Chapter IX: Usefulness of Art (6)

BOQUET. The sensibility that gives the desire to preserve a present sparkling so long as is possible with all the qualities that made it materially acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something so precious as a word; and when we receive one from another people, gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift itself, should make us watchful that it be not dimmed by the boorish breath of ignorance or cacophanized by unmusical voices. We therefore protest against a useful and tuneful noun-substantive, a native of France, the word _bouquet_, being maimed into _boquet_, a corruption as dissonant to the ear as were to the eye plucking a rose from a variegated nosegay, and leaving only its thorny stem. _Boquet_ is heard at times in well-upholstered drawing-rooms, and may even be seen in print. Offensive in its mutilated shape, it smells sweet again when restored to its native orthography.

BY NO MANNER OF MEANS. The most vigorous writers are liable, in unguarded moments, to lapse into verbal weakness, and so you meet with this vulgar pleonasm in Ruskin.

BY REASON OF. An ill-assorted, ugly phrase, used by accomplished reviewers and others, who ought to set a purer example.

COME OFF. Were a harp to give out the nasal whine of the bagpipe, or the throat of a nightingale to emit the caw of a raven, the aesthetic sense would not be more startled and offended than to hear from feminine lips, rosily wreathed by beauty and youth, issue the words, "The concert will _come off_ on Wednesday." This vulgarism should never be heard beyond the "ring" and the cock-pit, and should be banished from resorts so respectable as an oyster-cellar.

CONSIDER. Neither weight of authority nor universality of use can purify or justify a linguistic corruption, and make the intrinsically wrong in language right; and therefore such phrases as, "I consider him an honest man," "Do you consider the dispute settled?" will ever be bad English, however generally sanctioned. In his dedication of the "Diversions of Purley" to the University of Cambridge, Horne Tooke uses it wrongly when he says, "who always _considers_ acts of voluntary justice toward himself as favors." The original signification and only proper use of _consider_ are in phrases like these: "If you consider the matter carefully;" "Consider the lilies of the field."

CONDUCT. It seems to us that it were as allowable to say of a man, "He carries well," as "He conducts well." We say of a gun that it carries well, and we might say of a pipe that it conducts well. The gun and pipe are passive instruments, not living organisms, and thence the verbs are used properly in the neuter form. Perhaps, strictly speaking, even here _its charge_ and _water_ are understood.

CONTEMPLATE. "Do you contemplate going to Washington to-morrow?" "No: I contemplate moving into the country." This is more than exaggeration and inflation: it is desecration of a noble word, born of man's higher being; for contemplation is an exercise of the very highest faculties, a calm collecting of them for silent meditation--an act, or rather a mood, which implies even more than concentrated reflection, and involves themes dependent on large, pure sentiment. An able lawyer has to reflect much upon a broad, difficult case in order to master it; but when in the solitude of his study he is drawn, by the conflicts and wrongs he has witnessed during the day, to think on the purposes and destiny of human life, he more than reflects--he is lifted into a contemplative mood. Archbishop Trench, in his valuable volume on the "Study of Words," opens a paragraph with this sentence: "Let us now proceed to _contemplate_ some of the attestations for God's truth, and some of the playings into the hands of the devil's falsehood, which may be found to lurk in words." Here we suggest that the proper word were _consider_; for there is activity, and a progressive activity, in the mental operation on which he enters, which disqualifies the verb _contemplate_.

Habitual showiness in language, as in dress and manners, denotes lack of discipline or lack of refinement. Our American magniloquence--the tendency to which is getting more and more subdued--comes partly from national youthfulness, partly from license, that bastard of liberty, and partly from the geographical and the present, and still more the prospective, political grandeur of the country, which Coleridge somewhere says is to be "England in glorious magnification."