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Updated: June 8, 2025
In 1797, appeared the last book published during Casanova's lifetime, a small work entitled: 'A Leonard Snetlage, docteur en droit de l'Universite de Goettingue, Jacques Casanova, docteur en droit de l'Universite de Padoue'. This was a careful criticism of the neologisms introduced into French by the Revolution.
A discriminative avoidance of neologisms is honorific, not only because it argues that time has been wasted in acquiring the obsolescent habit of speech, but also as showing that the speaker has from infancy habitually associated with persons who have been familiar with the obsolescent idiom. It thereby goes to show his leisure-class antecedents.
So far as this second cause of sheer ignorance goes, the gaps in knowledge are continually resulting in slang and the addition of needless neologisms to the language. People come upon ideas that they know no English to express, and strike out the new phrase in a fine burst of ignorant discovery. There are Americans in particular who are amazingly apt at this sort of thing.
"All the time," I suggest, is precisely one of the phrases we should accept with gratitude if, indeed, it be not already naturalised. Mr. Lang is peculiarly unfortunate in calling Oliver Wendell Holmes to witness against his particular and pet aversion "I belong here" or "That does not belong there." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a stern opponent of such neologisms."
And with all this, in his hard rugged style, bristling with obsolescent words and unexpected neologisms, flashed perfect originalities, treasures of expression and superbly nomadic lines amputated of rhyme. Finally, over and above his Poemes Parisiens, where Des Esseintes had discovered this profound definition of woman: Eternel feminin de l'eternel jocrisse
In neglecting Tibullus and Propertius, Quintilian and the Plinies, Statius, Martial, even Terence and Plautus whose jargon full of neologisms, compound words and diminutives, could please him, but whose low comedy and gross humor he loathed, Des Esseintes only began to be interested in the Latin language with Lucan. Here it was liberated, already more expressive and less dull.
Likewise many landscapes in dreams, especially with bridges or with wooded mountains, can be readily recognized as descriptions of the genitals. Finally where one finds incomprehensible neologisms one may think of combinations made up of components having a sexual significance.
The wholly bombastic, distorted, and threadbare syntax of the modern standard author yea, even his ludicrous neologisms are not only tolerated, but placed to his credit as the spicy element in his works.
These are processes not of growth but of decay they distort, they render obsolete, and they destroy. The obsolescence and destruction of words and phrases cuts us off from the nobility of our past, from the severed masses of our race overseas, far more effectually than any growth of neologisms.
The two brothers are probably the latest composers who handled 16th-century music as their mother-language; suffering neither from the temptation to indulge even in such mild neologisms as they might have learnt from the elder brother's master, Nanino, nor from the necessity of preserving their purity of style by a mortified negative asceticism.
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