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Society for Pure English, Tract 11 - Three Articles on Metaphor by Society for Pure English
page 20 of 29 (68%)
IRRELEVANT ALLUSION

We all know the people--for they are the majority, and probably
include our particular selves--who cannot carry on the ordinary
business of everyday talk without the use of phrases containing a part
that is appropriate, and another that is pointless or worse; the two
parts have associated themselves together in their minds as making up
what somebody has said, and what others as well as they will find
familiar, and they have the sort of pleasure in producing the
combination that a child has in airing a newly acquired word. There
is, indeed, a certain charm in the grown man's boyish ebullience, not
to be restrained by thoughts of relevance from letting the exuberant
phrase jet forth. And for that charm we put up with it when a speaker
draws our attention to the methodical by telling us there is a method
in the madness, though method and not madness is all there is to see,
when another's every winter is the winter of his discontent, when a
third cannot complain of the light without calling it religious as
well as dim, when for a fourth nothing can be rotten outside the State
of Denmark, or when a fifth, asked whether he does not owe you 1s. 6d.
for that cab fare, owns the soft impeachment.

A slightly fuller examination of a single example may be useful. The
phrase to _leave severely alone_ has two reasonable uses--one in the
original sense of to leave alone as a method of severe treatment, i.e.
to send to Coventry or show contempt for, and the other in contexts
where _severely_ is to be interpreted by contraries--to leave alone by
way not of punishing the object, but of avoiding consequences for the
subject. The straightforward meaning, and the ironical, are both good;
anything between them, in which the real meaning is merely to leave
alone, and _severely_ is no more than an echo, is pointless and vapid
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