renconter, &c. On the other hand, it is satisfactory to note
that 'employee' appears to be taking the place of 'employe'.

[Footnote A: For the words marked with an asterisk see notes on page 10.]

The printing in italics and the restoration of foreign accents is
accompanied by awkward attempts to revert to the foreign pronunciation of
these words, which of course much lessens their usefulness in
conversation. Sometimes this, as in _nuance_, or _timbre_* practically
deprives us of a word which most of us are unable to pronounce correctly;
sometimes it is merely absurd, as in 'envelope', where most people try to
give a foreign sound to a word which no one regards as an alien, and which
has been anglicized in spelling for nearly two hundred years.

Members of our Society will, we hope, do what is in their power to stop
this process of impoverishment, by writing and pronouncing as English such
words as have already been naturalized, and when a new borrowing appears
in two forms they will give their preference to the one which is most
English. There are some who may even help to enrich the language by a
bolder conquest of useful terms, and although they may suffer ridicule,
they will suffer it in a good cause, and will only be sharing the
short-lived denunciation which former innovators incurred when they
borrowed so many concise and useful terms from France and Italy to enlarge
and adorn our English speech. If we are to use foreign words (and, if we
have no equivalents, we must use them) it is certainly much better that
they should be incorporated in our language, and made available for common
use. Words like 'garage' and 'nuance' and 'naivety' had much better be
pronounced and written as English words, and there are others, like
'bouleverse' and 'bouleversement', whose partial borrowing might well be
made complete; and a useful word like _malaise_ could with advantage
reassume the old form 'malease' which it once possessed.

II. _Alien Plurals_.

The useless and pedantic process of de-assimilation takes other forms, one
of the most common of which is the restoring their foreign plural forms to
words borrowed from Greek, Latin, and Italian. No common noun is genuinely
assimilated into our language and made available for the use of the whole
community until it has an English plural, and thousands of indispensable
words have been thus incorporated. We no longer write of _ideae_, _chori_,
_asyla_, _musea_, _sphinges_, _