"_Is anything but," &c._--As your work seems adapted, amongst other
subjects, to check the introduction into our language of undesirable
words, phrases, and forms of speech, I would call the attention of your
readers to the modern phrases, "is anything but," and the like, which
have lately crept into use, and will be found, in many (otherwise)
well-written books.
I read the phrase "is anything but," for the first time, in Napier's
_Peninsular War_; where it struck me as being so much beneath the
dignity of historical composition, and at the same time asserting an
impossibility, that I meditated calling the author's attention to it.
The not unfrequent use of the same phrase by other writers, since that
time, has by no means reconciled me to its use.
In the _Edinburgh Review_ for January last (1850) I find the following
sentence:--"But as pains have been taken to fix the blame _upon any one
except_ the parties culpable;" and in the July number of the same
_Review_ (p. 90.) occurs the sentence, "_any impulse rather than_ that of
patriotism," &c.
Now, a "thing," or "person," or "impulse,"--though it may not be the
"thing," or "person," or "impulse" charged as the agent,--must yet be
some _certain_ and _specific_ thing, or party, or impulse, {295} if
existing as an agent at all in the matter; and cannot be "_any_ thing,"
or "_any_ party," or "_any_ impulse," in the _indefinite_ sense intended
in these phrases. Moreover, there seems no difficulty in expressing, in
a simple and direct manner, that the agent was a very different, or
opposite, or dissimilar "thing," or "person," or "impulse" from that
supposed.
I wish some persons of competent authority in the science of our
language (and many such there are who write in your pages) would take up
this subject, with a view to preserve the purity of it; and would also,
for the future, exercise a watchful vigilance over the use, for the
_first_ time, of any incorrect, or low words or phrases, in composition;
and so endeavour to confine them to the vulgar, or to those who ape the
vulgar in their style.