Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/189

Rh The English people has insisted on its preference for a married clergy, and Dr. Ingram's successor may have 'arrows in the hand of a giant'.—Times.

The inverted commas seem to implore the reader's acceptance of this very battered ornament. One could forgive it more easily, if there were the slightest occasion for its appearance here.

The notion that Mr. Kipling, left to himself, is not competent to bring out all the latent possibilities of this phrase is a mistaken one, and argues an imperfect acquaintance with his works.

Many heads in England, I find, are shaken doubtfully over the politics, or what are thought to be the politics, of Australia. They—the politics, not the heads—are tangled, they are unsatisfactory in a high degree.—W. H..

We include under this head all substitutions of one word for another for the sake of variety, and some miscellaneous examples will be found at the end of the section. But we are chiefly concerned with what may be called pronominal variation, in which the word avoided is either a noun or its obvious pronoun substitute. The use of pronouns is itself a form of variation, designed to avoid ungainly repetition; and we are only going one step further when, instead of either the original noun or the pronoun, we use some new equivalent.