A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 317
disruption to the existing system as is consistent with the attainment of a reasonable end.
232. Purist Efforts.
Conservatives in matters of language, as in politics, are hardy perennials. We have seen
many examples of the type in the course of this history. They flourished especially during
the eighteenth century, but their descendants are fairly numerous in the nineteenth and
scarcely less common today. They generally look upon change with suspicion and are
inclined to view all changes in language as corruptions. In retrospect they seem often
melancholy figures, fighting a losing fight, many times living to see the usages against
which they fought so valiantly become universally accepted. Thomas De Quincey argued
at length against the use of implicit in such expressions as implicit faith or confidence,
wishing to restrict the word to a sense the opposite of explicit. The American philologist
George P.Marsh spoke against “the vulgarism of the phrase in our midst” and objected to
a certain adjectival use of the participle. “There is at present,” he says, “an inclination in
England to increase the number of active, in America, of passive participles, employed
with the syntax of the adjective. Thus, in England it is common to hear: ‘such a thing is
very damaging,’ and the phrase has been recently introduced into this country. Trench
says: ‘Words which had become unintelligible or misleading,’ and ‘the phrase could not
have been other than more or less misleading’; ‘these are the most serious and most
recurring.’ Now, though pleasing, gratifying, encouraging, and many other words have
long been established as adjectives, yet the cases cited from Trench strike us as
unpleasant novelties.” 48 Dean Alford, the author of The Queen’s English (1864), a
curious composite of platitude and prejudice with occasional flashes of unexpected
liberality, a book that was reprinted many times, finds much to object to, especially in the
English of journalism. “No man ever shows any feeling, but always evinces it…. Again,
we never begin anything in the newspapers now, but always commence…. Another
horrible word, which is fast getting into our language through the provincial press, is to
eventuate…. Avocation is another monster patronised by these writers…. Desirability is a
terrible word…. Reliable is hardly legitimate…” and so with many others. The battle
over reliable was still being waged at the end of the nineteenth century, as over lengthy
and standpoint. Often the American was accused of introducing these supposed outrages
against good English, and just as often accused unjustly. It is unnecessary to multiply
examples that could be useful only to the future historian of human error. If we might
venture a moral, it would be to point out the danger and the futility of trying to prevent
the natural development of language.
48
Lectures, I, 657.