INDIGESTED

ency of customs, so long as they do not make void the Divine word. See -CE, -CY, & DIFFERENTIATION.

indigested. Un- is the right form; see IN- & UN-.

indirect object. See TECHNICAL

TERMS.

INDIRECT QUESTION is the grammarian's name for a modification of what was originally a question, such that it does not stand by itself as a sentence, but is treated as a noun, serving for instance as subject or object to a verb outside of it. Thus : direct question, Who are you?; indirect question, I asked who he was, or Tell me who you are, or Who you are is quite irrelevant. Two points arise, one of grammar, & one of style.

1. It must be remembered that an indirect question is in grammar equivalent to one noun in the singular; the number of its internal subject has no influence on the number of the external verb; to disregard this fact, as when rest is written instead of rests in the following extract because terms happens to be plural, is an elementary blunderWhat terms Bulgaria may be_ultimately given rest with the Peace Conference.

2. The point of style is of much greater interest. How far is it legitimate to substitute in an indirect question the order of words that properly belongs to direct questions? The lamentable craze for INVERSION among writers who are fain to make up for dullness of matter by verbal contortions is no doubt responsible for the prevailing disregard of the normal order in indirect questions; for inversion, i.e. the placing of the subject later than its verb, is a mark of the direct, but not of the indirect question. Take these five types :A. How old are you? B. Tell me how old you are

or Tell me how old are you? C. He wondered how old she was

or He wondered how old was she?

D. He doesn't know how old I am or He doesn't know how old am I? E. How old I am is my affair

or How old am I is my affair. A is the direct question; in B, C, D, & E, the first form contains the normal, & the second the abnormal form of the indirect question. It will be seen that the abnormal form is progressively disagreeable as we recede from interrogative governing verbs, until in E it might fairly be thought impossible. To contortionists, however, all things are possible; readers possessed of the grammatical sense, or of literary taste, will find the following examples of the abnormal order repugnant in the same degree as the types to which the letters B, E, &c., assign them; it is only the encroachments of inversion in general that palliate this special abuse in indirect questions. I have been asked by the Editor to explain what are the duties of the Army towards the civil power, how is it constituted, to whom does it owe allegiance, by whom is it paid, & what is the source of its authority (B. The reason why the first & last clauses here are less distasteful than the others is explained later)./It shows inferentially how powerless is that body to carry out any scheme of its own (D. Normal order-how powerless that body is)./Experience has taught in what a restricted region can the State as trader or owner act to the general advantage (D. Normal order the State can act to the general advantage as trader)./How bold is this attack may be judged from the fact that... (E. Normal orderHow bold this attack is)./Why should we be so penalized must ever remain a mystery (E. Normal order -Why we should).

The further remarks promised on the first example are these: three of the five indirect-question clauses in that are clear cases of abnormal order-how is it instead of how it is, to whom does it owe instead of to whom it owes, & by whom is it paid instead of by whom it is paid-;

INDISCREET

but about the other two, which whether designedly or not act as advance-guard & rearguard covering those between & almost preventing us from discovering their character, it is not so easy to say whether they are abnormal or not. That is a characteristic of the special type of question consisting of subject, noun complement, & the verb be; in the answer to such questions, subject & complement are transposable. Question, What are the duties?; answer, indifferently, These are the duties, or The duties are these; to the first form corresponds in the indirect question Explain what are the duties, & to the second, Explain what the duties are ; & it can therefore hardly be said that one is more normal than the other. But to questions made of other elements than subject+be +noun complement, e.g. How is it constituted?, the two answers (It is constituted thus, & Thus is it constituted) are far from indifferent ; one is plainly normal & the other abnormal. This minor point has been discussed only because sentences like Explain what are the duties might be hastily supposed to justify all other uses of directquestion order in indirect-question constructions.

are a couple of passages in which the choice of it can have been dictated by nothing but WORN-OUT HUMOUR :-It is a most spirited episode, with a supernatural ending according to Tom Causey; this wily individual is the hero of some highly diverting stories./Taking a leaf out of the book of the individual who some years ago put forth his recollections under the title Reminiscences of a Young Man'.

The test for the right use of the word as opposed to the colloquial vulgarism' (OED) is the question whether the writer means or not to contrast the person he calls an individual with society, the family, or some body of persons; if he does, he may say individual with a clear conscience; if not, he must expect us to like his evocation of this ghost of 19th-century jocularity as little as we enjoy the fragrance of a blownout candle that just now gave us light, or of the smoking-room visited early next morning. A pair of examples will make the difference clear; in the first, the individual is directly contrasted with, though a member of, the House of Commons, & is therefore rightly so called; in the second it is true that there is a body of persons in question, but the individual is so far from being contrasted with this body that he is it; the right way to have written the sentence is added in brackets, & the efficiency with which his does all the work of of this longsuffering individual (19th-century perfume excepted) reveals the writer's style as one not to be imitated :-The House of Commons settled down very quietly to business yesterday afternoon; all trace of the preceding sitting's violent protestation appeared to have been obliterated from the political mind; the only individual who attempted to revive the spirit of animosity was Mr- -./We are little inclined to consider the urgency of the case made out for the patient agriculturalist; it would seem at first sight as if the needs of this long-suffering

INDORSATION

individual were such as could be supplied by (as if his needs could).

indorsation, but endorse(ment); see EM- & IM-.

or

induce makes -cible; see -ABLE 2. induct makes -tor; see -OR. induction) (deduction. The first is the drawing, from observed known cases, of the conviction that something established of them is true either of all similar cases, or of any particular similar case, that may afterwards be met with. The child who, having observed that all the persons known to him have two legs, confidently expects two legs on the newborn brother he has not yet seen, has made an induction. Deduction is the drawing from a general principle, however derived, of the conviction that a particular fact is true because if it were not the general principle, which has been accepted as undeniable, would not be true. The child who, being told that if you take a seed & sow it you may expect thirtyfold or so of what you took it from to spring up, sows a caraway seed & awaits the thirty copies of the seedcake from which he saved it is acting on a deduction. Whether the conclusion reached by induction or deduction is true depends on many conditions, which it is the province of Logic to expound; but the broad difference between the two is that induction starts from known instances & arrives at a generalization, or at the power of applying to new instances what it has gathered from the old, while deduction starts from the general principle, whether established by induction or assumed, & arrives at some less general principle, or some individual fact, that may be regarded as being wrapped up in it & therefore as having the same claim to belief as the general principle itself.

indue. En- better; see EM- & IM-. indulge. 1. 1. makes indulgeable ; see MUTE E. 2. But here & there

flashes out a phrase or a sentence that strikes the note of emotion & pride in the achievements of our armies which the most reticent of men may indulge. That passes the limit of what even this very elastic verb can be stretched to. You may i. your emotion, or i. in emotion, or i. yourself in emotion; further, you may i. in, or i. yourself in, a note of emotion; but you cannot i. a note, whether of emotion or of anything else, but only strike or utter or blow it ; & no-one who knows any grammar would deny that which represents note, not emotion & pride. The object of i. as a transitive verb must be either a person or at least something that can be credited with a capacity for being pleased or gratified; a passion, a fancy, an emotion, may be gratified, but not a note. The mistake is less a misunderstanding of the meaning of i. than an example of HAZINESS, note of emotion being confused with emotion, & the confusion escaping notice under cover of which.

INEVITABLE

aries within reach shows them all ignorant of the specialized modern use; the OED in particular, dated 1901 for the letter I, has no inkling of it. An example or two may therefore be welcome :-And even when a song is introduced, such as Ariel's Where the bee sucks there suck 1, its effect is so great because it seems dramatically inevitable./The mere matters of arrangement, of line therein, show how great was his power, how true his perception; he has the inevitableness of the Japanese./Inevitably he led up to the unanswerable case for giving to all women the vote, & one felt he spoke, as he declared he did, with all sincerity, with all his heart, of what he believed in./Both themes are well, that is to say inevitably, worked out./Miss may not always sing inevitably & spontaneously, simply for the love of beauty.

Better examples than these might be desired for the purpose of extracting the words' sense; they are the ones that happen to be at hand, recorded possibly for the very reason that they were open to objection. What the literary critic does mean by inevitable is perhaps this: surveying a work of art, we feel sometimes that the whole & all the parts are sufficiently consistent & harmonious to produce on us the effect of truth; we then call it, for short, convincing; thus & thus, we mean, it surely may have been or may be ; nothing in it inclines us to doubt; to be convincing is a step short of being inevitable; when the whole & the parts are so far in a concatenation accordingly that instead of Thus & thus it may have been we find ourselves forced to Thus & thus it must have been or was or is, when the change of a jot or tittle would be plain desecration, when we know that we are looking at the Platonic idea itself & no mere copy, then the tale or the picture or the music attains to inevitableness. This is an outsider's guess at the meaning; whether the guess is a good one or not, the meaning seems to be one

deserving expression in a single word-but only on the condition that that word shall be strictly confined to the works or parts of works that are worthy of it. Now it is, in fact, so often met with that one is compelled to infer the existence of a great deal more inevitability in twentieth-century art of all kinds than one at all suspected; so many things seem inevitable to the reviewer in which the reader could contemplate extensive alterations without a pang. The question is whether convincing or true to nature, phrases for whose interpretation we should not search the dictionaries in vain, would not be nearer the critic's private meaning than inevitable, & indeed whether he does not choose inevitable just because the reader would understand the other words too easily & miss being impressed by his command of mysterious terms.

inexactitude. For terminological i. - lie, see POLYSYLLABIC HUMOUR inexpressibles. See POLYSYLLABIC

HUMOUR.

inexpressive, un-. The second is recommended; see IN- & UN-.

infantile) (-ine. The OED does not lay down any distinction, giving as its sole definition of -ine infantile'. But its quotations for the two words do on the whole bear out one that might well (see DIFFERENTIATION) be encouraged, something like that between CHILDISH & childlike, though less established: -ile means of or in infancy, & -ine infantlike or as of an infant. If this is accepted, each of the following quotations from the OED would be the worse if -ile & -ine were to change places :-The interest which his story first impressed upon her infantile imagination./The countenance is so innocent & infantine, you would think this head belonged to a child of twelve. It may be said roughly that -ile records a fact, & -ine an impression.

infatuate makes -uable; see -ABLE 1. infer makes -rred &c.; see -R-, -RR-.

inferno. Pl. -os; see -o(E)s 3. inferrable. See INFERABLE.

infinite(ly). There are naughty people who will say i. when they only mean great or much or far. Their offence is here dealt with by a triple bench; the first member is a correspondent of a well-known journal; the second is its editor, a meek man, it should seem; the third is he who should have shared the writing of this book with me, among whose papers I find the cutting with his comment appended :1. Sir,-May I appeal to your love of accurate English against the common use in writing, as in speaking, of the word " infinitely equivalent to considerably' indefinitely '?—you write that oil is infinitely less bulky than coal in proportion to the energy derived - from it'. You write that the habitual loafer does infinite mischief'. In the first case you intend ' considerably' & in the second case you can only mean that the mischief is indefinite, sometimes great, sometimes no worse than this letter from your obedient servant, AN HABITUAL LOAFER OF NECESSITY.

as

or

2. We stand corrected. Our use was a vulgarism. And yet we must not run into a taboo of this noble word. Swinburne uses it finely, accurately, & therefore without vulgarity, in the line "In the infinite spirit is room for the pulse of an infinite pain'. There the use is exact, because it does not imply mere magnitude.-Ed.

3. Rot. Infinite is no more a vulgarism than any other deliberate exaggeration. And indefinitely is a totally wrong substitute; I have

INFLICT

known at least one person habitually use it, with ludicrous effect.

It was naughty of that Editor, though, to say infinite & then take his punishment lying down.

see

INFINITIVE. 1. For unidiomatic infinitives after nouns that prefer the gerund, as in the extract, GERUND. The habit of mapmakers to place lands & not seas in the forefront has obscured the oneness of the Pacific. 2. See SPLIT INFINITIVE.

infinitude does not appear to be now entitled to any higher rank than that of a NEEDLESS VARIANT of infinity. It might well have been, but can hardly now be, differentiated with the sense quality of being infinite. Milton & Sterne, however, will keep it in being for poets to fly to & stylists to play with when infinity palls on them. An escape from -ity is sometimes welcome: It is just this infinitude of possibilities that necessitates unity & continuity of command.