Good English - 1880 Author:Edward Sherman Gould Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MISUSED WORDS. The spurious words are less numerous than the misused words; but in both categories the philological heresy has the same origin, character, and... more » tendency. BESIDE. BESIDES. Our lexicographers have contented themselves with leaving these two words as they find them in the pages of good and bad writers—jumbled together without any attempt at discrimination between them. But, as such discrimination is important, the writer of this volume, having failed to find a satisfactory elucidation of the subject in any work on philology then within his reach, ventured to suggest the following solution of the difficulty through the medium of the New York Evening Post, in or about the year 1856. Beside is a preposition, meaning, originally, by the side of; as, "The lovely Thais sits beside thee"; and usage has modified, or extended, that meaning to one side, or, out of the regular course; as, " It is beside my present business to pursue the minor points of the argument." And it has been further modified to out of, or, in a state of deviation from; as, " Paul, thou art beside thyself." Again, besides is also a preposition when it means m addition to; as, " Besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed." And, finally, besides is an adverb, when it means moreover; as, " Set you down this; And say, besides, that in Aleppo once, When a malignant and a turbaned Turk," etc. The sum of the matter, then, is,—that beside is always a preposition, and only a preposition. Łe sides, also, is a preposition when it means in addition to; but when it means moreover, it is an adverb. Hence, not only is the use of beside as an adverb an error, but the error is aggravated by its taint of affectation: it smacks of attempted prettiness in sty...« less