PURE ENGLISH

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3090, 22 May 1917, Page 6

PURE ENGLISH

Sir,—One of the reformations I hope the war is going to work in the social body Iβ securing a better attention to tiie purity of oiir language. When language becomes corrupt, all other corruption follows as a matter of course JNoc to understand this as fact is not -to be able to understand anything metaphysic. Witness the decline and fall of tho Komaii Empire, together with its language. Later Latin authors are often hardly intelligible to classiciste. There is a principle underlying this, as I have said, and a moral for us. These few remarks are preliminary to thanking you for your short report' of the lending of Captain Evans to the American Navy. No doubt the loan conceals the compliment of showing Americans how to dash in and do things with T.B.D.s, and the virtue 'of your announcement is that you do not talk of Captain Evans as "loaned." The abomination of "loaned" is a pure .Americanism, which, in my opinion, deserves the greatest discouragement. Any alliterative or spectacular succession of syllables is good enough to express an American idea. But I hope the educated Englishman or Englishwoman has some distance, to go yet before reaching the descent to the sloppiness of intellect, which can see no difference between "loaned" and 'lent/'—l am, etc., F. V. WATERS. Wellington, May 21, 1917.