Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
225 
ular cut. These in his honor were known as “burnsides,” and 
imitated by a numerous body of admirers. The general’s fame 
however did not maintain itself, his name surviving chiefly as 
the symbol of a whisker type, which little by little even lost the 
special character required to make of it his capillary monument. 
By the merest slip of tongue—or possibly an error of pro¬ 
founder sort—this word assumed in someone’s mouth the form 
of “side-burns.” To him who for the first time heard it, “side- 
bums”—promptly associated with the proper object, by the aid 
of circumstance—was accepted in the sense of “bums” or 
whiskers, of perhaps a special order, growing on the sides of 
the face. Indeed it may be assumed that even he who was 
familiar with “burnsides,” but had no knowledge of the Gen¬ 
eral or this whiskers, was converted, “side-bums” having a con¬ 
vincing formal analogy with “side-whiskers.” 
This neologism, already very much in vogue, especially among 
the rising generation, needs but another accident to give it gen¬ 
eral prevalence. Once let loose upon the stage in a popular 
play, or in the columns of a widely circulated magazine or 
daily, it may enrich the English language with an important 
addition to its tonsorial vocabulary. % 
As intimated just above, it is doubtless not only possible to 
blunder into usage that is new, but also to blunder out of usage 
that is old. To illustrate, accident pure and simple may surely 
bring it about, that I hear on twenty successive occasions the ex¬ 
pression “I expect that he will come,” without once hearing the 
essential equivalent, “I expect him to come” or “I expect his 
coming.” Being given in the use of words to following blindly 
the lead of others, I unconsciously neglect and even altogether 
abandon the latter expressions. Under my influence, suppose 
that my wife and children do the like—that my family domi¬ 
nates my clan—-that other favoring circumstances spread my 
idiosyncrasy to all the community in which I live. Let now 
another accident—it may be literary, social or political—aug¬ 
ment extremely the importance of my community in the Eng¬ 
lish-speaking world. Just as the altogether extra-linguistic 
incident of Prussia’s elevation to the hegemony of central Eu- 
