Read
the following passage carefully before you choose your answers.
This
passage is taken from a nineteenth-century essay.
It is
not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a
familiar
for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without
affectation
is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing
that requires
more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of ex-
pression,
than the style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not (5)
only
all unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose,
unconnected,
slipshod allusions. It is not to take the first word
that
offers, but the best word in common use; it is not to throw
words
together in any combination we please, but to follow and
avail
ourselves of the true idiom of the language. To write a (10)
genuine
familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one
would
speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command
and
choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force,
and
perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.
Or to
give another illustration, to write naturally is the
(15)
same
thing in regard to common conversation, as to read naturally
is in
regard to common speech. It does not follow that it is
an easy
thing to give the true accent and inflection to the words
you
utter, because you do not attempt to rise above the level of
ordinary
life and colloquial speaking. You do not assume indeed (20)
the
solemnity of the pulpit, or the tone of stage-declamation:
neither
are you at liberty to gabble on at a venture, without
emphasis
or discretion, or to resort to vulgar dialect or clownish
pronunciation.
You must steer a middle course. You are tied down
to a
given and appropriate articulation, which is determined by (25)
the
habitual associations between sense and sound, and which
you
can only hit by entering into the author’s meaning, as you
must
find the proper words and style to express yourself by fixing
your
thoughts on the subject you have to write about. Any one
may
mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon (30)
stilts
to tell his thoughts: but to write or speak with propriety
and
simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a
pompous
style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want
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 (35)
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, (40)
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 (45)
of foreign
circumlocutions (with no precise associations) for the
mother-tongue.
How simple it is to be dignified without ease, 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 (50)
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 (55)
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.