ABSTRACT
All changes in our language—the styles of usage, and even the ways the authors think about them—come largely from a combination of two eternally recurring factors: One is the natural effort of an older generation to adjust to inevitable changes while maintaining the old familiarities and the traditional names of things. The second is the periodic insurgence of a new generation which takes up whatever it fancies to be new, attractive, and seductive, and seeks to give self-indulgent scope to its own individuality, its fresh energies and youthful vanities. In such evolution and revolution, meanings evolve and revolve. Language, thus, preserves a sense of old safeties and a taste for congenial notions and creates—often simultaneously, in hurly-burly years of radical conflict—new labels, identities, watchwords. Spent words signalized the incoherence, as men of the old philosophy had always warned.
