"The nineteenth century has witnessed the introduction of abundant Gallicisms, Germanisms, Americanisms, colonialisms, and provincialisms; nearly all needless, or easily to be supplied by more correct words or phrases. There is no nation, except our own easy-going one, that would tolerate such words as a propos or naive, the one a foreign phrase, the other the feminine of an adjective, applied indiscriminately to nouns of both genders; the Carlyleian before-unheard-of, phrase-binding-together, Aristophanes-wise; such vile compounds as starvation, a Saxon root with a Latin termination, in a misapplied sense; and the many provincial slang words, as to run down and put up with, both provincialisms."
-- From The London Review, 1864, quoted by Fitzedward Hall in "Modern English," 1873
No comments:
Post a Comment