To use the clear, wise words of Mr.
Whewell; "Language is often called an instrument of thought, but it is
also the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere on
which thought lives--a medium essential to the activity of our
speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its
operation; and an element modifying, by its changes and qualities, the
growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds."
Our enumeration of _errata_ being made alphabetically, the first to be
cited is one of the chief of sinners--the particle.
As. The misuse of _as_ for _so_ is, in certain cases, almost
universal. If authority could justify error and convert the faulty
into the faultless, it were idle to expose a misuse in justification
of which can be cited most of the best names in recent English
literature.
"_As_ far as doth concern my single self,"
is a line in Wordsworth ("Prelude," p. 70) which, by a change
of the first _as_ into _so_, would gain not only in sound (which is
not our affair at present), but, likewise in grammar. The seventh line
of the twenty-first stanza in that most tender of elegies and most
beautiful of poems, Shelley's "Adonais," begins, "_As_ long as skies
are blue," where also there would be a double gain by writing "_So_
long as skies are blue.
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