A History of English Language

A history of the english language 244
corruptions that Swift cites seem to us rather trivial. But the significance of such
utterances lies in the fact that they reveal an attitude of mind and lead to many attempts in
the course of the century to “purify” the language and rid it of supposed imperfections.
There have always been, and doubtless always will be, people who feel a strong
antipathy toward certain words or expressions or particular constructions, especially
those with the taint of novelty about them. Usually such people do not make their
objections felt beyond the circle of their friends. But occasionally an individual whose
name carries weight and who is possessed with a crusading spirit offers his or her views
to the public. However much the condemned usages may represent mere personal
prejudice, they are often regarded by others as veritable faults in the language and
continue to be condemned in words that echo those of the original critic until the
objections attain a currency and assume a magnitude out of all proportion to their
significance. Such seems to have been the case with the strictures of Dean Swift on the
English of his day.
In matters of language Swift was a conservative. His conservatism was grounded in a
set of political and religious, as well as linguistic, opinions. He cherished the principle of
authority in church and state, and thus deplored the Latitudinarians. He decried the
skeptical spirit of inquiry proposed by the Royal Society. Innovation, whether in politics
or language, cmmbled the cement of society. Taking his writings as a whole, one may
surmise that he would have preferred that the seventeenth century, at least after 1640,
with its political, commercial, and scientific revolutions had never happened. 7 Although
Swift upheld the classics, he understood the merits of a plain English style, so long as it
was not polluted by crude and careless usages. The things that specifically troubled the
gloomy dean in his reflections on the current speech were chiefly innovations that he says
had been growing up in the last twenty years. One of these was the tendency to clip and
shorten words that should have retained their full polysyllabic dignity. He would have
objected to taxi, phone, bus, ad, and the like, as he did to rep, mob, penult, and others.
The practice seems to have been a temporary fad, although not unknown to any period of
the language. It continued, however, to be condemned for fifty years. Thus George
Campbell in his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) says: “I shall just mention another set of
barbarisms, which also comes under this class, and arises from the abbreviation
7
Interesting perspectives on the motives that underlay Swift’s language proposals may be found in
Brian Vickers, ed., The World of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge, MA, 1968), especially the essays by
Pat Rogers, Brian Vickers, and Hugh Sykes Davies. See also Ann Cline Kelly, Swift and the
English Language (Philadelphia, 1988).