The Atlantic Monthly Volume 94 (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. 1904 Excerpt: ... to this recognition by the dictionary-makers of the important place in modern life of the telegrapher's eccentricities. This agency, then, encourages big words and the overworked words. Its tendency is thus against the widening of the popular vocabulary, a misfortune too patent to need comment. It is an axiom of the rhetoricians that the power to express many and various shades of thought and feeling rests on the possession of a large and well-managed vocabulary. Many of our words already have so many meanings as to be subject to constant misinterpretation. It has been argued that half of the petty disputes of mankind may be traced in the last analysis to a different understanding of the language involved in the issue between the disputants. Examples of this are familiar. But a greater effect of the telegraph on rhetorical forms arises from its relation to punctuation. Only the most obvious stops can be depended on; hence, one accustomed to this method of transmission learns to put sentences into such shape that they punctuate themselves, avoiding forms which could be completely overturned in sense by neglect of a period or by its conversion into a comma. The adverbial phrase at the beginning of a sentence is especially dangerous, because it so readily adapts itself to the end of the sentence before, with results that may be amusing or amazing. It is always safer to have sentences begin directly, and even abruptly, with the noun which is their subject. Much of the graceful elision of one sentence into the next is lost by this requirement. Where each sentence stands out as distinct as a brick the literary passage will have the aspect of a brick wall. Lest these should seem plausible but unsupported theories I will compare some actual narration which has gon...