ABSTRACT
Artemus Ward coined the word “ingrammaticisms” to describe some ways of making language funny not expressly included in the previous chapter. They are co-equal with the ways of making it unsightly to the inner eye. As soon as you have learned that some grammatic form is “wrong,” and learned to feel it wrong, you are prepared to enjoy it playfully as funny. You will find, moreover, that that wrongness is most humorous in play which repels you most in serious composition. To me the most unpleasant ingrammaticisms are those which sin against reason—using words, I mean, without a keen sense of their logical relations. As an earnest composer of “English,” I am a little old-maidish about these matters. If I write the sentence, “There is nobody in the world who could do what he has done,” I miss the word else acutely. Correspondingly, I find excessive pleasure in a funny line like this:
There is probly more promersing and virtuous young men in toledo than there is anywheres.
