A Dictionary of Cont..

notary 324
beauty; as a woman, a notorious adventuress.
Then, if one is exceedingly notorious he may
after his death become famous. We speak of
famous, not notorious, criminals of the past.
See also celebrity.
notary; notary public. The second form is preferred
to describe a public officer authorized to
authenticate contracts, acknowledge deeds, take
affidavits, protest bills of exchange, take depositions,
etc. The plural form is notaries public.
note and notice are interchangeable in the sense
of to become aware of, to pay attention to, to
observe, perceive (The world will little note
nor long remember what we say here, but it
can never forget what they did here. Notice
Neptune, though,/ Taming a sea-horse). Note,
however, often conveys the additional sense of
mark down, as in writing, make a memorandum
or notation of.
notice. When this verb is used in an active form
it may be followed by an object and the simple
form of a verb, as in he noticed her hesitate, by
an object and the -ing form of a verb, as in
he noticed her hesitating, or by a clause, as in
he noticed that she hesitated, but not by a toinfinitive.
We do not say he noticed her to hesitate.
When notice is used in a passive form
it may be followed by a to-infinitive, as in she
was noticed to hesitate, or by the -ing form of
a verb, as in she was noticed hesitating. See
also descry.
notion. See idea.
notoriety. See celebrity.
notwithstanding. This word is ordinarily an adverb
or a preposition, but it may also be used
as a conjunction. That is, it may introduce a
full clause without the aid of the word that, as
in John Hunter, notwithstanding he had a bee
in his bonnet, was really a great man.
nought. See aught.
nouns. It is very difficult to define a noun purely
in terms of English grammar. If one can refer
to Latin, the definition is easy. In Latin, nouns
are words that have gender, number, and case
and determine the gender, number, and case of
other words in the sentence. As a rule, teachers
of English mean by a noun, any word that
would be a noun in Latin. But they can hardly
offer this as a definition to American students.
The definition usually given, that a noun is
“the name of a person, place, or thing,” is unsatisfactory
in two ways. In the first place, it is
misleading to beginning students because it involves
an unfamiliar meaning of the word thing.
For example, in the lines:
They are not long, the weeping and the
laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
the words weeping, laughter, love, desire, hate,
portion, and gate are all nouns. It is unlikely
that anyone who did not already know that
these words were nouns would think of calling
weeping or desire a thing. In the second place,
it is illogical to try to distinguish the various
parts of speech by classifying their meanings.
A noun is not what it refers to, but simply a
certain kind of word that needs to be distinguished
from other words in some intelligible
manner.
A noun might be defined functionally, according
to the role that a word plays in a
sentence. But such a definition would make nonsense
of the question: When can a noun be
used as an adverb? And some of the most interesting
questions in grammar come in just
this form. For this reason, a different type of
definition, and one that may at first seem unnecessarily
complicated, is more useful in the
long run.
Most nouns have a singular and a plural
form, such as boy and boys. Some, such as
mud, have only a singular and some, such as
trousers, have only a plural form. A few, such
as deer, have the same form in the singular and
in the plural. But whenever a noun is used, it
must be used as a singular or as a plural. The
question of number cannot be disregarded, as
it is in words such as green, quickly, toward.
Verbs are also said to have number, but in an
entirely different sense. A plural verb, such as
they walk, does not mean that they walk more
than once. In languages that do not have a
rigid sentence order, verbs take on special
forms to show which word in the sentence they
are attached to and a verb is said to “agree
with its subject in number.” A little of this
survives in English and a few verb forms show
number. But this is merely a reflection, or a
matching, of the number which properly
belongs to some noun. A noun, therefore, can
be defined as “a word that has number,” that
is, a word that must be either singular or
plural.
This definition is not completely satisfactory.
Pronouns, which are words that are used in
place of nouns, also have number. In addition,
adjectives are sometimes used as nouns and
when they are, they too have number, as in
the injured were removed. One can distinguish
nouns from pronouns by the fact that a pronoun
is a word used instead of a noun, to
designate something without naming it. That is,
a pronoun is a function word and has no true
meaning until we know what noun it is standing
for. It is much harder to say whether a word
is actually a noun or merely an adjective functioning
as a noun. But since adjectives may be
qualified by adverbs and nouns may not, most
grammarians say that the word is an adjective
as long as it is possible to use an adverb before
it, as in the seriously injured. Recognizing these
problems, we may define a noun more accurately
as “a word that has number but that does
not have an antecedent and cannot be qualified
by an adverb.”
(For problems having to do with number in
nouns, see singular nouns, plural nouns, generic
nouns, group names, mass nouns, and adjectives
as nouns. For questions of number in verbs and