COME OFF. Were a harp to give out the nasal whine of the bagpipe, or the throat of a nightingale to emit the caw of a raven, the æsthetic sense would not be more startled and offended than to hear from feminine lips, rosily wreathed by beauty and youth, issue the words, “The concert will come off on Wednesday.” This vulgarism should never be heard beyond the “ring” and the cock-pit, and should be banished from resorts so respectable as an oyster-cellar.
CONSIDER. Neither weight of authority nor universality of use can purify or justify a linguistic corruption, and make the intrinsically wrong in language right; and therefore such phrases as, “I consider him an honest man,” “Do you consider the dispute settled?” will ever be bad English, however generally sanctioned. In his dedication of the “Diversions of Purley” to the University of Cambridge, Horne Tooke uses it wrongly when he says, “who always considers acts of voluntary justice toward himself as favors.” The original signification and only proper use of consider are in phrases like these: “If you consider the matter carefully;” “Consider the lilies of the field.”
CONDUCT. It seems to us that it were as allowable to say of a man, “He carries well,” as “He conducts well.” We say of a gun that it carries well, and we might say of a pipe that it conducts well. The gun and pipe are passive instruments, not living organisms, and thence the verbs are used properly in the neuter form. Perhaps, strictly speaking, even here its charge and water are understood.
CONTEMPLATE. “Do you contemplate going to Washington to-morrow?” “No: I contemplate moving into the country.” This is more than exaggeration and inflation: it is desecration of a noble word, born of man’s higher being; for contemplation is an exercise of the very highest faculties, a calm collecting of them for silent meditation—an act, or rather a mood, which implies even more than concentrated reflection, and involves themes dependent on large, pure sentiment. An able lawyer has to reflect much upon a broad, difficult case in order to master it; but when in the solitude of his study he is drawn, by the conflicts and wrongs he has witnessed during the day, to think on the purposes and destiny of human life, he more than reflects—he is lifted into a contemplative mood. Archbishop Trench, in his valuable volume on the “Study of Words,” opens a paragraph with this sentence: “Let us now proceed to contemplate some of the attestations for God’s truth, and some of the playings into the hands of the devil’s falsehood, which may be found to lurk in words.” Here we suggest that the proper word were consider; for there is activity, and a progressive activity, in the mental operation on which he enters, which disqualifies the verb contemplate.
Habitual showiness in language, as in dress and manners, denotes lack of discipline or lack of refinement. Our American magniloquence—the tendency to which is getting more and more subdued—comes partly from national youthfulness, partly from license, that bastard of liberty, and partly from the geographical and the present, and still more the prospective, political grandeur of the country, which Coleridge somewhere says is to be “England in glorious magnification.”
I AM FREE TO CONFESS. An irredeemable vulgarism.
IN THIS CONNECTION. Another.
INDEBTEDNESS. “The amount of my engagedness” sounds as well and is as proper as “the amount of my indebtedness.” We have already hard-heartedness, wickedness, composedness, and others. Nevertheless, this making of nouns out of adjectives with the participial form is an irruption over the boundaries of the parts of speech which should not be encouraged.
Archbishop Whately, in a passage of his shortcoming comments on Bacon’s “Essays,” uses preparedness. Albeit that brevity is a cardinal virtue in writing, a circumlocution would, we think, be better than a gawky word like this, so unsteady on its long legs. In favor of indebtedness over others of like coinage, this is to be said—that it imports that which in one form or other comes home to the bosom of all humanity.
INTELLECTS. That man’s intellectual power is not one and indivisible, but consists of many separate, independent faculties, is a momentous truth, revealed by the insight of Gall. One of the results of this great discovery may at times underlie the plural use of the important word intellect when applied to one individual. If so, it were still indefensible. It has, we suspect, a much less philosophic origin, and proceeds from the unsafe practice of overcharging the verbal gun in order to make more noise in the ear of the listener. The plural is correctly used when we speak of two or more different men.