lgamated into the British
empire. We retain little of the real old english--few words which may
not be traced to a foreign extraction. Different people settling in a
country would of course carry their ideas and manner of expressing them;
and from the whole compound a general agreement would, in process of
time, take place, and a uniform language be established. Such is the
origin and condition of our language, as well as every other modern
tongue of which we have any knowledge.

There is one practice of which our savans are guilty, at which I do most
seriously demur--the extravagant introduction of exotic words into our
vocabulary, apparently for no other object than to swell the size of a
dictionary, and boast of having found out and defined thousands of words
more than any body else. A mania seems to have seized our
lexicographers, so that they have forsaken the good old style of
"plainness of speech," and are flourishing and brandishing about in a
cloud of verbiage as though the whole end of instruction was to teach
loquacity. And some of our popular writers and speakers have caught the
infection, and flourish in borrowed garments, prizing themselves most
highly when they use words and phrases which no body can understand.

I will not contend that in the advancement of the arts and sciences it
may not be proper to introduce foreign terms as the mean of conveying a
knowledge of those improvements to others. It is better than to coin new
words, inasmuch as they are generally adopted by all modern nations. In
this way all languages are approximating together; and when the light of
truth, science, and religion, has fully shone on all the nations, we may
hope one language will be spoken, and the promise be fulfilled, that God
has "turned unto the people a pure language, that they may call upon the
name of the Lord, to serve him with one consent."

New ideas are formed like new inventions. Established principles are
employed in a new combination, so as to produce a new manifestation.
Words are chosen as nearly allied to former ideas as possible, to
express or represent this new combination. Thus, Fulton applied steam
power to navigation. A new idea was produced. A boat was seen passing
along the waters without the aid of wind or tide. Instead of coining a
new word to express the whole, a word which nobody would understand, two
old ones were combined, and "_steamboat_" became the sign to represent
the idea of the thing b