fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing the preposition: /to engineer/, /to chink/, /to stump/, /to hog/. Others grow out of an intermediate adjective, as /to boom/. Others are made by torturing nouns with harsh affixes, as /to burglarize/ and /to itemize/, or by groping for the root, as /to resurrect/. Yet others are changed from intransitive to transitive: a sleeping-car /sleeps/ thirty passengers. So with the adjectives. They are made of substantives unchanged: /codfish/, /jitney/. Or by bold combinations: /down-and-out/, /up-state/, /flat-footed/. Or by shading down suffixes to a barbaric simplicity: /scary/, /classy/, /tasty/. Or by working over adverbs until they tremble on the brink between adverb and adjective: /right/ and /near/ are examples. All of these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the English of England; in the days of its great Elizabethan growth they were in the lustiest possible being. They are, indeed, common to all languages; they keep language alive. But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former. English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians. It shows no living change in structure and syntax since the days of Anne, and very little modification in either pronunciation or vocabulary. Its tendency is to conserve that which is established; to say the new thing, as nearly as possible, in the old way; to combat all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in the days of Shakespeare. In place of the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of unyielding affectations in the spoken language, and in another form shows itself in the heavy Johnsonese of current English writing--the Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge lectures. This "infirmity of speech" Quiller-Couch finds "in parliamentary debates and in the newspapers"; [Pg025] ... "it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of their being." Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, "and have a knack of assimilating each other's vices."[45]