which as literal translations of foreign phrases, sound strange and affected.

EXAMPLES. .—1. The French language, as the language of polite society, is the greatest source of such words and phrases; eg. "A keen observer might have seen about him some signs of a jeunesse orageuse, but his manner was frank and pleasing." Every reader can recall such words as beau monde, savoir faire, faux pas, entre nous, haut ton, en grande toilette, blasé, débutante, as used in writings of the day.

2. Foreign idioms, too, are constantly creeping into the language, and are to be recognized and treated for what they are, exotics; e.g. “That goes without saying" (Cela va sans dire); to assist, in the sense of being present at a ceremony; according to me (selon moi); to give on, in the sense of open toward, as a window; to be in evidence. Of course many of these may be on the way to accepted usage.

Words used in travel, or in giving information about foreign countries and customs, or citations of foreign literary expressions, may sometimes be fittingly used in works obviously intended for readers to whom such terms will be familiar and

suggestive or ought to become so. The writer thus pays a compliment to the culture of his reader.

EXAMPLE. "You are in Rome, of course; the sbirro said so, the doganiere bowed it, and the postilion swore it; but it is a Rome of modern houses, muddy streets, dingy caffès, cigar-smokers, and French soldiers, the manifest junior of Florence. And yet full of anachronisms, for in a little while you pass the column of Antoninus, find the Dogana in an ancient temple whose furrowed pillars show through the recent plaster, and feel as if you saw the statue of Minerva in a Paris bonnet. You are driven to a hotel where all the barbarian languages are spoken in one wild conglomerate by the Commissionaire, have your dinner wholly in French, and wake the next morning dreaming of the Tenth Legion, to see a regiment of Chausseurs de Vincennes trotting by."1

III. PRESENT USE.

Under this head come the considerations that should influence the writer on account of the age of words: in general, he should admit only words in good standard present usage.

1 LOWELL, Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere, Works, Vol. i, p. 190

Language evinces its life as do all living things: by growth on the one hand, taking in and assimilating new expressions, as advancing thought or discovery or invention demands them; and on the other hand, by excretion, continually discarding old locutions for which there is no further use. It is this phenomenon of growth and excretion that distinguishes a living language from a dead one; the latter kind, like Latin or Hebrew, can be added to mechanically, but it does not grow, nor on the other hand does it diminish, being fixed and crystallized in its existing literature. But because it is thus fixed it does not take hold as does a living language; the spirit has gone out of it, so that at best its life can be only galvanized life.

In a living language there are always many words on the frontiers of the too-new or the too-old whose use is a matter of uncertainty and debate; and has to be determined by a general consensus of literary usage and authority, in which not only refined speech but the relative rank of authors has to be taken into account.

8. Words too New to be Standard. From the standard of the best literature, which is the only safe one for a writer to adopt, the many new words and phrases constantly appearing, and for a while in everybody's mouth, neologisms they are technically called — must pass through a period of testing and seasoning, in which it will become gradually apparent whether they are to be a permanent addition to the vocabulary or to die. His only reasonable attitude towards them is wariness, suspicion; not that he is not to use them at all, to lay down this rule would be to hamper him too much, but that he is not to use them unadvisedly, or merely because they are the fashion. "Be not the first by whom the new are tried" is Pope's maxim.

These new words come ordinarily without observation, and from a variety of sources, of which, as including the great predominance, may here be mentioned three:

1. Words adopted to name new advances in science, discovery, invention, and the like.1 The leading tendency nowadays is to derive these from the Greek, and generally they are regularly enough formed. Such new words become standard almost at once.

EXAMPLES.

The development of some new invention or department of science may bring into daily use a whole new section of the vocabulary; consider, for instance, how many new words electrical motor power alone has originated: dynamo, volt, ampere, ohm, trolley, and hosts of others, words unknown a few years ago. The same may be said of microscopic science, with its microbes, bacteria, antitoxin, antiseptic; and of photography, with its kinetoscope, cinematograph, etc. Along with these additions, one has to be on the lookout for grotesque formations; as in the sentence, "Do not speak to the motorneer," found on some electric cars. The new words made by quack medicine dealers and advertisers, too, are often ludicrous.

2. Words rising spontaneously in the discussion of public and political questions, as also in the shifting phases of the people's life; often adopted by newspapers for the sake of point and smartness, and at once becoming current phrases of conversation. Some of these expressions become established in the language, but for the most part they serve a transient occasion. In his attitude toward them the writer has to judge how far they are worthy of perpetuation, and whether they answer to the dignity and permanence of literature.

NOTE. So much has been said about newspaper English of late years that the metropolitan press at present uses a fairly pure vocabulary, the

1“ English, for a quarter of a century past, has been assimilating the phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, the phraseology of the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years ago; in part also the language of mystical theology: and none but pedants will regret a great consequent increase of its resources. For many years to come its enterprise may well lie in the naturalization of the vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive scholarship - in a liberal naturalization of the ideas of science too, for after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full, rich, complex matter to grapple with. The literary artist, therefore, will be well aware of physical science; science also attaining, in its turn, its true literary ideal." - PATER, Appreciations, p. 12.

"awful examples" of such English surviving mostly in provincial papers. Of course, as suits their ephemeral purpose, all newspapers have a right to a rather more dashing and audacious employment of neologisms than book literature; it suits the spirit and interests of the day. Such words as to burgle or burglarize; to suicide; to extradite ; to run (the government or an enterprise), in the sense of conduct or direct; a steal, in the sense of a theft; to see, in the sense of arrange with; log-rolling; scalawag, are evidently of this sub-literary vocabulary, to be recognized and employed, therefore, for what they are.

3. Words and phrases that take a popular fancy and are bandied about in conversation, and become slang. Every year sees a new crop of such expressions, which for the time are used so much that purists almost despair of the integrity of the language. Racy and spirited they undeniably are during their vogue, and, used masterfully, that is, with adequate estimate of their significance, they may have the point and beacon1 quality of a figure of speech. The disadvantage of them is, that the frequent or thoughtless use of slang impairs the earnestness and seriousness of speech; further, as it speedily becomes not a vehicle of thought but a substitute for it, standing as a meaningless counter for ideas that ought to be discriminated and fitted with their right words, the use of slang causes a poverty of vocabulary truly deplorable.

EXAMPLES. The following sentence suggests how a slang expression may on occasion enrich the thought: "Sooner or later, to use the forcible slang of the day, 'the cover must be taken off,' and the whole matter laid before the public conscience."2 This is really a figure of speech; its abuse consists in bandying it about until it is everybody's word. Such expressions as "That's right," for "that is true"; That is great," for anything desirable or interesting or surprising; “I draw the line”; “Is that straight goods?" "I am twenty-five cents shy" will occur to every one as specimens of current slang. There is a risk in recording such expressions as current, their day goes by so soon.

9. Coinage for an Occasion.

It is to be remembered that though language is a sacred heritage, to be cherished and

1 See above, p. 61, 1.

2 Quoted from The Outlook, Jan. 2, 1897.

guarded with all solicitude, yet after all it was made for man, not man for language. There is, therefore, both a freedom and a caution to be observed with regard to new coinages and formations. Because language is a living organism, and thought is living, there must be flexibility, adaptation, liberty; and so, not infrequently, a juncture of thought occurs where the masterful writer has to make his word from materials already existing, and where such a new coinage, though serving only the present occasion, may be precisely the most effective word possible.1

The justification or non-justification of new coinage connects itself with the question how real is the occasion.

1. The one real occasion, it would seem, is the demand of precision; a shading or fine distinction in the thought arises, for which there is no existing word, and some word has to be modified or made from existing materials and terminations to fit it.2

EXAMPLES.

The following, used by Professor Henry Drummond, is a word that the author himself would perhaps never have occasion to use again, nor would it ever be put into a dictionary, yet it fits its idea as no other word could do. "No one point is assailed. It is the whole system which when compared with the other and weighed in its balance is found wanting. An eye which has looked at the first cannot look upon this. To do that, and rest in the contemplation, it has first to uncentury itself." 3

The following, from W. D. Howells, serves to differentiate a fine shade of meaning which the occasion requires : “But for the time being Penelope was as nearly crazed as might be by the complications of her position, and received her visitors with a piteous distraction which could not fail of touching Bromfield Corey's Italianised sympatheticism.”4

1"New material must be found somehow. Even the Latin purist confesses so much as this. After speaking of the riskiness of new and unauthorized expressions, he says that nevertheless it must be risked -- audendum tamen!"— EARLE, English Prose, p. 218. Reference to Quintilian.

2 "The coining industry in the present age of English Prose will be found to draw its materials mainly from the vernacular, and far less than formerly from classi cal sources." — EARLE, English Prose, p. 230. See the whole section, pp. 221-231. 8 DRUMMOND, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, p. 30.

4 W. D. HOWELLS, Rise of Silas Lapham, p. 490.