jeu to them. It is like the man of highest fashion changing his hat-brim because the man of middling fashion has found the pattern of it.
The familiar gentleman burglar, who, having played wolf to his fellows qua financier, journalist, and barrister, undertakes to raise burglary from being a trade at least to the lupine level of those professions.—Times.
It is quite needless, and hardly correct, to use qua instead of as except where a sharp distinction is being made between two coexistent functions or points of view, as in the next quotation. Uganda needs quite different treatment if it is regarded as a country from what it needs as a campaigning ground:
For this point must be borne constantly in mind—the money spent to date was spent with a view only to strategy. The real development of the country qua country must begin to-day.—Times.
The reader would not care to have my impressions thereanent; and, indeed, it would not be worth while to record them, as they were the impressions of an ignorance crasse.—C. Brontë.
The writer who allows Charlotte Brontë's extraordinarily convincing power of presentment to tempt him into imitating her many literary peccadilloes will reap disaster. Thereanent is as annoying as ignorance crasse.
It was he who by doctoring the Ems dispatch in 1870 converted a chamade into a fanfaronnade and thus rendered the Franco-German war inevitable.—Times.
We can all make a shrewd guess at the meaning of fanfaronnade: how many average readers have the remotest idea of what a chamade[1] is? and is the function of newspapers to force upon us against our will the buying of French dictionaries?
2. Among the diplomatic words, entente may pass as suggesting something a little more definite and official than good understanding; démenti because, though it denotes the same as denial or contradiction, it connotes that no more
- ↑ Readers of history are of course likely to be familiar with it; it occurs, for instance, scores of times in Carlyle's Friedrich. In such work it is legitimate, being sure, between context and repetition, to be comprehensible; but this does not apply to newspaper writing.
