se will help to give it
authority and force. The effect of even a small number of successful
interventions will be to confirm right habits of choice, which may then,
as new opportunities arise, be applied to further cases. Among the cases
of linguistic usage which are varying and unfixed at the present time, and
in which therefore a deliberate choice is possible, the following may be
mentioned:

I. _The Naturalization of Foreign Words_.

There is no point on which usage is more uncertain and fluctuating than in
regard to the words which we are always borrowing from foreign languages.
Expression generally lags behind thought, and we are now more than ever
handicapped by the lack of convenient terms to describe the new
discoveries, and new ways of thinking and feeling by which our lives are
enriched and made interesting. It has been our national custom in the past
to eke out our native resources by borrowing from other languages,
especially from French, any words which we found ready to our needs; and
until recent times, these words were soon made current and convenient by
being assimilated and given English shapes and sounds. We still borrow as
freely as ever; but half the benefit of this borrowing is lost to us,
owing to our modern and pedantic attempts to preserve the foreign sounds
and shapes of imported words, which make their current use unnecessarily
difficult. Owing to our false taste in this matter many words which have
been long naturalized in the language are being now put back into their
foreign forms, and our speech is being thus gradually impoverished. This
process of de-assimilation generally begins with the restoration of
foreign accents to such words as have them in French; thus 'role' is now
written 'role'*[A]; 'debris', 'debris'; 'detour', 'detour'; 'depot',
'depot'; and the old words long established in our language, 'levee',
'naivety', now appear as 'levee', and 'naivete'. The next step is to
italicize these words, thus treating them as complete aliens, and thus we
often see _role_, _depot_, &c. The very old English word 'rendezvous' is
now printed _rendezvous_, and 'dilettante' and 'vogue' sometimes are
printed in italics. Among other words which have been borrowed at various
times and more or less naturalized, but which are now being driven out of
the language, are the following: confrere, congee, cortege, dishabille,
distrait, ensemble, fete, flair, mellay (now _melee_), nonchalance,
provenance,