6 Oct. 1814

Logic or Language

Ch. Qualities

Rules

1. Terms

2

2

II. Adjectives.

1. Either employed instead of each.

To the word either belongs an exclusive signification, which belongs not to the word each. Where the idea of exclusion is not intended to be conveyed, how slovenly and absurd is it not to employ a word by which the exclusion is expressed ? Yet of negligence in this shape, examples are continually occurring.

Poetry is the species of composition in which it is most frequent. There it has its excuse - 1. In cases where the monosyllable each would not, so it may be that the dissyllable either will suit the measure. 2. In poetry, distinctness is less requisite than in prose. A uniform distinctness would even be incompatible with the nature of the composition, and fatal to the design of it. To produce and keep up in the mind, confusion, so it be but accompanied with pleasure, is an object not of aversion, but of endeavour and study.

To affectation may the sin against propriety be imputed in this case, as well as in the last preceding one.

In saying taste when he means relish a man pleases himself with the thought of showing how familiarly he is acquainted with the language of France.

In saying either when he means each a man pleases himself with the thought of showing how familiarly he is acquainted with the language of poetry.

Affectation the genus, pedantry the species; formerly the dress most frequently worn by pedantry was Greek and Latin; latterly, it is French and poetry.

To the ambiguity attached to this impropriety, one circumstance alone operates in some measure as a palliative. If so it be, that for predicating what you meant to predicate alike of two things, A and B, the word you have employed is a word by which one of them is excluded; conceive the word repeated, then, one after the other, they are both of them comprised. First introduce A without B, then introduce B without A - both of them are introduced; but how much better would it not be if, without any such unintended exclusion, both were introduced at once.

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