Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/21

Rh in the estimate of the importance of the contradiction between current Religion and current Science put forward by thinkers of reputation.—. (why, in my opinion, some well-known thinkers make out the contradiction between current Religion and current Science to be so much more important than it is)

Sir,—Will you permit me to homologate all you say to-day regarding that selfish minority of motorists who...—Times. (agree with)

On the Berlin Bourse to-day the prospect of a general strike was cheerfully envisaged.—Times. (faced)

5. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

Despite the unfavourable climatic conditions.—Guernsey Advertiser. (Bad as the weather has been)

By way of general rules for the choice of words, so much must suffice. And these must be qualified by the remark that what is suitable for one sort of composition may be unsuitable for another. The broadest line of this kind is that between poetry and prose; but with that we are not concerned, poetry being quite out of our subject. There are other lines, however, between the scientific and the literary styles, the dignified and the familiar. Our rendering of the passage quoted from Mr. Balfour, for instance, may be considered to fall below the dignity required of a philosophic essay. The same might, with less reason, be said of our simplified newspaper extracts; a great journal has a tone that must be kept up; if it had not been for that, we should have dealt with them yet more drastically. But a more candid plea for the journalist, and one not without weight, would be that he has not time to reduce what he wishes to say into a simple and concrete form. It is in fact as much easier for him to produce, as it is harder for his reader to understand, the slipshod abstract stuff that he does rest content with. But it may be suspected that he often thinks the length of his words and his capacity for dealing in the abstract to be signs of a superior mind. As long as that