Institutio Oratoria
Quintilian
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.
Clearness results above all from propriety in the use of words. But propriety is capable of more than one interpretation. In its primary sense it means calling things by their right names, and is consequently sometimes to be avoided, for our language must not be obscene, unseemly or mean.
Language may be described as mean when it is beneath the dignity of the subject or the rank of the speaker. Some orators fall into serious error in their eagerness to avoid this fault, and are afraid of all words that are in ordinary use, even although they may be absolutely necessary for their purpose. There was, for example, the man who in the course of a speech spoke of
Iberian grass,a meaningless phrase intelligible only to himself. Cassius Severus, however, by way of deriding his affectation, explained that he meant Spanish broom.
Nor do I see why a certain distinguished orator thought
fishesa more elegant phrase than the word which he avoided. [*](Probably salsamenta.) But while there is no special merit in the form of propriety which consists in calling things by their real names, it is a fault to fly to the opposite extreme. This fault we call impropriety,v7-9 p.199conserved in brine
while the Greeks call it ἄκυρον As examples I may cite the Virgilian, [*](Aen. IV. 419. )
Never could I have hoped for such great woe,or the phrase, which I noted had been corrected by Cicero in a speech of Dolabella's,
To bring death,or again, phrases of a kind that win praise from some of our contemporaries, such as,
His words fell from the cross.[*]( Presumably in the sense, He spoke like one in bodily pain. ) On the other hand, everything that lacks appropriateness will not necessarily suffer from the fault of positive impropriety, because there are, in the first place, many things which have no proper term either in Greek or Latin.