THE PRINCIPLES OF RHETORIC. PART I.-COMPOSITION IN GENERAL. BOOK I.-GRAMMATICAL PURITY. CHAPTER I. GOOD USE. THE foundations of rhetoric rest upon grammar; for grammatical purity is a requisite of good writing. correctness in guage. Though it may be no merit to know the proper use of our native tongue, not to know it is a positive Importance of demerit, a demerit the greater in those of us the use of lanwho have had the advantages of education. To know is comparatively easy; but to have our knowledge always ready for use, to apply it in every sentence we frame, whether we have time to be careful or not, is far from easy. Not even eminent speakers or writers, not even those who readily detect in others errors in grammar, are themselves free from similar faults, such faults at least as may be committed, through inadvertence, in the hurry of speech or of composition. "A distinguished British scholar of the last century said he had known but three of his countrymen who spoke their native language with uniform gram matical accuracy, and the observation of most persons. widely acquainted with English and American society confirms the general truth implied in this declaration.” 1 Grammatical purity is, then, the first requisite of discourse, whether spoken or written. Whatever is addressed to English-speaking people should be in the Grammatical English tongue: it (1) should contain none purity defined. but English words and phrases, (2) should employ these words and phrases in their English meanings, and (3) should combine them according to the English idiom. What, now, determines whether a given expression is English? Evidently, the answer to this question is not to be sought in inquiries concerning the origin, the history, False tests of or the tendencies of the language. However good English. interesting in themselves, however successfully prosecuted, such investigations are of little practical value in a study which has to do, not with words as they have been or might have been or may be, but with words as they are; not with the English of yesterday or with that of to-morrow, still less with a theorist's ideal English, but with the English of to-day. In the English of to-day, one word is not preferred to another because it is derived from this or from that source; the present meaning of a word is not fixed by its etymology, nor its inflection by the inflection of other words with which it may, for some purposes, be classed. Athletics (from the Greek), farina (from the Latin), flour (from the Latin through the French), mutton (from the French), gas (a term invented by a chemist 2), are as 1 George P. Marsh: Lectures on the English Language, lect. v. 2 Van Helmont, a Fleming (born in 1577). good words as games, meal, sheep, fire. Properly used, manufacture is as good a word as handiwork, purple as red, prairie as meadow, magnificent as great, murmur as buzz, manual as handy, existence as being, convention as meeting, terminus as end. Though a vast majority of nouns form the plural in s, the plural of ox is still oxen, and that of mouse is still mice; though we no longer say, "A bee stang John," we do say, "The bird sang;" though its has been in use only three centuries, it is as much a part of the language as his or her, and one can only smile at a recent writer's hostility to this "unlucky, new-fangled word." 1 ousness. "There is," says Landor, “a fastidiousness in the use of language that indicates an atrophy of mind. We must take words as the world presents them to us, Fastidiwithout looking at the root. If we grubbed under this and laid it bare, we should leave no room for our thoughts to lie evenly, and every expression would be constrained and crampt. We should scarcely find at metaphor in the purest author that is not false or imperfect, nor could we imagine one ourselves that would not be stiff and frigid. Take now, for instance, a phrase in common use. You are rather late. Can anything seem plainer? Yet rather, as you know, meant originally earlier, being the comparative of rathe: the 'rathe primrose' of the poet recalls it. We cannot say, You are sooner late; but who is so troublesome and silly as to question the propriety of saying, You are rather late? We likewise say, bad orthography and false orthography: how can there be false or bad right-spelling?' "2 1 T. L. Kington Oliphant: The Sources of Standard English, chap. v. 2 Walter Savage Landor: Conversations, Third Series; Johnson and Horne (Tooke). |