As a general rule, I think, educated Americans are more apt to err on the side of purism than of laxity.
It is finally to be remembered, therefore, that Purism is always noble when it is instinctive.
Literature and poetry probably lost more than they gained by the contentious purism which was long prevalent in Italy, and which marred the freshness and vigor of many an able writer.
In equally stupid mannerpurism seeks to check the terrible scourge of its own creation--venereal diseases.
But the spirit of purism has so perverted the human mind that it has lost the power to appreciate the beauty of nudity, forcing us to hide the natural form under the plea of chastity.
But to-day this way of employing the word is so universally accepted that it would be an excess of purism to rise against this usage.
It is in the spirit of this classical purism that Scaliger minutely distinguishes the various rhetorical and grammatical figures, and carefully estimates their proper place and function in poetry.
The simplicity and purism of the tea-room resulted from emulation of the Zen monastery.
It is the icypurism of the sword-soul before which Shinto-Japan prostrates herself even to-day.
When any point of literary or grammatical form is under discussion in a leading American newspaper to-day, the dominant note is that of a purism more strict than will appear in a similar discussion in England.
Writers who undertook to treat of modern or religious themes, were driven by their zeal for purism to the strangest expedients of language.
