Society for Pure English

“ As the French are noted rather for their intelligence than for their imagination, they are the acknowledged masters of prose; and their achievement in poetry is more disputable. As they are governed by the social instinct, their language exhibits the varied refinements of a cultivated society where conversation is held in honour as one of the arts. The English speech, like the English-speaking peoples, is bolder, more energetic, more suggestive, and perhaps less precise. From no language could English borrow with more profit to itself than from French ”

“ The principle which ought to govern can be stated simply. English should be at liberty to help itself freely to every foreign word which seems to fill a want in our own language. It ought to take these words on probation, so to speak, keeping those which prove themselves useful, and casting out those which are idle or rebellious. And then those which are retained ought to become completely English, in pronunciation, in accent, in spelling, and in the formation of their plurals. ”

“ A man of culture is likely to be familiar with one or more foreign languages; and perhaps he may be a little vain of his intimacy with them. He prefers to give the proper French pronunciation to the words which he recognizes as French; and moreover as the possession of culture, or even of education, does not imply any knowledge of the history of English or of the principles which govern its growth, the men of culture are often inclined to pride themselves on this pedantic procedure. ”

“ If the formerly foreign word has been taken over and if it can therefore be utilized without hesitancy, can it be made to form its plural in accord with the customs of English. Here those who seek to make the English language truly English and to keep it truly pure, will meet with sturdy resistance. It will not be easy to persuade the literate, the men of culture, to renounce the x at the end of beaux and bureaux and to spell these plurals 'beaus' and 'bureaus'. ”

“ To balance 'employer' there is 'employee', better by far than employé, which insists on a French pronunciation. Matthew Arnold and Lowell, always apt and exact in their use of their own tongue, were careful to prefer the English 'technic' to the French technique, which is not in harmony with the adjectives 'technical' and polytechnic. So 'clinic' seems at last to have vanquished its French father clinique, as 'fillet' has superseded filet; and now that 'valet' has become a verb it has taken on an English pronunciation. ”

“ Their French pronunciation is out of the question. What can be done? Can anything be done? We may at least look the facts in the face and govern our own individual conduct by the results of this scrutiny. There is no reason why we should not accept what is a fact; and it is a fact that ennui has been adopted. So long ago as 1805 Sidney Smith used it as a verb and said that he had been ennuied. Why not therefore frankly and boldly pronounce it as English—ennwee? Why not forswear French again and pronounce nuance without trying vainly to preserve the Gallic nasality of the second n—newance? ”

“ An otherwise fine passage of Ruskin's has always been spoilt for me by the wilful incursion of two French words, which seem to me to break the continuity of the sentence: '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 ”

“ When we turn from the gas-engine on wings to the gas-engine on wheels, we find a heterogeny of words in use which bear witness to the fact that the French were the first to develop the motor-car, and also to the earlier fact that they had long been renowned for their taste and their skill as coach-builders. ”

“ The stream of immigrants from the French language has been for almost a thousand years larger than that from any other tongue; and even to-day it shows little sign of lessening. Of all the strangers within our gates none are more warmly received than those which come to us from across the Straits of Dover. None are more swiftly able to make themselves at home in our dictionaries and to pass themselves off as English. ”

“ Mark Twain once remarked that 'everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it'. And many people think that we might as well hope to direct the course of the winds as to order the evolution of our speech. Some words have proved intractable. In the course of the past two centuries and a half, scores and even hundreds of French words have domiciled themselves in English without relinquishing their French characteristics. ”

“ So we have the landaulet and limousine to designate different types of body. I think landaulet had already acquired an English pronunciation; at least I infer this because I cannot now recall that I ever heard it fall from the lips of an English-speaking person with its original French pronunciation of the nasal n. And limousine, being without accent and without nasal n can be trusted to take care of itself.
There are other technical terms of the motor-car industry which present more difficult problems. Tonneau is not troublesome, even if its spelling is awkward. ”

“ Encore and mise-en-scène are only two of a dozen or a score of French words not infrequently used in English and misused by being charged with meanings not strictly in accord with French usage. 'Levee' is one; the French say lever. Nom de plume is another; the French say nom de guerre. Musicale also is rarely, if ever, to be found in French, at least I believe it to be the custom in Paris to call an 'evening with music' a soirée musicale. If musicale is too serviceable to demand banishment, why should it not drop the e and become musical? ”

“ We are none of us surprised when we find in our newspaper criticisms artiste, ballet, conservatoire, comédienne, costumier, danseuse, début, dénoûment, diseuse, encore, ingénue, mise-en-scène, perruquier, pianiste, première, répertoire, revue, rôle, tragédienne—the catalogue stretches out to the crack of doom. ”

“ It is not always only the ignorant who are discommoded by a misguided reliance on foreign words as bestowers of elegance; it is often the man of culture, aware of the meaning of the alien vocable but none the less jarred by its obtrusion on an English page. The man of culture may have his attention disturbed even by a foreign word which has long been acclimatized in English, if it still retains its unfriendly appearance. I suppose that savan has established its citizenship in our vocabulary ”

“ Due to the fact that the drama has been more continuously alive in the literature of France than in that of any other country, and due also, it may be, to the associated fact that the French have been more loyally devoted to the theatre than any other people, the vocabulary of the English-speaking stage has probably more unassimilated French words than we can discover in the vocabulary of any of our other activities. ”

“ The same must be said also of dénoûment and of ingénue—French words which really fill a gap in our vocabulary and which are none the less abhorrent to our speech habits. The most that is likely to happen is that they may shed their accents and more or less approximate an English pronunciation, dee-noo-meant, perhaps, and inn-je-new, an approximation which will be sternly resisted by the literate. ”

“ Just as we Americans have kept alive not a few old words which have been allowed to drop out of the later vocabulary of the United Kingdom, so we have kept alive—at least to a certain extent—the power of complete assimilation. Restaurant, for example, is generally pronounced as though its second syllable rhymed with 'law', and its third with 'pant'. Trait is pronounced in accordance with its English spelling, and therefore very few Americans have ever discovered the pun in the title of Dr. ”

“ Harris explained that he intruded these hostile verbs and nouns to adorn his page, and justified himself by saying that 'they all do it. Everybody that writes elegantly'. Whereupon Mark Twain, whose own English was as pure as it was rich and flexible, promptly read Harris a needed lesson: 'A man who writes a book for the general public to read is not justified in disfiguring his pages with untranslated foreign expressions. ”

“ Perhaps we may liken mitrailleuse and franc-tireur, vrille and escadrille, brisance and rafale, to the foreign labourers who cross the frontier to aid in the harvest and who return to their own country when the demand for their service is over. ”

“ Many English writers have not done so, but using straunge wordes as latin, french, and Italian, do make all things darke and harde. Once I communed with a man whiche reasoned the englyshe tongue to be enryched and encreased thereby, sayinge—Who wyll not prayse that feaste where a man shall drinke at a diner bothe wyne, ale and beere? ”

“ Stolchy is so good a word that it does not need a dictionary. Wright gives only the verb stolch 'to tread down, trample, to walk in the dirt'. The adjective is therefore primarily applicable to wet land that has become sodden and miry by being poached by cattle, and then to any ground in a similar condition. Since poach is a somewhat confused homophone, its adjective poachy has no chance against stolchy. ”

“ Consider the sad case of élite (which Byron used a hundred years ago) , of encore (which Steele used two hundred years ago) of parvenu (which Gifford used in 1802) , of ennui (which Evelyn used in 1667) , and of nuance (which Walpole used in 1781) .
No one hesitates to accept these words and to employ them frequently. Ennui and nuance are two words which cannot well be spared, but which we are unable to reproduce in our native vocalization. ”

“ Henry Bradley in the Making of English provides further evidence of the aforetime primacy of the French in the military art. 'War itself is a Norman-French word, and among the other French words belonging to the same department which became English before the end of the thirteenth century' are armour, assault, banner, battle, fortress, lance, siege, standard, and tower—all of them made citizens of our vocabulary, after having renounced their allegiance to their native land. Another quotation from Dr. ”

“ If jackdaws are to appropriate a word to describe their behaviour, no word could be better than goistering, and we prefer goister to gauster. Its likeness to boisterous will assist it, and we guess that it will be accepted. In the little glossary at the end of the book goistering is explained as guffawing. That word is not so descriptive of the jackdaw, since it suggests 'coarse bursts of laughter', and the coarseness is absent from the fussy vulgarity and mere needless jabber of the daw.
3. 'A dor flew by with crackling cry'. ”

“ If a synonym for 'man of letters' is demanded why not find it in 'literator', which Lockhart did not hesitate to employ in the Life of Scott. It is pleasant to believe that communard, which was prevalent fifty years ago after the burning of the Tuileries, has been succeeded by 'communist' and that its twin-brother dynamitard is now rarely seen and even more rarely heard. ”

“ I have also detected evidences of a startling belief of the illiterate that artiste is the feminine of 'artist'. Nevertheless I found recently in a volume caricaturing the chief performers of the London music-halls a foot-note which explained that these celebrities were therein entitled artistes—because 'an artist creates, an artiste performs'. ”

“ It destroys the sense of security, the assurance of perfect congruity between thought and expression, which the unliterary and unacademic speaker and writer often has, and which, with both literary and unliterary, is the basis for all expressive use of language'. ”

“ Hence, the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived.'—'Carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency ”

“ In Paris it means the arrangement of the stage-business, whereas in London and in New York it is employed rather to indicate the elaboration of the scenery and of the spectacular accessories. An even more extraordinary misadventure has befallen pianiste, in that it is sometimes used as if it was to be applied only to a female performer. ”

“ Form has so many derivative senses that it would be an advantage to have this one thus differentiated both in spelling and sound.
26. 'Toadstools twired and hued fantastically'. (68)
Though the word twired is not explained in Mr. Blunden's glossary and the meaning is not evident from the context, we guess that he is using it here of shape, in the sense of 'contorted', which would range with the quotation from Burton (given in some dictionaries) 'No sooner doth a young man see his sweetheart coming, but he ... slickes his haire, twires his beard [&c.] '. ”