Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/27

No dead colleague is reparable—though his loss may or may not be so—this side the Day of Judgement.

Surely he was better employed in plying the trades of tinker and smith than in having resource to vice, in running after milkmaids, for example.—Borrow. (recourse)

You may indeed have recourse to a resource, but not vice versa. You may also resort to, which makes the confusion easier.

What she would say to him, how he would take it, even the vaguest predication of their discourse, was beyond him to guess.—E. F. Benson. (prediction)

Predication has nothing to do with the future; it is a synonym, used especially in logic, for statement. The mistake is generally whipped out of schoolboys in connexion with praedīcere and praedĭcare.

5. Words whose meaning is misapprehended without apparent cause. The hankering of ignorant writers after the unfamiliar or imposing leads to much of this. We start with two uses of which correct and incorrect examples are desirable: provided, where if is required; and to eke out in wrong senses. Provided adorns every other page of George Borrow; we should have left it alone as an eccentricity of his, if we had not lately found the wrong use more than once in The Times.

Provided is a small district in the kingdom of if; it can never be wrong to write if instead of provided: to write provided instead of if will generally be wrong, but now and then an improvement in precision. So much is clear; to define the boundaries of the district is another matter; we might be wiser merely to appeal to our readers whether all the examples to be quoted, except one, are not wrong. But that would be cowardly; we lay down, then, that (a) the clause must be a stipulation, i. e., a demand yet to be fulfilled, (b) there must be a stipulator, who (c) must desire, or at least insist upon, the fulfilment of it.