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Updated: June 11, 2025
We must remember that some of the Jewish tales which have so much interested and charmed our forefathers are hardly to be defended on strict ethical principles, yet they have been a leavening and widening influence. Who would wish to expel from churches the stories of Adam and Eve, of Joseph and David, on grounds of ethical purism?
Whole books of his poems are occupied with the settlement of Latin orthography and prosody, with the combating of Praenestine, Sabine, Etruscan provincialisms, with the exposure of current solecisms; along with which, however, the poet by no means forgets to ridicule the insipidly systematic Isocratean purism of words and phrases, and even to reproach his friend Scipio in right earnest jest with the exclusive fineness of his language.
I'll send you a copy of the Century dictionary." This gentleman carried purism to almost extravagant lengths. He objected to the customary pronunciation of "jew's-harp," insisting that the word should be "juice-harp," and instructing the actor who mentioned this innocent instrument of melody to write it down so in his script.
In his combat with humanistic purism he foreshadows a Christian puritanism. As always his mockery procured him a new flood of invectives. Bembo and Sadolet, the masters of pure Latin, could afford to smile at it, but the impetuous Julius Caesar Scaliger violently inveighed against him, especially to avenge Longolius's memory.
The farce of the Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon made popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes Savantes exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity of an excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to be idiotic in precision.
Like them, he wanted professional success, public office, and the ordinary rewards of American life; and like them, he bears no trace of political or moral purism. But, unlike them, he was not the intellectual and moral victim of his own purposes and ambitions; and unlike them, his life is a tribute to the sincerity and depth of his moral insight.
Sententious brevity and simplicity of expression belong to the pure spirit of the language, and when employed impart to it much dignity and beauty; but there is no standard of orthography, nor any grammar, and but few rules of universal application. Every Siamese writer spells to please himself, and the purism of one is the slang or gibberish of another.
But what you propose is Quixotic in every way. It will not hold water for a moment. You know as well as I do that no barrister would keep a wig on his head who pretended to such a code of morals in his profession. Such a doctrine is a doctrine of puritanism or purism, which is worse. All this moonshine was very well for you when you talked of being a clergyman, or an author, or a painter.
The only remedy Puritanism offers for this ill-begotten child is greater repression and more merciless persecution. In equally stupid manner purism seeks to check the terrible scourge of its own creation venereal diseases.
In one of his poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective purism questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining that in his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said "Eh, b'en," instead of "Eh, bien." He knew that we must be always on the lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance.
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