THE KING'S ENGLISH.

Evening Star, Issue 12027, 27 October 1903, Page 3

THE KING'S ENGLISH.

J. TO THE EDITOK. fc Sir, The King's English is not a tiling which even the most proficient j wiseacre can determine and dismiss off hand. There are many, however, who demur to anything approaching individuality, and yet grammar is only a style, and in many instances an obsolete art for modern epithet and epigrammatical expres- " sbn. It is both subtle and fluid, like the English Constitntion itself, in enunciation ' and pronunciation, and jumps the pedantic compound of the cultured grammarian, if \ there be sneh an one, to attend to its facts 2 and personalities. The average reader of to-day possesses a more intelligent appre--1 hension of what the King's RngKsh really ) is. It.is tie "King's," in cotrtradistme- * tion to a good deal of the verbiage which - f has been coined in the private mint of a ; Browning or a Meredith, or the diction decreed by ukase of some grammarian Czar of the stamp of Lindley Murray or Walker. y jyo appeal to this warrant of tie King's 8 English in order to prevent Dick, Tom, and ' Harry from being a law unto themselves. The love of the absolute uniform, as in the sciences, is not attainable, and when some % shallow pedant declares that this or that ex- ' pression is " incorrect," on the ground that , logically it ought to be so-and-so, oxdmarv ' mortals rebel, because idiom is generic, and has such a wide range. No one, of course, 3 recoinmends the reckless invention of pronunciation or of words in and out of seae son, the violation of simple rules of syntax & universally recognised, or the employment f of that which reasonable experience declares ? to be rank vulgarism. There is, meta--1 phoricafly speaking, such a thing in kaa guage and pronunciation as eating peas with - one s knife. One sometimes hears wretched r pronunciation, or mispronunciation by young , s^°,? le of *?* voxels, particularly " a" and 3 ' i," the ridiculous pronunciation in many s cases of the « o " too. Every vowel is mis- > pronounced. Take "cow" as an instance. i One mvariably heara "eeow"—one seldom . hears the beautiful roll of the Scotch "r," -r r "j r ' M m Roi)ert . or Richard, say. | leader-writers have happilv broken away t from old-fashioned rules, arid now give tts i terse, crispy, and elegant reading matter. MJJq we m Mir schools nritirata this modem

innovation to the advantage of many a hidden and yet undiscovered genius? Grammai grew out of oratory, and not oratory from grammar, and no specific receipt can be given to secure, even from the accentuated penultimate (the last syllable but one), nc grating upon one's ears. English is a living language, as the pages of the New Oxforc Dictionary testify, when it opens to " chor tie" and "galumph"—happy coinages from Lewis Carroll's uouveux books. Our language is constantly wasting, and needs replenishing, to say nothing of the everexpanding demands upon it. By all means let us- have the battle of the purists, be cause in many instances the struggle demonstrates an ancient and respectable pedigree. He (they) keeps his eyes open to observe what the litterateur actually writes, and lih ears to bear what the cultivated speaker ac tually says. At any given moment it i: the collection of words, pronunciations, am usages recognised by reasonably.-educatec society. Mrs Partington exists in langang* as in, other matters, but her besoms anc crotchets cannot check the outflow of the King's English.—l am, etc., P.M.