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Unit 26: Swift–Hints Towards An Essay on Conversation ...

the French Academy, charged with discovering “some method …for ascertaining and fixing our Notes
language for ever”. Swift thought highly of his proposal and it is one of the very few works that
he signed. He laments the degeneration of the English language from the period when it “received
most improvement”, i.e., the Elizabethan-Jacobean era:
The persons who are to undertake this work … Beside the grammar part wherein we are allowed
to be very defective they will observe many gross improprieties, which, however authorized by
practice, and grown familiar, ought to be discarded. They will find many words that deserve to be
utterly thrown out of our language, many more to be corrected, and perhaps not a few long since
antiquated which ought to be restored on account of their energy and sound. (Swift, 1712: 14-15)
Once again we see Swift dwelling on words as physical entities or at any rate, as events, but his
naïveté about language change is surprising and might seem to undermine my attempt to have
him promoted to the position of Dean of corpus linguistics. He is propounding a reductionist
theory of language. He appears to think it possible to freeze language and prevent it changing or
evolving. When we see Swift lamenting the degradation of the English language since the time
when it had flourished most (Elizabethan times), and when he talks of the barbarisms and
affectations, he is looking at the wordstock, the language as a whole. There is a sense in which he
sees words and language in all their physicality and substantiality. He uses core words in an
almost physical way.
Johnson’s rejoinder to Swift’s wild Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English
Tongue is typically harsh and grudging to his forebear but would still find much sympathy today:
When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, we laugh at the elixir that
promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be
derided … [who] shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from
corruption and decay.
Simplistic as Swift’s call for an English Academy might seem, this Proposal has other facets: it is
Swift’s aesthetic/artistic manifesto. He was not just being a “Tory anarchist”, as Orwell (1968)
suggests. He was, as Wordsworth would do later in the Prelude, limiting his lexicon and phrasicon
to the core vocabulary of the language. Swift’s Dublin publisher, Faulkner, recounts, in the preface
of the first edition of his Works (1735), how Swift asked him to read aloud, in the presence of two
men-servants, his proofs “which, if they did not comprehend, he would alter and amend, until
they understood it perfectly well”. We can understand from this that Swift had a firm grasp of the
concept of core vocabulary as posited by Carter (1986) and was fully aware that non-possession of
Graeco-Roman lexis might exclude those unfortunate enough not to have had a classical education
(Corson, 1985) from understanding written texts. I surmise that he might even have viewed Ogden’s
Basic English (1930) as a blueprint for the implementation of his Proposal. His intentions were
aesthetic, political, and moral and, although he might have been placing difficult restrictions on
himself, the resulting prose and poetry bears an unmistakable stamp. Indeed, Sykes Davies
underlines the importance of core vocabulary in achieving irony:
Flatness of language, commonplaceness, can itself serve as a key of de-coding of ironic messages,
especially when it is brought into vivid contrast with the opposing qualities of violence and
outrageousness of expression.
Milic (1967) maintains that Swift the writer and Swift the rhetorician were two different persons.
His recommendations about usage were never fully implemented in his own work.
The Dean and Corpora
Said (1999), as discussed above, mentioned Swift’s two models of conversation, correct as described
in Hints towards an Essay on conversation (1710-1712) and debased as in A Collection of Genteel and
Ingenious Conversation according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court and in the best
companies of England (henceforth, Polite Conversation (1738)). The first of these two works would

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