Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/50

28 It says foots and mouses; it says gooder and goodest; it confounds sit and set, lie and lay (in which last blunders, unfortunately, it is supported by the example of too many among the grown-up and educated). Care, on its own part and on that of its instructors, corrects by degrees such childish errors; but this care is often wanting or insufficient, and it grows up continuing still to speak bad English. Moreover, as we have already seen, not each child only, but each man, to his dying day, is a learner of his native tongue; nor is there any one who is not liable, from carelessness or defective instruction, to learn a word or phrase incorrectly, or to reproduce it inaccurately. For these reasons there always lies, in full vigour and currency, in the lower strata of language-users, as we may term them&mdash;among the uneducated or half-educated&mdash;a great host of deviations from the best usage, offences against the propriety of speech, kept down in the main by the controlling influence of good speakers, yet all the time threatening to rise to the surface, and now and then succeeding in forcing their way up, and compelling recognition and acceptance from even the best authorities.

Of this origin are the class of changes in language which we are at present considering. They are, in their inception, inaccuracies of speech. They attest the influence of that immense numerical majority among the speakers of English who do not take sufficient pains to speak correctly, but whose blunders become finally the norm of the language. They are mainly the results of two tendencies, already illustrated in the instances we have given: first, to make things easy to our organs of speech, to economize time and effort in the work of expression; second, to get rid of irregular and exceptional forms, by extending the prevailing analogies of the language. Let us look at a few examples.

Our written words are thickly sown with silent letters, which, as every one knows, are relics of former modes of pronunciation, once necessary constituents of spoken language, but gradually dropped, because it was easier to do without them. Instances are knight, calm, psalm, would, doubt, plough, thought, sword, chestnut. If we will but carry