It is our intention in this chapter, not to notice all the improprieties of speech that merit censure,—to do which would require volumes,—but to criticise some of those which most frequently offend the ear of the scholar in this country. The term impropriety we shall use, not merely in the strictly rhetorical sense of the word, but in the popular meaning, to include in it all inaccuracies of speech, whether offences against etymology, lexicography, or syntax. To pillory such offences, to point out the damage which they inflict upon our language, and to expose the moral obliquity which often lurks beneath them, is, we believe, the duty of every scholar who knows how closely purity of speech, like personal cleanliness, is allied to purity of thought and rectitude of action. To say that every person who aspires to be esteemed a gentleman should carefully shun all barbarisms, solecisms, and other faults in his speech, is to utter the merest truism. The man who habitually deviates from the custom of his country in expressing his thoughts, is hardly less ridiculous than one who walks the streets in a Spanish cloak or a Roman toga. An accurate knowledge and a correct and felicitous use of words are, of themselves, almost sure proofs of good breeding. No doubt it marks a weak mind to care more for the casket than for the jewel it contains,—to prefer elegantly turned sentences to sound sense; but sound sense always acquires additional value when expressed in pure English. Moreover, he who carefully studies accuracy of expression, the proper choice and arrangement of words in any language, will be also advancing toward accuracy of thought, as well as toward propriety and energy of speech; “for divers philosophers hold,” says Shakespeare, “that the lip is parcel of the mind.” Few things are more ludicrous than the blunders by which even persons moving in refined society often betray the grossest ignorance of very common words. A story is told in England of an over-classical Member of Parliament, who, not knowing or forgetting that “omnibus” is the plural of the Latin “omnis,” and means “for all,”—that is, a vehicle in which people of all ranks may sit together,—spoke of “two omnibi.” There are hundreds of educated persons who speak of the “banister” of a staircase, when they mean “balustrade,” or “baluster”; there is no such word as “banister.” There are hundreds of others who never eat anything, not even an apple, but always partake, even though they consume all the food before them; and even the London “Times,” in one of its issues, spoke of a jury “immersing” a defendant in damages. We once knew an old lady in a New England village, quite aristocratic in her feelings and habits, who complained to her physician that “her blood seemed to have all stackpoled;” and we have heard of another descendant of Mrs. Malaprop, who, in answer to the question whether she would be sure to keep an appointment, replied, “I will come,—alluding it does not rain.”
Goldsmith is one of the most charming writers in our language; yet in his “History of England,” the following statement occurs in a chapter on the reign of Elizabeth. Speaking of a communication to Mary, Queen of Scots, he says: “This they effected by conveying their letters to her by means of a brewer, that supplied the family with ale through a chink in the wall of her apartment.” A queer brewer that, to supply his ale through a chink in the wall! Again, we read in Goldsmith’s “History of Greece”: “He wrote to that distinguished philosopher in terms polite and flattering, begging of him to come and undertake his education, and bestow on him those useful lessons of magnanimity and virtue which every great man ought to possess, and which his numerous avocations rendered impossible for him.” In this sentence the pronoun he is employed six times, under different forms; and as, in each case, it may refer to either of two antecedents, the meaning, but for our knowledge of the facts, would be involved in hopeless confusion. First, the pronoun stands for Philip, then for Aristotle, then for Alexander, again for Alexander, and then twice for Philip. A still greater offender against clearness in the use of pronouns is Lord Clarendon; e.g., “On which, with the king’s and queen’s so ample promises to him (the Treasurer) so few hours before, conferring the place upon another, and the Duke of York’s manner of receiving him (the Treasurer), after he (the Chancellor) had been shut up with him (the Duke), as he (the Treasurer) was informed might very well excuse him (the Treasurer) from thinking he (the Chancellor) had some share in the effront he (the Treasurer) had undergone.” It would be hard to match this passage even in the writings of the humblest penny-a-liner; it is “confusion, worse confounded.”
Solecisms so glaring as these may not often disfigure men’s writing or speech; and some of the faults we shall notice may seem so petty and microscopic that the reader may deem us “word-catchers that live on syllables.” But it is the little foxes that spoil the grapes, in the familiar speech of the people as well as in Solomon’s vineyards; and, as a garment may be honey-combed by moths, so the fine texture of a language may be gradually destroyed, and its strength impaired, by numerous and apparently insignificant solecisms and inaccuracies. Nicety in the use of particles is one of the most decisive marks of skill and scholarship in a writer; and the accuracy, beauty, and force of many a fine passage in English literature depend largely on the use of the pronouns, prepositions, and articles. How emphatic and touching does the following enumeration become through the repetition of one petty word! “By thine agony and bloody sweat; by thy cross and passion; by thy precious death and burial; by thy glorious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost.” How much pathos is added to the prayer of the publican by the proper translation of the Greek article,—“God be merciful to me the sinner!”
De Quincey strikingly observes: “People that have practised composition as much, and with as vigilant an eye as myself, know also, by thousands of cases, how infinite is the disturbance caused in the logic of a thought by the mere position of a word as despicable as the word even. A mote that is in itself invisible, shall darken the august faculty of sight in a human eye,—the heavens shall be hid by a wretched atom that dares not show itself,—and the station of a syllable shall cloud the judgment of a council. Nay, even an ambiguous emphasis falling to the right-hand word, or the left-hand word, shall confound a system.” It is a fact well known to lawyers, that, the omission or misplacement of a monosyllable in a legal document has rendered many a man bankrupt. Fifteen years ago an expensive lawsuit arose in England, on the meaning of two phrases in the will of a deceased nobleman. In the one he gives his property “to my brother and to his children in succession”; in the other, “to my brother and his children in succession.” This diversity gives rise to quite different interpretations. In another case, by omitting the letter s in a legal document, an English attorney is said to have inflicted on a client a loss of £30,000.
In language, as in the fine arts, there is but one way to attain to excellence, and that is by study of the most faultless models. As the air and manner of a gentleman can be acquired only by living constantly in good society, so grace and purity of expression must be attained by a familiar acquaintance with the standard authors. It is astonishing how rapidly we may by this practice enrich our vocabularies, and how speedily we imitate and unconsciously reproduce in our language the niceties and delicacies of expression which have charmed us in a favorite author. Like the sheriff whom Rufus Choate satirized for having “overworked the participle,” most persons make one word act two, ten or a dozen parts; yet there is hardly any man who may not, by moderate painstaking, learn to express himself in terms as precise, if not as vivid, as those of Pitt, whom Fox so praised for his accuracy.[46] The account which Lord Chesterfield gives of the method by which he became one of the most elegant and polished talkers and orators of Europe, strikingly shows what miracles may be achieved by care and practice. Early in life he determined not to speak one word in conversation which was not the fittest he could recall; and he charged his son never to deliver the commonest order to a servant, but in the best language he could find, and with the best utterance. For years Chesterfield wrote down every brilliant passage he met with in his reading, and translated it into French, or, if it was in a foreign language, into English. By this practice a certain elegance became habitual to him, and it would have given him more trouble, he says, to express himself inelegantly than he had ever taken to avoid the defect. Lord Bolingbroke, who had an imperial dominion over all the resources of expression, and could talk all day just as perfectly as he wrote, told Chesterfield that he owed the power to the same cause,—an early and habitual attention to his style. When Boswell expressed to Johnson his surprise at the constant force and propriety of the Doctor’s words, the latter replied that he had long been accustomed to clothe his thoughts in the fittest words he could command, and thus a vivid and exact phraseology had become habitual.
It has been affirmed by a high authority that a knowledge of English grammar is rather a matter of convenience as a nomenclature,—a medium of thought and discussion about the language,—than a guide to the actual use of it; and that it is as impossible to acquire the complete command of our own tongue by the study of grammatical precept, as to learn to walk or swim by attending a course of lectures on anatomy. “Undoubtedly I have found,” says Sir Philip Sydney, “in divers smal learned courtiers a more sound stile than in some possessors of learning; of which I can ghesse no other cause, but that the courtier following that which by practice he findeth fittest to nature, therein (though he know it not) doth according to art, though not by art; where the other, using art to shew art, and not to hide art (as in these cases he should doe), flieth from nature, and indeed abuseth art.”
Let it not be inferred, however, from all this that grammatical knowledge is unnecessary. A man of refined taste may detect many errors by the ear; but there are other errors, equally gross, that have not a harsh sound, and consequently cannot be detected without a knowledge of the rules that are violated. Besides, it often happens, as we have already seen, that even the purest writers inadvertently allow some inaccuracies to creep into their productions. The works of Addison, Swift, Bentley, Pope, Young, Blair, Hume, Gibbon, and even Johnson, that leviathan of literature, are disfigured by numberless instances of slovenliness of style. Cobbett, in his “Grammar of the English Language,” says that he noted down about two hundred improprieties of language in Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets” alone; and he points out as many more, at least, in the “Rambler,” which the author says he revised and corrected with extraordinary care. Sydney Smith, one of the finest stylists of this century, has not a few flagrant solecisms; and, strange to say, some of them occur in a passage in which he is trying to show that the English language “may be learned, practically and unerringly,” without a knowledge of grammatical rules. “When,” he asks, “do we ever find a well educated Englishman or Frenchman embarrassed by an ignorance of the grammar of their respective languages? They first learn it practically and unerringly; and then, if they chose (choose?) to look back and smile at the idea of having proceeded by a number of rules, without knowing one of them by heart, or being conscious that they had any rule at all, this is a philosophical amusement; but who ever thinks of learning the grammar of their own tongue, before they are very good grammarians!” The best refutation of the reasoning in this passage is found in the bad grammar of the passage itself.
Even the literary detectives, who spend their time in hunting down and showing up the mistakes of others, enjoy no immunity from error. Harrison, in his excellent work on “The English Language,” written expressly to point out some of the most prevalent solecisms in its literature, has such solecisms as the following: “The authority of Addison, in matters of grammar; of Bentley, who never made the English grammar his study; of Bolingbroke, Pope, and others, are as nothing.” Breen, who in his “Modern English Literature: its Blemishes and Defects,” has shown uncommon critical acumen, writes thus: “There is no writer so addicted to this blunder as Isaac D’Israeli.” Again, in criticising a faulty expression of Alison, he sins almost as grievously himself by saying: “It would have been correct to say: ‘Suchet’s administration was incomparably less oppressive than that of any of the French generals in the Peninsula.’” This reminds one of the statement that “Noah and his family outlived all who lived before the flood,”—that is, they outlived themselves. Latham, in his profound treatise on “The English Language,” has such sentences as this: “The logical and historical analysis of a language generally in some degree coincides.” Here the syntax is correct; but the sense is sacrificed, since a coincidence implies at least two things. In the London “Saturday Review,” which “is nothing if not critical,” we find such a cacophonous sentence as the following: “In personal relations Mr. Bright is probably generally kindly.” Blair’s “Rhetoric” has been used as a text-book for half a century; yet it swarms with errors of grammar and rhetoric, against almost every law of which he has sinned. Moon, in his review of Alford, has pointed out hundreds of faults in “The Dean’s English,” as censurable as any which he has censured; and newspaper critics, at home and abroad, have pointed out scores of obscurations, as well as of glaring faults, in Moon.
It has been well observed by Professor Marsh that most men would be unable to produce a good caricature of their own individual speech, and that the shibboleth of our personal dialect is unknown to ourselves, however ready we may be to remark the characteristic phraseology of others. “It is a mark of weakness, of poverty of speech, or, at least, of bad taste, to continue the use of pet words, or other peculiarities of language, after we have once become conscious of them as such.” There are certain stock phrases, also, which, though not objectionable in themselves, have been so worn to shreds by continual repetition in speech and in the press, that a man of taste will shun using them as instinctively as he shuns a solecism. A few examples are the following: “History repeats itself,” “The irony of fate,” “That goes without saying,” “Ample scope and verge enough,” “We are free to confess,” “Conspicuous by its absence,” “The courage of his convictions.”
We proceed to notice some of the common improprieties of speech. Many of them are of recent origin, others are old offenders that have been tried and condemned at the bar of criticism again and again:—