There
is a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of many a noble term, and if, in an
access of formalism, we refuse hospitality to some item of questionable
repute, our descendants may be deprived of a linguistic jewel. Is the
calamity worth risking when time, and time alone, can decide its worth?
Why not capture novelties while we may, since others are dying all the
year round; why not throw them into the crucible to take their chance
with the rest of us? An English word is no fossil to be locked up in a
cabinet, but a living thing, liable to the fate of all such things.
Glance back into Chaucer and note how they have thriven on their own
merits and not on professorial recommendations; thriven, or perished, or
put on new faces!
I would make an exception to this rule. Foreign importations which do
not belong to us by right, idioms we have enticed from over the sea for
one reason or another, ought to remain, as it were, stereotyped. They
are respected guests and cannot decently be jostled in our crowd; let
them be jostled in their own; here, on British soil, they should be
allowed to retain that primal signification which, in default of a
corresponding English term, they were originally taken over to express.
What prompts me to this exordium is the discovery that a few pages back,
with a blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly
misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise
a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad,
or saddening.
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