VII

There are several questions which writers and speakers who give thought to their expressions will do well to ask themselves when they are tempted to employ a French word or indeed a word from any alien tongue.  The first is the simplest:  Is the foreign word really needed?  For example, there is no benefit in borrowing impasse when there exists already in English its exact equivalent, ‘blind-alley’, which carries the meaning more effectively even to the small percentage of readers or listeners who are familiar with French.  Nor is there any gain in resume when ‘summary’ and ‘synopsis’ and ‘abstract’ are all available.

The second question is perhaps not quite so simple:  Is the French word one which English has already accepted and made its own?  We do not really need questionnaire, since we have ‘interrogatory’, but if we want it we can make shift with ‘questionary’; and for concessionnaire we can put ‘concessionary’.  To balance ‘employer’ there is ‘employee’, better by far than employe, which insists on a French pronunciation.  Matthew Arnold and Lowell, always apt and exact in their use of their own tongue, were careful to prefer the English ‘technic’ to the French technique, which is not in harmony with the adjectives ‘technical’ and polytechnic.  So ‘clinic’ seems at last to have vanquished its French father clinique, as ‘fillet’ has superseded filet; and now that ‘valet’ has become a verb it has taken on an English pronunciation.

Then there is litterateur.  If a synonym for ‘man of letters’ is demanded why not find it in ‘literator’, which Lockhart did not hesitate to employ in the Life of Scott.  It is pleasant to believe that communard, which was prevalent fifty years ago after the burning of the Tuileries, has been succeeded by ‘communist’ and that its twin-brother dynamitard is now rarely seen and even more rarely heard.  Perhaps some of the credit may be due to Stevenson, who entitled his tale the Dynamiter and appended a foot-note declaring that ’any writard who writes dynamitard shall find in me a never-resting fightard’.

The third question may call for a little more consideration:  Has the foreign word been employed so often that it has ceased to be foreign even though it has not been satisfactorily anglicized in spelling and pronunciation?  In the Jungle Book Mr. Kipling introduces an official who is in charge of the ‘reboisement’ of India; and in view of the author’s scrupulosity in dealing with professional vocabularies we may assume that this word is a recognized technical term, equivalent to the older word ‘afforestation’.  What is at once noteworthy and praiseworthy is that in Mr. Kipling’s page it does not appear in italics.  And in Mr. Pearsall Smith’s book on the English language one admiring reader was pleased to find ‘debris’ also without italics, although with the retention of the French accent.  Perhaps the time is not far distant when the best writers will cease to stigmatize a captured word with the italics which are a badge of servitude and which proclaim that it has not yet been enfranchised into our language.