" UNTHINK ABLE."
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."1 Sin,—As you are an active opponent of the deterioration of the English language, can you find space for a protest against a gross exaggeration that is becoming common in talk and in the Press ? I refer to the use of the word "unthinkable" when "very improbable" is what is meant. The most recent offender is the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his speech in the House of Lords on the Accession Declaration Bill the Archbishop is reported in the Daily Telegraph to have said:- " The very notion nowadays of a King or public man being able to make such a promise as Charles II. made on succession, and then to negotiate, plot, and sign in favour of the Church of Rome—that possibility is not merely unlikely, but it is simply unthinkable." The report in the Times is to the same effect. Here the Archbishop predicates of the notion that he has thought of that it is possible and also unlikely, and then he proceeds to declare that it is "simply unthinkable " !
—I am, Sir, &c., A. T. ARUNDEL. [Our correspondent's principles if carried out would kill half the idioms in the language. We must be careful not to put our language into a strait-waistcoat.--En. Spectator.]
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