It may be stating the obvious that the differing stylistic properties of native and borrowed words make them more suitable for some functions and unfit for others. However, there have always been debates about the merits of the two lexical layers, and changing linguistic attitudes have affected the balance of the two elements in certain registers. In the course of these debates two related concepts have emerged: those of Pure English and Plain English.

We have seen how in the seventeenth century the Protestant antiquarians asserted a patriotic preference of native Saxon stock. This was by no means the first instance of Saxonism, a name applied to attempts “to raise the proportion borne by the originally and etymologically English words in our speech to those that come from alien sources” (Gowers, Modern English Usage, 1965). As far back as the fifteenth century Reginald Pecock, a theologian, tried to restore the power of creating new words which Old English had before the Norman Conquest by using such words as ungothroughsome for “impenetrable” and coining the term not-to-be-thought-uponable.

“Bouts” of Saxonism have usually followed periods of vocabulary expansion and may, in part, be attributed to a reaction against excessive borrowing. Few critics on language could stay impartial in the matter. Samuel Johnson, for instance, was seriously concerned about the Gallicizing trend introduced during the Restoration and made a call for the return to the native purity of English in the preface to his Dictionary:

In the nineteenth century the Dorset poet William Barnes, the author of The Speechcraft of the English Language, was one of the adherents of Saxonism. In his zeal for “English English” he advocated, with little success, the replacement of the Latin term adjective by his own creation markword of suchness and the word omnibus (also of Latin origin; later abbreviated to bus) by folk-wain.

William Morris was another prominent poet who did his best to promote the native element in the language. However, his artificial coinages like, for example, faith-heat (enthusiasm), fore-ween (anticipate), sundersome (divisible), and word-strain (accent) failed to uproot their Romance derived equivalents.

Occasionally, the attempts to promote a “native” coinage have met with some success: foreword (first recorded in 1842) has joined preface (first recorded in Chaucer, c. 1386); betterment and forebear have been given some amount of currency beside their Romance counterparts improvement and ancestor. But generally, the quest for Saxonism has proved to be an unrealisable nationalistic dream. As has been noted by Burchfield, one cannot remove all words of alien origin from modern English speech without destroying the fabric of the language.