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Updated: July 7, 2025
I am not the apologist of the godless rake, the defender of the roue; but I have small patience with those mawkish purists who persist in measuring men and women by the same standard of morals. We might as well apply the same code to the fierce Malay who runs amuck and to McAllister's fashionable pismires.
Altogether, in this respect, the poem was a bold experiment, for which Milton has been taken to task by purists among his commentators down to our own time. It is the matter, however, that interests us most here. The ode opens half-humorously with an address to the little book he was sending to Rous.
This substance has a peculiar effect upon the cloth, causing it to shrink, and thus making it more taut and rigid than it could be by the most careful stretching. Though the layman would not suspect it, this wash alone costs about $150 a machine. The seaplanes too or hydroaëroplanes as purists call them present a curious illustration of unexpected and, it would seem, unexplainable expense.
Here, it seems to me, is one of the most practical truths ever uttered by a teacher. Pianists spend thousands of hours trying to subjugate impossible muscles. Chopin, who found out most things for himself, saw the waste of time and force. I recommend his advice. He was ever particular about fingering, but his innovations horrified the purists.
If, however, you ought only to bow to a new acquaintance, you surely should do more to old ones. If you meet an intimate friend fifty times in a morning, give your hand every time, an observance of propriety, which, though worthy of universal adoption, is in this country only followed by the purists in politeness.
After the purists and the exacting have said their worst against the statue, it will yet be found from the spirit of its execution, its cleverness, and 'go, to resort to a vulgarism charming a very large class of uncritical examiners.
Such a phenomenon in language is peculiar to this country. But notwithstanding the fears of the purists and the philologers, it does not threaten the existence of the English language here, nor is it at all likely to affect it permanently even by the addition of one phrase or word. For our use of slang of this kind is the most fleeting of temporary fashions.
Perhaps the maire was also not indifferent to the question of style; he prided himself on his French; he had in his youth won a prize at the Lycée for composition, and he contributed occasional papers to the journal of the Société de l'Histoire de France on the antiquities of his department. Most Frenchmen are born purists in style, and the maire lingered over his words.
To strict moralists, therefore, and to purists in good taste, the Confessions will always be unpalatable. More indulgent readers will find in those pages the traces of a spirit which, with all its faults, its errors, its diseases, deserves something more than pity deserves almost love. At any rate, it is a spirit singularly akin to our own.
Let the purists who sneer at "Americanisms" think for one moment how much poorer the English language would be to-day if North America had become a French or Spanish instead of an English continent. I am far from advocating a breaking down of the barrier between literary and vernacular speech.
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