7.  This last fault, of damaging a word by wrong use, might come under the general head of ‘Abuse of words’.  This is a wide and popular topic, as may be seen by the constant small rain of private protests in the correspondence columns of the newspapers.  The committee of the S.P.E. would be glad to meet the public taste by expert treatment of offending words if members would supply their pet abominations.  There was a good letter on the use of morale in the Times Literary Supplement on February 19.  The writer, a member of our Society, permits us to reprint it here as a sample of sound treatment.

“MORAL(E)

’Tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard, and the purizing (so to speak) of the purist has been a tempting game since Lucian baited Lexiphanes; may I yield to the temptation?  During the war our amateur and other strategists have suppressed the English word morale and combined to force upon us in its stead the French (or Franco-German?) moral.  We have submitted, as to Dora, but with the secret hope, as about Dora, that when the war’s tyranny was overpast we might be allowed our liberty again.  Here are two specimens, from your own columns, of the disciplinary measures to which we have been subject:  ’He persistently spells moral (state of mind of the troops, not their morality) with a final e, a sign of ignorance of French which is unfortunately so often the mark of the classical scholar’; and again, ’The purist in language might quarrel with Mr. ——­’s title for this book on the psychology of war, for he means by morale not “ethics” or “moral philosophy”, but “the temper of a people expressing itself in action”.  But no doubt there is authority for the perversion of the French word.’

To such discipline we have all been laudably amenable, and morale has seldom been seen in the London papers since 1914; but it, and not moral, is the English word; we once all wrote it without thinking twice about the matter; even in war-time one met it in the local newspapers that had not time to keep up with London’s latest tricks, and in those parts of the London Press itself that had to use a tongue understanded of the people.  It is very refreshing to see that morale is now beginning to show itself again, timidly and occasionally, even in select quarters.  The fact is, these literary drill-sergeants have made a mistake; the English morale is not a ‘perversion of the French word’; it is a phonetic respelling, and a most useful one, of a French word.  We have never had anything to do with the French word morale (ethics, morality, a moral, &c.); but we found the French word moral (state of discipline and spirit in armies, &c.) suited to our needs, and put an e on to it to keep its sound distinct from that of our own word moral, just as we have done with the French local (English locale) and the German