Читать книгу Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature - Charles C. Bombaugh - Страница 74

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During William C. Bryant’s editorial management of the New York Evening Post, he attached to the walls of the rooms of the sub-editors and reporters a list of prohibited words. It would be a substantial benefit to “English undefiled” if a similar list were adopted and insisted upon by every American newspaper. For our newspapers have a manifest influence in determining the growth and character of our language, and it behooves them to do their best to preserve its purity. But this is a far less easy thing to do than most persons would imagine; and, if forbidden words do occasionally slip into the columns of the newspaper, it must be a blemish such as, in some shape and degree, is supposed to be inseparable from all human productions. Most of the writing on the modern daily newspaper is necessarily the work of that enterprising, wide-a-wake class known as reporters. They “shoot on the wing,” look more to present effect than to classic correctness in their writing, and are, none of them, purists in literary style.

The English language has never had any well defined and universally recognized laws of its own. In its literature it began with the time when every writer was a law unto himself, and it has never fully outgrown that condition. Nor can all the Trenches and Goulds and Grant Whites in existence mould it into any arbitrarily correct shape. It is a mixture of various tongues, and is drawing to itself, every year, a considerable number of additional words from the most diverse and curious sources, and especially from the other leading languages. It may in time—who knows?—become the universal language, the one which is to be the lingual Moses to lead the world out of the wilderness of the curse of Babel, and give to all people a common vehicle of communication. In this view of the case, the liberties taken by the ingenious and inventive newspaper reporter may be regarded as important and useful. The dictionaries wait upon the newspapers, and slowly accept and take to themselves, as English words, the intruders which a year or two before looked so strange in the newspapers, but which custom has rendered not only familiar, but seemingly necessary.

Here is Mr. Bryant’s list of forbidden words: