as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same
proportion as it alters practice.

As by the cultivation of various sciences, a language is amplified,
it will be more furnished with words deflected from original sense;
the geometrician will talk of a courtier's zenith, or the excentrick
virtue of a wild hero, and the physician of sanguine expectations
and phlegmatick delays. Copiousness of speech will give opportunities
to capricious choice, by which some words will be preferred,
and others degraded; vicissitudes of fashion will enforce the use
of new, or extend the signification of known terms. The tropes of
poetry will make hourly encroachments, and the metaphorical will
become the current sense: pronunciation will be varied by levity
or ignorance, and the pen must at length comply with the tongue;
illiterate writers will at one time or other, by publick infatuation,
rise into renown, who, not knowing the original import of words,
will use them with colloquial licentiousness, confound distinction,
and forget propriety. As politeness increases, some expressions will
be considered as too gross and vulgar for the delicate, others as
too formal and ceremonious for the gay and airy; new phrases are
therefore adopted, which must, for the same reasons, be in time
dismissed. Swift, in his petty treatise on the English language,
allows that new words must sometimes be introduced, but proposes
that none should be suffered to become obsolete. But what makes
a word obsolete, more than general agreement to forbear it? and
how shall it be continued, when it conveys an offensive idea, or
recalled again into the mouths of mankind, when it has once become
unfamiliar by disuse, and unpleasing by unfamiliarity?

There is another cause of alteration more prevalent than any other,