SOURCE: “The Past as Prologue,” in Verbatim: The Language Quarterly, Vol. XVI, No. 3, Winter 1990, pp. 1-3.

In the following essay, Dougherty compares Pepys's language in the Diary with contemporary English, and concludes that most of the differences are insignificant.

The diary that Samuel Pepys kept from the first day of 1660 till he thought he was losing his eyesight eight and a half years later can tell us a lot about how the English language has changed or remained more or less constant over the last three and a half centuries. There may be other sources equally rich in examples for comparison, but there can hardly be another that is at the same time so much fun to read and accessible. Moreover, the Restoration period when Pepys kept his diary is a good time to compare with ours, because by then the basis of modern English had been laid...