misdeed, they had <i>blundered
+after blunder</i>.—<span class="smcap">L. Courtney.</span></p>
+
+<p>Germany has, it would appear, yet another card in her hand,
+a card <i>of the kind which is useful to players when in
+doubt</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But the problem of inducing <i>a refractory camel</i> to squeeze
+himself through the eye of <i>an inconvenient needle</i> is and
+remains insoluble.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But these unsoldierlike recriminations among the Russian officers as
+well as their luxurious lives and their complete insouciance in the
+presence of their country’s misfortunes, seems to have <i>set back the
+hand on the dial of Japanese rapprochement</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Is there no spiritual purge to make the eye of the camel easier for a
+South-African millionaire?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>And so it has come to pass that, not only <i>where invalids do
+congregate</i>, but in places hitherto reserved for the summer
+recreation of the tourist or the mountaineer there is a growing influx
+of winter pleasure-seekers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Salmasius alone was not <i>unworthy sublimi
+flagello</i>.—<span class="smcap">Landor.</span></p>
+
+<p>Even if a change were desirable <i>with Kitchener duce et
+auspice</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Charged with carrying out the Military Member’s orders, but having,
+<i>pace Sir Edwin Collen</i>, no authority of his own.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is not in the interests of the Japanese to close the book of the
+war, until they have placed themselves in the position of beati
+possidentes.—<i>Times.</i> (<i>Beati possidentes</i> is a sentence,
+meaning <i>Blessed are those who are in possession</i>; to fit it into
+another sentence is most awkward)</p>
+
+<p>Resignation became a virtue of necessity for Sweden in hopes that
+a better understanding might in time grow out of the new order of
+things.—<i>Times.</i> (In the original phrase, <i>of necessity</i>
+does not depend on <i>virtue</i>, but on <i>make</i>; and it is
+intolerable without the word that gives it its meaning)</p>
+
+<p>Many of the celebrities who in that most frivolous of watering-places
+do congregate.—<span class="smcap">Baroness von Hutten.</span></p>
+
+<p>If misbehaviour be not checked in an effectual manner before long,
+there is every prospect that the whips of the existing Motor Act
+will be transformed into the scorpions of the Motor Act of the
+future.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A special protest should be made against the practice of introducing a
+quotation in two or three instalments of a word or two, each with its
+separate suit of quotation marks. The only quotations that should be
+cut up are those that are familiar enough to need no quotation marks,
+so that the effect is not so jerky.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The ‘pigmy body’ seemed ‘fretted to decay’ by the ‘fiery soul’ within
+it.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (The original is:—</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+ <div class="stanza">
+ <div class="verse indent0">A fiery soul which, working out its way,</div>
+ <div class="verse indent0">Fretted the pygmy-body to decay.—<span class="smcap">Dryden.</span>)</div>
+ </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>18. Trite Quotation</p>
+
+<p>Quotation may be material or formal. With the first, the writer quotes
+to support himself by the authority (or to impugn the authority) of the
+person quoted; this does not concern us. With the second, he quotes
+to add some charm of striking expression or of association to his own
+writing. To the reader, those quotations are agreeable that neither
+strike him as hackneyed, nor rebuke his ignorance by their complete
+novelty, but rouse dormant memories. Quotation, then, should be adapted
+to the probable reader’s cultivation. To deal in trite quotations and
+phrases therefore amounts to a confession that the writer either is
+uncultivated himself, or is addressing the uncultivated. All who would
+not make this confession are recommended to avoid (unless in some
+really new or perverted application—notum si callida verbum reddiderit
+junctura novum) such things as:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Chartered libertine; balm in Gilead; my prophetic soul; harmless
+necessary; e pur si muove; there’s the rub; the curate’s egg; hinc
+illae lacrimae; fit audience though few; a consummation devoutly to
+be wished; more in sorrow than in anger; metal more attractive; heir
+of all the ages; curses not loud but deep; more sinned against than
+sinning; the irony of fate; the psychological moment; the man in the
+street; the sleep of the just; a work of supererogation; the pity of
+it; the scenes he loved so well; in her great sorrow; all that was
+mortal of—; few equals and no superior; leave severely alone; suffer
+a sea-change.</p>
+
+<p>The plan partook of the nature of that of those ingenious islanders
+who lived entirely by taking in each other’s washing.—<span class="smcap">E. F.
+Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>For he was but moderately given to ‘the cups that cheer but not
+inebriate’, and had already finished his tea.—<span class="smcap">Eliot.</span></p>
+
+<p>Austria forbids children to smoke in public places; and in German
+schools and military colleges there are laws upon the subject; France,
+Spain, Greece, and Portugal <i>leave</i> the matter <i>severely
+alone</i>.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i> (<i>Severely</i> is much worse
+than pointless here)</p>
+
+<p>They carried compulsory subdivision and restriction of all kinds of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</span>
+skilled labour down to a degree <i>that would have been laughable
+enough, if it had only been less destructive</i>.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>If Diderot had visited ... Rome, even the mighty painter of the Last
+Judgment ... would have found an interpreter worthy of him. <i>But it
+was not to be.</i>—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. de Sélincourt has, of course, <i>the defects of his
+qualities</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The beloved <i>lustige Wien</i> [Vienna, that is] of his youth had
+<i>suffered a sea-change</i>. The green glacis down which Sobieski
+drove the defeated besieging army of Kara Mustafa was blocked by
+ranges of grand new buildings.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>19. <span class="smcap">Latin Abbreviations</span>, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>No one should use these who is not sure that he will not expose his
+ignorance by making mistakes with them. Confusion is very common, for
+instance, between <i>i. e.</i> and <i>e g.</i> Again, <i>sic</i> should
+never be used except when a reader might really suppose that there was
+a misprint or garbling; to insert it simply by way of drawing attention
+and conveying a sneer is a very heavy assumption of superiority.
+<i>Vide</i> is only in place when a book or dictionary article is being
+referred to.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Shaliapine, first bass at the same opera, has handed in his
+resignation in consequence of this affair, and also because of affairs
+in general, vide imprisonment of his great friend Gorki.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The industrialist organ is inclined to regret that the league did not
+fix some definite date such as the year 1910 (sic) or the year 1912,
+for the completion of this programme.—<i>Times.</i> (This is the
+true use of <i>sic</i>; as the years mentioned are not consecutive, a
+reader might suppose that something was wrong; sic tells him that it
+is not so)</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Boersen Courier</i> ... maintains that ‘nothing remains
+for M. Delcassé but to cry Pater peccavi to Germany and
+to retrieve as quickly as possible his diplomatic mistake
+(<i>sic</i>)’.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Let your principal stops be the full stop and comma, with a judicious
+use of the semicolon and of the other stops where they are absolutely
+necessary (<i>i. e.</i> you could not dispense with the note of
+interrogation in asking questions).—<span class="smcap">Bygott &amp; Jones.</span> (<i>e.
+g.</i> is wanted, not <i>i. e.</i>)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>20. <span class="smcap">Unequal Yokefellows and Defective Double Harness</span></p>
+
+<p>When a word admits of two constructions, to use both may not be
+positively incorrect, but is generally as ugly as to drive a horse and
+a mule in double harness.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>They did not <i>linger in</i> the long scarlet colonnades of
+the temple itself, nor gazing at the dancing for which it is
+famous.—<span class="smcap">Sladen.</span></p>
+
+<p>This undoubtedly caused prices to rise; but did it not also
+<i>cause</i> all <i>Lancashire to work</i> short time, many <i>mills
+to close</i>, and a great <i>restriction</i> in the purchases of all
+our customers for cotton goods?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... <i>set herself</i> quietly down <i>to the care</i> of her own
+household, and <i>to assist</i> Benjamin in the concerns of his
+trade.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+
+<p>This correspondent says that not only did the French Government
+<i>know that Germany recognized</i> the privileges resulting for
+France from her position in Algeria, but also her general <i>views</i>
+on the work of reform which it would be the task of the conference to
+examine.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Teach</i> them the ‘<i>character</i> of God’ through the ‘Son’s
+Life of Love’, <i>that conscience</i> must not be outraged, not
+because they would be punished if they did, or because they would be
+handsomely rewarded if they didn’t, but simply because they know a
+thing is right or wrong....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And any one who permits himself this incongruity is likely to be
+betrayed into actual blunders.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The popularity of the parlements was surely due to the detestation
+felt for the absolute Monarchy, and because they seemed to
+half-informed men to be the champions of....—<i>Times.</i> (Here
+<i>because they seemed</i> does not really fit <i>the popularity ...
+was</i>, but <i>parlements were popular</i>)</p>
+
+<p>A difference, this, which was not much considered where and when the
+end of the war was thought to be two or three years off, and that the
+last blow would be Russia’s.—<span class="smcap">F. Greenwood.</span> (The last clause
+does not fit <i>the end of the war was thought</i>, but <i>it was
+thought</i>)</p>
+
+<p>Attila and his armies, he said, came and disappeared in a very
+mysterious manner, and <i>that</i> nothing could be said with
+positiveness about them.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>Save him accordingly she did: but no sooner <i>is he dismissed</i>,
+and <i>Faust has made</i> a remark on the multitude of
+arrows which she is darting forth on all sides, than Lynceus
+returns.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<p>The short drives at the beginning of the course of instruction were
+intended gradually <i>to accustom</i> the novice to the speed, and
+<i>of giving</i> him in the pauses an opportunity to fix well in his
+mind the principles of the automobile.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The predecessors of Sir Antony MacDonnell ... were, to use the words
+of the Prime Minister, ‘the aiders, advisers, and suggesters of their
+official chiefs’.—<i>Times.</i> (Though a chief can have a suggester
+as well as an adviser, <i>adviser</i> is naturally followed by an
+objective genitive, but <i>suggester</i> can only be followed by a
+possessive genitive—except of the suggestion made)</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</span></p>
+
+<p>My assiduities expose me rather to her scorn ... than to the treatment
+due to a man.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>One worthy gentleman, who is, perhaps, <i>better known than
+popular</i> in City restaurants, is never known to have lavished even
+the humblest copper coin on a waiter.—<i>Titbits.</i></p>
+
+<p>Its hands require strengthening and its resources
+increased.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Analogous, but always incorrect, though excusable in various degrees,
+is the equipping of pairs that should obviously be in double harness
+with conjunctions or prepositions that do not match—following
+<i>neither</i> by <i>or</i>, <i>both</i> by <i>as well as</i>, and the
+like.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Diderot presented a bouquet which was <i>neither</i> well <i>or</i>
+ill received.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Like the Persian noble of old, I ask, ‘that I may <i>neither</i>
+command <i>or</i> obey’.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+
+<p>She would hear <i>nothing</i> of a declaration of war, <i>or</i> give
+any judgment on....—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>It appears, then, that <i>neither</i> the mixed and incomplete
+empiricism considered in the third chapter, <i>still less</i>
+the pure empiricism considered in the second chapter, affords
+us....—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Scarcely</i> was the nice new drain finished <i>than</i> several of
+the children sickened with diphtheria.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>Which differs from that and who in being used <i>both</i> as an
+adjective <i>as well as</i> a noun.—<span class="smcap">H. Sweet.</span></p>
+
+<p>M. Shipoff <i>in one and the same breath</i> denounces innovations,
+<i>yet</i> bases the whole electoral system on the greatest innovation
+in Russian history.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It would be <i>equally</i> absurd to attend to all the other parts
+of an engine and to neglect the principal source of its energy—the
+firebox—<i>as</i> it is ridiculous to pay particular attention
+to the cleanliness of the body and to neglect the mouth and
+teeth.—<i>Advertisement.</i></p>
+
+<p>The conception of God in their minds was not <i>that of</i> a Father,
+but <i>as</i> a dealer out of rewards and punishments.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Dr. Dillon, than whom no Englishman has a profounder and more accurate
+acquaintance <i>with</i> the seamy side—as, indeed, <i>of</i> all
+aspects of Russian life—assumes....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Sir,—<i>In view of</i> the controversy which has arisen concerning
+the 12 in. Mark VIII guns in the Navy, and especially <i>to</i> the
+suggestion which might give rise to some doubt as to the efficiency of
+the wire system of construction....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We add three sentences, in the first of which double harness should not
+have been used because it is too cumbrous, in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</span> second of which it
+is not correctly possible, and in the third of which the failure to use
+it is very slovenly.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The odd part of it is that this childish confusion does not only not
+take from our pleasure, but does not even take from our sense of
+the author’s talent.—<span class="smcap">H. James.</span> (far from diminishing our
+pleasure, does not....)</p>
+
+<p>As to the duration of the Austro-Russian mandate, there
+seems <i>little disposition</i> here to treat the question
+in a hard-and-fast spirit, <i>but rather</i> to regard it
+as....—<i>Times.</i> (... spirit; it is rather regarded as....)</p>
+
+<p>To the student of the history of religious opinions in England <i>few
+contrasts are more striking when he compares</i> the assurance
+and complacency with which men made profession of their beliefs
+at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the diffidence and
+hesitation with which the same are recited at the beginning of the
+twentieth.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (more striking than that between
+the assurance....)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>21. <span class="smcap">Common Parts</span></p>
+
+<p>When two sentences coupled by a conjunction (whether coordinating or
+subordinating) have one or more parts in common, there are two ways
+of avoiding the full repetition of the common parts. (<i>a</i>) ‘I
+see through your villany and I detest your villany’ can become ‘I see
+through and detest your villany’; ‘I have at least tried to bring
+about a reconciliation, though I may have failed to bring about a
+reconciliation’ can become ‘I have at least tried, though I may have
+failed, to bring about, &amp;c.’ (<i>b</i>) By substitution or ellipse,
+the sentences become ‘I see through your villany, and detest it’ and
+‘I have at least tried to bring about a reconciliation, though I may
+have failed (to do so)’. Of these, the (<i>a</i>) form requires careful
+handling: a word that is not common to both sentences must not be
+treated as common; and one that is common, and whose position declares
+that it is meant to do double duty, must not be repeated. Violations
+of these rules are always more or less unsightly, and are excusable
+only when the precise (<i>a</i>) form is intolerably stiff and the
+(<i>b</i>) form not available. In our examples below, the words placed
+in brackets are the two variants, each of which, when the other is
+omitted, should, with the common or unbracketed parts,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</span> form a complete
+sentence; the conjunctions being of course ignored for this purpose.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>What other power (could) or (ever has) produced such
+changes?—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Things temporal (had) and (would) alter.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>(It had), as (all houses should), been in tune with the pleasant,
+mediocre charm of the island.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This type will almost always admit of the emphatic repetition of the
+verb: ‘could produce or ever has produced’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Those of us who still believe in Greek as (one of the finest), if not
+(the finest) instruments....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>(One of the noblest), if not (the noblest), feelings an Englishman
+could possess.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Use (<i>b</i>): ‘One of the finest instruments, if not the finest’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The games were looked upon as being (quite as important) or (perhaps
+more important) than drill.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The railway has done (all) and (more) than was expected of
+it.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Use (<i>b</i>): ‘as important as drill, if not more so’; ‘all that was
+expected of it, and more’.</p>
+
+<p>All words that precede the first of two correlatives, such as ‘not ...
+but’, ‘both ... and’, ‘neither ... nor’, are declared by their position
+to be common; we bracket accordingly in the next examples:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The pamphlet forms (not only a valuable addition to our works on
+scientific subjects), but (is also of deep interest to German
+readers).—<i>Times.</i> (not only forms ..., but is ...)</p>
+
+<p>Forty-five per cent of the old Rossallians ... received (either
+decorations) (or were mentioned in despatches).—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i> (Either received ... or were)</p>
+
+<p>The Senate, however, has (either passed) (or will pass) amendments to
+every clause.—<i>Spectator.</i> (either has passed or will pass)</p>
+
+<p>Cloth of gold (neither seems to elate) (nor cloth of frieze to
+depress) him.—<span class="smcap">Lamb.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A curious extension, not to be mended in the active; for <i>neither</i>
+cannot well precede the first of two subjects when they have different
+verbs.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</span></p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, words placed between the two correlatives are
+declared by their position not to be common:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Which neither (suits one purpose) (nor the other).—<i>Times.</i>
+(suits neither ... nor)</p>
+
+<p>Not only (against my judgment), (but my
+inclination).—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Not only (in the matter of malaria), (but also
+beriberi).—<i>Times.</i> (In the matter not of malaria only, but of
+...)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>22. <span class="smcap">The Wrong Turning</span></p>
+
+<p>It is not very uncommon, on regaining the high road after a divergent
+clause or phrase, to get confused between the two, and continue quite
+wrongly the subordinate construction instead of that actually required.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I feel, however, that there never was a time when the people of
+this country were more ready to believe than they are today, and
+would openly believe if Christianity, with ‘doctrine’ subordinated,
+were presented to them in the most convincing of all forms,
+viz....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (<i>Would believe</i> is made
+parallel to <i>they are today</i>; it is really parallel to <i>there
+never was a time</i>; and we should read <i>and that they would openly
+believe</i>)</p>
+
+<p>In the face of this statement either proofs should be adduced to show
+that Coroner Troutbeck has stated facts ‘soberly judged’, and that
+they contain ‘warrant for the accusation of wholesale’ ignorance on
+the part of a trusted and eminently useful class of the community,
+or failing this, that the offensive and unjust charge should be
+withdrawn.—<i>Times.</i> (<i>The charge should be withdrawn</i> is
+made parallel to <i>Coroner Troutbeck has stated</i> and <i>they
+contain</i>; it is really parallel to <i>proofs should be adduced</i>;
+and we should omit <i>that</i>, and read <i>or failing this, the
+offensive</i>....)</p>
+
+<p>We cannot part from Prof. Bury’s work without expressing our unfeigned
+admiration for his complete control of the original authorities on
+which his narrative is based, and of the sound critical judgment
+he exhibits....—<i>Spectator.</i> (The judgment is admired, not
+controlled)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sometimes the confusion is not merely of the pen, but is in the
+writer’s thought; and it is then almost incurable.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... the privilege by which the mind, like the lamps of a mailcoach,
+moving rapidly through the midnight woods, illuminate, for one
+instant, the foliage or sleeping umbrage of the thickets, and, in the
+next instant, have quitted them, to carry their radiance forward upon
+endless successions of objects.—<span class="smcap">De Quincey.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>23. <span class="smcap">Ellipse in Subordinate Clauses</span></p>
+
+<p>The missing subject and (with one exception) the missing verb of a
+subordinate clause can be supplied only from the sentence to which it
+is subordinate. The exception is the verb ‘to be’. We can say ‘The
+balls, when wet, do not bounce’, ‘When in doubt, play trumps’, because
+the verb to be supplied is <i>are</i>, and the subject is that of
+the principal sentence. Other violations of the rule occur, but are
+scarcely tolerable even in the spoken language. The following are
+undesirable instances:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>For, though summer, I knew ... Mr. Rochester would like to see a
+cheerful hearth.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We can supply <i>was</i>, but not <i>it</i>; the natural subject is
+<i>I</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I have now seen him, and though not for long, he is a man who speaks
+with Bismarckian frankness.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Though I did not see him for long’, we are meant to understand. But
+the <i>though</i> clause is not subordinate to the sentence containing
+that subject and verb: <i>and</i> always joins coordinates and
+announces the transition from one coordinate to another. Consequently,
+the <i>though</i> clause must be a part (a subordinate part) of the
+second coordinate, and must draw from that its subject and verb:
+‘though he is not a man of Bismarckian frankness for long, ...’. Even
+if we could supply <i>I saw</i> with the clause in its present place,
+we should still have the absurd implication that the man’s habitual
+frankness (not the writer’s perception of it) depended on the duration
+of the interview. We offer three conjectural emendations: ‘I have now
+seen him, though not for long; and he is a man who ...’; ‘I have now
+seen him, and though I did not see him for long, I perceived that he
+was a man who ...’; ‘I have now seen him, and though I did not see him
+for long, I found out what he thought; for he is a man who...’.</p>
+
+
+<p>24. <span class="smcap">Some Illegitimate Infinitives</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Claim</i> is not followed by an infinitive except when the subject
+of <i>claim</i> is also that of the infinitive. Thus, <i>I claim to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</span>
+be honest</i>, but not <i>I claim this to be honest</i>. The <i>Oxford
+Dictionary</i> (1893) does not mention the latter use even to condemn
+it, but it is now becoming very common, and calls for strong protest.
+The corresponding passive use is equally wrong. The same applies to
+<i>pretend</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘This entirely new experiment’ which you claim to have ‘solved the
+problem of combining....’—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Usage, therefore, is not, as it is often claimed to be, the absolute
+law of language.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+
+<p>The gun which made its first public appearance on Saturday is
+claimed to be the most serviceable weapon of its kind in use in any
+army.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The constant failure to live up to what we claim to be our most
+serious convictions proves that we do not hold them at all.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>The anonymous and masked delators whose creation the
+Opposition pretends to be an abuse of power on the part of M.
+Combes.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Possible</i> and <i>probable</i> are not to be completed by an
+infinitive. For <i>are possible to</i> read <i>can</i>; and for
+<i>probable</i> read <i>likely</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But no such questions are possible, as it seems to me, to arise
+between your nation and ours.—<span class="smcap">Choate.</span></p>
+
+<p>Should Germany meditate anything of the kind it would look uncommonly
+like a deliberate provocation of France, and for that reason it seems
+scarcely probable to be borne out by events.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Prefer</i> has two constructions: I prefer this (living) <i>to</i>
+that (dying), and I prefer to do this <i>rather than</i> that. The
+infinitive construction must not be used without <i>rather</i> (unless,
+of course, the second alternative is suppressed altogether).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Other things being equal, I should prefer to marry a rich man than a
+poor one.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The following infinitives are perhaps by false analogy from those that
+might follow <i>forbade</i>, <i>seen</i>, <i>ask</i>. It may be noticed
+generally that slovenly and hurried writers find the infinitive a great
+resource.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Marshal Oyama strictly <i>prohibited</i> his troops <i>to take</i>
+quarter within the walls.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Chinese held a chou-chou, during which the devil was exorcised and
+duly <i>witnessed</i> by several believers <i>to take</i> his flight
+in divers guises.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Third, they might <i>demand</i> from Germany, all flushed
+as she was with military pride, <i>to tell</i> us plainly
+whether....—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>25. <span class="smcap">‘Split’ Infinitives</span></p>
+
+<p>The ‘split’ infinitive has taken such hold upon the consciences of
+journalists that, instead of warning the novice against splitting his
+infinitives, we must warn him against the curious superstition that the
+splitting or not splitting makes the difference between a good and a
+bad writer. The split infinitive is an ugly thing, as will be seen from
+our examples below; but it is one among several hundred ugly things,
+and the novice should not allow it to occupy his mind exclusively. Even
+that mysterious quality, ‘distinction’ of style, may in modest measure
+be attained by a splitter of infinitives: ‘The book is written with a
+distinction (save in the matter of split infinitives) unusual in such
+works.’—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The time has come to once again voice the general
+discontent.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It should be authorized to immediately put in hand such
+work.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Important negotiations are even now proceeding to further cement trade
+relations.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>We were not as yet strong enough in numbers to seriously influence the
+poll.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Keep competition with you unless you wish to once more see
+a similar state of things to those prevalent prior to the
+inauguration....—<i>Guernsey Evening Press.</i></p>
+
+<p>And that she should force me, by the magic of her pen to
+mentally acknowledge, albeit with wrath and shame, my own
+inferiority.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>The oil lamp my landlady was good enough to still allow me the use
+of.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>The ‘persistent agitation’ ... is to so arouse public opinion on the
+subject as to....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In order to slightly extend that duration in the case of a
+few.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>To thus prevent a constant accretion to the Jewish population of
+Russia from this country would be nobler work....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>26. <span class="smcap">Compound Passives</span></p>
+
+<p>Corresponding to the active construction ‘... have attempted to justify
+this step’, we get two passive constructions: (1) ‘This step has been
+attempted to be justified’, (2) ‘It has been attempted to justify this
+step’. Of these (1), although licensed by usage, is an incorrect and
+slovenly makeshift:<span class="pagenum" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</span> ‘this step’ is not the object of ‘have attempted’,
+and cannot be the subject of the corresponding passive. The true object
+of ‘have attempted’ is the whole phrase ‘to justify this step’, which
+in (2) rightly appears as the subject, in apposition to an introductory
+‘it’.—In point of clumsiness, there is perhaps not much to choose
+between the two passive constructions, neither of which should be used
+when it can be avoided. When the subject of the active verb ‘have
+attempted’ is definite, and can conveniently be stated, the active
+form should always be retained; to write ‘it had been attempted by the
+founders of the study to supply’ instead of ‘the founders had attempted
+to supply’ is mere perversity. When, as in some of our examples below,
+the subject of the active verb ‘have attempted’ is indefinite, the
+passive turn is sometimes difficult to avoid; but unless the object
+of ‘justify’ is a relative, and therefore necessarily placed at the
+beginning, ‘an attempt has been made’ can often be substituted for ‘it
+has been attempted’, and is less stiff and ugly.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The cutting down of ‘saying lessons’, by which it had been attempted
+by the founders of the study to supply the place of speech in the
+learning of Greek.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But when it was attempted to give practical effect to the popular
+exasperation, serious obstacles arose.—<i>Times.</i> (When an attempt
+was made to....)</p>
+
+<p>He and his friends would make the government of Ireland a sheer
+impossibility, and it would be the duty of the Irish party to make it
+so if it was attempted to be run on the lines of....—<i>Times.</i>
+(if an attempt was made to run it on the....)</p>
+
+<p>It is not however attempted to be denied.—<span class="smcap">Hazlitt.</span> (No one
+attempts to deny)</p>
+
+<p>As to the audience, we imagine that a large part of it,
+certainly all that part of it whose sympathies it was desired to
+enlist,...—<i>Times.</i> (whose sympathies were to be enlisted)</p>
+
+<p>He will see the alterations that were proposed to be made, but
+rejected.—<i>Times.</i> (proposed, but rejected)</p>
+
+<p>The argument by which this difficulty is sought to be
+evaded.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This and the following instances are not easily mended,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</span> unless we may
+supply the subject of ‘seek’, &amp;c. (‘some writers’).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The arguments by which the abolition was attempted to be supported
+were founded on the rights of man.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Some mystery in regard to her birth, which, she was well informed, was
+assiduously, though vainly, endeavoured to be discovered.—<span class="smcap">Fanny
+Burney.</span></p>
+
+<p>The close darkness of the shut-up house (forgotten to be
+opened, though it was long since day) yielded to the unexpected
+glare.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>Those whose hours of employment are proposed to be
+limited.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The insignificant duties proposed to be placed on food.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The anti-liberal principles which it was long ago attempted to embody
+in the Holy Alliance.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Considerable support was managed to be raised for
+Waldemar.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We may notice here a curious blunder that is sometimes made with the
+reflexive verb ‘I avail myself of’. The passive of this is never used,
+because there is no occasion for it: ‘I was availed of this by myself’
+would mean exactly the same as the active, and would be intolerably
+clumsy. The impossible passives quoted below imply that <i>it</i> and
+<i>staff</i> would be the direct objects of the active verb.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Watt and Fulton bethought themselves that, where was power was not
+devil, but was God; that it must be availed of and not by any means
+let off and wasted.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Used</i> or <i>employed</i>, and so in the next:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>No salvage appliances or staff could have been availed of in time to
+save the lives of the men.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>27. <span class="smcap">Confusion with Negatives</span></p>
+
+<p>This is extraordinarily common. The instances are arranged in order of
+obviousness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Yezd is not only the refuge of the most ancient of Persian religions,
+but it is one of the headquarters of the modern Babi propaganda,
+the far-reaching effects of which it is probably difficult to
+underestimate.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>Not a whit undeterred by the disaster which overtook them at
+Cavendish-square last week ... the suffragettes again made themselves
+prominent.—<i>Daily Mail.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</span></p>
+
+<p>So far as medicine is concerned, I am not sure that physiology,
+such as it was down to the time of Harvey, might as well not have
+existed.—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>The generality of his countrymen are far more careful not to
+transgress the customs of what they call gentility, than to violate
+the laws of honour or morality.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>France and Russia are allies, as are England and Japan. Is it
+impossible to imagine that, in consequence of the growing friendship
+between the two great peoples on both sides of the Channel,
+an agreement might not one day be realized between the four
+Powers?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I do not of course deny that in this, as in all moral principles,
+there may not be found, here and there, exceptional cases which may
+amuse a casuist.—<span class="smcap">L. Stephen.</span></p>
+
+<p>In view of the doubts among professed theologians regarding the
+genuineness and authenticity of the Gospels in whole or in part, he is
+unable to say how much of the portraiture of Christ may not be due to
+the idealization of His life and character.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Is it quite inconceivable that if the smitten had always turned the
+other cheek the smiters would not long since have become so ashamed
+that their practice would have ceased?—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>I do not think it is possible that the traditions and doctrines of
+these two institutions should not fail to create rival, and perhaps
+warring, schools.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Any man—runs this terrible statute—denying the doctrine of the
+Trinity or of the Divinity of Christ, or that the books of Scripture
+are not the ‘Word of God’, or ..., ‘shall suffer the pain of
+death’.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>But it would not be at all surprising if, by attempting too
+much, and, it must be added, by indulging too much in a style
+the strained preciosity of which occasionally verges on rant and
+even hysteria, Mr. Sichel has not to some extent defeated his own
+object.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>No one scarcely really believes.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to
+differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of
+difference?—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Lastly, how can Mr. Balfour tell but that two years hence he may not
+be too tired of official life to begin any new conflict?—<span class="smcap">F.
+Greenwood.</span></p>
+
+<p>What sort of impression would it be likely to make upon the Boers?
+They could hardly fail to regard it as anything but an expression of
+want of confidence in our whole South-African policy.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>My friend Mr. Bounderby could never see any difference between leaving
+the Coketown ‘hands’ exactly as they were and requiring them to be fed
+with turtle soup and venison out of gold spoons.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>But it is one thing to establish these conditions [the Chinese
+Ordinance], and another to remove them suddenly.—<i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>What economy of life and money would not have been spared the
+empire of the Tsars had it not rendered war certain.—<i>Times.</i>
+(<i>It</i> is the empire. The instance is not quoted for <i>not</i>,
+though that too is wrong, but for the confusion between loss and
+economy)</p>
+
+<p>The question of ‘raids’ is one which necessarily comes home to every
+human being living within at least thirty miles of our enormously
+long coast line.—<span class="smcap">Lonsdale Hale.</span> (An odd puzzle. <i>Within
+thirty</i> means less than thirty; <i>at least thirty</i> means not
+less than thirty. The meaning is clear enough, however, and perhaps
+the expression is defensible; but it would have been better to say:
+within a strip at least thirty miles broad along our enormous coast
+line)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The fact that a negative idea can often be either included in a word
+or kept separate from it leads to a special form of confusion, the
+construction proper to the resolved form being used with the compound
+and <i>vice versa</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>My feelings, Sir, are moderately unspeakable, and that is a
+fact.—American. (not moderately speakable: <i>moderately</i> belongs
+only to half of <i>unspeakable</i>)</p>
+
+<p>... who did not aim, like the Presbyterians, at a change in Church
+government, but rejected the notion of a national Church at
+all.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (<i>Reject</i> is equivalent to <i>will
+not have</i>. I reject altogether: I will not have at all)</p>
+
+<p>And your correspondent does not seem to know, or not to realize, the
+conditions of the problem.—<i>Times.</i> (<i>Seems</i>, not <i>does
+not seem</i>, has to be supplied in the second clause)</p>
+
+<p>I confess myself altogether unable to formulate such a principle,
+much less to prove it.—<i>Balfour.</i> (<i>Less</i> does not suit
+<i>unable</i>, but <i>able</i>; but the usage of <i>much less</i> and
+<i>much more</i> is hopelessly chaotic)</p>
+
+<p>War between these two great nations would be an inexplicable
+impossibility.—<span class="smcap">Choate.</span> (<i>Inexplicable</i> does not
+qualify the whole of <i>impossibility</i>; to make sense we must
+divide <i>impossibility</i> into <i>impossible event</i>, and take
+<i>inexplicable</i> only with <i>event</i>)</p>
+
+<p>And the cry has this justification,—that no age can see itself in a
+proper perspective, and is therefore incapable of giving its virtues
+and vices their relative places.—<i>Spectator.</i> (<i>No age</i>
+is equivalent to <i>not any age</i>, and out of this we have to take
+<i>any age</i> as subject to the last sentence; this is a common, but
+untidy and blameworthy device)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>28. <span class="smcap">Omission of ‘as’</span></p>
+
+<p>This is very common, but quite contrary to good modern usage, after the
+verb <i>regard</i>, and others like it. In the first three instances
+the motive of the omission is obvious, but does not justify it; all
+that was necessary was to choose another verb, as <i>consider</i>, that
+does not require <i>as</i>. In the later instances the omission is
+gratuitous.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I regard it as important as anything.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Bombie had run away with Lady Bombie ‘in her sark’. This I
+could not help regarding both a most improper as well as a most
+uncomfortable proceeding.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>So vital is this suggestion regarded.</p>
+
+<p>Rare early editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems—editions which
+had long been regarded among the national heirlooms.—<span class="smcap">S. Lee.</span></p>
+
+<p>The latter may now be expected to regard himself absolved from such
+obligation as he previously felt.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A memoir which was justly regarded of so much merit and importance
+that....—<span class="smcap">Huxley.</span></p>
+
+<p>... what might be classed a ‘horizontal’ European
+triplice.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>You would look upon yourself amply revenged if you knew what they have
+cost me.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>He also alluded to the bayonet, and observed that its main use
+was no longer a defence against cavalry, but it was for the final
+charge.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... I was rewarded with such a conception of the God-like majesty
+and infinite divinity which everywhere loomed up behind and shone
+through the humanity of the Son of Man that no false teaching or any
+power on earth or in hell itself will ever shake my firm faith in the
+combined divinity and humanity in the person of the Son of God, and
+<i>as sure am I</i> that I eat and drink and live to-day, so certain
+am I that this mysterious Divine Redeemer is in living....—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The last example is of a different kind. Read <i>as sure as I am</i>
+for <i>as sure am I</i> as the least possible correction. Unpractised
+writers should beware of correlative clauses except in their very
+simplest forms.</p>
+
+
+<p>29. <span class="smcap">Other Liberties taken with ‘as’</span></p>
+
+<p><i>As</i> must not be expected to do by itself the work of <i>such
+as</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There were not two dragon sentries keeping ward before the gate of
+this abode, <i>as</i> in magic legend are usually found on duty over
+the wronged innocence imprisoned.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>The specialist is naturally best for his particular job; but if the
+particular specialist required is not on the spot, as must often be
+the case, the best substitute for him is not another specialist but
+the man trained to act for himself in all circumstances, <i>as</i>
+it has been the glory of our nation to produce both in the Army and
+elsewhere.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>We question if throughout the French Revolution there was a single
+case of six or seven thousand insurgents blasted away by cannon shot,
+<i>as</i> is believed to have happened in Odessa.—<i>Spectator.</i>
+(This is much more defensible than the previous two; but when a
+definite noun—as here <i>case</i>—can be naturally supplied for the
+verb introduced by <i>as</i>, <i>such as</i> is better).</p>
+
+<p>The decision of the French Government to send a special mission to
+represent France at the marriage of the German Crown Prince is not
+intended as anything more than a mere act of international courtesy,
+<i>as</i> is customary on such occasions.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Neither <i>as</i> nor <i>such as</i> should be made to do the work of
+the relative pronoun where there would be no awkwardness in using the
+pronoun itself.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>With a speed of eight knots, <i>as</i> [which] has been found
+practicable in the case of the Suez Canal, the passage would occupy
+five days.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The West Indian atmosphere is not of the limpid brightness and
+transparent purity <i>such as</i> [that] are found in the sketch
+entitled ‘A Street in Kingston’.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The ideal statues and groups in this room and the next are scarcely so
+interesting as we have sometimes seen.—<i>Times.</i> (<i>As</i> is
+clearly here a relative adverb, answering to <i>so</i>; nevertheless
+the construction can be theoretically justified, the full form being
+<i>as we have sometimes seen groups interesting</i>. But it is very
+ugly; why not say instead <i>as some that we have seen</i>?)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The idiom <i>as who should say</i> must not be used unless the sentence
+to which it is appended has for subject a person to whom the person
+implied in <i>who</i> is compared. This seems reasonable, and is borne
+out, for instance, by all the Shakespeare passages—a dozen—that we
+have looked at. The type is: The cloudy messenger turns me his back,
+and hums, as who should say:—&amp;c.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>To think of the campaign without the scene is as who should
+read a play by candle-light among the ghosts of an empty
+theatre.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>30. <span class="smcap">Brachylogy</span></p>
+
+<p>1. Omission of a dependent noun in the second of two parallel series:
+‘The brim of my hat is wider than yours’. For this there is some
+justification: an ugly string of words is avoided, and the missing word
+is easily supplied from the first series; it has usually the effect,
+however, of attaching a preposition to the wrong noun:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I should be proud to lay an obligation upon my charmer to the amount
+of half, nay, to the whole of my estate.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+
+<p>There is as much of the pure gospel in their teachings as in any other
+community of Christians in our land.</p>
+
+<p>There cannot be the same reason for a prohibition of correspondence
+with me, as there was of mine with Mr. Lovelace.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here the right preposition is retained.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A man holding such a responsible position as Minister of the United
+States.—<span class="smcap">D. Sladen.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>2. A preposition is sometimes left out, quite unwarrantably, from a
+mistaken idea of euphony:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Without troubling myself as to what such self-absorption might lead in
+the future.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span> (lead to)</p>
+
+<p>He chose to fancy that she was not suspicious of what
+all his acquaintance were perfectly aware—namely,
+that....—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span> (aware of)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. Impossible compromises between two possible alternatives.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>To be a Christian means to us one who has been regenerated.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i> (‘A Christian means one who has’: ‘to be a Christian
+means to have been’)</p>
+
+<p>To do what as far as human possibility has proved out of his
+power.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (‘As a matter of human possibility’:
+‘as far as human possibility goes’)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>One compromise of this kind has come to be generally recognized:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>So far from being annoyed, he agreed at once. (‘So far was he from
+being annoyed that ...’: ‘far from being annoyed, he agreed’)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>31. <span class="smcap">Between two Stools</span></p>
+
+<p>The commonest form of indecision is that between statement and
+question. But the examples of this are followed by a few miscellaneous
+ones.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>May I ask <i>that</i> if care should be taken of remains of buildings
+a thousand years old, <i>ought not</i> care to be taken of ancient
+British earth-works several thousand years old?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Can I not make you understand that you are ruining yourself and me,
+and <i>that</i> if you don’t get reconciled to your father <i>what
+is</i> to become of you?—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>We will only say <i>that</i> if it was undesirable for a private
+member to induce the Commons to pass a vote against Colonial
+Preference, <i>why was it</i> not undesirable for a private
+member....—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Surely</i>, then, if I am not claiming too much for our efforts at
+that time to maintain the Union, <i>am I</i> exaggerating our present
+ability to render him effectual aid in the contest that will be fought
+at the next election if I say that prudence alone should dictate to
+him the necessity for doing everything in his power to revive the
+spirit which the policy of Sir Antony MacDonnell, Lord Dudley, and Mr.
+Wyndham has done so much to weaken?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I then further observed <i>that</i> China having observed the laws
+of neutrality, <i>how could he</i> believe in the possibility of an
+alliance with Russia?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The next two use both the relative and the participle construction,
+instead of choosing between them.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Thus it befell that our high and low labour vote, <i>which</i> (if one
+might say so in the hearing of M. Jaurès and Herr Bebel) <i>being</i>
+vertical rather than horizontal, and quite unhindered in the United
+States, of course by an overwhelming majority elected President
+Roosevelt.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>He replied to Mr. Chamberlain’s Limehouse speech, the only part
+of <i>which</i> that he could endorse <i>being</i>, he said, the
+suggestion that the electorate should go to the root of the question
+at the next general election.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Who, in Europe, at least, would <i>forego</i> the delights of
+kissing,—(which the Japanese by-the-by consider a disgusting
+habit),—<i>without</i> embraces,—and all those other
+endearments which are supposed to dignify the progress of true
+love!—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>Poor, bamboozled, patient public!—no wonder it is beginning to think
+<i>that</i> a halfpenny spent on a newspaper which is purchased to be
+thrown away, <i>enough</i> and more than enough.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>But hurriedly dismissing <i>whatever</i> shadow of earnestness, or
+faint<span class="pagenum" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</span> confession of a purpose, laudable or wicked, <i>that</i>
+her face, or voice, or manner, had, for the moment betrayed, she
+lounged....—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>At</i> the Épée Team Competition for Dr. Savage’s Challenge Cup,
+held on the 25th and 27th February last, <i>was won</i> by the Inns of
+Court team, consisting of....—<i>14th Middlesex Battalion Orders.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>32. <span class="smcap">The Impersonal ‘One’</span></p>
+
+<p>This should never be mixed up with other pronouns. Its possessive is
+<i>one’s</i>, not <i>his</i>, and <i>one</i> should be repeated, if
+necessary, not be replaced by <i>him</i>, &amp;c. Those who doubt their
+ability to handle it skilfully under these restrictions should only use
+it where no repetition or substitute is needed. The older experimental
+usage, which has now been practically decided against, is shown in the
+Lowell examples.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>That inequality and incongruousness in his writing which
+makes <i>one</i> revise <i>his</i> judgment at every tenth
+page.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+
+<p>As one grows older, <i>one</i> loses many idols, perhaps comes at last
+to have none at all, although <i>he</i> may honestly enough uncover in
+deference to the worshippers at any shrine.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+
+<p>There are many passages which <i>one</i> is rather inclined to like
+than sure <i>he</i> would be right in liking.—<span class="smcap">Lowell.</span></p>
+
+<p>He is a man who speaks with Bismarckian frankness, and who directly
+impresses <i>one</i> with the impression that <i>you</i> are speaking
+to a man and not to an incarnate bluebook.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The merit of the book, and it is not a small one, is that it discusses
+every problem with fairness, with no perilous hankering after
+originality, and with a disposition to avail <i>oneself</i> of what
+has been done by <i>his</i> predecessors.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>If <i>one</i> has an opinion on any subject, it is of little
+use to read books or papers which tell <i>you</i> what you know
+already.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... are all creations which make <i>one</i> laugh inwardly as
+<i>we</i> read.—<span class="smcap">Hutton.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>One’s</i>, on the other hand, is not the right possessive for the
+generic <i>man</i>; <i>man’s</i> or <i>his</i> is required according to
+circumstances; <i>his</i> in the following example:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There is a natural desire in the mind of <i>man</i> to sit for
+<i>one’s</i> picture.—<span class="smcap">Hazlitt.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>33. <span class="smcap">Between ... or</span></p>
+
+<p>This is a confusion between two ways of giving alternatives—<i>between
+... and</i>, and <i>either ... or</i>. It is always wrong.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The choice Russia has is between payment for damages in money
+<i>or</i> in kind.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Forced to choose between the sacrifice of important interests
+on the one hand <i>or</i> the expansion of the Estimates on the
+other.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>We have in that substance the link between organic <i>or</i> inorganic
+matter which abolishes the distinction between living <i>and</i> dead
+matter.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i> (Observe the ‘elegant variation’)</p>
+
+<p>The question lies between a God and a creed, <i>or</i> a God in such
+an abstract sense that does not signify.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The author of the last has been perplexed by the <i>and</i> in one of
+his alternatives. <i>He</i> should have used <i>on the one hand</i>, &amp;c.</p>
+
+
+<p>34. <span class="smcap">‘A’ placed between the Adjective and its Noun</span></p>
+
+<p>This is ugly when not necessary. Types of phrase in which it is
+necessary are: Many a youth; What a lie! How dreadful <i>a</i> fate! So
+lame an excuse. But there is no difficulty in placing a before ordinary
+qualifications of the adjective like <i>quite</i>, <i>more</i>, <i>much
+less</i>. In the following, read <i>quite a sufficient</i>, <i>a more
+valuable</i>, <i>a more glorious</i>, <i>a more serviceable</i>, <i>no
+different position</i>, <i>a</i> greater <i>or less degree</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>... adding that there was no suggestion of another raid against the
+Japanese flank, which was <i>quite sufficient an indication</i>
+of coming events for those capable of reading between the
+lines.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Can any one choose <i>more glorious an exit</i> than to die fighting
+for one’s own country?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Of sympathy, of ... Mr. Baring has a full measure, which, in his
+case, is <i>more valuable an asset</i> than familiarity with military
+textbooks.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>No great additional expenditure is required in order to make
+Oxford <i>more serviceable a part</i> of our educational
+system.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>And young undergraduates are in this respect in no different a
+position from that of any other Civil Servant.—<i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>The thousand and one adjuncts to devotion finding place <i>in more or
+less a degree</i> in all churches, are all....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The odd arrangement in the following will not do; we should have
+<i>a</i> either before <i>so</i> or before <i>degree</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</span></p><div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>But what I do venture to protest against is the sacrificing of the
+interests of the country districts in <i>so ridiculously an unfair
+degree</i> to those of a small borough.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>35. <span class="smcap"><i>DO</i> as Substitute Verb</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Do</i> cannot represent (1) <i>be</i>, (2) an active verb supplied
+from a passive, (3) an active verb in a compound tense, gerund, or
+infinitive; You made the very mistake that I <i>did</i>, but <i>have
+made</i>, <i>was afraid of making</i>, <i>expected to make</i>,
+<i>shall</i> (<i>make</i>).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It ... ought to have been satisfying to the young man. And so, in a
+manner of speaking, it did.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>It may justly be said, as Mr. Paul does, that....—<i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>To inflict upon themselves a disability which one day they will find
+the mistake and folly of doing.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We can of course say He lost his train, which I had warned him not to
+<i>do</i>; because <i>lose</i> is then represented not by <i>do</i>,
+but by <i>which</i> (thing).</p>
+
+
+<p>36. <span class="smcap">Fresh Starts</span></p>
+
+<p>The trick of taking breath in the middle of a sentence by means of a
+resumptive <i>that</i> or the like should be avoided; especially when
+it is a confession rather of the writer’s short-windedness than of the
+unwieldy length of his sentence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It does not follow (as I pointed out by implication above) that
+if, according to the account of their origin given by the system,
+those fundamental beliefs are true, that therefore they are
+true.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>Sir—Might I suggest that while this interesting question is being
+discussed that the hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ be sung in every church and
+chapel...?—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A very short-winded correspondent.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It seems to be a fair deduction that when the Japanese gained their
+flank position immediately West of Mukden, and when, further, they
+took no immediate advantage of the fact, but, on the contrary, began
+to hold the villages in the plain as defensive positions, that a much
+more ambitious plan was in operation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If the writer means what he says, and the grounds of the deduction
+are not included in the sentence, reconstruction is not obvious, and
+<i>that</i> is perhaps wanted to pick up the thread; but if, as may
+be suspected, the <i>when</i> clauses contain the grounds of the
+deduction, we may reconstruct as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</span> follows: ‘When the Japanese ..., and
+when ..., it was natural to infer that ...’.</p>
+
+
+<p>37. <span class="smcap">Vulgarisms and Colloquialisms</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Like</i> for <i>as</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Sins that were degrading me, like they have many others.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>They should not make a mad, reckless, frontal attack like General
+Buller made at the battle of Colenso.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Coming to God the loving Father for pardon, like the poor prodigal
+did.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>There is no moral force in existence ... which enlarges our outlook
+like suffering does.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>What ever ...?</i> is a colloquialism; <i>whatever ...?</i> a
+vulgarism:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Whatever reason have we to suppose, as the vast majority of professing
+Christians appear to do, that the public worship of Almighty God
+...?—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Whatever is the good in wrangling about bones when one is hungry and
+has nutritious food at hand?—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Those sort’:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I know many of those sort of girls whom you call
+conjurors.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+
+<p>Those sort of writers would merely take it as a first-class
+advertisement.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>38. <span class="smcap">Tautology</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Lord Rosebery has not budged from his position—splendid, no doubt—of
+(lonely) isolation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Counsel admitted that that was a grave suggestion to make,
+but he submitted that it was borne out by the (surrounding)
+circumstances.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>One can feel first the characteristics which men have in common
+and only afterward those which distinguish them (apart) from one
+another.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A final friendly agreement with Japan, which would be very welcome
+to Russia, is only possible if Japan (again) regains her liberty of
+action.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Miss Tox was (often) in the habit of assuring Mrs. Chick that
+...—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>He had come up one morning, as was now (frequently) his
+wont.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+
+<p>The counsellors of the Sultan (continue to) remain
+sceptical.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Peresviet lost both her fighting-tops and (in appearance) looked
+the most damaged of all the ships.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>They would, however, strengthen their position if they returned
+the (temporary) loan of Sir A. MacDonnell to his owners with
+thanks.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The score was taken to 136 when Mr. MacLaren, who had (evidently)
+seemed bent on hitting Mr. Armstrong off, was bowled.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... cannot prevent the diplomacy of the two countries from lending
+each other (mutual) support.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>However, I judged that they would soon (mutually) find each other
+out.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding which, (however,) poor Polly embraced them all
+round.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span></p>
+
+<p>If any real remedy is to be found, we must first diagnose the true
+nature of the disease; (but) that, however, is not hard.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>M. Delcassé contemplated an identical answer for France, Great
+Britain, and Spain, refusing, of course, the proposed conference, but
+his colleagues of the Cabinet were (, however,) opposed to identical
+replies.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The strong currents frequently shifted the mines, to the equal danger
+(both) of friend and foe.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>And persecution on the part of the Bishops and the Presbyterians, to
+(both of) whom their opinions were equally hateful, drove flocks of
+refugees over sea.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>But to the ordinary English Protestant (both) Latitudinarian and High
+Churchmen were equally hateful.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>Seriously, (and apart from jesting,) this is no light
+matter.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+
+<p>To go back to your own country ... with (the consciousness that you go
+back with) the sense of duty done.—<span class="smcap">Lord Halsbury.</span></p>
+
+<p>No doubt my efforts were clumsy enough, but Togo had a capacity for
+taking pains, by which (said) quality genius is apt to triumph over
+early obstacles.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... as having created a (joint) partnership between the two Powers in
+the Morocco question.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Sir—As a working man it appears to me that to the question ‘Do we
+believe?’ the only sensible position (there seems to be) is to frankly
+acknowledge our ignorance of what lies beyond.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>39. <span class="smcap">Redundancies</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Dr. Redmond told his constituents that <i>by</i> reducing the National
+vote in the House of Commons they would not <i>thereby</i> get rid of
+obstruction.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is not a thousand years <i>ago since</i> municipalities in Scotland
+were by no means free from the suspicion of corruption.—<span class="smcap">Lord
+Rosebery.</span></p>
+
+<p>Some substance equally <i>as</i> yielding.—<i>Daily Mail.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</span></p>
+
+<p>Had another expedition reached the Solomon Islands, who
+knows <i>but</i> that the Spaniards might <i>not</i> have
+gone on to colonize Australia and so turned the current of
+history?—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>As one <i>being</i> able to give full consent ... I am yours
+faithfully....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>But <i>to</i> where shall I look for some small ray of light that will
+illumine the darkness surrounding the mystery of my being?—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is quite <i>possible</i> that if they do that it <i>may</i> be
+<i>possible</i> to amend it in certain particulars.—<i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>Men and women who <i>professed to call</i> themselves
+Christians.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (An echo, no doubt, of ‘profess
+and call themselves Christians’)</p>
+
+<p>The correspondence that you have published <i>abundantly</i> throws
+out into <i>bold</i> relief the false position assumed....—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>In the course of the <i>day</i>, <i>yesterday</i>, M. Rouvier was able
+to assure M. Delcassé....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Moreover</i>, <i>too</i>, do we not all feel...?—<span class="smcap">J. C.
+Collins.</span></p>
+
+<p>The doing nothing for a length of days after the first shock he
+sustained was <i>the reason of how it came that</i> Nesta knitted
+closer her acquaintance....—<span class="smcap">Meredith.</span></p>
+
+<p>When the public adopt new inventions wholesale, ... <i>some obligation
+is due</i> to lessen, so far as is possible, the hardships in
+which....—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>40. ‘<span class="smcap">As to whether</span>’</p>
+
+<p>This is a form that is seldom necessary, and should be reserved for
+sentences in which it is really difficult to find a substitute.
+Abstract nouns that cannot be followed immediately by <i>whether</i>
+should if possible be replaced by the corresponding verbs. Many writers
+seem to delight in this hideous combination, and employ it not only
+with abstracts that can be followed by <i>whether</i>, but even with
+verbs.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Court declined to express any opinion <i>as to</i> whether the
+Russian Ambassador was justified in giving the assurances in question
+and <i>as to</i> whether the offences with which the accused were
+charged were punishable by German law.—<i>Times.</i> (Perhaps
+‘declined to say whether in their opinion’; but this is less easily
+mended than most)</p>
+
+<p>The difficulties of this task were so great that I was in doubt <i>as
+to</i> whether it was possible.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>His whole interest is concentrated on the question <i>as to</i> how
+his mission will affect his own fortunes.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A final decision has not yet been arrived at <i>as to</i> whether or
+not the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</span> proceedings shall be public.—<i>Times.</i> (It has not yet
+been finally decided whether)</p>
+
+<p>You raise the question <i>as to</i> whether Admiral Rozhdestvensky
+will not return.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I have much pleasure in informing Rear Admiral Mather Byles <i>as
+to</i> where he could inspect a rifle of the type referred to.</p>
+
+<p>The interesting question which such experiments tend to suggest is as
+to how far science may....—<i>Outlook.</i></p>
+
+<p>When we come to consider the question <i>as to</i> whether, upon
+the dissolution of the body, the spirit flies to some far-distant
+celestial realm....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>He never told us to judge by the lives of professing Christians <i>as
+to</i> whether Christianity is true.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>M. Delcassé did not allude to the debated question <i>as to</i>
+whether any official communication ... was made by the French
+Government to Germany. It is also pointed out that he did not let fall
+the slightest intimation <i>as to</i> whether the French Government
+expected....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>41. <span class="smcap">Superfluous ‘but’ and ‘though’</span></p>
+
+<p>Where there is a natural opposition between two sentences, adversative
+conjunctions may yet be made impossible by something in one of
+the sentences that does the work unaided. Thus if <i>in vain</i>,
+<i>only</i>, and <i>reserves</i> and <i>sole</i>, had not been used in
+the following sentences, <i>but</i> and <i>though</i> would have been
+right; as it is, they are wrong.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>(The author dreams that he is a horse being ridden) <i>In vain</i>
+did I rear and kick, attempting to get rid of my foe; <i>but</i> the
+surgeon remained as saddle-fast as ever.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the substance of the story is probably true, <i>though</i>
+Voltaire has <i>only</i> made a slip in a name.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>Germany, it appears, <i>reserves</i> for herself the <i>sole</i>
+privilege of creating triple alliances and ‘purely defensive’
+combinations of that character, <i>but</i> when the interests of other
+Powers bring them together their action is reprobated as aggressive
+and menacing.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Such mistakes probably result from altering the plan of a sentence in
+writing; and the cure is simply to read over every sentence after it is
+written.</p>
+
+<p>42. ‘<span class="smcap">If and when</span>’</p>
+
+<p>This formula has enjoyed more popularity than it deserves; either
+‘when’ or ‘if’ by itself would almost always give the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</span> meaning. Even
+where ‘if’ seems required to qualify ‘when’ (which by itself might
+be taken to exclude the possibility of the event’s never happening
+at all), ‘if’ and ‘when’ are clearly not coordinate, though both are
+subordinate to the main sentence: ‘if and when he comes, I will write’
+means ‘if he comes, I will write when he comes’, or ‘when he comes
+(if he comes at all), I will write’, and the ‘if’ clause, whether
+parenthetic or not, is subordinate to the whole sentence ‘I will write
+when he comes’. Our Gladstone instance below differs from the rest:
+‘when’ with a past tense, unqualified by ‘if’, would make an admission
+that the writer does not choose to make; on the other hand, the time
+reference given by ‘when’ is essential; ‘on the occasion on which it
+was done (if it really was done) it was done judicially’. The faulty
+coordination may be overlooked where there is real occasion for its
+use; but many writers seem to have persuaded themselves that neither
+‘if’ nor ‘when’ is any longer capable of facing its responsibilities
+without the other word to keep it in countenance.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>No doubt it will accept the experimental proof here alleged, if and
+when it is repeated under conditions....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The latter will include twelve army corps, six rifle brigades, and
+nine divisions or brigades of mounted troops, units which, if and when
+complete, will more than provide....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Unless and until we pound hardest we shall never beat the
+Boers.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is only if, and when, our respective possessions become
+conterminous with those of great military states on land that we
+each....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>If and when it was done, it was done so to speak
+judicially.—<span class="smcap">Gladstone.</span></p>
+
+<p>No prudent seaman would undertake an invasion unless or until
+he had first disposed of the force preparing ... to impeach
+him.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Its leaders decline to take office unless and until the 90 or 100
+German words of command used ... are replaced....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>If and when employment is abundant....—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>It means nothing less, if Mr. Chamberlain has his way, than the final
+committal of one of the two great parties to a return to Protection,
+if and when it has the opportunity.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is clear, however, that the work will gain much if and when she
+plays faster.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>43. <span class="smcap">Maltreated Idioms</span></p>
+
+<p>1. Two existing idioms are fused into a non-existent one.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It did not take him much trouble.—<span class="smcap">Sladen.</span> (I take: it costs
+me)</p>
+
+<p>An opportunity should be afforded the enemy of retiring northwards,
+more or less <i>of</i> their own <i>account</i>.—<i>Times.</i> (of my
+own accord: on my own account)</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Kuyper admitted that his opinion had been
+consulted.—<i>Times.</i> (I consult you: take your opinion)</p>
+
+<p>But it was in vain with the majority to attempt it.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span>
+(I attempt in vain: it is vain to attempt)</p>
+
+<p>The captain got out the shutter of the door, shut it up, made it all
+fast, and locked the door itself.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span> (make it fast:
+make all fast)</p>
+
+<p>The provisioning of the Russian Army would practically have to be
+drawn exclusively from the mother country.—<i>Times.</i> (draw
+provisions: do provisioning)</p>
+
+<p>It gives me the greatest pleasure in adding my testimony.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i> (I have pleasure in adding: it gives me pleasure to add)</p>
+
+<p>And if we rejected a similar proposition made to us, was it
+not too much to expect that Canada might not turn in another
+direction?—<span class="smcap">Chamberlain</span> (reported). (Might not Canada
+turn?... to expect that Canada would not turn)</p>
+
+<p>I can speak from experience that ... ‘conversion’ ... was a very real
+and powerful thing.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (speak to conversion’s
+being: say that conversion was)</p>
+
+<p>He certainly possessed, though in no great degree, the means of
+affording them more relief than he practised.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span>
+(preached more than he practised: had means of affording more than he
+did afford)</p>
+
+<p>My position is one of a clerk, thirty-eight years of age, and
+married.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (one that no one would envy: that of
+a clerk)</p>
+
+<p>Abbot, indeed, had put the finishing stroke on all attempts at a
+higher ceremonial. Neither he nor his household would bow at the name
+of Christ.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (put the finishing touches on: given
+the finishing stroke to)</p>
+
+<p>In this chapter some of these words will be considered, and also some
+others against which purism has raised objections which do not seem
+to be well taken.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span> (exceptions well taken:
+objections rightly made. <i>To take an objection well</i> can only
+mean to keep your temper when it is raised)</p>
+
+<p>A woman would instinctively draw her cloak or dress closer to her, and
+a man leave by far an unnecessary amount of room for fear of coming
+into contact with those to whom....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i> (by far
+too great: quite an unnecessary)</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</span></p>
+
+<p>The fines inflicted for excess of the legal speed.—<i>Times.</i>
+(excess of speed: exceeding the legal speed)</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the no inconsiderable distance by sea.—<i>Guernsey
+Advertiser.</i> (it is no inconsiderable distance: the—or a—not
+inconsiderable distance)</p>
+
+<p>His whim had been gratified at a trifling cost of ten thousand
+pounds.—<span class="smcap">Crawford.</span> (a trifling cost—unspecified: a trifle of
+ten thousand <i>or so</i>: the trifling cost of ten thousand. So in
+the next)</p>
+
+<p>Dying at a ripe old age of eighty-three.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>That question is the present solvency or insolvency of the Russian
+State. The answer to it depends not upon the fact whether Russia has
+or has not....—<i>Times.</i> (the fact that: the question whether.
+But <i>depends not upon whether</i> would be best here)</p>
+
+<p>To all those who had thus so self-sacrificingly and energetically
+promoted the organization of this fund he desired to accord in
+the name of the diocese their deep obligation.—<i>Guernsey
+Advertiser.</i> (accord thanks: acknowledge obligation)</p>
+
+<p>The allies frittered away in sieges the force which was ready for an
+advance into the heart of France until the revolt of the West and
+South was alike drowned in blood.—<i>Times.</i> (the revolts were
+alike drowned: the revolt was drowned)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>2. Of two distinct idioms the wrong is chosen.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>When, too, it was my pleasure to address a public meeting of more than
+2,000 at the Royal Theatre the organized opposition numbered less than
+seven score.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is our pleasure to present to you the enclosed notification of the
+proportion of profits which has been placed to the credit of your
+account.—Company circular. (I had, we have, the pleasure of—. The
+form chosen is proper to royal personages expressing their gracious
+will)</p>
+
+<p>In the face of it the rule appears a most advisable one.—<i>Guernsey
+Advertiser.</i> (<i>On the face of it</i> means prima facie: the other
+means in spite of)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. The form of an idiom is distorted, without confusion with another.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>However, towards evening the wind and the waves subsided and the night
+became quiet and starlight.—<i>Times.</i> (<i>Starlight</i> is a
+noun, which can be used as an adjective immediately before another
+noun only; a starlight night)</p>
+
+<p>Russia is now bitterly expiating her share in the infamy then visited
+upon Japan.—<i>Times.</i> (We visit upon a person his sins, or
+something for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</span> which he is responsible, and not we; or again, we may
+visit our indignation upon him)</p>
+
+<p>He anticipated much towards Mary’s recovery in her return to
+Japan.—<span class="smcap">Sladen.</span> (anticipate ... from)</p>
+
+<p>But both Governments have now requested Washington to be chosen as the
+place of meeting.—<i>Times.</i> (requested that Washington should)</p>
+
+<p>For as its author in later years told the writer of this article,
+he had studied war for nine years before he put the pen to the
+paper.—<i>Times.</i> (Put pen to paper. This looks like imitation
+French; it is certainly not English)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. The meaning of an idiom is mistaken without confusion with another.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>For days and days, in such moods, he would stay within his cottage,
+never darkening the door or seeing other face than his own
+inmates.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span> (To darken the door is always to enter as
+a visitor, never to go out)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>5. Some miscellaneous and unclassified violations are added, mostly
+without further comment than italics, to remind sanguine learners that
+there are small pitfalls in every direction.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>If I <i>did not have</i> the most thorough dependence on your
+good sense and high principles, I should not speak to you in this
+way.—<span class="smcap">Trollope.</span></p>
+
+<p>Japan, while desiring the massacre of her own and Russia’s subjects
+to be brought to an end, <i>has</i> nevertheless <i>every interest
+that</i> the war should go on.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The unpublished state, of which only <i>an extremely few</i> examples
+are in existence.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Once I <i>jested her</i> about it.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is <i>significant to add</i> that when Mrs. Chesnut died in 1886
+her servants were with her.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Herring boats, the drapery of whose black suspended nets
+<i>contrasted</i> with picturesque effect <i>the white sails</i> of
+the larger vessels.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is at least incumbent to be scrupulously accurate.—<i>Times.</i>
+(The metaphor in <i>incumbent</i> is so much alive that
+<i>upon</i>—is never dispensed with)</p>
+
+<p>A measure <i>according Roman Catholic clergymen</i> who have
+passed through the local seminaries but have not yet passed
+the prescribed Russian language test <i>to hold</i> clerical
+appointments.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>There will be established in this free England a commercial tyranny
+<i>the like of which</i> will not be inferior to the tyrannical
+Inquisition of the Dark Ages.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>44. <span class="smcap">Truisms and Contradictions in Terms</span></p>
+
+<p>A contradiction in terms is often little more than a truism turned
+inside out; we shall therefore group the two together, and with them
+certain other illogical expressions, due to a similar confusion of
+thought.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Praise which perhaps was scarcely meant to be taken <i>too</i>
+literally.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Where no standard of literalness is mentioned, <i>too literally</i>
+is ‘more literally than was meant’. We may safely affirm, without the
+cautious reservations <i>perhaps</i> and <i>scarcely</i>, that the
+praise was not meant to be taken more literally than it was meant to be
+taken. Omit <i>too</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He found what was <i>almost quite</i> as interesting.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If it was almost as interesting, we do not want <i>quite</i>: if quite,
+we do not want <i>almost</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Splendid and elegant, but <i>somewhat bordering on</i> the antique
+fashion.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Bordering on</i> means not ‘like’ but ‘very like’; ‘somewhat very
+like’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A <i>very unique</i> child, thought I.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>A <i>somewhat unique</i> gathering of our great
+profession.—<span class="smcap">Halsbury.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are no degrees in uniqueness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Steady, respectable labouring men—<i>one and all, with rare
+exceptions</i>, married.—<i>Times.</i> (all without exception, with
+rare exceptions)</p>
+
+<p>To <i>name</i> only a <i>few</i>, <i>take</i> Lord Rosebery, Lord
+Rendel, Lord ..., ..., ..., and <i>many</i> others.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Take</i> in this context means ‘consider as instances’; we cannot
+consider them as instances unless we have their names; <i>take</i> must
+therefore mean ‘let me name for your consideration’. Thus we get: ‘To
+<i>name</i> only a <i>few</i>, let me <i>name</i> ... and <i>many</i>
+others (whom I do <i>not</i> name)’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>More <i>led away</i> by a jingling antithesis of words than <i>an
+accurate perception</i> of ideas.—<span class="smcap">H. D. Macleod.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>‘Guided by an accurate perception’ is what is meant. To be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</span> ‘led
+away by accurate perception’ is a misfortune that could happen only
+in a special sense, the sense in which it has happened, possibly, to
+the writer, whom sheer force of accurate perception may have hurried
+into inaccurate expression; but more probably he too is the victim of
+‘jingling antithesis’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p><i>Long before</i> the appointed hour for the commencement of
+the recital, standing room only fell to the lot of those who
+arrived <i>just previous</i> to Mr. K.’s appearance on the
+platform.—<i>Guernsey Advertiser.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The necessary inference—that Mr. K., the reciter, appeared on the
+platform long before the appointed hour—is probably not in accordance
+with the facts.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The weather this week has for the most part been of that quality
+which the month of March so <i>strikingly</i> characterizes in the
+<i>ordinary</i> course of events.—<i>Guernsey Advertiser.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>What happens in the ordinary course of events can scarcely continue
+to be striking. Whether the month characterizes the weather, or the
+weather the month, we need not consider here.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He <i>forgot</i> that it was possible, that from a brief period of
+tumultuous disorder, there might issue a military despotism more
+compact, more disciplined, and more overpowering than any which had
+preceded it, or any which <i>has</i> followed it.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>He</i> could not forget, because he could not know, anything
+about the despotisms which <i>have</i> in fact followed. He might
+know and forget something about all the despotisms that had preceded
+or <i>should</i> follow (in direct speech, ‘that have preceded or
+shall follow’): ‘this may result in the most compact despotism in all
+history, past and future’. But probably Bagehot does not even mean
+this: the last clause seems to contain a reflection of his own, falsely
+presented as a part of what <i>he</i> ought to have reflected.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Some people would say that my present manner of travelling is much
+the <i>most preferable</i>, riding as I do now, instead of leading my
+horse.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Only two modes of travelling are compared: <i>the most preferable</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</span>
+implies four, three of them preferable in different degrees to the
+fourth. A not uncommon vulgarism.</p>
+
+
+<p>45. <span class="smcap">Double Emphasis</span></p>
+
+<p>Attempts at packing double emphasis into a single sentence are apt to
+result in real weakening.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>No government ever plunged <i>more</i> rapidly into a <i>deeper</i>
+quagmire.—<i>Outlook.</i> (From the writer’s evident wish to state
+the matter strongly, we infer that several Governments have plunged
+more rapidly into as deep quagmires, and as rapidly into deeper ones)</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Justice Neville ... will now have the very rare experience of
+joining on the Bench a colleague whom he defeated on the polls
+<i>just fourteen years ago</i>.—<i>Westminster Gazette.</i> (The
+<i>experience</i>, with exact time-interval, is probably unique, like
+any individual thumb-print; that does not make the <i>coincidence</i>
+more remarkable; and it is the coincidence that we are to admire)</p>
+
+<p>Nothing has brought out more strongly than motor-driving the
+over-bearing, selfish nature of too many motor-drivers and their utter
+want of consideration for their fellow men.—<span class="smcap">Lord Wemyss.</span>
+(The attempt to kill drivers and driving with one stone leaves both
+very slightly wounded. For what should show up the drivers more
+than the driving? and whom should the driving show up more than the
+drivers?)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The commonest form of this is due to conscientious but mistaken zeal
+for correctness, which prefers, for instance, <i>without oppressing or
+without plundering</i> to <i>without oppressing or plundering</i>. The
+first form excludes only one of the offences, and is therefore, though
+probably meant to be twice as emphatic, actually much weaker than the
+second, which excludes both. With <i>and</i> instead of <i>or</i>, it
+is another matter.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Actual experience has shown that a gun constructed on the wire
+system can still be utilized effectively without the destruction of
+the weapon or without dangerous effects, even with its inner tube
+split.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Union must be maintained without pandering to such prejudices on
+the one hand, <i>or without</i> giving way on the other to the ...
+schemes of the Nationalists.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>He inhibited him, on pain of excommunication, from seeking a
+divorce in his own English Courts, <i>or from</i> contracting a new
+marriage.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (Half excused by the negative sense
+of <i>inhibit</i>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</span></p>
+
+
+<p>46. <span class="smcap">‘Split’ Auxiliaries.</span></p>
+
+<p>Some writers, holding that there is the same objection to split
+compound verbs as to split infinitives, prefer to place any adverb or
+qualifying phrase not between the auxiliary and the other component,
+but before both. Provided that the adverb is then separated from the
+auxiliary, no harm is done: ‘Evidently he was mistaken’ is often as
+good as ‘He was evidently mistaken’, and suits all requirements of
+accentuation. But the placing of the adverb immediately before or
+after the auxiliary depends, according to established usage, upon
+the relative importance of the two components. When the main accent
+is to fall upon the second component, the normal place of the adverb
+is between the two; it is only when the same verb is repeated with a
+change in the tense or mood of the auxiliary, that the adverb should
+come first. ‘He evidently was deceived’ implies, or should imply, that
+the verb <i>deceived</i> has been used before, and that the point of
+the sentence depends upon the emphatic auxiliary; accordingly we should
+write ‘The possibility of his being deceived had never occurred to
+me; but he evidently was deceived’, but ‘I relied implicitly on his
+knowledge of the facts; but he was evidently deceived’. In our first
+two examples below the adverb is rightly placed first to secure the
+emphasis on the auxiliary: in all the others the above principle of
+accentuation is violated. The same order of words is required by the
+copula with whatever kind of complement.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>I recognize this truth, and always have recognized it.</p>
+
+<p>Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be
+so, as long as the world endures.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>They never are suffered to succeed in their
+opposition.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>She had received the homage of ... and occasionally had deigned to
+breathe forth....—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span></p>
+
+<p>He ordered breakfast as calmly as if he never had left his
+home.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span></p>
+
+<p>Miss Becky, whose sympathetic powers never had been called into action
+before.—<span class="smcap">Ferrier.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>They now were bent on taking the work into their own
+hands.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span></p>
+
+<p>There may have been a time when a king was a god, but he now is pretty
+much on a level with his subjects.—<span class="smcap">Jowett.</span></p>
+
+<p>They both are contradicted by all positive evidence.—<span class="smcap">W. H.
+Mallock.</span></p>
+
+<p>Religious art at once complete and sincere never yet has
+existed.—<span class="smcap">Ruskin.</span></p>
+
+<p>Not mere empty ideas, but what were once realities, and that I long
+have thought decayed.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>So that he might assist at a Bible class, from which he never had been
+absent.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.</span></p>
+
+<p>If we would write an essay, we necessarily must have something to
+say.—<span class="smcap">Bygott &amp; Jones.</span></p>
+
+<p>The protectionists lately have been affirming that the autumn session
+will be devoted to railway questions.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Visitors no longer can drive in open carriages along the
+littoral.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It still is the fact that his mind ... was essentially the mind of a
+poet.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>To whom in any case its style would have not appealed.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>To go wrong with <i>not</i> is an achievement possible only with
+triple compounds, where the principal division is of course between
+the finite (<i>would</i>) and the infinitive with participle (<i>have
+appealed</i>). ‘Would not have appealed’ must be written, though at an
+enormous sacrifice of ‘distinction’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This enhanced value of old English silver may be due partly to the
+increase in the number of collectors; but it also has been largely
+influenced by the publication....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Fry showed to a very great extent his power of defence.... To-day,
+if runs are to be of importance, he very likely will show his powers
+of hitting.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>47. <span class="smcap">Overloading</span></p>
+
+<p>A single sentence is sometimes made to carry a double burden:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>So unique a man as Sir George Lewis has, in truth, rarely been lost to
+this country.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The meaning is not ‘Men like Sir G. Lewis have seldom been lost’, but
+‘Men like the late Sir G. Lewis have seldom been found’. But instead
+of <i>the late</i> a word was required that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</span> should express proper
+concern; <i>lost</i> is a short cut to ‘men so unique as he whose loss
+we now deplore’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There are but few men whose lives abound in such wild and
+romantic adventure, and, for the most part, crowned with
+success.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The writer does not mean ‘adventures so wild, so romantic, and so
+successful in the main’; that is shown by the qualifying parenthesis,
+which is obviously one of comment on the individual case. What he does
+mean ought to have been given in two sentences: ‘There are but few ...
+adventure;—’s, moreover, was for the most part crowned with success’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The Sultan regrets that the distance and the short notice alone
+prevent him from coming in person.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is as much as to say that the Sultan wishes there were more
+obstacles. Read: ‘The Sultan regrets that he cannot come in person;
+nothing but the distance and the short notice could prevent him’.</p>
+
+
+<p>48. <span class="smcap">Demonstrative, Noun, and Participle or Adjective</span></p>
+
+<p>Of the forms, <i>persons interested</i>, <i>the persons interested</i>,
+<i>those interested</i>, <i>those who are interested</i>, one or
+another may better suit a particular phrase or context. <i>Those
+interested</i> is the least to be recommended, especially with
+an active participle or adjective. The form <i>those persons
+interested</i> is a hybrid, and is very seldom used by any good writer;
+but it is becoming so common in inferior work that it is thought
+necessary to give many examples. The first two, of the form <i>those
+interested</i>, will pass, though <i>those who were concerned</i>,
+<i>all who drive</i>, would be better. In the others <i>that</i> and
+<i>those</i> should be either replaced by <i>the</i> or (sometimes)
+simply omitted.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The idea of a shortage had hardly entered the heads even of
+<i>those</i> most immediately <i>concerned</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>They are the terror of all <i>those driving</i> or riding spirited
+horses.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</span></p>
+
+<p>At every time and in every place throughout <i>that</i> very
+limited <i>portion</i> of time and space <i>open</i> to human
+observation.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>That part</i> of the regular army <i>quartered</i> at home should
+be grouped by divisions.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Here they beheld acres of <i>that</i> stupendous <i>growth seen</i>
+only in the equinoctial regions.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is not likely that General Kuropatkine has amassed <i>those
+reserves</i> of military stores and supplies plainly <i>required</i>
+by the circumstances of his situation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The insurrection had been general throughout the country,
+at least <i>that portion</i> of it <i>occupied</i> by the
+Spaniards.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+
+<p>My amendment would be that <i>that part</i> of the report
+<i>dealing</i> with the dividend on the ‘A’ shares ... be not
+adopted.—Company report.</p>
+
+<p>We shall fail to secure <i>that unanimity</i> of thought and doctrine
+so <i>indispensable</i> both for....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... in order to minimize the effect produced by <i>that portion</i> of
+the Admirals’ report <i>favourable</i> to England.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A struggle ... which our nation must be prepared to face in the last
+resort, or else give way to <i>those countries</i> not <i>afraid</i>
+to accept the responsibilities and sacrifices inseparable from
+Empire.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Civil servants will not, nay, cannot, work with <i>that freedom</i> of
+action so <i>essential</i> to good work in the case of such persons,
+so long as....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>To <i>those Colonies unable</i> to concur with these suggestions a
+warning should be addressed.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>49. <span class="smcap">False Scent</span></p>
+
+<p>It is most annoying to a reader to be misled about the construction,
+and therefore most foolish in a writer to mislead him. In the sentences
+that follow, <i>facilities</i> and <i>excesses</i> are naturally taken
+as in the same construction, and similarly <i>influences</i> and
+<i>nature</i>, until the ends of the sentences show us that we have
+gone wrong. These are very bad cases; but minor offences of the kind
+are very common, and should be carefully guarded against.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He gloats over the facilities the excesses and the blunders of the
+authorities have given his comrades for revolutionary action among the
+masses.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature,
+to say<span class="pagenum" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</span> nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it
+more than usually difficult for him to cast aside or rightly
+subordinate.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That there is no comma between <i>facilities</i> and <i>the
+excesses</i> is no defence, seeing how often commas go wrong; indeed
+the comma after <i>age</i> in the second piece, which is strictly
+wrong, is a proof how little reliance is to be placed on such signs.</p>
+
+
+<p>50. <span class="smcap">Misplacement of Words</span></p>
+
+<p>Generous interpretation will generally get at a writer’s meaning; but
+for him to rely on that is to appeal <i>ad misericordiam</i>. Appended
+to the sentences, when necessary, is the result of supposing them to
+mean what they say.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is with grief and pain, that, <i>as admirers of the British
+aristocracy</i>, we find ourselves obliged to admit the
+existence of so many ill qualities in a person whose name is in
+Debrett.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span> (implies that admirers must admit this
+more than other people)</p>
+
+<p>It is from this fate that the son of a commanding prime minister
+is <i>at any rate</i> preserved.—<span class="smcap">Bagehot.</span> (implies that
+<i>preserved</i> is a weak word used instead of a stronger)</p>
+
+<p>And even if we could suppose it to be our duty, it is not one which,
+<i>as was shown in the last chapter</i>, we are practically competent
+to perform.—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>The chairman said there was no sadder sight in the world than to see
+women drunk, because they seemed to lose <i>complete</i> control of
+themselves. (implies that losing complete control leaves you with less
+than if you lost incomplete control)</p>
+
+<p>The soldiers are deeply chagrined at having had to give up positions,
+<i>in obedience to orders</i>, which the Japanese could not
+take.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information
+than by the printed page. I <i>only</i> would say, that it needs a
+strong head to bear that diet.—<span class="smcap">Emerson.</span> (implies that no one
+else would say it)</p>
+
+<p>Yes, the laziest of human beings, through the providence of God, <i>a
+being, too, of rather inferior capacity</i>, acquires the written part
+of a language so difficult that....—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>Right or wrong as his hypothesis may be, no one that knows him will
+suspect that he himself had not seen it, and seen over it.... Neither,
+<i>as we often hear</i>, is there any superhuman faculty required to
+follow him.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span> (implies that we often hear there is
+not)</p>
+
+<p>This, we say to ourselves, may be all very true (for have
+we, <i>too</i>, not browsed in the Dictionary of National
+Biography?); but why does Tanner<span class="pagenum" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</span> say it all, just at that moment,
+to....—<i>Times.</i> (implies that others have refrained from
+browsing)</p>
+
+<p>But in 1798 the Irish rising was crushed in a defeat of the insurgents
+at Vinegar Hill; and Tippoo’s death in the storm of his own capital,
+Seringapatam, <i>only</i> saved him from witnessing the English
+conquest of Mysore.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (implies that that was all
+it saved him from)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>51. <span class="smcap">Ambiguous Position</span></p>
+
+<p>In this matter judgement is required. A captious critic might find
+examples on almost every page of almost any writer; but most of
+them, though they may strictly be called ambiguous, would be quite
+justifiable. On the other hand a careless writer can nearly always
+plead, even for a bad offence, that an attentive reader would take
+the thing the right way. That is no defence; a rather inattentive and
+sleepy reader is the true test; if the run of the sentence is such that
+he at first sight refers whatever phrase is in question to the wrong
+government, then the ambiguity is to be condemned.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Louis XVIII, dying in 1824, was succeeded, as Charles X, by his
+brother the Count d’Artois.—<span class="smcap">E. Sanderson.</span> (The sleepy
+reader, assisted by memories of James the First and Sixth, concludes,
+though not without surprise, which perhaps finally puts him on the
+right track, that Louis XVIII of France was also Charles X of some
+other country)</p>
+
+<p>In 1830 Paris overthrew monarchy by divine right.—<span class="smcap">Morley.</span>
+(<i>By divine right</i> looks so much more like an adverbial
+than an adjectival phrase that the sleepy reader takes it with
+<i>overthrew</i>)</p>
+
+<p>(From review of a book on ambidexterity) Two kinds of emphatic
+type are used, and both are liberally sprinkled about the pages
+on some principle which is not at all obvious. The practice may
+have its merits, like ambidexterity, but it is generally eschewed
+by good writers who know their business, although they are not
+ambidextrous.—<i>Times.</i> (The balance of the sentence is extremely
+bad if the <i>although</i> clause is subordinated to <i>who</i>; and
+the sleepy reader accordingly does not take it so, but with <i>is
+eschewed</i>, and so makes nonsense)</p>
+
+<p>It was a temper not only legal, but pedantic in its legality,
+intolerant from its very sense of a moral order and law <i>of</i> the
+lawlessness and disorder of a personal tyranny.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span></p>
+
+<p>The library over the porch of the church, which is large and handsome,
+contains one thousand printed books.—<span class="smcap">R. Curzon.</span> (A large and
+handsome library, or porch, or church?)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</span></p>
+
+<p>Both these last are very unkind to the poor sleepy reader; it is true
+that in one of them he is inexcusable if he goes wrong, but we should
+for our own sakes give him as few chances of going wrong as possible.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Luck and dexterity always give more pleasure than intellect and
+knowledge; because they fill up what they fall <i>on to</i> the
+brim at once, and people run to them with acclamation at the
+splash.—<span class="smcap">Landor.</span> (<i>On</i> and <i>to</i> so regularly
+belong together now, though they did not in Landor’s time, that it is
+disconcerting to be asked to pause between them)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>52. <span class="smcap">Ambiguous Enumeration</span></p>
+
+<p>In comma’d enumerations, care should be taken not to insert appositions
+that may be taken, even if only at first sight, for separate members.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Some high officials of the Headquarter Staff, including the officer
+who is primus inter pares, the Director of Military Operations, and
+the Director of Staff duties....—<i>Times.</i> (Two, or three,
+persons? Probably two; but those who can be sure of this do not need
+the descriptive clause, and those who need it cannot be sure)</p>
+
+<p>Lord Curzon, Sir Edmond Elles, the present Military Member, and
+the Civilian Members of Council traverse the most material of Lord
+Kitchener’s statements of fact.—<i>Times.</i> (Is Sir E. Elles the
+Military Member? No need to tell any one who knows; and any one who
+does not know is not told)</p>
+
+<p>I here wish to remark that Lord Dufferin first formed the Mobilization
+Committee, of which the Commander-in-Chief is President, and the
+Military Member, Secretary, Military Department, and the heads of
+departments both at Army Headquarters and under the Government of
+India, are members with the express intention of....—<i>Times.</i>
+(Is the Military Member Secretary of the Mobilization Committee? Well,
+he may be, but a certain amount of patience shows us that the sentence
+we are reading does not tell us so)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>53. <span class="smcap">Antics</span></p>
+
+<p>A small selection must suffice. Straining after the dignified, the
+unusual, the poignant, the high-flown, the picturesque, the striking,
+often turns out badly. It is not worth while to attain any of these
+aims at the cost of being unnatural.</p>
+
+<p>1. Use of stiff, full-dress, literary, or out-of-the-way words.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And in no direction was the slightest concern
+<i>evinced</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The majority display <i>scant</i> anxiety for news.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... treating his characters on broader lines, occupying himself with
+more elemental emotions and types, and forsaking altogether his almost
+<i>meticulous</i> analysis of motive and temperament.—<i>Westminster
+Gazette.</i> (We recommend to this reviewer a more meticulous use of
+the dictionary)</p>
+
+<p>And most probably he is voted a fool for not doing as many men in
+similar positions are doing—viz., making up for a lack of principle
+by an abundance of <i>bawbees</i> easily extracted from a large class
+of contractors who are only too willing....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is Victor Hugo’s people, the motives on which they act, the means
+they take to carry out their objects, their relations to one another,
+that strike us as so <i>monumentally</i> droll.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Nothing definite has been decided upon as to the exact date of the
+visits, the <i>venue</i> of the visits, the....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>2. Pretentious circumlocution.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>That life was brought to a close in November 1567, at an age,
+probably, not far from <i>the one fixed by the sacred writer as the
+term of human existence</i>.—<span class="smcap">Prescott.</span></p>
+
+<p>She skated extremely badly, but with an enjoyment that was almost
+pathetic, <i>in consideration of the persistence of ‘frequent
+fall’</i>.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>The question of an extension of the Zemstvos to the southwest
+provinces is believed to be under consideration. It is understood that
+the visit of General Kleigels to St. Petersburg is <i>not unconnected
+therewith</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>3. Poetic phraseology, especially the Carlylese superlative. Almost any
+page of Milton’s prose will show whence Carlyle had this; but it is
+most offensive in ordinary modern writing.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A period when, as she puts it, men and women of fashion ‘tried not to
+be themselves, yet never so successfully displayed <i>the naked hearts
+of them</i>’.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The last week in February was harnessing her seven bright steeds in
+shining tandem in the silent courtyard of the time to be.—<i>The
+Lamp.</i></p>
+
+<p>Our enveloping movements since some days prove successful, and
+fiercest battle is now proceeding.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The unhappy man persuades himself that he has in truth become a new
+creature, of the wonderfullest symmetry.—<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. Patronizing superiority expressed by describing simple things in
+long words.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</span></p><div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The skating-rink, where happy folk all day slide with set purpose on
+the elusive material, and with great content perform mystic evolutions
+of the most complicated order.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>5. The determined picturesque.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Across the street blank shutters flung back the gaslight in cold
+smears.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+
+<p>The outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman
+not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed rope-purfled sails
+bulging sideways like insolent cheeks.—<span class="smcap">Kipling.</span></p>
+
+<p>An under-carry of grey woolly spindrift of a slaty colour flung
+itself noiselessly in the opposite direction, a little above the tree
+tops.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span></p>
+
+<p>Then for a space the ground was more clayey, and a carpet of green
+water-weeds were combed and waved by the woven ropes of water.—<span class="smcap">E.
+F. Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>At some distance off, in Winchester probably, which pricked the
+blue haze of heat with dim spires, a church bell came muffled and
+languid.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>A carriage drive lay in long curves like a flicked whip lash,
+surmounting terrace after terrace set with nugatory nudities.—<span class="smcap">E.
+F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>6. Recherché epithets.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Perhaps both Milton and Beethoven would live in our memories as
+writers of idylls, had not a <i>brusque</i> infirmity dreadfully shut
+them off from their fellow men.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The high <i>canorous</i> note of the north-easter.—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+
+<p>By specious and <i>clamant</i> exceptions.—<span class="smcap">Stevenson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>7. Formal antithesis or parallel. This particular form of artificiality
+is perhaps too much out of fashion to be dangerous at present. The
+great storehouse of it is in Macaulay.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>He had neither the qualities which make dulness respectable, nor the
+qualities which make libertinism attractive.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>The first two kings of the House of Hanover had neither those
+hereditary rights which have often supplied the place of merit, nor
+those personal qualities which have often supplied the defect of
+title.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>But he was indolent and dissolute, and had early impaired a
+fine estate with the dice-box, and a fine constitution with the
+bottle.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span></p>
+
+<p>The disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the
+revolution of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of
+Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the Reformation.—<span class="smcap">J.
+R. Green.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</span></p>
+
+<p>8. Author’s self-consciousness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>‘You mean it is,’ she said—‘about Bertie’. Charlie made the noise
+usually written ‘Pshaw’.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>9. Intrusive smartness—another form of self-consciousness.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Round her lay piles of press notices, which stripped the American
+variety of the English language bare of epithets.—<span class="smcap">E. F.
+Benson.</span></p>
+
+<p>Income-tax payers are always treated to the fine words which butter
+no parsnips, and are always assured that it is really a danger to the
+State to go on skinning them in time of peace to such an extent as to
+leave little integument to remove in time of war.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Yet in the relentless city, where no one may pause for a moment unless
+he wishes to be left behind in the great universal race for gold which
+begins as soon as a child can walk, and ceases not until he is long
+past walking, the climbing of the thermometer into the nineties <i>is
+an acrobatic feat which concerns the thermometer only</i>, and at the
+junction of Sixth Avenue and Broadway there was no slackening in the
+tides of the affairs of men.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>54. <span class="smcap">Miscellaneous Types of Journalese</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Mr. Lionel Phillips maintained that it was impossible to introduce
+white unskilled <i>labour</i> on a large scale <i>as a payable
+proposition</i> without lowering the position of the white
+man.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>How <i>labour</i> can be a <i>proposition</i>, and how a
+<i>proposition</i> can be <i>payable</i> it is not easy to say. The
+sentence seems to mean: ‘to introduce ... labour on a large scale and
+make it pay’. This is what comes of a fondness for abstracts.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>They have not hitherto discovered the formula for the intelligent
+use of our unrivalled resources for the <i>satisfaction of our
+security</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This perhaps means: ‘They have not yet discovered how our unrivalled
+resources may be made to ensure our safety’.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>An attempt to efface the ill-effects of the Czar’s refusal to see
+the workmen has been made <i>by</i> the grant <i>of</i> an interview
+<i>by</i> the Czar <i>at</i> Tsarkoe Selo <i>to</i> a body <i>of</i>
+workmen officially selected to represent the masses.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The powerful and convincing article on the question of War Office
+administration as it affects the Volunteers to be found in this
+month’s National.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Russian Government is at last face to face with the greatest
+crisis of the war, <i>in the shape of the fact that</i> the Siberian
+railway....—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</span></p>
+
+<p>No year passes now without evidence of the truth of the
+statement that the work of government is becoming increasingly
+difficult.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>It has taken a leading part in protesting against the Congo State’s
+treatment of natives controlled by it, and in procuring the pressure
+which the House of Commons has put upon our Government with a view to
+international insistence on fulfilment of the obligations entered upon
+by the Congo Government as regards native rights.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The outcome of a desire to convince the Government of the expediency
+of granting the return recently ordered by the House with regard to
+the names, ....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In default of information of the result of the deliberations which
+it has been stated the Imperial Defence Committee have been engaged
+in....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The volunteer does not volunteer to be compelled to suffer long,
+filthy, and neglected illnesses and too often death, yet such was
+South Africa on a vast scale, and is inevitable in war under the
+present official indifference.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>55. <span class="smcap">Somewhat</span>, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>Indulgence in qualifying adverbs, as <i>perhaps</i>, <i>possibly</i>,
+<i>probably</i>, <i>rather</i>, <i>a little</i>, <i>somewhat</i>,
+amounts with English journalists to a disease; the intemperate orgy
+of moderation is renewed every morning. As <i>somewhat</i> is rapidly
+swallowing up the rest, we shall almost confine our attention to it;
+and it is useless to deprecate the use without copious illustration.
+Examples will be classified under headings, though these are not quite
+mutually exclusive.</p>
+
+<p>1. <i>Somewhat</i> clearly illogical.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A number of questions to the Prime Minister have been put upon the
+paper with the object of eliciting information as to the personnel of
+the proposed Royal Commission and the scope of their inquiry. These
+are now <i>somewhat belated</i> in view of the official announcement
+made this morning.—<i>Times.</i> (The announcement contained both the
+list of members and the full reference)</p>
+
+<p>Thrills which gave him <i>rather a unique</i>
+pleasure.—<span class="smcap">Hutton.</span></p>
+
+<p>Russian despatches are <i>somewhat inconsistent</i>, one of them
+stating that there is no change in the position of the armies, while
+another says that the Japanese advance continues.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Being faint with hunger I was <i>somewhat in a listless condition</i>
+bordering on stupor.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the light of these, it would be hard to say what full belatedness,
+inconsistency, and listlessness may be.</p>
+
+<p>2. <i>Somewhat</i> with essentially emphatic words.</p>
+
+<p>We may call a thing dirty, or filthy; if we choose the latter, we mean
+to be emphatic; it is absurd to use the emphatic word and take away its
+emphasis with <i>somewhat</i>, when we might use the gentler word by
+itself.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>A member of the Legislative Council is allowed now to speak in
+Dutch if he cannot express himself clearly in English; under the
+proposed arrangement he will be able to decide for himself in which
+medium he can express himself the more clearly. Surely a <i>somewhat
+infinitesimal</i> point.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, it is <i>rather agonizing</i> at times to the
+philologist.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The distances at which the movements are being conducted receive
+a <i>somewhat startling</i> illustration from the statement
+that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Under these circumstances it is <i>somewhat extraordinary</i> to
+endeavour to save the Government from blame.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>In various evidently ‘well-informed’ journals the <i>somewhat
+amazing</i> proposition is set up that....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>But unfortunately the word ‘duties’ got accidentally substituted
+for ‘bounties’ in two places, and made the utterance <i>somewhat
+unintelligible</i> to the general reader.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The songs are sung by students to the accompaniment of a <i>somewhat
+agonizing</i> band.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>There is a mysterious man-killing orchid, a great Eastern
+jewel of State, and many other properties, some of them <i>a
+little well worn</i>, suitable for the staging of a tale of
+mystery.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Some of the instances in these two classes would be defended as
+humorous under-statement. But if this hackneyed trick is an example of
+the national humour, we had better cease making reflections on German
+want of humour.</p>
+
+<p>3. <i>Somewhat</i> shyly announcing an epigrammatic or well-chosen
+phrase.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There is a very pretty problem awaiting the decision of Prince Bülow,
+and one which is entirely worthy of his <i>somewhat acrobatic</i>
+diplomacy.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Gaston engaged in a controversy on the origin of evil, which
+terminated by his <i>somewhat abruptly quitting his Alma
+Mater</i>.—<span class="smcap">Beaconsfield.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</span></span></p>
+
+<p>Why even Tennyson became an amateur milkman to <i>somewhat
+conceal and excuse the shame and degradation of writing
+verse</i>.—<span class="smcap">Corelli.</span></p>
+
+<p>The virtuous but <i>somewhat unpleasing</i> type of the Roman
+nation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The sight of these soldiers and sailors sitting round camp-fires in
+the midst of the snow in fashionable thoroughfares, transforming the
+city into an armed camp, is <i>somewhat weird</i>.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>While Mary was trying to decipher these <i>somewhat mystic</i>
+lines.—<span class="smcap">S. Ferrier.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>4. <i>Somewhat</i> conveying a sneer.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is somewhat strange that any one connected with this institution
+should be so unfamiliar with its regulations.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... that the conclusion arrived at by the shortest route is
+to be accepted—a somewhat extravagant doctrine, according to
+which....—<span class="smcap">Balfour.</span></p>
+
+<p>But very few points of general interest have been elicited in any
+quarter by these somewhat academic reflections.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>This somewhat glowing advertisement of the new loan.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>5. The genuine <i>somewhat</i>, merely tame, timid, undecided,
+conciliatory, or polite.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>It is somewhat pitiful to see the efforts of a foreign State directed,
+not to the pursuit of its own aims by legitimate means, but to the
+gratification of personal hostility to a great public servant of
+France.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I am certain that the clergy themselves only too gladly acquiesce in
+this somewhat illogical division of labour.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>This, no doubt, is what Professor Ray Lankester is driving at in his
+somewhat intemperate onslaught.—Times.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>rather mysterious</i> visit of S. Tittoni, the Italian Foreign
+Minister, to Germany.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>These are of <i>rather remarkable</i> promise; the head shows
+an unusual power of realizing character under a purely ideal
+conception.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The <i>rather finely</i> conceived statuette called ‘The Human Task’
+by Mr. Oliver Wheatley.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is somewhat the fashion to say that in these days....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>A letter from one whose learning and experience entitle him to be
+heard, conceived, as I think, in a spirit of somewhat exaggerated
+pessimism.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>The statement made by the writer is somewhat open to
+doubt.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I have read with much interest the letters on the subject of
+hush-money, especially as they account to me somewhat for the
+difficulties I have experienced.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It would be valuable if he would somewhat expand his ideas regarding
+local defence by Volunteers.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</span></p>
+
+<p>Sir,—I have been somewhat interested in the recent correspondence in
+your columns.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>So many persons of undoubted integrity believe in ‘dowsing’ that he is
+a somewhat rash man who summarily dismisses the matter.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Sir Francis Bertie, whose dislike of unnecessary publicity is somewhat
+pronounced.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is not too much to say that any one who hopes to write well had
+better begin by abjuring <i>somewhat</i> altogether.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot tell whether this long list will have a dissuasive effect, or
+will be referred to foolish individual prejudice against an unoffending
+word. But on the first assumption we should like to add that a not
+less dissuasive collection might easily be made of the intensifier
+<i>distinctly</i> than of the qualifier <i>somewhat</i>. The use meant
+is that seen in:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The effect as the procession careers through the streets of Berlin is
+described as distinctly interesting.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Distinctly</i> gives the patronizing interest, as <i>somewhat</i>
+gives the contemptuous indifference, with which a superior person is
+to be conceived surveying life; and context too often reveals that the
+superiority is imaginary.</p>
+
+
+<p>56. <span class="smcap">Clumsy Patching</span></p>
+
+<p>When a writer detects a fault in what he has written or thought of
+writing, his best course is to recast the whole sentence. The next best
+is to leave it alone. The worst is to patch it in such a way that the
+reader has his attention drawn, works out the original version, and
+condemns his author for carelessness aggravated by too low an estimate
+of his own intelligence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Numerous allegations, too, were made of prejudiced
+treatment <i>measured out against</i> motorists by rural
+magistrates.—<i>Times.</i> (avoidance of the jingle in <i>meted</i>
+out to <i>motor</i>ists)</p>
+
+<p>No crew proved to be of the very highest class; but this,
+perhaps, <i>led the racing to be</i> on the whole close and
+exciting.—<i>Times.</i> (avoidance of the jingle in led to the
+rac<i>ing</i> be<i>ing</i>)</p>
+
+<p>The Lord Mayor last night entertained the Judges <i>to</i> a banquet
+at the Mansion House.—<i>Times.</i> (avoidance of double <i>at</i>)</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</span></p>
+
+<p>The occupants talked, inspected the cars <i>of one another</i>,
+interchanged tales of....—<i>Times.</i> (avoidance, in grammatical
+pusillanimity, of <i>one another’s cars</i>)</p>
+
+<p>... who have only themselves in view <i>by</i> breaking through
+it.—<span class="smcap">Richardson.</span> (avoidance of double <i>in</i>)</p>
+
+<p>He nodded, <i>as one who would say</i>, ‘I have already thought of
+that’.—<span class="smcap">Crockett.</span> (avoidance of the archaism, which however
+is the only natural form, <i>as who should say</i>)</p>
+
+<p>It is now practically certain that the crews of Nebogatoff’s squadron
+were in a state of mutiny, and that this is the explanation <i>for</i>
+the surrender <i>of</i> these vessels.—<i>Times.</i> (avoidance of
+double <i>of</i>)</p>
+
+<p>And <i>for</i> the first time <i>after</i> twenty years the Whigs saw
+themselves again in power.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (Avoidance of double
+<i>for</i>; if <i>after</i> had been originally intended, we should
+have had <i>at last</i> instead of <i>for the first time</i>)</p>
+
+<p>And oppressive laws forced even these <i>few</i> with <i>scant</i>
+exceptions to profess Protestantism.—<span class="smcap">J. R. Green.</span> (To avoid
+the repetition of <i>few</i> the affected word <i>scant</i> has been
+admitted)</p>
+
+<p>Given competition, any line would vie with the others in mirrors
+and gilded furniture; but if there is none, why spend a penny? Not
+a passenger the less will travel because the mode of transit is
+<i>bestial</i>.—<span class="smcap">E. F. Benson.</span> (To avoid the overdone word
+<i>beastly</i>—which however happens to be the right one here;
+<i>bestial</i> describes character or conduct)</p>
+
+<p>There is, indeed, a kind of timorous atheism in the man who dares
+not trust God to <i>render</i> all efforts to interpret his
+Word—and what is criticism but interpretation?—work together for
+good.—<i>Spectator.</i> (<i>Render</i> is substituted for <i>make</i>
+because <i>make efforts</i> might be taken as complete without the
+<i>work together</i> that is due. Unfortunately, <i>to render efforts
+work together</i> is not even English at all)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>57. <span class="smcap">Omission of the Conjunction ‘that’</span></p>
+
+<p>This is quite legitimate, but often unpleasant. It is partly a matter
+of idiom, as, <i>I presume you know</i>, but <i>I assume that you
+know</i>; partly of avoiding false scent, as in the sixth example
+below, where <i>scheme</i> might be object to <i>discover</i>. In
+particular it is undesirable to omit <i>that</i> when a long clause or
+phrase intervenes between it and the subject and verb it introduces, as
+in the first four examples.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>And it is to be hoped, <i>as the tree-planting season has arrived</i>,
+Stepney will now put its scheme in hand.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</span></p>
+
+<p>Sir,—We notice <i>in a leading article in your issue to-day on
+the subject of the carriage of Australian mails</i> you imply that
+the increased price demanded by the Orient Pacific Line was due
+to....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Lord Balfour ... moved that it is necessary, <i>before the
+constituencies are asked to determine upon the desirability of such
+conference</i>, they should be informed first....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Lord Spencer held that it was impossible <i>with regard to a question
+which had broken up the Government and disturbed the country</i> they
+could go into a conference which....—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>If the Australian is to be convinced that is an unreasonable wish, it
+will not be by arguments about taxation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I think he would discover the scheme unfolded and explained in them is
+a perfectly intelligible and comprehensive one.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is not till He cometh the ideal will be seen.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>And it is only by faith the evils you mention as productive of war can
+be cast out of our hearts.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I do not wish it to be understood that I consider all those who
+applied for work during the past two winters and who are now seeking
+employment are impostors.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>I assume Turkey would require such a cash payment of at least
+£500,000.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>Tawno leaped into the saddle, where he really looked like Gunnar of
+Hlitharend, save and except the complexion of Gunnar was florid,
+whereas that of Tawno was of nearly Mulatto darkness.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In some of these the motive is obvious, to avoid one <i>that</i>-clause
+depending on another; the end was good, but the means bad; a more
+thorough recasting was called for.</p>
+
+
+<p>58. <span class="smcap">Meaningless ‘while’</span></p>
+
+<p><i>While</i>, originally temporal, has a legitimate use also in
+contrasts. The further colourless use of it, whether with verb or
+with participle, as a mere elegant variation for <i>and</i> is very
+characteristic of journalese, and much to be deprecated.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>Of its value there can be no question. The editor’s article on
+‘Constitutions’, for example, and that of Mr. W. Wyse on ‘Law’ both
+well repay most careful study; <i>while</i> when Sir R. Jebb writes
+on ‘Literature’, Dr. Henry Jackson on ‘Philosophy’, or Professor
+Waldstein on ‘Sculpture’, their contributions must be regarded as
+authoritative.—<i>Spectator.</i></p>
+
+<p>The fireman was killed on the spot, and the driver as well as the
+guard of the passenger train was slightly injured; <i>while</i> the
+up-line was blocked for some time with débris from broken trucks of
+the goods train.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</span></p>
+
+<p>The deer on the island took some interest in the proceeding, while the
+peacocks on the lawn screamed at the right time.—<i>Birmingham Daily
+Post.</i></p>
+
+<p>It cannot be contended that it is more profitable to convey a
+passenger the twenty-four miles to Yarmouth for payment than to accept
+the same payment without performing the service; <i>while</i>, if the
+company wish to discourage the use of cheap week-end tickets, why
+issue them at all?—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>59. <span class="smcap">Commercialisms</span></p>
+
+<p>Certain uses of <i>such</i>, <i>the same</i>, and other words, redolent
+of commerce and the law, should be reserved for commercial and legal
+contexts. <i>Anent</i>, which has been noticed in Part I, is a legalism
+of this kind. In the Brontë instances quoted, a twang of flippancy will
+be observed; the other writers are probably unconscious.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>This gentleman’s state of mind was very harrowing, and I was glad when
+he wound up his exposition of the same.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>The present was no occasion for showy array; my dun mist crape would
+suffice, and I sought the same in the great oak wardrobe in the
+dormitory.—<span class="smcap">C. Brontë.</span></p>
+
+<p>There are certain books that almost defy classification, and this
+volume ... is one of such.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>I am pleased to read the correspondence in your paper, and hope that
+good will be the result of the same.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>The man who has approached nearest to the teaching of the Master, and
+carried the same to its logical and practical conclusion is General
+Booth.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Do I believe that by not having had the hands of a bishop laid upon
+my head I cannot engage in the outward and visible commemoration of
+the Lord’s Supper as not being fit to receive the same?—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>But do the great majority of people let their belief in the hereafter
+affect their conduct with regard to the same. I think not.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>Let us hope, Sir, that it may be possible in your own interests to
+continue the same till the subject has had a good innings.—<i>Daily
+Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>I believe, and have believed since, a tiny child, made miserable by
+the loss of a shilling, I prayed my Heavenly Father to help me to
+recover the same.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is of course possible, in this connexion, that the Prayer Book is
+responsible for ‘the same’.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>If I am refused the Sacrament I do not believe that I shall have
+less chance of entering the Kingdom of God than if I received such
+Sacrament.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>But when it comes to us following his life and example, in all
+its intricate details, all will, I think, agree that such is
+impossible.—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>An appeal to philanthropy is hardly necessary, the grounds for such
+being so self-evident.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... such a desire it should be the purpose of a Unionist Government
+to foster; but such will not be attained under the present regime in
+Dublin.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>... regaling themselves on half-pints at the said village
+hostelries.—<span class="smcap">Borrow.</span></p>
+
+<p>Having read with much interest the letters re ‘believe only’ now
+appearing in the <i>Daily Telegraph</i>....—<i>Daily Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>He ruined himself and family by his continued experiments for the
+benefit of the British nation.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>60. <span class="smcap">Pet Phrases</span></p>
+
+<p>Vivid writers must be careful not to repeat any conspicuous phrase so
+soon that a reader of ordinary memory has not had time to forget it
+before it invites his attention again. Whatever its merits, to use it
+twice (unless deliberately and with point) is much worse than never
+to have thought of it. The pages below are those of Green’s <i>Short
+History</i> (1875).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>The temper of the first [King George] was that of a gentleman usher.
+p. 704.</p>
+
+<p>Bute was a mere court favourite, with the abilities of a gentleman
+usher. p. 742.</p>
+
+<p>‘For weeks’, laughs Horace Walpole, ‘it rained gold boxes’. p. 729.</p>
+
+<p>‘We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is’, laughed
+Horace Walpole. p. 737.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The two following passages occur on pp. 6 and 81 of <i>The Bride of
+Lammermoor</i> (Standard Edition).</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>In short, Dick Tinto’s friends feared that he had acted like the
+animal called the sloth, which, having eaten up the last green leaf
+upon the tree where it has established itself, ends by tumbling down
+from the top, and dying of inanition.</p>
+
+<p>‘... but as for us, Caleb’s excuses become longer as his diet turns
+more<span class="pagenum" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</span> spare, and I fear we shall realise the stories they tell of
+the sloth: we have almost eaten up the last green leaf on the plant,
+and have nothing left for it but to drop from the tree and break our
+necks.’</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>61. <span class="smcap">‘Also’ as Conjunction; and</span> ‘&amp;c.’</p>
+
+<p><i>Also</i> is an adverb; the use of it as a conjunction is slovenly,
+if not illiterate.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>We are giving these explanations gently as friends, also patiently as
+becomes neighbours.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>‘Special’ is a much overworked word, it being used to mean great in
+degree, also peculiar in kind.—<span class="smcap">R. G. White.</span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Sonnenschein’s volume will show by parallel passages Shakespeare’s
+obligations to the ancients, also the obligations of modern writers to
+Shakespeare.—<i>Times.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The use of <i>&amp;c.</i>, except in business communications and such
+contexts, has often the same sort of illiterate effect. This is very
+common, but one example must suffice.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>There are others with faults of temper, &amp;c., evident enough, beside
+whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good.—<span class="smcap">C.
+Brontë.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="INDEX">INDEX</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><i>In this index all references are to pages. Small italics are used
+for words and phrases; small roman type for subjects incidentally
+mentioned; capitals for subjects expressly, even if not fully,
+treated.</i></p>
+
+
+<ul class="index">
+<li class="ifrst"> A</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>A-</i>, <a href="#Page_41">41-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>A</i> <span class="smcap">between Adjective and Noun</span>, <a href="#Page_329">329-30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Absolute Construction</span>, <a href="#Page_115">115-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Absolute construction and stops, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241-2</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Abstract Words</span>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Accent, Sentence</span>, <a href="#Page_296">296-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Acquiesce to</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Acte de malveillance</i>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Adjectival clause, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Adjectival Clause in Punctuation</span>, <a href="#Page_242">242-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Adverb and Adverbial Clause in Punctuation</span>, <a href="#Page_244">244-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Adverbial clause, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Adverse from</i>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Aesthophysiology</i>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Aggravate</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Aggress</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Aim to</i>, <a href="#Page_132">132-3</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Airs and Graces</span>, Cap. III.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>-al</i>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Albeit</i>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Alit</i>, <a href="#Page_39">39-40</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Alliteration</span>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Allusion</span>, <a href="#Page_307">307-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Alma mater</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Almost quite</i>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Also</i>, conj., and <i>&amp;c.</i></span>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Altogether</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Amateurs, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Ambiguity</span>, <a href="#Page_345">345-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Ambiguity, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_144">144-5</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Ambiguity and punctuation, <a href="#Page_264">264-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Ambiguous Enumeration</span>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Ambiguous Position</span>, <a href="#Page_347">347-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Amend</i>, n., <a href="#Page_38">38-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Americanisms</span>, <a href="#Page_23">23-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>A-moral</i>, <a href="#Page_41">41-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Amphitryon</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Anachronism in thought, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>And</i>, <a href="#Page_233">233-4</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>And which</i></span>, <a href="#Page_85">85-93</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>And who</i></span>, <a href="#Page_85">85-93</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Anent</i>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Animatedly</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Another story</i>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Antagonize</i>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Antecedentem scelestum</i>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Antics</span>, <a href="#Page_348">348-51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Antithesis, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Anyway</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Appendicitis</i>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Archaism</span>, <a href="#Page_193">193-200</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Archaism, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Archaism, positive and negative, <a href="#Page_198">198-200</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Archaism, sustained</span>, <a href="#Page_198">198-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Argon</i>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Arise</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Arrière pensée</i>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>As also</i>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>As</i> and <i>while</i> clauses, slovenly, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>As</i>, Case</span>, <a href="#Page_62">62-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>As</i> Clause, Causal</span>, <a href="#Page_298">298-300</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>As far as, that</i>, <a href="#Page_168">168-70</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>As if</i>, <a href="#Page_156">156-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>As</i>, Liberties with</span>, <a href="#Page_324">324-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>As</i>, Omission of</span>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>As to</i>, <a href="#Page_166">166-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</span> <span class="smcap"><i>As to whether</i></span>, <a href="#Page_333">333-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>As who should say</i>, <a href="#Page_325">325-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>At anyrate</i>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>At the letter</i>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Aught</i>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Au pied de la lettre</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Automedon</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Auxiliaries, Split</span>, <a href="#Page_342">342-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Avail</i>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Available</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Averse from</i>, <a href="#Page_162">162-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Avoidance, clumsy, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_355">355-6</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Await</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Awful</i>, <a href="#Page_49">49-50</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> B</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Back-number</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Back of</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Bagehot, <a href="#Page_210">210-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Balance Inversion</span>, <a href="#Page_182">182-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Balfour, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Ballon d’essai</i>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Banal</i>, <a href="#Page_38">38-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Banality</i>, <a href="#Page_38">38-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bang in the eye</i>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Bastard enumeration, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Be</i> and <i>do</i></span>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Beadnell, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bedrock</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Benefits of</i>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Besant, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bethink</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bêtise</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i><span class="smcap">Between ... or</span></i>, <a href="#Page_328">328-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Between two stools</span>, <a href="#Page_327">327-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Between you and I</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bewilderedly</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bien entendu</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bike</i>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Birrelling</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Blooming</i>, <a href="#Page_49">49-50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Boom</i>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Borrow, G., <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Both ... as well as</i>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bounder</i>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bow-street</i>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Brachylogy</span>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Brackets &amp; double dashes, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Brackets and Stops</span>, <a href="#Page_270">270-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Brisken</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Briticism</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Brontë, C., <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Bureaucracy</i>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Burke, E., <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>But</i>, Superfluous</span>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> C</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Cad</i>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Camaraderie</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Careless Repetition</span>, <a href="#Page_303">303-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Carlyle, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Case</span>, <a href="#Page_60">60-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Case</i>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Case after </span><i>as</i> <span class="smcap">and</span> <i>than</i>, <a href="#Page_62">62-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Case, Compound Possessive</span>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Case Confusion</span>, <a href="#Page_61">61-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Case in absolute construction, <a href="#Page_115">115-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Case in Apposition</span>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Case of Complement</span>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Case of Relatives</span>, <a href="#Page_93">93-4</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99-100</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Causal</span> <i>as</i> <span class="smcap">Clause</span>, <a href="#Page_298">298-300</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Cela va sans dire</i>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Chamade</i>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Chasseur</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Cherchez la femme</i>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Chic</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Circumlocution</span>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Circumlocution, <a href="#Page_165">165-70</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Claim</i>, <a href="#Page_317">317-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Climb down</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Closure</i>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Clumsy patching</span>, <a href="#Page_355">355-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Coastal</i>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Colloquialisms</span>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Colon</span>, <a href="#Page_263">263-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Colon, changed usage of, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Come into her life</i>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Comma before <i>that</i>, <a href="#Page_236">236-7</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249-50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Comma between Independent Sentences</span>, <a href="#Page_254">254-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Comma, distinct functions, <a href="#Page_221">221-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Comma misplaced</span>, <a href="#Page_248">248-50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Comma, Unaccountable</span>, <a href="#Page_262">262-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Commas, illogical, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Commas, unnecessary, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Commercialisms</i>, <a href="#Page_358">358-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Common case, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Common parts</span>, <a href="#Page_314">314-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Comparatives</span>, <a href="#Page_70">70-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</span> <i>Complacent</i>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Complaisant</i>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Compositors, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Compound passives</span>, <a href="#Page_319">319-21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Compound possessive, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Compound verbs and inversion, <a href="#Page_184">184-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Compound words, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Comprehensively</i>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Comprise</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Concision</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Conditionals</span>, <a href="#Page_156">156-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Conditionals, Subjunctive</span>, <a href="#Page_157">157-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Conditionals, subjunctive, <a href="#Page_192">192-3</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Confusion with Negatives</span>, <a href="#Page_321">321-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Conjunctions, Compound</span>, <a href="#Page_165">165-70</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Conjunctions, coordinating and subordinating, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Consequential</i>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Consist of</i> or <i>in</i>, <a href="#Page_163">163-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Content myself by</i>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Contest</i>, vb, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Continuance</i>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Continuation</i>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Continuity</i>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Contradictions in Terms</span>, <a href="#Page_339">339-41</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Contumacity</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Coordination of Relatives</span>, <a href="#Page_85">85-100</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Copula, Number</span>, <a href="#Page_65">65-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Corelli, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Cornering</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Correctitude</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Coûte que coûte</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Criterion of rightness, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Crockett, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Cryptic</i>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Cui bono?</i>, <a href="#Page_35">35-6</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> D</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Dans cette galère</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Dashes</span>, <a href="#Page_266">266-75</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Dashes and Stops</span>, <a href="#Page_269">269-75</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Dashes, Debatable Questions</span>, <a href="#Page_269">269-74</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Dashes, Double</span>, <a href="#Page_270">270-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Dashes, Misuses</span>, <a href="#Page_274">274-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Dashes, Types</span>, <a href="#Page_267">267-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Dead metaphors, <a href="#Page_201">201-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Decapitable Sentences</span>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Defining Relatives</span>, <a href="#Page_75">75-85</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Defining relatives in punctuation, <a href="#Page_240">240-1</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Déjeuner</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Démarche</i>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Demean</i>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Démenti</i>, <a href="#Page_29">29-30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Demonstrative, Noun, and Participle or Adjective</span>, <a href="#Page_344">344-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Depend upon it</i>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Dependable</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Deplacement</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Deprecate</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Depreciate</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> De Quincey, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Desultory</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Détente</i>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Determinedly</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Differentiation, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Different to</i>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Dilemma</i>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Diplomatic French</span>, <a href="#Page_29">29-30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Disagree from</i>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Dishabille</i>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Dispensable</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Disposable</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Distinction</i>, <a href="#Page_38">38-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Distinction, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Distinctly</i>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Distinguished</i>, <a href="#Page_38">38-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Distrait</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Do</i> as Substitute Verb</span>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Double dashes &amp; brackets, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Double Emphasis</span>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Double event</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Double Harness</span>, <a href="#Page_311">311-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Doubtful gender, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Doubt that</i>, <a href="#Page_158">158-60</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Dovetailing</span>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308-10</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> E</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Each</i>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>-edly</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>E.g.</i>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Eirenicon</i>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Either</i></span>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</span> <i>Eke out</i>, <a href="#Page_14">14-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Elegant Variation</span>, <a href="#Page_175">175-80</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Elegant variation, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Eliot, George, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Ellipse in Subordinate Clauses</span>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Emblem</i>, vb, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Emerson, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Emphasis, Double</span>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Emphatic Inversion</span>, <a href="#Page_190">190-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Employé</i>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Endowed by</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>English</i>, vb, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Enjoinder</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Ennui</i>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Entente</i>, <a href="#Page_29">29-30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Entourage</i>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Enumeration</span>, <a href="#Page_250">250-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Enumeration, Ambiguous</span>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Envisage</i>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Epithets, recherché, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Epoch-making</i>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Equally as</i>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Ere</i>, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Especial</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Esprit d’escalier</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Etc.</i></span>, <span class="smcap">Slovenly</span>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Euchred</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Eudaemometer</i>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Euphemism</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Euphony</span>, <a href="#Page_291">291-304</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Euphony, <a href="#Page_46">46-7</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub2">and punctuation, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Euphony with relatives, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Euphuism</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Evasion</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Excepting</i>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Exclamation and Question</span>, <a href="#Page_259">259-61</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Exclamation Mark</span>, <a href="#Page_258">258-62</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Exclamation Mark, Internal</span>, <a href="#Page_261">261-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Exclamatory Inversion</span>, <a href="#Page_181">181-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Ex-Participles</span>, <a href="#Page_110">110-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Experimentalize</i>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Exploit</i>, vb, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Extemporaneous</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> F</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Faits divers</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Fall</i> (autumn), <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">False Scent</span>, <a href="#Page_345">345-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> False scent, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123-4</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264-5</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_356">356</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Fanfaronnade</i>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Far-fetched Words</span>, <a href="#Page_4">4-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Femininity</i>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Ferrier, S., <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Fielding, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Find fault to</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Fix up</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Flexibility, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Flood-of-Tears-and-Sedan-Chair</span>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Floored</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>For</i>, <a href="#Page_233">233-4</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>For all it is worth</i>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Forbid from</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Forceful</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Foreign Words</span>, <a href="#Page_26">26-39</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Foreign Words, Adaptation of</span>, <a href="#Page_37">37-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Foreign Words, Blunders</span>, <a href="#Page_34">34-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Foreign Words Translated</span>, <a href="#Page_30">30-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Foreword</i>, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Formation and Analogy</span>, <a href="#Page_41">41-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Formation Blunders</span>, <a href="#Page_39">39-41</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Formation, Ugly</span>, <a href="#Page_46">46-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Fresh Starts</span>, <a href="#Page_330">330-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Frills</i>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Frontal attack</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Frontispiece</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Fudging in punctuation, <a href="#Page_240">240-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Fused Participle</span>, <a href="#Page_117">117-25</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> G</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Gallant</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Galore</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Ganymede</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Gaucherie</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> George Eliot, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Gerund</span>, <a href="#Page_116">116-33</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Gerund and Infinitive</span>, <a href="#Page_129">129-33</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Gerund and Participle</span>, <a href="#Page_107">107-10</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Gerund and Possessive</span>, <a href="#Page_116">116-25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Gerund, Compound Subject</span>, <a href="#Page_123">123-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Gerund, Omission of Subject</span>, <a href="#Page_125">125-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</span> <i>Get the boot</i>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Globetrotter</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Go Nap</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Go one better</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Grammar</span>, <a href="#Page_311">311-31</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Grammar and Punctuation</span>, <a href="#Page_220">220-5</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235-63</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Green, J. R., <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Group System in Punctuation</span>, <a href="#Page_228">228-30</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> H</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Half-world</i>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Hebe</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Hedge</i>, vb., <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> He-or-she, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Hereof</i>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>He said</i>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Homologate</i>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Honey-coloured</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Howbeit</i>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>However</i>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>How it pans out</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Hugo, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Humour, Polysyllabic</span>, <a href="#Page_171">171-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Humour, Types</span>, <a href="#Page_171">171-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Huxley, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Hybrid words, <a href="#Page_41">41-2</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Hyphens</span>, <a href="#Page_275">275-80</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Hyphens, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> I</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Ideal</i>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Idiom, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Idioms, Maltreated</span>, <a href="#Page_336">336-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>I. e.</i>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>If and when</i></span>, <a href="#Page_334">334-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Ignorance crasse</i>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>I guess</i>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Illegitimate Infinitives</span>, <a href="#Page_317">317-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Immanence</i>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Immovability</i>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Impersonal</span> <i>one</i>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Impliedly</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Inasmuch as</i>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Incentive</i>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Incongruity, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Incontinently</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Indirect question and punctuation, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Individual</i>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Infinitive and Gerund</span>, <a href="#Page_129">129-33</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Infinitive, Omission of Subject</span>, <a href="#Page_125">125-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Infinitive Perfect</span>, <a href="#Page_154">154-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Infinitives, Illegitimate</span>, <a href="#Page_317">317-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Infinitive, Split</span>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>-ing</i>, <a href="#Page_107">107-10</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Initiative of</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Innate</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>In nowise</i>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Insensate</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>In so far as, that</i>, <a href="#Page_168">168-70</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Instil</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Insuccess</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Intellectuals</i>, <a href="#Page_22">22-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Intelligence</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Intensate</i>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Intervening-noun error in number, <a href="#Page_66">66-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Intimism</i>, <a href="#Page_38">38-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Intimity</i>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Inversion</span>, <a href="#Page_180">180-93</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Inversion and compound verbs, <a href="#Page_184">184-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Inversion and emphasis, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Inversion, Balance</span>, <a href="#Page_182">182-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Inversion, Emphatic</span>, <a href="#Page_190">190-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Inversion, Exclamatory</span>, <a href="#Page_181">181-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Inversion in <i>as</i> or <i>than</i> clauses, <a href="#Page_188">188-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Inversion in relative clauses, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Inversion in Syntactic Clauses</span>, <a href="#Page_187">187-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Inversion, Miscellaneous</span>, <a href="#Page_191">191-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Inversion, Negative</span>, <a href="#Page_190">190-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>In view of</i>, <a href="#Page_167">167-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Inwardness</i>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Irony</span>, <a href="#Page_215">215-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Irony</i>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Irreparable</i>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Italics, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Italics and irony, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>It should seem</i>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>It’s me</i>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>It ... that</i>, <a href="#Page_104">104-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>It were</i>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> J</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Jehu</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Jingles</span>, <a href="#Page_291">291-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</span> Jonathan Wild, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Journalese</span>, <a href="#Page_351">351-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Journalese, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Judicial</i>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Just</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> K</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Kipling 24-5, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Knock out</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> L</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Lamb, Charles, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Lapsus calami, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Latin Abbreviations</span>, &amp;c., <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Laughable</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Laxity, disappearance of, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Laxity in punctuation, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Laze</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Leading question</i>, <a href="#Page_306">306-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Legislature</i>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Lie</i> and <i>lay</i>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Like</i>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>-like</i>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Literary critics’ words, <a href="#Page_38">38-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Logic and Punctuation</span>, <a href="#Page_220">220-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Logic and rhetoric in punctuation, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Log-rolling</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Long and Short Derivatives</span>, <a href="#Page_44">44-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Long sentences, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Long words, <a href="#Page_349">349-50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Loquently</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>-ly</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> M</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Macaulay, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Malaprops</span>, <a href="#Page_8">8-18</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Maltreated Idioms</span>, <a href="#Page_336">336-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Mannerism, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Meaning</span>, <a href="#Page_331">331-45</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Meaningless</span> <i>while</i>, <a href="#Page_357">357-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Me</i>, ethic, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Mercury</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Meredith, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Metaphor</span>, <a href="#Page_200">200-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Metaphor, live and dead, <a href="#Page_201">201-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Metaphysical</i>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Meticulous</i>, <a href="#Page_38">38-9</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Metrical Prose</span>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Misplacement of Words</span>, <a href="#Page_346">346-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Misquotation</span>, <a href="#Page_305">305-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Mixed metaphor, <a href="#Page_203">203-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Mob</i>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Monstrosity stops, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286-7</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Morale</i>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>More and more than ever</i>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>More easily imagined than described</i>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>More honoured in the breach</i>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>More than I can help</i>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Most</i>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Most of any</i>, <a href="#Page_74">74-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Mutual</i>, <a href="#Page_56">56-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>My</i> and <i>mine</i>, <a href="#Page_40">40-1</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> N</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Naïveté</i>, <a href="#Page_37">37-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Naivety</i>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Native words, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Negative Confusion</span>, <a href="#Page_321">321-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Negative Inversion</span>, <a href="#Page_190">190-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Negatives, resolved and compound, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Négligé</i>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Negotiate</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Neither</i>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Neither ... or</i>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Neologisms</span>, <a href="#Page_18">18-23</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Neologisms, scientific, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Newspaper style, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Nice</i>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>No</i> and <i>none</i>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Noisiness, <a href="#Page_202">202-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Nom de guerre</i>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Nom de plume</i>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Nonce-words, <a href="#Page_19">19-20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Non-defining Relatives</span>, <a href="#Page_75">75-85</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Non est</i>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Nouns and abstract expression, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Nouns of Multitude</span>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Nouns used adjectivally, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Number</span>, <a href="#Page_65">65-70</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Number of Copula</span>, <a href="#Page_65">65-7</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> O</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Oblivion to</i>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Oblivious to</i>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</span> <i>Observance</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Œuvre</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Of sorts</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Oft</i>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Oft-times</i>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Ohne Hast ohne Rast</i>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Old-fashioned enough to</i>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Olfactory organ</i>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Omission of</span> <i>as</i>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Omission of Relatives</span>, <a href="#Page_101">101-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Omission of relatives, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Omission of</span> <i>that</i>, <span class="smcap">conj.</span>, <a href="#Page_356">356-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>On a moment’s notice</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>One</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>One</i>, Impersonal</span>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>One’s</i> and <i>his</i>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>One’s</i> or <i>his</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>On your own</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Oppositely</i>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Orient</i>, vb., <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Originality, Cheap</span>, <a href="#Page_217">217-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Ornament, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Ostentation, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Our</i> and <i>ours</i>, <a href="#Page_40">40-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Overloading</span>, <a href="#Page_343">343-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Over-stopping</span>, <a href="#Page_231">231-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Over-stopping, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262-3</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> P</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Parenthesis, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Parenthesis</span>, <a href="#Page_247">247-50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Parenthesis in Relative Clauses</span>, <a href="#Page_94">94-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Partially</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Participle and Gerund</span>, <a href="#Page_107">107-10</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Participles</span>, <a href="#Page_110">110-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Participles Absolute</span>, <a href="#Page_115">115-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Participles Unattached</span>, <a href="#Page_112">112-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Participles with</span> <i>my</i>, &amp;c., <a href="#Page_111">111-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Passive monstrosities, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Passives, Compound</span>, <a href="#Page_319">319-21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Patching, Clumsy</span>, <a href="#Page_355">355-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Paulo-post future</i>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Pedantry, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Penchant</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Perchance</i>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Perfect Infinitive</span>, <a href="#Page_154">154-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Perfection</i>, vb., <a href="#Page_44">44-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Period, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Perseverant</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Personification, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Perspicuity</i>, <a href="#Page_8">8-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Peter out</i>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Pet Phrases</span>, <a href="#Page_359">359-60</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Phantasmagoria</i>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Phase</i>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Phenomenal</i>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Philistine</i>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Picturesque, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Picturesquities</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Placate</i>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Playful Repetition</span>, <a href="#Page_172">172-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Play the game</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Pleonasm, v. Redundancies.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Poetic words, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Polysyllabic humour, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Polysyllabic Humour</span>, <a href="#Page_171">171-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Pontificalibus</i>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Possessive, absolute, <a href="#Page_40">40-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Possessive and Gerund</span>, <a href="#Page_116">116-25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Possessive, Compound</span>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Possessive, compound, <a href="#Page_122">122-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Possible</i>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Preciosity, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Predication</i>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Prediction</i>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Preface</i>, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Prefer</i>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Preposition at end of clause, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Prepositions</span>, <a href="#Page_161">161-70</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Prepositions, Compound</span>, <a href="#Page_165">165-70</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub2"><span class="smcap">Omitted</span>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub2"><span class="smcap">Repeated</span>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub2"><span class="smcap">Superfluous</span>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Pretend</i>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Preventative</i>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Probable</i>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Procession</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Promote</i>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Pronominal variation, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Proportion, <a href="#Page_300">300-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Provided</i>, <a href="#Page_13">13-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Prudential</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Psychological moment</i>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Punctuation</span>, Cap. IV.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Punctuation and ambiguity, <a href="#Page_264">264-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Punctuation and neatness, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Punctuation and relatives, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Punctuation, Difficulties</span>, <a href="#Page_219">219-24</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</span> Punctuation, full and slight, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Punctuation, group system, <a href="#Page_228">228-31</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Punctuation in scientific and philosophic work, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Punctuation, Logic, and Rhetoric</span>, <a href="#Page_220">220-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Punctuation, Spot Plague</span>, <a href="#Page_226">226-31</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> Q</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Qua</i>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Quand même</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Question and Exclamation</span>, <a href="#Page_259">259-61</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Question-mark, Internal</span>, <a href="#Page_261">261-62</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Quieten</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Quotation</span>, <a href="#Page_305">305-11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Quotation, half-and-half, <a href="#Page_237">237-8</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Quotation marks</span>, <a href="#Page_280">280-90</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Quotation marks and irony, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Quotation marks and slang, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Quotation marks and Stops</span>, <a href="#Page_282">282-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Quotation marks misplaced, <a href="#Page_288">288-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Quotation marks, Single and Double</span>, <a href="#Page_287">287-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Quotation marks, superfluous, <a href="#Page_280">280-82</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Quotation, Trite</span>, <a href="#Page_310">310-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Quotations cut up, <a href="#Page_309">309-10</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> R</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Racial</i>, <a href="#Page_22">22-3</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Railway names, <a href="#Page_276">276-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Raison d’être</i>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Reader, <a href="#Page_2">2-3</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231-3</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>,</li>
+<li class="isub4">280-1, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347-8</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Reading aloud, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Recasting, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177-8</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232-3</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>,</li>
+<li class="isub4">257, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355-6</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Recliner</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Record</i>, adj., <a href="#Page_51">51-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Recrudescence</i>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Rectitudinous</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Rédaction</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Redundancies</span>, <a href="#Page_332">332-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Regard</i>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Regenesis</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Régime</i>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Relative and participle, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Relative clauses and inversion, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Relative Coordination</span>, <a href="#Page_85">85-100</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Relative, Miscellaneous Uses and Abuses</span>, <a href="#Page_96">96-107</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Relative, Omission of Preposition</span>, <a href="#Page_102">102-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Relative omitted</span>, <a href="#Page_101">101-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Relatives</span>, <a href="#Page_75">75-107</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Relatives and punctuation, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Relatives, Case</span>, <a href="#Page_93">93-4</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99-100</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Relatives Defining and Non-Defining</span>, <a href="#Page_75">75-85</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Relatives, Parenthesis</span>, <a href="#Page_94">94-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Relatives, Sequence of</span>, <a href="#Page_293">293-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Reliable</i>, <a href="#Page_42">42-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Remindful</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Repetition</span>, <a href="#Page_209">209-13</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Repetition, Careless</span>, <a href="#Page_303">303-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Repetition, Playful</span>, <a href="#Page_172">172-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Requisition</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Research</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Resource</i>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Reverend</i>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Rhetoric, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Rhetorical repetition, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Rhetoric and Punctuation</span>, <a href="#Page_220">220-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Right along</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Romance Words</span>, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Royal pronoun, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Run the show</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> S</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Said</i> with inversion, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Same, the</i>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Sans</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Save</i>, <a href="#Page_2">2-3</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Saxon Words</span>, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_2">2-3</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Scandalum magnatum</i>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Schadenfreude</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Scott, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Seasonable</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Self-consciousness, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Semicolon and independent sentences, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</span> <span class="smcap">Semicolon and Subordinate Clauses</span>, <a href="#Page_257">257-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Semicolon, distinct functions of, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Sense and sound, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Sensibleness</i>, <a href="#Page_44">44-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Sentence, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Sentence Accent</span>, <a href="#Page_296">296-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Shall</i> and <i>will</i></span>, <a href="#Page_133">133-54</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Shall</i>, archaic and literary, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Short and Long Words</span>, <a href="#Page_6">6-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Shrimp-pink</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Sic</i>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Signpost connexion, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Since several days</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Skilled</i>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Slang</span>, <a href="#Page_47">47-53</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Slang and idiom, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Slang, Various Origins</span>, <a href="#Page_49">49-51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Slang with quotation marks, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Slating</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Smartness, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Smollett, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>So far as, that</i>, <a href="#Page_168">168-70</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Somewhat</i></span>, &amp;c., <a href="#Page_352">352-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Sordor</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Sound and sense, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Soupçon</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Special</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Spencer, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Spirit of the staircase</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Split Auxiliaries</span>, <a href="#Page_342">342-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Split Infinitive</span>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Spot-Plague</span>, <a href="#Page_226">226-31</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Standpoint</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Stands to reason</i>, <a href="#Page_213">213-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Status quo</i>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Stave off</i>, <a href="#Page_206">206-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Steep</i> (slang), <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Sterne, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Stevenson, <a href="#Page_198">198-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Stops and tone symbols, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Street names, <a href="#Page_276">276-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Stronger</i>, adv., <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Stumped</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Style</span>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>-end.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Styles, various, <a href="#Page_7">7-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Subject</span>, &amp;c., and <span class="smcap">Verb in Punctuation</span>, <a href="#Page_239">239-42</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Subjunctive, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Subjunctive conditionals, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Substantival Clause in Punctuation</span>, <a href="#Page_235">235-8</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Such</i>, <a href="#Page_358">358-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Such who</i>, <i>which</i>, and <i>that</i>, <a href="#Page_103">103-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Summerly</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Superfluous</span> <i>but</i> <span class="smcap">and</span> <i>though</i>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Superlatives</span>, <a href="#Page_74">74-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Superlatives, Carlylese, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Superlatives without</span> <i>the</i>, <a href="#Page_216">216-17</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Super-sensitized</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Superstitions, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Surprisedly</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Syntax</span>, Cap. II.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> T</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Tache</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Tackle</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Take a back seat</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Take it lying down</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Take my word for it</i>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Tautology</span>, <a href="#Page_331">331-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Tautology, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Tear and wear</i>, <a href="#Page_217">217-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Telegram</i>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Tell-tale errors, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>,
+ <a href="#Page_308">308</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Tête-à-tête</i>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Thackeray, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Than</i>, Case</span>, <a href="#Page_62">62-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Than whom</i>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>That</i> and <i>which</i>, <a href="#Page_242">242-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>That</i> and <i>which</i> (<i>who</i>)</span>, <a href="#Page_80">80-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>That</i> (conjunction), Omission of</span>, <a href="#Page_356">356-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>That</i> (relative) of persons</span>, <a href="#Page_83">83-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>That</i> resumptive, <a href="#Page_330">330-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>That</i>, Sequence of</span>, <a href="#Page_294">294-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>That’s him</i>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>The exception proves</i>, &amp;c., <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Their</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>The more</i></span>, <a href="#Page_70">70-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>The more</i>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Thereanent</i>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Therefore</i>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Thereto</i>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Theretofore</i>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>The same</i>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>The ... that</i> (resolved interrogative), <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</span> <i>Thither</i>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Those interested</i>, <a href="#Page_344">344-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Those sort</i>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Though</i> superfluous</span>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Thrasonical</i>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Tinker with</i>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Today</i>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>To have ...</i>, <a href="#Page_154">154-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Tomorrow</i>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Tone symbols and stops, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>To the foot of the letter</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Transcendentally</i>, <a href="#Page_10">10-11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Translate</i>, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Translation of Foreign Words</span>, <a href="#Page_30">30-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Transpire</i>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Trite Phrases</span>, <a href="#Page_213">213-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Trite Quotation</span>, <a href="#Page_310">310-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Trow</i>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Truisms</span>, <a href="#Page_339">339-41</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Trustedly</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Trustfulness</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Types of Humour</span>, <a href="#Page_171">171-5</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> U</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>-ude</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Unconscious to</i>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Under dog</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Under-stopping</span>, <a href="#Page_234">234-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Unequal Yokefellows</span>, &amp;c., <a href="#Page_311">311-14</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Unique</i>, <a href="#Page_58">58-9</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Unquiet</i>, n., <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Up to date</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> V</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Verbal noun, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Verberant</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Vexedly</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Vide</i>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Vieille escrime</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Vieilles perruques</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Vieux jeu</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Violence</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Vividity</i>, <a href="#Page_46">46-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Vocabulary</span>, Cap. I.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Vocabulary, General Rules</span>, <a href="#Page_1">1-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Vocabulary, prose and poetry, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> Vulgarism, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Vulgarisms</span>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> W</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Waddle</i>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Walking stick</i>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>War-famous</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Wens and Hypertrophied Members</span>, <a href="#Page_300">300-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Were</i>, <a href="#Page_157">157-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>What</i>, antecedent-relative, <a href="#Page_100">100-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>What ever...?</i>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Whatever...?</i>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>What</i>, relative and interrogative, <a href="#Page_100">100-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Whereof</i>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>While</i> and <i>as</i>, clauses, slovenly 189.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>While</i>, Meaningless</span>, <a href="#Page_357">357-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Whimsical</i>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Who</i> and <i>whom</i></span>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Whole-hogging</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap"><i>Will</i> and <i>shall</i></span>, <a href="#Page_133">133-54</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Will not do this thing</i>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Wind-flower</i>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Wire</i>, vb., <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>With a view to</i>, <a href="#Page_167">167-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>With the view of</i>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Word-formation</span>, <a href="#Page_37">37-47</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>World policy</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Worn-out Humorous Phrases</span>, <a href="#Page_173">173-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Worthy</i>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Wot</i>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Write you</i>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <span class="smcap">Wrong Turning</span>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst"> Y</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>Your</i> and <i>yours</i>, <a href="#Page_40">40-1</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"> <i>You shall find</i>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+<p class="center p4 big">Printed in England at the Oxford University Press</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h3>
+Some Oxford Books<br>
+on<br>
+ENGLISH</h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+¶ <i>General.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH, by <span class="smcap">W. S. Tomkinson</span>. Pp. 230. 5s. 6d.
+net.</p>
+
+<p>‘It is full of good things.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>Educational Times</i><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p>THE RUDIMENTS OF CRITICISM, by <span class="smcap">E. A. G. Lamborn</span>. Pp. 192. 3s.
+6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>‘A valuable book for teachers, showing how children may be taught to
+appreciate poetry and verbal melody.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>Athenaeum.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p>EXPRESSION IN SPEECH AND WRITING, by <span class="smcap">E. A. G. Lamborn</span>. Pp.
+120. 4s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>‘It is hard to over praise this inspiring little book, written with
+all the author’s raciness, humour, and enthusiasm. It deals in five
+chapters with oral and written composition, verse making, original
+music, and the rendering of poetry.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>AMA.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+¶ <i>Phonetics.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>THE SOUNDS OF ENGLISH, by <span class="smcap">Henry Sweet</span>. Pp. 140. 3s 6d. n.</p>
+
+<p>An elementary introduction to Phonetics with particular reference to
+Standard English.</p>
+
+
+<p>A PRIMER OF SPOKEN ENGLISH. Introduction, Analysis, Synthesis, by
+<span class="smcap">Henry Sweet</span>. 4th edition revised. 1911. Pp. 110. 3s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+
+<p>PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTIONS OF ENGLISH PROSE, by <span class="smcap">Daniel Jones</span>. Pp.
+60. 2s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+
+<p>EXAMINATION PAPERS IN PHONETICS, by <span class="smcap">Daniel Jones</span>. Pp. 52. 2s.
+6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>Designed to furnish practice for Oxford, Cambridge, and London
+Certificates.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+¶ <i>English Grammar, Descriptive.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>ELEMENTARY GRAMMAR AND EXERCISE BOOK, by <span class="smcap">O. W. Tancock</span>. Third
+edition. Pp. 92. 2s.</p>
+
+
+<p>AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR AND READING BOOK. For lower forms in Classical
+Schools, by <span class="smcap">O. W. Tancock</span>. Pp. 332. 3s. 6d.</p>
+
+
+<p>ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR, by <span class="smcap">H. C. Wyld</span>. Pp. 224.
+2s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+
+<p>A NEW ENGLISH GRAMMAR based on the recommendations of the Joint
+Committee on Grammatical Terminology by <span class="smcap">E. A. Sonnenschein</span>,
+with exercises by <span class="smcap">E. Archibald</span>. Part I, 1s. 6d. net; Part II,
+2s. net; Part III, 2s. 6d. net. Also in one volume. Pp. 426. 5s. net.</p>
+
+
+<p>SENTENCE ANALYSIS for the Lower Forms of Public Schools, by <span class="smcap">H. W.
+Fowler</span>. Pp. 68. 2s. net.</p>
+
+<p>‘A clear, simple, and exact practical exposition of the subject,
+produced in typographical form which leaves nothing to be desired.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>Pitman’s Journal.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p>For books marked with a dagger, thus †, teachers’ Keys are available.
+Prices and conditions may be had on application to the publisher.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+¶ <i>English Historical Grammar.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>A PRIMER OF HISTORICAL ENGLISH GRAMMAR, by <span class="smcap">Henry Sweet</span>. Second
+edition. Pp. 120. 3s. net.</p>
+
+
+<p>A SHORT HISTORICAL ENGLISH GRAMMAR, by <span class="smcap">Henry Sweet</span>. Corrected
+impression. 1924. Pp. 276. 4s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+
+<p>NEW ENGLISH GRAMMAR: Logical and Historical, in two parts, by <span class="smcap">Henry
+Sweet</span>.</p>
+
+<p>Part I: Introduction, Phonology, and Accidence. Pp. 524. 10s. 6d. n.
+Part II: Syntax. Pp. 148. 5s. net.</p>
+
+
+<p>A PRIMER OF ENGLISH ETYMOLOGY, by <span class="smcap">W. W. Skeat</span>. Sixth edition,
+revised. 1923. Pp. 120. 2s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>Chapters on the Sources of the Language; the History, Symbols and
+Sounds; Modern English Spelling; Words of Native Origin; Vowel Mutation
+and Gradation, &amp;c.</p>
+
+
+<p>STANDARD ENGLISH, by <span class="smcap">T. Nicklin</span>. (World’s Manuals.) Pp. 102.
+2s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>‘The author pleads that all children of whatever birth shall be
+carefully taught the “standard dialect”—the English, that is to say,
+of the educated class, and often hitherto regarded as a prerogative of
+that class.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>Journal of Education.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p>ON THE RELATIONS BETWEEN SPOKEN AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE, by <span class="smcap">Henry
+Bradley</span>. Pp. 36. 2s. net.</p>
+
+<p>An examination of the difficulties of spelling reform.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+¶ <i>Dictionaries.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>¶ THE POCKET OXFORD DICTIONARY OF CURRENT ENGLISH, compiled by H. W.
+and <span class="smcap">F. G. Fowler</span>. Pp. 1016. Cloth, 3s. 6d. net. India Paper,
+6s. net.</p>
+
+<p>An authoritative guide to the latest and best English usage. Over 2,000
+columns of clear type; yet the volume is small enough to be carried in
+the pocket of a traveller or holiday maker.</p>
+
+
+<p>¶ THE CONCISE OXFORD DICTIONARY, compiled by H. W. and <span class="smcap">F. G.
+Fowler</span>. Eleventh impression. 1923. Pp. 1076. Cloth, 7s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>‘We strongly recommend every one to secure this Dictionary. Whatever
+they may possess this will be a distinct acquisition, and daily use
+will make it more and more indispensable.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>London Quarterly Review.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p>¶ The <i>Pocket Oxford Dictionary</i> and the <i>Concise Oxford
+Dictionary</i> are of unrivalled authority because they alone among
+one-volume dictionaries are based on the great <span class="smcap">Oxford English
+Dictionary</span>, edited by Sir James Murray, Dr. Bradley, Dr. Craigie,
+and Mr. Onions. Of this great work Vol. I was published in 1888 after
+many years of preparation. Vol. X (the last) is now appearing in
+sections. The complete work will contain articles on about 425,000
+words and will extend to over 15,000 large pages, each of three
+columns. For details see the General Catalogue.</p>
+
+
+<p>A CONCISE ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY, by <span class="smcap">W. W. Skeat</span>; new and
+corrected impression. 1911. Pp. 680. 6s. net; on thin paper, 7s. 6d.
+net.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+¶ <i>English Composition.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>EXERCISES IN PROSE LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION, by <span class="smcap">G. Clifford
+Dent</span>. Pp. 300. 4s.</p>
+
+<p>Also separately. Part I (Ages 8-10),Text, 9d., Text and Exercises, 1s.
+Part II (Ages 11-14), Text, 1s., Text and Exercises, 1s. 6d. Part III
+(Ages 15-18), Text, 1s. 3d., Text and Exercises, 2s.</p>
+
+
+<p>ENGLISH COMPOSITION, based on the study of literary models, by <span class="smcap">A.
+Cruse</span>. Pp. 200. 2s. 6d.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Contents</span>:—The History of the Essay, Writing an Essay, Types
+of Essay, Style, Letter Writing, Paraphrasing, Verse Writing.</p>
+
+
+<p>ENGLISH COMPOSITION, Progressive Exercises (A Two-Years’ Course for
+upper forms), by <span class="smcap">C. E. L. Hammond</span>. With an introduction by
+<span class="smcap">J. C. Smith</span>. Pp. 176. 3s. 6d. Also in two parts: Part I, pp.
+80. 2s.; Part II, pp. 112, 2s. 6d.</p>
+
+<p>‘These books are truly admirable. We have not seen a more interesting
+or more suggestive treatment of English, and we cordially recommend
+them to all teachers of English.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>Scottish Educational Journal.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p>EXERCISES IN DICTATION AND COMPOSITION, with selected examination
+papers and a vocabulary of all difficult words, by <span class="smcap">N. Notman</span>.
+Pp. 168. 2s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>Standard of Oxford and Cambridge Locals.</p>
+
+
+<p>† SHORT ESSAYS FOR FOURTH AND FIFTH FORMS, with specimen analyses, by
+<span class="smcap">S. E. Winbolt</span>. Pp. 292. 3s. 6d.</p>
+
+
+<p>THE WRITING OF ENGLISH, by <span class="smcap">P. J. Hartog</span>, assisted by Mrs.
+<span class="smcap">Amy H. Langdon</span>. Third edition. Pp. 176. 4s. net.</p>
+
+<p>The authors explain how it is that French boys write French so well
+while English boys write English so indifferently; and apply to
+English, with acknowledged practical success, the French method of
+teaching the mother tongue.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>By H. W. and F. G. Fowler.</i></p>
+
+
+<p>THE KING’S ENGLISH, ABRIDGED for School use. Pp. 160. 3s. net.</p>
+
+<p>‘For the young writer we know of no better work since the appearance of
+Hodgson’s <i>Errors in English</i>.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>Literary World.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>‘If freely used, it would do much to arrest the degradation of the
+English language.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>The Scotsman.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p>THE KING’S ENGLISH. Second edition. Pp. 380. 6s. net.</p>
+
+<p>‘To author and journalists <i>The King’s English</i> should be
+invaluable.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>The Author.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>‘This is the best book of its kind we have ever seen.’</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<i>Glasgow Herald.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+¶ <i>Précis Writing.</i><br>
+</p>
+
+<p>† A PROGRESSIVE COURSE OF PRÉCIS WRITING. Part I for beginners, Part II
+Official Correspondence, Minutes, &amp;c., pp. 146, graduated, by <span class="smcap">F. E.
+Robeson</span>. 2s. 6d.</p>
+
+
+<p>HISTORICAL PASSAGES FOR PRÉCIS WRITING, by <span class="smcap">F. E. Robeson</span>. Pp.
+118. 2s. 6d.</p>
+
+
+<p>PRÉCIS WRITING. The two books in one volume. Pp. 264. 4s. 6d.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="OXFORD_SERIES_OF_TEXTS_OR_TRANSLATIONS_FOR_SCHOOLS">OXFORD SERIES OF TEXTS OR TRANSLATIONS FOR SCHOOLS</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>DR. LOWE’S POPULAR READERS, with Notes, Maps, Vocabularies, English
+Exercises, and many illustrations. Each book proceeds from simple
+sentences to compound sentences; then to short paragraphs; and finally
+to a slightly adapted version of the original text. 2s. each.</p>
+
+
+<p>LINGUA LATINA. The Direct Method. Edited by <span class="smcap">W. H. D. Rouse</span> and
+<span class="smcap">S. O. Andrew</span>. Crown 8vo. Eight text-books, a Teacher’s book,
+and a wall-picture.</p>
+
+
+<p>OXFORD JUNIOR LATIN SERIES. Under the General Editorship of <span class="smcap">C. E.
+Freeman</span>. Fcap 8vo. 2s. each. The series includes the following
+volumes:—</p>
+
+<p><i>Virgil, Aeneid I, II, IV, V, VI, X; Catullus; Horace, Select Odes;
+Selections from Ovid; Livy I, XXI, XXII.</i></p>
+
+
+<p>THE CLARENDON LATIN AND GREEK SERIES. Partly in the Original and
+partly in Translation. Under the general editorship of <span class="smcap">R. W.
+Livingstone</span>. Each volume with introduction, notes, and vocabulary.
+Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net each. The series includes the following Latin
+volumes:—</p>
+
+<p><i>Apuleius, Cupid and Psyche; Caesar, Civil War I-II, III; Caesar,
+Gallic War IV (20-38) and V, VI-VII; Cicero the Advocate; The
+Catilinarian Conspiracy; Livy, XXI-XXII; Sallust, The Jugurthine War;
+Virgil, Aeneid I-III, IV-VI, VII-IX, The Georgics.</i></p>
+
+
+<p>OXFORD CLASSICAL TEXTS. Crown 8vo. The series includes the following
+Latin volumes:—</p>
+
+<p><i>Asconius; Caesar, Commentarii; Catullus; Cicero, Epistulae;
+Cicero, Orationes; Cicero, Rhetorica; Horace; Isidori Etymologiae,
+Livy; Lucretius; Martial; Nepos; Ovid; Persius and Juvenal; Phaedrus;
+Plautus; Propertius; Statius; Tacitus; Terence; Tibullus; Vergil;
+Appendix Vergiliana.</i></p>
+
+<p>OXFORD LIBRARY OF TRANSLATIONS. These Oxford Translations have not
+been written to order, but produced for the delight of the writers
+themselves by students of their favourite authors. Uniform volumes.
+Fcap 8vo. From 5s. net each.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+Lists of the above series and of other annotated editions may<br>
+be had on application to the<br>
+<br>
+OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS<br>
+<br>
+Amen House, Warwick Square, E.C. 4<br>
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter transnote">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
+
+
+<p>Missing and incorrect punctuation marks have been corrected without
+note.</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistencies that did not affect understanding were left as per the
+original text.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#Page_38">Page 38</a>: “call it <i>navity</i>” changed to “call it <i>naivety</i>”</p>
+
+<p><a href="#Page_213">Page 213</a>: “aud flourishes in” changed to “and flourishes in”</p>
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75439 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/75439-h/images/cover.jpg b/75439-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..efedc3a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75439-h/images/cover.jpg
Binary files differ
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..effd337
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #75439 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75439)
generated by cgit v1.2.3 (git 2.25.1) at 2025-12-26 14:11:18 +0000