INDEBTEDNESS.  “The amount of my engagedness” sounds as well and is as proper as “the amount of my indebtedness.”  We have already hard-heartedness, wickedness, composedness, and others.  Nevertheless, this making of nouns out of adjectives with the participial form is an irruption over the boundaries of the parts of speech which should not be encouraged.

Archbishop Whately, in a passage of his shortcoming comments on Bacon’s “Essays,” uses preparedness.  Albeit that brevity is a cardinal virtue in writing, a circumlocution would, we think, be better than a gawky word like this, so unsteady on its long legs.  In favor of indebtedness over others of like coinage, this is to be said—­that it imports that which in one form or other comes home to the bosom of all humanity.

INTELLECTS.  That man’s intellectual power is not one and indivisible, but consists of many separate, independent faculties, is a momentous truth, revealed by the insight of Gall.  One of the results of this great discovery may at times underlie the plural use of the important word intellect when applied to one individual.  If so, it were still indefensible.  It has, we suspect, a much less philosophic origin, and proceeds from the unsafe practice of overcharging the verbal gun in order to make more noise in the ear of the listener.  The plural is correctly used when we speak of two or more different men.

LEFT.  “I left at ten o’clock.”  This use of leave as a neuter verb, however attractive from its brevity, is not defensible. To leave off is the only proper neuter form.  “We left off at six, and left (the hall) at a quarter past six.”  The place should be inserted after the second left.  Even the first is essentially active, some form of action being understood after off:  we left off work or play.

MIDST.  “In our midst” is a common but incorrect phrase.

OUR AUTHOR.  A vulgarism, which, by its seeming convenience, gets the countenance of critical writers.  We say seeming convenience; for in this seeming lies the vulgarity, the writer expressing, unconsciously often, by the our, a feeling of patronage.  With his our he pats the author on the back.

PERIODICAL is an adjective, and its use as a substantive is an unwarrantable gain of brevity at the expense of grammar.

PROPOSE.  Hardly any word that we have cited is so frequently misused, and by so many good writers, as propose, when the meaning is to design, to intend to propose.  It should always be followed by a personal accusative—­I propose to you, to him, to myself.  In the preface to Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun” occurs the following sentence; “The author proposed to himself merely to write a fanciful story, evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not purpose attempting a portraiture of Italian manners and character”—­a sentence than which a fitter could not be written to illustrate the proper use of propose and purpose.