A History of English Language

The appeal to authority, 1650-1800 245
of polysyllables, by lopping off all the syllables except the first, or the first and second.
Instances of this are hyp for hypochondriac, rep for reputation, ult for ultimate, penult for
penultimate, incog for incognito, hyper for hypercritic, extra for extraordinary. Happily
all these affected terms have been denied the public suffrage. I scarcely know any such
that have established themselves, except mob for mobile. And this it hath effected at last,
notwithstanding the unrelenting zeal with which it was persecuted by Dr. Swift, wherever
he met with it. But as the word in question hath gotten use, the supreme arbitress of
language, on its side, there would be as much obstinacy in rejecting it at present, as there
was perhaps folly at first in ushering it upon the public stage.” 8 Campbell’s admission of
the word mob is interesting, because in theory he accepted the test of usage, but he could
not quite free himself from prejudice against this word.
A second innovation that Swift opposed was the tendency to contract verbs like
drudg’d, disturb’d, rebuk’d, fledg’d “and a thousand others everywhere to be met with in
prose as well as verse, where, by leaving out a vowel to save a syllable, we form a jarring
sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondered how it could ever obtain.” His
ostensible reason for rejecting this change, which time has fully justified, is that “our
language was already overstocked with monosyllables.” We accordingly hear a good bit
in the course of the century about the large number of monosyllabic words in English, an
objection that seems to have no more to support it than the fact that a person of Swift’s
authority thought monosyllables “the disgrace of our language.”
A third innovation that aroused Swift’s ire has to do with certain words then enjoying
a considerable vogue among wits and people of fashion. They had even invaded the
pulpit. Young preachers, fresh from the universities, he says, “use all the modern terms of
art, sham, banter, mob, bubble, bully, cutting, shuffling, and palming, all which, and
many more of the like stamp, as I have heard them often in the pulpit, so I have read them
in some of those sermons that have made most noise of late.” Swift was by no means
alone in his criticism of new words. Each censor of the language has his own list of
objectionable expressions (cf. § 205). But this type of critic may be illustrated here by its
most famous representative.
All of these faults that Swift found in the language he attacked in a letter to the Tatler
(No. 230) in 1710, and he called attention to them again two years later in his Proposal
for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English
8
I. 428–29.