A sharp-eyed gamekeeper nails up rows of dead vermin on a barn door. Even so our Editors ought once a month or so to head their columns with a list of new-fangled words, the use of which should be forbidden to every writer for their journals; to be sure, the vermin unhappily are not yet dead. In this list would come, I hope, many words already gibbeted in this chapter, together with postprandial, solidarity, egoism, collaborator, acerbity, dubiety, donate.[1] Some of these words, I believe, came to us from America. Our kinsmen there have made noble contributions to our common stock of literature; the works of Irving, Motley, Marsh, Bryant, Longfellow, are prized on both sides of the Atlantic alike. Dr. March by his Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon language, a work to which I owe so much, has shown us that in some things American scholarship aims at rivalling German thoroughness. But Englishmen cannot help being astonished at one thing in his book: he writes labor, honor, &c., instead of following the good old English spelling. Here is one of the few instances in which the pupil, strong in his right, may make bold to correct the master. Our English honour, the French honure or honneur, takes us back eight hundred years to the bloody day, big with our island's doom, when the French knights were charging up the slope at Senlac again and again, when striving to break the stubborn English shield-wall. The word honure, which had already
- ↑ Every writer, who prints his travels, calls his book ‘Personal Adventures.’ Lord Plunkett, when asked the meaning of this, supposed that there was the same difference between what was Real and what was Personal in travels, as in the law of property.
