It is an insolence toward the majority of the purchasers,
for it is a very frank and impudent way of saying, "Get the translations
made yourselves if you want it--this book is not written for the
ignorant classes".... The writer would say that he uses the foreign
language where the delicacy of his point cannot be conveyed in English.
Very well, then, he writes his best things for the tenth man, and he
ought to warn the other nine not to buy his book.'

The result of these straight-forward and out-spoken remarks is set
forth by Mark Twain himself: 'When the musing spider steps upon the
red-hot shovel, he first exhibits a wild surprise, then he shrivels
up. Similar was the effect of these blistering words upon the tranquil
and unsuspecting agent. I can be dreadfully rough on a person when the
mood takes me.'

VI

This sermon might have been made even broader in its application. It is
not always only the ignorant who are discommoded by a misguided reliance
on foreign words as bestowers of elegance; it is often the man of
culture, aware of the meaning of the alien vocable but none the less
jarred by its obtrusion on an English page. The man of culture may have
his attention disturbed even by a foreign word which has long been
acclimatized in English, if it still retains its unfriendly appearance.
I suppose that _savan_ has established its citizenship in our
vocabulary; it is, at least, domiciled in our dictionaries[2]; but when
I found it repeated by Frederic Myers, in _Science and a Future Life_,
to avoid the use of 'scientist', the French word forced itself on me,
and I found myself reviving a boyish memory of a passage in Abbott's
_Life of Napoleon_ dealing with Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt and
narrating the attacks of the Mamelukes, when the order was given to
form squares with '_savans_ and asses in the center'.

An otherwise fine passage of Ruskin's has always been spoilt for me by
the wilful incursion of two French words, which seem to me to break the
continuity of the sentence: 'A well-educated gentleman may not know many
languages; may not be able to speak any but his own; may have read very
few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever
word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in
the peerage of words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood
at a glance from words of modern _canaille_; remembers all their
ancestry, their intermarriages, dist