would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to
speak the sentence aloud.
"Now, my boy, we shall see," he said, "how
well you have learned your lesson."
"Now, my boy," he said, "we shall see how
well you have learned your lesson."
"What's more, they would never," she
added, "consent to the plan."
"What's more," she added, "they would
never consent to the plan."
14. Avoid fancy words.
Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-
dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a livelier
tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words. In this, as in so many matters pertaining to
style, one's ear must be one's guide:
gut
is a lustier noun than
intestine
, but the two words
are not interchangeable, because
gut
is often inappropriate, being too coarse for the
context. Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason.
If you admire fancy words, if every sky is
beauteous
, every blonde
curvaceous
, every
intelligent child prodigious, if you are tickled by
discombobulate
, you will have a bad time
with Reminder 14. What is wrong, you ask, with
beauteous
? No one knows, for sure.
There is nothing wrong, really, with any word — all are good, but some are better than
others. A matter of ear, a matter of reading the books that sharpen the ear.
The line between the fancy and the plain, between the atrocious and the felicitous, is
sometimes alarmingly fine. The opening phrase of the Gettysburg address is close to the
line, at least by our standards today, and Mr. Lincoln, knowingly or unknowingly, was
flirting with disaster when he wrote "Four score and seven years ago." The President could
have got into his sentence with plain "Eighty-seven" — a saving of two words and less of a
strain on the listeners' powers of multiplication. But Lincoln's ear must have told him to go
ahead with four score and seven. By doing so, he achieved cadence while skirting the
edge of fanciness. Suppose he had blundered over the line and written, "In the year of our
Lord seventeen hundred and seventy-six." His speech would have sustained a heavy blow.
Or suppose he had settled for "Eighty-seven." In that case he would have got into his
introductory sentence too quickly; the timing would have been bad.
The question of ear is vital. Only the writer whose ear is reliable is in a position to use bad
grammar deliberately; this writer knows for sure when a colloquialism is better than formal
phrasing and is able to sustain the work at a level of good taste. So cock your ear. Years
ago, students were warned not to end a sentence with a preposition; time, of course, has
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