These days, you don't hear many English teachers advocating "purity of diction"--at least not in those terms.
But back in the 19th century, language mavens were greatly concerned about maintaining the honor and good standing of English words. In his popular textbook The Manual of the Art of Prose Composition (1867), Methodist minister John Mitchell Bonnell explained that the "diction of a writer is said to be pure when he employs no words except such as belong to the English language, as it is at present used by the best writers and speakers."
Never mind that in terms of its abundant hoard of loanwords and borrowings, English vocabulary is (and always has been) about as pure as the driven slush. From Bonnell's prescriptive viewpoint, the purity of the language is violated by provincialisms, obsolete words, unauthorized words, and foreign words. To all of these déclassé intruders he applied the term barbarism:
The pupil will perceive that the sole reason why words of this class are not as good as other words is that they are only partially used. Thus, chores is a barbarism, because it is used only in New England. Tote is a barbarism, because it is confined to the Southern States. Hugger-mugger is a barbarism probably peculiar to England.
As it is partial usage that stamps any word as a barbarism, all those slang words that come into use among men of a certain trade or profession are to be included in this class. . . . Under the condemnation of partial usage fall those words that are used only by the lower classes; but these have also an air of vulgarity about them, which is far worse than can be said of a mere provincialism.
(John Mitchell Bonnell, A Manual of the Art of Prose Composition for the Use of Colleges and Schools. John P. Morton and Company, 1867)
Teachers won't be surprised to hear that Bonnell's snooty admonitions were largely ignored by his pupils. A look at some of the 19th-century "barbarisms" identified, defined, and discredited in his textbook shows that most have since found a secure and respectable place in American English.
- bamboozle (outwit)
- bender (drunken frolic)
- bogus (spurious)
- bosh (nonsense, trash)
- boss (head-workman, employer)
- cantankerous (contentious, irascible)
- cavort (prance)
- chores (little jobs of daily work)
- chunky (short, thickset)
- contraption (contrivance)
- dumps (low spirits)
- flare-up (a sudden manifestation of anger)
- gallivanting (gallanting)
- grab (seize)
- gump (a blockhead)
- gumption (common sense)
- harum-scarum (in a wild, disorderly manner)
- helter-skelter (in a loose, irregular manner)
- higgledy-piggledy (in great confusion)
- highfalutin (bombastic, grandiloquent)
- hobble (difficulty)
- hocus-pocus (sleight of hand)
- humbug (a cheat, a pretense)
- humdrum (monotonous)
- jabber (to talk incessantly)
- lingo (language, diction)
- loggerheads (variance, quarrel)
- palaver (idle or deceptive talk)
- pesky (troublesome, provoking)
- primp (to arrange one's self for)
- rambunctious (headlong, rough)
- skedaddle (retreat in disorder)
- riff-raff (low and vulgar people)
- rigmarole (a long and worthless account)
- rumpus (disorderly noise)
- spree (drunken frolic)
- topsy-turvy (upside down)
- tote (carry)
- shilly-shally (in a hesitating manner)
- whopper (a huge specimen)
Of course, not all 19th-century writers were repelled by such barbarous lingo. In the essay "Slang in America" (1888), poet Walt Whitman (he of the "barbaric yawp") pointed out that "many of the oldest and solidest words we use, were originally generated from the daring and license of slang":
Language, be it remember'd, is not an abstract construction of the learn'd, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea. It impermeates all, the Past as well as the Present, and is the grandest triumph of the human intellect.Almost a century later, in his influential book Words and Ways of American English, linguist Thomas Pyles wrote that "what is fittest in language has a way of surviving, as the admirable o.k., the real McCoy, highbrow, crook, lengthy, haywire, panhandle, roughneck, Annie Oakley, and bawl out . . . have done."
What's clear is that anybody who assumes the chore of preserving the bogus "purity" of English will in the end be bamboozled by the riff raff who actually use the language.
