" WOKEN."
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."
SIn,—Like Canon Lyttelton, I confess to a mild surprise on reading the word " woken " in the columns of the Spectator, The expression is found frequently in the cheaper forms of "literature" that pour from the press, and displace in popular favour the work of men who study to preserve the beauty and, purity of our language. Too common also are the words " wokened" and " awokened," which the Canon rightly regards as inadmissible. Until and unless we have a Natio...al Academy to decide such matters authoritatively, there must needs ba divergence of opinion and use, and every man, within limits, must be a law unto himself. Your courtesy will perhaps allow a Scot, who has'settled this question for his own purposes, to explain the principles on which he acts. In the first place, the verb " wake" is primarily intransitive. It is sometimes, and perhaps not incorrectly, used transitively, in the sense of rousing out of sleep, but this may be due to writers mistaking it for the proper transitive form—." waken." The perfect tense of the former is " woke " or " wakened" ; of the latter " wakened " (once in the Bible " waked "—see Zech. iv. 1); the past participle of both is "wakened." In the second place, confusion seems to have been caused by taking " awake " as a verb, while it is actually, as all grammarians know, an adjective ("a-wake," on-the-wake) equivalent to the Latin vigilans, and therefore it should • never have been used and conjugated as a verb. The word in "Awake thou that sleepest I" (Eph. v. 14) is the imperative not of "awake," but of " be " understood. ("Eripe: be awake 1) But time- honoured custom insists on making " awake " an intransitive, and sometimes also a transitive, verb, and in these matters walla vest?' gia retroraurn. Therefore I take it that " awoke" and "awakened" must be admitted as the perfect tense, and "awakened" as the past participle. I have long hesitated over "awaken " as a transitive verb : much might be said for it, but I have discarded it. Perhaps this is an excess of
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