Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.

The observance of these rules is concerned with either one or more words. I must now be understood to use verbum in its most general sense. It has of course two meanings; the one covers all the parts of which language is composed, as in the line of Horace:

  1. Once supply the thought,
  2. And words will follow swift as soon as sought
Ars Poetica, 311.
the other restricts it to a part of speech such as lego and scribo. To avoid this ambiguity, some authorities prefer the terms voces, locutiones, dictiones.

Individual words will either be native or imported, simple or compound, literal or metaphorical, in current use or newly-coined. A single word is more likely to be faulty than to possess any intrinsic merit. For though we may speak of a word as appropriate, distinguished or sublime, it can possess none of these properties save in relation to connected and consecutive speech; since when we praise words, we do so because they suit the matter.

There is only one excellence that

v1-3 p.81
can be isolated for consideration, namely euphony, the Greek term for our uocalitas: that is to say that, when we are confronted with making a choice between two exact synonyms, we must select that which sounds best.

In the first place barbarisms and solecisms must not be allowed to intrude their offensive presence. These blemishes are however pardoned at times, because we have become accustomed to them or because they have age or authority in their favour or are near akin to positive excellences, since it is often difficult to distinguish such blemishes from figures of speech.1 The teacher therefore, that such slippery customers may not elude detection, must seek to acquire a delicate discrimination; but of this I will speak later when I come to discuss figures of speech. [*](cp. § 40. )

For the present I will define barbarism as an offence occurring in connexion with single words. Some of my readers may object that such a topic is beneath the dignity of so ambitious a work. But who does not know that some barbarisms occur in writing, others in speaking? For although what is incorrect in writing will also be incorrect in speech, the converse is not necessarily true, inasmuch as mistakes in writing are caused by addition or omission, substitution or transposition, while mistakes in speaking are due to separation or combination of syllables, to aspiration or other errors of sound.