No stone or inscription marks the location of their interment. What adult pedestrian has not heard this request from a very small child carrying a milk can or a beer jug but unable from exiguity of stature to reach the topmost tintinnabulum? Adolescens ! art thou endeavouring to entice a member of the finny tribe to engulf into his denticulated mouth the barbed hook at whose point is affixed a dainty allurement ? 1 127. Avoid all slang. SLANG. 128. Persons who use slang take an apparently meaningless word, like bamboozle, and invest it with arbitrary meaning, or they take a perfectly proper word, like awful, and give it meanings of which it is innocent. The habit at best is a stupid one. It implies laziness or ignorance, and a disregard for the dignity and truth of language. It is inconsistent with clear thinking. It lowers the mental standard, and in time may even lower the moral standard of those who employ it. Exercise 71. Re-write the following sentences in good English: The flower is awfully pretty; the roads are awfully dusty; the day is awfully fine, and we have had an awfully jolly spree. His professions are all bosh. We spent a very jolly week at the seaside. The draper offered his goods at a low figure. How do you feel?-Pretty peckish; and how do you?-Oh! A 1. You cannot bamboozle him; he is up to snuff. I gave the best answer I could, but I was awfully sat upon. It is true that he hit the mark, but it was only a fluke. That fellow has bamboozled us again. He is very uppish, as you may see by his phiz. I asked him what he was up to. She was very much cut up by the news. The Mayor gave the Alderman the cold shoulder. The small boy answered, 'No sir; I'm fishing.' We are going to have a jolly lark as the pater and the mater are both out. He varies his literary work by running about the biggest [that is, one of the biggest] market-garden in England. [The slang use of running and the careless use of about make it appear that the author ran about his garden.] OLD WORDS AND NEW WORDS. 129. A living language, like every other living thing, is continually undergoing a double process of decay and growth. Old words are ever dropping out of use and new words are coined or borrowed. Avoid obsolete words. They may exceed in beauty or expressiveness the words that have taken their places; but you write to be understood, and how can you expect to make your meaning clear if you employ terms intelligible now only to students of our older authors? Even if the terms are understood, they harmonise as little with your style as trunk-hose would with a dress-coat of the present day. Avoid new words also, unless they express new ideas; and do not attempt to coin terms. Our mother-tongue has proved sufficient to convey greater thoughts than ours, and if we search long enough we cannot fail to find in it all the words we need. 130. Some writers of the Tudor and the Stuart periods are a standing caution against the use of new words. They introduced many Greek and Latin terms that refused to take root and now stand dead in the midst of the living. Thus : (1) 'The terrible term, predestination, which hath troubled so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in respect to God no prescious [fore-knowing] determination of our estates to come but a definitive blast of His will already fulfilled and at the instant that He first decreed it.'-SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Religio Medici, § 2. (2) When they separate from others, they knit but loosely among themselves, nor contented with a general breach or dichotomy [division] with their church do subdivide and mince themselves almost into atoms.'-Id. § 8. (3) 'There is no danger to profound [fathom] these mysteries.'-Id. § 13.. (4) Some are without efficient [beginning], as God.'—Id. § 14. (5) This cryptic [hidden] and involved method of His providence have I ever admired.'-Id. § 17. (6) I may give only this advice according to my small model [capacity]. BACON's Essays; Of Unity in Religion. (7) 'It beginneth with the mixed adeption [acquisition] of a crown by arms and title.'—BACON, Of the Advancement of Learning, Bk. I., ii., 8. (8) 'The alchemists . . . inculcate that Vulcan is a second nature, and imitateth that dexterously and compendiously which nature worketh by ambages [circuitous ways] and length of time.'-Id. Bk. II., vii., 1. (9) 'He knoweth the nature of arefaction [drying].'—Id. Bk. II., viii., 3. (10) We may see what celsitude [loftiness] of honour Plinius Secundus attributeth to Trajan in his funeral oration.'—Id. Bk. II., xxii., 15. 131. A brief examination of almost any poem will show that the diction of poetry differs in many respects from that of prose. Let us take, for example, Tennyson's 'Lotos-Eaters.' Confining our attention to the choice of words and grammatical forms, we find the following lines which would not occur in prose :— Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse. Laden with flower and fruit whereof they gave Music that gentlier on the spirit lies And turning yellow Falls, and floats adown the air. To watch the crisping ripples on the beach. To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill. Only to hear were sweet. 132. The fact that a word may with propriety be used by a poet of the present day does not necessarily warrant its use by a prose writer; because (i.) Some words still used in poetry are obsolete in prose, and (ii.) Many words (such as ire, woe, dole, dire, direful, blissful, baleful, thrall) are by common consent deemed too 'poetical' for ordinary prose. 133. In writing prose, poetical words should be avoided. 134. Like new and coined words, strange words should be avoided. If you have nothing to say, why write? If you have something to say, why not say it in words that your reader will understand? Exercise 72. Re-write the following sentences, substituting other words for those printed in italics :- Mr. Brown donated a hundred dollars. The English language of the future will need all the mental acuity of the English people of the future. As far as we have been able to test them, the answers are dependable. A double set is provided, which may be interchangeable at the teacher's pleasure. An explanatory introductory thoroughly understood will pave the way. The squire said that he hunted his dogs parallelogrammatically. This is the day on which those charming little missives ycleped valentines cross and intercross each other at every street. The ire of the goddess was unappeasable. He who erst was king now kept a school. It irks me to see so perverse a disposition. Homicide and verbicide are alike forbidden. Nothing but an oscitancy from which no writer is exempted can account for so odd a misapplication of a familiar term. A friendly discussion which his wife ultroniously embarked upon The jovial and eupeptic vicar in a very nonchalant manner confessed the crime. They don't frivol over speculative points of abstrusive philosophy. The poetical aspects of engineering on which he enthused were new to his audience. The prisoner attempted to suicide. He is a comical [kóμn—the hair of the head] artist. She carries the historic proud countenance of the Geraldines of her dayaristocratic, matrician, and fixed. He was left during the moment as followed quasily [Lat. quasi, as if] dumb. The shells, however, at length ceased to displode. The whole system of registration is clamant for reform. He ultroniously and illegally took to beating the boys. He is an example of eupeptic good nature and common sense. FOREIGN WORDS. 135. More to be avoided than old, new, or strange words are foreign words. It is not likely that you can have anything to say which may not be said in your mother-tongue. Some writers seem (like Holofernes in the play) to have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps.' They possibly wish to show their learning; what they often do show is (as in the following examples) their lack of it. (1) She does not forget her protege [who was a little girl]. There are two mistakes in this sentence. There is no such word as protege, and protégé is Masculine. The correct French word is protégée. 1 A class of writers has sprung up who appear to think it their special business to 'enrich' the language by dragging into it, without any attempt at assimilation, contributions from all the tongues of the earth. The result is a wretched piece of patchwork, which may have charms in the eyes of some people, but which is certainly an abomination in the eyes of the genuine student of language. We need only glance into one of the periodical representatives of fashionable literature, or into a novel of the day, to see how serious this assault upon the purity of the English language has become. The chances are more than equal that we shall fall in with a writer who considers it a point of honour to choose all his most emphatic words from a French vocabulary, and who would think it a lamentable falling off in his style did he write half a dozen sentences without employing at least half that number of foreign words. His heroes are always marked by an air distingué; his vile men are sure to be blasés; his lady friends never merely dance or dress well, they dance or dress à merveille; and he himself when lolling on the sofa under the spirit of laziness does not simply enjoy his rest, he luxuriates in the dolce far niente, and wonders when he will manage to begin his magnum opus. And so he carries us through his story, running off into hackneyed French, Italian, or Latin expressions whenever he has anything to say which he thinks should be graphically or emphatically said. It really seems as if he thought the English language too meagre, or too commonplace a dress in which to clothe his thoughts. The tongue which gave a noble utterance to the thoughts of Shakespeare and Milton is altogether insufficient to express the more cosmopolitan ideas of Smith, or Tomkins, or Jenkins! We have before us an article from the pen of a very clever writer, and, as it appears in a magazine which specially professes to represent the 'best society,' it may be taken as a good specimen of the style. It describes a dancing party, and we discover for the first time how much learning is necessary to describe a 'hop' properly. The reader is informed that all the people |