In 1710, Jonathan Swift declared that “…our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and, that in many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar.”
He made his declaration in an essay titled “The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue.” He wrote it in the form of a letter to the Earl of Oxford, who was the Royal Treasurer, and it’s essentially a request for the Earl to fund an institution to safeguard the English language. Much like France does to this day.
He goes on to say that Italian, French, and Spanish are much more “refined” languages, although even they don’t attain the “purity” of Latin — and he made it clear that even Latin, over time, began to decay because of “the Change of their Government into a Tyranny, which ruined the Study of Eloquence, there being no further Use of Encouragement for popular Orators.”
One thing he complained about was English spelling — specifically, any shortcuts or variations he noticed. He was particularly disturbed by the practice, common at the time, of writing “disturb’d” in place of “disturbed”. After all, as he says, “…by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, … so difficult to utter…”
He was also mightily annoyed by students trying to display their burgeoning knowledge: “Several young Men at the Universities, terribly possed with the fear of Pedantry, run into a worse Extream, and think all Politeness to consist in reading the daily Trash sent down to them from hence: This they call knowing the World, and reading Men and Manners.” More specifically, these annoying fellows would write essays in which they used words of recent coinage such as “trips”, “spies”, and “amusements”. Swift’s essay was not in favor of change when it came to language. Unless, of course, the changes were his idea.
It wasn’t language alone that bothered Swift. For one thing, he pointed out that “with all the real good Qualities of our Country, we are naturally not very Polite.” Of course, that natural rudeness was also displayed linguistically because people really oughtn’t to use shorter words: “This perpetual Disposition to shorten our Words, by retrenching the Vowels, is nothing else but a tendency to lapse into the Barbarity of those Northern Nations from whom we are descended…” He explains that he was talking about Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, where people shorten words because of the “Roughness and Frequency of Consonants” in those languages.
One of the subtexts of his essay is that if you allow the lower classes to introduce variations in the language, well, those are just the people foolish enough to be bamboozled (a word that had just recently appeared) by the fast talk of “projectors” (con men — his essay mentions “projectors” a number of times). And those contractions he hated (it wasn’t just “disturb’d” that raised his hackles; contractions that we still use, like “can’t” and “I’ll” were just as bad) are just another way to talk faster. What might he have said about acronyms?
Maybe it was just a lack of patience in using language that really bothered Swift. After all, he thought it was pretty good writing to digress into an explanation of the history of “why English is less perfect than the Romance languages of southern Europe”. And some of his sentences demand a certain patience to get through: “Mean time, the Britains, left to shift for themselves, and daily harassed by cruel Inroads from the Picts, were forced to call in the Saxons for their Defense; who, consequently, reduced the greatest Part of the Island to their own Power, drove the Britains into the most remote and mountainous Parts, and the rest of the Country, in Customs, Religion, and Language, became wholly Saxon.”
On the other hand, don’t forget that this is the same Jonathan Swift who wrote “A Modest Proposal”, where he suggested that Irish children be sold as food to rich people, and who introduced the word “yahoo” as a label for fools and idiots. So this essay may not be quite what it appears at first glance…
