amuseoffyre:

I just stumbled on Robert Burns’s response to a reviewer who criticised his ‘obscure language’. Now bear in mind a lot of Burns’s poetry was written in Scots, he took this slightly personally.

Ellisland, 1791.

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed;
thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the
nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and
consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the
flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets
of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of
orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of
affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of
jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of
gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar;
thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting
builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded;
thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and
tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus,
misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the
puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom;
thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and
facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.