taken
off.

We have here noted a score of the errors prevalent in written and
spoken speech--some of them perversions or corruptions, countenanced
even by eminent writers; some, misapplications that weaken and
disfigure the style of him who adopts them; and some, downright
vulgarisms--that is, phrases that come from below, and are
thrust into clean company with the odors of slang about them. These
last are often a device for giving piquancy to style. Against such
abuses we should be the more heedful, because, from the convenience of
some of them, they get so incorporated into daily speech as not to be
readily distinguishable from their healthy neighbors, clinging for
generations to tongues and pens. Of this tenacity there is a notable
exemplification in a passage of Boswell, written nearly a hundred
years ago. Dr. Johnson found fault with Boswell for using the phrase
to _make_ money: "Don't you see the impropriety of it? To _make_ money
is to _coin_ it: you should say _get_ money." Johnson, adds Boswell,
"was jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and
prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms; such as _pledging_ myself,
for _undertaking_; _line_ for _department_ or _branch_, as the _civil
line_, the _banking line_. He was particularly indignant against the
almost universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or
_opinion_, when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something of
which an image can be formed in the mind. We may have an _idea_ or
_image_ of a mountain, a tree, a building, but we surely cannot have
an idea or image of an _argument_ or _proposition_. Yet we
hear the sages of the law 'delivering their _ideas_ upon the question
under consideration;' and the first speakers of Parliament 'entirely
coinciding in the _idea_ which has been ably stated by an honorable
member.'"

Whether or not the word _idea_ may be properly used in a deeper or
grander sense than that stated by Dr. Johnson, there is no doubt that
he justly condemned its use in the cases cited by him, and in similar
ones. All the four phrases _make money_, _pledge_, _line_, and _idea_,
whereupon sentence of guilty was passed by the great lexicographer,
are still at large, and, if it be not a bull to say so, more at large
to-day than in the last century, since the area of their currency has
been extended to America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.

VIII.

A NATIONAL DRAMA.[8]

[8] From _Putnam's Mo