Under this canon, Dr. Campbell prefers delicacy, authenticity, and vindictive, to delicateness, authenticalness, and vin- The canon of dicative, — decisions which have been sustained by time. euphony. Aversion has supplanted averseness; artificiality, artificialness; and scarcity is supplanting scarceness. The principle of euphony has, perhaps, a greater influence upon the language than some grammarians admit. Not infrequently, it overrides other principles. Thus, notwithstanding Canon I., it prohibits dailily, holily, jollily, heavenlily, timelily, homelily, and the like, preferring to such forms the inconvenience of having but one form-"daily,' homely," &c. - for both adjective and adverb; and it overrules the argument that would make forwards and backwards the sole adverbial forms in order to distinguish them from the adjectives forward and backward. “Forwards, march!" would be intolerable. So, too, as between beside and besides, toward and towards, homeward and homewards, the ear naturally chooses the form that sounds best in the sentence; as, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way."1 Notwithstanding Canon II., euphony frequently prefers need and dare to needs and dares; as, 5 5 "What is not true in the case of this usage need not be true." 2 "A bard to sing of deeds he dare not emulate." 8 Brevity, too, may be sacrificed to euphony. " "With difficulty" is preferable to difficultly; "most honest, beautiful, pious, distant, delicate," to honestest, beautifullest, piousest, distantest, delicatest; "most unquestionable, virtuous, indispensable, generous, more genteel," to unquestionablest, virtuousest, indispensablest, generousest,' genteeler ;1 and the same principle holds with many dissyllabic and with most polysyllabic adjectives. "Clearer" is better than more clear. 6 It is, of course, wrong to give undue weight to considerations of euphony, -to sacrifice sense to sound, strength to melody, or compactness to pleasant verbosity; but wherever one can, without serious loss, substi tute a word that is agreeable to the ear for an extremely 1 Gray: Elegy in a Country Churchyard. 3 Scott. 7 Thackeray. 2 Dr. J. H. Newman: Essays, Critical and Historical, vol. i. p. 224. Yet Bentham condemns words that he calls "difficultly pronounceable." Ruskin. 6 Carlyle. disagreeable one, or avoid an expression unusually difficult to pronounce, this should be done. Canon V. In the few cases in which neither perspicuity The canon of nor analogy, neither sound nor simplicity, deancient usage. termines the question between two forms of expression equally favored by good authors, we should choose the one which conforms to the older usage. On this ground, "jail," the form used in America, is preferable to gaol; 1 “ begin" to commence ("Things never began with Mr. Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced both in private life and on his handbills " 2); "photographer" to photographist, and the like; "trustworthy" to reliable3 (where there is no difference of meaning). Though, under this canon, "man of science" is preferable to scientist, the superior brevity of scientist is likely to carry the day; though the active participle in ing is in many cases preferable to the passive form with being," corn is selling" to is being sold, a house is building" to is being built, — yet the modern form is sometimes necessary to remove ambiguity: "is beating,” for instance, will hardly do for is being beaten. 4 Valuable as these canons are in determining the choice between two forms of speech equally favored by good use, helpful as they may be in keeping both archaismserlite Good use and vulgarisms out of the language, there supreme. can be no appeal to them in a case once decided. In such a case, the protests of scholars and the dogmatism of lexicographers are equally unavailing. It was in vain that Swift fought against the words, 1 Macaulay. Gladstone. 2 George Eliot: Middlemarch, book in. chap. xxxii. 3 The argument from analogy against this word, to the effect that, if it is to exist at all, it should be relyuponable, is, however, answered by the existence, in spite of the alleged analogy, of familiar words like indispensable, disposable; not to speak of laughable, inextricable,-words which it is possible to distinguish from reliable. See "On English Adjectives in Able, with special reference to Reliable," by Fitzedward IIall (1877). Words, however, like actable (Prof. Henry Morley in The XIXth Century, 1878), dependable (revived by The Saturday Review and The Spectator), recitable, should be discouraged. 4 Coined, it is said, by Dr. Whewell. wide mob, banter, reconnoitre, ambassador; that Dr. Johnson roared at clever, fun, nowadays, and punch; that Dr. Campbell lost his temper over dancing attendance, pellmell, as lief, ignore, subject-matter; that Bishop Lowth insisted that sitten — though, as he admitted, "almost wholly disused"—was, on the principle of analogy, the only correct form for the past participle of to sit; that Landor wished to spell as Milton did, objected to antique and to this (in place of these) means, declared "passenger and messenger coarse and barbarous for passager and messager, and nothing the better for having been adopted into polite society," and said that to talk about a man of talent was to talk "like a fool;" that Coleridge insisted on using or with neither; that the (London) Times for years wrote diocess for "diocese," chymistry for "chemistry;" or that Abraham Lincoln wrote in his messages to Congress abolishment instead of "abolition." It is in vain that the writer who cannot forgive the language for taking so kindly to its, would have poets called "makers," and rhyme, "rime;" or that Mr. E. A. Freeman seeks to resuscitate the more part in the Biblical sense of "the greater part," and mickle in the sense of "great," as in his "mickle worship," "mickle minster of Rheims." The recent efforts of grammarians on both sides of the Atlantic to keep telegram out of the language utterly failed. So did the attempt of the late Senator Sumner, in the following letter, to substitute a rare for a well-known word: 3 4 “With these views I find the various processes of annexion only a natural manifestation to be encouraged always, and to be 1 Landor: Works, vol. iv. pp. 175, 231. Forster: Life of Landor, book viii. 4 The question was whether to annex Charlestown to Boston. welcomed under proper conditions of population and public opinion. I say 'annexion' rather than 'annexation.' Where a word is so much used, better save a syllable, especially as the shorter is the better." For two or three days after the publication of this letter, some of the local journals followed Mr. Sumner's lead; but in a week his suggestion was forgotten. Such is the fate of all attempts to stem the current of usage, when it strongly sets one way. CHAPTER III. BARBARISMS. THE offences against the usage of the English language are: (1) Barbarisms, words not English; (2) Solecisms, constructions not English; (3) Improprieties, words or phrases used in a sense not English.1 Barbarisms are: (1) words which, though formerly in good use, are now obsolete; (2) words, whether of native growth or of foreign extraction, which have never established themselves in the language; (3) new formations from words in good use. SECTION I. OBSOLETE WORDS. "Language, like every thing else in the world, is subject to change. It is not so much men as times that differ. Events go on; with them, ideas, words, all the forms of a language, are subject to one and the same law. The expressive words, the happy turns of phrase, used in the Middle Ages, are sometimes regretted; but people forget that time leaves behind it only that which is no longer used." 2 1 See, for the corresponding excellences, p. 2. 2 X. Doudan: Mélanges, tome i.; De la Nouvelle École Poétique. |