A history of the English Language

237.
A Liberal Creed.
In closing this chapter on the language of our own day it may not be inappropriate to 
suggest what should be an enlightened modern attitude toward linguistic questions. It has 
often been necessary in the course of this book to chronicle the efforts of well-meaning 
but misguided persons who hoped to make over the language in accordance with their 
individually conceived pattern. And we will find all too often provincialism and prejudice 
masquerading as scientific truth in discussions of language by men and women who
56 
Kennedy, p. 42. 
57 
Kennedy, p. 35. 
The nineteenth century and after 327

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would blush to betray an equal intolerance of the music or furniture or social conventions 
of other parts of the world than their own. Doubtless the best safeguard against prejudice 
is knowledge, and some knowledge of the history of English in the past is necessary to an 
enlightened judgment in matters affecting present use. Such knowledge warns us to 
beware of making arbitrary decisions on questions that only time can settle. It teaches us 
that reason is but a sorry guide in many matters of grammar and idiom and that the usage 
of educated speakers and writers is the only standard in language for the educated. It 
should make us tolerant of colloquial and regional forms, because like the common 
people, they claim their right to exist by virtue of an ancient lineage. And finally, it 
should prepare us for further changes since language lives only on the lips of living 
people and must change as the needs of people in expressing themselves change. But 
knowledge of the ways of language in the past is not all that is necessary. Knowledge 
must be coupled with tolerance, and especially tolerance toward usage that differs from 
our own. We must avoid thinking that there is some one region where the “best” English 
is spoken, and particularly that that region is the one in which we ourselves live. We must 
not think that the English of London or Oxford, or Boston or Philadelphia, is the norm by 
which all other speech must be judged, and that in whatever respects other speech differs 
from this norm it is inferior. Good English is the usage—sometimes the divided usage—
of cultivated people in that part of the English-speaking world in which one happens to 
be. 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
The best source of information about the growth of the vocabulary in the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries is the second edition of the 
Oxford English Dictionary,
ed. J.A.Simpson and 
E.S.C.Weiner (20 vols., Oxford, 1989) and its 
Additions Series
(1993–). For the ways in which 
changes in the vocabulary take place, excellent treatments are J.B.Greenough and 
G.L.Kittredge, 
Words and Their Ways in English Speech
(New York, 1901); George 
H.McKnight, 
English Words and Their Background
(New York, 1923); and J.A.Sheard, 
The 
Words We Use
(New York, 1954). A regular department of the quarterly journal 
American 
Speech
is “Among the New Words,” and annual lists appear in the 
Britannica Book of the Year
. 
For many examples of common words from proper names, see Ernest Weekley, 
Words and 
Names
(London, 1932), and Eric Partridge, 
Name into Word
(2nd ed., New York, 1950). A 
readable account of the growth of scientific English is Theodore H.Savory, 
The Language of 
Science
(2nd ed., London, 1967). Principles of English word formation are explained and fully 
illustrated in Herbert Koziol,