things will continue to be being done, and the gentle manly barkeeper of the period will call his grog-shop a sample-room, notwithstanding all that I have said, and all that abler men and better scholars than I am may say, to the contrary. But, although I do not expect to purge away corruption, I do hope to arrest it in some measure by giving hints that help toward wholesome ness. This book may possibly correct some of the prevailing evils against which it is directed; but I shall be satisfied if it awakens an attention to its subject that will prevent evil in the future. Scholars and philologists need not be told that it is not addressed to them; but neither is it written for the unintelligent and entirely uninstructed. It is intended to be of some service to intelligent, thoughtful, educated persons, who are interested in the study of the English language, and in the protection of it against pedants on the one side and coarse libertines in language on the other. On the etymology of words I have said little, because little was needed. The points from which I have regarded words are in general rather those of taste and reason than of history; and my discussions are philological only as all study of words must be philological. The few suggestions which I have made in etymology I put forth with no affectation of timidity, but with little concern as to their fate. Etymology, which, as it is now practised, is a product of the last thirty years, fulfils towards language the function which the antiquarian and the genealogist discharge in the making of the world's history. The etymologist of the present day follows, as he should follow, his word up step by step through the written records of past years, until he finds its origin in the fixed form of a parent language. The disappearance of every letter, the modification of every sound, the introduction of every new letter, must be accounted for in accordance with the analogy of the language at the period when the change, real or supposed, took place. Thus etymology has at last been placed upon its only safe bases, research and comparison, and the origin of most words in modern. languages is as surely determinable as that of a member of any family which has a recorded history. I have only to add here that in my remarks on what I have unavoidably called, by way of distinction, British English and "American" English, and in my criticism of the style of some eminent British authors, no insinuation of a superiority in the use of their mother tongue by men of English race in "America" is intended, no right to set up an independent standard is implied. Of the latter, indeed, there is no fear. When that new "American" thing, so eagerly sought, and hitherto so vainly, does appear, if it ever do appear, it will not be a language, or even a literature. This book was prepared for the press in the autumn of 1869. An unavoidable and unexpected delay in its appearance has enabled me to add a few examples in illustration of my views, which I have met with since that time; but it has received no other additions. NEW YORK, July 8, 1870. R. G. W. |