Corruption of Our English Tongue, From the Tatler

       "The following letter has laid before me many great and manifest evils in the world of letters which I had overlooked;  but they open to me a very busy scene, and it will require no small care and application to amend errors which are become so universal.  The affectation of politeness is exposed in this epistle with a great deal of wit and discernment;  so that whatever discourses I may fall into hereafter upon the subjects the writer treats of, I shall at present lay the matter before the world, without the least alteration from the words of my correspondent.

To Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire.  Sir,
       There are some abuses among us of great consequence, the reformation of which is properly your province;  though, as far as I have been conversant in your papers, you have not yet considered them.  These are, the deplorable ignorance that for some years hath reigned among our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual corruption of our style.  I say nothing here of those who handle particular sciences, divinity, law, politics, and the belles lettres;  together with those by whom books are not translated, but, as the common expressions are 'done out of' French, Latin, or other language, and 'made English.'  I cannot but observe to you, that until of late years a Grub Street book was always bound in sheepskin, with suitable print and paper, the price never above a shilling, and taken off wholly by common tradesmen or country pedlars;  but now they appear in all sizes and shapes, and in all places.  They are handed about from lapfuls in every coffee-house to persons of quality;  are shown in Westminster Hall and the Court of Requests.  You may see them gilt, and in royal paper of five or six hundred pages, and rated accordingly.  I would engage to furnish you with a catalogue of English books published within the compass of seven years past, which at the first hand would cost you a hundred pounds, wherein you shall not be able to find ten lines together of common grammar or common sense.
       These two evils, ignorance and want of taste, have produced a third;  I mean the continual corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely remedy, will suffer more by the false refinements of twenty years past, than it hath been improved in the forgoing hundred.  And this is what I design chiefly to enlarge upon, leaving the former evils to your animadversion.
      But instead of giving you a list of the last refinements crept into our language, I here send you a copy of a letter I received, some time ago, from a most accomplished person in this way of writing;  upon which I shall make some remarks.  It is in these terms:
                'Sir,
                        I cou'd n't get the things you sent for all about Town.-----I tho't to ha' come down myself, and then I'd h' brot' um;  but I ha'nt don't, and I believe I can't do't, that's Pozz------.  Tom begins to gi' mself airs, because he's going with the Plenipo's ------.  'Tis said the French King will bamboozl us agen, which causes many speculations.  The Jacks and others of that Kidney are very appish, and alert upon't, as you may see by their Phizz's------.  Will Hazzard has got the hipps, having lost to the Tune of five hundr'd pound, tho' he understands play very well, no Body better.  He has promis't me upon rep, to leave off play;  but you know 'tis a weakness he's too apt to give into, tho' he has as much wit as any man, no Body more.  He has lain incog ever since-----.  The mob's very quiet with us now------.  I believe you thot I banter'd you in my last, like a country put-----. I shan't leave town this month, etc.'

      This letter is in every point an admirable pattern of the present polite way of writing;  nor is it of less authority for being an epistle.  You may gather every flower in it, with a thousand more of equal sweetness, from the books, pamphlets, and single papers offered us every day in the coffee-houses.  And these are the beauties introduced to supply the want of wit, sense, humour, and learning, which formerly were looked upon as qualifications for a writer.  If a man of wit, who died forty years ago, were to rise from the grave on purpose, how would he be able to read this letter?  And after he had got through that difficulty, how would he be able to understand it?  The first thing that strikes your eye is the breaks at the end of almost every sentence;  of which I know not the use, only that it is a refinement, and very frequently practised.  Then you will observe the abbreviations and elisions, by which consonants of most obdurate sound are joined together, without one softening vowel to intervene;  and all this only to make one syllable of two, directly contrary to the example of the Greeks and Romans, altogether of the Gothic strain, and a natural tendency towards relapsing into barbarity, which delights in monosyllables, and uniting of mute consonants, as it is observable in all the northern languages.  And this is still more visible in the next refinement, which consists in pronouncing the first syllable in a word that has many, and dismissing the rest, such as 'phizz, hipps, mob, pozz, rep,' and many more, when we are already overloaded with monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our language.  Thus we cram one syllable, and cut off the rest, as the owl fatteneth her mice after she had bit off their legs to prevent them from running away;  and if ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer the end;  for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them.  Some words are hitherto but fairly split, and therefore only in their way to perfection, as Incog., and Plenipo.  But in a short time, it is to be hoped, they will be further docked to Inc. and Plen.  This reflection has made me of late years very impatient for a peace, which I believe would save the lives of many brave words, as well as men.  The war has introduced abundence of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many more campaigns, 'speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambassadors, palisadoes, communication, circumvallation, battallions,'  as numerous as they are, if they attack us too frequently in our coffee-houses, we shall certainly put them to flight, and cut off the rear.
       The third refinement, observable in the letter I send you, consists in the choice of certain words invented by some pretty fellows, such as 'banter, bamboozle, country put, and kidney,' as it is there applied;  some of which are now struggling for the vogue, and others are in possession of it.  I have done my utmost for some years past, to stop the progress of 'mob' and 'banter,' but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me.
       In the last place, you are to take notice of certain choice phrases scattered through the letter, some of them tolerable enough, until they were worn to rags by servile imitators.  You might easily find them though they were not in a different print, and therefore I need not disturb them.
       These are the false refinements in our style which you ought to correct;  first, by argument and fair means, but if those fail, I think you are to make use of your authority as Censor, and by an annual Index Expurgatorius expunge all words and phrases that are offensive to good sense and condemn those barbarous mutilations of vowels and syllables.  In this last point the usual pretence is that they spell as they speak:  a noble standard for language!  to depend on the caprice of every coxcomb, who, because words are the clothing of our thoughts, cuts them out and shapes them as he pleases, and changes them oftener than his dress.  I believe all reasonable people would be content that such refiners were more sparing in their words and liberal in their syllables;  and upon this head I should be glad you would bestow some advice upon several young readers in our churches, who, coming up from the university full fraught with admiration of our town politeness, will needs correct the style of their prayer-books.  In reading the absolution, they are very careful to say 'Pardons and Absolves';  but in the prayer for the Royal Family, it must be endue'um, enrich'um, prosper'um, and bring'um.  Then in their sermons they 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 from such young sophisters, so have I read them in some of 'those sermons that have made most noise of late.'  The design, it seems, is to avoid the dreadful imputation of pedantry;  to show us that they know the town, understand men and manners, and have not been poring upon old unfashionable books in the university.
       I should be glad to see you the instrument of introducing into our style that simplicity which is the best and truest ornament of most things in life, which the politer ages always aimed at in their building and dress, simplex munditiis,as well as their productions of wit.  It is manifest that all new affected modes of speech, whether borrowed from the court, the town, or the theatre, are the first perishing parts in any language;  and, as I could prove by many hundred instances, have been so in ours.  The writings of Hooker, who was a country gentleman, and of Parsons the Jesuit, both in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, are in a style that, with very few allowances, would not offend any present reader, and are much more clear and intelligible than those of Sir Harry Wotton, Sir Robert Naunton, Osborn, Daniel the historian, and several others who writ later;  but being men of the court, and affecting the phrases then in fashion, they are often either not to be understood, or appear perfectly ridiculous.
       What remedies are to be applied to those evils I have not room to consider, having, I fear, already taken up most of your paper.  Besides, I think it is our office only to represent abuses, and yours to redress them.  I am with great respect, Sir, Your, etc.

      


     

Church Thermometer, from the Tatler

"The Church Thermometer, which I am now to treat of, is supposed to have been invented in the reign of Henry the Eighth, about the time when that religious prince put some to death for owning the Pope's supremacy, and others for denying transubstantiation.  I do not find, however, any great use of this instrument until it fell into the hands of a learned and vigilant priest or minister, for he frequently wrote himself both one and the other, who was sometime vicar of Bray.  This gentleman lived in his vicarage to a good old age, and, after having seen several successions of his neighboring clergy either burned or banished, departed this life with the satisfaction of having never deserted his flock, and died vicar of Bray.  As this glass was first designed to calculate the different degrees of heat in religion, as it raged in Popery, or as it cooled and grew temperate in the Reformation;  it was marked at several distances, after the manner our ordinary thermometer is to this day, viz. 'Extreme Hot, Sultry Hot, Very Hot, Hot, Warm, Temperate, Cold, Just Freezing, Frost, Hard Frost, Great Frost, Extreme Cold.'

       It is well known that Toricellius, the inventor of the common weather-glass, made the experiment in a long tube which held thirty-two feet of water;  and that a more modern virtuoso finding such a machine altogether unwieldy and useless, and considering that thirty-two inches of quicksilver weighed as much as so many feet of water in a tube of the same circumference, invented that sizeable instrument which is now in use.  After this manner, that I might adapt the thermometer I am now speaking of to the present constitution of our Church, as divided into High and Low, I have made some necessary variations both in the tube and the fluid it contains.  In the first place, I ordered a tube to be cast in a planetary hour, and took care to seal it hermetically when the sun was in conjunction with Saturn.  I then took the proper precautions about the fluid, which is a compound of two very different liquors;  one of them a spirit drawn out of a strong heady wine;  the other a particular sort of rock-water, colder than ice and clearer than crystal.  The spirit is of a red fiery colour, and so very apt to ferment that unless it be mingled with a proportion of the water, or pent up very close, it will burst the vessel that holds it, and fly up in fume and smoke.  The water, on the contrary, is of such a subtle piercing cold, that unless it be mingled with a proportion of the spirits, it will sink almost through everything that it is put into;  and seems to be of the same nature as the water mentioned by Quintus Curtius, which, says the historian, could be contained in nothing but the hoof, or, as the Oxford manuscript has it, in the skull of an ass.  The thermometer is marked according to the following figure;  which I set down at length, not only to give my reader a clear idea of it, but also to fill up my paper.
                                                   Ignorance
                                                    Persecution
                                                   Wrath
                                                    Zeal
                                                    CHURCH
                                                    Moderation
                                                    Lukewarmness
                                                    Infidelity
                                                    Ignorance
       The reader will observe that the Church is placed in the middle point of the glass, between Zeal and Moderation;  the situation in which she always flourishes, and in which every good Englishman wishes her who is a friend to the constitution of his country.  However, when it mounts to Zeal, it is not amiss;  and when it sinks to Moderation, is still in a most admirable temper.  The worst of it is, that when once it begins to rise it still has an inclination to ascend;  insomuch that it is apt to climb up from Zeal to Wrath, and from Wrath to Persecution, which always ends in Ignorance, and very often proceeds from it.  In the same manner, it frequently takes its progress through the lower half of the glass;  and when it has a tendency to fall, will gradually descend from Moderation to Lukewarmness, and from Lukewarmness to Infidelity, which very often terminates in Ignorance, and always proceeds from it.
       It is a common observation that the ordinary thermometer will be affected by the breathing of people who are in the same room where it stands;  and indeed it is almost incredible to concieve how the glass I am now describing will fall by the breath of a multitude crying 'Popery;' or on the contrary, how it will rise when the same multitude, as it sometimes happens, cry out in the same breath: 'The Church is in danger.'
       As soon as I had finished this my glass, and adjusted it to the above-mentioned scale of religion, that I might make proper experiments with it, I carried it under my cloak to several coffee-houses and other places of resort about this great city.  At Saint James's coffee-house the liquor stood at moderation;  but at Will's, to my great surprise, it subsided to the very lowest mark on the glass.  At the Grecian it mounted but just one point higher;  at the Rainbow it still ascended two degrees;  Child's fetched it up to Zeal, and other adjacent coffee-houses to Wrath.
       It fell in the lower half of the glass as I went further into the city, until at length it settled at Moderation, where it continued all the time I stayed about the Exchange, as also while I passed by the Bank.  And here I cannot but take notice that though the whole course of my remarks I never observed my glass to rise at the same time that the stocks did.
    To complete the experiment, I prevailed upon a friend of mine, who works under me in the occult sciences, to make a progress with my glass through the whole island of Great Britain;  and after his return, to present me with a register of his observations.  I guessed beforehand at the temper of several places he passed through, by the characters they have had time out of mind.  Thus that facetious divine, Doctor Fuller, speaking of the town of Banbury near a hundred years ago, tells us it was a place famous for cakes and zeal, which I find by my glass is true to this day as to the latter part of this description;  though I must confess, it is not in the same reputation for cakes that it was in the time of that learned author;  and thus of other places.  In short, I have by now by me digested in an alphabetical order all the counties, corporations, and boroughs in Great Britain, with their respective tempers, as they stand related to my thermometer.  But this I shall keep to myself, because I would by no means do anything that may seem to influence any ensuing elections.
       The point of doctrine which I would propagate by this my invention, is the same which was long ago advanced by that able teacher Horace, out of whom I have taken my text for this discourse:  we should be careful not to overshoot ourselves in the pursuits even of virtue.  Whether zeal or moderation be the point we aim at, let us keep fire out of the one, and frost out of the other.  But alas!  the world is too wise to want such a precaution.  The terms High-church and Low-church, as commonly used, do not so much denote a principle, as they distinguish a party.  They are like words of battle, that have nothing to do with their original signification;  but are only given out to keep a body of men together, and to let them know friends from enemies.
       I must confess I have considered, with some little attention, the influence which the opinions of these great national sects have upon their practice;  and do look upon it as one of the unaccountable things of our times, that multitudes of honest gentlemen, who entirely agree in their lives, should take it in their heads to differ in religion."