Misused Words.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 954, 26 December 1933, Page 6

Misused Words.

CORRESPONDENT writes:—As a reader of your notes, I am writing in the hope that you will lx* kind enough to explain in somewhat simpler English the following sentences: “The beasts of the field are not so many .automata without sensation, so constructed as to assume all the natural expressions of it. Nature hath not practised this universal deception upon our species.” I do not understand what the “ universal deception ” is. and “ practised ” sounds baffling. Jn the following sentence does the word “ that ” mean “ that kind of’’? “ And when the physiologist lays open the recesses of their system, by means of that scalpel under whose operation they just shrink .. .” Does “of” in the next sentence mean “by means of ” ? “ Theirs is unmixed and unmitigated pain, the agonies of martyrdom without the alleviation ‘of ’ the hopes and the sentiments whereof men are capable.” The sentence means that if beasts have no feelings, men’s eyes deceive them. “ Universal ” is used properly in the sense of “ including the whole number ” or the whole of mankind. The word “ practised ” is used not in the ordinary sense of “ performed frequently,” but in the Shakespearean sense of done by artifice or stratagem, as in, “ He will practise against thee by poi- “ That scalpel ” is a more emphatic and telling way of saying “ the knife ” or “ an instrument.” In puzzling over sentences like the last, •the correspondent should try simpler words in the same order or relationship. He might therefore write:—“The pleasures of bathing without the inconveniences of the mosquito bites and sunburn with which men are afflicted.” Thus the sentence would explain itself. A correspondent asks for the pronunciai tion of Sinaitic, which appeared in a cable I message about the purchase of a scripture j manuscript. It is sigh-nav-it-ic, with stress ! on the first and third syllables. TOUCHSTONE.