most. The eminently democratic desire to get above their own sphere will
often lead them to seek to dignify a vulgar profession by a Greek or
Latin name. The lower the calling is, and the more remote from learning,
the more pompous and erudite is its appellation. Thus the French
rope-dancers have transformed themselves into acrobates and funambules.

In the absence of knowledge of the dead languages, democratic
nations are apt to borrow words from living tongues; for their mutual
intercourse becomes perpetual, and the inhabitants of different
countries imitate each other the more readily as they grow more like
each other every day.

But it is principally upon their own languages that democratic nations
attempt to perpetrate innovations. From time to time they resume
forgotten expressions in their vocabulary, which they restore to use; or
they borrow from some particular class of the community a term peculiar
to it, which they introduce with a figurative meaning into the language
of daily life. Many expressions which originally belonged to the
technical language of a profession or a party, are thus drawn into
general circulation.

The most common expedient employed by democratic nations to make an
innovation in language consists in giving some unwonted meaning to
an expression already in use. This method is very simple, prompt, and
convenient; no learning is required to use it aright, and ignorance
itself rather facilitates the practice; but that practice is most
dangerous to the language. When a democratic people doubles the meaning
of a word in this way, they sometimes render the signification which it
retains as ambiguous as that which it acquires. An author begins by a
slight deflection of a known expression from its primitive meaning, and