'
It is the intention of our society to offer only expert and
well-considered opinion on these literary matters, which are often
popularly handled in the newspapers and journals as fit subjects
for private taste and uninformed prejudice: and since the Oxford
Dictionary has done more fully for English what Littr['e] did
for French, our task is comparatively easy. But experts cannot be
expected, all of them, to have the self-denying zeal of ['E]mile
Littr['e], and the worth of our tracts will probably improve with the
increase of our subscribers.
BICKER
As Burns happens to use _bickering_ as his epithet for the mouse's
brattle, we may take this word as another illustration of Littr['e]'s
principle. The _N.E.D._ gives the original meaning as _skirmish_, and
quotes Shakespeare,
If I longer stay
We shall begin our ancient bickerings,
which a man transposing the third and fourth words might say to-day
without rising above colloquial speech; but there is another allied
signification which Milton has in
Smoak and bickering flame;
and this is followed by many later writers. It would seem therefore,
if the word is to have a special sense, that it must be focused in the
idea of something that both wavers and skirmishes, and this suggests
another word which caught our eye in the dictionary, that is
BRANGLE
It is defined in the _N.E.D._ as 'a brawl, wrangle, squabble' and
marked _obsolete_.
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