FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Romance languages are those whose grammatical structure, as well as part at least of their vocabulary, is directly descended from Latin—as Italian, French, Spanish. Under Romance words we include all that English has borrowed from Latin either directly or through the Romance languages. And words borrowed from Greek in general use, ranging from alms to metempsychosis, may for the purposes of this chapter be considered as Romance. The vast number of purely scientific Greek words, as oxygen, meningitis, are on a different footing, since they are usually the only words for what they denote.
[3] Even in the legitimate sense (see p. 16), originally a happy metaphor for mysterious leaking out, but now vulgarized and ‘dead’.
[4] Not that this word calls for censure in itself; but when packed into a sentence with snow-white, green, and shrimp-pink, it contributes noticeably to that effect of brief and startling exhaustiveness which is one variety of what we have stigmatized as efficiency.
[5] It has. ‘It would be difficult to say just how many weddings of famous people have been celebrated at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square.’—Westminster Gazette.
[6] Readers of history are of course likely to be familiar with it; it occurs, for instance, scores of times in Carlyle’s Friedrich. In such work it is legitimate, being sure, between context and repetition, to be comprehensible; but this does not apply to newspaper writing.
[7] The Oxford Dictionary has fourteen varieties.
[8] Alit is due, no doubt, to mere inadvertence or ignorance: the form litten (‘red-litten windows’, &c.), for which the Oxford Dictionary quotes Poe, Lytton, W. Morris, and Crockett, but no old writer, is sham archaism.
[9] The use deprecated has perhaps crept in from such phrases as the sun was partially eclipsed, an adaptation of a partial eclipse; and to such phrases it should be restricted. ‘The case was partially heard on Oct. 17’ is ambiguous; and the second example in the text is almost so, nearly enough to show that the limitation is desirable. The rule should be never to write partially without first considering the claims of partly.