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 Grammar,

P h i lo soph y,

and Logic

Bruce silver
Grammar, Philosophy, and Logic
 Bruce Silver

Grammar,
Philosophy, and
Logic
Bruce Silver
Department of Philosophy
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-66256-5    ISBN 978-3-319-66257-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66257-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956096

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
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For Sonja
 Acknowledgments

I begin by acknowledging the encouragement that I have received from

so many students who thanked me for correcting errors in their critical
papers and who sometimes requested my help with their writing. I am
encouraged by students who are as eager to learn as they are to receive a
superior grade in the course. Memories of their gratitude, talent, and
good cheer kept me going as I wrote this book.
I am especially grateful to my former student, friend, and colleague
Christopher Hudspeth who pressed me to write a systematic study of
frequently unexpected ties between grammar, philosophy, and logic.
Without his urging and reminder that “own” is frequently a useless adjec-
tive, I would have given only a little thought to crafting these chapters. I
am also grateful to Jennifer Ingle, another former student, colleague, and
friend, who graciously accepted my corrections and criticisms when
many years ago she showed me the initial draft of her doctrinal disserta-
tion. Jennifer thanked me for my remarks and was pleased rather than
unsettled by the assorted changes I urged her to make.
I thank an anonymous reader who agreed to evaluate my manuscript
in its initial stages. His or her comments, complaints, and questions
helped me to bring focus to my task and to remind me that as I go about
the business of correcting errors that others make, I must be sure to avoid
errors in my prose and slippage in my phrasing.

vii
viii Acknowledgments

I must thank Judith Allan, acquisitions editor in linguistics and lan-

guages for Palgrave Macmillan, and her editorial assistant Rebecca Wyde.
Judith encouraged me and told me what I needed to do to enrich my
submission. In accordance with her insights and advice, I refined my
draft, clarified and narrowed my dominant thesis, and took greater
advantage of the available scholarship. Her understanding, kindness, and
patience were evident throughout the process.
After I made the changes that Judith recommended, she and her edito-
rial board agreed to publish the revised version of a monograph that
depends upon philosophers and logicians whose observations unexpect-
edly prompted me to detect and to correct subtle errors in grammar, dic-
tion, use, and style. Judith and the board accepted an idiosyncratic study
that falls within and beyond the categories and conventional lists of what
nearly all other publishers expect or require from their authors. I am
thrilled that Judith and Palgrave Macmillan decided to take a chance on
me and my proposal.
Rebecca guided me through the many steps between acceptance and
preparation for production. She was so very helpful as she patiently
addressed my concerns.
Finally, I thank Jayavel Dhanalakshmi of SPi Global. She oversaw pro-
duction of the manuscript as it became a book. Without her help, ques-
tions, explanations, and gentle reminders, I could not have concluded the
project on schedule. I also thank her superior proof-reading staff who
detected errors and offered suggestions for crafting an improved draft of
Grammar, Philosophy, and Logic.
As always, I repeat what most authors write and all authors mean. Any
errors and shortcomings that remain in this book are my responsibility
alone.
 Contents

1 Is “Interesting” Interesting?   1

2 Possible Worlds, Possible Showers, and Apparent Suicides  43

3 Comparisons That Go Wrong  65

4 We All Die, but None of Us is Dead  93

5 Tautologies and Illogical Questions 111

6 The Impossible and the Implausible 137

7 Simplicity, Economy, and Intensity 159

Epilogue 179

ix
x Contents

S
 elected Bibliography 193

Index 201
 Introduction

William James suggests that the efforts of major philosophers and their
philosophies from at least the seventeenth century into the early twenti-
eth century take a back seat to the sciences where the issue is “practical
power.” The official position is that scientists develop theories, interrogate
nature, and frequently, though not always, arrive at empirically verified
answers that shape the world to human advantage. Not every scientist
sees things in just this way. C.S. Peirce (1831–1914), the most scientifi-
cally minded American pragmatist, insists that “True science is distinc-
tively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied
without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such
work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.”1
Philosophers frequently deal with looming “Why?” questions that
provoke thought but that provide no concrete solutions to problems
that confront us as we try to get about in the world. No one can rea-
sonably doubt that James and his fellow pragmatists address philo-
sophical debates and tensions that the sciences and common sense
cannot helpfully address: is the world material or spiritual? In what
does self-consciousness or personal identity consist? Does God exist,
and if he does, what difference does his existence make in the lives of
believers? Are we free or determined when we choose? What is the
nature of truth?

xi
xii Introduction

These questions are fine as far as they go, but insofar as each of them
exceeds actual knowledge, we are left with James’s familiar reminder:

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical dis-

putes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many—
fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which
might or may not hold good of the world: and disputes over such notions
are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret
each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences… If no practi-
cal difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically
the same thing, and all dispute is idle.2

Every specialist in American pragmatism or any philosopher or academic

who is familiar with James’s rendering of pragmatism is aware of critics
who complain that this philosophy is empty, that it bears on questions
that only a very few people ask, that it is subjective, and that—to turn
James’s phrase against him—his rendering of pragmatism “bakes no
bread.”
A reader may wonder what these prefatory remarks have to do with
grammar, syntax, word choice, and style. To the same critics who agree or
disagree with James, a recurrent question emerges: what good is philoso-
phy? Philosophers of all kinds and not only pragmatists are immediately
on the defensive. They say such things as the fruits of philosophical
inquiry enable us to think more coherently and more deeply or that
Aristotle and John Henry Newman were correct insofar as studying phi-
losophy need not serve any other end than knowing for its sake, not for
the sake of some useful good. They might add that we can ask the same
question of historians, poets, composers, and novelists. The difference is
that art historians, poets, composers, and novelists help us to produce an
aesthetically appealing world or that historians can in principle help us to
learn from earlier mistakes. Of course one can doubt that we learn any-
thing from the past except how to repeat its mistakes.
My position and my thesis throughout the chapters that follow is
that in an important sense philosophy serves a practical, non-
metaphysical end that it is rarely if ever called upon to serve, namely the
elevation of writing and of speaking correctly, economically, and pre-
 Introduction
   xiii

cisely. This thesis is bolder than it might at first appear. Traditional

grammarians, as well as the revisionists who disagree with traditional-
ists, announce that a certain construction is ungrammatical or that
another construction is more fluid and should replace one that is awk-
ward. They write about correcting some phrase or its alternative; how-
ever, they rarely produce sturdy arguments in favor of what they declare,
and they do not enlist philosophical analyses or principles of logic for
supporting their positions. In a sense, philosophy is ahead of grammar-
ians in its attention to language. This claim is surprising. William
P. Alston, an analytic philosopher, notes:

Thus to the extent that philosophy consists of conceptual analysis, it is

always concerned with language. And if it is either all or a large part of a
philosopher’s business to bring about features of the use or misuse of vari-
ous words and forms of statement, it is essential for him to proceed on the
basis of some general conception of the nature of linguistic use and mean-
ing. This becomes especially important when analytical philosophers
become involved in persistent disputes over what a given word means…3

Someone might ask why grammarians should look to philosophy and

logic since their business is different from that of philosophers or logi-
cians. A reply is easy and is close to a restatement of what Alston says.
Philosophy and logic bake bread beyond themselves and are good because,
among other things, they enable academics, professors of philosophy, and
hopeful authors to produce essays, articles, chapters, and books that are
superior to the writings and lectures of people who have no background
in these two ancient disciplines. I believe that the insights of all sorts of
philosophers and the rules of logical inference are almost ideally suited to
craft prose that is correct, economical, and clear.
None of what I say in the previous paragraph applies to every person
who ever took up a pen, sat at a computer or stood behind a lectern. That
most gifted writers and speakers have no philosophical background is
probable. I am making the more modest but emphatic claim that by far
the majority of those people who believe that they have something to
write or say will do far better at their tasks if they strive to be among the
xiv Introduction

philosophically elect. I am trying to make a case for applied philosophy

that as far as I know, no major philosopher has taken the trouble to make.
If my thesis is correct, then we do not need another guide to using cor-
rect grammar, word choice, syntax, and proper diction if it does nothing
more than rehearse familiar terrain. This book is not one of those guides.
I do not restate a list of suggestions and corrections that one finds in ear-
lier books that describe ways to avoid familiar errors. I leave that task to
Ambrose Beirce, William Strunk, E.B. White, Steven Pinker, Rodney
Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum and countless other grammarians and
stylists who comment on spilt infinitives, the correct use of “momen-
tarily,” the failure to make the subject and predicate of a sentence agree,
and the need to avoid defective prepositional phrases such as “between
you and I.”4
The audience I try to reach is like that of Steven Pinker, although my
emphasis differs in some ways from his. Pinker’s book The Sense of Style is
“designed for people who know how to write and want to write better.” I
share his audience, and I also offer suggestions and develop arguments for
readers who wish to improve their writing, but I try to do more.5
I concentrate on only a few errors that most traditional guides to gram-
mar and diction ignore or miss. I summon philosophy insofar as many of
its arguments help readers to avoid infelicitous sentences, poor diction,
and crabbed prose. To the degree that I call on the arguments of world-
class philosophers and the canons of logical rationality, I try to offer a
book that is as philosophically searching as it is a study of English gram-
mar and style.
The result is a book that can be instructive in courses such as English
composition or critical writing, although the classroom is not its sole
focus. Once again, my effort is to exhibit and to defend the irreplaceable
connective tissues between philosophy and one of its neglected functions,
which is to enrich what an author, especially one in an academic disci-
pline, wishes to declare, explain or defend. A partial list of the philoso-
phers to whom I appeal includes Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius,
Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant,
Mill, William James, John Dewey, A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell,
G.E. Moore, and Gilbert Ryle.
 Introduction
   xv

(1)
In a biting review of Pinker’s The Sense of Style, the critic John Preston
holds nothing back and after calling Pinker “a colossal windbag, never
using three words when 35 can be rammed into the breach,” he adds: “As
you hack through endless thickets of Dangling Modifiers and Possessive
Adjectives, it becomes increasingly clear that Pinker doesn’t have any-
thing new to say, and that anyone who follows his example is far more
likely to end up writing waffle and bilge than War and Peace.”6 I believe
that I have something new to say. I also believe Preston’s peevish assess-
ment of Pinker’s book is overstated, even though his complaint has led
me to reassess a good deal that Pinker and other grammarians and lin-
guists say about subpar English.
Preston objects to Pinker’s bias and criticizes him for approvingly
quoting the prose of his wife’s Betraying Spinoza (2009) and his friend
Richard Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow (2006).7 Preston does not
gratuitously indulge in ad hominems or object to the style, syntax, and
grammar of these authors. He merely points out that Pinker is not entirely
even-handed in his treatment of authors who are his good friends, his
notable colleagues or his wife. I agree with Preston that when it comes to
detecting and correcting errors in speech and writing, being unusually
kind to friends, colleagues, and kin is inappropriate.
Readers of these chapters will find an analysis of overworked words,
constructions, and phrases that usually pass unnoticed but that are out of
place in fine prose. Pinker and I occasionally travel the same road, but I
strive to achieve the simplicity that I defend in good philosophical writ-
ing while Pinker’s arguments and justifications strike me as sometimes
more labored than they should be. This fact is surprising insofar as Pinker
frequently defends a phrase for its economy or criticizes a sentence that is
wordy and cumbersome. I try hard to issue my brief for simplicity and
economy in all the chapters that follow and deal almost exclusively with
these values in Chap. 7. And once more, my principal weapon is the
value of applied philosophy and Aristotle’s laws of thought to eliminate
constructions that miscarry in grammatical prose and word choice.
xvi Introduction

(2)
Many writers worry with just cause about the first sentence or page of their
manuscripts. What if that sentence is not intriguing? What if it immedi-
ately fails to capture the attention of acquisitions editors? What becomes of
these writers and their proposals? The answers are common and disap-
pointing. Competition for a place on every publisher’s list is fierce.
If authors are unknown, they fret that an editor will ignore their drafts
or will not read beyond the title or first paragraph of their proposal. They
worry nearly as much that an editor who looks beyond the opening page
will be unimpressed. They fear receiving a formulaic letter in a thin envelop,
a letter that politely begins “Thank you for submitting your proposal.
Unfortunately, your project does not fit our publishing list. We wish you all
the best in your search for another publisher.” This polite rejection leads the
author to the painful belief that an editor does not think much of her sub-
mission. The author believes correctly or incorrectly that editors, including
those whose budgets are tight, cannot find room for a manuscript that
strikes them as good, that earns favorable pre-publication peer reviews but
that has little chance of selling even a few hundred copies.
Established authors are somewhat less apprehensive that editors will
reject their proposals, but they have different worries. These authors
might have agents and notable publications. Their concern is different
from that of unknown authors but is serious. They wonder whether their
published essays will attract readers, whether their books will have favor-
able reviews in major journals, newspapers and online sites or, worse,
whether they will draw the attention of any reviewers. They belong to the
set of authors who, in the celebrated words of the David Hume (“My
Own Life,” April 1776), are apprehensive that their writing will fall
“dead-born from the press.”
What does my fretful prolog have to do with this book? Is it a digres-
sion? No. I am an academically trained professor of philosophy and pri-
marily a self-taught student of English language and literature. My
specialties are the history of modern philosophy, American philosophy
and formal logic, yet I have chosen to write about grammar, syntax, and
diction as they intersect with what we learn from philosophers and logi-
cians. I have suggested that what I have learned over many years of teach-
 Introduction
   xvii

ing and writing is that a background in philosophy and logic helps a

writer become a better writer. The reasons for my belief will be explicit
throughout the book insofar as every chapter draws arguments from one
or more of the philosophical insights or arguments that are well-known
to professors of philosophy, even if these insights and arguments are not
expressed to improve scholarly writing and formal speaking.
Will readers, principally those who have reservations about interdisci-
plinary studies, be patient with me as I argue for the objections that I
raise? Will they discount what I write on the grounds that I am not a
professor of English composition and that I have moved beyond my aca-
demic specialties? I cannot say, but I hope that my analysis will receive an
impartial hearing even though it comes from someone outside a depart-
ment in which Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton—not Plato, Aristotle,
and Kant—are i primi lumi.

(3)
My secondary worry is unsurprising and is one that I share with gram-
marians. Can I persuade readers that what passes for acceptable prose and
speech is too often unacceptable? Will they think that yet another book
about grammar, syntax, and diction enriches them in any way that mat-
ters? Will they agree that knowing what critical philosophers and logi-
cians demand in their fields of inquiry serves to develop their talents as
authors and lecturers?
If I am guilty of hubris in writing this book, I offer a partial defense by
recalling my high school and undergraduate college education. I belong to
a generation that had to master English and Latin grammar, learn how to
parse sentences, know how to identify parts of speech and distinguish them
from parts of a sentence. I learned the difference between the jussive and
potential subjunctive mood.8 My contemporaries and I were also required
to master at least one modern language and, preferably, two. The assump-
tion was that undergraduate students, graduate students and educators
who knew French, German, or Spanish were better equipped to grasp the
rules and subtitles of English. Today, in our multicultural world, there are
much better reasons to acquire fluency in languages other than English.
xviii Introduction

These anecdotes in which I star are consequential if and only if I can

use them to make a case for the claim that this book does what authors of
available manuals of style and handbooks on grammar miss or ignore.
Henry W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), The
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), and the most recent
edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (2017) are nearly Biblical in their
reputations for assisting established authors whose English profits from
some revisions, for aspiring authors whose work is not quite ready for
publication, and for college students who worry about how they go about
writing a critical paper.
Authors who are eager to secure an audience for their books turn for
help to these magisterial guides and to numerous less familiar manuals.
Once more the problem and opportunity for me is that these guides and
manuals have little or nothing to say about the errors and lapses that are
the woof and warp of my chapters.9 I reject the position that a subtle
mistake does not deserve attention. Subtlety is frequently characteristic of
philosophical analysis. If we accept the conclusions of Kant’s searching
arguments as he develops antinomies and paralogisms, we do not com-
plain that his analyses are subtle, but we might wish that they were clearer.
Perhaps grammarians assume that there are enough gross errors in
writing and that these errors demand their attention far more than errors
that almost no one notices. I have encountered this attitude but insist
that every error is worth correcting. I also insist that concentrating on less
glaring, unfamiliar errors illuminates the extent to which applied philos-
ophy and formal logic are the best tools for spotting and correcting a class
of infelicities that are rarely or never included in conventional texts on
grammar, syntax, diction, and style.
I do not restate objections and suggestions that first-year college students
find in the margins of papers graded by their graduate-student instructors.
I do not impose on readers my prepossessions and impressions about what
counts as excellent, acceptable, and unacceptable use. I say here what I will
emphasize repeatedly: biases and subjective preferences are private and
unimpressive and are therefore far from persuasive; hence, they are out of
place in this kind of book. My suggestions are products of careful observa-
tion and the kind of analysis that ordinary-language philosophers under-
take. (Finally, with apologies to Fowler, Pinker and other critics whom I
 Introduction
   xix

quote or to whom I refer, I favor “use” over “usage” and will not refer in this
book to “usage” in my attempt to do more than complain about the current
state of the English language.)

(4)
I think that Stanford Pritchard makes a compelling point in his updated
appendix to Strunk and White: “As I said..., grammar and usage are not
God-given and immutable; they go through changes and metamorpho-
ses. I just happen to think that if something works well, and has worked
well for a long time, there ought to be a good, convincing and logical
reason to change it.”10 I try hard to follow his lead.
I believe with Pinker that talking about fixed rules of grammar rou-
tinely involves appealing to the past and that what was regarded as fine
speech and writing in the mists of history sometimes seems arbitrary and
stylized to our twenty-first-century eyes, ears, and brains. His impatience
with dwelling on what once served well is unambiguous:

Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any
level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several
hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long
as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints
about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the
best writers in English at all periods, including Shakespeare and most of
the mavens themselves, have been among the flagrant flouters.11

Still, agreeing with Pinker does not entail supporting all that he says. For
example, he writes in the Guardian (August 15, 2014), page 1:

Presciptivists prescribe how language ought to be used. They uphold stan-

dards of excellence and a respect for the best of our civilization, and are a
bulwark against relativism, vulgar populism and the dumbing down of
literate culture. Descriptivists describe how language actually is used. They
believe that the rules of correct usage are nothing more than the secret
handshake of the ruling class, designed to keep the masses in their place.
Language is an organic product of human creativity, say the Descriptivists,
and people should be allowed to write however they please.
xx Introduction

Pinker develops the distinction more fully in The Sense of Style.12 .

In The Economist, January 30, 2016 (page 78), the unnamed author of
“The Johnson Column of Language,” writes:

The two schools of thought, known as “prescriptivism” (which sets down

how the language should be) and “descriptivism” (which tells how it is),
have often been at daggers drawn... In the caricature, prescriptivists are
authoritarians with their heads in the sand insisting on Victorian-era non-
rules. The descriptivists are mocked as “anything is correct,” embracing
every fad, even that Shakespeare should be taught in text-message speak.
To take one example, some prescriptivists say “like” cannot be a conjunc-
tion... Descriptivists point to its continuous use since Chaucer.13

Genuine descriptivists are like capable social scientists, and “should” falls
outside the scope of their proper concerns. They have no business admon-
ishing people to write or to speak in a specific manner. Their job is to
describe and to explain the facts. But urging people to speak and to write
“however they please” or as Chaucer wrote is not descriptivism. In fact,
urging or persuasion of any kind is not the business of descriptivists. They
must not play the role of descendants of the French Renaissance human-
ist Rabelais whose fraternal Thelemites’ motto was “Do What You Wish.
Do as You Will.”14
That the rules of English grammar and phrasing as well as declarations
about proper diction and syntax do not enjoy the status of immutable
truths or the fixity of mathematical equations is indisputable, but one
should not conclude that these grammatical rules are uniformly arbitrary.
Philosophers of science are fond of pointing out what scientists them-
selves have known for a long time: inductive generalities are the marrow
of the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the social sciences, but nei-
ther Charles’s law of the expansion of gases nor Newton’s inverse-square
law is a necessary truth that enjoys the same level of certainty as “The
interior angles of a Euclidean triangle equal 180 degrees.” If only one
exception to either of these scientific laws emerges and is objectively vali-
dated, the law must be modified or the law must die. What bearing does
this fact have on an analysis of English use?
 Introduction
   xxi

Leibniz provides the preliminary basis for an answer in his Monadology

(1714): “There are two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of
fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossi-
ble; the truths of fact are contingent, and their opposite is possible.”15
Whether we accept or reject the Leibnizian distinction that many phi-
losophers draw between necessary truths in geometry or contingent truths
in the sciences is unimportant to antinomians who have doubts that gram-
matical conventions enjoy the status of either kind of truth. Linguistic lib-
ertarians or antinomians will say, and have said, that rules of the game are
not laws, that the rules are nothing more that stipulations that evolve as the
game changes. This evolutionary fact does not apply to the scope and con-
tent of established laws such as those that we discover in mathematics or
others that we apply in chemistry, physics, and biology.
Changes in the rules of a game are especially conspicuous in sports
such as hockey, soccer, and football where teams sometimes decide out-
comes of a match with shootouts, in baseball where American League
pitchers, unlike their National League counterparts, do not bat against
opposing American League teams and in football where rules for a legal
forward pass emerged in 1905 only after passing had accidentally become
part of the sport. None of these changes was a feature of these games in
the beginning.
Non-traditional scholars, sociologists, and linguists will insist that what
holds for sporting games also holds for the language game. They can main-
tain whatever they wish, but are they right? Can they defend what they so
easily declare? These questions are among those that I attempt to answer.
If these libertarians mean that some rule in grammar commands less
attention than it once did, they are on firm ground and are also correct
about what happens to a great many words. We know that almost no one
today uses “symposium” to designate an all-male drinking party, and
although “depends” originally meant “to hang from,” who can recall any-
one outside of Victorian literature saying “Madam, the pendant depends
beautifully from your neck.” And who today would praise or copy the
mannered and pretentious prose of the Victorian field-marshal Garnet
Wolseley, who in advance of the Zulu wars (1878–1879) characterized
himself as “a Jingo in the best acceptation of that sobriquet”?16
xxii Introduction

We also have a cordial letter from Thomas Jefferson to Secretary of

War Henry Knox, a letter that today strikes many of us as amusing or
as sexually charged (July 1791): “Any day and every day...you would
make me supremely happy by messing with me...”17 To most of us this
invitation sounds like the kind of slang that almost no one praises.
Would anyone today who is outside the military services understand
“messing with me” as it refers to a request to have someone join him for
dinner? Examples such as this one allow Pinker to go as far as to main-
tain that “a glance at any page of a historical reference book, such as the
Oxford English Dictionary...will show that very few words retain their
original senses.”18

(5)
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the grammarian and mathema-
tician John Wallis declared, naturally in Latin (Grammatica Linguae
Anglicanae, 1653), that the first person singular and plural in English
requires us to express the future as “I shall” and “We shall” and that in the
second and third person future, “will” replaces “shall.”19 Somehow, this
entirely arbitrary pattern became Wallis’s rule. This rule acquired the sta-
tus of a law that many grammarians and fine writers still support. The
rule was unquestioned doctrine in my salad days.
Generations of British and American educators insist that Wallis’s rule
is binding and is an example of cultivated English. Those of us who vio-
late the rule are often penalized for our word choice. Apart from Wallis’s
authority as an influential man of letters in his day, there is no basis for
the rule, and for more than three centuries some stylists as well as sticklers
for correct grammar have been divided. Some of them have ignored
Wallis’s imperative while others have demanded that writers defer to
Wallis, presumably because his rule was binding for excellent writers of
the Enlightenment in England.
Twenty-first-century authors who disregard the rule are not always
contrarians. They ignore the rule because they believe that the basis for
Wallis’s imperative is arbitrary and elective. Other examples of what
 Introduction
   xxiii

appear to be arbitrary conventions are more familiar. For instance, we are

endlessly reminded that double negatives are proscribed even as we also
know that they occasionally find a place in Shakespeare’s plays. If anyone
is entitled to poetic license, it is the greatest author who ever wrote an
English sentence. But double negatives are not rejected arbitrarily.
Solecisms that we find in plays, poetry, and novels can be products of
a novelist’s, poet’s or playwright’s fecund imagination. Understood as sty-
listic devices or as important to developing a fictional character, double
negatives that are at home in Twelfth Night and in other plays are not
really errors.20 It makes as little sense to say that John Falstaff errs as it
does to say that the impossibly muscular female bodies of Michelangelo’s
sculpted Dawn and Night (1524–1534) are a mistake. Michelangelo was
not mistaken. He was a careful student of human anatomy, and he was a
magnificent sculptor. We rarely have reasonable complaints about the
imaginative pieces of great masters working at the height of their
talents.21
Double negatives in world-class literature are suspected of being
banned because of Robert Lowth’s rejection of their use in nonfiction and
historical prose (1762): “Lowth stated the rule that we are now bound by:
‘Two Negatives in English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an
Affirmative’. Thus a useful idiom was banished from polite speech.”22
If we wish, we can maintain that what became Lowth’s principle is
gratuitous and therefore baselessly stipulated, but we should be cau-
tious about this claim and should do well not to make it. Here logic
comes to our aid and to Lowth’s. His principle is independently affirmed
both by grammarians and by the logical Law of Double Negation;
hence, there is a non-arbitrary basis for rejecting the use of double neg-
atives. And a very good way to justify this rule is not so much in a class
in English composition, in which rules are to be followed and not to be
rejected, but from a course in introductory logic in which we prove “‘p’
and ‘~p’” expresses an equivalence that a logician’s truth table estab-
lishes. Because the grammarian’s objection to double negation is con-
gruent with Lowth’s objections, but is also supported by truth tables,
we must not complain that this law is one among a set of arbitrary rules
that govern and shape fluent English.23
xxiv Introduction

(6)
The status of the rules of grammar is markedly different from that of
words. The contrast is stark between the principles that govern how we
ought to speak and write on the one hand and the vocabulary with which
we express ourselves on the other hand. Neologisms pop up constantly;
they always have. Purists and traditionalists dislike the quartet of “impact,”
“access,” “parent,” and “reference” as verbs. They maintain impatiently
but impotently that if these words are verbs, they should not be. They
wonder when, how, and why these nouns retain their substantive status
even as they lead a double life as verbs, and they dislike what they read
and hear. They object to “parenting” but might not be aware that before
men and women “parented” (“The horror! The horror!”) and “raised”
children, they “grew” wheat and “reared” their offspring. Just as “There is
no new thing under the sun,” nothing is remarkable about the constant
appearance of neologisms in English.
Purists or traditionalists deplore the use of “hopefully” as parenthetic
rather than as adverbial or modal but seem to be much less disturbed or
entirely undisturbed by the non-adverbial, parenthetic use of adverbs such
as “happily,” “sadly,” “luckily,” “regrettably,” “incidentally,” “honestly,”
“frankly,” and “thankfully.”24 Jason Gay misuses “Thankfully” when he
writes on the first page of The Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2014, “End of
an Era—Thankfully.” Is this headline any worse than “End of an Era—
Hopefully”? No. Neither of them improves the phase to which it is attached.
The list of selective corrections and objections to many words is long,
but I do not wish to end it just yet; therefore, I include a few additional
observations now and will not to return to them, except in passing, in
subsequent chapters.
Years ago an obscure linguist and political philosopher spoke elo-
quently on NPR about the entrenched racial divisions in the United
States and then closed his commentary by objecting to the slogan of the
United Negro College Fund: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” He
insisted that the correct slogan should have been “To waste and mind is a
terrible thing.” Was his plea for revision justified? Yes and no.
 Introduction
   xxv

Grammarians could make this observation: if we consider the common

meaning of “terrible” in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, he was
justified, but if we understand “terrible” in its Biblical sense, as Nehemiah
used it to describe God, the linguist’s complaint was unjustified: “O Lord
God of heaven, the great and terrible God who keeps covenant and stead-
fast love with those who love him and keep his commandments...” (Neh
1:5; my emphasis). Here a terrible and loving God are the same being, and
by extension, a person’s mind, especially if it is “well-furnished,” might well
be a terrible thing to waste. That “terrible” has more than one meaning is a
fact, and what is true for “terrible” is obviously true for many other words
that have assorted meanings in English. Some of these meanings are at odds
with other meanings of the same word.
What do traditionalists say about “mindset,” “skill set,” and “lifestyle”?
They say that these words are unnecessary and that they carry no more
weight or specificity than the words “mind,” “skills,” or “way of life.” They
object with their spleens rather than with arguments. They dislike these
words and again insist that if “mindset” and “lifestyle” are words, then
English is too malleable, but their insistent prescriptivism—even for
those of us who side with them—is fruitless. These words are here, and
they will not disappear unless other neologisms displace them. The best
that we who dislike “mindset” and “lifestyle” can do is omit them from
our writing and speaking.
I have tried unsuccessfully in lectures to make a case against using
phrases that are more often heard than read. Among them I am especially
turned aside by “As it were,” “If you will,” “So to speak” and, more com-
mon in British and Australian English, “If you like.” I regard them as the
annoying cousins of an athlete’s “You know” as in “I threw him a curve
ball that was barely off the plate but, you know, he somehow drove if for
a homerun over the right field wall, you know.”
Critics might reply that my preferences are irrelevant and have no place
in this book. I have already said that I agree. They ask as Latinists and his-
torians of medieval philosophy whether I am aware that Thomas Aquinas
wrote in the thirteenth century “Intellectus autem humanus…est sicut tabula
rasa in qua nihil est scriptum.” (“But the human intellect is as it were a blank
tablet on which nothing is written.”) They urge me to recall that in classical
and medieval Latin and in my translation, “sicut” means “as it were.” I am
xxvi Introduction

familiar with their reminder and dislike “as it were” wherever and whenever
I encounter it. Aquinas was the greatest medieval philosopher. His influ-
ence in philosophy, Catholic theology, and literature is difficult to exagger-
ate. Dante’s Divine Comedy is underpinned by Aquinas’s Summae and so
too are portions of Milton’s Protestant Paradise Lost, but Aquinas’s Latin
has no bearing on my distaste for “as it were.” We do not have to be
reminded how important Aquinas was in shaping the philosophical con-
tent of the high Middle Ages and beyond. This reminder of Aquinas’s influ-
ence is irrelevant insofar as his philosophical talents and queries have no
bearing on my objection to “as it were.”
My riposte will leave critics unimpressed insofar as they believe the
most I can say is that I dislike empty phrases that add nothing to the
meaning of a sentence or statement in which they are written or spoken.
That these phrases are empty will not be enough. We know from contem-
porary philosophers and linguists, and before them from Bishop George
Berkeley (1685–1753), that language has many functions and that artic-
ulating meaningful propositions is only one of them. Expressing emo-
tions and venting passions is another function.

There are other ends, as the raising of some passion, the exciting to or
deferring from an action, the putting the mind in some particular disposi-
tion; to which the former is in many cases barely subservient, and some-
times entirely omitted, when these can be obtained without it, as I think
doth not infrequently happen in the familiar use of language. I entreat the
reader to reflect with himself, and see if it doth not happen, either in hear-
ing or reading a discourse, that the passions of fear, love hatred imagina-
tion, and disdain, and the like, arise immediately in his mind upon the
perception of certain words…25

Some of us can dislike words that are invented or phrases that leave us,
as Hume puts it, “discomposed and much ruffled,” but democracy trumps
what we dislike. Later in the book I will establish, not simply affirm, that
some phrases are a poor fit in refined English speech and writing. For
now I hope that readers will be open to my view that many phrases are
meaningless and add nothing but extra words and clutter to the sentences
in which we find them. No phrase is made more appealing merely because
 Introduction
   xxvii

it appears in the writings of great thinkers and authors or because most

English speakers use and approve it.
That many words and phrases come from audio test kitchens and from
computer laboratories where they were once safely confined is old news.
The escapees include “feedback,” “input” and “to interface.” I stay with
“opinion,” advice,” “suggestion,” and “to connect.” In taking this stand, I
confess that in some cases, I agree with the traditionalists. And when the
jargon of social media governs users of Facebook so that they “friend” but
no longer “befriend” those whom they wish to add to their online com-
munity, I am displeased.
But this book is not my confessional. Mere lamentations about the
current state of English have no purchase, and apologists for the transfer
of a word from one domain to another remind us that for decades we
have borrowed “home run” and “can’t get to first base” to designate suc-
cess and failure. Most of us have been doing this sort of thing without
much thought, and the guardians of proper grammar, correct syntax, dic-
tion, and use have rarely complained.
A colleague whose specialty in ancient philosophy told me that stewards
of proper English who protest about arrogating words and phrases from a
game or laboratory into the public domain inevitably misuse “tragedy.” He
said all well-trained classicists know that a tragedy is a play of a certain kind
and does not refer to any extra-literary catastrophic event. He adds that no
tragedy is horrifying beyond the stage, the movie screen or a book since
tragedies do not exist beyond the proscenium, outside the screen or apart
from a printed page or a computer monitor. That he spoke for the minority,
even among experts in grammar and diction, is undeniable.
On the other side, the stewards and self-appointed governors of use
and diction pay almost no attention to words and phrases that have fallen
out of favor and out of use, perhaps because the Oxford English Dictionary
does not yet label them “obsolete.” These words find a place among what
I think of as shades that populate a linguistic netherworld. They are barely
alive but still have a faint pulse, and a dwindling number of purists occa-
sionally use them. A few examples include “vouchsafe,” “peradventure,”
“wrought,” “perforce,” “betimes,” “oftimes,” “athwart,” and “passing
strange.”
xxviii Introduction

Should we revive these words in the interest of elegant speech or should

we treat them as filigree and as a kind of rococo embellishments that have
no place in twenty-first-century English? Who makes this decision, and
who will eventually decide that their disuse makes them unacceptable as
well as archaic? No good answer comes to mind because there is no good
answer, and there might not be one unless the next edition of the O.E.D.
designates them “obsolete.”
Just as unaccountable is that other antique phrases hang on even when
grammarians and linguists are pressed to spell out their meaning. An
obvious case is the odd expression “Be that as it may.” We know the con-
texts and the subjunctive mood that justify using this expression but are
pressed to explain why we continue to use it. For what word or phrase is
it a synonym or a stand-in? I am uncertain and suspect that the people
who say or write it are also uncertain.
Another construction that comes off as more Elizabethan and
Spenserian than contemporary is “Would that I could” where “If I could”
will work just fine as a stand-in. This observation and those that precede
it simply reinforce what everyone recognizes or suspects. Once more we
are left with the truism that even as language changes, it sometimes
remains the same. Suggestions that we alter or to omit a longstanding
phrase are ignored, and those of us who study its mutations are too often
stymied when we try to discover the reasons that in English change and
fixity stand side by side.
Traditionalists who reject many changes have no unchallenged board of
experts, no final authority, no unassailable rulebook to explain alteration
“when it alteration finds.” They must live with change even if they stub-
bornly refuse to adapt to it and cannot defend their addiction to stasis.
We notice that purists treat neologisms, unlike words and phrases that
are simply mannered, as a threat and variety of change that they cannot
ignore. Their position is like that of Plato: “Indeed, it isn’t even reason-
able to say that there is such a thing as knowledge, Cratylus, if all things
are passing and none remain.”26 John Dewey and Henri Bergson, two
philosophers who promote the reality of change, indict Plato and his
Neo-Platonic followers who insist that what is immutable and what is
real are interchangeable and who blindly maintain that change in the
meaning of words is undesirable.27
 Introduction
   xxix

Good words, whatever they are and however they have acquired their
credentials, are the ones that we keep even when they fall into disuse.
Liberal protests that language and its changes are inseparable and that
every word began its life as a newcomer are not enough to gain impartial
attention and agreement from the conservative literati. What William
James says about competing philosophies applies just as well to the vis-
ceral clash that separates grammatical conservatives from revisionists or
liberals: “In manners we find formalists and free-and-easy persons. In
government, authoritarians and anarchists. In literature, purists or aca-
demicals, and realists, In art, classics and romantics.”28
Temperamental preferences can never qualify as entry-level credentials
for debates. That we prefer what appeals to our tastes or sense of refinement
is beyond question, but arguing about preferences and tastes is no more
productive than the attempts by friendly combatants who try hopelessly to
persuade each other that Pepsi-Cola is better tasting than Coca-Cola or the
converse. The philosopher G.E. Moore established convincingly, and did
not merely affirm, that there really is no disputing tastes.29
Those of us who have the temerity to write and to lecture about gram-
mar, syntax, and style frequently wish that we had the authority to ignore
the vox populi and to proscribe the use of words and phrases that we do not
like. Since we do not have that authority, I will simply list some of the
words and phrases that I dislike so that they do not infect any of the argu-
ments to come. Again, nothing else that I say in the next seven chapters and
epilogue is simply an expression of my impatience. In them I disparage
taste as a guide to fine writing. Here I do nothing more than give my read-
ers a hint where I am coming from even as I dislike “I know where you’re
coming from.” None of these words, phrases or questions is at home in
what I write or say: “It is what it is,” “worse-case scenario,” “icon,” “surreal,”
“incentivize,” “behaviors,” “harms,” “ongoing,” “insightful,” “physicality,”
“presently” (for “currently”), “begs the question,” “hard copy,” “prioritize,”
“disambiguation,” “flunk,” “going forward,” “at the end of the day,” “the
bottom line,” “lack thereof,” “part of the equation,” “do the math,” “crunch
the numbers,” “on the same page,” “to gift,” “boots on the ground,” “inter-
national community,” “backs against the wall” (the cry of every baseball
player whose team faces elimination from the playoffs), “level playing
field,” “game changer,” “since day one,” “vocabulary words,” “What have
xxx Introduction

you got?” (What would television detective shows do without “got”?), “The
reality is,” “part of the puzzle,” “The reason is because,” “I would hope
that,” “vehicle” (When did dealers stop selling automobiles and trucks?), “a
disconnect,” “to dialogue,” “to task,” “quote/unquote,” “to interface,” “pub-
lic persona,” “talk with” instead of the stronger “talk to,” “conversation” (a
fine word until panelists on television and radio declare that an alternative
to armed attacks between nations and sects is for the combatants to have a
conversation), “the new normal,” “as of late,” “The thing of it is,” and “the
fact that.” Strunk insists “the expression the fact that should be revised out
of every sentence in which it occurs.”30 What has become of “lately”? When
did the adjective “late” come to be an object of the preposition “of”? I say
more about “as of late” in Chap. 7.
I add “partner” as another word with which I am impatient when it
refers to a couple who may or may not be married but who presumably
love each other. I find something cold and detached about the word for
such “entangling alliances” and think immediately of partners in a law or
accounting firm or a medical practice. Far from being in love, these part-
ners might dislike each other. They remain together only for the money.
Why do speakers and journalists who refer to “part of the equation”
rarely have in mind anything close to a mathematical equivalence? “Rising
grocery and prescription drug prices cause concern, but economists
maintain that in evaluating the GDP, retail sales are only part of the equa-
tion.”31 Why do writers who identify “part of the puzzle” almost never
mean a portion of a challenging newspaper crossword puzzle or a mounted
picture cut with a jigsaw into 500 interlocking pieces?
Respondents will answer that my list is too literal and that I have no
eye nor ear nor brain for metaphors, similes, and the colorful expansion
of English. I disagree. My best response, which is not enough to satisfy
critics, is that I welcome metaphors and similes that enrich language and
are far from numbing. I have no desire to deprive English of its color or
to behave as a strict traditionalist with respect to change. I hold, however,
that refusing to call an expression an “equation” when it fails to designate
a mathematical equivalence or some other expression a puzzle when it is
not a “puzzle” does nothing to diminish opportunities to craft appealing
sentences and declarations.
 Introduction
   xxxi

“Medication,” “wellness,” and “empower” are not any better than other
words on my list. Not long ago we took medicine, not medication. We
spoke of good health, not of wellness. Some of us had the power to chart
a course and to make our way through life. We had no need to be empow-
ered. Physicians prescribed medicine for their patients. New patients
listed the medicines that they take for pain, hypertension, elevated cho-
lesterol, and allergies, but a switch from “medicine” to “medication” took
hold and then took over. “Medication” once applied only to a course of
treatment such as an insulin regimen or 16 weeks of chemotherapy. Even
swallowing a pill now and then for a headache amounts to taking medica-
tion far more often than taking medicine. How does the shift from taking
medicine to taking medication enrich English? The answer is that it does
not do anything for English nor does taking medication rather than med-
icine augment the curative power of the people who swallow it.

(7)
Readers who have stayed with me so far might share some of my prefer-
ences as well as my discontent and will name other candidates that they
include on their Index verborum prohibitorum. A few of them might
improbably wish that my examples were more numerous. Other readers
will disagree and insist that I make too much of too little and that I have
dwelt too long on “a trifle light as air.” They hope but wonder whether I
have anything more substantial to offer, and they ask, echoing the lyrics
of Peggy Lee’s existential hit, “Is That All There Is?” I reply to both classes
of readers that I have more to say and that the balance of the book takes
up where their wishes and their complaints end.
Up to this stage in the introduction, it might seem that, contrary to
my earlier complaint, my splenetic objections have taken precedence over
my thinking and penchant for arguments. Readers expect more than a
screed and a collection of my objections, and they can remind me that I
have promised to defend my complaints. I have written and repeated that
my visceral and impressionistic reactions to words and phrases are not
reasons for anyone else to stop using them. They will add that what holds
xxxii Introduction

for me holds for many grammarians and that they have no good reasons
to agree with me or with professional grammarians simply because we
dislike a word or construction.
I stand accused of pontificating about words and expressions that I dis-
approve. Fine, but do I do anything more? Do I work hard in the balance
of the book to sustain objections to what disappoints me and to what com-
pels me to make demands on authors and lecturers? I have written this
book in order to assure readers that its pages are not just another march
down well-traveled paths. In the chapters that come, I stand by my belief
that nothing significant emerges from merely chiding people for their lapses
in what they say and write. I must therefore do more than complain.
A good deal of our language is arbitrary and I agree with Pinker some
of it “rules conform neither to logic or tradition,” I make the case for each
of the claims that I announce and investigate and offer no additional lists
of words or phrases that are not accompanied by analysis and reasons for
omitting them from English that deserves the epithets “well-crafted,”
“well-said,” and “well-written.” Wherever I can, which is frequent, I call
on philosophy and logic to transform simple objections into arguments.
That these arguments were not designed to improve English or any other
language is an accidental fact. That their arguments explain and establish
lapses in grammar and use, and that they enable us to allow us to improve
our writing, is what counts. That applied philosophy is at the center of
my task and challenge counts as much or more.
I employ a method of analysis that is available to anyone who is eager
to write articles or monographs that are very good and not that are merely
good enough.32 I employ it for the ends that I have laid out in the previ-
ous pages. Philosophical questions are often important and are some-
times urgent or seem urgent to those who raise them. Can grammarians
who lay bare the foundations for proper language really find help from
philosophers and their method? Yes. Am I overly optimistic? No.
Concrete examples of this method are often more helpful than a gen-
eral description so as one example of what I have in mind, I urge sympa-
thetic readers as well as combatants to think of the innumerable times
they have heard political liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and inde-
pendents debate these questions: what right did the courts have to inter-
fere with a woman’s reproductive choices? What gave the government the
 Introduction
   xxxiii

right to legislate against same-sex marriage? What right does Congress

have to restrict the personal or medical use of marijuana? Each of these
questions is what social, political, and moral philosophers ask. We tend
most often to characterize them as liberals or as conservatives depending
on the side that they take and that they attempt to defend.
At the outset these questions need to be refined. Disputants should be
careful to distinguish the federal government from state and local govern-
ments. More important, in each of these examples, the questions that
emphasize rights are incorrect. Governments have powers or lose powers
that they once had. Citizens and legal residents have rights. The correct
use of two ordinary words turns the debate in a more productive direc-
tion. Anxiety about behavior that is sanctioned or proscribed remains,
but the answers are not those that occupy the terrain of disputants about
moral rights and the limits of government.
Powers are different from rights. Philosophers have stressed the signifi-
cance of this difference at least since Hobbes wrote the Leviathan (1651).33
The House and Senate have legislative powers spelled out by delegates to
the Constitutional Convention (summer 1787). The judicial powers of
the government are listed in the Constitution as it was ratified in the
summer of 1788. These powers are broadened by the Judiciary Act of
1789 and by the unwritten power of judicial review (Marbury v. Madison).
The president has the limited power of a veto, which is not a right, that
he can exercise if he believes that a legislative bill is noxious to the public
good or to provisions of the Constitution.
Rights never enter the picture so if the debaters ask the proper ques-
tion, namely “What gives the government the power to...?”, a much less
complicated answer emerges. The Constitution and the Founders who
drafted it spelled out governmental powers as well as their limits, and
enough states ratified the Constitution to make it the foundational docu-
ment of the federal government and the source of its powers. This answer
is surgical, economic, sound, and factual. It need not please either side in
the debate, but it is the answer for which the disputing parties have been
looking, and it is the answer that shows one of the ways in which using
proper language sometimes has extra-grammatical purchase.
And so a little more about my method. I will address difficulties in
speech and writing without miming the literary and journalistic mem-
bers of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel or becoming some-
xxxiv Introduction

one such as a member of the French literary elect who preside over the
Académie Française. My purpose is neither to defend recalcitrant tradi-
tionalists nor to commend progressives who value change more than fix-
ity. The former often cling to the past because it is the past. The latter are
members of the group who often misunderstand, misrepresent, and slav-
ishly promote what they think is Einstein’s message. They maintain that
in language as in morals, politics, and aesthetic assessments, everything is
relative, and therefore nothing is constant, but they are wrong. They do
not seem to know that the speed of light, far from being relative, is con-
stant and that there is no need to celebrate relativity wherever they think
they find it. As Pinker says, “Contrary to the common misunderstanding
in which Einstein proved that everything is relative and Heisenberg
proved that observers always affect what they observe, most scientists
believe that there are objective truths about the world and that they can
be discovered by a disinterested observer.”34
I have promised that I will not deny that language is mutable, and I
make clear that the way we employ English is often irrelevant to the way
we ought to employ it. Neither of these declarations is shocking. A ratio-
nally grounded commitment to improvements and corrections is far from
demanding an upheaval in the way that we use English.
With the single exception of what I say about the novelist Wallace
Stegner and the television shows House and Law and Order: SVU (Chap.
1), I do not address the language we find in novels, poetry, utopian fan-
tasies or science fiction. Why not? Sometimes dialectical English, poor
grammar, and inappropriate word choice shape and develop the charac-
ters who appear in masterpieces of these genres. The most stubborn and
demanding literary critics do not expect us to agree that Fielding, Dickens,
Trollop, Hardy, Mark Twain, Faulkner, and Steinbeck would have been
better novelists if their heroes, heroines, and villains had used correct
grammar and had spoken fluently. As George P. Elliott puts it in his com-
ments about Huckleberry Finn: “Yet how beautifully the restrictions of
Huck’s language serve the ends of the story: they prevent Mark Twain
from lapsing into the highfalutin talk which he was tempted by, they
preserve him from lapsing in to his own voice at the expense of the char-
acters and the story, they make possible a gay surface beneath which his
satire may damage to its full power.”35
 Introduction
   xxxv

How much less would we think of Oliver Twist if Fagan and Oliver
spoke the King’s English? I would also be surprised to hear about people
who discount T.S. Eliot’s great simile—one of the finest similes in our
language—in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“Let us go then, you
and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient ether-
ized upon a table…”) because they claim that the phrase “you and me,”
not “you and I,” is apposite to “Let us go then...”
Theodore Dreiser speaks for himself and for other novelists when he
chides critics for objecting that they give us so many lower class characters
who speak unimpressively and much too commonly: “To sit up and criti-
cise me for saying ‘vest,’ instead of ‘waistcoat’; to talk about my splitting the
infinite and using vulgar commonplaces here and there, when the tragedy
of man’s life is being displayed, is silly. More, it is ridiculous.”36

(8)
Knowing how and when to complete an introduction is almost as chal-
lenging as concluding an entire book; nonetheless, it is time to move
beyond preliminary obiter dicta and to close this introduction. Again, I
hope that readers will evaluate my arguments, will decide whether my
approach to improving conventional English is convincing, and will
determine whether these chapters provide helpful suggestions and guid-
ance for writing and speaking skillfully, forcefully, and economically. At
the same time, I hope that they gain an appreciation for the service and
value of applied philosophy
What comes next is a look at and grammarians, linguists, logicians,
and philosophers who, when they are most helpful, avoid the stereotypi-
cal philosophical “regions of cloud and fiction” to which F.H. Bradley
refers and confront the ways that we must deal with this world in which
we move, speak, set goals, read, and write.37 If I discharge my intended
mission, I will have pressed hard for a few philosophical and logical strat-
egies to encourage students, authors, educators, and curious readers to
use English that is rich and grammatical rather than English that is styl-
ized, ungrammatical and awkward.
xxxvi Introduction

Notes
1. Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. and intro. Justus Buchler (New York:
Dover Publications, 1940), page 23.
2. William James, Pragmatism, page 43. Emphasis added.
3. William Alston, Philosophy of Language (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1964), page 7.
4. William Strunk, The Elements of Style (1920), updated and annotated for
present-day use by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White (London:
Longman, 1999). Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, The
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
5. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in
the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2014). References and quotations
from Pinker’s book are keyed to the Kindle E-book edition in which
“Loc” stands in for “page.” The citation here is to Loc 147.
6. John Preston, “The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker, review: ‘waffle and
bilge,’” The Telegraph, September 16, 2014.
7. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who
Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schoken Books, 2009) and Richard
Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for
Wonder (New York: Mariner Books, 2000).
8. Pinker, The Sense of Style, Loc 3897–3934.
9. Henry Watson Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, intro.
David Crystal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The Chicago
Manual of Style, sixteenth edition (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Rodney Huddleston and Geoffry Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of
the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
10. Strunk, The Elements of Style, Loc 2235.
11. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New
York: Harper Collins, 1994), page 373. The Sense of Style, Loc 3175–3234.
12. Pinker, “10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s OK to break (Sometimes),”Guardian,
August 15, 2014,
13. Emphasis added.
14. François Rabelais, Oeuvres Complètes (1546), ed. Pierre Jourda (Paris:
Garnier, 1962), page 204. My translation. For an abbreviated discussion
of the differences between descriptivism and prescriptivism is morals, see
Kant’s Preface to his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785),
trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pages 1–5.
 Introduction
   xxxvii

15. G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), page 217.
16. Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (New York: W.W. Norton,
1972), page 219.
17. Quoted by Jon Meacham in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New
York: Random House, 2012), page 238.
18. Pinker, The Sense of Style, Loc 3257.
19. Albert C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, second edition (New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), pages 337–38.
20. In this regard, see A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, second edition,
reprint (New York: Dover, 1952), pages 44–45.
21. Frederick Hartt and David G. Wallis, History of Renaissance Art, fifth
edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2003), pages 585–86.
22. Baugh, A History of the English Language, page 336.
23. Robert Baum, Logic, fourth edition (Orlando: Harcourt Brace &
Company, 1996), page 238.
24. “The modal use of hopefully...was quite rare until around the 1960s,
when it acquired considerable popularity, but also aroused strong (in
some cases quite intemperate) opposition from conservative speakers.”
Huddleston and Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language, page 768, note 33.
25. George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, para-
graph 20. See also David, Berman, George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pages 144–46.
26. Plato, Cratylus, 440b, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. and intro. John
M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), page 155.
27. See Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Capricorn Books, 1929),
chapter 1, Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), trans.
T.E. Hulme (Indianapolis, 1955) and Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1962), pages 93–4. For one among many
classic statements of the position that what is real is unchanging, see
Socrates’s Platonic pronouncement in the Phaedo, 78c-d.
28. William James, Pragmatism, page 20.
29. For the classic argument that we cannot usefully argue about matters of
preference and taste, see Moore, Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1912), pages 50–82.
30. Strunk, The Elements of Style, Loc 661.
31. Tampa Bay Times, Sunday, May 24, 2015, page 1A. Emphasis added.
xxxviii Introduction

32. For examples of this approach and method at work, see G.E. Moore,
Philosophical Papers (New York: Collier Books, 1962) and Ryle in every
chapter of Dilemmas.
33. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, chapters 14, 20, and 21.
34. Pinker, The Sense of Style, Loc 590.
35. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Afterword George
P. Elliott (New York: Signet, 1984), page 285.
36. New York Times, January 20, 1901.
37. See F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, second edition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1927), page 86.
 1
Is “Interesting” Interesting?

The emphasis of this chapter is the emptiness of “interesting,” one of the

most commonly used adjectives in English. Before concentrating exclu-
sively on this nearly meaningless, overworked adjective, some prefatory
remarks are appropriate.
John Dewey never grew tired of remarking that philosophers from
Plato forward have been obsessed with finding certitude or, on the other
side, with denying that certitude is possible. In most cases, as Platonically
minded searchers looked to mathematics and formal logic for models,
they sought intuitive or demonstrative knowledge of a truth. Dewey was
confident that the search for certainty in this world is futile: “It is to the
conception of philosophy that we come back. No mode of action can, as
we have insisted, give anything approaching absolute certitude; it pro-
vides insurance but no assurance. Doing is always subject to peril, to the
danger of frustration.”1 The searchers whom Dewey characterizes never
doubt that they can find certainty in mathematics, geometry, and logic,
but they seek more. They desire the comfort and security of certainty in
areas and endeavors that have nothing to do with quantitative truths and
logical first principles.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. Silver, Grammar, Philosophy, and Logic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66257-2_1
2 1 Is “Interesting” Interesting?

Fallibilists such as John Stuart Mill, C.S. Peirce, C.I. Lewis, and
Dewey had no illusions about arriving at any other kind of certainties
and were convinced that the most scientists can manage is to uncover
probabilities and that about the best philosophers can do is to produce
intriguing arguments. Neither scientists nor philosophers can reveal
necessary truths about the universe. For fallibilists and for most conven-
tional empiricists, no such truths exist.2 Here Bishop Berkeley comes to
mind as he defends a world of sensible things (ideas in God’s mind) that
depend for every moment of their existence on God’s support, but
divine support and benevolence provide no certainty about laws that
govern this world:

…by a diligent observation of the phenomena within our view, we may

discover the general laws of nature, and from them deduce other phenom-
ena. I do not say demonstrate; for all deductions of that kind depend on the
supposition that the Author of Nature always operates uniformly, and in a
constant observance of those rules we take for principles, which we cannot
evidently know.3

That the laws of nature are not “principles,” which means for Berkeley
that they are neither intuitive truths nor demonstrable theorems, is
Berkeley’s way of affirming that the laws that characterize nature’s unifor-
mity are highly confirmed generalities that hold only because a generous,
benevolent God freely chooses to fashion and to sustain a world that
conforms to them. But since God is free, these truths of nature are inde-
monstrable generalities that inevitably fall short of certainty. God could
at any time change these laws, but Berkeley is confident that he will not.
His confidence rests upon the presumption that the God he worships
would not toy with human beings and that changing the laws would
leave us, like Milton’s fallen angels, “in wandering mazes lost.”
Fine, but what do these prefatory remarks or Berkeley’s observation
have to do with grammar and, more restrictively, with the limits of “inter-
esting” as an instructive or descriptive adjective? An answer is available
and is part of the emphasis throughout the sections that follow.
 1 Is “Interesting” Interesting? 3

(1)
The question about using “interesting” and the misguided assumption
that it does its job serve as a reminder that grammarians and linguists are
wrong if they believe that the search for certain, unchanging grammatical
rules and lexical definitions can be satisfied. No less important, especially
insofar as this book deals with faulty grammar, improper syntax, poor
diction, and defective word choice, we learn why what these grammari-
ans tell us about assorted words and rules is not certain. In short, good
arguments are available that “interesting,” among other words, fails as
descriptive adjective about whose meaning we can be clear.
In the same context, revisionists and fallibilists agree that trying to find
what is unchanging in language amounts to pursuing the wrong goal
with the wrong expectations. Be assured that this observation is not a
“straw man” and that despite the evolution of English and its rules, there
are true believers who hold tight to the position that we can be certain
about the meanings of words and about familiar rules of grammar. They
announce that because we have ourselves determined or stipulated the
meanings of words and the rules of grammar, there can be no doubt
about the certainty of their meanings and application.
The method and fruits of philosophical reasoning can help to exhibit
persistent lapses in grammar, meaning, and use, but one should be careful
not to misunderstand the scope and limits of such reasoning. Does philo-
sophical reasoning exhibit the legitimate use of “interesting” in order to
expand or to clarify the meaning of the noun it is supposed to modify?
No. What philosophical reasoning can do is to show that “interesting”
fails to do the job that it is supposed to do even though almost everyone
whose primary language is English acts on the unreflective assumption
that it fits seamlessly not only into English but into cultivated English.
Why else would we use “interesting” to describe so much that we experi-
ence and so many people whom we encounter? Why is “interesting”
often the first choice of English speakers and writers who wish to com-
ment positively on an event, a book, a painting, an architectural monu-
ment, or a theatrical performance?
4 1 Is “Interesting” Interesting?

An attempt to find instructive meaning in “interesting” is as misdi-

rected as looking to reason as a tool for answering trans-rational ques-
tions. What the Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote
years ago helps to point out the adjectival poverty of “interesting” even
though his emphasis has nothing to do with the judicious choice of adjec-
tives: “So far as I know…, there is not one really cogent and definitive
argument of any consequence in the entire history of philosophy.”4 Later
in the same essay Frankfurt advances what he regards as an intriguing
argument in defense of Descartes’s willingness to “continue to rely upon
reason” and to disregard skeptics’s belief that reasoning is insolvent.
What are we to make of Frankfurt’s apology for Descartes’s appeal to
reason and to the Cartesian argument that seems to diminish his prelimi-
nary reservations about philosophical reasoning? Perhaps we ought to
return once more to Berkeley and to accept his witty observation early in
his Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge and say that
Frankfurt, like so many other philosophers, “first raised a dust and then
complain…[he] cannot see.” We can agree with Berkeley, “but finding a
germ of truth in his witticism takes us no closer to the shortcomings of
‘interesting.’”
We might also hold that Frankfurt and the thinkers about whom he
complains are hedonistic as well as Sisyphean. These characteristics are
another “gift” from philosophers to the rest of us. Even traditionalists
sometimes have reservations about their arguments and about those of
their predecessors, but like Socrates, they cannot resist the appeal of
inquiry and criticism. This penchant for criticism, even if it leads nowhere,
amounts to the unremarkable thesis that philosophers, no less than poets
and novelists, do what they do because they enjoy the challenge, because
taking up the challenge is almost addictive, or because they believe they
are good at their task. Most of them probably sleep well enough after they
ask ever-looming “Why?” questions and probably do not worry to dis-
traction about the failure to find necessarily true, unchanging answers.
With only a few notable exceptions, philosophers tend to belong to
Aristotle’s set of beings who “by nature desire to know” but who have at
least the faint hope, unlike Aristotle himself, that reasoning well helps
them to satisfy their desire for non-quantitative, certain knowledge.5
Descartes, unlike Berkeley, thought that certainties about the world were
 1 Is “Interesting” Interesting? 5

discoverable as long as one employs a proper method of inquiry and dis-

covery. His most forceful and famous statement of this kind of optimism
is from The Discourse on the Method (1637), Part II:

Those long chains composed of very simple and easy reasonings, which
geometers customarily use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations,
had given me occasion to suppose that all things which can fall under human
knowledge are interconnected in the same way. And I thought that, pro-
vided we refrain from accepting anything as true which is not, and always
keep to the order of deducing one thing from another, there can be nothing
to remote to be reached in the end or to well hidden to be discovered.6

Descartes’s optimism was groundless. Neither in The Principles of

Philosophy (1644) nor in his Description of the Human Body (1664) nor in his
philosophical correspondence was he up to the challenge of developing the
underpinnings of a demonstrative science of physics, vision, or physiology.
Grammarians and Descartes are bedfellows when the issue is satisfying
what they wish to accomplish. Prescriptive grammarians would like their
objections to flawed writing and their prescriptions for its improvement
to be persuasive and might be disappointed when they attract few con-
verts and fail to validate their version of the quest for certainty. They do
not have unrealistic expectations that they can, if they work long enough,
convince people to follow their lead. One must be clear. The issue is not
that these grammarians dislike “interesting.” They may be all for it. The
larger point is again that revisionist grammarians, like traditionalists,
have no lasting illusions that they can persuade speakers and writers to
appeal to reasoning that will turn them away from employing infelicitous
words and phrases. These grammarians who urge us to correct our English
rarely, if ever, fret that “interesting” is in most cases an empty adjective.
The dominant thesis of this chapter is that they should care, that vener-
able philosophical reasoning shows why they should care, and that “inter-
esting” is vacant and descriptively meaningless.
Of course masters of the language know that if people scrupulously fol-
lowed their advice, they as professional grammarians would be out of work.
Whom would they criticize if as a consequence of their ­pronouncements,
analyses, examples, and arguments, all of us learned to speak and to write
6 1 Is “Interesting” Interesting?

grammatical, jargon-free, appealing English? The improbable success of

these stewards of the language would please them even as it would lead to
their increasing uselessness and to the gradual disappearance of a market for
their books.

(2)
Again, readers who have been patient up to now will wonder how
extended comparisons between philosophers and grammarians, as well as
remarks about fallibilism and certainty, bear on objections to using
“interesting” in superior or in at least the more formal English that tal-
ented journalists, speech-writers, jurists, essayists, and historians pro-
duce. Be assured that the comparison addresses their curiosity, but how
does such a comparison promote their understanding of sturdy grammar
and their choice of words that is in its way congruent with that grammar?
I can provide a few answers and establish that this extended comparison
is not a digression.
“Interesting” lacks any firm provenance or genealogy. The Oxford
English Dictionary, which includes a dense page and a half on the assorted
meanings of “interest” as a noun and verb, offers almost nothing except
circularity about its adjectival rendering: “Interesting” = df. “Adapted to
excite interest; having the qualities which rouse curiosity, engage atten-
tion, or appeal to the emotions.” The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language is a comprehensive and scrupulous guide to grammar, syntax,
diction, and use, but it says nothing about “interesting” as a modifier and
is not helpful if we search for understanding of its shortcomings as an
adjective.
“Interesting” has no clear antecedent in classical Latin and probably
comes to us by way of France, but unlike aged cheese, fine wine, and
Descartes’s Meditations, “intéressant” is an import that we had no need to
welcome. Why should anyone agree with this comment?
The short answer is that “interesting” does nothing to enrich English
and, worse, too often has the opposite effect. This fuller answer is that
authors and speakers can become better at using fine English if they cease
to describe a book, a painting, a film, an activity, a person, a machine, a
 1 Is “Interesting” Interesting? 7

plant, or an animal as interesting. In fact, calling anyone, anything, or

any event interesting is too frequently to fail to provide a description or
characterization that is even minimally instructive or evocative.

(3)
A longer, more surprising claim that we can live very nicely without
“interesting” derives from a specific return to philosophy by restating the
ontological proof for the existence of God and for comparing its failure
with misconceived attempts to speak for the presence of “interesting” in
superior English. Once more, then, we return to a search for certainty,
this time in theological philosophy. This famous proof, which is supposed
to establish the certainty that God exists, is one of the most familiar and
troublesome arguments in Western philosophy. The central defect in this
argument for the certainty that there is a God helps by extension to estab-
lish the solvency of good arguments against the use of “interesting.” Here,
then, we have a test case to sustain the fallibilists’ doubts that we can be
certain of non-mathematical truths. We need to do nothing more than to
show that “God exists” is not a necessary truth.
That the ontological argument for the existence of God can shed light
on the status of “interesting” might seem to be a stretch for those who
know the proof, but it is not. In order to see whether this argument helps
to illustrate what is troublesome about “interesting,” I begin with a state-
ment of the demonstration that first appears in St. Anselm’s (1033–1109)
Proslogion, Chapter III. Apart from his attempted proof, philosophers
would have very little interest in Anselm, and Church historians remind
us that his principal vocation was serving as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Chapter III is little more than two compact paragraphs, but its brevity
falls short of its influence:

It is a greater thing to exist both in the understanding and in reality than to

be in the understanding alone. And if this being is in the understanding
alone, whatever has even in the past existed in reality will be greater than this
being. And so that which was greater than all beings will be less than some
being, and will not be greater than all: which is a manifest contradiction.
8 1 Is “Interesting” Interesting?

And hence, that which is greater than all, already proved to be in the
understanding, must exist not only in the understanding, but also in real-
ity; for otherwise it will not be greater than all other beings.7

Thomas Aquinas accepts Anselm’s faith and God but rejects his argu-
ment. The argument is restated, modified, and endorsed by the philo-
sophical rationalists Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.8 Although there are
some differences among the versions that these philosophers offer, the
rendering of the proof below captures the premises and the conclusion
that are at the center of its variations. The proof is intended to be a ratio-
nal argument, not one that calls on Anselm’s or Descartes’s faith, that the
proposition “God exists” is a certain, necessary truth whose denial is a
contradiction:

1. God is by definition the greatest conceivable being (GCB).

2. The GCB exists at least as an idea in the mind.
3. Either the GCB exists only as an idea in the mind or it is not true
that the GCB exists only as an idea in the mind (by the principle of
the excluded middle, a proposition of the form “p or not-p” is neces-
sarily true).
4. If it is not true that the GCB exists only as an idea in the mind, then
it is true that the GCB exists outside the mind (by 3).
5. But if the GCB exists only as an idea in the mind, then it is true that
there is another and greater conceivable being, greater than the GCB,
namely a being that possesses extra-mental existence.
6. By definition there can be no being greater than the GCB.
7. Hence it is not true that the GCB exists only as an idea in the mind
(by 5 and 6).
8. If it is not true that the GCB exists only as an idea in the mind, then
it must be true that the GCB also exists outside the mind and is not
merely an idea (by 3 and 4).
9. God is the GCB (by 1).
10. Therefore God, the greatest conceivable being (GCB), exists outside
the mind as an extra-mental being. Q.E.D.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
would cheer him up so, wouldn't it? I'm sure we ought to try to make him happy—poor
Tom! He says nobody cares for him!"

Mrs. Triggs had not paid much attention to the conversation, but she now turned her head
sharply round.

"Is that my Tom you be speakin' of? His mother cares for him more'n all the world! He was
such a handsome baby—took arter his father—who were a fine, upstandin' man, but with a
taste for the beer. Tom be made arter the same pattern. An' I says if God and Natur' made
him so, why blame the poor lad? An' he never have given his mother an unkind word!"

"I like Tom very much," Harebell answered her eagerly. "And when Aunt Diana comes back
I'll beg her with tears to let me go and see him, and I'll find him a wife as quick as ever I
can!"

"A wife?" screamed the old woman. "You let my Tom be! What do he want a wife for? He
have a good home, and there isn't a girl in this village who'd do him aught but harm. Idle
worthless hussies they be! Go on with you! A wife, indeed!"

Harebell looked frightened. She said good-bye and slipped away. Miss Triggs said in a
whisper to her:

"Never you mind mother, dear. She don't mean to be rude, but she don't take kindly to a
wife for Tom, and I can't say he ought to have one, unless his heart gets changed, and his
life too!"

Harebell went back to the Rectory slowly and thoughtfully, but when she found Peter and
Nan had put up a swing in the orchard, and were enjoying themselves upon it, she joined
them gleefully. They forgot their squabble, and she was a happy light-hearted child again.

The return of her aunt was the next event. Mrs. Garland kept her till after the arrival, and
when Harebell went home the next day, the whole house seemed to have altered its ways.

There was a man's coat and hat in the hall. A strange man-servant was sitting in the
pantry talking to Andy. A little cheerful bustle pervaded the house. There was a smell of
tobacco in the morning-room. Two or three newspapers and pipes lay on the table.

Mrs. Keith came out of the drawing-room to greet Harebell. The child was so startled at the
difference in her aunt's face that all fear of her vanished. Putting up her slim little arms,
she clasped her round the neck.

"Your ice has gone!" she exclaimed. "Oh, I'm so very glad!"

And Mrs. Keith did not stare, or frown, or reprove her coldly for such words. She looked
tired, but very happy, and there was a light and softness in her eyes that had never been
there before. "Would you like to see your uncle? You must be very quiet, as he is quite an
invalid at present. But I have told him about you. Come this way."

Harebell trod on tip-toe, with eager eyes and a beating heart. On a couch near the open
window was a grey-haired man propped up with pillows. His hands looked white and thin;
his face was lined with pain; he had a hooked nose, and thick bushy eyebrows, but when
he saw Harebell, both his lips and eyes smiled.

"The little niece! Come and welcome a poor old sick soldier, who isn't worth the trouble he
gives."
"I'm so very glad you're here," said Harebell standing before him with clasped hands. "Me
and God have talked you over often, and God seemed to tell me He would send you back
soon."

If Colonel Keith was surprised at such a welcome, he did not show it. He looked at his wife,
and his eyes grew soft and tender. Then he spoke to Harebell.

"Life deals hardly with those who quarrel with her. Don't you let your passions ever get
mastery of your love, little woman."

"I don't understand a bit what you mean."

"And there is no need that you should," said her aunt a little sharply.

Colonel Keith put his hand on his wife's arm, as she stood by his couch. Her voice softened
at once.

"Come and sit down and talk to your Uncle Herbert; I must go away for a little. I have
letters to write."

So Harebell took a chair by the couch, and when her aunt had left the room, her tongue
began to move, and she poured into her uncle's ear a flood of talk. She told him of her
home in India, of Chris, of the Rectory children, of Tom Triggs and his sister and his
mother, of Fanny Crake and her mother, and the little cottage. But she did not talk much of
her aunt, and Colonel Keith noticed the omission. Harebell found him as good a listener as
Mr. Graham. She ended up by saying impulsively:

"I do like you so much, Uncle Herbert! You quite understand what I mean. I haven't to
keep explaining; Andy thinks me quite easy and understandable, he says, but Goody is
always saying I amaze her. I've always said I like men better than I do women."

"But you can't and must not like me better than your aunt!" expostulated Colonel Keith.
"You don't know what trouble I brought upon her by my hot temper and wicked pride! She
has suffered, and yet now has no reproach upon her lips. I'm a bad lot, and she's a saint!"

Harebell did not answer for a minute; then she said solemnly:

"I'll try and like you both the same."

Certainly she found life much gayer now. Her aunt and uncle were much together, and she
was left more than ever to her own devices; but when she was with them at meals, her
busy tongue was no longer repressed. Her uncle encouraged her to talk, and liked to hear
all about her lessons and play. Her aunt's voice was getting softer, her smiles were more
frequent. And as for Andy, his old face was radiant with happiness.

"Ah! The good old times have come back," he said to Harebell. "The days of mourning are
over for this old house."

The little girl nodded.

"I haven't to hush about the house any more, I can almost make as much noise as they do
at the Rectory."

It was not very long before she begged permission from her aunt to go and see Tom Triggs
again. Mrs. Keith did not actually refuse her; but she said she must wait. And then one day
at the Rectory, Nan informed her that Tom was very nearly well, and was going away from
the village altogether. Harebell was much surprised, and rather uneasy.

"Why is he going away? How can he leave his mother? Oh, I must see him, and ask him all
about it."

It happened to be a Saturday, and every Saturday, Harebell dined at the Rectory and spent
her half-holiday there.

"We'll go and see him this afternoon," suggested Nan. "Peter wants to see him, don't you,
Peter? Tom is making him a box with lock and key to keep his birds' eggs in. He's out of
hospital, and living with his mother."

"That will be lovely!" exclaimed Harebell. It was only when she was actually starting with
them, that she remembered her aunt had not given her permission to do it. With a little
hesitation, she told Nan and Peter that perhaps she had better not go.

"Go home and ask your aunt," said Peter; but Nan vehemently opposed this suggestion.

"We have no time. It's such a long way off; and if we go to the village, we can go on to the
woods and have some fun."

Harebell hesitated.

"I'll go," cried Peter, "on my bicycle. I'll go, and catch you up before you get to the village."

Peter had only lately owned a bicycle, so he liked to use it on every occasion.

Harebell brightened up.

"That will be jolly! And I don't believe Aunt Diana will say 'no' to you."

He rode off at full speed, and the little girls walked in the direction of the village. They had
barely reached it before he overtook them.

"Can I go?" Harebell asked him eagerly.

"Yes," he said.

She skipped for joy. Tom's future held a big place in her thoughts, and she was delighted
to see him again.

"Oh, do come on," she besought the others when the village sweet shop brought them to a
standstill.

"I want some bull's eyes," said Peter.

He wheeled his cycle up to the shop, leant it against the wall, and then disappeared inside.
Nan followed him.

Harebell stamped with impatience: then determined not to wait for them, and walked on
quickly to Mrs. Triggs' cottage.

She had one more check.

Colonel Keith was coming out of the post office and met her. He was rapidly getting
stronger, and now got about in a low pony trap, which for the present, he hired.
"Hulloa!" he said. "Where are you going?"

"I'm with Peter and Nan. We're going to see Tom Triggs. He's going away."

"Oh, that's your friend, is it? And your aunt knows?"

Colonel Keith knew all about the forbidden visits; for Harebell had besought him to help
her, and he had been doing his best in that way.

"Oh yes," Harebell said with assurance; "she has given me leave to-day."

"And is it to be a wife, or work, or a cottage?" Harebell laughed, and ran on. She was
breathless when she stood at the cottage door.

Tom himself came to open it, and smiled all over his face when he saw who it was.

"Why, I thought you and me was friends no longer!" he said.

Harebell seized hold of his hand.

"Oh, Tom, dear Tom, don't go away! Do stay and have a little cottage here. I don't want
you to go."

He led her into the little parlour.

"Hessie be out to-day, and mother and me be mindin' each other."

"And how's your leg?"

Tom swung it slowly to and fro.

"Near as good as ever 'twas! You see, missy, I be what you call going on the tack. And I
have an offer of work in a town firm. 'Tis a contrac' for some big house, ten mile or so
away. 'Twill be a change and a beginning! But I ain't goin' so very far arter all!"

Harebell smiled.

"Did you get any message about Fanny? That's what she said—the drinking to be given up
first, and then the work and then the wife?"

Tom's eyes twinkled.

"That there Fanny be too forward. Her must wait till her is axed!"

"Oh, but I asked her; I besoughted her; I begged her with all my heart, to marry you just
as you were, and very quickly too! She was a great disappointment to me; I did hope she
would have married you directly you came out of hospital!"

Tom threw his head back, and laughed aloud. There was a clearer look in his eyes, and he
held his head higher than he had ever done before.

"I shan't sit down and cry, if her don't want me," he said. "I can't keep a wife just at
present. The girls be too expensive in these days."

Harebell was silent. This seemed quite a new Tom; a man who could scorn a wife was
beyond her comprehension.
"And you're never going to a nasty public-house again?"

"Ay, well, there be no tellin'; but I ain't visitin' the 'Black Swan' just now."

"Tom," said Harebell looking up at him with solemn eyes, "are you through?"

His eyes met hers rather gravely.

"Through? How d'ye mean?"

"Through the Door? You know I almost think you are. And I believe that's the first thing of
all to be done. I wonder if you did it first."

"I wonder," said Tom, in a low grave voice, looking over Harebell's head as he spoke.

"I wish you'd tell me. Because we'd be on the same side, then. I ask God every day to
keep me on the right side, the inside you know, and not to let me run out."

"Hi! Tom! Where's my box?"

Peter's shrill voice coming up the garden-path interrupted them. There was no more
opportunity for serious talk. Tom took the children to the backyard where he was working,
and for half an hour they stayed there chattering and watching him complete Peter's egg-
box. Then they left him, and went on to the woods, where they had a very happy time.

Coming home, Harebell said:

"Haven't we had a jolly afternoon? And isn't Tom Triggs nice? Quite different to when he
was drinking!"

Peter edged up to her.

"I want to tell you a secret. Go on, Nan; it isn't for you."

Nan laughed.

"I'm not a bit curious. You never have interesting secrets, Peter."

She obligingly crossed the road. Peter sank his voice to a whisper.

"You needn't think your aunt gave you leave to go and see Tom, for she didn't. You'd
better keep quiet about it, and not let her know you went."

"Oh, Peter, what do you mean?"

"Don't shout, you stupid! I did go to ask her; but she was out, so I couldn't!"

"But you told a lie! You said she had given me leave."

"I didn't!" said Peter, a little sullenly. "You asked me if you could go, and I said, 'Yes.' I
didn't say anything about your aunt!"

Harebell stopped still in the road. He dragged her on by the arm.

"There's nothing to make a fuss about! I didn't tell a lie. You needn't say a word about
going to Tom. Tell her you went to the woods, if she asks you."
"But I met Uncle Herbert, and told him I was going to Tom, and I told him aunt had given
me leave to go!"

"You were a little fool."

Then he changed his tone.

"Look here, Harebell, don't you get me into a row. Don't split, will you? You aren't a sneak,
and it would be awfully mean to tell tales. You see, your aunt and uncle are coming to
dinner to-night at our house, and they'd make a row over it. I only wanted you to have a
good time. I needn't have interfered at all, and it wasn't a lie, and of course they'd think it
was, they'd never understand. I'll never forgive you if you split!"

"Oh, I won't say a word about you! You needn't be afraid."

Harebell's voice was scornful.

Peter got rather red in the face.

"Such a fuss about nothing!" he muttered. "I don't expect your aunt will care where you've
been. You can tell her you had to come with us; you couldn't help yourself."

Harebell did not speak. Then she said slowly:

"I have told lies myself in India, but not since I've been in England. I couldn't have done it,
as you did!"

"I didn't tell a lie."

Peter left her and joined Nan. They were rather a constrained trio for the rest of their walk.
Nan remarked—

"You and Peter don't seem to have enjoyed the secret."

And Harebell said quickly:

"I shouldn't think so!"

When they reached the Rectory, Harebell said good-bye. She kissed Nan, but turned her
back on Peter.

"Remember!" he called after her threateningly.

"You needn't be afraid!" she retorted.

But she entered her aunt's house with a sinking heart.

CHAPTER IX
IN DISGRACE
HAREBELL had her tea in the schoolroom alone, as she very often did. Andy waited upon
her.

"There be visitors in the drawin'-room," he said. "'Tis like old times, gentlemen a-comin'
here! For years we've had nothing but ladies, and a few on them. Sir Robert Ferguson and
his lady have been to tea, and the Colonel be quite spry. What have you been a-doin' to-
day? Somethin' to get a scoldin' for! Mistress says to me, 'Tell Miss Harebell to go to her
bedroom after she has finished her tea, and stay there till I come to her.'

"Then she knows," said poor Harebell with a deep sigh. "Did she look very angry, Andy?"

"Very cold and quiet," said Andy. "What have you been doin'?"

But Harebell for a wonder would not tell him.

"Mayn't I go and see Chris?" she asked.

"Best not. I've given you the message exack'ly as it were given me!"

Harebell's tea almost choked her. She left it unfinished and went upstairs.

"It's no good," she said to herself as she sat down disconsolately in her little chair by the
window, "to say I'm not frightened of Aunt Diana, because I am; and she'll say I've
disobeyed her, and so I did. And I never, on my word and honour, meant to be naughty to-
day. God knows about me; that is one comfort. He knows I didn't mean to be naughty. And
as for Peter, he's the wickedest, meanest boy I ever knew, and I don't think I shall ever be
friends with him again!"

When she heard her aunt's step at last, she stood up with a beating heart.

To her aunt, as she came into the room, Harebell looked the picture of guilt.

Mrs. Keith's face was very hard and stern. "I have come," she said, "to have some
explanation from you of your conduct this afternoon. You not only directly disobeyed me,
and went off to see that drunken man, but you told your uncle a lie, and said that you had
my permission to do so. Do you remember what I told you when you first came here about
lies?"

"Yes," said Harebell miserably. "I remember quite well, but I haven't told a lie, I really
haven't."

"Don't try to cover up one lie with another; that is only making matters worse."

Harebell was silent. What could she say?

"Have you anything to say for yourself?"

"I don't know," faltered Harebell; "it was—was a mistake. I—I thought you'd given me
leave."

"How can you have the face to say such a thing to me? You know I did not."

"I didn't tell a lie," Harebell murmured.

Her aunt looked at her with an expression of disgust. "I suppose I was foolish to think that
you were a truthful child. My eyes are open now. If you had only frankly confessed, I might
have regarded it more leniently. However, I keep my word, I shall send you to school after
the summer holidays. Never will I have a child in my house who deceives, or tries to
deceive me."

Harebell began to cry.

"Oh," she sobbed in the depths of her despair, "if you were God, you'd understand!"

"Don't add hypocrisy to lies," said her aunt sharply. "You are not to come downstairs to-
night. Go to bed, and remember that I might have forgiven your disobedience—but I will
never forgive lying!"

She left the room.

Harebell flung herself on the floor.

"I shall never, never be happy again! I'm not a liar, I'm not even disobedient; it's all a
muddling mistake, and it's Peter, and not me, who ought to be punished!"

She began to feel justly angry with Peter.

"He'll go on living and people will think him a good boy, and I shall be thought a liar for
ever and ever! And school is a prison, and—oh, I never thought of it! I shall have to leave
my darling Chris! My heart will be broken. I wish I could die!"

She lay there sobbing her heart out, and Goody, entering the room later, was much
astonished and alarmed.

Harebell raised a white tear-stained face to her.

"I ought to be in bed," she said slowly. "Aunt Diana said I was to go. She thinks I've told a
lie, and I haven't, Goody, and I'm to be sent to school in disgrace."

"Dearie me! What an upset! You must get hold of the Colonel. He'll put things right."

A gleam of hope stole into Harebell's eyes; then it died away.

"He thinks I told him a lie. He won't help me. I'm what you call doomed, Goody."

She began to undress. She would give no explanation to Goody, for fear of inculpating
Peter.

She heard a carriage come to take her uncle and aunt to dinner at the Rectory.

She wondered if her aunt would tell them all there of her wickedness; and if so, how Peter
would feel when he heard it. She began to hope that perhaps his conscience would compel
him to confess and to clear her. But she remembered that Nan said once that Peter never
owned himself to be in the wrong.

Goody went away at last, and she was left alone in bed.

It was hours before she slept, and when she did, she dreamt that a school-mistress with
flaming red curls and bony hands was pushing her down some steep steps into a dark
cellar!

When the morning came, she wondered at first what awful thing had happened to her. The
birds were singing. It was a lovely sunshiny morning in June, and when she remembered
the trouble in which she was, she felt that some help would come to her.
"Aunt Diana won't really send me away. Peter will be sorry and tell."

Yet as she dressed, fear overcame hope. She ran softly downstairs and made her way to
the stable. Chris neighed in delight when he heard her step, and rubbed her all over with
his nose. Of course he was told all, and Harebell clasped him passionately round the neck.

"If they send me away from you, I shall die," she assured him.

Then the prayer bell rang, and she slowly went into the house. Her uncle did not come
down to breakfast, but had it in his room. He was still quite an invalid. Mrs. Keith hardly
spoke to her, but as she was leaving the breakfast-table, she said:

"Are you ready to confess the lie you told? Are you sorry?"

Harebell looked at her aunt nervously.

"I feel," she said, "if I said I had told a lie, that would be a lie."

"You will be in disgrace till you do confess," said her aunt shortly.

Harebell went to the Rectory with a heavy heart.

She could hardly say "Good Morning" to Peter. Nan asked her at once what was the matter,
and Harebell looked Peter straight in the face as she said:

"I'm in disgrace. Aunt Diana says I've told a lie, when I haven't. I'm going to be sent away
to school, and I shall never come back again!"

"Oh yes, you will," said Peter fast and eagerly, whilst his cheeks got hot and red. "School is
awfully jolly; and you always come home in the holidays. I wish I could get sent to school.
No such luck for me."

"School is enchanting," said Nan. "A girl in the next village goes to a boarding-school, and
she loves it. I don't pity you, if you go to school, Harebell."

"And how can I part with Chris?"

"You'll have him in the holidays," said Peter; "and p'raps dad will keep him for you when
you're away, and we'll exercise him for you!"

This was too much for Harebell. She turned upon Peter in a blazing fury.

"I hate you! I'd like Chris to kick you off and tread on you, if you ever dare to ride him. He
knows all about you. I've told him. And I've told God, too, and I'll never play with you
again, and I won't speak to you, and if you leave any of your birds' eggs about, I will
smash them in bits!"

"My dear child!"

Mrs. Garland had come into the room unnoticed.

Harebell's fury was stayed. She hung her head.

Nan was looking quite frightened; Peter red and uncomfortable.

"What has Peter done to provoke such an outburst?" Mrs. Garland said.
Harebell flung herself into her arms.

"I can't say, but I never tell lies, do I? Do I? Aunt Diana says I do."

"And does Peter say you do?"

Mrs. Garland looked at her small son very keenly.

"No—no!" he stammered. "I never said she did. It isn't my fault!"

"She's going to be sent to school, and she doesn't like it," said Nan. "Her aunt is angry
with her."

Mrs. Garland tried to discover what had happened, but neither Peter nor Harebell would
tell her, and Nan was as much in the dark as she was.

Miss Forster interrupted them, and lessons began. Harebell naturally did hers very badly,
but Miss Forster saw she was much upset and made allowances. When twelve o'clock
came, they went into the garden to play. Harebell left the others, and wandered round the
paths in the shrubbery, feeling very miserable.

"I'm not a bit like a child who is inside the Door," she told herself. "I've been in a temper
with Peter, and I'm sure I oughtn't to be. Jesus Christ wasn't angry when He was ill-
treated, and I know He doesn't want me to be. But it's very hard not to call Peter names.
He is the meanest—sneakiest—oh, I mustn't! But how can I love him when it's all his fault,
and not mine at all!"

It was a hard struggle with Harebell. Her sense of justice was great, and her punishment
she knew was not deserved. But before she left the Rectory she went up to Peter.

"I'm sorry I said I would like to smash your eggs. I won't. I'll try and forgive you. But
you're making me awfully miserable, and you know you are."

Peter walked away from her.

"You're making a fuss about nothing," he said; "you chose to think I meant what I didn't
mean. It was only a mistake."

He was feeling miserable too, but he would not allow it, and tried to make excuses for
himself.

"Such a fuss!" he repeated to himself. "It isn't worth thinking about. I'm sure Mrs. Keith
won't really send her to school. She'll forget all about it in a few days."

When Harebell went home she found her uncle pacing the garden paths. He called her to
him cheerily, and wished her "Good morning" as usual.

Harebell looked up at him wistfully. She longed to confide in him.

"Well," he said, "how have the lessons gone?"

"Very badly," said Harebell, shaking her head. "I've an extra lesson to learn for not
attending; but my soul was in such a state, that I couldn't work at sums, so they got
jumbled up."

Her uncle sat down on the garden seat and drew her to him.
"Tell me about it, little woman."

Harebell worked her fingers in and out of his coat buttonhole nervously.

"Do you think I told you a lie yesterday? I didn't. It was a mistake, not a lie, and Aunt
Diana won't believe me."

"How was it?"

Harebell was silent.

"I can't explain myself—but I'm telling true. And if—"

Here she got excited and waved her hands about.

"If Aunt Diana was to burn me, or flog me, or drown me, I couldn't say anything but that I
didn't tell a lie!"

"Try and explain," said her uncle gently. "Your aunt has such a horror of deceit and lying
that perhaps she did not give you time to speak."

"I can't tell her. She won't believe me. But oh, Uncle Herbert, I can't live without Chris. If
she sends me away from him, I shall die. I shall never live to come back. Please don't let
her send me away to school."

"I hope that will not be necessary."

Mrs. Keith came up to them.

"Harebell, go into the house. Until you confess your fault you are in disgrace."

Harebell turned disconsolately away. Colonel Keith said something to her aunt, which she
could not hear, but she heard her aunt's clear cold voice reply:

"It is her mother over again! I warned her when she came to me. There is no mistake. She
disobeyed, told a lie, and sticks to it. I will not undertake the charge of her any more. I
shall send her to a strict school, for I will not be responsible for her training."

With despair in her heart, Harebell crept indoors.

The following days were very unhappy ones. She grew very quiet, moped about the house,
lost her appetite, did not sleep at nights, and got a peaked white look upon her face. But
as time passed, she grew accustomed to her aunt's cold displeasure, and as no more was
said, began to hope that perhaps she would not carry out her threat.

The summer holidays came. The Rectory children went away to the seaside with their
parents.

For over a month, Harebell had not been allowed to ride out on Chris; but now, owing to
her uncle's intercession, she was permitted to begin her rides again.

Mrs. Keith hardly ever took any notice of her, but at last one day she called her to her.

"I have made all arrangements about school, and you will go next Monday. Goody will take
you. The school is at Eastbourne."

Harebell looked at her aunt with frightened miserable eyes.

Then her aunt said in a gentler tone:

"You have still four days before you. If you will frankly confess, and express real sorrow for
the lie you told, I may be induced to forgive you. Your uncle has made me promise that I
will."

Harebell's lips quivered, but she said nothing. She knew there was no hope now. Peter was
away, and was not coming home till after Monday. Unhappy as she was, the thought never
crossed her mind that she might break her promise to Peter.

The four days gradually slipped away.

She watched Goody pack her clothes; Miss Triggs had come round to make her some new
frocks, but she, as well as Andy and Goody, considered that going to school was nothing so
very bad after all. The only comfort that came to her was hearing from Miss Triggs that
Tom was getting on splendidly; he had signed the pledge and was keeping it.

"He's a first-class workman, Tom is, when he's sober, and we've heard his master thinks no
end of him."

Harebell was nearly desperate when Sunday came, and when she laid her head on her
pillow in the evening a tempting plan came into her head.

This was to get up very early on Monday morning, saddle Chris, and ride off with him out
of reach of all the people who were taking part in sending her to school.

"I shall go along and get my food in farmhouses where they make nice hot bread and have
cream with their porridge. I have five shillings of my own, and that will last a long time. I
will get lost where no one can find me. And then Peter will be sorry and confess what he
did, and aunt will be sorry too!"

The more she thought about this the more easy and delightful it seemed to be.

"Aunt Diana wants to get rid of me, and, if I go away, she'll be glad!"

Then, after a good deal more thinking, she fell asleep.

CHAPTER X
A LITTLE RUNAWAY

IT was a lovely summer morning. Harebell woke up a little before five o'clock. With a set
determined face she got up and dressed herself, stepping about her room as quietly as
possible. She tied up a nightgown and brush and comb and toothbrush in a bundle. Then
she began to think that she might want more clothes than that. She took a few things out
of her drawers, and put them into a red cotton bag which she tied round her waist.

Then on tip-toe, she stole downstairs, and softly unbolted the back-door. It was easy then
to find her way to the stable. Andy had taught her how to saddle Chris, and in about half
an hour's time she had got free of the house, and was cantering along the country lanes.
Then she remembered that she had not said her prayers. Her conscience began to trouble
her. Was this like a child of the Kingdom? Harebell refused to let herself think. In a
whisper, she gabbled over her prayers; for she felt that she wanted God to take care of
her, though she did not mean to mention her plan in her prayers to Him.

The fresh air and the birds' singing did not seem as enjoyable to her, as she expected they
would be. She passed through the village as quickly as she could, and took the road that
the signpost said led to London.

"Everybody goes to London," she said. "But I will stop before I get there. I'll find a nice
pretty farm, with apples in the garden, and they'll give me some breakfast."

But as time passed she began to feel hungry, and no pretty farm came in sight. The
country was singularly desolate. She came upon two or three small cottages by the
wayside, and an inn; but none of these seemed to her attractive enough for breakfast. At
last she turned up a leafy lane.

"I must try and lose myself thoroughly, Chris," she said; "so that nobody can possibly find
me and take me back. I feel quite frightened now, when I think of Aunt Diana finding me
gone. How very angry she'll be!"

Childlike, she was living entirely in the present. Her future never troubled her. The lane
wound about in a wonderful way, then suddenly ended. A white gate appeared and a high
wall on either side of it.

"This must be a house," said Harebell to herself.

She found the gate open and rode up a neglected drive; nettles and rank grass flourished
on either side of a mossy road. Overgrown shrubs and thick trees lined the way.

Her heart began to beat excitedly.

"It's like the palace grounds of the Sleeping Beauty. I wish I could have a real adventure."

The drive seemed an interminable distance to her, but at last, to her great delight, she saw
a big grey house in the distance. It looked still and deserted.

When she came up to the big flight of steps leading up to the front door she persuaded
herself that it was, indeed, the Sleeping Palace. Slipping off Chris, she let him turn aside to
munch at the long grass on the lawn, and then mounted the steps with eager expectancy.
Would the door open at her touch? Would she go in and find the remains of feasting in the
great hall, and the servants all asleep at their posts?

Alas! the door was fast shut and barred, the windows were shuttered, and through a small
peephole in a broken shutter, she saw that the inside of the house was empty and
unfurnished.

Slowly and reluctantly she turned away; then, seeing a side path near the house, she ran
along it, wondering if the back of the house would prove more cheerful than the front. She
found a side door, and to her joy, as she turned the handle and pushed, it yielded to her
touch. The next moment, she was inside a long wide passage. It was light, and looking up,
she saw there was a big glass dome high up in the centre. Rather fearfully she made her
way along, till she reached the centre hall. A great staircase wound up to a gallery round
it. She was just mounting the stairs, when she suddenly heard a man's laugh.
Now she was frightened. Into her brain rushed stories of ogres, giants, burglars, and
criminals. Panic seized her; she fled back along the passage, missed her way, got into
another part of the house, and could not find an open door anywhere. Then she screamed.
It seemed like some hideous nightmare. She beat and kicked against a door with her
hands and feet. The horrible thought came to her that she had been purposely locked in,
and that some wicked man would come and kill her.

Suddenly, from behind, a big hand laid hold of her shoulder. She screamed louder than
ever in real terror, and then she turned to confront Tom Triggs, and to hear him say with a
little gasp of bewilderment:

"Why, I'm blest if it ain't little missy!"

She clung to him in a tempest of sobs.

"Oh, take me out! Dear Tom, save me! Where am I?"

The next moment a door was opened and she was in the fresh air, with the sun shining and
the birds singing, and Chris still calmly munching the grass a little distance off. It took
some minutes to soothe and calm her, but Tom did it. He was in his working clothes, with
his carpenter's apron on, and looked strangely out of place in this great empty house.

"It's the funniest thing out that you should have come straight to the very house I'm
workin' at. Me and my mates were havin' our breakfast in the back yard. We are doin'
repairs to the stables, and all on a sudden we heard a scream, and it seemed to come
from inside the house, an' I come along to find out whether it be a ghost or a h'owl, and
then I catches sight of you a-beatin' your fists against a door. Now, do you just tell me
what has brought you here. Did you come to find out whether good-for-nothing Tom were
keeping off the drink?"

Harebell smiled through her tears, but she kept a tight clutch of Tom's hand.

"I didn't think of you. I didn't know you were here. I was a dreadful coward, but I felt I
was lost a good deal more than I meant to be. And generally when I'm frightened, I ask
God to take care of me; but I couldn't, and I felt He was a million miles away from me,
and wouldn't dream of coming near me. And then I knew it was because I must have run
outside the Door, and wasn't safe any more!"

She spoke with feverish intensity. Tom looked at her and then at Chris in a puzzled sort of
way. Then he sat her down on the broad balustrade at the bottom of the steps.

"Take yer time, missy. Tell me just how you come to be so far away from home this
morning!"

Then Harebell poured it all out, every bit of her trouble. She felt that she could even tell
Tom about Peter's deceit, after making him promise that he would not tell any one. And
Tom listened and rubbed his head, and then delivered his verdict.

"You must go back, missy; there's no help for it. You must get you back!"

Harebell began to cry. She was tired and hungry. She began to wonder how she had dared
to run away in such a fashion.

"Aunt Diana will be so very, very angry."

"But she'll be in a terrible state about you now. You can't bide alone in the world, trampin'
the roads without food and money. It be a stoopid thing to do—"

"I s'pose you haven't got a cottage yet? Couldn't you take me somewhere? I'm afraid of
Aunt Diana now. She'll never forgive me!"

"You must get you back," Tom repeated with conviction. "It be bad you're comin' off in that
fashion, but every hour you stay away, it be badder!"

Harebell looked up at him beseechingly.

"I don't know what to do. I can't go back."

"Oh yes, you can! I'll come a bit of the way with you, and if you trot your pony pretty fast,
you'll get home not so very late for breakfast after all. Would you like a sip of hot tea? You
wait here a minute."

He disappeared, but soon came back with a hot tin of tea, and some bread and cheese.

"'Tis mos' remarkable you comin' away in a straight line to the house which I be workin'
on! How did you do it now?"

Harebell drank the tea thirstily, then she looked at Tom gravely.

"I s'pose God brought me to you, so that you would tell me how wicked I was, and send
me back. I used to think when I first knew about you, Tom, that you were much wickeder
than I was. Now it's me that is wicked, and you're trying to make me good. It's dreadfully
wicked to run away, isn't it? Almost as bad as telling a lie."

"It's a poor thing to do—to run away," said Tom slowly; "but I don't know that I ain't just
done it myself! You see, I knowed how my old pals would be gettin' over me, so I come
away twelve mile off to make a fresh start where I couldn't be baited!"

"But you didn't run away from home, Tom. Your mother and sister knew you were coming."

"Bless their hearts, that they did! And I be gettin' along fine. And some day I hopes I'll
come back and be able to look my fellow-creatures straight in the face. For I shan't be
feared then o' nobody. An' I do allow 'tis a happy thing to feel inside the Kingdom's Door,
missy. I humbly 'ope I've crawled through, and the Lord be holdin' my feet straight, and
my mouth from even wanting the accursed stuff; and He have got me by His hand, so I
just steps behind Him, and He goes first."

Harebell smiled for the first time.

"Oh, Tom dear, I'm so very glad. I always did know you would get through soon. When did
you do it?"

"Well, I can't rightly say as to day an' hour—but I had a try in hospital, and then agen at
home—an' it seemed to me as one day I was for goin' in, an' the next for comin' out, an' I
didn't get much forrarder, so at last I gets down on my knees and tells the Lord He must
please do it all Hisself, for I were come to the Door an' He must do the rest. Bless His
name, He seemed to stoop right down an' get hold of me—a reg'lar safe grip—and there I
be—very afeared of myself, but very sure o' Him!"

"And do you think I've been naughty and so He's put me outside? Oh, Tom, do you think
you're inside now and I'm outside?"
Harebell's lips were quivering.

"I ain't no scholar, missy, but there be one chapter in the Bible I reads over and over and
over! 'Tis the one you mentioned first about the Door. If we be inside the Door, I take it we
be in the sheepfold; and if we be in the sheepfold, we be the sheep; and if we be the
Lord's sheep, He has us safe, sure enough, for it says, 'Neither shall any man pluck them
out of My hand.' You be right enough—just a slip—and you're a-goin' back now to say
you're sorry—an' I'm a-comin' a bit o' the way with ye!"

"I haven't said my prayers properly this morning," Harebell confessed with shame. "I
gabbled them through. I'll just speak to God here, if you go away—and tell Him I'm sorry."

Tom moved away, rolled up his apron, then caught Chris, and by the time he joined
Harebell again, the cloud was off her face.

She mounted Chris, and Tom walked by her side till they reached the high-road.

"There!" he said. "Now 'tis a straight road home, and you can't miss it. Good-bye, little
missy; and just put up a prayer for good-for-nothing Tom, will you?"

"I will," promised Harebell, "but p'r'aps You'll never see me again. I'm goin' to be sent to
school, you know."

She conquered a rising sob.

Tom looked at her thoughtfully.

"Ay, 'twas through me, you be in this trouble! Well, p'r'aps I can help of 'ee out."

"It will be too late. I shall be gone," said Harebell.

Tom rubbed his head.

The little girl added, "And you mustn't tell about Peter, you promised not to; and I don't
mean to tell."

"Well, you be doin' a fine thing, a-bearin' his fault."

Harebell rode away, waving her hand to her friend.

He looked after her in perplexity. "If I were a scholar now! But I'll venture on it!"

He returned to his work with a plan in his head.

And Harebell rode on home, feeling more and more frightened and unhappy as she drew
nearer the village.

"It all seems as bad as it can be, and when I say I've seen Tom, Aunt Diana will think I
went to him on purpose, and it will make her angrier still!"

Presently she met Andy at the entrance to the village. He threw up his hands.

"Ay! You naughty child, we've all turned out to catch ye! To think of your going off for a
ride this very morning when you're to go to school."

"I'm sorry, Andy. I'm coming back!"

"Comin' back! High time, too. The missis an' the master be in a terrible way. What did you
go to do it for?"

Harebell did not answer. Even Andy, her friend, was scolding her.

The house was reached. Andy took her pony, and when Harebell reached the front door,
her aunt met her in the hall.

"Come in here," she said. "Where have you been? Did you not know a cab was coming at
ten o'clock to take you to the station? It is now nearly eleven."

She drew her into the morning-room. Colonel Keith was not there. Harebell's heart sank
within her. She looked up at her aunt. Somehow or other, Mrs. Keith was not looking as
angry as she had expected.

"I am very sorry, Aunt Diana, but I meant to run away and never come back again; I quite
meant to. And—and—I met Tom—I didn't mean to meet him—he and me think God
managed it, and—and—he made me come home again."

There was silence.

"Where did you meet him?"

"At an old, old house far away. I found it by accident and—" here Harebell's love of
romance seized her, and she forgot she was in disgrace—"do you know it was exactly like
the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. It was still and silent, and the weeds were enormous;
and I quite hoped to see everybody asleep, and all that was left of the feast. And then I
got into the house and found it empty and dark, and I was dreadfully frightened, and I
couldn't find my way out, and I thought I was locked in; and then I screamed and
screamed, and Tom heard me and came to me, and he's the carpenter who's mending the
stable there!"

She paused for breath.

Her aunt was silent for a moment. She seemed to be turning over things in her mind.

Harebell put her arm out timidly and touched her aunt's arm.

"Do please forgive me, Aunt Diana. I know it was wicked of me to run away. I knew when I
did it that it was, and that made it worse, didn't it!"

"What made you come back?" her aunt asked sharply.

"It was Tom. I wasn't even going to do it for him, but when he told me he was inside the
Door of the Kingdom and would never drink any more, I was so glad, it made me—well, it
made something different in my heart—and I knew I must come back if you—if you
whipped me to death!"

She ended her sentence with desperate emphasis.

"I have never yet raised my hand against you," her aunt said gravely.

"No, but I thought you might," Harebell replied quickly. "I thought of such a lot of things
you could do to me; but, you know, it was God and Tom who made me come back. I had
to."
"It was exceedingly naughty of you to think of running away. If you had gone on, you
might have met with accidents. We should, of course, have followed you and brought you
back before the day was over. And nothing then would have prevented my sending you to
school to-morrow. A little girl who acts like that wants a great deal more discipline than I
can give her. But as you turned back of your own accord, I am going to forgive you. I have
received a letter from Mrs. Garland this morning. If you had been here at breakfast-time,
you would have heard about it. Of course, the letter has explained what you ought to have
explained to me long ago—"

Harebell's eyes were open wide.

"What?" she gasped.

"It seems that Peter has been unhappy a long time, and confessed to his mother yesterday
that he was the cause of your disobeying me. Why did not you tell me so before?"

"I—he—I promised him I wouldn't tell," faltered Harebell.

"You had no right to promise such a thing. It was not being frank with me, and led me to
think what was not true—"

"I—I told you it was a mistake I made, and not a lie," said Harebell. "I couldn't explain
properly; I really couldn't, Aunt Diana."

Tears came into her eyes. She was relieved that she was cleared of untruthfulness, but she
still seemed to be in disgrace.

Then Mrs. Keith spoke more gently:

"I want to be fair with you, Harebell. I am deeply thankful to find that you did not tell me a
lie, and to think that I can still trust your word. And for the present, I shall not send you to
the school I intended for you. As I told you just now, if you had not come back of your own
accord, I should still have done it. But as it is, Miss Forster will still continue to teach you. I
am sorry to think that there is so little confidence between us that all this trouble has been
the result. You ought to have told Peter at once that you could not withhold truth from me.
You did not tell me an untruth, but you withheld the truth, and both are wrong. Do you
understand me?"

"Not quite," said Harebell; "isn't it wrong to tell tales?"

"Not if it helps to deceive. Your not telling about Peter helped to deceive me; and I acted
wrongly because of it. I want you to remember this, for people have made themselves and
others very miserable because of it. If shielding one person makes another act unjustly, it
is wrong. Now I shall say no more—you had better have some breakfast."

She stooped and kissed Harebell, then led her into the schoolroom, where some food was
awaiting her.

Harebell began to feel much happier, and when her uncle came in presently, and told her
how glad he was to hear that the mystery was all cleared up, she heaved a deep sigh and
said:

"I feel as if a heavy weight has lifted out of my chest. And now that aunt has forgiven me,
and I'm not going to school, may I tell you about Tom?"
 CHAPTER XI
TOM'S LAST EFFORT

THAT very same evening, Mrs. Keith received an ill-written letter from Tom:

"MADAM,—This is to say as little Miss to my sertain nowledge have not

toled a lie. There be anuther party in the bisness wich if you cud
discover wud be rather near home but I am pleged to say nothing. They
that lives most with her knows and is hidinge the truth.

"Your obedient servant

"TOM TRIGGS."

Mrs. Keith showed this to her husband. As Harebell was cleared, they did not tell her
anything about it, but Tom was written to and thanked for his intervention.

And very soon the Rectory party returned from the seaside. Peter and Harebell had a very
solemn interview. He was made by his mother to come up and tell Mrs. Keith exactly what
he had said; and then he apologised to Harebell.

She took his shamefaced apology very gravely. But when she began to relate to him her
runaway ride, he brightened up and was most interested.

"It's just like a story! What a pity you came back. I should have gone to sea!"

"I couldn't have. I couldn't have taken Chris with me. It was him I didn't like leaving."

"Girls never keep things up. They always get frightened and stop in the middle."

"What would you have felt like if I had never come back?"

Peter reflected.

"I think I should have told people it was my fault, and then I should have felt obliged to
run away after you to find you. That would have been good fun! I should have gone on the
donkey, and you bet I should have caught you up!" His eyes gleamed at the idea.

"I'm very glad I didn't go on. It's horrid if you feel you're quite alone in the world. I felt
when I was in that empty house, as if I had lost my friends and my home—and the most
awful thing of all—that I had lost God, and didn't belong to Him any more."

It was Peter's turn to look grave.

"I'm glad I'm not you, without a mother. Mother is ripping. She wasn't a bit angry when I
told her, only very sorry—and—well—loving. I was rather a cad, and, of course it was a lie
I told. I'm never going to tell another as long as I live. If I die for it, I won't!"

Peter clenched his fists determinedly.