Bids ocean labor with tremendous roar,
To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore;
Sets wheels on wheels in motion,—what a clatter!
To force up one poor nipperkin of water;
Alike in every theme his pompous art,
Heaven’s awful thunder, or a rumbling cart.”
One of the latest “modern improvements” in speech is the substitution of “lady” and “female” for the good old English “woman.” On the front of Cooper’s Reading Room, in the city of New York, is the sign in golden letters, “Male and Female Reading Rooms.” Suppose Scott, in his noble tribute to women for their devotion and tenderness to men in their hour of suffering, had sung
“Oh, LADIES, in our hours of ease,” etc.,
would not the lines have been far more touching? An English writer says truly that the law of euphemisms is somewhat capricious; “one cannot always tell which words are decent and which are not.... It really seems as if the old-fashioned feminine of ‘man’ were fast getting proscribed. We, undiscerning male creatures that we are, might have thought that ‘woman’ was a more elegant and more distinctive title than ‘female.’ We read only the other day a report of a lecture on the poet Crabbe, in which she who was afterward Mrs. Crabbe was spoken of as ‘a female to whom he had formed an attachment.’ To us, indeed, it seems that a man’s wife should be spoken of in some way which is not equally applicable to a ewe lamb or a favorite mare. But it was a ‘female’ who delivered the lecture, and we suppose the females know best about their own affairs.”
Can any person account for the apparent antipathy which many writers and speakers have to the good Saxon verb “to begin”? Ninety-nine out of every hundred persons one talks with are sure to prefer the French words “to commence” and “to essay,” and the tendency is strong to prefer “to inaugurate” to either. Nothing in our day is begun, not even dinner; it is “inaugurated with soup.” In their fondness for the French words, many persons are betrayed into solecisms. Forgetting, or not knowing, that, while “to begin” may be followed by an infinitive or a gerund, “to commence” is transitive, and must be followed by a noun or its equivalent, they talk of “commencing to do” a thing, “essaying to do well,” etc. Persons who think that “begin” is not stately enough, or that it is even vulgar, would do well to look into the pages of Milton and Shakespeare. With all his fondness for Romanic words, the former hardly once uses “commence” and “commencement”; and the latter is not only content with the idiomatic word, but even shortens it, as in the well known line that depicts so vividly the guilt-wasted soul of Macbeth: