V. Dialectal and Popular Words.

Whether words may, by conscious effort, be preserved in colloquial usage is an unsolved question, though perhaps our Society may help to solve it; there is, however, another and more certain benefit which its members, or at any rate such of them as are writers, may confer upon the language. There are many excellent words spoken in uneducated speech and dialect all about us, which would be valuable additions to our standard vocabulary if they could be given currency in it. Many of these are dying words like bide, dight, blithe, malison, vengeance, and since these are still spoken in other classes, it might be less difficult to restore them to educated speech. Others are old words like thole and nesh and lew and mense and foison and fash and douce, which have never been accepted into the standard English, or have long since vanished from it, in spite of their excellence and ancient history, and in spite of the fact that they have long been in current use in various districts. Others are new formations, coined in the ever-active mint of uneducated speech, and many of these, coming as they do full of freshness and vigour out of the vivid popular imagination—words like harum-scarum, gallivant, cantankerous, and pernickety—or useful monosyllables and penny pieces of popular speech like blight and nag and fun—have already found their way into standard English. But there are many others which might with advantage be given a larger currency. This process of dialectal regeneration, as it is called, has been greatly aided in the past by men of letters, who have given a literary standing to the useful and picturesque vocabulary of their unlettered neighbours, and thus helped to reinforce with vivid terms our somewhat abstract and faded standard speech. We owe, for instance, words like lilt and outcome to Carlyle; croon, eerie, gloaming have become familiar to us from Burns’s poems, and Sir Walter Scott added a large number of vivid local terms both to our written and our spoken language. In the great enrichment of the vocabulary of the romantic movement by means of words like murk, gloaming, glamour, gruesome, eerie, eldritch, uncanny, warlock, wraith—all of which were dialect or local words, we find a good example of the expressive power of dialect speech, and see how a standard language can be enriched by the use of popular sources. All members of our Society can help this process by collecting words from popular speech which are in their opinion worthy of a larger currency; they can use them themselves and call the attention of their friends to them, and if they are writers, they may be able, like the writers of the past, to give them a literary standing. If their suggestions are not accepted, no harm is done; while, if they make a happy hit and bring to public notice a popular term or idiom which the language needs and accepts, they have performed a service to our speech of no small importance.

	The Stars Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and rain, a sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back into the shelter of a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open; the illumination of the Stars poured down from behind the dispersing clouds. I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the night with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by them; Arcturus followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses, and then emerged triumphant, Lord of the Western sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own footsteps, my thoughts were among the Constellations. I was one of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me also there was something that was not insignificant and mean and of no account.