Poor Mary has been confined" and there she stopped; for that was the last word on a sheet, and the next sheet had dropped and fluttered away, and poor Mary, unmarried, was left really in a delicate situation until the missing sheet was found, and the reader continued-" to her room for three days, with what, we fear, is suppressed scarlet fever.” The disuse of the verb to child has been a real loss to our language, with the genius of which it was. in perfect harmony, while it expressed the fact intended to be conveyed with a simplicity and delicacy which would seem unobjectionable to every one, except those who are so superfinely and superhumanly shameful that they think it immodest that a woman should bear and bring forth a child at all. It might comfort them in the use of this word to remember that the French, which they regard as a language so much more refined than their own, has in constant use an exactly correspondent word,enfanter. But that might lead them to say that yesterday Mrs. Jones enfanted.*

FEMALE. The use of this word for woman is one of the most unpleasant and inexcusable of the common perversions of language. It is not a Briticism, although it is much more in vogue among British writers and speakers than among our own. With us lady is the favorite euphemism for woman. For every one of the softer and more ambitious sex who is dissatisfied with her social position, or uncertain of it, seems to share Mrs. Quickly's dislike of being called a woman. There is no lack of what is called authoritative usage during three centuries for this misuse of female. But this is one of those per

See Note at the end of this chapter.

versions which are justified by no example, however eminent. A cow, or a sow, or any she brute, is a female, just as a woman is; as a man is no more a male than a bull is, or a boar; and when a woman calls herself a female, she merely shares her sex with all her fellow-females throughout the brute creation.*

But

GENTLEMAN, LADY. - These words have been forced upon us until they have begun to be nauseous, by people who will not do me the honor of reading this book; so that any plea here for man and woman would be in vain and out of place. I will notice a very common misuse of the former, which prevails in business correspondence, in which Mr. A. is addressed as Sir, but the firm of A. B. & Co. as Gentlemen. Now, the plural of Sir is Sirs; and if gentleman has any significance at all, it ought not to be made common and unclean by being applied to mere business purposes. As to the ado that is made about "Mr. Blank and lady," it seems to me quite superfluous. If it pleases any man to announce on a hotel book that his wife, or any other woman who is travelling under his protection, is a lady, a perfect lady, let him do so in peace. This is a matter of taste and habit. The world is wide, and the freedom of this country has not yet quite deprived us of the right of choosing our associates ǝr of forming our own manners.

*The following whimsical fling at this squeamishness is from Graham's "Word Gossip," which has appeared since the publication of these chapters in their original form. Observe the implication that a young person must be of the female sex. This is a Briticism⚫ —

"In the many surgings of the mighty crowd I had actually laboured to assist and protect two (I was going to say ladies, but ladies are grateful; I can't say young persons, for they wern't young; nor can I say women, for that is considered a slight; or females, for such persons are no longer supposed to exist)—well, two individuals of a different sex from inv own."-p. 79.

LIMB. A squeamishness, which I am really ashamed to notice, leads many persons to use this word exclusively instead of leg. A limb is any. thing which is separated from another thing, and yet joined to it. In old English limbed was used to mean joined. Thus, in the "Ancren Riwle," "Loketh that ye beon euer mid onnesse of herte ilimed togeder," i. e., "Look that ye be ever with oneness of heart joined together." The branches of a tree have a separate individual character, and are yet parts of the tree, and thus are limbs. The fingers are properly limbs of the hand; but the word is generally applied to the greater divisions, both of trees and animals. The limbs of the human body are the arms and the legs; the latter no more so than the former. Yet some folk will say that by a railway accident one woman had her arms broken, and another her limbs - meaning her legs; and some will say that a woman hurt her leg when her thigh was injured. Perhaps these persons think that it is indelicate for a woman to have legs, and that therefore they are concealed by garments, and should be ignored in speech. Heaven help such folk; they are far out of my reach. I can only say to them that there is no immodesty in speaking of any part or function of the human body when there is necessity for doing so, and that when they are spoken of it is immodest not to call them by their proper names. The notion that by giving a bad thing a wrong or an unmeaning name, the thing, or the mention of it, is bettered, is surely one of the silliest that ever entered the mind of man. It is the occasion and the purpose of speech that make

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it modest or immodest, not the thing spoken of, ot the giving it its proper name.

RETIRE. If you are going to bed, say so, should there be occasion. Don't talk about retiring, unless you would seem like a prig or a prurient prude. ROOSTER.

-

A rooster is any animal that roosts. Almost all birds are roosters, the hens, of course, as well as the cocks. What sense or delicacy, then, is there in calling the cock of the domestic fowl a rooster, as many people do? The cock is no more a rooster than the hen; and domestic fowls are no more roosters than canary birds or peacocks. Out of this nonsense, however, people must be laughed, rather than reasoned.

NOTE (p. 179).-Southey uses the verb to child in "The Battle of Blenheim, ne of the simplest and most popular of his poems.

"And many a childing mother died."

How much more truly decent and delicate this is than the following passage from, I am sorry to say, the London "Medical Press: "

"For what female about legitimately to become a mother would desire to be among strangers at such a time!"

That a physician, of all men, should call a wife near her delivery, or a married woman near childbirth, by such a sickening round-about phrase as "a female about legitimately to become a mother!" But the extremity of this nauseating nonsense was reached in a woman's letter which was produced in a divorce case in some Western State. The wife, who was herself with child when she was married, discovered, about six months afterwards, a letter addressed to her husband in a feminine hand, which she was dishonorable enough to open and read. In it she found, as she deserved to find, this question:"Did you marry that child because she too was en famille?" As a combination of ignorant pretension and prurient prudery, this is unsurpassable. En famille means at home, without ceremony, in the family circle, domestic. This poor creature thought she was elegantly using the French for that hideous English phrase, “In the family way."

CHAPTER VI.

I

SOME BRITICISMS.

HAVE heretofore designated the misuse of cer tain words as Briticisms. There is a British affectation in the use of some other words which is worthy of some attention. And in saying that a form of English speech is of British origin, or is a Briticism, I mean that it has arisen or come into vogue in Great Britain since the beginning of the eighteenth century, when, by the union of England and Scotland (A. D. 1705-7), the King of England and of Scotland became King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, a British took the place of an English Parliament, and Englishmen became politically Britons. This period is one of mark in social and literary, as well as in political history. To us it is one of interest, because, about that time, although our political bonds were not severed until three quarters of a century latter, our absolute identity with the English of the mother country may be regarded as having ceased. For, after a moderate Jacobite exodus at the end of the seventeenth century, there was comparatively little emigration. from the old England to the new. They change their skies, but not their souls, who cross the sea; and whatever the population of this country may