“The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology”

—  Alexis De Tocqueville

France Before The Consulate, Chapter I: "How the Republic was ready to accept a master", in Memoir, Letters, and Remains, Vol I (1862), p. 266 http://books.google.com/books?id=ilm0jHyQQM0C&pg=PA266&vq=%22last+thing+abandoned%22&source=gbs_search_r&cad=1_1
Variant translation: The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary. This is because, in party politics as in other matters, it is the crowd who dictates the language, and the crowd relinquishes the ideas it has been given more readily than the words it has learned.
As quoted in The Viking book of Aphorisms : A Personal Selection (1962) by W. H. Auden, and Louis Kronenberger, p. 306.
Variant translation: The last thing that a party abandons is its language.
1850s and later
Context: The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas that have been instilled into it than the words that it has learnt.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Alexis De Tocqueville photo
Alexis De Tocqueville 135
French political thinker and historian 1805–1859

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