Part 15

Nevertheless, as inaccuracies, laxities, vulgarisms--transgressions more or less superficial--such errors take from the correctness, from the efficacy, from the force as well as the grace, of written or spoken speech.

The high level of strength, suppleness and beauty occupied by our English tongue has been reached, and can only be maintained, by strenuous, varied, and continuous mental action. Offenses against the laws and proprieties of language--like so many other of our lapses--are in most cases effects of the tendency in human nature to relax its tone. None save the most resolute and rigorous but have their moods of unwatchfulness, of indolence. Moreover, men are prone to resist mental refinement and intellectual subdivisions. Discrimination requires close attention and sustained effort; and without habitual discrimination there can be no linguistic precision or excellence. In this, as in other provinces, people like to take things easily. Now, every capable man of business knows that to take things easily is an easy way to ruin. Language is in a certain sense every one's business; but it is especially the business, as their appellation denotes, of men of letters; and a primary duty of their high vocation is to be jealous of any careless or impertinent meddling with, or mishandling of, those little glistening, marvelous tools wherewith such amazing structures and temples have been built and are ever a-building. Culture, demanding and creating diversity and subtlety of mental processes, is at once a cause and an effect of infinite multiplication in the relations the mind is capable of establishing between itself and the objects of its action, and between its own processes; and language, being a chief instrument of culture, has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands, Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness, any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating influence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr. Whewell; "Language is often called an instrument of thought, but it is also the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere on which thought lives--a medium essential to the activity of our speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its operation; and an element modifying, by its changes and qualities, the growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds."

Our enumeration of errata being made alphabetically, the first to be cited is one of the chief of sinners--the particle.

As. The misuse of as for so is, in certain cases, almost universal. If authority could justify error and convert the faulty into the faultless, it were idle to expose a misuse in justification of which can be cited most of the best names in recent English literature.

"As far as doth concern my single self,"

is a line in Wordsworth ("Prelude," p. 70) which, by a change of the first as into so, would gain not only in sound (which is not our affair at present), but, likewise in grammar. The seventh line of the twenty-first stanza in that most tender of elegies and most beautiful of poems, Shelley's "Adonais," begins, "As long as skies are blue," where also there would be a double gain by writing "So long as skies are blue." On page 242 of the first volume of De Quincey's "Literary Remains" occurs this sentence; "Even by as philosophic a politician as Edmund Burke," in which the critical blunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excuse for the grammatical blunder. The rule (derived, like all good rules, from principle) which determines the use of this small particle is, I conceive, that the double as should only be employed when there is direct comparison. In the first part of the following sentence there is no direct comparative relation--in the second, the negative destroys it; "So far as geographical measurement goes, Philadelphia is not so far from New York as from Baltimore." Five writers out of six would commit the error of using as in both members of the sentence. The most prevalent misuse of as is in connection with soon; and this general misuse, having moreover the countenance of good writers, is so inwoven into our speech that it will be hard to unravel it. But principle is higher than the authority derived from custom. Judges are bound to give sentence according to the statute; and if the highest writers, whose influence is deservedly judicial, violate the laws of language, their decisions ought to be, and will be, reversed, or language will be undermined, and, slipping into shallow, illogical habits, into anarchical conditions, will forfeit much of its manliness, of its subtlety, of its truthfulness. Language is a living organism, and to substitute authority, or even long usage, for its innate genius and wisdom, and the requirements and practices that result from these, were to strike at its life, and to expose it to become subject to upstart usurpation, to deadening despotism. Worcester quotes from the Psalms the phrase, "They go astray as soon as they be born." We ask, Were not the translators of the Bible as liable to err in grammar as De Quincey, or Wordsworth, or Shelley? A writer in the English "National Review" for January, 1862, in an admirable paper on the "Italian Clergy and the Pope," begins a sentence with the same phrase: "As soon as the law was passed." And we ourselves, sure though we be that the use of as in this and every similar position is an error, need to brace both pen and tongue against running into it, so strong to overcome principle and conviction is the habit of the senses, accustomed daily to see and to hear the wrong.

AT THAT. We should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into bound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not be italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a phrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, of American mintage, coined in one of those frolicksome exuberant moods, when a young people, like a loosed horse full of youth and oats, kicks up and scatters mud with the unharnessed license of his heels.

ANOTHER. Before passing to the letter B on our alphabetical docket, we will call up a minor criminal in A, viz. another, often incorrectly used for other; as in "on one ground or another," "from one cause or another." Now, another, the prefix an making it singular,--embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contrary to the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there are but two grounds or causes. Write "on one ground or other," and the words are in harmony with the meaning of the writer, the word other implying several or many grounds.

BOQUET. The sensibility that gives the desire to preserve a present sparkling so long as is possible with all the qualities that made it materially acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something so precious as a word; and when we receive one from another people, gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift itself, should make us watchful that it be not dimmed by the boorish breath of ignorance or cacophanized by unmusical voices. We therefore protest against a useful and tuneful noun-substantive, a native of France, the word bouquet, being maimed into boquet, a corruption as dissonant to the ear as were to the eye plucking a rose from a variegated nosegay, and leaving only its thorny stem. Boquet is heard at times in well-upholstered drawing-rooms, and may even be seen in print. Offensive in its mutilated shape, it smells sweet again when restored to its native orthography.

BY NO MANNER OF MEANS. The most vigorous writers are liable, in unguarded moments, to lapse into verbal weakness, and so you meet with this vulgar pleonasm in Ruskin.

BY REASON OF. An ill-assorted, ugly phrase, used by accomplished reviewers and others, who ought to set a purer example.

COME OFF. Were a harp to give out the nasal whine of the bagpipe, or the throat of a nightingale to emit the caw of a raven, the æsthetic sense would not be more startled and offended than to hear from feminine lips, rosily wreathed by beauty and youth, issue the words, "The concert will come off on Wednesday." This vulgarism should never be heard beyond the "ring" and the cock-pit, and should be banished from resorts so respectable as an oyster-cellar.

CONSIDER. Neither weight of authority nor universality of use can purify or justify a linguistic corruption, and make the intrinsically wrong in language right; and therefore such phrases as, "I consider him an honest man," "Do you consider the dispute settled?" will ever be bad English, however generally sanctioned. In his dedication of the "Diversions of Purley" to the University of Cambridge, Horne Tooke uses it wrongly when he says, "who always considers acts of voluntary justice toward himself as favors." The original signification and only proper use of consider are in phrases like these: "If you consider the matter carefully;" "Consider the lilies of the field."

CONDUCT. It seems to us that it were as allowable to say of a man, "He carries well," as "He conducts well." We say of a gun that it carries well, and we might say of a pipe that it conducts well. The gun and pipe are passive instruments, not living organisms, and thence the verbs are used properly in the neuter form. Perhaps, strictly speaking, even here its charge and water are understood.

CONTEMPLATE. "Do you contemplate going to Washington to-morrow?" "No: I contemplate moving into the country." This is more than exaggeration and inflation: it is desecration of a noble word, born of man's higher being; for contemplation is an exercise of the very highest faculties, a calm collecting of them for silent meditation--an act, or rather a mood, which implies even more than concentrated reflection, and involves themes dependent on large, pure sentiment. An able lawyer has to reflect much upon a broad, difficult case in order to master it; but when in the solitude of his study he is drawn, by the conflicts and wrongs he has witnessed during the day, to think on the purposes and destiny of human life, he more than reflects--he is lifted into a contemplative mood. Archbishop Trench, in his valuable volume on the "Study of Words," opens a paragraph with this sentence: "Let us now proceed to contemplate some of the attestations for God's truth, and some of the playings into the hands of the devil's falsehood, which may be found to lurk in words." Here we suggest that the proper word were consider; for there is activity, and a progressive activity, in the mental operation on which he enters, which disqualifies the verb contemplate.

Habitual showiness in language, as in dress and manners, denotes lack of discipline or lack of refinement. Our American magniloquence--the tendency to which is getting more and more subdued--comes partly from national youthfulness, partly from license, that bastard of liberty, and partly from the geographical and the present, and still more the prospective, political grandeur of the country, which Coleridge somewhere says is to be "England in glorious magnification."

I AM FREE TO CONFESS. An irredeemable vulgarism.

IN THIS CONNECTION. Another.

INDEBTEDNESS. "The amount of my engagedness" sounds as well and is as proper as "the amount of my indebtedness." We have already hard-heartedness, wickedness, composedness, and others. Nevertheless, this making of nouns out of adjectives with the participial form is an irruption over the boundaries of the parts of speech which should not be encouraged.

Archbishop Whately, in a passage of his shortcoming comments on Bacon's "Essays," uses preparedness. Albeit that brevity is a cardinal virtue in writing, a circumlocution would, we think, be better than a gawky word like this, so unsteady on its long legs. In favor of indebtedness over others of like coinage, this is to be said--that it imports that which in one form or other comes home to the bosom of all humanity.

INTELLECTS. That man's intellectual power is not one and indivisible, but consists of many separate, independent faculties, is a momentous truth, revealed by the insight of Gall. One of the results of this great discovery may at times underlie the plural use of the important word intellect when applied to one individual. If so, it were still indefensible. It has, we suspect, a much less philosophic origin, and proceeds from the unsafe practice of overcharging the verbal gun in order to make more noise in the ear of the listener. The plural is correctly used when we speak of two or more different men.

LEFT. "I left at ten o'clock." This use of leave as a neuter verb, however attractive from its brevity, is not defensible. To leave off is the only proper neuter form. "We left off at six, and left (the hall) at a quarter past six." The place should be inserted after the second left. Even the first is essentially active, some form of action being understood after off: we left off work or play.

MIDST. "In our midst" is a common but incorrect phrase.

OUR AUTHOR. A vulgarism, which, by its seeming convenience, gets the countenance of critical writers. We say seeming convenience; for in this seeming lies the vulgarity, the writer expressing, unconsciously often, by the our, a feeling of patronage. With his our he pats the author on the back.

PERIODICAL is an adjective, and its use as a substantive is an unwarrantable gain of brevity at the expense of grammar.

PROPOSE. Hardly any word that we have cited is so frequently misused, and by so many good writers, as propose, when the meaning is to design, to intend to propose. It should always be followed by a personal accusative--I propose to you, to him, to myself. In the preface to Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" occurs the following sentence; "The author proposed to himself merely to write a fanciful story, evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not purpose attempting a portraiture of Italian manners and character"--a sentence than which a fitter could not be written to illustrate the proper use of propose and purpose.

PREDICATED UPON. This abomination is paraded by persons who lose no chance of uttering "dictionary words," hit or miss; and is sometimes heard from others from whom the educated world has a right to look for more correctness.

RELIABLE. A counterfeit, which no stamping by good writers or universality of circulation will ever be able to introduce into the family circle of honest English as a substitute for the robust Saxon word whose place it would usurp--trustworthy. Reliable is, however, good English when used to signify that one is liable again. When you have lost a receipt, and cannot otherwise prove that a bill rendered has been paid, you are re-liable for the amount.