POETS AND POETRY.
A SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO WORDS.►
IT is possible to shut ourselves off entirely from painting. We need have nothing to do with music. For us sculpture may not exist, but it is impossible for anybody living in any sort of community to get away from the use of words, and there perhaps hardly exists a person who is not in some way amused and interested by the patterns that can be made with the coins of everyday barter and exchange. We are all pleased by some kind or other of verbal fantasia. It may be, according to our taste, " There are lots of girls beside I should like to sit beside, Beside the sea-side,
Beside the sea."
or perhaps-
" Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since Of leery damsels met in forest wide • By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, Lancelot, or Pollees, or Pellenore."
It is all a matter of taste—both are good. But the actual coins out of which the patterns are made—the words themselves— are often curiously alive even to the least poetical of us. Who has not known some obviously unliterary person who had a violent prejudice against some new word or who prided himself on his unique and superior pronunciation of some old one ? Who felt an inch taller because he said " Corfee " for " Coffee," " Balcony " for " Balcony," " Bumbay " for " Bombay" ? Hence there are very few of us who, if we once take up Tract No. 3, The Society for Pure English, will put it down again till it is finished and probably marked all over with the reader's violent agreements or disagreements. To the poet—who is, we trust, familiar with Mr. Pearsall Smith's English Language—the tract will be a delight. Mr. Pearsall Smith in an admirable mentor in the use of language, for he is hardly ever priggish. He is delighted to admit new words, and he does not rush down by-paths in pursuit of half-apprehended and un- attainable nicety. What ought to be our practice in the matter of foreign words We think that Mr. Pearsall Smith is per- fectly right in his contention that we should, as far as possible, follow the old usage and naturalize wherever possible, and the effort which has been made in some quarters lately to preserve or restore the foreign sounds and shapes of many words is very much to be deprecated. Our speech is being gradually im- poverished by a piece of snobbery and of false taste.
"The process of de-assimilation generally begins with the restoration of foreign accents to such words as have them in French ; thus ' role' is now written ' role ' debris,' ' debris' ; ' detour," detour' ; ' depot," depot' ; and the old words long established in our language, levee," naivety,' • The Society for Pure English: Trod No. S. By Logan Pearsall Brulth. 'Word : at the elFrendos PrO811. Lis, Sd. not)
now appear as levee,' and ' naivete' The next step is to italicize these words, thus treating them as complete aliens, and thus we often see rile, dep6t, &c. The very old English word 'rendezvous' is now printed rendezvous, and ' dilettante' and vogue' sometimes are printed in italics. Among other words which have been borrowed at various times and more or less naturalized, but which are now being driven out of the language, are the following : confrere, congee, cortege, dishabille, distrait, ensemble, fete, flair, mellay (now mike), nonchalance, provenance, renconter, &c.). On the other hand, it is satisfactory to note that employee ' appears to be taking the place of employe.' " Readers of Marriage a to Mode (or "Alameda ") will be able to date the arrival of many of these words.
The present writer would be inclined to say that naturalization as complete as possible should always be the rule where the foreign word fills a real want, as " garage " and " chauffeur." Let the first rhyme with " carriage " and the second be " chaufer." " Shover " was a jocularity and is dead. Mr. Pearsall Smith also instances " malaise," so familiar in the " General Malaise," of the elementary text-books on medicine and nursing. "It could with advantage reassume the old form melees° which it once possessed."
Alien plurals be particularly dislikes. Why should we say " sanatoria," " memoranda," " gymnasia," &o., when we have capital plurals in " sanatoriums," " memorandums," " gym- nasiums," and so forth ? We might just as well write " ideae," " chori," " asyla," "muaea," &c. Mr. Pearsall Smith does not use one argument which the writer feels is the strongest one of all in favour of as much anglicizing as possible. Every word with a foreign termination or a foreign pronunciation is an extra stumbling-block to the unlettered who are trying to employ a more liberal vocabulary. Hence aliens are genuine nuisances and should bo Englished at sight. Why must a man learn French in order to read and write in English ? In the ease of one word we do not, however, agree with Mr. Pearsall Smith. He bids us say " bandits" and not " banditti." " Bandit " is a sort of stage word, anyhow. It is all tinsel and plush with a tinfoil sword and a property wig, and the exotic plural, in the present writer's opinion, adds greatly to its glamour. It also has a claim to being one of the rare rhymes to " committee."
Another curious aspect of the natural history of words is the fact that occasionally, for no apparent reason, a word will pine away and die:— "There is the kind of blight which attacks many of our most ancient, beautiful, and expressive words, rendering them first of all unsuitable for colloquial use, though they may bo still used in prose. Next they are driven out of the prose vocabulary into that of poetry, and at last removed into that limbo of archaisms and affectations to which so many beautiful but dead words of our language have been unhappily banished. It is not that these words lose their lustre, as many words lose it, by hackneyed use and common handling ; the process is exactly opposite ; by not being used enough, the phosphorescence of decay seems to attack them, and gives them a kind of shimmer which makes them seem too fine for common occasions."
Let the young poet beware of such words in his verse. They must be used with infinite precaution,f or they have come loose from their meanings. There are further words which might still be saved by a slight effort, like " maiden," " damsel," " weep," " bide," " sojourn," " seek," " heinous," " chide." But we think that Mr. Pearsall Smith makes a mistake when he says, " Though we still call people swine ' or ' hounds,' we no longer use these words for the animals they more properly designate." Surely to have instanced " hounds " here was an oversight. To differentiate the canine used for hunting from all other dogs is surely an enrichment of language as it is the substitution of two words for a pair of synonyms. One curious natural pheno- menon, as he points out, is that such dying words may oocasion- _ally come back to life by being used humorously, as it were, in quotation marks. For instance, at Eton the old word " usher " was first used only for humorous effect, but it has now nearly found its way back into the common speech of the school We hope that at some future date some of the words that became common during the war may be discussed. A good many of them seem to be dropping out of use again, which is surely in many instances a pity. " Gadget " still lives, but there are probably already young people who would not know what was meant by " swinging the lead," and the present writer would plead for the resurrection of "buckshee "—now defunct. It was a capital word—expressive, and as far as the present writer is aware, there is no other word which expresses its meaning- i.e., an extra ; something left over. For example, " So-and-so is engaged all right, but he has got a buckshee girl where ho is in camp." Or, "Pass the fags round, and if there is a buckshee one give it to Bill."
There is an interesting dissertation, too, upon "morale," alias " moral," in which a complete case is made out for the use of " morale." "The English morale is not," he says, "a perversion of the French word ': it is a phonetic respelling, and a most useful one, of a French word. We have never had anything to do with the French word teerale (ethics, morality, a moral, &e.), but we found the French word moral (state of discipline and spirit in armies, &c.) suited to our needs, and put an e on to it to keep its sound distinct from that of our own word moral,' just as we have done with the French local (English locale)."
We note at the end that the Society appeals for a co-operation of its members in such ways as these : Members should suggest a list of foreign nouns that are uncertain of their Englishod plurals, and discuss the question of re-adoption of words from dialect. Any word we propose to reinstate in our language should (like Buckshee) not only be a good word, but must supply a felt want.
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