Book 1
5.1
Style has three kinds of excellence, correctness, lucidity and elegance (for many include the all-important quality of appropriateness under the heading of elegance). Its faults are likewise threefold, namely the opposites of these excellences. The teacher of literature therefore must study the rules for correctness of speech, these constituting the first part of his art.
5.2
The observance of these rules is concerned with either one or more words. I must now be understood to use verbum in its most general sense. It has of course two meanings; the one covers all the parts of which language is composed, as in the line of Horace: Once supply the thought, And words will follow swift as soon as sought Ars Poetica, 311. the other restricts it to a part of speech such as lego and scribo. To avoid this ambiguity, some authorities prefer the terms voces, locutiones, dictiones.
5.3
Individual words will either be native or imported, simple or compound, literal or metaphorical, in current use or newly-coined. A single word is more likely to be faulty than to possess any intrinsic merit. For though we may speak of a word as appropriate, distinguished or sublime, it can possess none of these properties save in relation to connected and consecutive speech; since when we praise words, we do so because they suit the matter.
