James Brander Matthews was a highly influential literary historian and critic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Mark Twain opened his critical essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" with a quotation from Matthews.) For over 30 years Matthews taught at Columbia University, where he held the first chair in dramatic literature.
In this excerpt from the essay "Is the English Language Deteriorating?" (written in 1918), Matthews argues that language is nourished by "new usages and new words and new meanings for old words."
New Words
by Brander Matthews
Despite the exacerbated protests of the upholders of authority and tradition a living language makes new words as these may be needed; it bestows novel meanings upon old words; it borrows words from foreign tongues; it modifies its usages to gain directness and to achieve speed. Often these novelties are abhorrent; yet they may win acceptance if they approve themselves to the majority. This irrepressible conflict between stability and mutation and between authority and independence can be observed at all epochs in the evolution of all languages, in Greek and in Latin in the past as well as in English and in French in the present. The man in the street is likely to have a relish for verbal novelty and even for verbal eccentricity; and the man in the library is likely to be a stanch upholder of the good old ways, especially hostile to what he contemptuously stigmatizes as "neologisms," an abhorrent and horrific term of reproach. Theophile Gautier, for example, apparently regarded the French language in the light of an exclusive club into which a new word could be admitted only after being duly proposed and seconded and finally favorably reported by a committee on nominations. [Jonathan] Swift was vehement and vociferous in his demand for power to forbid all innovation and to "fix" the language once for all. Ben Jonson was objurgated by his rivals because he had put into circulation words of his own coinage; and yet he once took occasion to declare that he loved "pure and neat language . . . yet plaine and customary."
The belief that a language ought to be "fixt," that is, made stable, or in other words, forbidden to modify itself in any way, was held by a host of scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were more familiar with the dead languages, in which the vocabulary is closed and in which usage is petrified, than they were with the living languages, in which there is always incessant differentiation and unending extension. To "fix" a living language finally is an idle dream, and if could be brought about it would be a dire calamity. Luckily language is never in the exclusive control of scholars; it does not belong to them alone, as they are often inclined to believe; it belongs to all who have it as a mother-tongue. It is governed not by elected representatives but by a direct democracy, by the people as a whole assembled in town-meeting. The younger and more active citizens of this linguistic community may propose new usages and new words and new meanings for old words; and the elder and more conservative citizens may protest against these novelties with all the weight due to seniority. And when both sides have been heard, there is a show of hands; and by this the irrevocable decision of the community itself is rendered.
When the community finds itself at a standstill because it lacks new words to name new things, it has to supply itself in a hurry. It makes the new word it needs when it feels the need; it has no time to submit the extemporized term to revision by a committee of scholars. The new word may be made in the library or in the laboratory, in the shop or in the street; it may be well made or ill made; but if it approves itself to the special group which needs it, it is likely at last to win acceptance from the rest of us. We Americans devised a new thing when we first built a huge receptacle for grain; and the men who devised this called it an elevator, which does not seem to be the best possible name for that particular thing, but which is its name, none the less, and its only name. Almost at the same time, a word was needed for another novel device, that by which passengers could be carried to the upper floors of a building. The French termed this device an ascender (ascenseur); the Americans called it an elevator, in spite of the fact that they had just given the same name to another and wholly different instrument of advancing civilization; and the British preferred lift, perhaps the best of the three as the shortest and simplest.
Very often the verbal novelty is borrowed from a foreign tongue. "The great metropolitan English speech," so [Ralph Waldo] Emerson reminded us, is "the sea which receives tributaries from every region under Heaven." This is no merely modern activity, even if it may seem to be more frequent in the twentieth century than it was in the eighteenth. English began to appropriate words from other languages when it was in the early stage that we call Anglo-Saxon. This borrowing is wholly without danger to the purity of English if the word is definitely anglicized, if it is actually made to feel at home in our vocabulary, if it drops its alien accents and if it modifies its foreign pronunciation to adjust itself to our speech-habits. On the other hand, it must be regarded as a menace if it refuses to make this adjustment or if it cannot. So long as its users are conscious that it is foreign, so long as speakers try to give it its original pronunciation and so long as writers feel that they ought to indicate its exoticism by the use of italics, then it is a defilement of our native speech, since the foreign word discloses itself as a foreign substance merely imbedded in English and not really assimilated.
The new words, home-made or imported, may have been due to the effort of ignorance or they may have been inspired by tradition; they may be the result of individual independence or they may be sanctified by authority; they may win immediate acceptance or they may arouse prolonged controversy; but in the end they either fall out of use and into disrepute or they establish themselves in standard English. The ultimate decision as to their fate lies in the hands not of the educated alone or of the ignorant alone but of the main body of the users of English. When this verdict of the majority is once rendered, there is no appeal to a higher court. The decision stands for all time; and later generations will employ the verbal novelty unhesitatingly, ignorant that its validity had ever been a matter of dispute. [Claude Favre de] Vaugelas, who helped to guide French in the right path, once put the case in a nutshell: "There is only one master of language, who is the king and tyrant; this is usage."
"New Words" is part two of the essay "Is the English Language Deteriorating?" by Brander Matthews. Written in 1918, "Is the English Language Deteriorating?" is the first essay in the collection Essays on English, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1922.
