James Nicoll - "The Purity of The English Language"

"The Purity of The English Language"

In 1990, in the Usenet group rec.arts.sf-lovers, Nicoll wrote the following epigram on the English language:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.

(A followup to the original post acknowledged that the spelling of 'riffle' was a misspelling of 'rifle'.)

Over the years it has spread over the internet, often misattributed to other individuals including Booker T. Washington and a nineteenth-century painter also named James Nicoll. In recent years however the epigram has also been quoted, with proper attribution, in books by professor of rhetoric and communication design Randy Harris. Amateur linguists Jeremy Smith, Richard Lederer, and Anu Garg have also referenced Nicoll's quote.

Professional linguists who have referenced the quotation online include Professor of Linguistics Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania and Language Log; Associate Professor of Linguistics Suzanne Kemmer of Rice University, who also posted her research into the quote at the LINGUIST mailing list; and Second Language Acquisition Ph.D. student Rong Liu. There are also amateur philologists who have used the quote, including journalist Suw Charman and journalist Vale White.