The Most Unkindest Cut of All

The Most Unkindest Cut of All The Most Unkindest Cut of All The Most Unkindest Cut of All By Maeve Maddox Some of my readers and I experienced an episode of mutual astonishment the other day. In a post about the abbreviation e.g., I wrote the following sentence: The most unkindest cut of all regarding the use of  e.g.  and its ilk came to my attention in 2008 when I read an article in the  London Telegraph  about a movement in Britain to purge English of such long-established Latin shortcuts. The emails began to fly: Were you serious in the use of the following sentence?   I am making reference to the use of most unkindest. The most unkindest cut   Hmm.   This one threw me, Maeve. most unkindest assuming thats an editing error and not a grammatical error! Most unkindest. Did you really mean that? Isnt it, most unkind?   Would you please comment? â€Å"The most unkindest cut of all†¦Ã¢â‚¬  I think one should use either â€Å"The unkindest†¦Ã¢â‚¬  or â€Å"The most unkind†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Can you believe he/she wrote the most unkindest. It should be the most unkind  or the unkindest. At the time I wrote the sentence, I had the feeling that someone might twit me for the use of a word like ilk, but it never occurred to me that anyone would turn a hair at the quotation from Julius Caesar. Many years have passed since I studied Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in the ninth grade, but I still remember the speech in which Antony refers to the dagger thrust made by Brutus as â€Å"the most unkindest cut of all.† Antony’s funeral oration over the corpse of Caesar is very long. My classmates and I memorized the first section, beginning with these lines: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. We memorized up to where Antony pauses the first time to let his words sink in: My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me. The speech continues. It’s an excellent example of the way a clever speaker can manipulate the sentiment of a hostile, ignorant crowd. Antony pulls out all the rhetorical stops. At the very end, he wins the mob with a sentimental â€Å"show and tell,† making Caesar’s death personal and tangible. He holds up Caesar’s bloody mantle and spreads the holes with his fingers, putting names to them: Look, in this place ran Cassius dagger through. See what a rent the envious Casca made. Through this the well-belovà ¨d Brutus stabbed. And as he plucked his cursà ¨d steel away, Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it, As rushing out of doors, to be resolved If Brutus so unkindly knocked, or no. For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel. Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him! This was the most unkindest cut of all. NOTE: According to the historical record, Caesar’s assassins stabbed him twenty-three times. â€Å"Most unkindest cut of all† is nonstandard English. The rule for comparison, as my dismayed readers point out, does not permit a most to attend an adjective ending in -est. But Shakespeare was writing iambic pentameter. He needed a line with ten syllables. And besides, his intention was to have Antony wring out as much emotion as he could from the mob. The cut made by Brutus wasn’t simply unkind or most unkind, or the unkindest, it was absolutely the pinnacle of unkindness, hence the most, the -est, and the â€Å"of all.† When I quoted Shakespeare’s line, I was emphasizing the dismay I felt at the thought that branches of officialdom- in Britain of all places- could believe that it could be in the public interest to purge words from the English vocabulary. The very idea calls to mind a quotation from another of my favorite authors: Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.- Orwell, 1984 I don’t have a conclusion to this post. We’re living along a seam in time. Some of us have had one kind of education, others a different kind. The practice of quoting from the English literary canon in articles intended for a general audience belongs to a passing generation. Is this is a bad thing? According to Hamlet, â€Å"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.† As King Arthur says at the end of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, The old order changeth, yielding place to new. Related posts: When Most Is Enough Slipping into Newspeak Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Expressions category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:16 Substitutes for â€Å"Because† or â€Å"Because Of†Empathy "With" or Empathy "For"?While vs. Whilst

3 Dangers of ACT Practice Tests

3 Dangers of ACT Practice Tests SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips Practice tests are key to good ACT prep, but just taking full-length practice tests isn’t enough to guarantee a good score. In this article, we'll go over the three major pitfalls that many students stumble into when attempting to use ACT practice tests. feature image credit: Danger Danger Danger Danger/used under CC BY 2.0/Cropped and resized from original. Danger #1: Inaccurate Practice Tests Many non-official practice tests are lower quality than the real test. The quality problems can range from materials that don't test the right things or ask about them in the right way to tests that are rife with errors. Some might argue that doing any sort of practice test is better than nothing, no matter if it's not as good as the real ACT. But using low-quality ACT practice tests is like practicing to become a ping pong champ by playing squash: it will not only waste your time but will also make your score worse because it's teaching you the wrong skills. Danger #2: Overdosing on Practice Tests Practice tests don’t help you if you mindlessly do one after another without taking the time to study in-between. It's okay to take the first few practice tests without too much reflection, just to get used to the format and the experience of taking the test. Once you get to the 4th or more practice test, though, you need to thoroughly review your mistakes if you want to see any improvement in your score. Danger #3: Underdoing Practice Tests You cannot have a good ACT study program without at least four real practice tests. If you're spending less than 10% of your ACT prep time on practice tests, things are going wrong. Preferably, you'll spend up to 30% of your total ACT prep time taking practice tests. Making room in your busy schedule for the chunk of time a realistic practice takes can be tricky, however. A good rule of thumb to follow is that out of every 40 hours you spend doing ACT prep, you should spend (at a minimum) at least 3-4 of those hours taking a realistic, full-length practice test (with breaks). Thousands compete for military university admission/used under CC BY-SA/Cropped from original. What’s Next? Running short on prep time? Follow our 20-hour prep guide to using ACT practice tests to get the most out of the time you have left. Now you know what to avoid on a high-level with planning out your ACT prep, but what about while you're taking practice tests? We've collected the top eleven mistakes students make during ACT practice tests in this article. Ready to take some practice tests, but not sure where to get them? Not to worry - we've got a collection of free official and unofficial ACT practice tests for you to use. Want to improve your ACT score by 4 points? Check out our best-in-class online ACT prep program. We guarantee your money back if you don't improve your ACT score by 4 points or more. Our program is entirely online, and it customizes your prep program to your strengths and weaknesses. We also have expert instructors who can grade every one of your practice ACT essays, giving feedback on how to improve your score. Check out our 5-day free trial: