We know now that growth is a condition of life; and that only a dead language is rigid. We know now that it is dangerous to elevate the literary diction too far above the speech of the plain people. We have found out that nobody in Rome ever spoke Ciceronian Latin; Cicero did not speak it himself; he did not even write it naturally; he wrote it with an effort and not always to his own satisfaction at the first attempt. We have discovered that there was a wide gap between the elegance of the orator’s polished periods and the uncouth bluntness of the vulgar tongue of the Roman people; and we believe that this divergence was broader than that between the perfect style of Hawthorne, for example, and the every-day dialect of Salem or of Concord.
By experts like Whitney we are told that there has been less structural modification of our language in the second half of the nineteenth century than in any other fifty-year period of its existence. Our vocabulary has been enormously enriched, but the skeleton of our speech has been only a little developed. With the decrease in illiteracy the conserving force of the printing-press must always hereafter make change increasingly difficult—even in the obvious cases where improvement is possible. The indirect influence of the novelist and the direct influence of the schoolmaster—very powerful each of them and almost irresistible when united—will always be exerted on the side of the conservatives. To seize these facts firmly and to understand their applications is to have ready always an ample answer for all those who chatter about the impending corruption of our noble tongue.
But we may go further. The study of history shows us that the future of English is dependent not on the watchfulness of its guardians, not upon the increasing richness and flexibility of its vocabulary, not upon the modification of its syntax, not upon the needed reform of its orthography; it is not dependent upon any purity or any corruption of the language itself. The future of the English language is dependent upon the future of the two great peoples that speak it; it is dependent upon the strength, the energy, the vigor, and the virtue of the British and the Americans. A language is but the instrument of those who use it; and English has flourished and spread not because of its own merits, many as they are, but because of the forthputting qualities of the masterful English stock. It must rise and fall with us who speak it. “No speech can do more than express the ideas of those who employ it at the time,” so a recent historian of our language has reminded us. “It cannot live upon its past meanings, or upon the past conceptions of great men that have been recorded in it, any more than the race which uses it can live upon its past glory or its past achievements.”
When we have once possessed ourselves of the inexorable fact that it is not in our power to warp the development of our language by any conscious effort, we can listen with amused toleration to the excited outcries of those who are constantly protesting against this or that word or phrase or usage which may seem to them new and therefore unjustifiable. We discover also that the self-appointed legislators who lay down the law thus peremptorily are often emphatic in exact proportion to their ignorance of the history of the language.
“Every word we speak,” so Dr. Holmes told us, “is the medal of a dead thought or feeling, struck in the die of some human experience, worn smooth by innumerable contacts, and always transferred warm from one to another.” We must admit that these chance medalists of language have not always been gifted artists or skilled craftsmen, so the words of their striking are sometimes misshapen; nor have they always respected the standard, so there is counterfeit coin in circulation sometimes. Even when the word is sterling and well minted, be it new or old,
Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary,
the coin itself is sometimes locked up in the reserve, to be misrepresented by a shabby paper promise to pay. So fierce is the popular demand for an increased per capita that the verbal currency is ever in danger of debasement. This is the apparent justification of the self-appointed tellers who busy themselves with touchstones of their own and who venture to throw out much false coin. Their tests are trustworthy now and again; but more often than not the pieces they have nailed to the counter are of full weight and ought to pass current.
“There is a purism,” Whitney said, “which, while it seeks to maintain the integrity of the language, in effect stifles its growth; to be too fearful of new words and phrases, new meanings, familiar and colloquial expressions, is little less fatal to the well-being of a spoken tongue than to rush into the opposite extreme.” And Professor Lounsbury goes further and asserts that our language is not to-day in danger from the agencies commonly supposed to be corrupting it, but rather “from ignorant efforts made to preserve what is called its purity.” And elsewhere the same inexpugnable authority reminds us that “the history of language is the history of corruptions,” and that “the purest of speakers uses every day, with perfect propriety, words and forms which, looked at from the point of view of the past, are improper, if not scandalous.”
There would be both interest and instruction in a list of the many words securely intrenched in our own vocabulary to-day which were bitterly assaulted on their first appearance. Swift praises himself for his valiant effort against certain of these intruders: “I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of mob and banter, but have been plainly borne down by numbers and betrayed by those who promised to assist me.” Puttenham (or whoever it was that wrote the anonymous ‘Arte of English Poesie,’ published in 1589) admitted the need of certain words to which the purists might justly object, and then adds that “many other like words borrowed out of the Latin and French were not so well to be allowed by us,” citing then, among those of which he disapproved, audacious, egregious, and compatible. In the ‘Poetaster,’ acted in 1601, Ben Jonson satirized Marston’s verbal innovations, and among the words he reviled are clumsy, inflate, spurious, conscious, strenuous, defunct, retrograde, and reciprocal; and in his ‘Discoveries’ Jonson shrewdly remarked that “a man coins not a new word without some peril and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured.”
Puttenham wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, Jonson at the beginning of the seventeenth, Swift at the beginning of the eighteenth; and at the beginning of the nineteenth we find Lady Holland declaring influential to be a detestable word and asserting that she had tried in vain to get Sheridan to forego it.