132 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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, desid- 

 erate, 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 hind, 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 

 1 1 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 commit- 

 ment, 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-con- 

 servatives 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, how- 

 ever, has demonstrated fully that the fears of those purists were un- 

 warranted 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, with- 

 out 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 ab- 

 sorptive power. 



