rather confusedly says:  “The parenthesis () and hooks [] include a remark or clause, not essential to the sentence in construction.”—­Philosophical Gram., p. 219; Improved Gram., p. 154.  But, in his Dictionary, he forgets both the hooks and the parenthesis that are here spoken of; and, with still worse confusion or inaccuracy, says:  “The parenthesis is usually included in hooks or curved lines, thus, ().”  Here he either improperly calls these regular little curves “hooks,” or erroneously suggests that both the hooks and the curves are usual and appropriate signs of “the parenthesis.”  In Garner’s quarto Dictionary, the French word Crochet, as used by printers, is translated, “A brace, a crotchet, a parenthesis;” and the English word Crotchet is defined, “The mark of a parenthesis, in printing, thus [ ].”  But Webster defines Crotchet, “In printing, a hook including words, a sentence or a passage distinguished from the rest, thus [].”  This again is both ambiguous and otherwise inaccurate.  It conveys no clear idea of what a crotchet is. One hook includes nothing.  Therefore Johnson said:  “Hooks in which words are included [thus].”  But if each of the hooks is a crotchet, as Webster suggests, and almost every body supposes, then both lexicographers are wrong in not making the whole expression plural:  thus, “Crotchets, in printing, are angular hooks usually including some explanatory words.”  But is this all that Webster meant?  I cannot tell.  He may be understood as saying also, that a Crotchet is “a sentence or a passage distinguished from the rest, thus [];” and doubtless it would be much better to call a hint thus marked, a crotchet, than to call it a parenthesis, as some have done.  In Parker and Fox’s Grammar, and also in Parker’s Aids to English Composition, the term Brackets only is applied to these angular hooks; and, contrary to all usage of other authors, so far as I know, the name of Crotchets is there given to the Curves.  And then, as if this application of the word were general, and its propriety indisputable, the pupil is simply told:  “The curved lines between which a parenthesis is enclosed are called Crotchets.”—­Gram., Part III, p. 30; Aids, p. 40.  “Called Crotchets” by whom?  That not even Mr. Parker himself knows them by that name, the following most inaccurate passage is a proof:  “The note of admiration and interrogation, as also the parenthesis, the bracket, and the reference marks, [are noted in the margin] in the same manner as the apostrophe.”—­Aids, p. 314.  In some late grammars, (for example, Hazen’s and Day’s,) the parenthetic curves are called “the Parentheses” From this the student must understand that it always takes two parentheses to make one parenthesis! If then it is objectionable, to call the two marks “a parenthesis,” it is much more so, to call each of them by that name, or both “the parentheses.”  And since Murray’s phrases are both entirely too long for common use, what better name can be given them than this very simple one, the Curves?