English setter

“ The study of history shows us that the future of English is dependent not on the watchfulness of its guardians, not upon the increasing richness and flexibility of its vocabulary, not upon the modification of its syntax, not upon the needed reform of its orthography; it is not dependent upon any purity or any corruption of the language itself. The future of the English language is dependent upon the future of the two great peoples that speak it; it is dependent upon the strength, the energy, the vigor, and the virtue of the British and the Americans. ”

“ The little room where he had worked with such fervour was filled with a grey glimmer that filtered in through the mist-hung orchard trees. The fire had been set but not yet lit. He put a match to it; he would have much to burn. Then he sat down by the table and drew forth his manuscripts. The last line he had written—that line set only yesterday from a full heart—met his eye:
English was then in the perfection of his young manhood—a splendid specimen of an Englishman, athletic, handsome, intellectual, a born leader of men, and withal, the truest comrade ever a man had. ”

“ One would have to be singularly unmindful of the treachery and versatility of our language to deny that as a mere matter of English the words 'where it might have been brought' may carry more than one meaning. ”

“ If indeed a guardian were necessary, what Englishman would it be who would best preserve our pure English—the shepherd of Dorset or the miner of Northumberland, the Yorkshire man or the cockney? If it is not the London apprentice who is to set the standard, but the Englishman of breeding, it is hard to discover the ground whereon this Englishman can claim superiority of taste or knowledge over the other educated men to whom English is the mother-tongue, whether they were born in Scotland, Ireland, or America, in Australia, India, or Canada. ”

“ Surely the mental habit of people who express their thoughts in so very different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, the one plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding, cannot be essentially the same. The English language, strange compound as it is, with its want of inflections, and with all the difficulties which this want of inflections brings upon it, has yet made itself capable of being, in good hands, a business-instrument as ready, direct, and clear, as French or Latin. ”

“ It is not my fault if the English are not clever enough to make thermometers and dyes, and are cruel enough to read private letters and shoot the writer. Must I suddenly be convinced that the English are absolutely right and wise and perfect in all they do? ”

“ And is it not a noble thing, that the English tongue is, as it were, the common focus and point of union to which opposite beauties converge? Is it a trifle that we temper energy with softness, strength with flexibility, capaciousness of sound with pliancy of idiom? ”

“ Withal there is such dash and spirit, such mastery of language, such marvellous descriptive power, such subtle pauses and breaks, carrying echoes beyond the letter—as laid hold on men and women—specially on women—in a way that was new and strange. ”

“ A multitude of English, educated at the universities, bred into their society with manners, ability, and the gifts of fortune, are every day confronting the peers on a footing of equality, and outstripping them, as often, in the race of honor and influence. ”

“ I was soon to get used to that marvelous English ability at specializing men—a system by which a man intended for a certain career is arrested in every other kind of growth, except only that which tends to make him more perfect for his purpose. Observing an English coachman, or valet or butler or what not, you say, “Here is a remarkably clever man.” ”

“ There can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously by its expansion over the American continent. The prime function of a language, after all, is to interpret the ‘form and pressure’ of life—the experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, and aspiration of the race which employs it. ”

“ By adhering to our own practice, we preserve a superiority over the English, in those instances, in which ours is guided by rules; and so far ought we to be from conforming to their practice, that they ought rather to conform to ours. ”

“ Nothing to have been the delight of men of the greatest and most varied genius? Nothing to be read wherever the English tongue is spoken, and, as seems likely, as long as the English tongue shall last? ”

“ The English vocabulary offers a fruitful field of study. First of all, the cast of thought that it expresses is individual. Ours is a distinct, not necessarily superior, civilization; and all the forms of intellectual activity represented by our tongue are so characteristic that one may well believe in the formative influence of a language over the people speaking it. ”

“ Our British cousins assume an exasperating air of superiority when they mention the matter of our spelling and, as self-appointed conservators of the language, point out what they are pleased to style the offensive eccentricities of American spelling. The British journals ever and anon draw attention to our manner of writing such words as favor, honor, center, program, almanac, tire, curb, check and criticize and the like, which they spell favour, honour, centre, programme, almanack, tyre, kerb, cheque and criticise. ”

“ It isn’t English, for one thing, and—isn’t it odd?—the notion persists that it is. If we are ever to have a race of our own here—if the melting pot we are always talking about ever really melts up the mass—how English, how German, how Puritanic will it be? ”

“ If any one among us have a facility or purity more than ordinary in his Mother Tongue, it is owing to Chance, or his Genius, or any thing, rather than to his Education or any care of his Teacher. To Mind what English his Pupil speaks or writes is below the Dignity of one bred up amongst Greek and Latin, though he have but little of them himself. ”

“ The English tongue, tho later in its progress towards perfection, has attained to a considerable degree of purity, strength and elegance, and been employed, by an active and scientific nation, to record almost all the events and discoveries of ancient and modern times.
This language is the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents. To cultivate and adorn it, is a task reserved for men who shall understand the connection between language and logic, and form an adequate idea of the influence which a uniformity of speech may have on national attachments. ”

“ Their traditional faith in compromise, their traditional dread of ideas, their traditional habit of acting first and reasoning afterwards, has made the English system a hopelessly confused bundle of semi-efficiency and semi-inefficiency—just as it has made the best English social type a gentleman, but a gentleman absolutely conditioned, tempered, and supplemented by a flunky. ”

“ And, on the other hand, by the slow growth, the gradual development of his talent, by his spirit of independence and initiative, tempered by regard for the past, he is one of the incarnations of his race, one of those men in whom to-day we may see most clearly the features of the English character. ”

“ How our English vernacular has changed ever since the days of the famous virgin queen, not to mention the more radical changes of the far-remote days of the ill-starred Richard II! A spoken language is constantly changing. It grows and develops, or languishes and decays, upon the lips of those who employ it as their mother-tongue, now incorporating into itself new expressions and idioms and now casting off such as are old and worn out. ”

“ I saw that the character of the English was servile to rank, and yielding to pretension —they admire you for your acquaintance, and cringe to you for your conceit. The first thing, therefore, was to know great people—the second to controul them. ”

“ For, of course, if English is to continue to be the speech of vital, developing, progressive peoples, nothing is more certain than that this vitality and progress will be accompanied and sustained by a literature. We stand together now because of the treasury of wisdom which our common language enables us to share; but wisdom itself fades to a dream, unless new expressions of it are continually found, to illuminate and summarize the swift accumulations of human experience. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The influences at work upon the English language at present are very complex, and play on it with great force, so that the changes are startling in their rapidity. English is not only the language of a nation or of a race, not even of an empire ”

“ The truth is, it does not fall legitimately within the province of the lexicographer to settle the question whether a polite slang term of recognized fitness and utility should be deemed good English or not. No man, however competent a scholar he may be, has the right to determine the growth and development of our language. Yet such a practise means this in the last analysis. ”

“ In that half-foreign English which is always so much more eloquent a language than the English-speaking peoples use, he said: "They have their homes there only by the patience of the thief; it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow." ”

“ All classes have possessed it, and possessed it so thoroughly as to insist on a hundred private and personal interpretations of the one sacred text. Nothing is more English than non-conformity, except the acceptance of it, and nothing more necessary to the vitality of the practical English mind. ”

“ When English becomes the world-language,—if our speech ever is raised to fill that position of honor and usefulness,—it will be the English language as it is spoken by all the branches of the English race, no doubt; but the dominant influence in deciding what the future of that language shall be must come from the United States. The English of the future will be the English that we shall use here in the United States ”

“ The dubious and wildering track struck out by those innovators and visionaries who absurdly endeavor to teach modern English, by rejecting the authority and sanction of custom, and by conducting the learner back to the original combinations, and the detached, disjointed, and barbarous constructions of our progenitors, both prudence and reason, as well as a due regard for correct philology, impel me to shun. ”

“ Before leaving this point, which to my thinking is the cause of many frictions and misunderstandings between ourselves and the English, I mustn’t omit to give instances of divergence, where an Englishman will speak of matters upon which we are silent, and is silent upon subjects of which we will speak.
You may present a letter of introduction to an Englishman, and he wishes to be civil, to help you to have a good time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He would therefore talk about ladies, knights, or statesmen; and when dis­coursing about these, he must have been almost driven to interlard his English with a few French words, such as were constantly employed by his friends of the higher class. As a man of learning, he would begin to look down upon the phrases of his childhood as somewhat coarse, and his lowly hearers rather liked a term now and then that was a little above their understanding: what is called ‘fine language’ has unhappily always had charms for most Englishmen. ”

“ In asking this question I am not thinking about the tragic possibility that English may be the only language left in which civilized men can think and talk freely, even though that fact by itself would make it terribly basic. ”

“ I can only repeat that the English are a naturally silent race. They are apt to mistrust fluency. 'Glibness' they call it, and scent behind it the adventurer, the player of the confidence trick or the three-card trick, the robber of the widow and the orphan. ”

“ And now, who were the forty men who dealt so wisely and sparingly with the old translators; who came to their offices of revision with so tender a reverence, and who put such nervous, masculine, clear-cut English into their [48] own emendations of this book as to leave it a monument of Literature? ”

“ When an Englishman and an American meet, no matter how casually, their common tongue furnishes, immediately, a means of communication which makes them "Native to the manner born." A few spoken words, a few lines of correspondence, open up, if need be, the whole life of each nation: its politics, its forms and principles of justice, its religion, its domestic interests and feelings, its science, its drama, its literature, its past, present, and future. It establishes a sympathy and bond in all common things. ”