spots its speech.

Nevertheless, as inaccuracies, laxities, vulgarisms--transgressions
more or less superficial--such errors take from the correctness, from
the efficacy, from the force as well as the grace, of written or
spoken speech.

The high level of strength, suppleness and beauty occupied by our
English tongue has been reached, and can only be maintained, by
strenuous, varied, and continuous mental action. Offenses against the
laws and proprieties of language--like so many other of our
lapses--are in most cases effects of the tendency in human nature to
relax its tone. None save the most resolute and rigorous but have
their moods of unwatchfulness, of indolence. Moreover, men are
prone to resist mental refinement and intellectual subdivisions.
Discrimination requires close attention and sustained effort; and
without habitual discrimination there can be no linguistic precision
or excellence. In this, as in other provinces, people like to take
things easily. Now, every capable man of business knows that to take
things easily is an easy way to ruin. Language is in a certain sense
every one's business; but it is especially the business, as their
appellation denotes, of men of letters; and a primary duty of their
high vocation is to be jealous of any careless or impertinent meddling
with, or mishandling of, those little glistening, marvelous tools
wherewith such amazing structures and temples have been built and are
ever a-building. Culture, demanding and creating diversity and
subtlety of mental processes, is at once a cause and an effect of
infinite multiplication in the relations the mind is capable of
establishing between itself and the objects of its action, and between
its own processes; and language, being a chief instrument of culture,
has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands,
Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of
its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness,
any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex
tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by
the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating
influence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr.
Whewell; "Language is often called an instrument of thought, but it is
also the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere on
which thought lives--a medium essential to the activity of our
speculat