'Oxoniensis' approaches them with courage, his thoughts are expressed in plain, unmistakable language, howbeit with the touch of a master hand.—Daily Telegraph.
Albeit means though: howbeit always nevertheless, beginning not a subordinate clause, but a principal sentence. A good example of the danger attending ignorant archaism.
In a word, Count von Bülow, who took a very rosy view of the agreement last year, now suddenly discovers that he was slighted, and is indignant in the paulo-post future tense.—Times.
This jest would be pedantic in any case, since no one but schoolmasters and schoolboys knows what the paulo-post-future tense is. Being the one represented in English by I shall have been killed, it has, further, no application here; paulo-ante-past tense, if there were such a thing, might have meant something. As it is, pedantry is combined with inaccuracy.
6. Words used in unaccustomed, though not impossible, senses or applications. This is due sometimes to that avoidance of the obvious which spoils much modern writing, and sometimes to an ignorance of English idiom excusable in a foreigner, but not in a native.
No one can imagine non-intervention carried through so desperate and so consequential a war as this.—Greenwood.
If important or fateful will not do, it is better to write a war so desperate and so pregnant with consequences than to abuse a word whose idiomatic uses are particularly well marked. A consequential person is one who likes to exhibit his consequence; a consequential amendment is one that is a natural consequence or corollary of another.
Half of Mr. Roosevelt's speech deals with this double need of justice and strength, the other half being a skilled application of Washington's maxims to present circumstances.—Times. (skilful)
Idiom confines skilled, except in poetry, almost entirely to the word labour, and to craftsmen—a skilled mason, for instance.
