Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
251 
offending—combination, I mentally rearranged my expres¬ 
sion, obtaining “Everybody expects with the completest con¬ 
fidence.” At this point, having been already a little prolix, 
I was inclined to use the briefer verbal nouns. But it dawned 
upon me that these are commonly used in rather immediate 
sequence on the principal' verb, or—to put it less positively— 
that there would be a sort of oddity in “Everybody expects, 
with the completest confidence, him to come” or even “his com¬ 
ing.” Or, we may say, an inhibition occurred, of which the 
grounds were possibly less than fully conscious, but which 
itself was sufficiently effective to lead to a thoroughly conscious 
effort to find a better expression. Accordingly I attempted 
“Everybody expects him to come (or his coming) with the 
completest confidence.” But I felt at once that you might 
well be quite uncertain whether this confidence was intended to 
characterize the expectation, or the coming. So once more I 
made an effort, developing the expression “Everybody expects 
with the completest confidence that he will come,” and, think¬ 
ing again “quod esset bonurn”, I gave the expression utterance. 
After all this making, trying on and refitting, the ultimate 
clothing of thought in the subjunctive form may be ranked I 
think as a choice, or act of conscious preference. The partic¬ 
ular form of verbal noun expression is in this case hardly ob* 
tained by any mere reaction to previous mental status. It 
surely is not the result of obedience to rules, for I am not 
aware of any. It is not occasioned by a desire to imitate, 
except perhaps so broad and vague as to have little application 
to the case in hand. 
To cover all the cases recognized, I contend that the use of 
the given hybrid must be explained by subjective causes. 
With that in mind which has been said—and more, no doubt, 
that ought to have been said—a broader, deeper and exacter 
investigation would, I believe, establish that the use of verbal 
forms is not so often as believed occasioned by obedience to 
rule, or by conscious or unconscious imitation; that it is rather 
corollary first of all to inclusion or exclusion of belief in thought 
17—S. & A. 
