Read "A Corrupt Following" by Alice Meynell online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
During the whole nineteenth century our language underwent a certain derogation, notorious, different in kind from the corruptions of all other ages, and as familiar as brick and slate, gas, and the architecture of stations-and apparently of yesterday, and to-day, and of a morrow seen in rather dull and discouraging prospect. But the truth is that this common speech is due to the enormous influence of a great author who was born in 1737, was for forty-seven years the contemporary of Dr. Johnson, and died well within the eighteenth century.
Whose, for instance, is the use of ‘I expect' for a conjecture referring to the past? It is Gibbon's: ‘I should expect that the eunuchs were not expelled from the palace. ' What is the ‘and which', ‘and who' of the slovenly? and what the ‘whose' applied to inanimate things by authors too fine and too modern to write ‘whereof'? Gear of Gibbon's style, both: ‘Below the citadel stood a palace of gold, decorated with precious stones, and whose value might be esteemed,' &c.; and ‘A Menapian of the meanest origin, but who had long signalized his skill as a pilot'. There is, it is true, the inanimate ‘whose' of a more illustrious and older author, but that claims the excuse of metre.