'In Deference to That Great Authority'

“The connexion is supplied with great perspicuity; and the thoughts, which, to a reader of less skill, seem thrown together by chance, are concatenated without any abruption.” 

It sounds like a mock-elegant complaint mumbled sotto voce by W.C. Fields, though it’s actually Dr. Johnson laying it on a little thick in his “Life of Cowley.” He is criticizing one of Abraham Cowley’s Pindar translations (1656). The result reads like a parody of Latinate style in English, as criticized by Hazlitt in his essay “On Familiar Style”:

 

“The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson’s style is that there is no discrimination, no selection, no variety in it. He uses none but ‘tall, opaque words,’ taken from the ‘first row of the rubric’--words with the greatest number of syllables, or Latin phrases with merely English terminations.”

 

To translate: concatenate is a transitive verb taken straight from the Latin, meaning, according to the OED, “to chain together (obsolete); to connect like the links of a chain, to link together. figurative.” The Dictionary cites Johnson’s use of the word in The Rambler #151:  

 

“Whatever may lull vigilance, or mislead attention, is contemptuously rejected, and every disguise in which errour may be concealed, is carefully observed, till, by degrees, a certain number of incontestable or unsuspected propositions are established, and at last concatenated into arguments, or compacted into systems.”

 

Abruption, also from the Latin, is defined as “the action or an act of breaking off or away from something; an interruption; a sudden curtailment.” The OED cites Johnson’s usage. What he’s saying, in modern language, is that Cowley’s translation of Pindar’s “Olympian Odes” is seamless, the transitions between parts skillfully rendered.

 

Ambrose Bierce seems to have admired Johnson’s phraseology. In The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary (eds. David Schultz and S.T. Joshi, University of Georgia Press, 2000), he includes an entry for concatenate, giving this definition: “linked together like the several instalments of a sausage.” Then he cites Johnson's usage and adds a four-stanza bit of doggerel which concludes: “And this (the world completed) lies / without concatenation-- / Unutterable!—and supplies / The hash for all creation.”

 

In his entries for abrupt and abruption, Bierce again cites Johnson. The Civil War veteran defines abrupt  as “sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon-shot and the departure of the soldier whose interest are most affected by it.” Of the noun he writes:

 

“Dr. Johnson said of a certain work that the ideas were ‘concatenated without abruption.’ In deference to that great authority we have given the word a place.”