thriven in Gaul for eleven hundred years, must have been often in the conquerors' months all through those long weary hours; it was one of the first French words that we afterwards admitted to English citizenship; and it should abide with us in the shape that it has always hitherto worn. If we change it into honor, we pare down its history, and we lower it to the level of the many Latin words that came in at the Reformation: from the Bastard of Falaise to the English Josiah is a great drop. Let us in this, as in everything else, hold to the good old way; and let our kinsmen, like ourselves, turn with dislike from changes, utterly needless, that spoil a word's pedigree. To maul an old term, whether English or French, is to imitate the clerical boors who wrought such havock at Durham and Canterbury within the last Century.
America and England alike are too much given to slang and to clipping old words. Nothing in the speech of the former country, so far as I know, can match our ‘awfully nice,’ or our ‘what say?’ but one comfort is, that slang takes hundreds of years before it can creep into Standard English. Mob and sham were slang in 1680, and smack strongly of that year's peculiarities; on the other hand, humbug, though as old as Bonnell Thornton, can as yet be employed by no grave author. Addison had before protested against curtailing words, as in the case of incog.; what would he have said to our exam.? Fine writing has set its dingy mark upon America as well as England; I think it was President Pierce who, in his opening address at the Capitol, twenty years ago, spoke of slavery as
