CHAPTER VII

PROSE DICTION

I. USAGE

201. Diction includes all separate consideration of words, phrases, and clauses. The sentence, being independent, self-supporting, may be conveniently taken as the smallest unit of composition. Everything below that, every consideration not included in the previous chapters, falls properly under the head of diction. By a man's diction we mean his choice of words as distinct from his method of composition.

202. The use of words to express meaning, to convey information, is determined by usage. Usage, from country to country using the same language, and from age to age, shows considerable variation. Language is at no time and place fixed. The invention of printing and other means of communication have retarded change; but they have not stopped it. Every spoken language, like the nation that speaks it, is in motion. Consciously or unconsciously, each generation is adapting to itself the inheritance of all generations. But since there is an inheritance, and since the change is slow, there is for every generation a consensus as to what has been kept intact, what has been fitly added, and finally what of old or new remains in doubt. This consensus, more or less

definite, more or less binding, according to the temper of the particular nation, is called usage or good use.

203. The record of usage in spelling, punctuation, meaning, is the dictionary. The dictionary does not properly legislate; it records. Its office is to say,

not-"This word shall be used in such and such a sense;" but "This word is used in such and such a sense now. The eighteenth-century use to mean so-and-so is now so far obsolescent as hardly to appear outside of verse. The application to so-and-so has not yet been recognized by good authors." Noah Webster's promulgation of new spellings, for the sake of uniformity and of his views of etymologies, was usurpation. To reform is no part of the lexicographer's business. We look into the dictionary for an accurate tabular view, not of what should be, but sometimes of what has been, sometimes of what seems about to be, always and above all of what is.

204. Thus faithfully and impersonally to reflect usage is a task both large and hard; and even harder than for French or Italian is the task for English. The wide dissemination of English-speaking peoples operates, in spite of the ease of modern interchange, toward disintegration. Local peculiarities can no longer, indeed, ripen into distinct dialects; but they grow enough to be quite distinguishable in speech. Still stronger against uniformity is the English temper of individualism. Speaking generally, the man of English race has always taken more liberties with his mother tongue than the man of Latin race. If correctness stand in the way of a use that seems to his present urgency forcible, he is impatient of correct

ness.

And since such arbitrary extensions of meaning

are obvious in the speech, not only of the careless and illiterate, but also of recognized men of letters, a dictionary of English, having behind it less weight of conservative restraint, has less weight of sanction than a dictionary of French. Recording more varieties of extension, it sometimes leaves so far less plain what usage is as to encourage a propensity to further

variation.

205. The freedom of English has led some scholars even to deny the reality of an English good use. Finding in every use of English the scientific interest. of unconscious changes according to physical tendencies and of conscious changes according to social tendencies, they question the authority by which any one use is made superior to the others. But it remains true in English, only less than in some other languages, that the effect alike of popular lapse and of the innovation of individuals is always checked, and sometimes counteracted, by conservative custom. This custom, the consensus of those whose knowledge of the language and skill in its use gives them a kind of professional assurance, does in fact still rule the mass of writers, though the mass is now enormously increased. For being less definite and less visible, the authority of usage in English is less strong, indeed, but not less real.

206. The authority is less definite and accessible in that it oftener needs interpretation. No one city holds for English the place of Athens for Greek, or Paris for French. Social eminence is marked, especially in this country, by nothing else so little as by purity of speech; and the purest use is not reflected for the mass of the people, as in Germany, by the stage. There remains, of course, as a standard the consentient use of English

men of letters everywhere, of writers and scholars whose preeminence has been recognized; but precisely what this use is may sometimes in a particular case be in doubt. Its most direct expression seems at present to be through critical reviews, such as the London Spectator, and the New York Nation. An authoritative record, however, is more difficult. We do not accept our dictionaries as final, because they have not proved themselves final. Where they agree we may probably rest assured; but they too sometimes disagree. In fact, since the great dictionary of Dr. Johnson, English lexicography has not faithfully kept before the people, with adequate discrimination and reference, the actual progress of the language. For scholarship it has sometimes. given us pedantry; for usage, sometimes the preference of the lexicographer. The discredit thus accruing to the dictionary must in time give way to the more faithful scholarship of the present. Meantime the native individualism of Englishmen can find warrant for vagary.

207. Yet all this concerns mainly the outlying provinces and new dependencies of the language. As to the great body of law no one need be in doubt for lack of recorded decisions; no one can fairly plead ignorance. For correction and confirmation the dictionary is quite adequate to ordinary need. As to the acquiring of good use, that, in language as in everything else, is by good breeding and good company. A man may be correct without scientific scholarship. Even the converse is possible, that a man may have much science of his language without habitual correctness. And the cultivation of correctness, the conscious refining of speech, progresses not more by consultation of dictionaries than by living studiously with pure speech and pure writing.