AT THAT. We should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the
pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into
bound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not be
italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a
phrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, of
American mintage, coined in one of those frolicksome exuberant moods,
when a young people, like a loosed horse full of youth and oats, kicks
up and scatters mud with the unharnessed license of his heels.
ANOTHER. Before passing to the letter B on our alphabetical docket, we
will call up a minor criminal in A, viz. _another_, often incorrectly
used for _other_; as in "on one ground or another," "from one
cause or another." Now, _another_, the prefix _an_ making it
singular,--embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contrary
to the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there are
but two grounds or causes. Write "on one ground or other," and the
words are in harmony with the meaning of the writer, the word _other_
implying several or many grounds.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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