indeed, they are in no better case than that unfortunate lady at
Earlswood who esteems newspapers stitched with unravelled carpet and
trimmed with orange peel, the extreme of human splendour. In truth,
their pride is baseless, and this slang of theirs no sort of
distinction whatever. Let me assure them that in our heavier way we in
this island are just as busy defiling our common inheritance. We can
send a team of linguists to America who will murder and misunderstand
the language against any eleven the Americans may select.

Of course there is a natural and necessary growth and development in a
living language, a growth that no one may arrest. In appliances, in
politics, in science, in philosophical interpretation, there is a
perpetual necessity for new words, words to express new ideas and new
relationships, words free from ambiguity and encumbering associations.
But the neologisms of the street and the saloon rarely supply any
occasion of this kind. For the most part they are just the stupid
efforts of ignorant men to supply the unnecessary. And side by side
with the invention of inferior cheap substitutes for existing words and
phrases, and infinitely more serious than that invention, goes on a
perpetual misuse and distortion of those that are insufficiently known.
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. A language may grow--our language must grow--it
may be clarified and refined and strengthened, but it need not suffer
the fate of an algal filament, and pass constantly into rottenness and
decay whenever growth is no longer in progress. That has been the fate
of languages in the past because of the feebler organization, the
slenderer, slower intercommunication, and, above all, the insufficient