1a. They saw him run. b. He was seen to run. 2a. They heard him shouting. b. He was heard shouting. 3a. They will require the purchaser of the estate to assume the burden. b. The purchaser of the estate shall merely be required to assume this burden.-HAWTHORNE. 282. Even a noun or a pronoun used as the object of a preposition in the active sentence may in the passive sentence become the passive subject; the object of the active form, if there should be an object, remaining after the passive verb-phrase, and the preposition also remaining as an adjunct of the verb. 1a. No book-lover can dispense with this work. b. This work cannot be dispensed with by any book-lover. 2a. They did away with that nuisance. b. That nuisance was done away with. 3a. The carriage that he sent for was mine. b. The carriage that was sent for was mine. 44. We take no notice of those men. b. Those men are taken no notice of by us. This form of the sentence may have arisen in the following manner: Type a may have been transposed for emphasis. IC. This book no book-lover can dispense with. 2c. That nuisance they did away with. 4c. Those men we take no notice of. In these sentences the function of the preposition is obscured by its separation from its object. And whether the above transpositions were made or not, the prepositions came to attach themselves to the verbs, and could be easily felt as adverbs, or even as a part of the verbidea (see Section 162). The substantive object of the preposition, standing first in the transposed sentence, took the nominative form; or the verb plus the following attached preposition (or noun and preposition) came to be felt as a unit, a transitive verb, and so treated, the substantive following the preposition being used, like the object of a regularly transitive verb, as the subject of the passive; thus the subject of the active sentence (a) was put into a phrase of agent after the passive verb-phrase (b), as in normal sentences. The active object remained in its first position-after the verb (as in 4b). The idiomatic sentence is sometimes decidedly awkward, and the best writers usually avoid it; yet it has the advantage of avoiding mention of the one responsible for the action. Some further examples follow: 5. The most sacred things in life may be made ill use of. (Smoother form, "may be ill used.") 6. It is laid hands upon. (Better, "Hands are laid upon it.") 7. After these defeats, the Picts were never heard of in history. 8. She was much talked about. 9. He was made much of by the literary men of the city. 10a. I have known it triumphed in and boasted of with reason. The prepositional adjuncts here follow the passive past participles. Compare the predicate verbs in Iob. They triumphed in it and boasted of it. c. It was triumphed in and boasted of. 11. Miss Jervois loves to sit up late, either reading or being read to. NOTE 1.-In explaining this form, refer to 1ob, c: a. The nurse read to her. b. She was read to by the nurse. NOTE 2.—An idiomatic passive, colloquial and awkward, is Compare, "The horse ran away with me," and Section 156c. 283. Compare the following active and passive forms: 1a. They shall call his name John. b. His friend was called a traitor by him. 4a. They painted the house white. b. The house was painted white. The active sentence contains a subject, a verb, an object, and an objective complement. The active object becomes the passive subject, and the objective complement of the active form becomes the subjective complement of the passive form. The infinitive to be may accompany such a subjective complement as an introductory term (compare Sections 57b and 25b); as and for are also introducing particles. (See Section 76.) 5. When any one of our relations was found to be a person of very bad character, upon his leaving my house, I ever took care to lend him a riding-coat. . . .-GOLDSMITH, The Vicar of Wakefield i. 6. Even those knights were regarded as men of inferior breed.— MACAULAY. The same construction is found with verbals, and when one of the complements is a phrase or a clause. 7. There's no greater luxury in life than being read to sleep. Compare the two sentences following: 8a. The nurse read me to sleep. b. I was read to sleep by the nurse. CHAPTER XXII A CHAPTER FOR TEACHERS ERRORS IN USAGE 284. What makes an expression correct or incorrect? We are too apt to think that grammars make rules of language and that dictionaries make rules for spelling and pronunciation. It is not true, however; grammars and dictionaries cannot make a single rule; they are not "authorities." They can only formulate, with more or less accuracy, in a convenient place and form for reference, the customs that prevail among the users of the language. The standard by which we decide whether or not a form or a combination is correct, is based on usage. 285. But what do we mean by usage? Is it the custom of the majority of the users of the language? And if the majority of the users are ignorant and careless, can they not introduce all sorts of strange forms and combinations? Doubtless mere numbers have great weight in settling questions of usage; but among people as devoted to education and therefore as conservative as are the users of English, another consideration is sure to come in. Quality counts for as much as, or more than, mere numbers. We ask, not only, "How many persons use this expression?" but also, "What kind of persons use it?" And to our mind the authority of a great number of illiterate persons does not count for as much as does the authority of fewer cultivated ones. The real basis of our standard, then, is good usage. In our use of language we wish to rank ourselves with the better class, even though it is the smaller one. When education becomes practically universal, the better class may not be in numbers far behind the larger class; it may even become the larger class. 286. The better class is always conservative. It holds tenaciously to the rules already formulated and accepted, and is always ready to cry "Error!" to an innovation. At the same time, the lower class, which is careless about rules and elegancies and is satisfied if it only makes itself understood, is permitting innovations; and sometimes, by mere weight of numbers, it forces an innovation into the standard language in spite of the conservative upper class. Gradually the upper class lets go of the rule to which it has been holding; at length every one forgets the rule, and the innovation is universally hailed as "correct. The history of language furnishes many examples of this process. An interesting one is found in the plural form of our pronoun of the second person. The declension was once strictly: nominative ye, genitive your, objective you. It was just as bad in those days to say, "You went" as it is now to say, "Him and me went "; the subject of the sentence should be in the nominative case. But the objective of the second person plural has been used in place of the nominative to such an extent that it has completely superseded the latter form. In our everyday speech we have entirely forgotten the old declension, and we all say "You went" without a blush. 287. There is, then, it is easy to see, for every innovation a period of doubt as to whether the phrase or form under dispute is or is not good English. When a great number of persons, some of them respected for their intelligence, were saying "You went," and at the same time some pedantic or conservative speakers clung to "Ye went," a man may well have feared that he should seem old-fashioned if he insisted on ye or illiterate if he used you. We can appreciate his state of mind if we think of our own with regard to the expression "It is me." Is it good English now? If it is not yet, will it ever be? When doctors disagree, who shall decide? It is not easy to draw a sharp line between the class that can, by its usage, stamp an expression as "correct" and the class that cannot; and even if we could do this, it would be impossible to take an accurate vote of the upper class. We are always more or less uncertain when we have to depend on general estimates. The best rule of practice is the old one of Pope's: "Be not the first by whom the new is tried, 288. But is there nothing except good and accepted usage that helps us to decide what is standard speech? No, nothing certain. Sometimes we think logical considerations affect us, |