Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

while the Greeks call it ἄκυρον As examples I may cite the Virgilian, [*](Aen. IV. 419. )

Never could I have hoped for such great woe,

or the phrase, which I noted had been corrected by Cicero in a speech of Dolabella's,

To bring death,

or again, phrases of a kind that win praise from some of our contemporaries, such as,

His words fell from the cross.

[*]( Presumably in the sense, He spoke like one in bodily pain. ) On the other hand, everything that lacks appropriateness will not necessarily suffer from the fault of positive impropriety, because there are, in the first place, many things which have no proper term either in Greek or Latin.

For example, the verb iaculari is specially used in the sense of

to throw a javelin,

whereas there is no special verb appropriated to the throwing of a ball or a stake. So, too, while lapidare has the obvious meaning of

to stone,

there is no special word to describe the throwing of clods or potsherds.

Hence abuse or catachresis of words becomes necessary, while metaphor, also, which is the supreme ornament of oratory, applies words to things with which they have strictly no connexion. Consequently propriety turns not on the actual term, but on the meaning of the term, and must be tested by the touchstone of the understanding, not of the ear.