prognosticate makes -cable, -tor; see -ABLE 1, -or.

prognostic. For synonymy see SIGN. program(me). It appears from the OED quotations that -am was the regular spelling until the 19th c., & the OED's judgement is: The carlier program was retained by Scott, Carlyle, Hamilton, & others, & is preferable, as conforming to the usual English representation of Greek gramma, in anagram, cryptogram, diagram, telegram, &c.'.

progress. The OEDgives prō-as preferable to pro-. Noun prō'gris, verb progre's; see NOUN & VERB ACCENT. progression. Arithmetical p. & geometrical p. These are in constant demand to express a rapid rate of increase, which is not involved in either of them, & is not even suggested by a. p. Those who use the expressions should bear in mind (1) that you canoot determine the nature of the progression from two terms whose relative place in the series is unknown, (2) that every rate of increase that could be named is slower than some rates of a. p. & of g. p., & faster than some others, & consequently (3) that the phrases 'better than a. p., than g. p.', 'almost in a. p., g. p.', are wholly meaningless.

In 1903 there were ten thousand

PROGRESSIONIST

paying guests', last year [1906] fifty thousand. The rate of increase, is better, it will be observed, than arithmetical progression. Better, certainly, than a. p. with increment 1, of which the fourth annual term would have been 10,003; but as certainly worse than a. p. with increment a million, of which the fourth term would have been 3,010,000; & neither better nor worse than, but a case of, a. p. with increment 13333). The writer meant a. p. with annual increment 10,000; but as soon as we see what he meant to say we see also that it was not worth saying, since it tells us no more than that, as we knew before, fifty thousand is greater than forty thousand.

Even g. p. may be so slow that to raise 10,000 in three years to as little as the 10,003 mentioned above is merely a matter of fixing the increment ratio low enough. Neither a. p. nor g. p. necessarily implies rapid progress. The point of contrast between them is that one involves growth or decline at a constant pace, & the other at an increasing pace. Hence the famous sentence in Malthus about population & subsistence, the first increasing in a g. & the second in an a. ratio, which perhaps started the phrases on their career as POPULARIZED TECHNICALITIES. Of the following extracts, the first is a copy of Malthus, the second a possibly legitimate use, according to what it is meant to convey, & the third the usual absurdity :-The healthy portion of the population is increasing by a. p., & the feeble-minded by g. p./ Scientific discovery is likely to proceed by g. p./As the crude prejudice against the soldier's uniform vanished, & as ex-Regular officers joined the Volunteers, & Volunteers passed on to the Army, the idea that every man owes willing service to his country began to spread in an almost geometrical ratio.

progressionist, progressist, progressive, nn. The last is recommended.

PROHIBIT

prohibit. The modern construction, apart from that with an object noun as in an Act prohibiting export, is from doing, not to do; the OED marks the latter as archaic, but it is less archaism than ignorance of idiom & the analogy of forbid that accounts for it in such contexts as :Marshal Oyama prohibited his troops to take quarter within the walls./The German Government has decided to issue a decree prohibiting all Government officials to strike. P. makes -tor; see -OR.

prohibition. Pronounce proĬ- ; the his sounded, however, where the i following it bears the accent, as in prohibit itself. See PRONUNCIATION.

project. Verb projekt, noun pro'jikt; see NOUN & VERB ACCENT. The verb makes tor; see -OR.

prolate, -lative. See TECHNICAL

The

prologue, -logize, -loguize. prevalent modern pronunciation is prōlog, but the OED gives preference to pro ́lŏg. In the verb it seems best to spell -gize, the Greeks having the verb -gizo, but with licence at least (see GREEK G) to pronounce it prologiz.

promenade. Pronounce -ahd. Promethean. See HERCULEAN. prominence, -cy. The second is a NEEDLESS VARIANT. See -CE, -CY. promiscuous. The colloquial use for random, chance, casual, &c., springs from POLYSYLLABIC HUMOUR.

promise makes -sable; see MUTE E. The noun promisor is confined to legal use, & -er is the ordinary word. P., vb, is liable to the abuse dis

cussed in DOUBLE PASSIVES: If it had been taken down, even though promised to be re-erected, it might have shared the fate of Temple Bar.

promissory. So spelt, not -isory. promote. 1. P. makes -table; see MUTE E. 2. Construction. You can p. a person to an archbishopric, or p. him to be archbishop, or p. him archbishop, but not mix two of these & p. him to archbishop. The unidiomatic construction, however, is now commoner in the newspapers than it should be :-The crowning glory of an executive naval officer's career is to be promoted to Admiral of the Fleet./Major-General has been appointed to succeed LieutenantGeneral as Director-General (temp.) of the Army Medical Service, & has been promoted to LieutenantGeneral (temp.)./Over 1150 cadets of the Military Colleges were promoted to officers.

promulgate makes -atable, -tor; see -ATABLE, OR.

pronounce makes -ceable; see -ABLE 1. Pronouncedly has four Pronouncesyllables; see -EDLY.

ment is kept in being by the side of pronunciation owing to complete differentiation; it means only declaration or decision, which the other never does.

PRONOUNS & pronominal adjectives are rather tricky than difficult. Those who go wrong over them do so from heedlessness, & will mostly plead guilty when they are charged. It is enough to state the dangers very shortly, & prove their existence by sufficient citations. 1. There must be a principal in existence for the pronoun or proxy to act for. 2. The principal should not be very far off. 3. There should not be two parties justifying even a momentary doubt about which the pronoun represents. 4. One pronoun should not represent two principals on one occasion. 5. The pronoun should seldom precede its principal.

1. No pronoun without a principal in being. Viscount Wolverhampton,

PRONOUNS, 2

acting under medical advice, has resigned the office of Lord President, & His Majesty the King has been pleased to accept it (it is resignation; but as that word has not been used we can only suppose H.M. to have accepted the office)./The member for Morpeth has long been held in the highest respect by all who value sterling character & whole-hearted service in the cause of his fellows; it was Earl Grey who once declared that Mr Burt was the finest gentleman' he ever knew (His means a man's, & not, as grammar requires since a man has not been mentioned, Mr Burt's)./Now, the public interest is that coal should be cheap & abundant, & that it should be got without the dangerous friction which has attended the disputes between masters & men in this, trade. And, if nationalization is to be the policy, it looks to an assured peace in the coal-trade as its main advantage. For this it will pay a fair price & be willing that a considerable experiment should be made, but without the sure prospect of such a peace it will see no benefit to itself & a very doubtful benefit to the miners in the change from private to State ownership (Each of these its means the public, not the public interest)./The number of these abstainers is certainly greater than can be attributed to merely local or personal causes, & those who have watched the election agree that a portion of them are due to doubts & uncertainties about the Insurance Act (A portion, that is, of the abstentions, not of the abstainers)./An American Navy League Branch has even been established in London, & is influentially supported by their countrymen in this city (Whose countrymen ?).

2. The principal should not be very far off. We have to go further back than the beginning of the following extracts to learn who he & she are :And yet, as we read the pages of the book, we feel that a work written when the story is only as yet half told, amid the turmoil of the events which

he is describing, can only be taken as a provisional impression./It is always a shock to find that there are still writers who regard the war from the standpoint of the sentimentalist. It is true that this story comes from America & bears the traces of its distance from the field of action. But even distance cannot wholly excuse such an exterior view as she permits herself. 3. There should not be two parties justifying even a moment's doubt about which the pronoun represents. Mr Harcourt, who presided at a large public meeting, declared that it was his experience as Home Secretary which changed Sir William Harcourt's earlier views & convinced him that drastic legislation was necessary (Mr H.'s experience, or Sir W.'s? See also 5)./In the December previous to his raid on the Tower he was chief of a gang who, overpowering his attendants, seized the Duke of Ormonde in St-James Street when returning from a dinner-party (His refers not to the preceding he, but to the following Duke; see 5, & FALSE SCENT)./Four years, the years that followed her marriage, suffice Lady Younghusband for her somewhat elaborate study, Marie Antoinette : Her Early Youth, 1770-1774' (Not Lady Y.'s marriage; see FALSE SCENT)./Professor Geddes's fine example of sociology applied to Civics, his plea for a comprehensive & exact survey of his own city as a branch of natural history required for the culture of every instructed citizen (The professor's own city? Ah, no; here comes, perhaps better late than never, the true principal)./As it is, the shortsighted obstinacy of the bureaucracy has given its overwhelming strength to the revolution (Not bureaucracy's, but revolution's, strength; see also 5)./Coriolanus is the embodiment of a great noble ; & the reiterated taunts which he hurls in play after play at the rabble only echo the general temper of the Renascence (Not Coriolanus, but Shakspere, is the hurler; the interloping of Coriolanus between Shakspere &

PRONOUNS, 4

his proxy makes things difficult for the reader)./On the Lord Mayor's left was Queen Elena, as calm & placid as her husband, who had come into the Guildhall in Parma violet silk, with a large violet-coloured hat & a bouquet of orchids of the same hue. 4. One pronoun, one job. ...which opens up the bewildering question as to how far the Duma really represents the nation. The answer to this is far from solving the Russian riddle, but without answering it it is idle even to discuss it (It represents, first, the bewildering question, secondly, the discussion of that riddle, & last, the riddle itself-which is not the same as the question)./This local option in the amount of outdoor relief given under the Poor Law has always operated inequitably & been one of the greatest blots on the system; to extend it to the first great benefit under the Insurance Act will greatly lessen its usefulness (It is the blot, but its is the Act's)./Again, unconsciousness in the person himself of what he is about, or of what others think of him, is also a great heightener of the sense of absurdity; it makes it come the fuller home to us from his insensibility to it (It is first the unconsciousness, secondly the sense of absurdity, & thirdly absurdity).

5. The pronoun should seldom precede its principal. For Plato, being then about twenty-eight years old, had listened to the Apology' of Socrates; had heard from them all that others had heard or seen of his last hours (had heard from others all that they had heard &c.)./The old Liberal idea of cutting expenditure down to the bone, so that his money might fructify in the pocket of the taxpayer, had given place to the idea of... (the taxpayer's money might fructify in his pocket)./Both these lines of criticism are taken simultaneously in a message which its special correspondent sends from Laggan, in Alberta, to the Daily Mail this morning (which the D. M. prints this morning from its correspondent &c.).

As

to do better than our neighbours is in many departments of life a virtue; in pronunciation it is a vice; there the only right ambition is to do as our neighbours. It is true this at once raises the question who our neighbours are. To reply that some people's neighbours are the educated, others' the uneducated, & others' again a mixture, is not very helpful in itself, suggesting social shibboleths; but there is truth in it, for all that, which may serve us if we divide words also into classes, viz that of the words that everybody knows & uses, & that of the words that only the educated, or any other section of us, know & use. regards the first of these classes, our neighbour is the average Englishman; as regards the second, our neighbour is our fellow member of the educated or any other section. The moral of which is that, while we are entitled to display a certain fastidious precision in our saying of words that only the educated use, we deserve not praise but censure if we decline to accept the popular pronunciation of popular words. To make six syllables of extraordinary, or end level & picture with a clear -ěl & -tur, or maintain the old accent on the middle syllable of contemplate, all everyday wordsthese feats establish one's culture at the cost of one's modesty, & perhaps of one's hearer's patience. But if, with some word that most of us pass their lives without uttering-comminatory, for instance, or intercalary, a scholar likes to exhibit his deftness in saying many successive syllables after a single accent where the vulgar would help themselves out with a second one (kõ ́minatori, ko'minā'tori; Inter'kalari, î'nterkǎ'lari), why, no-one need mind. The broad principles are: Pro

PRONUNCIATION

nounce as your neighbours do, not better; For words in general use, your neighbour is the general public. A few particular points may be touched upon :

Silent t. No effort should be made to sound the t in the large classes of words ending in -sten (chasten, fasten, listen) & -stle (castle, wrestle, epistle, jostle, bustle), nor in often, soften, ostler, nestling, waistcoat, postpone. But some good people, afraid they may be suspected of not knowing how to spell, say the t in self-defence.

Silent h. In Hunt has hurt his head, it is nearly as bad to sound the h of has & his as not to sound that of Hunt & hurt & head. In many compounds whose second element begins with h, the h is silent unless the accent falls on the syllable that it begins; so philhe'llenism sounds the h, but philhelle'nic does not ; similarly Philharmo'nic has fi'lar-. In nihilism the h should be silent, though nihil, if there is occasion to say the word, sounds it.

Demonetize & decolo(u)rize raise the question whether the peculiar vowel sound of money & colour (-ŭ-) is to be extended to derivatives involving recurrence to the Latin nouns ; -mon- is recommended, &, if decolorize is spelt, as it should be, without u, then -col-.

Clothes, forehead, fortune, fossil, knowledge, are samples of the many words whose spelling & ordinary pronunciation do not correspond, but with which mistaken attempts are made to restore the supposed true sound. They should be called klōz, fo'rid, for'choon, fŏ'sl, no ́lij, in accordance with the principles laid down above.

The variations ah & ǎ for a, aw & Ŏ for o, loo & lû for lu, are widely prevalent in large classes of words (pass, telegraph, ask; gone, soft, loss; lucid, absolute, illumine); it need only be said that the first two are roughly local distinctions, ah & aw being southern & ǎ & Ŏ northern, while loo is displacing lu, especially

For a particular affectedly refined pronunciation, see GIRL.

Participles &c. of verbs &c. in -er(r), -ur(r). Is erring to follow err (er'ing) or errant (e'ring)? are furry & currish to be fer'i & ker'ish, or fù'ri & ku'rish? The OED is nearly but not quite consistent; in the words concurring, currish, demurring, deterring, erring, furry, purring, slurring, & spurring, the full er sound is given; recurring, however, is given as riku'ring, & incurring & occurring are not marked. It may be taken that -ering &c. (not -ĕring, -ŭri, &c). are the orthodox sounds.

Readers to whom the pronunciation of English words derived from Latin (very slightly touched upon in FALSE QUANTITY) is bewildering will find some clues in an interesting article by the late John Sargeaunt in S.P.E. Tract iv.

For an easily intelligible yet fairly complete system of showing pronunciation in print, see PHONETICS.

propaganda is singular, not plural : a p., this p., &c.; & the plural, if required, is -as (The difference between these propagandas is obvious enough). But it is not unnaturally mistaken for a Latin neuter plural = things to be propagated; it is in fact a curtailed phrase Congregatio de Propaganda Fide Board for Propagating the Faith.

propagate makes gable, -tor; see -ABLE 1, -OR.

propel makes -lled, -lling, -llable;