i 3 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The humorous pages of Frangois Babelais, also, have a copious sprink- 

 ling 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 Eng- 

 lish 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 ver- 

 nacular exhibited by his contemporaries. He affirms that the con- 

 scienceless, 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, communi- 

 cations, 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 Tcidney.' " 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 prom- 

 ised to assist me." 



Two years later Swift addressed a public letter to the Earl of 

 Oxford, the Lord High Treasurer, deprecating the approaching deca- 

 dence of the English tongue and earnestly urging some sort of con- 

 certed action for correcting and improving the vernacular. The lan- 

 guage, the letter recited, was very imperfect and daily deteriorating. 

 The period of its greatest purity, Swift went on to say, was that from 



