Well, I answer these notice-boards by saying that, literature being personal, and men various—­and even the “Oxford English Dictionary” being no Canonical book—­man’s use or defiance of the dictionary depends for its justification on nothing but his success:  adding that, since it takes all kinds to make a world, or a literature, his success will probably depend on the occasion.  A few months ago I found myself seated at a bump-supper next to a cheerful youth who, towards the close, suggested thoughtfully, as I arose to make a speech, that, the bonfire (which of course he called the ‘bonner’) being due at nine-thirty o’clock, there was little more than bare time left for ‘langers and godders.’  It cost me, who think slowly, some seconds to interpret that by ‘langers’ he meant ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and by ‘godders’ ‘God Save the King.’  I thought at the time, and still think, and will maintain against any schoolmaster, that the neologisms of my young neighbour, though not to be recommended for essays or sermons, did admirably suit the time, place, and occasion.

Seeing that in human discourse, infinitely varied as it is, so much must ever depend on who speaks, and to whom, in what mood and upon what occasion; and seeing that Literature must needs take account of all manner of writers, audiences, moods, occasions; I hold it a sin against the light to put up a warning against any word that comes to us in the fair way of use and wont (as ‘wire,’ for instance, for a telegram), even as surely as we should warn off hybrids or deliberately pedantic impostors, such as ‘antibody’ and ‘picture-drome’; and that, generally, it is better to err on the side of liberty than on the side of the censor:  since by the manumitting of new words we infuse new blood into a tongue of which (or we have learnt nothing from Shakespeare’s audacity) our first pride should be that it is flexible, alive, capable of responding to new demands of man’s untiring quest after knowledge and experience.  Not because it was an ugly thing did I denounce Jargon to you, the other day:  but because it was a dead thing, leading no-whither, meaning naught.  There is wickedness in human speech, sometimes.  You will detect it all the better for having ruled out what is naughty.

Let us err, then, if we err, on the side of liberty.  I came, the other day, upon this passage in Mr Frank Harris’s study of ’The Man Shakespeare’:—­

In the last hundred years the language of Moliere has grown fourfold; the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of the engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may deal easily with the new thoughts.  French is now a superb instrument, while English is positively poorer than it was in the time of Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle class.[1]

Well, let us not lose our heads over this, any more than over other prophecies of our national decadence.  The “Oxford English Dictionary” has not yet unfolded the last of its coils, which yet are ample enough to enfold us in seven words for every three an active man can grapple with.  Yet the warning has point, and a particular point, for those who aspire to write poetry:  as Francis Thompson has noted in his Essay on Shelley:—­