"If you do not speak in that manner, you had much better not speak at all." "A reader who wants an amusing account of the United States had better go to Mrs. Trollope, coarse and malignant as she is. A reader who wants information about American politics, manners, and literature had better go even to so poor a creature as Buckingham."2 Another familiar idiom is shown in the expression, "Please hand me that book," for "May it please you to," etc. The more formal expression still survives in "May it please your Honor." The perfect and pluperfect tenses of the verb be are used idiomatically with to and a substantive or an infinitive of purpose. For example: "Have you been to the theatre?" "He had been to see Irving that night." Other idiomatic expressions are, many a, as in "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen," never so good, would God, whether or no, either at the end of a negative sentence, as in "I can't go, either." Still another idiom, which is objected to in England, it is said, but which is universal in the United States, consists in the use of do, and especially of do not, with have, in such expressions as "America does not have a monopoly of bad English," "He did not have much appetite." Some idioms are relics of what was once ordinary usage. The origin of others has not yet been discovered, but the more the language is studied, the more light is shed upon the history of expressions which do not now. carry their meaning on the face of them, as they once 1 Lord Chesterfield: Letter to his son, July 9, O. S., 1750. 2 Macaulay; in Trevelyan's "Life and Letters of Macaulay," vol. ii. chap. ix. See "The Saturday Review," Dec. 1, 1888, p. 641. did. Dance attendance, scrape acquaintance, curry favor, however difficult to understand word by word, are easy to understand as phrases. As phrases, they are facts in language: "Welcome, my lord: I dance attendance here; I think the duke will not be spoke withal."1 "Politicians who, in 1807, sought to curry favour with George the Third by degrading Caroline of Brunswick, were not ashamed, in 1820, to curry favour with George the Fourth by persecuting her." 2 The true test lish. of good Eng In the use of language there is only one sound principle of judgment. If to be understood is, as it should be, a writer's first object, his language must be such as his readers understand, and understand as he understands it. If he is so fond of antiquity as to prefer a word that has not been in use since the twelfth or the seventeenth century to one only fifty or twenty years old but in good repute to-day, he is in danger of being shelved with his adopted contemporaries; if he is so greedy of novelty as to snatch at the words of a season, few of which survive the occasion that gives them birth, his work is likely to be as short-lived as they. If, being a scholar, he uses Latinisms or Gallicisms known only to scholars like himself; if, being a lawyer or a physician, he uses legal or medical jargon; or if, living in Yorkshire or in Arkansas, he writes in the dialect of Yorkshire or in that of Arkansas, he will be understood by those who belong to his class or to his section of country, but he may be unintelligible, as well as distasteful, to the general public. By avoiding pedantry and vulgarity alike, a writer, while commending himself - 1 Shakspere: Richard III., act iii. scene vii. to the best class of readers, loses nothing in the estima tion of any other class; for those who do not themselves speak or write pure English understand it when spoken or written by others. The reasons, in short, which prevent an English author from publishing a treatise in Greek, Celtic, or French, or in a dialect peculiar to a place or to a class, prohibit him from employing an English expression that is not favored by the great body of cultivated men in English-speaking countries, an expression not sanctioned by GOOD USE,that is, by Present, National, and Reputable use: present, as opposed to obsolete or ephemeral; national, as opposed to local, professional, or foreign; reputable, as opposed to vulgar or affected. PRESENT USE is determined neither by authors who wrote so long ago that their diction has become antiquated, nor by those whose reputation as good Present use. writers is not firmly established. Not even the authority of Shakspere, of Milton, or of Johnson, though supported by the uniform practice of his contemporaries, justifies an expression that has been long disused; nor does the adoption by many newspapers of a new word, or of an old word in a new sense, make it a part of the language. In both cases, time is the court of last resort; and the decisions of this court are made known through writers of national reputation. The exact boundaries of present use cannot, however, be fixed with precision. Dr. Campbell, writing in the middle of the last century, held that a word which had not appeared in any book written since 1688, or which was to be found in the works of living authors only, should not be deemed in present use; but in these days of change words go and come more rapidly. Old names disappear with old things, or acquire new meanings; new things call for new names, and the new names, if generally accepted, come into present use. Familiar instances are supplied by the history of chivalry, heraldry, astrology, on the one hand, and of gas, steam, mining, electricity, on the other. Sometimes words long disused are recalled to life. “Reason and understanding, as words denominative of distinct aculties; the adjectives sensuous, transcendental, subjective and objective, supernatural, as an appellation of the spiritual, or that Immaterial essence which is not subject to the law of cause and effect, and is thus distinguished from that which is natural, are ail words revived, not invented by the school of Coleridge.” 1 Other words "revived, not invented," are connotation, spiritualism, tennis, plaisance (which is the old word pleasance) in "Midway Plaisance;" but each of these is used in a sense different from that which it originally bore. Words may be in present use in poetry which are obsolete, er almost obsolete, in prose. Such words are: ere, anon, nigh, save (except), betwixt, scarce and exceeding (scarcely, exceedingly), erst, fain, whilom, withal, hath, yore, quoth, kine, don, doff, nay, yea, ever or alway (always), mine, as in "mine host." Mrs. Browning may write twain and corse, where prose would write "two" and "corpse;" Tennyson may write rampire and shoon, where prose would write "rampart" and "shoes," just as he may call the sky "the steadfast blue.” 8 Words that are obsolete for one kind of prose may not be obsolete for another. In an historical novel, for example, archaic expressions may be introduced if they are characteristic of the time in which the scene is laid; 1 Marsh: Lectures on the English Language, lect. viii. but they should not be so many as to render the work unintelligible or distasteful to ordinary readers. All that may properly be done is to suggest antiquity. In Thackeray's "Henry Esmond," for example, the use of 'tis for "it is " (frequent in "The Spectator," but rare in modern prose1) helps to take the reader back to Queen Anne's time In all cases, "the question is not, whether a diction is antiquated for current speech, but whether it is antiquated for that particular purpose for which it is employed. A diction that is antiquated for common speech and common prose, may very well not be antiquated for poetry or certain special kinds of prose. 'Peradventure there shall be ten found there,' is not antiquated for Biblical prose, though for conversation or for a newspaper it is antiquated. The trumpet spake not to the arméd throng,' is not antiquated for poetry, although we should not write in a letter, he spake to me,' or say, 'the British soldier is armed with the Enfield rifle." " 2 Some words may be regarded as applicants for admission to the language, but as not yet in present use. Such words are allowable in conversation, in books that reproduce conversation, and in writings that serve a temporary purpose. "I certainly should not, in regular history," writes Macaulay, "use some of he phrases which you censure. But I do not consider a review of this sort as regular history, and I really think that, from the highest and most unquestionable authority, I could vindicate my practice. Take Addison, the model of pure and graceful writing. In his Spectators I find 'wench,' 'baggage,' 'queer old put,' 'prig,' 'fearing that they should smoke the Knight.' All these expressions I met this morning, in turning over two or three of his papers at breakfast. I would no more use the word 'bore' or 'awkward squad' in a composition meant to be uniformly serious and earnest, than Addison would in a State paper have called 1 Used frequently, however, by Emerson. 2 Matthew Arnold: Essays in Criticism; On Translating Homer, Last Words. |