Foreign words must always be allowed to land on our coasts without a passport; yet if any of them linger long enough to warrant a belief that they may take out their papers sooner or later, we must decide at last whether or not they are likely to be desirable residents of our dictionary; and if we determine to naturalize them, we may fairly enough insist on their renouncing their foreign allegiance. They must cast in their lot with us absolutely, and be bound by our laws only. The French chaperon, for example, has asked for admission to our vocabulary, and the application has been granted, so that we have now no hesitation in recording that Daisy Miller was chaperoned by Becky Sharp at the last ball given by the Marquis of Steyne; and we have even changed the spelling of the noun to correspond better with our Anglicized pronunciation, thus chaperone. Thus technique has changed its name to technic, and is made welcome; so early as 1867 Matthew Arnold used technic in his ‘Study of Celtic Literature,’ but even now his fellow-islanders are slow in following his example. Thus employé is accepted in the properly Anglicized form of employee. Thus the useful clôture undergoes a sea-change and becomes the English closure. And why not cotery also? I note that in his ‘Studies in Literature,’ published in 1877, Professor Dowden put technique into italics as tho it was still a foreign word, while he left coterie in ordinary type as tho it had been adopted into English.
So toilette has been abbreviated to toilet; at least, I should have said so without any hesitation if I had not recently seen the foreign spelling reappearing repeatedly in the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Amateur Emigrant’—and this in the complete Edinburgh edition prepared by Mr. Sidney Colvin. To find a Gallic spelling in the British prose of Stevenson is a surprise, especially since the author of the ‘Dynamiter’ is on record as a contemner of another orthographic Gallicism. In a foot-note to ‘More New Arabian Nights’ Stevenson declares that “any writard who writes dynamitard shall find in me a never-resting fightard.”
I should like to think that the naturalized literator was supplanting the alien littérateur, but I cannot claim confidence as to the result. Literator is a good English word: I have found it in the careful pages of Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’; and I make no doubt that it can prove a much older pedigree than that. It seems to me a better word by far than literarian, which the late Fitzedward Hall manufactured for his own use “some time in the fifties,” and which he defended against a British critic who denounced it as “atrocious.” Hall, praising the word of his own making, declared that “to literatus or literator, for literary person or a longer phrase of equivalent import, there are obvious objections.” Nobody, to the best of my belief, ever attempted to use in English the Latin literatus, altho its plural Poe made us familiar with by his series of papers on the ‘Literati of America.’ Since Poe’s death the word has ceased to be current, altho it was not uncommon in his day.
Perhaps one of the obvious objections to literatus is that if it be treated as an English word the plural it forms is not pleasant to the ear—literatuses. Here, indeed, is a moot point: How does a foreign word make its plural in English? Some years ago Mr. C. F. Thwing, writing in Harper’s Bazar on the college education of young women, spoke of foci. Mr. Churton Collins, preparing a book about the study of English literature in the British universities, expressed his desire “to raise Greek, now gradually falling out of our curricula and degenerating into the cachet and shibboleth of cliques of pedants, to its proper place in education.” Here we see Mr. Thwing and Mr. Collins treating focus and curriculum as words not yet assimilated by our language, and therefore required to assume the Latin plural.
Does not this suggest a certain lack of taste on the part of these writers? If focus and curriculum are not good English words, what need is there to employ them when you are using the English language to convey your thoughts? There are occasions, of course, where the employment of a foreign term is justifiable, but they must always be very rare. The imported word which we really require we had best take to ourselves, incorporating it in the language, treating it thereafter absolutely as an English word, and giving it the regular English plural. If the word we use is so foreign that we should print it in italics, then of course the plural should be formed according to the rules of the foreign language from which it has been borrowed; but if it has become so acclimated in our tongue that we should not think of underlining it, then surely it is English enough to take an English plural. If cherub is now English, its plural is the English cherubs, and not the Hebrew cherubim. If criterion is now English, its plural is the English criterions, and not the Greek criteria. If formula is now English, its plural is the English formulas, and not the Latin formulæ. If bureau is now English, its plural is the English bureaus, and not the French bureaux.
What is the proper plural in English of cactus? of vortex? of antithesis? of phenomenon? In a volume on the ‘Augustan Age,’ in Professor George Saintsbury’s ‘Periods of European Literature,’ we find lexica—a masterpiece of petty pedantry and of pedantic pettiness. As Landor made himself say in his dialog with Archdeacon Hare, “There is an affectation of scholarship in compilers of spelling-books, and in the authors they follow for examples, when they bring forward phenomena and the like. They might as well bring forward mysteria. We have no right to tear Greek and Latin declensions out of their grammars: we need no vortices when we have vortexes before us; and while we have memorandums, factotums, and ultimatums, let our shepherd dogs bring back to us by the ear such as have wandered from the flock.”
Landor’s own scholarship was too keen and his taste was too fine for him not to abhor such affectation. He held that Greek and Latin words had no business in an English sentence unless they had been frankly acclimated in the English language, and that one of the conditions of this acclimatizing was the shedding of their original plurals. And that this is also the common-sense view of most users of English is obvious enough. Nobody now ventures to write factota or ultimata; and even memoranda seems to be vanishing. But phenomena and data still survive; and so do errata and candelabra. Whatever may be the fate of phenomena, that of the three other words may perhaps be like unto the fate of opera—which is also a Latin plural and which has become an English singular. We speak unhesitatingly of the operas of Rossini; are we going, in time, to speak unhesitatingly of the candelabras of Cellini? In his vigorous article on the orthography of the French language—which is still almost as chaotic and illogical as the orthography of the English language—Sainte-Beuve noted as a singular peculiarity the fact that errata had got itself recognized as a French singular, but that it did not yet take the French plural; thus we see un errata and des errata.
It is true also that when we take over a term from another language we ought to be sure that it really exists in the other language. For lack of observance of this caution we find ourselves now in possession of phrases like nom de plume and déshabille, of which the French never heard. And even when we have assured ourselves of the existence of the word in the foreign language, it behooves us then to assure ourselves also of its exact meaning before we take it for our own. In his interesting and instructive book about ‘English Prose,’ Professor Earle reminds us that the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe is not yet an extinct species; and he adds in a note that “the word levée seems to be another genuine instance of the same insular dialect,” since it is not French of any date, but an English improvement upon the verb (or substantive) lever, “getting up in the morning.”
An example even more extraordinary than any of these, I think, will occur to those of us who are in the habit of glancing through the theatrical announcements of the American newspapers. This is the taking of the French word vaudeville to designate what was once known as a “variety show” and what is now more often called a “specialty entertainment.” For any such interpretation of vaudeville there is no warrant whatever in French. Originally the “vaudeville” was a satiric ballad, bristling with hits at the times, and therefore closely akin to the “topical song” of to-day; and it is at this stage of its evolution that Boileau asserted that
Le Français, né malin, créa le vaudeville.