he chooses, he generally does prefer doing without it altogether to attempting a precision that strikes him as either undignified or pretentious. It is therefore to be wished that it might be disencumbered of its diaeresis, its accent, and its italics. It is true that the first sight of naivety is an unpleasant shock; but we ought to be glad that the thing has begun to be done, and in speaking sacrifice our pride of knowledge and call it navity.
The case of banality is very different. In one sense it has a stronger claim than naivety, its adjective banal being much older in English than naïve; but the old use of banal is as a legal term connected with feudalism. That use is dead, and its second life is an independent one; it is now a mere borrowing from French. Whether we are to accept it or not should be decided by whether we want it; and with common, commonplace, trite, trivial, mean, vulgar, all provided with nouns, which again can be eked out with truism and platitude, a shift can surely be made without it. It is one of those foreign feathers, like intimism, intimity, femininity, distinction and distinguished (the last pair now banalities if anything was ever banal; so do extremes meet), in which writers of literary criticism love to parade, and which ordinary persons should do their best to pluck from them, protesting when there is a chance, and at all times refusing the compliment of imitation. But perhaps the word that the critics would most of all delight their readers by forgetting is meticulous.
Before adding an example or two, we draw attention to the danger of accidentally assimilating a good English word to a French one. Amende is good French; amends is good English; but amend (noun) is neither:
Triviality and over-childishness and naivety.— H. Sweet.
Agrippa himself was primarily a paradox-monger. Many of his successors were in dead earnest, and their repetition of his ingenuities becomes banal in the extreme. Bercher himself can by no means be acquitted of this charge of banality.—Times.
