Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/274
really meant, we venture to question this point, as we do also in some of the earlier sentences. Any one who agrees with the details of this summary can save himself the trouble of reading the subsequent discussion.
a. In that interval what had I not lost!–Lamb.
b. And what will not the discontinuance cost me!–Richardson.
c. A streak of blue below the hanging alders is certainly a characteristic introduction to the kingfisher. How many people first see him so?–Times.
d. Does the reading of history make us fatalists? What courage does not the opposite opinion show!–Emerson.
e. What economy of life and money, he exclaims, would not have been spared the empire of the Tsars had it not rendered war certain by devoting itself so largely to the works of peace.–Times.
f. How many, who think no otherwise than the young painter, have we not heard disbursing secondhand hyperboles?–Stevenson.
It will be noticed that in all these sentences except c there is a negative, which puts them, except f, wrong; while in c it is the absence of the negative that makes the question wrong. It will be simplest to start with c. The writer clearly means to let us know that many people see the kingfisher first as a blue streak. He might give this simply so, as a statement. He might (artificially) give it as an exclamation—How many first see him so! Or he might (very artificially) give it as a question—How many do not first see him so?—a 'rhetorical question' in which How many interrogative is understood to be equivalent to Few positive. He has rejected the simple statement; vaulting ambition has o'erleapt, and he has ended in a confusion between the two artificial ways of saying the thing, taking the words of the possible exclamation and the stop of the possible question. In a, b, d, and implicitly in e, we have the converse arrangement, or derangement. But as a little more clear thinking is required for them, we point out that the origin of the confusion (though the careless printing of fifty or a hundred years ago no doubt helped to establish it) lies in the identity between the words used for questions and for exclamations. It will be enough to suggest