The principles of the Society for Pure English were stated in general terms in its preliminary pamphlet; since, however, many questions have been asked about the application of these principles, a few suggestions about special points may be found useful.  The Society does not attempt to dictate to its members; it does, however, put forward its suggestions as worthy of serious consideration; and, since they have received the approval of the best scientific judgement, it is hoped that they will be generally acceptable.

Some of them, when blankly stated, may seem trivial and unimportant; but we neither expect nor desire to make any sudden and revolutionary changes.  A language is an established means of communication, sanctioned by the general consent, and cannot be transformed at will.  Language is, however, of itself always changing, and if there is hesitation between current usages, then choice becomes possible, and individuals may intervene with good effect; for only by their preferences can the points in dispute be finally settled.  It is important, therefore, that these preferences should be guided by right knowledge, and it is this right knowledge which the Society makes it its aim to provide.  While, therefore, any particular ruling may seem unimportant, the principle on which that ruling is based is not so; and its application in any special case will help to give it authority and force.  The effect of even a small number of successful interventions will be to confirm right habits of choice, which may then, as new opportunities arise, be applied to further cases.  Among the cases of linguistic usage which are varying and unfixed at the present time, and in which therefore a deliberate choice is possible, the following may be mentioned: 

I. The Naturalization of Foreign Words.

There is no point on which usage is more uncertain and fluctuating than in regard to the words which we are always borrowing from foreign languages.  Expression generally lags behind thought, and we are now more than ever handicapped by the lack of convenient terms to describe the new discoveries, and new ways of thinking and feeling by which our lives are enriched and made interesting.  It has been our national custom in the past to eke out our native resources by borrowing from other languages, especially from French, any words which we found ready to our needs; and until recent times, these words were soon made current and convenient by being assimilated and given English shapes and sounds.  We still borrow as freely as ever; but half the benefit of this borrowing is lost to us, owing to our modern and pedantic attempts to preserve the foreign sounds and shapes of imported words, which make their current use unnecessarily difficult.  Owing to our false taste in this matter many words which have been long naturalized in the language are being now put back into their foreign forms, and our speech is being thus gradually impoverished.  This process of de-assimilation generally begins with the restoration of foreign accents to such words as have them in French; thus ‘rôle’ is now written ’rôle’; ‘debris’, ‘debris’; ‘detour’, ‘detour’; ‘depot’, ‘depot’; and the old words long established in our language, ‘levee’, ‘naivety’, now appear as ‘levee’, and ‘naïveté’.  The next step is to italicize these words, thus treating them as complete aliens, and thus we often see _rôle_, _depot_, &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, fête, flair, mellay (now _melee_), nonchalance, provenance, renconter, &c.  On the other hand, it is satisfactory to note that ‘employee’ appears to be taking the place of ‘employe’.

The printing in italics and the restoration of foreign accents is accompanied by awkward attempts to revert to the foreign pronunciation of these words, which of course much lessens their usefulness in conversation.  Sometimes this, as in nuance, or timbre practically deprives us of a word which most of us are unable to pronounce correctly; sometimes it is merely absurd, as in ‘envelope’, where most people try to give a foreign sound to a word which no one regards as an alien, and which has been anglicized in spelling for nearly two hundred years.

Members of our Society will, we hope, do what is in their power to stop this process of impoverishment, by writing and pronouncing as English such words as have already been naturalized, and when a new borrowing appears in two forms they will give their preference to the one which is most English.  There are some who may even help to enrich the language by a bolder conquest of useful terms, and although they may suffer ridicule, they will suffer it in a good cause, and will only be sharing the short-lived denunciation which former innovators incurred when they borrowed so many concise and useful terms from France and Italy to enlarge and adorn our English speech.  If we are to use foreign words (and, if we have no equivalents, we must use them) it is certainly much better that they should be incorporated in our language, and made available for common use.  Words like ‘garage’ and ‘nuance’ and ‘naivety’ had much better be pronounced and written as English words, and there are others, like ‘bouleverse’ and ‘bouleversement’, whose partial borrowing might well be made complete; and a useful word like malaise could with advantage reassume the old form ‘malease’ which it once possessed.

II. Alien Plurals.

The useless and pedantic process of de-assimilation takes other forms, one of the most common of which is the restoring their foreign plural forms to words borrowed from Greek, Latin, and Italian.  No common noun is genuinely assimilated into our language and made available for the use of the whole community until it has an English plural, and thousands of indispensable words have been thus incorporated.  We no longer write of ideae, chori, asyla, musea, sphinges, specimina for ideas, choruses, asylums, museums, sphinxes, specimens, and the notion of returning to such plurals would seem barbarous and absurd.  And yet this very process is now going on, and threatens us with deplorable results. Sanatoria, memoranda, gymnasia are now replacing sanatorium, memorandums, and gymnasiums; automata, formulae, and lacunae are taking the place of automatons, formulas, and lacunas; indices and apices of indexes and apexes, miasmata of miasmas or miasms; and even forms like lexica, rhododendra, and chimerae have been recently noted in the writings of authors of repute.

Some of these words are no doubt exceptions. Memoranda is preferable when used collectively, but the English plural is better in such a phrase as ‘two different memorandums’. Automata, too, is sometimes collective; and lacuna always carries the suggestion of its classical meaning, which makes half the meaning of the word.  So again, when the classical form is a scientific term, it is convenient and well to preserve its differentiation, e.g. formulae in science, or foci and indices in mathematics; but such uses create exceptions, and these should be recognized as exceptions, to a general rule that wherever there is choice then the English form is to be preferred:  we should, for instance, say bandits and not banditti.

III. ae and oe.

The use of ae and oe in English words of classical origin was a pedantic innovation of the sixteenth century:  in most words of common use ae and oe have been replaced by the simple e, and we no longer write praevious, aeternal, aera, aemulate, c[oe]lestial, [oe]conomy, &c.  Since, however, those forms have a learned appearance, they are being now restored in many words which had been freed from them; medieval is commonly written mediaeval; primaeval and co-aeval are beginning to make their appearance; peony is commonly written paeony, and the forms saecular, chimaera, hyaena and praeternatural have recently been noted.  As this is more than a mere change in orthography, being in fact a part of the process of de-assimilation, members of our Society would do well to avoid the use of the archaic forms in all words which have become thoroughly English, and which are used without thought of their etymology.  The matter is not so simple with regard to words of Latin or Greek derivation which are only understood by most people through their etymology; and for these it may be well to keep their etymologically transparent spelling, as aetiology, [oe]strus, &c.  Whether learned words of this kind, and classical names such as Cæsar, AEschylus, &c., should be spelt with vowels ligatured or divided (Cæsar, Aeschylus), is a point about which present usage varies; and that usage does not always represent the taste of the writers who employ it.  Mr. Horace Hart, in his Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford, ruled that the combinations ae and oe should each be printed as two letters in Latin and Greek words and in English words of classical derivation, but this last injunction is plainly deduced from the practice of editors of Latin texts, and is an arbitrary rule in the interest of uniformity:  it has the sanction and influence of the Clarendon Press, but is not universally accepted.  Thus Dr. Henry Bradley writes, ’This question does not seem to me to be settled by the mere fact that all recent classical editors reject the ligatures, just as most of them reject other aids to pronunciation which the ancients had not, such as j, v, for consonantal i, u.  Many printers have conformed the spelling of English words in this respect to the practice of editors of Latin texts.  I confess my own preference is for adhering to the English tradition of the ligature, not only in English words, but even in Latin or Greek names quoted in an English context.  If we write ae, oe in Philae, Adelphoe, we need the diaeresis in Aglaë, Pholoe, and a name like Aeaea looks very funny in an English context.  The editors of Latin texts are perfectly right in discarding the ligatures; but so they are also in writing Iuuenalis; Latin is one thing and English is another.’

IV. Dying Words.

Our language is always suffering another kind of impoverishment which is somewhat mysterious in its causes and perhaps impossible to prevent.  This 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 be 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 give them a kind of shimmer which makes them seem too fine for common occasions.  But once a word falls out of colloquial speech its life is threatened; it may linger on in literature, but its radiance, at first perhaps brighter, will gradually diminish, and it must sooner or later fade away, or live only as a conscious archaism.  The fate of many beautiful old words like teen and dole and meed has thus been decided; they are now practically lost to the language, and can probably never be restored to common use. It is, however, an interesting question, and one worthy of the consideration of our members, whether it may be possible, at its beginning, to stop this process of decay; whether a word at the moment when it begins to seem too poetical, might not perhaps be reclaimed for common speech by timely and not inappropriate usage, and thus saved, before it is too late, from the blight of over-expressiveness which will otherwise kill it in the end.

Meed is likewise lost by homophony with 1 mead = meadow and 2 mead = metheglin:  and it is a very serious loss.  N is almost extinct except among farmers and hay merchants, but the absurd ambiguity of N is effective.

Teen, the writer’s third example, has shown recent signs of renewed vitality in literature. [Ed.]]

The usage in regard to these tainted words varies a good deal, though probably not so much as people generally think:  some of them, like delve and dwell, still linger on in metaphors; and people will still speak of delving into their minds, and dwelling in thought, who would never think of delving in the garden, or dwelling in England; and we will call people swine or hounds, although we cannot use these words for the animals they more properly designate.  We can speak of a swift punishment, but not a swift bird, or airplane, or steamer, and we shun a thought, but not a bore; and many similar instances could be given.  Perhaps words of this kind cannot be saved from the unhappy doom which threatens them.  It is not impossible, on the other hand, that, by a slight conscious effort, some of these words might still be saved; and there may be, among our members, persons of sufficient courage to suffer, in a pious cause, the imputation of preciosity and affectation which such attempts involve.  To the consideration of such persons we could recommend words like maid, maiden, damsel, weep, bide, sojourn, seek, heinous, swift, chide, and the many other excellent and expressive old words which are now falling into colloquial disuse.

There is one curious means by which the life of these words may be lengthened and by which, possibly, they may regain a current and colloquial use.  They can be still used humorously and as it were in quotation marks; words like pelf, maiden, lad, damsel, and many others are sometimes used in this way, which at any rate keeps them from falling into the limbo of silence.  Whether any of them have by this means renewed their life would be an interesting subject of inquiry; it is said that at Eton the good old word usher, used first only for humorous effect, has now found its way back into the common and colloquial speech of the school.

V. Dialectal and Popular Words.

Whether words may, by conscious effort, be preserved in colloquial usage is an unsolved question, though perhaps our Society may help to solve it; there is, however, another and more certain benefit which its members, or at any rate such of them as are writers, may confer upon the language.  There are many excellent words spoken in uneducated speech and dialect all about us, which would be valuable additions to our standard vocabulary if they could be given currency in it.  Many of these are dying words like bide, dight, blithe, malison, vengeance, and since these are still spoken in other classes, it might be less difficult to restore them to educated speech.  Others are old words like thole and nesh and lew and mense and foison and fash and douce, which have never been accepted into the standard English, or have long since vanished from it, in spite of their excellence and ancient history, and in spite of the fact that they have long been in current use in various districts.  Others are new formations, coined in the ever-active mint of uneducated speech, and many of these, coming as they do full of freshness and vigour out of the vivid popular imagination-words like harum-scarum, gallivant, cantankerous, and pernickety-or useful monosyllables and penny pieces of popular speech like blight and nag and fun-have already found their way into standard English.  But there are many others which might with advantage be given a larger currency.  This process of dialectal regeneration, as it is called, has been greatly aided in the past by men of letters, who have given a literary standing to the useful and picturesque vocabulary of their unlettered neighbours, and thus helped to reinforce with vivid terms our somewhat abstract and faded standard speech.  We owe, for instance, words like lilt and outcome to Carlyle; croon, eerie, gloaming have become familiar to us from Burns’s poems, and Sir Walter Scott added a large number of vivid local terms both to our written and our spoken language.  In the great enrichment of the vocabulary of the romantic movement by means of words like murk, gloaming, glamour, gruesome, eerie, eldritch, uncanny, warlock, wraith-all of which were dialect or local words, we find a good example of the expressive power of dialect speech, and see how a standard language can be enriched by the use of popular sources.  All members of our Society can help this process by collecting words from popular speech which are in their opinion worthy of a larger currency; they can use them themselves and call the attention of their friends to them, and if they are writers, they may be able, like the writers of the past, to give them a literary standing.  If their suggestions are not accepted, no harm is done; while, if they make a happy hit and bring to public notice a popular term or idiom which the language needs and accepts, they have performed a service to our speech of no small importance.

L.P.S.