Words and Their Uses, Past and Present; A Study of the English Language (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II NEWSPAPER ENGLISH. BIG WORDS FOR SMALL THOUGHTS Simple and unpretending ignorance is always respectable, and sometimes charming; but there is little that more deserves contempt than the pretence of ignorance to knowledge. The curse and the peril of language in this day, and particularly in this country, is, that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of being content to use it well according to their honest ignorance, use it ill according to their affected knowledge; who, being vulgar, would seem elegant; who, being empty, would seem full; who make up in pretence what they lack in reality; and whose little thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound like firecrackers in an empty barrel. How I detest the vain parade Of big-mouthed words of large pretence And shall they thus thy soul degrade, 0 tongue so dear to common sense Shouldst thou accept the pompous laws By which our blustering tyros prate, Soon Shakespeare's songs and Bunyan's sawa Some tumid trickster must translate. Our language, like our daily life, Accords the homely and sublime, And jars with phrases that are rife With pedantry of every clime. For eloquence it clangs like arms, For lore it touches tender chords, But he to whom the world's heart warms Must speak in wholesome, home-bred words. To the reader who is familiar with Beranger's Derniers Chansons these lines will bring to mind two stanzas in the poet's Tambour Major, in which he compares pretentious phrases to a big, bedizened drum-major, and simple language to the little gray- coated Napoleon at Austerlitz ? a comparison which has been brought to my mind very frequently during the writing of this book. It will be well for us to examine some examples of this vice of language in its various k...