tools of his trade than Professor Harry Thurston Peck in his incisive
discussion of ‘What is Good English?’ He begins by noting that “the
English language, as a whole, is the richest of all modern tongues,
and it is not to be bounded by the comparatively narrow limits of
its literature. There exists, as well, the easy, fluent usage of
conversation, and there is also the strong, simple, homely speech of
the common people, rooted in plain Saxon, smacking of the soil, and
having a sturdy power about it that is unsurpassable for downright
force and blunt directness.” And Professor Peck, having pointed out
how an artist in words is free to avail himself of the term he needs
from books or from life, declares that “the writer of the best English
is he whose language responds exactly to his mood and thought, now
thundering and surging with the majestic words whose immediate ancestry
is Roman, now rippling and singing with the smooth harmonies of later
speech, now forging ahead with the irresistible energy of the Saxon,
and now laughing and wantoning in the easy lightness of our modern
phrase.”
(1897-99)
VII
THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WORDS
When Taine was praising that earliest of analytical novels, the
‘Princess of Cleves,’ he noted the simplicity of Madame de Lafayette’s
style. “Half of the words we use are unknown to Madame de Lafayette,”
he declared. “She is like the painters of old, who could make every
shade with only five or six colors.” And he asserts that “there is no
easier reading” than this story of Madame de Lafayette’s; “a child
could understand without effort all her expressions and all her
phrases.... Nowadays every writer is a pedant, and every style is
obscure. All of us have read three or four centuries, and three or four
literatures. Philosophy, science, art, criticism have weighted us with
their discoveries and their jargons.”
This is true enough, no doubt; and one of the strange phenomenons of
the nineteenth century was the sudden and enormous swelling of our
vocabularies. Perhaps the distention of the dictionary is even more
obvious in English than in French, for there are now three times as
many human beings using the language of Shakspere as there are now
using the language of Molière; and while the speakers of French are
compacted in one country and take their tone from its capital, the
speakers of English are scattered in the four quarters of the earth,
and they use each man his own speech in his own fashion. From the wider
variety of interests among those who speak English, our language is
perforce more hospitable to foreign words than French needs to be,
since it is used rather by a conservative people who prefer to stay at
home.
Perhaps the French are at times even too inhospitable to the foreign
phrase. A friend of mine who came to the reading of M. Paul Bourget’s
‘Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine,’ fresh from the perusal of
the German philosophers, told me that he was pained by M. Bourget’s
vain effort to express the thoughts the French author had absorbed
from the Germans. It seemed as tho M. Bourget were struggling for
speech, and could not say what was in his mind for lack of words in
his native tongue capable of conveying his meaning. Of course it
must be remembered that German philosophy is vague and fluctuating,
and that the central thought is often obscured by a penumbra, while
French is the most precise of languages. Those who are proud of it
have declared that what is not clear is not French. When Hegel was
asked by a traveler from Paris for a succinct statement of his system
of philosophy, he smiled and answered that it could not be explained
summarily--“especially in French!”
The English language extends a warmer welcome to the foreign term, and
also exercises more freely its right to make a word for itself whenever
one is needed. The manufactured article is not always satisfactory,
but if it gets into general use, no further evidence is required that
it was made to supply a genuine want. _Scientist_, for example, is an
ugly word (altho an invention of Whewell’s), and yet it was needed. How
necessary it was can be seen by any reader of the late F. W. H. Myers’s
essay on ‘Science and a Future Life,’ who notes that Myers refused
resolutely to use it, altho it conveys exactly the meaning the author
wanted, and that the British writer preferred to employ instead the
French _savant_, which does not--etymologically at least--contain his
full intention. Myers’s fastidiousness did not, however, prevent his
using _creationist_ as an adjective, and also _bonism_ as a substitute
for _optimism_, “with no greater barbarism in the form of the word and
more accuracy in the meaning.”
Just as Myers used _savant_ so Ruskin was willing to arrest the
rhythm of a fine passage by the obtrusion of two French words: “A
well-educated gentleman may not know many languages; may not be able
to speak any but his own; may have read very few books. But whatever
language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces,
he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of
words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood at a glance
from words of modern _canaille_; remembers all their ancestry, their
intermarriages, distantest relationships, and the extent to which they
were admitted, and offices they hold among the national _noblesse_ of
words, at any time and in any country.” There seems to be little or
no excuse for the employment here of _noblesse_=nobility; and as for
_canaille_, perhaps Ruskin held that to be a French word on the way
to become an English word--a naturalization not likely to take place
without a marked modification of the original pronunciation, which is
difficult for the English mouth.
Every one who loves good English cannot but have a healthy hatred
for the style of a writer who insists on bespattering his pages with
alien words and foreign phrases; and yet we are more tolerant, I
think, toward a term taken from one of the dead languages than toward
one derived from any of the living tongues. Probably the bishop who
liked now and then to cite a Hebrew sentence was oversanguine in his
explanation that “everybody knows a little Hebrew.” It is said that
even a Latin quotation is now no longer certain to be recognized in
the British House of Commons; and yet it was a British statesman who
declared that, altho there was no necessity for a gentleman to know
Latin, he ought at least to have forgotten it.
For a bishop to quote Hebrew is now pedantic, no doubt, and even for
the inferior clergy to quote Latin. It is pedantic, but it is not
indecorous; whereas a French quotation in the pulpit, or even the
use of a single French word, like _savant_, for example, would seem
to most of us almost a breach of the proprieties. It would strike
us, perhaps, not merely as a social solecism, but somehow as morally
reprehensible. A preacher who habitually cited French phrases would
be in danger of the council. To picture Jonathan Edwards as using the
language of Voltaire is impossible. That a French quotation should
seem more incongruous in the course of a religious argument than a
Latin, a Greek, or a Hebrew quotation, is perhaps to be ascribed to the
fact that many of us hold the Parisians to be a more frivolous people
than the Romans, the Athenians, or the Israelites; and as the essay
of Mr. Myers was a religious argument, this may be one reason why his
employment of _savant_ was unfortunate.
Another reason is suggested by Professor Dowden’s shrewd remark that “a
word, like a comet, has a tail as well as a head.” An adroit craftsman
in letters is careful always that the connotations of the terms he
chooses shall be in accord with the tone of his thesis. It may be
disputed whether _savant_ denotes the same thing as _scientist_, but
it can hardly be denied that the connotations of the two words are
wholly different. For my own part, some lingering memory of Abbott’s
‘Napoleon,’ absorbed in boyhood, links the wise men of France with the
donkeys of Egypt, because whenever the Mameluke cavalry threatened the
French squares the cry went up, “Asses and _savants_ to the center!”
After all, it is perhaps rather a question whether or not _savant_ is
now an English noun. There are many French words knocking at the door
of the English language and asking for admission. Is _littoral_ for
_shore_ now an English noun? Is _blond_ an English adjective meaning
_light-haired_ and opposed to _brunette_? Is _brunette_ itself really
Anglicized? (I ask this in spite of the fact that a friend of mine once
read in a country newspaper a description of a _brunette_ horse.) Has
_inedited_ for _unpublished_ won its way into our language finally?
Lowell gave it his warrant, at least by using it in his ‘Letters’; but
I confess that it has always struck me as liable to confusion with
_unedited_.
Foreign words must always be allowed to land on our coasts without a
passport; yet if any of them linger long enough to warrant a belief
that they may take out their papers sooner or later, we must decide
at last whether or not they are likely to be desirable residents of
our dictionary; and if we determine to naturalize them, we may fairly
enough insist on their renouncing their foreign allegiance. They must
cast in their lot with us absolutely, and be bound by our laws only.
The French _chaperon_, for example, has asked for admission to our
vocabulary, and the application has been granted, so that we have
now no hesitation in recording that Daisy Miller was _chaperoned_ by
Becky Sharp at the last ball given by the Marquis of Steyne; and we
have even changed the spelling of the noun to correspond better with
our Anglicized pronunciation, thus _chaperone_. Thus _technique_ has
changed its name to _technic_, and is made welcome; so early as 1867
Matthew Arnold used _technic_ in his ‘Study of Celtic Literature,’ but
even now his fellow-islanders are slow in following his example. Thus
_employé_ is accepted in the properly Anglicized form of _employee_.
Thus the useful _clôture_ undergoes a sea-change and becomes the
English _closure_. And why not _cotery_ also? I note that in his
‘Studies in Literature,’ published in 1877, Professor Dowden put
_technique_ into italics as tho it was still a foreign word, while he
left _coterie_ in ordinary type as tho it had been adopted into English.
So _toilette_ has been abbreviated to _toilet_; at least, I should
have said so without any hesitation if I had not recently seen the
foreign spelling reappearing repeatedly in the pages of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s ‘Amateur Emigrant’--and this in the complete Edinburgh
edition prepared by Mr. Sidney Colvin. To find a Gallic spelling in the
British prose of Stevenson is a surprise, especially since the author
of the ‘Dynamiter’ is on record as a contemner of another orthographic
Gallicism. In a foot-note to ‘More New Arabian Nights’ Stevenson
declares that “any writard who writes _dynamitard_ shall find in me a
never-resting fightard.”
I should like to think that the naturalized _literator_ was supplanting
the alien _littérateur_, but I cannot claim confidence as to the
result. _Literator_ is a good English word: I have found it in the
careful pages of Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’; and I make no doubt
that it can prove a much older pedigree than that. It seems to me a
better word by far than _literarian_, which the late Fitzedward Hall
manufactured for his own use “some time in the fifties,” and which he
defended against a British critic who denounced it as “atrocious.”
Hall, praising the word of his own making, declared that “to
_literatus_ or _literator_, for _literary person_ or a longer phrase of
equivalent import, there are obvious objections.” Nobody, to the best
of my belief, ever attempted to use in English the Latin _literatus_,
altho its plural Poe made us familiar with by his series of papers on
the ‘Literati of America.’ Since Poe’s death the word has ceased to be
current, altho it was not uncommon in his day.
Perhaps one of the obvious objections to _literatus_ is that if it be
treated as an English word the plural it forms is not pleasant to the
ear--_literatuses_. Here, indeed, is a moot point: How does a foreign
word make its plural in English? Some years ago Mr. C. F. Thwing,
writing in _Harper’s Bazar_ on the college education of young women,
spoke of _foci_. Mr. Churton Collins, preparing a book about the study
of English literature in the British universities, expressed his desire
“to raise Greek, now gradually falling out of our _curricula_ and
degenerating into the cachet and shibboleth of cliques of pedants, to
its proper place in education.” Here we see Mr. Thwing and Mr. Collins
treating _focus_ and _curriculum_ as words not yet assimilated by our
language, and therefore required to assume the Latin plural.
Does not this suggest a certain lack of taste on the part of these
writers? If _focus_ and _curriculum_ are not good English words, what
need is there to employ them when you are using the English language
to convey your thoughts? There are occasions, of course, where the
employment of a foreign term is justifiable, but they must always
be very rare. The imported word which we really require we had best
take to ourselves, incorporating it in the language, treating it
thereafter absolutely as an English word, and giving it the regular
English plural. If the word we use is so foreign that we should print
it in italics, then of course the plural should be formed according
to the rules of the foreign language from which it has been borrowed;
but if it has become so acclimated in our tongue that we should not
think of underlining it, then surely it is English enough to take an
English plural. If _cherub_ is now English, its plural is the English
_cherubs_, and not the Hebrew _cherubim_. If _criterion_ is now
English, its plural is the English _criterions_, and not the Greek
_criteria_. If _formula_ is now English, its plural is the English
_formulas_, and not the Latin _formulæ_. If _bureau_ is now English,
its plural is the English _bureaus_, and not the French _bureaux_.
What is the proper plural in English of _cactus_? of _vortex_? of
_antithesis_? of _phenomenon_? In a volume on the ‘Augustan Age,’ in
Professor George Saintsbury’s ‘Periods of European Literature,’ we find
_lexica_--a masterpiece of petty pedantry and of pedantic pettiness.
As Landor made himself say in his dialog with Archdeacon Hare, “There
is an affectation of scholarship in compilers of spelling-books, and
in the authors they follow for examples, when they bring forward
_phenomena_ and the like. They might as well bring forward _mysteria_.
We have no right to tear Greek and Latin declensions out of their
grammars: we need no _vortices_ when we have _vortexes_ before us; and
while we have _memorandums_, _factotums_, and _ultimatums_, let our
shepherd dogs bring back to us by the ear such as have wandered from
the flock.”
Landor’s own scholarship was too keen and his taste was too fine for
him not to abhor such affectation. He held that Greek and Latin words
had no business in an English sentence unless they had been frankly
acclimated in the English language, and that one of the conditions of
this acclimatizing was the shedding of their original plurals. And
that this is also the common-sense view of most users of English is
obvious enough. Nobody now ventures to write _factota_ or _ultimata_;
and even _memoranda_ seems to be vanishing. But _phenomena_ and _data_
still survive; and so do _errata_ and _candelabra_. Whatever may be
the fate of _phenomena_, that of the three other words may perhaps be
like unto the fate of _opera_--which is also a Latin plural and which
has become an English singular. We speak unhesitatingly of the _operas_
of Rossini; are we going, in time, to speak unhesitatingly of the
_candelabras_ of Cellini? In his vigorous article on the orthography
of the French language--which is still almost as chaotic and illogical
as the orthography of the English language--Sainte-Beuve noted as a
singular peculiarity the fact that _errata_ had got itself recognized
as a French singular, but that it did not yet take the French plural;
thus we see _un errata_ and _des errata_.
It is true also that when we take over a term from another language
we ought to be sure that it really exists in the other language. For
lack of observance of this caution we find ourselves now in possession
of phrases like _nom de plume_ and _déshabille_, of which the French
never heard. And even when we have assured ourselves of the existence
of the word in the foreign language, it behooves us then to assure
ourselves also of its exact meaning before we take it for our own. In
his interesting and instructive book about ‘English Prose,’ Professor
Earle reminds us that the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe is not yet an
extinct species; and he adds in a note that “the word _levée_ seems to
be another genuine instance of the same insular dialect,” since it is
not French of any date, but an English improvement upon the verb (or
substantive) _lever_, “getting up in the morning.”
An example even more extraordinary than any of these, I think, will
occur to those of us who are in the habit of glancing through the
theatrical announcements of the American newspapers. This is the taking
of the French word _vaudeville_ to designate what was once known
as a “variety show” and what is now more often called a “specialty
entertainment.” For any such interpretation of _vaudeville_ there is no
warrant whatever in French. Originally the “vaudeville” was a satiric
ballad, bristling with hits at the times, and therefore closely akin to
the “topical song” of to-day; and it is at this stage of its evolution
that Boileau asserted that
Le Français, né malin, créa le vaudeville.
In time there came to be spoken words accompanying those sung, and
thus the “vaudeville” expanded slowly into a little comic play in
which there were one or more songs. Of late the Parisian “vaudeville”
has been not unlike the London “musical farce.” At no stage of its
career had the “vaudeville” anything to do with the “variety show”;
and yet to the average American to-day the two words seem synonymous.
There was even organized in New York, in the fall of 1892, a series of
subscription suppers during which “specialty entertainments” were to
be given; and in spite of the fact that the organizers were presumably
persons who had traveled, they called their society the “Vaudeville
Club,” altho no real “vaudeville” was ever presented before the members
during its brief and inglorious career. Of course explanation and
protest are now equally futile. The meaning of the word is forever
warped beyond correction; and for the future here in America a
“vaudeville performance” is a “variety show,” no matter what it may be
or may have been in France. When the people as a whole accept a word as
having a certain meaning, that is and must be the meaning of the word
thereafter; and there is no use in kicking against the pricks.
The fate in English of another French term is even now trembling in
the balance. This is the word _née_. The French have found a way out
of the difficulty of indicating easily the maiden name of a married
woman; they write unhesitatingly about Madame Machin, _née_ Chose; and
the Germans have a like idiom. But instead of taking a hint from the
French and the Germans, and thus of speaking about Mrs. Brown, _born_
Gray, as they do, not a few English writers have simply borrowed the
actual French word, and so we read about Mrs. Black, _née_ White. As
usual, this borrowing is dangerous; and the temptation seems to be
irresistible to destroy the exact meaning of _née_ by using it in the
sense of “formerly.” Thus in the ‘Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-88,’
collected and arranged by Mr. George W. E. Russell, the editor supplies
in foot-notes information about the persons whose names appear in the
correspondence. In one of these annotations we read that the wife of
Sir Anthony de Rothschild was “_née_ Louisa Montefiore” (i. 165),
and in another that the Hon. Mrs. Eliot Yorke was “_née_ Annie de
Rothschild” (ii. 160). Now, neither of these ladies was _born_ with
a given name as well as a family name. It is obvious that the editor
has chosen arbitrarily to wrench the meaning of _née_ to suit his own
convenience, a proceeding of which I venture to think that Matthew
Arnold himself would certainly have disapproved. In fact, I doubt
if Mr. Russell is not here guilty of an absurdity almost as obvious
as that charged against a wealthy western lady now residing at the
capital of the United States, who is said to have written her name on
the register of a New York hotel thus: “Mrs. Blank, Washington, _née_
Chicago.”
Why is it that the wandering stars of the theatrical firmament are
wont to display themselves in a _répertoire_ when it would be so
much easier for them to make use of a _repertory_? And why does the
teacher of young and ambitious singers insist on calling his school
a _conservatoire_ when it would assert its rank just as well if it
was known as a _conservatory_? What strange freak of chance has led
so many of the women who have made themselves masters of the technic
of the piano to announce themselves as _pianistes_ in the vain belief
that _pianiste_ is the feminine of _pianist_? How comes it that a man
capable of composing so scholarly a book as the ‘Greek Drama’ of Mr.
Lionel D. Barnett really is should be guilty of saying that certain
declamations in the later theater “were adapted to the style of popular
_artistes_”? And why does Mr. Andrew Lang (in his ‘Angling Sketches’)
write about the _asphalte_, when the obvious English is either
_asphalt_ or _asphaltum_?
And yet Mr. Lang, himself convicted of this dereliction, has no
hesitation in objecting to a “delightful grammatical form which closes
a scene in one of the new rag-bag journals. The author gets his
characters off the stage with the announcement: ‘They exit.’ He seems
to think that _exit_ is a verb. I _exit_, he _exits_, they _exit_. It
would be interesting to learn how he translates _exeunt omnes_. One is
accustomed to ‘a _penetralia_’ from young lions, and to ‘a _strata_,’
but ‘they _exit_’ is original.”
But the verb _to exit_ is not original with the writer in the new
rag-bag journal. It has been current in England for three quarters of a
century at least, and it can be found in the pages of that vigorously
written pair of volumes, Mrs. Trollope’s ‘Domestic Manners of the
Americans’ (published in 1831), in the picturesque passage in which she
describes how the American women, left alone, “all console themselves
together for whatever they may have suffered in keeping awake by
taking more tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe-cake, johnny-cake,
waffle-cake and dodger-cake, pickled peaches and preserved cucumbers,
ham, turkey, hung-beef, apple-sauce, and pickled oysters, than ever
were prepared in any other country of the known world. After this
massive meal is over, they return to the drawing-room, and it always
appeared to me that they remained together as long as they could bear
it, and then they rise _en masse_, cloak, bonnet, shawl, and exit.”
The verb _to exit_, with the full conjugation Mr. Lang thought so
strange, has long been common among theatrical folk. The stage-manager
will tell the leading lady “You _exit_ here, and she _exits_ up left.”
The theatrical folk, who probably first brought the verb into use, did
not borrow it from the Latin, as Mr. Lang seems to suppose; they simply
made a verb of the existing English noun _exit_, meaning a way out. We
old New-Yorkers who can recall the time when Barnum’s Museum stood at
the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, remember also the signs which
used to declare
THIS WAY
TO THE
GRAND EXIT
and we have not forgotten the facile anecdote of the countryman who
went wonderingly to discover what manner of strange beast the “exit”
might be, and who unexpectedly found himself in the street outside.
The unfortunate remark of Mr. Lang was due to his happening not to
recall the fact that _exit_ had become, first, an English noun, and,
second, an English verb. When once it was Anglicized, it had all the
rights of a native; it was a citizen of no mean country. The principle
which it is well to keep in mind in any consideration of the position
in English of terms once foreign is that no word can serve two masters.
The English language is ever ravenous and voracious; its appetite is
insatiable. It is forever taking over words from strange tongues, dead
and alive. These words are but borrowed at first, and must needs
conform to all the grammatical peculiarities of their native speech.
But some of them are sooner or later firmly incorporated into English;
and thereafter they must cease to obey any laws but those of the
language into which they have been adopted. Either a word is English or
it is not; and a decision on this point is rarely difficult.
(1895-1900)
VIII
THE FUNCTION OF SLANG