Co-Operation of Members
The method by which this Society proposes to work is to collect expert opinion on matters wherein our present use is indeterminate or unsatisfactory, and thus to arrive at a general understanding and consensus of opinion which might be relied on to influence practice.
This method implies the active co-operation of the members of the Society, who, it is presumed, are all interested in our aims; and the purpose of our secretary’s paper (printed above) is to suggest topics on which members might usefully contribute facts and opinions.
The committee, who have added a few notes to the paper, offer some remarks on the topics suggested.
1. Whether it is advisable to Anglicize the spelling of certain French words, like timbre, in order to promote their assimilation. A paper dealing with this question, giving as full a list as possible of the words that are at present in a precarious condition, and proposing in each case the curative spelling, is invited; and any single practical contribution to the subject will be welcome.
2. A full list of foreign nouns that are uncertain of their Englished plurals is required. The unreadiness to come to a decided opinion in doubtful cases is due to the absence of any overruling principle; and the lack of a general principle is due to ignorance of all the particulars which it would affect. Inconsistent practice is no doubt in many cases established irrevocably, and yet if all the words about which there is at present any uncomfortable feeling were collected and exhibited, it would then probably appear that the majority of instances indicated a general rule of propriety and convenience, and this would immediately decide all doubtful cases, and these, when once recognized and established in educated practice, would win over many other words that are refractory in the absence of rule. What exceptions remained would be tabulated as definitely recognized exceptions.
3. Besides the class of words indicated in Mr. Pearsall Smith’s paper, there is another set of plural forms needing attention, and that is the Greek words that denote the various sciences and arts; there is in these an uncertainty and inconsistency in the use of singular and plural forms. We say Music and Physics, but should we say Ethic or Ethics, Esthetic or Esthetics? Here again agreement on a general rule to govern doubtful cases would be a boon. The experience of writers and teachers who are in daily contact with such words should make their opinions of value, and we invite them to deal with the subject. The corresponding use of Latin plurals taking singular verbs, as Morals, should be brought under rule.
4. The question of the use of ae (æ) and oe (œ). Our Society from the first abjured the whole controversy about reforms of spelling, but questions of literary propriety and convenience must sometimes involve the spellings; and this is an instance of it. On the main question of phonetic spelling the Society would urge its members to distinguish the use of phonetic script in teaching, from its introduction into English literature. The first is absolutely desirable and inevitable: the second is not only undesirable but impracticable, though this would not preclude a good deal of reasonable reform in our literary spelling in a phonetic direction. Those who fear that if phonetics is taught in the schools it will then follow that our books will be commonly printed in phonetic symbols, should read Dr. Henry Bradley’s lecture to the British Academy ‘On the relations between spoken and written language’ (1913), and they will see that the Society’s Tract II, on ‘English Homophones’, illustrates the unpractical nature of any scheme either of pure phonetics in the printing of English books, or even of such a scheme as is offered by ‘the Simplified Spelling Society’; because the great number of homophones which are now distinguished by their different spellings would make such a phonetic writing as unutilitarian as our present system is: moreover, if it were adopted it would inevitably lead to the elimination of far more of these homophones than we can afford to lose; since it would enforce by its spelling the law which now operates only by speech, that homophones are self-destructive.
5. Mr. Pearsall Smith has returned to the question of dialectal regeneration mentioned in Tract I, in which we invited contributions on the subject. In response we had a paper sent to us, which we do not print because, though full of learning and interesting detail, it was a curious and general disquisition calculated to divert attention from the practical points. What the Society asks for is not a list of lost words that are interesting in themselves: we need rather definite instances of good dialect words which are not homophones and which would conveniently supply wants. That is, any word proposed for rehabilitation in our practical vocabulary should be not only a good word in itself, but should fall into some definite place and relieve and enrich our speech by its usefulness. It is evident that no one person can be expected to supply a full list of such words, but on the other hand there must be very many of our members who could contribute one or two; and such contributions are invited.
Exempli gratia. Here are two words with very different titles and claims, nesh and hyppish.
Nesh, which has two columns in the Oxford Dictionary, begins in A.D. 888, and is still heartily alive in Yorks. and North Derbyshire, where it is used in the sense of being oversensitive to pain and especially to cold. In this special signification, to which it has locally settled down after a thousand years of experience, it has no rival; and its restoration to our domestic vocabulary would probably have a wholesome moral and physical effect on our children.
Hyppish is the Englished form of hypochondriacal, its suffix carrying its usual diminutive value, so that its meaning is ‘somewhat hypochondriacal’. Berkeley, Gray, and Swift used hyps or the hyp for hypochondriasis, and the adjective was apparently common. It would seem that hypochondria was then spoken, as hypocrisy still is, with the correct and pleasant short vowels of the Greek prefix, not as now with a long alien diphthong haipo-. It was presumably this short y that accidentally killed hyppish; for the word hipped was used of a horse lamed in the hip, and alongside of this hipped, and maybe attracted by it, an adjective hypt arose. When once hyp and hypt were confounded with hip and hipped, hyppish would suffer and lose definition. But hypt and hipped combined forces, and were probably even from the first in their present uncertain condition, for when nowadays a man says that he is hipped, he has no definite notion of what he means except that he is in some way, either in his loins or mind incapacitated and out of sorts. Whether hypt and hipped have mortally wounded each other or are still fighting in the dark may be open to discussion: hyppish has now a fair field, and if people would know what the word means, it might be restored, like nesh, to useful domestic activity.
6. The example given of the word fast on p. 12 suggests another matter to which attention might be paid. If one looks up any word in the Oxford Dictionary, one will be almost distressed to see how various the significations are to which it is authoritatively susceptible. A word seems to behave like an animal that goes skirting about discontentedly, in search of a more congenial habitation. It is sometimes successful, and meets with surprising welcome in some strange corner where it establishes itself, forgetful of its old home: sometimes, like the bad spirit in the gospel, it will return to the house whence it came forth. It is, of course, natural and essential to a living language that such shades and varieties of meaning should evolve themselves, although they are incidentally a source of ambiguity and subtle traps for careless logic; but when these varieties so diverge as to arrive ultimately at absurdities and contradictions, then it is advisable to get rid of them. In such extreme cases the surgeon’s knife may sometimes save life; it is the only cure; and to use a word in a deforming or deformed sense should be condemned as a solecism. Contributions, stating examples of this with the proposed taboo, are invited.
7. This last fault, of damaging a word by wrong use, might come under the general head of ‘Abuse of words’. This is a wide and popular topic, as may be seen by the constant small rain of private protests in the correspondence columns of the newspapers. The committee of the S.P.E. would be glad to meet the public taste by expert treatment of offending words if members would supply their pet abominations. There was a good letter on the use of morale in the Times Literary Supplement on February 19. The writer, a member of our Society, permits us to reprint it here as a sample of sound treatment.
“Moral(e)
’Tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard, and the purizing (so to speak) of the purist has been a tempting game since Lucian baited Lexiphanes; may I yield to the temptation? During the war our amateur and other strategists have suppressed the English word morale and combined to force upon us in its stead the French (or Franco-German?) moral. We have submitted, as to Dora, but with the secret hope, as about Dora, that when the war’s tyranny was overpast we might be allowed our liberty again. Here are two specimens, from your own columns, of the disciplinary measures to which we have been subject: ‘He persistently spells moral (state of mind of the troops, not their morality) with a final e, a sign of ignorance of French which is unfortunately so often the mark of the classical scholar’; and again, ‘The purist in language might quarrel with Mr. ——’s title for this book on the psychology of war, for he means by morale not “ethics” or “moral philosophy”, but “the temper of a people expressing itself in action”. But no doubt there is authority for the perversion of the French word.’
To such discipline we have all been laudably amenable, and morale has seldom been seen in the London papers since 1914; but it, and not moral, is the English word; we once all wrote it without thinking twice about the matter; even in war-time one met it in the local newspapers that had not time to keep up with London’s latest tricks, and in those parts of the London Press itself that had to use a tongue understanded of the people. It is very refreshing to see that morale is now beginning to show itself again, timidly and occasionally, even in select quarters. The fact is, these literary drill-sergeants have made a mistake; the English morale is not a ‘perversion of the French word’; it is a phonetic respelling, and a most useful one, of a French word. We have never had anything to do with the French word morale (ethics, morality, a moral, &c.); but we found the French word moral (state of discipline and spirit in armies, &c.) suited to our needs, and put an e on to it to keep its sound distinct from that of our own word moral, just as we have done with the French local (English locale) and the German Choral (English chorale), and as, using contrary means for the same end of fixing a sound, we have turned French diplomate into English diplomat. Our English forte (‘Geniality is not his forte,’ &c.) is altered from the French fort without even the advantage of either keeping the French sound or distinguishing the spoken word from our fort; but who proposes to sacrifice the reader’s convenience by correcting the ‘ignorant’ spelling? In the light of these parallels is it not the patrons of moral who deserve the imputation of ignorance rather than we common folk? We do not indeed profess to know what moral and morale mean in French, but then that knowledge is irrelevant. They do not know the true English method of dealing with borrowings from French; and that knowledge is highly relevant.
A fair summary of the matter is perhaps this. The case for the spelling moral is that (1) the French use the word moral for what we used to call morale, and therefore we ought to do the same; and (2) the French use morale to mean something different from what we mean by it. The case against moral is (1) that it is a new word, less comprehensible to ordinary people, even now, after its war-time currency, than the old morale; (2) that it badly needs to be dressed in italics owing to the occasional danger of confusion with the English word moral, and that such artificial precautions are never kept up; (3) that half of us do not know whether to call it mŏ´ral, moră´l, or morah´l, and that it is a recognized English custom to resolve such doubts by the addition of -e or other change of spelling. And the right choice is surely to make the English word morale, use ordinary type, call it morah´l, and ignore or abstain from the French word morale, of which we have no need.
The risk of confusion, merely mentioned above, perhaps deserves a paragraph to itself. If we reinstate the once almost universal morale, we need no italics, and there is no fear of confusion; if we adopt moral, we need italics, and there is no hope of getting them; it is at present printed oftener without than with them. The following five extracts, in some of which the English adjective moral, and in some the French noun moral, is meant, are printed here exactly as they originally appeared, that is, with moral in the same type as the rest, and they are enough to suggest how easy it is for real doubts to arise about which word is being used—‘An astounding increase in the moral discipline and patriotism of German soldiers.’ Has, or has not, a comma dropped out after moral? ‘It is, indeed, a new proof of the failing moral and internal troubles of the German people.’ Moral and internal? or moral and troubles? ‘A true arbitrator, a man really impartial between two contendants and even indifferent to their opposing morals.’ ‘The Russian army will recover its moral and fighting power.’ ‘The need of Poland, not only for moral, but for the material support of the Allies.’
H. W. FOWLER.”