Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/29

Rh The peculiarity of eke out is that it implies difficulty; in technical language, agreeing with supplement in its denotation, it has the extra connotation of difficulty. But it does not mean to make, nor to endure. From its nature, it will very seldom be used (correctly), though it conceivably might, without the source of the addition's being specified. In the first of the quotations, it is rightly used; in the second it is given the wrong meaning of make, and in the last the equally wrong one of endure.

A writer with a story to tell that is not very fresh usually ekes it out by referring as much as possible to surrounding objects.—H..

She had contrived, taking one year with another, to eke out a tolerably sufficient living since her husband's demise.—.

Yes, we do believe, or would the clergy eke out an existence which is not far removed from poverty?—Daily Telegraph.

Next, some isolated illustrations of our present heading:

'There are many things in the commonwealth of Nowhere, which I rather wish than hope to see adopted in our own.' It was with these words of characteristic irony that More closed the great work.—J. R..

The word irony is one of the worst abused in the language; but it was surely never more gratuitously imported than in this passage. There could be no more simple, direct, and literal expression of More's actual feeling than his words. Now any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same. The only way to make out that we have irony here is to suppose that More assumed that the vulgar would think that he was speaking ironically, whereas he was really serious—a very topsy-turvy explanation. Satire, however, with which irony is often confused, would have passed.

A literary tour de force, a recrudescence, two or three generations later, of the very respectable William Lamb (afterwards Lord Melbourne), his unhappy wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Lord Byron.—Times. (reincarnation, avatar, resurrection?)

Recrudescence is becoming quite a fashionable journalistic