Parts of Speech: Essays on English

Altho the various essays which are now brought together in this book have been written from time to time during the past ten years, nearly all of them have had their origin in a...

Matthew Arnold thought that we owed “to the Latin element in our language the most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the moder...

The issue of that conflict cannot be foreseen by any inspection of figures, for it will turn not so much on mere numbers--altho the possession of these will be an immense advant...

If the Norman conquest had not taken place the history of the English race would be very different, and the English language would not be what it is, since it would have had for...

Perhaps the principle which will govern can best be stated in another quotation from M. Bréal: “The limit within which the right to innovate stops is not fixed by any idea of ‘p...

In the ‘Art of French Poetry,’ first printed in 1565, Ronsard, one of the most adroit of Victor Hugo’s predecessors in the mastery of verse, proffers this significant advice to...

One of the best known of true Americanisms is _lumber_=“timber.” When we speak of the _lumbering_ industry we mean not only the cutting down of trees and their sawing up into pl...

Perhaps this is a reason why the poets have ever been ready to rescue a cast-off word from the rubbish-heap of the past. Professor Earle (of Oxford) declares that “it has been o...

It is well that strange uses like these do not win early acceptance into our speech--that there should be alert challengers at the portal to cry “Halt!” and to examine a newcome...

The fate in English of another French term is even now trembling in the balance. This is the word _née_. The French have found a way out of the difficulty of indicating easily t...

_To freeze to_ anything or any person is a down-east phrase, so Lowell records, but it has a far-western strength; and so has _to get solid with_, as when the advice is given th...

Most of the little manuals which pretend to regulate our use of our own language and to declare what is and what is not good English are grotesque in their ignorance; and the be...

“I have a theory about double rimes for which I shall be attacked by the critics, but which I could justify perhaps on high authority, or, at least, analogy,” wrote Mrs. Brownin...

In the one poem of Walt Whitman’s in which he seemed almost willing to submit to the bonds of rime and meter, and which--perhaps for that reason partly--is the lyric of his now...

Sometimes the hard facts are twisted arbitrarily to force them into an imported falsehood. Elberon, where Garfield died, was founded by one L. B. Brown, so they say, and the hom...

Far be it from me to appear as the defender of the “American spelling” which the British journalists denounce. This “American spelling” is less absurd than the British spelling...

The securing of an absolutely phonetic spelling being impracticable,--even if it was altogether desirable,--the efforts of those who are dissatisfied with the prevailing orthogr...

There are many words in circulation among us which we understand fairly well, which we use ourselves, and which we should, however, find it difficult to define. I think that _Am...