Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/134

 130 The humorous pages of François Rabelais, also, have a copious sprinkling of slang expressions and invite comparison with the productions of some of our own American humorists, who depend not a little upon the vigorous western slang to enhance the effectiveness of their humor. But it is more to the point to cite historical instances among our English authors, especially those who set themselves the burdensome, yet thankless, task of striving to preserve the primitive purity of our speech.

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 practise 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 mobb 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