S. P. E

Tract No. III

A FEW PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS

By Logan Pearsall Smith

MDCCCCXX

EDITORIAL
CO-OPERATION OF MEMBERS, ETC.
REPORT TO EASTER, 1920

A FEW PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS

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 ‘role’ is now written ‘rôle’*; ‘debris’, ‘débris’; ‘detour’, ‘détour’; ‘depot’, ‘dépôt’; and the old words long established in our language, ‘levee’, ‘naivety’, now appear as ‘levée’, and ‘naïveté’. The next step is to italicize these words, thus treating them as complete aliens, and thus we often see rôle, dépôt, &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 mêlée), nonchalance, provenance, renconter, &c. On the other hand, it is satisfactory to note that ‘employee’ appears to be taking the place of ‘employé’.

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 ideæ, 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 chimeræ have been recently noted in the writings of authors of repute.

Some of these words are no doubt exceptions.