Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...reading such books as chiefly deserve to be read in any foreign language, it is wise to translate consciously and in words as we read. There is no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It compels us to such a choosing and testing, to such a nice discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and shade of meaning, that we now first learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest matter, as it should be set forth, is not only...
Down to the end of the eighteenth century, the official language of the college was Latin, and the Class-day orators seldom attempted the vernacular. But the Latin verse was difficult and the poets from the first appear to have written in English. Toward the end of the last century the orators began to incline toward their mother tongue and this occasioned a remonstrance from the faculty in the form of a regulation, passed in 1802, that "in future no performance but a valedictory oration in the Latin language * * * be permitted" on Class-day. The faculty was soon forced from...