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Updated: June 14, 2025
There are the same pompous phrases, the same inversions, the same stereotyped list of similes, the same poor bedraggled company of words. It is amusing to note the exclamations which rise to the lips of Voltaire's characters in moments of extreme excitement Qu'entends-je? Que vois-je? Où suis-je? Grands Dieux! Ah, c'en est trop, Seigneur! Juste Ciel! Sauve-toi de ces lieux!
He was well-known as a theorist and composer, and was the author of a harmony treatise in which were set forth the laws of chord inversions and derivations, a stroke of genius that hopelessly entangled him in perplexities. His instrumentation was more highly colored, his rhythms more varied than those of his predecessor, and his sincerity of purpose more evident.
Eminent among these was Benny Briggs, for if you looked high enough, you could see him any day with a balancing pole in his hand, walking on the ridge-poles and fences, or making of himself all sorts of peduncles and pendulums; bringing about in his own individual person the most astonishing inversions, subversions and retroversions, and the most remarkable twists and lurches and topsey-turveys and topplings-over.
He formed many new compound words after the German fashion, such as "mischief-joy"; and when he pleased, he coined new words, like "dandiacal" and "croakery." His frequent exclamations and inversions make his style seem choppy, like a wave-tossed sea; but his sentences are so full of vigor that they almost call aloud from the printed page.
It is for having cut all connection between the two terms that philosophers have been led to establish between them a rigorous parallelism, of which the ancients had not dreamed, to regard them as translations and not as inversions of each other; in short, to posit a fundamental identity as a substratum to their duality.
To him France owes the first attempt at the ode and the heroic epic; in the former, he is regarded as the precursor of Malherbe, who is still looked on as a model in this style, But Ronsard, and the numerous school which he formed, not only imitated the spirit and form of the ancients, but aimed to subject his own language to combinations and inversions like those of the Greek and Latin, and foreign roots and phrases began to overpower the reviving flexibility of the French idiom.
Perhaps Imogen had confided in Sir Basil; perhaps he agreed with her, was sorry, sympathetic, and embarrassed by a sympathy that set him against the woman he loved; perhaps he already felt a protecting, paternal affection for Imogen, just as he himself, in the absurd inversions of their situation, felt a protecting filial affection for Valerie.
Unfortunately she got mixed: the Serbian for open is very like the word for shut, and she used them reversed. There was much confusion. Just as the officials were getting used to her inversions, she corrected herself. More confusion. An English girl came in, pushed aside the papers on the big table, and began to brew cocoa on a Primus stove which she had brought with her.
Is it not like passing from the glare and vicarious holloaing of the street into a quiet, grave assembly of well-bred men, who are not afraid to let each other speak, and know how to make themselves heard without shouting; men who choose their words so well that they afford to speak without emphasis, and in whose speech you find neither neologisms, nor inversions, nor grammatical extravagances, nor calculated brutalities, nor affected ignorance, nor any faintest trace of pedantry?
Shear him of his paradoxes, of his surprises, of his sudden inversions, of his taking sallies in the face of the common reason, and appraise him for his real mastery over the elements of life and of the mind, as we do Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, and he will be found wanting. And yet, let me quickly add, there is something more precious and divine about him than about any or all the others.
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