Words Reclaimed

 For about fifteen years centered on 2003, I often encountered the word "emblematic" in newspapers. The first time it appeared to mean "exemplary". Other times it might have meant "symbolic". I came to think that there must be a tool called "an emblematic" to provide a filler for tired journalists. The OED acknowledges the word, but I hadn't encountered a case I thought it suited.

Last weekend, in Morality and Conflict by Stuart Hampshire, I read

Certain minutiae of behaviour, as they strike a stranger, may be emblematic and have the right or wrong emotional significance for those who understand the behaviour, 'understand' in the sense that one understands an idiom in a spoken language.

That use of "emblematic" strikes me as just right.

More recently, one encounters the term "iconic" everywhere. Usually it means "famous", I think. I would be happy to restrict it to a form of ecclesiastical art, to researches into the ancient city of Iconium, or to code written in the Icon programming language. But those who write for the public are more liberal with it.

 Also last weekend, I encountered a case where "iconic" seemed to fit. In the chapter "Early Latin Trinitarian Theology" of Augustine and Nicene Theology, Michel Barnes classifies Faustinus's "Nicene" Trinitarian theology as having a

logic that is neither power-based nor substance based but iconic.

That is to say, Faustinus relies on

Scriptural descriptions of the Son's iconic or visual relationship to the Father

 

Split Infinitives

 In section 6 of the essay "Morality and Convention" of Morality and Conflict by Stuart Hampshire, there appears the sentence

The kind of 'must not' that arises within this [local] area of morality can be compared with a linguistic prohibition, for example that you must not split an infinitive: a particular rule of a particular language, which is not made less binding by the fact that it is not a general rule in language.

Morality and Conflict was published in 1983. In Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs, published in 1984, an American professor reflects on the conversation of a man who says that he "[used] to really enjoy baseball" with

A person without inner resources who splits infinitives ...

The first edition of H.W. Fowler's Modern English Usage, published in 1927, gives almost three pages to the question of split infinitives, and sorts writers by attitude into five divisions. Clearly Fowler is with the fifth:

5. The attitude of those who know and distinguish is something like this: We admit that the separation of to from its infinitive .. is not in itself desirable ... We maintain however that a real [split infinitive], though not desirable in itself, is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, & to patent artificiality.

 Presumably Lurie's character belonged to Fowler's division 1, "those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is".

Arbiters

 A footnote late in the chapter "My Station and Its Duties" of F.H. Bradley's Ethical Studies runs

It is worth while in this connexion to refer to the custom some persons have (and find useful) of calling before the mind, when in doubt, a known person of high character and quick judgment, and thinking what they would have done. This no doubt both delivers the mind from private considerations and also is to act in the spirit of the other person (so far as we know it), i. e. from the general basis of his acts (certainly not the mere memory of his particular acts, or such memory plus inference.

 The footnote attaches to a sentence beginning "Precept is good, but example is better".

 The note reminded me of one in Sydney Smith's "Letters to Archdeacon Singleton", a work more playfully written but serious even so:

Mr. Fox very often used to say, "I wonder what Lord B. will think of this!" Lord B. happened to be a very stupid person, and the curiosity of Mr. Fox's friends was naturally excited to know why he attached such importance to the opinion of such an ordinary common-place person. "His opinion," said Mr. Fox, "is of much more importance than you are aware. He is an exact representative of all common-pace English prejudices, and what Lord B. thinks of any measure, the great majority of of English people will think of it." It would be a good thing if every Cabinet of philosophers had a Lord B. among them.

This is attached to a passage likewise explicit:

I am astonished that these Ministers neglect the common precaution of a foolometer, with which no public man should be unprovided: I mean, the acquaintance and society of three or four regular British fools as a test of public opinion. Every Cabinet minister should judge of all his measures by his foolometer, as a navigator crowds or shortens sail by the barometer in his cabin. I have a very valuable instrument of that kind myself, which I have used for many years; and I would be bound to predict, with the utmost nicety, the precise effect which any measure would produce on public opinion.

 Would or did Bradley think of Smith's application of "example is better" as frivolous? Smith wrote about 40 years before Bradley.