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It is, you dear humdrum! what the dictionary calls "nascent." I never liked the word, but it stands for a fact. The Countess here exhibits the weakness of a self-educated intelligence. She does not comprehend the joys of scholarship in her employment of Latinisms. It will be pardoned to her by those who perceive the profound piece of feminine discernment which precedes it.

The Saxon words grow obsolete; French ones come pouring in. And Americans are even more prone to Latinisms than Englishmen are: they 'locate' at such and such a place, where an English man would just go and live there. Before Latin, Celtic was the language of Britain. Finally, says W.Q. Judge, Sanskrit will become the universal language.

It is, you dear humdrum! what the dictionary calls "nascent." I never liked the word, but it stands for a fact. The Countess here exhibits the weakness of a self-educated intelligence. She does not comprehend the joys of scholarship in her employment of Latinisms. It will be pardoned to her by those who perceive the profound piece of feminine discernment which precedes it.

The very tricks mechanical dots, dashes, aposiopeses which offend us now and then in Sterne; the unfamiliar Latinisms which frighten some and disgust others in Browne, drop from Lamb's lips or pen like the pearls of the Fairy story. Unless you are born out of sympathy with Elia, you never think about them as tricks at all.

She preferred to remain ladylike to the last, in this and other little trifles in her lack of humour, her redundancies, her love of expensive clothes and genuinely humble people, of hot baths and latinisms and flowers and pet dogs and sealing-wax.

We think well of Johnson's prose. Yet the respectable English of our own time will bear comparison with his; it is more agile and less infected with Latinisms; why go back to Johnson? Let us admire him as a landmark, and pass on! Some literary periods may deserve to be called good, others bad; so be it.

Sometimes this is done at the expense of homely Saxon words which are the very sinews of our language; and wherever such words are sacrificed for Latinisms, the beauty and force of the whole are impaired or destroyed. Again, the translator seems to have a peculiar antipathy to everything like poetical expressions or the euphonious arrangement of sentences.

In attacking latinisms in the language borrowed from older poets Cheke and his companions were attacking the two chief sources of Elizabethan poetic vocabulary.

In other words, it gives as ready a welcome to the last experiment in Slang as to its false and pompous Latinisms. Nor is the welcome given in vain. Never before in the world's history has Slang flourished as it has flourished in America. And its triumph is not surprising. It is more than any artifice of speech the mark of a various and changing people.

I lamented this fact to a solitary gentleman who was strolling about here and who replied, upon due deliberation: "One cannot have everything." Then he added, as a suggestive afterthought: "Inasmuch as one thing sometimes excludes another." But veiled in sonorous Latinisms, the staleness of such remarks assumes an air of profundity.