5. WRONG USE OF WORDS.

Foreign Words.—It is not in the use of home-grown, but in the abuse of exotic words that blunders are oftenest made in English. As Prof. Freeman, in two articles “On some Recent Abuses of Words”, in Longman’s Magazine (vols. v. and vi.), points out, a crowd of words derived of old Greek and old Roman history and politics are now used in English, each in a sense altogether oblivious of its original meaning. Indeed, a foreign is often preferred to a home-grown word by an “English writer” simply because is it in every respect foreign to him. Among many other words, Prof. Freeman cites:—

DECIMATE, which in the seventeenth century had still the meaning proper to it, the same meaning as ‘tithe’, i.e., take the tenth part of. Now, however, when it is said that this town or this army was ‘literally decimated’, the expression does not really mean that one man in ten was killed. A farmer will write, “My field of turnips was absolutely decimated; scarce a root was left untouched” (Hodgson, Errors in the Use of English).

LITERALLY, etc.—An actor’s playing, according to a newspaper report, “literally brought down the house”—a repetition of Samson’s feat! ‘Vandalism’, ‘Plebeian’, ‘Tyrant’, ‘Ostracism’, ‘Ovation’, ‘Proscribe’, ‘Metropolis and the Provinces’, ‘Aristocracy and Democracy’, etc., etc., are, as shown by Prof. Freeman, continually being misapplied by writers who have a weakness for these words, because they have no notion whatever of the Vandals, the Plebs, Tyrranos, etc., etc.

AGGRAVATE, meaning properly ‘add weight to’, is often misused in the sense of ‘irritate’.

ALTERNATIVE properly means ‘the other of two course’, and yet we often read of ‘three alternatives’. (“Mr. Gladstone gives three alternatives.”—London Times, Feb. 2, 1891.)

ANTICIPATE, ‘take beforehand’, ‘take before the proper time’, is frequently misused in the sense of expect.

AVOCATION properly means calling away from a vocation or pursuit; and it is only in quite recent times that the word has come to be confounded with ‘vocation’,

DEMEAN, from the old French word demener, means to manage or conduct one’s self; but, confounding the word with mean or base (wherewith it has naught in common but the sound), many writers nowadays (ab)use it in the sense of lower one’s self. ‘Why should I so demean myself?’ (instead of abase myself).

An article in the Nineteenth Century (Jan. 1890) cites ‘dilapidated lungs’, ‘christening a horse’, ‘gooseberry fool’ (for ‘gorse-berry foulé), ‘feminine persuasion’, etc., etc.