Abstract
IT is quite true, as Mr. Basset says, that “in English considerable care is often required in the arrangement of a sentence, so as to avoid ambiguity”; but he seems to go too far when he says that “brevity ought always to be aimed at.” Too much brevity will often, as we are warned by Horace, lead to obscurity: “brevis esse laboro: obscurus fio”; and the absence of inflections and genders renders it impossible to write English in the brief, epigrammatic style that is common in Latin.
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S., T. Misuse of Words and Phrases. Nature 71, 9 (1904). https://doi.org/10.1038/071009e0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/071009e0
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