Parts of Speech: Essays on English

Altho the various essays which are now brought together in this book have been written from time to time during the past ten years, nearly all of them have had their origin in a desire to make plain and to emphasize one fact: that the English language belongs to the peoples who speak it—that it is their own precious possession, to deal with at their pleasure and at their peril. The fact itself ought to be obvious enough to all of us; and yet there would be no difficulty in showing that it is not everywhere accepted. Perhaps the best way to present it so clearly that it cannot be rejected is to draw attention to some of its implications; and this is what has been attempted in one or another of these separate papers.

The point of view from which the English language has been approached is that of the man of letters rather than that of the professed expert in linguistics. But the writer ventures to hope that the professed expert, even tho he discovers little that is new in these pages, will find also little that demands his disapproval. The final essay is frankly more literary than linguistic, for it is an attempt to define not so much a word as a thing.

So wise a critic of literature and of language as Sainte-Beuve has declared that “orthography is like society: it will never be entirely reformed; but we can at least make it less vicious.” In this sensible saying is the warrant for the simplified spellings adopted in the following pages. As will be seen by readers of the two papers on our orthography, the writer is by no means a radical “spelling-reformer,” so called. But he believes that all of us who wish to keep the English language up to its topmost efficiency are bound always to do all in our power to aid the tendency toward simplification—whether of orthography or of syntax—which has been at work unceasingly ever since the language came into existence.

B. M.

Columbia University,
July 4, 1901.