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
he adapts it, thus modified, as well as he can to his subject. A second
writer twists the sense of the expression in another way; a third takes
possession of it for another purpose; and as there is no common appeal
to the sentence of a permanent tribunal which may definitely settle the
signification of the word, it remains in an ambiguous condition. The
consequence is that writers hardly ever appear to dwell upon a single
thought, but they always seem to point their aim at a knot of ideas,
leaving the reader to judge which of them has been hit. This is a
deplorable consequence of democracy. I had rather that the language
should be made hideous with words imported from the Chinese, the
Tartars, or the Hurons, than that the meaning of a word in our own
language should become indeterminate. Harmony and uniformity are
only secondary beauties in composition; many of these things are
conventional, and, strictly speaking, it is possible to forego them; but
without clear phraseology there is no good