Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 122.djvu/65

SHOULD LANGUAGE BE ABOLISHED? 59 And then they talked on in words I could not get the drift of, until we came to our corner. As we got out, I heard the conductor say, as though he had repeated it over and over, 'An', sir, I ain't seen Mike in fifteen year not since we wuz young fellers back in old St Jo.'

He had a sort of cloudy reminiscent look in his eyes, and as I looked back over my shoulder as we reached the curb, I could see him still, half-way down the block, standing on the car-platform, the book, closed now, in both hands, and his gaze far off into the great still shadows of the Park.

language should be abolished is, doubtless, an open question. Whether it is being abolished is not an open question. It is being abolished. Its abolition is going on around us everywhere, with increasing rapidity. The process, to be sure, is an unconscious one. But unconscious processes are generally the most elemental and momentous. If this particular radical alteration in the habits of humanity is a desirable one, well and good; let it go on. If it is not, it is high time to become aware of it and do what we can to check it.

Before going further, I ought to explain that, when I say language is being abolished, I do not mean that men, or women, are ceasing to communicate with one another. I am not using the word language in its wide sense of any medium whatever whereby meaning is conveyed from mind to mind, as we speak of the language of the eye, or as Shakespeare speaks of finding

"Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones,"

and so forth. I use the word rather in its narrower application to the total body of arbitrary verbal signs employed by a people in its spoken, written, and printed discourse. This is the language which, for good or ill, is being abolished.

What! you exclaim, language being abolished, when every fresh edition of the dictionary has to make room for thousands of new words; when newspapers and magazines multiply faster than rabbits in Australia; when talks and speeches and lectures are crowded into every hour of the day and night?

Yes, in the teeth of these facts, I stand by my assertion.

As for the dictionary, it is indeed growing obese. But may not this very obesity be a symptom of the unhealthy condition of that which resides within it? And when it comes to the magazines and newspapers, compare them with those of a generation ago, and you will see what is happening: the printed matter, where it has not been crowded out by highly pictorial advertisements, is subsiding into a sort of gloss (more or less superfluous) on the illustrations.