I shall offer one more example to show that costly mistakes in emphasis may result from supposing that the adjective can compete with the noun. This one came under my observation, and has remained with me as a classical instance of rhetorical ineptitude. On a certain university campus “Peace Week” was being observed, and a prominent part of the program was a series of talks. The object of these talks was to draw attention to those forces which seemed to be leading mankind toward a third world war. One of the speakers undertook to point out the extent to which the Western nations, and especially the United States, were at fault. He declared that a chief source of the bellicose tendency of the United States was its “proud rectitude,” and it is this expression which I wish to examine critically. The fault of the phrase is that it makes “rectitude” the villain of the piece, whereas sense calls for making “pride.” If we are correct in assigning the substantive a greater intrinsic weight, then it follows that “rectitude” exerts the greater force here. But rectitude is not an inciter of wars; it is rather that rectitude which is made rigid or unreasonable by pride which may be a factor in the starting of wars, and pride is really the provoking agent. For the most fortunate effect, then, the grammatical relationship should be reversed, and we should have “rectitude” modifying “pride.” But since the accident of linguistic development has not provided it with an adjective form of equivalent meaning, let us try “pride of rectitude.” This is not the best expression imaginable, but it is somewhat better since it turns “proud” into a substantive and demotes “rectitude” to a place in a prepositional phrase. The weightings are now more in accordance with meaning: what grammar had anomalously made the chief word is now properly tributary, and we have a closer delineation of reality. As it was, the audience went away confused and uninspired, and I have thought of this ever since as a situation in which a little awareness of the rhetoric of grammar—there were other instances of imperceptive usage—could have turned a merely well-intentioned speech into an effective one. Having laid down this relationship between adjective and substantive as a principle, we must not ignore the real or seeming exceptions. For the alert reader will likely ask, what about such combinations as “new potatoes,” “drunk men,” “a warlike nation”? Are we prepared to say that in each of these the substantive gets the major attention, that we are more interested in “potatoes” than in their being “new,” in “men” than their being “drunk,” and so forth? Is that not too complacent a rule about the priority of the substantive over the adjective?