120 



Locutius in Fabrica. 



ollection of the noun demeanor, which is certainly not synonymous 

 with debasement, ought to be a sufficient correction of the error. 



Merchant for tradesman or shopkeeper. — In the older and better 

 use of the first word, it was strictly confined to persons who carried on 

 foreign traffic. To call retail dealers " merchants " is to multiply syno- 

 nyms uselessly, at the cost of losing a very convenient distinction. 



Sustain for receive. — Chiefly in daily-paper language ; "the victim 

 sustained a trifling bruise on his arm." Well, it would have been re- 

 markable if he had not "sustained" a wound of that description. 

 The writer was, of course, trying to say that the person received the 

 wound. How hard it is, sometimes, to be simple ! 



Liable for likely. — A wrongdoer is liable to punishment. To say 

 that he is " liable to escape," meaning that he is likely to escape, is 

 to commit an error that is really comical in its absurdity, when one 

 compares the true meaning of the sentence with the idea intended to 



Monopoly. — The frequent and glaring misuse of this term is of no 

 little importance, as it leads to confusion of thought and sometimes to 

 very ill-advised political action. A monopoly is, of course, an indus- 

 try that is protected from competition by legal enactment. Dema- 

 gogues of the Dennis Kearney stripe are doing their best to lead the 

 unthinking multitude to apply the term to industries which are per- 

 fectly open to competition but in which, for one reason or another, 

 nobody cares to compete — a very widely different thing. The owner 

 of a patent has a monopoly ; but the notion that railroading, banking 

 or gas-making can be a monopoly, as long as all the world is at liberty 

 to engage therein if it pleases, is at once grotesque and dangerous. 



The list stretches out indefinitely; one knows not where to stop. It 

 seems that on this subject, as on some others, there is verily need of 

 line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a good 

 deal. Yet one word of caution must be added. The doctrine that 

 words should not be used to convey ideas foreign to their real mean- 

 ing, ought never to be so perverted as to interfere with their employ- 

 ment in a secondary, derivative or figurative sense, the legitimate out- 

 growth of their primary significance. A single illustration will make 

 this clear. The verb to endorse means to put on the back of; and the 

 United States post-office department takes a mallet for a hammer 

 with a vengeance when it informs the senders of registered letters, by 

 a placard displayed in many post-offices, that such letters "require 

 the name of the sender to be endorsed on the face of the envelope ! " 

 Endorsed on the face! The writer of this notice — who doubtless 

 imagined that endorsed was merely a more elegant synonym for writ- 

 ten— might as well speak of hoisting a load down. But no small 



