Never ask the gods for a life set free from grief,
but ask for courage that endureth long.MENANDER, 4th century B.C.
While admonition is a perfectly fine term to use when describing strongly worded cautionary warnings, there is another word that is, technically speaking, even more accurate. It is the antonym of exhortation. But unless you have the vocabulary of a five-time Jeopardy! champ or you’re a professor of rhetoric, the word is almost certainly not in your current vocabulary. The exact opposite of exhortation is dehortation.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines dehortation this way: “The act of dehorting from a course of action; earnest dissuasion.” This doesn’t help very much, but the OED’s entry on dehort makes it clearer:
To use exhortation to dissuade from a course or purpose;
to advise or counsel against (an action, etc.).
When we exhort people, we’re encouraging them to do something; we’re trying to spur them on. It’s a form of persuasion. When we dehort people, on the other hand, we’re trying to convince people that they should not do something, or maybe even never do it. Dehortation is a form of discouragement or negative persuasion, which is technically called dissuasion. We can summarize it all in an analogy:
Exhortation is to dehortation as persuasion is to dissuasion.
I first came across the word dehort a number of years ago while browsing through a fascinating book by David Grambs: The Endangered English Dictionary: Bodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot (1994). Grambs is an American writer who actually worked at one of my fantasy jobs: dictionary definer. While in this position for the American Heritage Dictionary and the Random House Dictionary, Grambs became intrigued by the many English words that either fell out of favor or never caught on, even though they perfectly captured some aspect of human life. In his “remembrance of words past,” he wrote a book to serve as “a constant reminder of the words that could have been, that fell through the cracks.” He also hoped that his book would awaken interest in some currently neglected words and possibly inspire readers to make them “a part of our everyday usage.” Among the thousands of words Grambs included in his book was:
dehort (dee-hort); to loudly or strongly advise against or dissuade from.
In 2007, I was delighted to see dehort featured in an issue of “A.Word.A.Day” (AWAD), a daily e-mail that I—and over a million other subscribers—look forward to receiving every day. AWAD was launched in 1994 by Anu Garg, a computer scientist who turned his love for words into one of the Internet’s most dramatic success stories. In 2002, the New York Times described AWAD as “arguably the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace.” Garg defined dehort as “to discourage from doing something.” He then added:This well-meaning word has gone out of circulation while its antithesis “exhort” continues to prosper. It’s about time to remedy the situation and bring this rather usable word back to currency.
I stand firmly with Grambs and Garg in believing that dehort and dehortation should be rescued from the closet of obscurity and brought into the world of popular usage. Currently, though, those two words are familiar only to serious linguaphiles and students of rhetoric, who appreciate their relationship to a classical figure of speech known as dehortatio (DEE-hore-TAY-she-oh or DAY-hore-TAHT-ee-oh).
In The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary (1983), Willard R. Espy defined dehortatio as “Dissuasive advice given with authority.” He went on to explain that “Dehortatio is negative persuasion; it tells what not to do.” In providing examples, he gave several famous sayings that did not begin with the word never, including:
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.(THE FIRST COMMANDMENT)
Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.WILLIAM PRESCOTT
At first, the notion that commandments were dehortations came as a surprise, but it made sense once I began to think about it. Many of the Ten Commandments, after all, certainly meet the criterion of dissuasive advice given with authority. And while I accept the idea that dehortations can also begin with the words don’t or do not, I’m not convinced they are the best examples of the form. Look over the following quotations:
Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures.BERNARD M. BARUCH
Don’t try to fine-tune somebody else’s view.GEORGE H. W. BUSH
Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.PHILIP K. DICK
Do not mistake a child for his symptom.ERIK ERIKSON
Don’t overestimate your own merits.BERTRAND RUSSELL
Yes, they are all fine dehortations. And technically, all are examples of the “negative persuasion” that Espy described earlier. But think how much more memorable each could have been if expressed just a bit more forcefully:
Never blame anybody for your mistakes and failures.
Never try to fine-tune somebody else’s view.
Never try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
Never mistake a child for his symptom.
Never overestimate your own merits.
The implication, I hope, is apparent. If you’re ever thinking about the best way to offer dissuasive advice—and you want to do it forcefully—select words with impact. And that may mean changing an anemic don’t or a mousy do not into an authoritative never. With a tip of the hat to the rhetorical figure of dehortatio, we might even say:
Never let a weak word diminish the strength of your argument.
Being a realist, I know that dehort and dehortation will probably never become a part of popular usage. But there is another term you might want to consider when describing cautionary warnings and dissuasive advice introduced with the word never. You won’t find the word in any dictionary because I coined it myself. The word is neverism. A few years ago, I did something similar when I created the term ifferism to describe an aphorism that begins with the word if. That neologism worked out fairly well, and I’m hoping that neverism will also be given a warm welcome. Like all good nouns, neverism comes with a corresponding adjective and adverb, so you can also expect to see the words neveristic and neveristically in the pages ahead.
I began the systematic collection of quotations many decades ago, and I pursue my hobby with the same fervor that is often found in serious collectors of coins, stamps, butterflies, and other objects of fascination. I’m always on the lookout for new “finds,” and I feel a definite thrill when I come across a great new specimen I have never seen before. Like all serious collectors, I have also tried to organize my enormous collection of quotations into a number of more manageable categories. In my case, I put them into computer files with labels like chiasmus, retorts, puns, insults, paradox, lost positives, modified maxims, and ifferisms. For more than twenty years, I have also had a file for quotations that begin with the word never.
Some of history’s best-known quotations have been expressed neveristically, and one very special admonition has long been a personal favorite:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world.MARGARET MEAD
This is the most famous quotation from one of history’s most famous women. The saying is so intimately associated with Mead—and so
