pirants, indeed, the words of Scripture are specially applicable. Many are called, but few are chosen. Out of the army of terms that offer themselves for admission in every generation, but a very limited number find lodgment in the speech. Nor do these, save in the rarest of instances, displace or make obsolete those already there. The fundamental error which vitiated the conclusions of Swift and his contemporaries consisted in their belief that the language was steadily moving in a straight line away from its sources. Hence it followed that, unless it became what they called fixed, their own writings would in process of time become unintelligible. They complained accordingly that length of fame was denied to modern writers. These could hope to live at best but a bare threescore years. As Pope expressed it, and illustrated it by an example.
Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.
We are now in a position to take a farther step. The various expressions criticised by Swift and Beattie and Landor constitute but a pitiful handful of the number that have from time to time been denounced—often too by men of ability—as barbarisms and corruptions. Yet nearly all of them are now employed unhesitatingly—ordinarily too in complete ignorance of their once scandalous reputation—by those who are engaged in pointing out the present perils of the same sort which threaten the speech. Indeed, no more curious chapter in the history of our tongue could be furnished than one giving a complete account of the words in common use to which on their first appearance exception has been taken, ranging all the way from mere disapproval to severest condemnation. In the list, it may be added, can be found the now somewhat noted adjective strenuous. There can be no question as to the fact that during its history the language has absorbed very many locutions and constructions which, according to the purists of the past, were destined if adopted to prove its bane. There is not, however, any evidence that its health has suffered the slightest in consequence. This condition of things awakens the hope, and indeed conveys the assurance, that all the alarm about the language is based upon utter misconception of what the real agencies are which impair the efficiency and purity of speech.
This involves the comprehension of two points. The first is that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a language becoming corrupt. It is an instrument which will be just what those who use it choose to make it. The words that constitute it have no real significance of their own. It is the meaning which men put into them that gives them all the efficacy they possess. Language does nothing more than reflect the character and the characteristics of those who speak it. It mirrors their thoughts and feelings, their passions and prejudices, their hopes and aspirations, their aims, whether high or low. In the mouth of the bombastic it will be inflated; in the mouth of the illiterate it will be full of vulgarisms; in the mouth of the precise it will be formal and pedantic. If therefore those who employ it as the medium of conveying their ideas lose all sense of what is vigorous in action and of what is earnest in belief, all appreciation of what is pure in taste and of what is lofty in conduct, if, in fine, they become intellectually coarse and morally corrupt, the speech they use may be relied upon to share in their degradation. Never was there a more ridiculous reversal of the actual order of events than that contained in Landor's assertion that "no nation hath long survived the decrepitude of its language."
This is the first point. The second one is that the history of language is the history of corruptions—using that term in the sense in which it is constantly employed by those who are stigmatizing by it the new words and phrases and constructions to which they take exception. Every one of us to-day is employing expressions which either outrage the rules of strict grammar, or disregard the principles of analogy, or belong by their origin to what we now deem the worst sort of vulgarisms. These so-called corruptions are found everywhere in the vocabulary, and in nearly all the parts of speech. Words are spelled and pronounced in utter defiance of their derivation, letters have been added to them as a result of slovenly pronunciation. On
