The Enquirer's Oracle; Or, What to Do and How to Do It (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 Excerpt: ...--The continuing incongruousness of English orthography is a state of confusion, for which Dr. Samuel Johnson is in a great degree responsible. When he set about his dictionary, instead of studying the essential bases out of which words are evolved, and applying himself to the comparatively easy task of laying the foundations of scientific uniformity, he left all that sort of thing out of account, and, unfortunately for himself and subsequent generations, undertook the far less useful, but immensely greater labour of collating preceding authorities, which, in fact, were not sound authorities at all, because, until his time, every man had been free to write and spell as seemed best to himself; and upon the ever shifting sands of that immeasurable field of research, Dr. Johnson founded the incubus of his dictionary, Which, as a work of genius, has nothing to recommend it except respect for the prodigious labour it involved and the evidence it furnishes of the unreliable nature of the grounds upon which he proceeded. The broad result is that, what with ancient scribes and modern pharisees, sustained by the very heavy weight of Johnson's Dictionary, upon which all others are chiefly founded, we have to put up with a style of literary expression which, for educational purposes, is the very worst in the world. HE WHO PEALS WITH A FOX MUST EXPECT CUNNING. CUNNING IS THE FOOL'S SUBSTITUTE FOR WISDOM. 1412. Foreign Pretensions.--It is claimed, by foreign commentators, who take upon themselves the criticism of English, that their languages are free from the incongruities which are perceptible in every simple sentence of ours. No doubt they are less open to the charge of difficulty, but it is unfortunately not true that their own languages are free from contradictory ...