tress because of the impending ruin of the tongue.
It is both suggestive and instructive to learn a little of this new language which had just come into fashion, as Mercury gives Swift to understand. "Instead of life, new, wish for, take, plunge, etc.," he told him, "you must say existence, novel, desiderate, 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." This last word, we are told, had been imported about twenty years before. Sort and kind were unfashionable nouns, and indeed quite vulgar; description, on account of its length and Latin original, was better. Instead of undervaluing your enemies, you set no store by them. Unfriendly and hostile had both given place to inimical. This word is said to have come in at the same time with capture; but though a great favorite, it was pronounced differently by those who used it.
There are many other words and phrases censured, some of which the majority of us would now think we could hardly get along without. Line, meet, marked, feel, and go, we are told, were employed on all occasions, whether they had any meaning or not. Instead of saying conduct, it was fashionable to say line of conduct. You meet a person's wishes and arguments. You are received with marked applause, or contempt, or admiration.
The words am and he were in danger of being forgotten, having been crowded out by feel. Accordingly, instead of using is with the following adjectives, one says he feels anxious, afraid, warm, sick, ashamed. Instead of saying that one's arguments proved certain things, we must assert that his arguments went to prove. For reformation, again, everybody was learning to say reform, this latter being a French word and the other vile old English. Instead of for the future it had become fashionable to say in future. There were also some current phrases which were not merely ambiguous but unintelligible. Among them were such expressions as scouted the idea, netted a cool thousand, to make up one's mind. Then there was a tendency to use uncommon terminations. Men said committal instead of commitment, approval instead of approbation, truism for truth, agriculturist for husbandman, and pugilist for boxer. Swift's patience is represented as finally giving way altogether under the infliction of the following sentence: "We hear it is in contemplation to run up a novel and superb pavilion at Newmarket for Pugilistical exhibitions." He sees his old friend Addison coming, and takes his departure with the assertion that it would require an hour even of his conversation to wear out the disagreeable impression left in his mind by this abominable detail of vulgarity, pedantry, and barbarism.
So much for the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century abounded in men who had very decided opinions as to the debasement which was overtaking the speech and were filled with anxiety about its future. But expression of views of this sort came rarely from writers of ability or learning. To this rule there is one distinguished exception. It is Walter Savage Landor. His observations, both general and particular, on language are to be found in certain of his "Imaginary Conversations." Of these the first series came out in 1824. Knowledge of the nature and development of speech had made a good deal of progress during the more than century which had gone by since Swift addressed his letter to Lord Oxford. But not a ray of this additional light ever reached Landor's ears. He still continued to retain and repeat the crude notions long abandoned by all students of language and left now to the craziest class of verbal critics. Necessarily came from him the same doleful representation of the condition and prospects of the speech. In one of his earlier Conversations Landor told us that within another generation the language, with the improper innovations constantly made, would have become so corrupt that writers, if they hoped for life, would find it necessary to mount up near its sources. In one of his latest he affirmed that the English tongue had fallen, for the last half-century, more rapidly into corruption and decomposition than any other ever spoken among men.
