[21]
Again, our style need not always dwell on the
heights: at times it is desirable that it should sink.
For there are occasions when the very meanness of
the words employed adds force to what we say.
When Cicero, in his denunciation of Piso,1 says,
“When your whole family rolls up in a dray,” do
you think that his use of the word dray was accidental,
and was not designedly used to increase his audience's
contempt for the man he wished to bring to ruin?
The same is true when he says elsewhere, “You put
down your head and butt him.”
1 Fr. 100.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.