s
ever more and more pedantic and foreign, till it becomes at last as
unfitting a vehicle for living thought as monkish Latin. That we should
all be made to talk like books is the danger with which we are
threatened by the Universal Schoolmaster, who does his best to enslave
the minds and memories of his victims to what he esteems the best models
of English composition, that is to say, to the writers whose style is
faultily correct and has no blood-warmth in it. No language after it has
faded into _diction_, none that cannot suck up the feeding juices
secreted for it in the rich mother-earth of common folk, can bring forth
a sound and lusty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass
from page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and
the lips suppled by downright living interests and by passion in its
very throe. Language is the soil of thought, and our own especially is a
rich leaf-mould, the slow deposit of ages, the shed foliage of feeling,
fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth-change, that the
vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself anew with living
green. There is death in the dictionary; and, where language is too
strictly limited by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is
limited also; and we get a _potted_ literature, Chinese dwarfs
instead of healthy trees.

But while the schoolmaster has been busy starching our language and
smoothing it flat with the mangle of a supposed classical authority, the
newspaper reporter has been doing even more harm by stretching and
swelling it to suit his occasions. A dozen years ago I began a list,
which I have added to from time to time, of some of the changes which
may be fairly laid at his door. I give a few of them as showing their
tendency, all the more dangerous that their effect, like that of some
poisons, is insensibly cumulative, and that they are sure at last of
effect among a people whose chief reading is the daily paper. I give in
two columns the old style and its modern equivalent.

_Old Style._ _New Style._

Was hanged. Was launched into
eternity.

When the halter When the fatal
was put round noose was adjusted
his neck. about the
neck of the unfortunate
victim
of his own unbridled
passions.

A great crowd A vast concourse