Abstract

It Seems to Heywood Broun

The people who take it on themselves to keep the other fellow's English pure and accurate advance high-falutin excuses for their activity. It is not the love of interference which moves them, so they say, but only a devotion to the mother-tongue. If it were possible for each and every one to be a precisionist and to carry one's education like a gentleman the author might be in favor of movements for speech reform. Still, even such a state of society is open to certain criticisms. This would not be the best of all possible worlds if every man from porter to president exchanged the morning's greetings in a finished Harvard accent. The author suspects that life would be easier and more natural if nobody ever undertook to hold one's fellows up to grammatical and linguistic perfection.