In tracing the history of English during the eighteenth century, there is nothing more important than to understand the mindset of the language professionals, for this would colour our entire way of thinking for the next 300 years. Indeed, it was only in the latter part of the twentieth century that we began to free ourselves from it, and started to give language realities the sort of recognition which was routine in earlier ages (Chapter 20). And because the mindset is grounded in the social climate of the period, it has been necessary to begin this chapter with an excursus into social history.
[...]
Exactly the same argument continues to be used today, except that for “polite” read “educated”.
How was it that polite people had got themselves into such a mess? Where had the chaos come from? The literary pundits were in no doubt. It was because the language had been left to take care of itself. Individuals of all kinds of ability had been allowed to use it in any way they wanted. as a result it had changed in countless unpredictable ways. There was uncontrolled variation everywhere, in writing as well as in speech.
[...]
Above all, there was the danger of words entering the language from “below” - cant words, which Swift called “the most ruinous Corruption in any Language”. Who was to blame? Virtually everyone, according to Swift.,The recent playwrights, to begin with, who had been badly influenced by the “licentiousness” of the Restoration court:
“the Plays, and other Compositions, written for Entertainment within Fifty years past; filled with a Succession of affected Phrases, and new, conceited Words.”
The poets were just as bad in their lack of responsibility, abbreviating words to fit the metre of their verse (drudgd, rebuk ‘t) in a manner which Swift found especially irritating:
“There is another Sett of Men who have contributed very much to the spoiling of the English Tongue; I mean the Poets, from the Time of the Restoration.”
Then there were the spelling reformers:
“a foolish Opinion, advanced of late Years, that we ought to spell exactly as we speak; which beside the obvious Inconvenience of utterly destroying our Etymology, would be a thing we should never see an End of.”
[374]
His reasoning here was that there was so much variation and change in speech that any attempt to reflect this in spelling ’would entirely confound Orthography’.
“the Words are so curtailed, and varied from their original Spelling, that whoever hath been used to plain English, will hardly know them by sight.”
And the university people must take their share of the blame:
“Several young Men at the Universities, terribly possessed 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. Thus furnished they come up to Town, reckon all their Errors for Accomplishments, borrow the newest Sett of Phrases, and if they take Pen into their Hands, all the odd words they have picked up in a Coffee-House, or a Gaming Ordinary [gambling-house], are produced as Flowers of Style.”
It is difficult to see how any writers could have escaped Swift’s wide-ranging censure.
Swift was not the first to place the blame for linguistic deterioration firmly on the shoulders of the literary writers. Ironically, the same sentiments had been expressed, a generation before, by the poet laureate John Dryden. The irony lies in the fact that Dryden would have been one of those whom Swift had in mind when he castigated the poets’ ‘barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure of their Verses’, perhaps thinking of lines like these:
“the Day approach’d when Fortune shou’d decide
Th’important Enterprize, and give the Bride.”
Swift’s scorn would have included Dryden; Dryden’s scorn, as we shall see, included his predecessors; and the grammarian Robert Lowth would later be scornful of Swift’s “carelessness” (see p.397).