borrowed so many concise and useful terms from France and Italy to enlarge
and adorn our English speech. If we are to use foreign words (and, if we
have no equivalents, we must use them) it is certainly much better that
they should be incorporated in our language, and made available for common
use. Words like 'garage' and 'nuance' and 'naivety' had much better be
pronounced and written as English words, and there are others, like
'bouleverse' and 'bouleversement', whose partial borrowing might well be
made complete; and a useful word like _malaise_ could with advantage
reassume the old form 'malease' which it once possessed.


II. _Alien Plurals_.

The useless and pedantic process of de-assimilation takes other forms, one
of the most common of which is the restoring their foreign plural forms to
words borrowed from Greek, Latin, and Italian. No common noun is genuinely
assimilated into our language and made available for the use of the whole
community until it has an English plural, and thousands of indispensable
words have been thus incorporated. We no longer write of _ideæ_, _chori_,
_asyla_, _musea_, _sphinges_, _specimina_ for _ideas_, _choruses_,
_asylums_, _museums_, _sphinxes_, _specimens_, and the notion of returning
to such plurals would seem barbarous and absurd. And yet this very process
is now going on, and threatens us with deplorable results. _Sanatoria_,
_memoranda_, _gymnasia_ are now replacing _sanatorium_, _memorandums_, and
_gymnasiums_; _automata_, _formulae_, and _lacunae_ are taking the place
of _automatons_, _formulas_, and _lacunas_; _indices_ and _apices_ of
_indexes_ and _apexes_, _miasmata_ of _miasmas_ or _miasms_; and even
forms like _lexica_, _rhododendra_, and _chimeræ_ have been recently noted
in the writings of authors of repute.