Johnson, whose reputation as a talker was hardly less than that which he acquired as a writer, prided himself on the appositeness of his quotations, the choice of his words, and the correctness of his expressions.
He quoted: "Some to the fascination of a name Surrender judgment hoodwinked," and laughed to himself at the appositeness of Cowper's lines.
This time it was My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean, its special appositeness seeming to lie in the line, "Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me!
And the appositeness of the moment is just as perfect in this era of electric light and central heating, as it was in the era of Virgil, who, by the way, described a Christmas tree.
To emphasize the relativity of tact let me cite a family anecdote, the appositeness of which must condone a certain lack of reticence in its telling.
Through some accidentalappositeness to some contemporaneous situation, these may become generally current.
But in thinking out its details we may for the first time note its appositeness to the solution of the problem in hand.
But an examination of half a dozen casual words in contemporary languages shows how arbitrary are the signs used, and how little appositeness or relevance they bear in their sound to the sense which they represent.
