Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/118



O one who is interested in the subject of language can have failed to be struck with the prevalence of complaints about the corruption which is overtaking our own speech. There seems to have been in every period of the past, as there is now, a distinct apprehension in the minds of very many worthy persons that the English tongue is always in the condition of approaching collapse, and that arduous efforts must be put forth, and put forth persistently, in order to save it from destruction. In every age there is in one particular a striking similarity in the lamentations of these prophets of woe. They are always pointing to the past with pride. In some preceding period, usually not very remote, they tell us, the language was spoken and written with the greatest purity. It is not an infrequent remark that it had then attained the acme of perfection at which it is capable of arriving. But since that happy time it has been degenerating. Corruptions of all kinds are not merely stealing in, they are pouring in with the violence of a tidal wave. Slang, unnecessary words, ungrammatical locutions, phrases borrowed from foreign tongues, especially from the French, replace and drive out the genuine vernacular.

It was not so very unnatural that views of this kind should be expressed in the past, when the nature of language and of the influences that operate upon it was little understood. Men knew nothing of the historical development of the words and grammatical forms they were in the habit of using. They had not the slightest conception out of what impurity had sprung much of the vaunted purity in which they rejoiced. To them the language seemed a sort of intellectual machine which had come into their possession with all its parts finished and elaborated. They were consequently solicitous that nothing should be brought in to impair its imagined perfection. They lived in perpetual dread of agencies that might threaten its integrity. One very favorite idea with them was that it should be rendered what they called "fixed," in consequence of which it would undergo no further change. They seemed to be unaware that in order to have a language fixed, it must first of all be dead. In all these delusions great writers of former times largely shared, whether they belonged to England or to other countries.

Of the class of men just indicated Dean Swift is in our literature far the greatest representative. The desire for what he deemed the purity of the language amounted with him almost to a passion. To securing it he devoted no small share of thought and attention. One of his earliest utterances upon the subject—perhaps his earliest—appeared in the Tatler of September 28, 1710. In it he deplored the general ignorance and want of taste exhibited by the writers of the age. These were bringing about the steady corruption of the English tongue. Unless some timely remedy was found, he declared that the language would suffer more by the false refinements of the twenty years which had just passed than it had been improved in the foregoing hundred. Swift's essay was largely taken up with the exemplification of these asserted barbarisms which had been steadily creeping into and corrupting the speech.

They were of three kinds. The first were abbreviations, in which only the first part of a word was used. The result was to add a further number of mono-syllables to a language already overloaded with them. As illustrations of these he gave phiz for physiognomy, hyp for hypo-