Questions at Issue in Our English Speech

by Edwin W. Bowen

The greatest representative of this number in English literature, excepting Addison, is Swift, the famous dean of St. Patrick’s. He was impelled by a desire amounting almost to a passion, it is said, to hand down the English language to his successors with its vaunted purity and beauty absolutely unimpaired. In an essay in The Tattler of September 28, 1710, he gives vehement utterance to his feelings on the shocking carelessness and woeful lack of taste in the use of the vernacular exhibited by his contemporaries. He affirms that the conscienceless, unrefined writers of his day were utterly indifferent as to the effect of their deplorable practice upon the future of the English tongue and brought forward, in proof of his contention, numerous examples of solecisms which he alleged were constantly employed, to the corruption and deterioration of the language.

Swift made a threefold division of the barbarous neologisms which were introduced in his day. It is interesting to observe his several classes of these locutions that were contrary to all rules of propriety. The first class was made up of abbreviations in which only the first syllable or part of the word had to do duty for the entire word, as phiz for physiognomy, hyp for hypochondria, mob for mobile vulgus, poz for positive, rep for reputation, incog for incognito and plenipo for plenipotentiary. The second class included polysyllables, such as speculations, battalions, ambassadors, palisadoes, operations, communications, preliminaries, circumvallations and other ungraceful, mouth-filling words, which Swift alleged were introduced into the language as a result of the war of the Spanish succession then in progress. His third class embraced those terms which were, to quote his own words, “invented by certain pretty fellows, such as banter, bamboozle, country put and kidney.” “I have done my utmost,” he pathetically remarks, “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.”

Two years later Swift addressed a public letter to the Earl of Oxford, the Lord High Treasurer, deprecating the approaching decadence of the English tongue and earnestly urging some sort of concerted action for correcting and improving the vernacular. The language, the letter recited, was very imperfect and daily deteriorating. The period of its greatest purity, Swift went on to say, was that from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign to the breaking out of the civil war of 1642. His perturbed mind was filled with mingled feelings of grief and indignation as he pointed out in this letter the growing corruptions then so apparent even in the writings of the best authors, and more especially as he was compelled to admit that not only the fanatics of the commonwealth, but also the court itself, had contributed to bring about the sad condition of the language.

It is not worth while to speak in detail of Swift’s fanciful and quixotic scheme for purging the language and keeping it pure. But it is interesting to observe, in passing, that his urgent appeal to the prime minister to become the guardian and curator of the English tongue was utterly fruitless and, what is more, that his direful predictions as to the speedy decay of English have never been verified. Furthermore, some of those very neologisms which Swift criticized so unrelentingly are now recognized in polite speech and bear the stamp of approval as the jus et norma loquendi. Of his second class of barbarisms well-nigh all are to-day accepted as standard English and are without a trace of slang. With his first and third classes, however, fate has not dealt so kindly, for these words are still under condemnation, save mob, which has forced its way to recognition in good usage as a necessary term.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century appeared another champion of the preservation of the purity and propriety of the English speech. This was James Beattie, a learned Scotchman. For some reason or other, the Scotch seemed extremely solicitous about the English language during the eighteenth century—a solicitude that was not appreciated by the British lexicographers and least of all by Dr. Johnson. In a letter written in 1790, Beattie took occasion to speak of the “new-fangled phrases and barbarous idioms that are now so much affected by those who form their style from political pamphlets and those pretended speeches in Parliament that appear in the newspapers.” “Should this jargon continue to gain ground among us,” he assures his correspondent, in a doleful mood, “English literature will go to ruin. During the last twenty years, especially since the breaking out of the American war, it has made alarming progress.... If I live to execute what I purpose on the writings and genius of Addison, I shall at least enter my protest against the practise; and by exhibiting a copious specimen of the new phraseology, endeavor to make my reader set his heart against it.”

In order to emphasize the damage resulting to the language from the neologisms which were creeping in, Beattie conceived the clever plan of privately printing a series of “Dialogues of the Dead,” which purported to be the production of his son deceased a few years before. The most interesting of these “Dialogues” is the report of an imaginary conversation between Dean Swift, a bookseller and Mercury, in which the worthy dean expresses himself as greatly shocked and disgusted at the outlandish English used by the bookseller; and he calls on Mercury to translate the patois into good English. In response to Swift’s earnest request, Mercury says among other things: “Instead of life, new, wish for, take, plunge, etc., you must say existence, novel, desiderate, capture, ingurgitate, etc., as—a fever put an end to his existence.... Instead of a new fashion, you will do well to say a novel fashion.... You must on no account speak of taking the enemy’s ships, towns, guns or baggage: it must be capturing.” Other words which were censured as improper by this phantom critic were unfriendly and hostile for which inimical was recommended; sort and kind, in place of each of which description was to be used. Some of the locutions then in vogue which especially offended good taste, according to Beattie, were to make up one’s mind, to scout the idea, to go to prove, line of conduct, in contemplation, and for the future. Furthermore, the frequent use of feel, which threatened to supplant the verb to be in such an idiom as “I am sick” and drive it from its rightful domain, aroused the learned Scotch purist’s apprehension as to the final outcome, as did also the growing tendency to employ truism for truth, committal for commitment, pugilist for boxer, approval for approbation and agriculturist for husbandman.

No doubt Beattie believed with Swift that the influx of such pedantic Latinisms as desiderate and ingurgitate and the like would result in impairing the purity of our speech and perhaps hasten its declension. Nor did he look with favor on the growing fashion to use monosyllables, though of pure Saxon origin, so much affected by some writers during that period. Both of these tendencies were of temporary vogue; yet they served to arouse the fears of the ultra-conservatives as to the fate of the English language. One might suppose that, dreading the then threatening invasion of Latin terms as they clearly did, they would have hailed with delight the revival of Saxon monosyllables as a favorable offset. But even this did not allay their fears and was rather interpreted as a harmful symptom. Time, however, has demonstrated fully that the fears of those purists were unwarranted and that their dire predictions as to the future of English were founded on a very imperfect knowledge of linguistic development. A cursory examination of Beattie’s lists reveals the fact that of the verbal innovations and offending phrases which he put under the ban, the genius of the language has adopted not a few, and that, too, without impairing in the least the purity of the English tongue or its capacity for expressing the finest shades of thought. So far from losing, the language has gained in its capacity for expressing nice distinctions of thought and feeling, as a result of its marvelous absorptive power.

It has thus been shown that in the eighteenth century there were not wanting those—purists or what not—who entertained and expressed no little concern as to the ultimate effect upon our speech of the multitude of neologisms and asserted improprieties that were introduced. Did space permit, utterances of a similar character by nineteenth-century writers, from Walter Savage Landon down to critics of far less renown, might be brought forward as evidence to show that the watch-dogs of our speech were as numerous and as alert as ever. Nor is their tribe yet extinct. Ever and anon, even in the last few years, some prophet of evil is heard to raise his voice in vigorous protest against the increasing use of slang as foreboding the decadence of our vernacular. But the warning is not heeded; and the English language, like the real living thing that it is, goes on developing according to the subtle principles of speech development.

The laws governing speech development are very imperfectly known. Consequently none can foretell how a given tongue may develop. The language appears to be independent of one’s individual habit of speech; yet it is the sum total of the individual habits of speech that constitutes the language. No man makes a language; no man can make it. Not even the greatest monarch on earth can, by decree or fiat, predetermine the course of development of the language of his subjects. Language is an involuntary product and does not result from any determined concert of action. Yet it is modified and changed by various influences. As long as it is alive and spoken, it is constantly changing and will not remain “fixed” according to the whimsical desire of the purist. When it ceases to be used upon the lips of the people as a medium of communication of their thoughts and feelings, then it will cease to change and grow and will become “fixed.” But when a language is no longer spoken, it is characterized as dead. It is in this sense that we call Latin and Greek dead languages, although they survive in modern Italian and modern Greek, respectively.

It follows, therefore, that it is the height of folly for any one, no matter how highly esteemed as an author, to attempt the rôle of reformer of the speech. Such an one is destined to have only his labor for his pains. He can not directly purge the language of its neologisms and improprieties of usage. These violations of standard usage which offend good taste, strange as it may seem, furnish indubitable evidence of the vitality of the speech; for from these contraband expressions come the new terms and idioms which are to take the place of the obsolete words which drop out of the vocabulary.