"Think of it," he said, when he emerged to linguistic purity once more.

Shiroka is remembered as a deeply emotional lyricist, and as one of linguistic purity, who was obsessed with his own fate and that of his distant homeland.

What possible help could a bunch of foreign authors offer to the resolution of the most urgent task of any literary Italian, which is, of course, the return to linguistic purity?

Foreign musics were suppressed while Mussolini's government encouraged nationalism and linguistic and ethnic purity.

In the interest of linguistic purity it is important to know the difference between a covey and a pack of grouse.

The Academie Francaise, the guardian of linguistic purity, utters not a peep of complaint.

"In a country obsessed with linguistic purity, it turns a stigma into a positive emblem, a form of covert prestige," Ms. Lefkowitz said.

It's the same nonsense that gets people steaming about 'Americanisms' that are actually the older versions of words - service in the name of a linguistic purity that never existed.

But French literary figures have treated the proposal, which would include removing many circumflex accents, as an assault on the ramparts of linguistic purity.

His stylistic incisiveness has led some French critics to put him in the same class as Paul Valéry, an ultimate accolade of linguistic purity.