Comment on tautology¹ and grammar(Written in 1898)

May 6. . . . I do not find that the repetition of an important word a few times--say, three or four times--in a paragraph troubles my ear if clearness of meaning is best secured thereby². But tautological³ repetition which has no justifying⁴ object, but merely exposes the fact that the writer's balance at the vocabulary bank has run short and that he is too lazy to replenish⁵ it from the thesaurus--that is another matter. It makes me feel like calling the writer to account. It makes me want to remind him that he is not treating himself and his calling with right respect, and, incidentally, that he is not treating me with proper reverence⁶. At breakfast, this morning, a member of the family read aloud an interesting review of a new book about Mr. Gladstone in which the reviewer used the strong adjective "delightful⁷" thirteen times. Thirteen times in a short review, not a long one. In five of the cases the word was distinctly the right one, the exact one, the best one our language can furnish, therefore it made no discord⁸; but in the remaining cases it was out of tune⁹. It sharped or flatted, one or the other, every time, and was as unpleasantly noticeable as is a false note in music. I looked in the thesaurus, and under a single head I found four words which would replace with true notes the false ones uttered by four of the misused¹⁰ "delightfuls"; and of course if I had hunted under related heads for an hour and made an exhaustive search I should have found right words, to a shade, wherewith to replace the remaining

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