nt to express: it is not so easy to pitch upon the very
word that exactly fits it. Out of eight or ten words equally common,
equally intelligible, with nearly equal pretensions, it is a matter
of some nicety and discrimination to pick out the very one the
preferableness of which is scarcely perceptible, but decisive.
The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson's style is that there is no
discrimination, no selection, no variety in it. He uses none but 'tall,
opaque words,' taken from the 'first row of the rubric'--words with
the greatest number of syllables, or Latin phrases with merely English
terminations. If a fine style depended on this sort of arbitrary
pretension, it would be fair to judge of an author's elegance by the
measurement of his words and the substitution of foreign circumlocutions
(with no precise associations) for the mother-tongue.(1) How simple is
it to be dignified without case, to be pompous without meaning! Surely
it is but a mechanical rule for avoiding what is low, to be always
pedantic and affected. It is clear you cannot use a vulgar English word
if you never use a common English word at all. A fine tact is shown in
adhering to those which are perfectly common, and yet never falling into
any expressions which are debased by disgusting circumstances, or
which owe their signification and point to technical or professional
allusions. A truly natural or familiar style can never be quaint
or vulgar, for this reason, that it is of universal force and
applicability, and that quaintness and vulgarity arise out of the
immediate connection of certain words with coarse and disagreeable
or with confined ideas. The last form what we understand by _cant_ or
_slang_ phrases.--To give an example of what is not very clear in the
general statement, I should say that the phrase _To cut with a knife,_
or _To cut a piece of wood,_ is perfectly free from vulgarity, because
it is perfectly common; but _to cut an acquaintance_ is not quite
unexceptionable, because it is not perfectly common or intelligible, and
has hardly yet escaped out of the limits of slang phraseology. I should
hardly, therefore, use the word in this sense without putting it in
italics as a license of expression, to be received _cum grano
salis._ All provincial or bye-phrases come under the same mark of
reprobation--all such as the writer transfers to the page from his
fireside or a particular _coterie,_ or that he invents for his own sole
use and conv