An old Missouri deed for forty acres of land is a good illustration of legal verbiage. It conveys “all and singular—appurtenances, appendages, advowsons, benefits, commons, curtilages, cow-houses, corncribs, dairies, dovecotes, easements, emoluments, freeholds, features, furniture, fixtures, gardens, homestalls, improvements, immunities, limekilns, meadows, marshes, mines, minerals, orchards, parks, pleasure grounds, pigeon houses, pigstyes, quarries, remainders, reversions, rents, rights, ways, water courses, windmills, together with every other necessary right, immunity, privilege and advantage of whatsoever name, nature or description.”
Prayers Constructed with Elaborate Skill
Dean Goulburn points out that the words employed in the Collects in the Book of Common Prayer are the purest and best English known, “representing to us our language when it was in full vigor and just about reaching its prime;” and that in the arrangement of the words, the balancing of clauses, and the giving unity to the whole composition, the composers and translators have been as happy as in their choice of words. “Let any one,” he adds, “try to write (say) an epitaph with as much unity of design, as much point, as much elegance, and as much brevity as the Collects are written with, and in proportion to the difficulty which he finds in achieving such a task will the elaborate skill with which these prayers have been constructed rise in his estimation.” Dean Goulburn has not exaggerated the rhythmical movement and the singular felicity of expression which mark the Collects; indeed, one has only to compare them with the prayers published on special occasions by modern archbishops, or with any modern forms of prayer, to see their superiority, not only in choice of language, but in compression of thought.
Its
The word ITS, the possessive case of the neuter pronoun it, originally written his, appears neither in Cruden’s nor in Young’s Concordance. It was not known to the translators of King James’ version of the Bible, who had to resort to circumlocution for want of that little pronoun. It has been assumed, therefore, that it is not to be found in the Sacred Scriptures. Nevertheless, it occurs in the fifth verse of the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus, as follows:
“That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap.”
Rough
Dickens, in “All the Year Round,” objects to the “softening of ruffian into rough, which has lately become popular.” Yet the use of the noun rough as applied to a coarse, violent, riotous fellow, a bully, instead of being a recent creation, dates back to the Elizabethan period. In Motley’s “History of the United Netherlands” in the description of the death of Queen Elizabeth (iv. 183), we are told:
“The great queen, moody, despairing, dying, wrapt in profoundest thought, with eyes fixed upon the ground or already gazing into infinity, was besought by the counsellors around her to name the man to whom she chose that the crown should devolve. ‘Not to a Rough,’ said Elizabeth, sententiously and grimly.”