Chapter I: Vocabulary (3)

To leave no possible doubt about the distinction, we shall give many examples, divided into (1) right uses, (2) wrong uses, (3) sentences in which, though the author has used the word rightly, a perverse reader might take it wrongly. It will be observed that in (1) to substitute _man_ or _person_ would distinctly weaken the sense; in the sentence from Macaulay it would be practically impossible. The words italicized are those that prove the contrast with bodies, or organizations, to have been present to the writer’s mind, though it may often happen that he does not actually show it by specific mention of them. On the other hand, in (2) _person_ or _man_ or _he_ might always be substituted without harm to the sense, though sometimes a more exact word (not _individual_) might be preferable. In (3) little difference would be made by the substitution.

(1) Many of the _constituent bodies_ were under the absolute control of individuals.--MACAULAY.

Regarding the general effect of Lord Kitchener’s proclamation, everything so far as is known here points to the conclusion that the document has failed to secure the surrender of any _body of men_. Merely a few individuals have yielded.--_Times._

The wise Commons, considering that they are, if not a French _Third Estate_, at least an aggregate of individuals pretending to some title of that kind, determine....--CARLYLE.

(2) That greenish-coloured individual is an advocate of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre.--CARLYLE. (person)

Surely my fate is somehow strangely interwoven with that of this mysterious individual.--SCOTT. (person)

And, as its weight is 15 lb., nobody save an individual in no condition to distinguish a hawk from a handsaw could possibly mistake it for a saluting charge.--_Times._ (person)

The Secretary of State for War was sending the same man down to see what he could do in the Isle of Wight. The individual duly arrived.--_Times._ (he)

My own shabby clothes and deplorable aspect, as compared with this regal-looking individual.--CORELLI. (person)

In the present case, however, the individual who had secured the cab had a companion.--BEACONSFIELD. (man)

I give my idea of the method in which Mr. Spencer and a Metaphysician would discuss the necessity and validity of the Universal Postulate. We must suppose this imaginary individual to have so far forgotten himself as to make some positive statement--A. J. BALFOUR. (person)

But what made her marry that individual, who was at least as much like an oil-barrel as a man?--C. BRONTË. (monstrosity)

He was a genteelly dressed individual; rather corpulent, with dark features.--BORROW. (man)

During his absence two calls were made at the parsonage--one by a very rough-looking individual who left a suspicious document in the hands of the servant.--TROLLOPE. (man)

(3) Almost all the recent Anarchist crimes were perpetrated by _isolated_ halfwitted individuals who aimed at universal notoriety.--_Times._

Which of these two individuals, in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their king? For a king or leader they, as all _bodies of men_, must have.--CARLYLE.

Some apology is due for so heaping up instances of the same thing; but here, as with other common blunders to be treated of later, it has seemed that an effect might be produced by mere iteration.

The word _mutual_ requires caution. As with _individual_, any one who is not prepared to clear his ideas upon its meaning will do well to avoid it; it is a very telltale word, readily convicting the unwary, and on the other hand it may quite easily be done without. Every one knows by now that _our mutual friend_ is a solecism. _Mutual_ implies an action or relation between two or more persons or things, A doing or standing to B as B does or stands to A. Let A and B be the persons indicated by _our_, C the _friend_. No such reciprocal relation is here implied between A and B (who for all we know may be enemies), but only a separate, though similar relation between each of them and C. There is no such thing as a mutual friend in the singular; but the phrase _mutual friends_ may without nonsense be used to describe either A and C, B and C, or, if A and B happen to be also friends, A and B and C. _Our mutual friend_ is nonsense; _mutual friends_, though not nonsense, is bad English, because it is tautological. It takes two to make a friendship, as to make a quarrel; and therefore all friends are mutual friends, and _friends_ alone means as much as _mutual friends_. _Mutual wellwishers_ on the other hand is good English as well as good sense, because it is possible for me to be a man’s wellwisher though he hates me. Mutual love, understanding, insurance, benefits, dislike, mutual benefactors, backbiters, abettors, may all be correct, though they are also sometimes used incorrectly, like _our mutual friend_, where the right word would be _common_.

Further, it is to be carefully observed that the word _mutual_ is an equivalent in meaning, and sometimes a convenient one for grammatical reasons, of the pronoun _each other_ with various prepositions. To use it as well as _each other_ is even more clearly tautological than the already mentioned _mutual friendship_.

If this be the case, much of the lost mutual understanding and unity of feeling may be restored.--_Times._

Correct, if _mutual_ is confined to _understanding_: they no longer understand _each other_.

Once their differences removed, both felt that in presence of certain incalculable factors in Europe it would be of mutual advantage to draw closer together.--_Times._

Slightly clumsy; but it means that they would get advantage _from each other_ by drawing together, and may stand.

... conversing with his Andalusian lady-love in rosy whispers about their mutual passion for Spanish chocolate all the while.--MEREDITH.

Surely you have heard Mrs. Toddles talking to Mrs. Doddles about their mutual maids.--THACKERAY.

Indefensible.

There may be, moreover, while each has the key of the fellow breast, a mutually sensitive nerve.--MEREDITH.

A nerve cannot respond to each other; nerves can; _a common nerve_ would have done; or _mutually sensitive nerves_.

It is now definitely announced that King Edward will meet President Loubet this afternoon near Paris. Our Paris Correspondent says the meeting will take place by mutual desire.--_Times._

Right or wrong according to what is meant by _desire_. (1) If it means that King Edward and M. Loubet desired, that is, had a yearning for, each other, it is correct; but the writer probably did not intend so poetic a flight. (2) If it means that they merely desired a meeting, it is wrong, exactly as _our mutual friend_ is wrong. The relation is not one between A and B; it is only that A and B hold separately the same relation to C, the meeting. It should be _common desire_. (3) If _desire_ is here equivalent to _request_, and each is represented as having requested the other to meet him, it is again correct; but only politeness to the writer would induce any one to take this alternative.

The carpenter holds the hammer in one hand, the nail in the other, and they do their work equally well. So it is with every craftsman; the hands are mutually busy.--_Times._

Wrong. The hands are not _busy_ with or _upon each other_, but with or upon the work. As _commonly_ would be ambiguous here, _equally_ or _alike_ should be used, or simply _both_. _Mutually serviceable_, again, would have been right.

There were other means of communication between Claribel and her new prophet. Books were mutually lent to each other.--BEACONSFIELD.

This surprising sentence means that Vanity Fair was lent to Paradise Lost, and Paradise Lost to Vanity Fair. If we further assume for politeness’ sake that _mutually_ is not mere tautology with _to each other_, the only thing left for it to mean is _by each other_. The doubt then remains whether (1) Paradise Lost was lent to Vanity Fair by Paradise Lost, and Vanity Fair to Paradise Lost by Vanity Fair, or (2) Paradise Lost was lent to Vanity Fair by Vanity Fair, and Vanity Fair to Paradise Lost by Paradise Lost. This may be considered captious; but we still wish the author had said either, They lent each other books, or, Books were lent by them to each other.

A thing is _unique_, or not unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness; nothing is ever somewhat or rather unique, though many things are almost or in some respects unique. The word is a member of a depreciating series. _Singular_ had once the strong meaning that _unique_ has still in accurate but not in other writers. In consequence of slovenly use, _singular_ no longer means singular, but merely remarkable; it is worn out; before long _rather unique_ will be familiar; _unique_, that is, will be worn out in turn, and we shall have to resort to _unexampled_ and keep that clear of qualifications as long as we can. Happily it is still admitted that sentences like the three given below are solecisms; they contain a self-contradiction. For the other regrettable use of _unique_, as when the advertisement columns offer us what they call _unique opportunities_, it may generally be assumed with safety that they are lying; but lying is not in itself a literary offence, so that with these we have nothing to do.

Thrills which gave him _rather_ a _unique_ pleasure.--HUTTON.

A _very unique_ child, thought I.--C. BRONTË.

... is to be translated into Russian by M. Robert Böker, of St. Petersburg. This is a _somewhat unique_ thing to happen to an English text-book.--_Westminster Gazette._

To _aggravate_ is not to annoy or enrage (a person), but to make worse (a condition or trouble). The active participle should very rarely, and the rest of the active practically never, be used without an expressed object, and that of the right kind. In the sentence, _An aggravating circumstance was that the snow was dirty_, the meaning is not that the dirt was annoying, but that it added to some other misery previously expressed or implied. But, as the dirt happens to be annoying also, this use is easily misunderstood, and is probably the origin of the notorious vulgarism; since it almost inevitably lays a writer open to suspicion, it is best avoided. Of the following quotations, the first is quite correct, the other five as clearly wrong; in the fifth, _aggrieved_ would be the right word.

A premature initiative would be useless and even dangerous, being calculated rather to aggravate than to simplify the situation.--_Times._

Perhaps the most trying and aggravating period of the whole six months during which the siege has lasted was this period of enforced idleness waiting for the day of entry.--_Times._

There is a cold formality about the average Englishman; a lack of effusive disposition to ingratiate himself, and an almost aggravating indifference to alien customs or conventions.--_Times._

Mrs. Craigie may possibly be regarding him with an irony too fine for us to detect; but to the ordinary mind he appears to be conceived in the spirit of romance, and a very stupid, tiresome, aggravating man he is.--_Times._

‘Well, I’m sure I’m very much obliged to you, Misses Brown,’ said the unfortunate youth, greatly aggravated.--DICKENS.

Nevertheless, it is an aggravating book, though we are bound to admit that we have been greatly interested.--_Westminster Gazette._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Romance languages are those whose grammatical structure, as well as part at least of their vocabulary, is directly descended from Latin--as Italian, French, Spanish. Under Romance words we include all that English has borrowed from Latin either directly or through the Romance languages. And words borrowed from Greek in general use, ranging from _alms_ to _metempsychosis_, may for the purposes of this chapter be considered as Romance. The vast number of purely scientific Greek words, as _oxygen_, _meningitis_, are on a different footing, since they are usually the only words for what they denote.

[2] As in the second quotation from _The Times_ on p. 4.

[3] Even in the legitimate sense (see p. 16), originally a happy metaphor for mysterious leaking out, but now vulgarized and ‘dead’.

[4] Not that this word calls for censure in itself; but when packed into a sentence with _snow-white_, _green_, and _shrimp-pink_, it contributes noticeably to that effect of brief and startling exhaustiveness which is one variety of what we have stigmatized as efficiency.

[5] It has. ‘It would be difficult to say just how many weddings of famous people have been celebrated at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square.’--_Westminster Gazette._

[6] Readers of history are of course likely to be familiar with it; it occurs, for instance, scores of times in Carlyle’s _Friedrich_. In such work it is legitimate, being sure, between context and repetition, to be comprehensible; but this does not apply to newspaper writing.

[7] The _Oxford Dictionary_ has fourteen varieties.

[8] _Alit_ is due, no doubt, to mere inadvertence or ignorance: the form _litten_ (‘red-litten windows’, &c.), for which the _Oxford Dictionary_ quotes Poe, Lytton, W. Morris, and Crockett, but no old writer, is sham archaism.

[9] The use deprecated has perhaps crept in from such phrases as _the sun was partially eclipsed_, an adaptation of _a partial eclipse_; and to such phrases it should be restricted. ‘The case was partially heard on Oct. 17’ is ambiguous; and the second example in the text is almost so, nearly enough to show that the limitation is desirable. The rule should be never to write _partially_ without first considering the claims of _partly_.