There is a word of Abraham Lincoln’s that I long for the right to use. Mr. Noah Brooks has recorded that he once heard the President speak of a certain man as interruptious. This adjective conveys a delicate shade of meaning not discoverable in any other; it may not be inscribed in the bead-roll of the King’s English, but it was a specimen of the President’s English; and has any Speech from the Throne in this century really rivaled the force and felicity of the Second Inaugural?

It was not the liberator of the negro but one of the freedmen themselves who made offhand use of a delicious word, for which it is probably hopeless for us to expect acceptance, however useful the new term might prove. During a debate in the legislature of South Carolina in the Reconstruction days, a sable ally of the carpet-baggers rose to repel the taunts of his opponents, declaring energetically that he hurled back with scorn all their insinuendos. The word holds a middle ground between insinuation and innuendo; and between the two it has scant chance of survival. But it is an amusing attempt, for all its failure; and it would have given pleasure to the author of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ And how many of Lewis Carroll’s own verbal innovations, wantonly manufactured for his sport, are likely to get themselves admitted into the language of literature? Chortle stands the best chance of them all, I think; and I believe that many a man has said that he chortled, with no thought of the British bard who ingeniously devised the quaint vocable.

So Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s burgle seems to be winning its way into general use. At first those who employed it followed the example of the comic lyrist, and did so with humorous intent; but of late it is beginning to serve those who are wholly devoid of humor. Perhaps the verb to burgle (from the noun burglar) supplied the analogy on which was made the verb to ush (from the noun usher). With my own ears I once heard a well-known clergyman in New York express the thanks of the congregation to “the gentlemen who ush for us.”

It is well that strange uses like these do not win early acceptance into our speech—that there should be alert challengers at the portal to cry “Halt!” and to examine a newcomer’s credentials. It is well also that the stranger should have leave to prove his usefulness and so in time gain admittance even to the inner sanctuary of the language. John Dryden discussed the reception into English of new words and phrases with the sturdy common sense which was one of the characteristics most endearing him to us as a true type of the man of letters who was also a man of the world. “It is obvious,” he wrote in his ‘Defense of the Epilog,’ “that we have admitted many, some of which we wanted, and therefore our language is the richer for them, as it would be by importation of bullion; others are rather ornamental than necessary; yet by their admission the language is become more courtly and our thoughts are better dressed.”

Historians of the language have had no difficulty in bringing together a mass of quotations from the British writers of the eighteenth century to show that they were then possessed of the belief that it was feasible and necessary to set bounds to the growth of English. They were afraid that the changes going on in the language would make it “impossible for succeeding ages to read or appreciate the literature produced.” In his interesting and instructive lecture on the ‘Evolution of English Lexicography,’ Dr. Murray remarks that “to us of a later age, with our fuller knowledge of the history of language, and our wider experience of its fortunes, when it has to be applied to entirely new fields of knowledge, such as have been opened to us since the birth of modern science, this notion seems childlike and pathetic. But it was eminently characteristic of the eighteenth century.”

It is small wonder therefore that this absurd notion infected two of the most characteristic figures of the eighteenth century—Johnson and Franklin. Dr. Johnson set forth in the plan of his dictionary that “one great end of this undertaking is to fix the English language.” Even so shrewd a student of all things as was Franklin seems to have accepted this current fallacy. When he acknowledged the dedication of Noah Webster’s ‘Dissertations on the English Language,’ he declared that he could not “but applaud your zeal for preserving the purity of our language, both in its expressions and pronunciation.” Then, as tho to prove to us, once for all, the futility of all efforts to “fix the language” and to “preserve its purity,” Franklin picks out half a dozen novelties of phrase and begs that Webster will use his “authority in reprobating them.” Among these innovations that Franklin disapproved of are improved, noticed, advocated, progressed, and opposed.

This letter to Webster was written in 1789; and already in 1760 Franklin had yielded to certain of David Hume’s criticisms upon his parts of speech: “I thank you for your friendly admonition relating to some unusual words in the pamphlet. It will be of service to me. The pejorate and the colonize, since they are not in common use here, I give up as bad; for certainly in writings intended for persuasion and for general information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression in the least obscure is a fault. The unshakable, too, tho clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing new words, where we are already possessed of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally wrong, as it tends to change the language.”

With all his intellect and all his insight and all his common sense—and with this most precious quality Franklin was better furnished than either Johnson or Dryden—he could not foresee that to notice and to advocate and to colonize were words without which the English language could not do its work in the world. And when he gives up unshakable “as rather low” he stands confessed as a contemporary of the men whom Fielding and Goldsmith girded at. In spite of the example of Steele and Addison, in spite of his own vigorous directness in ‘Poor Richard’ and in all his political pamphlets, Franklin feels that there is and that there ought to be a wide gap between the English that is spoken and the English that is written. He did not perceive that spoken English, with all its hazardous expressions, its clipped words, its violent metaphors, its picturesque slang, its slovenly clumsiness, is none the less the proving-ground of the literary vocabulary, which is forever tending to self-exhaustion.

Nobody has better stated the wiser attitude of a writer toward the tools of his trade than Professor Harry Thurston Peck in his incisive discussion of ‘What is Good English?’ He begins by noting that “the English language, as a whole, is the richest of all modern tongues, and it is not to be bounded by the comparatively narrow limits of its literature. There exists, as well, the easy, fluent usage of conversation, and there is also the strong, simple, homely speech of the common people, rooted in plain Saxon, smacking of the soil, and having a sturdy power about it that is unsurpassable for downright force and blunt directness.” And Professor Peck, having pointed out how an artist in words is free to avail himself of the term he needs from books or from life, declares that “the writer of the best English is he whose language responds exactly to his mood and thought, now thundering and surging with the majestic words whose immediate ancestry is Roman, now rippling and singing with the smooth harmonies of later speech, now forging ahead with the irresistible energy of the Saxon, and now laughing and wantoning in the easy lightness of our modern phrase.”

(1897-99)