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Updated: May 26, 2025
If books do not help us to this, if they even devise our thoughts into knots and put straws in our hair, then they ought to be burned. It is true that some of us may get pleasure from searching novels for solecisms and collecting evidence by which shall be guessed the originals of the novelist's characters, just as others extract amusement from puzzle pictures.
Ineffable moment! when the man you secretly hate sends you a Latin epigram with a false gender hendecasyllables with a questionable elision, at least a toe too much attempts at poetic figures which are manifest solecisms. That moment had come to Politian: the secretary had put forth his soft head from the official shell, and the terrible lurking crab was down upon him.
Just as the most well-bred persons can afford on occasions to be most careless of their manners just as only an old-established aristocracy can be truly reckless of the character of new associates whom it may please to take up so it may be that the well-educated man, confident of his impeccability and altogether off his guard, more readily absorbs into his daily speech cant phrases and even solecisms than the half-educated who is ever watchful lest he slip.
In a different set of circumstances, under a different inspiration, and with a different artistic attitude, solecisms they certainly are not. But, as Thackeray makes Ethel Newcome say, "We belong to our belongings." Our circumstances, inspiration, artistic attitude, are involuntary and possess us as our other belongings do.
That is not, of course, entirely true, for there are grades of speech in the United States, but it is relatively true true for the purpose of a comparison with the conditions in Great Britain. The Englishman may be surprised at the number of solecisms committed in the course of an hour's talk by a well-to-do New Yorker whom he has met in the company of gentlemen in England.
I likewise perceive that by a kind of natural instinct, you so dislike flattery, the nurse of tyranny, and the most grievous pest of a legitimate monarchy, that you as heartily hate the courtly solecisms and barbarisms as they are relished and affected by those who consider themselves as the arbiters of every elegance, and who, by way of seasoning their conversation, are perpetually sprinkling it with majesties, lordships, excellencies, and, if possible, with other expressions still more nauseous.
Just as exactly, too; for the correctness and propriety with which these terms are introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a Lord Chancellor." Senator Davis wrote: "We seem to have something more than a sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art. No legal solecisms will be found.
Bill Hay himself was a diamond in the rough, square, sturdy, uncompromising, generous and hospitable; his great pride and glory was his wife; his one great sorrow that their only child had died almost in infancy. His solecisms in syntax and society were many.
At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms; and here, at the very headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism. Efforts have been made to obtain in English some term equivalent to Philister or épicier; Mr. Carlyle has made several such efforts: "respectability with its thousand gigs," he says; well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle means, a Philistine.
We were nicely critical of music, yet in color were constantly committing the gravest solecisms. He did not think there were seventeen interiors in London that the educated eye could wander over without pain. Yet what knowledge was so useful?
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