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The Works of Thomas De Quincey ...: Leaders in literature.
The Works of Thomas De Quincey Leaders in literature Author:Thomas De Quincey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LANGUAGE. No language is stationary, except in rude and early periods of society. The languages of nations like the English and French, walking in the van of ... more »civilisation, having popular institutions, and taking part in the business of the earth with morbid energy, are placed under the action of causes that will not allow them any respite from change.. Neologism, in revolutionary times, is not an infirmity of caprice, seeking (to use the proverb of Cervantes) "for better bread than is made of wheat," but is a mere necessity of the unresting intellect. New ideas, new aspects of old ideas, new relations of objects to each other, or to man—the subject 'who contemplates those objects—absolutely insist on new words. And it would not be a more idle misconception to find a disease in the pains of growth, than to fancy a decay of vernacular purity in the multitude of verbal coinages which modern necessities of thought and action are annually calling forth on the banks of the Thames and the Seine. Such coinages, however, do not all stand upon the same basis of justification. Some are regularly formed from known roots upon known analogies ; others are formed licentiously. Some again meet a real and clamorous necessity of the intellect; others are fitted to gratify themere appetite for innovation. They take their rise in various sources, and are moulded with various degrees of skill. Let us throw a hasty glance on the leading classes of these coinages, and of the laws which appear to govern them, or of the anomalies with which they are sometimes associated. There are also large cases of innovation, in which no process of coinage whatever is manifested, but perhaps a simple restoration of old words, long since obsolete in literature and good society, yet surviving to this hour in provin...« less