Thomas Jefferson
American politician, statesman, and writer
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
I am no friend, therefore, to what is called Purism, but a zealous one to the Neology which has introduced these two words without the authority of any dictionary. I consider the one as destroying the nerve and beauty of language, while the otherimproves both, and adds to its copiousness. I have been not a little disappointed, and made suspicious of my own judgment, on seeing the Edinburgh Reviews, the ablest critics of the age, set their faces against the introduction of new words into the English language; they are particularly apprehensive that the writers of the United States will adulterate it.
—Thomas Jefferson, American politician, statesman, and writer, letter to John Waldo, 1813
Posted on August 2, 2000 at 7:52 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage. Society is the work-shop in which new ones are elaborated. When an individual uses a new word, if illformed it is rejected in society, if wellformed, adopted, and, after due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries. And if, in this process of sound neologisation, our transatlantic brethren shall not choose to accompany us, we may furnish, after the Ionians, a second example of a colonial dialect improving on it's primitive.
—Thomas Jefferson, American politician, statesman, and writer, letter to John Waldo, 1820
Posted on July 19, 2000 at 9:42 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Yet I have no hesitation in saying that the English language is founded on a broader base [than the French], native and adopted, and capable, with the like freedom of employing its materials, of becoming superior to that in copiousness and euphony. Not indeed by holding fast to Johnson's Dictionary; not by raising a hue and cry against every word he has not licensed; but by encouraging and welcoming new compositions of its elements.
—Thomas Jefferson, American politician, statesman, and writer, letter to John Waldo, 1813
Posted on August 4, 2000 at 4:08 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
If Dictionaries are to be the Arbiters of language, in which of them shall we find Neologism. No matter. It is a good word, well sounding, obvious, and expresses an idea which would otherwise require circumlocution. ... I am a friend to Neology. It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony. Without it we should still be held to the vocabulary of Alfred or of Ulphilas.
—Thomas Jefferson, American politician, statesman, and writer, letter to John Waldo, 1820
Posted on August 5, 2000 at 12:23 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Here, where all is new, no innovation is feared which offers good. But we have no distinct class of literati in our country. Every man is engaged in some industrious pursuit, and science is but a secondary occupation, always subordinate to the main business of his life. Few therefore of those who are qualified, have leisure to write. In time it will be otherwise. In the meanwhile, necessity obliges us to neologize. And should the language of England continue stationary, we shall probably enlarge our employment of it, until its new character may separate it in name as well as in power, from the mother-tongue.
—Thomas Jefferson, American politician, statesman, and writer, letter to John Waldo, 1813
Posted on September 10, 1999 at 12:13 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Certainly so great growing a population, spread over such an extent of country, with such a variety of climates, of productions, of arts, must enlarge their language, to make it answer its purpose of expressing all ideas, the new as well as the old. The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.
—Thomas Jefferson, American politician, statesman, and writer, letter to John Waldo, 1813
Posted on August 22, 2000 at 7:46 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
—Thomas Jefferson, American politician, statesman, and writer
Posted on October 16, 2001 at 7:49 AM
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