IV. OFFENCES AGAINST PURITY. 104. Errors in Diction have long been classified in two ways; (I.) As opposed to 1. Reputable, 2. National, 3. Present Use;1 (II.) With reference to the Departments of Grammar under which they fall,-1. Etymology, 2. Syntax, 3. Lexicography.2 105. The two classifications are entirely distinct; each has its own principle of division; each includes all possible offences against Purity. Every violation of Purity, therefore, can be classified in both ways; first, as opposed to Good Use, and, secondly, as offending against a principle of Grammar. Naturally, however, the fuller discussion and exemplification of the subject will be reserved for the second division of the subject. (1.) VIOLATIONS OF PURITY AS Opposed to Good Use. 1. VIOLATIONS OF REPUTABLE USE. 3 106. Violations of Reputable Use are, (1) VULGARISMS,3 modes of speech used chiefly by the illiterate; (2) IDIOTISMS, the affectations and the mannerisms of single writers or groups of writers. For example ; 4 (1) VULGARISMS: Ain't, don't (for does n't),5 walkist, to wire, you was, to you and I, lay (for lie or laid), laid (for lay) 1 Day, 285. (See 2 97, above.) The distinctions had, of course, been made long before Day wrote; but he was the first to state them formally. Curiously enough, he does not name either the vulgarism or the neologism. (106 and 131, below.) 2 Quintilian, Inst. Orat., I. v. 5. Latin vulgus, the many, and, hence, the illiterate, since the correct use of language has ever been the acquisition of but comparatively few people. 4 Greek idiúrns (idiótes), a citizen of peculiar political habits. 5 Many such contractions, don't (for do not), isn't, aren't, shan't, etc., are actually preferable in informal speech or writing; but no valid excuse (one would think) can be found for ain't, unless, indeed, its nearly universal use warrants it. I am not is easily shortened into I'm not; and ain't for isn't or aren't or have n't is, of course, unnecessary. leave (for let), female (for woman, lady), individual (for person, man, woman), less (for fewer), fewest (for smallest),1 gums, or rubbers (for overshoes), gentleman or lady (for man or woman), man or woman (for gentleman or lady). "Tact and a sense of the fitness of things," says Alfred Ayres," "decide when a man is a man or when he is a gentleman." Each word is good in its place; each is vulgar when out of its place. Gentleman and lady are, of course, far more frequently misused than man or woman; and it is no doubt true "that the terms lady and gentleman are least used by those who are most worthy of being designated by them." " But it is no cure for the misuse of either pair of words to exclude it from the vocabulary. "With a nice discrimination worthy of special notice, one of our daily papers recently said, 'Miss Jennie Halstead, daughter of the proprietor of the Cincinnati Commercial, is one of the most brilliant young women in Ohio;"'""" but, surely, Mrs. So and So ought not to speak of her friends invited to a german as so many men and women.3 Mr. So and So may ask a few men to the Club, or even to his own house; but both men and women, when spoken of as holding a certain social position, should be mentioned with courtesy and deference. In this view they are gentlemen or ladies, and should be called so. An absurd expression, verbose as well as wrong in sense, is the phrase a Boston lady or a Philadelphia gentleman for a Bostonian, a Philadelphian, or equivalents. 6 6 6 4 (2) IDIOTISMS: Tipsify, toxophilite, divagation, Thukydidês, Herodotos," Senlac, Elsass, Regensburg, neither . . . or,1 egoism, egoist (for egotism, egotist).8 ... 1 As in less people, the fewest number, etc. The construction may be explained as attraction or ad intellectum (to the thought in the writer's mind, as opposed to the thought expressed); but this is only apologizing for error with high-sounding names. 2 The Verbalist, s. v. Lady. 3 A recent (and, doubtless, a passing) fashion. 4 Thackeray, Vanity Fair. 5 A purism imitated from the German, and practised by its few supporters with a refreshing disregard for either consistency or uniformity. Another purism, originated (apparently) by Dr. E. A. Freeman. 7 In Shakspere, two cases are plain slips or misprints (Meas.,IV. ii. 108; I Henry VI., v. i. 59), and in a third (Cor., II. ii. 13) neither is not correlative, but stands for not. (Cf. 1. 18 of the same scene.) 8 George Eliot and her imitators. 107. Many vulgarisms spring from what has been aptly termed the "slovenly" use of words,—their use, that is, in a sense either grossly exaggerated or else vague and indefinite. Thus, awfully, dreadfully, terribly, etc., are used for very or quite; very or quite, when no qualifying word is needed; nice, without any definite meaning; beastly, nasty, for ugly, uncomfortable; and so on ad nauseam. Whether it records an actual occurrence, or not, the story of the witty American girl's reply to an overpunctilious [!] Englishman points the moral here intended. "Why do you say 'nice'?" he asked: “I think 'nice' is a nasty word." why do you say 'nasty'?" she rejoined: "do you think 'nasty' a nice word?" For a correct use of nice in the phrase "a nice discrimination," see the quotation from Mr. Ayres, § 106. "And 108. Vulgarisms may be coarse or indelicate expressions, but they need not be. Indeed, some of the deepest-dyed offences of this class result from the effort to avoid indelicacy or coarseness. Older English allowed a freedom of speech quite as great as that allowed today by certain foreign languages. Sex-names for the domestic animals, dog, bitch, horse, mare, fox, vixen, he-wolf, she-wolf, were never censured. Modest women -ladies of the highest rank-spoke in a way that is today condemned as coarse even on the part of men. Thoughts now considered incommunicable except under the strictest guard, were then freely interchanged. Today all this is altered: many persons "shrink from plain words, and fear to call things by their names.' "Shade of Cobbet! we are now forbidden to call a spade a spade; our speech, like Bottom the weaver, is indeed translated." Doubtless, the feeling that prompts to this squeamishness is delicacy, but it is a mistaken delicacy, 1 Grant White, Words and their Uses, ch. v. 2T. L. Kington Oliphant, Standard English, ch. vi. 1 and it has betrayed many a speaker into gross vulgarism.1 Surely, the English tongue is not so defective, that its speakers must choose between real indelicacies and actual vulgarities. 109. "Slang," in the sense of low, vulgar language, belongs under this head; but, meaning the language of a class, it is rather Technicality," an offence against national use. 110. It ought to be true that vulgarisms are used only by the illiterate; but who will declare himself sinless, save in downright indelicacies? Bad habits of speech, contracted like an epidemic disease—no one knows how -cling to many otherwise cultured people, and defy all but the most strenuous efforts to dislodge them. That these efforts are worth making has already been seen; that they can be successful, let the exquisite purity of many a writer and speaker bear witness. But the student must keep one truth always before him. The price of freedom from blemishes of this sort is the price of liberty, eternal vigilance: indifference and the Will Honeycomb doctrine that to be able to spell correctly ill befits the character of a gentleman,3 are the surest roads to impurity and literary incapacity. III. At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that the surest road to grammatical purity is not a reckless striving after that virtue, but the cultivation of a refined literary feeling, a taste that, like an instinct, prompts to the use of language simple yet elegant, adorned or unadorned as the case may demand, but always unaffected and true. Purism is not Purity. In its very determination to be right at all costs, it either promotes an icy coldness of style, and so removes a writer to such a distance from 1 For example, what of lady-dog as a polite (!) equivalent for bitch; and this, though the adjective female or the prefix she could have been used, if the special sex-word seemed indelicate? 23 117, below. 3 Spectator, No. 105. Cf. Love's Labours Lost, I., ii. 42. his readers that he cannot influence them, or else betrays him into substituting for really pure speech a stilted, pretentious language that is certainly a most vulgar form of the Vulgarism. 112. The latter style of composition, known as “fine writing," especially besets the half-educated, whether those whose education is as yet only begun, or those who for any reason have not (as the phrase goes) pleted their education." Several grades of the bad practice may be noted. com 113. First, among imperfectly educated professional men—especially those who, whatever their special knowledge, have no general culture, and who seek to cover their ignorance with a cloud of words-many abominations of this sort may be heard. The doctor of medicine who asks permission to percute his patient's chest; the lawyer whose “small Latin and less Greek" leads him to write fecit per alium instead of act by another, or whose mistaken idea of what constitutes "good English" sets him on to say the heterogeneous masses with whom our profession brings us into daily contact instead of the common people whom I must meet every day; the clergyman who exhorts his hearers to add "one more blossom to the millennial consummation," or who can not say that plenty of soap and water have a healthy bracing effect upon the body, but must talk of habits of cleanliness and daily ablutions are sad examples; for they are "sinners above all the Galileans," their place among highly cultivated men demanding better things of them. "Her Majesty's Diplomatic and Consular servants have been officially reminded that whatever may be the forms and habits of speech in the countries where they reside, they are expected to communicate with the Foreign Office in English pure and undefiled. Lord Granville has issued a circular containing examples of grotesque words and slovenly phrases taken from the department files of correspondence received during the |