Swift was the fiercest advocate of all. He once wrote to the earl of Oxford to express his outrage that words like bamboozle, uppish, and—of all things—couldn’t were appearing in print. He wanted the establishment of strict rules banning such words as offensive to good sense. In future he wanted all spellings fixed—a firm orthography, the correctness of writing. He wanted the pronunciations laid down—an equally firm orthoepy, the correctness of speech. Rules, rules, rules: They were essential, declared Gulliver’s creator.
