Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/136

 132 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.