ever was slang, or had any offensive associations. In this manner many words have made their way into the literary language. The Elizabethan drama, for instance, has preserved and propagated many such expressions, for in a play every speech is, in a manner, a quotation.

The slang of the United States differs in many particulars from that of Great Britain, and India and Australia show a multitude of peculiar coinages that differ from both. Yet the lively intercourse of trade and travel, the newspapers, the theatrical tour,' and the dialect sketch' have kept the different English-speaking peoples tolerably familiar with one another's latest coinages. For universal hospitality is the guiding principle of slang.

The bewildering variety of our language, and in particular the lawless and fantastic coinages which we have just been studying, may well suggest the question, 'Is there any criterion of good English? What principle of selection is one to follow who wishes to speak and write hist mother tongue with purity and without affectation?' It is the business of grammar, rhetoric, and lexicography to answer this question.

As soon as a literary language is thoroughly developed, it becomes a subject of earnest study. Literature, like painting or music, has a technique, and it is the province of critics and rhetoricians to describe this technique, and to reduce its principles and its details to a form in which they may be conveniently acquired. Such principles are inferred, in the main, from the works of men of genius, but they soon become, so far as they are correct, fundamental conventions of expression, which must be followed by everybody who would make himself immediately intelligible. So long as a language is alive, it is, however, constantly changing, so that the grammar and rhetoric of

It is

has

a living language can never be absolutely fixed. only when the language has ceased to be spoken, become, as we say, a dead language, — that fixed rules can be framed which every one who undertakes to write it must observe. The very statement that a language is dead implies that henceforward no individual or body of persons has power to change it in any particular.

Now all rules of grammar and rhetoric must be based on usage, for there is no other standard in linguistic matters; and in order that they may be capable of intelligible statement, the usage from which they are derived must be limited in time. Yet at the very moment when the rules are committed to writing, usage is shifting; for language never stands still until it ceases to move altogether. Hence the codified principles of literary expression will always be slightly behind the actual usage of one's contemporaries. In other words, we are here dealing with conservative forces which tend to retard the naturally rapid changes of speech. Conservatism always implies distrust of that which is new, however good it may be; and teaching implies not only docility on the part of the learner, but some dogmatism on the part of the instructor. Unless a man thinks he knows something, it is useless for him to teach it, just as it is idle for a boy to go to school who thinks he has nothing to learn. When dogmatic conservatism in language goes farther than is reasonable, we call it purism,' and stigmatize its disciples as purists.' Everybody, however, who speaks or writes with any care must be a purist in some degree, for we all have our pet aversions in matters of vocabulary and construction. Both the purist and the innovator are necessary factors in the development of a cultivated tongue. Without the purist our language would change with extravagant

rapidity; our vocabulary, for example, would give daily hospitality to hosts of new words which have nothing but whim to justify them, and which would be soon superseded by equally lawless formations. Without the innovator our language would come to a dead stop, so far as literary expression is concerned, and in a short time the speech of books would have lagged so far behind the speech of conversation that the two would form different dialects. The history of any literary language is, then, a record of successive compromises and readjustments between the old and the new.

A novel word or phrase which has not yet secured unquestioned admission into the standard dialect is called a neologism, which is simply a Greek term for a new form of speech.' There is no test but time. If a neologism seems to most speakers to supply a lack in the language, or to be peculiarly fit for the expression of some special idea, it is sure to maintain itself against the protests of the literary and scholastic guild.

On the other hand, nothing can force a new term into any language against the inclination of a large majority of those who speak it. The field of language is strewn with the dry bones of adventurous words which once started out with the paternal blessing to make their fortune, but which have met with an untimely end, and serve only, when collected, to fill the shelves of a lexicographical museum. Some years ago, when the annexation of a large tract of territory to the United States was discussed, Charles Sumner endeavored to revive the obsolete word annexion in place of this somewhat cumbrous term. Sumner's position as an orator, a man of culture, and a statesman seemed to insure the favorable reception of this convenient form, but all these influences were of no avail.

For a year or two annexion was seen in the newspapers occasionally, but to most of the present generation it is as unknown as the eccentric ink-horn terms of the Elizabethan age.1

See Sumner's speech on the Cession of Russian America (1867), and also that on the Proposed Annexion of the Island of San Domingo, 1870.

CHAPTER VII

THE LITERARY LANGUAGE

THE language which all educated users of English speak and write is in one sense an artificial tongue. It is what is called a literary language' as distinguished from the unstudied speech of peoples whose mother tongue comes to them without the influence of literature or the schools. This literary language' is not confined to cultivated speakers. It is the common property of all but the absolutely illiterate, the regular medium of communication throughout the English-speaking world. Different persons speak and write this standard English with different degrees of correctness and elegance, and there are local and national varieties in idiom and pronunciation which distinguish the English of England from that of America or of Australia. But such differences bear no proportion to the substantial uniformity of English speech. What is the origin of standard or literary English, which most of us take for granted as if it had existed from the beginning? The question is complicated, but the clew is easy to catch and to follow: it consists in the single word 'dialect.'

It is natural for a person whose knowledge of English conforms in the main to the literary or standard type to regard the dialect of Yorkshire or of Dorset as a degraded form of his own speech. Such an impression, however, is quite erroneous. The Yorkshireman's dialect is not a debased form of standard English. On the contrary, standard