other rules or cautions he adds: "Our
maker therefore at these days shall not follow Piers Plowman, nor Gower,
nor Lydgate, nor yet Chaucer, for their language is now out of use with
us: neither shall he take the terms of Northern men, such as they use in
daily talk, whether they be noblemen or gentlemen or of their best
clerks, all is a matter; nor in effect any speech used beyond the river
of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the purer English
Saxon at this day, yet it is not so courtly nor so current as our
Southern English is; no more is the far Western man's speech: ye shall
therefore take the usual speech of the court, and that of London and the
shires lying about London within sixty miles and not much above. I say
not this but in every shire of England there be gentlemen and others
that speak, but specially write, as good Southern as we of Middlesex or
Surry do; but not the common people of every shire, to whom the
gentlemen and also their learned clerks do for the most part condescend;
but herein we are ruled by the English dictionaries and other books
written by learned men, and therefore it needeth none other direction in
that behalf. Albeit peradventure some small admonition be not
impertinent, for we find in our English writers many words and speeches
amendable, and ye shall see in some many inkhorn terms so ill affected
brought in by men of learning, as preachers and schoolmasters; and many
strange terms of other languages by secretaries and merchants and
travellers, and many dark words and not usual nor well sounding, though
they be daily spoken in court. Wherefore great heed must be taken by our
maker in this point that his choice be good." He modestly expresses his
apprehensions that in some of these respects he may himself be accounted
a transgressor, and he subjoins a list of the new, foreign or unusual
words employed by him in this tract, with his reasons for their
adoption. Of this number are; _scientific_, _conduict_, "a French word,
but well allowed of us, and long since usual; it sounds something more
than this word (leading) for it is applied only to the leading of a
captain, and not as a little boy should lead a blind man;" _idiom_, from
the Greek; _significative_, "borrowed of the Latin and French, but to us
brought in first by some noblemen's secretary, as I think, yet doth so
well serve the turn as it could not now be spared; and many more like
usurped Latin and French words; as