imputing to this history a certain mystical quality?  Are we not giving language a power to change of its own accord over and above the involuntary tendency of individuals to vary the norm?  And if this drift of language is not merely the familiar set of individual variations seen in vertical perspective, that is historically, instead of horizontally, that is in daily experience, what is it?  Language exists only in so far as it is actually used—­spoken and heard, written and read.  What significant changes take place in it must exist, to begin with, as individual variations.  This is perfectly true, and yet it by no means follows that the general drift of language can be understood[129] from an exhaustive descriptive study of these variations alone.  They themselves are random phenomena,[130] like the waves of the sea, moving backward and forward in purposeless flux.  The linguistic drift has direction.  In other words, only those individual variations embody it or carry it which move in a certain direction, just as only certain wave movements in the bay outline the tide.  The drift of a language is constituted by the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual variations that are cumulative in some special direction.  This direction may be inferred, in the main, from the past history of the language.  In the long run any new feature of the drift becomes part and parcel of the common, accepted speech, but for a long time it may exist as a mere tendency in the speech of a few, perhaps of a despised few.  As we look about us and observe current usage, it is not likely to occur to us that our language has a “slope,” that the changes of the next few centuries are in a sense prefigured in certain obscure tendencies of the present and that these changes, when consummated, will be seen to be but continuations of changes that have been already effected.  We feel rather that our language is practically a fixed system and that what slight changes are destined to take place in it are as likely to move in one direction as another.  The feeling is fallacious.  Our very uncertainty as to the impending details of change makes the eventual consistency of their direction all the more impressive.

[Footnote 129:  Or rather apprehended, for we do not, in sober fact, entirely understand it as yet.]

[Footnote 130:  Not ultimately random, of course, only relatively so.]

Sometimes we can feel where the drift is taking us even while we struggle against it.  Probably the majority of those who read these words feel that it is quite “incorrect” to say “Who did you see?” We readers of many books are still very careful to say “Whom did you see?” but we feel a little uncomfortable (uncomfortably proud, it may be) in the process.  We are likely to avoid the locution altogether and to say “Who was it you saw?” conserving literary tradition (the “whom”) with the dignity of silence.[131] The folk makes no apology.  “Whom did you