Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/552

548 Probably Doctor Johnson shared this feeling when he exclaimed in the preface to his dictionary, Quis autem custodiet ipsos custodes?

So much for the lexicographers of the eighteenth century. Let us now consider some of the pronunciations authorized by them, which have long since been discarded. These will serve as illustrations to bring home to the mind of the reader the truth that our speech is slowly but surely and constantly changing, and that English pronunciation, unlike English spelling, has never been stereotyped in a fast, unvarying form. They will also show how indispensable an auxiliary to our crystallized, conventional spelling has the pronouncing dictionary become.

An interesting illustration is furnished by the word asparagus. The popular pronunciation of this word in the eighteenth century was sparrowgrass. This was felt by the orthoepists, however, to be a vulgar corruption of the word, and they therefore strove with concerted effort to stem the popular tide and to make the pronunciation conform to abstract propriety as indicated by the spelling. Walker, in commenting upon the pronunciation of the word, remarks, as if apologizing for the theoretically correct form which he recommends, that 'the corruption of the word into sparrow-grass is so general that asparagus has an air of stiffness and pedantry.' Another word with a no less interesting history is cucumber. This word used to be generally pronounced cowcumber. The popular pronunciation of this word as well as of asparagus, once so universal, has survived even up to the present in the lingo of the illiterate whites of New England and in the Negro dialect. This vulgar pronunciation which was a thorn in the flesh to the eighteenth century lexicographers, it is instructive to note in passing, was not the result of mere caprice, but was warranted by an old variant spelling of the word. This historic spelling, long since discarded altogether by the users of English, was formerly very prevalent and in good literary usage. Hence little wonder that the vulgar pronunciation for a long time contested the supremacy with the mode of utterance now universally accepted. Even so high an authority as Mr. Pepys refers in his 'Diary' to a certain man as 'dead of eating cowcumbers.' It was not till wellnigh the middle of the last century that the orthoepists Knowles and Smart ventured to denounce cow-cumberalong with sparrow-grass as vulgar and therefore tabooed in polite circles.

It is a well-established fact in the history of English pronunciation that in the seventeenth century and far into the following century such words as spoil, toil, boil, and so on, were pronounced, even in best usage, precisely as they are uttered to-day in the Negro dialect and by the illiterate whites among us, that is, just as if they were written 'spile,' 'tile' and 'bile.' This is conclusively proved by the