ELIMINATE.
(Vol. v., p. 317.)
"N. & Q." has from time to time done much good service by holding up to reprobation modern and growing corruptions of the English language. I trust that its columns may be open to one more attempt to rescue from abuse the word which stands at the head of this article.
Its signification, whether sought from Latin usage and etymology, or from the works of English mathematicians, is "to turn out of doors," "to oust," or, as we say in the midland counties, "to get shut of." In French it may be rendered as well by se défaire as by éliminer. Within the last seven or eight years, however, this valuable spoil of dead Latinity has been strangely perverted, and, through the ignorance or carelessness of writers, it has bidden fair to take to itself two significations utterly distinct from its derivation, viz. to "elicit," and to "evaluate." The former signification, if less vicious, is more commonly used than the latter. I append examples of both from three of the most elegant writers of the day. In the third extract the word under consideration is used in the latter sense; in the other extracts it carries the former.
Lectures on the Philosophical Tendencies of the Age, by J. D. Morrell, London, 1848, p. 41.:
"Had the men of ancient times, when they peopled the universe with deities, a deeper perception of the religious element in the mind, than had Newton, when having eliminated the great law of the natural creation, his enraptured soul burst forth into the infinite and adored?"
I take one more illustration (among many others) from pp. 145, 146. of this work:
"It would not be strictly speaking correct to call them philosophical methods, because a philosophical method only exists when any tendency works itself clear, and gives rise to a formal, connected, and logical system of rules, by which we are to proceed in the elimination of truth."
The Eclipse of Faith, by Professor Rogers, London, 1852, p. 392.:
"They are now at college, and have imbibed in different degrees that curious theory which professedly recognises Christianity (as consigned to the New Testament) as a truly divine revelation, yet asserts that it is intermingled with a large amount of error and absurdity, and tells each man to eliminate the divine 'element' for himself. According to this theory, the problem of eliciting revealed truth may be said to be indeterminate, the value of the unknown varies through all degrees of magnitude; it is equal to any thing, equal to every thing, equal to nothing, equal to infinity."
Theological Essays, by F. D. Maurice, Cambridge, 1853, p. 89.:
"Let us look, therefore, courageously at the popular dogma, that there are certain great ideas floating in the vast ocean of traditions which the old world exhibits to us, that the gospel appropriated some of these, and that we are to detect them and eliminate them from its own traditions."
But for the fact that such writers have given the weight of their names to so unparalleled a blunder, it would seem almost childish to occupy the columns of a literary periodical with exposing it. It is, however, somewhat singular that it should be principally men of classical attainments who perpetrate it. In my under-graduate days at Cambridge, the proneness of "classical men" to commit the blunder in question was proverbial.
In conclusion, then, let it be remembered that the word "eliminate" obtained general currency from the circumstance of its being originally admitted into mathematical works. In such works elimination signifies the process of causing a function to disappear from an equation, the solution of which would be embarrassed by its presence there. In other writings the word "elimination" has but one correct signification, viz. "the extrusion of that which is superfluous or irrelevant." As an example of this legitimate use of the word, I will quote from Sir William Hamilton's accurate, witty, and learned article on "Logic," published in the Edinburgh Review, April, 1833:
"The preparatory step of the discussion was, therefore, an elimination of these less precise and appropriate significations, which, as they could at best only afford a remote genus and difference, were wholly incompetent for the purpose of a definition."
C. Mansfield Ingleby.
Birmingham.