Studies in the Ways of Grice

Words, Words, Words

Very Like A Whale


By J. L. Speranza

for the Grice Club, etc


One of the best ever written by Fowler (other than the COD(*), later transpired as the SOD (**)) surely is "The Quean's English"

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* The Concise Oxford Dictionary
new edn. with 5,693 new entries,
and Chomskyan diagramms
for the stupidest collocations

** The Shortest Oxford Dictionary


The sections read like a paralipomena to Grice's implicature:

Vocabulary
General Principles
Familiar/far-fetched words
Concrete/abstract expression
Circumlocution
Short/long words
Saxon/Romance words
Requirements of different styles
Malaprops
Neologisms
Americanisms
Foreign words
Formation
Slang
Individual
Mutual
Unique
Aggravate
Case
Number
Comparatives/superlatives
Relatives
Defining/non-defining relative clauses
That and who or which
And who, and which
Case of the relative
Miscellaneous uses of the relative
It … that
Participle/gerund
Participles
The gerund
Distinguishing the gerund
Omission of the gerund subject
Choice between gerund/infinitive
Shall/will
The pure system
The coloured-future system
The plain-future system
Second-person questions
Examples of principal sentences
Substantival clauses
Conditional clauses
Indefinite clauses
Examples of subordinate clauses
Perfect infinitive
Conditionals
Doubt that
Prepositions
Airs and Graces
Certain types of humour
Elegant variation
Inversion
Exclamatory
Balance
In syntactic clauses
Negative, and false-emphasis
Miscellaneous
Archaism
Occasional
Sustained
Metaphor
Repetition
Miscellaneous
Trite phrases
Irony
Superlatives without the
Cheap originality
Punctuation
General difficulties
General principles
The spot plague
Over-stopping
Under-stopping
Grammar/punctuation
Substantival clauses
Subject, &c., and verb
Adjectival clauses
Adverbial clauses
Parenthesis
Misplaced commas
Enumeration
Comma between independent sentences
Semicolon with subordinate members
Exclamations/statements
Exclamations/questions
Internal question/exclamation marks
Unaccountable commas
The colon
Miscellaneous
Dashes
General abuse
Legitimate uses
Debatable questions
Common misuses
Hyphens
Quotation marks
Excessive use
Order with stops
Single/double
Misplaced
Half quotation
Euphony
Jingles
Alliteration
Repeated prepositions
Sequence of relatives
Sequence of that, &c.
Metrical prose
Sentence accent
Causal as clauses
Wens and hypertrophied members
Careless repetition
Quotation, &c.
Common misquotations
Uncommon misquotations of well-known passages
Misquotation of less familiar passages
Misapplied and misunderstood quotations and phrases
Allusion
Incorrect allusion
Dovetailed and adapted quotations and phrases
Trite quotation
Latin abbreviations, &c.
Grammar
Unequal yokefellows/defective double harness
Common parts
The wrong turning
Ellipse in subordinate clauses
Some illegitimate infinitives
Split infinitives
Compound passives
Confusion with negatives
Omission of as
Other liberties taken with as
Brachylogy
Between two stools
The impersonal one
Between … or
A placed between the adjective & its noun
Do as substitute verb
Fresh starts
Vulgarisms/colloquialisms
Meaning
Tautology
Redundancies
As to whether
Superfluous but and though
If and when
Maltreated idioms
Truisms and contradictions in terms
Double emphasis
Split auxiliaries
Overloading
Demonstrative, noun, and participle or adjective
Ambiguity
False scent
Misplacement of words
Ambiguous position
Ambiguous enumeration
Style
Antics
Journalese
Somewhat, &c.
Clumsy patching
Omission of the conjunction that
Meaningless while
Commercialisms
Pet Phrases
Also as conjunction; and &c.

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