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<hr class="chap pg-brk" />

<h1>
WORDS;<br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">THEIR USE AND ABUSE.</span></h1>

<p class="p4 pfs60">BY</p>

<p class="p2 pfs120">WILLIAM MATHEWS, LL.D.,</p>

<p class="p1 pfs60">AUTHOR OF “GETTING ON IN THE WORLD,” “ORATORY AND ORATORS,”<br />
ETC., ETC.</p>

<p class="p4 fs90">Die Sprache ist nichts anderes als der in die Erscheinung tretende Gedanke
und beide sind innerlich nur eins und dasselbe.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Becker.</span></p>

<p class="p4 pfs120">CHICAGO</p>
<p class="pfs120">SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY</p>
<p class="pfs120">1907</p>


<hr class="chap pg-brk" />

<p class="p6" />
<p class="pfs90 smcap">Copyright, 1876,</p>
<p class="pfs90 smcap">By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY.</p>

<hr class="r15" />

<p class="pfs90 smcap">Copyright, 1884,</p>
<p class="pfs90 smcap">By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY.</p>
<p class="p6" />


<hr class="chap pg-brk" />

<div class="fs90">

<p>Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead
sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to
speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Max Müller.</span></p>

<p>A winged word hath struck ineradically in a million hearts, and envenomed
every hour throughout their hard pulsation. On a winged word hath
hung the destiny of nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been
willing to cast the immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future
happiness.&mdash;<span class="smcap">W. S. Landor.</span></p>

<p>Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought,
produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Byron.</span></p>

<p>A dead language is full of all monumental remembrances of the people who
spoke it. Their swords and their shields are in it; their faces are pictured
on its walls; and their very voices ring still through its recesses.&mdash;<span class="smcap">B. W.
Dwight.</span></p>

<p>Every sentence of the great writer is like an autograph.... If Milton had
endorsed a bill of exchange with half-a-dozen blank-verse lines, it would be
as good as his name, and would be accepted as good evidence in court.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Alexander
Smith.</span></p>

<p>If there be a human talent, let it get into the tongue, and make melody
with that organ. The talent that can say nothing for itself, what is it?
Nothing; or a thing that can do mere drudgeries, and at best make money
by railways.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>

<p>Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted with
difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself
become so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every
sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables.&mdash;<span class="smcap">T.
W. Higginson.</span></p>

<p>Accustom yourself to reflect on the words you use, hear, or read, their
birth, derivation, and history. For if words are not things, they are living
powers, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated,
combined, and harmonized.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Coleridge.</span></p>

<p>Words possess an endless, indefinable, tantalizing charm. They paint
humanity in its thoughts, longings, aspirations, struggles, failures&mdash;paint it
upon a canvas of breath, in the colors of life.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Anon.</span></p>

<p>Ye know not what hurt ye do to Learning, that care not for Words, but
for Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the Heart.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ascham.</span></p>

<p>Let him who would rightly understand the grandeur and dignity of speech,
meditate on the deep mystery involved in the revelation of the Lord Jesus
as the Word of God.&mdash;<span class="smcap">F. W. Farrar.</span></p>
</div>


<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Words are lighter than the cloud foam</p>
<p class="verse2">Of the restless ocean spray;</p>
<p class="verse0">Vainer than the trembling shadow</p>
<p class="verse2">That the next hour steals away;</p>
<p class="verse0">By the fall of summer rain-drops</p>
<p class="verse2">Is the air as deeply stirred;</p>
<p class="verse0">And the rose leaf that we tread on</p>
<p class="verse2">Will outlive a word.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Yet on the dull silence breaking</p>
<p class="verse2">With a lightning flash, a word,</p>
<p class="verse0">Bearing endless desolation</p>
<p class="verse2">On its blighting wings, I heard.</p>
<p class="verse0">Earth can forge no keener weapon,</p>
<p class="verse2">Dealing surer death and pain,</p>
<p class="verse0">And the cruel echo answered</p>
<p class="verse2">Through long years again.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">I have known one word hang star-like</p>
<p class="verse2">O’er a dreary waste of years,</p>
<p class="verse0">And it only shone the brighter</p>
<p class="verse2">Looked at through a mist of tears,</p>
<p class="verse0">While a weary wanderer gathered</p>
<p class="verse2">Hope and heart on life’s dark way,</p>
<p class="verse0">By its faithful promise shining</p>
<p class="verse2">Clearer day by day.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">I have known a spirit calmer</p>
<p class="verse2">Then the calmest lake, and clear</p>
<p class="verse0">As the heavens that gazed upon it.</p>
<p class="verse2">With no wave of hope or fear;</p>
<p class="verse0">But a storm had swept across it.</p>
<p class="verse2">And its deepest depths were stirred.</p>
<p class="verse0">Never, never more to slumber.</p>
<p class="verse2">Only by a word.</p>
<p class="verse12"><span class="smcap">Adelaide A. Procter.</span></p>
</div></div>
</div>


<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk fs135 lsp0"><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.</h2>
<hr class="r15" />


<p class="drop-capy">The unexpected favor with which this work has been
received by the public from year to year, since its
publication in 1873, has made the author anxious to render
it more worthy of regard. He has, therefore, carefully
revised the work, corrected some errors, and added
two new chapters, one on “Onomatopes,” the other on
“Names of Men,” besides many pages on the subjects of the
other chapters.</p>

<p>Professor G. P. Marsh, in his “Lectures on the English
Language,” quotes the saying of a distinguished British
scholar of the last century, that he had known but three
of his countrymen who spoke their native language with
uniform grammatical accuracy; and the Professor adds
that “the observation of most persons acquainted with
English and American society confirms the general truth
implied in this declaration.” In this statement, made by
one of the most eminent philologists of the day, is found,
at least, a partial justification of works like the present,
if they are properly written. The author is well aware
that, in writing such a book, he is obnoxious to the complaint
of Goethe, that “everybody thinks that, because he
can speak, he is entitled to speak about language;” he is
aware, too, that in his criticisms on the misuses and abuses
of words, he has exposed himself to criticism; and it may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>
be that he has been guilty of some of the very sins which
he has condemned. If so, he sins in good company, since
nearly all of his predecessors, who have written on the
same theme, have been found guilty of a similar inconsistency,
from Lindley Murray down to Dean Alford,
Breen, Moon, Marsh, and Fowler. If the public is to
hear no philological sermons till the preachers are faultless,
it will have to wait forever. “The only impeccable
authors,” says Hazlitt, “are those who never wrote.”</p>

<p>It is hardly necessary to add that the work is designed
for popular reading, rather than for scholars. How much
the author is indebted to others, he cannot say. He has
been travelling, in his own way, over old and well worn
ground, and has picked up his materials freely from all
the sources within his reach. <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Non nova, sed nové</i>, has been
his aim; he regrets that he has not accomplished it more
to his satisfaction. The world, it has been truly said, does
not need new thoughts so much as it needs that old
thoughts be recast. There are some writers, however, to
whom he has been particularly indebted; they are Archbishop
Trench, the Rev. Matthew Harrison, author of “The
Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English
Language,” Professor G. P. Marsh, and especially Archdeacon
F. W. Farrar, the last of whom in his three linguistic
works has shown the ability to invest the driest
scientific themes with interest. A list of the books consulted
will be found on pages <a href="#Page_479">479, 480</a>.</p>


<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk fs135 lsp2"><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.</h2>
<hr class="r15" />


<div class="center">
<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="90%" summary="">
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER I.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">The Significance of Words</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER II.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">The Morality in Words</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_62">62</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER III.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Grand Words</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER IV.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Small Words</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_139">139</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER V.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Words without Meaning</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER VI.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Some Abuses of Words</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER VII.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Saxon Words, or Romanic?</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_194">194</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER VIII.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">The Secret of Apt Words</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[x]</a></span>
                    CHAPTER IX.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">The Secret of Apt Words <span class="fvnormal">(continued)</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_229">229</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER X.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Onomatopes</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_242">242</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER XI.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">The Fallacies in Words</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_257">257</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER XII.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">The Fallacies in Words <span class="fvnormal">(continued)</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_295">295</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER XIII.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Names of Men</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_323">323</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER XIV.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Nicknames</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_345">345</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER XV.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Curiosities of Language</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_367">367</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc">CHAPTER XVI.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap">Common Improprieties of Speech</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_424">424</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl smcap tdpp">Index</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_481">481</a></td></tr>
</table></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>

<p class="p4 pfs150">WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE.</p>
<hr class="r15" />

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER I.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS.</span></h2>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Speech is morning to the mind;</p>
<p class="verse0">It spreads the beauteous images abroad,</p>
<p class="verse0">Which else lie dark and buried in the soul.”</p>
</div><div class="stanza" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">
<p class="verse0">La parole, cette main de l’esprit.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Charron.</span></p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Syllables govern the world.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Coke.</span></p>
</div></div>
</div>


<p class="drop-capy">To the thoughtful man, who has reflected on the common
operations of life, which, but for their commonness,
would be deemed full of marvel, few things are more
wonderful than the origin, structure, history and significance
of words. The tongue is the glory of man; for
though animals have memory, will and intellect, yet language,
which gives us a duplicate and multipliable existence,&mdash;enabling
mind to communicate with mind,&mdash;is the
Rubicon which they never have dared to cross. The dog
barks as it barked at the creation; the owl hoots in the
same octaves in which it screamed ages ago; and the crow
of the cock is the same to-day as when it startled the ear
of repentant Peter. The song of the lark and the howl of
the leopard have continued as unchangeable as the concentric
circles of the spider and the waxen hexagon of the bee;
and even the stoutest champion of the orang-outang theory<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
of man’s origin will admit that no process of natural
selection has yet distilled significant words out of the
cries of beasts or the notes of birds. Though we have little
reason to doubt that animals think, there is yet no
proof that a single noise made by them expresses a
thought, and especially an abstraction or a generalization,
properties characterizing the language of man. He only,
in this world, is able to classify objects which in some
respects resemble, and in others differ from one another,
and to analyze and decompound the various objects of
thought; and to him is limited the privilege of designating
by arbitrary signs, and describing by distinctive terms,
the things he thus comprehends. Speech is a divine gift.
It is the last seal of dignity stamped by God upon His
intelligent offspring, and proves, more conclusively than
his upright form, or his looks “commercing with the
skies,” that he was made in the image of God. Without
this crowning gift to man, even reason would have been
comparatively valueless; for he would have felt himself to
be imprisoned even when at large, solitary in the midst of
a crowd; and the society of the wisest of his race would
have been as uninstructive as that of barbarians and savages.
The rude tongue of a Patagonian or Australian is
full of wonders to the philosopher; but as we ascend in the
scale of being from the uncouth sounds which express
the desires of a savage to the lofty periods of a Cicero or a
Chatham, the power of words expands until it attains to
regions far above the utmost range of our capacity. It
designates, as Novalis has said, God with three letters, and
the infinite with as many syllables, though the ideas conveyed
by these words are immeasurably beyond the utmost
grasp of man. In every relation of life, at every moment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
of our active being, in every thing we think or do, it is on
the meaning and inflection of a <em>word</em> that the direction of
our thoughts, and the expression of our will, turn. The
soundness of our reasonings, the clearness of our belief
and of our judgment, the influence we exert upon others,
and the manner in which we are impressed by our fellow-men,&mdash;all
depend upon a knowledge of the value of words.
It is in language that the treasures of human knowledge,
the discoveries of Science, and the achievements of Art
are chiefly preserved; it is language that furnishes the poet
with the airy vehicle for his most delicate fancies, the
orator with the elements of his electrifying eloquence,
the savant with the record of his classification, the metaphysician
with the means of his sharp distinction, the
statesman with the drapery of his vast design, and the
philosopher with the earthly instrument of his heaven-reaching
induction.</p>

<p>“Words,” said the fierce Mirabeau, in reply to an opponent
in the National Assembly, “are <em>things</em>;” and truly
they were such when <em>he</em> thundered them forth from the
Tribune, full of life, meaning and power. Words are
always things, when coming from the lips of a master-spirit,
and instinct with his own individuality. Especially
is this true of so impassioned orators as Mirabeau, who
have thoughts impatient for words, not words starving for
thoughts, and who but give utterance to the spirit breathed
by the whole Third Estate of a nation. Their words are
not merely things, but <em>living</em> things, endowed with power
not only to communicate ideas, but to convey, as by spiritual
conductors, the shock and thrill which attended their
birth. Hazlitt, fond as he was of paradox, did not exaggerate
when he said that “words are the only things that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
live forever.” History shows that temples and palaces,
mausoleums and monuments built at enormous cost and
during years of toil to perpetuate the memory or preserve
the ashes of ancient kings, have perished, and left not even
a trace of their existence. The pyramids of Egypt have,
indeed, escaped in some degree the changes and chances of
thousands of years; yet an earthquake may suddenly engulf
these masses of stone, and “leave the sand of the desert as
blank as the tide would have left it on the sea shore.” A
sudden accident may cause the destruction of the finest
masterpieces of art, and the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo
Belvedere, or the Venus de Medicis, upon which millions
have gazed with rapture, may be hopelessly injured or irretrievably
ruined. A mob shivers into dust the statue of
Minerva, whose lips seemed to move, and whose limbs
seemed to breathe under the flowing robe; a tasteless
director of the Dresden Gallery removes the toning of
Correggio’s “Notte,” where the light breaks from the heavenly
child, and deprives the picture of one of its fairest
charms; an inferior pencil retouches the great Vandyck at
Wilton, and destroys the harmony of its colors; and though
no such mishap as these befall the product of the painter’s
skill, yet how often,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“When a new world leaps out at his command,</p>
<p class="verse0">And ready nature waits upon his hand;</p>
<p class="verse0">When the ripe colors soften and unite,</p>
<p class="verse0">And sweetly melt into just shade and light;</p>
<p class="verse0">When mellowing years their full perfection give</p>
<p class="verse0">And each bold figure just begins to live.</p>
<p class="verse0">The treacherous colors the fair art betray,</p>
<p class="verse0">And all the bright creation fades away.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Not so with words. The language which embodies the
ideas and emotions of a great poet or thinker, though
entrusted to perishable ink and paper, which a moth or a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
few drops of water may destroy, is indestructible, and,
when his body has turned to dust, he continues to rule men
by the power of his thought,&mdash;not “from his urn,” like a
dead hero whose deeds only are remembered, but by his
very spirit, living, breathing and speaking in his works.
Look at the “winged words” of old Homer, into which he
breathed the breath of his own spiritual life; how long
have they kept on the wing! For twenty-five or thirty
centuries they have maintained their flight across gulfs of
time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the
languages of common life have sunk into oblivion; and
they are still full of the life-blood of immortal youth.
“The ‘Venus’ of Apelles, and the ‘grapes’ of Zeuxis have
vanished, and the music of Timotheus is gone; but the
bowers of Circe still remain unfaded, and the ‘chained
Prometheus’ has outlived the ‘Cupid’ of Praxiteles, and
the ‘brazen bull’ of Perillus.”</p>

<p>“How forcible,” says Job, “are right words!” “A
word fitly spoken,” says Solomon, “is like apples of gold
in pictures of silver.” No artificer’s hand, however cunning,
can contrive a mechanism comparable with those
masterpieces of ingenuity that may be wrought by him
who can convey a great or noble thought in apt and vivid
words. A mosaic of words may be made more beautiful
than any of inlaid precious stones. Few persons have duly
estimated the power of language. In anatomical museums
one will sometimes see the analysis of a man,&mdash;that is,
the mere chemical constituents, so much lime, so much
albumen, so much phosphorus, etc. These dead substances
fail not more utterly in representing a living man, with
his mental and moral force, than do the long rows of words
in the lexicon of exhibiting the power with which, as signs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
of ideas, they may be endowed. Language has been truly
pronounced the armory of the human mind, which contains
at once the trophies of its past and the weapons of its
future conquests. Look at a Webster or a Calhoun, when
his mighty enginery of thought is in full operation; how
his words tell upon his adversary, battering down the
intrenchments of sophistry like shot from heavy ordnance!
Cannon-shot are very harmless things when piled up for
show; so are words when tiered up in the pages of a dictionary,
with no mind to select and send them home to the
mark. But let them receive the vitalizing touch of genius,
and how they leap with life; with what tremendous energy
are they endowed! When the little Corsican bombarded
Cadiz at the distance of five miles, it was deemed the very
triumph of engineering; but what was this paltry range to
that of words, which bombard the ages yet to come?
“Scholars,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “are men of peace.
They carry no arms, but their tongues are sharper than
Actus his razors; their pens carry further and make a
louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock
of a basalisco than the fury of a merciless pen.”</p>

<p>The words which a man of genius selects are as much
his own as his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the
incarnation, of his thought, as the body contains the soul.
As John Foster once said, “his diction is not the clothing
of his sentiments, it is the skin; and to alter the language
would be to flay the sentiments alive.” Analyze a speech
by either of the great orators I have just named, and a
critical study will satisfy you that the crushing force of
his arguments lies not less in the nicety and skill with
which the words are chosen, than in the granite-like
strength of his thought. Attempt to substitute other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
words for those that are used, and you will find that the
latter are part and parcel of the speaker’s mind and conception;
that every word is accommodated with marvellous
exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; that not
even the most insignificant term can be changed without
marring the force and completeness of the author’s idea.
If any other words can be used than those which a writer
does use, he is a bungling rhetorician, and skims only the
surface of his theme. True as this is of the best prose,
it is doubly true of the best poetry; it is a linked strain
throughout. It has been said by one who was himself a
consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection
of any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your
memory, you may hunt through the forty thousand words
in the language, and not one shall fit the vacant place but
that which the poet put there. Though he uses only the
simplest and homeliest terms, yet “you might as well
think,” says Coleridge, “of pushing a brick out of a wall
with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of
any of the finished passages of Shakespeare.”</p>

<p>Who needs to be told how much the wizard sorcery of
Milton depends on the words he uses? It is not in what
he directly tells us that his spell lies, but in the immense
suggestiveness of his verse. In Homer, it has been justly
said, there are no hidden meanings, no deeps of thought
into which the soul descends for lingering contemplation;
no words which are key-notes, awakening the spirit’s
melodies,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Untwisting all the links that tie</p>
<p class="verse0">The hidden soul of harmony.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">But here is the realm of Milton’s mastery. He electrifies
the mind through conductors. His words, as Macaulay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
declares, are charmed. Their meaning bears no proportion
to their effect. “No sooner are they pronounced, than the
past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty
start at once into existence, and all the burial places of the
memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the
sentence, substitute one synonym for another, and the
whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and
he who should then hope to conjure with it would find
himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale,
when he stood crying ‘Open Wheat,’ ‘Open Barley,’ to the
door which obeyed no sound but ‘Open Sesame.’”</p>

<p>The force and significance which Milton can infuse into
the simplest word are strikingly shown in his description
of the largest of land animals, in “Paradise Lost.” In a
single line the unwieldy monster is so represented as coming
from the ground, that we almost involuntarily start
aside from fear of being crushed by the living mass:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Behemoth, the biggest born of earth, upheaved</p>
<p class="verse0">His vastness.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Note, again, that passage in which Death at hell-gates
threatens the Arch-Fiend, Satan:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse6">“Back to thy punishment,</p>
<p class="verse0">False fugitive! and to thy speed add wings,</p>
<p class="verse0">Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue</p>
<p class="verse0">Thy lingering,&mdash;or, with one stroke of this dart,</p>
<p class="verse0">Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">“The hand of a master,” says Montgomery, “is felt through
every movement of this sentence, especially toward the
close, where it seems to grapple with the throat of the
reader; the hard <em>staccato</em> stops that well might take the
breath, in attempting to pronounce ‘or, with one stroke of
this dart,’ are followed by an explosion of sound in the last<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
line, like a heavy discharge of artillery, in which, though a
full syllable is interpolated even at the cæsural pause, it is
carried off almost without the reader perceiving the surplusage.”
No poet better understood than Milton the art
of heightening the majesty of his strains by an occasional
sacrifice of their harmony. By substituting quantities for
accented verse, he produces an effect like that of the skilful
organist who throws into the full tide of instrumental
music an occasional discord, giving intenser sweetness to
the notes that follow.</p>

<p>It is this necromantic power over language,&mdash;this skill
in striking “the electric chain with which we are darkly
bound,” till its vibrations thrill along the chords of the
heart, and its echoes ring in all the secret chambers of the
soul,&mdash;which blinds us to the absurdities of “Paradise
Lost.” While following this mighty magician of language
through</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">&mdash;&mdash; “many a winding bout</p>
<p class="verse0">Of linked sweetness long drawn out,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">we overlook the incongruity with which he makes angels
fight with “villanous saltpetre” and divinities talk Calvinism,
puts the subtleties of Greek syntax into the mouth
of Eve, and exhibits the Omnipotent Father arguing like a
school divine. As with Milton, so with his great predecessor,
Dante. Wondrous as is his power of creating pictures
in a few lines, he owes it mainly to the directness,
simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him “the invisible
becomes visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence
describes a character; a word acts as a flash of lightning,
which displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower
is standing, with dreadful faces at the window.”</p>

<p>The difference in the use of words by different writers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
is as great as that in the use of paints by great and poor
artists; and there is as great a difference in the effect upon
the understanding and the sensibilities of their readers.
Who that is familiar with Bacon’s writings can ever fail to
recognize one of his sentences, so dense with pith, and
going to the mark as if from a gun? In him, it has been
remarked, language was always the flexible and obedient
instrument of the thought; not, as in the productions of a
lower order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave.</p>

<p>“All authors below the highest seem to use the mighty gift
of expression with a certain secret timidity, lest the lever
should prove too ponderous for the hand that essays to
wield it; or rather, they resemble the rash student in the
old legend, who was overmastered by the demons which he
had unguardedly provoked.” Who that is familiar with
Dryden’s “full, resounding line,” has not admired the magic
effects he produces with the most familiar words? Macaulay
well says that in the management of the scientific
vocabulary he succeeded as completely as his contemporary,
Gibbons, succeeded in carving the most delicate flowers
from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of
language became ductile at his touch. Emerson, in speaking
of the intense vitality of Montaigne’s words, says that
if you cut them, they will bleed. Joubert, in revealing
the secret of Rousseau’s charm, says: “He imparted, if I
may so speak, <em>bowels of feeling</em> to the words he used (<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">donna
des entrailles à tous les mots</i>), and poured into them such a
charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that
his writings have an effect upon the soul something like
that of those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste
and intoxicate our understanding.” So in the weird poetic
fictions of Coleridge there is an indescribable witchery of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
phrase and conceit that affects the imagination as if one
had eaten of “the insane root that takes the reason
prisoner.”</p>

<p>How much is the magic of Tennyson’s verse due to
“the fitting of aptest words to things,” which we find on
every page of his poetry! He has not only the vision,
but the faculty divine, and no secret of his art is hid from
him. Foot and pause, rhyme and rhythm, alliteration;
subtle, penetrative words that touch the very quick of the
truth; cunning words that have a spell in them for the
memory and the imagination; old words, with their weird
influence,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and words used for the occasion in their primary sense, are
all his ministers, and obedient to his will. An American
writer, Mr. E. C. Stedman, in speaking of Swinburne’s
marvellous gift of melody, asks: “Who taught him all the
hidden springs of melody? He was born a tamer of words,
a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most copious of the
literary tongues. In his poetry we discover qualities we
did not know were in the language&mdash;a softness that seemed
Italian, a rugged strength we thought was German, a blithe
and debonair lightness we despaired of capturing from the
French. He has added a score of new stops and pedals to
the instrument. He has introduced, partly from other
tongues, stanzaic forms, measures and effects untried before,
and has brought out the swiftness and force of metres like
the anapestic, carrying each to perfection at a single trial.
Words in his hands are like the ivory balls of a juggler,
and all words seem to be in his hands.”</p>

<p>Words, with such men, are “nimble and airy servitors,”
not masters, and from the exquisite skill with which they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
are chosen, and the firmness with which they are knit
together, are sometimes “half battles, stronger than most
men’s deeds.” What is the secret of the weird-like power
of De Quincey? Is it not that, of all late English writers,
he has the most imperial dominion over the resources of
expression; that he has weighed, as in a hair-balance, the
precise significance of every word he uses; that he has
conquered so completely the stubbornness of our vernacular
as to render it a willing slave to all the whims and caprices,
the ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic variations of his thought?
Turn to whatever page you will of his writings, and it is
not the thorough grasp of his subject, the enormous erudition,
the extraordinary breadth and piercing acuteness of
intellect which he displays, that excite your greatest surprise;
but you feel that here is a man who has gauged the
potentiality of every word he uses, who has analyzed the
simples of his every compound phrase. In his hands our
stiff Saxon language becomes almost as ductile as the Greek.
Ideas that seem to defy expression,&mdash;ideas so subtile, or so
vague and shifting, that most thinkers find it difficult to
contemplate them at all,&mdash;are conveyed on his page with a
nicety, a felicity of phrase, that might almost provoke the
envy of Shakespeare. In the hands of a great sculptor
marble and bronze become as soft and elastic as living flesh,
and not unlike this is the dominion which the great writers
possess over language. In their verse our rugged but pithy
and expressive English breathes all sounds, all melodies;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“And now ’tis like all instruments,</p>
<p class="verse2">Now like a lonely flute,</p>
<p class="verse0">And now it is an angel’s song,</p>
<p class="verse2">That makes the heavens be mute.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The superiority of the writers of the seventeenth century<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
to those of our own day is due not less to their
choice and collocation of words than to their weight of
thought. There was no writing public nor reading populace
in that age; the writers were few and intellectual,
and they addressed themselves to learned, or, at least, to
studious and thoughtful readers. “The structure of their
language,” says Henry Taylor, “is itself an evidence that
they counted upon another frame of mind, and a different
pace and speed in reading, from that which can alone be
looked to by the writers of these days. Their books were
not written to be snatched up, run through, talked over,
and forgotten; and their diction, therefore, was not such
as lent wings to haste and impatience, making everything
so clear that he who ran or flew might read.
Rather was it so constructed as to detain the reader over
what was pregnant and profound, and compel him to that
brooding and prolific posture of mind by which, if he
had wings, they might help him to some more genial
and profitable employment than that of running like an
ostrich through a desert. And hence those characteristics
of diction by which these writers are made more fit than
those who have followed them to train the ear and utterance
of a poet. For if we look at the long-suspended
sentences of those days, with all their convolutions and
intertextures,&mdash;the many parts waiting for the ultimate
wholeness,&mdash;we shall perceive that without distinctive
movement and rhythmical significance of a very high
order, it would be impossible that they could be sustained
in any sort of clearness. One of these writers’ sentences
is often in itself a work of art, having its strophes and
antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, by which
the reader, though conscious of plural voices and running<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
divisions of thought, is not, however, permitted to dissociate
them from their mutual concert and dependency, but
required, on the contrary, to give them entrance into his
mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, as one
compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences thus elaborately
constructed, and complex, though musical, are not
easy to a remiss reader, but they are clear and delightful
to an intent reader.”</p>

<p>Few persons are aware how much knowledge is sometimes
necessary to give the etymology and definition of a
word. In 1839 the British Court of Queen’s Bench,&mdash;Sir
F. Pollock, Mr. Justice Coleridge, the Attorney General,
Sir J. Campbell, and other learned lawyers,&mdash;disputed for
some hours about the meaning of the word “upon,” as a
preposition of time; whether it meant “after” or “before.”
It is easy to define words as certain persons satirized
by Pascal have defined <em>light</em>: “A luminary movement
of luminous bodies”; or as a Western judge once defined
<em>murder</em> to a jury: “Murder, gentlemen, is when a man is
murderously killed. It is the <em>murdering</em> that constitutes
murder in the eye of the law. Murder, in short, is&mdash;murder.”
We have all smiled at Johnson’s definition of
<em>network</em>: “Network&mdash;anything reticulated <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'or decussed at'">or decussated at</ins>
equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.”
Many of the definitions in our dictionaries remind one of
Bardolph’s attempt to analyze the term <em>accommodation</em>:
“Accommodation,&mdash;that is, when a man is, as they say,
accommodated; or when a man is being whereby he
may be thought to be accommodated, which is an excellent
thing.” <em>Brimstone</em>, for example, the lexicographer
defines by telling us that it is <em>sulphur</em>; and then rewards
us for the trouble we have had in turning to <em>sulphur</em>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
by telling us that it is <em>brimstone</em>. The eccentric Davy
Crockett, whose exterior roughness veiled a great deal
of mother wit, happily characterized this whole tribe of
lexicographers by a remark he once made to a Western
member of Congress. When the latter, in a speech on a
bill for increasing the number of hospitals, wearied his
hearers by incessant repetition,&mdash;“Sit down,” whispered
Crockett, “you are coming out of the same hole you
went in at.” There is a mythical story that the forty
members of the French Academy once undertook to define
the word <em>crab</em>, and hit upon this, which they deemed quite
satisfactory: “Crab,&mdash;a small red fish, which walks backward.”
“Perfect, gentlemen,” said Cuvier, when interrogated
touching the correctness of the definition; “perfect,&mdash;only
I will make one small observation in natural
history. The crab is <em>not</em> a fish, it is <em>not</em> red, and it does <em>not</em>
walk backward. With these exceptions, your definition is
admirable.” Too many easily made definitions are liable to
similar damaging exceptions.</p>

<p>The truth is, no word can be truly defined until the
exact idea is understood, in all its relations, which the word
is designed to represent. Let a man undertake to define
the word “alkali” or “acid,” for instance, and he will
have to encounter some pretty hard problems in chemistry.
Lavoisier, the author of the terminology of modern chemistry,
tells us that when he undertook to form a nomenclature
of that science, and while he proposed to himself
nothing more than to improve the chemical language, his
work transformed itself by degrees, and without his being
able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the elements of
chemistry. Often a theory or an argument, which seems
clear and convincing in its disembodied form, is found to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
incoherent and altogether unsatisfactory as soon as it is
fixed in words on paper. Samuel Bailey, who held a derivative
opinion in favor of Berkeley’s “Theory of Vision,”
tells us that having, in the course of a philosophical discussion,
occasion to explain it, he found, on attempting to
state <em>in his own language</em> the grounds on which it rested,
that they no longer appeared to him to be so clear and
conclusive as he had fancied them to be. He determined,
therefore, to make them the subject of a patient and dispassionate
examination; and the result was a clear conviction
of the erroneousness of Berkeley’s theory, the philosophical
grounds for which conviction he has so ably and
luminously set forth in his book on the subject. The truth
is, accurate definitions of the terms of any science can only
follow accurate and sharply defined notions of the science
itself. Try to define the words <em>matter</em>, <em>substance</em>, <em>idea</em>, <em>will</em>,
<em>cause</em>, <em>conscience</em>, <em>virtue</em>, <em>right</em>, and you will soon ascertain
whether you have grappled with the grand problems or
only skimmed the superficies of metaphysics and ethics.</p>

<p>Daniel O’Connell once won a law-suit by the knowledge
furnished him of the etymology of a word. He was engaged
in a case where the matter at issue was certain river-rights,
especially touching a branch of the stream known
by the name of the “Lax Weir.” His clients were in possession
of rights formerly possessed by a defunct salmon-fishing
company, formed by strangers from Denmark, and
they claimed the privilege of obstructing the “Lax Weir”
for the purposes of their fishery, while the opposite party
contended that it should be open to navigation. A natural
inference from the name of the piece of water in question
seemed to turn the scale against O’Connell; for how could
he establish the right to make that a close weir which, ever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
since the first existence of the fishery, had been notoriously
a lax one? His cause seemed desperate, and he had given
up all hope of success, when victory was wrested from his
adversaries by a couple of lines on a scrap of paper that
was handed to him across the court. These lines informed
him that in the language of Germany, and the north of
Europe, <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">lachs</i>, or <em>lax</em>, means a salmon. The “Lax Weir”
was simply a salmon weir. By the aid of this bit of philological
knowledge, O’Connell won not only a verdict for his
client, but for himself a great and sudden growth of his
reputation as a young advocate.</p>

<p>Let no one, then, underrate the importance of the
study of words. Daniel Webster was often seen absorbed
in the study of an English dictionary. Lord Chatham read
the folio dictionary of Bailey twice through, examining
each word attentively, dwelling on its peculiar import and
modes of construction, and thus endeavoring to bring the
whole range of our language completely under his control.
One of the most distinguished American authors is said
to be in the habit of reading the dictionary through
about once a year. His choice of fresh and forceful terms
has provoked at times the charge of pedantry; but, in
fact, he has but fearlessly used the wealth of the language
that lies buried in the pages of Noah Webster. It is only
by thus working in the mines of language that one can
fill his storehouses of expression, so as to be above the
necessity of using cheap and common words, or even using
these with no subtle discrimination of their meanings.
William Pinkney, the great American advocate, studied
the English language profoundly, not so much to acquaint
himself with the nice distinctions of its philosophical
terms, as to acquire copiousness, variety, and splendor of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
expression. He studied the dictionary, page after page,
content with nothing less than a mastery of the whole
language, as a body of expression, in its primitive and
derivative stock. Rufus Choate once said to one of his
students; “You don’t want a diction gathered from the
newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive;
but you want one whose every word is full-freighted
with suggestion and association, with beauty and
power.” The leading languages of the world are full of
such words, “opulent, microcosmic, in which histories are
imaged, which record civilizations. Others recall to us
great passages of eloquence, or of noble poetry, and
bring in their train the whole splendor of such passages,
when they are uttered.”</p>

<p>Mr. Disraeli says of Canning, that he had at command
the largest possible number of terms, both “rich and
rare,”&mdash;words most vivid and effective,&mdash;really spirit-stirring
words; for words there are, as every poet knows,
whose sound is an echo to the sense,&mdash;words which, while
by their literal meaning they convey an idea to the mind,
have also a sound and an association which are like music
to the ear, and a picture to the eye,&mdash;vivid, graphic, and
picturesque words, that make you almost see the thing
described. It is said of Keats, that when reading Chaucer,
Spenser, and Milton, he became a critic of their thoughts,
their words, their rhymes, and their cadences. He brooded
over fine phrases like a lover; and often, when he met a
quaint or delicious word in the course of his reading, he
would take pains to make it his own by using it, as
speedily as possible, in some poem he was writing. Upon
expressions like “the sea-shouldering whale” of Spenser,
he would dwell with an ecstasy of delight. It is said of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
Theophile Gautier, whose language is remarkable for its
copiousness and splendor, that he enriched his picturesque
vocabulary from the most recondite sources, and that his
favorite reading was the dictionary. He loved words for
themselves, their look, their aroma, their color, and kept
a supply of them constantly on hand, which he introduced
at effective points.</p>

<p>The question has been often discussed whether, if man
were deprived of articulate speech, he would still be able
to think, and to express his thought. The example of the
deaf and dumb, who evidently think, not by associations of
sound, but of touch,&mdash;using combinations of finger-speech,
instead of words, as the symbols of their thought,&mdash;appears
to show that he might find a partial substitute for his
present means of reflection. The telegraph and railway
signals are, in fact, new modes of speech, which are quickly
familiarized by practice. The engine driver shuts off the
steam at the warning signal, without thinking of the words
to which it is equivalent; a particular signal becomes associated
with a particular act, and the interposition of words
becomes useless. It is well known that persons skilled in
gesticulation can communicate by it a long series of facts
and even complicated trains of thought. Roscius, the
Roman actor, claimed that he could express a sentiment
in a greater variety of ways by significant gestures than
Cicero could by language. During the reign of Augustus,
both tragedies and comedies were acted, with powerful
effect, by pantomime alone. When the Megarians wanted
help from the Spartans, and threw down an empty meal-bag
before the assembly, declaring that “it lacked meal,”
these verbal economists said that “the mention of the sack
was superfluous.” When the Scythian ambassadors wished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
to convince Darius of the hopelessness of invading their
country, they made no long harangue, but argued with far
more cogency by merely bringing him a bird, a mouse, a
frog, and two arrows, to imply that unless he could soar
like a bird, burrow like a mouse, and hide in the marshes
like a frog, he would never be able to escape their shafts.
Every one has heard of the Englishman in China, who,
wishing to know the contents of a dish which lay before
him, asked “Quack, quack?” and received in reply the
words “Bow-wow.” The language of gesture is so well
understood in Italy that it is said that when King Ferdinand
returned to Naples after the revolutionary movements
of 1822, he made an address to the lazzaroni from
the balcony of the palace, wholly by signs; and though
made amidst the most tumultuous shouts, they were perfectly
intelligible to the assemblage. It is traditionally
affirmed that the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers
was organized wholly by facial signs, not even the hand
being employed. Energetic and faithful, however, as gesture
is as a means of expression, it is in the domain of
feeling and persuasion, and for embellishing and enforcing
our ordinary language, that it is chiefly useful. The conventionality
of language, which can be parroted where there
is little thought or feeling, deprives it in many cases of its
force; and it is a common remark that a look, a tone, or
a gesture is often more eloquent than the most elaborate
speech. But it is only the most general facts of a situation
that gesture can express; it is incapable of distinguishing
or decomposing them, and utterly fails to express the delicate
shades of difference of which verbal expression is
capable. Natural expression, from the cry and groan, and
laugh and smile, up to the most delicate variations of tone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
and feature which the elocutionist uses, is emotional, subjective,
and cannot convey an intellectual conception, a
judgment, or a cognition.</p>

<p>Facts like these tend to show that man might still have
been, as the root of the word “man” implies in Sanskrit,
“a thinking being,” though he had never been a “speech-dividing”
being; but it is evident that his range of thought
would have been exceedingly narrow, and that his mightiest
triumphs over nature would have been impossible.
While it may be true, as Tennyson says, that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Thought leapt out to wed with thought,</p>
<p class="verse0">Ere thought could wed itself to speech,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">yet there is an intimate relation between <em>ratio</em> and <em>oratio</em>,
and it may well be doubted whether, without <em>some</em>
signs, verbal or of another sort, thought, except of the
simplest kind, would not have been beyond man’s power.
Long use has so familiarized us with language, we employ
it so readily, and without conscious effort, that we are apt
to regard it as a matter of course, and become blind to its
mystery and deep significance. We rarely think of the
long and changeful history through which each word we
utter has passed,&mdash;of the many changes in form and
changes in signification it has undergone,&mdash;and of the
time and toil spent in its invention and elaboration by
successive generations of thinkers and speakers. Still less
do we think how different man’s history would have been,
how comparatively useless would have been all his other
endowments, had God not given him the faculties “which,
out of the shrieks of birds in the forest, the roar of beasts,
the murmur of rushing waters, the sighing of the wind,
and his own impulsive ejaculations, have constructed the
great instrument that Demosthenes, and Shakespeare, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
Massillon wielded, the instrument by which the laws of
the universe are unfolded, and the subtle workings of the
human heart brought to light.” Language is not only a
means of communication between man and man, but it has
other functions hardly less important. It is only by its
aid that we are able to analyze our complex impressions,
to preserve the results of the analysis, and to abbreviate
the processes of thought.</p>

<p>Were we content with the bare reception of visual
impressions, we could to some extent dispense with words;
but as the mind does not receive its impressions passively,
but reflects upon them, decomposes them into their parts,
and compares them with notions already stored up, it
becomes necessary to give to each of these elements a name.
By virtue of these names we are able to keep them apart
in the mind, and to recall them with precision and facility,
just as the chemist by the labels on his jars, or the gardener
by those on his flower-pots, is enabled to identify the
substances these vessels contain. Thus reflections which
when past might have been dissipated forever, are by their
connection with language brought always within reach.
Who can estimate the amount of investigation and thought
which are represented by such words as <em>gravitation</em>, <em>chemical
affinity</em>, <em>atomic weight</em>, <em>capital</em>, <em>inverse proportion</em>, <em>polarity</em>,
and <em>inertia</em>,&mdash;words which are each the quintessence
and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental
processes, and which may be compared to the paper money,
or bills of exchange, by which the world’s wealth may be
inclosed in envelopes and sent swiftly to the farthest centres
of commerce? Who can estimate the inconvenience
that would result, and the degree in which mental activity
would be arrested, were we compelled to do without these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
comprehensive words which epitomize theories, sum up the
labors of the past, and facilitate and abridge future mental
processes? The effect would be to restrict all scientific
discovery as effectually as commerce and exchange would
be restricted, if all transactions had to be carried on with
iron or copper as the sole medium of mercantile intercourse.</p>

<p>Language has thus an educational value, for in learning
words we are learning to discriminate things. “As the
distinctions between the relations of objects grow more
numerous, involved, and subtle, it becomes more analytic,
to be able to express them; and, inversely, those who are
born to be the heirs of a highly analytic language, must
needs learn to <em>think up</em> to it, to observe and distinguish all
the relations of objects, for which they find the expressions
already formed; so that we have an instructor for the
thinking powers in that speech which we are apt to deem
no more than their handmaid and minister.” No two
things, indeed, are more closely connected than poverty of
language and poverty of thought. Language is, on one
side, as truly the limit and restraint of thought, as on
the other that which feeds and sustains it. Among the
“inarticulate ones” of the world, there may be, for aught
we know, not a few in whose minds are ideas as grand,
pictures as vivid and beautiful, as ever haunted the brain
of a poet; but lacking the words which only can express
their conceptions, or reveal them in their true majesty to
themselves, they must remain “mute, inglorious Miltons”
forever. A man of genius who is illiterate, or who has little
command of language, is like a painter with no pigments
but gray and dun. How, then, shall he paint the purple
and crimson of the sunset? Though he may have made the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
circuit of the world, and gazed on the main wonders of
Nature and of Art, he will have little to say of them beyond
commonplace. In bridging the chasm between such a man
and one of high culture, the acquisition of words plays
as important a part as the acquisition of ideas.</p>

<p>It has been justly said that no man can learn from or
communicate to another more than the words they are
familiar with either express or can be made to express.
The deep degradation of the savage is due as much to the
brutal poverty of his language as to other causes. This
poverty, again, is due to that deficiency of the power of
abstraction which characterizes savages of every land. A
savage may have a dozen verbs for “I am here,” “I am
well,” “I am thirsty,” etc.; but he has no word for “am”:
he may have a dozen words for “my head,” “your head,”
etc.; but he can hardly conceive of a head apart from its
owner. Nearly all the tongues of the American savages
are polysynthetic; that is, whole clauses and even whole
sentences are compressed together so violently, that often
no single syllable would be capable of separate use. The
Abbé Domenech states that such is the absolute deficiency
of the simplest abstractions in some of these languages
that an Indian cannot say “I smoke” without using such
a number of concrete pictures that his immensely long
word to represent that monosyllabic action means: “I
breathe the vapor of a fire of herb which burns in a stone
bowl wedged into a pierced stone.” To express the idea
of “day,” the Pawnees use such a word as <i>shakoorooceshairet</i>,
and their word for “tooth” is the fearful polysyllable
<i>khotsiakatatkhusin</i>! The word for “tongue” in Tlatskanai
has twenty-two letters. Though these vocables,
which bristle with more consonants than the four sneezes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
of a Russian name of note, would be enough, as De Quincey
says, “to splinter the teeth of a crocodile,” yet Mexican
has sounds even more ear-splitting. In this language
the common address to a priest is the one word <i>Notlazomahuizteopixcatatzin</i>;
that is, “Venerable priest, whom I
honor as a father.” A fagot is <i>tlatlatlalpistiteutli</i>, and
“if the fagot were of green wood, it could hardly make a
greater splutter in the fire.” A lover would have been
obliged to say “I love you,” in this language, in this style,
<i>ni-mits-tsikāwakā-tlasolta</i>; and instead of a kiss he would
have had to ask for a <i>tetenna-miquilitzli</i>. “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Dieu merci!</i>”
exclaims the French writer who states this fact, “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">quand on
a prononcé le mot on a bien mérité la chose</i>.”</p>

<p>It is easy to see, from these facts, what an obstacle the
language of the savage presents to his civilization. Let us
suppose a savage to possess extraordinary natural endowments,
and to learn any one of the leading languages of
Europe; is it not easy to see that he would find himself
prepared for labor in departments of mental effort which
had been before utterly inaccessible to him, and that he
would feel that his powers had been cheated out of their
action by this possession of only inferior tools? Hence
the knowledge of words is not an elegant accomplishment
only, not a luxury, but a positive necessity of the civilized
and cultivated man. It is necessary not only to him who
would express himself, but to him who would <em>think</em>, with
precision and effect. There is, indeed, no higher proof of
thorough and accurate culture than the fact that a writer,
instead of employing words loosely and at hap-hazard,
chooses only those which are the exact vesture of his
thought. As he only can be called a well dressed man
whose clothes exactly fit him, being neither small and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
shrunken, nor loose and baggy, so it is the first characteristic
of a good style that the words fit close to the ideas.
They will be neither too big here, hanging like a giant’s
robe on the limbs of a dwarf, nor too small there, like a
boy’s garments into which a man has painfully squeezed
himself; but will be the exact correspondents and perfect
exponents of his thought. Between the most synonymous
words a careful writer will have a choice; for, strictly
speaking, there are no synonyms in a language, the most
closely resembling and apparently equivalent terms having
some nice shade of distinction,&mdash;a fine illustration of which
is found in Ben Jonson’s line, “Men may <em>securely</em> sin, but
<em>safely</em> never”; and, again, in the reply with which Sydney
Smith used to meet the cant about popular education in
England: “Pooh! pooh! it is the worst <em>educated</em> country in
the world, I grant you; but it is the best <em>instructed</em>.”
William Pitt was a remarkable example of this precision of
style. Fox said of him: “Though I am myself never at a
loss for a word, Pitt not only has <em>a</em> word, but <em>the</em> word,&mdash;the
very word,&mdash;to express his meaning.” Robert Hall
chose his words with a still more fastidious nicety, and he
gave as one reason for his writing so little, that he could
so rarely approach the realization of his own <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">beau-idéal</i> of
a perfect style. It is related of him that, when he was correcting
the proofs of his sermon on “Modern Infidelity,” on
coming to the famous passage, “Eternal God, on what are
thine enemies intent? What are those enterprises of guilt
and horror, that, for the safety of their performers, require
to be enveloped in a darkness which the eye of Heaven
must not penetrate?”&mdash;he exclaimed to his friend, Dr.
Gregory: “<em>Penetrate!</em> did I say <em>penetrate</em>, sir, when I
preached it?” “Yes.” “Do you think, sir, I may venture<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
to alter it? for no man who considers the force of the
English language would use a word of three syllables there
but from absolute necessity. For <em>penetrate</em> put <em>pierce</em>:
<em>pierce</em> is the word, sir, and the only word, to be used there.”</p>

<p>John Foster was a yet more striking example of this
conscientiousness and severity in discriminating words.
Never, perhaps, was there a writer the electric action of
whose mind, telegraphing with all nature’s works, was so
in contrast with its action in writing. Here it was almost
painfully slow, like the expression of some costly oil, drop
by drop. He would spend whole days on a few short sentences,
passing each word under his concentrated scrutiny,
so that each, challenged and examined, took its place in the
structure like an inspected soldier in the ranks. When
Chalmers, after a visit to London, was asked what Foster
was about, he replied: “Hard at it, at the rate of a line a
week.” Read a page of the essay on “Decision of Character,”
and you will feel that this was scarcely an exaggeration,&mdash;that
he stood by the ringing anvil till every word
was forged into a bolt. Few persons know how hard easy
writing is. Who that reads the light, sparkling verse of
Thomas Moore, dreams of the mental pangs, the long and
anxious thought, which a single word often cost him?
Irving tells us that he was once riding with the Irish poet
in the streets of Paris, when the hackney-coach went suddenly
into a deep rut, out of which it came with such a jolt
as to send their pates bump against the roof. “By Jove,
<em>I’ve got it</em>!” cried Moore, clapping his hands with great
glee. “Got what?” said Irving. “Why,” said the poet,
“that <em>word</em> I’ve been hunting for six weeks, to complete
my last song. That rascally driver has jolted it out of me.”</p>

<p>The ancient writers and speakers were even more nice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
and fastidious than the moderns, in their choice and arrangement
of words. Virgil, after having spent eleven
years in the composition of the Æneid, intended to devote
three years to its revision; but, being prevented by his last
sickness from giving it the finishing touches which his exquisite
judgment deemed necessary, he directed his friends
to burn it. The great orator of Athens, to form his style,
transcribed Thucydides again and again. He insisted that
it was not enough that the orator, in order to prepare for
delivery in public, should write down his thoughts,&mdash;he
must, as it were, <em>sculpture</em> them in brass. He must not
content himself with that loose use of language which
characterizes a thoughtless fluency, but his words must
have a precise and exact look, like newly minted coin, with
sharply cut edges and devices. That Demosthenes himself
“recked his own rede” in this matter we have abundant
proof in almost every page of his great speeches. In his
masterpieces we are introduced to mysteries of prose composition
of which the moderns know nothing. We find
him, as a German critic has remarked, bestowing incredible
pains, not only upon the choice of words, but upon the
sequence of long and short syllables, not in order to produce
a regularly recurring metre, but to express the most
various emotions of the mind by a suitable and ever-changing
rhythm. It is in this art of ordering words with
reference to their effect, even more, perhaps, than in the
action for which his name is a synonym, that he exhibits
his consummate dexterity as an orator. Change their
order, and you at once break the charm. The rhythm, in
fact, <em>is</em> the sense. You destroy the significance of the
sentence as well as its ring; you lessen the intensity of the
meaning as well as the verbal force. “At his pleasure,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
says Professor Marsh, “he separates his lightning and his
thunder by an interval that allows his hearer half to forget
the coming detonation, or he instantaneously follows up
the dazzling flash with a pealing explosion that stuns,
prostrates and crushes the stoutest opponent.”</p>

<p>Not less did the Roman orators consult the laws of
euphonic sequence or metrical convenience, and arrange
their words in such a succession of articulate sounds as
would fall most pleasingly on the ear. The wonderful
effects which sometimes attended their elocution were, in
all probability, chiefly owing to their exquisite choice of
words and their skill in musical concords. It was by the
charm of numbers, as well as by the strength of reason,
that Cicero confounded Catiline and silenced the eloquent
Hortensius. It was this that deprived Curio of all power
of recollection when he rose to oppose that great master
of enchanting rhetoric; it was this that made even Cæsar
himself tremble, and at last change his determined purpose,
and acquit the man he had resolved to condemn.
When the Roman orator, Carbo, pronounced, on a certain
occasion, the sentence, “<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Patris dictum sapiens temeritas filii
comprobavit</i>,” it was astonishing, says Cicero, to observe
the general applause which followed that harmonious close.
Doubtless we are ignorant of the art of pronouncing that
period with its genuine emphasis; but Cicero assures us
that had the final measure,&mdash;what is technically called a
<em>dichoree</em>,&mdash;been changed, and the words placed in a different
order, their whole effect would have been absolutely destroyed.
With the same exquisite sensibility to numbers,
an ancient writer says that a similar result would follow,
if, in reading the first line of the Æneid,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="la" xml:lang="la">
<p class="verseq">“Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span></p>

<p class="noindent">instead of <em>primus</em> we were to pronounce it <em>primis</em> (<em>is</em> being
long, and <em>us</em> short).</p>

<p>It is this cunning choice, along with the skilful arrangement
of words, that, even more than the thought,
eternizes the name of an author. Style is, and ever has
been, the most vital element of literary immortalities.
More than any other quality it is a writer’s own property;
and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or even
diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning grow
commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms;
but a grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness
or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even more than for
his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; it is “the ordered
march of his lordly prose” that is the secret of Macaulay’s
charm; and it is the unstudied grace of Hume’s periods
which renders him, in spite of his imperfect learning, in
spite of his wilful perversions of truth, in spite of his
infidelity and his toryism, the popular historian of England.</p>

<p>It has been truly said by a brilliant New England
writer that this mystery of style,&mdash;why it is, that when
one man writes a fact, it is cold or commonplace, and when
another man writes it, in a little different, but equivalent
phraseology, it is a rifle-shot or a revelation,&mdash;has never
been sounded. “One can understand a little how the wink
or twinkle of an eye, how an attitude, how a gesture, how
a cadence or impassioned sweep of voice, should make a
boundless distance between truths stated or declaimed.
But how words, locked up in forms, still and stiff in
sentences, contrive to tip a wink, how a proposition will
insinuate more scepticism than it states, how a paragraph
will drip with the honey of love, how a phrase will trail<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
an infinite suggestion, how a page can be so serene or so
gusty, so gorgeous or so pallid, so sultry or so cool, as to
lap you in one intellectual climate or its opposite,&mdash;who
has fathomed yet this wonder?”</p>

<p>From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to
suppose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces
of literature by means of translations. Among the arguments
against the study of the dead languages, none is
more pertinaciously urged by the educational red republicans
of the day than this,&mdash;that the study is useless,
because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity,
have been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot
enjoy Carlyle’s version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth’s
Cicero, Morris’s Virgil, Martin’s Horace, or Carter’s Epictetus,
must be either a prodigious scholar or a prodigious
dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator even
improves upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opinion
of many, upon Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” All this
seems plausible enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar
knows it to be fallacious and false. He knows that the
finest passages in an author,&mdash;the exquisite thoughts, the
curious verbal felicities,&mdash;are precisely those which defy
reproduction in another tongue. The most masterly translations
of them are no more like the original than a
walking-stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence
of a writer,&mdash;the life and spirit,&mdash;all that is idiomatic,
peculiar, or characteristic,&mdash;all that is Homerian in
Homer, or Horatian in Horace,&mdash;evaporates in a translation.</p>

<p>It is true that, judging by dictionaries only, almost
every word in one language has equivalents in every
other; but a critical study of language shows that, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
the exception of terms denoting sensible objects and acts,
there is rarely a precise coincidence in meaning between
any two words in different tongues. Compare any two
languages, and you will find that there are, as the
mathematicians would say, many incommensurable quantities,
many words in each untranslatable into the other,
and that it is often impossible, by a paraphrase, to supply
an equivalent. To use De Quincey’s happy image from the
language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk
of the original word and its translated representative, is,
in thousands of instances, not <em>annular</em>; the centres do not
coincide; the words overlap. Even words denoting sensible
objects are not always exact equivalents in any two
languages. It might be supposed that a <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">berg</i> (the
German for mountain or hill) was a <em>berg</em> all the world
over, and that a word signifying this tangible object in
one language must be the absolute equivalent of the word
expressing it in another. Yet, as a late German writer<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>
has said, this is far from being the case. The English
“mountain,” for instance, refers to something bigger than
the German <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">berg</i>. On the other hand, “hill,” which has
the next lower signification, in its many meanings is far
too diminutive for the German term, which finds no exact
rendering in any English vocable.</p>

<p>A comparison of the best English versions of the New
Testament with the original, strikingly shows the inadequacy
of the happiest translations. Even in the Revised
Version, upon which an enormous amount of labor was
expended by the best scholars in England and the United
States, many niceties of expression which mark the original
fail to appear. Owing to the poverty of our tongue<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
compared with the Greek, which, it has been said, can
draw a clear line where other languages can only make
a blot, the translators have been compelled to use the same
English word for different Greek ones, and thus obliterate
many fine distinctions which are essential to the meaning.
Thus, as one of the Revisers has shown, it is impossible
to exhibit in English the delicate shades of difference in
meaning which appear in the Greek between the two verbs
both rendered “love,”<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> in John xxi, 15-17. “The word
first employed by Christ is a very common one in the New
Testament, and specially denotes a pure, spiritual affection.
It is used of God’s love to man, as in John iii, 16&mdash;‘God
so <em>loved</em> the world,’ etc.&mdash;and of man’s love to God, as in
Matt. xxii, 37&mdash;‘Thou shalt <em>love</em> the Lord thy God,’ etc.
The other word more particularly implies that warmth of
feeling which exists between friends. Thus, it is used
respecting Lazarus in John xi, 3: ‘Behold, he whom thou
<em>lovest</em> is sick;’ and again, in John xx, 2, of St. John himself,
when he is spoken of as ‘the disciple whom Jesus
<em>loved</em>.’ Now, the use of the one word at first by Christ
serves to remind St. Peter of the claim which his Divine
Master had upon his deep, reverential love. But the
Apostle, now profoundly sensible of his own weakness,
does not venture to promise this, yet, feeling his whole
heart flowing out to Christ, he makes use of the other
word, and assures the Saviour at least of a fervent personal
affection. Christ then repeats His question, still using the
same verb, and Peter replies as before. But on asking the
question for the third time, Christ graciously adopts the
term employed by the Apostle: He speaks to him again
as a friend; He clasps the now happy disciple afresh to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
His own loving heart.”<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Now all this is lost through the
comparative meagreness of our language. To what extent
the subtle distinctions of the Greek original are and must
be lost in the translation, may be guessed from the fact
that there are no fewer than ten Greek words which have
been rendered “appoint” in the ordinary version, no fewer
than fourteen which stand for “give,” and no fewer than
twenty-one which correspond to “depart.”</p>

<p>Above all does poetry defy translation. It is too subtle
an essence to be poured from one vessel into another
without loss. Of Cicero’s elegant and copious rhetoric, of
the sententious wisdom of Tacitus, of the keen philosophic
penetration and masterly narrative talent of Thucydides,
of the thunderous eloquence of Demosthenes, and even of
Martial’s jokes, it may be possible to give some inkling
through an English medium; but of the beauties and
splendors of the Greek and Latin poets,&mdash;never. As soon
will another Homer appear on earth, as a translator
echo the marvellous music of his lyre. <em>Imitations</em> of the
“Iliad,” more or less accurate, may be given, or <em>another</em>
poem may be substituted in its place; but a perfect
transfusion into English is impossible. For, as Goethe
somewhere says, Art depends on Form, and you cannot
preserve the form in <em>altering</em> the form. Language is a
strangely suggestive medium, and it is through the reflex
and vague operation of words upon the mind that the
translator finds himself baffled. Words, as Cowper said of
books, “are not seldom talismans and spells.” They have,
especially in poetry, a potency of association, a kind of
necromantic power, aside from their significance as representative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
signs. Over and above their meanings as given
in the dictionary, they connote all the feeling which has
gathered round them by their employment for hundreds
of years. There are in every language certain magical
words, which, though they can be translated into other
tongues, yet are hallowed by older memories, or awaken
tenderer and more delightful associations, than the corresponding
words in those tongues. Such words in English
are <em>gentleman</em>, <em>comfort</em>, and <em>home</em>, about each of which
cluster a multitude of associations which are not suggested
by any foreign words by which they can be rendered.
There is in poetry a mingling of sound and sense, a
delicacy of shades of meaning, and a power of awakening
associations, to which the instinct of the poet is the key,
and which cannot be passed into a foreign language if
the <em>meaning</em> be also preserved. You may as easily make
lace ruffles out of hemp. Language, it cannot be too often
repeated, is not the dress of thought; it is its living expression,
and controls both the physiognomy and the organization
of the idea it utters.</p>

<p>How many abortive attempts have been made to translate
the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” into English verse!
What havoc have even Pope and Cowper made of some of
the grandest passages in the old bard! The former, it has
been well said, turned his lines into a series of brilliant epigrams,
sparkling and cold as the “Heroic Epistles” of Ovid;
the other chilled the warmth and toned down the colors
of Homer into a sober, drab-tinted hue, through which
gods and men loom feebly, and the camp of the Achæans,
the synod of the Trojans, and the deities in council, have
much of the air of a Quaker meeting-house. Regarded
as an English poem, Pope’s translation of the “Iliad” is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
unquestionably a brilliant and exquisitely versified production;
but viewed as a transfusion of the old bard into
another language, it is but a <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">caput mortuum</i>, containing
but little more of Homer than the names and events. The
fervid and romantic tone, the patriarchal simplicity, the
mythologic coloring, the unspeakable audacity and freshness
of the images,&mdash;all that breathes of an earlier world,
and of the sunny shores, and laughing waves, and blue
sky, of the old Ægean,&mdash;all this, as a critic has observed,
“is vanished and obliterated, as is the very swell and fall
of the versification, regular in its very irregularity, like
the roll of the ocean. Instead of the burning, picture-like
words of the old Greek, we have the dainty diction of a
literary artist; instead of the ever varied, resounding swell
of the hexameter, the neat, elegant, nicely balanced modern
couplet. In short, the old bard is stripped of his flowing
chlamys and his fillets, and is imprisoned in the high-heeled
shoes, the laced velvet coat, and flowing periwig of the
eighteenth century.” Chapman, who has more of the spirit
of Homer, occasionally catches a note or two from the
Ionian trumpet; but presently blows so discordant a blast
that it would have grated on the ear of Stentor himself.
Lord Derby and William C. Bryant have been more successful
in many respects than Pope or Cowper; but each
has gained some advantages by compensating defects.</p>

<p>Did Dryden succeed better when he put the “Æneid”
into verse? Did he give us that for which Virgil toiled
during eleven long years? Did he give us the embodiment
of those vulgar impressions which, when the old
Latin was read, made the Roman soldier shiver in all his
manly limbs? All persons who are familiar with English
literature know what havoc Dryden made of “Paradise<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
Lost,” when he attempted, even in the same language, to
put it into rhyme,&mdash;a proposal to do which drew from
Milton the contemptuous remark: “Ay, young man; you
can tag my rhymes.” A man of genius never made a
more signal failure. He could not draw the bow of
Ulysses. His rhyming, rhetorical manner, splendid and
powerful as it confessedly is, proved an utterly inadequate
vehicle for the high argument of the great Puritan. So
with his modernizations of Chaucer. His reproductions
of “the first finder of our faire language” contain much
admirable verse; but it is not Chaucer’s. They are simply
elaborate paraphrases, in which the idiomatic colors
and forms, the distinctive beauties of the old poet,&mdash;above
all, the simplicity and sly grace of his language,
the exquisite tone of <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">naïveté</i>, which, like the lispings of
infancy, give such a charm to his verse,&mdash;utterly vanish.
Dryden failed, not from lack of genius, but simply
because failure was inevitable,&mdash;because this aroma of
antiquity, in the process of transfusion into modern language,
is sure to evaporate.</p>

<p>All such changes involve a loss of some subtle trait of
expression, or some complexional peculiarity, essential to
the truthful exhibition of the original. The outline, the
story, the bones remain; but the soul is gone,&mdash;the essence,
the ethereal light, the perfume is vanished. As well might
a painter hope, by using a different kind of tint, to give
the expression of one of Raphael’s or Titian’s masterpieces,
as any man expect, by any other words than those
which a great poet has used, to convey the same meaning.
Even the humblest writer has an idiosyncrasy, a
manner of his own, without which the identity and truth
of his work are lost. If, then, the meaning and spirit of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
a poem cannot be transferred from one place to another,
so to speak, under the roof of a common language, must
it not <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">a fortiori</i> be impossible to transport them faithfully
across the barriers which divide one language from
another, and antiquity from modern times?</p>

<p>How many ineffectual attempts have been made to
translate Horace into English and French! It is easy to
give the right meaning, or something like the meaning,
of his lyrics; but they are cast in a mould of such exquisite
delicacy that their ease and elegance defy imitation.
All experience shows that the <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">traduttore</i> must
necessarily be <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">tradittore</i>,&mdash;the translator, a traducer of
the Sabine bard. As well might you put a violet into a
crucible, and expect to reproduce its beauty and perfume,
as expect to reproduce in another tongue the mysterious
synthesis of sound and sense, of meaning and suggested
association, which constitutes the vital beauty of a lyric.
The special imagination of the poet, it has been well
said, is an imagination inseparably bound up with language;
possessed by the infinite beauty and the deepest,
subtlest meanings of words; skilled in their finest sympathies;
powerful to make them yield a meaning which
another never could have extracted from them. It is of
the very essence of the poet’s art, so that, in the highest
exercise of that art, there is no such thing as the rendering
of an idea in appropriate language; but the conception,
and the words in which it is conveyed, are a
simultaneous creation, and the idea springs forth full-grown,
in its panoply of radiant utterance.</p>

<p>The works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and
Goethe, exist in the words as the mind in conjunction
with the body. Separation is death. Alter the melody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
ever so skilfully, and you change the effect. You cannot
translate a sound; you cannot give an elegant version of
a melody. Prose, indeed, suffers less from paraphrase than
poetry; but even in translating a prose work, unless one
containing facts or reasoning merely, the most skilful
linguist can be sure of hardly more than of transferring
the raw material of the original sentiment into his own
tongue. The bullion may be there, but its shape is altered;
the flower is preserved, but the aroma is gone;
there, to be sure, is the arras, with its Gobelin figures,
but it is the wrong side out. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that there is as much contrast between the best
translation and the original of a great author, as between
a wintry landscape, with its dead grass and withered
foliage, and the same landscape arrayed in the green
robes of summer. Nay, we prefer the humblest original
painting to a feeble copy of a great picture,&mdash;a barely
“good” original book to any lifeless translation. A living
dog is better than a dead lion; for the external
attributes of the latter are nothing without the spirit
that makes them terrible.</p>

<p>The difficulty of translating from a dead language, of
whose onomatopœia we are ignorant, will appear still
more clearly, when we consider what gross and ludicrous
blunders are made in translating even from one living
language into another. Few English-speaking persons can
understand the audacity of Racine, so highly applauded by
the French, in introducing the words <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">chien</i> and <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">sel</i> into
poetry; “dog” and “salt” may be used by us without danger;
but, on the other hand, we may not talk of “entrails”
in the way the French do. Every one has heard of the
Frenchman, who translated the majestic exclamation of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
Milton’s Satan, “Hail! horrors, hail!” by “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Comment vous
portez-vous, Messieurs les Horreurs, comment vous portez-vous?</i>”
“How do you do, horrors, how do you do?”
Another Frenchman, in reproducing the following passage
from Shakespeare in his own tongue,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,</p>
<p class="verse0">So dull, so dead in look, so <em>woe-begone</em>,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">translated the italicized words thus: “So, grief, be off
with you!” In the opera of “Macbetto,” the term “hell-broth”
in the witches’ scene is rendered in Italian <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">polto
inferno</i>. Hardly less ridiculous is the blunder made by
a translator of Alexander Smith’s “Life-Drama,” who
metamorphoses the expression, “clothes me with kingdoms,”
into “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">me fait un vêtement de royaumes</i>,”&mdash;“makes
me a garment of kingdoms.” Even so careful a writer
as Lord Mahon, in his “History of the War of the
Succession in Spain,” translates the French word <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">abbé</i> by
“abbot.” One of the chief difficulties in translating into
a foreign language is that, though every word the translator
uses may be authorized by the best writers, yet the
combination of his terms may be unidiomatic. Thus the
words <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">arène</i> and <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">rive</i> are both to be found in the best
French writers; yet if a foreigner, not familiar with the
niceties of that language, should write</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">
<p class="verseq">“Sur la rive du fleuve amassant de l’arène,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">he would be laughed at, not only by the critics, but by
the most illiterate workmen in Paris. The French idiom
will not admit of the expression <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">sur la rive du fleuve</i>,
correct though each word may be taken singly, but requires
the phrase <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">sur le bord de la rivière</i>, as it does
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">amasser du sable</i>, and not <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">amasser de l’arène</i>. What can
be more expressive than one of the lines in which Milton<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
describes the lost angels crowding into Pandemonium,
where, he says, the air was</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“<em>Brushed</em> with the <em>hiss</em> of <em>rustling</em> wings,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">a line which it is impossible to translate into words that will
convey precisely the same emotions and suggestions that
are roused by a perusal of the original? Suppose the
translator to hit so near to the original as to write</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Stirred with the noise of quivering wings,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">will not the line affect you altogether differently? Let
one translate into another language the following line of
Shakespeare,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“The learned <em>pate ducks</em> to the golden fool,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and is it at all likely that the quaint, comic effect of the
words we have italicized would be reproduced?</p>

<p>The inadequacy of translations will be more strikingly
exemplified by comparing the following lines of Shakespeare
with such a version as we might expect in another
language:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“How sweet the moonlight <em>sleeps</em> upon this bank!</p>
<p class="verse0">Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music</p>
<p class="verse0">Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night</p>
<p class="verse0">Become the touches of sweet harmony.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>A foreign translator, says Leigh Hunt, would dilute
and take all taste and freshness out of this draught of
poetry, after some such fashion as the following:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“With what a charm the moon serene and bright</p>
<p class="verse0">Lends on the bank its soft reflected light!</p>
<p class="verse0">Sit we, I pray, and let us sweetly hear</p>
<p class="verse0">The strains melodious, with a raptured ear;</p>
<p class="verse0">For soft retreats, and night’s impressive hour,</p>
<p class="verse0">To harmony impart divinest power.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In view of all these considerations what can be more
untrue than the statement so often made, that to be
capable of easy translation is a test of the excellence of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
a composition? This doctrine, it has been well observed,
goes upon the assumption that one language is just like
another language,&mdash;that every language has all the ideas,
turns of thought, delicacies of expression, figures, associations,
abstractions, points of view which every other language
has. “Now, as far as regards Science, it is true
that all languages are pretty much alike for the purposes
of Science; but even in this respect some are more suitable
than others, which have to coin words or to borrow
them, in order to express scientific ideas. But if languages
are not all equally adapted even to furnish symbols for
those universal and eternal truths in which Science consists,
how can they be reasonably expected to be all equally
rich, equally forcible, equally musical, equally exact,
equally happy, in expressing the idiosyncratic peculiarities
of thought of some original and fertile mind, who has
availed himself of one of them? * * *</p>

<p>“It seems that a really great author must admit of
translation, and that we have a test of his excellence when
he reads to advantage in a foreign language as well as
in his own. Then Shakespeare <em>is</em> a genius because he can
be translated into German, and not a genius because he
cannot be translated into French. The multiplication table
is the most gifted of all conceivable compositions, because
it loses nothing by translation, and can hardly be said to
belong to any one language whatever. Whereas I should
rather have conceived that, in proportion as ideas are
novel and recondite, they would be difficult to put into
words, and that the very fact of their having insinuated
themselves into one language would diminish the chance
of that happy accident being repeated in another. In the
language of savages you can hardly express any idea or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
act of the intellect at all. Is the tongue of the Hottentot
or Esquimau to be made the measure of the genius
of Plato, Pindar, Tacitus, St. Jerome, Dante, or Cervantes?”<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p>

<p>The truth is, music written for one instrument cannot
be played upon another. To the most cunning writer that
ever tried to translate the beauties of an author into a
foreign tongue, we may say in the language of a French
critic: “You are that ignorant musician who plays his part
exactly, not skipping a single note, nor neglecting a rest,&mdash;only
what is written in the key of <em>fa</em>, he plays in the key of
<em>sol</em>. Faithful translator!”</p>

<p>When we think of the marvellous moral influence which
words have exercised in all ages, we cannot wonder that
the ancients believed there was a subtle sorcery in them,
“a certain bewitchery or fascination,” indicating that language
is of mystic origin. The Jews, believing that God
had revealed a full-grown language to mankind, attached
a divine character to language, and supposed that there
was a natural and necessary connection between words
and things. The name of a person was not a mere conventional
sign, but an essential attribute, an integral part
of the person himself. Hence we find in Genesis no less than
fifty derivations of names, in almost all of which the derivation
connects the name, prophetically or otherwise, with
some event in the person’s life. Hence, also, the practice,
under certain conditions, of changing men’s names, as illustrated
in the histories of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Joshua
and others. “Call me not Naomi (pleasant), but Mara
(bitter),” said the broken-hearted widow of Elimelech.
“Even in the New Testament we find our Lord Himself in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
a solemn moment fixing on the mind of His greatest apostle
a new and solemn significance given to the name he bore.
‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my church.’
St. Paul also, is probably playing upon a name when, in
Phil. iv, 3, he affectionately addresses a friend as <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">γνήσιε Σύζυγε</span>,
‘true yoke fellow,’ since it is an ancient and very
probable supposition that Syzygus or Yokefellow is there
a proper name.” The Gothic nations supposed that even
their mysterious alphabetical characters, called “Runes,”
possessed magical powers; that they could stop a sailing
vessel or a flying arrow,&mdash;that they could excite love or
hate, or even raise the dead. The Greeks believed that
there was a necessary, mysterious connection between
words and the objects they signified, so that man unconsciously
expressed, in the words whereby he named things
or persons, their innermost being and future destiny, as
though in a symbol incomprehensible to himself. The
accidental good omen in the name of an envoy who was
called Hegesistratos, or “leader of an army,” decided a
Greek general to assist the Samians, and led to the battle
of Mycale. The Romans, in their levies, took care to
enrol first names of good omen, such as Victor, Valerius,
Salvius, Felix, and Faustus. Cæsar gave a command in
Spain to an obscure Scipio, merely for the omen which his
name involved. When an expedition had been planned
under the leadership of Atrius Niger, the soldiers absolutely
refused to proceed under a commander of so ill-omened
a name,&mdash;<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">dux abominandi nominis</i>,&mdash;it being, as
De Quincey says, “a pleonasm of darkness.” The same
deep conviction that words are powers is seen in the
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">favete linguis</i> and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">bona verba quæso</i> of the Romans, by
which they endeavored to repress the utterance of any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
word suggestive of ill fortune, lest the event so suggested
to the imagination should actually occur. So they were
careful to avoid, by euphemisms, the utterance of any
word directly expressive of death or other calamity, saying
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">vixit</i> instead of <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">mortuus est</i>, and “be the event fortunate or
otherwise,” instead of “adverse.” The name Egesta they
changed into Segesta, Maleventum into Beneventum, Axeinos
into Euxine, and Epidamnus into Dyrrhachium, to
escape the perils of a word suggestive of <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">damnum</i>, or
detriment. Even in later times the same feeling has prevailed,&mdash;an
illustration of which we have in the life of
Pope Adrian VI, who, when elected, dared not retain his
own name, as he wished, because he was told by his cardinals
that every Pope who had done so had died in the first
year of his reign.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>

<p>That there is a secret instinct which leads even the
most illiterate peoples to recognize the potency of words,
is illustrated by the use made of names in the East, in
“the black art.” In the Island of Java, a fearful influence,
it is said, attaches to names, and it is believed that
demons, invoked in the name of a living individual, can be
made to appear. One of the magic arts practised there is
to write a man’s name on a skull, a bone, a shroud, a bier,
an image made of paste, and then put it in a place where
two roads meet, when a fearful enchantment, it is believed,
will be wrought against the person whose name is so
inscribed.</p>

<p>But we need not go to antiquity or to barbarous nations
to learn the mystic power of words. There is not a day,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
hardly an hour of our lives, which does not furnish examples
of their ominous force. Mr. Maurice says with truth,
that “a light flashes out of a word sometimes which frightens
one. It is a common word; one wonders how one has
dared to use it so frequently and so carelessly, when there
were such meanings hidden in it.” Shakespeare makes one
of his characters say of another, “She speaks poniards, and
every word stabs”; and there are, indeed, words which are
sharper than drawn swords, which give more pain than a
score of blows; and, again, there are words by which pain
of soul is relieved, hidden grief removed, sympathy conveyed,
counsel imparted, and courage infused. How often
has a word of recognition to the struggling confirmed a
sublime yet undecided purpose,&mdash;a word of sympathy
opened a new vista to the desolate, that let in a prospect
of heaven,&mdash;a word of truth fired a man of action to do a
deed which has saved a nation or a cause,&mdash;or a genius
to write words which have gone ringing down the ages!</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“I have known a word more gentle</p>
<p class="verse2">Than the breath of summer air;</p>
<p class="verse0">In a listening heart it nestled,</p>
<p class="verse2">And it lived forever there.</p>
<p class="verse0">Not the beating of its prison</p>
<p class="verse2">Stirred it ever, night or day;</p>
<p class="verse0">Only with the heart’s last throbbing</p>
<p class="verse2">Could it ever fade away.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>A late writer has truly said that “there may be phrases
which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to
explore; a single word may be a window from which one
may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory
of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated
volumes have labored in vain to utter; there may be years
of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span></p>

<p>“Nothing,” says Hawthorne, “is more unaccountable
than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A
thought may be present to the mind so distinctly that no
utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be
conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take
the profoundest interest; but as long as it remains unspoken,
their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden
idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something
sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like
bringing up a drowned body out of the deepest pool of the
rivulet, which has been aware of the horrible secret all
along, in spite of its smiling surface.”</p>

<p>The significance of words is illustrated by nothing,
perhaps, more strikingly than by the fact that unity of
speech is essential to the unity of a people. Community of
language is a stronger bond than identity of religion,
government, or interests; and nations of one speech,
though separated by broad oceans, and by creeds yet more
widely divorced, are one in culture, one in feeling. Prof.
Marsh has well observed that the fine patriotic effusion of
Arndt, “<i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?</i>” was founded
upon the idea that the oneness of the <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Deutsche Zunge</i>,
the German speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of aims,
and of duties; and the universal acceptance with which
the song was received showed that the poet had struck a
chord to which every Teutonic heart responded. When
a nation is conquered by another, which would hold it in
subjection, it has to be again conquered, especially if its
character is essentially opposed to that of its conqueror,
and the second conquest is often the more difficult of the
two. To kill it effectually, its nationality must be killed,
and this can be done only by killing its language; for it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
is through its language that its national prejudices, its
loves and hates, and passions live. When this is not done,
the old language, slowly dying out,&mdash;if, indeed, it dies at
all,&mdash;has time to convey the national traditions into the
new language, thus perpetuating the enmities that keep
the two nations asunder. We see this illustrated in the
Irish language, which, with all the ideas and feelings of
which that language is the representative and the vehicle,
has been permitted by the English government to die a
lingering death of seven or eight centuries. The coexistence
of two languages in a state is one of the greatest
misfortunes that can befall it. The settlement of townships
and counties in our country by distinct bodies of
foreigners is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily newspaper,
with an Irish, German, or French prefix, or in a
foreign language, is a perpetual breeder of national animosities,
and an effectual bar to the Americanization of
our foreign population.</p>

<p>The languages of conquered peoples, like the serfs of
the middle ages, appear to be <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">glebæ adscriptitiæ</i>, and to
extirpate them, except by extirpating the native race itself,
is an almost impossible task. Rome, though she conquered
Greece, could not plant her language there. The barbarians
who overran the Roman Empire adopted the languages
of their new subjects; the <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'Avars and Slaves'">Avars and Slavs</ins> who
settled in Greece became Hellenized in language; the
Northmen in France adopted a Romanic tongue; and the
Germans in France and northern Italy, as well as the
Goths in Spain, conformed to the speech of the tribes
they had vanquished. It is asserted, on not very good
authority, that William the Conqueror fatigued his ear
and exhausted his patience, during the first years of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
sovereignty, in trying to learn the Saxon language; but,
failing, ordered the Saxons to speak Norman-French. He
might as well have ordered his new subjects to walk on
their heads. Charles the Fifth, in all the plenitude of his
power, could not have compelled all his subjects, Dutch,
Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., to learn his language;
he had to learn theirs, though a score in number,
as had Charlemagne before him.</p>

<p>England has maintained her dominion in the East for
more than a hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of
Hindoos know no more of her language than of the Greek.
In the last century, Joseph II, of Austria, issued an edict
that all his subjects, German, Slavonic, or Magyar, should
speak and write one language,&mdash;German; but the people
recked his decree as little as did the sea that of Canute.
Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and
the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were
for a long period under the Austrian yoke; but they
spoke as pure Italian as did any of their independent
countrymen, and they never detested their rulers more
heartily than at the time of their deliverance. The
strongest bond of union between the different States of
this country is not the wisdom of our constitution, nor the
geographical unity of our territory, but the one common
language that is spoken throughout the Republic, from the
great lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic
to the Pacific Ocean. Were different tongues spoken in the
different sections of the realm, no wisdom of political
structure or sagacity of political administration could hold
so many States together amidst such diversities of culture
and social customs, and interests so conflicting. But our
unity of speech,&mdash;the common language in which we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
express our thoughts and feelings, making all friendly and
commercial correspondence easy, giving us a common literature,
and enabling us to read the same books, newspapers,
printed lectures and speeches,&mdash;this is like a soul
animating all the limbs of the Republic, giving it a firmer
unity than its geological skeleton or its political muscles
could possibly ensure. Were the languages of our country
as various as those of Europe, who does not see that the
task of allaying the bitter feeling of hostility at the South,
which led to the late outbreak, and of fusing the citizens
of the North and of the South into one homogeneous people,
would be almost hopeless?</p>

<p>As a corollary from all that has been said, it is plain
that nothing tends more to make a man just toward other
nations than the exploration through their languages of
their peculiar thought-world. He who masters the speech
of a foreign people will gain therefrom a profound knowledge
of their modes of thought and feeling, more accurate
in some respects than he could gain by personal intercourse
with them. He will feel the pulse of their national
life in their dictionary, and will detect in their phraseology
many a noble and manly impulse, of which, while blinded
by national prejudice, he had never dreamed.</p>

<p>A volume might be filled with illustrations of the power
of words; but, great as is their power, and though, when
nicely chosen, they have an intrinsic force, it is, after all,
the <em>man</em> who makes them potent. As it was not the
famous needle gun, destructive as it is, which won the late
Prussian victories, but the intelligence and discipline of
the Prussian soldier,&mdash;the man <em>behind</em> the gun, educated in
the best common schools in the world,&mdash;so it is the latent
heat of character, the man behind the words, that gives<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
them momentum and projectile force. The same words,
coming from one person, are as the idle wind that kisses
the cheeks; coming from another, they are the cannon shot
that pierces the target in the bull’s-eye. The thing said is
the same in each case; the enormous difference lies in the
man who says it. The man fills out, crowds his words with
meaning, and sends them out to do a giant’s work; or he
makes them void and nugatory, impotent to reach their
destination, or to do any execution should they hit the
mark. The weight and value of opinions and sentiments
depend oftentimes less upon their intrinsic worth than
upon the degree in which they have been organized into
the nature of the person who utters them; their force, less
upon their inherent power than upon the latent heat stored
away in their formation, which is liberated in their publication.</p>

<p>There is in character a force which is felt as deeply,
and which is as irresistible, as the mightiest physical force,
and which makes the plainest expressions of some men like
consuming fire. Their words, instead of being the barren
signs of abstract ideas, are the media through which the
life of one mind is radiated into other minds. They
inspire, as well as inform; electrify, as well as enlighten.
Even truisms from their lips have the effect of original
perceptions; and old saws and proverbs, worn to shreds by
constant repetition, startle the ear like brilliant fancies.
Some of the greatest effects recorded in the history of eloquence
have been produced by words which, when read,
strike us as tame and commonplace. The tradition that
Whitefield could thrill an audience by saying “Mesopotamia!”
probably only burlesques an actual fact.</p>

<p>Grattan said of the eloquence of Charles James Fox that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
“every sentence came rolling like a wave of the Atlantic,
three thousand miles long.” Willis says that every word
of Webster weighs a pound. College sophomores, newly
fledged lawyers, and representatives from Bunkumville,
often display more fluency than the New Hampshire giant;
but his words are to theirs as the roll of thunder to the
patter of rain. What makes his argument so ponderous and
destructive to his opponents, is not its own weight alone,
but in a great degree the added weight of his temper and
constitution, the trip-hammer <em>momentum</em> with which he
makes it fall upon the theory he means to crush. Even
the vast mass of the man helped, too, to make his words
impressive. “He carried men’s minds, and overwhelmingly
pressed his thought upon them, with the immense
current of his physical energy.” When the great champion
of New England said, in the United States Senate,
“There are Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, and
there they will remain forever,” it was the weight of character,
and of all the associations connected with it, which
changed that which, uttered by another, would have been
the merest truism, into a lofty and memorable sentiment.
The majesty of the utterance, which is said to have quickened
the pulse even of “the great Nullifier,” Calhoun, is
due to the fact that it came from a mighty nature, which
had weighed and felt all the meaning which those three
spots represent in the stormy history of the world. It
was this which gave such prodigious power to the words
of Chatham, and made them smite his adversaries like an
electric battery. It was the haughty assumption of superiority,
the scowl of his imperial brow, the ominous growl
of his voice, “like thunder heard remote,” the impending
lightnings which seemed ready to dart from his eyes, and,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
above all, the evidence which these furnished of an imperious
and overwhelming will, that abashed the proudest
peers in the House of Lords, and made his words perform
the office of stabs and blows. The same words, issuing
from other lips, would have been as harmless as pop-guns.</p>

<p>In reading the quotations from Chalmers, which are
reported to have so overwhelmingly oppressed those who
heard them, almost every one is disappointed. It is the
creative individuality projected into the words that makes
the entire difference between Kean or Kemble and the
poorest stroller that murders Shakespeare. It is said that
Macready never produced a more thrilling effect than by
the simple words, “<em>Who said that?</em>” An acute American
writer observes that when Sir Edward Coke, a man essentially
commonplace in his intellect and prejudices, though
of vast acquirement and giant force of character, calls
Sir Walter Raleigh “a spider of hell,” the metaphor may
not seem remarkable; but it has a terrible significance
when we see the whole roused might of Sir Edward Coke
glaring through it.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> What can be more effective than
the speech of Thersites in the first book of the “Iliad”?
Yet the only effect was to bring down upon the speaker’s
shoulders the staff of Ulysses. Pope well observes that,
had Ulysses made the same speech, the troops would have
sailed for Greece that very night. The world considers
not merely what is said, but <em>who</em> speaks, and <em>whence</em> he
says it.</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Let but a lord once own the happy lines,</p>
<p class="verse0">How the wit brightens, how the style refines!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">says the same poet of a servile race; and another poet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
says of a preacher who illustrated his doctrine by his life,
that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Euripides expresses the same belief in the efficacy of
position and character, when he makes Hecuba entreat
Ulysses to intercede for her; “for the arguments,” says
she, “which are uttered by men of repute, are very different
in strength from those uttered by men unknown.”</p>

<p>The significance of the simplest epithet depends upon
the character of the man that uses it. Let two men of
different education, tastes, and habits of thought, utter
the word “grand,” and our sense of the word is modified
according to our knowledge of the men. The conceptions
represented by the words a man uses, it is evident, are
different from every other man’s; and into this difference
enter all his individuality of character, the depth or the
shallowness of his knowledge, the quality of his education,
the strength or feebleness of his feelings, everything that
distinguishes him from another man.</p>

<p>Mr. Whipple says truly that “there are no more simple
words than ‘green,’ ‘sweetness,’ and ‘rest,’ yet what depth
and intensity of significance shine in Chaucer’s ‘green’;
what a still ecstasy of religious bliss irradiates ‘sweetness,’
as it drops from the pen of Jonathan Edwards; what
celestial repose beams from ‘rest’ as it lies on the page of
Barrow! The moods seem to transcend the resources of
language; yet they are expressed in common words, transfigured,
sanctified, imparadised by the spiritual vitality
which streams through them.” The same critic, in speaking
of style as the measure of a writer’s power, observes that
“the marvel of Shakespeare’s diction is its immense suggestiveness,&mdash;his
power of radiating through new verbal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
combinations, or through single expressions, a life and
meaning which they do not retain in their removal to
dictionaries. When the thought is so subtle, or the emotion
so evanescent, or the imagination so remote, that it
cannot be flashed upon the ‘inward eye,’ it is hinted to
the inward ear by some exquisite variation of tone. An
American essayist on Shakespeare, Mr. Emerson, in speaking
of the impossibility of acting or reciting his plays,
refers to this magical suggestiveness in a sentence almost
as remarkable as the thing it describes. ‘The recitation,’
he says, ‘begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from
all this painted pedantry, <em>and sweetly torments us with
invitations to its own inaccessible homes</em>!’ He who has not
felt this witchery in Shakespeare’s style has never read
him. He may have looked <em>at</em> the words, but has never
looked <em>into</em> them.”</p>

<p>The fact that words are never taken absolutely,&mdash;that
they are expressions, not simply of thoughts or feelings,
but of natures,&mdash;that they are media for the emission and
transpiration of character,&mdash;is one that cannot be too
deeply pondered by young speakers and writers. Fluent
young men who wonder that the words which they utter
with such glibness and emphasis have so little weight with
their hearers, should ask themselves whether their characters
are such as to give weight to their words. As in
engineering it is a rule that a cannon should be at least
one hundred times heavier than its shot, so a man’s
character should be a hundred times heavier than what
he says. When a La Place or a Humboldt talks of the
“universe,” the word has quite another meaning than
when it is used by plain John Smith, whose ideas have
never extended beyond the town of Hull. So, when a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
man’s friend gives him religious advice, and talks of “the
solemn responsibilities of life,” it makes a vast difference
in the weight of the words whether they come from one
who has been tried and proved in the world’s fiery furnace,
and whose whole life has been a trip-hammer to drive
home what he says, or from a callow youth who prates
of that which he feels not, and testifies to things which
are not realities to his own consciousness. There is a
hollow ring in the words of the cleverest man who talks
of “trials and tribulations” which he has never felt.
“Words,” says the learned Selden, “must be fitted to a
man’s mouth. ’Twas well said by the fellow that was
to make a speech for my lord mayor, that he desired first
to take measure of his lordship’s mouth.”</p>

<p>Few things are more interesting in the study of a language,
than to note how much it gains by time and
culture. In its vocabulary, its forms, and its euphonic and
other changes, it embodies the mental growth and modifications
of thousands of minds. It enriches itself with all
the intellectual spoils of the people that use it, and with
the lapse of years is gradually deepened, mellowed, and
refined. The language of an old and highly civilized
people differs from that of its infancy, as much as a broad
and majestic river, bearing upon its bosom the commerce
of the world, differs from the tiny streamlet in which it
had its origin. And yet it is no less true that, as Max
Müller has observed, since the beginning of the world no
new addition has ever been made to the substantial elements
of speech, any more than to the substantial elements
of nature. There is a constant change in language, a
coming and going of words; but no man can ever invent
an entirely new word. Before a novel term can be introduced<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
into use, there must be some connection with a
former term,&mdash;a bridge to enable the mind to pass over
to the new word. Equally true is it that when a vocable
has dropped out of the language,&mdash;has become dead or
obsolete,&mdash;it is almost as impossible to call it back to life
as it is to restore to life a deceased human being. Pope,
it is true, speaks of commanding “old words that have
long slept to wake;” and Horace declares that many
words will be born again that have seemingly dropped
into their graves. But it is certain that, as Prof. Craik
says, “very little revivification has ever taken place in
human speech,” and that one may more easily introduce
into a language a dozen new words than restore to
general use an old one that has been discarded. It is true
that when Thomson published his “Castle of Indolence,”
he prefixed to the poem a list of so-called obsolete words,
of which not a few, as “carol,” “glee,” “imp,” “appall,”
“blazon,” “sere,” are in good standing to-day. It is true,
also, that in the first quarter of this century Coleridge,
Byron, Keats, Scott, and other poets, enriched their vocabularies
with words taken from the more archaic and
obsolescent element of the language, and that we have in
use many words that were more or less neglected during
the eighteenth century. But in nearly all these cases it is
probable that the vocables thus recalled to a living and
working condition, were never actually dead, but only in
a state of suspended animation.</p>

<p>It has been calculated that our English language,
including the nomenclature of the arts and sciences, contains
one hundred thousand words; yet of this immense
number it is surprising how few are in common use. It is
a common opinion that every Englishman and American<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
speaks English, every German German, and every Frenchman
French. The truth is, that each person speaks only
that limited portion of the language with which he is
acquainted. To the great majority even of educated men,
three-fourths of these words are almost as unfamiliar as
Greek or Choctaw. Strike from the lexicon all the obsolete
or obsolescent words; all the words of special arts or
professions; all the words confined in their usage to particular
localities; all the words of recent coinage which
have not yet been naturalized; all the words which even
the educated speaker uses only in homœopathic doses,&mdash;and
it is astonishing into what a manageable volume your
plethoric Webster or Worcester will have shrunk. It has
been calculated that a child uses only about one hundred
words; and, unless he belongs to the educated classes, he
will never employ more than three or four hundred. A
distinguished American scholar estimates that few speakers
or writers use as many as ten thousand words; ordinary
persons, of fair intelligence, not over three or four thousand.
Even the great orator, who is able to bring into
the field, in the war of words, half the vast array of
light and heavy troops which the vocabulary affords, yet
contents himself with a far less imposing display of verbal
force. Even the all-knowing Milton, whose wealth of
words seems amazing, and whom Dr. Johnson charges
with using a “Babylonish dialect,” uses only eight thousand;
and Shakespeare himself, “the myriad-minded,” only
fifteen thousand. Each word, however, has a variety of
meanings, with more or fewer of which every man is
familiar, so that his knowledge of the language, which has
practically over a million of words, is far greater than it
appears. Still the facts we have stated show that the difficulty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
of mastering the vocabulary of a new tongue is
greatly overrated; and they show, too, how absurd is the
boast of every new dictionary-maker that <em>his</em> vocabulary
contains so many thousand words more than those of his
predecessors. This may, or may not, be a merit; but it is
certain that there is scarcely a page of Johnson that does
not contain some word&mdash;obsolete, un-English, or purely
scientific&mdash;that has no business there; while Webster and
Worcester cram them in by hundreds and thousands at a
time; each doing his best to load and deform his pages,
and all the while triumphantly challenging the world to
observe how prodigious an advantage he has gained over
his rivals.</p>

<p>We are accustomed to go to the dictionary for the
meaning of words; but it is <em>life</em> that discloses to us their
significance in all the vivid realities of experience. It is
the actual world, with its joys and sorrows, its pleasures
and pains, that reveals to us their joyous or terrible meanings&mdash;meanings
not to be found in Worcester or Webster.
Does the young and light-hearted maiden know the meaning
of “sorrow,” or the youth just entering on a business
career understand the significance of the words “failure”
and “protest”? Go to the hod carrier, climbing the many-storied
building under a July sun, for the meaning of
“toil”; and, for a definition of “overwork,” go to the pale
seamstress who</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“In midnight’s chill and murk</p>
<p class="verse0">Stitches her life into her work;</p>
<p class="verse0">Bending backwards from her toil,</p>
<p class="verse0">Lest her tears the silk might soil;</p>
<p class="verse0">Shaping from her bitter thought</p>
<p class="verse0">Heart’s-ease and forget-me-not;</p>
<p class="verse0">Satirizing her despair</p>
<p class="verse0">With the emblems woven there!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span></p>

<p class="noindent">Ask the hoary-headed debauchee, bankrupt in purse,
friends, and reputation,&mdash;with disease racking every
limb,&mdash;for the definition of “remorse”; and go to the
bedside of the invalid for the proper understanding of
“health.” Life, with its inner experience, reveals to us
the tremendous force of words, and writes upon our
hearts the ineffaceable records of their meanings. Man is
a dictionary, and human experience the great lexicographer.
Hundreds of human beings pass from their cradles
to their graves who know not the force of the commonest
terms; while to others their terrible significance comes
home like an electric flash, and sends a thrill to the innermost
fibres of their being.</p>

<p>To conclude,&mdash;it is one of the marvels of language,
that out of the twenty plain elementary sounds of which
the human voice is capable, have been formed all the
articulate voices which, for six thousand or more years,
have sufficed to express all the sentiments of the human
race. Few as are these sounds, it has been calculated
that one thousand million writers, in one thousand million
years, could not write out all the combinations of
the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, if each writer
were daily to write out forty pages of them, and if each
page should contain different orders of the twenty-four
letters. Another remarkable fact is that the vocal organs
are so constructed as to be exactly adapted to the properties
of the atmosphere which conveys their sounds, while
at the same time the organs of hearing are fitted to
receive with pleasure the sounds conveyed. Who can
estimate the misery that man would experience were his
sense of hearing so acute that the faintest whisper would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
give him pain, loud talking or laughter stun him, and a
peal of thunder strike him deaf or dead?</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“If Nature thunder’d in his opening ears,</p>
<p class="verse0">And stunn’d him with the music of the spheres,</p>
<p class="verse0">How would he wish that Heaven had left him still</p>
<p class="verse0">The whispering zephyr and the purling rill!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Karl Hildebrand.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">ἀγαπάω</span> and <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">φιλέω</span>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> “Companion to the Revised Version of the English New Testament,” by
Alexander Roberts, D.D.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> “University Sermons,” by J. H. Newman.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> We have heard of an Englishman’s deploring with the deepest pathos his
having been named “James,” asserting that it had to some extent made a
flunkey of his very soul, against his will.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> “Literature and Life,” by Edwin P. Whipple.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER II.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">THE MORALITY IN WORDS.</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">Genus dicendi imitatur publicos mores.... Non potest alius esse ingenio,
alius animo color.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Seneca.</span></span></p>

<p>The world is satisfied with words; few care to dive beneath the surface.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Pascal.</span></p>

<p>Words are the signs and symbols of things; and as in accounts, ciphers and
symbols pass for real sums, so, in the course of human affairs, words and names
pass for things themselves.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Robert South.</span></p>

<p>Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Isaiah</span> v, 20.</p></div>


<p class="drop-capy">The fact that a man’s language is a part of his character,&mdash;that
the words he uses are an index to his mind
and heart,&mdash;must have been noted long before language
was made a subject of investigation. “Discourse,” says
Quintilian, “reveals character, and discloses the secret disposition
and temper; and not without reason did the Greeks
teach that as a man lived so would he speak.” <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Profert
enim mores plerumque oratio, et animi secreta detegit. Nec
sine causa Græci prodiderunt, ut vivat, quemque etiam dicere.</i>
When a clock is foul and disordered, its wheels warped or
cogs broken, the bell hammer and the hands will proclaim
the fact; instead of being a guide, it will mislead, and,
while the disorder continues, will continually betray its
own infirmity. So when a man’s mind is disordered or his
heart corrupted, there will gather on his face and in his
language an expression corresponding to the irregularities
within. There is, indeed, a physiognomy in the speech as
well as in the face. As physicians judge of the state of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
body, so may we judge of the mind, by the tongue. Except
under peculiar circumstances, where prudence, shame, or
delicacy seals the mouth, the objects dearest to the heart,&mdash;the
pet words, phrases, or shibboleths, the terms expressing
our strongest appetencies and antipathies,&mdash;will rise most
frequently to the lips; and Ben Jonson, therefore, did not
exaggerate in saying that no glass renders a man’s form
and likeness so true as his speech. “As a man speaks, so
he thinks; and as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”</p>

<p>If a man is clear-headed, noble-minded, sincere, just,
and pure in thought and feeling, these qualities will be
symbolized in his words; and, on the other hand, if he
has a confused habit of thought, is mean, grovelling and
hypocritical, these characteristics will reveal themselves in
his speech. The door keeper of an alien household said to
Peter, “Thou art surely a Galilean; thy speech bewrayeth
thee”; and so, in spite of all masks and professions, in
spite of his reputation, the essential nature of every person
will stamp itself on his language. How often do the words
and tones of a professedly religious man, who gives liberally
to the church, prays long and loud in public, and
attends rigidly to every outward observance, betray in
some mysterious way,&mdash;by some impalpable element which
we instinctively detect, but cannot point out to others,&mdash;the
utter worldliness of his character! How frequently do
words uttered volubly, and with a pleasing elocution, affect
us as mere sounds, suggesting only the hollowness and
unreality of the speaker’s character! How often does the
use of a single word flash more light upon a man’s motives
and principles of action, give a deeper insight into his
habits of thought and feeling, than an entire biography!
How often, when a secret sorrow preys upon the heart,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
which we would fain hide from the world by a smiling
face, do we betray it unconsciously by a trivial or parenthetical
word! Fast locked do we deem our Bluebeard
chamber to be, the key and the secret of which we have in
our own possession; yet all the time a crimson stream is
flowing across the door sill, telling of murdered hopes
within.</p>

<p>Out of the immense magazine of words furnished by our
English vocabulary,&mdash;embracing over a hundred thousand
distinct terms,&mdash;each man selects his own favorite expressions,
his own forms of syntax, by a peculiar law which is
part of the essential difference between him and all other
men; and in the verbal stock in trade of each individual
we should find, could it once be laid open to us, a key that
would unlock many of the deepest mysteries of his humanity,&mdash;many
of the profoundest secrets of his private history.
How often is a man’s character revealed by the adjectives
he uses! Like the inscriptions on a thermometer, these
words of themselves reveal the temperament. The conscientious
man weighs his words as in a hair-balance; the
boaster and the enthusiast employ extreme phrases, as if
there were no degree but the superlative. The cautious
man uses words as the rifleman does bullets; he utters but
few words, but they go to the mark like a gunshot, and
then he is silent again, as if he were reloading. The dogmatist
is known by his sweeping, emphatic language, and
the absence of all qualifying terms, such as “perhaps” and
“it may be.” The fact that the word “glory” predominates
in all of Bonaparte’s dispatches, while in those of his
great adversary, Wellington, which fill twelve enormous
volumes, it never once occurs&mdash;not even after the hardest
won victory,&mdash;but “duty,” “duty,” is invariably named as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
the motive for every action, speaks volumes touching their
respective characters. It was to work out the problem of
self-aggrandizement that Napoleon devoted all his colossal
powers; and <em>conscience</em>, <em>responsibility</em>, and kindred terms,
seem never to have found their way into his vocabulary.
Men, with their physical and moral force, their bodily
energies, and their passions, prejudices, delusions, and enthusiasms,
were to him but as fuel to swell the blaze on the
altar of that ambition of which he was at once the priest
and deity. Of duties to them he never for a moment
dreamed; for, from the hot May-day of Lodi to the autumnal
night of Moscow, when he fled the flaming Kremlin, he
seemed unconscious that he was himself a created and
responsible being.</p>

<p>An author’s style is an open window through which
we can look in upon him, and estimate his character. The
cunning reader reads between the lines, and finds out
secrets about the writer, as if he were overhearing his
soliloquies. He marks the pet phrase or epithet, draws
conclusions from asseveration and emphasis, notes the half-perceptible
sneer or insinuation, detects the secret misery
that is veiled by a jest, and learns the writer’s idiosyncrasies
even when he tries hardest to mask them. We
know a passage from Sir Thomas Browne, as we know a
Rembrandt or a Dürer. Macaulay is betrayed by his
antitheses, and Cicero by his <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">esse videatur</i>.</p>

<p>Dr. Arnold has strikingly shown how we may judge of
a historian by his style, his language being an infallible
index to his character. “If it is very heavy and cumbrous,
it indicates either a dull man or a pompous man,
or at least a slow and awkward man; if it be tawdry and
full of commonplaces enunciated with great solemnity, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
writer is most likely a silly man; if it be highly antithetical
and full of unusual expressions, or artificial ways
of stating a plain thing, the writer is clearly an affected
man. If it be plain and simple, always clear, but never
eloquent, the writer may be a very sensible man, but is
too hard and dry to be a very great man. If, on the
other hand, it is always elegant, rich in illustrations, and
without the relief of simple and great passages, we must
admire the writer’s genius in a very high degree, but
we may fear that he is too continually excited to have
attained to the highest wisdom, for that is necessarily
calm. In this manner the mere language of a historian
will furnish us with something of a key to his mind, and
will tell us, or at least give us cause to presume, in what
his main strength lies, and in what he is deficient.” It
has been said of Gibbon’s style that it was one in which
it was impossible to speak the truth.</p>

<p>A writer in the “Edinburgh Review” observes that the
statement that a man’s language is part of his character,
holds true, not only in regard to the usage of certain
shibboleths of a party, whether in religion or politics, but
also in regard to a general vocabulary. “There is a school
vocabulary and a college vocabulary; certain phrases
brought home to astound and perplex the uninitiated, and
passing now and then into general currency. In this age
of examinations,&mdash;army, navy, civil-service, and middle-class,&mdash;the
verb ‘to pluck’ is well-nigh incorporated with
the vernacular, and must take its place in dictionaries.
The sportsman Nimrod has his esoteric vocabulary, and so
has likewise the angler Walton. The man of the world has
his own set of phrases, understood and recognized by the
fraternity; and so has the gourmand; and so also has the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
fancier of wines, who, in opposition to one of the laws of
nature, speaks to you of wine, a fluid, as being ‘dry.’
The connoisseur in painting tells you also of ‘dryness’ in
a picture, and he uses other terms which seem as if they
had been invented to puzzle the uninitiated. Your favorite
landscape may have ‘tones’ in it, as well as your violin.
With shoulders that are ‘broad,’ and with cloth that is
‘broad’ covering those broad shoulders, you stand and
observe that a painting is ‘broad.’ You sit down at dinner
with a ‘delicious bit’ of venison before you on the table,
and looking up see a ‘delicious bit’ of Watteau or
Wouvermans before you on the wall.”</p>

<p>As with individuals, so with nations: the language of
a people is often a moral barometer, which marks with
marvellous precision the rise or fall of the national life.
The stock of words composing any language corresponds
to the knowledge of the community that speaks it, and
shows with what objects it is familiar, what generalizations
it has made, what distinctions it has drawn,&mdash;all its cognitions
and reasonings, in the worlds of matter and of
mind. “As our material condition varies, as our ways
of life, our institutions, public and private, become other
than they have been, all is necessarily reflected in our
language. In these days of railroads, steamboats and
telegraphs, of sun pictures, of chemistry and geology, of
improved wearing stuffs, furniture, styles of building,
articles of food and luxury of every description, how
many words and phrases are in every one’s mouth which
would be utterly unintelligible to the most learned man
of a century ago, were he to rise from his grave and walk
our streets!... Language is expanded and contracted in
precise adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
who use it; it is enriched or impoverished, in every
part, along with the enrichment or impoverishment
of their minds.”<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> Every race has its own organic
growth, its own characteristic ideas and opinions, which
are impressed on its political constitution, its legislation,
its manners and its customs, its modes of religious
worship; and the expression of all these peculiarities is
found in its speech. If a people is, as Milton said of the
English, a noble and a puissant nation, of a quick, ingenious,
and piercing spirit, acute to invent and subtle to
discourse, its language will exhibit all these qualities;
while, on the other hand, if it is frivolous and low-thoughted,&mdash;if
it is morally bankrupt and dead to all
lofty sentiments,&mdash;its mockery of virtue, its inability to
comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the
feebleness of its moral indignation, will all inevitably
betray themselves in its speech, as truly as would the
opposite qualities of spirituality of thought and exaltation
of soul. These discreditable qualities will find an utterance
“in the use of solemn and earnest words in senses
comparatively trivial or even ridiculous; in the squandering
of such as ought to have been reserved for the highest
mysteries of the spiritual life, on slight and secular objects;
and in the employment, almost in jest and play, of words
implying the deepest moral guilt.”</p>

<p>Could anything be more significant of the profound
degradation of a people than the abject character of the
complimentary and social dialect of the Italians, and the
pompous appellations with which they dignify things in
themselves insignificant, as well as their constant use of
intensives and superlatives on the most trivial occasions?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
Is it not a notable fact that they, who for so long a time
had no country,&mdash;on whose altars the fires of patriotism
have, till of late, burned so feebly,&mdash;use the word <em>pellegrino</em>,
“foreign,” as a synonym for “excellent”? Might
we not almost infer <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">a priori</i> the servile condition to which,
previous to their late uprising, centuries of tyranny had
reduced them, from the fact that with the same people, so
many of whom are clothed in rags, a man of honor is
“a well dressed man”; that a man who murders in secret
is “a brave man,” <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">bravo</i>; that a <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">virtuoso</i>, or “virtuous man,”
is one who is accomplished in music, painting, and sculpture,&mdash;arts
which should be the mere embroidery, and not
the web and woof, of a nation’s life; that, in their magnificent
indigence, they call a cottage with three or four
acres of land <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">un podere</i>, “a power”; that they term every
house with a large door <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">un palazzo</i>, “a palace,” a lamb’s fry
<i lang="it" xml:lang="it">una cosa stupenda</i>, “a stupendous thing,” and that a message
sent by a footman to his tailor through a scullion is <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">una
ambasciata</i>, “an embassy”?</p>

<p>Let us not, however, infer the <em>hopeless</em> depravity of
any people from the baseness of the tongue they have
inherited, not chosen. It makes a vast difference, as Prof.
Marsh justly observes, whether words expressive of noble
thoughts and mighty truths do not exist in a language,
or whether ages of soul-crushing tyranny have compelled
their disuse, and the employment of the baser part of the
national vocabulary. The mighty events that have lately
taken place in Italy “show that a tone of hypocrisy may
cling to the tongue, long after the spirit of a nation is
emancipated, and that where grand words are found in
a speech, there grand thoughts, noble purposes, high
resolves exist also; or, at least, the spark slumbers which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
a favoring breath may, at any moment, kindle into a
cherishing and devouring flame.”<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>

<p>A late writer calls attention to the fact that the French
language, while it has such positive expressions as “drunk”
and “tipsy,” conveyed by <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">ivre</i> and <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">gris</i>, contains no such
negative term as “sober.” <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Sobre</i> means always “temperate”
or “abstemious,” never the opposite condition to
intoxication. The English, it is argued, drink enough to
need a special illustrative title for a man who has not
drunk; but though the Parisians began to drink alcohol
freely during the sieges, the French have never yet felt
the necessity of forming any such curious subjective appellation,
consequently they do not possess it. Again, the
French boast that they have no such word as “bribe,” as
if this implied their exemption from that sin; and such,
indeed, may be the fact. But may not the absence of this
word from their vocabulary prove, on the contrary, their
lack of sensibility to the heinous nature of the offense,
just as the lack of the word “humility,” in the language of
the Greeks, usually so rich in terms, proves that they
lacked the thing itself, or as the fact that the same people
had no word corresponding to the Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ineptus</i>, argues,
as Cicero thought, not that the character designated by
the word was wanting among them, but that the fault
was so universal with them that they failed to recognize
it as such? Is it not a great defect in a language that
it lacks the words by which certain forms of baseness or
sinfulness, in those who speak it, may be brought home
to their consciousness? Can we properly hate or abhor
any wicked act till we have given it a specific objective
existence by giving it a name which shall at once designate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
and condemn it? The <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">pot-de-vin</i>, and other jesting
phrases which the French have coined to denote bribery,
can have no effect but to encourage this wrong.</p>

<p>What shall we think of the fact that the French language
has no word equivalent to “listener”? Is it not
a noteworthy circumstance, shedding light upon national
character, that among thirty-seven millions of talkers, no
provision, except the awkward paraphrase, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">celui qui écoute</i>,
“he who hears,” should have been made for hearers?
Is there any other explanation of this blank than the
supposition that every Frenchman talks from the pure
love of talking, and not to be heard; that, reversing the
proverb, he believes that silence is silver, but talking
is golden; and that, not caring whether he is listened to
or not, he has never recognized that he has no name for
the person to whom he chatters? Again, is it not remarkable
that, among the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bonhomme</i>, “a good man,” is
a term of contempt; that the fearful Hebrew word,
“gehenna,” has been condensed into <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">gêne</i>, and means only
a petty annoyance; and that <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">honnêteté</i>, which once meant
honesty, now means only civility? It was in the latter
half of the reign of Louis XIV that the word <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">honnête</i>
exchanged its primitive for its present meaning. Till then,
according to good authority, when a man’s descent was
said to be <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">honnête</i>, he was complimented on the virtuousness
of his progenitors, not reminded of the mediocrity
of their condition; and when the same term was applied
to his family, it was an acknowledgment that they belonged
to the middle ranks of society, not a suggestion
that they were plebeians. Again, how significant is the
fact that the French has no such words as “home,”
“comfort,” “spiritual,” and but one word for “love” and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
“like,” compelling them to put Heaven’s last gift to man
on a par with an article of diet; as “I love Julia,”&mdash;“I
love a leg of mutton”! Couple with these peculiarities
of the language the circumstance that the French term
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">spirituel</i> means simply witty, with a certain quickness,
delicacy, and versatility of mind, and have you not a real
insight into the national character?</p>

<p>It is said that the word oftenest on a Frenchman’s lips
is <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">la gloire</i>, and next to that, perhaps, is <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">brillant</i>, “brilliant.”
The utility of a feat or achievement in literature or science,
in war or politics, surgery or mechanics, is of little moment
in his eyes unless it also dazzles and excites surprise. It is
said that Sir Astley Cooper, the great British surgeon, on
visiting the French capital, was asked by the surgeon <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">en
chef</i> of the empire how many times he had performed some
feat of surgery that required a rare union of dexterity and
nerve. He replied that he had performed the operation
thirteen times. “Ah! but, Monsieur, I have performed
him one hundred and sixty time. How many time did you
save his life?” continued the curious Frenchman, as he
saw the blank amazement of Sir Astley’s face. “I,” said
the Englishman, “saved eleven out of the thirteen. How
many did <em>you</em> save out of a hundred and sixty?” “Ah!
Monsieur, I lose dem all;&mdash;but de operation was very
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">brillant</i>!”</p>

<p>The author of “Pickwick” tells us that in America the
sign vocal for starting a coach, steamer, railway train, etc.,
is “Go Ahead!” while with John Bull the ritual form is
“All Right!”&mdash;and he adds that these two expressions are
somewhat expressive of the respective moods of the two
nations. The two phrases are, indeed, vivid miniatures
of John Bull and his restless brother, who sits on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
safety valve that he may travel faster, pours oil and rosin
into his steam furnaces, leaps from the cars before they have
entered the station, and who would hardly object to being
fired off from a cannon or in a bombshell, provided there
were one chance in fifty of getting sooner to the end of his
journey. Let us hope that the day may yet come when
our “two-forty” people will exchange a little of their fiery
activity for a bit of Bull’s caution, and when our Yankee
Herald’s College, if we ever have one, may declare “All
Right!” to be the motto of our political escutcheon, with
as much propriety as it might now inscribe “Go Ahead!”
beneath that fast fowl, the annexing and screaming eagle,
that hovers over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, dips
its wings in two oceans, and has one eye on Cuba and the
other on Quebec.</p>

<p>A volume might be filled with illustrations of the truth
that the language of nations is a mirror, in which may
be seen reflected with unerring accuracy all the elements
of their intellectual as well as of their moral character.
What scholar that is familiar with Greek and Latin has
failed to remark how indelibly the contrariety of character
in the two most civilized nations of antiquity is impressed
on their languages, distinguished as is the one by exuberant
originality, the other by innate poverty of thought? In
the Greek, that most flexible and perfect of all the European
tongues,&mdash;which surpasses every other alike in its
metaphysical subtlety, its wealth of inflections, and its
capacity for rendering the minutest and most delicate
shades of meaning,&mdash;the thought controls and shapes the
language; while the tyrannous objectivity of the Latin,
rigid and almost cruel, like the nation whose voice it is,
and whose words are always <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
ratione voluntas</i>, coerces rather than simply syllables the
thought. “Greek,” says Henry Nelson Coleridge, “the
shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our
race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of
indefatigable strength; with the complication and distinctness
of nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from
which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like
Italian, speaking to the mind like English; at once the
variety and picturesqueness of Homer, the gloom and
intensity of Æschylus; not compressed to the closest by
Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato, not
sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its
ardors under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes himself.
And Latin,&mdash;the voice of Empire and of Law, of
War and of the State,&mdash;the best language for the measured
research of History, and the indignant declamation
of moral satire; rigid in its constructions, parsimonious
in its synonyms; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive
in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct
with the spirit of nations, and not with the passions of
individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not
the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and
spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust,
by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and
thoughtful Tacitus.”</p>

<p>It is a noteworthy fact that, as the Romans were the
most majestic of nations, so theirs is the only ancient
language that contains the word “majesty,” the Greek having
nothing that exactly corresponds to it; and the Latin
language is as majestic as were the Romans themselves.
Cicero, or some other Latin writer, finds an argument to
show that the intellectual character of the Romans was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
higher than that of the Greeks, in the fact that the word
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">convivium</i> means “a living together,” while the corresponding
Greek term, <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">συμπόσιον</span>, means “a drinking together.”
While the Romans retained their early simplicity and
nobility of soul, their language was full of power and
truth; but when they became luxurious, sensual, and corrupt,
their words degenerated into miserable and meaningless
counters, without intrinsic value, and serving only as
a conventional medium of exchange. It has been said
truly that “in the pedantry of Statius, in the puerility
of Martial, in the conceits of Seneca, in the poets who
would go into emulous raptures on the beauty of a lap-dog
and the apotheosis of a eunuch’s hair, we read the
hand-writing of an empire’s condemnation.”</p>

<p>The climate of a country, as well as the mind and
character of its people, is clearly revealed in its speech.
The air men breathe, the temperature in which they live,
and the natural scenery amid which they pass their lives,
acting incessantly upon body and mind, and especially
upon the organs of speech, impart to them a soft or a
harsh expression. The languages of the South, as we
should expect them to be, “are limpid, euphonic, and
harmonious, as though they had received an impress from
the transparency of their heaven, and the soft sweet sounds
of the winds that sigh among the woods. On the other
hand, in the hirrients and gutturals, the burr and roughness
of the Northern tongues, we catch an echo of the
breakers bursting on their crags, and the crashing of the
pine branch over the cataract.” The idiom of Sybaris
cannot be that of Sparta. The Attic Greek was softer than
the Doric, the dialect of the mountains; the Ionic, spoken
in the voluptuous regions of Asia Minor, was softer and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
more sinuous than the Attic. The Anglo-Saxon, the language
of a people conversant chiefly with gloomy forests
and stormy seas, and prone to silence, was naturally harsh
and monosyllabic. The roving sea-king of Scandinavia,
cradled on the ocean and rocked by its storms, could no
more speak in the soft and melting accents of a Southern
tongue than the screaming eagle could utter the liquid
melody of a nightingale’s song.</p>

<p>It is said that in the South Sea Islands version of the
New Testament there are whole chapters with no words
ending in consonants, except the proper names of the
original. Italian has been called the love-talk of the
Roman without his armor. Fuller, contrasting the Italians
and the Swiss, quaintly remarks that the former, “whose
country is called ‘the country of good words,’ love the
circuits of courtesy, that an ambassador should not, as a
sparrow hawk, fly outright to his prey, and meddle presently
with the matter in hand; but, like the noble falcon,
mount in language, soar high, fetch compasses of compliment,
and then in due time stoop to game, and seize on
the business propounded. Clean contrary, the Switzers
(who sent word to the king of France not to send them
an ambassador with stores of words, but a treasurer with
plenty of money) count all words quite out which are not
straight on, have an antipathy against eloquent language,
the flowers of rhetoric being as offensive to them as sweet
perfume to such as are troubled with the mother; yea,
generally, great soldiers have their stomachs sharp set to
feed on the matter; loathing long speeches, as wherein
they conceive themselves to lose time, in which they could
conquer half a country; and, counting bluntness their best
eloquence, love to be accosted in their own kind.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span></p>

<p>It is in the idioms of a people, its peculiar turns of
expression, and the modifications of meaning which its
borrowed words have undergone, that its distinctive genius
is most strikingly seen. The forms of salutation used by
different nations are saturated with their idiosyncrasies,
and of themselves alone essentially reveal their respective
characters. How clearly is the innermost distinction between
the Greek mind and the Hebrew brought out in
their respective salutations, “Rejoice!” and “Peace!” How
vividly are contrasted, in the two salutations, the sunny,
world-enjoying temper of the one people with the profound
religious feeling of the other! The formula of the robust,
energetic, valiant Roman,&mdash;with whom virtue was manliness,
and whose value was measured by his <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">valor</i>,&mdash;was
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Salve! Vale!</i> that is, “Be well,” “Be strong.” In the
expression, “If God will it, you are well,” is betrayed the
fatalism of the Arab; while the greeting of the Turk,
“May your shadow never be less!” speaks of a sunny
clime. In the hot, oppressive climate of Egypt perspiration
is essential to health, and you are asked, “How do you
perspire?” The Italian asks, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">Come sta?</i> literally, “How
does he stand?” an expression originally referring to the
<em>standing</em> of the Lombard merchants in the market place,
and which seems to indicate that one’s well-being or health
depends on his business prosperity. Some writers, however,
have regarded the word “stand” in this formula as
meaning no more than “exist”; mere life itself, in the
land of <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">far niente</i>, being a blessing. The Genoese, a
trading people, and at one time the bankers of Europe,
used in former days to say, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">Sanita e guadagno</i>, or
“Health and gain!” a phrase in which the ideals of the
countrymen of Columbus are tersely summed up. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
dreamy, meditative German, dwelling amid smoke and
abstractions, salutes you with the vague, impersonal,
metaphysical <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Wie gehts?</i>&mdash;“How goes it?” Another
salutation which he uses is, <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Wie befinden sie sich?</i>&mdash;“How
do you find yourself?” A born philosopher, he is
so absent-minded, so lost in thought and clouds of tobacco
smoke, that he thinks you cannot tell him of the state of
your health till you have searched for and <em>found</em> it.</p>

<p>The trading Hollander, who scours the world, asks,
<i>Hoe vaart’s-ge?</i> “How do you go?” an expression eminently
characteristic of a trading, travelling people,
devoted to business, and devoid of sentiment. The
thoughtful Swede inquires, “How do you think?” They
also inquire, <i>Hur mär ni?</i>&mdash;literally “How can you?”
that is, “Are you strong?” The lively, restless, vivacious
Frenchman, who lives in other people’s eyes, and
is more anxious about appearances than about realities,&mdash;who
has never to hunt himself up like the German,
and desires less to do, like the Anglo-Saxon, than to be
lively, to show himself,&mdash;says frankly, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Comment vous
portez-vous?</i>&mdash;“How do you carry yourself?” In these
few words we have the pith and essence, the very soul,
of the French character. Externals, the shapes and
shows of things,&mdash;for what else could we expect a people
to be solicitous, who are born actors, and who live,
to a great extent, for stage effect; who unite so much
outward refinement with so much inward coarseness;
who have an exquisite taste for the ornamental, and an
almost savage ignorance of the comfortable; who invented,
as Emerson says, the dickey, but left it to the English to
add the shirt? It has been said that a man would be
owl-blind, who in the “Hoo’s a’ wi’ ye” of the kindly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
Scot, could not perceive the mixture of national pawkiness
with hospitable cordiality. “One sees, in the mind’s
eye, the canny chield, who would invite you to dinner
three days in the week, but who would look twice at
your bill before he discounted it.” What can be more
unmistakably characteristic than the Irish peasant’s
“Long life to your honor; may you make your bed in
glory!” After such a grandiose salute, we need no
mouser among the records of antiquity to certify to us
that the Hibernian is of Oriental origin, nor do we need
any other key to his peculiar vivacity and impressionableness
of feeling, his rollicking, daredevil, hyperbole-loving
enthusiasm. Finally, of all the national forms
of salutation, the most signally characteristic,&mdash;the one
which reveals the very core, the inmost “heart of heart”
of a people,&mdash;is the Englishman’s “How do you do?” In
these four little monosyllables the activity, the intense
practicality of the Englishman, the very quintessence of
his character, are revealed as by a lightning’s flash. To
do! Not to think, to stand, to carry yourself, but to <em>do</em>;
and this doing is so universal among the English,&mdash;its
necessity is so completely recognized,&mdash;that no one
dreams of asking whether you are doing, or what you
are doing, but all demand, “<em>How</em> do you do?”</p>

<p>It has been well observed by the learned German
writer, J. D. Michaelis, that “some virtues are more sedulously
cultivated by moralists, when the language has
fit names for indicating them; whereas they are but
superficially treated of, or rather neglected, in nations
where such virtues have not so much as a name. Languages
may obviously do injury to morals and religion by
their equivocation; by false accessories, inseparable from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
the principal idea; and by their poverty.” It is a striking
fact, noted by an English traveller, that the native
language of Van Dieman’s Land has four words to
express the idea of taking life, not one of which indicates
the deep-lying distinction between to kill and to
murder; while any word for love is wanting to it altogether.
One of the most formidable obstacles which
Christian missionaries have encountered in teaching the
doctrines and precepts of the Gospel to the heathen, has
been the absence from their languages of a spiritual and
ethical nomenclature. It is in vain that the religious
teachers of a people present to them a doctrinal or ethical
system inculcating virtues and addressed to faculties,
whose very existence their language, and consequently
the conscious self-knowledge of the people, do not recognize.
Equally vain is it to reprehend vices which have
no name by which they can be described and denounced,
as things to be loathed and shunned. Hence, in translating
the Bible into the languages of savage nations, the
translators have been compelled to employ merely provisional
phrases, until they could develop a dialect fitted to
convey moral as well as intellectual truth. It is said that
the Ethiopians, having but one word for “person” and
“nature,” could not apprehend the doctrine of the union
of Christ’s two natures in one single person. There are
languages of considerable cultivation in which it is not
easy to find a term for the Supreme Being. Seneca
wrote a treatise on “Providence,” which had not even a
name at Rome in the time of Cicero. It is a curious
fact that the English language, rich as it is in words to
express the most complex religious ideas, as well as in
terms characterizing vices and crimes, had until about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
two centuries ago no word for “selfishness,” the root of
all vices, nor any single word for “suicide.” The Greeks
and Romans had a clear conception of a moral ideal, but
the Christian idea of “sin” was utterly unknown to the
Pagan mind. Vice they regarded as simply a relaxed
energy of the will, by which it yielded to the allurements
of sensual pleasure; and <em>vir</em>tue, literally “manliness,”
was the determined spirit, the courage and vigor
with which it resisted such temptations. But the idea
of “holiness” and the antithetic idea of sin were such utter
strangers to the Pagan mind that it would have been
impossible to express them in either of the classical
tongues of antiquity. As De Maistre has strikingly
observed, man knew well that he could “irritate” God or
“a god,” but not that he could “offend” him. The words
“crime” and “criminal” belong to all languages: those of
“sin” and “sinner” belong only to the Christian tongue.
For a similar reason, man could always call God “Father,”
which expresses only a relation of creation and of power;
but no man, of his own strength, could say “my Father”!
for this is a relation of love, foreign even to Mount Sinai,
and which belongs only to Calvary.</p>

<p>Again, the Greek language, as we have already seen,
had no term for the Christian virtue of “humility”; and
when the apostle Paul coined one for it, he had to employ
a root conveying the idea, not of self-abasement
before a just and holy God, but of positive debasement
and meanness of spirit. On the other hand, there is a
word in our own tongue which, as De Quincey observes,
cannot be rendered adequately either by German or Greek,
the two richest of human languages, and without which
we should all be disarmed for one great case, continually<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
recurrent, of social enormity. It is the word “humbug.”
“A vast mass of villany, that cannot otherwise be reached
by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric of scorn,
would go at large with absolute impunity, were it not
through the stern Rhadamanthian aid of this virtuous
and inexorable word.”</p>

<p>There is no way in which men so often become the
victims of error as by an imperfect understanding of certain
words which are artfully used by their superiors.
Cynicism is seldom shallower than when it sneers at what
it contemptuously calls the power of words over the popular
imagination. If men are agreed about things, what,
it is asked, can be more foolish than to dispute about
names? But while it is true that in the physical world
things dominate over names, and are not at the mercy
of a shifting vocabulary, yet in the world of ideas,&mdash;of
history, philosophy, ethics and poetry,&mdash;words triumph
over things, are even equivalent to things, and are as
truly the living organism of thought as the eyes, lips,
and entire physiognomy of a man, are the media of the
soul’s expression. Hence words are the only certain <em>test</em>
of thought; so much so that we often stop in the midst
of an assertion, an exclamation, or a request, startled by
the form it assumes in words. Thus, in Shakespeare,
King John says to Hubert, who pleaded his sovereign’s
order for putting the young prince to death, that if,
instead of receiving the order in signs,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse16">“Thou</p>
<p class="verse0">Hadst bid me tell my tale <em>in express words</em>,</p>
<p class="verse0">Deep shame had struck me dumb.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Words are often not only the vehicle of thought, but the
very mirror in which we see our ideas, and behold the
beauty or ugliness of our inner selves.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>

<p>A volume might be written on the mutual influence
of language and opinion, showing that as</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Faults in the life breed errors in the brain,</p>
<p class="verse0">And these reciprocally those again,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">so the sentiments we cherish mould our language, and
our words react upon our opinions and feelings. Let a
man go into a foreign country, give up his own language,
and adopt another, and he will gradually and unconsciously
change his opinions, too. He will neither be
able to express his old ideas adequately in the new words,
nor to prevent the new words of themselves putting new
ideas in his brain. Who has failed to notice that the
opinion we entertain of an object does not more powerfully
influence the mind in applying to it a name or an
epithet, than the epithet or name influences the opinion?
Call thunder “the bolt of God’s wrath,” and you awaken
a feeling of terror; call it, with the German peasant, <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">das
liebe gewitter</i>, “the dear thunder,” and you excite a different
emotion. As the forms in which we clothe the outward
expression of our feelings react with mighty force
upon the heart, so our speculative opinions are greatly
confirmed or invalidated by the technical terms we employ.
Fiery words, it has been truly said, are the hot blast
that inflames the fuel of our passionate nature; and formulated
doctrine, a hedge that confines the discursive wanderings
of the thoughts. In personal quarrels, it is the
stimulus men give themselves by stinging words that
impels them to violent deeds; and in argumentative discussions
it is the positive affirmation and reaffirmation of
our views which, more than the reasons we give, deepen
our convictions. The words that have helped us to conquer
the truth often become the very tyrants of our convictions;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
and phrases once big with meaning are repeated
till they “ossify the very organs of intelligence.” False
or partial definitions often lead into dangerous errors;
an impassioned polemic falls a victim to his own logic,
and a wily advocate becomes the dupe of his own rhetoric.</p>

<p>Words, in short, are excellent servants, but the most
tyrannical of masters. Some men command them, but a
vast majority are commanded by them. There are words
which have exercised a more iron rule, swayed with a more
despotic power, than Cæsar or the Russian Czar. Often an
idle word has conquered a host of facts; and a mistaken
theory, embalmed in a widely received word, has retarded
for centuries the progress of knowledge. Thus the protracted
opposition in France to the Newtonian theory arose
chiefly from the influence of the word “attraction”; the
contemptuous misnomer, “Gothic,” applied to northern
mediæval architecture, perpetuated the dislike with which
it was regarded; and the introduction of the term “landed
proprietor” into Bengal caused a disorganization of society
which had never been caused by its most barbarous invaders.</p>

<p>Macaulay, in his “History of England,” mentions a circumstance
strikingly illustrative of the connection between
language and opinion,&mdash;that no large society of which the
language is not Teutonic has ever turned Protestant, and
that wherever a language derived from ancient Rome is
spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day prevails.
“Men believe,” says Bacon, “that their reason is lord over
their words, but it happens, too, that words exercise a
reciprocal and reactionary power over the intellect....
Words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding
of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
the judgment.” Not only every language, but every age,
has its charmed words, its necromantic terms, which give
to the cunning speaker who knows how to ring the changes
upon them, instant access to the hearts of men, as at “Open
Sesame!” the doors of the cave flung themselves open to
the thieves, in the Arabian tale. “There are words,” says
Balzac, “which, like the trumpets, cymbals and bass drums
of mountebanks, attract the public; the words ‘beauty,’
‘glory,’ ‘poetry,’ have witcheries that seduce the grossest
minds.” At the utterance of the magic names of Austerlitz
and Marengo, thousands have rushed to a forlorn hope,
and met death at the cannon’s mouth.</p>

<p>When Haydon’s picture of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem
was exhibited in London in 1820, Mrs. Siddons, the
famous actress, entering the exhibition room, said: “The
paleness of your Christ gives it a supernatural look.” This,
says the painter, settled its success. There is great value
in the selection of terms; many a man’s fortune has been
made by a happy phrase. Thousands thronged to see the
great work with “a supernatural look.”</p>

<p>South, in his eloquent sermons on “The Fatal Imposture
and Force of Words,” observes that any one who
wishes to manage “the rabble,” need never inquire, so
long as they have ears to hear, whether they have any
understanding whereby to judge. With two or three
popular, empty words, well tuned and humored, he may
whistle them backward and forward, upward and downward,
till he is weary; and get upon their backs when he
is so. When Cæsar’s army mutinied, no argument from
interest or reason could persuade them; but upon his
addressing them as <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Quirites</i>, the tumult was instantly
hushed, and they took that word in payment of all. “In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
the thirtieth chapter of Isaiah we find some arrived at that
pitch of sottishness, and so much in love with their own
ruin, as to own plainly, and roundly say, what they would
be at. In the tenth verse, ‘Prophesy not unto us,’ say
they, ‘right things, but prophesy to us smooth things.’ As
if they had said, ‘Do but oil the razor for us, and let us
alone to cut our own throats.’ Such an enchantment is
there in words; and so fine a thing does it seem to some
to be ruined plausibly, and to be ushered to destruction
with panegyric and acclamation; a shameful, though irrefragable
argument of the absurd empire and usurpation of
words over things; and that the greatest affairs and most
important interests of the world are carried on by things,
not as they are, but as they are called.”</p>

<p>The Romans, after the expulsion of Tarquin, could not
brook the idea of being governed by a <em>king</em>; yet they
submitted to the most abject slavery under an emperor.
Cromwell was too sagacious to disgust the republicans by
calling himself King, though he doubtless laughed grimly
in his sleeve as, under the title of Lord Protector, he
exercised all the regal functions. We are told by Saint
Simon that at the court of the grand monarch, Louis XIV,
gambling was so common that even the ladies took part
in it. The gentlemen did not scruple to cheat at cards;
but the ladies had a peculiar tenderness on the subject.
No lady could for a moment think of retaining such
unrighteous gains; the moment they were touched, they
were religiously given away. But then, we must add, the
gift was always made to some other winner of her own sex.
By carefully avoiding the words “interchange of winnings,”
the charming casuists avoided all self-reproach, and all
sharp censure by their discreet and lenient confessors.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
There are sects of Christians at the present day that protest
vehemently against a hired ministry; yet their preachers
must be warmed, fed and clothed by “donation parties”;
reminding one of the snob gentleman in Molière, whose
father was no shop-keeper, but kindly “chose goods” for his
friends, which he let them have for&mdash;money.</p>

<p>Party and sectarian leaders know that the great secret
of the art of swaying the people is to invent a good shibboleth
or battle cry, to be dinned continually in their
ears. Persons familiar with British history will remember
certain talismanic vocables, such as “Wilkes and Liberty,”
the bare utterance of which has been sufficient at times
to set a whole population in a flame; while the solemn
and sepulchral cadences in which Pitt repeated the cuckoo
song of “thrones and altars,” “anarchy and dissolution
of social order,” were more potent arguments against
revolution than the most perfect syllogism that was ever
constructed in mood and figure. So in our own country
this verbal magic has been found more convincing than
arguments in “Barbara” or “Baralipton.” Patriots and
demagogues alike have found that it was only necessary,
in South’s phrase, to take any passion of the people, when
it was predominant and just at the critical height of it,
“and nick it with some lucky or unlucky word,” and they
might “as certainly overrule it to their own purpose as
a spark of fire, falling upon gunpowder, will infallibly
blow it up.” “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” “No
More Compromise,” “The Higher Law,” “The Irrepressible
Conflict,” “Squatter Sovereignty,” and other similar
phrases, have roused and moved the public mind as much
as the pulpit and the press.</p>

<p>Gouverneur Morris, in his Parisian journal of 1789,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
tells an anecdote which strikingly illustrates this influence
of catch-words upon the popular mind. A gentleman, in
walking, came near to a knot of people whom a street
orator was haranguing on the power of a qualified veto
(<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">veto suspensif</i>), which the constituent assembly had just
granted to the king. “Messieurs,” said the orator, “we
have not a supply of bread. Let me tell you the reason.
It has been but three days since the king obtained this
qualified veto, and during that time the aristocrats have
bought up some of these <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">suspensions</i>, and carried the grain
out of the kingdom.” To this profound discourse the
people assented by loud cheers. Not only shibboleths,
but epithets, are often more convincing than syllogisms.
The term <em>Utopian</em> or <em>Quixotic</em>, associated in the minds of
the people with any measure, even the wisest and most
practicable, is as fatal to it as what some one calls the
poisonous sting of the American (?) <em>humbug</em>.</p>

<p>So in theology; false doctrines and true doctrines have
owed their currency or non-currency, in a great measure,
to the coinage of happy terms, by which they have been
summed up and made attractive or offensive. Trench
observes that “the entire secret of Buddhism is in the
‘Nirvâna.’ Take away the word, and it is not too much to
say that the keystone to the whole arch is gone.” When
the Roman Catholic Church coined the term “transubstantiation,”
the error which had so long been held in solution
was precipitated, and became henceforth a fixed and influential
dogma. What a potent watchword was the term
“Reformation,” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries!
Who can estimate the influence of the phrases “Broad
Church,” “Liberal Church,” “Close Communion,” in advancing
or retarding the growth of certain religious sects<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
at this day? Many of even the most “advanced thinkers,”
who reject the supernatural element of the Bible,
put all religions upon the same level, and deem Shakespeare
as truly inspired as the Apostles, style themselves
“Christians.”</p>

<p>Even in science happy names have had much to do with
the general reception of truth. “Hardly any original
thoughts on mental or social subjects,” says a writer,
“ever make their way among mankind, or assume their
proper proportions even in the minds of their inventors,
until aptly selected words or phrases have, as it were,
nailed them down and held them fast.” How much is
the study of the beautiful science of botany hindered by
such “lexical superfetations” as <i>chrysanthemum leukanthemum,
Myosotis scorpioeides</i>,&mdash;“scorpion-shaped mouse’s
ear”; and how much is that of astronomy promoted
by such popular terms as “the bear,” “the serpent,”
“the milky way”! How much knowledge is gathered
up in the compact and easily remembered phrase,
“correlation of forces”; and to what an extent the wide
diffusion of Darwin’s speculations is owing to two or
three felicitous and comprehensive terms, such as “the
struggle for existence,” “survival of the fittest,” “the process
of natural selection”! Who that has felt the painfulness
of doubt has not desired to know something of
“the <em>positive</em> philosophy” of Comte? On the other hand,
the well-known anatomist, Professor Owen, complains
with just reason of the embarrassments produced in his
science by having to use a long description instead of a
name. Thus a particular bone is called by Soemmering
“<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">pars occipitalis stricte sic dicta partis occipitalis ossis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
spheno-occipitalis</i>,” a description so clumsy that only the
direst necessity would lead one to use it.</p>

<p>Even great authors, who are supposed to have “sovereign
sway and masterdom” over words, are often bewitched
and led captive by them. Thus Southey, Coleridge
and Wordsworth were bent on establishing their
Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, not because
they knew anything of that locality, but because
Susquehanna was “such a <em>pretty name</em>.” Again, to point
an epigram or give edge to a sarcasm, a writer will stab
a rising reputation as with a poniard; and, even when
convicted of misrepresentation, will sooner stick to the
lie than part with a <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">jeu d’esprit</i>, or forego a verbal felicity.
Thus Byron, alluding to Keats’s death, which was
supposed to have been caused by Gifford’s savage criticism
in the “Quarterly,” said:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle,</p>
<p class="verse0">Should let itself be snuffed out by an article!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Though he was afterward informed of the untruth of
these lines, Byron, plethoric as he was with poetic wealth
and wit, could not willingly let them die; and so the witticism
yet remains to mislead and provoke the laughter of
his readers.</p>

<p>Again, there are authors who, to meet the necessities
of rhyme, or to give music to a period, will pad out their
sentences with meaningless expletives. They employ
words as carpenters put false windows into houses; not to
let in light upon their meaning, but for symmetry. Or,
perhaps, they imagine that a certain degree of distension
of the intellectual stomach is required to enable it to act
with its full powers,&mdash;just as some of the Russian peasantry
mix sawdust with the train oil they drink, or as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
hay and straw, as well as corn, are given to horses, to
supply the necessary bulk. Thus Dr. Johnson, imitating
Juvenal, says:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Let observation, with extensive view,</p>
<p class="verse0">Survey mankind from China to Peru.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">This, a lynx-eyed critic contended, was equivalent to saying:
“Let observation, with extensive observation, observe
mankind extensively.” If the Spartans, as we are told,
fined a citizen because he used three words where two
would have done as well, how would they have punished
such prodigality of language?</p>

<p>It is an impressive truth which has often been noticed
by moralists, that indulgence in verbal vice speedily leads
to corresponding vices in conduct. If a man talk of any
mean, sensual, or criminal practice in a familiar or flippant
tone, the delicacy of his moral sense is almost sure
to be lessened, he loses his horror of the vice, and, when
tempted to do the deed, he is far more likely to yield.
Many a man, without dreaming of such a result, has thus
talked himself into vice, into sensuality, and even into
ruin. The apostle James was so impressed with the
significance of speech that he regarded it as an unerring
sign of character. “If any man offend not in word,”
he declares, “the same is a perfect man, and able also to
bridle the whole body.” Again he declares that “the
tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison”; commenting
upon which, Rev. F. W. Robertson observes:
“The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is
known; there are poisons so destructive that a single drop
insinuated into the veins produces death in three seconds....
In that drop of venom which distils from the sting
of the smallest insect, or the spikes of the nettle-leaf,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
there is concentrated the quintessence of a poison so
subtle that the microscope cannot distinguish it, and yet
so virulent that it can inflame the blood, irritate the whole
constitution, and convert night and day into restless
misery.” So, he adds, there are words of calumny and
slander, apparently insignificant, yet so venomous and
deadly that they not only inflame hearts and fever human
existence, but poison human society at the very fountain
springs of life. It was said with the deepest feeling of
the utterers of such words, by one who had smarted
under their sting: “Adders’ poison is under their lips.”</p>

<p>Who can estimate the amount of misery which has
been produced in society by merely idle words, uttered
without malice, and by words uttered in jest? A poet,
whose name is unknown to us, has vividly painted the
effects of such utterances:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“A frivolous word, a sharp retort,</p>
<p class="verse2">A flash from a passing cloud,</p>
<p class="verse0">Two hearts are scathed to their inmost core,</p>
<p class="verse0">Are ashes and dust forevermore;</p>
<p class="verse2">Two faces turn to the crowd,</p>
<p class="verse0">Masked by pride with a lifelong lie,</p>
<p class="verse0">To hide the scars of that agony.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“A frivolous word, a sharp retort,</p>
<p class="verse2">An arrow at random sped;</p>
<p class="verse0">It has cut in twain the mystic tie</p>
<p class="verse0">That had bound two souls in harmony,</p>
<p class="verse2">Sweet love lies bleeding or dead.</p>
<p class="verse0">A poisoned shaft, with scarce an aim,</p>
<p class="verse0">Has done a mischief sad as shame.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>How often have thoughtless words set empires ablaze,
and kindled furious wars among nations! It was one of
the virtues of George Washington that he knew how to
be silent. John Adams said he had the most remarkable
mouth he had ever seen; for he had the art of controlling
his lips. One of the rules of conduct to which David<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
Hume inflexibly adhered, was never to reply to any attack
made upon him or his writings. It was creditable to him
that he had no anxiety to have “the last word,”&mdash;that
which in family circles has been pronounced to be “the
most dangerous of infernal machines.”</p>

<p>It is not, however, in the realm of literature and morals
only that the power of words is seen. Who is ignorant of
their sway in the world of politics? Is not fluency of
speech, in many communities, more than statesmanship?
Are not brains, with a little tongue, often far less potent
than “tongue with a garnish of brains”? Need any one
be told that a talent for speech-making has stood in place
of all other acquirements; that it is this which has made
judges without law, and diplomatists without French;
which has sent to the army brigadiers who knew not a
cannon from a mortar, and to the legislature men who
could not tell a bank note from a bill of exchange; which,
according to Macaulay, made a Foreign Minister of Mr. Pitt,
who never opened Vattel, and which was near making a
Chancellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not
work a sum in long division? “To be a man of the world,”
says Corporal Bunting, a character in one of Bulwer’s
novels, “you must know all the ins and outs of speechifying.
It’s words that make another man’s mare go your
road. Augh! that must have been a clever man as invented
language. It is a marvel to think how much a man does
in the way of cheating, if he only has the gift of the gab;
wants a missus,&mdash;talks her over; wants your horse,&mdash;talks
you out of it; wants a place,&mdash;talks himself into it....
Words make even them ’ere authors, poor creatures, in
every man’s mouth. Augh! sir, take note of the <em>words</em>,
and the things will take care of themselves.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span></p>

<p>It is true that “lying words” are not always responsible
for the mischief they do; that they often rebel and growl
audibly against the service into which they are pressed, and
testify against their taskmasters. The latent nature of a
man struggles often through his own words, so that even
truth itself comes blasted from his lips, and vulgarity,
malignity, and littleness of soul, however anxiously cloaked,
are betrayed by the very phrases and images of their
opposites. “A satanic drop in the blood,” it has been said,
“makes a clergyman preach diabolism from scriptural
texts, and a philanthropist thunder hate from the rostrum
of reform.”<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> But though the truth often leaks out
through the most hypocritical words, it is yet true that
they are successfully employed, as decoy ducks, to deceive,
and the dupes who are cheated by them are legion. There
are men fond of abstractions, whom words seem to enter
and take possession of, as their lords and owners. Blind
to every shape but a shadow, deaf to every sound but an
echo, they invert the legitimate order, and regard things
as the symbols of words, not words as the symbols of
things. There is, in short, “a besotting intoxication which
this verbal magic, if I may so call it, brings upon the mind
of man.... Words are able to persuade men out of what
they find and feel, to reverse the very impressions of sense,
and to amuse men with fancies and paradoxes, even in
spite of nature and experience.”<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>

<p>All who are familiar with Dickens will recollect the
reply of the shrewd Samuel Weller, when asked the meaning
of the word monomania: “When a <em>poor</em> fellow takes
a piece of goods from a shop, it is called theft; but if a
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>wealthy lady does the same thing, it is called <em>monomania</em>.”
There is biting satire as well as <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">naïveté</i> and dry humor
in the reply, and it strikingly shows the moral power of
language; how the same act may be made to appear in
wholly different lights, according to the phraseology used to
describe it. The same character may be made to look as
spotless as an angel, or as black as “the sooty spirits that
troop under Acheron’s flag,” through the lubricity of language.
“<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Timidus</i>,” says Seneca, “<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">se cantum vocat; sordidus
parcum</i>.” Thousands who would shrink back with disgust
or horror from a vice which has an ugly name, are led
“first to endure, then pity, then embrace,” when men have
thrown over it the mantle of an honorable appellation.
A singular but most instructive dictionary might be compiled
by taking one after another the honorable and the
sacred words of a language, and showing for what infamies,
basenesses, crimes, or follies, each has been made a pretext.
Is there no meaning in the fact that, among the ancient
Romans, the same word was employed to designate a crime
and a great action, and that a softened expression for “a
thief” was “a man of three letters” (f. u. r.)? Does it
make no difference in our estimate of the gambler and his
profession, whether we call him by the plain, unvarnished
Saxon “blackleg,” or by the French epithet, “industrious
chevalier”? Can any one doubt that in Italy, when poisoning
was rifest, the crime was fearfully increased by the fact
that, in place of this term, not to be breathed in ears
polite, the death of some one was said to be “assisted”?
Or can any one doubt the moral effect of a similar perversion
of words in France, when a subtle poison, by which
impatient heirs delivered themselves from persons who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
stood between them and the inheritance they coveted, was
called “succession powder”?</p>

<p>Juvenal indignantly denounces the polished Romans for
relieving the consciences of rich criminals by softening the
names of their crimes; and Thucydides, in a well known
passage of his history, tells how the morals of the Greeks
of his day were sapped, and how they concealed the
national deterioration, by perversions of the customary
meanings of words. Unreasoning rashness, he says, passed
as “manliness” and <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">esprit de corps</i>, and prudent caution
for specious cowardice; sobermindedness was a mere “cloak
for effeminacy,” and general prudence was “inefficient
inertness.” The Athenians, at one time, were adepts in
the art of coining agreeable names for disagreeable things.
“Taxes” they called “subscriptions,” or “contributions”;
the prison was “the house”; the executioner a “public
servant”; and a general abolition of debt was “a disburdening
ordinance.” Devices like these are common to
all countries; and in our own, especially, one is startled
to see what an amount of ingenuity has been expended
in perfecting this “devil’s vocabulary,” and how successful
the press has been in its efforts to transmute acts of
wickedness into mere peccadilloes, and to empty words
employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and
earnestness of the moral reprobation they convey.</p>

<p>The use of classical names for vices has done no little
harm to the public morals. We may say of these names,
what Burke said with doubtful correctness of vices themselves,
that “they lose half their deformity by losing all
their grossness.” If any person is in doubt about the moral
quality of an act, let him characterize it in plain Saxon,
and he will see it in its true colors.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span></p>

<p>Some time ago a Wisconsin clergyman, being detected
in stealing books from a bookstore, confessed the truth,
and added that he left his former home in New Jersey
under disgrace for a similar theft. This fact a New York
paper noted under the head of “A Peculiar Misfortune.”
About the same time a clerk in Richmond, Va., being sent
to deposit several hundreds of dollars in a bank, ran
away with the money to the North. Having been pursued,
overtaken, and compelled to return the money, he was
spoken of by “the chivalry” as the young man “who had
lately <em>met with an accident</em>.” Is it not an alarming sign
of the times, when, in the legislature of one of our largest
eastern States, a member declares that he has been asked
by another member for his vote, and told that he would
get “five hundred <em>reasons</em> for giving it”; thus making
the highest word in our language, that which signifies
divinely given power of discrimination and choice, the
synonym of bribery?</p>

<p>Perhaps no honorable term in the language has been
more debased than “gentleman.” Originally the word
meant a man born of a noble family, or <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">gens</i>, as the
Romans called it; but as such persons were usually
possessed of wealth and leisure, they were generally distinguished
by greater refinement of manners than the
working classes, and a more tasteful dress. As in the
course of ages their riches and legal privileges diminished,
and the gulf which separated them from the citizens of the
trading towns was bridged by the increasing wealth and
power of the latter, the term “gentleman” came at last to
denote indiscriminately all persons who kept up the state
and observed the social forms which had once characterized
men of rank. To-day the term has sunk so low that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
acutest lexicographer would be puzzled to tell its meaning.
Not only does every person of decent exterior and deportment
assume to be a gentleman, but the term is applied
to the vilest criminals and the most contemptible miscreants,
as well as to the poorest and most illiterate
persons in the community.</p>

<p>In aristocratic England the artificial distinctions of
society have so far disappeared that even the porter who
lounges in his big chair, and condescends to show you
out, is the “gentleman in the hall”; Jeames is the “gentleman
in uniform”; while the valet is the “gentleman’s
gentleman.” Even a half a century ago, George IV, who
was so ignorant that he could hardly spell, and who in
heart and soul was a thorough snob, was pronounced, upon
the ground of his grand and suave manners, “the first
gentleman of Europe.” But in the United States the term
has been so emptied of its original meaning,&mdash;especially
in some of the southern states, where society has hardly
emerged from a feudal state, and where men who shoot
each other in a street fray still babble of being “born
gentlemen,” and of “dying like gentlemen,”&mdash;that most
persons will think it is quite time for the abolition of that
heartless conventionality, that pretentious cheat and barbarian,
the gentleman. Cowper declared, a hundred years
ago, in regard to duelling:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“A gentleman</p>
<p class="verse0">Will not insult me, and no other can.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">A southern newspaper stated some years ago that a “gentleman”
was praising the town of Woodville, Mississippi,
and remarked that “it was the most quiet, peaceable place
he ever saw; there was no quarrelling or rowdyism, no
fighting about the streets. If a <em>gentleman</em> insulted another,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
he was <em>quietly shot down</em>, and there was the last of
it.” The gentle Isaiah Rynders, who acted as marshal at
the time the pirate Hicks was executed in New York,
had doubtless similar notions of gentility; for, after conversing
a moment with the culprit, he said to the bystanders:
“I asked the <em>gentlemen</em> if he desired to address
the audience, but he declined.” In a similar spirit Booth,
the assassin of Lincoln, when he was surrounded in the
barn, where he was shot like a beast, offered to pledge his
word “as a <em>gentleman</em>,” to come out and try to shoot one
or two of his captors. When the Duke of Saxe-Weimar
visited the United States about fifty years ago, he was
asked by a hackman: “Are you the <em>man</em> that’s going to
ride with me; for I am the <em>gentleman</em> that’s to drive?”</p>

<p>When a young man becomes a reckless spendthrift,
how easy it is to gloss over his folly by talking of his
“generosity,” his “big-heartedness,” and “contempt for
trifles”; or, if he runs into the opposite vice of miserly
meanness, how convenient to dignify it by the terms
“economy” and “wise forecast of the future”! Many a
man has blown out another’s brains in “an affair of
honor,” who, if accused of murder, would have started
back with horror. Many a person stakes his all on a
public stock, or sells wheat or corn which he does not
possess, in the expectation of a speedy fall, who would be
thunderstruck if told that, while considering himself only
a shrewd speculator, he is, in everything save decency
of appearance, on a par with the haunter of a “hell,”
and as much a gambler as if he were staking his money
on <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">rouge-et-noir</i> or <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">roulette</i>. Hundreds of officials have
been tempted to defraud the government by the fact
that the harshest term applied to the offence is the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
rose-water one, “defaulting”; and men have plotted without
compunction the downfall of the government, and
plundered its treasury, as “secessionists,” who would have
expected to dangle at the rope’s end, or to be shot down
like dogs, had they regarded themselves as rebels or
traitors. So Pistol objected to the odious word “steal,”&mdash;“<em>convey</em>
the wise it call.” There are multitudes of persons
who can sit for hours at a festive table, gorging themselves,
Gargantua-like, “with links and chitterlings,” and
guzzling whole bottles of champagne, under the impression
that they are “jolly fellows,” “true epicureans,” and “connoisseurs
in good living,” whose cheeks would tingle with
indignation and shame if they were accused, in point-blank
terms, of vices so disgusting as intemperance or
gluttony. “I am not a slut,” boasts Audrey, in “As You
Like It,” “though I thank the gods I am foul.”</p>

<p>Of all classes of men whose callings tempt them to
juggle with words, none better than auctioneers understand
how much significance lies in certain shades of
expression. It is told of Robins, the famous London auctioneer,
who in selling his wares revelled in an oriental
luxury of expression, that in puffing an estate he described
a certain ancient gallows as a “hanging wood.” At
another time, having made the beauties of the earthly
paradise which he was commissioned to sell too gorgeously
enchanting, and finding it necessary to blur it by a fault
or two, lest it should prove “too good for human nature’s
daily food,” the Hafiz of the mart paused a moment, and
reluctantly added: “But candor compels me to add, gentlemen,
that there are two drawbacks to this splendid
property,&mdash;<em>the litter of the rose leaves and the noise of the
nightingales</em>.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span></p>

<p>It is hardly possible to estimate the mischief which is
done to society by the debasement of its language in the
various ways we have indicated. When the only words
we have by which to designate the personifications of
nobleness, manliness, courtesy and truth are systematically
applied to all that is contemptible and vile, who
can doubt that these high qualities themselves will ultimately
share in the debasement to which their proper
names are subjected? Who does not see how vast a difference
it must make in our estimate of any species of
wickedness, whether we are wont to designate it, and to
hear it designated, by some word which brings out its
hatefulness, or by one which palliates and glosses over its
foulness and deformity? How much better to characterize
an ugly thing by an ugly word, that expresses moral
condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of some
coarseness, than to call evil good and good evil, to put
darkness for light, and light for darkness, by the use of
a term that throws a veil of sentiment over a sin! In
reading the literature of former days, we are shocked
occasionally by the bluntness and plain speaking of our
fathers; but even their coarsest terms,&mdash;the “naked
words, stript from their shirts,”&mdash;in which they denounced
libertinism, were far less hurtful than the ceremonious
delicacy which has taught men to abuse each
other with the utmost politeness, to hide the loathsomeness
of vice, and to express the most indecent ideas in
the most modest terms.</p>

<p>It has been justly said that the corrupter of a language
stabs straight at the very heart of his country. He commits
a crime against every individual of a nation, for he
poisons a stream from which all must drink; and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
poison is more subtle and more dangerous, because more
likely to escape detection, than the deadliest venom with
which the destructive philosophy of our day is assailing
the moral or the religious interests of humanity. “Let
the words of a country,” says Milton in a letter to an
Italian scholar, “be in part unhandsome and offensive in
themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered,
and what do they declare but, by no light indication, that
the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly
yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any
amount of servility?”</p>

<p>Sometimes the spirit which governs employers or employed,
and other classes of men, in their mutual relations,
is indicated by the names they give each other. Some
years ago the legislature of Massachusetts made a law
requiring that children of a certain age, employed in the
factories of that State, should be sent to school a certain
number of weeks in the year. While visiting the factories
to ascertain whether this wise provision of the State
government was complied with, an officer of the State
inquired of the agent of one of the principal factories at
New Bedford, whether it was the custom to do anything
for the physical, intellectual, or moral welfare of the
work people. The reply would not have been inappropriate
from the master of a plantation, or the captain of a
coolie ship: “We never do; as for myself, I regard my
work people as I regard <em>my machinery</em>.... They must
look out for <em>themselves</em>, as I do for <em>myself</em>. When my
machinery gets old and useless, I reject it and get new:
and these people are a part of my machinery.” Another
agent in another part of the State replied to a similar
question, that “he used his mill hands <em>as he used his horse</em>;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
as long as the horse was in good condition and rendered
good service, he treated him well; otherwise he got rid of
him as soon as he could, and what became of him afterward
was no affair of his.”</p>

<p>But we need not multiply illustrations to show the
moral power of words. As the eloquent James Martineau
says: “Power they certainly have. They are alive with
sweetness, with terror, with pity. They have eyes to look
at you with strangeness or with response. They are even
creative, and can wrap a world in darkness for us, or flood
it with light. But in all this, they are not signs of the
weakness of humanity: they are the very crown and blossom
of its supreme strength; and the poet whom this faith
possesses will, to the end of time, be master of the critic
whom it deserts. The whole inner life of men moulds the
forms of language, and is moulded by them in turn; and
as surely pines when they are rudely treated as the plant
whose vessels you bruise or try to replace with artificial
tubes. The grouping of thought, the musical scale of
feeling, the shading and harmonies of color in the spectrum
of imagination, have all been building, as it were,
the molecules of speech into their service; and if you heedlessly
alter its dispositions, pulverize its crystals, fix its
elastic media, and turn its transparent into opaque, you
not only disturb expression, you dislodge the very things
to be expressed. And in proportion as the idea or sentiment
thus turned adrift is less of a mere personal characteristic,
and has been gathering and shaping its elements
from ages of various affection and experience, does it become
less possible to replace it by any equivalents, or
dispense with its function by any act of will.”</p>

<p>To conclude: there is one startling fact connected with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
words, which should make all men ponder what they utter.
Not only is every wise and every idle word recorded in the
book of divine remembrance, but modern science has shown
that they produce an abiding impression on the globe we
inhabit. Plunge your hand into the sea, and you raise its
level, however imperceptibly, at the other side of the
globe. In like manner, the pulsations of the air, once set
in motion, never cease; its waves, raised by each sound,
travel the entire round of earth’s and ocean’s surface; and
in less than twenty-four hours, every atom of atmosphere
takes up the altered movement resulting from that sound.
The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are
written in imperishable characters all that man has spoken,
or even whispered. Not a word that goes from the lips
into the air can ever die, until the atmosphere which
wraps our huge globe in its embrace has passed away forever,
and the heavens are no more. There, till the heavens
are rolled together as a scroll, will still live the jests
of the profane, the curses of the ungodly, the scoffs of the
atheist, “keeping company with the hours,” and circling
the earth with the song of Miriam, the wailing of Jeremiah,
the low prayer of Stephen, the thunders of Demosthenes,
and the denunciations of Burke.</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Words are mighty, words are living;</p>
<p class="verse2">Serpents, with their venomous stings,</p>
<p class="verse0">Or, bright angels, crowding round us</p>
<p class="verse2">With heaven’s light upon their wings;</p>
<p class="verse0">Every word has its own spirit,</p>
<p class="verse2">True or false, that never dies;</p>
<p class="verse0">Every word man’s lips have uttered</p>
<p class="verse2">Echoes in God’s skies.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> “Language and the Study of Language,” by W. D. Whitney.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> “Lectures on the English Language.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> “Literature and Life,” by Edwin P. Whipple.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> South’s Sermons.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER III.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">GRAND WORDS.</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>The fool hath planted his memory with an army of words.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Shakespeare.</span></p>

<p>In the commerce of speech use only coin of gold and silver.... Be profound
with clear terms, and not with obscure terms.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Joubert.</span></p>

<p>The more you have studied foreign languages, the more you will be disposed
to keep Ollendorff in the background; the proper result of such acquirements
is visible in a finer ear for words.&mdash;<span class="smcap">T. W. Higginson.</span></p>

<p>Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth.
Don’t whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want to tingle.&mdash;<span class="smcap">H.
W. Beecher.</span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy">It is a trite remark that words are the representatives
of things and thoughts, as coin represents wealth.
You carry in your pocket a doubloon or a dollar, stamped
by the king or state, and you are the virtual owner of
whatever it will purchase. But who affixes the stamp
upon a word? No prince or potentate was ever strong
enough to make or unmake a single word. Cæsar confessed
that with all his power he could not do it, and
Claudius could not introduce even a new letter. He
attempted to introduce the consonant V, as distinct from
U, the Roman alphabet having but one character for both;
but he could not make his subjects accept the new letter,
though he could kill or plunder them at pleasure. Cicero
tried his hand at word-coining; but though he proved
a skilful mint-master, and struck some admirable trial
pieces, which were absolutely needed to facilitate mental
exchanges, yet they did not gain circulation, and were
thrown back upon his hands. But that which defied the
power of Cæsar and of Cicero does not transcend the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
ability of many writers of our own day, some of whom
are adepts in the art of word-coining, and are daily minting
terms and phrases which must make even Noah
Webster, boundless as was his charity for new words,
turn in his grave. It is doubtful, however, whether these
persons do so much damage to our noble English language
as those who vulgarize it by the use of penny-a-liner
phrases. There is a large and growing class of speakers
and writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who, apparently
despising the homely but terse and telling words of their
mother tongue, never use a Saxon term, if they can find
what Lord Brougham calls a “long-tailed word in <em>’osity</em> or
<em>’ation</em>” to do its work.</p>

<p>What is the cause of this? Is it the extraordinary, not
to say excessive, attention now given by persons of all ages
to foreign languages, to the neglect of our own? Is it the
comparative inattention given to correct diction by the
teachers in the schools of to-day; or is it because the
favorite books of the young are sensational stories, made
pungent, and, in a sense, natural, through the lavish use of
all the colloquialisms and vulgarisms of low life? Shall
we believe that it is because there is little individuality
and independence in these days, that the words of so few
persons are flavored with their idiosyncrasies; that it is
from conscious poverty of thought that they try to trick
out their ideas in glittering words and phrases, just as, by
means of high-heeled boots, a laced coat, and a long
feather, a fellow with a little soul and a weak body might
try to pass muster as a bold grenadier? Or is it because
of the prevalent mania for the sensational,&mdash;the craving
for novelty and excitement, which is almost universal in
these days,&mdash;that so many persons make sense subservient<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
to sound, and avoid calling things by their proper names?
Or, finally, to take a more charitable view of the case,
is it because it is impossible for inaccurate minds to hit
the exact truth, and describe a thing just as they have
seen it,&mdash;to express degrees of feeling, to observe measures
and proportions, and define a sensation as it was felt?
Was Talleyrand wrong when he said that language was
given to man to conceal his thought; and was it really
given to hide his want of thought? Is it, indeed, the main
object of expression to convey the smallest possible amount
of meaning with the greatest possible amount of appearance
of meaning; and, since nobody can be “so wise as
Thurlow looked,” to look as wise as Thurlow while uttering
the veriest truisms?</p>

<p>Be all this as it may, in nothing else is the lack of
simplicity, which is so characteristic of our times, more
marked than in the prevailing forms of expression. “The
curse and the peril of language in our day, and particularly
in this country,” says an American critic, who
may, perhaps, croak at times, but who has done much
good service as a literary policeman in the repression of
verbal licentiousness, “is that it is at the mercy of men
who, instead of being content to use it well, according
to their honest ignorance, use it ill, according to their
affected knowledge; who, being vulgar, would seem elegant;
who, being empty, would seem full; who make up
in pretence what they lack in reality; and whose little
thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound like fire-crackers
in an empty barrel.” In the estimation of many
writers at the present day, the great, crowning vice in
the use of words is, apparently, to employ plain, straightforward
English. The simple Saxon is not good enough<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
for their purposes, and so they array their ideas in “big,
dictionary words,” derived from the Latin, and load their
style with expletives as tasteless as the streamers of
tattered finery that flutter about the person of a dilapidated
belle. The “high polite,” in short, is their favorite
style, and the good old Spartan rule of calling a spade
a spade they hold in thorough contempt. Their great
recipe for elegant or powerful writing is to call the most
common things by the most uncommon names. Provided
that a word is out-of-the-way, unusual, or far-fetched,&mdash;and
especially if it is one of many syllables,&mdash;they care
little whether it is apt and fit or not.</p>

<p>With them a fire is always “the devouring element,”
or a “conflagration”; and the last term is often used
where there is no meeting of flames, as when a town is
fired in several places, but when only one building is
burned; the fire never burns a house, but it always “consumes
an edifice,” unless it is got under, in which case
“its progress is arrested.” A railroad accident is always
“a holocaust,” and its victims are named under the “death
roll.” A man who is the first to do a thing “takes the
initiative.” Instead of loving a woman, a man “becomes
attached” to her; instead of losing his mother by death,
he “sustains a bereavement of his maternal relative.” A
dog’s tail, in the pages of these writers, is his “caudal
appendage”; a dog breaker, “a kunopædist”; and a fish-pond
they call by no less lofty a title than “piscine preserve.”
Ladies, in their classic pages, have ceased to be
married, like those poor, vulgar creatures, their grandmothers;
they are “led to the hymeneal altar.” Of
the existence of such persons as a man, a woman, a boy,
or a girl, these writers are profoundly ignorant; though<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
they often speak of “individuals,” “gentlemen,” “characters,”
and “parties,” and often recognize the existence
of “juveniles” and “juvenile members of the community.”
“Individual” is another piece of pompous inanity
which is very current now. In “Guesses at Truth”
mention is made of a celebrated preacher, who was so
destitute of all feeling for decorum in language, as to
call our Saviour “this eminent <em>individual</em>.” “Individual”
is a good Latin word, and serves a good purpose when it
distinguishes a person from a people or class, as it served
a good purpose in the scholastic philosophy; but would
Cicero or Duns Scotus have called a great man an <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">eminens
individuum</i>? These “individuals,” strange to say, are
never dressed, but always “attired”; they never take off
their clothes, but “divest themselves of their habiliments,”
which is so much grander.</p>

<p>“In the church,” says St. Paul, “I had rather speak
five words with my understanding, that by my voice I
might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an
unknown tongue.” Not so think some of the preachers of
the Gospel of the present day, if we may judge them by
the language they use in their discourses. To give their
sermons a philosophical air, or because simple language is
not to their taste, they invest their discourses with the
technicalities of science and philosophy. They never speak
of so old-fashioned a thing as the will, but always of
“volition”; duty, with them, is never duty simply, but
always “moral obligation”; and their sermons abound in
“necessary relations,” “moral and physical necessities,”
“intellectual processes,” “laws of nature,” and “arguments
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">a priori</i> and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">a posteriori</i>.” It was a preacher of this class,
who having occasion to tell his hearers that there was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
not one Gospel for the rich and another for the poor,
informed them that, “if they would not be saved on
‘general principles,’ they could not be saved at all.” Who
can doubt that such language as this is not only poorly
understood, if understood it is, by the ordinary hearer,
but is far less effective than the simple Saxon words which
might be used to convey the same ideas? Some years ago
a white minister preached in a plain, direct style to a
church of negroes in the South, whose “colored” pastor
was greatly addicted to the use of high-flown language
in his sermons. In the season of exhortation and prayer
that followed, an old negro thanked the Lord for the
various blessings of the Sabbath and the sanctuary, and
especially, he added, “we thank Thee that to-day we have
been fed from <em>a low crib</em>.” Would it not be well for
preachers generally to remember that many of Christ’s
flock are “little ones,” whose necks are short, and that they
may consequently starve, if their food, however nutritious,
is placed in too lofty a crib?</p>

<p>But preachers are not the only anti-Saxons of our day;
we may find them in nearly all the classes of society,&mdash;persons
who never tell us that a man is asleep, but say
that he is “locked in slumber”; who deem it vulgar, and
perhaps cruel, to say that a criminal was hanged, but very
elegant to say that he was “launched into eternity.” A
person of their acquaintance never does so low a thing
as to break his leg; he “fractures his limb.” They
never see a man fall; but sometimes see “an individual
precipitated.” Our Latin friends,&mdash;fortunate souls,&mdash;never
have their feelings hurt, though it must be confessed that
their “sensibilities” are sometimes dreadfully “lacerated.”
Above the necessities of their poor fellow-creatures, they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
never do so vulgar a thing as to eat a meal; they always
“partake of a repast,” which is so much more elegant.
They never do so commonplace a thing as to take a walk;
they “make a pedestrian excursion.” A conjurer with
them is a “prestidigitator”; a fortune-teller, a “vaticinator.”
As Pascal says, they mask all nature. There is with
them no king, but an “august monarch”; no Paris, but
a “capital of a kingdom.” Even our barbers have got
upon stilts. They no longer sell tooth-powder and shaving-soap,
like the old fogies, their fathers, but “odonto,” and
“dentifrice,” and “rypophagon”; and they themselves,
from the barber-ous persons they once were, have been
transformed into “<em>artists</em> in hair.” The medical faculty,
too, have caught the spirit of the age. Who would suspect
that “epistaxis” means simply bleeding at the nose, and
“emollient cataplasm” only a poultice? Fancy one schoolboy
doubling up his fist at another, and telling him to
look out for epistaxis! Who would dream that “anheidrohepseterion”
(advertised in the London “Times”) means
only a saucepan, or “taxidermist” a bird-stuffer? Is it
not remarkable that tradesmen have ceased “sending in”
their “little bills,” and now only “render their accounts”?</p>

<p>“There are people,” says Landor, “who think they
write and speak finely, merely because they have forgotten
the language in which their fathers and mothers used
to talk to them.” As in dress, deportment, etc., so in
language, the dread of vulgarity, as Whately has suggested,
constantly besetting those who are half conscious that they
are in danger of it, drives them into the opposite extreme
of affected finery. They act upon the advice of Boileau:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">
<p class="verseq">“Quoique vous écriviez, évitez la bassesse;</p>
<p class="verse0">Le style le moins noble a pourtant sa noblesse;”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span></p>

<p class="noindent">and, to avoid the undignified, according to them, it is only
necessary not to call things by their right names. Hence
the use of “residence” for house, “electric fluid” for
lightning, “recently deceased” for lately dead, “encomium”
for praise, “location” for place, “locate” for put, “lower
limb” for leg, “sacred edifice” for church, “attired” for
clad,&mdash;all of which have so learned an air, and are preferred
to the simpler words for the same reason, apparently,
that led Mr. Samuel Weller, when writing his
famous valentine to Mary, to prefer “circumscribed” <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'to “circumwented,” as'">to
“circumvented,” as</ins> having a deeper meaning.</p>

<p>Such persons forget that glass will obstruct the light
quite as much when beautifully painted as when discolored
with dirt; and that a style studded with far-fetched epithets
and high-sounding phrases may be as dark as one
abounding in colloquial vulgarisms. Who does not sympathize
with the indignation of Dr. Johnson, when, taking
up at the house of a country friend a so called “Liberal
Translation of the New Testament,” he read, in the
eleventh chapter of John, instead of the simple and touching
words, “Jesus wept,”&mdash;“Jesus, the Saviour of the
world, overcome with grief, burst into a flood of tears”?
“<em>Puppy!</em>” exclaimed the critic, as he threw down the
book in a rage; and had the author been present, Johnson
would doubtless have thrown it at his head. Yet
the great literary bashaw, while he had an eagle’s eye
for the faults of others, was unconscious of his own sins
against simplicity, and, though he spoke like a wit, too
often wrote like a pedant. He had, in fact, a dialect
of his own, which has been wittily styled <em>Johnsonese</em>.
Goldsmith hit him in a vulnerable spot when he said:
“Doctor, if you were to write a fable about little fishes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
you would make them talk like whales.” The faults of
his pompous, swelling diction, in which the frivolity of
a coxcomb is described in the same rolling periods and
with the same gravity of antithesis with which he would
thunder against rebellion and fanaticism, are hardly exaggerated
by a wit of his own time who calls it</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse12">“A turgid style,</p>
<p class="verse0">Which gives to an inch the importance of a mile;</p>
<p class="verse0">Uplifts the club of Hercules&mdash;for what?</p>
<p class="verse0">To crush a butterfly, or brain a gnat;</p>
<p class="verse0">Bids ocean labor with tremendous roar,</p>
<p class="verse0">To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore;</p>
<p class="verse0">Sets wheels on wheels in motion,&mdash;what a clatter!</p>
<p class="verse0">To force up one poor nipperkin of water;</p>
<p class="verse0">Alike in every theme his pompous art,</p>
<p class="verse0">Heaven’s awful thunder, or a rumbling cart.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>One of the latest “modern improvements” in speech
is the substitution of “lady” and “female” for the good
old English “woman.” On the front of Cooper’s Reading
Room, in the city of New York, is the sign in golden
letters, “Male and Female Reading Rooms.” Suppose
Scott, in his noble tribute to women for their devotion
and tenderness to men in their hour of suffering, had
sung</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Oh, <span class="fs70">LADIES</span>, in our hours of ease,” etc.,</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">would not the lines have been far more touching? An
English writer says truly that the law of euphemisms is
somewhat capricious; “one cannot always tell which words
are decent and which are not.... It really seems as if the
old-fashioned feminine of ‘man’ were fast getting proscribed.
We, undiscerning male creatures that we are,
might have thought that ‘woman’ was a more elegant and
more distinctive title than ‘female.’ We read only the
other day a report of a lecture on the poet Crabbe, in
which she who was afterward Mrs. Crabbe was spoken of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
as ‘a female to whom he had formed an attachment.’ To
us, indeed, it seems that a man’s wife should be spoken of
in some way which is not equally applicable to a ewe lamb
or a favorite mare. But it was a ‘female’ who delivered
the lecture, and we suppose the females know best about
their own affairs.”</p>

<p>Can any person account for the apparent antipathy
which many writers and speakers have to the good Saxon
verb “to begin”? Ninety-nine out of every hundred persons
one talks with are sure to prefer the French words
“to commence” and “to essay,” and the tendency is strong
to prefer “to inaugurate” to either. Nothing in our day
is begun, not even dinner; it is “inaugurated with soup.”
In their fondness for the French words, many persons are
betrayed into solecisms. Forgetting, or not knowing, that,
while “to begin” may be followed by an infinitive or a
gerund, “to commence” is transitive, and must be followed
by a noun or its equivalent, they talk of “commencing to
do” a thing, “essaying to do well,” etc. Persons who
think that “begin” is not stately enough, or that it is even
vulgar, would do well to look into the pages of Milton and
Shakespeare. With all his fondness for Romanic words,
the former hardly once uses “commence” and “commencement”;
and the latter is not only content with the idiomatic
word, but even shortens it, as in the well known line
that depicts so vividly the guilt-wasted soul of Macbeth:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“I ’gin to grow a-weary of the sun.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">What a shock would every right-minded reader receive if,
upon opening his Bible, he should find, in place of the old
familiar words, the following: “In the <em>commencement</em> God
created the heavens and the earth,”&mdash;“The fear of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
Lord is the <em>commencement</em> of wisdom!” Well did Coleridge
say: “Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from
being vulgar in point of style.” “Commence” is a good
word enough, but, being of outlandish origin, should never
take the place of “begin,” except for the sake of rhythm
or variety.</p>

<p>Another of these grand words is “imbroglio.” It is
from the Italian, and means an intricate or complicated
plot. Why, then, should a quarrel in the Cabinet at Washington,
or a prospective quarrel with France or England,
be called an “imbroglio”? Again, will any one explain to
us the meaning of “interpellation,” so often used by the
correspondents of our daily newspapers? The word properly
means an interruption; yet when an opposition member
of the French or Italian Parliament asks a question
of a minister, he is said “to put an interpellation.” Why
should an army be said to be “decimated,” without regard
to the number or nature of its losses? The original meaning
of this term was grave, and often terrible; it meant
no less than taking the tenth of a man’s substance, or
shooting every tenth man in a mutinous regiment, the
victims being called out by lot. “This appalling character
of decimation lay in the likelihood that innocent persons,
slain in cold blood, might suffer for the guilty. But
the peculiar horror vanishes when we alter the conditions;
and a regiment which has taken part in a hard-fought
battle, and comes off the field only decimated,&mdash;that is to
say, with nine living and unscathed for each man left on
the field,&mdash;might be accounted rather fortunate than the
reverse.” Why, again, should “donate” be preferred to
“give”? Does it show a larger soul, a more magnificent
liberality, to “donate” than to give? Must we “<em>donate</em><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
the devil his due,” when we would be unusually charitable?
Why should “elect” be preferred to “choose,” when
there is no election whatever; or why is “balance” preferable
to “remainder”? As a writer has well said:
“Would any man in his senses dare to quote King David
as saying: ‘They are full of children, and leave the <em>balance</em>
of their substance unto their babes’? or read, ‘Surely the
wrath of man shall praise thee: the <em>balance</em> of wrath thou
shalt restrain,’ where the translators of our Bible wrote
‘the remainder’? And if any one went into the nursery,
and telling that tale of perennial interest of the little boys
that ‘a-sliding went, a-sliding went, a-sliding went, all on a
summer’s day,’ should, after recounting how ‘they all fell
in, they all fell in, they all fell in,’ add ‘the <em>balance</em> ran
away,’ would there not go up a chorus of tiny but indignant
protests against this mutilation, which would enlist
a far wider sympathy than some of the proposed changes
in the texts of classic authors, which have set editors and
commentators at loggerheads?”</p>

<p>Again, why should one say “rendition” for performance,
“enactment” for acting, or “nude” for naked? In
the seventeenth century, certain fanatics in England ran
about without clothes, crying: “We are the naked Truth.”
Had they lived in this age of refinement, instead of shocking
their countrymen with such indelicate expressions, they
would have said, “We are Verity in a nude condition”;
and had any person clothed them, he would have been
said to have “rehabilitated” them. More offensive than
any of these grandiose words is “intoxicated” in place of
“drunk,” which it has nearly banished. A man can be
intoxicated only when he has lost his wits, not by
quantity, but by quality,&mdash;by drinking liquor that has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
been drugged. “Intoxicated,” however, has five syllables;
drunk has but one; so the former carries the day by five
to one. No doubt nine-tenths of those who drink to
excess in this country, are, in fact, intoxicated, or poisoned;
still, the two words should not be confounded. “Ovation”
is a word often used incorrectly, as when an emperor,
empress, king or queen, on making a triumphal entry
into the capital of a state amid great popular enthusiasm,
is said to receive an “ovation,” though such an honor is
distinctively reserved for meritorious subjects of the ruler.
Sometimes we find a word of Latin origin used in a sense
precisely opposite to the true one, as when “culminate,”
which can be applied only to something which has reached
the limit of its possible height, is used regarding the
career of some wrong-doer, which is said to “culminate”
in the lowest depths of degradation.</p>

<p>Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the
sun; and this itching for pompous forms of expression,
this contempt for plainness and simplicity of style, is as
old as Aristotle. In the third book of his “Rhetoric,” discussing
the causes of frigidity of style, he speaks of one
Alcidamas, a writer of that time, as “employing ornaments,
not as seasonings to discourse, but as if they were
the only food to live upon. He does not say ‘sweat,’ but
‘the humid sweat’; a man goes not to the Isthmian games,
but to ‘the collected assembly of the Isthmian solemnity’;
laws are ‘the legitimate kings of commonwealths’; and
a race, ‘the incursive impulse of the soul.’ A rich man
is not bountiful, but the ‘artificer of universal largess.’”
Is it not curious that our modern Quicklys and Malaprops,
who often pride themselves upon their taste for swelling
words and phrases, and their skill in using them, should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
have been anticipated by Alcidamas two thousand years
ago?</p>

<p>The abuse of the queen’s English, to which we have
called attention, did not begin with Americans. It began
with our transatlantic cousins, who employed “ink-horn”
terms and outlandish phrases at a very early period. In
“Harrison’s Chronicle” we are told that after the Norman
conquest “the English tongue grew into such contempt
at court that most men thought it no small dishonor to
speak any English there; which bravery took his hold at
the last likewise in the country with every ploughman, that
even the very carters began to wax weary of their mother
tongue, and labored to speak French, which was then
counted no small token of gentility.”</p>

<p>The English people of to-day are quite as much addicted
to the grandiose style as the Americans. Gough, in one of
his lectures, speaks of a card which he saw in London, in
which a man called himself “Illuminating Artist to Her
Majesty,” the fact being that he lighted the gas lamps near
the palace. Mr. E. A. Freeman, the English historian,
complained in a recent lecture that our language had few
friends and many foes, its only friends being ploughboys
and a few scholars. The pleasant old “inns” of England,
he said, had disappeared, their places being supplied by
“hotels,” or “establishments”; while the landlord had
made way for the “lessee of the establishment.” A gentleman
going into a shop in Regent street to buy half-mourning
goods was referred by the shopman to “the mitigated
affliction department.” The besetting sin of some of the
ablest British writers of this century is their lack of
simplicity of language. Sydney Smith said of Sir James
Mackintosh, that if he were asked for a definition of “pepper,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
he would reply thus: “Pepper may philosophically
be described as a dusty and highly pulverized seed of an
oriental fruit; an article rather of condiment than diet,
which, dispersed lightly over the surface of food, with no
other rule than the caprice of the consumer, communicates
pleasure, rather than affords nutrition; and by adding a
tropical flavor to the gross and succulent viands of the
North, approximates the different regions of the earth,
explains the objects of commerce, and justifies the industry
of man.”</p>

<p>Francis Jeffrey, the celebrated critic, had, even in conversation,
an artificial style and language, which were fit
only for books and a small circle of learned friends. His
diction and pronunciation, it is said, were unintelligible to
the mass of his countrymen, and in the House of Commons
offensive and ridiculous. An anecdote told in illustration
of this peculiarity strikingly shows the superiority of simple
to high-flown language in the practical business of life.
In a trial, which turned upon the intellectual competency
of a testator, Jeffrey asked a witness, a plain countryman,
whether the testator was “a man of intellectual capacity,”&mdash;“an
intelligent, shrewd man,”&mdash;“a man of capacity?”
“Had he ordinary mental endowments?” “What d’ye
mean, sir?” asked the witness. “I mean,” replied Jeffrey,
testily, “was the man of sufficient ordinary intelligence to
qualify him to manage his own affairs?” “I dinna ken,”
replied the chafed and mystified witness,&mdash;“Wad ye say
the question ower again, sir?” Jeffrey being baffled,
Cockburn took up the examination. He said: “Ye kenned
Tammas &mdash;&mdash;?” “Ou, ay; I kenned Tammas weel;
me and him herded together when we were laddies [boys].”
“Was there onything in the cretur?” “De’il a thing but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
what the spune [spoon] put into him.” “Would you have
trusted him to sell a cow for you?” “A cow! I wadna
lippened [trusted] him to sell a calf.” Had Jeffrey devoted
a review article to the subject, he could not have given a
more vivid idea of the testator’s incapacity to manage his
own affairs.</p>

<p>Our readers need not be told how much Carlyle has
done to teutonize our language with his “yardlongtailed”
German compounds. It was a just stroke of criticism
when a New York auctioneer introduced a miscellaneous
lot of books to a crowd with the remark: “Gentlemen, of
this lot I need only say, six volumes are by Thomas Carlyle;
the seventh is written in the <em>English</em> language.”
Some years ago, a learned doctor of divinity and university
professor in Canada wrote a work in which, wishing
to state the simple fact that the “rude Indian” had
learned the use of firing, he delivered himself as follows:
“He had made slave of the heaven-born element, the
brother of the lightning, the grand alchemist and artificer
of all times, though as yet he knew not all the worth
or magical power that was in him. By his means the
sturdy oak, which flung abroad its stalwart arms and
waved its leafy honors defiant in the forest, was made to
bow to the behest of the simple aborigines.” As the plain
Scotchwoman said of De Quincey, “the bodie has an awfu’
sicht o’ words!” This style of speaking and writing has
become so common that it can no longer be considered
wholly vulgar. It is gradually working upward; it is
making its way into official writings and grave octavos;
and is even spoken with unction in pulpits and senates.
Metaphysicians are wont to define words as the signs of
ideas; but with many persons, they appear to be, not so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
much the signs of their thought, as the signs of the signs
of their thought. Such, doubtless, was the case with the
Scotch clergyman, whom a bonneted abhorrer of legal
preaching was overheard eulogizing: “Man, John, wasna
yon preachin’!&mdash;yon’s something for a body to come awa
wi’. The way that he smashed down his text into so mony
heads and particulars, just a’ to flinders! Nine heads and
twenty particulars in ilka head&mdash;and <em>sic mouthfu’s o’
grand words!</em>&mdash;an’ every ane o’ them fu’ o’ meaning, if
we but kent them. We hae ill improved our opportunities;
man, if we could just mind onything he said, it
would do us guid.”</p>

<p>The whole literature of notices, handbills, and advertisements,
in our day, has apparently declared “war to
the knife” against every trace of the Angles, Jutes and
Saxons. We have no schoolmasters now; they are all
“principals of collegiate institutes”; no copy-books, but
“specimens of caligraphy”; no ink, but “writing fluid”;
no physical exercise, but “calisthenics” or “gymnastics.”
A man who opens a groggery at some corner for the
gratification of drunkards, instead of announcing his
enterprise by its real name, modestly proclaims through the
daily papers that his “saloon” has been fitted up for the
reception of customers. Even the learned architects of
log cabins and pioneer cottages can find names for them
only in the sonorous dialects of oriental climes. Time was
when a farmhouse was a farmhouse and a porch a porch;
but now the one is a “villa” or “hacienda,” and the other
nothing less than a “veranda.” In short, this genteel slang
pursues us from the cradle to the grave. In old times,
when our fathers and mothers died, they were placed in
coffins, and buried in the graveyard or burying ground;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
now, when an unfortunate “party” or “individual” “deceases”
or “becomes defunct,” he is deposited in a “burial
casket” and “interred in a cemetery.” It matters not
that the good old words “grave” and “graveyard” have
been set in the pure amber of the English classics,&mdash;that
the Bible says, “There is no wisdom in the grave,” “Cruel
as the grave,” etc. How much more pompous and magniloquent
the Greek: “There is no wisdom in the cemetery,”
“Cruel as the cemetery!”</p>

<p>Seriously, let us eschew all these vulgar fineries of
style, as we would eschew the fineries of a dandy. Their
legitimate effect is to barbarize our language, and to destroy
all the peculiar power, distinctiveness, and appropriateness
of its terms. Words that are rarely used will
at last inevitably disappear; and thus, if not speedily
checked, this grandiloquence of expression will do an irreparable
injury to our dear old English tongue. Poetry
may for a while escape the effects of this vulgar coxcombry,
because it is the farthest out of the reach of such
contagion; but, as prose sinks, so must poetry, too, be
ultimately dragged down into the general gulf of feebleness
and inanition.</p>

<p>It was a saying of John Foster that “eloquence resides
in the thought, and no words, therefore, can make that
eloquent which will not be so in the plainest that could
possibly express the same.” Nothing, therefore, can be
more absurd than the notion that the sounding brass and
tinkling cymbal of pompous and sonorous language are
necessary to the expression of the sublime and powerful
in eloquence and poetry. So far is this from being true,
that the finest, noblest, and most spirit-stirring sentiments
ever uttered, have been couched, not in sounding polysyllables<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
from the Greek or Latin, but in the simplest
Saxon,&mdash;in the language we hear hourly in the streets
and by our firesides. Dr. Johnson once said that “big
thinkers require big words.” He did not think so at the
time of the great Methodist movement in the last century,
when “the ice period” of the establishment was breaking
up. He attributed the Wesleys’ success to their plain,
familiar way of preaching, “which,” he says, “clergymen
of genius and learning ought to do from a principle of
duty.” Arthur Helps tells a story of an illiterate soldier
at the chapel of Lord Morpeth’s castle in Ireland. Whenever
Archbishop Whately came to preach, it was observed
that this rough private was always in his place, mouth
open, as if in sympathy with his ears. Some of the gentlemen
playfully took him to task for it, supposing it was
due to the usual vulgar admiration of a celebrated man.
But the man had a better reason, and was able to give
it. He said, “That isn’t it at all. The Archbishop is easy
to understand. There are no fine words in him. A fellow
like me, now, can follow along and take every bit of it in.”
“Whately’s simplicity,” observes a writer to whom we are
indebted for this illustration, “meant no lack of pith or
power. The whole momentum of his large and healthy
brain went into those homely sentences, rousing and feeding
the rude and the cultured hearer’s hunger alike, as
sweet bread and juicy meat satisfy a natural appetite.”</p>

<p>Emerson observes that as any orator at the bar or the
senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language;
that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of
passion, he comes down to a level with the ear of all
his audience. “It is the oratory of John Brown and of
Abraham Lincoln, the one at Charleston, the other at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
Gettysburg, in the two best specimens of oratory we have
had in this country.” Daniel Webster, in his youth, was
a little bombastic in his speeches; but he very soon discovered
that the force of a sentence depends chiefly on
its meaning, and that great writing is that in which
much is said in few words, and those the simplest that
will answer the purpose. Having made this discovery,
he became “a great eraser of adjectives”; and whether
convincing juries, or thundering in the senate,&mdash;whether
demolishing Hayne, or measuring swords with Calhoun,&mdash;on
all occasions used the plainest words. “You will find,”
said he to a friend, “in my speeches to juries, no hard
words, no Latin phrases, no <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">fieri facias</i>; and that is the
secret of my style, if I have any.”</p>

<p>Chaucer says, in praise of his Virginia, that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“No contrefited termes had she</p>
<p class="verse0">To semen wise;”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and if any one would write or speak well, his English
should be genuine, not counterfeit. The simplest words
that will convey one’s ideas are always best. What can
be simpler and yet more sublime than the “Let there be
light, and there was light!” of Moses, which Longinus so
admired? Would it be an improvement to say, “Let
there be light, and there was a solar illumination”? “I
am like a child picking up pebbles on the seashore,” said
Newton. Had he said he was like an awe-struck votary,
lying prostrate before the stupendous majesty of the cosmical
universe, and the mighty and incomprehensible
<em>Ourgos</em> which had created all things, we might think it
very fine, but should not carry in our memories such a
luggage of words. The fiery eloquence of the field and
the forum springs upon the vulgar idiom as a soldier<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
leaps upon his horse. “Trust in the Lord, and keep your
powder dry,” said Cromwell to his soldiers on the eve of
a battle. “Silence, you thirty voices!” roars Mirabeau to
a knot of opposers around the tribune. “I’d sell the shirt
off my back to support the war!” cries Lord Chatham;
and again, “Conquer the Americans! I might as well think
of driving them before me with this crutch.” “I know,”
says Kossuth, speaking of the march of intelligence, “that
the light has spread, and that <em>even the bayonets think</em>.”
“You may shake me, if you please,” said a little Yankee
constable to a stout, burly culprit whom he had come to
arrest, and who threatened violence, “but recollect, if
you do it, you don’t shake a chap of five-feet-six; you’ve
<em>got to shake the whole State of Massachusetts</em>!” When a
Hoosier was asked by a Yankee how much he weighed,&mdash;“Well,”
said he, “commonly I weigh about one hundred
and eighty; but <em>when I’m mad I weigh a ton</em>!” “Were
I to die at this moment,” wrote Nelson after the battle
of the Nile, “‘<em>more frigates</em>’ would be found written on
my heart.” The “Don’t give up the ship!” of our memorable
sea-captain stirs the heart like the sound of a
trumpet. Had he exhorted the men to fight to the last
gasp in defence of their imperilled liberties, their altars,
and the glory of America, the words might have been
historic, but they would not have been quoted vernacularly,
as they have been, for over threescore years and
ten.</p>

<p>There is another phase of the popular leaning to the
grandiose style, which is not less reprehensible than that
which we have noticed; we mean the affectation of foreign
words and phrases. As foreign travel has increased, and
the study of foreign languages has become fashionable in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
our country, this vice has spread till society in some places,
like Armado and Holofernes, seems to have been at a great
feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. Many persons
scarcely deign to call anything by its proper English name,
but, as if they believed with Butler, that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse6">“He that’s but able to express</p>
<p class="verse0">No sense at all in several languages,</p>
<p class="verse0">Will pass for learneder than he that’s known</p>
<p class="verse0">To speak strongest reason in his own,”&mdash;</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">they apply to it some German, French, or Italian word.
In their dialect people are <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">blasés</i>, and <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">passés</i>, or have <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">un air
distingué</i>; <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">in petto, dolce far niente</i>, are among their pet
phrases; and not infrequently they betray their ignorance
by some ludicrous blunder, as when they use <em>boquet</em> for
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bouquet</i>, <em>soubriquet</em> for <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">sobriquet</i>, and talk of a <em>sous</em>,
instead of a <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">sou</i>, a mistake as laughable as the Frenchman’s
“un pence.” Some of the modern fashionable novelists
and writers of books of travel have even shown so
bad a taste as to state in German, French, or Italian,
whatever is supposed to have been said by Germans,
Frenchmen, or Italians. In Currer Bell’s “Villette” a
large proportion of the dialogue, even in pages containing
the very marrow of the plot, is thus written in French,
making the book, though an English book, unintelligible
to an Englishman, however familiar with his native
tongue, unless he has mastered a foreign one also, and
that not in its purity, but “after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe.”
In striking contrast to this taste for exotics
is the rooted dislike which the French have to foreign
words and idioms. It is only in cases of the direst necessity
that they consent to borrow from their neighbors,
whether in <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">perfide Angleterre</i> or elsewhere. Even when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
they deign to adopt a new word, they so disguise it that
the parent language would not know it again. They strip
it gradually of its foreign dress, and make it assume the
costume of the country. “Beefsteak” is turned into <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bifteck</i>;
“plum-pudding” is metamorphosed into <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">pouding de
plomb</i>; “partner” becomes <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">partenaire</i>; “riding-coat” becomes
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">redingote</i>; and now fashionable English tailors advertise
these “redingotes,” never for a moment dreaming
that they are borrowing an expression which the French
stole from the English. It was their contempt for the
practice of borrowing foreign words that enabled the
Greeks to preserve their native tongue so long in its
purity; while on the contrary, by an affectation in the
Romans of Greek words and idioms, the Latin language
was not only corrupted, but lost in a few centuries much
of the beauty and majesty it had in the Augustan age.</p>

<p>It is said that the Spaniards, in all ages, have been
distinguished for their love of long and high-flown names,&mdash;the
sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of appellative
glory and honor. In looking at the long string of titles
fastened like the tail of a kite to the name of some Don
or other grandee, one is puzzled to tell whether it is the
man that belongs to the name, or the name to the man.
There is nothing odd, therefore, in the conduct of that
Spaniard, who, whenever his name was mentioned, always
took off his hat in token of respect to himself,&mdash;that is, as
the possessor of so many appellations. A person of high
diplomatic talent, with the unpretending and rather plebeian
name of “Bubb,” was once nominated to represent
Great Britain at Madrid. Lord Chesterfield was then a
minister of state, and on seeing the newly appointed minister
remarked,&mdash;“My dear fellow, your name will damn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
you with the Spaniards; a one-syllable patronymic will
infallibly disgust the grandees of that hyperbolic nation.”
“What shall I do?” said Bubb. “Oh, that is easily managed,”
rejoined the peer; “get yourself dubbed, before
you start on your mission, as Don Vaco y Hijo Hermoso
y Toro y Sill y Bubb, and on your arrival you will have
all the Spanish Court at your feet.”</p>

<p>The effort of the Spaniards to support their dignity by
long and sounding titles is repeated daily, in a slightly
different form, by many democratic Americans. Writers
and speakers are constantly striving to compensate for
poverty of thought by a multitude of words. Magniloquent
terms, sounding sentences, unexpected and startling
phrases, are dropped from pen and tongue, as gaudy and
high-colored goods are displayed in shop windows, to attract
attention. “Ruskin,” says an intelligent writer,
“long ago cried out against the stuccoed lies which rear
their unblushing fronts on so many street corners, shaming
our civilization, and exerting their whole influence to
make us false and pretentious. Mrs. Stowe and others
have warned us against the silken lies that, frizzled,
flounced, padded, compressed, lily-whitened and rouged,
flit about our drawing rooms by gaslight, making us
familiar with sham and shoddy, and luring us away from
real and modest worth. Let there be added to these complaints
the strongest denunciation of the kindred literary
lies which hum about our ears and glitter before our eyes,
which corrupt the language, and wrong every man and
woman who speaks it by robbing it of some portion of
its beauty and power.”</p>

<p>When shall we learn that the secret of beauty and of
force, in speaking and in writing, is not to say simple<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
things finely, but to say fine things as simply as possible?
“To clothe,” says Fuller, “low creeping matter with high-flown
language is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It
rather loads than raises a wren to fasten the feathers of
an ostrich to her wings.” It is a significant fact that the
books over which generation after generation of readers
has hung with the deepest delight,&mdash;which have retained
their hold, amid all the fluctuations of taste, upon all
classes,&mdash;have been written in the simplest and most
idiomatic English, that English for which the “fine school”
of writers would substitute a verbose and affected phraseology.
Such books are “Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s
Travels,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which Macaulay has
justly characterized as treasures of pure English. Fitz-Greene
Halleck tells us that some years ago a letter fell
into his hands which a Scotch servant girl had written to
her lover. The style charmed him, and his literary friends
agreed that it was fairly inimitable. Anxious to clear up
the mystery of its beauty, and even elegance, he searched
for its author, who thus solved the enigma: “Sir, I came
to this country four years ago. Then I did not know how
to read or write. Since then I have learned to read and
write, but I have not yet learned how to spell; so always
when I sit down to write a letter, I choose those words
which are so short and simple that I am sure to know
how to spell them.” This was the whole secret. The
simple-minded Scotch girl knew more of rhetoric than
Blair or Campbell. As Halleck forcibly says: “Simplicity
is beauty. Simplicity is power.”</p>

<p>It is through the arts and sciences, whose progress is
so rapid, that many words of “learned length and thundering
sound” force their way in these days into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
language. The vocabulary of science is so repugnant to
the ear and so hard to the tongue, that it is a long while
before its terms become popularized. We may be sure that
many years will elapse before “aristolochioid,” “megalosaurus,”
“acanthopterygian,” “nothoclæna-trichomanoides,”
“monopleurobranchian,” “anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphæoid,”
and other such “huge verbal blocks, masses of
syllabic aggregations, which both the tongue and the taste
find it difficult to surmount,” will establish themselves in
the language of literature and common life. Still, while
the lover of Anglo-Saxon simplicity is rarely shocked by
such terms, there are hundreds of others, less stupendous,
such as “phenomenon,” “demonstrative,” “inverse
proportion,” “transcendental,” “category,” “predicament,”
“exorbitant,” which, once heard only in scientific lecture
rooms or in schools, are now the common currency of the
educated; and it is said that in one of our Eastern colleges,
the learned mathematical professor, on whom the
duty devolved one morning of making the chapel prayer,
startled his hearers by asking Divine Goodness to enable
them to know its length, its breadth, and its superficial
contents. Should popular enlightenment go on for some
ages with the prodigious strides it has lately made, a
future generation may hear lovers addressing their mistresses
in the terms predicted by Punch:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“I love thee, Mary, and thou lovest me.</p>
<p class="verse0">Our mutual flame is like the affinity</p>
<p class="verse0">That doth exist between two simple bodies.</p>
<p class="verse0">I am Potassium to thine Oxygen.</p>
<p class="verse0">... Sweet, thy name is Briggs,</p>
<p class="verse0">And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we</p>
<p class="verse0">Agree to form a <em>Johnsonate of Briggs</em>?</p>
<p class="verse0">We will. The day, the happy day is nigh,</p>
<p class="verse0">When Johnson shall with beauteous Briggs combine.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span></p>

<p>It is useless, of course, to complain of the terminology
of science, since inaccurate names, that connote too many
things, or that are otherwise lacking in precision, would be
productive of continual mischief. But indispensable as
this distinctive nomenclature is, it is, no doubt, often
needlessly uncouth, and it has been well said that if the
language of common life were equally invariable and
unelastic, imagination would be cancelled, and genius
crushed. How barbarous and repulsive appear many of
the long, polysyllabic, technical names of plants and flowers
in our treatises on botany, when compared with such
popular names as “Stag-beetle,” “Rosemary,” and “Forget-me-not!”
To express the results of science without
the ostentation of its terms, is an admirable art, known,
unfortunately, to but few. How few surgeons can communicate
in simple, intelligible language to a jury, in a
law case, the results of a <em>post-mortem</em> examination! Almost
invariably the learned witness finds a wound “in the
parieties of the abdomen, opening the peritoneal cavity”;
or an injury of some “vertebra in the dorsal or lumbar
region”; or something else equally frightful. Some years
ago, in one of the English courts, a judge rebuked a witness
of this kind by saying, “You mean so and so, do you
not, sir?”&mdash;at the same time translating his scientific
barbarisms into a few words of simple English. “I do,
my Lord.” “Then why can’t you <em>say</em> so?” He <em>had</em> said
so, but in a foreign tongue.</p>

<p>To all the writers and speakers who needlessly employ
grandiose or abstract terms, instead of plain Saxon ones,
we would say, as Falstaff said to Pistol: “If thou hast
any tidings whatever to deliver, prithee deliver them like
a man of this world!” Never, perhaps, did a college<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
professor give a better lesson in rhetoric than was given
by a plain farmer in Kennebec County, Maine, to a schoolmaster.
“You are excavating a subterranean channel, it
seems,” said the pedagogue, as he saw the farmer at work
near his house. “No, sir,” was the reply, “I am only
digging a ditch.” A similar rebuke was once administered
by the witty Governor Corwin, of Ohio, to a young lady
who addressed him in high-flown terms. During a political
tour through the State, he and the Hon. Thomas
Ewing stayed at night at the house of a leading politician,
but found no one at home but his niece, who presided
at the tea-table. Having never conversed with
“great men” before, she supposed she must talk to them
in elephantine language. “Mr. Ewing, will you take
condiments in your tea, sir?” inquired the young lady.
“Yes, miss, if you please,” replied the Senator. Corwin’s
eyes twinkled. Here was a temptation that could not be
resisted. Gratified at the apparent success of her trial
in talking to the United States Senator, the young lady
addressed Mr. Corwin in the same manner,&mdash;“Will you
take condiments in <em>your</em> tea, sir?” “Pepper and salt,
but no mustard,” was the prompt reply, which the lady,
it is said, never forgave, declaring that the Governor was
“horridly vulgar.”</p>

<p>The faults of all those who thus barbarize our tongue
would be comparatively excusable, were it so barren of
resources that any man whose conceptions are clear need
find difficulty in wreaking them upon expression. But the
language in which Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth,
and Tennyson have sung; in which Hume, Gibbon,
Froude, Motley, and Prescott have narrated; in which
Addison, Swift, Newman, and Ruskin have written; and in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
which Bolingbroke, Chatham, Fox, Pitt, and Webster have
spoken, needs not to ask alms of its neighbors. Not only
these, but a hundred other masters, have shown that it
is rich enough for all the exigencies of the human mind;
that it can express the loftiest conceptions of the poet,
portray the deepest emotions of the human heart; that
it can convey, if not the fripperies, at least the manly
courtesies of polite life, and make palpable the profoundest
researches of the philosopher. It is not, therefore,
because of the poverty of our vocabulary that so many
writers Gallicize and Germanize our tongue; the real
cause is hinted at in the answer of Handel to an ambitious
musician, who attributed the hisses of his hearers to a
defect in the instrument on which he was playing: “The
fault is not there, my friend,” said the composer, jealous
of the honor of the organ, on which he himself performed;
“the fact is, you have no music in your <em>soul</em>.”</p>

<p>We are aware that the English tongue,&mdash;our own
cartilaginous tongue, as some one has quaintly styled it,&mdash;has
been decried, even by poets who have made it discourse
the sweetest music, for its lack of expressive terms, and
for its excess in consonants, guttural, sibilant, or mute.
It was this latter peculiarity, doubtless, which led Charles
V, three centuries ago, to compare it to the whistling of
birds; and others since, from the predominance of the <em>s</em>,
to the continued hissing of red-hot iron in water. Madame
de Stael likens it to the monotonous sound of the surge
breaking on the sea-shore; and even Lord Byron,&mdash;whose
own burning verse, distinguished not less by its melody
than by its incomparable energy, has signally revealed
the hidden harmony that lies in our short Saxon words,&mdash;turns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
traitor to his native language, and in a moment of
caprice denounces it for its harshness:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,</p>
<p class="verse2">Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,</p>
<p class="verse0">And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,</p>
<p class="verse2">With syllables that breathe of the sweet South,</p>
<p class="verse0">And gentle liquids, gliding all so pat in,</p>
<p class="verse2">That not a single accent seems uncouth,</p>
<p class="verse0">Like our harsh, Northern, whistling, grunting guttural,</p>
<p class="verse0">Which we’re obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">It is strange that the poet could not see that, in this very
selection of condemnatory terms, he has strikingly shown
the wondrous expressiveness of the tongue he censures.
What can be softer, more musical, or more beautifully
descriptive, than the “gentle liquids gliding,” and the
words “breathe of the sweet South”; and where among
all the languages of the “sweet South” would he have
found words so well fitted to point his sarcasm, so saturated
with harshness, as the terms “harsh,” “uncouth,”
“northern,” “whistling,” “grunting,” “guttural,” “hiss,”
“spit,” and “sputter?” It has been well said that “the
hand that possesses strength and power may have as delicate
a touch, when needed, as the hand of nervous debility.
The English language can drop the honeyed words of peace
and gentleness, and it can visit with its <em>withering, scathing,
burning, blasting curse</em>.” Again, even Addison, who wrote
so musical English, contrasting our own tongue with the
vocal beauty of the Greek, and forgetting that the latter
is the very lowest merit of a language, being merely its
<em>sensuous</em> merit, calls it brick as against marble. Waller,
too, ungrateful to the noble tongue that has preserved his
name, declares that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Poets that lasting marble seek,</p>
<p class="verse0">Must carve in Latin or in Greek.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span></p>

<p class="noindent">Because smoothness is one of the requisites of verse, it has
been hastily concluded that languages in which vowels and
liquids predominate must be better adapted to poetry, and
that the most mellifluous must also be the most melodious.
But so far is this from being true, that, as Henry Taylor
has remarked, in dramatic verse our English combinations
of consonants are invaluable, both in giving expression
to the harsher passions, and in impairing keenness and
significancy to the language of discrimination, and especially
to that of scorn.</p>

<p>The truth is, our language, so far from being harsh,
or poor and limited in its vocabulary, is the richest and
most copious now spoken on the globe. As Sir Thomas
More long ago declared: “It is plenteous enough to expresse
our myndes in anythinge whereof one man hath
used to speak with another.” Owing to its composite
character, it has a choice of terms expressive of every
shade of difference in the idea, compared with which the
vocabulary of many other modern tongues is poverty itself.
But for the impiety of the act, those who speak it might
well raise a monument to the madcaps who undertook the
tower of Babel; for, as the mixture of many bloods has
made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the
mingling of divers tongues given them a language which
is one of the noblest vehicles of thought ever vouchsafed
to man. This very mingling of tongues in our language
has been made the ground of an accusation against it;
and the Anglo-Saxon is sometimes told by foreigners that
he “has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the
scraps”; that his dialect is “the alms-basket of wit,” made
up of beggarly borrowings, and is wholly lacking in
originality.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span></p>

<p>It is true that the Anglo-Saxon has pillaged largely
from the speech of other peoples; that he has a craving
desire to annex, not only states and provinces, even whole
empires, to his own, but even the best parts of their languages;
that there is scarce a tongue on the globe which
his absorbing genius has not laid under contribution to
enrich the exchequer of his all-conquering speech. Strip
him of his borrowings,&mdash;or “annexations,” if you will,&mdash;and
he would neither have a foot of soil to stand upon,
nor a rag of language in which to clothe his shivering
ideas. To say nothing of the Greek, Latin, and French,
which enter so largely into the woof of the tongue, we are
indebted to the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic,
Hebrew, Hindoo, and even the North American Indian
dialects, for many words which we cannot do without.
The word-barks of our language are daily increasing in
size, and terms that sprang up at Delhi and Benares four
thousand years ago are to-day scaling the cliffs of the
Rocky Mountains. But while the English has thus borrowed
largely from other tongues, and the multifarious
etymology of “its Babylonish vocabulary,” as its enemies
are pleased to call it, renders it, of all modern languages,
one of the most difficult to master in all its wealth and
power, yet it makes up in eclecticism, vigor, and abundance
far more than it loses in apparent originality.
Mosaic-like and heterogeneous as are its materials, it is
yet no mingle-mangle or patchwork, but is as individual
as the French or the German. Though the rough materials
are gathered from a hundred sources, yet such is its
digestive and assimilative energy that the most discordant
aliments, passing through its anaconda-like stomach, are
as speedily identified with its own independent existence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
as the beefsteak which yesterday gave roundness to the
hinder symmetry of a prize ox becomes to-morrow part
and parcel of the proper substance,&mdash;the breast, leg, or
arm,&mdash;of an Illinois farmer.</p>

<p>In fact the very caprices and irregularities of our
idiom, orthography, and pronunciation, which make foreigners
“stare and gasp,” and are ridiculed by our own
philological ultraists, are the strongest proofs of the nobleness
and perfection of our language. It is the very extent
to which these caprices, peculiar idioms, and exceptions
prevail in any tongue, that forms the true scale of its
worth and beauty; and hence we find them more numerous
in Greek than in Latin,&mdash;in French or Italian than in
Irish or Indian. There is less symmetry in the rugged,
gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its branches,
which has defied the storms of a thousand years, than in
the smoothly clipped Dutch yew tree; but it is from the
former that we hew out the knees of mighty line-of-battle
ships, while a vessel built of the latter would go to pieces
in the first storm. It was our own English that sustained
him who soared “above all Greek, above all Roman fame”;
and the same “well of English undefiled” did not fail the
myriad-minded dramatist, when</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Each scene of many colored life he drew,</p>
<p class="verse0">Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Nor have even these great writers, marvellous and varied
as is their excellence, fathomed the powers of the language
for grand and harmonious expression, or used them to the
full. It has “combinations of sound grander than ever
rolled through the mind of Milton; more awful than the
mad gasps of Lear; sweeter than the sighs of Desdemona;
more stirring than the speech of Antony; sadder than the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
plaints of Hamlet; merrier than the mocks of Falstaff.”
To those, therefore, who complain of the poverty or harshness
of our tongue, we may say, in the words of George
Herbert:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Let foreign nations of their language boast,</p>
<p class="verse2">What fine variety each tongue affords;</p>
<p class="verse0">I like our language, as our men and coast:&mdash;</p>
<p class="verse2"><em>Who cannot dress it well, want</em> <span class="fs70">WIT</span>, <em>not</em> <span class="fs70">WORDS</span>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER IV.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">SMALL WORDS.</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>It is with words as with sunbeams,&mdash;the more they are condensed, the
deeper they burn.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Southey.</span></p>

<p>Language is like the minim immortal among the infusoria, which keeps
splitting itself into halves.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Coleridge.</span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy1">Among the various forms of ingratitude, one of the
commonest is that of kicking down the ladder by
which one has climbed the steeps of celebrity; and a good
illustration of this is the conduct of the author of the
following lines, who, though indebted in no small degree
for his fame to the small words, the monosyllabic music
of our tongue, sneers at them as low:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“While feeble expletives their aid do join,</p>
<p class="verse0">And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">“How ingenious! how felicitous!” the reader exclaims; and,
truly, Pope has shown himself wonderfully adroit in ridiculing
the Saxon part of the language with words borrowed
from its own vocabulary. But let no man despise
little words, even though he echo the little wasp of Twickenham.
Alexander Pope is a high authority in English
literature; but it is long since he was regarded as having
the infallibility of a Pope Alexander. The multitude of
passages in his works, in which the small words form not
only the bolts, pins, and hinges, but the chief material in
the structure of his verse, show that he knew well enough
their value; but it was hard to avoid the temptation of
such a line as that quoted. “Small words,” he elsewhere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
says, “are generally stiff and languishing, but they may
be beautiful to express melancholy.” It is the old story of</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“&mdash;&mdash; the ladder</p>
<p class="verse0">Whereto the climber upward turns his face,</p>
<p class="verse0">But when he once attains the utmost round,</p>
<p class="verse0">He then unto the ladder turns his back,</p>
<p class="verse0">Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees</p>
<p class="verse0">By which he did ascend.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The truth is, the words most potent in life and literature,&mdash;in
the mart, in the senate, in the forum, and at
the fireside,&mdash;are small words, the monosyllables which
the half-educated speaker and writer despises. All passionate
expression,&mdash;the outpouring of the soul when
moved to its depths,&mdash;is, for the most part, in monosyllables.
They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the
brain, made visible by utterance. The will makes its
giant victory strokes in little monosyllables, deciding for
the right and against the wrong. In the hour of fierce
temptation, at the ballot-box, in the court-room, in all
the crises of life, how potent for good or evil are the little
monosyllables, “Yes” and “No”! “‘Yes’ is the Olympian
nod of approval which fills heaven with ambrosia and
light; ‘no’ is the stamp of Jupiter which shakes heaven
and darkens the faces of the gods. ‘Yes:’ how it trembles
from the maiden’s lips, the broken utterance, the key-syllable
of a divine song which her heart only sings; how
it echoes in the ecstatic pulses of the doubtful lover, and
makes Paradise open its gates for the royal entry of the
triumphing conqueror, Love. ‘No,’&mdash;well might Miles
Standish say that he could not stand fire if ‘No’ should
come ‘point-blank from the mouth of a woman’; what
‘captain, colonel or knight-at-arms’ could? ‘No:’ ’tis the
impregnable fortress,&mdash;the very Malakoff of the will; it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
is the breastwork and barrier thrown up, which the
charge must be fierce indeed to batter down or overleap.
It is the grand and guarded tower against temptation; it
is the fierce and sudden arrow through all the rings, that
dismays the suitors of the dear and long-cherished and
faithful Penelope, and makes the unforgotten king start
from the disguise of a beggar.”</p>

<p>Again, there is a whole class of words, and those
among the most expressive in the language, of which the
great majority are monosyllables. We refer to the interjections.
We are aware that some philologists deny that
interjections are language. Horne Tooke sneers at this
whole class of words as “brutish and inarticulate,” as
“the miserable refuge of the speechless,” and complains
that, “because beautiful and gaudy,” they have been
suffered to usurp a place among words. “Where will
you look for it” (the interjection), he triumphantly asks;
“will you find it among laws, or in books of civil institutions,
in history, or in any treatise of useful arts or
sciences? No: you must seek for it in rhetoric and
poetry, in novels, plays and romances.” This acute writer
has forgotten one book in which interjections abound,
and awaken in the mind emotions of the highest grandeur
and pathos,&mdash;namely, the Bible. But the use of this
part of speech is not confined to books. It is heard
wherever men interchange thought and feeling, whether
on the gravest or the most trivial themes; in tones of
the tenderest love and of the deadliest hate; in shouts of
joy and ecstasies of rapture, and in the expression of
deep anguish, remorse and despair; in short, in the outburst
of every human feeling. More than this, not only
is it heard in daily life, but we are told by the highest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
authority that it is heard in the hallelujahs of angels,
and in the continual “Holy! Holy! Holy!” of the cherubim.</p>

<p>What word in the English language is fuller of significance,
has a greater variety of meanings, than the
diminutive “Oh”? Uttered by the infant to express surprise
or delight, it is used by the man to indicate fear, aspiration
or appeal, and, indeed, according to the tone in which
it is uttered, may voice almost any one of the emotions
of which he is capable. What a volume of meaning is
condensed in the derisive “Oh! oh!” which greets a silly
utterance in the House of Commons! In no other assembly,
perhaps, are the powers of human speech more fully
exhibited; yet it was in that body that one of the most
famous of interjections originated,&mdash;we mean the cry of
“Hear! hear!” which, though at first an imperative verb,
is now “nothing more or less than a great historical
interjection,” indicating, according to the tone in which
it is uttered, admiration, acquiescence, indignation or
derision. It has been truly said that when a large assembly
is animated by a common sentiment which demands
instantaneous utterance, it can find that utterance only
through interjections.</p>

<p>Again, how many exquisite passages in poetry owe to
the interjection their beauty, their pathos, or their power!
“The first sincere hymn,” says M. Taine, “is the one word
‘O.’” This “O,” the sign of the vocative, must not be
confounded with “Oh!” the emotional interjection, which
expresses a sentiment, as of appeal, entreaty, expostulation,
etc. What depth of meaning is contained in that little
word, as an expression of grief, in the following lines by
Wordsworth:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“She lived unknown, and few could know</p>
<p class="verse2">When Lucy ceased to be!</p>
<p class="verse0">Now she is in her grave,&mdash;and oh!</p>
<p class="verse2">The difference to me.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>What possible combination of words could be more
significant than the reply “Pooh! pooh!” to a controversialist’s
theory, or the contemptuous “Fudge!” with
which Mr. Churchill, in “The Vicar of Wakefield,” sums
up the pretensions of the languishing Miss Carolina
Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs:</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>“Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is
that to be found?”</p>

<p>“Fudge!”</p></div>

<p class="noindent">How full of pathos is the “Alack, alack!” of Jeanie Deans
at the supreme moment in her sister’s trial; and how
forcibly “Oho!” expresses exasperating self-felicitation at
the discovery of a carefully guarded secret! What volumes
of meaning are sometimes condensed into the little
word “psha”! “Doubt,” says Thackeray, “is always crying
‘psha,’ and sneering.” How expressive are those almost
infinitesimal words which epitomize the alternations of human
life, “ah!” and “ha!” As Fuller beautifully moralizes:
“‘Ha!’ is the interjection of laughter; ‘ah!’ is an interjection
of sorrow. The difference between them is very small,
as consisting only in the transposition of what is no substantial
letter, but a bare aspiration. How quickly, in
the age of a minute, in the very turning of our breath,
is our mirth changed to mourning!”</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Nature in many tones complains,</p>
<p class="verse0">Has many sounds to tell her pains;</p>
<p class="verse0">But for her joys has only three,</p>
<p class="verse0">And those but small ones, Ha! ha! he!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The truth is that, so far is this class of words from
being, as Max Müller contends, the mere <em>outskirts</em> of language,
they are more truly words than any others. These<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
little words, so expressive of joy, of hope, of doubt, of fear,
which leap from the heart like fiery jets from volcanic
isles,&mdash;these surviving particles of the ante-Babel tongues,
which spring with the flush or blanching of the face to
all lips, and are understood by all men,&mdash;these “silver
fragments of a broken voice,” to use an expression of
Tennyson’s, “the only remains of the Eden lexicon in the
dictionaries of all races,”&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">“The only words</p>
<p class="verse0">Of Paradise that have survived the fall,”&mdash;</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">are emphatically and preëminently language. It is doubtless
true that civilization, with its freezing formalities,
tends to diminish the use of interjections, as well as their
natural accompaniments, gesture and gesticulation; but on
the other hand, it should be noted, that there are certain
interjections which are the fruits of the highest and most
mature forms of human culture. Interjections, in truth,
are not so much “<em>parts</em> of speech” as entire expressions
of feeling or thought. They are preëminently pictorial. If
I pronounce the words “house,” “strike,” “black,” “beautifully,”
without other words or explanatory gestures, I say
nothing distinctly; I may mean any one of a hundred things;
but if I utter an interjectional exclamation, denoting joy or
sorrow, surprise or fear, every person who hears me knows
at once by what affection I am moved. I communicate
a fact by a single syllable. Instead of ranking below
other words, the interjection stands on a higher plane,
because its significance is more absolute and immediate.
Moreover, from these despised parts of speech has been
derived a whole class of words; as, for example, in the
natural interjection “ah”! <em>ach!</em> we have the root of a
large class of words in the Aryan languages, such as <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">ἄχος</span>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
<i>achen!</i> “ache,” “anguish,” “anxious,” <i>angustus</i>, and the
word “agony” itself. Many words are used interjectionally
which are not interjections, such as “Farewell!”
“Adieu!” “Welcome!” which are to be looked upon as
elliptical forms of expression. They are, in fact, abbreviated
sentences, resembling the <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">Ο</span> for <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">οὐ</span>, “not,” with
which the poet Philoxenus is said to have replied in
writing to the tyrant Dionysius who had invited him to
the court of Syracuse. The true interjection is an apostrophe,
condensed into a syllable. It is the effort of Nature
to unburden herself of some intense, pressing emotion.
It is the sigh of humanity for what it cannot have or
hope for; for what it has lost; for what it did not value
till it lost it. George Eliot thus defines it when she speaks
of certain deeds as “little more than interjections, which
give vent to the long passion of a life.” In oratory, poetry,
and the drama, the interjection plays an important part.
Public speakers, especially, find it indispensable to their
success. “As the most eloquent men are apt to find their
language inadequate to their needs,&mdash;as still, after they
have exhausted their vocabulary of other words,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse6">‘There hover in these restless heads</p>
<p class="verse0">One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the best,</p>
<p class="verse0">Which into words no virtue can digest,’</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">they find great need of the interjection. In their hands
it deepens all assertions, gives utterance to intense longings,
carries the hearer away into ultimate possibilities,
and expresses the most passionate emotions in the instant
of their most overwhelming power.” Who that is familiar
with the history of oratory, does not remember instances
when these little words, so despised by grammarians, have
been more impressive, more to the point, more eloquent
than a long speech? The interjections of Whitefield,&mdash;his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
“Ah!” of pity for the unrepentant sinner, and his “Oh!” of
encouragement and persuasion for the almost converted
listener,&mdash;were words of tremendous power, and formed
a most potent engine in his pulpit artillery.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> Garrick
used to say that he would give a hundred guineas if he
could say “Oh!” as Whitefield did. The condensed force
of interjections,&mdash;their inherent expressiveness,&mdash;entitles
them, therefore, to be regarded as the appropriate language,
the mother-tongue of passion; and hence the
effect of good acting depends largely on the proper introduction
and just articulation of this class of words.</p>

<p>Shakespeare’s interjections exact a rare command of
modulation, and cannot be rendered with any truth except
by one who has mastered the whole play. What a profound
insight of the masterpiece of the poet is required of
him who would adequately utter the word “indeed” in the
following passage of Othello! “It contains in it,” says an
English writer, “the gist of the chief action of the play,
and it implies all that the plot develops. It ought to be
spoken with such an intonation as to suggest the diabolic
scheme of Iago’s conduct. There is no thought of the
grammatical structure of the compound, consisting of the
preposition ‘in’ and the substantive ‘deed,’ which is equivalent
to ‘act,’ ‘fact,’ or ‘reality.’ All this vanishes and
is lost in the mere iambic dissyllable which is employed
as a vehicle for the feigned tones of surprise.”</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>“<em>Iago.</em> &nbsp; I did not think he had been acquainted with her.</p>

<p><em>Oth.</em> &nbsp; O, yes, and went between us very oft.</p>

<p><em>Iago.</em> &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Indeed!</span></p>

<p><em>Oth.</em> &nbsp; Indeed? ay, indeed. Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest?</p>

<p><em>Iago.</em> &nbsp; Honest, my lord?</p>

<p><em>Oth.</em> &nbsp; Honest? ay, honest!”</p></div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span></p>

<p>The Greek and Latin languages abound with interjections,
which are used by the orators and poets with great
effect. To gratify the Athenians, as they behold their
once proud enemy humbled to the dust, and draining the
cup of affliction to the very last dregs, Æschylus, in his
“Persai,” employs almost every form of ejaculation in
which abject misery can be expressed.</p>

<p>The English language is preëminently a language of
small words. It has more monosyllables than any other
modern tongue, a peculiarity which gives it a strikingly
direct and straightforward character, equally removed
from the indirect French and the intricate, lumbering German.
Its fondness for this class of words is even greater
than that of the Anglo-Saxon. Not a few of our present
monosyllables, such as the verbs “to love,” “bake,”
“beat,” “slide,” “swim,” “bind,” “blow,” “brew,” were,
in the Anglo-Saxon, dissyllables. The English language,
impatient of all superfluities, cuts down its words to the
narrowest possible limits,&mdash;lopping and condensing, never
expanding. Sometimes it cuts off an initial syllable, as in
“gin” for “engine,” “van” for “caravan,” “prentice”
for “apprentice,” “’bus” for “omnibus,” “wig” for “periwig”;
sometimes it cuts off a final syllable or syllables, as
in “aid” for “aidedecamp,” “prim” for “primitive,” “cit”
for “citizen,” “grog” for “grogram,” “pants” for “pantaloons,”
“tick” for (pawnbroker’s) “ticket”; sometimes
it strikes out a letter, or letters, from the middle of a
word, or otherwise contracts it, as in “last” for “latest,”
“lark” for “laverock,” “since” for “sithence,” “fortnight”
for “fourteen nights,” “lord” for “hlaford,”
“morning” for “morrowning,” “sent” for “sended,”
“chirp” for “chirrup” or “cheer up,” “fag” for “fatigue,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
“consols” for “consolidated annuities.” The
same abbreviating processes are followed, when English
words are borrowed from the Latin. Thus we have the
monosyllable “strange” from the trisyllable <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">extraneus</i>;
“spend” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">expendo</i>; “scour” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">exscorio</i>; “stop”
from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">obstipo</i>; “funnel” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">infundibulum</i>; “ply” from
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">plico</i>; “jetty” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">projectum</i>; “dean” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">decanus</i>;
“count” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">computo</i>; “stray” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">extravagus</i>;
“proxy” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">procurator</i>; “spell” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">syllabare</i>, etc.
Not only are single Latin words thus maimed when
converted into English, and their letters changed, transposed,
or omitted, but often two English words are clipped
and squeezed into one word. Thus from “proud”
and “dance” we have “prance”; from “grave” and
“rough” we have “gruff”; from “scrip” and “roll”
comes “scroll”; from “tread,” or “trot,” and “drudge,”
we have “trudge.” Even in the construction of its primitive
monosyllables the English language manifests the
same economy, and forms words of a totally different
meaning by the simple change of a vowel; as, bag, beg,
big, bog, bug; bat, bet, bit, bot, but; ball, bell, bill, boll,
bull; or, again, by the change of the first letter; as, fight,
light, might, night, right, tight,&mdash;dash, hash, lash, gash,
rash, sash, wash. The final “ed” of our participles is
rapidly disappearing, as a distinct syllable. Not content
with suppressing half the letters of our syllables,
and half the syllables of our words, we clip our vowels,
in speaking, shorter than any other people, so that our
language threatens to become a kind of stenology, or
algebraic condensation of thought,&mdash;a pemmican of ideas.
Voltaire said that the English gained two hours a day by
clipping their words. The same love of brevity has shown<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
itself in rendering the final <em>e</em> in English always mute. In
Chaucer the final <em>e</em> must often be sounded as a separate
syllable, or the verse will limp. To the same cause we
owe such expressions as “ten <em>o</em>’clock,” instead of “<em>of</em> the
clock,” or “<em>on</em> the clock,” and the hissing <em>s</em>, so offensive to
foreign ears. The old termination of the verb, <em>th</em>, has given
way to <em>s</em> in the third person singular, and <em>en</em> to a single
letter in the third person plural.</p>

<p>The Anglo-Saxon, the substratum of our modern English,
is emphatically monosyllabic; yet many of the
grandest passages in our literature are made up almost
exclusively of Saxon words. The English Bible abounds
in grand, sublime, and tender passages, couched almost
entirely in words of one syllable. The passage in Ezekiel,
which Coleridge is said to have considered the sublimest
in the whole Bible: “And he said unto me, son of man,
can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou
knowest,”&mdash;contains seventeen monosyllables to three
others. What passage in Holy Writ surpasses in energetic
brevity that which describes the death of Sisera,&mdash;“At
her feet he bowed, he fell; at her feet he bowed, he
fell, he lay down; where he bowed, there he fell down
dead”? Here are twenty-two monosyllables to one dissyllable
thrice repeated, and that a word which is usually
pronounced as a monosyllable. The lament of David over
Saul and Jonathan is not surpassed in pathos by any similar
passage in the whole range of literature; yet a very
large proportion of these touching words are of one or
two syllables:&mdash;“The beauty of Israel is slain upon the
high places; how are the mighty fallen!... Ye mountains
of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain
upon you, nor fields of offering.... Saul and Jonathan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death
they were not divided.... They were swifter than eagles,
they were stronger than lions.... How are the mighty
fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast
slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my
brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me:
thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”
Occasionally a long word is used in the current version,
where a more vivid or picturesque short one might have
been employed, as where our Saviour exclaims: “Oh, ye
generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from
the wrath to come?” In one of the older versions
“brood” is used in place of “generation,” with far greater
effect.</p>

<p>The early writers, the “pure wells of English undefiled,”
abound in small words. Shakespeare employs them
in his finest passages, especially when he would paint a
scene with a few masterly touches. Hear Macbeth:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“Here lay Duncan,</p>
<p class="verse0">His silver skin laced with his golden blood;</p>
<p class="verse0">And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in Nature</p>
<p class="verse0">For ruin’s wasteful entrance. There the murderers,</p>
<p class="verse0">Steep’d in the colors of their trade, their daggers</p>
<p class="verse0">Unmannerly breech’d with gore.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Are monosyllables passionless? Listen, again, to the
“Thane of Cawdor”:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“That is a step</p>
<p class="verse0">On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,</p>
<p class="verse0">For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires,</p>
<p class="verse0">Let not light see my black and deep desires.</p>
<p class="verse0">The eye winks at the hand. Yet, let that be</p>
<p class="verse0">Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Two dissyllables only among fifty-two words!</p>

<p>Bishop Hall, in one of his most powerful satires, speaking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
of the vanity of “adding house to house and field to
field,” has these beautiful lines:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store,</p>
<p class="verse0">And he that cares for most shall find no more.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">“What harmonious monosyllables!” exclaims the critic,
Gifford; yet they may be paralleled by others in the same
writer, equally musical and equally expressive.</p>

<p>Was Milton tame? He knew when to use polysyllables
of “learned length and thundering sound”; but he
knew also when to produce the grandest effects by the
small words despised by inferior artists. Read his account
of the journey of the fallen angels:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse4">“Through many a dark and dreary vale</p>
<p class="verse0">They passed, and many a region dolorous,</p>
<p class="verse0">O’er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death</em>,&mdash;</p>
<p class="verse0">A universe of death.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">In what other language shall we find in the same
number of words a more vivid picture of desolation than
this? Hear, again, the lost archangel calling upon hell
to receive its new possessor:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse12">“One who brings</p>
<p class="verse0">A mind not to be changed by place or time.</p>
<p class="verse0">The mind is its own place, and in itself</p>
<p class="verse0">Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.</p>
<p class="verse0">What matter where, if I be still the same,</p>
<p class="verse0">And what I should be&mdash;all but less than He</p>
<p class="verse0">Whom thunder hath made greater? Here, at least,</p>
<p class="verse0">We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built</p>
<p class="verse0">Here for His envy; will not drive us hence;</p>
<p class="verse0">Here we may reign secure, and, in my choice,</p>
<p class="verse0">To reign is worth ambition, though in hell;</p>
<p class="verse0">Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Did Collins lack lyric beauty, grace, or power? Read
the following exquisite lines, in which the truth of the
sentiment that “poetry is the short-hand of thought”
is strikingly illustrated:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“How sleep the brave who sink to rest</p>
<p class="verse0">By all their country’s wishes blest!</p>
<p class="verse0">When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,</p>
<p class="verse0">Returns to deck their hallow’d mould,</p>
<p class="verse0">She there shall dress a sweeter sod</p>
<p class="verse0">Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">By fairy hands their knell is rung,</p>
<p class="verse0">By forms unseen their dirge is sung;</p>
<p class="verse0">There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray,</p>
<p class="verse0">To bless the turf that wraps their clay;</p>
<p class="verse0">And Freedom shall a while repair,</p>
<p class="verse0">To dwell a weeping hermit there.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Where, in the whole range of English poetry, shall we
find anything more perfect than these lines? What a
quantity and variety of thought are here condensed into
two verses, like a cluster of rock crystals, sparkling and
distinct, yet receiving and reflecting lustre by the combination!
Poetry and picture, pathos and fancy, grandeur
and simplicity, are combined in verse, the melody of which
has never been surpassed. Yet, out of the seventy-nine
words in these lines, sixty-two <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'are monsyllables.'">are monosyllables.</ins></p>

<p>Did Byron lack force or fire? His skilful use of monosyllables
is often the very secret of his charm. It is true
that he too frequently resorts to quaint, obsolete, and outlandish
terms, thinking thereby to render his style more
gorgeous or grand. But his chief strength lies in his
despotic command over the simplest forms of speech.
Listen to the words in which he describes the destruction
of Sennacherib:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,</p>
<p class="verse0">And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;</p>
<p class="verse0">And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill,</p>
<p class="verse0">And their hearts beat but once, and forever lay still.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Here, out of forty-two words, all but four are monosyllables;
and yet how exquisitely are all these monosyllables
linked into the majestic and animated movement of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
the anapestic measure! Again, what can be more musical
and more melancholy than the opening verse of the lines
in which the same poet bids adieu to his native land?</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Adieu! adieu! my native shore</p>
<p class="verse2">Fades o’er the waters blue,</p>
<p class="verse0">The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,</p>
<p class="verse2">And shrieks the wild sea-mew.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Yon sun that sets upon the sea</p>
<p class="verse2">We follow in his flight;</p>
<p class="verse0">Farewell awhile to him and thee,</p>
<p class="verse2">My native land, good night!</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">With thee, my bark, I’ll swiftly go</p>
<p class="verse2">Athwart the foaming brine;</p>
<p class="verse0">Nor care what land thou bear’st me to,</p>
<p class="verse2">So not again to mine.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves</p>
<p class="verse2">And when you fail my sight,</p>
<p class="verse0">Welcome, ye deserts and ye caves!</p>
<p class="verse2">My native land, good night!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Two Latin words, “native” and “desert”; one French,
“adieu”; the rest, English purely. The third and fourth
lines paint the scene to the life; yet all the words but one
are monosyllables.</p>

<p>How graceful, tender, thoughtful, and melancholy, are
the following lines by Moore, of which the monosyllabic
music is one of the principal charms:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Those evening bells! those evening bells!</p>
<p class="verse0">How many a tale their music tells,</p>
<p class="verse0">Of youth and home, and that sweet time,</p>
<p class="verse0">When last I heard their soothing chime.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Those joyous hours have passed away;</p>
<p class="verse0">And many a heart, that then was gay,</p>
<p class="verse0">Within the tomb now darkly dwells,</p>
<p class="verse0">And hears no more those evening bells.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">And so ’twill be when I am gone;</p>
<p class="verse0">That tuneful peal will still ring on,</p>
<p class="verse0">While other bards shall walk those dells,</p>
<p class="verse0">And sing your praise, sweet evening bells!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span></p>

<p>The following brief passage from one of Landor’s poems
strikingly illustrates the metrical effect of simple words of
one syllable:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“She was sent forth</p>
<p class="verse0">To bring that light which never wintry blast</p>
<p class="verse0">Blows out, nor rain, nor snow extinguishes&mdash;</p>
<p class="verse0">The light that shines from loving eyes upon</p>
<p class="verse0">Eyes that love back, till they can see no more.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one;
nearly all the rest are monosyllables.</p>

<p>Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the “Philosophy
of Style,” has pointed out the superior forcibleness of
Saxon-English to Latin-English, and shown that it is due
largely to the comparative brevity of the Saxon. If a
thought gains in energy in proportion as it is expressed in
fewer words, it must also gain in energy in proportion
as the words in which it is expressed have fewer syllables.
If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract his
attention, and diminish the strength of the impression
made upon him, it matters not whether they consist of
entire words or of parts of words. “Formerly,” says an
able writer, “when armies engaged in battle, they were
drawn up in one long line, fighting from flank to flank;
but a great general broke up this heavy mass into several
files, so that he could bend his front at will, bring any
troops he chose into action, and, even after the first onslaught,
change the whole order of the field; and though
such a broken line might not have pleased an old soldier’s
eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it
carried the day, and is everywhere now the arrangement.
There will thus be an advantage, the advantage of suppleness,
in having the parts of a word to a certain degree
kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the way with all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
languages as they become more refined; and so far are
monosyllabic languages from being lame and ungainly,
that such are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of
Asia; and the most rough and untamed (those of North
America) abound in huge unkempt words,&mdash;yardlongtailed,
like fiends.”</p>

<p>I have spoken in the previous chapter of Johnson’s
fondness for big, swelling words, the leviathans of the
lexicon, and also of certain speakers and writers in our
own day, who have an equal contempt for small words,
and never use one when they can find a pompous polysyllable
to take its place. It is evident from the passages
I have cited, that these Liliputians,&mdash;these Tom Thumbs
of the dictionary,&mdash;play as important a part in our literature
as their bigger and more magniloquent brethren.
Horne Tooke admitted their force, when, on his trial for
high treason, he said that he was “the miserable victim
of two prepositions and a conjunction.” Like the infusoria
of our globe, so long unnoticed, which are now known
to have raised whole continents from the depths of the
ocean, these words, once so despised, are now rising in
importance, and are admitted by scholars to form an important
class in the great family of words.</p>

<p>The class of small words which were once contemptuously
called “particles,” are now acknowledged to be the
very bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure of language.
Their significance increases just in the degree that a nation
thinks acutely and expresses its thought accurately. An
uncultivated idiom can do without them; but as soon as
a people becomes thoughtful, and wishes to connect and
modify its ideas,&mdash;in short, to pursue metaphysical inquiries,
and to reason logically,&mdash;the microscopic parts of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
speech become indispensable. In some kinds of writing
the almost exclusive use of small words is necessary.
What would have been the fate of Bunyan’s immortal
book, had he told the story of the Pilgrim’s journey in the
ponderous, elephantine “osities” and “ations” of Johnson,
or the gorgeous Latinity of Taylor? It would have been
like building a boat out of timbers cut out for a ship. It
is owing to this grandiose style, as much as to any other
cause, that the author of the “Rambler,” in spite of his
sturdy strength and grasp of mind, “lies like an Egyptian
king, buried and forgotten in the pyramid of his fame.”
When a man half understands the subject of which he
speaks or writes, he will, like Goldsmith’s schoolmaster,
use words of “learned length and thundering sound.”
But when he is master of his theme, and when he feels
deeply, he will use short, plain words which all can understand.
Rage and fear, it has been happily said, strike
out their terms like the sharp crack of the rifle when it
sends its bullets straight to the point.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> When, after wearily
waiting in Chesterfield’s ante-room, Johnson wrote his
indignant letter, he broke away, to a considerable extent,
from his usual elephantine style, and used short, sharp,
and stinging terms.</p>

<p>In conclusion, when we remember that the Saxon language,
the soul of the English, is essentially monosyllabic;
that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by
the vowel <em>a</em> alone, more than five hundred; by the vowel
<em>e</em>, some four hundred and fifty; by the vowel <em>i</em>, about four
hundred; by the vowel <em>o</em>, over four hundred; and by the
vowel <em>u</em>, more than two hundred and fifty; we must admit
that these seemingly petty and insignificant words, even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
the microscopic particles, so far from meriting to be treated
as “creepers,” are of high importance, and that to know
when and how to use them is of no less moment to the
speaker or writer than to know when to use the grandiloquent
expressions which we have borrowed from the
language of Greece and Rome. To every man who has
occasion to teach or move his fellow-men by tongue or
pen, I would say in the words of Dr. Addison Alexander,&mdash;themselves
a happy example of the thing he commends:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Think not that strength lies in the big round word,</p>
<p class="verse2">Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak.</p>
<p class="verse0">To whom can this be true who once has heard</p>
<p class="verse2">The cry for help, the tongue that all men speak</p>
<p class="verse0">When want or woe or fear is in the throat,</p>
<p class="verse2">So that each word gasped out is like a shriek</p>
<p class="verse0">Pressed from the sore heart, or a strange, wild note</p>
<p class="verse2">Sung by some fay or fiend? There is a strength</p>
<p class="verse0">Which dies if stretched too far or spun too fine,</p>
<p class="verse2">Which has more height than breadth, more depth than length;</p>
<p class="verse0">Let but this force of thought and speech be mine,</p>
<p class="verse2">And he that will may take the sleek, fat phrase,</p>
<p class="verse0">Which glows and burns not, though it gleam and shine,&mdash;</p>
<p class="verse2">Light, but no heat&mdash;a flash, but not a blaze!</p>
<p class="verse0">Nor is it mere strength that the short word boasts;</p>
<p class="verse2">It serves of more than fight or storm to tell,</p>
<p class="verse0">The roar of waves that clash on rock-bound coasts,</p>
<p class="verse2">The crash of tall trees when the wild winds swell,</p>
<p class="verse0">The roar of guns, the groans of men that die</p>
<p class="verse2">On blood-stained fields. It has a voice as well</p>
<p class="verse0">For them that far off on their sick beds lie;</p>
<p class="verse2">For them that weep, for them that mourn the dead;</p>
<p class="verse0">For them that laugh, and dance, and clap their hand;</p>
<p class="verse2">To joy’s quick step, as well as grief’s slow tread.</p>
<p class="verse0">The sweet, plain words we learned at first keep time;</p>
<p class="verse2">And though the theme be sad, or gay, or grand,</p>
<p class="verse0">With each, with all, these may be made to chime,</p>
<p class="verse2">In thought, or speech, or song, in prose or rhyme.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> “Lectures on the English Language,” by G. P. Marsh.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> “The Use of Short Words,” by Hon. Horatio Seymour.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER V.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">WORDS WITHOUT MEANING.</span></h2>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0"><span class="smcap">Polonius.</span> What do you read, my Lord?</p>
<p class="verse0"><span class="smcap">Hamlet.</span> &nbsp; Words, words, words.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Shakespeare.</span></p>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>Is not cant the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">materia prima</i> of the Devil, from which all falsehoods,
imbecilities, abominations, body themselves; from which no true thing can
come? For cant is itself properly a double-distilled lie; the second power of
a lie.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Carlyle.</span></p>

<p>Mankind are fond of inventing certain solemn and sounding expressions
which appear to convey much, and in reality mean little; words that are the
proxies of absent thoughts, and, like other proxies, add nothing to argument,
while they turn the scales of decision.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Shelley.</span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy">Some years ago the author of the “Biographical History
of Philosophy,” in a criticism of a certain public
lecturer in London, observed that one of his most
marked qualities was the priceless one of frankness. “He
accepts no sham. He pretends to admire nothing he does
not in his soul admire. He pretends to <em>be</em> nothing that
he <em>is</em> not. Beethoven bores him, and he says so: how
many are as wearied as he, but dare not confess it? Oh,
if men would but recognize the virtue of intrepidity! If
men would but cease lying in traditionary formulas,&mdash;pretending
to admire, pretending to believe, and all in
sheer respectability!”</p>

<p>Who does not admire the quality here commended, and
yet what quality, in this age of self-assertion, of sounding
brass and tinkling cymbal, is more rare? What an
amount of insincerity there is in human speech! In how
few persons is the tongue an index to the heart! What
a meaningless conventionality pervades all the forms of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
social intercourse! Everybody knows that “How d’ye
do?” and “Good morning!” are parroted in most cases
without a thought of their meaning, or at least, without
any positive interest in the health or prosperity of the
person addressed; we begin a letter to one whom we
secretly detest with “My dear sir,” and at the end subscribe
ourselves his “obedient servant,” though we should
resent a single word from him which implied a belief in
our sincerity, or bore the slightest appearance of a command.
But not to dwell upon these phrases, the hollowness
of which may be excused on the ground that they
sweeten human intercourse, and prevent the roughest
men from degenerating into absolute boors, it is yet
startling to reflect how large a proportion of human
speech is the veriest cant. That men should use words
the meaning of which they have never weighed or discriminated,
is bad enough; but that they should habitually
use words as mere counters or forms, is certainly
worse. There is hardly a class, a society, or a relation in
which man can be placed toward man, that does not call
into play more or less of language without meaning.
The “damnable iteration” of the lawyer in a declaration
of assault and battery is not more a thing of form than
is the asseveration of one petitioner that he “will ever
pray,” etc., and of another that he “will be a thousand
times obliged,” if you will grant his request. Who does
not know to what an amount of flummery the most trifling
kindness done by one person to another often gives occasion
on both sides? The one racks the vocabulary for
words and phrases in which to express his pretended gratitude,
while, in fact, he is only keenly humiliated by
having to accept a favor, and the other as eloquently disclaims<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
any merit in the grant, which he really grudged,
and will never think of without feeling that he made
a great sacrifice.</p>

<p>The secret feeling of many a “public benefactor,”
loudly praised by the newspapers, was finely let out by
Lord Byron when he sent four thousand pounds to the
Greeks, and privately informed a friend that he did not
think he could <em>well get off for less</em>. How many wedding
and other presents, and subscriptions to testimonials and
to public enterprises, are made by those who secretly
curse the occasion that exacts them! With the stereotyped
“thanks” and “grateful acknowledgments” of the
shopkeeper all are familiar, as they are with “the last,”
the “positively the last,” and the “most positively the
very last” appearances of the dramatic stars that shine
for five hundred or a thousand dollars a night. As
nobody is deceived by these phrases, it seems hypercritical
to complain of them, and yet one can hardly help
sympathizing with the country editor who scolds a celebrated
musician because he is now making farewell tours
“once a year,” whereas formerly he made them “only
once in five years.” Considering the sameness of shop-keepers’
acknowledgments, one cannot help admiring the
daring originality of the Dutch commercial house of which
the poet Moore tells, that concluded a letter thus: “Sugars
are falling more and more every day; not so the respect
and esteem with which we are your obedient servants.”
The cant of public speakers is so familiar to the public
that it is looked for as a matter of course. When a man
is called on to address a public meeting, it is understood
that the apology for his “lack of preparation” to meet
the demand so “unexpectedly” made upon him, will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
preface the “impromptu” which he has spent weeks in
elaborating, as surely as the inevitable “This is so unexpected”
prefaces the reply of a maiden to the long-awaited
proposal of marriage from her lover.</p>

<p>Literary men are so wont to weigh their words that
cant in them seems inexcusable; yet where shall we find
more of it than in books, magazines, and newspapers?
How many reasons are assigned by authors for inflicting
their works on the public, other than the true one,
namely, the pleasure of writing, the hope of a little
distinction, or of a little money! How many writers profess
to welcome criticism, which they nevertheless ascribe
to spite, envy, or jealousy, if it is unfavorable! What is
intrinsically more deceptive than the multitudinous “we”
in which every writer, great and small, hides his individuality,&mdash;whether
his object be, as Archdeacon Hare
says, “to pass himself off unnoticed, like the Irishman’s
bad guinea in a handful of halfpence,” or to give to the
opinions of a humble individual the weight and gravity
of a council? “Who the &mdash;&mdash; is ‘We’?” exclaimed the
elder Kean on reading a scathing criticism upon his
“Hamlet”; and the question might be pertinently asked
of many other <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">nominis umbræ</i> who deliver their vaticinations
and denunciations as oracularly as if they were lineal
descendants of Minos or Rhadamanthus. Who can estimate
the diminution of power and influence that would
result should the ten thousand editors in the land, who
now assume a mystic grandeur and speak with a voice
of authority, as the organs of the public or a party,
come down from their thrones, and exchange the regal
“we” for the plebeian and egotistic “I”? “Who is ‘I’?”
the reader might exclaim, in tones even more contemptuous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
than Kean’s. The truth is, “I” is a nobody. He
represents only himself. He may be Smith or Jones,&mdash;the
merest cipher. He may weigh but a hundred pounds,
and still less morally and intellectually. He may be
diminutive in stature, and in intellect a Tom Thumb.
Who cares what such a pygmy thinks? But “we” represents
a multitude, an imposing crowd, a mighty assembly,
a congress, or a jury of sages; and we all quail before
the opinions of the great “we.” As a writer has well
said: “‘We have every reason to believe that beef will
rise to starvation prices’ is a sentiment which, when
read in a newspaper, will make the stoutest stomach
tremble; but substitute an ‘I’ for the ‘we,’ and nobody
cares a copper for the opinion. It has been well said
that what terrified Belshazzar was the hand on the wall,
because he couldn’t see to whom it belonged; and the
same may be said of the editorial ‘we.’ It is the mystery
in which it is involved that invests it with potency.”</p>

<p>The history of literature abounds with examples of
words used almost without meaning by whole classes of
writers. There is a time in the history of almost every
literature when language apparently loses its vitality,
and becomes dead, by being divorced from the living
thought that created it. Many of the most effete and
worn-out forms of expression, when first introduced,
pleased by their novelty, and manifested originality in
their inventors; but by dint of continual repetition, the
delicate bloom has been rubbed off, and they have lost
their power. A great deal of what is preserved in books,
and is called fine writing, is made up of these lifeless
parts of language, which are like the elements of a
decayed and rotten tree, of which the organic form and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
structure are perfect, but the life of which has departed.
It is the outward form of literature without the soul; an
abundance of fine writing, but no ideas. It has been
truly said that it is amazing to see how much of this
dead material is accumulated at the present day; whole
books filled to repletion with words without thoughts,
standing like dead forests, upright indeed, and regular
in form and structure, but presenting no fruit nor
verdure, sheltering no life, monuments only of past
vitality, and soon to crumble into oblivion. “Wandering
through these catacombs of the mind, one meets everywhere
with the most admirable ‘styles,’ which, doubtless,
when first constructed, were the vehicles of as admirable
thought, the fit language of great and stately minds, but
which, transported from the past, and made to represent
the little and despicable ‘notions’ of their plunderers,
become a very mockery.”</p>

<p>Who does not know how feeble and hollow British
poetry had become in the eighteenth century, just before
the appearance of Cowper? Compelled to appear in the
costume of the court, it had acquired its artificiality; and
dealing with the conventional manners and outside aspects
of men, it had almost forsaken the human heart, the proper
haunt and main region of song. Instead of being the
vehicle of lofty and noble sentiments, it had degenerated
into a mere trick of art,&mdash;a hand-organ operation, in
which one man could grind out tunes nearly as well as
another. A certain monotonous smoothness, a perpetually
recurring assortment of images, had become so much the
traditional property of the versifiers, that one could set
himself up in the business as a shopkeeper might supply
himself with his stock in trade. The style that prevailed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
has been aptly termed by the poet Lowell “the Dick
Swiveller style.” As Dick always called the wine “rosy,”
sleep “balmy,” so did these correct gentlemen always employ
a glib epithet or a diffuse periphrasis to express the
commonest ideas. The sun was never called by his plain,
almanac name, but always “Phœbus,” or “the orb of day.”
The moon was known only as “Cynthia,” “Diana,” or “the
refulgent lamp of night.” Naïads were as plenty in every
stream as trout or pickerel. If these poets wished to say
tea, they would write</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Of China’s herb the infusion hot and mild.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Coffee would be nothing less than</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“The fragrant juice of Mocha’s kernel gray.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">A boot would be raised to</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“The shining leather that the leg encased.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">A wig was “Alecto’s snaky tresses”; a person traversing St.
Giles was “Theseus threading the labyrinth of Crete”; and
a magistrate sitting in judgment was nothing less than
“Minos” or “Rhadamanthus.” If a poet wished to speak of
a young man’s falling in love, he set himself to relate how
Cupid laid himself in ambush in the lady’s eye, and from
that fortress shot forth a dart at the breast of the unhappy
youth, who straightway began to writhe under his wound,
and found no ease till the lady was pleased to smile upon
him. All women in that golden age were “nymphs”;
“dryads” were as common as birds; carriages were “harnessed
pomps”; houses, humble or stately “piles”; and
not a wind could blow, whether the sweet South, or
“Boreas, Cecias, or Argestes loud,” but it was “a gentle
zephyr.” Pope satirized this conventional language in the
well known lines:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,</p>
<p class="verse0">With sure returns of still expected rhymes,</p>
<p class="verse0">Where’er you find ‘the cooling western breeze,’</p>
<p class="verse0">In the next line ‘it whispers through the trees’;</p>
<p class="verse0">If crystal streams ‘with pleasing murmurs creep,’</p>
<p class="verse0">The reader’s threatened, not in vain, with ‘sleep.’”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Yet Pope himself was addicted to these circumlocutions
and to threadbare mythological allusions, quite as much
as the small wits whom he ridiculed. The manly genius
of Cowper broke through these traditionary fetters, and
relieved poetry from the spell in which Pope and his
imitators had bound its phraseology and rhythm. Expressing
his contempt for the “creamy smoothness” of
such verse, in which sentiment was so often</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“Sacrificed to sound,</p>
<p class="verse0">And truth cut short to make a period round,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">he cried:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Give <em>me</em> the line that ploughs its stately course,</p>
<p class="verse0">Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force;</p>
<p class="verse0">That, like some cottage beauty, strikes the heart,</p>
<p class="verse0">Quite unindebted to the tricks of art.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The charm of Cowper’s letters, acknowledged by all
competent judges to be the best in the English language,
lies in the simplicity and naturalness,&mdash;the freedom from
affectation,&mdash;by which they are uniformly characterized.
Contrasting them with those of Wilberforce, Dr. Andrew
Combe observes in a letter to a friend: “Cowper’s letters,
to my mind, do far more to excite a deep sense of religion,
than all the labored efforts of Wilberforce. The one gives
expression simply and naturally to the thoughts and feelings
which spring up spontaneously as he writes. The
other <em>forces in the one topic in all his letters</em>, and lashes
himself up to a due fervor of expression, whether the mind
wills or not. On one occasion Wilberforce dispatched a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
very hurried letter on Saturday night, without any religious
expressions in it. In the night-time his conscience
troubled him so much for the omission, that he could not
rest till he sat down next morning and wrote a second with
the piety, and apologizing for his involuntary departure
from his rule! Only think what a perversion of a good
principle this was!”</p>

<p>It is in the conduct of political affairs that the class of
words of which we have spoken are used most frequently.
Sir Henry Wotton long since defined an ambassador as “a
gentleman sent abroad <em>to lie</em> for the benefit of his country.”
In Europe, so indissolubly has diplomacy been associated
with trickery, that it is said Talleyrand’s wonderful success
with the representatives of foreign courts was owing largely
to his frankness and fair dealing, nobody believing it possible
that he was striving for that for which he seemed to
be striving. The plain, open, straightforward way in
which he spoke of and dealt with all public matters, completely
puzzled the vulgar minds, that could not dissociate
from diplomacy the mysterious devices that distinguish the
hack from the true diplomatist. In the titles and styles of
address used by Kings and Emperors, we have examples of
cant in its most meaningless forms. One sovereign is His
Most Christian Majesty; another, Defender of the Faith, etc.
A monarch, forced by public opinion to issue a commission
of inquiry, addresses all the members of it as his “well-beloved,”
though in his heart he detests them.</p>

<p>Everybody knows that George I of England obtained
his crown, not by hereditary title, but by an Act of Parliament;
yet, in his very first speech to that body, he had the
effrontery to speak of ascending the throne of his ancestors.
Well might Henry Luttrell exclaim:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“O that in England there might be</p>
<p class="verse0">A duty on hypocrisy!</p>
<p class="verse0">A tax on humbug, an excise</p>
<p class="verse0">On solemn plausibilities,</p>
<p class="verse0">A stamp on everything that canted!</p>
<p class="verse0">No millions more, if these were granted,</p>
<p class="verse0">Henceforward would be raised or wanted.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">So an American politician, who, by caucus-packing, “wire-pulling,”
and perhaps bribery, has contrived to get elected
to a State legislature or to Congress, will publicly thank
his fellow-citizens for having sent him there “by their
voluntary, unbiased suffrages.” When the patriot, Patkul,
was surrendered to the vengeance of Charles XII of Sweden,
the following sentence was read over to him: “It is
hereby made known to be the order of his Majesty, our
<em>most merciful</em> sovereign, that this man, who is a traitor to
his country, be broken on the wheel and quartered,” etc.
“What mercy!” exclaimed the poor criminal. It was with
the same mockery of benevolence that the Holy Inquisition
was wont, when condemning a heretic to the torture, to
express the tenderest concern for his temporal and eternal
welfare. One of the most offensive forms of cant is the
profession of extreme humility by men who are full of
pride and arrogance. The haughtiest of all the Roman
Pontiffs styled himself “the servant of the servants of
God,” at the very time when he humiliated the Emperor of
Germany by making him wait five days barefoot in his
ante-chamber in the depth of winter, and expected all the
Kings of Europe, when in his presence, to kiss his toe or
hold his stirrup. Catherine of Russia was always mouthing
the language of piety and benevolence, especially when
about to wage war or do some rascally deed. Louis the
Fourteenth’s paroxysms of repentance and devotion were
always the occasion for fresh outrages upon the Huguenots;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
and Napoleon was always prating of his love of peace,
and of being compelled to fight by his quarrelsome neighbors.
While the French revolutionists were shouting
“Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!” men were executed
in Paris without law and against law, and heads fell by
cartloads from the knife of the guillotine. The favorite
amusement of Couthon, one of the deadliest of Robespierre’s
fellow-cutthroats, was the rearing of doves. The
contemplation of their innocence, he said, made the charm
of his existence, in consoling him for the wickedness of
men. Even when he had reached the height of his “bad
preëminence” as a terrorist, he was carried to the National
Assembly or the Jacobin Club fondling little lapdogs, which
he nestled in his bosom. It is told of one of his bloody
compatriots, who was as fatal to men and as fond of dogs
as himself, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded
to him in vain for her husband’s life, in retiring from his
presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel’s tail, he
cried out, “Good heavens, Madam! have you no <em>humanity</em>?”</p>

<p>“My children,” said Dr. Johnson, “clear your minds of
cant.” If professional politicians should follow this advice,
many of them would be likely to find their occupation
clean gone. At elections they are so wont to simulate the
sentiments and language of patriotism,&mdash;to pretend a zeal
for this, an indignation for that, and a horror for another
thing, about which they are known to be comparatively indifferent,
as if any flummery might be crammed down the
throats of the people,&mdash;that the voters, whom the old party
hacks fancy they are gulling, are simply laughing in their
sleeves at their transparent attempts at deception. Daniel
O’Connell, the popular Irish orator, is said to have had
a large vocabulary of stock political phrases, upon which he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
rang the changes with magical effect. He could whine,
and wheedle, and wink with one eye, while he wept with
the other; and if his flow of oratory was ever in danger of
halting, he had always at hand certain stereotyped catch-words,
such as his “own green isle,” his “Irish heart,” his
“head upon the block,” his “hereditary bondsmen, know
ye not,” etc., which never failed him in any emergency.</p>

<p>Offensive as are all these forms of speech without meaning,
they are not more so than the hollow language of&mdash;strange
to say,&mdash;some moral philosophers. Many persons
have been so impressed by the ethical essays of Seneca, in
which he sings the praises of poverty, and denounces in
burning language the corruption of Rome and the extortion
in the provinces, that they could account for the
excellence of these writings only on the theory of a Christian
influence; and a report gained credit that the Roman
philosopher had met and conversed with the Apostle Paul.
But what are these brilliant moral discourses? Reading
them by the light of the author’s life and character, we
find they are only words. A late German historian tells
us that the same Seneca who could discourse so finely upon
the abstemiousness and contentment of the philosopher, and
who, on all occasions, paraded his contempt for earthly
things as nothingness and vanity, amassed, during the four
years of his greatest prosperity and power, a fortune of
three hundred millions of sesterces,&mdash;over fifteen millions
of dollars. While writing his treatise on “Poverty,” he
had in his house five hundred citrus tables, tables of veined
wood brought from Mount Atlas, which sometimes cost
as much as twenty-five, and even seventy thousand dollars.
The same Seneca, who denounced extortion with so
virtuous anger, built his famous museum gardens with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
gold and the tears of Numidia. The same Seneca, who
preached so much about purity of morals, was openly
accused of adultery with Julia and Agrippina, and led his
pupil Nero into still more shameful practices. He wrote a
work upon “Clemency,” yet had, beyond question, a large
part of Nero’s atrocities upon his conscience. It was he
who composed the letter in which Nero justified before the
Senate the murder of his own mother.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>

<p>Common, however, as are meaningless phrases on the
stump and platform, and even in moral treatises, it is to be
feared that they are hardly less so in the meeting-house,
and there they are doubly offensive, if not unpardonable.
It is a striking remark of Coleridge, that truths, of all
others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered
so true that they lose all the power of truth, and
lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side
with the most despised and exploded errors. Continual
handling wears off the beauty and significance of words,
and it is only by a distinct effort of the mind that we can
restore their full meaning. Gradually the terms most
vital to belief cease to mean what they meant when first
used; the electric life goes out of them; and, for all practical
purposes, they are dead. Hence it is that “the traditional
maxims of old experience, though seldom questioned,
have often so little effect on the conduct of life, because
their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt, until
personal experience has brought it home. And thus, also,
it is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even
politics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts,
have manifested a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless
dogmas, which tendency all the efforts of an education<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
expressly and skilfully directed to keeping the meaning
alive are barely found sufficient to counteract.”<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>

<p>There can be little doubt that many a man whose life
is thoroughly selfish cheats himself into the belief that he
is pious, because he parrots with ease the phrases of piety
and orthodoxy. Who is not familiar with scores of such
pet phrases and cant terms, which are repeated at this
day apparently without a thought of their meaning?
Who ever attended a missionary meeting without hearing
“the Macedonian cry,” and an account of some “little
interest,” and “fields white for the harvest”? Who is
not weary of the ding-dong of “our Zion” and the solecism
of “in our midst”; and who does not long for a
verbal millennium when Christians shall no longer “feel
to take” and “grant to give”? “How much I regret,”
says Coleridge, “that so many religious persons of the
present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of
manner and phraseology as a token to each other! They
must ‘improve’ this and that text, and they must do so and
so in a ‘prayerful’ way; and so on. A young lady urged
upon me, the other day, that such and such feelings were
the ‘marrow’ of all religion; upon which I recommended
her to try to walk to London on her marrow bones only.”
The language of prayer, both public and private, being
made up more or less of technical expressions, tends continually
to become effete. The scriptural and other
phrases, which were used with good taste and judgment
several generations ago, may have lost their significance
to-day, and should, in that case, be exchanged for others
which have a living meaning. Profound convictions, it
has been truly said, are imperilled by the continued use<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
of conventional phraseology after the life of it has gone
out, so that nothing in the real experience of the people
responds to it, when they hear it or when they use it.
Mr. Spurgeon, in his “Lectures to Students,” remarks
that “‘the poor unworthy dust’ is an epithet generally
applied to themselves by the proudest men in the congregation,
and not seldom by the most moneyed and grovelling;
in which case the last words are not so very inappropriate.
We have heard of a good man who, in pleading for his
children and grandchildren, was so completely beclouded
in the blinding influence of this expression, that he exclaimed,
‘O Lord, save thy dust, and thy dust’s dust, and
thy dust’s dust’s dust.’ When Abraham said, ‘I have
taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust
and ashes,’ the utterance was forcible and expressive; but
in its misquoted, perverted, and abused form, the sooner
it is consigned to its own element the better.”</p>

<p>Many persons have very erroneous ideas of what constitutes
religious conversation. That is not necessarily
religious talk which is interlarded with religious phrases,
or which is solely about divine things; but that which is
permeated with religious feeling, which is full of truth,
reverence, and love, whatever the theme may be. Who
has not heard some men talk of the most worldly things
in a way that made the hearer feel the electric current of
spirituality playing through their words, and uplifting
his whole spiritual being? And who has not heard other
men talk about the divinest things in so dry, formal, and
soulless a way that their words seemed a profanation, and
chilled him to the core? It is almost a justification of
slang that it is generally an effort to obtain relief from
words worn bare by the use of persons who put neither<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
knowledge nor feeling into them, and which seem incapable
of expressing anything real.</p>

<p>When Lady Townsend was asked if Whitefield had
recanted, she replied, “No; he has only <em>canted</em>.” Often,
when there is no deliberate hypocrisy, good men use language
so exaggerated and unreal as to do more harm than
the grossest worldliness. We have often, in thinking upon
this subject, called to mind a saying of Dr. Sharp, of Boston,
a Baptist preacher, who was a hater of all cant and
shams. “There’s Dr. &mdash;&mdash;,” said he, about the time of
the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance, “who went
all the way to Europe to talk up brotherly love. If he
should meet a poor Baptist minister in the street, he
wouldn’t speak to him.” Robert Hall had an intense abhorrence
of religious cant, to which he sometimes gave
expression in blunt terms. A young preacher who was
visiting him spent a day in sighing and in begging pardon
for his suspirations, saying that they were caused by
grief that he had so hard a heart. The great divine bore
with him all the first day, but when the lamentations
were resumed the next morning at breakfast, he said:
“Why, sir, don’t be cast down; remember the compensating
principle, and be thankful and still.” “Compensating
principle!” exclaimed the young man; “what can compensate
for a hard heart?” “Why, a soft head, to be sure,”
said Hall, who, if rude, certainly had great provocation.
Nothing is cheaper than pious or benevolent talk. A
great many men would be positive forces of goodness in
the world, if they did not let all their principles and
enthusiasm escape in words. They are like locomotives
which let off so much steam through the escape valves,
that, though they fill the air with noise, they have not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
power enough left to move the train. There is hardly
anything which so fritters spiritual energy as talk without
deeds. “The fluent boaster is not the man who is steadiest
before the enemy; it is well said to him that his courage
is better kept till it is wanted. Loud utterances of
virtuous indignation against evil from the platform, or in
the drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual giant;
so much indignation as is expressed has found vent; it is
wasted; is taken away from the work of coping with evil;
the man has so much less left. And hence he who restrains
that love of talk lays up a fund of spiritual strength.”<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control</p>
<p class="verse2">That o’er thee swell and throng;</p>
<p class="verse0">They will condense within thy soul,</p>
<p class="verse2">And change to purpose strong.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">But he who lets his feelings run</p>
<p class="verse2">In soft luxurious flow,</p>
<p class="verse0">Shrinks when hard service must be done,</p>
<p class="verse2">And faints at every woe.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Faith’s meanest deed more favor bears,</p>
<p class="verse2">Where hearts and wills are weigh’d.</p>
<p class="verse0">Than brightest transports, choicest prayers,</p>
<p class="verse2">Which bloom their hour and fade.”<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>It is said that Pambos, an illiterate saint of the middle
ages, being unable to read, came to some one to be taught
a psalm. Having learned the simple verse, “I said, I will
take heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue,”
he went away, saying that was enough if it was practically
acquired. When asked six months, and again many years
after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he
answered that he had never been able truly to master
this. A man may have a heart overflowing with love
and sympathy, even though he is not in the habit of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>exhibiting on his cards “J. Good Soul, Philanthropist,”
and was never known to unfold his cambric handkerchief,
with the words, “Let us weep.” On the other hand,
nothing is easier than to use a set phraseology without
attaching to it any clear and definite meaning,&mdash;to cheat
one’s self with the semblance of thought or feeling, when
no thought or feeling exists. It has been truly said that
when good men who have no deep religious fervor use
fervent language, which they have caught from others,
or which was the natural expression of what they felt in
other and better years,&mdash;above all, when they employ on
mean and trivial occasions expressions which have been
forged in the fires of affliction and hammered out in
the shock of conflict,&mdash;they cannot easily imagine what
a disastrous impression they produce on keen and discriminating
minds. The cheat is at once detected, and
the hasty inference is drawn that all expressions of religious
earnestness are affected and artificial. The honest
and irrepressible utterance of strong conviction and deep
emotion commands respect; but intense words should
never be used when the religious life is not intense.
“Costing little, words are given prodigally, and sacrificial
acts must toil for years to cover the space which a single
fervid promise has stretched itself over. No wonder that
the slow acts are superseded by the available words, the
weighty bullion by the current paper money. If I have
conveyed all I feel by language, I am tempted to fancy,
by the relief experienced, that feeling has attained its
end and realized itself. Farewell, then, to the toil of the
‘daily sacrifice!’ Devotion has found for itself a vent in
words.”<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span></p>
<p>Art, as well as literature, politics, and religion, has its
cant, which is as offensive as any of its other forms.
When Rossini was asked why he had ceased attending
the opera in Paris, he replied, “I am embarrassed at
listening to music with Frenchmen. In Italy or Germany,
I am sitting quietly in the pit, and on each side
of me is a man shabbily dressed, but who feels the
music as I do; in Paris I have on each side of me a
fine gentleman in straw-colored gloves, who explains to
me all I feel, but who feels nothing. All he says is very
clever, indeed, and it is often very true; but it takes the
gloss off my own impression,&mdash;if I have any.”</p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Ulhorn’s “Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism;” pp. 93, 94.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Mill’s “Logic.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Sermons, by Rev. F. W. Robertson.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> Professor J. H. Newman.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> “Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson.”</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER VI.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">SOME ABUSES OF WORDS.</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>He that hath knowledge spareth his words.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Proverbs xvii</span>, 27.</p>

<p>Learn the value of a man’s words and expressions, and you know him....
He who has a superlative for everything wants a measure for the great
or small.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Lavater.</span></p>

<p>Words are women; deeds are men.&mdash;<span class="smcap">George Herbert.</span></p>

<p>He that uses many words for the explaining of any subject, doth, like
the cuttle-fish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ray.</span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy">The old Roman poet Ennius was so proud of knowing
three languages that he used to declare that he had
three hearts. The Emperor Charles V expressed himself
still more strongly, and declared that in proportion to
the number of languages a man knows, is he more of a
man. According to this theory, Cardinal Mezzofanti, who
understood one hundred and fourteen languages, and
spoke thirty with rare excellence, must have been many
men condensed into one. Of all the human polyglots in
ancient or modern times, he had perhaps the greatest
knowledge of words. Yet, with all his marvellous linguistic
knowledge, he was a mere prodigy or freak of
nature, and, it has been well observed, scarcely deserves a
higher place in the Pantheon of intellect than a blindfold
chess-player or a calculating boy. Talking foreign
languages with a fluency and accuracy which caused
strangers to mistake him for a compatriot, he attempted
no work of utility,&mdash;left no trace of his colossal powers;
and therefore, in contemplating them, we can but wonder<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
at his gifts, as we wonder at the Belgian giant or a five-legged
lamb. In allusion to his hyperbolical acquisitions,
De Quincey suggests that the following would be an
appropriate epitaph for his eminence: “Here lies a man
who, in the act of dying, committed a robbery,&mdash;absconding
from his fellow-creatures with a valuable polyglot
dictionary.” Enormous, however, as were the linguistic
acquisitions of Mezzofanti, no man was ever less vain of
his acquirements,&mdash;priding himself, as he did, less upon
his attainments than most persons upon a smattering of
a single tongue. “What am I,” said he to a visitor,
“but an ill-bound dictionary?” The saying of Catherine
de Medicis is too often suggested by such prodigies of
linguistic acquisition. When told that Scaliger understood
twenty different languages,&mdash;“That’s twenty words for
one idea,” said she; “I had rather have twenty ideas for
one word.” In this reply she foreshadowed the great
error of modern scholarship, which is too often made the
be-all and the end-all of life, when its only relation to it
should be that of a graceful handmaid. The story of the
scholar who, dying, regretted at the end of his career
that he had not concentrated all his energies upon the
dative case, only burlesques an actual fact. The educated
man is too often one who knows more of <em>language</em> than
of <em>idea</em>,&mdash;more of the husk than of the kernel,&mdash;more
of the vehicle than of the substance it bears. He has
got together a heap of symbols,&mdash;of mere counters,&mdash;with
which he feels himself to be an intellectual Rothschild;
but of the substance of these shadows, the sterling gold
of intellect, coin current throughout the realm, he has
not an eagle. All his wealth is in paper,&mdash;paper like bad
scrip, marked with a high nominal amount, but useless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
in exchange, and repudiated in real traffic. The great
scholar is often an intellectual miser, who expends the
spiritual energy that might make him a hero upon the
detection of a wrong dot, a false syllable, or an inaccurate
word.</p>

<p>In this country, where fluency of speech is vouchsafed
in so large a measure to the people, and every third man
is an orator, it is easier to find persons with the twenty
words for one idea, than persons with twenty ideas for
one word. Of all the peoples on the globe, except perhaps
the Irish, Americans are the most spendthrift of language.
Not only in our court-houses and representative halls,
but everywhere, we are literally deluged with words,&mdash;words,&mdash;words.
Everybody seems born to make long
speeches, as the sparks to fly upward. The Aristotelian
theory that Nature abhors a vacuum appears to be a
universal belief, and all are laboring to fill up the realms
of space with “mouthfuls of spoken wind.” The quantity
of breath that is wasted at our public meetings,&mdash;religious,
political, philanthropic, and literary,&mdash;is incalculable.
Hardly a railroad or a canal is opened, but the occasion
is seized on as a chance for speeches of “learned length
and thundering sound”; and even a new hotel cannot
throw open its doors without an amount of breath being
expended, sufficient, if economically used, to waft a boat
across a small lake.</p>

<p>One is struck, in reading the “thrilling” addresses on
various occasions, which are said to have “chained as with
hooks of steel the attention of thousands,” and which
confer on their authors “immortal reputations” that die
within a year, to see what tasteless word-piling passes
with many for eloquence. The advice given in Racine’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
“<cite lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Plaideurs</cite>,” by an ear-tortured judge to a long-winded
lawyer, “to skip to the deluge,” might wisely be repeated
to our thousand Ciceros and Chathams. The Baconian
art of condensation seems nearly obsolete. Many of our
orators are forever breaking butterflies on a wheel,&mdash;raising
an ocean to drown a fly,&mdash;loading cannon to shoot
at humming-birds. Thought and expression are supplanted
by lungs and the dictionary. Instead of great
thoughts couched in a few close, home, significant sentences,&mdash;the
value of a thousand pounds sterling of
sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond,&mdash;we
have a mass of verbiage, delivered with a pompous
elocution. Instead of ideas brought before us, as South
expresses it, like water in a well, where you have fulness
in a little compass, we have the same “carried out into
many petty, creeping rivulets, with length and shallowness
together.”</p>

<p>It is in our legislative bodies that this evil has reached
the highest climax. A member may have a thought or a
fact which may settle a question; but if it may be couched
in a sentence or two, he thinks it not worth delivering.
Unless he can wire-draw it into a two-hours speech, or at
least accompany it with some needless verbiage to plump
it out in the report, he will sit stock still, and leave the
floor to men who have fewer ideas and more words at
command. The public mind, too, revolts sometimes
against nourishment in highly concentrated forms; it
requires bulk as well as nutriment, just as hay, as well
as corn, is given to horses, to distend the stomach, and
enable it to act with its full powers. Then, again,&mdash;and
this, perhaps, is one of the main causes of long-winded
speeches,&mdash;there is a sort of reverence entertained for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
a man who can “spout” two or three hours on the
stretch; and the wonder is heightened, if he does it
without making a fool of himself. Nothing, however,
can be more absurd than to regard mere volubility as
a proof of intellectual power. So far is this from being
the case that it may be doubted whether any large-thoughted
man, who was accustomed to grapple with the
great problems of life and society, ever found it easy
upon the rostrum to deliver his thoughts with fluency
and grace.</p>

<p>Bruce, the traveller, long ago remarked of the Abyssinians,
that “they are all orators, as,” he adds, “are most
barbarians.” It is often said of such tonguey men that
they have “a great command of language,” when the
simple fact is that language has a great command of
them. As Whately says, they have the same command
of language that a man has of a horse that runs away
with him. A true command of language consists in the
power of discrimination, selection, and rejection, rather
than in that of multiplication. The greatest orators of
ancient and modern times have been remarkable for their
economy of words. Demosthenes, when he</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece</p>
<p class="verse0">To Macedon and Artaxerxes’ throne,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">rarely spoke over thirty minutes, and Cicero took even
less time to blast Catiline with his lightnings. There
are some of the Greek orator’s speeches which were
spoken, as they may now be read with sufficient slowness
and distinctness, in less than half an hour; yet they are
the effusions of that rapid and mighty genius the effect
of whose words the ancients exhausted their language
in describing; which they could adequately describe only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
by comparing it to the workings of the most subtle and
powerful agents of nature,&mdash;the ungovernable torrent,
the resistless thunder. Chatham was often briefer still,
and Mirabeau, the master-spirit of the French tribune,
condensed his thunders into twenty minutes.</p>

<p>It is said that not one of the three leading members
of the convention that formed the Constitution of the
United States spoke, in the debates upon it, over twenty
minutes. Alexander Hamilton was reckoned one of the
most diffuse speakers of his day; yet he did not occupy
more than two hours and a half in his longest arguments
at the bar, nor did his rival, Aaron Burr, occupy over
half that time. A judge who was intimately acquainted
with Burr and his practice declares that he repeatedly
and successfully disposed of cases involving a large
amount of property in half an hour. “Indeed,” says
he, “on one occasion he talked to the jury seven minutes
in such a manner that it took me, on the bench, half an
hour to straighten them out.” He adds. “I once asked
him, ‘Colonel Burr, why cannot lawyers always save the
time, and spare the patience of the court and jury, by
dwelling only on the important points in their cases?’
to which Burr replied, ‘Sir, you demand the greatest
faculty of the human mind, selection.’” To these examples
we may add that of a great English advocate.
“I asked Sir James Scarlett,” says Buxton, “what was
the secret of his preëminent success as an advocate. He
replied that he took care to press home the one principal
point of the case, without paying much regard to the
others. He also said that he knew the secret of being
short. ‘I find,’ said he, ‘that when I exceed half an hour,
I am always doing mischief to my client. If I drive into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
the heads of the jury unimportant matter, I drive out
matter more important that I had previously lodged
there.’”</p>

<p>Joubert, a French author, cultivated verbal economy
to such an extreme that he tried almost to do without
words. “If there is a man on earth,” said he, “tormented
by the cursed desire to get a whole book into a page, a
whole page into a phrase, and this phrase into one word,&mdash;that
man is myself.” The ambition of many American
speakers, and not a few writers, is apparently the reverse
of this. We do not seem to know that in many cases,
as Hesiod says, a half is more than the whole; and that
a speech or a treatise hammered out painfully in every
part is often of less value than a few bright links, suggestive
of the entire chain of thought. Who wants to
swallow a whole ox, in order to get at the tenderloin?</p>

<p>Prolixity, it has been well said, is more offensive now
than it once was, because men think more rapidly. They
are not more thoughtful than their ancestors, but they
are more vivid, direct, and animated in their thinking.
They are more impatient, therefore, of long-windedness,
of a loose arrangement, and of a heavy, dragging movement
in the presentation of truth. “A century ago men
would listen to speeches and sermons,&mdash;to divisions and
subdivisions,&mdash;that now would be regarded as utterly
intolerable. As the human body is whisked through space
at the rate of a mile a minute, so the human mind travels
with an equally accelerated pace. Mental operations are
on straight lines, and are far more rapid than they once
were. The public audience now craves a short method,
a distinct, sharp statement, and a rapid and accelerating
movement, upon the part of its teachers.”<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> It is, in
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
short, an age of steam and electricity that we live in, not
of slow coaches; an age of locomotives, electric telegraphs,
and phonography; and hence it is the cream of a speaker’s
thoughts that men want,&mdash;the wheat, and not the chaff,&mdash;the
kernel, and not the shell,&mdash;the strong, pungent essence,
and not the thin, diluted mixture. The model discourse
to-day is that which gives, not all that can be said, even
<em>well</em> said, on a subject, but the very <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">apices rerum</i>, the tops
and sums of things reduced to their simplest expression,&mdash;the
drop of oil extracted from thousands of roses, and
condensing all their odors,&mdash;the healing power of a hundred
weight of bark in a few grains of quinine.</p>

<p>“Certainly the greatest and wisest conceptions that ever
issued from the mind of man,” says South, “have been
couched under, and delivered in, a few close, home, and
significant words.... Was not the work of all the six
days [of creation] transacted in so many words?...
Heaven, and earth, and all the host of both, as it were,
dropped from God’s mouth, and nature itself was but the
product of a word.... The seven wise men of Greece,
so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired
all that fame, each of them by a single sentence consisting
of two or three words. And <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">γνῶθι σεαυτὸν</span> still lives and
flourishes in the mouths of all, while many vast volumes
are extinct, and sunk into dust and utter oblivion.”</p>

<p>Akin to the prolixity of style which weakens so many
speeches, is the habitual exaggeration of language which
deforms both our public and our private discourse. The
most unmanageable of all parts of speech, with many
persons, is the adjective. Voltaire has justly said that
the adjectives are often the greatest enemies of the substantives,
though they may agree in gender, number, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
case. Generally the weakness of a composition is just in
proportion to the frequency with which this class of words
is introduced. As in gunnery the force of the discharge
is proportioned, not to the amount of powder that can be
used, but to the amount that can be thoroughly ignited,
so it is not the multitude of words, but the exact number
fired by the thought, that gives energy to expression.
There are some writers and speakers who seem to have
forgotten that there are three degrees of comparison.
The only adjectives they ever use are the superlative, and
even these are raised to the <em>third power</em>. With them
there is no gradation, no lights and shadows. Every hill
is Alpine, every valley Tartarean; every virtue is godlike,
every fault a felony; every breeze a tempest, and every
molehill a mountain. Praise or blame beggars their
vocabulary; epithets are heightened into superlatives;
superlatives stretch themselves into hyperboles; and
hyperboles themselves get out of breath, and die asthmatically
of exhaustion.</p>

<p>Of all the civilized peoples on the face of the globe,
our Hibernian friends excepted, Americans are probably
the most addicted to this exaggeration of speech. As our
mountains, lakes and rivers are all on a gigantic scale,
we seem to think our speech must be framed after the same
pattern. Even our jokes are of the most stupendous kind;
they set one to thinking of the Alleghanies, or suggest
the immensity of the prairies. A Western orator, in
portraying the most trivial incident, rolls along a Mississippian
flood of eloquence, and the vastness of his metaphors
makes you think you are living in the age of the
megatheriums and saurians, and listening to one of a
pre-Adamite race. Our political speeches, instead of being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
couched in plain and temperate language, too often
bristle</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">“With terms unsquared</p>
<p class="verse0">Which, from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropped,</p>
<p class="verse0">Would seem hyperboles.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">In ordinary conversation, such is our enthusiasm or our
poverty of expression, that we cannot talk upon the most
ordinary themes, except in the most extravagant and enraptured
terms. Everything that pleases us is positively
“delicious,” “nice,” or “charming”; everything handsome
is “elegant,” or “splendid”; everything that we dislike is
“hateful,” “dreadful,” “horrible,” or “shocking.” Listen
to a circle of lively young ladies for a few minutes, and
you will learn that, within the compass of a dozen hours,
they have met with more marvellous adventures and hairbreadth
escapes,&mdash;passed through more thrilling experiences,
and seen more gorgeous spectacles,&mdash;endured more
fright, and enjoyed more rapture,&mdash;than could be crowded
into a whole life-time, even if spun out to threescore and
ten.</p>

<p>Ask a person what he thinks of the weather in a rainy
season, and he will tell you that “it rains cats and dogs,”
or that “it beats all the storms since the flood.” If his
clothes get sprinkled in crossing the street, he has been
“drenched to the skin.” All our winds blow a hurricane;
all our fires are conflagrations,&mdash;even though only a hen-coop
is burned; all our fogs can be cut with a knife. Nobody
fails in this country; he “bursts up.” All our
orators rival Demosthenes in eloquence; they beat Chillingworth
in logic; and their sarcasm is more “withering”
than that of Junius himself. Who ever heard of a public
meeting in this country that was not “an immense<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
demonstration”; of an actor’s benefit at which the house
was not “crowded from pit to dome”; of a political nomination
that was not “sweeping the country like wild-fire”?
Where is the rich man who does not “roll in wealth”;
or the poor man who is “worth the first red cent”? All
our good men are paragons of virtue,&mdash;our villains, monsters
of iniquity.</p>

<p>Many of our public speakers seem incapable of expressing
themselves in a plain, calm, truthful manner on any
subject whatever. A great deal of our writing, too, is
pitched on an unnatural, falsetto key. Quiet ease of style,
like that of Cowley’s “Essays,” Goldsmith’s “Vicar of
Wakefield,” or White’s “Natural History of Selborne,” is
almost a lost art. Our newspaper literature is becoming
more and more sensational; and it seems sometimes as if
it would come to consist of head-lines and exclamation
points. Some of the most popular correspondents are
those whose communications are a perfect <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">florilegium</i> of
fine words. They rival the “tulipomania” in their love of
gaudy and glaring colors, and apparently care little how
trite or feeble their thoughts may be, provided they have
dragon-wings, all green and gold. It was said of Rufus
Choate, whose brain teemed with a marvellous wealth of
words, and who was very prodigal of adjectives, that he
“drove a substantive-and-six” whenever he spoke in public,
and that he would be as pathetic as the grand lamentations
in “Samson Agonistes” on the obstruction of fish-ways,
and rise to the cathedral music of the universe on
the right to manufacture India-rubber suspenders. When
Chief-Justice Shaw, before whom he had often pleaded,
heard that there was a new edition of “Worcester’s Dictionary,”
containing two thousand five hundred new words,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
he exclaimed, “For heaven’s sake, don’t let Choate get hold
of it!”<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>

<p>Even scientific writers, who might be expected to aim at
some exactness, often caricature truth with equal grossness,
describing microscopic things by colossal metaphors. Thus
a French naturalist represents the blood of a louse as
“rushing through his veins like a torrent!” Even in
treating on this very subject of exaggeration, a writer in
an English periodical, after rebuking sharply this <em>American</em>
fault, himself outrages truth by declaring that “he
would walk fifty miles on foot to see the man that never
caricatures the subject on which he speaks!” To a critic
who thus fails to reck his own rede, one may say with Sir
Thomas Browne: “Thou who so hotly disclaimest the
devil, be not thyself guilty of diabolism.”</p>

<p>Seriously, when shall we have done with this habit of
amplification and exaggeration,&mdash;of blowing up molehills
into Himalayas and Chimborazos? Can anything be more
obvious than the dangers of such a practice? Is it not
evident that by applying super-superlatives to things petty
or commonplace, we must exhaust our vocabulary, so that,
when a really great thing is to be described, we shall be
bankrupt of adjectives? It is true there is no more unpardonable
sin than dulness; but, to avoid being drowsy, it is
not necessary that our “good Homers” should be always
electrifying us with a savage intensity of expression.
There is nothing of which a reader tires so soon as of a
continual blaze of brilliant periods,&mdash;a style in which a
“<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">qu’il mourut</i>” and a “let there be light” are crowded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
into every line. On the other hand, there is nothing which
adds so much to the beauty of style as contrast. Where
all men are giants, there are no giants; where all is emphatic
in style, there is no emphasis. Travel a few months
among the mountains, and you will grow as sick of the
everlasting monotony of grandeur, of beetling cliffs and
yawning chasms, as of an eternal succession of plains.
Yet, in defiance of this obvious truth, the sensational
writer thinks the reader will deem him dull unless every
sentence blazes with meaning, and every paragraph is
crammed with power. His intellect is always armed
cap-a-pie, and every passage is an approved attitude of
mental carte and tierce. If he were able to create a
world, there would probably be no latent heat in it, and
no twilight; and should he drop his pen and turn painter,
his pictures would be all foreground, with no more
perspective than those of the Chinese.</p>

<p>De Quincey, speaking of the excitability of the French,
says that, having appropriated all the phrases of passion
to the service of trivial and ordinary life, they have no
language of passion for the service of poetry, or of occasions
really demanding it, because it has been already
enfeebled by continual association with cases of an unimpassioned
order. “Ah, Heavens!” or “O my God!” are
exclamations so exclusively reserved by the English for
cases of profound interest that, on hearing a woman even
utter such words, they look round expecting to see her
child in some situation of danger. But in France “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Ciel!</i>”
and “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">O mon Dieu!</i>” are uttered by every woman if a
mouse does but run across the floor. There is much
suggestive truth in this. By the habitual use of strong
language men may blunt and petrify their feelings, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
surely as by the excessive use of alcoholic stimulants they
may deaden the sensibility of the palate. “Naturally the
strongest word ought to be used to give expression to the
strongest feeling. But strong words have been so blunted
through frequent use that they have lost their sharp edge,
and pass over our thick skin without even pricking our
sensibility; while, at moments when we expect a heavy
blow, the light tickling of the socially polite feather may
far more vividly stimulate our sensibility.”</p>

<p>It is a law of oratory, and indeed of all discourse,
whether oral or written, that it is the subdued expression
of conviction and feeling, when the speaker or writer, instead
of giving vent to his emotions, veils them in part,
and suffers only glimpses of them to be seen, that is the
most powerful. It is the man who is all <em>but</em> mastered
by his excitement, but who, at the very point of being
mastered, masters himself,&mdash;apparently cool when he is
at a white heat,&mdash;whose eloquence is most conquering.
When the speaker, using a gentler mode of expression
than the case might warrant, appears to stifle his feelings
and studiously to keep them within bounds, a reaction is
produced in the hearer’s mind, and, rushing into the
opposite extreme, he is moved more deeply than by the
most vehement and passionate declamation. The jets of
flame that escape now and then,&mdash;the suppressed bursts
of feeling,&mdash;the partial eruptions of passion,&mdash;are regarded
as but hints or faint intimations of the volcano within.
Balzac, in one of his tales, tells of an artist, who, by a
few touches of his pencil, could give to a most commonplace
scene an air of overpowering horror, and throw over
the most ordinary and prosaic objects a spectral air of
crime and blood. Through a half-opened door you see a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
bed with the clothes confusedly heaped, as in some death-struggle,
over an undefined object which fancy whispers
must be a bleeding corpse; on the floor you see a slipper,
an upset candlestick, and a knife perhaps; and these
hints tell the story of blood more significantly and more
powerfully than the most elaborate detail, because the
imagination of man is more powerful than art itself.
So with Hood’s description of the Haunted House:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Over all there hung a cloud of fear;</p>
<p class="verse2">A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,</p>
<p class="verse0">And said, as plain as whisper to the ear,</p>
<p class="verse2">‘The place is haunted!’”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Thoreau, describing an interview he had at Concord
with John Brown, notices as one of the latter’s marked
peculiarities, that he did not overstate anything, but spoke
within bounds. “He referred to what his family had
suffered in Kansas, without ever giving the least vent to
his pent-up fire. <em>It was a volcano with an ordinary
chimney-flue.</em>” In one of the published letters of the late
Rev. F. W. Robertson, there are some admirable comments
on a letter, full of strongly expressed religious sentiments,
pious resolutions, etc., which he had received from a
fashionable lady. The letter, he says, “is in earnest so
far as it goes; only <em>that fatal facility of strong words</em>
expresses feeling which will seek for itself no other expression.
She believes or means what she says, but the
very vehemence of the expression injures her, for really
it expresses the penitence of a St. Peter, and would not
be below the mark if it were meant to describe the bitter
tears with which he bewailed his crime; but when
such language is used for trifles, there remains <em>nothing
stronger for the awful crises of human life</em>. It is like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
Draco’s code,&mdash;death for larceny; and there remains for
parricide or treason only death.”</p>

<p>Let us then be as chary of our superlatives as of our
Sunday suit. Hardly a greater mistake can be made in
regard to expression, than to suppose that a uniform
intensity of style is a proof of mental power. So far is
this from being true, that it may safely be said that such
intensity not only implies a want of truthfulness and simplicity,
but even of earnestness and real force. Intensity
is not a characteristic of nature, in spirit or in matter.
The surface of the earth is not made up of mountains and
valleys, but, for the most part, of gentle undulations. The
ocean is not always in a rage, but, if not calm, its waves
rise and fall with gentle fluctuation. Hurricanes and
tempests are the extraordinary, not the usual, conditions
of our atmosphere. Not only the strongest thinkers, but
the most powerful orators, have been distinguished rather
for moderation than for exaggeration in expression. The
great secret of Daniel Webster’s strength as a speaker lay
in the fact that he made it a practice to understate rather
than to overstate his confidence in the force of his own
arguments, and in the logical necessity of his conclusions.
The sober and solid tramp of his style reflected the movements
of an intellect that palpably respected the relations
and dimensions of things, and to which exaggeration
would have been an immorality. Holding that violence
of language is evidence of feebleness of thought and
lack of reasoning power, he kept his auditor constantly in
advance of him, by suggestion rather than by strong asseveration,
and by calmly stating the facts that <em>ought</em> to
move the hearer, instead of by making passionate appeals,
the man being always felt to be greater than the man’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
feelings. Such has been the method of all great rhetoricians
of ancient and modern times.</p>

<p>The most effective speakers are not those who tell all
they think or feel, but those who, by maintaining an
austere conscientiousness of phrase, leave on their hearers
the impression of reserved power. Great bastions of military
strength must lie at rest in times of peace, that they
may be able to execute their destructive agencies in times
of war; and so let it be with the superlatives of our
tongue. Never call on the “tenth legion,” or “the old
guard,” except on occasions corresponding to the dignity
and weight of those tremendous forces. Say plain things
in a plain way, and then, when you have occasion to send
a sharp arrow at your enemy, you will not find your
quiver empty of shafts which you wasted before they
were wanted.</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“You should not speak to think, nor think to speak;</p>
<p class="verse0">But words and thoughts should of themselves outwell</p>
<p class="verse0">From inner fulness; chest and heart should swell</p>
<p class="verse0">To give them birth. Better be dumb a week</p>
<p class="verse0">Than idly prattle; better in leisure sleek</p>
<p class="verse0">Lie fallow-minded, than a brain compel</p>
<p class="verse0">To wasting plenty that hath yielded well,</p>
<p class="verse0">Or strive to crop a soil too thin and bleak.</p>
<p class="verse0">One true thought, from the deepest heart upspringing,</p>
<p class="verse0">May from within a whole life fertilize;</p>
<p class="verse0">One true word, like the lightning sudden gleaming,</p>
<p class="verse0">May rend the night of a whole world of lies.</p>
<p class="verse0">Much speech, much thought, may often be but seeming,</p>
<p class="verse0">But in one truth might boundless ever lies.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> Shedd’s “Homiletics.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> Perhaps Choate justified himself by the authority of Burke, who sometimes
harnessed five adjectives to a noun; <em>e.g.</em>, in his diatribe against the metaphysicians,
he says: “Their hearts are like that of the principal of evil himself,&mdash;incorporeal,
pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil.”</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER VII.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC?</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>I cannot admire the constant use of French or Latin words, instead of
your own vernacular. My Anglo-Saxon feelings are wounded to the quick ... by
such words as <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">chagrin</i> instead of “grief,” <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">malediction</i> instead of “curse,”
etc.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Count De Montalembert</span>, in letter to Mrs. Oliphant.</p>

<p>The devil does not care for your dialectics and eclectic homiletics, or
Germanic objectives and subjectives; but pelt him with Anglo-Saxon in the
name of God, and he will shift his quarters.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Rev. C. H. Spurgeon.</span></p></div>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Words have their proper places, just like men;</p>
<p class="verse0">We listen to, not venture to reprove,</p>
<p class="verse0">Large language swelling under gilded domes,</p>
<p class="verse0">Byzantine, Syrian, Persepolitan.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Landor.</span></p>
</div></div>
</div>


<p class="drop-capy1">It is a question of deep interest to all public speakers
and writers, and one which has provoked not a little
discussion of late years, whether the Saxon or the Romanic
part of our language should be preferred by those who
would employ “the Queen’s English” with potency and
effect. Of late it has been the fashion to cry up the
native element at the expense of the foreign; and among
the champions of the former we may name Dr. Whewell,
of Cambridge, and a modern rector of the University of
Glasgow, whom De Quincey censures for an erroneous
direction to the students to that effect. We may also
add Lord Stanley,&mdash;one of the most brilliant and polished
speakers in the British Parliament,&mdash;who, in an
address some years ago to the students of the same
university, after expressing his surprise that so few persons,
comparatively, in Great Britain, have acquainted
themselves with the origin, the history, and the gradual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
development of that mother tongue which is already
spoken over half the world, which is destined to yet
further geographical extension, and which embodies many
of the noblest thoughts that have ever issued from the
brain of man,&mdash;adds: “Depend upon it, it is the plain
Saxon phrase, not the term borrowed from Greek or
Roman literature, that, whether in speech or writing, goes
straightest and strongest to men’s heads and hearts.” On
the other hand “the Opium-Eater,” commenting on a remark
of Coleridge that Wordsworth’s “Excursion” bristles
beyond most poems with polysyllabic words of Greek or
Latin origin, asserts that so must it ever be in meditative
poetry upon solemn, philosophic themes. The gamut of
ideas needs a corresponding gamut of expressions; the
scale of the thinking, which ranges through every key,
exacts for the artist an unlimited command over the
entire scale of the instrument he employs.</p>

<p>It has been computed, he adds, that the Italian opera
has not above six hundred words in its whole vocabulary;
so narrow is the range of its emotions, and so little are
those emotions disposed to expand themselves into any
variety of thinking. The same remark applies to that
class of simple, household, homely passion, which belongs
to the early ballad poetry. “Pass from these narrow
fields of the intellect, where the relations of the objects
are so few and simple, and the whole prospect so bounded,
to the immeasurable and sea-like arena upon which
Shakespeare careers,&mdash;co-infinite with life itself,&mdash;yes,
and with something more than life. Here is the other
pole, the opposite extreme. And what is the choice of
diction? What is the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">lexis</i>? Is it Saxon exclusively, or
is it Saxon by preference? So far from that, the Latinity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
is intense,&mdash;not, indeed, in his construction, but in his
choice of words; and so continually are these Latin words
used, with a critical respect to their earliest (and where
<em>that</em> happens to have existed, to their unfigurative) meaning,
that, upon this one argument I would rely for upsetting
the else impregnable thesis of Dr. Farmer as to
Shakespeare’s learning.... These ‘dictionary’ words are
indispensable to a writer, not only in the proportion by
which he transcends other writers as to extent and as to
subtlety of thinking, but also as to elevation and sublimity.
Milton was not an extensive or discursive
thinker, as Shakespeare was; for the motions of his mind
were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets;
not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things into
its sphere; not multiform; repulsion was the law of his
intellect,&mdash;he moved in solitary grandeur. Yet, merely
from this quality of grandeur,&mdash;unapproachable grandeur,&mdash;his
intellect demanded a larger infusion of Latinity
into his diction.” De Quincey concludes, therefore, that
the true scholar will manifest a partiality for neither part
of the language, but will be governed in his choice of
words by the theme he is handling.</p>

<p>This we believe to be the true answer to the question.
The English language has a special dowry of power in
its double-headed origin: the Saxon part of the language
fulfils one set of functions; the Latin, another. Neither
is good or bad absolutely, but only in its relation to its
subject, and according to the treatment which the subject
is meant to receive. The Saxon has nerve, terseness, and
simplicity; it smacks of life and experience, and “puts
small and convenient handles to things,&mdash;handles that
are easy to grasp;” but it has neither height nor breadth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
for every theme. To confine ourselves to it would be,
therefore, a most egregious error. The truth is, it is no
one element which constitutes the power and efficiency of
our noble and expressive tongue, but the great multitude
and the rich variety of the elements which enter into its
composition. Its architectural order is neither Doric,
Ionic, nor Corinthian, but essentially composite; a splendid
mosaic, to the formation of which many ancient and
modern languages have contributed; defective in unity
and symmetrical grace of proportion, but of vast resources
and of immense power. With such a wealth of words at
our command, to confine ourselves to the pithy but limited
Saxon, or to employ it chiefly, would be to practise
a foolish economy,&mdash;to be poor in the midst of plenty,
like the miser amid his money bags. All experiments
of this kind will fail as truly, if not as signally, as that
of Charles James Fox, who, an intense admirer of the
Saxon, attempted to portray in that dialect the revolution
of 1688, and produced a book which his warmest admirers
admitted to be meagre, dry, and spiritless,&mdash;without picturesqueness,
color, or cadence.</p>

<p>It is true that within a certain limited and narrow
circle of ideas, we can get along with Saxon words very
well. The loftiest poetry, the most fervent devotion,
even the most earnest and impassioned oratory, may all
be expressed in words almost purely Teutonic; but the
moment we come to the abstract and the technical,&mdash;to
discussion and speculation,&mdash;we cannot stir a step without
drawing on foreign sources. Simple narrative,&mdash;a
pathos resting upon artless circumstances,&mdash;elementary
feelings,&mdash;homely and household affections,&mdash;these are all
most happily expressed by the old Saxon vocabulary; but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>
a passion which rises into grandeur, which is complex,
elaborate, and interveined with high meditative feelings,
would languish or absolutely halt, without aid from the
Romanic part of the vocabulary. If Anglo-Saxon is the
framework or skeleton of our language, the spine on
which the structure of our speech is hung,&mdash;if it is the
indispensable medium of familiar converse and the business
of life,&mdash;it no more fills out the full and rounded
outline of our language, than the skeleton, nerves, and
sinews form the whole of the human body. It is the
classical contributions, the hundreds and thousands of
Romanic words which during and since the sixteenth century
have found a home in our English speech, that have
furnished its spiritual conceptions, and endowed the material
body with a living soul.</p>

<p>These words would never have been adopted, had they
not been absolutely necessary to express new modes and
combinations of thought. As children of softer climes
and gentler aspect than our harsh but pithy Teutonic
terms, they have been received into the English family of
words, and add grace and elegance to the speech that has
adopted them. The language has gained immensely by
the infusion, not only in richness of synonym and the
power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling,
but, more than all, in light-footed polysyllables that trip
singing to the music of verse. If the saying of Shakespeare,
that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“The learned pate ducks to the golden fool,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">is more expressive than it would be if couched in Latin
words, would not the fine thought that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Nice customs courtesy to kings,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">be greatly injured by substituting any other words for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
“nice” and “courtesy”? Because Shakespeare’s “oak-cleaving
thunderbolts” is so admirable, shall we fail to
appreciate Milton’s “fulmined over Greece,” where the
idea of flash and reverberation is conveyed, without that
of riving and shattering? It has been observed that
Wordsworth’s famous ode, “Intimations of Immortality,”
translated into “Hints of Deathlessness,” would hiss like
an angry gander. Instead of Shakespeare’s</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse4">“Age cannot wither her.</p>
<p class="verse0">Nor custom stale her infinite variety,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">say “her boundless manifoldness,” and would not the sentiment
suffer in exact proportion with the music? With
what terms equally expressive would you supply the place
of such words as the long ones blended with the short in
the exclamation of the horror-stricken Macbeth?&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood</p>
<p class="verse0">Clean from my hand? No! this my hand will rather</p>
<p class="verse0">The multitudinous sea incarnadine,</p>
<p class="verse0">Making the green one red.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>As the poet Lowell justly asks, could anything be more
expressive than the huddling epithet which here implies
the tempest-tossed soul of the speaker, and at the same time
pictures the wallowing waste of ocean more vividly than
does Æschylus its rippling sunshine? “‘Multitudinous
sea,’&mdash;what an expression! You feel the wide weltering
waste of confused and tumbling waves around you in
that single word. What beauty and wealth of color too
in ‘incarnadine,’ a word capable of dyeing an ocean! and
then, after these grand polysyllables, how terse and stern
comes in the solid Saxon, as if a vast cloud had condensed
into great heavy drops,&mdash;the deep one red.”<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> Is it not
plain that if you substitute any less massive words for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">sesquipedalia verba</i>, the sonorous terms “multitudinous”
and “incarnadine,” the whole grandeur of the passage
would collapse at once?</p>

<p>Among the British orators of this century few have
had a greater command of language, or used it with nicer
discrimination, than Canning. What can be happier than
the blending of the native and the foreign elements in
the following eloquent passage? Most of the italicized
words are Saxon:</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>“Our present repose is no more a proof of our inability to act than the
state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen <em>those mighty masses
that float in the waters above your town</em> is a proof that they are devoid of
strength or incapable of being fitted for action. You well know, gentlemen,
how soon one of those stupendous <em>masses now reposing on their shadows in
perfect stillness</em>&mdash;how soon, upon any call of patriotism or of necessity, it
would assume <em>the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and motion</em>&mdash;how
soon it <em>would ruffle</em>, as it were, <em>its swelling plumage&mdash;how quickly it would
put forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered</em> elements <em>of strength,
and awake its dormant thunders</em>. Such as is one of those magnificent machines
when springing from inaction into a display of its strength, such is England
itself, while, apparently passive and motionless, she silently causes her power
to be put forth on an adequate occasion.”</p></div>

<p>In the famous passage in Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,”
which has been pronounced the most musical in our language,
nearly all the words are Saxon:</p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>“The accusing spirit that flew up to Heaven’s chancery with the oath,
blushed as he gave it in, and the recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropped
a tear upon the word, and blotted it out forever.”</p></div>

<p>On the other hand, in the following passage from
Napier’s history of the Peninsular War,&mdash;in which the
impetuosity of the style almost rivals that of the soldiers it
describes, and in reading which we seem almost to hear the
tramp and the shouts of the charging squadrons, and the
sharp rattle of the musketry,&mdash;how indispensable to the
effect of the description are the Romance words, which we
have italicized:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span></p>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>“Suddenly and sternly <em>recovering</em>, they closed on their <em>terrible</em> enemies: and
then was seen with what a strength and <em>majesty</em> the British <em>soldier</em> fights. In
vain did Soult, by <em>voice</em> and gesture, <em>animate</em> his Frenchmen; in vain did the
hardiest <em>veterans, extricating</em> themselves from the crowded <em>columns, sacrifice</em>
their lives to gain time for the mass to open out on such a fair field; in
vain did the mass itself bear up, and, fiercely striving, fire <em>indiscriminately</em>
upon friends and foes, while the horsemen hovering on the <em>flank</em> threatened to
<em>charge</em> the <em>advancing</em> line. Nothing could stop that <em>astonishing infantry</em>; no
sudden burst of <em>undisciplined valor</em>, no nervous <em>enthusiasm</em>, weakened the <em>stability</em>
of their <em>order</em>; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark <em>columns</em> in their
<em>front</em>; their <em>measured</em> tread shook the ground; their dreadful <em>volleys</em> swept
away the head of every <em>formation</em>; their deafening shouts overpowered the
<em>different cries</em> that broke from all <em>parts</em> of the <em>tumultuous</em> crowd, as, foot by
foot, and with a <em>horrid carnage</em>, it was driven by the <em>incessant vigor</em> of the
<em>attack</em> to the furthest edge of the hill. In vain did the French <em>reserves</em>, joining
with the struggling <em>multitudes, endeavor to sustain</em> the fight; their <em>efforts</em> only
<em>increased</em> the <em>irremediable confusion</em>, and the mighty mass, giving way like a
loosened cliff, went headlong down the <em>ascent</em>. The rain poured after in streams
<em>discolored</em> with blood, and fifteen hundred unwounded men, the <em>remnant</em> of six
thousand <em>unconquerable</em> British <em>soldiers</em>, stood <em>triumphant</em> on the <em>fatal</em> field.”</p></div>

<p>It is true, as we have already said, that the Saxon has
the advantage of being the aboriginal element, the basis,
and not the superstructure, of the language; it is the dialect
of the nursery, and its words therefore, being consecrated
to the feelings by early use, are full of secret
suggestions and echoes, which greatly multiply their power.
Its words, though not intrinsically, yet to us, from association,
are more concrete and pictorial than those derived
from the Latin; and this is particularly true of many beautiful
words we have lost. How much more expressive to
us is “sea-robber” than “pirate”; “sand-waste” than
“desert”; “eye-bite” than “fascinate”; “mill-race” than
“channel”; “water-fright” than “hydrophobia”; “moonling”
than “lunatic”; “show-holiness” than “hypocrisy”;
“in-wit” than “conscience”; “gold-hoard” than “treasure”;
“ship-craft” than “the art of navigation”; “hand-cloth”
than “towel”; “book-craft” than “literature”!
Therefore, as De Quincey says, “wherever the passion of a
poem is of that sort which <em>uses, presumes, or postulates</em> the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
ideas, without seeking to extend them, Saxon will be the
‘cocoon’ (to speak by the language applied to silk-worms),
which the poem spins for itself. But on the other hand,
where the motion of the feeling is <em>by</em> and <em>through</em> the ideas,
where (as in religious or meditative poetry,&mdash;Young’s, for
instance, or Cowper’s) the pathos creeps and kindles underneath
the very tissues of the thinking,&mdash;there the Latin will
predominate; and so much so that, while the flesh, the
blood, and the muscle will be often almost exclusively Latin,
the articulations only, or hinges of connection, will be
Anglo-Saxon.”</p>

<p>Let us be thankful, then, that our language has other
elements than the Saxon, admirable as that is. The circumstances
under which this element had its origin were such
as to impart strength rather than beauty or elegance. The
language of our continental forefathers was the language
of fierce barbarians, hemmed in by other barbarous tribes,
and having no intercourse with foreign nations, except
when roving as sea wolves to plunder and destroy. It was
the speech of a taciturn people living only in gloomy
forests and on stormy seas, and was naturally, therefore,
harsh and monosyllabic. It was full, nevertheless, of pithy,
bold, and vigorous expressions, and needed only that its
hardy stock should receive the grafts of sunnier and softer
climes, to bear abundant and beautiful fruit. Let us be
thankful that this union took place. Let us be grateful for
that inheritance of collateral wealth, which, by engrafting
our Anglo-Saxon stem with the mixed dialect of Normandy,
caused ultimately the whole opulence of Roman, and even
of Grecian thought, to play freely through the veins of our
native tongue. No doubt the immediate result was anything
but pleasant. For a long time after the language<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
was thrown again into the crucible, Britons, Saxons and
Normans talked a jargon fit neither for gods nor men. It
was a chaos of language, hissing, sputtering, bubbling like
a witch’s caldron. But luckily the Saxon element was yet
plastic and unfrozen, so that the new elements could fuse
with its own, thus forming that wondrous instrument of
expression which we now enjoy, fitted fully to reflect the
thoughts of the myriad-minded Shakespeare, yet, at the
same time, with enough remaining of its old forest stamina
for imparting a masculine depth to the sublimities of
Milton or the Hebrew prophets, and to the Historic Scriptures
that patriarchal simplicity which is one of their
greatest charms.</p>

<p>We are aware that, in reply to all this, it may be
asked, “Are not ninety-three words out of every hundred
in the Bible Anglo-Saxon; and where are the life, beauty
and freshness of our language to be found in so heaped
a measure as in that ‘pure well of English,’ the Bible?”
Nothing can be plainer or simpler than its vocabulary,
yet how rich is it in all that concerns the moral, the
spiritual, and even the intellectual interests of humanity!
Is it logic that we ask? What a range of abstract
thought, what an armory of dialectic weapons, what an
enginery of vocal implements for moving the soul, do
we find in the epistles of St. Paul! Is it rhetoric that
we require? “Where,” in the language of South, “do
we find such a natural prevailing pathos as in the lamentations
of Jeremiah? One would think that every letter
was written with a tear, every word was the noise of a
breaking heart; that the author was a man compacted
of sorrow, disciplined to grief from his infancy, one who
never breathed but in sighs, nor spoke but in a groan.”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
Yet, while our translation owes much of its beauty to
the Saxon, there are passages the grandeur of which
would be greatly diminished by the substitution of Saxon
words for the Latin ones. In the following the Latin
words italicized are absolutely necessary to preserve one
of the sublimest rhythms of the Bible: “And I heard,
as it were, the voice of a great <em>multitude</em>, and as the
voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings,
saying, ‘Alleluia, for the Lord God <em>Omnipotent
reigneth</em>.’”</p>

<p>The truth is, the translators of the Bible, while they
have employed a large percentage of Saxon words, have
hit the golden mean in their version, never hesitating to
use a Latin word when the sense or the rhythm demanded
it; and hence we have the entire volume of revelation
in the happiest form in which human wit and learning
have ever made it accessible to man. This an English
Catholic writer, a convert from the Anglican church, has
mournfully acknowledged, in the following touching passage:&mdash;“Who
will not say that the uncommon beauty and
marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is one of
the great strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives
on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten,
like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly
knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be
almost things rather than mere words. It is part of
the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness....
The memory of the dead passes into it. The
potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses.
The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden
beneath its words. It is the representative of his best
moments, and all that there has been about him of soft<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
and gentle, and pure and penitent and good, speaks to
him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred
thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy
never soiled.... In the length and breadth of the land
there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness
about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon
Bible.”<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>

<p>It is a very striking and suggestive fact that those
very writers who award the palm for expressiveness to
the Saxon part of our language, cannot extol the Saxon
without the help of Latin words. Dr. Gregory tells us
that when, in the company of Robert Hall, he chanced
to use the term “felicity” three or four times in rather
quick succession, the latter asked him: “Why do you say
‘felicity’? ‘Happiness’ is a better word, more musical,
and genuine English, coming from the Saxon.” “Not
more musical,” said Dr. Gregory. “Yes, more musical,&mdash;and
so are all words derived from the Saxon, generally.
Listen, sir: ‘My heart is smitten, and withered like
grass.’ There is plaintive music. Listen again, sir:
‘Under the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.’ There is
cheerful music.” “Yes, but ‘rejoice’ is French.” “True,
but all the rest is Saxon; and ‘rejoice’ is almost out of
time with the other words. Listen again: ‘Thou hast
delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and
my feet from falling.’ All Saxon, sir, except ‘delivered.’
I could think of the word ‘tear’ till I wept.” But whence
did Robert Hall get the words “musical” and “plaintive
music”? Are they not from the Greek and the French?
Is not this stabbing a man with his own weapons? It
is a curious fact, that, in spite of this eulogy on Saxon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
words, a more than ordinary percentage of the words
used in Mr. Hall’s writings are of Romanic origin.
Again, even Macaulay, one of the most brilliant and
powerful of all English writers, finds it impossible to
laud the Saxon part of the language without borrowing
nearly half the words of his famous panegyric from the
Romanic part of the vocabulary. In his article on Bunyan,
in a passage written in studied commendation of
the “pure old Saxon” English, we find, omitting the
particles and wheelwork, one hundred and twenty-one
words, of which fifty-one, or over forty-two per cent,
are classical or alien. In other words, this great English
writer, than whom few have a more imperial command
over all the resources of expression, finds the Saxon
insufficient for his eloquent eulogy on Saxon, and is
obliged to borrow four-tenths of his words, and those the
most emphatic ones, from the imported stock!</p>

<p>It is an important fact, that while we can readily frame
a sentence wholly of Anglo-Saxon, we cannot do so with
words entirely Latin, because the determinative particles,&mdash;the
bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure,&mdash;must be
Saxon. Macaulay, in his famous contrast of Dr. Johnson’s
conversational language with that of his writings, has
vividly illustrated the superiority of a Saxon-English to a
highly Latinized diction. “The expressions which came
first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque.
When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out
of English into Johnsonese. ‘When we were taken up
stairs,’ says he in one of his letters from the Hebrides,
‘a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of
us was to lie.’ This incident is recorded in his published
Journey as follows: ‘Out of one of the beds on which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man as
black as a Cyclops from the forge.’ Sometimes,” Macaulay
adds, “Johnson translated aloud. ‘The Rehearsal,’ he said,
‘has not wit enough to keep it sweet;’ then, after a pause,
‘It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.’”
Doubtless Johnson, like Robertson, Hume, and
Gibbon, thought that he was refining the language by
straining it through the lees of Latin and Greek, so as to
imbue it with the tone and color of the learned tongues,
and clear it of the barbarous Saxon; while real purity
rather springs from such words as are our own, and
peculiar to our fatherland. Nevertheless, the elephantine
diction of the Doctor proved, in the end, a positive blessing
to the language; for by pushing the artificial or
classic system to an extreme, it brought it into disrepute,
and led men to cultivate again the native idiom.</p>

<p>In conclusion, to sum up our views of the matter, we
would say to every young writer: Give no fantastic
preference to either Saxon or Latin, the two great wings
on which our magnificent English soars and sings, for you
can spare neither. The union of the two gives us an
affluence of synonyms and a nicety of discrimination which
no homogeneous tongue can boast. To know how to use
each in due degree, and on proper occasions,&mdash;when to
aim at vigor and when at refinement of expression,&mdash;to
be energetic without coarseness, and polished without
affectation,&mdash;is the highest proof of a cultivated taste.
Never use a Romanic word when a Teutonic one will do
as well; for the former carries a comparatively cold and
conventional signification to an English ear. Between the
sounding Latin and the homely, idiomatic Saxon, there is
often as much difference in respect to a power of awakening<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
associations, as between a gong and a peal of village
bells. Pleasant though it be to read the pages of one
who writes in a foreign tongue, as it is pleasant to visit
distant lands, yet there is always the charm of home, with
all its witchery, in the good old Anglo-Saxon of our fathers.
Of the words that we heard in our childhood, there are
some which have stored up in them an ineffable sweetness
and flavor, which make them precious ever after;
there are others which are words of might, of power,&mdash;old,
brawny, large-meaning words, heavily laden with
associations,&mdash;which, when they strike the imagination,
awaken tender and tremulous memories, obscure, subtle,
and yet most powerful. The orator and the poet can
never employ these terms without great advantage; their
very sound is often a spell “to conjure withal.” Our
language is essentially Teutonic; the whole skeleton of it
is thoroughly so; all its grammatical forms, all its most
common and necessary words, are still identical with that
old mother tongue whose varying forms lived on the lips
of Arminius and of Hengest, of Harold of Norway, and
of Harold of England, of Alaric, of Alboin, and of Charles
the Great. On the other hand, never scruple to use a
Romanic word when the Saxon will not do as well; that
is, do not over-Teutonize from any archaic pedantry, but
use the strongest, the most picturesque, or the most
beautiful word, from whatever source it may come. The
Latin words, though less home-like, must nevertheless be
deemed as truly denizen in the language as the Saxon,&mdash;as
being no alien interlopers, but possessing the full right
of citizenship. Some of them came so early into the language,
and are, therefore, so thoroughly naturalized, that
we hardly recognize them as foreign words, unless our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>
attention is particularly called to their origin. When a
person speaks of “paying money” or “paying a debt,” we
are no more sensible of an exotic effect than if he had
spoken of “eating bread,” “drinking water,” or “riding a
horse.” That “pay” is derived from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">pacare</i>, “debt” from
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">debitum</i>, or “money” from (<em>Juno</em>) <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Moneta</i>, scarcely suggests
itself even to the scholar. Perhaps of all our writers
Shakespeare may be deemed, in this matter of the choice
of words, the student’s best friend. No one better knows
how far the Saxon can go, or so often taxes its utmost
resources; yet no one better knows its poverty and weakness;
and, therefore, while in treating homely and familiar
themes he uses simple words, and shows, by his total
abstinence from Latin words in some of his most beautiful
passages, that he understands the monosyllabic music of
our tongue, yet in his loftiest flights it is on the broad
pinions of the Roman eagle that he soars, and we shall
find, if we regard him closely, that every feather is plucked
from its wing.</p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> W. W. Story.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> F. W. Faber, in “Dublin Review,” June, 1853.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER VIII.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">THE SECRET OF APT WORDS.</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Le style c’est de l’homme.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Buffon.</span></span></p>

<p>Altogether the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind;
therefore if any man wish to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his
thoughts; and if he would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble
soul.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Goethe.</span></p>

<p>No noble or right style was ever yet founded but out of a sincere heart.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ruskin.</span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy1">It was a saying of the wily diplomatist, Talleyrand, that
language was given to man to conceal his thought.
There is a class of writers at the present day who seem to
be of the same opinion,&mdash;sham philosophers for the most
part, who have an ambition to be original without the
capacity, and seek to gain the credit of soaring to the
clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist. As all objects
look larger in a fog, so their thoughts “loom up through
the haze of their style with a sort of dusky magnificence
that is mistaken for sublimity.” This style of writing is
sometimes called “transcendental”; and if by this is meant
that it transcends all the established laws of rhetoric, and
all ordinary powers of comprehension, the name is certainly
a happy one. It is a remark often made touching these
shallow-profound authors, “What a pity that So-and-so
does not express thoughts so admirable in intelligible
English!”&mdash;whereas, in fact, but for the strangeness and
obscurity of the style, which fills the ear while it famishes
the mind, the matter would seem commonplace. The simple
truth is, that the profoundest authors are always the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
clearest, and the <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">chiaro-oscuro</i> which these transcendentalists
affect, instead of shrouding thoughts which mankind
cannot well afford to lose, is but a cloak for their intellectual
nakedness,&mdash;the convenient shelter for meagreness
of thought and poverty of expression. As the banks and
shoals of the sea are the ordinary resting-place of fogs, so is
it with thought and language; the cloud almost invariably
indicates the shallow.</p>

<p>But, whether language be or be not fitted to <em>cloak</em> our
ideas, as Talleyrand and Voltaire before him supposed,
there are few persons to whom it has not seemed at times
inadequate to <em>express</em> them. How many ideas occur to us
in our daily reflections, which, though we toil after them
for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize them and render
them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand times,
the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled birds,
they have swept by him,&mdash;thoughts so swift and so many-hued
that any attempt to arrest or describe them seemed
like mockery? How common it is, after reflecting on some
subject in one’s study, or a lonely walk, till the whole mind
has become heated and filled with the ideas it suggests, to
feel a descent into the veriest tameness when attempting to
embody those ideas in written or spoken words! A thousand
bright images lie scattered in the fancy, but we
cannot picture them; glimpses of glorious visions appear
to us, but we cannot arrest them; questionable shapes float
by us, but, when we question them, they will not answer.
Even Byron, one of the greatest masters of eloquent expression,
who was able to condense into one word, that fell
like a thunderbolt, the power and anguish of emotion, experienced
the same difficulty, and tells us in lines of splendid
declamation:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Could I embody and unbosom now</p>
<p class="verse0">That which is most within me,&mdash;could I wreak</p>
<p class="verse0">My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw</p>
<p class="verse0">Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,</p>
<p class="verse0">All that I would have sought, and all I seek,</p>
<p class="verse0">Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe,&mdash;into one word,</p>
<p class="verse0">And that one word were lightning, I would speak;</p>
<p class="verse0">But, as it is, I live and die unheard,</p>
<p class="verse0">With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>So, too, that great verbal artist, Tennyson, complains:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“I sometimes hold it half a sin</p>
<p class="verse0">To put in words the grief I feel;</p>
<p class="verse0">For words, like Nature, half reveal,</p>
<p class="verse0">And half conceal the soul within.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have
not words corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly
developed nature, nor can ever express themselves in acts,
but must lie appreciable by God only, like the silent melodies
in a great musician’s heart, never to roll forth from
harp or organ.</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“The sea of thought is a boundless sea,</p>
<p class="verse0">Its brightest gems are not thrown on the beach;</p>
<p class="verse0">The waves that would tell of the mystery</p>
<p class="verse0">Die and fall on the shore of speech.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>“Thought,” says the eloquent Du Ponceau, “is vast as
the air; it embraces far more than languages can express;&mdash;or
rather, languages <em>express</em> nothing, they only make
thought flash in electric sparks from the speaker to the
hearer. A single word creates a crowd of conceptions,
which the intellect combines and marshals with lightning-like
rapidity.”</p>

<p>The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a
class of persons who have conception without expression,&mdash;gifted,
thoughtful men, lovers of goodness and truth, who
have no lack of ideas, but who hesitate and stammer when
they would put them into language. Such men they term<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
men of “passive genius.” Their minds are like black glass,
absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give out any
for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them “the dumb
ones of earth,” for, like Zacharias, they have visions of
high import, but are speechless when they would tell them.
The infirmity of these dumb ones, is, however, the infirmity,
in a less degree, of all men, even the most fluent; for there
are thoughts which mock at all attempts to express them,
however “well-languaged” the thinker may be.</p>

<p>It is not true, then, that language is, as Vinet characterizes
it, “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">la pensée devenue matière</i>”; for the very
expression involves a contradiction. Words are nothing
but symbols,&mdash;imperfect, too, at best,&mdash;and to make the
symbol in any way a measure of the thought is to bring
down the infinite to the measure of the finite. It is true
that our words mean more than it is in their power to
express,&mdash;shadow forth far more than they can define;
yet, when their capacity has been exhausted, there is
much which they fail, not only to express, but even to
hint. There are abysses of thought which the plummet
of language can never fathom. Like the line in mathematics,
which continually approaches to a curve, but,
though produced forever, does not cut it, language can
never be more than an <em>asymptote</em> to thought. Expression,
even in Shakespeare, has its limits. No power of language
enables man to reveal the features of the mystic
Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which
hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath
ever lifted my veil.”</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse16">“Full oft</p>
<p class="verse0">Our thoughts drown speech, like to a foaming force</p>
<p class="verse0">Which thunders down the echo it creates;</p>
<p class="verse0">Words are like the sea-shells on the shore; they show</p>
<p class="verse0">Where the mind ends, and not how far it has been.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span></p>

<p>Notwithstanding all this, however, there is truth in
the lines of Boileau:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">
<p class="verseq">“Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure,</p>
<p class="verse0">L’expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure;</p>
<p class="verse0">Ce que l’on concoit bien s’énonce clairement,</p>
<p class="verse0">Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In spite of the complaints of those who, like the great
poets we have quoted, have expressed in language of
wondrous force and felicity their feeling of the inadequacy
of language, it is doubtless true, as a general
thing, that impression and expression are relative ideas;
that what we clearly conceive we can clearly convey;
and that the failure to embody our thoughts is less the
fault of our mother tongue than of our own deficient
genius. What the flute or the violin is to the musician,
his native language is to the writer. The finest instruments
are dumb till those melodies are put into them
of which they can be only the passive conductors. The
most powerful and most polished language must be
wielded by the master before its full force can be known.
The Philippics of Demosthenes were pronounced in the
mother tongue of every one of his audience; but “who
among them could have answered him in a single sentence
like his own? Who among them could have
guessed what Greek could do, though they had spoken
it all their lives, till they heard it from his lips?” So
with our English tongue; it has abundant capabilities
for those who know how to use it aright. What subject,
indeed, is there in the whole boundless range of imagination,
which some English author has not treated in
his mother tongue with a nicety of definition, an accuracy
of portraiture, a gorgeousness of coloring, a delicacy of
discrimination, and a strength and force of expression,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
which fall scarcely short of perfection itself? Is there
not something almost like sorcery in the potent spell
which some of these mighty magicians of language are
able to exercise over the soul? Yet the right arrangement
of the right words is the whole secret of the
witchery,&mdash;a charm within the reach of any one of equal
genius. Possess yourself of the necessary ideas, and feel
them deeply, and you will not often complain of the
barrenness of language. You will find it abounding in
riches,&mdash;exuberant beyond the demand of your intensest
thought. “The statue is not more surely included in the
block of marble, than is all conceivable splendor of utterance
in ‘Webster’s Unabridged.’” As Goethe says:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Be thine to seek the honest gain,</p>
<p class="verse2">No shallow-sounding fool;</p>
<p class="verse0">Sound sense finds utterance for itself,</p>
<p class="verse2">Without the critic’s rule;</p>
<p class="verse0">If to your heart your tongue be true,</p>
<p class="verse2">Why hunt for words with much ado?”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>But we hear some one say,&mdash;is this the only secret of
apt words? Is nothing more necessary to be done by
one who would obtain a command of language? Does not
Dr. Blair tell us to study the “Spectator,” if we would
learn to write well; and does not Dr. Johnson, too, declare
that “whoever wishes to obtain an English style, familiar
but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give
his days and nights to the volumes of Addison?” Yes,
and it is a pity that Johnson did not act upon his own
advice. That it is well for a writer to familiarize himself
with the best models of style (models sufficiently
numerous to prevent that mannerism which is apt to
result from unconscious imitation, when he is familiar
with but one) nobody can doubt. A man’s vocabulary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
depends largely on the company lie keeps; and without a
proper vocabulary no man can he a good writer. Words
are the material that the author works in, and he must
use as much care in their selection as the sculptor in
choosing his marble, or the painter in choosing his colors.
By listening to those who speak well, by profound study
of the masterpieces of literature, by exercises in translation,
and, above all, by frequent and careful practice in
speaking and writing, he may not only enrich his vocabulary,
learn the secret of the great writer’s charm, and
elevate and refine his taste as he can in no other way,
but acquire such a mastery of language that it shall become,
at last, a willing and ready instrument, obedient
to the lightest challenge of his thought. Words, apt and
telling, will then flow spontaneously, though the result
of the subtlest art, like the waters of our city fountains,
which, with much toil and at great expense, are carried
into the public squares, yet appear to gush forth naturally.
But to suppose that a good style can be acquired
by imitating any one writer, or any set of writers, is one
of the greatest follies that can be imagined. Such a
supposition is based on the notion that fine writing is an
addition from without to the matter treated of,&mdash;a kind
of ornament superinduced, or luxury indulged in, by one
who has sufficient genius; whereas the brilliant or powerful
writer is not one who has merely a copious vocabulary,
and can turn on at will any number of splendid phrases
and swelling sentences, but he is one who has something
to say, and knows how to say it. Whether he dashes off
his compositions at a heat, or elaborates them with fastidious
nicety and care, he has but one aim, which he
keeps steadily before him, and that is to give forth what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
is in him. From this very earnestness it follows that,
whatever be the brilliancy of his diction, or the harmony
of his style,&mdash;whether it blaze with the splendors of a
gorgeous rhetoric, or take the ear prisoner with its musical
surprises,&mdash;he never makes these an end, but has always
the charm of an incommunicable simplicity.</p>

<p>Such a person “writes passionately because he feels
keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too
clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose: he can
analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces
it as a whole and in parts, and therefore he is consistent;
he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous.
When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament;
when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He
always has the right word for the right idea, and never
a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words
suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has
its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march
of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but what
all cannot say, and his sayings pass into proverbs among
the people, and his phrases become household words and
idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the
rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands
the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and
pavements of modern palaces.”<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></p>

<p>It follows from all this that there is no model style,
and that the kind of style demanded in any composition
depends upon the man and his theme. The first law of
good writing is that it should be an expression of a man’s
self,&mdash;a reflected image of his own character. If we know
what the man is, we know what his style should be. If it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
mirrors his individuality, it is, relatively, good; if it is not
a self-portraiture, it is bad, however polished its periods,
or rhythmical its cadences. The graces and witcheries of
expression which charm us in an original writer, offend us
in a copyist. Style is sometimes, though not very happily,
termed the dress of thought. It is really, as Wordsworth
long ago declared, the <em>incarnation</em> of thought. In Greek,
the same word, Logos, stands for reason and speech,&mdash;and
why? Because they cannot be divided; because thought
and expression are one. They each co-exist, not one <em>with</em>
the other, but <em>in</em> and <em>through</em> the other. Not till we can
separate the soul and the body, life and motion, the convex
and concave of a curve, shall we be able to divorce thought
from the language which only can embody it. But allowing,
for the moment, that style is the verbal clothing of
ideas, who but the most poverty-stricken person would think
of wearing the clothes of another? It is true that there are
certain general qualities, such as clearness, force, flexibility,
simplicity, variety, which all good styles will alike possess,
just as all good clothing will have certain qualities in common.
But for all men to clothe their thoughts in the same
manner would be as foolish as for a giant to array himself
in the garments of a dwarf, a stout man in those of a thin,
or a brunette in those of a blonde. Robert Hall, when
preaching in early life at Cambridge, England, for a short
time aped Dr. Johnson; but he soon saw the folly of it. “I
might as well have attempted,” said he, “to dance a hornpipe
in the cumbrous costume of Gog and Magog. My
puny thoughts could not sustain the load of words in which
I tried to clothe them.”</p>

<p>It is with varieties of style as with the varieties of the
human face, or of the leaves of the forest; while they are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
obvious in their general resemblance, yet there are never
two indistinguishably alike. Sometimes the differences are
very slight,&mdash;so minute and subtle, as almost to defy characterization;
yet, like the differences in musical styles
which closely resemble each other, they are <em>felt</em> by the discerning
reader, and so strongly that he will scarcely
mistake the authorship, even on a single reading. Men of
similar natures will have similar styles; but think of
Waller aping the gait of Wordsworth, or Leigh Hunt that
of Milton! Can any one conceive of Hooker’s style as slipshod,&mdash;of
Dryden’s as feeble and obscure,&mdash;of Gibbon’s as
mean and vulgar,&mdash;of Burke’s as timid and creeping,&mdash;of
Carlyle’s as dainty and mincing,&mdash;of Emerson’s as diffuse
and pointless,&mdash;or of Napier’s as lacking picturesqueness,
<em>verve</em>, and fire?</p>

<p>There are some writers of a quiet, even temperament,
whose sentences flow gently along like a stream through a
level country, that hardly disturbs the stillness of the air
by a sound; there are others vehement, rapid, redundant,
that roll on like a mountain torrent forcing its way over
all obstacles, and filling the valleys and woods with the
echoes of its roar. One author, deep in one place, and
shallow in another, reminds you of the Ohio, here unfordable,
and there full of sand bars,&mdash;now hurrying on with
rapid current, and now expanding into lovely lakes, fringed
with forests and overhung with hills; another, always
brimming with thought, reminds you of the Mississippi,
which rolls onward the same vast volume, with no apparent
diminution, from Cairo to New Orleans. “Sydney Smith,
concise, brisk, and brilliant, has a manner of composition
which exactly corresponds to those qualities; but how
would Lord Bacon look in Smith’s sentences? How grandly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
the soul of Milton rolls and winds through the arches and
labyrinths of his involved and magnificent diction, waking
musical echoes at every new turn and variation of its
progress; but how could the thought of such a light trifler
as Cibber travel through so glorious a maze, without
being lost or crushed in the journey? The plain, manly
language of John Locke could hardly be translated into
the terminology of Kant,&mdash;would look out of place in the
rapid and sparkling movement of Cousin’s periods,&mdash;and
would appear mean in the cadences of Dugald Stewart.”<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a></p>

<p>Not only has every original writer his own style, which
mirrors his individuality, but the writers of every age
differ from those of every other age. Joubert has well
said that if the French authors of to-day were to write as
men wrote in the time of Louis XIV, their style would
lack truthfulness, for the French of to-day have not the
same dispositions, the same opinions, the same manners. A
woman who should write like Madame Sévigné would be
ridiculous, because she is not Madame Sévigné. The more
one’s writing smacks of his own character and of the
manners of his time, the more widely must his style diverge
from that of the writers who were models only because
they excelled in manifesting in their works either the
manners of <em>their</em> own age or <em>their</em> own character. Who
would tolerate to-day a writer who should reproduce, however
successfully, the stately periods of Johnson, the mellifluous
lines of Pope, or the faultless but nerveless periods
of Addison? The style that is to please to-day must be
dense with meaning and full of color; it must be suggestive,
sharp, and incisive. So far is imitation of the old
masterpieces from being commendable, that, as Joubert<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
says, good taste itself permits one to avoid imitating the
best styles, for taste, even good taste, changes with manners,&mdash;“<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Le
bon goût lui-même, en ce cas, permet qu’on
s’écarte du meilleur goût, car le goût change avec les
mœurs, même le bon goût</i>.”</p>

<p>Let no man, then, aim at the cultivation of style for
style’s sake, independently of ideas, for all such aims will
result in failure. To suppose that noble or impressive
language is a communicable trick of rhetoric and accent,
is one of the most mischievous of fallacies. Every writer
has his own ideas and feelings,&mdash;his own conceptions,
judgments, discriminations, and comparisons,&mdash;which are
personal, proper to himself, in the same sense that his
looks, his voice, his air, his gait, and his action are personal.
If he has a vulgar mind, he will write vulgarly; if he has
a noble nature, he will write nobly; in every case, the
beauty or ugliness of his moral countenance, the force
and keenness or the feebleness of his logic, will be imaged
in his language. It follows, therefore, as Ruskin says,
that all the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral:
it becomes accurate, if the writer desires to be true; clear,
if he write with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible;
powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant, if he has a sense
of rhythm and order.</p>

<p>This sensibility of language to the impulses and qualities
of him who uses it; its flexibility in accommodating
itself to all the thoughts, feelings, imaginations, and
aspirations which pass within him, so as to become the
faithful expression of his personality, indicating the very
pulsating and throbbing of his intellect, and attending
on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow;
and, strangest, perhaps, the magical power it has, where<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
thought transcends the sensuous capacities of language,
to suggest the idea or mood it cannot directly convey,
and to give forth an aroma which no analysis of word
or expression reveals,&mdash;is one of the marvels of human
speech. The writer, therefore, who is so magnetized by
another’s genius that he cannot say anything in his own
way, but is perpetually imitating the other’s structure of
sentence and turns of expression, confesses his barrenness.
The only way to make another’s style one’s own is to
possess one’s self of his mind and soul. If we would
reproduce his peculiarities of diction, we must first
acquire the qualities that produced them. “Language,”
says Goldwin Smith, “is not a musical instrument into
which, if a fool breathe, it will make melody. Its tones
are evoked only by the spirit of high or tender thought;
and though truth is not always eloquent, real eloquence
is always the glow of truth.” As Sainte-Beuve says of
the plainness and brevity of Napoleon’s style,&mdash;“<span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"><em>Prétendre
imiter le precédé de diction du héros qui sut
abréger Cæsar lui-même</em> ... <em>il convient</em> d’avoir fait
d’aussi grandes choses <em>pour avoir le droit d’être aussi nu</em>.</span>”</p>

<p>It is not imitation, but general culture,&mdash;as another
has said, the constant submission of a teachable, apprehensive
mind to the influence of minds of the highest
order, in daily life and books,&mdash;that brings out upon
style its daintiest bloom and its richest fruitage. “So
in the making of a fine singer, after the voice has been
developed, and the rudiments of vocalization have been
learned, farther instruction is almost of no avail. But
the frequent hearing of the best music given by the best
singers and instrumentalists,&mdash;the living in an atmosphere
of art and literature,&mdash;will develop and perfect a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
vocal style in one who has the gift of song; and, for any
other, all the instruction of all the musical professors
that ever came out of Italy will do no more than teach
an avoidance of positive errors in musical grammar.”<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></p>

<p>The Cabalists believed that whoever found the mystic
word for anything attained to as absolute mastery over
that thing as did the robbers over the door of their cave
in the Arabian tale. The converse is true of expression;
for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought becomes
master of the <em>word</em> fitted to express it, while he who has
but a half-possession of it vainly seeks to torture out of
language the secret of that inspiration which should be in
himself. The secret of force in writing or speaking lies
not in Blair’s “Rhetoric,” or Roget’s “Thesaurus,”&mdash;not
in having a copious vocabulary, or a dozen words for
every idea,&mdash;but in having something that you earnestly
wish to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious
of it. Phidias, the great Athenian sculptor, said
of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb,
because the modelling clay yielded to its careless touch
a grace of sweep which it refused to the utmost pains of
others. So he who has thoroughly possessed himself of
his thought will not have to hunt through his dictionary
for apt and expressive words,&mdash;a method which is but an
outside remedy for an inward defect,&mdash;but will find language
eagerly obedient to him, as if every word should say,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“<em>Bid</em> me discourse; I will enchant thine ear,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and fit expressions, as Milton says, “like so many nimble
and airy servitors, will trip about him at command, and,
in well-ordered files, fall aptly into their own places.”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
It was the boast of Dante that no word had ever forced
him to say what <em>he</em> would not, though he had forced many
a word to say what <em>it</em> would not; and so will every writer,
who as vividly conceives and as deeply feels his theme,
be able to conjure out of words their uttermost secret <em>of</em>
power or pathos.</p>

<p>The question has been sometimes discussed whether the
best style is a colorless medium, which, like good glass,
only lets the thought be distinctly seen, or whether it
imparts a pleasure apart from the ideas it conveys. There
are those who hold that when language is simply transparent,&mdash;when
it comes to us so refined of all its dross,
so spiritualized in its substance that we lose sight of it
as a vehicle, and the thought stands out with clearness
in all its proportions,&mdash;we are at the very summit of the
literary art. This is the character of Southey’s best prose,
and of Paley’s writing, whose statement of a false theory
is so lucid that it becomes a refutation. There are writers,
however, who charm us by their language, apart from the
ideas it conveys. There is a kind of mysterious perfume
about it, a delicious aroma, which we keenly enjoy, but
for which we cannot account. Poetry often possesses a
beauty wholly unconnected with its meaning. Who has
not admired, independently of the sense, its “jewels, five
words long, that, on the stretched forefinger of all time,
sparkle forever”? There are passages in which the mere
cadence of the words is by itself delicious to a delicate ear,
though we cannot tell how and why. We are conscious
of a strange, dreamy sense of enjoyment, such as one feels
when lying upon the grass in a June evening, while a
brook tinkles over stones among the sedges and trees.
Sir Philip Sidney could not hear the old ballad of Chevy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
Chase without his blood being stirred as by the sound of
a trumpet; Boyle felt a tremor at the utterance of two
verses of Lucan; and Spence declares that he never repeated
particular lines of delicate modulation without a
shiver in his blood, not to be expressed. Who is not
sensible of certain magical effects, altogether distinct from
the thoughts, in some of Coleridge’s weird verse, in Keats’s
“Nightingale,” and in the grand harmonies of Sir Thomas
Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Ruskin, and De Quincey?</p>

<p>Perspicuity, or transparency of style, is, undoubtedly,
the first law of all composition; but it may be doubted
whether <em>vividness</em>, which was the ruling conception of the
Greeks with regard to this property of style, is not quite
as essential. Style, it has been well said, “is not only a
medium; it is also a form. It is not enough that the
thoughts be seen through a clear medium; they must be
seen in a distinct shape. It is not enough that truth be
visible in a clear, pure air; the atmosphere must not only
be crystalline and sparkling, but the things in it must
be bounded and defined by sharply cut lines.”<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a></p>

<p>A style may be as transparent as rock-water, and yet
the thoughts be destitute of boldness and originality. The
highest degree of transparency, however, can be attained
only by the writer who has thoroughly mastered his theme,
and whose whole nature is stirred by it. As that exquisite
material through which we gaze from our windows on
the beauties of nature, obtains its crystalline beauty after
undergoing the furnace,&mdash;as it was melted by fire before
the rough particles of sand disappeared,&mdash;so it is with
language. It is only a burning invention that can make
it transparent. A powerful imagination must fuse the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span>
harsh elements of composition until all foreign substances
have disappeared, and every coarse, shapeless word has
been absorbed by the heat, and then the language will
brighten into that clear and unclouded style through which
the most delicate conceptions of the mind and the faintest
emotions of the heart are visible.</p>

<p>How many human thoughts have baffled for generations
every attempt to give them expression! How many opinions
and conclusions are there, which form the basis of
our daily reflections, the matter for the ordinary operations
of our minds, which were toiled after perhaps for
ages, before they were seized and rendered comprehensible!
How many ideas are there which we ourselves have
grasped at, as if we saw them floating in an atmosphere
just above us, and found the arm of our intellect just
too short to reach them; and then comes a happier genius,
who, in a lucky moment, and from some vantage ground,
arrests the meteor in its flight, and, grasping the floating
phantom, drags it from the skies to earth; condenses that
which was but an impalpable coruscation of spirit; fetters
that which was but the lightning-glance of thought; and,
having so mastered it, bestows it as a perpetual possession
and heritage on mankind!</p>

<p>The arrangement of words by great writers on the
printed page has sometimes been compared to the arrangement
of soldiers on the field; and if it is interesting to see
how a great general marshals his regiments, it is certainly
not less so to see how the Alexanders and Napoleons of
letters marshal their verbal battalions on the battle-fields of
thought. Foremost among those who wield despotic sway
over the domain of letters, is my Lord Bacon, whose
words are like a Spartan phalanx, closely compacted,&mdash;almost<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
crowding each other, so close are their files,&mdash;and
all moving in irresistible array, without confusion
or chasm, now holding some Thermopylæ of new truth
against some scholastic Xerxes, now storming some ancient
Malakoff of error, but always with “victory sitting eagle-winged
on their crests.” A strain of music bursts on
your ear, sweet as is Apollo’s lute, and lo! Milton’s dazzling
files, clad in celestial panoply, lifting high their
gorgeous ensign, which “shines like a meteor, streaming
to the wind,” “breathing united force and fixed thought,”
come moving on “in perfect phalanx, to the Dorian
mood of flutes and soft recorders.” Next comes Chillingworth,
with his glittering rapier, all rhetorical rule and
flourish, according to the schools,&mdash;<i lang="it" xml:lang="it">passado</i>, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">montanso</i>,
<i lang="it" xml:lang="it">staccato</i>,&mdash;one, two, three,&mdash;the third in your bosom.
Then stalks along Chatham, with his two-handed sword,
striking with the edge, while he pierces with the point,
and stuns with the hilt, and wielding the ponderous
weapon as easily as you would a flail. Next strides Johnson
with elephantine tread, with the club of logic in one
hand and a revolver in the other, hitting right and left
with antithetical blows, and, “when his pistol misses fire,
knocking you down with the butt end of it.” Burke,
with lighted linstock in hand, stands by a Lancaster gun;
he touches it, and forth there burst, with loud and ringing
roar, missiles of every conceivable description,&mdash;chain
shot, stone, iron darts, spikes, shells, grenadoes, torpedoes,
and balls, that cut down everything before them. Close
after him steals Jeffrey, armed cap-a-pie,&mdash;carrying a
tomahawk in one hand and a scalping-knife in the other,&mdash;steeped
to the eye in fight, cunning of fence, master
of his weapon and merciless in its use, and “playing it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
like a tongue of flame” before his trembling victims.
There is Brougham, slaying half-a-dozen enemies at once
with a tremendous Scotch claymore; Macaulay, running
under his opponent’s guard, and stabbing him to the
heart with the heavy dagger of a short, epigrammatic
sentence; Hugh Elliot, cracking his enemies’ skulls with
a sledge-hammer, or pounding them to jelly with his huge
fists; Sydney Smith, firing his arrows, feathered with
fancy and pointed with the steel of the keenest wit; Disraeli,
armed with an oriental scimitar, which dazzles while
it kills; Emerson, transfixing his adversaries with a blade
of transcendental temper, snatched from the scabbard of
Plato; and Carlyle, relentless iconoclast of shams, who
“gangs his ain gait,” armed with an antique stone axe,
with which he smashes solemn humbugs as you would
drugs with a pestle and mortar.</p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> “The Idea of a University,” by J. H. Newman.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> “Essays and Reviews,” by Edwin P. Whipple.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> “Words and Their Uses,” by Richard Grant White.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> “Homiletics and Pastoral Theology,” by W. G. Shedd, D.D.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER IX.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">THE SECRET OF APT WORDS&mdash;(<em>continued</em>).</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>“To acquire a few tongues,” says a French writer, “is the task of a
few years; but to be eloquent in one is the labor of a life.”&mdash;<span class="smcap">Colton.</span></p>

<p>When words are restrained by common usage to a particular sense, to run
up to etymology, and construe them by a dictionary, is wretchedly ridiculous.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Jeremy
Collier.</span></p></div>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Where do the words of Greece and Rome excel,</p>
<p class="verse0">That England may not please the ear as well?</p>
<p class="verse0">What mighty magic’s in the place or air,</p>
<p class="verse0">That all perfection needs must centre there?&mdash;<span class="smcap">Churchill.</span></p>
</div></div>
</div>


<p class="drop-capy1">It is an interesting question connected with the subject
of style, whether a knowledge of other languages is
necessary to give an English writer a full command of his
own. Among the arguments urged in behalf of the study
of Greek and Latin in our colleges, one of the commonest
is the supposed absolute necessity of a knowledge of
those tongues to one who would speak and write his own
language effectively. The English language, we are
reminded, is a composite one, of whose words thirty per
cent are of Roman origin, and nearly five per cent of
Greek; and is it not an immense help, we are asked, to
a full and accurate knowledge of the meanings of the
words we use, to know their entire history, including
their origin? Is not the many-sided Goethe an authority
on this subject, and does he not tell us that “<i lang="de" xml:lang="de">wer fremde
sprache nicht kennt weiss nichts von seinen eigenen</i>,”&mdash;“He
who is acquainted with no foreign tongues, knows
nothing of his own”? Have we not the authority of one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>
of the earliest of English schoolmasters, Roger Ascham,
for the opinion that, “even as a hawke fleeth not hie
with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellency
with one tongue”?</p>

<p>In answering the general question in the negative, we
do not mean to question the value or profound interest of
philological studies, or to express any doubt concerning
their utility as a means of mental discipline. The value
of classical literature as an instrument of education has
been decided by an overwhelming majority of persons of
culture. We cannot, without prejudice to humanity, separate
the present from the past. The nineteenth century
strikes its roots into the centuries gone by, and draws
nutriment from them. Our whole literature is closely
connected with that of the ancients, draws its inspiration
from it, and can be understood only by constant reference
to it. As a means of that encyclopedic culture, of that
thorough intellectual equipment, which is one of the most
imperious demands of modern society, an acquaintance
with foreign, and especially with classic, literature, is absolutely
indispensable; for the records of knowledge and of
thought are many-tongued, and even if a great writer
could have wreaked his thoughts upon expression in another
language, it is certain that another mind can only in
a few cases adequately translate them. It is only by the
study of different languages and different literatures,
ancient as well as modern, that we can escape that narrowness
of thought, that Chinese cast of mind, which characterizes
those persons who know no language but their own,
and learn to distinguish what is essentially, universally,
and eternally good and true from what is the result of
accident, local opinion, or the fleeting circumstances of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
time. It is useless to say that we know human nature
thoroughly, if we know nothing of antiquity; and we can
know antiquity only by study of the originals. Mitford,
Grote, and Mommsen differ, and the reader who consults
them with no knowledge of Greek or Latin is at the mercy
of the last author he has perused. It has been frequently
remarked that every school of thinkers has its mannerism
and its mania, for which there is no cure but intercourse
with those who are free from them. To study any class of
writers exclusively is to bow slavishly to their authority, to
accept their opinions, to make their tastes our tastes, and
their prejudices our prejudices. Only by qualifying their
ideas and sentiments with the thoughts and sentiments of
writers in other ages, shall we be able to resist the intense
pressure which is thus exercised upon our convictions and
feelings, and avoid that mental slavery which is baser than
the slavery of the body.</p>

<p>The question, however, is not about the general educational
value of classical studies, but whether they are indispensable
to him who would write or speak English with
the highest force, elegance, and accuracy. I think they
are not. In the first place, I deny that a knowledge of
the etymologies of words,&mdash;of their meanings a hundred or
five hundred years ago,&mdash;is essential to their proper use
now. How am I aided in the use of the word “villain”
by knowing that it once meant peasant,&mdash;in the use of
“wince” by knowing that it meant kick,&mdash;in the use of
“brat,” “beldam,” and “pedant,” by knowing that they
meant, respectively, child, fine lady, and tutor,&mdash;in the use
of “meddle,” by knowing that formerly it had no offensive
meaning, and that one could meddle even with his own
affairs? Am I more or less likely to use “ringleader”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
correctly to-day, from learning that Christ is correctly
spoken of by an old divine as “the ringleader of our
salvation”? Shall I be helped in the employment of the
word “musket” by knowing that it was once the name of
a small hawk, or fly, or in the use of the word “tragedy”
by knowing that it is connected in some way with the
Greek word for a goat? Facts like these are of deep
interest to all, and of high value to the scholar; but how
is the knowledge of them necessary that one may speak
or write well?</p>

<p>The question with the man who addresses his fellow-man
by tongue or pen to-day, is not what ought to be,
or formerly was, the meaning of a word, but, what is it
<em>now</em>? Indeed, it may be doubted whether a reference to
the roots and derivations,&mdash;the old original meanings of
words,&mdash;which have grown obsolete by the fluctuations
of manners, customs, and a thousand other causes, does
not, as Archbishop Whately insists, tend to confusion,
and prove rather a hindrance than a help to the correct
use of our tongue. Words not only, for the most part,
ride very slackly at anchor on their etymologies, borne,
as they are, hither and thither by the shifting tides and
currents of usage, but they often break away from their
moorings altogether. The knowledge of a man’s antecedents
may help us sometimes to estimate his present self:
but the knowledge of what a word meant three or twenty
centuries ago may only mislead us as to its meaning
now. Spenser uses the word “edify” in the sense of
“to build”; but would any one speak of a house being
edified to-day? “Symbol” and “conjecture” are words
that etymologically have precisely the same signification;
and the same is true of “hypostasis,” “substance,” and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>
“understanding,” derived respectively from the Greek,
Latin, and Saxon; yet have either the two former, or the
three latter words, as they are now used, the least similarity
of meaning? Is it desirable to call a suffering man
a “passionate” man,&mdash;to say with Bishop Lowth that “the
Emperor Julian very ‘judiciously’ planned the overthrow
of Christianity,”&mdash;to speak with Paley of the “judiciousness”
of God,&mdash;and with Guizot of the “duplicity” of certain
plays of Shakespeare (meaning their dual structure),&mdash;merely
because we find these significations lying at the
remote and dead roots of the words which we now employ
in wholly different significations? The effect of a constant
reference to etymology, in the use of words, is seen in
the writings of Milton, whose use of “elate” for “lifted
on high,” “implicit” for “entangled,” “succinct” for
“girded,” “spirited” for “inspired,” and hundreds of
other such perversions of language, may please the scholar
who loves to crack philological nuts, but is fitted only
to perplex, confound, and mislead the ordinary reader.
It is seen still more plainly in the writings of Donne,
Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, who not only
imported Latin words by wholesale into the language,
only giving them an anglicized form and termination,
but sometimes employed in a new sense words already
adopted into English, and used in their original sense.
Thus Taylor uses “immured” for “encompassed,” “irritation”
for “making void”; and in referring to “the
bruising of the serpent’s head,” he ludicrously speaks of
the “‘contrition’ of the serpent.” Again, he uses the word
“excellent” for “surpassing,” and even perverts the
meaning of the word so far as to speak of “an ‘excellent’
pain!”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span></p>

<p>Will it be said that words become more vivid and picturesque,&mdash;that
we get a firmer and more vigorous grasp
of their meaning,&mdash;when, as Coleridge advises, we present
to our minds the visual images that form their primary
meanings? The reply is, that long use deadens us to the
susceptibility of such images, and in not one case in a
thousand, probably, are they noticed. How many college
graduates think of a “miser” as being etymologically a
“miserable” man, of a “savage” as one living in “a
wood,” or of a “desultory” reader as one who leaps from
one study to another, as a circus rider leaps from horse
to horse? A distinguished poet once confessed that the
Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">imago</i> first suggested itself to him as the root of
the English word “imagination” when, after having been
ten years a versifier, he was asked by a friend to define
this most important term in the critical vocabulary of
his art. “We have had to notice over and over again,”
says Mr. Whitney in his late work on “The Life and
Growth of Language,” “the readiness on the part of language-users
to forget origins, to cast aside as cumbrous
rubbish the etymological suggestiveness of a term, and
concentrate force upon the new and more adventitious tie.
This is one of the most fundamental and valuable tendencies
in name-making; it constitutes an essential part
of the practical availability of language.”</p>

<p>If a knowledge of Greek and Latin is necessary to him
who would command all the resources of our tongue, how
comes it that the most consummate mastery of the English
language is exhibited by Shakespeare? Will it be said
that his writings prove him to have been a classical
scholar; that they abound in facts and allusions which
imply an intimate acquaintance with the masterpieces of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>
Greek and Roman literature? We answer that this is a
palpable begging of the question. By the same reasoning
we can prove that scores of English authors, who, we
know positively, never read a page of Latin or Greek,
were, nevertheless, classical scholars. By similar logic we
can prove that Shakespeare followed every calling in life.
Lawyers vouch for his acquaintance with law; physicians
for his skill in medicine; mad-doctors for his knowledge
of the phenomena of mental disease; naturalists assert
positively, from the internal evidence of his works, that
he was a botanist and an entomologist; bishops, that he
was a theologian; and claims have been put forth for his
dexterity in cutting up sheep and bullocks. Ben Jonson
tells us that he had “small Latin and less Greek”;
another contemporary, that he had “little Latin and no
Greek.” “Small Latin,” indeed, it must have been which
a youth could have acquired in his position, who married
and entered upon the duties of active life at eighteen.
The fact that translations were abundant in the poet’s
time, and that all the literature of that day was steeped
in classicism, will fully account for Shakespeare’s knowledge
of Greek and Roman history, as well as for the classical
turns of expression which we find in his plays.</p>

<p>But it may be said that Shakespeare, the oceanic, the
many-souled, was phenomenal, and that no rule can be
based on the miracles of a cometary genius who has had
no peer in the ages. What shall we say, then, to Izaak
Walton? Can purer, more idiomatic, or more attractive
English be found within the covers of any book than
that of “The Complete Angler”? Among all the controversialists
of England, is there one whose words hit harder,&mdash;are
more like cannon-balls,&mdash;than those of Cobbett?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
By universal concession he was master of the whole vocabulary
of invective, and in narration his pen is pregnant
with the freshness of green fields and woods; yet neither
he, nor “honest Izaak,” ever dug up a Greek root, or
unearthed a Latin derivation. Let any one compare a
page of Cobbett with a page of Bentley, the great classical
critic, and he will find that the former writer excels
the latter alike in clearness and precision of terms, in
grammatical accuracy, and in the construction of his
periods. Again, what shall we say of Keats, who could
not read a line of Greek, yet who was the most thoroughly
classical of all English authors,&mdash;whose soul was
so saturated with the Greek spirit, that Byron said “he
was a Greek himself”? Or what will the classicists do
with Lord Erskine, confessedly the greatest forensic orator
since Demosthenes? He learned but the elements of Latin,
and in Greek went scarcely beyond the alphabet; but he
devoted himself in youth with intense ardor to the study
of Milton and Shakespeare, committing whole pages of the
former to memory, and so familiarizing himself with the
latter that he could almost, like Porson, have held conversations
on all subjects for days together in the phrases
of the great English dramatist. It was here that he
acquired that fine choice of words, that richness of thought
and gorgeousness of expression, that beautiful <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">rhythmus</i>
of his sentences, which charmed all who heard him.</p>

<p>If one must learn English through the Greek and
Latin, how shall we account for the admirable,&mdash;we had
almost said, inimitable,&mdash;style of Franklin? Before he
knew anything of foreign languages he had formed his
style, and gained a wide command of words by the study
of the best English models. Is the essayist, Edwin P.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
Whipple, a master of the English language? He was
not, we believe, classically educated, yet few American
authors have a greater command of all the resources of
expression. His style varies in excellence,&mdash;sometimes,
perhaps, lacks simplicity; but, as a rule, it is singularly
copious, nervous, and suggestive, and clear as a pebbled
rill. What is the secret of this command of our tongue?
It is his familiarity with our English literature. His
sleepless intellect has fed and fattened on the whole race
of English authors, from Chaucer to Currer Bell. The
profound, sagacious wisdom of Bacon, and the nimble,
brilliant wit of Sydney Smith; the sublime mysticism of
Sir Thomas Browne, and the rich, mellow, tranquil beauty
of Taylor; Jonson’s learned sock and Heywood’s ease; the
gorgeous, organ-toned eloquence of Milton, and the close,
bayonet-like logic of Chillingworth; the sweet-blooded wit
of Fuller, and Butler’s rattling fire of fun; Spenser’s voluptuous
beauty, and the lofty rhetoric, scorching wit, and
crushing argument of South; Pope’s neatness, brilliancy,
and epigrammatic point, and Dryden’s energy and “full
resounding line”; Byron’s sublime unrest and bursts of
misanthropy, and Wordsworth’s deep sentiment and sweet
humanities; Shelley’s wild imaginative melody, and Scott’s
picturesque imagery and antiquarian lore; the polished
witticisms of Sheridan, and the gorgeous periods of Burke,&mdash;with
all these writers, and every other of greater or
lesser note, even those in the hidden nooks and crannies
of our literature, he has held converse, and drawn from
them expressions for every exigency of his thought.</p>

<p>To all these examples we may add one, if possible, still
more convincing,&mdash;that of the late Hugh Miller, who, as
Professor Marsh justly remarks, had few contemporaneous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>
superiors as a clear, forcible, accurate, and eloquent writer,
and who <em>uses the most cumbrous Greek compounds</em> as freely
as monosyllabic English particles. His style is literally
the despair of all other English scientific writers; yet it
is positively certain that he was wholly ignorant of all
languages but that in which he wrote, and its Northern
provincial dialects.</p>

<p>As to the oft-quoted saying of Goethe, to which the
objector is so fond of referring, we may say with Professor
Marsh, that, “if by knowledge of a language is meant the
power of expressing or conceiving the laws of a language
in formal rules, the opinion may be well founded; but, if
it refers to the capacity of understanding, and skill in
properly using our own tongue, all observation shows it
to be very wide of the truth.” Goethe himself, the same
authority declares, was an indifferent linguist; he apparently
knew little of the remoter etymological sources of
his own tongue, or the special philologies of the cognate
languages; and “it is difficult to trace any of the excellencies
of his marvellously felicitous style to the direct
imitation, or even the unconscious influence of foreign
models.”<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> But he was a profound student of the great
German writers of the sixteenth century; and hence his
works are a test example in refutation of the theory that
ascribes so exaggerated a value to classical studies.</p>

<p>It is a remarkable fact, which throws a flood of light
upon this subject, that the greatest masters of style in all
the ages were the Greeks, who yet knew no word of any
language but their own. In the most flourishing period
of their literature, they had no grammatical system, nor
did they ever make any but the most trivial researches<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
in etymology. “The wise and learned nations among the
ancients,” says Locke, “made it a part of education to cultivate
their own, not foreign languages. The Greeks
counted all other nations barbarous, and had a contempt
for their languages. And though the Greek learning grew
in credit among the Romans, ... yet it was the Roman
tongue that was made the study of their youth; their own
language they were to make use of, and therefore it was
their own language they were instructed and exercised in.”
Demosthenes, the greatest master of the Greek language,
and one of the mightiest masters of expression the world
has seen, knew no other tongue than his own. He modelled
his style after that of Thucydides, whose wonderful
compactness, terseness, and strength of diction were derived
from no study of old Pelasgic, Phœnician, Persian,
or other primitive etymologies of the Attic speech,&mdash;of
which he knew nothing,&mdash;but were the product of his
own marvellous genius wreaking itself upon expression.</p>

<p>No riches are without inconvenience. The men of
many tongues almost inevitably lose their peculiar raciness
of home-bred utterance, and their style, like their words,
has a certain polyglot character. It has been observed by
an acute Oxford professor that the Romans, in exact proportion
to their study of Greek, paralyzed some of the
finest powers of their own language. Schiller tells us
that he was in the habit of reading as little as possible
in foreign languages, because it was his business to write
<em>German</em>, and he thought that, by reading other languages,
he should lose his nicer perceptions of what belonged to
his own. Dryden attributed most of Cowley’s defects to
his continental associations, and said that his losses at
home overbalanced his gains from abroad. Thomas Moore,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
who was a fine classical scholar, tells us that the perfect
purity with which the Greeks wrote their own language
was justly attributed to their entire abstinence from
every other. It is a saying as old as Cicero that women,
being accustomed solely to their native tongue, usually
speak and write it with a grace and purity surpassing
those of men. “A man who thinks the knowledge of
Latin essential to the purity of English diction,” says
Macaulay, “either has never conversed with an accomplished
woman, or does not deserve to have conversed
with her. We are sure that all persons who are in the
habit of hearing public speaking must have observed that
the orators who are fondest of quoting Latin are by no
means the most scrupulous about marring their native
tongue. We could mention several members of Parliament,
who never fail to usher in their scraps of Horace
and Juvenal with half-a-dozen false concords.”</p>

<p>Mr. Buckle, in his “History of Civilization in England,”
does not hesitate to express the opinion that “our great
English scholars have corrupted the English language by
jargon so uncouth that a plain man can hardly discern
the real lack of ideas which their barbarous and mottled
dialect strives to hide.” He then adds that the principal
reason why well educated women write and converse in
a purer style than well educated men, is “because they
have not formed their taste according to those ancient
classical standards, which, admirable as they are in themselves,
should never be introduced into a state of society
unfitted for them.” To nearly the same effect is the
declaration of that most acute judge of style, Thomas De
Quincey, who says that if you would read our noble language
in its native beauty, picturesque form, idiomatic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>
propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in
its composition, you must steal the mail-bags, and break
open the women’s letters. On the other hand, who has
forgotten what havoc Bentley made when he laid his
classic hand on “Paradise Lost”? What prose style,
always excepting that of the “Areopagitica,” is worse for
imitation than that of Milton, with its long, involved,
half-rhythmical periods, “dragging, like a wounded snake,
their slow length along”? Yet Bentley and Milton,
whose minds were imbued, saturated with Greek literature
through and through, were probably the profoundest
classical scholars that England can boast. Let
the student, then, who has a patriotic love for his native
tongue, study it in its most idiomatic writers, and
beware lest while he is wandering in fancy along the
banks of the Meander, the Ilyssus, or the Tiber, or drinking
at the fountains of Helicon, he heedlessly and profanely
trample under foot the beautiful, fragrant, and
varied productions of his own land.</p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> “Lectures on the English Language.”</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER X.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">ONOMATOPES.</span></h2>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence;</p>
<p class="verse0">The sound must seem an echo to the sense.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Pope.</span></p>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>Our blunted senses can no more realize the original delicacy of the appellative
faculty, than they can attain to the keen perfection in which they still
exist in the savage.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Lepsius.</span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy">Whatever opinion we have of the onomatopœia
theory of the origin of language, so ably advocated
by Farrar, Wedgwood, and Whitney, and so keenly ridiculed
by Max Müller and others, it is impossible to deny
that there is a natural relationship between thought and
articulate sound,&mdash;in other words that certain sounds are
the natural expression of certain sensations, and of mental
states that are analogous to those sensations. All languages
contain words which, in their very structure as
composite sounds, more or less nearly resemble in quality,
as soft or harsh, the sounds they designate. Such, in our
language, are words representing animal sounds, as quack,
cackle, roar, whinny, bellow, caw, croak, hiss, screech, etc.;
words representing inarticulate human sounds, as laugh,
cough, sob, shriek, whoop, etc.; sounds representing the
collision of hard bodies, as clap, rap, tap, slap, etc.; sounds
representing the collision of softer bodies, as dab, dub,
thud, dub-a-dub; sounds representing motion through the
air, as whizz, buzz, sough, etc.; sounds representing resonance,
as clang, knell, ring, twang, etc.; and sounds representing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>
the motion of liquids, as clash, splash, dash, etc.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a>
Even the various degrees of intensity in sound are expressed
by modifications of the vowels,&mdash;high notes being
represented by <em>i</em>, low, broad sounds by <em>a</em>, and diminution by
the change of <em>a</em> or <em>o</em> to <em>i</em>; while continuance is expressed
by a reduplication of syllables, as in murmur, etc., and by
the addition of <em>r</em> and <em>l</em>, as in grab, grapple, wrest, wrestle,
crack, crackle, dab, dabble. Animals are often named,
upon the same principle, from their cries, birds especially,
as we see in whip-poor-will, cuckoo, crow, quail, curlew,
chough, owl, peewit, turtle, and many others. Again, we
find that, independently of all confusion between a word
and its associations, words having a harsh signification
generally have a rough, harsh form, while words that
denote something soft and pleasing, or sweet and tender,
seem to breathe the very sensation they describe. The
various passions of men naturally find expression in different
sounds. Anger, vehemence, gentleness, etc., have
each a language, a style of utterance, peculiar to themselves.
Love and sorrow prompt smooth, melodious expressions,
while violent emotions express themselves in
words that are hurried, abrupt and harsh.</p>

<p>Were further proof wanting of this connection between
external sounds and the processes of the mind, it is supplied
in the strongest form by the fact that the different languages
of the earth are stamped with marks of predominant
local influences,&mdash;of the climate, scenery, and other
physical conditions amid which they have been evolved.
Rousseau, a century ago, called attention to the fact that
the languages of the rich and prodigal South, being the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>
daughters of passion, are poetic and musical, while those of
the North, the daughters of necessity, bear a trace of their
hard origin, and express by rude sounds rude sensations.
Who does not discern in the “soft and vowelled undersong”
of the Italian the effect of a climate altogether
different from that which has produced the stridulous,
hirrient roughness of the German, the Dutch, and the
Russian tongues? What but different geographical positions
has made the language of the South-Sea Islanders so
different from the dissonant clicks of the Hottentot, or the
guttural polysyllables of the Cherokee? What other cause
has made the language of the Tlascalans, the hardy and
independent mountaineers dwelling in the high volcanic
regions between Mexico and Vera Cruz, so much rougher
than the polished Tezucan, or the popular dialect of the
Aztecs, who are of the same family as the mountaineers?
It is because the vocal organs, which are formed with
exceeding delicacy, are affected by the most trifling physical
influences, that English is spoken in Devonshire, England,
with a splutter, and in Suffolk with an attenuated whine;
that the language spoken in the northern counties is
harsher than that spoken in the southern; and that in the
mountainous regions we find a harsher dialect than we
hear in the plains.</p>

<p>The manner in which words are formed by means of the
imitations of natural sounds is illustrated by the word
“cock” which is considered by etymologists to be an abbreviated
imitation of chanticleer’s “cock-a-doodle-doo!”
From the name of the animal, which is thus derived from
its cry, and then generalized and made fruitful in derivatives,
come, by allusion to the bird’s pride and strut, the
words “coquette,” “cockade,” the “cock” of a gun, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>
“cock” one’s eye, to “cock” the head on one side, a “cocked”
hat, a “cock” of hay, a “cock”-swain, a “cock”-boat, the
“cock” of a balance, and so on. It is in all probability by
this method more than by any other, that words were
produced in all the earlier stages of language, while the
interjectional or exclamatory principle was, doubtless, next
in importance.</p>

<p>It is sometimes objected to the theory of the extensive
use of onomatopœia in the formation of language, that,
were it true, we should find in the different languages of
the earth a greater identity than actually exists in the
terms expressive of physical facts. We should not find
words so unlike as “bang” in English and <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">pouf</i> in French,
employed to denote the sound of a gun; or <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">γρύλλοϛ</span> in
Greek, <i>quirquirra</i> in the Basque, and <i>sirsor</i> in Chinese,
used as names for the grasshopper. Why, if the theory in
question be true, do we find a clap of thunder called in
Sanscrit <i>vaǵraǵvala</i>, in Gaelic <i>tàirneanach</i>, in Bohemian
<i>hromobitz</i>, in Icelandic <i>thruma</i>? Why does Coleridge sing
of the nightingale’s “murmurs musical and sweet <em>jug-jug</em>,”
while Tennyson says that “<em>Whit, whit, whit</em>, in the
bush beside me, chirrupt the nightingale”?</p>

<p>The answer to this is, that man in naming things does
not attempt to reproduce the <em>identical</em> sound which he
hears, but artistically to reproduce it, or rather the impression
which it has made, just as a painter often deviates
from the actual colors of nature, and paints a picture more
or less ideal, to enhance the effect of his art. The imitation
is not a dull, literal echo of the sound, but an echo of
the impression produced by it on the human intelligence;
not a mere spontaneous repercussion of the perception
received, but a repercussion modified <em>organically</em> by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>
configurations of the mouth, and <em>ideally</em> by the nature of
the analogy perceived between the sound and the object it
expresses.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> These repercussions, moreover, have been
greatly blurred by the lapse of ages,&mdash;so much so, in many
cases, as to be indistinguishable. Again, we must remember
that the impressions made by the same sounds on different
minds, and even on the same mind in different moods,
will greatly vary; and that in naming objects from other
characteristics than the sound, different characteristics are
chosen by different peoples. According to the mental constitution,
the preponderance of reason or imagination, for
example, in the name-giver, or particular experiences in
connection with the object, the designating quality which
is deemed most fit to furnish the name for it will vary.
Thus it happens that in Sanscrit there is a great variety of
names for the elephant, such as the “hand-possessing”
animal, the “toothed,” the “two-tusked,” the “great-toothed,”
the “pounder,” the “roarer,” the “forest-roarer,”
the “mailed,” the “twice-drinking,” the “mountain-born,”
the “vagabond,” and many others. Thus it happens that
in Arabic there are five hundred names for the lion, two
hundred for the serpent, and not less than a thousand for
the sword. The nightingale is said to have twenty distinct
articulations; and if this is true, we should expect that in
the different languages of Europe it would have different
names. The old poets all speak of the nightingale’s song
as “most melancholy,” but in modern verse we read of</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse6">“the <em>merry</em> nightingale</p>
<p class="verse0">That crowds and hurries and precipitates</p>
<p class="verse0">With fast thick warble its delicious notes.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">So with thunder; the impression it makes upon hearers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>
varies with the varying qualities of their minds. To one
man it is a dull rumble, to another a crackling explosion,
and to a third a sudden flashing of light. As Archdeacon
Farrar finely says: “What the eye sees and the ear hears
depends in no small measure on the brain and the heart.
The hieroglyphics of nature, like the inscriptions on the
swords of Vathek, vary with every eye that glances on
them; her voices, like the voice of Helen to the ambushed
Greeks, take not one tone of their own, but the tone that
each hearer loves best to hear.”<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a></p>

<p>Though a large part of language has been formed in
the way I have named, yet it must be admitted that few
words, compared with the whole number, bear upon their
face unmistakable traces of their origin. The explanation
of this lies in the great changes which phonetic corruption
effects in language. No sooner do men coin a word, than
they instinctively and unconsciously seek to rid it of its
superfluous letters, and in other ways to economize the
time and labor expended upon its utterance; and if they
are obliged to use a new or strange word, which conveys
no intrinsic meaning to them, they try to give it a meaning
by so changing it as to remove its arbitrary character.
(See <a href="#WIE">“Words of Illusive Etymology,”</a> in Chapter on the
“Curiosities of Language.”) Thus words, in the course of
ages, are rolled and rubbed out of shape, like the pebbles
which are rubbed and rounded into smoothness by the sea
waves on a shingly beach, until at last, though once plainly
imitative, they lose all trace of their sensuous origin.
Who, without knowledge of the intermediate <em>diurnus</em> and
<em>giorno</em>, would for a moment suspect that <em>jour</em> could be
derived from <em>dies</em>; or would suppose, if he had not traced<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span>
the etymology of “musket,” that it is derived from the
onomatope, <em>musso</em>, “I buzz”? But, notwithstanding all
this, and though in the progress of scientific culture language
becomes more and more abstract,&mdash;that is, words
having no natural connection with the thoughts are used
more and more arbitrarily to represent them, just as
algebraic signs represent mathematical relations,&mdash;still
language never loses wholly its original imitative character.
It will always, therefore, be a signal excellence
of style when thought and emotion are represented by
imitative expressions,&mdash;that is, by means of pictures or
images of sensible things and events. The sound then
points to the external object or event, or some sensible
property or characteristic of it, and this, again, to the
mental state or thought which it is taken to represent.
It is for this reason that the poets, from Homer to
Tennyson, abound in onomatopes,&mdash;in words and combinations
of words in which the sound is an echo to the
sense. These words are not only the most vivid, the most
passionate, and the most picturesque, but they are the only
ones which are instantly intelligible, and which possess an
inherently graphic power. The power of poetry lies largely
in the fact that, as Bunsen says, it “reproduces the original
process of the mind in which language originates. The
coinage of words is the primitive poem of humanity, and
the imagery of poetry and oratory is possible and effective
only because it is a continuation of that primitive process
which is itself a reproduction of creation.”</p>

<p>Dyer, in his “Ruins of Rome,” thus exemplifies, in a
passage quoted with praise by Johnson, the beauty and
force imparted to style by the adaptation of the sounds
to the object described:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">“The pilgrim oft</p>
<p class="verse0">At dead of night, ’mid his oraison, hears</p>
<p class="verse0">Aghast the voice of time; disparting towers</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Tumbling all precipitate down dashed,</em></p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Rattling around, loud thundering to the moon</em>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Not only single words, but an entire sentence, or a
series of sentences, may resemble the sound represented;
as in the following description of the abode of Sleep, in
Spenser:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“And more to lull him in his slumbers soft,</p>
<p class="verse0">A trickling stream from high rocks tumbling downe,</p>
<p class="verse0">And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft,</p>
<p class="verse0">Mixed with a murmuring wind much like the sowne</p>
<p class="verse0">Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swoone:</p>
<p class="verse0">No other noise, nor people’s troublous cries,</p>
<p class="verse0">As still are wont t’ annoy the walléd towne,</p>
<p class="verse0">Might there be heard; but careless Quiet lies,</p>
<p class="verse0">Wrapped in eternal silence, far from enemies.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">An intelligent writer reminds us that in reading this
stanza, we ought to humor it with a corresponding tone of
voice, lowering or deepening it, “as though we were going
to bed ourselves, or thinking of the rainy night that had
lulled us.” He suggests also that attention to the accent
and pause in the last line will make us feel the depth
and distance of the scene. Another illustration is furnished
by the well known lines of Pope:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Soft is the stream when Zephyr gently blows,</p>
<p class="verse0">And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;</p>
<p class="verse0">But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,</p>
<p class="verse0">The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.</p>
<p class="verse0">When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,</p>
<p class="verse0">The line too labors, and the words move slow;</p>
<p class="verse0">Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,</p>
<p class="verse0">Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>More striking still, in some respects, is Christopher
Pitt’s translation of the corresponding passage in Vida’s
“Art of Poetry”:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“When things are small the terms should still be so,</p>
<p class="verse0">For low words please us, when the theme is low.</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>But when some giant, <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'horrible and g im'">horrible and grim</ins>,</em></p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Enormous in his gait, and vast in every limb,</em></p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Comes towering on</em>; the swelling words must rise</p>
<p class="verse0">In just proportion to the monster’s size.</p>
<p class="verse0">If some large weight his huge arms strive to shove,</p>
<p class="verse0">The verse too labors; the thronged words scarce move.</p>
</div>
<hr class="tb" />
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">But if the poem suffer from delay,</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Let the lines fly precipitate away</em>;</p>
<p class="verse0">And when the viper issues from the brake,</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Be quick; with stones and brands and fire attack</em></p>
<p class="verse0"><em>His rising crest, and drive the serpent back</em>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">The overflowing of the fourth line in this passage, the
abrupt termination of the middle of the next line, the
pause at “Be quick!” and the rapidity of the last four
lines, are exceedingly happy. The illustration of rapid
motion is far superior to the last long and sprawling line
of Pope, in which the preponderance of liquids and sibilants
detains the voice too much, while it is further impeded
by the word “unbending,”&mdash;one of the most sluggish,
as Johnson truly says, in the language.</p>

<p>How felicitous are “the hoarse Trinacrian shore” of
Milton, and his description of the rapid motion and grating
noise with which Hell’s gates are opened!&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">“On a sudden, open fly</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>With impetuous recoil, and jarring sound,</em></p>
<p class="verse0"><em>The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate</em></p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Harsh thunder</em>, that the lowest bottom shook</p>
<p class="verse0">Of Erebus.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>What can be more expressive than this representation
of the sounds of a battle in ancient times?&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">“Arms on armor clashing bray’d</p>
<p class="verse0">Horrible discord; and the madding wheels</p>
<p class="verse0">Of brazen chariots raged.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span></p>

<p>How effective is the pause after the word “shook” in
these lines!&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse6">“And over them triumphant Death his dart</p>
<p class="verse0">Shook, but delayed to strike.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Discordant sounds are vividly described in this line
from “Lycidas”:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Two of the most perfect examples of imitative harmony
in our literature are Wordsworth’s couplet,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“And see the children shouting on the shore,</p>
<p class="verse0">And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and Byron’s vivid description of a storm among the
mountains:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse14">“Far along</p>
<p class="verse0">From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,</p>
<p class="verse0">Leaps the live thunder!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The numerous adaptations of sound to sense in Dryden’s
“Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day” are familiar to all. The
following verse, from a song in his “King Arthur,” is less
hackneyed:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“Come, if you dare, our trumpets sound;</p>
<p class="verse10">&nbsp; Come, if you dare, our foes rebound;</p>
<p class="verse10">&nbsp; <em>We come, we come, we come, we come,</em></p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Says the double, double, double beat of the thundering drum</em>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>No modern poet has made a more frequent or a more
judicious use of onomatopœia than Tennyson. “The Bugle
Song,” “The Brook,” “Tears, Idle Tears,” and “Break,
Break, Break,” will at once occur to the poet’s admirers
as masterpieces of representative art. The second stanza
of the “Bugle Song” has few equals in ancient or modern
verse:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">“&nbsp;‘O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,</p>
<p class="verse4">And thinner, clearer, farther going;</p>
<p class="verse2">O sweet and far, from cliff and scar,</p>
<p class="verse4">The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!’</p>
<p class="verse0">Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,</p>
<p class="verse0">Blow, bugle; answer echoes, dying, dying, dying.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span></p>

<p>What can be more perfect of its kind than the picture
of the shock of a <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">melée</i>, when the combatants</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse12">“Closed</p>
<p class="verse0">In conflict with the crash of shivering points,</p>
<p class="verse0">And thunder ...</p>
<p class="verse0">And all the plain,&mdash;brand, mace, and shaft, and shield</p>
<p class="verse0">Shock’d, <em>like an iron-clanging anvil banged</em></p>
<p class="verse0"><em>With hammers</em>;”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">or the picture of a fleet of glass wrecked on a reef of
gold, in the lines,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">“For the fleet drew near,</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Touched, clinked, and clanked</em>, and vanished.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Motion, as well as sound, has been happily imitated in
language,&mdash;of which we have signal examples in the progress
of Milton’s fiend, whose wearisome journey is portrayed
by this artful arrangement of words:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse14">“The fiend</p>
<p class="verse0">O’er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,</p>
<p class="verse0">With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,</p>
<p class="verse0">And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies;”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and in Pope’s translation of the noted passage in the
“Odyssey” describing Sisyphus:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“With many a step and many a groan,</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone</em>;</p>
<p class="verse0">The huge round stone, <em>resulting with a bound,</em></p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground</em>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In reading the second line, with its frequent recurrence
of the aspirate, one seems to hear the giant pantings
and groanings of Sisyphus; and a similar feeling is experienced
in reading the following line:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“And when up ten steep slopes you’ve dragged your thighs.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Crowe, the now forgotten author of “Lewisdon Hill,”
fairly rivals Pope in the closing line of a version of the
foregoing passage in the “Odyssey”:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“A sudden force</p>
<p class="verse0">Turned the curst stone, and, slipping from his hold,</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Down again, down the steep rebounding, down it rolled</em>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span></p>

<p>An able literary critic,&mdash;the Rev. Robert A. Willmott,&mdash;has
thus contrasted the majestic and easy verse of Dryden
with the “mellifluence” of Pope. “‘The mellifluence of
Pope,’ as Johnson called it, has the defect of monotony.
Exquisite in the sweet rising and falling of its clauses, it
seldom or never takes the ear prisoner by a musical surprise.
If Pope be the nightingale of our verse, he displays
none of the irregular and unexpected gush of the
songster. He has no variations. The tune is delicate,
but not natural. It reminds us of a bird, all over brilliant,
which pipes its one lay in a golden cage, and has
forgotten the green wood in the luxury of confinement.
But Dryden’s versification has the freedom and the freshness
of the fields.... This is a great charm. He preserved
the simple, unpremeditated graces of the earlier couplet,
its confluence and monosyllabic close, while he added a
dignity and a splendor unknown before. Pope’s modulation
is of the ear; Dryden’s of the subject. He has a
different tone for Iphigenia slumbering under trees, by
the fountain side; for the startled knight, who listens to
strange sounds within the glooms of the wood; and for
the courtly Beauty to whom he wafted a compliment.”</p>

<p>In the following lines from “Il Penseroso,” the effect
combines both sound and motion:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Oft on a plat of rising ground,</p>
<p class="verse0">I hear the far-off curlew sound,</p>
<p class="verse0">Over some wide-watered shore,</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Swinging slow with sullen roar</em>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>How admirably does the quick and joyous movement
of the following lines from “L’Allegro” portray the
thing described!&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Let the merry bells resound</p>
<p class="verse0">And the jocund rebecks sound,</p>
<p class="verse0">To many a youth, and many a maid,</p>
<p class="verse0">Dancing in the chequered shade.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span></p>

<p>Huge, unwieldy bulk, implying slowness of movement,
has been happily expressed by Milton in the subjoined
passages:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse6">“O’er all the dreary coasts</p>
<p class="verse0">So, stretched out, huge in length, the arch-fiend lay.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“But ended foul, in many a scaly fold</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Voluminous and vast</em>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>How inflated with bulky meaning are these lines from
Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”!&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“The large Achilles, on his pressed bed lolling,</p>
<p class="verse0">From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The greatest of the Greek and Roman poets have employed
those “echoes of nature,” the onomatopes, as freely
as the modern. Every schoolboy is familiar with the words
in which Virgil describes thunder,&mdash;“<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Iterum atque iterum
fragor intonat ingens</i>,” as well as with those in which he
represents the rapid clatter of horses’ hoofs:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="la" xml:lang="la">
<p class="verseq">“<em>Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum</em>,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and the vivid words in which Homer recalls the snapping
of a sword:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">
<p class="verse0"><ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'Τριχθί τε καὶ τετραχθὶ διατρύφεν'">Τριχθά τε καὶ τετραχθὰ διατρύφεν</ins>.</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Who does not catch the hurtling of battle in the same
poet’s</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">
<p class="verse0">σκέπτετ’ ὀϊστῶν τε ῥοῖζον καὶ δοῦπον ἀκόντων,</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and a murmur of ocean in</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">
<p class="verse0">ἐξ ἀκαλαῤῥείταο βαθυῤῥόου Ὠκεανοῖο?</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">A similar effect is produced by his</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">
<p class="verse0">πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης,</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">the first word of which was perhaps intended to represent
the roaring of the wave as it mounts on the sea-shore,
and the second the hissing sound of a receding billow.</p>

<p>Virgil’s description of the Cyclopses toiling at the anvil;
his picture of the Trojans laboriously hewing the foundations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>
of a tower on the top of Priam’s palace, and its sudden
and violent fall; Ennius’s imitation of a trumpet
blast; and the imitation by Aristophanes of the croaking
of frogs,&mdash;will recur to the classic reader as other examples
of the felicitous use of this figure by the Greek and
Roman writers.</p>

<p>Paronomasia and alliteration owe their subtle beauty to
the fact that in using them the writer has reference to
words considered as sounds. Though an excess of either
is offensive, yet, charily used, it adds a surprising force to
expression. How much is the grandeur of the effect enhanced
by the repetition of the s in the following lines
from Macbeth!&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“That shall, to all our days and nights to come,</p>
<p class="verse0">Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Dr. Johnson, in speaking of imitative harmony, observes
that the desire of discovering frequent adaptations
of the sound to the sense “has produced many wild conceits
and imaginary beauties.” This is only saying that
the poet, like the painter, may exaggerate the importance
of his accessories, while he gives too little heed to his
main theme. But this is no argument against the legitimate
use of any subtle or peculiar beauty in either the
pictorial or the metrical art. There are many cases where
it is impossible to use language which is specific, vivid,
and appropriate, without employing imitative words. For
the choice of these words no rules can be given; only an
instinctive and exquisite taste can enable one to decide
when they may be consciously used, and when they should
be shunned. But he who can use onomatopœia with
skill and judgment,&mdash;who can call into play, on proper
occasions, that swift and subtle law of association whereby<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
a reproduction of the sounds at once recalls to the mind
the images or circumstances with which they are connected,&mdash;has
mastered one of the greatest secrets of the
writer’s art. It was a saying of Shenstone, which experience
confirms, that harmony and melody of style have
greater weight than is generally imagined in our judgments
upon writing and writers; and, as a proof of this,
he says that the lines of poetry, the periods of prose, and
even the texts of Scripture we most frequently recollect
and quote, are those which are preëminently musical.
The following magical lines, which owe their interest to
the cadence hardly less than to their imagery, illustrate
Shenstone’s remark:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8"><span class="smcap">Youth and Age.</span></p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;</p>
<p class="verse2">Friendship is a sheltering tree;</p>
<p class="verse0">Oh, the joys that came down shower-like,</p>
<p class="verse2">Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty,</p>
<p class="verse8">Ere I was old!</p>
<p class="verse0">Ere I was old! Ah, woful Ere!</p>
<p class="verse0">Which tells me, Youth’s no longer here!</p>
<p class="verse0">O Youth! for years so many and sweet,</p>
<p class="verse2">’Tis known that thou and I were one;</p>
<p class="verse0">I’ll think it but a fond conceit&mdash;</p>
<p class="verse2">It cannot be that Thou art gone!</p>
<p class="verse0">The vesper bell hath not yet tolled,</p>
<p class="verse0">And thou wert aye a masker bold!</p>
<p class="verse0">What strange disguise hast now put on,</p>
<p class="verse0">To make believe that thou art gone?</p>
<p class="verse0">I see these locks in silvery slips,</p>
<p class="verse2">This drooping gait, this altered size:</p>
<p class="verse0">But spring-tide blossoms on thy lips,</p>
<p class="verse2">And tears take sunshine from thine eyes.</p>
<p class="verse0">Life is but thought; so think I will,</p>
<p class="verse0">That Youth and I are house-mates still.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> This classification is from Farrar, who has abridged it from Wedgwood,
in Phil. Trans. II., 118.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> “Chapters on Language” by Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D., F.R.S.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> “Chapters on Language,” p. 104.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER XI.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">THE FALLACIES IN WORDS.</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Gardons-nous de l’équivoque!&mdash;<span class="smcap">Paul Louis Courier.</span></span></p>

<p>Words are grown so false, I am loathe to prove reason with them.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Shakespeare.</span></p>

<p>The mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is
the mother of all error.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Hooker.</span></p></div>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt;</p>
<p class="verse0">One trivial letter ruins all, left out;</p>
<p class="verse0">A knot can choke a felon into clay;</p>
<p class="verse0">A knot will save him, spelt without the k;</p>
<p class="verse0">The smallest word has some unguarded spot,</p>
<p class="verse0">And danger lurks in i without a dot.&mdash;<span class="smcap">O. W. Holmes.</span></p>
</div></div>
</div>


<p class="drop-capy">On some of the great American rivers, where lumbering
operations are carried on, the logs, in floating
down, often get jammed up here and there, and it becomes
necessary to find the timber which is a kind of keystone
and stops all the rest. Once detach this, and away dash
the giant trunks, thundering headlong, helter-skelter, down
the rapids. It is just this office which he who defines his
terms accurately performs for the dead-locked questions
of the day. Half the controversies of the world are disputes
about words. How often do we see two persons
engage in what Cowper calls “a duel in the form of a
debate,”&mdash;tilting furiously at each other for hours,&mdash;slashing
with syllogisms, stabbing with enthymemes, hooking
with dilemmas, and riddling with sorites,&mdash;with no
apparent prospect of ever ending the fray, till suddenly
it occurs to one of them to define precisely what he means<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
by a term on which the discussion hinges; when it is found
that the combatants had no cause for quarrel, having
agreed in opinion from the beginning! The juggle of all
sophistry lies in employing equivocal expressions,&mdash;that
is, such as may be taken in two different meanings, using
a word in one sense in the premises, and in another sense
in the conclusion. Frequently the word on which a controversy
turns is unconsciously made to do double duty,
and under a seeming unity there lurks a real dualism of
meaning, from which endless confusions arise. Accurately
to define such a term is to provide one’s self with a master-key
which unlocks the whole dispute.</p>

<p>Who is not familiar with the fierce contests of the
Nominalists and Realists, which raged so long in the Middle
Ages? Though turning upon refinements of abstraction
so subtle that one would think they never could stir
in the human bosom the faintest breath of passion, the
dispute roused the combatants on both sides to the most
frenzied fury. Beginning with words, these two metaphysical
sects came at last to blows, and not only shed
blood, but even sacrificed lives for the question, whether
an abstract name (as <em>man</em>, for example) represented any
one man in particular, or man in general. Yet, properly
understood, they maintained only opposite poles of the
same truth; and were, therefore, both right, and both
wrong. The Nominalists, it has been said, only denied
what no one in his senses would affirm, and the Realists
only contended for what no one in his senses would deny;
a hair’s breadth parted those who, had they understood
each other’s language, would have had no altercation.
Again, who can tell how far the clash of opinions among
political economists has been owing to the use in opposite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span>
senses of a very few words? Had Smith, Say, Ricardo,
Malthus, M’Culloch, Mill, begun framing their systems by
defining carefully the meanings attached by them to certain
terms used on every page of their writings,&mdash;such
as Wealth, Labor, Capital, Value, Supply and Demand,
Over-trading,&mdash;it may be doubted whether they would
not, to some extent, have harmonized in opinion, instead
of giving us theories as opposite as the poles.</p>

<p>How many fallacies have grown out of the ambiguity
of the word “money,” which, instead of being a simple
and indivisible term, has at least half-a-dozen different
meanings! Money may be either specie, bank-notes, or
both together, or credit, or capital, or capital offered for
loan. A merchant is said to fail “for lack of money,”
when, in fact, he fails because he lacks credit, capital, or
merchandise, money having no more to do with the matter
than the carts or railway wagons by which the merchandise
is transported. Again: money is spoken of as
yielding “interest,” which it cannot do, since wherever it
is, whether in a bank, in one’s pocket, or in a safe, it is
dead capital. The confusion of the terms “wealth” and
“money” gave birth to “the mercantile system,” one of
the greatest curses that ever befell Europe. As in popular
language to grow rich is to accumulate “money,” and to
grow poor is to lose “money,” this term became a synonym
for “wealth”; and, till recently at least, all the nations
of Europe studied every means of accumulating gold and
silver in their respective countries. To accomplish this
they prohibited the exportation of money, gave bounties
on the importation, and restricted the importation of
other commodities, expecting thus to produce a “favorable
balance of trade,”&mdash;a conduct as wise as that of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span>
shop-keeper who should sell his goods only for money, and
hoard every dollar, instead of replacing and increasing his
stock, or putting his surplus capital at interest. France,
under Colbert, acted upon this principle, and Voltaire
extolled his wisdom in thus preferring the accumulation
of imperishable bullion to the exchange of it for articles
which must, sooner or later, <em>wear out</em>. The effect of this
fallacy has been to make the nations regard the wealth
of their customers as a source of loss instead of profit,
and an advantageous market as a curse instead of a blessing,
by which errors the improvement of Europe has been
more retarded than by all other causes put together.</p>

<p>So with the mortal theological wars in which so much
ink has been shed. Who has not read of the disputes
between the Arians and Semi-Arians and their enemies,
when orthodoxy became so nice that a slip in a single
expression, the use or omission of a single word, sufficed
to make a man a heretic,&mdash;when every heresy produced a
new creed, and every creed a new heresy? The shelves
of our public libraries groan under the weight of huge
folios and quartos once hurled at each other by the giants
of divinity, which never would have been published but
for their confused notions, or failure to discriminate the
meaning, of certain technical and oft-recurring terms.
Beginning with discordant ideas of what is meant by the
words Will, Necessity, Unity, Law, Person,&mdash;terms vital in
theology,&mdash;the more they argued, the farther they were
apart, and while fancying they were battling with real
adversaries, were, Quixote-like, tilting at windmills, or
fighting with shadows, till at last utter</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“Confusion umpire sat,</p>
<p class="verse0">And by deciding worse embroiled the fray.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span></p>
<p>The whole vast science of casuistry, which once occupied
the brains and tongues of the Schoolmen, turned upon
nice, hair-splitting verbal distinctions, as ridiculous as the
disputes of the orthodox Liliputians and the heretical
Blefuscudians about the big ends and the little ends of
the eggs. The readers of Pascal will remember the fierce
wars in the Sorbonne between the Jesuits and the Jansenists,
touching the doctrine of “efficacious” and “sufficient”
grace. The question was, “Whether all men received
from God <em>sufficient grace</em> for their conversion.” The
Jesuits maintained the affirmative; the Jansenists insisted
that this <em>sufficient</em> grace would never be <em>efficacious</em>, unless
accompanied by <em>special</em> grace. “Then the <em>sufficient</em> grace,
which is not <em>efficacious</em>, is a contradiction in terms,” cried
the Jesuits; “and, besides, it is a heresy!” We need not
trace the history of the logomachy that followed, which
Pascal has immortalized in his “Provincial Letters,”&mdash;letters
which De Maistre denounces as “Les Menteurs,”
but which the Jesuits found to be both “sufficient” and
“efficacious” for their utter discomfiture. The theological
student will recall the microscopic distinctions;
the fine-spun attenuations; the spider-like threads of
meaning; the delicate, infinitesimal verbal shavings of
the grave and angelic doctors; how one subtle disputant,
with syllabical penetration, would discover a heresy in
his opponent’s monosyllables, while the other would detect
a schism in his antagonist’s conjunctions, till finally, after
having filled volumes enough with the controversy to
form a library, the microscopic point at issue, which had
long been invisible, was whittled down to nothing.</p>

<p>A controversy not less memorable was that which raged
in the church in the third and fourth centuries between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span>
the “Homoousians” and the “Homoiusians” concerning
the nature of Christ. The former maintained that Christ
was of the <em>same</em> essence with the Father; the latter that
he was of <em>like</em> essence,&mdash;a dispute which Boileau has
satirized in these witty lines:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">
<p class="verseq">“D’une <em>syllabe</em> impie un saint <em>mot</em> augmenté</p>
<p class="verse0">Remplit tous les esprits d’aigreurs si meurtrières&mdash;</p>
<p class="verse0">Tu fis, dans une guerre et si triste et si longue,</p>
<p class="verse0">Périr tant de Chrétiens, <em>martyrs d’une diphthongue</em>!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">The determination of the controversy depended on the
retention or rejection of the diphthong <em>oi</em>, or rather upon
the change of the letter <em>o</em> into <em>i</em>; and hence it has been
asserted that for centuries Christians fought like tigers,
and tore each other to pieces, on account of a single letter.
It must be admitted, however, that the dispute, though it
related to a mystery above human comprehension, was
something more than a verbal one; and though it is easy
to ridicule “microscopic theology,” yet it is evident that
if error employs it, truth must do the same, even if the
distinction be as small as the difference between two
animalcules fighting each other among a billion of fellows
in a drop of water.</p>

<p>Another famous theological controversy was that concerning
the doctrine of the Double Procession, which,
though mainly a verbal dispute, tore asunder the Eastern
and Western Churches, gave the chief occasion for the
anathemas of the Athanasian creed, precipitated the fall of
the Empire of Constantinople, and, it has been asserted,
sowed the original seed of the present perplexing Eastern
Question.</p>

<p>To how many discussions has that ambiguous phrase,
“the Church,” given rise! It has been shown that in all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
countries where there is a religious establishment supported
by law, this phrase may have six different meanings.
A Romanist understands by “the Church” his own communion,
with the hierarchy and papal head; a Protestant
includes within “the Church” all sincere and devout
Christians of every denomination. A Romanist, again,
understands “priest” to refer to a sacrificial priesthood; a
Presbyterian regards it as derived from “presbyter,” and
to mean simply “elder.”</p>

<p>Disraeli remarks, in his “Curiosities of Literature,” that
there have been few councils or synods where the addition
or omission of a word or a phrase might not have terminated
an interminable logomachy. “At the Council of
Basle, for the convenience of the disputants, John de
Secubia drew up a treatise of <em>undeclined words</em>, chiefly to
determine the significations of the particles <em>from</em>, <em>by</em>, <em>but</em>,
and <em>except</em>, which, it seems, were perpetually occasioning
fresh disputes among the Hussites and Bohemians.... In
modern times the popes have more skilfully freed the
church from the ‘confusion of words.’ His holiness on one
occasion, standing in equal terror of the Court of France,
who protected the Jesuits, and of the Court of Spain, who
maintained the cause of the Dominicans, contrived a phrase,
where a comma or a full stop, placed at the beginning or
the end, purported that his holiness tolerated the opinions
which he condemned; and when the rival parties dispatched
deputations to the Court of Rome to plead for the
period, or advocate the comma, his holiness, in this ‘confusion
of words,’ flung an unpunctuated copy to the parties;
nor was it his fault, but that of the spirit of party, if the
rage of the one could not subside into a comma, nor that
of the other close by a full period!”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span></p>

<p>It has been truly said by a Scotch divine that the vehemence
of theological controversy has been generally proportional
to the emptiness of the party phrases used. It is
probable that in nine cases out of ten accurate definitions
of the chief terms in dispute would have made the most
celebrated controversies impossible. It is stated by the
biographer of Dr. Chalmers that that eminent divine and
Dr. Stuart met one day in Edinburgh, and engaged in a
long and eager conversation on <em>saving grace</em>. Street after
street was paced, and argument after argument was vigorously
plied. At last, his time or his patience exhausted,
Chalmers broke off the interview; but, as at parting he
shook his opponent by the hand, he said: “If you wish to
see my views stated clearly and distinctly, read a tract
called ‘Hindrances to Believing the Gospel.’” “Why,” exclaimed
Stuart, “that’s the very tract I published myself!”</p>

<p>As in theology, so in philosophy, words used without
precision have been at the bottom of nearly all controversies.
How often such terms as Nature, Necessity, Freedom,
Law, Body, Matter, Substance, Revelation, Inspiration,
Knowledge, Belief, Finite, and Infinite, are tossed about in
the wars of words, as if everybody knew their meaning,
and as if all the disputants used them in exactly the same
sense! Max Müller sensibly observes that people will fight
and call each other very hard names for denying or asserting
certain opinions about the Supernatural, who would
consider it impertinent if they were asked to define what
they mean by the Supernatural, and who have never even
clearly perceived the meaning of Nature. The same writer
shows that the words “to know” and “to believe,” the
meanings of which seem so obvious, are each used, in
modern languages, in three distinct senses. When we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>
speak of our belief in God, or in the immortality of the
soul, we want to express a certainty independent of sense,
evidence and reason, yet more convincing than either. But
when we say that we believe Our Lord suffered under Pontius
Pilate, or lived during the reign of Augustus, we do
not mean to say that we believe this with the same belief
as the existence of God, or the immortality of the soul.
Our assent, in this case, is based on historical evidence,
which is only a subdivision of sense evidence, supplemented
by the evidence of reason. When, thirdly, we say, “I believe
it is going to rain,” “I believe” means no more than
“I guess.” The same word, therefore, “conveys the highest
as well as the lowest degree of certainty that can be
predicated of the various experiences of the human mind,
and the confusion produced by its promiscuous employment
has caused some of the most violent controversies in matters
of religion and philosophy.”<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p>

<p>The art of treaty-making appears once to have consisted
in a kind of verbal sleight-of-hand; and the most
dexterous diplomatist was he who had always “an <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">arrière
pensée</i>, which might fasten or loosen the ambiguous expression
he had so cautiously and so finely inlaid in the
mosaic of treachery.” When the American colonies refused
to be taxed by Great Britain, on the ground that
they were not represented in the House of Commons, a
new term, “<em>virtual</em> representation,” was invented to silence
their clamors. The sophism was an ingenious one; but it
cost the mother country a hundred millions sterling, forty
thousand lives, and the most valuable of her colonial
possessions.</p>

<p>Hume’s famous argument against miracles is based<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>
entirely upon a <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">petitio principii</i>, or begging of the question,
artfully concealed in an ambiguous use of the word
“experience.” In all our experience, he argues, we have
never known the laws of nature to be violated; on the
other hand, we have had experience, again and again, of
the falsity of testimony; consequently we ought to believe
that any amount of testimony is false rather than admit
the occurrence of a miracle. But <em>whose</em> experience does
Hume mean? Does he mean the experience of <em>all</em>
the men that ever lived? If so, he palpably begs the
very question in dispute. Does he mean that a miracle
is contrary to the experience of <em>each individual</em> who has
never seen one? This would lead to the absurdest consequences.
Not only was the King of Bantam justified
in listening to no evidence for the existence of ice, but no
man would be authorized, on this principle, to expect his
own death. His experience informs him directly, only that
<em>others</em> have died; and, as he has invariably recovered when
attacked by disease himself, why, judging by his experience,
should he expect any future sickness to be mortal?
If, again, Hume means only that a miracle is contrary to
the experience of <em>men generally</em>, as to what is common and
of ordinary occurrence, the maxim will only amount to this,
that false testimony is a thing of common occurrence, and
that miracles are not. This is true enough; but “too
general to authorize of itself a conclusion in any particular
case. In any other individual question as to the admissibility
of evidence, it would be reckoned absurd to consider
merely the average chances for the truth of testimony in
the abstract, without inquiring what the testimony is, in
the particular instance before us. As if, <em>e.g.</em>, any one
had maintained that no testimony could establish Columbus’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>
account of the discovery of America, because it is
more common for travellers to lie than for new continents
to be discovered.”<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p>

<p>Again, the terms “experience” and “contrary to experience,”
imply a contradiction fatal to the whole argument.
It is clear that a revelation cannot be founded, as regards
the external proof of its reality, upon anything else than
miracles; and these events <em>must</em> be, in a sense, contrary to
nature, <em>as known to us</em>, by the very definition of the word.
If they entered into the ordinary operations of nature,&mdash;that
is, were subjects of experience,&mdash;they would no longer
be miracles.</p>

<p>In the very phrase “a violation of nature,” so cunningly
used by sceptics, there lurks a sophism. The
expression seems to imply that there are effects that have
no cause; or, at least, effects whose cause is foreign to the
universe. But if miracles disturb or interrupt the established
order of things, they do so only in the same way
that the will of man continually breaks in upon the order
of nature. There is not a day, an hour, or a minute, in
which man, in his contact with the material world, does
not divert its course, or give a new direction to its order.
The order of nature allows an apple-tree to produce fruit;
but man can girdle the tree, and prevent it from bearing
apples. The order of nature allows a bird to wing its
flight from tree to tree; but the sportsman’s rifle brings
the bird to the dust. Yet, in spite of this, it is asserted
that the smallest conceivable intervention, disturbing the
fated order of nature, linked as are its parts indissolubly
from eternity in one chain, must break up the entire system
of the universe! “If only the free will of man be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
acknowledged, then” as an able writer says, “this entire
sophism comes down in worthless fragments. So long as
we allow ourselves to speak <em>as theists</em>, then miracles which
we attribute to the <em>will</em>, the <em>purpose</em>, the <em>power</em> of God,
are not in any sense violations of nature; or they are so
in the same sense in which the entireness of our human
existence,&mdash;our active converse with the material world
from morning to night of every day,&mdash;is also a violation
of nature.” The truth is, however, that miracles are not
properly violations of the laws of nature, but suspensions
of them, or rather intercalations of higher and immediate
operations of God’s power, in place of the ordinary
development of those laws. An eminent scientist finds a
rough illustration of this in the famous Strasburg clock.
He stood one day, and watched it steadily marking the
seconds, minutes, hours, days of the week, and phases of
the moon, when suddenly the figure of an angel turned
up his hour-glass, another struck four times, and Death
struck twelve times with metal marrow-bones to indicate
noon; various figures passed in and out of the doorways;
the twelve Apostles marched, one by one, before the figure
of their Master, and a brass cock three times flapped its
wings, threw back its head, and crowed. “All this,” says
the scientist, “was as much a part of the designer’s plan
as the ordinary marking of time, and he had provided
for it in advance, and the machinery for its execution was
so arranged as to come into play at a definite moment. So
God may have prepared the universe from the beginning
with a view to miracles, may have ordered its laws in such
a manner that at the predetermined hour in His providence
these wonderful phenomena should appear, and bear convincing
testimony to His own power and greatness.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span></p>

<p>A further and not less fatal objection to Hume’s argument
is that it confounds the distinction between testimony
and authority, between the veracity of a witness and his
competency. The miraculous character of an event is not
a matter of intuition or observation, but of inference, and
cannot be decided by testimony, but only by reasoning from
the probabilities of the case. The testimony relates only
to the <em>happening of the event</em>; the question concerning the
<em>nature</em> of this event, whether it is, or is not, a violation of
physical law, can only be determined by the judgment,
after weighing all the circumstances of the case. No event
whatever, viewed simply as an event, as an external phenomenon,
can be so marvellous that sufficient testimony
will not convince us that it has really occurred. A thousand
years ago the conversion of five loaves of bread into as
many hundred, or the raising of a dead man to life, would
not have appeared more incredible than the transmission of
a written message five thousand miles, without error,
within a minute of time, or from Europe to America, under
the waters of the Atlantic; yet these feats, miraculous as
they would once have seemed, have been accomplished by
the electric telegraph. Hume’s argument against miracles,
therefore, which is based entirely upon an appeal to experience
and testimony, without reference to the <em>competency</em> of
the conclusion that the events testified to were supernatural,
is altogether inapplicable.</p>

<p>Hume’s argument reminds us of the fallacies that lurk
in the word “Nature,” and the phrase “Law of Nature.”
Etymologically, “Nature” means she who gives birth, or who
brings forth. But what is she? Is she an independent
power, a being endowed with intelligence and will? Or is it
not evidently a mere figure of speech, when we personify<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span>
Nature, and speak of her works and her laws? “It is easy,”
says Cuvier, “to see the puerility of those philosophers
who have conferred on Nature a kind of individual existence,
distinct from the Creator, from the laws which He has
imposed on the movement, and from the properties and
forms which He has given to His creatures; and who represent
Nature as acting on matter by means of her own
power and reason.” Again, the phrase “Law of Nature”
is sometimes used as if it were equivalent to <em>efficient cause</em>.
There are persons who attempt to account for the phenomena
of the universe by the mere agency of physical laws,
when there is no such agency, except as a figure of speech.
A “Law of Nature” is only a general statement concerning
a large number of similar individual facts, which it
describes, but in no way <em>accounts for</em>, or explains. It is not
the Law of Gravitation which <em>causes</em> a stone thrown into
the air to fall to the earth; but the fact that the stone so
falls is classed with many other facts, which are comprehended
under the general statement called the “Law of
Gravitation.” “Second causes,” as physical laws are sometimes
called, “are no causes at all; they are mere fictions
of the intellect, and exist only in thought. A <em>cause</em>,
in the proper sense of the word, that is, an <em>efficient</em> cause,
as original and direct in its action, must be a <em>first</em> cause;
that through which its action is transmitted is not a cause,
but a portion of the <em>effect</em>,&mdash;as it does not act, but is acted
upon.”<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>

<p>The changes of meaning which words undergo in the
lapse of time, and the different senses in which the same
word is used in different countries, are a fruitful source of
misunderstanding and error. Hence in reading an old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>
author it is necessary to be constantly on our guard lest
our interpretations of his words involve a gross anachronism,
because his “pure ideas” have become our “mixed
modes.” The titles of “tyrant,” “sophist,” “parasite,”
were originally honorable distinctions; and to attach to
them their modern significations would give us wholly false
ideas of ancient history. When Bishop Watson, in defending
Christianity and the Bible from the attacks of Gibbon
and Thomas Paine, entitled his books “An Apology for
Christianity,” and “An Apology for the Bible,” he used the
word “apology” in its primitive sense of “a defence,” as
Plato had used it in his “Apologia Socratis,” and Quadratus
in his “Apology for Christianity” to the Emperor
Adrian; but the author was probably understood by many
of his readers to be offering an <em>excuse</em> for the Christian system
and for the faults of the Scriptures, instead of a vindication
of their truth. “Apology for the Bible!” exclaimed
George the Third, on hearing of the book; “the Bible
needs no apology.” When we find an old English writer
characterizing his opponent’s argument as “impertinent,”
we are apt to attach to the word the idea of insolence or
rudeness; whereas the meaning is simply “not pertinent” to
the question. So a magistrate who “‘indifferently’ administered
justice” meant formerly a magistrate who administered
justice “impartially.”</p>

<p>Were we to use the word “gravitation” in translating
certain passages of ancient authors, we should assert that
the great discovery of Newton had been anticipated by hundreds
of years, though we know that these authors had
never dreamed of the law which that word recalls to our
minds. Most of the terminology of the Christian church
is made up of words that once had a more general meaning.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
“Bishop” meant originally overseer; “priest,” or
“presbyter,” meant elder; “deacon” meant administrator;
and “sacrament,” a vow of allegiance. In reading
the passage in the Athanasian Creed where the persons
of the Trinity are spoken of as the Father “incomprehensible,”
the Son “incomprehensible,” and the Holy
Ghost “incomprehensible,” almost all persons suppose the
word “incomprehensible” to mean “inconceivable,” or
beyond or above the human understanding. But when
the Creed was translated into English from the Latin,
the word meant simply “not comprehended within any
limits,” and corresponded to the term “immense,” used in
the original. In studying the Greek and Latin classics,
we shall be continually led into error, unless we note the
difference between the meanings attached in them to certain
terms, and those we now attach to corresponding
terms. Thus the “God” denoted by the Greek and
Latin words which we so translate, was not the eternal
Maker and Governor of the Universe, whom Christians
worship, but a being such as our Pagan forefathers worshipped.
In reading the history of France, an American
or Englishman is constantly in danger of misapprehension
by associating with certain words common to the French
and English languages similar ideas. When he reads of
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Parliaments</i> or the <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Noblesse</i>, he is apt to suppose that they
resembled the Parliaments and Nobility of England, when
their constitution was altogether different. To confound
them is like confounding a Jacobin and a Jacobite, a
French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">vicaire</i> with an English vicar, or a French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">gouvernante</i>
with an English governess. The list is almost endless
of words, which, derived from the same Latin term,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span>
connote one class of ideas in French and another in
English.</p>

<p>Mr. J. S. Mill observes that historians, travellers, and
all who write or speak concerning moral and social phenomena
with which they are unacquainted, are apt to confound
in their descriptions things wholly diverse. Having
but a scanty vocabulary of words relating to such phenomena,
and never having analyzed the facts to which these
words correspond in their own country, they apply them
to other facts to which they are more or less inapplicable.
Thus, as I have before briefly stated, the first English
conquerors of Bengal carried with them the phrase
“landed proprietor” into a country where the rights
of individuals over the soil were extremely different in
degree, and even in nature, from those recognized in England.
Applying the term with all its English associations
in such a state of things, to one who had only a limited
right they gave an absolute right; from another, because
he had not an absolute right, they took away all right;
drove whole classes of men to ruin and despair; filled
the country with banditti; created a feeling that nothing
was secure; and produced, with the best intentions, a disorganization
which had not been produced in that country
by the most ruthless of its barbarian invaders.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p>

<p>How often, in reading ancient history, are we misled
by the application of modern terms to past institutions
and events! Guizot, in speaking of the towns of Europe
between the fifth and tenth centuries, cautions his readers
against concluding that their state was one either of positive
servitude or of positive freedom. He observes that
when a society and its language have lasted a considerable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span>
time, its words acquire a complete, determinate, and precise
meaning,&mdash;a kind of legal official signification. Time
has introduced into the signification of every term a thousand
ideas, which are suggested to us every time we hear
it pronounced, but which, as they do not all bear the same
date, are not all suitable at the same time. Thus the
terms “servitude” and “freedom” recall to our minds
ideas far more precise and definite than the facts of the
eighth, ninth, or tenth centuries, to which they relate.
Whether we say that the towns in the eighth century were
in a state of “freedom” or in a state of “servitude,” we
say, in either case, too much; for they were a prey to the
rapacity of the strong, and yet maintained a certain degree
of independence and importance.</p>

<p>So, again, as the same writer shows, the term “civilization”
comprises more or fewer ideas, according to the
sense, popular or scientific, in which it is used. “The
popular signification of a word is formed by degrees, and
while all the facts it represents are present. As often as a
fact comes before us which seems to answer to the signification
of a known term, this term is naturally applied to
it, and thus its signification goes on broadening and deepening,
till, at last, all the various facts and ideas which,
from the nature of things, ought to be brought together
and embodied in the term, are collected and embodied in it.
When, on the contrary, the signification of a word is
determined by science, it is usually done by one or a very
few individuals, who, at the time, are under the influence
of some particular fact, which has taken possession of their
imagination. Thus it comes to pass that scientific definitions
are, in general, much narrower, and, on that very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span>
account, much less correct, than the popular significations
given to words.”</p>

<p>It is this continual incorporation of new facts and ideas,&mdash;circumstances
originally accidental,&mdash;into the permanent
significations of words, which makes the dictionary
definition of a word so poor an exponent of its real meaning.
For a time this definition suffices; but in the lapse of
time many nice distinctions and subtle shades of meaning
adhere to the word, which whoever attempts to use it with
no other guide than the dictionary is sure to confound.
Hence the ludicrous blunders made by foreigners, whose
knowledge of a language is gained only from books; and
hence the reason why, in any language, there are so few
exact synonyms.</p>

<p>How many persons who oppose compulsory education,
have been frightened by the word “compulsory,” attaching
to it ideas of tyranny and degradation! How many persons
are there in every community, who, in the language
of Milton,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,</p>
<p class="verse0">And still revolt when the truth would make them free;</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>License</em> they mean when they cry <em>liberty</em>,</p>
<p class="verse0">For who love that, must first be wise and good.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Who can estimate the amount of mischief which has been
done to society by such phrases as “Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity,” and other such “rabble-charming words,” as
South calls them, “which have so much wildfire wrapped
up in them”? How many persons who declaim passionately
about “the majesty of the people,” “the sovereignty
of the people,” have ever formed for themselves any definite
conceptions of what they mean by these expressions?
Locke has well said of those who have the words “wisdom,”
“glory,” “grace,” constantly at their tongue’s end,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span>
that if they should be asked what they mean by them,
they would be at a stand, and know not what to answer.
Even Locke himself, who has written so ably on the abuse
of words, has used some of the cardinal and vital terms
in his philosophy in different senses. La Harpe says that
the express object of the entire “Essay on the Human
Understanding” is to demonstrate rigorously that <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">l’entendement
est esprit et d’une nature essentiellement distincte de
la matière</i>; yet the author has used the words “reflection,”
“mind,” “spirit,” so vaguely that he has been accused of
holding doctrines subversive of all moral distinctions. Even
the eagle eye of Newton could not penetrate the obscurity
of Locke’s language, and on reading the “Essay” he
took its author for a Hobbist. De Maistre declares the
title a misnomer; instead of being called an “Essay on
the Human Understanding,” it should be entitled, he
thinks, an “Essay on the Understanding of Locke.”</p>

<p>Again, what an amount of error is wrapped up in what
have been called the regulation-labels of philosophy; as,
for example, when a writer is called a “pantheist” in
religion, an “intuitionist” in ethics, an “absolutist” in
politics, etc., etc.! Classifications of this sort, made, as
they generally are, without judgment, discrimination, or
qualification, are the greatest foes of true knowledge. It
is probable that in nine cases out of ten, the persons who
confidently label Mr. Emerson as a “pantheist” or “intuitionist,”
could neither define these terms accurately, nor
put their fingers upon the passages in his writings which
are supposed to justify their use.</p>

<p>Professor Bowen notices a fallacy in a certain use of
the word “tend.” When there is more than an even
chance that a given result will occur, we may properly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
say that it “tends” to happen; if there is less than an
even chance, it “tends” <em>not</em> to happen. Thus, <em>all</em> persons
who have attained the age of twenty-four survive, <em>on an
average</em>, till they are sixty-two years old. But <em>no one
person</em>, now aged twenty-four, has a right to expect that
this average will be exemplified in his particular case. <em>All</em>,
collectively, “tend” to the average; but no <em>one</em> “tends”
to the average. Mr. Darwin, in his “Origin of Species
by Natural Selection,” bases his theory on a fallacy in
the use of the word “tend.” “He first argues that the
specific Marks of Species, both in the animal and vegetable
kingdoms, ‘tend’ to vary, because, perhaps in one case
out of ten thousand, a child is born with six fingers on
one hand, or a cat with blue eyes, or a flower grows out of
the middle of another flower. Collecting many instances of
such sports of nature or monstrosities, he bases his whole
theory upon them, forgetting that the vastly larger number
of normal growths and developments proves that the
‘tendency’ is to <em>non-variation</em>. Then, secondly, because,
perhaps, one out of a hundred of these abnormal Marks is
transmitted by inheritance, he assumes that these freaks
of nature <em>tend</em> to perpetuate themselves in a distinct race,
and thus to become permanent Marks of distinct species.
Thirdly, as either of the two preceding points, taken
singly, affords no basis whatever for his doctrine, he
assumes that their <em>joint</em> occurrence is probable, because he
has made out what is, in truth, a very faint probability
that each may <em>separately</em> happen. But if the chance of a
variation in the first instance is only one out of a thousand,
and that of the anomaly being handed down by descent
is one out of a hundred, the probability of a variation
established by inheritance is but one out of a hundred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>
thousand. As the theory further requires the <em>cumulation</em>
of an indefinite number of such variations, one upon
another, the formation of a new species by the Darwinian
process may safely be pronounced to be incredible.”</p>

<p>In treating of the difference between “the disgraceful”
and “the indecent,” Archbishop Whately observes that
the Greeks and the Romans, unfortunately, had not, like
ourselves, a separate word for each; <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">turpe</i> and <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">αἰσχρὸς</span>
served to express both. Upon this ambiguity some of
the ancient philosophers, especially the Cynics, founded
paradoxes, by which they bewildered themselves and their
hearers. It is an interesting fact that the Saxon part of
our language, containing a smaller percentage of synonymous
words that are liable to be confounded, is much
freer from equivocation than the Romanic. Of four
hundred and fifty words discriminated by Whately, in his
treatise on synonyms, less than ninety are Anglo-Saxon.
On the other hand, it has been noted by the same writer
that the double origin of our language, from Saxon and
Norman, often enables a sophist to seem to render a reason,
when he is only repeating the assertion in synonymous
words of a different family: <em>e.g.</em>, “To allow every man an
unbounded freedom of speech must be always, on the
whole, highly advantageous to the State; for it is extremely
conducive to the interests of the community that each
individual should enjoy a liberty perfectly unlimited of
expressing his sentiments.” So the physician in Molière
accounted for opium producing sleep by saying that it
had a soporific virtue. Again, there is a large class of
words employed indiscriminately, neither because they express
precisely the same ideas, nor because they enable the
sophist to confound things that are essentially different,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>
but because they convey no distinct ideas whatever, except
of the moral character of him who uses them. “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Il m’appelle</i>,”
says Paul Louis Courier, speaking of an opponent,
“<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">jacobin, révolutionnaire, plagiaire, voleur, empoissonneur,
faussaire, pestiféré ou pestifère, enragé, imposteur, calomniateur,
libelliste, homme horrible, ordurier, grimacier,
chiffonnier, ... Je vois ce qu’il vent dire; il entend que
lui et moi sommes d’avis différent.</i>”</p>

<p>It is an old trick of controversialists, noticed in a previous
chapter, to employ “question-begging” words that
determine disputes summarily without facts or arguments.
Thus political parties and religious sects quietly beg the
questions at issue between them by dubbing themselves
“the Democrats” and “the Republicans”, or “the Orthodox”
and “the Liberals”; though the orthodoxy of the one
may consist only in opposition to somebody else’s doxy, and
the liberality of the other may differ from bigotry only in
the fact that the bigots are liberal only to <em>one</em> set of opinions,
while the Liberals are bigoted against all. So with
the argument of what is called the Selfish School of Moral
Philosophers, who deny that man ever acts from purely
disinterested motives. The whole superstructure of their
degrading theory rests upon a confounding of the term
“self-love” with “selfishness.” If I go out to walk, and,
being overtaken by a shower, spread my umbrella to save
myself from a wetting, never once, all the while, thinking
of my friends, my country, or of anybody, in short, but
myself, will it be pretended that this act, though performed
exclusively for self, was in any sense selfish? As well might
you say that the cultivation of an “art” makes a man
“artful”; that one who gets his living by any “craft” is
necessarily “crafty”; that a man skilled in “design” is a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span>
“designing” man; or that a man who forms a “project” is,
therefore, a “projector.”</p>

<p>Derivatives do not always retain the force of their
primitives. Wearing woolen clothes does not make a man
sheepish. A representative does not, and <em>should</em> not, always
represent the will of his constituents (that is, in the
sense of voting as they wish, or being their mere <em>spokesman</em>);
for they may clamor for measures opposed to the
Constitution, which he has sworn to support. Self-love, in
the highest degree, implies no disregard of the rights of
others; whereas Selfishness is always sacrificing others to
itself,&mdash;it contains the germ of every crime, and fires its
neighbor’s house to roast its own eggs.</p>

<p>What towering structures of fallacy conservatives have
often built upon the twofold meaning of the word “old”!
Strictly, it denotes the <em>length</em> of time that any object has
existed; but it is often employed, instead of “ancient,” to
denote <em>distance</em> of time. Because old men are generally the
wisest and most experienced, opinions and practices handed
down to us from the “old times” of ignorance and superstition,
when the world was comparatively in its youth, it is
thought must be entitled to the highest respect. The truth
is, as Sydney Smith says, “of living men the oldest has,
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ceteris paribus</i>, the most experience; of generations, the
oldest has the least experience. Our ancestors, up to the
Conquest, were children in arms; chubby boys in the time
of Edward the First; striplings under Elizabeth; men in
the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the white-bearded,
silver-headed ancients, who have treasured up,
and are prepared to profit by, all the experience which
human life can supply.” Again, how many tedious books,
pamphlets, and newspaper articles have been written to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>
prove that education should consist of mental discipline,&mdash;founded
on an erroneous derivation of the word from
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">educere</i>, “to draw out.” Does education, it is asked, consist
in filling the child’s mind as a cistern is filled with
water brought in buckets from some other source, or in the
opening up of its own fountains? The fact is, education
comes not from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">educere</i>, but from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">educare</i>, which means “to
nourish,” “to foster,” to do just what the nurse does.
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Educit obstetrix</i>, says Cicero, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">educat nutrix, instituit pædagogus</i>.
It is food, above all things, which the growing
mind craves; and the mind’s food is knowledge. Discipline,
training, healthful development is, indeed, necessary,
but it should form a part only, not usurp the lion’s share,
of education. In an ideal system this and the nourishing
of the mind by wholesome knowledge would proceed simultaneously.
The school lesson would <em>feed</em> the mind, while
the thorough, patient and conscientious acquisition of it
would <em>gymnaze</em> the intellect and strengthen the moral
force. Why have one class of studies for discipline only,
and another class for nourishment only, when there are
studies which at once fill the mind with the materials of
thinking, and develop the power of thought,&mdash;which, at the
same time, impart useful knowledge, and afford an intellectual
gymnastic? Is a merchant, whose business compels
him to walk a dozen miles a day, to be told that he must
walk another dozen for the sake of exercise, and for that
alone? Yet not less preposterous, it seems to us, is the reasoning
of a class of educators who would range on one side
the practically useful and on the other the educational, and
build high between them a partition wall.</p>

<p>If a man, by mastering Chillingworth, learns how to
reason logically at the same time that he learns the principles<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>
of Protestantism, must he study logic in Whately or
Jevens? One of the disadvantages of an education of which
discipline, pure and simple, is made the end, is that the
discipline, being disagreeable, too often ends with the
school-days; whereas the discipline gained agreeably, instead
of being associated with disgust, would be continued
through life. It is possible that the muscular discipline
which the gymnasium gives is greater while it lasts than
that which is gained by a blacksmith or other laborer in
his daily work; but whose muscles are more developed,
the man’s who practises a few months or years in a gymnasium,
or the man’s whose calling compels him to use his
muscles all his life? What would the graduate of the gymnasium
do, if hugged by a London coal-heaver?</p>

<p>Again, the reader of Macaulay’s “History of England”
will recollect the hot and long-protracted debates in Parliament
in 1696, upon the question whether James II had
“abdicated” or “deserted” the crown,&mdash;the Lords insisting
upon the former, the Commons upon the latter, term.
He will also recall the eloquent and fierce debate by the
Lords upon the motion that they should subscribe an
instrument, to which the Commons had subscribed, recognizing
William as “rightful and lawful king of England.”
This they refused to do, but voted to declare that he had
the right by law to the English crown, and that no other
person had any right whatever to that crown. The distinction
between the two propositions, observes Macaulay,
a Whig may, without any painful sense of shame, acknowledge
to be beyond the reach of his faculties, and leave to
be discussed by high churchmen. The distinction between
“abdicate” and “desert,” however, is an important one,
obvious almost at a glance. Had Parliament declared<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span>
that James had “deserted” the throne, they would have
admitted that it was not only his right, but his duty, to
return, as in the case of a husband who had deserted his
wife, or a soldier who had deserted his post. By declaring
that he had “abdicated” the throne, they virtually asserted
that he had voluntarily relinquished the crown, and forfeited
all right to it forever.</p>

<p>Among the ambiguous words which at this day lead to
confusion of thought, one of the most prominent is the
word, “unity.” There are not a few Christians who confound
what the Apostles say concerning “unity” of spirit,
faith, etc., with unity of church government, and infer,
because the church,&mdash;that is, the church universal,&mdash;is
<em>one</em>, as having one common Head, one Spirit, one Father,
it must, therefore, be one as a <em>society</em>. “Church unity”
is a good thing, so long as it does not involve the sacrifice
of a denomination’s life or principles; but there are cases
where it amounts to absorption. It sometimes resembles
too closely that peculiar union which the boa-constrictor
is so fond of consummating between itself and the goat.
It is exceedingly fond of goats; but when the union is
complete, there is not a trace of the goat,&mdash;it is all boa-constrictor.</p>

<p>Hardly any ambiguous word has been more fruitful of
controversy than the word “person,” as used in the phrase,
“the three Persons of the Trinity.” If there are three
Persons, or personalities, in the Trinity, then there must
be, it is argued, three Gods. It is true, the word “person”
implies a numerically distinct substance; but the theological
meaning is very different. The word is derived from
the Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">persona</i>, which denotes the state, quality, or
condition, whereby one man differs from another, as shown<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span>
by the phrases <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">personam induere, personam agere</i>, etc.
Cicero says: “<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Tres personas unus sustineo; meam, adversarii,
judicis</i>; I, being one, sustain three characters, my
own, that of my client, and that of the judge.” Archbishop
Whately thinks it probable that the Latin fathers
meant by “person” to convey the same idea as did the
Greek theologians by the word “hypostasis,”&mdash;that which
stands under (<em>i.e.</em>, is the subject of) attributes.</p>

<p>The confusion of “opposite” and “contrary” is a source
of not a little fallacious reasoning in ethics and in politics.
In every good system of government there are contrivances
and adjustments by which a force acting in one
direction may, at a certain point, be met and arrested by
an opposite force. We see this illustrated by the “governor”
of a steam engine, by which the supply of steam
is checked as the velocity is increased, and enlarged as the
velocity is diminished. This system of “checks and balances,”
as it is termed, is often sneered at by theoretical
politicians, simply because they do not discriminate between
things “opposite” and things “contrary.” Things
“opposite” complete each other, their action producing
a common result compounded of the two; things “contrary”
antagonize and exclude each other. The most
“opposite” mental or moral qualities may meet in the
same person; but “contrary” qualities, of course, cannot.
The right hand and the left are “opposites”; but right
and wrong are “contraries.” Sweet and sour are “opposites”;
sweet and bitter are “contraries.” As it has been
happily said, “opposites” unfold themselves in different
directions from the same root, as the positive and negative
forces of electricity, and in their very opposition
uphold and sustain one another; while “contraries” encounter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>
one another from quarters quite diverse, and one
subsists only in the exact degree that it puts out of
working the other.</p>

<p>Not a few of our English particles are equivocal in
their signification, especially “and” and “or.” The dual
meaning of the latter particle, which may imply either
that two objects or propositions are equivalent, if not
identical, or that they are unlike, if not contradictory, is
a fruitful source of misunderstanding and confusion. The
conjunction “and” is hardly less indefinite and equivocal.
This is illustrated in the case of <em>Stradling vs. Stiles</em>, in
“Martinus Scriblerus,” familiar to the readers of Pope,
where, in a supposed will, a testator, possessed of six black
horses, six white horses, and six pied, or black-and-white
horses, bequeathed to A. B. “all my black and white
horses.” The question, thereupon, rose whether the bequest
carried the black horses, and the white horses, or
the black-and-white horses only. The equivocation could
have been avoided by writing “all my black and all my
white horses,” or, “all my pied horses”; still, it is evident
that our language needs a new conjunctive.</p>

<p>Sir William Hamilton points out a defect in our philosophical
language, in which the terms “idea,” “conception,”
“notion,” are used as almost convertible to denote
objects so different as the images of sense and the unpicturable
notions of intelligence. The confusion thus
produced is avoided in the German, “the richest in metaphysical
expressions of any living tongues,” in which the
two kinds of objects are carefully distinguished.</p>

<p>Again, how many systems of error in metaphysics and
ethics have been based upon the etymologies of words, the
sophist assuming that the meaning of a word must always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>
be that which it, or its root, originally bore! Thus Horne
Tooke tries to prove by a wide induction that since all
particles,&mdash;that is, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions,&mdash;were
originally nouns and verbs, they must be so
still; a species of logic which would prove that man, if the
Darwinian theory be true, is still a reptile. In a similar
way the same writer has reached the conclusion that there
is no eternal truth, since “truth,” according to its etymology,
is simply what one “troweth,” that is, what one thinks
or believes. This theory, it is thought, was suggested to
Tooke by a conjecture that “if” is equivalent to “gif,”
an imperative of the verb “to give”; but as it has been
shown, from cognate forms in other languages, that this
particle has no connection with the verb “to give,” or any
other verb, any system founded on this basis is a mere
castle in the air. Truth, argues Tooke, supposes mankind;
for whom, and <em>by</em> whom alone the word is formed, and to
whom alone it is applicable. “If no man, then no truth.
There is no such thing as eternal, immutable, everlasting
truth, unless mankind, <em>such as they are at present</em>, be also
eternal, immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may
contradict each other, and yet both speak truth, for the
truth of one person may be opposite to the truth of
another.”</p>

<p>Even if we admit this derivation of “truth,” the
conclusion does not follow; for whatever the word once
meant, it now means that which is certain, whether we
think it or not. If we are to be governed wholly by
etymology, we must maintain that a “beldam” is a “fine
lady,” that “priest” can mean only “advanced in years,”
and that “Pontifex” can only signify “a bridge-builder.”
But Horne Tooke’s etymology has been disputed by the very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span>
highest authority. According to Mr. Garnett, an acute
English philologist, “truth” is derived “from the Sanscrit
<i>dhru</i>, ‘to be established,’&mdash;<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">fixum esse</i>; whence <i>dhruwa</i>,
‘certain,’ <em>i.e.</em> ‘established’; German, <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">trauen</i>, ‘to rely,’
‘trust’; <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">treu</i>, ‘faithful,’ ‘true’; Anglo-Saxon, <i>treow-treowth</i>
(<i>fides</i>); English, ‘true,’ ‘truth.’ To these we
may add Gothic, <i>triggons</i>; Icelandic, <i>trygge</i>; (<i>fidus</i>,
<i>securus</i>, <i>tutus</i>): all from the same root, and all conveying
the same idea of stability or security. ‘Truth,’ therefore,
neither means what is <em>thought</em> nor what is <em>said</em>, but that
which is <em>permanent</em>, <em>stable</em>, and is and ought to be <em>relied
upon</em>, because, upon sufficient data, it is capable of being
demonstrated or shown to exist. If we admit this explanation,
Tooke’s assertions ... become <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Vox et preterea
nihil</i>.”</p>

<p>Some years ago a bulky volume of seven hundred pages
octavo was written by Dr. Johnson, a London physician,
to prove that “might makes right,”&mdash;that justice is the
result, not of divine instinct, but purely and simply of
arbitrary decree. The foundation for this equally fallacious
and dangerous theory was the fact that “right” is
derived from the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">rego</i>, “to rule”; therefore whatever
the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">rex</i>, or “ruler,” authorizes or decrees, is <em>right</em>! As well
might he argue that only courtiers can be polite, because
“courtesy” is borrowed from palaces, or that there can
be no “heaven” or “hell” in the scriptural sense, because,
in its etymological, the one is the canopy <em>heaved</em> over our
heads, and the other is the <em>hollow</em> space beneath our feet.
Indeed, we have seen an argument, founded on the etymology
of the latter word, to prove that there is “no hell
beyond a hole in the ground.” In the same way, because
our primitive vocabulary is derived solely from sensible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
images, it has been assumed that the mind has no ideas
except those derived through the senses, and that thought
therefore is only sensation. But neither idealism nor
materialism can derive any support from the phenomena
of language, for the names we give either to outward
objects or to our conceptions of immaterial entities can
give us no conception of the things themselves. It is
true that in every-day language we talk of color, smell,
thickness, shape, etc., not only as sensations within us, but
as qualities inherent in the things themselves; but it has
long since been shown that they are only modifications of
our consciousness. It has been justly said that our knowledge
of beings is purely indirect, limited, relative; it does
not reach to the beings themselves in their absolute reality
and essences, but only to their accidents, their modes, their
relations, limitations, differences, and qualities; all which
are manners of conceiving and knowing which not only
do not impart to knowledge the absolute character which
some persons attribute to it, but even positively exclude it.
“Even substance is but a purely hypothetical postulated
residuum after the abstraction of all observable qualities.”
If, then, our conception of an object in no way resembles
the object,&mdash;if heat, for example, can be, in no sense,
like a live coal, nor pain like the pricking of a pin,&mdash;much
less can a word by which we denote an object be
other than a mere hieroglyphic, or teach us a jot or tittle
about the world of sense or thought. Again, the fact
that “spirit” once signified “breath,” and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">animus</i>, <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">ἀνεμὸς</span>,
“air,” lends no countenance to materialism. “When we
impose on a phenomenon of the physical order a moral
denomination, we do not thereby spiritualize matter; and
because we assign a physical denomination to a moral<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span>
phenomenon, we do not materialize spirit.” Even if the
words by which we designate mental conceptions are derived
from material analogies, it does not follow that our
conceptions were themselves originally material; and we
shall in vain try to account by any external source for
the relations of words among themselves. It is told of
the metaphysician, Cudworth, that, in reply to a person who
ridiculed the doctrine of innate ideas, he told him to take
down the first book that came to hand in his library, open
at random, and read. The latter opened Cicero’s “Offices,”
and began reading the first sentence, “<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Quamquam</i> &mdash;&mdash;”
“Stop!” cried Cudworth, “it is enough. Tell me how
through the <em>senses</em> you acquire the idea of <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">quamquam</i>.”</p>

<p>It is a mistake to suppose that a language is no more
than a mere collection of words. The terms we employ
are symbols only, which can never fully express our
thought, but shadow forth far more than it is in their
power distinctly to impart. Lastly, there are in every
language, as another has truly said, a vast number of
words, such as “sacrifice,” “sacrament,” “mystery,”
“eternity,” which may be explained by the idea, though
the idea cannot be discovered by the word, as is the case
with whatever belongs to the mystery of the mind; and
this of itself is enough to disprove the conclusion which
nominalists would draw from the origin of words, and to
prove that, whatever the derivation of “truth,” its etymology
can establish nothing concerning its essence; and
we are still at liberty to regard it as independent, immutable,
and eternal, having its archetype in the Divine
mind.</p>

<p>Among the terms used in literary criticism, few are
more loosely employed than the word “creative” as applied<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
to men of genius. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, are
said to have “creative power”; and, as a figure of speech,
the remark is true enough: but, strictly speaking, only
Omnipotence can <em>create</em>; man can only <em>combine</em>. The
genius of a great painter may fill his gallery with the
most fantastic representations, but every piece of which
his paintings are composed exists in nature. Few artists
have been more original than Claude Lorraine; yet all his
paintings were composed of picturesque materials gathered
from different scenes in nature, united with consummate
taste and skill, and idealized by his exquisite imagination.
To make a modern statue there is a great melting down
of old bronze. The essence of originality is not that it
creates new material, but that it invents new combinations
of material, and imparts new life to whatever it discovers
or combines, whether of new or old. Shakespeare’s genius
is at no other time so incontestably sovereign as when he
borrows most,&mdash;when he adapts or moulds, in a manner
so perfect as to resemble a new creation, the old chronicles
and “Italian originals,” which have been awaiting the
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">vivida vis</i> that makes them live and move. <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Non nova, sed
nové</i>, sums up the whole philosophy of the subject. “Originality,”
says an able writer, “never works more fruitfully
than in a soil rich and deep with the foliage of ages.”</p>

<p>The word “same” is often used in a way that leads to
error. Persons say “the same” when they mean similar.
It has been asked whether the ship Argo, in which Jason
sought the Golden Fleece, and whose decaying timbers, as
she lay on the Greek shore, a grateful and reverent nation
had patched up, till, in process of time, not a plank of the
original ship was left, was still “the same” ship as of old.
The question presents no difficulty, if we remember that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span>
“sameness,” that is “identity,” is an absolute term, and can
be affirmed or denied only in an absolute sense. No man
is the same man to-day that he was yesterday, though he
may be very similar to his yesterday’s self.</p>

<p>A common source of confusion in language is what
logicians call “amphibolous” sentences,&mdash;that is, sentences
that are equivocal, not from a double sense in any word,
but because they admit of a double construction. Quintilian
mentions several cases where litigation arose from
this kind of ambiguity in the wording of a will. In one
case a testator expressed a wish that a statue should be
erected, and used the following language: <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">poni statuam
auream hastam in manu tenentem</i>. The question arose
whether it was the statue, or the spear only, that was to
be of gold. It is well known that punctuation was unknown
to the Greeks and Romans; and hence the ancient
oracles were able to deliver responses, which, written down
by the priests and delivered to the inquirers, were adapted,
through the ambiguity thus caused, to save the credit of
the oracle, whether the expected event was favorable or
unfavorable. An example of this is the famous response,
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Aio te Æacida Romanos vincere posse</i>; which may mean
either, “Thou, Pyrrhus, I say, shalt subdue the Romans;”
or, “I say, Pyrrhus, that the Romans shall subdue thee.”
A better illustration is the remarkable response which was
given when an oracle was consulted regarding the success
of a certain military expedition: <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Ibis et redibis nunquam
peribis in bello</i>, which, not being punctuated, might have
been translated either: “Thou shalt go, and shalt never
return, thou shalt perish in battle;” or, “Thou shalt go
and return, thou shalt never perish in battle.” We have
an example of amphibolous sentences in English in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span>
witch prophecy, “The Duke yet lives that Henry shall
depose,” and in the words cited by Whately from the
Nicene Creed, “by whom all things were made,” which
are grammatically referable either to the Father or to the
Son.</p>

<p>Among the fallacies in words may be classed those false
impressions which some writers contrive to give, while at
the same time making no single statement that is untrue
or exceptionable. Thus in Gibbon’s famous history, it is
not by what he expressly says regarding Christianity, that
he misleads the reader, but by what he suppresses, hints, and
insinuates. As Paley long ago observed, the subtle error
rather lies hid in the sinuous folds than is directly apparent
on the surface of the polished style. Never openly
attacking Christianity, or advancing any opinions which
he might find it difficult to defend, he yet contrives to
leave an <em>impression</em> adverse to the theory of its divine
origin. In like manner, it is not usually by false statements
that Hume perverts the truth of English history;
but his unfairness secretes itself so subtly in the turns of
the words, that, when you seek to point it out, it is gone.</p>

<p>Even the Natural Sciences, in which precision of language
is vital, are disfigured by words which, if closely
scrutinized, are found to be full of error. It is true that
as the progress of inquiry brings fresh facts into view,
the words which serve to illustrate exploded theories are
usually rejected; yet names are sometimes retained after
they cease to be correct or expressive. The word “electricity”
suggests thunder-storms, shocks at scientific soirées,
and Morse’s telegraph; yet it means only “the amber-force.”
The explanation of this name is that the observation
of the fact that amber, when rubbed, attracts to itself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>
light bodies, was the first step taken toward the establishment
of this marvellous science. So the name “oxygen,”
or “the acid-producer,” was given to the gas so called,
when it was considered to be the cause of acidity. In 1774
the gas called “muriatic acid” was renamed by Scheele, in
consequence of certain discoveries made by him, “dephlogisticated
muriatic acid.” By and by the doctrine of phlogiston
was exploded, and Lavoisier, having to modify the
name, changed it to “oxymuriatic,” or “oxygenized muriatic
acid.” When, again, it was found that this pungent
gas was a <em>simple</em> body, and actually entered into the constitution
of the muriatic, or, as it is now called, hydrochloric
acid,&mdash;that the oxygen merely withdrew from the latter
the second constituent, viz., hydrogen,&mdash;the name had to
be altered again, and this time Sir Humphrey Davy suggested
“chlorine,” or “the green gas,” which seems likely
to be permanent. Again, until lately, “caloric” was a
term in constant use among chemists, and designated something
that produced heat. Now this doctrine is abandoned,
and heat is said to be the result of molecular and ethereal
vibration. All matter is supposed to be immersed in a
highly elastic medium, which is called “ether.” But what
is this “ether,” of which heat, light, electricity, and sound,
are only so many different modes or manifestations?
“‘Ether’ is a myth,&mdash;an abstraction, useful, no doubt, for
the purpose of physical speculation, but intended rather to
mark the present horizon of our knowledge, than to represent
anything which we can grasp either with our senses
or our reason.”<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a></p>

<p>The form of cerebral congestion known as “sunstroke,”
was erroneously so named from the popular belief that it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>
is caused by a sudden concentration of the sun’s rays upon
a focal point. It is now well known that persons may be
attacked by this disease who have not been exposed to the
sun’s rays,&mdash;that it occurs often at night,&mdash;and that its
cause is not extreme heat only, but the exhaustion consequent
upon over-exertion&mdash;especially of the brain&mdash;anxiety,
and worry.</p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> “Lectures on the Science of Language,” Second Series, pp. 592-6.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> Whately’s Logic.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> Bowen’s “Logic,” p. 432.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> “Logic,” Book IV., Chap. 5.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> Max Müller’s “Science of Language,” Vol. II, p. 600.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER XII.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">THE FALLACIES IN WORDS&mdash;(<em>continued</em>).</span></h2>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">I never learned rhetorike certain;</p>
<p class="verse0">Things that I speke, it mote be bare and plain.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Chaucer.</span></p>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>Here is our great infelicity, that, when single words signify complex ideas,
one word can never distinctly manifest all the parts of a complex idea.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Isaac
Watts.</span></p>

<p>If reputation attend these conquests which depend on the fineness and
niceties of words, it is no wonder if the wit of men so employed should perplex
and subtilize the signification of sounds.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Locke.</span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy1">It has been remarked by Archbishop Whately that the
words whose ambiguity is the most frequently overlooked,
and produces the greatest amount of confusion of
thought and fallacy, are the commonest,&mdash;the very ones
whose meaning is supposed to be best understood. “Familiar
acquaintance is perpetually mistaken for accurate knowledge.”
Such a word is “luxury.”</p>

<p>A favorite theme for newspaper declamations in these
days is the luxury and extravagance of the American
people, especially of the <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">nouveaux riches</i> whose fortunes
have been of mushroom growth. It is easy to declaim
thus against luxury,&mdash;that is, against the use of things
which, at any particular period, are not deemed indispensable
to life, health, and comfort; but what do those who
indulge in this cheap denunciation mean by the term? Is
not luxury a purely <em>relative</em> term? Is there a single article
of dress, food or furniture which can be pronounced an
absolute luxury, without regard to the wealth or poverty of
him who enjoys it? Are not the luxuries of one generation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span>
or country the necessaries of another? Persons who are
familiar with history know that Alfred the Great had not a
chair to sit down upon, nor a chimney to carry off his
smoke; that William the Conquerer was unacquainted
with the luxury of a feather bed, if it can be called one;
that the early aristocracy of England lived on the ground
floor, without drainage; that in the Middle Ages shirts
were deemed a useless superfluity, and men were even put
in the pillory for wearing them; that night-shirts were
esteemed a still more needless luxury, and persons of all
ranks and classes slept in the first costume of Adam; that
travelling carriages are an ingenious invention of modern
effeminacy; that the men who first carried umbrellas in
the streets, even in the severest rain-storms, were hooted at
as dandies and coxcombs; that the nobles and dames of the
most brilliant epochs of England’s annals ate with their
fingers, generally in couples, out of one trencher on a bare
table; and that when forks were introduced, they were
long hotly opposed as an extravagance, and even denounced
by many as a device of Satan, to offer an affront to Providence,
who had provided man with fingers to convey his
food to his mouth. In the introduction to Hollinshed’s
“Chronicles,” published in 1577, there is a bitter complaint
of the multitude of chimneys lately erected, of the exchange
of straw pallets for mattresses or flock beds, and of wooden
platters for earthenware and pewter. In another place,
the writer laments that oak only is used for building,
instead of willow as heretofore; adding, that “formerly
our houses indeed were of willow, but our men were of
oak; but now that our houses are of oak, our men are not
only of willow, but some altogether of straw, which is a
sore alteration.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span></p>

<p>Erasmus tells us that salt beef and strong ale constituted
the chief part of Queen Elizabeth’s breakfast, and
that similar refreshments were served to her in bed for
supper. There is not a single able-bodied workingman in
the United States who does not enjoy fare which would
have been deemed luxurious by men of high station in
the iron reign of the Tudors; hardly a thriving shopkeeper
who does not occupy a house which English nobles
in 1650 would have envied; hardly a domestic servant or
factory girl who does not on Sundays adorn herself with
apparel which would have excited the admiration of the
duchesses in Queen Elizabeth’s ante-rooms. Xenophon accounts
for the degeneracy of the Persians by their luxury,
which, he says, was carried to such a pitch that they used
gloves to protect their hands. Tea and coffee were once
denounced as idle and injurious luxuries; and throughout
the larger part of the world tooth-brushes, napkins, suspenders,
bathing-tubs, and a hundred other things now
deemed indispensable to the health or comfort of civilized
man, would be regarded as proofs of effeminacy and extravagance.</p>

<p>Luxury has been a favorite theme of satire and denunciation
by poets and moralists from time immemorial.
But it may be doubted whether in nations or individuals
its effects, even when it rages most fiercely, are half so
pernicious as those springing from that indifference to
comforts and luxuries which is sometimes dignified with
the name of contentment, but which is only another name
for sheer laziness. While thousands are ruined by prodigality
and extravagance, tens of thousands are kept in
poverty by indifference to the comforts and ornaments of
life,&mdash;by a too feeble development of those desires to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span>
gratify which the mass of men are striving. It is a bad
sign when a man is content with the bare necessities of
life, and aspires to nothing higher; and equally ominous
is it when a nation, however rich or powerful, is satisfied
with the capital and glories it has already accumulated.
Cry up as we may the virtues of simplicity and frugality,
it is yet quite certain that a people content to live upon
garlic, macaroni, or rice, are at the very lowest point in
the scale both of intellect and morality. A civilized man
differs from a savage principally in the multiplicity of his
wants. The truth is, man is a constitutionally lazy being,
and requires some stimulus to prick him into industry.
He must have many difficulties to contend with, many
clamorous appetites and tastes to gratify, if you would
bring out his energies and virtues; and it is because they
are always grumbling,&mdash;because, dissatisfied amid the
most enviable enjoyments, they clamor and strive for more
and more of what Voltaire calls <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">les superflues choses, si
nécessaires</i>,&mdash;that the English people have reached their
present pinnacle of prosperity, and accumulated a wealth
which almost enables them to defy a hostile world.</p>

<p>Among the familiar words that we employ, few have
been more frequently made the instrument of sophistry
than “nature” and “art.” There are many persons who
oppose the teaching of elocution, because they like a
“natural” and “artless” eloquence, to which, they think,
all elaborate training is opposed. Yet nothing is more
certain than that nature and art, between which there
is supposed to be an irreconcilable antagonism, are often
the very same thing. What is more natural than that a
man who lacks vocal power should cultivate and develop
his voice by vocal exercises; or that, if he is conscious of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span>
faults in his manner of speaking,&mdash;his articulation, gestures,
etc.,&mdash;he should try, by the help of a good teacher,
to overcome them? So with the style of a writer; what
is more natural than for one who feels that he has not
adequately expressed his thought, to blot the words first
suggested and try others, and yet others, till he despairs
of further improvement? There are subjects so deep and
complex, ideas so novel and abstruse, that the most practised
writer cannot do justice to them without great labor.
A conscientious author is, therefore, continually transposing
clauses, reconstructing sentences, substituting words,
polishing and repolishing paragraphs; and <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'this, unquestianably'">this, unquestionably</ins>,
is “art,” or the application of means to an end.
But is this art inconsistent with nature?</p>

<p>Similar to the fallacy which lurks in the words “nature”
and “natural,” as thus employed, is that which lurks
in a popular use of the word “simplicity.” It has been
happily said that while some men talk as if to speak
naturally were to speak like a natural, others talk as if
to speak with simplicity meant to speak like a simpleton.
But what is true “simplicity,” as applied to literary
composition? Is it old, worn-out commonplace,&mdash;“straw
that has been thrashed a hundred times without wheat,”
as Carlyle says,&mdash;the shallowest ideas expressed in tame
and insipid language? Or is it not rather</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">“Nature to advantage dressed,</p>
<p class="verse0">What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,”&mdash;</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">in other words, a just and striking thought expressed in
the aptest and most impressive language? Those persons
who declaim against the employment of art in speaking
and writing, forget that we are all exceedingly artificial,
conventional beings. Without training, a speaker is almost<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
sure to be awkward in gesture and unnatural in utterance.
The very preacher who in the street forgets himself
and uses the most natural gesticulation and tones, will
become self-conscious the moment he ascends the pulpit,
and speak in a falsetto key. It is to get rid of these
artificial habits that “art” (which is the employment of
proper means) is needed.</p>

<p>How many controversies about the “transmutation of
Species,” and the “fixity of Species,” would have been
avoided, had the scientists who use these phrases fully
pondered their meaning, or rather no-meaning! Some
writers have tried to explain the law of constancy in
transmission, and its independence of the law of variation,
by maintaining that it is the Species only, not the
individual, which is reproduced. “Species,” says Buffon,
“are the only beings in nature.” A sheep, it is said, is
always and everywhere a sheep, and a man a man, reproducing
the <em>specific type</em>, but not necessarily reproducing
any individual peculiarities. This hypothesis is a striking
example of the confusion which results from the introduction
of old metaphysical ideas into science. It is evident,
as a late writer has clearly shown, that Species
cannot reproduce itself, for Species does not exist. It is
an entity, an abstract idea, not a concrete fact.</p>

<p>The <em>thing</em> Species no more exists than the thing Goodness
or the thing Whiteness. “Nature only knows individuals.
A collection of individuals so closely resembling
each other as all sheep resemble each other, are conveniently
classed under one general term, Species; but this
general term has no objective existence; the abstract or
typical sheep, apart from all concrete individuals, has no
existence out of our systems. Whenever an individual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>
sheep is born, it is the offspring of two individual sheep,
whose structures and dispositions it reproduces; it is not
the offspring of an abstract idea; it does not come into
being at the bidding of a type, which as a Species sits
apart, regulating ovine phenomena.... If, therefore,
‘transmutation of Species’ is absurd, ‘fixity of Species’
is not a whit less so. That which does not exist can
neither be transmuted nor maintained in fixity. Only
individuals exist; they resemble their parents, and they
differ from their parents. Out of these resemblances we
create Species; out of these differences we create Varieties;
we do so as conveniences of classification, and then
believe in the reality of our own figments.”<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a></p>

<p>A popular fallacy, which is partly verbal, is the notion,
so tenaciously held by many, that exposure to hardship,
and even want, in youth, is the cause of the bodily vigor
of those men who have lived to a good age in countries
with a rocky soil and a bleak climate. What is more
natural, it is argued, than that <em>hardships</em> should <em>harden</em>
the constitution? Look at the Indians; how many of them
live till eighty or ninety! Yet no person who reasons
thus would think, if engaged in cattle-breeding, of neglecting
to feed and shelter his animals in their youth;
nor if a dozen men, out of a hundred who had faced a
battery, should survive and live to a good age, would he
think of regarding the facing of batteries as conducive to
longevity. The truth is, that early hardships, by destroying
all the weak, merely prove the hardiness of the survivors,&mdash;which
latter is the cause, not the effect, of their
having lived through such a training. So “loading a gun-barrel
to the muzzle, and firing it off, does not <em>give</em> it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span>
strength; though it proves, if it escape, that it was
strong.”</p>

<p>The revelations of travellers have dissipated the illusions
which once prevailed concerning the hardiness and
health of the Indians and other savages. The savage, it
is now known, lives in a condition but one degree above
starvation. If he sink below it, he disappears instantaneously,
as if he had never been. A certain amount of
hardship he can endure; but it has limits, which if he
passes, he sinks unnoticed and unknown. There is no
registrar or newspaper to record that a unit has been subtracted
from the amount of human existence. It is true
that severe diseases are rarely seen by casual visitors of
savage tribes,&mdash;and why? Because death is their doctor,
and the grave their hospital. When patients are left
wholly to nature, nature presses very hard for an immediate
payment of her debt.</p>

<p>An ambiguous word, which has been a source of not a
little error, is the adjective “light,” which is used sometimes
in a literal, sometimes in a figurative sense. When
writers on Agricultural Chemistry declare that what are
called <em>heavy</em> soils are always specifically the <em>lightest</em>, the
statement looks like a paradox. By “heavy” soils are
meant, of course, not those which are the weightiest, but
those which are ploughed with difficulty,&mdash;the effect being
like that of dragging a heavy weight. So some articles
of food are supposed to be <em>light of digestion</em> because they
are <em>specifically light</em>. Again, there is a popular notion that
<em>strong</em> drink must make men <em>strong</em>; which is a double
fallacy, since the word “strong” is applied to alcoholic
liquors and to the human body in entirely different senses,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span>
and it is assumed that an effect must be like its cause,
which is not true.</p>

<p>Another ambiguous term, at least as popularly used, is
“murder.” There are persons who assert that the <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">coup
d’état</i> of Louis Napoleon, in 1851, was murder in the
strictest sense of the term. To send out into the streets
of a peaceful town a party of men dressed in uniform,
with muskets and bayonets in their hands, and with orders
to kill and plunder, is just as essentially murder and robbery,
it is said, as to break into a house with half-a-dozen
companions out of uniform, and do the same things. Was
not Orsini’s crime, they ask, as truly a murder as when a
burglar kills a man with a revolver in order to rob him?
So, again, there are Christian moralists, who, when asked
for proof that suicide is sinful, adduce the Scriptural
injunction, “Thou shalt do no murder,” assuming that
suicide, because it is called self-<em>murder</em>, is a species of
“murder” in the primary sense of the word. It is evident,
however, that most, if not all, of these assertions
are founded on palpable fallacies. “Murder” is a technical
term, and means the wilful, deliberate killing, without
just cause, and without certain specified excuses, of a man
who belongs to a settled state of society, in which security
is afforded to life and property. In all that is said about
the atrocity of murder, there is a latent reference to this
state of things. Were the “Vigilance Committee” of San
Francisco murderers, when they executed criminals illegally?
Are the men who “lynch” horse-thieves on our
western frontiers, murderers? Were the rebels who, in
our late Civil War, shot down Union soldiers, murderers?</p>

<p>The common sentiment of the civilized world recognizes
a vast difference between the rights and duties of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span>
sovereigns and subjects, and the relations of nations to
each other, on the one hand, and the rights and duties of
private individuals on the other; and hence the rules of
public and those of private morality must be essentially
different. According to legal authority, it is not murder
to kill an alien enemy in time of war; nor is it murder
to take away a man’s life by perjury. Revolutions and
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">coups d’état</i> most persons will admit to be sometimes
justifiable; and both, when justifiable, justify a certain
degree of violence to person, to property, or to previous
engagements. The difficulty is to tell just when, and how
far, violence may justify and be justified. It has been
well said by an acute and original writer that “it is by
no means the same thing whether a man is plundered
and wounded by burglars, or by the soldiers of an absolute
king who is trying to maintain his authority. The sack
of Perugia shocked the sensibilities of a great part of
Europe; but if the Pope had privately poisoned one of his
friends or servants from any purely personal motive, even
the blindest religious zeal would have denounced him as
a criminal unfit to live. A man must be a very bitter
Liberal indeed, who really maintains that the violation by
a sovereign of his promissory oath of office stands on
precisely the same footing as deliberate perjury in an
ordinary court of justice.” Suicide, it is evident, lacks
the most essential characteristic of murder, namely, its
<em>inhumanity</em>,&mdash;the injury done to one’s neighbor and to
others by the <em>insecurity</em> they are made to feel. Can a man
rob himself? If not, how can he, in the proper sense of
the word, murder himself?</p>

<p>Take another case. When Napoleon Bonaparte was at
the climax of his power, and the entire continent lay at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>
his feet, he aimed a blow at the naval supremacy of
England, which, had it taken effect, would have fatally
crippled her resources. By a secret article in the Treaty
of Tilsit, it was stipulated that he and Alexander, the
czar of Russia, should take possession of the fleets of the
Neutral Powers. Mr. Canning, the British Prime Minister,
saw the peril, and instantly, upon learning of the
intrigue, dispatched a naval force under Nelson to Copenhagen,
which captured the Danish fleet, the object of the
confederates, and conveyed it to Portsmouth. The violation
of the law of nations involved in this act was vehemently
denounced in the pulpit, in parliament, and on
the hustings; and to-day there are many persons who
regard the audacious measure as little better than piracy.
The world, however, has not sustained the charge. Problems
arise in the life of both men and nations, for the
solution of which the ordinary rules of ethics are insufficient.
It is possible to kill without being guilty of murder,
to rob without being a thief, and to break the law
of nations without being a buccaneer. The justification
of the British Minister lay in the fact that Denmark was
powerless to resist the Continental powers, and that her
coveted fleet, if not seized by England, would have been
used against her.</p>

<p>There is hardly any word which is oftener turned into
an instrument of the fallacy of ambiguity than “theory.”
There is a class of men in every community, of limited education
and narrow observation, who, because they have
mingled in the world and dealt with affairs, claim to be
preëminently <em>practical</em> men, and ridicule the opinions of
thinkers in their closets as the speculations of “mere
<em>theorists</em>.” Not discriminating carefully between the word<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span>
“general” and the word “abstract,” and regarding as
<em>abstract</em> principles what are in nearly all cases <em>general</em> principles,
they regard all theorizing as synonymous with visionary
speculation; while that which they call “practical
knowledge,” and which they fancy to be wholly devoid of
supposition or guesswork, but which is nothing else than a
heap of hasty deductions from scanty and inaccurately
observed phenomena, they deem more trustworthy than the
discoveries of science and the conclusions of reason. Yet,
when correctly defined, this very practical knowledge, so
boastfully opposed to theory, in reality presupposes it.
True practical knowledge is simply a ready discernment of
the proper modes and seasons of applying to the common
affairs of life those general truths and principles which are
deduced from an extensive and accurate observation of
facts, by minds stored with various knowledge, accustomed
to investigation, and trained to the art of reasoning; or, in
other words, by <em>theorists</em>. Every man who attempts to
trace the causes or effects of an occurrence that falls under
his personal observation, theorizes. The only essential distinction,
in most cases, between “practical” men and those
whom they denounce as visionary, is, not that the latter
alone indulge in speculation, but that the theories of the
former are based on the facts of their own experience,&mdash;those
that happen within a narrow sphere, and in a single
age; while the conclusions of the latter are deduced from
the <em>facts of all ages and countries</em>, minutely analyzed and
compared.</p>

<p>Thus the “practical” farmer does not hesitate to consult
the neighboring farmers, and to make use of the
results of their experience concerning the best soils for certain
crops, the best manures for those soils, etc.; yet if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span>
another farmer, instead of availing himself of his neighbors’
experiences only, consults a book or books containing the
digested and classified results of a thousand farmers’ experiences
touching the same points, he is called, by a strange
inconsistency, “a book-farmer,” “a mere theorist.” The
truth is, the “practical” man, so called, extends his views
no farther than the fact before him. Even when he is so
fortunate as to learn its cause, the discovery is comparatively
useless, since it affords no light in new and more
complex cases. The scientific man, unsatisfied with the
observation of one fact, collects many, and by tracing the
points of resemblance, deduces a comprehensive truth of
universal application. “Practical” men conduct the details
of ordinary business with a masterly hand. As Burke said
of George Grenville, they do admirably well so long as
things move on in the accustomed channel, and a new and
troubled scene is not opened; but they are not fitted to
contend successfully with the difficulties of an untried and
hazardous situation. When “the high roads are broken
up, and the waters are out,” when a new state of things is
presented, and “the line affords no precedent,” then it is
that they show a mind trained in a subordinate sphere,
formed for servile imitation, and destined to borrow its
lights of another. “Expert men,” says Bacon, “can execute,
and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but
the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of
affairs, come best from those that are learned.”</p>

<p>Among the current phrases of the day, by which men
are led into error, one of the commonest is the expression
“doing good.” Properly understood, “to do good” is to do
right; but the phrase has acquired a technical sense which
is much narrower. It means, not discharging faithfully<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span>
the duties of one’s calling, but stepping aside from its
routine to relieve the poor, the distressed, and the ignorant;
or to reform the sinful. The lawyer who, for a fee, conscientiously
gives advice, or pleads in the courts, is not
thought to be doing good; but he is so regarded if he gratuitously
defends a poor man or a widow. A merchant
who sells good articles at fair prices, and pays his notes
punctually, is not doing good; but he is doing good, if he
carries broth and blankets to beggars, teaches in a Sunday
School, supports a Young Men’s Christian Association, or
distributes tracts to the irreligious. Charitable and philanthropic
societies of every kind are all recognized as organs
for doing good; but the common pursuits of life,&mdash;law,
medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, trading, etc.,&mdash;are
not.</p>

<p>The incorrectness of this view will be seen if we for a
moment reflect what would become of society, including its
charitable institutions and philanthropists, should its different
members refuse to perform their respective functions.
Society is a body corporate, which can exist,&mdash;at least, in a
healthy state,&mdash;only on condition that each man performs
the specific work which Providence, or his own sense of his
fitness for it, has assigned to him. Thus one man tills the
ground; another engages in manufacturing; a third gathers
and distributes the produce of labor in its various
forms; a fourth loans or exchanges money; a fifth makes
or executes laws; and each of these persons, as he is contributing
to the general good, is doing good as truly as the
most devoted clergyman who labors in the cure of souls,
or philanthropist who carries loaves of bread to hovels.
To deny this, it has been well said, is to say that a commissariat
or transport corps has nothing to do with carrying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span>
on a war, and that this business is discharged entirely by
the men who stand in line of battle or mount the breach.</p>

<p>The popular theory proceeds upon two assumptions,
both of which are false; first, that the motives which urge
men to diligence in their callings are mean and paltry,&mdash;that
selfishness is the mainspring which causes all the
wheels in the great machine of society to revolve; and,
secondly, that pursuits which benefit those who prosecute
them are necessarily selfish. The truth is, the best work,
and a very large part of the work, done in every calling,
is done not from a mean and sordid hunger for its emoluments,
whether of money, rank, or fame, but from a sincere
love for it, and pride in performing its duties well
and creditably. The moment a man begins to lose this
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">esprit de corps</i>, this high-minded professional pride, and
to find his reward in his pay and not in his work, that
moment his work begins to deteriorate, and he ceases to
meet with the highest success. If pursuits which benefit
those who follow them are necessarily selfish, then philanthropy
itself is selfish, for its rewards, in popular estimation,
are of the noblest kind. No sane man will
depreciate the blessings that result from the labors of
the Howards, the Frys, and the Nightingales; but they
bear the same relation to the ordinary pursuits of life
that medicine bears to food. Doctors and surgeons are
useful members of society; but their services are less
needed than those of butchers and bakers. Let the farmer
cease to sow and reap, let the loom and the anvil be
forsaken, and the courts of justice be closed, and not only
will the philanthropist starve, but society will speedily
become a den of robbers, if it does not utterly cease to
exist.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span></p>

<p>Mr. Mill notices an ambiguity in the word “right,”
which has been made the occasion of an ingenious sophism.
A man asserts that he has a right to publish his opinions,
which may be true in one sense, namely, that it would
be wrong in any <em>other</em> person to hinder or prevent their
publication; but it does not follow that, in publishing his
opinions, he is <em>doing right</em>, for this is an entirely distinct
proposition from the other. Its truth depends upon two
things; first, whether he has taken due pains to ascertain
that the opinions are true, and second, whether their
publication in this manner, and at this time, will probably
be beneficial to the interests of truth on the whole.
Another sophism, based on the ambiguity of the same
word, is that of confounding a right of any kind with a
right to enforce that right by resisting or punishing any
violation of it, as in the case of a people whose right to
good government is ignored by tyrannical rulers. The
right or liberty of the people to turn out their rulers is
so far from being the same thing as the other, that “it
depends upon an immense number of varying circumstances,
and is altogether one of the knottiest questions
in practical ethics.”</p>

<p>Montaigne complains with good reason that too many
definitions, explanations, and replies to difficult questions,
are purely verbal. “I demand what ‘nature’ is, what
‘pleasure,’ ‘circle,’ and ‘substitution’ are? The question is
about words, and is answer’d accordingly. A stone is a
body; but if a man should further urge, and ‘what is body?’
‘Substance;’ ‘and what is substance?’ and so on, he would
drive the respondent to the end of his calepin. We exchange
one word for another, and ofttimes for one less
understood. I better know what man is, than I know<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>
what animal is, or mortal, or rational. To satisfie one
doubt, they pop me in the mouth with three; ’tis the
Hydra’s head.”<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> There was a time when it was said that
the essence of gold and its substantial form consisted in
its <em>aureity</em>, and this explanation was supposed to answer
all questions, and solve all doubts.</p>

<p>From all this it will be seen that our words are, to a large
extent, carelessly employed,&mdash;the signs of crude and indefinite
generalizations. But even when the greatest care is
taken in the employment of words, it is nearly impossible to
choose and put them together so exquisitely that a sophist
may not wrest and pervert their meaning. Those persons
who have ever had a lawsuit need not be told how much
ingenious argument may hang on a shade of meaning, to
be determined objectively without reference to the fancied
intentions of the legislator or the writer. Hardly a week
passes, but a valuable bequest is successfully contested
through some loophole of ambiguous phraseology. If, in
ordinary life, words represent impressions and ideas, in
legal instruments they are <em>things</em>; they dispose of property,
liberty, and life; they express the will of the lawgiver,
and become the masters of our social being. Yet
so carelessly are they used by lawyers and legislators,
that half the money spent in litigation goes to determine
the meanings of words and phrases. O’Connell used to
assert that he could drive a coach-and-six through an Act
of Parliament. Many of our American enactments yawn
with chasms wide enough for a whole railway train. But
even when laws have been framed with the most consummate
skill, the subtlety of a Choate or a Follett may twist
what appears to be the clearest and most unmistakable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span>
language into a meaning the very opposite to that which
the common sense of mankind would give it.</p>

<p>I have heard Judge Story make the following statement
to show the extreme difficulty of framing a statute
so as to avoid all ambiguity in its language. Being once
employed by Congress to draft an important law, he spent
six months in trying to perfect its phraseology, so that its
sense would be clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, leaving
not the smallest loophole for a lawyer to creep through.
Yet, in less than a year, after having heard the arguments
of two able attorneys, in a suit which came before him as
a Judge of the United States Supreme Court, he was
utterly at a loss to decide upon the statute’s meaning!</p>

<p>A signal illustration of the ambiguity that lurks in the
most familiar words, is furnished by a legal question that
was fruitful of controversy and “costs” not long ago in
England. An English nobleman, Lord Henry Seymour,
who lived in Paris many years, executed a will in 1856,
wherein he made a bequest of property worth seventy
thousand pounds to the hospitals of London and Paris.
No sooner was it known that he was dead, than the question
was raised, “What does ‘London’ mean? Where are
its limits, and what is its area? What does it contain,
and what does it exclude?” Four groups of claimants
appeared, each to some extent opposed by the other three.
Group the first said, “The gift is obviously confined to the
<em>City</em> proper of London,”&mdash;that is, “London within the
walls,” comprising little more than half of a square mile.
“Not so,” protested group the second; “it extends to all
the hospitals within the old bills of mortality,”&mdash;that is,
London, Westminster, Southwark, and about thirty out-parishes,
but excluding Marylebone, St. Pancras, Paddington,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span>
Chelsea, and everything beyond. Group the third
insisted that “London” included “all the area within
the metropolitan boroughs”; while group the fourth, for
cogent reasons of their own, were positive that the testator
meant, and the true construction was, nothing less than
the whole area included within the Registrar-General’s
and the Census Commissioner’s interpretation of the word
“Metropolis.” The Master of the Rolls decided that the
testator meant to use the word “London” in its full, complete,
popular sense, as including all the busily occupied
districts of what is usually called the Metropolis, as it
existed in the year when the will was made. No sooner,
however, was this vexed question settled, than another,
hardly less puzzling, arose,&mdash;namely, What is a “Hospital”?
Nearly every kind of charitable institution put in its
claim; but it was finally decided that only such charities
should share in the bequest as fell within the definition of
the French word <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">hospice</i> used in the will.</p>

<p>Another perplexing question which came before the
English courts some years ago, and which not less vividly
shows the importance of attention to the words we use,
related to the meaning of the word “team,” as used by
writers generally, and used in a written agreement. A
certain noble duke made an agreement with one of his
tenants in Oxfordshire concerning the occupancy of a
farm, and a portion of the agreement was couched in the
following terms: “The tenant to perform each year for
the Duke of &mdash;&mdash;, at the rate of one day’s team-work,
with two horses and one proper person, for every fifty
pounds of rent, when required (except at hay or corn harvest),
without being paid for the same.” In other words,
the rent of the farm was made up of two portions, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span>
larger being a money payment, and the former a certain
amount of farm service. All went on quietly and smoothly
in reference to this agreement, until one particular day,
when the duke’s agent or bailiff desired the farmer to send
a cart to fetch coals from a railway station to the ducal
mansion. “Certainly not,” said the farmer. “I’ll send
the horses and a man, but you must find the cart.”
“Pooh, pooh! what do you mean? Does not your agreement
bind you to do team-work occasionally for his Grace?”
“Yes, and here’s the team; two horses and a careful man
to drive them.” “But there can’t be a team without a
cart or wagon.” “O yes, there can, the horses are the
team.” “No, the horses and cart together are the team.”</p>

<p>The question which the court was called on to decide in
the lawsuit which followed, was,&mdash;What is a “team”? The
case was at first tried at Oxford, before a common jury,
who gave a verdict substantially for the duke. A rule
was afterward obtained, with a view to bring the question
of definition before the judges at the Court of Queen’s
Bench. The counsel for the duke contended that as team-work
cannot be done by horses without a cart or wagon, it
is obvious that a team must include a vehicle as well as the
horses by which it was to be drawn. Mr. Justice A. said
that, in the course of his reading, he had met with some
lines which tend to show that the team is separate from
the cart,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Giles Jelt was sleeping, in his cart he lay;</p>
<p class="verse0">Some waggish pilf’rers stole his team away.</p>
<p class="verse0">Giles wakes and cries, ‘Ods Bodikins, what’s here?</p>
<p class="verse0">Why, how now; am I Giles or not?</p>
<p class="verse0">If he, I’ve lost six geldings to my smart;</p>
<p class="verse0">If not, Ods Bodikins, I’ve found a cart.’”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Mr. Justice B. quoted a line from Wordsworth,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“My jolly team will work alone for me,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span></p>

<p class="noindent">as proving the farmer’s interpretation, seeing that, though
horses might possibly be jolly, a cart cannot. The counsel
for His Grace urged that the dictionaries of Johnson and
Walker both speak of a team as “a number of horses
drawing the same carriage.” “True,” said Justice A. “do
not these citations prove that the team and the carriage
are distinct things?” “No,” replied the counsel on the
duke’s side; “because a team without a cart would be of
no use.” He cited the description given by Cæsar of the
mode of fighting in chariots adopted by the ancient Britons,
and of the particular use and meaning of the word <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">temanem</i>.
From Cæsar he came down to Gray, the English
poet, and cited the lines,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,</p>
<p class="verse2">Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe hath broke;</p>
<p class="verse0">How jocund did they drive their team afield,</p>
<p class="verse2">How bowed the wood beneath their sturdy stroke;”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and from Gray he came down to the far-famed “Bull
Run” affair in the recent American civil war, a graphic
account of which told that “the teamsters cut the traces
of the horses.”</p>

<p>The counsel for the farmer, on the other hand, referred
to Richardson’s English dictionary, and to Bosworth’s
Anglo-Saxon dictionary, for support to the assertion that
a team implies only the horses, not the vehicle also; and
he then gave the following citations to the same effect:
From Spenser,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Thee a ploughman all unmeeting found,</p>
<p class="verse0">As he his toilsome team that way did guide.</p>
<p class="verse0">And brought thee up a ploughman’s state to bide.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">From Shakespeare,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“We fairies that do run,</p>
<p class="verse0">By the triple Hecat’s team,</p>
<p class="verse0">From the presence of the sun,</p>
<p class="verse0">Following darkness like a dream.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span></p>

<p class="noindent">Again from Shakespeare,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse4">“I am in love, but a team of horse shall</p>
<p class="verse0">Not pluck that from me, nor who ’tis I love.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">From Dryden,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“He heaved with more than human force to move</p>
<p class="verse0">A weighty straw, the labor of a team.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Again from Dryden,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse6">“Any number, passing in a line;</p>
<p class="verse0">Like a long team of snowy swans on high,</p>
<p class="verse0">Which clap their wings and cleave the liquid sky.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Spenser, Roscommon, Martineau, and other authorities,
were also cited to the same purport, and all the light
which English literature could throw upon the point was
converged upon it. The learned judges were divided in
their opinions, one deciding that the word “team” clearly
implied the cart as well as the horses, two other judges
deciding that it was enough if the farmer sent the horse
and the driver to be put to such service as the duke’s
agent might please. The arguments by which each supported
his conclusion were so acute, cogent, and weighty,
that their disagreement seems to have been inevitable.</p>

<p>The English historian, Hallam, says of the language of
Hobbes that it is so lucid and concise that it would be
almost as improper to put an algebraical process in different
terms as some of his metaphysical paragraphs. Having
illustrated his precept by his practice, Hobbes speaks
with peculiar authority on the importance of discrimination
in the use of words. In a memorable passage of
the “Leviathan,” from which we have already quoted, he
says: “Seeing that truth consisteth in the right ordering
of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise
truth had need to remember what every name he useth
stands for, and to place it accordingly; or else he will find<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span>
himself entangled in words as a bird in limetwigs,&mdash;the
more he struggles, the more belimed. Words are wise
men’s counters,&mdash;they do but reckon by them; but they
are the money of fools, that value them by the authority
of an Aristotle, a Cicero, a Thomas, or any other doctor
whatsoever.” Fuller quaintly suggests that the reason
why the Schoolmen wrote in so bald a style was, “that
the vermin of equivocation might not hide themselves in
the nap of their words.” The definition of words has been
often regarded as a mere pedagogue’s exercise; but when
we call to mind the persecutions, proscriptions, tortures,
and even massacres, which have resulted from mistakes
about the meaning of certain words, the office of the lexicographer
assumes a grave and dignified aspect. It is not
enough, however, in guarding against error, to discriminate
our words, so as to understand their exact force. We
must also keep constantly in mind the fact that language,
when used with the utmost precision, is at best but an
imperfect representation of thought. Words are properly
neither the “names of things,” as modern writers have
defined them, nor, as the ancients viewed them, the “pictures
of ideas.” The most they can do is to express the
<em>relations</em> of things; they are, as Hobbes said, “the signs
of our conceptions,” serving as a mark to recall to ourselves
the likeness of a former thought, and as a sign to
make it known to others.</p>

<p>Even as the signs of our conceptions, they are at best
imperfect and unsatisfactory, representing only approximately
what we think, and never coordinating with the
conceptions they are used to represent. “Seizing on some
characteristic mark of the conception, they always express
too little or too much. They are sometimes distinctly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span>
metaphorical, sometimes indefinitely assertive; sometimes
too concrete, sometimes too abstract.” Our sentences are
not images of thought, reflected in a perfect mirror, nor
photographs which lack coloring only; they are but the
merest skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, tentative
signs, which can put another only into a partial possession
of our consciousness. To apprehend perfectly the thought
of another man, even one who uses language with the
utmost nicety and accuracy, we need to know his individuality,
his entire past history; we must interpret and supplement
his meaning by all that we know of his intellectual
and moral constitution, his ways of thinking, feeling, and
speaking; we must be <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">en rapport</i> with him; and even then
we may fail to penetrate to the central meaning of his
words, the very core of his thought.</p>

<p>The soul of every man is a mystery which no other
man can fathom; we are, as one has said, spirits in prison,
able only to make signals to each other, but with a world
of things to think and say which our signals cannot describe
at all. There is hardly an abstract term in any
language which conveys precisely the same meaning to two
different minds; every word is sure to awaken in one mind
more or less different associations from those it awakens
in another. Words mean the same thing only to persons
who are psychologically the same, and who have had the
same experiences. It is obvious that no word can explain
any sensation, pleasant or painful, to one who has never
felt the sensation. When Saunderson, who was born
blind, tried to define “red,” he compared that color to the
blowing of a trumpet, or the crowing of a cock. In like
manner Massieu, the deaf-mute, in trying to describe the
sound of a trumpet, said that it was “red.” The statement<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span>
that words have to two persons a common meaning
only when they suggest ideas of a common experience, is
true even of the terms we stop to ponder; how much more
true, then, of words whose full and exact meaning we no
more pause to consider, than we reflect that the gold eagle
which passes through our hands is a thousand cents. Try
to ascertain the meaning of the most familiar words which
are dropping from men’s lips, and you find that each has
its history, and that many are an epitome of the thoughts
and observations of ages.</p>

<p>What two persons, for example, attach the same meaning
to the words “democracy,” “conservatism,” “radicalism,”
“education”? What is the meaning of “gentleman,”
“comfortable,” “competence”? De Quincey says
that he knew several persons in England with annual incomes
bordering on twenty thousand pounds, who spoke
of themselves, and seemed seriously to think themselves,
“unhappy paupers.” Lady Hester Stanhope, with an
income of two thousand seven hundred pounds a year,
thought herself an absolute pauper in London, and went
to live in the mountains of Syria; “for how, you know,”
she would say pathetically, “could the humblest of spinsters
live decently on that pittance?” Do the chaste and
the licentious, the amiable and the revengeful, mean the
same thing when they speak of “love” or “hate”? With
what precious meaning are the words “home” and
“heaven” flooded to some persons, and with what icy
indifference are they heard by others!</p>

<p>So imperfect is language that it is doubtful whether
such a thing as a self-evident verbal proposition, the absolute
truth of which can never be contested, is possible; for
it can never be absolutely certain what is the meaning of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span>
the words in which the proposition is expressed, and the
assertion that it is founded on partial observation, or that
the words imperfectly express the observation on which it
is founded, or are incomplete metaphors, or are defective
in some other respect, must always be open to proof.</p>

<p>Even words that designate outward, material objects,
cognizable by the senses, do not always call up similar
thoughts in different minds. The meaning they convey
depends often upon the mental qualities of the hearer.
Thus the word “sun” uttered to an unlettered man of
feeble mental powers, conveys simply the idea of a ball
of light and heat, which rises in the sky in the morning,
and goes down at evening; but to the man of vivid imagination,
who is familiar with modern scientific discoveries,
it suggests, more or less distinctly, all that science has
revealed concerning that luminary. If we estimate words
according to their etymological meaning, we shall still
more clearly see how inadequate they are in themselves
to involve the mass of facts which they connote,&mdash;as
inadequate as is a thin and worthless bit of paper, which
yet may represent a thousand pounds. In no case is the
whole of an object expressed or characterized by its appellation,
but only some salient feature or phenomenon is
suggested, which is sometimes real, at others only apparent.
Take the name of an animal, and it may probably
express some trivial fact about its nose or its tail, as in
“rhinoceros” we express nothing but the horn in its nose,
and in “squirrel” we note only its shady tail; but each
of these animals has other important characteristics, and
other animals may have the very characteristics which
these names import. The Latin word <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Homo</i> means, etymologically,
a creature made of earth, which is but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span>
metaphorically true; but for what an infinity, almost, of
complex conceptions and relations does it stand! The Sanskrit
has four names for “elephant,” from different petty
characteristics of the animal, and yet how few of its qualities
do they describe! “Take a word expressive of the
smallest possible modification of matter,&mdash;a word invented
in the most expressive language in the world, and invented
by no less eminent a philosopher than Democritus, and
that, too, with great applause,&mdash;the word ‘atom,’ meaning
that which cannot be cut. Yet simple as is the notion
to be expressed, and great as were the resources at command,
what a failure the mere <em>word</em> is! It expresses too
much and too little, too much as being applicable to other
things, and consequently ambiguous; too little, because it
does not express all the properties even of an atom. Its
inadequacy cannot be more forcibly illustrated than by the
fact that its precise Latin equivalent is by us confined to
the single acceptation ‘insect’!”<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a></p>

<p>But if words are but imperfect symbols for designating
material objects, how much more unequal must they be to
the task of expressing that which lies above and behind
matter and sensation, especially as all abstract terms are
metaphors taken from sensible objects! How many feelings
do we have, in the course of our lives, which beggar description!
How many apprehensions, limitations, distinctions,
opinions are clearly present, at times, to our consciousness,
which elude every attempt to give them verbal expression!
Even the profoundest thinkers and the most accurate, hair-splitting
writers, who weigh and test to the bottom every
term they use, are baffled in the effort so to convey their
conclusions as to defy all misapprehension or successful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span>
refutation. Beginning with definitions, they find that the
definitions themselves need defining; and just at the triumphant
moment when the structure of argument seems
complete and logic-proof, some lynx-eyed adversary detects
an inaccuracy or a contradiction in the use of some keystone
term, and the whole magnificent pile, so painfully
reared, tumbles into ruins.</p>

<p>The history of controversy, in short, in all ages and
nations, is a history of disputes about words. The hardest
problems, the keenest negotiations, the most momentous
decisions, have turned on the meaning of a phrase, a term,
or even a particle. A misapplied or sophistical expression
has provoked the fiercest and most interminable quarrels.
Misnomers have turned the tide of public opinion; verbal
fallacies have filled men’s souls with prejudice, rage, and
hate; and “the sparks of artful watchwords, thrown among
combustible materials, have kindled the flames of deadly
war and changed the destiny of empires.”</p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> “Westminster Review,” September, 1856.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> “Essays,” Cotton’s edition.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> “Chapters on Language,” by F. W. Farrar.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER XIII.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">NAMES OF MEN.</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">“Imago animi, vultus, vitae, nomen est.”</span></p>

<p><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">L’étude des noms propres n’est point sans intérêt pour la morale, l’organization
politique, la legislation, et l’histoire même de la civilization.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Salverte.</span></span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy1">Among the crotchets of Sterne’s dialectician, Walter
Shandy, was a theory regarding the importance of
Christian names in determining the future behavior and
destiny of the children to whom they are given. He solemnly
maintained the opinion that there is a strange
kind of magic bias which good or bad names, as he called
them, irresistibly impress upon men’s character or conduct.
“How many Cæsars and Pompeys,” he would say, “by
mere inspiration of their names, have been rendered worthy
of them? And how many there are,” he would add, “who
might have done exceedingly well in the world, had not
their characters and spirits been utterly depressed and Nicodemused
into nothing!” Of all the names in the universe
the one to which the philosopher had the most unconquerable
aversion was “Tristram.” He would break off in the
midst of one of his disputes on the subject of names, and
demand of his antagonist whether he would say he had
ever remembered, or whether he had ever heard tell of a
man called “Tristram” performing anything great or worth
recording. “No,” he would say; “<em>Tristram!</em> the thing is
impossible.”</p>

<p>In these observations of Mr. Shandy there may be some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span>
exaggeration, but they contain substantial truth. The
power of names in elevating or degrading both the things
and persons to whom they are applied, is known to all
thoughtful observers. Give to a conscious being a significant
and graphic appellation, and it tends to make the
character gravitate in the direction of the name. There
are names that seem to act like promissory notes, which the
bearer does all in his power to redeem at maturity; names
that tend to verify themselves by swaying men <em>toward</em> the
qualities they denote, while they too often lead to the exclusion
of others no less important. It is difficult to say
which is the greater misfortune, for a man to have a positively
mean name, or one that is grandiose. Lord Lytton,
in “Kenelm Chillingly,” speaking of the moral responsibilities
of parents for the names they give their children,
regards as equally to be deprecated the names which stamp
a child with mediocrity, and those which stamp him with an
impress of absurd and overweening ambition. Inflict upon
a man, he says, the burden of a great name which he must
utterly despair of equalling, and you crush him beneath
the weight. If a poet were called John Milton, or William
Shakespeare, he would not dare publish even a sonnet. On
the other hand, call a child Peter Snooks or Lazarus Rust,
and though he have the face and form of the god of the
silver bow, and the eloquence of a Chatham, he will find it
hard, if not impossible, to achieve distinction,&mdash;the name
will be such a dead weight on his intellectual energies.
Can Tabitha be a name to conjure with; can Jerusha be
musical on the lips of love, or Higginbotham fill the trump
of fame? Think of Washington having the name of Jenkins,
and toasts being drunk to the immortal Jenkins, “first in
war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen!”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span>
The true choice of a name lies between extremes,&mdash;the
two extremes of ludicrous insignificance and oppressive
renown. It is questionable whether a good deal of the
mediocrity of the reigning families in Europe is not due to
the labyrinth of names in which the heir to a throne is hidden
at birth, like a moth in a silk cocoon. Some years ago
an infant prince of Saxony was enveloped in sixteen names.
About forty years ago the Queen of Naples gave birth to a
princess whose names numbered thirty-two, or a dozen
more than the names of Susan Brown, of whom we are told
that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“The patronymical name of the maid</p>
<p class="verse0">Was so completely overlaid</p>
<p class="verse2">With a long prenomical cover,</p>
<p class="verse0">That if each additional proper noun</p>
<p class="verse0">Was laid by the priest intensively down,</p>
<p class="verse0">Miss Susan was done uncommonly Brown,</p>
<p class="verse2">The moment the christening was over!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Think of an infant’s being smothered for years in such a
superfetation of names as that of the Neapolitan princess.
It must require more mental energy than many babies can
command, to break one’s way out of such a verbal palace
prison as that.</p>

<p>“<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Notre nom propre</i>,” says a French writer, “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">c’est nous
mêmes</i>.” The name of a man instantly recalls him to
recollection, with his physical and moral qualities, and the
remarkable events, if any, in his career. The few syllables
forming it “suffice to reopen the fountain of a bereaved
mother’s tears; to cover with blushes the face of the
maiden who believes her secret about to be revealed; to
agitate the heart of the lover; to light up in the eyes of
an enemy the fire of rage, and to awaken in the breast of
one separated by distance from his friend the liveliest
emotions of hope or regret.” What would history or biography<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span>
be without proper names; or what stimulus would
men have, inciting them to the performance of great
and noble deeds, if they could not live a second life in their
names? Among most nations the imposition of names has
been esteemed of such moment, that it has been attended
with religious rites. The Jews accompanied it with circumcision;
the Greeks and Romans with religious ceremonies
and sacrifices; the Persians, after a religious service,
chose at a venture from names written on slips of paper,
and laid upon the Koran; while many Christians sanctify
the rite by baptism.</p>

<p>It is a well established fact that all proper names were
originally significant, though in the lapse of years the
meaning of many of them has been obscured or obliterated.
Thus, the oldest known name, Adam, meant “red,”
indicating that his body was fashioned from the red earth;
while Moses signified “drawn from the water.” So the
fore-names of the Saxons were significant,&mdash;as Alfred,
“all peace”; Biddulph, “the slayer of wolves”; Edmund,
“truth-mouth,” or “the speaker of truth”; Edward,
“truth-keeper”; Goddard, “honored of God.” It is said
that Mr. Freeman, the English historian, has grown, in
the course of his studies, so in love with the Old-English
period, that he has named three of his children Ælfred,
Eadward, and Æthelburgh. According to Verstegan, William
was a name not given to children, but a title of honor
given for noble or worthy deeds. When a German had
killed a Roman, the golden helmet of the vanquished soldier
was placed upon his head, and the victor was honored
with the title Gildhelm, or “golden helmet,”&mdash;in French,
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Guillaume</i>.</p>

<p>In the early ages of the world a single name sufficed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span>
for each person. It was generally descriptive of some
quality he had, or which his parents hoped he might in
future have. In the course of time, to distinguish a man
from others bearing the same appellative, a second name
became necessary. The earliest approach to the modern
system of nomenclature, was the addition of the name of
a man’s son to his own name; as Caleb, the son of
Jephunneh, or Joshua, the son of Nun,&mdash;a practice which
survives in our own day in such names as Adamson and
Fitzherbert. The Romans, to mark the different <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">gentes</i>
and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">familiæ</i>, and to distinguish individuals of the same
race, had three names,&mdash;the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Prænomen</i>, the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Nomen</i>, and
the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Cognomen</i>. The first denoted the individual; the second
was the generic name, or term of clanship; and the
third indicated the family. Military commanders, and
other persons of the highest eminence, sometimes were
honored with a fourth name, or <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Agnomen</i>; as Coriolanus,
Africanus, Germanicus, borrowed from the name of a hostile
country, which had been the scene of their exploits.
A person was usually addressed only by his prænomen,
which, Horace tells us, “delicate ears loved”:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="la" xml:lang="la">
<p class="verse6">“Gaudent prænomine molles</p>
<p class="verse0">Auriculæ.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Archdeacon Hare has well observed that by means of their
names political principles, political duties, political affections
were impressed on the minds of the Romans from
their birth. Every member of a great house had a determinate
course marked out for him, the path in which his
forefathers had trod; his name admonished him of what
he owed to his country. “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Rien</i>,” says Desbrosses, “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">n’a
contribué davantage à la grandeur de la république que cette
methode de succession nominale, qui, incorporant, pour ainsi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span>
dire, à la gloire de l’état, la gloire des noms héréditaires,
joignit le patriotisme de race au patriotisme national</i>.”</p>

<p>After the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the old
Pagan names were commonly discarded, and Scriptural
names, or names derived from church history, took their
place. About the close of the tenth century, distinctive
appellations, describing physical and moral qualities, habits,
professions, etc., were added for the purpose of identification;
but as these sobriquets were imposed upon many
who bore the same baptismal names, an entire change in
the system of names became necessary, and hereditary
surnames were adopted. These, it is said, were at first
written, “not in a direct line after the Christian name,
but above it, between the lines,” and thus were literally
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">supra nomina</i>, or “surnames.”</p>

<p>Our English names, most of which have originated
since the Norman Conquest, are borrowed, to some extent,
from nearly all the races and languages of the earth. The
Hebrew is represented in Ben, which means “son,” and the
Syriac in Bar, as in Barron and Bartholomew. The desire
to disguise Old Testament names has shortened Abraham
into “Braham,” and Moses into “Mosely” or “Moss.” In
like manner Solomon becomes “Sloman”; Levi, “Lewis”;
and Elias, “Ellis.”</p>

<p>The three most common patronymics of Celtic origin,
now used by the English, are <em>O</em>, <em>Mac</em>, and <em>Ap</em>. The Highlanders
of Scotland employed the <em>sire</em>-name with Mac, and
hence the Macdonalds and Mac Gregors, meaning “the son
of Donald” and “the son of Gregor.” The Irish used the
prefix of <em>Oy</em> or <em>O</em>, signifying grandson; as, O’Hara,
O’Neale. They use the word Mac also; and the two
names together are so essential notes of the Irish, that</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="la" xml:lang="la">
<p class="verseq">“Per Mac atque O, tu veros cognoscis Hibernos,</p>
<p class="verse0">His duobus ademptis, nullus Hibernus adest.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Mr. Lower, in his interesting work on personal names,<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a>
states that among the archives of the corporation of Galway,
there is an order dated 1518, declaring that “neither
O ne Mac shoulde strutte ne swagger through the streetes
of Galway.”</p>

<p>The old Normans prefixed to their names the word <em>Fitz</em>
a corruption of <em>fils</em>, derived from the Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">filius</i>; as Fitz-William,
“the son of William.” Camden states that there
is not a village in Normandy that has not surnamed some
family in England. The French names thus introduced
from Normandy may generally be known by the prefixes
<em>De</em>, <em>Du</em>, <em>De la</em>, <em>St.</em>, and by the suffixes <em>Font</em>, <em>Beau</em>, <em>Age</em>, <em>Mont</em>,
<em>Bois</em>, <em>Champ</em>, <em>Ville</em>, etc., most of which are parts of the
proper names of places; as De Mortimer, St. Maure (Seymour),
Montfort, etc. The Russian peasantry employ the
termination <em>witz</em>, and the Poles <em>sky</em> in the same sense; as
Peter Paulowitz, “Peter, the son of Paul,” and James
Petrowsky, “James, the son of Peter.”</p>

<p>In Wales, till a late period, no surnames were used,
except <em>Ap</em>, or <em>Son</em>; as Ap Richard, now corrupted into
Prichard; Ap Owen, now Bowen; Ap Roderick, now Broderick
and Brodie. Not over a century has passed since
one might have heard in Wales of such “yard-long-tailed”
combinations as Evan-ap-Griffith-ap-David-ap Jenken, and
so on to the seventh or eighth generation, the individual
carrying his pedigree in his name.<a name="FNanchor_38a_38a" id="FNanchor_38a_38a"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> To ridicule this
absurd species of nomenclature, a wag of the seventeenth
century described cheese as being</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Adam’s own cousin-german by its birth,</p>
<p class="verse0">Ap-Curds-ap-Milk-ap-Cow-ap-Grass-ap-Earth!”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Mr. Lower says that the following anecdote was related to
him by a native of Wales: An Englishman riding one
dark night among the mountains, heard a cry of distress,
uttered apparently by a man who had fallen into a ravine
near the highway, and, on listening more attentively,
heard the words: “Help, master, help!” in a voice truly
Cambrian. “Help! what, who are you?” inquired the
traveller. “Jenkin-ap-Griffith-ap-Robin-ap-William-ap-Rees-ap-Evan,”
was the reply. “Lazy fellows that ye be,”
rejoined the Englishman, putting spurs to his horse, “to
lie rolling in that hole, <em>half a dozen of ye</em>; why, in the
name of common sense, don’t ye <em>help one another out</em>?”</p>

<p>In the twelfth century it was considered a mark of disgrace
to have no surname. A wealthy heiress is represented
as saying in respect to her suitor, Robert, natural
son of King Henry I, who had but one name:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“It were to me a great shame,</p>
<p class="verse0">To have a lord withouten his twa name;”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">whereupon the King, to remedy the fatal defect, gave him
the surname of Fitz-Roy.</p>

<p>The early Saxons had as a rule but one name, which
was always significant of some outward or other peculiarity,
and was doubtless often given to children with the belief
or hope that the meaning of the word might exert some
mysterious influence on the bearer’s future destiny. Ere
long, however, surnames came into fashion with them, too,
and were derived from the endless variety of personal
qualities, natural objects, occupations and pursuits, social
relations, localities, offices, and even from different parts of
the body (as Cheek, Beard, Shanks), from sports (as Ball,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span>
Bowles, Whist, Fairplay), from measures (as Gill, Peck),
and from diseases (as Cramp, Toothacher, Akenside), from a
conjunction (as And), and from coins (as Penny, Twopenny,
Moneypenny, Grote, Pound). On a person with the first of
these pecuniary names, the following epitaph was written:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Reader, if cash thou art in want of any,</p>
<p class="verse0">Dig four feet deep, and thou shalt find a Penny.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The prefix <em>atte</em> or <em>at</em> softened to <em>a</em> or <em>an</em> has helped to
form many names. A man living on a moor would call
himself Attemoor or Atmoor; if near a gate, Attegate or
Agate. John Atten Oak was oftentimes condensed into
John-a-Noke, and then into John Noaks. Nye is thus a
corruption of Atten-Eye, “at the island.” From Applegarth,
“an orchard,” are derived Applegate and Appleton.
Beckett means literally “a little brook”; Chase, “a forest”;
Cobb, “a harbor”; Craig, “a rock” or “precipice”;
Holme and Holmes, “a meadow surrounded with water”;
Holt, “a grove”; Holloway, “a deep road between high
banks”; Lee and Leigh, “a pasture”; Peel, “a pool”;
Slack, “low ground,” or “a pass between mountains.” The
root of the ubiquitous Smith is <em>smitan</em>, “to smite,” and like
the Latin <em>faber</em>, the name was originally given to all “smiters,”
whether workers in wood or workers in metal. Soldiers
were sometimes called War-Smiths. Among all the forty
thousand English surnames, no one has been more prolific
of jests and witticisms, especially John Smith, which, from
its commonness, is practically no name, though the rural
Englishman seems to have thought otherwise, who directed
a letter, “For Mr. John Smith, London,&mdash;with spead.”
As there are hundreds of John Smiths in the London
Directory, the letter might as well have been addressed to
the Man in the Moon. There is a well known story of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span>
wag at a crowded theatre, who secured a seat by shouting
“Mr. Smith’s house is on fire!”</p>

<p>Many words obsolete in English are preserved in surnames;
as Sutor, which is the Latin and Saxon for “shoemaker;”
Latimer, from Latiner, “a writer of Latin;”
Chaucer, from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">chausier</i>, “a hose-maker”; Lorimer, “a
maker of spurs, and bits for bridles.” An Arkwright was
“a maker of meal-chests”; Lander is from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">lavandier</i>, “a
washerwoman”; Banister, is “a keeper of the Bath”;
Crocker, “a potter”; Shearman, “one who shears worsteds,
etc.”; Sanger, “a singer”; Notman, “a cowherd.” Generally
all names ending in <em>er</em> indicate some employment or
profession. Such names as Baxter and Brewster are the
feminine of Baker and Brewer, as is Webster of Webber, or
“weaver,” which shows that these trades were anciently
carried on by women, and that when men began to follow
them, they retained for some time the feminine names, as do
men-milliners now. The name of the poet Whittier, however,
is a corruption of “White church.” The termination
<em>ward</em> indicates “a keeper”; as Hayward, “keeper of the
town cattle”; Woodward, “forest-keeper.” Rush is “subtle”;
Bonner, “kind”; Eldridge, “wild,” “ghastly.” Numerous
surnames are derived from the chase, showing the
passion of the early English for field-sports; as Bowyer,
Fowler, Fletcher (from the French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">flèche</i>, an arrow), Hartman.
Tod is the Scotch word for fox; hence Todhunter
(the name of a celebrated mathematician who died recently
at Cambridge, Eng.) is “a fox-hunter.” Among the names
derived from offices are Chalmers, “a chamberlain;” Foster,
“a nourisher,” one who had care of the children of
great men; and Franklin, a person next in dignity to an
esquire. Palmer comes from the professional wanderer of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span>
the ancient time, who always carried a <em>palm</em>-branch as a
pledge of his having visited the Holy Land. Landseer was
a “land-steward,” or bailiff.</p>

<p>Some names, denoting mean occupations which only
bondmen would follow, have been disguised by a new orthography,
“mollified ridiculously,” as Camden says, “lest
their bearers should seem vilified by them.” Carter, Tailor,
and Smith have been metamorphosed into Carteer, Tayleure,
Smyth, Smeeth, or Smythe. Mr. Hayward, ashamed of
being called “cattle-keeper,” has transformed himself into
Howard, as if he hoped to smuggle himself among the connections
of the greatest of ducal houses. Dean Swift, speaking
of these devices to change the vulgar into the genteel
by the change of a letter, says: “I know a citizen who adds
or alters a letter in his name with every plum he acquires;
he now wants only the change of a vowel to be allied to a
sovereign prince, Farnese, in Italy, and that perhaps he may
contrive to be done by a mistake of the graver upon his
tombstone.” Mr. Lower tells a good story of a Tailor who
had been thus dignified, and who haughtily demanded of a
farmer the name of his dog. The answer was: “Why, sir,
his proper name is Jowler, but since he’s a consequential
kind of puppy, we calls him Jowleure!”</p>

<p>Of the Saxon patronymics the most fruitful is <em>son</em>, with
which is mingled inseparably the genitive letter <em>s</em>. Thus
from the Christian name <em>Adam</em> are derived Adams, Adamson,
Addison; from <em>Andrew</em>, Andrews, Anderson; from
<em>Dennis</em>, Dennison, Jennison; from <em>Henry</em>, Henrison, Harris,
Harrison, Hawes, Hawkins; from <em>John</em>, Johns, Jones, Jonson,
Johnson, Jennings, Jenks, Jenkinson, Jackson, Jockins;
from <em>William</em>, Williamson, Williams, Wilson, Wills, Wilkins,
Wilkinson, Wells; from <em>Walter</em>, Watson, Watts,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span>
Watkins. From the Old Saxon derivation <em>ing</em>, signifying
offspring, it is said that we get over two thousand proper
names. Browning and Whiting are dark and white offspring.
The termination <em>kin</em>, derived from the ancient <em>cyn</em>,
meaning “race,” is found in a yet greater number of
names; while from the termination <em>ock</em> (as in Pollock,
from Paul, and contracted into Polk) are obtained comparatively
few names. Scandinavian mythology has contributed
a few names to our English list. From <em>Thor</em> we have
Thoresby, Thursby, and Thurlow.</p>

<p>Among the surnames derived from personal qualities,
we have Russell, “red”; Gough, also “red”; Snell, “agile”
or “hardy”; Read, Reid, or Reed, an old spelling of “red”;
Duff, “black”; Vaughan, “little”; Longfellow, Moody,
Goodenough, Toogood, and hundreds of others. Farebrother
is a Scottish name for “uncle”; Waller means a “pilgrim,”
or “stranger.” Of Puritan surnames derived from the virtues,
Be-courteous Cole, Search-the-Scriptures Moreton,
Fly-fornication Richardson, Kill-sin Pemble, Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith
White, are examples. Surnames have
even been derived from oaths, and other such exclamations.
Profane swearing was a common vice in the early times,
and when men habitually interlarded their conversations
with oaths, they became sobriquets by which they were
known. Just as Say-Say became the title of an old gentleman
who always began a remark with “I say-say, old boy,”
so a profane exclamation, repeatedly uttered, became a
proper name. Godkin, Blood, and <em>Sacré</em> are said to be
clipped oaths. Parsall is corrupted from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Par Ciel</i>, “By
Heaven,” Pardoe from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Par Dieu</i>, and Godsall and Godbody
from “By the soul and body of God!” the shocking but
favorite oath of Edward III.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span></p>

<p>There are names which in the social circle will provoke
a smile, in spite of every attempt to preserve one’s gravity;
others that excite horror, hate, or contempt; and others
which, inviting cheap puns and gibes, irritate the minds
of the calmest men. Shenstone thanked God that his name
was not liable to a pun. There is a large class of names
indicative of personal blemishes or moral obliquities, such
as Asse, Goose, Lazy, Leatherhead, Addlehead, Milksop,
Mudd, Pighead, Trollope, Hussey, Silliman, Cruickshank,
Blackmonster, etc. In many countries Devil is a surname.
Kennard, once Kaynard, means “you dog,” also a “rascal.”
The Romans had their Plauti, Pandi, Vari, and Scauri,
that is, the Splay-foots, the Bandy-legs, the In-knees, and
the Club-foots. Cocles means “one-eyed”; Flaccus, one of
the names of Horace, “flap-eared”; and Naso points to a
long “nose.” Cæsar, from whose name come the German
<i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Kaiser</i> and the Russian <em>Czar</em>, was so called (or, at least, the
first Roman with the name was so called) from his coming
into the world with long hair (<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">cæsaries</i>), or from his unnatural
mode of birth (<em>a</em> <span class="fs70">CÆSO</span> <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">matris utero</i>). Who would
introduce Mr. Shakelady into the circle of his friends, and
what worthy deeds could be expected from a Doolittle?
Who can blame Dr. Jacob Quackenboss for dropping a
couple of syllables and the quack at the same time from
his name, and becoming Jacob Bush, M.D.? Who can help
sympathizing with Mr. Death, who asked the Legislature of
Massachusetts to change his name to one less sepulchral;
or with Mr. Wormwood, who petitioned for liberty to
assume the name of Washington, declaring that the intense
sufferings of so many years of wormwood existence deserved
the compensation of a great and glorious name? Louis
XI was less justified in changing the name of his barber,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span>
Olivier le Diable, into Olivier le Mauvais, then to Olivier le
Malin, and then into Olivier le Daim, at the same time forbidding
his former names ever to be mentioned. On the other
hand, the ill-omened name of Maria Theresa’s noble minister,
Thunichtgut, “Do-no-good,” was rightfully changed
by the Empress into Thugut, “Do-good.” The original
name of the great French writer, Balzac, was Guez, “a
beggar.” Men who inherit names originally given in
contempt and scorn have this compensation, that, as many
a hump-backed and ugly-looking man has found in his
deformity “a perpetual spur to rescue and deliver him
from scorn,” so the inheritors of mean or degrading names
are provoked and stimulated, as we see in the case of
Brutus, “stupid,” to redeem them from their degradation
by noble deeds, and make them for centuries the watchwords
of humanity.</p>

<p>The dislike to vulgar and cacophonous names led some
scholars and others, at an early period, to adopt Greek or
Latin forms. The native name of Erasmus was Gherærd
Gherærds. The root of Gherærd is a verb meaning “to
desire,” and so the great scholar Latinized his Christian
name into Desiderius, and Græcized his surname into Erasmus,
both signifying the same thing. The name of Luther’s
friend, the celebrated theologian and reformer, Melanchthon,
is a translation of the German Schwarzerde, or
“Black Earth.”</p>

<p>Considering the great variety of English proper names,&mdash;representing,
as they do, nearly all the nationalities of
Europe,&mdash;it is not strange that they have suffered much
from corruption. The causes of this corruption have been
the wear and tear of time and usage; the repetition of
foreign sounds by alien lips; the falling of those sounds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span>
upon a dull or deafened ear; their disguisement by too
thick or too thin an utterance; incorrect spelling; the
practice of pronouncing the words as they were written;
and the fluctuations of orthography. Many Norman names
have been so mutilated, that their owners, if they could
see them, would find them unintelligible. Thus we have
Darcy from Adrecy, Boswell from Bosseville, Loring from
Lorraine, and Taille-bois has been changed into Tallboys!
Paganus became first Painim, and then Payne. But the
most unhappy victims of this corrupting tendency were
four Normans, whose names were anglicized from honorable
into the most ill-omened and repulsive appellations.
One, called De Ath, became Death; another, De-Ville, was
transformed into a Devil; and the third, Scardeville, is now
Skarfield, and&mdash;<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">horresco referens</i>&mdash;Scaredevil!</p>

<p>It is natural to suppose that all families bearing English
names are of English extraction; but there are examples
of the contrary. The descendant of a German family,
whose name in the Old World was Brückenbauer, calls
himself in this country Bridgebuilder. A German called
Feuerstein (“firestone,” or “flint”), having settled among a
French population in the West, changed his name to
Pierre à Fusil; but, the Anglo-American population becoming
after a while the leading one, Pierre à Fusil was
transformed into the pithy Peter Gun!</p>

<p>Mr. Lower gives an interesting account of the origin of
certain famous historical names. The name of Fortescue
was bestowed on Sir Richard le Forte, a leader in the
Conqueror’s army, because he protected his chief at the
battle of Hastings by bearing before him a massive <em>escu</em>,
or shield. The name of Lockhart was originally given to
a follower of Lord Douglas, who accompanied him to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span>
Holy Land with the heart of King Robert Bruce. Hence
some of the family bear a padlock enclosing a heart in
their arms. The illustrious surname of Plantagenet, borne
by eight kings of England, originally belonged to Fulke,
the Count of Anjou, in the twelfth century. To expiate
certain flagrant crimes of which he had been guilty, he
went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and wore in his cap,
as a mark of humility, a <i>planta genista</i>, or “broom-plant,”
and hence was surnamed Plantagenet. Another version
of the story is that he suffered himself to be beaten with
“broom-twigs,” <i>plantagananstæ</i>. The Scottish name, Turnbull,
is said to have been given to a strong man, one
Ruel, who “turned” by the head, a wild “bull” which ran
violently against King Robert Bruce in Stirling Park.
The celebrated and numerous Scottish family of Armstrong
derive their surname from an ancestor who was
an armor-bearer, and by whom an ancient King of Scotland
was remounted, after his horse had been killed under
him in battle. The Halidays were named from their
war cry, “A holy day”; every day being holy, in their
estimation, that was spent in ravaging the enemy’s country.
A poor child, picked up at Newark-upon-Trent, was
called by the inhabitants Tom Among Us. Becoming
eminent, he was employed in several embassies, and
changed his name to the dignified one of Dr. Thomas
Magnus. Though the earliest names were short and
simple, yet there appears to have prevailed, even in the
olden times, a taste for long and sounding names. In a
note to Coleridge’s “Literary Biography,” mention is made
of an author whose name is of fearful length,&mdash;Abul
Waled Mohammed Ebn Ashmed Ebn Mohammed Ebn Raschid.
Think of the time wasted in speaking and writing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[339]</a></span>
such an appellation, which, unless he was blessed with a
very tenacious memory, its owner himself must have been
sometimes puzzled to recollect! The polytitled Arab,
whose name thus “drags, like a wounded snake, its slow
length along,” was born at Corinth about 1150, and died in
Morocco in 1206. The Spaniards have been noted, beyond
all other peoples, for a passion for voluminous and dignified
names; and to enlarge them, they often add their
places of residence. This is amusingly illustrated by a
story told by Fuller in his “Worthies.” A rich citizen, of
the name of John Cuts, was ordered by Queen Elizabeth
to receive and entertain the Spanish ambassador; but the
don was greatly displeased, feeling that he was disparaged
by being placed with a man whose name was so ridiculously
short, and who, consequently, could never have
achieved anything great or honorable; but when he
found that the hospitality of his host had nothing monosyllabic
about it, but more than made up for the brevity
of his name, he was reconciled. Lucian tells of one
Simon, who, coming to a considerable fortune, aggrandized
his name to Simonides. Diocles, becoming emperor,
lengthened his name to Dioclesian; and Bruna, Queen of
France, tried to give regal pomp to her name by transforming
it to Brunehault.</p>

<p>Oddities, eccentricities, and happy accidents of names
are common to all languages, and open a wide field of
playful speculation and research. What queer yet felicitous
conjunctions are Preserved Fish, Virginia Weed,
Dunn Browne, Mahogany Coffin, and Return Swift? Especially
remarkable is the extent to which the occupations
of men harmonize with their surnames. In London, Gin
&amp; Ginman, and Alehouse are publicans. Portwine and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[340]</a></span>
Negus are licensed victuallers, one in Westminster, the
other in Bishopsgate street. Seaman is the host of the
Ship Hotel, and A. King keeps the Crown and Sceptre.
Pye is a pastry cook, and Fitall and Treadaway are shoemakers.
Mr. Weinmann sells sherries, madeiras, etc., in
Chicago, and Mr. Silverman is a noted banker. It is a
striking fact that Mr. Loud and Mr. Thunder were, some
years ago, both organists in the same American town; and
we must acknowledge that few names could harmonize
better, or accord more happily with the double diapason
and the swell to which their professional duties accustomed
them. What name could be more picturesque for
a pot-boy than Corker, for a dentist than Tugwell, or for
an editor of “Punch” than Mark Lemon? What happier
appellation for the owner of a line of stage-coaches
than Jehu Golightly, the name of a southern proprietor,
which the incredulous passenger refused to believe accidental?</p>

<p>Sometimes the name harmonizes ill with, or is positively
antagonistic to, the occupation or character. The
amiable and witty banker-poet, Horace Smith, even
declares that “surnames ever go by contraries,” and, as
proof, says:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Mr. Barker’s as mute as a fish in the sea,</p>
<p class="verse2">Mr. Miles never moves on a journey,</p>
<p class="verse0">Mr. Go-to-bed sits up till half-past three,</p>
<p class="verse2">Mr. Makepeace was bred an attorney.</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">Mr. Gardener can’t tell a flower from a root,</p>
<p class="verse2">Mr. Wild with timidity draws back;</p>
<p class="verse0">Mr. Rider performs all his travels on foot,</p>
<p class="verse2">Mr. Foote all his journeys on horseback.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Ward and Lock, who should sell bank safes, are book
publishers. Neal and Pray was the title of a house in
New England, that was by no means given to devotion.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[341]</a></span>
Butcher, Death, Slaughter, Churchyard, and Coffin were
the names of so many London surgeons and apothecaries.
Partnerships often show a curious conjunction of names; as
Lamb &amp; Hare, Holland &amp; Sherry, Carpenter &amp; Wood, Spinage
&amp; Lamb, Flint &amp; Steel, Foot &amp; Stocking, hosiers,
Rumfit &amp; Cutwell, tailors, Robb &amp; Steel, and, above all, I.
Ketchum &amp; U. Cheatham, the immortal names of two New
York brokers. Not only business but hymeneal partnerships
reveal some singular combinations; as when Mr.
Good marries Miss Evil, when George Virtue is united to
Susan Vice, and when Benjamin Bird, aged sixty, is wedded
to Julia Chaff, aged twenty, showing that, in spite of the
old saw, “an old bird” may be “caught by chaff.”</p>

<p>Punning upon names has always been a favorite amusement
with those</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse4">“Who think it legitimate fun</p>
<p class="verse0">To be blazing away at every one</p>
<p class="verse0">With a regular double-loaded gun.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">When the defender of a certain extortioner, whom Lutatius
Catulus accused, attempted by a sarcasm to disconcert his
vehement adversary, saying, “Why do you bark, little
dog?” (“<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Quid latras, Catule?</i>”) “Because I saw a thief,”
retorted Catulus. Shakespeare makes Falstaff play upon
his swaggering ancient’s name, telling Pistol he will double
charge him with sack, or dismissing him with&mdash;“No more,
Pistol; I would not have you go off here; discharge yourself
of our company, Pistol.” When a man named Silver
was arraigned before Sir Thomas More, he said: “<em>Silver</em>,
you must be <em>tried by fire</em>.” “Yes,” replied the prisoner,
“but you know, my lord, that Quick <em>Silver</em> cannot abide
the fire.” The man’s wit procured his discharge. An old
gentleman by the name of Gould, having married a very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[342]</a></span>
young wife, wrote to a friend informing him of his good
fortune, concluding with</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“So you see, my dear sir, though I’m eighty years old,</p>
<p class="verse0">A girl of eighteen is in love with old Gould.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">To this his friend replied:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“A girl of eighteen may love, it is true,</p>
<p class="verse0">But believe me, dear sir, it is Gold without U.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">When a Bishop Goodenough was appointed to his office,
a certain dignitary who had hoped, but failed, to get the
appointment, was asked the secret of his disappointment,
and replied: “Because I was not Goodenough.”</p>

<p>Fuller, in his “Grave Thoughts,” tells an anecdote
which shows that where the punning propensity exists,
no occasion or subject, however solemn, will prevent it
from finding expression: “When worthy Master Hern,
famous for his living, preaching, and writing, lay on his
deathbed (rich only in goodness and children), his wife
made such womanish lamentations, what should become
of her little ones? ‘Peace! sweet-heart,’ said he; ‘that God
who feedeth the ravens will not starve the herns;’ a speech
censured as light by some, observed by others as prophetical;
as indeed it came to pass that they were all well
disposed of.” It is said that John Huss, when burning at
the stake, fixed his eyes steadfastly upon the spectators,
and said with much solemnity: “They burn a <em>goose</em>, but
in a hundred years a <em>swan</em> will arise out of the ashes;”
words which many years afterward were regarded as
predicting the great Protestant reformer,&mdash;Huss signifying
“a goose,” and Luther, “a swan.”</p>

<p>There are occasions, however, when, as Sir William
F. Napier once wrote to a friend, in excusing himself for
making some bad puns, “a bitter feeling turns to humor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[343]</a></span>
to avoid cursing;” and it is certain that it was from no
desire to display his wit, that Æschylus devoted twelve
lines of “a splendid and passionate chorus” to a denunciation
of</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse12">“Sweet Helen,</p>
<p class="verse0"><em>Hell in</em> her name, but Heaven in her looks.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Even Dr. Johnson, a professed hater of puns, could not
resist the temptation, when introduced to Mrs. Barbauld,
of growling, “<em>Bare-bald!</em> why, that’s the very <em>pleonasm of
baldness</em>!”</p>

<p>At the beginning of this chapter some remarks were
made on the names of children, and with a few words
further on the same theme I will end. Too often the boy
or girl is named after the father or mother, taking the
names, however ugly, ill-sounding, or uneuphonious, that
have been handed down in the family from generation to
generation, without a thought of the cruelty inflicted on the
unconscious babe by fastening Ebenezer or Tabitha on it
for life. Where this folly is avoided by parents, they often
outrage their sons by baptizing them George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, or Andrew Jackson,
or worse still, loading them with classical names, like those
of which Ex-President Grant is a conspicuous victim. The
whims, freaks, and eccentricities which dictate the names of
children are as inexplicable as they are multifarious. At a
United States census some years ago, record was obtained
of a man who had named his five children Imprimis,
Finis, Appendix, Addendum, and Erratum. It has been
suggested that had there been a sixth, he would probably
have been Supplement. Everybody is familiar with the
story of a worthy lady, who, having named four sons
successively Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, insisted on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[344]</a></span>
calling the fifth Acts,&mdash;a perversity equalled by that of
the father of ten children, who, having been blessed with
three more, named them Moreover, Nevertheless, and
Notwithstanding. No doubt these last appellatives are
mythical; but it is positively certain that names are often
given to children, which, being utterly incongruous with
their looks, descent, or character, rendering them targets
for coarse jests, or raising expectations that are sure to
be falsified, are productive to their bearers, if they are
at all sensitive, of an incalculable amount of suffering.
In naming a child his individuality should, first of all, be
recognized. Instead of being invested with the cast-off
appellation of some dead ancestor, as musty as the clothes
he wore,&mdash;a ghostly index-finger forever pointing to the
past,&mdash;he should have a fresh name, free from all ridiculous
or unpleasant associations, congruous with his probable
destiny, and suggestive of a history to be filled, a life
of usefulness to be lived. If such a name cannot be invented,
let him bear the plain, honest one of John, Edward,
or Robert, which affords no opportunity for gibes, and
consequent heart-burnings, promises nothing, disappoints
nobody, and yet may be transfigured and glorified by the
noblest and most illustrious deeds.</p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> “An Essay on English Surnames,” by Mark Antony Lower, M.A.,
F.S.A., a work full of interesting information on the subject of which it treats,
and to which I am much indebted.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[345]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER XIV.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">NICKNAMES.</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>The word “nick” in nickname is cognate with the German word <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">necken</i>, to
mock, to quiz, and the English word “nag,” to tease, or provoke.&mdash;<span class="smcap">W. L.
Blackley</span>, <cite>Word-Gossip</cite>.</p>

<p>A good name will wear out, a bad one may be turned: a nickname lasts
forever.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Zimmerman.</span></p>

<p><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">J’ai été toujours étonné que les Familles qui portent un Nom odieux ou
ridicule, ne le quitteut pas.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Bayle.</span></span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy1">Among the books that need to be written, one of the
most instructive would be a treatise on the history
and influence of nicknames. Philosophers who study the
great events in the world’s history, are too apt, in their
eagerness to discover adequate causes, to overlook the
apparently trifling means by which mankind are influenced.
They are eloquent enough upon the dawning of
a new idea in the world, when its effects are set forth in
all the pomp of elaborate histories and disquisitions; but
they would do a greater service by showing how and
when, by being condensed into a pithy word or phrase, it
wins the acceptance of mankind. The influence of songs
upon a people in times of excitement and revolution is
familiar to all. “When the French mob began to sing
the Marseillaise, they had evidently caught the spirit of
the revolution; and what a song is to a political essay,
a nickname is to a song.” In itself such a means of
influence may seem trivial; and yet history shows that
it is no easy thing to estimate the force of these ingenious
appellations.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[346]</a></span></p>

<p>The name of a man is not a mere label, which may be
detached, as one detaches a label from a piece of lifeless
furniture. As Goethe once feelingly said, it is not like
a cloak, which only hangs about a man, and at which one
may at any rate be allowed to pull and twitch; but it is
a close-fitting garment, which has grown over and over
him, like his skin, and which one cannot scrape and flay
without injuring himself. Names not only represent certain
facts or thoughts, but they powerfully mould the
facts and thoughts which they represent. Men have borne
names which they have felt to be stigmas, an active cause
of discouragement and failure to their dying day; and
they have borne names, inherited from their ancestors,
which have lifted them above themselves, by bringing
them into fellowship with a past of high effort or generous
sacrifice.</p>

<p>In politics, it has long been observed that no orator
can compare for a moment in effect with him who can
give apt and telling nicknames. Brevity is the soul of
wit, and of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise
and irresistible. It is a terse, pointed, short-hand mode
of reasoning, condensing a volume of meaning into an
epithet, and is especially popular in these days of steam
and electric telegraphs, because it saves the trouble of
thinking. There is a deep instinct in man which prompts
him, when engaged in any controversy, whether of tongue
or pen, to assume to himself some honorable name which
begs the whole matter in dispute, and at the same time
to fasten on his adversary a name which shall render him
ridiculous, odious, or contemptible. By facts and logic
you may command the assent of the few; but by nicknames
you may enlist the passions of the million on your<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[347]</a></span>
side. Who can doubt that when, in the English civil
wars, the parliamentary party styled themselves “the
Godly” and their opponents “the Malignants,” the question
at issue, wherever entrance could be gained for these
words, was already decided? Who can estimate how much
the Whig party in this country was damaged by the
derisive sarcasm, “All the decency,” or its opponents by
the appellation of “Locofocos”? Is it not certain that the
odious name “Copperheads,” which was so early in our
late civil war affixed to the northern sympathizers with
the South, had an incalculable influence in gagging them,
and in preventing their numbers from multiplying?</p>

<p>It has been truly said that in the distracted times of
early revolution, any nickname, however vague, will fully
answer a purpose, though neither those who are blackened
by the odium, nor those who cast it, can define the hateful
appellative. The historian Hume says that when the term
“Delinquents” came into vogue in England, it expressed
a degree and species of guilt not easily known or ascertained.
It served, however, the end of those revolutionists
who had coined it, by involving any person in, or
coloring any action by, “delinquency”; and many of the
nobility and gentry were, without any questions being
asked, suddenly discovered to have committed the crime of
“delinquency.” The degree in which the political opinions
of our countrymen were influenced, and their feelings
embittered, some forty years ago, by the appellation
“Federalist,” cannot be easily estimated. The fact that
many who heard the derisive title knew not its origin,
and some not even its meaning, did not lessen its influence,&mdash;as
an incident related by Judge Gaston of North Carolina
well illustrates. In travelling on his circuit through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[348]</a></span>
the backwoods of that state, he learned that the people of
a certain town had elected a Democrat, in place of a Whig,
to serve them in the legislature. When asked the reason
of this change, his informant, an honest, rough-looking
citizen, replied: “Oh, we didn’t reëlect Mr. A., because he
is a <em>fetheral</em>.” “A fetheral!” exclaimed the judge, “what is
a fetheral?” “I don’t know,” was the reply, “but <em>it ain’t
a human</em>.”</p>

<p>There is no man so insignificant that he may not blast
the reputation of another by fastening upon him an odious
or ludicrous nickname. Even the most shining character
may thus be dragged down by the very reptiles of the
race to the depths of infamy. A parrot may be taught
to call names, and, if you have a spite against your neighbor,
may be made to give him a deal of annoyance, without
much wit either in the employer or the puppet. Goethe
felt this when he made the remark above quoted, which
was provoked by a coarse pun made on his name by Herder.
Though no man could better afford to despise such
a jest, it rankled, apparently, even in his great mind; for,
forty years later, after Herder’s death, he spoke of it bitterly,
in the course of a very kindly criticism upon that
writer, as an instance of the sarcasm which often rendered
him unamiable. Hotspur would have had a starling taught
to speak nothing but “Mortimer” in the ears of his enemy.
An insulting or degrading epithet will stick to a man long
after it has been proved malicious or false. Who could
dissociate with the name of Van Buren the idea of craft
or cunning, after he had become known as the “Kinderhook Fox”;
or who ever venerated John Tyler as the Chief
Magistrate of the nation, after he had been politically
baptized as “His Accidency”? Who can tell how far<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[349]</a></span>
General Scott’s prospects for the Presidency were damaged
by the contemptuous nickname of “Old Fuss and
Feathers”; especially after he had nearly signed his own
political death-warrant by that fatal allusion to “a hasty
plate of soup,” which convulsed the nation with laughter
from the St. Croix to the Rio Grande? The hero of Chippewa
found it hard to breast the torrent of ridicule which
this derisive title brought down upon him. It would have
been easier far to stand up against the iron shock of the
battle-field. Who, again, has forgotten how a would-be
naval bard of America was “damned to everlasting fame”
by a verbal tin-pail attached to his name in the form of
one of his own verses?<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> “I have heard an eminent character
boast,” says Hazlitt, “that he did more to produce
the war with Bonaparte by nicknaming him ‘The Corsican,’
than all the state papers and documents on the subject
put together.” “Give a dog a bad name,” says the
proverb, “and you hang him.” It was only necessary to
nickname Burke “The Dinner Bell,” to make even <em>his</em>
rising to speak a signal for a general emptying of the
house.</p>

<p>The first step in overthrowing any great social wrong
is to fix upon it a name which expresses its character.
From the hour when “taxation without representation”
came to be regarded by our fathers as a synonym for
“tyranny,” the cause of the colonies was safe. Had the
southern slaves been called by no other name than that
used by their masters,&mdash;namely, “servants,”&mdash;they would
have been kept in bondage till they had won their
freedom by the sword.</p>

<p>The French Revolution of 1789 was fruitful of examples<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[350]</a></span>
showing the ease with which ignorant men are led and
excited by words whose real import and tendency they do
not understand, and illustrating the truth of South’s
remark, that a plausible and insignificant word in the
mouth of an expert demagogue is a dangerous and destructive
weapon. Napoleon was aware of this, when he declared
that “it is by epithets that you govern mankind.”
Destroy men’s reverence for the names of institutions hoary
with age, and you destroy the institutions themselves.
“Pull down the nests,” John Knox used to say, “and the
rooks will fly away.” The people of Versailles insulted
with impunity in the streets, and at the gates of the Assembly,
those whom they called “Aristocrats”; and the magic
power of the word was doubled, when aided by the further
device of calling the usurping Commons the “National Assembly.”
When the title of <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Frondeurs</i>, or “the Slingers,”
was given to Cardinal de Retz’s party, he encouraged its
application, “for we observed,” says he, “that the distinction
of a name healed the minds of the people.” The French
showman, who, when royalty and its forms were abolished
in France, changed the name of his “<em>Royal</em> Tiger,” so
called,&mdash;the pride of his menagerie,&mdash;to “<em>National</em> Tiger,”
showed a profound knowledge of his countrymen and of the
catchwords by which to win their patronage.</p>

<p>A nickname is the most stinging of all species of satire,
because it gives no chance of reply. Attack a man with
specific, point-blank charges, and he can meet and repel
them; but a nickname baffles reply by its very vagueness;
it presents no tangible or definite idea to the mind, no horn
of a dilemma with which the victim can grapple. The very
attempt to defend himself only renders him the more ridiculous;
it looks like raising an ocean to drown a fly, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[351]</a></span>
firing a cannon at a wasp, to meet a petty gibe with formal
testimony or elaborate argument. Or, if your defence is
listened to without jeers, it avails you nothing. It has no
effect,&mdash;does not tell,&mdash;excites no sensation. The laugh is
against you, and all your protests come like the physician’s
prescription at the funeral, too late.</p>

<p>The significance of nicknames is strikingly illustrated
by the fact that, as a late writer suggests, you cannot properly
hate a man of different opinions from your own till
you have labelled him with some unpleasant epithet. In
theological debates, a heretic may be defined as a man with
a nickname. Till we have succeeded in fastening a name
upon him, he is confounded among the general mass of the
orthodox; his peculiarities are presumably not sufficient to
constitute him into a separate species. But let the name
come to us by a flash of inspiration, and how it sticks to the
victim through his whole life! There is a refinement of
cruelty in some nicknames which resembles the barbarity of
the old heathen persecutors, who wrapped up Christians in
the skins of wild beasts, so that they might be worried and
torn in pieces by dogs. “Do but paint an angel black,”
says an old divine, “and that is enough to make him pass
for a devil.” On the other hand, there are loving nicknames,
which are given to men by their friends,&mdash;especially
to those who are of a frank, genial, companionable nature.
The name of Charles Lamb was ingeniously transformed
into the Latin diminutive <em>Carlagnulus</em>; and the friends of
Keats, in allusion to his occasional excess of fun and animal
spirits, punned upon his name, shortening it from John
Keats into “Junkets.”</p>

<p>That prince of polemics, Cobbett, was a masterly inventor
of nicknames, and some of his felicitous epithets will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[352]</a></span>
not be forgotten for many years to come. Among the
witty labels with which he ticketed his enemies were
“Scorpion Stanley,” “Spinning Jenny Peel,” “the pink-nosed
Liverpool,” “the unbaptized, buttonless blackguards”
(applied to the Quakers), and “Prosperity Robinson.” The
nickname, “Old Glory,” given by him, stuck for life to Sir
Francis Burdett, his former patron and life-long creditor.
“Æolus Canning” provoked unextinguishable laughter
among high and low; and it is said that of all the devices
to annoy the brilliant but vain Lord Erskine, none was
more teasing than being constantly addressed by his second
title of “Baron Clackmannon.” One of the literary tricks
of Carlyle is to heap contemptuous nicknames upon the
objects he dislikes; as, “The Dismal Science” of Political
Economy, “The Nigger Question,” “Pig Philosophy,”
“Horse-hair and Bombazine Procedure,” etc.</p>

<p>The meaning of nicknames, as of many other words, is
often a mystery. Often they are apparently meaningless,
and incapable of any rational explanation; yet they are
probably due, in such cases, to some subtle, imperceptible
analogy, of which even their authors were hardly conscious,
When the English and French armies were encamped in
the Crimea, they, by common consent, called the Turks
“Bono Johny;” but it would not be easy to tell why. A
late French prince was called “Plomb-plomb”; yet there
is no such word in the French language, and different
accounts have been given of its origin. To explain, again,
why nicknames have such an influence,&mdash;so magical an
effect,&mdash;is equally difficult; one might as well try to explain
why certain combinations of colors or musical sounds
impart an exquisite pleasure. All we know, upon both
these points, is, that certain persons are doomed to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[353]</a></span>
known by a nickname; at the time of life when the
word-making faculty is in the highest activity, all their
acquaintances are long in labor to hit off the fit appellation;
suddenly it comes like an electric spark, and it is
felt by everybody to be impossible to think of the victim
without his appropriate designation. In vain have his
godfathers and godmothers called him Robert or Thomas;
“Bob,” or “Tom,” or something wholly unrelated to these,
he is fated to be to the end of his days.</p>

<p>Many of the happiest of these headmarks, which stick
like a burr from the moment they are invented, are from
sources utterly unknown; they appear, they are on everybody’s
lips, but whence they came nobody can tell. One
of the commonest ways in which nicknames are suggested
is by some egregious blunder which one makes. Thus, I
knew a schoolboy to be asked who demolished Carthage, and
upon his answering “Scorpio Africanus,” to be promptly
nicknamed “Old Scorp.” Another way is by a glaring
contradiction between a man’s name and his character,&mdash;when
he is ridiculed as sailing under false colors, or
claiming a merit which does not belong to him. There
is in all men, as Trench has observed, a sense of the
significance of names,&mdash;a feeling that they ought to be,
and in a world of absolute truth would be, the utterance
of the innermost character or qualities of the persons
that bear them; and hence nothing is more telling in a
personal controversy than the exposure of a striking incongruity
between a name and the person who owns it. I
have been told that the late President Lincoln, on being
introduced to a very stout person by the name of Small,
remarked, “Small, Small! Well, what strange names they
do give men, to be sure! Why, they’ve got a fellow down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[354]</a></span>
in Virginia whom they call <em>Wise</em>!” In the same spirit,
Jerome, one of the Fathers of the Church, being engaged
in controversy with one Vigilantius, <em>i.e.</em>, “the Watchful,”
about certain vigils which the latter opposed, stigmatized
him as Dormitantius, or “the Sleeper.” But more frequently
the nickname is suggested by the real name where
there is no such antagonism between them,&mdash;where the
latter, as it is, or by a slight change, can be made to contain
a confession of the ignorance or folly of the bearer.
Thus, Tiberius Claudius Nero, in allusion to his drunkenness,
was called “Biberius Caldius Mero”; and the Arians
were nicknamed “Ariomanites.” What can be happier
in this way than the “Brand of Hell,” applied to Pope
Hildebrand; the title of “Slanders,” affixed by Fuller to
Sanders, the foul-mouthed libeller of Queen Elizabeth; the
“Vanity” and “Sterility,” which Baxter coined from the
names of Vane and Sterry; and the term “Sweepnet,”
which that skilful master of the passions, Cicero, gave to
the infamous Prætor of Sicily, whose name, Verres (<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">verro</i>),
was prophetic of his “sweeping” the province,&mdash;declaring
that others might be partial to the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">jus verrinum</i> (which
might mean verrine law or boar sauce), but not he? On
the other hand, the nickname <em>Schinokephalos</em>, or “onion-head,”
which the Athenians gave to Pericles on account
of the shape of his head, was unredeemed by wit or humor.</p>

<p>The people of Italy are exceedingly fond of nicknames;
and it is an odd peculiarity of many which they give that
the persons so characterized are known only by their
nicknames. In the case of many celebrated persons the
nickname has wholly obliterated the true name. Thus
<em>Guercino</em> “Squint Eye,” <em>Masaccio</em> “Dirty Tom,” <em>Tintoretto</em>
“The Little Dyer,” <em>Ghirlandaio</em> “The Garland-Maker,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[355]</a></span>
<em>Luca del Robbia</em> “Luke of the Madder,” <em>Spagnoletto</em>
“The Little Spaniard,” and <em>Del Sarto</em> “The Tailor’s Son,”
would scarcely be recognized under their proper names of
Barbieri, Guido, Robusti, Barbarelli, Corradi, Ribera, and
Vannachi. The following, too, are all nicknames of eminent
persons derived from their places of birth: Perugino,
Veronese, Aretino, Pisano, Giulio Romano, Correggio, Parmegiano.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a></p>

<p>There is probably no country, unless it be our own, in
which nicknames have flourished more than in England.
Every party there has had its watchwords with which to
rally its members, or to set on its own bandogs to worry and
tear those of another faction; and what is quite extraordinary
is, that many of the names of political parties and
religious sects were originally nicknames given in the
bitterest scorn and party hate, yet ultimately accepted by
the party themselves. Thus “Tory” originally meant an
Irish freebooting bog-trotter,&mdash;an outlaw who favored the
cause of James II; and “Whig” is derived from the Scotch
name for sour milk, which was supposed aptly to characterize
the disposition of the Republicans. “Methodists”
was a name given in 1729, first to John and Charles
Wesley at Oxford, on account of their close observance of
system and method in their studies and worship, and afterward
to their followers. So in other countries, the “Lutherans”
received their name, in which they now glory, from
their antagonists. “Capuchin” was a jesting name given
by the boys in the streets to certain Franciscan monks, on
account of the peaked and pointed hood (<i lang="it" xml:lang="it">capuccio</i>) which
they wore. The Dominicans gloried all the more in their
name when it was resolved by their enemies into <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Domini<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[356]</a></span>
canes</i>; they were proud to acknowledge that they were, indeed,
“the Lord’s watchdogs,” who barked at the slightest
appearance of heresy, and strove to drive it away. Finally,
the highest name which any man can bear was originally
a nickname given by the idle and witty inhabitants of
Antioch, in Asia Minor. In the early days of Christianity,
when the new faith was preached with all the vigor of
intense conviction, and the enthusiasm attendant upon a
fresh experiment in private and social morality; when
the apostles were said to be “turning the world upside
down,” and were, indeed, promulgating a religion which
was soon to revolutionize civilized society; there was, for
a long time, great difficulty in finding a name for the new
faith and its professors. The apostles, indeed, had no
name for it whatever; they spoke of the nascent religion
simply as “the way,” or “this way.” Paul says that he
“persecuted <em>this way</em> unto the death,” and at Ephesus, it
is said, “there arose no small stir about <em>the way</em>.” By the
Jews the converts to the new religion were called “Nazarenes,”
a term of contempt which they could not, of course,
adopt. The Jews believed in the coming of a Messiah,
though they rejected the true one; but the appearance of
any Christ was a wholly new and original idea to the
pagan world, and the constant repetition of the striking
name of Christ in the discourses of the missionaries at
Antioch, would have naturally suggested to the keen-witted
Greek pagans around them to call them after the
name of their Master. The Antiochenes were famous in
all antiquity for their nicknames, for inventing which
they had a positive genius; and it is altogether probable,&mdash;indeed,
there is hardly a doubt,&mdash;that the name “Christian”
was originally a term of ridicule or of reproach,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[357]</a></span>
given by them to the first converts from paganism. It
was, in fact, a nickname, designed to intimate that the
teachers and the taught, who talked continually about
their Christ, were a set of fanatics who deserved only to
be laughed at for their infatuation. But what was thus
meant as an insult was instantly accepted by the believers
in Christ as a title of honor, implying that devotion to
Christ was not an accident, but the very essence and soul
of their religion. “Nothing else,” says Canon Liddon,
“expressed so tersely the central reason for the fierce
antagonism of the pagans to the new religion: it was the
religion of the divine, but crucified Christ; nothing else
expressed so adequately the Christian sense of what Christianity
was and is,&mdash;a religion not merely founded by
Christ, but centring in Christ, so that, apart from Him,
it has, properly speaking, no existence, so that it exists
only as an extension and perpetuation of His life.”</p>

<p>The Dutch people long prided themselves on the humiliating
nickname of <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Les Gueulx</i>, “the Beggars,” which
was given in 1566 to the revolters against the rule of
Philip II. Margaret of Parma, then governor of the
Netherlands, being somewhat disconcerted at the numbers
of that party, when they presented a petition to her, was
reassured by her minister, who remarked to her that there
was nothing to be feared from a crowd of beggars.
“Great was the indignation of all,” says Motley, “that
the state councillor (the Seigneur de Berlaymont) should
have dared to stigmatize as beggars a band of gentlemen
with the best blood of the land in their veins. Brederode,
on the contrary, smoothing their anger, assured them with
good humor that nothing could be more fortunate. ‘They
call us “beggars!”’ said he; ‘let us accept the name. We<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[358]</a></span>
will contend with the Inquisition, but remain loyal to the
king, till compelled to wear the beggar’s sack.... Long
live the beggars!’ he cried, as he wiped his beard, and set
the bowl down; ‘<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Vivent les gueulx!</i>’ Then, for the first
time, from the lips of those reckless nobles rose the famous
cry, which was so often to ring over land and sea, amid
blazing cities, on blood-stained decks, through the smoke
and carnage of many a stricken field. The humor of
Brederode was hailed with deafening shouts of applause.
The shibboleth was invented. The conjuration which they
had been anxiously seeking was found. Their enemies
had provided them with a spell, which was to prove,
in after days, potent enough to start a spirit from palace
or hovel, as the deeds of the ‘wild beggars’ the ‘wood
beggars,’ and the ‘beggars of the sea,’ taught Philip at last
to understand the nation which he had driven to madness.”</p>

<p>In like manner the French Protestants accepted and
gloried in the scornful nickname of the “Huguenots,” as
did the two fierce Italian factions in those of “Guelphs,”
or “Guelfs,” and “Ghibellines.” It was in the twelfth
century, at the siege of Weinsberg, a hereditary possession
of the Welfs, that the war-cries, “Hurrah for Welf!”
“Hurrah for Waibling!” which gave rise to the party
names, “Welfs” and “Waiblings” (Italicé, “Guelfs” and
“Ghibellines”), were first heard. Even the title of the
British “Premier,” or “Prime Minister,” now one of the
highest dignity, was at first a nickname, given in pure
mockery,&mdash;the statesman to whom it was applied being
Sir Robert Walpole, as will be seen by the following words
spoken by him in the House of Commons in 1742: “Having
invested me with a kind of mock dignity, and styled
me a ‘Prime Minister,’ they (the opposition) impute to me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[359]</a></span>
an unpardonable abuse of the chimerical authority which
<em>they</em> only created and conferred.” It is remarkable that
the nickname Cæsar has given the title to the heads of
two great nations, Germany and Russia (<i lang="de" xml:lang="de">kaiser</i>, <em>czar</em>).</p>

<p>It is a fortunate thing when men who have been
branded with names intended to make them hateful or
ridiculous, can thus turn the tables on their <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">dénigreurs</i>,
by accepting and glorying in their new titles. It was
this which Lord Halifax did when he was called “a trimmer.”
Instead of quarrelling with the nickname, he exulted
in it as a title of honor. “Everything good,” he
said, “trims between extremes. The temperate zone trims
between the climate in which men are roasted, and the
climate in which men are frozen. The English Church
trims between the Anabaptist madness and the Papist
lethargy. The English constitution trims between Turkish
despotism and Polish anarchy. Virtue is nothing but a
just temper between propensities, any one of which, indulged
to excess, becomes vice. Nay, the perfection of
the Supreme Being himself consists in the exact equilibrium
of attributes, none of which could preponderate
without disturbing the whole moral and physical order
of the world.”<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a></p>

<p>The nicknames “Quaker,” “Puritan,” “Roundhead,”
unlike those we have just named, were never accepted by
those to whom they were given. “Puritan” was first
heard in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and was given to
a party of purists who would have reformed the Reformation.
They were also ridiculed, from their fastidiousness
about trivial matters, as “Precisians”; Drayton characterizes
them as persons that for a painted glass window<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[360]</a></span>
would pull down the whole church. The distinction
between “Roundhead” and “Cavalier” first appeared during
the civil war between Charles I and his Parliament.
A foe to all outward ornament, the “Roundhead” wore
his hair cropped close, while the “Cavalier” was contra-distinguished
by his chivalrous tone, his romantic spirit,
and his flowing locks.</p>

<p>All readers of history are familiar with “The Rump,”&mdash;the
contemptuous nickname given to the Long Parliament
at the close of its career. The “Rump,” Mr. Disraeli
remarks, became a perpetual whetstone for the loyal wits,
till at length its former admirers, the rabble themselves,
in town and country, vied with each other in burning
rumps of beef, which were hung by chains on a gallows
with a bonfire underneath, and proved how the people,
like children, come at length to make a plaything of that
which was once their bugbear.</p>

<p>A member of the British Parliament in the reign of
George III is known as “Single-speech Hamilton,” and is
referred to by that designation as invariably as if it were
his baptismal name. He made one, and but one, good
speech during his parliamentary career. “Boot-jack Robinson”
was the derisive title given to a mediocre politician,
who, during a crisis in the ministry of the Duke of Newcastle,
was made Home Secretary and ministerial leader
of the House of Commons. “Sir Thomas Robinson lead
us!” indignantly exclaimed Pitt to Fox; “the duke might
as well send his boot-jack to lead us!” It is said that
Mr. Dundas, afterward Lord Melville, got his nickname
from a new word which he introduced in a speech in the
House of Commons, in 1775, on the American war. He
was the first to use the word “starvation” (a hybrid<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[361]</a></span>
formation, in which a Saxon root was united with a Latin
ending), which provoked shouts of contemptuous laughter
in the House; and he was always afterward called by his
acquaintances, “Starvation Dundas.” This poor specimen
of word-coining was long resisted by the lexicographers;
and one modern philological dictionary omits it even now;
but it has long been sanctioned by usage. One of the
most fatal nicknames ever given to a politician was one
fastened by Sheridan upon Addington, the Prime Minister
of England, in a speech made in Parliament in 1803.
Addington was the son of an eminent physician, and something
in his air and manner had given him, to a limited
extent, the name of “the Doctor.” Sheridan, alluding to
the personal dislike of Addington felt by many, quoted the
well known epigram of Martial:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="la" xml:lang="la">
<p class="verseq">“Non amo te, Sabine, nec possum dicere quare;</p>
<p class="verse0">Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te;”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">and added the English parody:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“I do not like thee, <em>Doctor</em> Fell,</p>
<p class="verse0">The reason why I cannot tell;</p>
<p class="verse0">But this, I’m sure, I know full well,</p>
<p class="verse0">I do not like thee, <em>Doctor</em> Fell.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">His droll emphasis on the word “Doctor,” and the repetition
of it in the course of the speech, drew forth peals
of laughter; and henceforth the butt of his ridicule was
generally known as “The Doctor.” The Opposition newspapers
caught up the title, and rang innumerable changes
upon it, till finally the Prime Minister was fairly overwhelmed
by the laughter of his enemies, and forced to
resign his office.</p>

<p>Everybody has heard of “Ditto to Mr. Burke”; the
victim of this title was a Mr. Conger, who was elected with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[362]</a></span>
Burke to represent the city of Bristol. Utterly bewildered
as to how to thank the electors after his associate’s splendid
speech, he condensed his own address into these significant
words: “Gentlemen, I say ditto to Mr. Burke, ditto
to Mr. Burke!” “Chicken Taylor” was the name which,
in the early part of the century, long stuck to Mr. M. A.
Taylor; he contended against a great lawyer in the House,
and then apologized that he, “a chicken in the law, should
venture on a fight with the cock of Westminster.” “Adullamites,”
or “Dwellers in the Cave,” the name given by
Mr. Bright to Mr. Lowe and some of his Liberal friends,&mdash;a
name derived from the Scripture story of David and his
followers retiring to a cave,&mdash;will probably long continue
to be applied to the members of a discontented faction.</p>

<p>Who does not remember the nickname, “The Spasmodic
School of Poetry,” which was given to three or four young
poets some thirty years ago? It was in the brain of Professor
Aytoun that this title originated, and immediately
these writers, whose salient faults were thus felicitously
hit off, were everywhere recognized as “spasmodists.” For
years after, no one of these minstrels could strike his lyre
in public, even in the most humdrum, old-fashioned way,
but the cry of “spasmodist” was raised so loudly that he
was glad to retreat into his wonted obscurity. Even Ben
Jonson, the sturdy old dramatist, did not escape a nickname.
His envious rivals dubbed him “The Limestone
and Mortar Poet,” in allusion to his lack of spontaneity
as a poet, and his having begun life as a bricklayer.</p>

<p>Among the other memorable English nicknames, that of
“Jemmy Twitcher,” taken from the chief of Macheath’s
gang in “The Beggar’s Opera,” and applied to Lord Sandwich,&mdash;that
of “Orange Peel,” given to Sir Robert Peel by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[363]</a></span>
the Irish, the inveterate foes of the House of Orange,&mdash;“the
stormy Petrel of debate,” given to Mr. Bernal
Osborne,&mdash;“Finality Russell,” fastened upon Lord John
Russell because he wished a certain Reform measure to
be final,&mdash;“The Dandy Demagogue,” given to Mr. T. S.
Duncombe, the able parliamentary advocate of the people,
who was distinguished by the remarkable elegance and
finish of his attire,&mdash;the unique “Dizzy,” into which his
enemies condensed the name of the celebrated Jewish
premier,&mdash;and the “Who? Who? Ministry,” applied to
Lord Derby’s Cabinet in 1852,&mdash;are preëminently significant
and telling. Among the hundreds of American political
nicknames, there are many which are not remarkably
expressive; others, like “Old Bullion” and “Old Hickory,”
are steeped in “the very brine of conceit,” and sum up
a character as if by inspiration.</p>

<p>It is a curious fact that some of the most damaging
nicknames have been terms or epithets which were originally
complimentary, but which, used sarcastically, have
been associated with more ridicule or odium than the most
opprobrious epithets. Men hate to be continually reminded
of any one virtue of a fellow-man,&mdash;to hear the changes
rung continually upon some one great action or daring
feat he has performed. It seems, indeed, as if a man
whose name is continually dinned in our ears, coupled with
some complimentary epithet, some allusion to a praiseworthy
deed which he once did, or some excellent trait of
character, must be distinguished for nothing else. Unless
this is his only virtue, why all this fuss and pother about
it? The Athenians banished Aristides, because they were
tired of hearing him called “the Just.”</p>

<p>Some parents have so great a dread of nicknames that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[364]</a></span>
they tax their ingenuity to invent for their children a
Christian name that may defy nicking or abbreviation.
With Southey’s Doctor Dove, they think “it is not a good
thing to be Tom’d or Bob’d, Jack’d or Jim’d, Sam’d or
Ben’d, Natty’d or Batty’d, Neddy’d or Teddy’d, Will’d or
Bill’d, Dick’d or Nick’d, Joe’d or Jerry’d, as you go
through the world.” The good doctor, however, had no
such antipathy to the shortening of female names. “He
never called any woman Mary, though <em>Mare</em>, he said, being
the sea, was in many respects too emblematic of the sex.
It was better to use a synonym of better omen, and Molly
was therefore preferred, as being soft. If he accosted a
vixen of that name in her worst temper, he Mollyfied her!
On the contrary, he never could be induced to substitute
Sally for Sarah. Sally, he said, had a salacious sound, and,
moreover, it reminded him of rovers, which women ought
not to be. Martha he called Patty, because it came pat
to the tongue. Dorothy remained Dorothy, because it
was neither fitting that women should be made Dolls, nor
I-dols! Susan with him was always Sue, because women
were to be sued, and Winnifred, Winny, because they
were to be won.”<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a></p>

<p>The annoyance which may be given to a man, even by
an apparently meaningless nickname, which sticks to him
wherever he goes, is well illustrated by a story told by
Hazlitt in his “Conversations with Northcote,” the painter.
A village baker got, he knew not how, the name of “Tiddy-doll.”
He was teased and worried by it till it almost drove
him crazy. The boys hallooed it after him in the streets,
and poked their faces into his shop-windows; the parrots
echoed the name as he passed their cages; and even the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[365]</a></span>
soldiers took it up (for the place was a military station),
and marched to parade, beating time with their feet, and
singing “Tiddy-doll, Tiddy-doll,” as they passed by his door.
He flew out upon them at the sound with inextinguishable
fury, was knocked down and rolled into the kennel, and
got up in an agony of rage, his white clothes drabbled and
bespattered with mud. A respectable and friendly gentleman
in the neighborhood, who pitied his weakness, called
him into his house one day, and remonstrated with him
on the subject. He advised him to take no notice of his
persecutors. “What,” said he, “does it signify? Suppose
they <em>do</em> call you ‘Tiddy-doll?’ What harm?” “<em>There,&mdash;there
it is again!</em>” burst forth the infuriated baker; “you’ve
called me so <em>yourself</em>. You called me in on purpose to
insult me!” And, saying this, he vented his rage in a
torrent of abusive epithets, and darted out of the house
in a tempest of passion.</p>

<p>The readers of Boswell will remember, in connection
with this subject, an amusing anecdote told of Dr. Johnson.
Being rudely jostled and profanely addressed by a stout
fish-woman, as he was passing through Billingsgate, he
looked straight at her, and said deliberately, “You are a
triangle!” which made her swear louder than before. He
then called her “a rectangle! a parallelogram!” but she
was more voluble still. At last he screamed out, “You
are a miserable, wicked <em>hypothenuse</em>!” and she was struck
dumb. Curran had a similar ludicrous encounter with
a fish-woman at Cork. Taking up the gauntlet, when
assailed by her on the quay, he speedily found that he was
overmatched, and that he had nothing to do but to beat
a retreat. “This, however, was to be done with dignity;
so, drawing myself up disdainfully, I said, ‘Madam, I scorn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[366]</a></span>
all further discourse with such an <em>individual</em>!’ She did not
understand the word, and thought it, no doubt, the very
hyperbole of opprobrium. ‘Individual, you wagabond!’
she screamed, ‘what do you mean by that? I’m no more
an individual than your mother was!’ Never was victory
more complete. The whole sisterhood did homage to me,
and I left the quay of Cork covered with glory.”</p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> “The sun has gone down with his battle-stained eye.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> “Roba di Roma,” by W. W. Story.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> Macaulay’s “History of England,” Vol. II.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> “The Doctor,” Vol, VII.</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[367]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER XV.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE.</span></h2>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>Language is the depository of the accumulated body of experience, to
which all former ages have contributed their part, and which is the inheritance
of all yet to come.&mdash;<span class="smcap">J. S. Mill.</span></p>

<p>Often in words contemplated singly there are boundless stores of moral
and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination, laid up.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Trench.</span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy">A thoughtful English writer tells us that, when
about nine years old, he learned with much surprise
that the word “sincere” was derived from the practice of
filling up flaws in furniture with wax, whence <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">sine cera</i>
came to mean pure, not vamped up or adulterated. This
explanation gave him great pleasure, and abode in his
memory as having first shown him that there is a reason in
words as well as things. There are few cultivated persons
who have not felt, at some time in their lives, a thrill of
surprise and delight like that of this writer. Throughout
our whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, the stream of
our history, inner and outer, runs wonderfully blended
with the texture of the words we use. Dive into what
subject we will, we never touch the bottom. The simplest
prattle of a child is but the light surface of a deep sea containing
many treasures. It would be hard, therefore, to
find in the whole range of inquiry another study which at
once is so fascinating, and so richly repays the labor, as
that of the etymology or primitive significations of words.</p>

<p>It is an epoch in one’s intellectual history when he first
learns that words are living and not dead things,&mdash;that in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[368]</a></span>
these children of the mind are incarnated the wit and wisdom,
the poetic fancies and the deep intuitions, the passionate
longings and the happy or sad experiences of many
generations. The discovery is “like the dropping of scales
from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the
introduction into a new world;” he never ceases wondering
at the moral marvels that everywhere reveal themselves to
his gaze. To eyes thus opened, dictionaries, instead of
seeming huge masses of word-lumber, become vast storehouses
of historical memorials, than which none are more
vital in spirit or more pregnant with meaning. It is not
in oriental fairy-tales only that persons drop pearls every
time they open their mouths; like Molière’s <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Bourgeois
Gentilhomme</i>, who had been speaking prose all his life
without knowing it, we are dropping gems from our lips in
almost every hour of the day. Not a thought, or feeling, or
wish can we utter without recalling, by an unconscious
sign or symbol, some historic fact, some memory of “auld
lang syne,” some bygone custom, some vanished superstition,
some exploded prejudice, or some ethical divination
that has lost its charm. Even the homeliest and most
familiar words, the most hackneyed phrases, are connected
by imperceptible ties with the hopes and fears, the reasonings
and reflections, of bygone men and times.</p>

<p>Every generation of men inherits and uses all the scientific
wealth of the past. “It is not merely the great and
rich in the intellectual world who are thus blessed, but the
humblest inquirer, while he puts his reasonings into words,
benefits by the labors of the greatest. When he counts his
little wealth, he finds he has in his hands coins which bear
the image and superscription of ancient and modern intellectual
dynasties, and that in virtue of this possession<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[369]</a></span>
acquisitions are in his power, solid knowledge within his
reach, which none could ever have attained to, if it were
not that the gold of truth once dug out of the mine circulates
more and more widely among mankind.” Emerson
beautifully calls language “fossil poetry.” The etymologist,
he adds, finds the deadest word to have been once a
brilliant picture. “As the limestone of the continent consists
of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so
language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in
their secondary use, have long since ceased to remind us of
their poetic origin.”</p>

<p>Not only is this true, but many a single word, as Archbishop
Trench remarks, is itself a concentrated poem, in
which are treasured stores of poetical thought and imagery.
Examine it closely, and it will be found to rest upon some
palpable or subtle analogy of things material and spiritual,
showing that, however trite the image now, the man who
first coined the word was a poet. The older the word, the
profounder and more beautiful the meanings it will often
be found to inclose; for words of late growth speak to the
head, not to the heart; thoughts and feelings are too subtle
for new words, and are conveyed only by those about which
cluster many associations. It is the use of words when new
and fresh from the lips of their inventors, before their vivid
and picturesque meanings have faded out or been obscured
by their many secondary significations, that gives such pictorial
beauty, pith, and raciness, to the early writers; “and
hence to recall language, to restore its early meanings, to
re-mint it in novel forms, is the secret of all effective
writing and speaking,&mdash;of all verbal expression which is to
leave, as was said of the eloquence of Pericles, stings in the
minds and memories of the hearers.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[370]</a></span></p>

<p>Language is not only “fossil poetry,” but it is also fossil
philosophy, fossil ethics, and fossil history. As in the pre-Adamite
rock are bound up and preserved the vegetable
and animal forms of ages long gone by, so in words are
locked up truths once known but now forgotten,&mdash;the
thoughts and feelings, the habits, customs, opinions, virtues
and vices of men long since in their graves. Language is,
in short, “the depository of the accumulated body of experience,
to which all former ages have contributed their part,
and which is the inheritance of all yet to come.”<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> It is
“like amber, circulating the electric spirit of truth, and
preserving the relics of ancient wisdom.”<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> Compared with
this memorial of the past, these records of ancient and
modern intellectual dynasties, how poor are all other monuments
of human power, perseverance, skill, or genius!
Unlike the works of individual genius, or the cuneiform
inscriptions which are found in oriental countries on the
crumbling fragments of half-calcined stone, language gives
us the history not only of individuals, but of nations; not
only of nations, but of mankind. It is, indeed, “an admirable
poem on the history of all ages; a living monument
on which is written the genesis of human thought. Thus
‘the ground on which our civilization stands is a sacred
one, for it is the deposit of thought. For language, as it
is the mirror, so it is the product of reason, and, as it
embodies thought, so it is the child of thought. In it are
embodied the sparks of that celestial fire which from a
once bright centre of civilization has streamed forth over
the inhabited earth, and which now already, after less than
three myriads of years, forms a galaxy round the globe, a
chain of light from pole to pole.’”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[371]</a></span></p>

<p>How pregnant with instruction is often the history of
a single word! Coleridge, who keenly appreciated the significance
of words, says that there are cases where more
knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history
of a word than by the history of a campaign. Sometimes
the germ of a nation’s life,&mdash;the philosophy of some political,
moral, or intellectual movement in a country,&mdash;will
be found coiled up in a single word, just as the oak is
found in an acorn. The word “ostracize” gives us a
vivid picture of the Athenian democracy, and of the
period when oyster-shells were used for ballots. It calls
up the barbarity which held an election of candidates for
banishment; the arbitrary power which enabled the vilest
of the citizens, from mere envy of the reputation of the
best man in the city, to make him an exile; and the utter
lack and desecration of liberty, while its forms were
fetiches for the popular worship. The fact that the Arabs
were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists,
and the merchants of the Middle Ages, is shown by the
words we have borrowed from them,&mdash;“algebra,” “almanac,”
“cypher,” “zero,” “zenith,” “alkali,” “alcohol,”
“alchemy,” “alembic,” “magazine,” “tariff,” “cotton,”
“elixir”; and so that the monastic system originated in
the Greek, and not in the Latin church, is shown by the
fact that the words expressing the chief elements of the
system, as “monk,” “monastery,” “anchorite,” “cenobite,”
“ascetic,” “hermit,” are Greek, not Latin. What an
amount of history is wrapped up in the word “Pagan”!
The term, we learn from Gibbon, is remotely derived from
<span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">Πάγη</span>, in the Doric dialect, signifying a fountain; and the
rural neighborhood which frequented the same derived the
common appellation of <em>Pagus</em> and “Pagans.” Soon “Pagan”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[372]</a></span>
and “rural” became nearly synonymous, and the
meaner peasants acquired that name which has been corrupted
into “peasant” in the modern languages of Europe.
All non-military people soon came to be branded as Pagans.
The Christians were the soldiers of Christ; their adversaries,
who refused the “sacrament,” or military oath of baptism,
might deserve the metaphorical name of Pagans.
Christianity gradually filled the cities of the empire; the
old religion retired and languished, in the time of Prudentius,
in obscure villages. From <em>Pagus</em>, as a root, comes
<em>pagius</em>, first a villager, then a rural laborer, then a servant,
lastly a “page.” <em>Pagina</em>, first the inclosed square of
cultivated land near a village, graduated into the “page”
of a book. <em>Pagare</em>, from denoting the “field service” that
compensated the provider of food and raiment, was applied
eventually to every form in which the changes of
society required the benefited to “pay” for what they received.
Again, when a Scotchman speaks of his “shacklebone,”
he not only conveys an idea of his wrist, but
discovers by this very term that slavery, or vassalage, continued
so long in Scotland as to impress itself indelibly on
the language of the country.</p>

<p>Often where history is utterly dumb concerning the
past, language speaks. The discovery of the foot-print
on the sand did not more certainly prove to Robinson
Crusoe that the island of which he had fancied himself the
sole inhabitant contained a brother man, than the similarity
of the inflections in the speech of different peoples
proves their brotherhood. Were all the histories of England
swept from existence, the study of its language,&mdash;developing
the fact that the basis of the language is Saxon,
that the names of the prominent objects of nature are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[373]</a></span>
Celtic, the terms of war and government Norman-French,
the ecclesiastical terms Latin,&mdash;would enable us to reconstruct
a large part of the story of the past, as it even now
enables us to verify many of the statements of the chroniclers.
Humboldt, in his “Cosmos,” eulogizes the study
of words as one of the richest sources of historical knowledge;
and it is probable that what comparative philology,
yet in its infancy, has already discovered, will compel a
rewriting of the history of the world. Even now it has
thrown light on many of the most perplexing problems of
religion, history, and ethnography; and it seems destined
to triumphs of which we can but dimly apprehend the
consequences. On the stone tablets of the universe God’s
own finger has written the changes which millions of
years have wrought on the mountain and the plain; and
in the fluid air, which he coins into spoken words, man
has preserved forever the grand facts of his past history
and the grand processes of his inmost soul. “Nations and
<em>languages</em> against dynasties and treaties,” is the cry which
is remodelling the map of Europe; and in our country,
comparative philologists,&mdash;to their shame be it said,&mdash;have
labored with Satanic zeal to prove the impossibility
of a common origin of languages and races, in order to
justify, by scientific arguments, the theory of slavery. It
has been said that the interpretation of one word in the
Vedas fifty years earlier would have saved many Hindoo
widows from being burned alive; and now that the philologists
of Germany and England have shown that the
iron network of <em>caste</em>, which for centuries has hindered
the development of India, is not a religious institution,
and has no authority in their sacred writings, but is the
invention of an arrogant and usurping priesthood,&mdash;or, at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[374]</a></span>
best, an erroneous tradition, due to the half-knowledge
or to the imposture of the native pundits,&mdash;the British
government will be able to inflict penalties for the observance
of the rules of <em>caste</em>, and thus to relieve India from
the greatest clog on its progress.</p>


<h3 class="smallh3">CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF WORDS.</h3>

<p>Language, as it daguerreotypes human thought, shares,
as we have seen, in all the vicissitudes of man. It mirrors
all the changes in the character, tastes, customs, and
opinions of a people, and shows with unerring faithfulness
whether, and in what degree, they advance or recede
in culture or morality. As new ideas germinate in the
mind of a nation, it will demand new forms of expression;
on the other hand, a petrified and mechanical national
mind will as surely betray itself in a petrified and mechanical
language. It is by no accident or caprice that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse4">“Words, whilom flourishing,</p>
<p class="verse0">Pass now no more, but banished from the court,</p>
<p class="verse0">Dwell with disgrace among the vulgar sort;</p>
<p class="verse0">And those which eld’s strict doom did disallow,</p>
<p class="verse0">And damn for bullion, go for current now.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Often with the lapse of time the meaning of a word
changes imperceptibly, until after some centuries it becomes
the very opposite of what it once was. To disinter
these old meanings out of the alluvium and drift
of ages affords as much pleasure to the linguist as to
disinter a fossil does to the geologist.</p>

<p>An exact knowledge of the changes of signification
which words have undergone is not merely a source of
pleasure; it is absolutely indispensable to the full understanding
of old authors. Thus, for example, Milton and
Thomson use “horrent” and “horrid” for bristling, <em>e.g.</em>,</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[375]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“With dangling ice all <em>horrid</em>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Milton speaks of a “savage” (meaning woody, <em>silva</em>) hill,
and of “amiable” (meaning lovely) fruit. Again, in the
well known lines of the “Allegro,” where, Milton says,
amongst the cheerful sights of rural morn,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“And every shepherd tells his tale</p>
<p class="verse0">Under the hawthorn in the vale,”&mdash;</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">the words “tells his tale” do not mean that he is romancing
or making love to the milkmaid, but that he is
<em>counting his sheep</em> as they pass the hawthorn,&mdash;a natural
and familiar occupation of shepherds on a summer’s
morning. The primary meaning of “tale” is to count or
number, as in the German <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">zahlen</i>. It is thus used in
the Book of Exodus, which states that the Israelites were
compelled to deliver their “tale of bricks.” In the English
“tale” and in the French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">conte</i> the secondary meaning
has supplanted the first, though we still speak of “keeping
tally,” of “untold gold,” and say, “Here is the sum
twice-told.”</p>

<p>Again, Milton’s use of the word “jolly” in the following
lines from his “Sonnet to the Nightingale,” strikingly
illustrates the disadvantages under which poetry in a
living, and consequently ever-changing, language, labors:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Thou with fresh hope the lover’s heart doth fill,</p>
<p class="verse0">While the jolly hours lead on propitious May.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Though we may know the meaning which the word bore
a little more than two and a half centuries ago, yet it is
impossible entirely to banish from the mind the vulgar
associations which have gathered round it since.</p>

<p>It has been said that one of the arts of a great poet or
prose-writer, who wishes to add emphasis to his style,&mdash;to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[376]</a></span>
bring out all the latent forces of his native tongue,&mdash;will
often consist in reconnecting a word with its original
derivation, in not suffering it to forget itself and its
father’s house, though it would. This Milton does sometimes
with signal effect; but in the great majority of
cases his meaning becomes obscure to the unlearned reader.
In a great number of cases we must interpret his words
rather by their classical meanings than by their English
use. Thus in “Paradise Lost,” when Satan speaks of his
having been pursued by “Heaven’s <em>afflicting</em> thunder,” the
poet uses the word “afflicting” in its original primary
sense of striking down bodily. Properly the word denotes
a state of mind or feeling only, and is not used to-day
in a concrete sense. So when Milton, at the opening of
the same poem, speaks of</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse6">“The <em>secret</em> top</p>
<p class="verse0">Of Oreb or of Sinai,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">the meaning of the word “secret” is not that of the English
adjective, but is remote, apart, lonely, as in Virgil’s
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">secretosque pios</i>. The absurdity of supposing the word
to be the same as our ordinary adjective led Bentley,
among many ridiculous “improvements” of Milton’s language,
to change it to “sacred.” Again, the word “recollect”
is used in its etymological sense in these lines from
“Paradise Lost”:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">“But he, his wonted pride</p>
<p class="verse0">Soon recollecting, with high words,” etc.</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">So Milton uses the word “astonished” in its etymological
sense of “thunderstruck,” <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">attonitus</i>, as when he makes
Satan say that his associates</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Lie thus <em>astonished</em> on the oblivious pool.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Holland, in his translation of Livy, speaks of a knave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[377]</a></span>
who threw some heavy stones upon a certain king,
“whereof the one smote the king upon his head, the
other astonished his shoulder.”</p>

<p>Shakespeare, also, not unfrequently uses words in their
classical sense. Thus when Cleopatra speaks of</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Such gifts as we greet <em>modern</em> friends withal,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">“modern” is used in the sense of “modal” (from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">modus</i>, a
fashion or manner); a modern friend, compared with a
true friend, being what the fashion of a thing is, compared
with the substance. So,&mdash;as De Quincey, to whom
we owe this explanation, has shown,&mdash;when in the famous
picture of life, “All the World’s a Stage,” the justice is
described as</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Full of wise saws and modern instances,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">the meaning is not “full of wise sayings and modern
illustrations,” but full of proverbial maxims of conduct
and of trivial arguments; <em>i.e.</em>, of petty distinctions that
never touch the point at issue. “Instances” is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">instantia</i>,
which the monkish and scholastic writers always
used in the sense of an argument. When in “Julius
Cæsar” we read,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse12">“And come down</p>
<p class="verse0">With fearful bravery, thinking by this face</p>
<p class="verse0">To fasten in our thoughts that they have courage,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">we must not attach to “bravery” its modern sense; and the
same remark applies to the word “extravagant” in the following
passage from “Hamlet”:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,</p>
<p class="verse0">The extravagant and erring spirit hies</p>
<p class="verse0">To his confine,” etc.</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>“Courage” is “good heart.” “Anecdote,”&mdash;from the
Greek <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">ἀν</span> (not), <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">ἐκ</span> (out), and <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">δότα</span> (given),&mdash;meant once a
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[378]</a></span>
fact not given out or published; now it means a short,
amusing story. Procopius, a Greek historian in the reign
of Justinian, is said to have coined the word. Not daring,
for fear of torture and death, to speak of some living persons
as they deserved, he wrote a work which he called
“Anecdotes,” or a “Secret History.” The instant an anecdote
is published, it belies its title; it is no longer an
anecdote. “Allowance” formerly was used to denote
praise or approval; as when Shakespeare says in “Troilus
and Cressida,”</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“A stirring dwarf we do <em>allowance</em> give</p>
<p class="verse0">Before a sleeping giant.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">“To prevent,” which now means to hinder or obstruct, signified,
in its Latin etymology, to anticipate, to get the start
of, and is thus used in the Old Testament. “Girl” once
designated a young person of either sex. “Widow” was
applied to men as well as women. “Sagacious” once
meant quick-smelling, as in the line</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“The hound sagacious of the tainted prey.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">“Rascal,” according to Verstegan, primarily meant an
“il-favoured, lean, and worthelesse deer.” Thus Shakespeare:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Horns! the noblest deer hath them as huge as the rascal.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Afterward it denoted the common people, the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">plebs</i> as distinguished
from the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">populus</i>. A “naturalist” was once a
person who rejected revealed truth, and believed only in natural
religion. He is now an investigator of nature and her
laws, and often a believer in Christianity. “Blackguards”
were formerly the scullions, turnspits, and other meaner
retainers in a great household, who, when a change was
made from one residence to another, accompanied and took<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[379]</a></span>
care of the pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils, by which
they were smutted. Webster, in his play of “The White
Devil,” speaks of “a lousy knave, that within these twenty
years rode with the ‘black guard’ in the Duke’s carriage,
amongst spits and dripping-pans.” “Artillery,” which to-day
means the heavy ordnance of modern warfare, was two
or three centuries ago applied to any engines for throwing
missiles, even to the bow and arrow. “Punctual,” which
now denotes exactness in keeping engagements, formerly
applied to space as well as to time. Sir Thomas Browne
speaks of “a ‘punctual’ truth”; and we read in other
writers of “a ‘punctual’ relation,” or “description,”
meaning a particular or circumstantial relation or description.</p>

<p>“Bombast,” now swelling talk, inflated diction without
substance, was originally cotton padding. It is derived
from the Low Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">bombax</i>, cotton. “Chemist” once
meant the same as alchemist. “Polite” originally meant
polished. Cudworth speaks of “polite bodies, as looking-glasses.”
“Tidy,” which now means neat, well arranged,
is derived from the old English word “tide,” meaning time,
as in eventide. “Tidy” (German, <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">zeitig</i>) is timely, seasonable.
As things in right time are apt to be in the right
place, the transition in the meaning of the word is a natural
one. “Caitiff” formerly meant captive, being derived
from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">captivus</i> through the Norman-French. The change of
signification points to the tendency of slavery utterly to
debase the character,&mdash;to transform the man into a cowardly
miscreant. In like manner “miscreant,” once simply
a misbeliever, and applied to the most virtuous as well as
to the vilest, points to the deep-felt conviction that a wrong
belief leads to wrong living. Thus Gibbon: “The emperor’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[380]</a></span>
generosity to the ‘miscreant’ [Soliman] was interpreted
as treason to the Christian cause.” “Thought,” in
early English, was anxious care; <em>e.g.</em>, “Take no ‘thought’
for your life” (Matt, vi, 25). “Thing” primarily meant
discourse, then solemn discussion, council, court of justice,
cause, matter or subject of discourse. The “husting” was
originally the house-thing, or domestic court.</p>

<p>“Coquets” were once male as well as female. “Usury,”
which now means taking illegal or excessive interest,
denoted, at first, the taking of any interest, however small.
A “tobacconist” was formerly a smoker, not a seller, of
tobacco. “Corpse,” now a body from which the breath of
life has departed, once denoted the body of the living also;
as in Surrey,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“A valiant <em>corpse</em>, where force and beauty met.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">We have already spoken of the striking change which the
word “incomprehensible” has undergone within the last
three centuries.</p>

<p>“Wit,” now used in a more limited sense, at first signified
the mental powers collectively; <em>e.g.</em>, “Will puts in
practice what the wit deviseth.” Later it came to denote
quickness of apprehension, beauty or elegance in composition,
and Pope defined it as</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse8">“Nature to advantage dressed,</p>
<p class="verse0">What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Another meaning was a man of talents or genius. The
word “parts,” a hundred years ago, was used to denote
genius or talents. Horace Walpole, in one of his letters,
says of Goldsmith that “he was an idiot, with once or
twice a fit of ‘parts.’” The word “loyalty” has undergone
a marked change within a few centuries. Originally<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[381]</a></span>
it meant in English, as in French, fair dealing, fidelity to
engagements; now it means, in England, fidelity to the
throne, and, in the United States, to the Union or the
Constitution. “Relevant,” which formerly meant relieving
or assisting, is now used in the sense of “relative” or
“relating” to, with which, from a similarity of sound,
though without the least etymological connection, it appears
to have been confounded. The word “exorbitant”
once meant deviating from a track or orbit; it is now
used exclusively in the sense of excessive.</p>

<p>The word “coincide” was primarily a mathematical
term. If one mathematical point be superposed upon another,
or one straight line upon another between the same
two points, the two points in the first case and the two
lines in the latter are said to coincide. The word was soon
applied figuratively to identity of opinion, but, according
to Prof. Marsh, was not fully popularized, at least in
America, till 1826. On the Fourth of July in that year,
the semi-centennial jubilee of the Declaration of Independence,
Thomas Jefferson, the author of that manifesto, and
John Adams, its principal champion on the floor of Congress,
both also Ex-Presidents, died; and this fact was
noticed all over the world, and especially in the United
States, as a remarkable “coincidence.” The death of Ex-President
Monroe, also, on the Fourth of July five years
after, gave increased currency to the word. Our late civil
war has led to some striking mutations in the meaning
of words. “Contraband,” from its general signification of
any article whose importation or exportation is prohibited
by law, became limited to a fugitive slave within the
United States’ military lines. “Secede” and “secession,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[382]</a></span>
“confederate” and “confederacy,” have also acquired new
special meanings.</p>


<h3 class="smallh3">DEGRADATION OF WORDS.</h3>

<p>Another striking characteristic of words is their tendency
to contract in form and degenerate in meaning.
Sometimes they are ennobled and purified in signification;
but more frequently they deteriorate, and from an honorable
fall into a dishonorable meaning. I will first
note a few examples of the former:&mdash;“Humility,” with the
Greeks and Romans, meant meanness of spirit; “Paradise,”
in oriental tongues, meant only a royal park; “regeneration”
was spoken by the Greeks only of the earth in the
springtime, and of the recollection of forgotten knowledge;
“sacrament” and “mystery” are words “fetched from the
very dregs of paganism” to set forth the great truths of
our redemption. On the other hand, “thief” (Anglo-Saxon,
<i>theow</i>) formerly signified only one of the servile
classes; and “villain” or “villein,” meant peasant,&mdash;the
serf who, under the feudal system, was <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">adscriptus glebæ</i>.
The scorn of the landholders, the half-barbarous aristocracy,
for these persons, led them to ascribe to them the
most hateful qualities, some of which their degrading situation
doubtless tended to foster. Thus the word “villein”
became gradually associated with ideas of crime and guilt,
till at length it became a synonym for knaves of every
class in society. A “menial” was one of the many;
“insolent” meant unusual; “silly,” blessed,&mdash;the infant
Jesus being termed by an old English poet “that harmless
‘silly’ babe”; “officious” signified ready to do kindly
offices. “Demure” was used once in a good sense, without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[383]</a></span>
the insinuation which is now almost latent in it, that
the external shows of modesty and sobriety rest on no corresponding
realities. “Facetious,” which now has the
sense of buffoonish, originally meant urbane. “Idiot,”
from the Greek, originally signified only a private man, as
distinguished from an office-holder. “Homely” formerly
meant secret and familiar; and “brat,” now a vulgar and
contemptuous word, had anciently a very different signification,
as in the following lines from an old hymn by
Gascoigne:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“O Israel, O household of the Lord,</p>
<p class="verse0">O Abraham’s brats, O brood of blessed seed,</p>
<p class="verse0">O chosen sheep that loved the Lord indeed.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>“Imp” once meant graft; Bacon speaks of “those most
virtuous and goodly young imps, the Duke of Sussex and
his brother.” A “boor” was once only a farmer; a
“scamp” a camp deserter. “Speculation” first meant the
sense of sight; as in Shakespeare:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Thou hast no speculation in those eyes.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Next it was metaphorically transferred to mental vision,
and finally denoted, without a metaphor, the reflections
and theories of philosophers. From the domain of philosophy
it has finally travelled downward to the offices of stock-jobbers,
share-brokers, and all men who get their living by
their wits, instead of by the sweat of their brows. So
“craft” at first meant ability, skill, or dexterity. The
origin of the term, according to Wedgewood, is seen in the
notion of seizing, expressed by the Italian, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">graffiare</i>, Welsh,
<i>craff</i>, a hook, brace, holdfast. The term is then applied to
seizing with the mind, as in the Latin term “apprehend,”
“comprehend,” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">prehendere</i>, to seize in a material way.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[384]</a></span>
“Cunning” once conveyed no idea of sinister or crooked
wisdom. “The three Persons of the Trinity,” says a reverent
writer of the fifteenth century, “are of equal cunning.”
Bacon, a century later, uses the word in its present sense of
fox-like wisdom; and Locke calls it “the ape of wisdom.”
“Vagabond” is a word whose etymology conveys no reproach.
It denoted at first only a wanderer. But as men
who have no homes are apt to become loose, unsteady, and
reckless in their habits, the term has degenerated into its
present signification.</p>

<p>“Paramour” meant originally only lover; a “minion”
was a favorite; and “knave,” the lowest and most contemptuous
term we can use when insulting another, signified
originally, as <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">knabe</i> still does in German, a boy. Subsequently,
it meant servant; thus Paul, in Wicliffe’s version
of the New Testament, reverently terms himself “a
‘knave’ of Jesus Christ.” A similar parallel to this is the
word “varlet,” which is the same as “valet.” “Retaliate,”
from the Latin <em>re</em> (back) and <em>talis</em> (such), naturally means
to pay back in kind, or such as we have received. But as,
according to Sir Thomas More, men write their injuries in
marble, the kindnesses done them in sand, the word “retaliate”
is applied only to offences or indignities, and never to
favors. The word “resent,” to feel in return, has undergone
a similar deterioration. A Frenchman would say, “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Il
‘ressentit’ une vive douleur</i>,” for “He felt acute pain”;
whereas we use the word only to express the sentiment of
anger.</p>

<p>So “animosity,” which etymologically means only spiritedness,
is now applied to only one kind of vigor and activity,
that displayed in enmity and hate. “Defalcation,” from
the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">falx</i>, a sickle or scythe, is properly a cutting off<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[385]</a></span>
or down, a pruning or retrenchment. Thus Addison: “the
tea-table is set forth with its usual bill of fare, and without
any defalcation.” To-day we read of a “defalcation in
the revenue,” or “in a treasurer’s accounts,” by which is
meant a decrease in the amount of the revenue, or in the
moneys accounted for, irrespective of the cause,&mdash;a falling
off. This erroneous use of the word is probably due to a
confusion of it with the expression “fall away,” and with
the noun “defaulter.” Between the first word and either of
the last two, however, there is not the slightest etymological
relationship. “Chaffer,” to talk much and idly, primarily
meant to buy, to make a bargain, to higgle or dispute
about a bargain. “Gossip” (God-akin) once meant a
sponsor in baptism. “Simple” and “simplicity” have
sadly degenerated in meaning. A “simple” fellow, once
a man <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">sine plica</i> (without fold, free from duplicity), is
now one who lacks shrewdness, and is easily cheated or
duped.</p>

<p>There are some words which, though not used in an
absolutely unfavorable sense, yet require a qualifying
adjective to be understood favorably. Thus, if a man is
said to be noted for his “curiosity,” a prying, impertinent,
not a legitimate, curiosity is supposed to be meant. So
“critic” and “criticise” are commonly associated with a
carping, fault-finding spirit. “Lust” has undergone a
signal deterioration. In Chaucer it is used both as a noun
and a verb, and signifies wish, desire, pleasure, enjoyment,
without any evil connotation. “Parson” (<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">persona ecclesiæ</i>)
had originally no undertone of contempt. In the
eighteenth century it had become a nickname of scorn; and
it was at a party of a dozen parsons that the Earl of Sandwich
won his wager, that no one among them had brought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[386]</a></span>
his prayer-book or forgotten his corkscrew. “Fellow” was
originally a term of respect,&mdash;at least, there was in it no
subaudition of contempt; now it is suggestive of worthlessness,
if not of positively bad morals. Shakespeare did not
mean to disparage Yorick, the jester, when he said that “he
was a ‘fellow’ of infinite jest”; Pope, on the other hand,
tells us, a century or more later, that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Worth makes the man, and want of it the <em>fellow</em>.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>“By a ‘fast’ man, I presume you mean a ‘loose’ one,”
said Sir Robert Inglis to one who was describing a rake.
Of all the words which have degenerated from their original
meaning, the most remarkable is the term “dunce,” of
the history of which Archbishop Trench has given a striking
account in his work on “The Study of Words.” In the
Middle Ages certain theologians, educated in the cathedral
and cloister schools founded by Charlemagne and his successors,
were called Schoolmen. Though they were men of
great acuteness and subtlety of intellect, their works, at the
revival of learning, ceased to be popular, and it was considered
a mark of intellectual progress and advance to have
thrown off their yoke. Some persons, however, still clung
to these Schoolmen, especially to Duns Scotus, the great
teacher of the Franciscan order; and many times an adherent
of the old learning would seek to strengthen his
position by an appeal to its great doctor, familiarly called
Duns; while his opponents would contemptuously rejoin,
“Oh, you are a ‘Duns-man,’” or, more briefly, “You are a
‘Duns.’” As the new learning was enlisting more and
more of the scholarship of the age on its side, the title
became more and more a term of scorn; and thus, from
that long extinct conflict between the old and the new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[387]</a></span>
learning, the mediæval and the modern theology, we inherit
the words “dunce” and “duncery.” The lot of poor Duns,
as the Archbishop observes, was certainly a hard one. That
the name of “the Subtle Doctor,” as he was called, one of
the keenest and most subtle-witted of men,&mdash;according to
Hooker, “the wittiest of the school divines,”&mdash;should
become a synonym for stupidity and obstinate dulness, was
a fate of which even his bitterest enemies could never have
dreamed.</p>


<h3 class="smallh3">COMMON WORDS WITH CURIOUS DERIVATIONS.</h3>

<p>“Bit” is that which has been bit off, and exactly corresponds
to the word “morsel,” used in the same sense, and
derived from the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">mordere</i>, to bite. “Bankrupt” means
literally broken bench. It was the custom in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries for the Lombard merchants to
expose their wares for sale in the market-place on benches.
When one of their number failed, all the other merchants
set upon him, drove him from the market, and “broke” his
“bench” to pieces. <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">Banco rotto</i>, the Italian for bench-broken,
becomes <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">banqueroute</i> in French, and in English “bankrupt.”
To the Lombard merchants, who flocked to England in
the thirteenth century, we owe also the words “bank,”
“debtor,” “creditor,” “usance” (the old word for interest),
“journal,” “diary,” “ledger,” “ditto,” and “£. s. d.,”
which derives its origin from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Lire</i>, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Soldi</i>, and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Denari</i>. “Alligator”
is from the Spanish <i lang="es" xml:lang="es">el lagarto</i>, the lizard, being
the largest of the lizard species. “Stipulation” is from
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">stipulum</i>, a straw, which the Romans broke when they made
a mutual engagement. “Dexterity” is simply righthandedness.
“Mountebank” means a quack-medicine vendor,&mdash;from
the Italian <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">montare</i>, to mount, and <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">banco</i>, a bench;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[388]</a></span>
literally, one who mounts a bench to boast of his infallible
skill in curing diseases. “Quandary” is a corruption of the
French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">qu’en dirai (je)</i>? “what shall I say of it?”&mdash;and
expresses that feeling of uncertainty which would naturally
prompt such a question. “Faint” is from the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">se
feindre</i>, to pretend; so that originally fainting was a
pretended weakness or inability. We have an example of
the thing originally indicated by the word, in the French
theatres, where professional fainters are employed, whose
business it is to be overcome and to sink to the floor under
the powerful acting of the tragedians.</p>

<p>“Topsy-turvy” is said to be a contraction or corruption
of “top-side t’other way.” “Helter-skelter” is either from
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">hilariter et celeriter</i>, “gaily and quickly,” or, more probably,
from helter, to hang, and <em>skelter</em>, order, <em>i.e.</em>, “hang order.”
“Hip! hip! hurrah!” is said to have been originally a war-cry
adopted by the stormers of a German town, wherein
a great many Jews had taken refuge. The place being
sacked, the Jews were all put to the sword, amid the
shouts of “<em>Hierosolyma est perdita!</em>” From the first letters
of these words (h. e. p.) an exclamation was contrived.
When the wine sparkles in the cup, and patriotic or other
soul-thrilling sentiments are greeted with a “Hip! hip!
hurrah!” it is well enough to remember the origin of a
cry which reminds us of the cruelty of Christians toward
God’s chosen people. “Sexton” is a corruption of “sacristan,”
which is from <em>sacra</em>, the sacred things of a church. The
sacristan’s office was to take care of the vessels of the
service and the vestments of the clergy. Since the
Reformation, his duties in this respect have been greatly
lessened, and he has dug the graves,&mdash;so that the term<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[389]</a></span>
now commonly means grave-digger, though it still retains
somewhat of its old meaning.</p>

<p>“Toad-eater” is a metaphor supposed to be taken from
a mountebank’s boy eating toads, in order to show his
master’s skill in expelling poison. It is more probable,
however, that the phrase is a version of the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">avaler
des couleuvres</i>, which means putting up with all sorts of
indignities without showing resentment. The propriety
of the term rests on the fact that dependent persons are
often forced to do the most nauseous things to please their
patrons. The same trick of pretending to eat reptiles,
such as toads, is held by some etymologists to be the origin
of the terms “buffoon,” “buffoonery,” from the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">bufo</i>,
a toad. Wedgwood derives it from the French, bouffon, a
jester, from the Italian, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">buffa</i>, a puff, a blast or a blurt
with the mouth made at one in scorn. A puff with the
mouth indicates contempt; it is emblematically <em>making
light</em> of an object. In “David Copperfield” we read:
“‘And who minds Dick? Dick’s nobody! Whoo!’ He blew
a slight, contemptuous breath, as if he blew himself
away.”</p>

<p>“Cant” (Gaelic, <i>cainnt</i>, speech) is properly the language
spoken by thieves and beggars among themselves, when
they do not wish to be understood by bystanders. Subsequently
it came to mean the peculiar terms used by any
other profession or community. Some etymologists derive
the word from the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">cantare</i>, to sing, and suppose it to
signify the whining cry of professional beggars, though it
may have obtained its beggar sense from some instinctive
notion of the quasi-religious one. It has been noted that
the whole class of words comprising “enchant,” “incantation,”
etc., were primarily referable to religious ceremonies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[390]</a></span>
of some kind; and as once an important part of a beggar’s
daily labor was invoking, or seeming to invoke, blessings
on those who gave him alms, this, with the natural tendency
to utter any oft-repeated phrases in a sing-song,
rhythmical tone, gave to the word “cant” its present signification.
In Scotland the word has a peculiar meaning.
About the middle of the seventeenth century, Andrew and
Alexander Cant, of Edinburgh, maintained that all refusers
of the covenant ought to be excommunicated, and that all
excommunicated might lawfully be killed; and in their
grace after meat they “praid for those phanaticques and
seditious ministers” who had been arrested and imprisoned,
that the Lord would pity and deliver them. From
these two Cants, Andrew and Alexander, it is said, all
seditious praying and preaching in Scotland is called
“Canting.”</p>

<p>The tendency to regard money as the source of true
happiness is strikingly illustrated in the word “wealth,”
which is connected with “weal,” just as in Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">beatus</i>
meant both blessed and rich, and <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">ὄλβιος</span> the same in Greek.
“Property” and “propriety” come from the same French
word, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">propriété</i>; so that the Frenchman in New York was
not far out of the way, when in the panic of 1857 he
said he “should lose all his <em>propriety</em>.” The term “blue-stocking,”
applied to literary ladies, has a curious origin.
Originally, in England in 1760, it was conferred on a
society of literary persons of both sexes. The society
derived its name from the blue worsted stockings always
worn by Benjamin Stillingfleet, a distinguished writer, who
was one of the most active promoters of this association.
This term was subsequently conferred on literary ladies,
from the fact that the accomplished and fascinating Mrs.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[391]</a></span>
Jerningham wore blue stockings at the social and literary
entertainments given by Lady Montague. “Woman” is
the <em>wif</em> or <em>web</em>-man, who stays at home to spin, as distinguished
from the weap-man, who goes abroad to use the
weapon of war. The term “man” is, of course, generic,
including both male and female. “Lady” primarily signifies
bread keeper. It is derived from the Anglo-Saxon,
<i>hlæfdige</i>, <em>i.e.</em>, she who looks after the loaf; or else is a
corruption of <i>hlâfweardige</i>, from <i>hlâf</i>, bread, loaf, and
<i>weardian</i>, to keep, look after. “Waist” is the same as
waste; that part of the figure which wastes,&mdash;that is,
diminishes.</p>

<p>“Canard” has a very curious origin. M. Quêtelet, a
French writer, in the “Annuaire de l’Académie Française,”
attributes the first application of this term to
Norbert Cornelïssen, who, to give a sly hit at the ridiculous
pieces of intelligence in the public journals, stated
that an interesting experiment had just been made calculated
to prove the voracity of ducks. Twenty were
placed together; and one of them having been killed and
cut up into the smallest possible pieces, feathers and all,
was thrown to the other nineteen, and most gluttonously
gobbled up. Another was then taken from the nineteen,
and, being chopped small like its predecessor, was served
up to the eighteen, and at once devoured like the other;
and so on to the last, who thus was placed in the position
of having eaten his nineteen companions. This story,
most pleasantly narrated, ran the round of all the journals
of Europe. It then became almost forgotten for
about a score of years, when it went back from America
with amplifications; but the word remained in its novel
signification.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[392]</a></span></p>

<p>“Abominable” was once supposed to have been derived
from the Latin words <em>ab</em>, from, and <em>homo</em>, a man, meaning
repugnant to humanity. It really comes from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">abominor</i>,
which again is from <em>ab</em> and <em>omen</em>; and it conveys the
idea of what is in a religious sense profane and detestable,&mdash;in
short, of evil omen. Milton always applies it to
devilish, profane, or idolatrous objects. “Poltroon” is
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">pollice truncus</i>, <em>i.e.</em>, with the thumb cut off,&mdash;<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">pollex</i>, Latin,
meaning thumb, and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">truncus</i>, maimed or mutilated. When
the Roman empire was about falling in pieces, the valor
of the citizens had so degenerated, that, to escape fighting,
many cut off their right thumbs, thus disabling themselves
from using the pike. “Farce” is derived from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">farcire</i>,
a Latin word meaning to stuff, as with flour, herbs, and
other ingredients in cooking. A farce is a comedy with
little plot, stuffed with ludicrous incidents and expressions.
“Racy” is from “race,” meaning family, breed, and signifies
having the characteristic flavor of origin, savoring of
the source.</p>

<p>“Trivial” may be from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">trivium</i>, in the sense of <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">tres viæ</i>,
a place where three roads meet, and thus indicate that
which is commonplace, or of <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'daily occurence'">daily occurrence</ins>. But it is
more probably from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">trivium</i>, in the sense in which the
word was used in the Middle Ages, when it meant the
course of three arts, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which
formed the common curriculum of the universities, as distinguished
from the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">quadrivium</i>, which embraced four
more, namely, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.
Trivial things in this sense may mean things that occur
ordinarily, as distinguished from higher or more abstruse
things. The word “quiz” has a remarkable origin, unless
the etymologists who give its derivation are themselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[393]</a></span>
quizzing their readers. It is said that many years ago,
when one Daly was patentee of the Irish theatres, he
spent the evening of a Saturday in company with many
of the wits and men of fashion of the day. Gambling
was introduced, when the manager staked a large sum
that he would have spoken, all through the principal
streets of Dublin, by a certain hour next day, Sunday, a
word having no meaning, and being derived from no
known language. Wagers were laid, and stakes deposited.
Daly repaired to the theatre, and dispatched all
the servants and supernumeraries with the word “Quiz,”
which they chalked on every door and every shop window
in town. Shops being all shut next day, everybody going
to and coming from the different places of worship saw
the word, and everybody repeated it, so that “Quiz” was
heard all through Dublin; the circumstance of so strange
a word being on every door and window caused much
surprise, and ever since, should a strange story be attempted
to be passed current, it draws forth the expression
“You are ‘quizzing’ me.” Some person who has a
just aversion to practical jokes, wittily defines a “quizzer”
as “one who believes me to be a fool because I will not
believe him to be a liar.”</p>

<p>“Huguenot” is a word whose origin is still a <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">vexata
quæstio</i> of etymology. Of the many derivations given,
some of which are ridiculously fanciful, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Eignots</i>, which
Voltaire and others give from the German, <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Eidgenossen</i>,
confederates, is the one generally received. A plausible
derivation is from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Huguenot</i>, a small piece of money,
which, in the time of Hugo Capet, was worth less than a
denier. At the time of Amboisi’s conspiracy, some of the
petitioners fled through fear; whereupon some of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[394]</a></span>
countrymen said they were poor fellows, not worth a
Huguenot,&mdash;whence the nickname in question. “Pensive”
is a picturesque word, from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">pensare</i>, the frequentative
of <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">pendere</i>, to weigh. The French have <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">pensée</i>,
a thought, the result of mental weighing. A pensive
figure is that in which a person appears to be holding
an invisible balance of reflection. “Bumper” is a corruption
of <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">le bon père</i>, meaning “the Holy Father,” or
Pope, who was once the great toast of every feast.
As this was commonly the first toast, it was considered
that the glasses would be desecrated by being again
used.</p>

<p>“Nice” is derived by some etymologists from the Anglo-Saxon,
<i>hnesc</i>, soft, effeminate; but there is good reason
for believing that it is from the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">nescius</i>, ignorant,
“Wise, and nothing nice,” says Chaucer; that is, no wise
ignorant. If so, it is a curious instance of the extraordinary
changes of meaning which words undergo, that
“nice” should come to signify accurate or fastidious, which
implies knowledge and taste rather than ignorance. The
explanation is, that the diffidence of ignorance resembles
the fastidious slowness of discernment. “Gibberish” is
from a famous sage, Giber, an Arab, who sought for the
philosopher’s stone, and used, perhaps, senseless incantations.
“Alert” is a picturesque word from the Italian,
<i lang="it" xml:lang="it">all’ erte</i>,&mdash;on the mound or rampart. The “alert” man
is one who is wide-awake and watchful, like the warder on
the watch-tower, or the sentinel upon the rampart. “By-laws”
are not, etymologically, laws of inferior importance,
but the laws of “byes” or towns, as distinguished from
the general laws of a kingdom. “By” is Danish for town<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[395]</a></span>
or village; as “Whitby,” White Town, “Derby,” Deer
Town, etc.</p>

<p>A writer in “Notes and Queries” suggests that the
word “snobs” may be of classical origin, derived from
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">sine obola</i>, without a penny. It is not probable, however,
that it was meant as a sneer at poverty only. A more
ingenious suggestion is that, as the higher classes were
called “nobs,”&mdash;<em>i.e.</em>, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">nobilitas</i>, the nobility,&mdash;the “s-nobs”
were those <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">sine nobilitate</i>, without any blue blood in their
veins, or pure aristocratic breeding. “Humbug” is an
expressive word, about the origin of which etymologists
are disagreed. An ingenious explanation, not given in the
dictionaries, is, that it is derived from “Hume of the Bog,”
a Scotch laird, so called from his estate, who lived during
the reign of William and Anne. He was celebrated in
Edinburgh circles for his marvellous stories, which, in the
exhausting draughts they made on his hearer’s credulity,
out-Munchausened Munchausen. Hence, any tough story
was called “a regular Hume of the Bog,” or, by contraction,
“Humbug.” Another etymology of “humbug” is a
piece of Hamburg news; <em>i.e.</em>, a Stock Exchange canard.
Webster derives the word from “hum,” to impose on, deceive,
and “bug” a frightful object, a bugbear. Wedgwood
thinks it may come from the union of “hum” and
“buzz,” signifying sound without sense. He cites a catch,
set by Dr. Arne in “Notes and Queries”:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“‘Buzz,’ quoth the blue fly,</p>
<p class="verse2">‘Hum,’ quoth the bee,</p>
<p class="verse0">‘Buzz’ and ‘hum’ they cry.</p>
<p class="verse2">And so do we.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>“Imbecile” is from the Latin, <em>in</em> and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">bacillum</i>, a walking
stick; one who through infirmity leans for support<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[396]</a></span>
upon a stick. “Petrels” are little Peters, because, like
the apostles, they can walk on the water. “Hocus pocus”
is a corruption of <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Hoc est corpus</i>, “this is the body,” words
once used in necromancy or jugglery. “Chagrin” is primarily
a hard, granulated leather, which chafes the limbs;
hence, secondarily, irritation or vexation. “Canon” is
from a Greek word meaning “cane”; first a hollow rule
or a cane used as a measure, then a law or rule. The
word is identical with “cannon,” so called from its hollow,
tube-like form. Hence it has been wittily said that the
world in the Middle Ages was governed first by canons,
and then by cannons,&mdash;first, by Saint Peter, and then by
saltpetre.</p>

<p>“Booby” primarily denotes a person who gapes and
stares about, wondering at everything. From the syllable
“ba,” representing the opening of the mouth, are formed
the French words <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">baier</i>, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">béer</i>, to gape, and thence in the
patois of the Hainault, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">baia</i>, the mouth, and figuratively
one who stands staring with open mouth, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">boubié</i>. Webster
thinks the word is derived from the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">boubie</i>, a waterfowl.
“Pet,” a darling, is from the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">petit</i>, which
comes from the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">petitus</i>, sought after. “My pet”
means literally “my sought after or desired one.” “Petty”
is also from the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">petit</i>, little. “Assassin” is derived
from the Persian, <i>hashish</i>, an intoxicating opiate. “The
Assassins” were a tribe of fanatics, who lived in the
mountains of Lebanon, and executed with terror and
subtlety every order entrusted to them by their chief, the
“Old Man of the Mountain.” They made a jest of torture
when seized, and were the terror alike of Turk and
Christian. They resembled the Thugs of India. “Blunderbuss”
(properly thunder-buss) is from the German<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[397]</a></span>
<i lang="de" xml:lang="de">büchse</i>, applied to a rifle, a box; hence “arquebuss” and
“Brown Bess.” “Bosh” is derived, according to some
etymologists, from a Turkish word meaning “empty,”&mdash;according
to others, from the German, <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">bosse</i>, a joke or
trifle. Mr. Blackley, in his “Word-Gossip,” says it is the
pure gypsy word for “fiddle,” which suggests the semi-sanctioned
“fiddle-de-dee!” “Person” primarily meant
an actor. The Roman theatres, which could hold thirty
to forty thousand spectators, were so large that the actors
wore masks containing a contrivance to render the voice
louder. Such a mask was called <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">persona</i> (<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">per sonare</i>, to
sound through), because the voice sounded through it. By
a common figure of speech, the word meaning “mask”
(<em>persona</em>) was afterward applied to its wearer; so <em>persona</em>
came to signify “actor.” But as all men are actors, playing
each his part on the stage of life, the word “person”
came afterward to signify a man or woman. “Parson”
the “chief person” of a parish, is another form of the
same word. “Curmudgeon” is probably from “corn-merchant,”
one who tries to enrich himself by hoarding
grain and withholding it from others; or it may
be from the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">cœur</i>, the heart, and <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">méchant</i>,
wicked. “Haberdasher” is from the German, <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Habt
ihr das hier?</i> <em>i.e.</em>, Have you this here? “Hoax” is
from the Anglo-Saxon, <i>husc</i>, mockery or contempt; or,
perhaps it is from “hocuspocus,” which was at one time
used to ridicule the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.</p>

<p>“Right” is from the Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">rectus</i>, ruled, proceeding in a
straight line; “wrong” is the perfect participle of “wring,”
that which has been “wrung” or wrested from the right;
just as in French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">tort</i> is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">torqueo</i>, that which is twisted.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[398]</a></span>
“Humble-pie” is properly “umble-pie.” The umbles were
the entrails or coarser parts of the deer, the perquisite of
the keeper or huntsman. “Pantaloon” is from the Italian,
<i lang="it" xml:lang="it">piante leone</i> (<em>panta-leone</em>, <em>pantaloon</em>), “the Planter of the
Lion”; <em>i.e.</em>, the Standard-Bearer of Venice. The Lion
of St. Mark was the standard of Venice. “Pantaloon” was
a masked character in the Italian comedy, the butt of the
play, who wore breeches and stockings that were all of one
piece. The Spanish language has <i lang="es" xml:lang="es">pañalon</i>, a slovenly fellow
whose shirt hangs out of his breeches. “Cheat” is from
the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">cadere</i>, to fall. The word “escheats” first denoted
lands that “fell” to the crown by forfeiture. The
“escheatours,” who certified these to the Exchequer, practised
so much fraud, that, by a natural transition, the “escheatour”
passed into “cheater,” and “escheat” into
“cheat.”</p>

<p>“Salary” is from the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">sal</i>, salt, which in the
reign of the Emperor Augustus comprised the provisions, as
well as the pay, of the Roman military officers. From
“salary” came, probably, the expression, “He is not worth
his ‘salt,’” that is, his pay or wages. “Kidnap” is from the
German <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">kind</i>, or Provincial English, <em>kid</em>, meaning “child,”
and <em>nap</em> or <em>nab</em>, “to steal,”&mdash;to steal children. “Hawk,”
in Anglo-Saxon, <i>hafoc</i>, points to the havoc which that bird
makes among the smaller ones; as “raven” expresses the
greedy or “ravenous” disposition of the bird so named.
“Owl” is said to be the past participle of “to yell” (as in
Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ulula</i>, the screech-owl, is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ululare</i>), and differs
from “howl” only in its spelling. “Solecism” is from <em>Soli</em>,
a town of Cilicia, the people of which corrupted the pure
Greek. “Squirrel” is from two Greek words, <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">σκία</span>, a shade,
and <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">οὐρά</span>, a tail. “Sycophant” is primarily a “fig-shower”;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[399]</a></span>
one who informed the public officers of Attica that the law
against the exportation of figs had been violated. Hence
the word came to mean a common informer, a mean
parasite. “Parasite,” from the Greek <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">παρά</span>, beside, and
<span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">σῖτος</span>, food, means literally one who eats at the table of
another,&mdash;a privilege which is apt to be paid for by
obsequiousness and flattery.</p>

<p>“Sarcasm,” from the Greek, <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">σάρξ</span>, flesh, and <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">κάζω</span>, I tear, is
literally a tearing of the flesh. “Tribulation” is from the
Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">tribulum</i>, a kind of sledge or heavy roller, which did
the work of the English flail, by hard grinding and wearing,
instead of by repeated light strokes. Troubles, afflictions
and sorrows being the divinely appointed means for separating
the chaff from the wheat of men’s natures,&mdash;the
light and trivial from the solid and valuable,&mdash;the early
Christians, by a rustic but familiar metaphor, called these
sorrows and trials “tribulations,” threshings of the inner
spiritual man, by which only could he be fitted for the
heavenly garner. As Wither beautifully sings:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Till the mill the grains in pieces tear,</p>
<p class="verse0">The richness of the flour will scarce appear;</p>
<p class="verse0">So till men’s persons great afflictions touch,</p>
<p class="verse0">If worth be found, their worth is not much;</p>
<p class="verse0">Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet</p>
<p class="verse0">That value, which in threshing they may get.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>“Tabby,” a familiar name of cats, is the French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">tabis</i>,
which comes from the Persian <i>retabi</i>, a rich watered silk,
and denotes the wavy bars upon their coats. “Schooner”
has a curious derivation. In 1713 Captain Andrew Robinson
launched the first vessel of this kind, with gaffs instead
of the lateen yards until then in use, and the luff of the sail
bent to hoops on the mast. As she slipped down the ways
a bystander exclaimed, “Oh, how she ‘scoons’!”&mdash;whereupon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[400]</a></span>
the builder, catching at the word, replied, “A
‘scooner’ let her be!” Originally the word was spelled
without the <em>h</em>. “Supercilious,” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">supercilium</i>, the eyebrow,
is literally knitting the eyebrows in pride. “Slave”
chronicles the contest between the Teutonic and Sclavonic
or Slavonic races. When a German captured a Russian or
Bohemian, he would call him a “sclave” or “slave,” whereby
the word became associated with the idea of servitude. In
Oriental France, in the eighth century, princes and bishops
were rich in these captives.</p>

<p>“Servant” is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">servus</i>, which the Justinian code
derives from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">serrare</i>, to preserve,&mdash;because the victor preserved
his captives alive, instead of killing them.</p>

<p>“Scrupulous” is from the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">scrupulus</i>, a small,
sharp stone, such as might get into a Roman traveller’s
open shoe, and distress him, whence the further meaning
of doubts, or a source of doubt and hesitation. Afterward
the word came to express a measure of weight, the twenty-fourth
part of an ounce; and hence to be scrupulous is
to pay minute, nice, and exact attention to matters often in
themselves of small weight. “Plagiarism” is literally
“man-stealing.” As books are one’s mental offspring, the
word came naturally to mean, first, the stealing of a book
or manuscript which the thief published as his own; secondly,
quoting from another man’s writings without
acknowledgment. “Parlor,” from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">parler</i>, to speak, is,
therefore, the “talking room,” as “boudoir,” from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">bouder</i>, to
pout, is literally the “pouting-room.” “Egregious” is from
the Latin <em>ex</em>, from, and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">grege</i>, flock or herd. An “egregious”
lie is one distinguished from the common herd of
lies, such as one meets with in every patent-medicine<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[401]</a></span>
advertisement and political newspaper. “Negotiate” is
from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">negotior</i>, compounded of <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ne ego otior</i>, I am not idle.</p>

<p>The origin of the word “caucus” has long been a vexed
question with etymologists. Till recently it was supposed
by many to be a corruption of “caulkers,” being derived
from an association of these men in Boston, who met to
organize resistance to England just before the revolutionary
war. Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, of Hartford,
Connecticut, has suggested a new and ingenious derivation
of the term, which is more satisfactory, and probably
correct. Strachey, in his “Historie of Travaile into Virginia,”
1610-12 (printed by the Hakluyt Society, 1849),
says that the Chechahamanias, a free people, acknowledging
the supremacy of Powhatan, were governed, not by a
<i>weroance</i>, commander, sent by Powhatan, but by their
priests, with the assistance of their elders; and this board
was called <i>cawcawwas</i>. Captain John Smith writes <em>cockerouse</em>
for <em>cawcawwas</em>, in the sense of “captain”; but the English
generally understood it in the sense of “counsellor,”
and adopted it from the Indians, as Beverley states that it
designates “one that has the honor to be of the king’s or
queen’s council,” a provincial councillor, just as northern
politicians now use the word <em>sachem</em>, and formerly used
<em>mugwomp</em>. The verb from which <em>cawcawwas</em>, or <em>cockerouse</em>
comes, means primarily “to talk to,”&mdash;hence to
“harangue,” “advise,” “encourage,” and is found in all
Algonquin dialects, as Abnaki <i>kakesoo</i>, to incite, and Chippeway
<i>gaganso</i> (<em>n</em> nasal), to exhort, urge, counsel. <em>Cawcawwas</em>,
representing the adjective form of this verb, is
“one who advises, promotes,”&mdash;a caucuser. “Manumit”
is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">manus</i>, hand, and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">mittere</i>, to dismiss,&mdash;to dismiss
a slave with a slap of the hand, on setting him free.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[402]</a></span>
“Hypocrite” comes from a Greek word signifying one who
feigns or plays a part on the stage. “Kennel,” a dog
house, is from the Italian, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">canile</i>, and this from the Latin,
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">canis</i>, a dog. “Kennel,” in the sense of gutter, with its
kindred words, “can,” “cane,” and “channel,” is derived
from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">canna</i>, a cane, which is like a tube.</p>

<p>“Apple-pie order” is a popular phrase of which few
persons know the meaning. Does it signify in order, or
in disorder? A writer in the “North British Review”
favors the latter interpretation. He thinks it has nothing
to do with “apple” or “pie,” in the common sense of those
words. He believes that it is a typographical term, and
that it was originally “Chapel pie.” A printing house
was, and is to this day, called a chapel,&mdash;perhaps from the
Chapel at Westminster Abbey, in which Caxton’s earliest
works are said to have been printed; and “pie” is type
after it is “distributed” or broken up, and before it has
been re-sorted. “‘Pie’ in this sense came from the confused
and <em>perplexing rules of the ‘Pie,’ that is, the order for
finding the lessons, in Catholic times</em>, which those who have
read, or care to read, the Preface to the ‘Book of Common
Prayer,’ will find there expressed and denounced. Here
is the passage: ‘Moreover the number and hardness of
the rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of
the service, was the cause that to turn the book only was
so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was
more business to find out what should be read than to
read it when it was found out.’ To leave your type in
‘pie’ is to leave it unsorted and in confusion, and ‘apple-pie
order,’ which we take to be ‘chapel-pie order,’ is to
leave anything in a thorough mess. Those who like to
take the other side, and assert that ‘apple-pie order’<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[403]</a></span>
means in perfect order, may still find their derivation in
‘chapel-pie’; for the ordering and sorting of the ‘pie’ or
type is enforced in every ‘chapel’ or printing-house by
severe fines, and so ‘chapel-pie order’ would be such order
of the type as the best friends of the chapel would wish
to see.” “The bitter end,” a phrase often heard during
the late civil war, has a remarkable etymology. A ship’s
cable has always two ends. One end is fastened to the
anchor and the other to the “bits,” or “bitts,” a frame
of two strong pieces of timber fixed perpendicularly in
the fore part of the ship, for the express purpose of
holding the cables. Hence the “bitter,” or “bitter
end,” is the end fastened to the bitts; and when the cable
is out to the “bitter end,” it is all out; the extremity
has come.</p>

<p>Few persons who utter the word “stranger,” suspect that
it has its root in the single vowel <em>e</em>, the Latin preposition for
“from,” which it no more resembles than a bird resembles
an egg. The links in the chain are,&mdash;<em>e</em>, <em>ex</em>, <em>extra</em>, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">extraneus</i>,
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">étranger</i>, <em>stranger</em>. When a boy answers a lady, “Yes’m,”
he does not dream that his “m” is a fragment of the five
syllables, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">mea domina</i> (“madonna,” “madame,” “madam,”
“ma’am” “’m”). The French word <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">même</i> is a striking
illustration of what philologists call “phonetic change,”
which sometimes “eats away the whole body of a word, and
leaves nothing behind but decayed fragments.” Who would
believe that <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">même</i> contains the Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">semetipsissimus</i>? The
words “thrall” and “thraldom” have an interesting history.
They come to us from a period when it was customary
to “thrill” (or drill) the ear of a slave in token of
servitude; and hence the significance of Sir Thomas
Browne’s remark, “Bow not to the omnipotency of gold, nor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[404]</a></span>
‘bore’ thy ear to its servitude.” The expression “‘signing’
one’s name” takes us back to an age when most persons
made their mark or “sign.” We must not suppose that
this practice was then, as now, a proof of the ignorance of
the signer. Among the Saxons, not only illiterate persons
made this sign, but, as an attestation of the good faith of
the person signing, the mark of the cross was required to be
attached to the name of those who could write. From its
holy association, it was the symbol of an oath; and hence
the expression “God save the mark!” which so long puzzled
the commentators of Shakespeare, is now understood
to be a form of ejaculation resembling an oath. It is
said that Charlemagne, being unable to write, was compelled
to dip the forefinger of his glove in ink, and smear
it over the parchment when it was necessary that the
imperial sign-manual should be fixed to an edict. “Window”
is a corruption of “wind-door,”&mdash;door to let in the
wind.</p>

<p>The word “handkerchief” is curiously fashioned. “Kerchief,”
the first form of the word, is from the French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">couvre-chef</i>,
“a head-covering.” If to “kerchief”, we prefix
“hand,” we have a “hand-head-covering,” or a covering for
the head held in the hand, which is palpably absurd; but
when we qualify this word by “neck” or “pocket,” we
reach the climax beyond which confusion can no farther go.
How a covering for the “head” is to be held in the “hand,”
and yet carried in the “pocket,” it requires a more than
ordinarily vivid imagination to conceive. “Constable” is
derived from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">comes stabuli</i>, or “Count of the stable,” who
formerly had charge of the king’s horses. “Bib” is from
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">bibere</i>, to drink, the tucker being used to save the child’s
clothes from whatever may be spilt when it is bibbing.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[405]</a></span></p>

<p>“Dollar” is the German <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">thaler</i>, which is an abbreviation of
<i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Joachemsthaler</i>, the valley where it was coined.</p>

<p>“Host,” an army, or a multitude, is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">hostis</i>; “host,”
an entertainer, is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">hospes</i>; “host,” a sacrifice, is from
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">hostia</i>. The word “rostrum” is from the Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">rostra</i>, the
beak of a ship. After the submission of the Latins, 334
B.C., the vessels of Antium having been burnt, their beaks
were made to adorn the tribune in the Forum. From that
time the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">rostra</i> became the indispensable decoration of the
Forum, and hence the name “rostrum” to denote a platform
for orators. “Verdict” is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">veredictum</i>, truly
said. “Palliate” is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">pallium</i>, a cloak. “Carat” is
from the Arabic <i>kaura</i>, a bean, the standard weight for
diamonds. “Salmon” is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">saliendo</i>, which points to the
“leaps” it makes. A “cur,” from the Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">curtus</i>, is a
curtailed dog, whose tail has been cut off for straying in
the woods; a “terrier” is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">terrarius</i>, an earth-dog;
a “spaniel” is a Spanish dog; a “mongrel” is a dog
of mingled breed; and the mastiff guards the <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">maison</i>,
or house. A horse is called a “pony” when puny; a
“hack” from “hackney;” and the lady’s horse was called
a “palfrey,” because it was led <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">par le frein</i>, or by the
rein.</p>

<p>A “palace” is so called from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Collis Palatinus</i>, one of the
seven hills of Rome, which was itself called Palatinus, from
<em>Pales</em>, a pastoral deity. On this hill stood the “Golden
House” of Nero, which was called the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Palatium</i>, and
became the type of the palaces of all the kings and emperors
of Europe. The word “court” had its origin in the
same locality and in the same distant age. It was on the
hills of Latium that <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">cohors</i> or <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">cors</i> was first used in the
sense of a “hurdle,” an “enclosure,” a “cattle yard.” The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[406]</a></span>
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">cohortes</i>, or divisions of the Roman army, were thus named,
so many soldiers forming a pen or a court. <em>Cors</em>, <em>cortis</em>,
became in mediæval Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">curtis</i>, and was used to denote a
farm, or a castle built by a Roman settler in the provinces,
and finally a royal residence, or palace. That a word originally
meaning “cow-pen,” or “cattle-yard,” should assume
the meaning of “palace,” and give rise to such derivatives
as “courteous,” “courtesy,” and “to court,” that is, to pay
attentions, or to propose marriage, is a striking example of the
strange transformations which words undergo in the course
of ages. The “Court of the Star Chamber,” so odious in
English history, derived its name from the ceiling of the
room where it sat, which was dotted with stars. “Pontiff”
has an almost equally humble origin. It is from the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Pons
Sublicius</i>, which Ancus Marcus placed on wooden joists, and
which was rebuilt by the censor Æmilius Lepidus in the
reign of the second of the Cæsars,&mdash;the bridge which Horatius
Cocles defended, and whose construction, preservation,
and maintenance were confided to the college of priests,&mdash;that
the word “pontiff” is derived. The word “exchequer”
comes, according to Blackstone, from the “checked” cloth
that covered the table behind which the money-changers
sat. “Suffrage” is from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">suffragium</i>, a broken piece or
potsherd, used by the ancients in voting in their assemblies.
“Easter” is from the Anglo-Saxon, <i>Eastre</i> (German,
<i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Ostara</i>), a heathen goddess whose feast was celebrated in
the spring. Remains of the old pagan worship have survived
in Easter eggs, yule logs, and, on the Continent of
Europe, Whitsun fires.</p>

<p>“Mystery,” something secret or unknown, comes from
<em>mu</em>, the imitation of closing the lips; but “mystery,”
in the Mystery Plays, such as continue to be performed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[407]</a></span>
at Ammergan, in Bavaria, is a corruption of
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ministerium</i>; it meant a religious ministry, or service,
had nothing to do with mystery, and should be spelled
with an <em>i</em>, and not with a <em>y</em>. “Puny” is from the French
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">puis-né</i>, “since born,” hence, by metaphor, sickly, inferior,
diminutive. From the same source is derived “puisne”
(that is, younger, or inferior) judge. The phrase “True
Blue,” applied to the Presbyterians, is said by Dean Stanley
to be owing to the distinct dress of the Scotch Presbyterian
clergy, which at one time was a blue gown and a
broad blue bonnet. The Episcopal clergy <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'either were no'">either wore no</ins>
distinctive dress in public services, or wore a black gown.
The Rev. Dr. Murray, however, in an address before the
Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, gave a different
explanation of the phrase: “A Scotchman once told
me that when we were persecuted as a denomination, the
minister was wont to go to the mountains, and when there
was to be a communion a blue flag was held up as a signal
or notice, and also as an invitation to attend, and some
regard this as the origin of the term; but on a visit to
Pompeii, a few years ago, I spent some time in inspecting
the splendid frescoes of variegated hues. I found all
colors had faded except the blue, and that was as bright
as when first put on, though nearly two thousand years
previously. The ‘true blue’ never gives out,&mdash;never
changes. So, when we say of a man ‘he is true blue,’ it
is equivalent to saying he is firm in and true to his principles.”
“France” owes its name to the Franks, who
conquered her native Celts. The word <em>Franc</em> comes, according
to a German philologist, either from the Teutonic
<i>franhô</i>, “bold,” “frank,” or from <i>franca</i>, a sharp, double-edged
battle-axe, which the Franks hurled with great dexterity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[408]</a></span>
in attacking their enemies. From <em>Franc</em> are derived
our words “franchise” and “enfranchisement.”</p>

<p>One of the most interesting classes of common words
with curious derivations is that of the names of things or
acts which were once names of persons. Language teems
in this way with honors to the great and good men who
have been benefactors of their race; and it also avenges
the wrongs of humanity by impaling the very names of
the wrong-doers in a perpetual crucifixion. Many words of
this class betray their origin at once. It is easy to recognize
Tantalus in “to tantalize,” Epicurus in “epicure,”
Mesmer in “mesmerism,” Gordius in the “gordian” knot
which Alexander cut, Galvani in “galvanism,” Volta in
the “voltaic” pile, Daguerre in “daguerreotype,” and McAdam
and Burke in “to macadamize” and “to burke.”
But when we read or hear of a work on “algebra,” or of
a person who has uttered “gibberish,” we get no hint, at
first, of Giber or Geber, the famous Arabian sage, who
sought for the philosopher’s stone, and used, perhaps,
senseless incantations. “Artesian,” applied to a well,
does not inform us that such a well was first cut through
the chalk basin of the province of Artois. We speak of a
“dun” without suspecting that the word came from the
name of a stern bailiff in the time of Henry VII, one
Dun, who was eminently successful in collecting debts.
We hear of a “maudlin” speech without thinking of
Mary Magdalen; of a “lazaretto,” without being reminded
of Lazarus; of “simony” without a suggestion
of Simon Magus; and of “silhouettes,” without a suspicion
that it was the unpopular French minister of finance,
M. de Silhouette, whose persistent economy doomed his
name to be affixed to the slight and cheap outline portraits<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[409]</a></span>
thus named. “Martinet” does not recall the rigid
disciplinarian in the army of Louis XIV, nor does a
“tram-road” point very plainly to Outram, the inventor.
In “saunterer” we do not readily detect <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">La Sainte Terre</i>,
“the Holy Land,” the pilgrims to which took their own
time to get there; nor would a “pander” ever remind us
of the Trojan general Pandarus, or “tawdry” of the fair
of St. Etheldreda, or St. Awdry, where gaudy finery was
sold. “Music,” “museum,” and “mosaic,” do not inevitably
suggest the Muses, nor does a “pasquinade” tell us
about the statue of an ancient gladiator which was exhumed
at Rome, in the peculiar physiognomy of which
the wits of that city detected a resemblance to Pasquino,
a snappish cobbler, who lived near by, and on the pedestal
of which it became a practice to post lampoons. Few men
think of Jaque, of Beauvais, as they put on “jackets”;
of Blacket, who first manufactured the article, when they
lie under “blankets”; or of Hermes Trismegistus, the
Egyptian priest, when they “hermetically” seal a bottle or
fruit can. Excepting the readers of Pascal, it is probable
that not many Frenchmen detect in the word <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">escobarder</i>,
“to equivocate,” the name of the great casuist of the Jesuits,
Escobar, whose subtle devices for the evasion of the moral
law have been immortalized in the “Provincial Letters.”</p>

<p>Vulcan is still at his forge in “volcanoes,” and has even
descended so low as to “vulcanize” rubber; and though
“Great Pan is dead,” he comes to life again in every
“panic.” A “sandwich” calls to mind Lord Sandwich,
the inveterate gamester, who begrudged the time necessary
for a meal; and the “spencer” recalls Lord Spencer, who
in hunting lost one skirt of his coat, and tore off the
other,&mdash;which led some inventive genius to make half-coats,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[410]</a></span>
and call them “spencers.” Of the two noble lords
it has been said that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“The one invented half a coat,</p>
<p class="verse2">The other half a dinner.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Epic and dramatic poetry, and fiction generally, have
added much to the force and suggestiveness of speech.
What apt and expressive terms are “utopian”<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> (from the
name given by Sir Thomas More to his imaginary island),
and “quixotic”! With what other words could we supply
the place of Dean Swift’s “liliputian” and “brobdingnagian,”
Kenny’s “Jeremy Diddler,” or Dickens’s “pickwickian”
and “Circumlocution Office”? What convenient
terms are “thrasonical,” from Thraso, the braggart of the
Roman comedy, and “rodomontade,” from Rodamonte, a
hero of Boiardo, who, strange to say, does not brag and
bluster, as the word based on his name seems to imply!
It is said that Boiardo, when he had hit upon the name
of his hero, had the village bells rung for joy. To Homer
we are indebted for “stentorian,” that is, loud-voiced, from
Stentor, the Greek herald, whose voice surpassed the united
shout of fifty men; and for the word “to hector,” founded
on the big talk of the Trojan hero.</p>

<p>The language of savages teems with expressions of deep
interest both to the philologist and the student of human
nature. Speech with them is a perpetual creation of utterances
to image forth the total picture in their minds.
The Indian “does not analyze his thoughts or separate his
utterances; his thoughts rush forth in a troop. His speech
is as a kindling cloud, not as radiant points of light.”
The Lenni Lenape Indians express by one polysyllable
what with us requires seven monosyllables and <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'three dissyllables'">three disyllables</ins>,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[411]</a></span>
viz.: “Come with the canoe and take us across
the river.” This polysyllable is <i>nadholineen</i>, and it is
formed by taking parts of several words and cementing
them into one. In the Iroquois language one word of
twenty-one letters expresses this sentence of eighteen
words: “I give some money to those who have arrived,
in order to buy them more clothes with it.” The apparent
wealth of synonyms and of grammatical forms in savage
languages is due, not to the mental superiority of the races
that speak them, but to their inferiority,&mdash;their deficiency
in the power of abstraction. “The more barbarous a
language,” says Herder, “the greater is the number of its
conjugations.” We must not suppose that simplicity in
language precedes complexity: simplicity is the triumph
of science, not the spontaneous result of intelligence. The
natives of the Society Isles have one word for the tail of a
dog, another for the tail of a bird, and a third for the tail
of a sheep, while for “tail” itself, “tail” in the abstract,
they have no word whatever. The Mohicans have words
for wood-cutting, cutting the head, etc., yet no verb meaning
simply to cut. Even the Anglo-Saxon language, which
had a sufficiency of words for all shades of green, red,
blue, yellow, had to borrow from the Latin the abstract
word “color,” and, while possessing abundant names for
every sort of crime, derived from the same source the
abstract words “crime” and “transgression.”</p>

<p>Some Indian tribes call a squirrel by a name signifying
that he “can stick fast in a tree”; a mole, by a word
signifying “carrying the right hand on the left shoulder”;
and they have a name for a horse which means “having
only one toe.” Among the savages of the Pacific, “to
think” is “to speak in the stomach.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[412]</a></span></p>


<h3 class="smallh3"><a name="WIE" id="WIE"></a>WORDS OF ILLUSIVE ETYMOLOGY.</h3>

<p>In the lapse of ages words undergo great changes of
form, so that it becomes at last difficult or impossible to
ascertain their origin. Terms, of which the composition
was originally clear, are worn and rubbed by use like the
pebbles which are fretted and rounded into shape and
smoothness by the sea waves or by a rapid stream. Like
the image and superscription of a coin, their meaning is
often so worn away that one cannot make even a probable
guess at their origin. One of the commonest causes of the
corruptions of words, by which their sources and original
meanings are disguised, is the instinctive dislike we feel
to the use of a word that is wholly new to us, and the
consequent tendency to fasten upon it a meaning which
shall remove its seemingly arbitrary character. Foreign
words, therefore, when adopted into a language, are especially
liable to these changes, being corrupted both in
pronunciation and orthography. By thus anglicizing them,
we not only avoid the uncouth, barbarous sounds which
are so offensive to the ear, but we help the memory by
associating the words with others already known.</p>

<p>The mistakes which have been made in attempting to
trace the origin of words thus disguised, have done not
a little, at times, to bring philology into contempt. The
philologist, unless he has much native good sense, and
rules his inclinations with an iron rod, is apt to become
a verbomaniac. There is a strange fascination in word-hunting,
and his hobby-horse, it has been aptly said, is
a strong goer that trifles never balk. “To him the British
Channel is a surface drain, the Alps and Apennines mere
posts and rails, the Mediterranean a simple brook, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[413]</a></span>
the Himalayas only an outlying cover.” Cowper justly
ridicules those word-hunters who, in their eagerness to
make some startling discovery, never pause to consider
whether there is any historic connection between two
languages, one of which is supposed to have borrowed a
word from another,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse6">“Learned philologists, who chase</p>
<p class="verse0">A panting syllable through time and space,</p>
<p class="verse0">Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,</p>
<p class="verse0">To Gaul,&mdash;to Greece,&mdash;and into Noah’s ark.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>A fundamental rule, to be kept constantly in sight by
those who would not etymologize at random, is, that no
amount of resemblance between words in different languages
is sufficient to prove their relationship, nor is any
amount of seeming unlikeness in sound or form sufficient
to disprove their consanguinity. Many etymologies are
true which appear improbable, and many appear probable
which are not true. As Max Müller says: “Sound etymology
has nothing to do with sound. We know words
to be of the same origin which have not a single letter
in common, and which differ in meaning as much as black
and white.” On the other hand, two words which have
identically the same letters may have no etymological
connection. An instance of the last case is the French
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">souris</i>, a smile, and <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">souris</i>, a mouse, from the Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">subridere</i>
and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">sorex</i> respectively. Fuller amusingly says that
“we are not to infer the Hebrew and the English to be
cognate languages because one of the giants, son of Anak,
was called <i>A-hi-man</i>;” yet some of his own etymologies,
though witty and ingenious, are hardly more correct than
this punning derivation. Thus “compliments,” he says, is
derived from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">à completè mentiri</i>, because compliments are
in general completely mendacious; and he quotes approvingly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[414]</a></span>
Sir John Harrington’s derivation of the old English
“elf” and “goblin,” from the names of two political
factions of the Empire, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.</p>

<p>Archbishop Trench speaks of an eminent philologist
who deduced “girl” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">garrula</i>, girls being commonly
talkative. “Frontispiece” is usually regarded as a piece
or picture in front of a book; whereas it means literally
“a front view,” being from the Low Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">frontispicium</i>,
the forefront of a house. The true origin of many words
is hidden by errors in the spelling. “Bran-new” is brand-new,
<em>i.e.</em>, “burnt new.” “Grocer” should be “grosser,”
one who sells in the gross; “pigmy” is properly “pygmy,”
as Worcester spells it, and means a thing the size
of one’s fist (<span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">πυγμή</span>). “Policy,” state-craft, is rightly
spelled; but “policies of insurance” ought to have the
<em>ll</em>, the word being derived from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">polliceor</i>, to promise
or assure. “Island” looks as if it were compounded of
“isle” and “land”; but it is the same word as the Anglo-Saxon
<i>ealand</i>, water-land, compounded of <em>ea</em>, water, and
“land.” So Jers<em>ey</em> is literally “Cæsar’s island.” “Lieutenant”
has been pronounced “leftenant,” from a notion
that this officer holds the “left” of the line while the
captain holds the right. The word comes from the French,
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">lieu-tenant</i>, one holding the place of another.</p>

<p>“Wiseacre” has no connection with “acre.” The word
is a corruption, both in spelling and pronunciation, of the
German <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">weissarger</i>, a “wise-sayer,” or sayer of wise maxims.
“Gooseberry,” Dr. Johnson explains as “a fruit eaten as
a sauce for goose.” It is, however, a corruption of the
German, <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">krausbeere</i>,&mdash;from <i>kraus</i> or <i>gorse</i>, crisp; and the
fruit gets its name from the upright hairs with which it
is covered. “Shame-faced” does not mean having a face<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[415]</a></span>
denoting shame. It is from the Anglo-Saxon, <i>sceamfaest</i>,
protected by shame. “Surname” is from the French,
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">surnom</i>, meaning additional name, and should not, therefore,
be spelled “sirname,” as if it meant the name of
one’s sire. “Freemason” is not half Saxon, but is from
the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">frèremaçon</i>, brother mason. “Foolscap” is a
corruption of the Italian, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">foglio capo</i>, a full-sized sheet
of paper. “Country-dance” is a corruption of the French
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">contre-danse</i>, in which the partners stand in opposite lines.</p>

<p>“Bishop,” which looks like an Anglo-Saxon word, is
from the Greek. It means primarily an overseer, in Latin
<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">episcopus</i>, which the Saxons broke down into “biscop,”
and then softened into “bishop.” There was formerly an
adjective “bishoply”; but as, after the Norman Conquest,
the bishops, and those who discussed their rights and
duties, used French and Latin rather than English, “episcopal”
has taken its place. Among the foreign words
most frequently corrupted are the names of plants, which
gardeners, not understanding, change into words that
sound like the true ones, and with which they are familiar.
In their new costume they often lose all their original
significance and beauty. To this source of corruption we
owe such words as “dandelion,” from the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">dent de
lion</i>, lion’s tooth; “rosemary,” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ros marinus</i>; “quarter-sessions
rose,” the meaningless name of the beautiful
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">rose des quatre saisons</i>; “Jerusalem artichoke,” into which,
with a ludicrous disregard for geography, we have metamorphosed
the sunflower artichoke, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">articiocco girasole</i>,
which came to us from Pery, through Italy; and “sparrow-grass,”
which we have substituted for “asparagus.”</p>

<p>Animals have fared no better than plants; the same
dislike of outlandish words, which are meaningless to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[416]</a></span>
them, leads sailors to corrupt Bellerophon into “Billy
Ruffian,” and hostlers to convert Othello and Desdemona
into “Odd Fellow and Thursday morning,” and Lamprocles
into “Lamb and Pickles.” The <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">souris dormeuse</i>,
or sleeping mouse, has been transformed into a “dormouse”;
the hog-fish, or <em>porcpisce</em>, as Spenser terms him,
is disguised as a “porpoise”; and the French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">écrevisse</i>
turns up a “crayfish” or “crawfish.” The transformations
of the latter word, which has passed through three languages
before attaining its present form, are among the
most surprising feats of verbal legerdemain. Starting on
its career as the old High German <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">krebiz</i>, it next appears
in English as “crab,” and in German as <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">krebs</i>, or “crab,”
from the grabbing or clutching action of the animal.
Next it crosses the Rhine, and becomes the French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">écrevisse</i>;
then crosses the Channel, and takes the form of <em>krevys</em>;
and, last of all, with a double effort at anglicizing, it
appears in modern English as “crawfish” or “crayfish.”
The last two words noticed illustrate the tendency which
is so strong, in the corruption of words, to invent new
forms which shall be appropriate as well as significant,
other examples of which we have in “wormwood” from
<i lang="de" xml:lang="de">wermuth</i>, “lanthorn” from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">laterna</i>, “beefeater” from
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">buffetier</i>, “rakehell” from <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">racaille</i>, “catchrogue” from the
Norman-French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">cachreau</i>, a bum-bailiff, and “shoot” for
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">chute</i>, a fall or rapid. So the French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">beffroi</i>, a stronghold
or tower,&mdash;a movable tower of several stories used in
besieging,&mdash;has been corrupted into “belfry,” though there
is no such French word as “bell.”</p>

<p>Often the corrupted form gives birth to a wholly false
explanation. Thus in the proverbial <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">dormir comme une
taupe</i>, which has been twisted into the phrase “to sleep<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[417]</a></span>
like a top,” there is no trace of the mole; and the corruption
of <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">acheter</i>, to buy, into “achat,”&mdash;which in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was in London the word
for trading, and was first pronounced and then written
“acat,”&mdash;led to the story that Whittington, the famous Lord
Mayor, obtained his wealth by selling and re-selling “a
cat.” There is no hint in “somerset” of its derivation
from the Italian, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">soprasalto</i>, an overleap, through the
French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">sobresault</i>, and the early English, to “somersault”;
nor would the shrewdest guesser ever discover in <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">faire un
faux pas</i>, to commit a blunder, the provincial saying, “to
make a fox’s paw.” The word “ceiling,” from the old
French <i>seel</i>, “a seal,” was formerly written “seeling,” and
meant a wainscoating, a covering with boards for the purpose
of sealing up chinks and cracks. The spelling was
changed from an opinion that the word is derived from
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">ciel</i>, which means “heaven” and “a canopy.”</p>

<p>Among the most frequent corruptions are the names of
places and persons. Thus Penne, Coombe, and Ick, the
former name of Falmouth, has been transformed into
“Penny-come-quick”; and the corruption of <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Chateau Vert</i>
into “Shotover” has led to the legend that Little John
“shot over” the hill of that name near Oxford, England.
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Leighton-beau-desert</i> has been converted into “Leighton-Buzzard”;
Bridge-Walter, in Somersetshire, into “Bridgewater.”
The <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Chartreuse</i> has become the “Charter-House.”
Sheremoniers Lane, so called because the artisans dwelt
there whose business it was to sheer or cut bullion into
shape for the die, became first “Sheremongers Lane,” and
then, from its nearness to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and an
analogy with Amen Corner and Paternoster Row, passed
into “Sermon Lane.” The origin of the well known legend<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[418]</a></span>
of Bishop Hatto, who forestalled the corn from the poor,
and was devoured in his fortress on the Rhine by rats, is
owing, it is said, to a corruption of the name of the <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">maut-thurm</i>,
or custom-house, into the <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">mäuse-thurm</i>, or “Mouse-tower.”
The Cologne myth of the eleven thousand virgins
is supposed by an English philologist to have sprung from
the name of St. Undecemilla, a virgin martyr. “The insertion
of a single letter in the calendar has changed this
name into the form ‘<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Undecem millia Virg. Mart.</i>’ The
bones of the eleven thousand, which are reverently shown
to the pious pilgrim, have been pronounced by Professor
Owen to comprise the remains of almost all the quadrupeds
indigenous to the district.” The name “Gypsies” is a
misnomer springing out of an error in ethnology. When
they first appeared in Europe, nearly five centuries ago,
their dark complexion and their unknown language led
men to suppose that they were Egyptians, which word was
corrupted into “Gypsies.” Boulogne Mouth was corrupted
by the British sailors into “Bull and Mouth”; and Surajah
Dowlah, the name of the Bengal prince who figured in
the famous Black Hole atrocity, the British soldiers persisted
in anglicizing into “Sir Roger Dowlas”! “Bedlam”
is a corruption of Bethlehem, and gets its meaning
from a London priory, St. Mary’s of Bethlehem, which
was converted into a lunatic asylum.</p>

<p>“To curry favor” is said to be a corrupt translation of
the French proverbial phrase <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">étriller Fauveau</i>, “to curry
the chestnut horse.” It was usual to make a proper name
of the color of a horse, as Bayard, Dun, Ball, Favel, etc.
Hence the proverbs, “To have Ball in the stable,” “Dun
in the mire,” “To curry Favel,” in which last some unknown
Bentley substituted “favor” for Favel when the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[419]</a></span>
meaning of the latter had ceased to be understood. Another
striking illustration of the freaks of popular usage
by which the etymology of words is obscured, is the word
“causeway.” Mr. W. W. Skeat, in a late number of
“Notes and Queries,” states that the old spelling of the
word was “calcies.” The Latin was <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">calceata via</i>, a road
made with lime; hence the Spanish, <i lang="es" xml:lang="es">calzada</i>, a paved way,
and the modern French, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">chaussée</i>. “The English Word,”
Mr. Skeats says, “used to be more often spelled ‘causey,’
as, for instance, by Cotgrave; and popular etymology,
always on the alert to infuse some sort of meaning into
a strange word, turned ‘causey’ into ‘causeway,’ with the
trifling drawback that, while we all know what ‘way’
means, no one can extract any sense out of ‘cause.’”</p>

<p>Words from the dead languages have naturally undergone
the most signal corruptions, many of them completely
disguising the derivation. Sometimes the word is condensed,
as in “alms,” from the Greek <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">ἐλεημοσύνη</span> in early
English, “almesse,” now cut down to four letters; “summons,”
a legal term, abbreviated (like the <em>fi. fa.</em> of the
lawyers) from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">submoneas</i>; “palsy,” an abridgment of
“paralysis,” literally a relaxation; “quinsy,” in French
<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">esquinancie</i>, which, strange to say, is the same word as
“synagogue,” coming, like this last, from <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">σύν</span> together,
and <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">ἄγω</span>, to draw. “Megrim” is a corruption of “hemicrany,”
a pain affecting half of the head. “Treacle,” now
applied only to molasses or sirup, was originally viper’s
flesh made into a medicine for the viper’s bite. It is called
in French <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">thériaque</i>, from a corresponding Greek word;
in early English, “triacle.” “Zero” is a contraction of the
Italian <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">zephiro</i>, a zephyr, a breath of air, a nothing. Another
name for it is “cipher,” from the Arabic, <i>cifr</i>, empty.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[420]</a></span></p>


<h3 class="smallh3">CONTRADICTORY MEANINGS.</h3>

<p>Among the curious phenomena of language one of the
most singular is the use of the same word in two distinct
senses, directly opposed to each other. Ideas are associated
in the mind not only by resemblance but by contrast; and
thus the same root, slightly modified, may express the most
opposite meanings. A striking example of this, is the
word “fast,” which is full of contradictory meanings. A
clock is called “fast,” when it goes too quickly; but a man
is told to stand “fast,” when he is desired to stand still.
Men “fast” when they have nothing to eat; and they eat
“fast” after a long abstinence. “Fast” men, as we have
already seen, are apt to be very “loose” in their habits.
When “fast” is used in the sense of “abstinence,” the
idea may be, as in the Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">abstineo</i>, holding back from
food; or the word may come from the Gothic, <i>fastan</i>, “to
keep” or “observe,”&mdash;that is, the ordinance of the church.
The verb “to overlook” is used in two contradictory
senses; as, he overlooked the men at work, he overlooked
the error.</p>

<p>The word “nervous” may mean either possessing or
wanting nerve. A “nervous” writer is one who has
force and energy; a “nervous” man is one who is weak,
sensitive to trifles, easily excited. The word “post,” from
the Latin <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">positum</i>, placed, is used in the most various
senses. We speak of a “post”-office, of “post”-haste, of
“post”-horses, and of “post”-ing a ledger. The contradiction
in these meanings is more apparent than real. The
idea of “placing” is common to them all. Before the invention
of railways, letters were transmitted from place to
place (or post to post) by relays of horses stationed at intervals<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[421]</a></span>
so that no delay might occur. The “post”-office used
this means of communication, and the horses were said to
travel “post”-haste. To “post” a ledger is to place or
register its several items.</p>

<p>The word “to let” generally means to permit; but in
the Bible, in Shakespeare, and in legal phraseology, it often
has the very opposite meaning. Thus Hamlet says, “I’ll
make a ghost of him that lets me,” that is, interferes with
or obstructs me; and in law books “without let or hindrance”
is a phrase of frequent occurrence. It should be
remarked, however, that “to let,” in the first sense, is from
the Saxon, <i>laetan</i>; in the second, from <i>letjan</i>. The word
“to cleave” may mean either to adhere to closely, as when
Cowper says, “Sophistry cleaves close and protects sin’s
rotten trunk”; or it may mean to split or to rend asunder,
as in the sentence, “He cleaved the stick at one blow.”
According to Mätzner, the word in the first sense is from
the Anglo-Saxon, <i>cleofan</i>, <i>clufan</i>; in the last sense, it is
from <i>clifan</i>, <i>clifian</i>. The word “dear” has the two meanings
of “prized” because you have it, and “expensive”
because you want it. The word “lee” has very different
acceptations in “lee”-side and “lee”-shore.</p>

<p>The word “mistaken” has quite opposite meanings.
“You are mistaken” may mean “You mistake,” or “You
are misunderstood,” or “taken for somebody else.” In the
line</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“<em>Mistaken</em> souls that dream of heaven,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">in a popular hymn, the word is used, of course, in the
former sense. The adjective “mortal” means both “deadly”
and “liable to death.” Of the large number of adjectives
ending in “able” or “ible,” some have a subjective
and others an objective sense. A “terrible” sight is one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[422]</a></span>
that is able to inspire terror; but a “readable” book is
one which you can read. It is said that the word “wit”
is used in Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” with at least seven
different meanings.</p>

<p>The prefixes “un” and “in” are equivocal. Commonly
they have a negative force, as in “unnecessary,” “incomplete.”
But sometimes, both in verbs and adjectives, they
have a positive or intensive meaning, as in the words
“intense,” “infatuated,” “invaluable.” To “invigorate”
one’s physical system by exercise, is not to lessen, but to
increase one’s energy. The verb “unloose” should, by
analogy, signify “to tie,” just as “untie” means “to loose.”
“Inhabitable” should signify “not habitable,” according
to the most frequent use of “in.” To “unravel” means
the same as “to ravel”; to “unrip” the same as “to rip.”
Johnson sanctions the use of the negative prefix in these
two words, but Richardson and Webster condemn it as
superfluous. Walton, in his “Angler,” tells an amusing
anecdote touching the two words. “We heard,” he says,
“a high contention amongst the beggars, whether it was
easiest to ‘rip’ a cloak or ‘unrip’ a cloak. One beggar
affirmed it was all one; but that was denied, by asking
her, if doing and undoing were all one. Then another
said, ’twas easiest to unrip a cloak, for that was to let it
alone; but she was answered by asking how she could
<em>unrip</em> it, if she let it alone.”</p>

<p>This opposition in the meanings of a word is a phenomenon
not altogether peculiar to the English language. In
Greek, <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">θοάζειν</span> has the seemingly contradictory meanings
of “to move hastily,” and “to sit”; <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">χρεία</span> means both “use”
and “need”; and <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">λάω</span> means both “to wish” and “to
take.” In Latin, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">sacer</i> means “set apart” or “tabooed,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[423]</a></span>
and <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">unicus</i> implies singularity,&mdash;<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">unitas</i>, association. Many
other examples might be cited to show that “as rays of
light may be reflected and refracted in all possible ways
from the primary direction, so the meaning of a word
may be deflected from its original bearing in a variety of
manners; and consequently we cannot well reach the
primitive force of the term unless we know the precise
gradations through which it has gone.”</p>

<p>Several writers on our language have noticed a singular
tendency to limit or narrow the signification of certain
words, whose etymology would suggest a far wider application.
Why should we not “retaliate” (that is, pay
back in kind, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">res, talis</i>) kindnesses as well as injuries?
Why should we “resent” (feel again) insults, and not
affectionate words and deeds? Why should our hate, animosity,
hostility, and other bad passions, be “inveterate”
(that is, gain strength by age), but our better feelings,
love, kindness, charity, never? Byron showed a true
appreciation of the better uses to which the word might
be put, when he subscribed a letter to a friend, “Yours
inveterately, <span class="smcap">Byron</span>.”</p>

<p>In some of our nouns there is a nice distinction of
meaning between the singular and the plural. A “minute”
is a fraction of time; “minutes” are notes of a
speech, conversation, etc. The “manner” in which a man
enters a drawing-room may be unexceptionable, while his
“manners” are very bad. When the “Confederates”
threatened to pull down the American “colors” at New
Orleans, they did it under “color” of right. A person
was once asked whether a certain lawyer had got rich
by his practice. “No,” was the sarcastic reply, “but by
his practices.”</p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Mill’s “Logic.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> Coleridge.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> From <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">οὔ</span> and <span lang="grc" xml:lang="grc">τόπος</span>, “no-place.”</p></div></div>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[424]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">CHAPTER XVI.</a><br />
<br />
<span class="fs70 lsp">COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH.</span></h2>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0">In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,</p>
<p class="verse0">Alike fantastic if too new or old;</p>
<p class="verse0">Be not the first by whom the new are tried,</p>
<p class="verse0">Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Pope.</span></p>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="blockquot">

<p>If a gentleman be to study any language, it ought to be that of his own
country.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Locke.</span></p>

<p>Aristocracy and exclusiveness tend to final overthrow, in language as well
as in politics.&mdash;<span class="smcap">W. D. Whitney.</span></p>

<p>People who write essays to prove that though a word in fact means one
thing, it <em>ought</em> to mean another, or that though all well educated Englishmen
do conspire to use this expression, they <em>ought</em> to use that, are simply bores.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Edinburgh
Review.</span></p></div>


<p class="drop-capy">One of the most gratifying signs of the times is the
deep interest which both our scholars and our people
are beginning to manifest in the study of our noble English
tongue. Perhaps nothing has contributed more to awaken
a public interest in this matter, and to call attention to
some of the commonest improprieties of speech, than the
publication of “The Queen’s English” and “The Dean’s
English,” and the various criticisms which have been provoked
in England and in the United States by the Moon-Alford
controversy. Hundreds of persons who before felt
a profound indifference to this subject, have had occasion
to thank the Dean for awakening their curiosity in regard
to it; and hundreds more who otherwise would never have
read his dogmatic small-talk, or Mr. Moon’s trenchant
dissection of it, have suddenly found themselves, in consequence
of the newspaper criticisms of the two books,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[425]</a></span>
keenly interested in questions of grammar, and now, with
their appetites whetted, will continue the study of their
own language, till they have mastered its difficulties, and
familiarized themselves with all its idioms and idiotisms.
Of such discussions we can hardly have too many, and just
now they are imperiously needed to check the deluge of
barbarisms, solecisms, and improprieties, with which our
language is threatened. Not only does political freedom
make every man in America an inventor, alike of labor-saving
machines and of labor-saving words, but the mixture
of nationalities is constantly coining and exchanging new
forms of speech, of which our busy Bartletts, in their lists
of Americanisms, find it impossible to keep account.</p>

<p>It is not merely our spoken language that is disfigured
by these blemishes; but our written language,&mdash;the
prose of the leading English authors,&mdash;exhibits more
slovenliness and looseness of diction than is found in any
other literature. That this is due in part to the very
character of the language itself, there can be no doubt.
Its simplicity of structure and its copiousness both tend
to prevent its being used with accuracy and care; and it
is so hospitable to alien words that it needs more powerful
securities against revolution than other languages of less
heterogeneous composition. But the chief cause must be
found in the character of the English-speaking race.
There is in our very blood a certain lawlessness, which
makes us intolerant of syntactical rules, and restive under
pedagogical restraints. “Our sturdy English ancestors,”
says Blackstone, “held it beneath the condition of a freeman
to appear, or to do any other act, at the precise
time appointed.” The same proud, independent spirit
which made the Saxons of old rebel against the servitude<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[426]</a></span>
of punctuality, prompts their descendants to spurn the
yoke of grammar and purism. In America this scorn of
obedience, whether to political authority or philological,
is fostered and intensified by the very genius of our institutions.
We seem to doubt whether we are entirely free,
unless we apply the Declaration of Independence to our
language, and carry the Monroe doctrine even into our
grammar.</p>

<p>The degree to which this lawlessness has been carried
will be seen more strikingly if we compare our English
literature with the literature of France. It has been
justly said that the language of that country is a science
in itself, and the labor bestowed on the acquisition of it
has the effect of vividly impressing on the mind both the
faults and the beauties of every writer’s style. Method
and perspicuity are its very essence; and there is hardly
a writer of note who does not attend to these requisites
with scrupulous care. Let a French writer of distinction
violate any cardinal rule of grammar, and he is pounced
upon instantly by the critics, and laughed at from Calais
to Marseilles. When Boileau, who is a marvel of verbal
and grammatical correctness, made a slip in the first line
of his Ninth Satire,</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">
<p class="verseq">“C’est <em>à</em> vous, mon Esprit, <em>à</em> qui je veux parler,”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">the grammatical sensibility of the French ear was shocked
to a degree that we, who tolerate the grossest solecisms,
find it hard to estimate. For two centuries the blunder
has been quoted by every writer on grammar, and impressed
on the memory of every schoolboy. Indeed, such
is the national fastidiousness on this subject, that it has
been doubted whether a single line in Boileau has been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[427]</a></span>
so often quoted for its beauty, as this unfortunate one
for its lack of grammar. When did an English or an
American writer thus offend the critical ears of his countrymen,
even though he were an Alison, sinning against
Lindley Murray on every page?</p>

<p>We are no friends to hypercriticism, or to that finical
niceness which cares more for the body than for the soul
of language, more for the outward expression than for
the thought which it incarnates. Too much rigor is as
unendurable as laxity. It is, no doubt, possible to be so
over-nice in the use of words and the construction of sentences
as to sap the vitality of our speech. We may so
refine our expression, by continual straining in our critical
sieves, as to impair both the strength and the flexibility
of our noble English tongue. There are some
verbal critics, who, apparently go so far as to hold that
every word must have an invariable meaning, and that
all relations of thoughts must be indicated by absolute
and invariable formulas, thus reducing verbal expression
to the rigid inflexibility of a mathematical equation. If
we understand Mr. Moon’s censures of Murray and Alford,
some of them are based on the assumption that an ellipsis
is rarely, if ever, permissible in English speech. We have
no sympathy with such extremists, nor with the verbal
purists who challenge all words and phrases that cannot be
found in the “wells of English undefiled,” that have been
open for more than a hundred years. We must take the
good with the bad in the incessant changes and masquerades
of language. “The severe judgment of the scholar
may condemn as verbiage that undergrowth of words
which threatens to choke up and impoverish the great
roots that have occupied the soil from the earliest times;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[428]</a></span>
he may apprehend wreck and disaster to the fixedness of
language when he sees words loosened from their etymons,
and left to drift upon the ocean at the mercy of wind and
tide; and he is justified in every seasonable and reasonable
attempt he makes to reconcile current and established significations
with the sanction of authority.” But it must
not be forgotten that language is a living, organic thing,
and by the very law of its life must always be in a fluctuating
state. To petrify it into immutable forms, to preserve
it as one preserves fruits and flowers in spirits of
wine and herbariums, is as hopeless as it would be undesirable,
if we would have it a medium for the ever-changing
thoughts of man.</p>

<p>Language is a growing thing, as truly as a tree; and as
a tree, while it casts off some leaves, will continually put
forth others, so a language will be perpetually growing
and expanding with the discoveries of science, the extension
of commerce, and the progress of thought. Such
events as the growth of the Roman Empire, the introduction
of Christianity, the rise of the scholastic and of the
mystic theology in the middle ages, the irruption of the
northern barbarians into Italy, the establishment, of the
Papacy, the introduction of the feudal system, the Crusades,
the Reformation, the French Revolution, the American
Civil War, give birth to new ideas, which clamor for
new words to express them. Every age thus enriches
language with new accessions of beauty and strength.
Not only are new words coined, but old ones continually
take on new senses; and it is only in the transition period,
before they have established themselves in the general
favor of good speakers and writers, that purity of style
requires them to be shunned. Those who are so ignorant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[429]</a></span>
of the laws of language as to resist its expansion,&mdash;who
declare that it has attained at any time the limit of its
development, and seek by philological bulls to check its
growth,&mdash;will find that, like a vigorous forest tree, it will
defy any shackles that men may bind about it; that it will
reck as little of their decrees as did the advancing ocean
of those of Canute. The critics who make such attempts
do not see that the immobility of language would be the
immobility of history. They forget that many of the
purest words in our language were at one time startling
novelties, and that even the dainty terms in which they
challenge each new-comer, though now naturalized, had
once to fight their way inch by inch. Shakespeare ridicules
“element”; Fulke, in the seventeenth century, objects
to such ink-horn terms as “rational,” “scandal,”
“homicide,” “ponderous,” and “prodigious”; Dryden censures
“embarrass,” “grimace,” “repartee,” “foible,”
“tour,” and “rally”; Swift denounces “hoax” as low
and vulgar; Pope condemns “witless,” “welkin,” and
“dulcet”; and Franklin, who could draw from the clouds
the electric fluid which now carries language with the
speed of lightning from land to land, vainly struggled
against the introduction of the words “to advocate” and
“to notice.” In the “New World of Words,” by Edward
Phillips, published in 1678, there is a long list of words
which he declared should be either used warily or rejected
as barbarous. Among these words are the following,
which are all in good use to-day: autograph, aurist, bibliograph,
circumstantiate, evangelize, ferocious, holograph,
inimical, misanthropist, misogynist, and syllogize.</p>

<p>The word “Fatherland” seems so natural that we are
apt to regard it as an old word; yet the elder Disraeli<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[430]</a></span>
claims the honor of having introduced it. Macaulay tells
us that the word “gutted,” which was doubtless objected
to as vulgar, was first used on the night in which James II
fled from London: “The king’s printing-house ... was,
to use a coarse metaphor, which then, for the first time,
came into fashion, completely <em>gutted</em>.” How much circumlocution
is saved by the word “antecedents” (formerly a
grammatical term only), in its new sense, denoting a man’s
past history; with reference to which Punch says it would
be more satisfactory to know something of a suspected
man’s <em>relatives</em> than of his <em>antecedents</em>! What a happy,
ingenious use of an old word is that of “telescope” to
describe a railway accident, when the force of a collision
causes the cars to run or fit into each other, like the
shortening slides of a telescope! The term is so picturesque
and so convenient in avoiding a periphrasis, that it cannot
fail to be stamped with the seal of good usage. How
admirably was a real void in the vocabulary filled by the
word “squatter,” when it was first coined! The man who
first uttered it gave vivid expression to an idea which had
existed vaguely in the brains of thousands; and it was
hardly spoken before it was on every tongue. Coleridge
observes truly that any new word expressing a fact or
relationship, not expressed by any other word in the language,
is a new organ of thought; and how true is this
of the terms “solidarity” (as in the phrase “solidarity
of the peoples”), and “international,” both of which express
novel and characteristic conceptions of our own
century. The latter word is a coinage of Jeremy Bentham,
to whom we are also indebted for “codify,” “maximise,”
and “minimise.” The little word “its” had to force its
way into the language, against the opposition of “correct”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[431]</a></span>
speakers and writers, on the ground of its apparent analogy
with the other English possessives.</p>

<p>Dr. Johnson objected to the word “dun” in Lady Macbeth’s
famous soliloquy, declaring that the “efficacy of this
invocation is destroyed by the insertion of an epithet now
seldom heard but in the stable:&mdash;”</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verse10">“Come, thick night,</p>
<p class="verse0">And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">It was a notion of the great critic and lexicographer, with
which his mind was long haunted, that the language should
be refined and fixed so as finally to exclude all rustic and
vulgar elements from the authorized vocabulary of the lettered
and polite. Dryden had hinted at the establishment
of an academy for this purpose, and Swift thought the Government
“should devise some means for ascertaining and
<em>fixing the language forever</em>,” after the necessary alterations
should be made in it.</p>

<p>If it were possible to exclude needed new words from a
language, the French Academy would have succeeded in its
attempts to do so, consisting as it did of the chief scholars of
France. Not content with crushing political liberty, Richelieu
sought to become autocrat of the French language.
No word was to be uttered anywhere in the realm until he
had countersigned it. But in spite of all the efforts of his
Academy to exercise a despotic authority over the French
tongue, new words have continually forced their way in,
and so they will continue to do while the French nation
maintains its vitality, in spite of the protests of all the
purists and academicians in France. “They that will fight
custom with grammar,” says Montaigne, “are fools”; and,
with the limitations to be hereafter stated, the remark is
just, and still more true of those who triumphantly appeal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[432]</a></span>
against custom to the dictionary, which is not merely a
home for living words, but a cemetery for the dead.</p>

<p>Even slang words, after long knocking, will often gain
admission into a language, like pardoned outlaws received
into the body of respectable citizens. We need not add to
these, words coined in his lofty moods by the poet, who is a
<em>maker</em> by the very right of his name. That creative energy
which distinguishes him,&mdash;“the high-flying liberty of conceit
proper to the poet,”&mdash;will, of course, display itself
here, and the all-fusing imagination will at once, as Trench
has remarked, suggest and justify audacities in speech
which would not be tolerated from creeping prose-writers.
Great liberties may be allowed, too, within certain bounds,
to the idiosyncrasies of all great writers. We love the rugged,
gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its
branches, better than the smoothly clipped uniformity of
the Dutch yew tree. Carlyleisms may therefore be tolerated
from the master, though not from the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">umbræ</i> that spaniel
him at the heels, and feebly echo his singularities and oddities.
A style that has no smack or flavor of the man that
uses it is a tasteless style. But there is a limit even to the
liberty of great thinkers in coining words. It must not degenerate
into license. Coleridge was a skilful mint-master
of words, yet not all his genius can reconcile us to such expressions
as the following, in a letter to Sir Humphrey
Davy: “I was a well meaning sutor who had ultra-crepidated
with more zeal than wisdom.”</p>

<p>No one would hesitate to place Isaac Barrow among the
greatest masters of the English tongue; yet the weighty
thoughts which his words represented did not prevent
many of the trial-pieces which he coined in his verbal mint
from being returned on his hands. Who knows the meaning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[433]</a></span>
of such words as “avoce,” “acquist,” “extund”? Sir
Thomas Browne abounds in such hyperlatinistic expressions
as “bivious,” “quodlibetically,” “cunctation,” to which
even his gorgeous rhetoric does not reconcile the reader.
Charles Lamb has “agnise” and “bourgeon.” Coleridge
invents “extroitive,” “retroitive,” “influencive”; Bentley,
“commentitious,” “negoce,” “exscribe.” Sydney Smith
was continually coining words, some of them compounds
from the homely Saxon idiom, others big-wig classical epithets,
devised with scholar-like precision, and exceedingly
ludicrous in their effect. Thus he speaks of “frugiverous”
children, of “mastigophorous” schoolmasters, of “fugacious”
or “plumigerous” captains; of “lachrymal and
suspirious” clergymen; of people who are “simious,”
and people who are “anserous”; he <ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'enriches the langauge'">enriches the language</ins>
with the expressive hybrid, “Foolometer”; and
he characterizes the September sins of the English by
the awful name of “perdricide.” In the early ages of our
literature, when the language was less fixed, and there were
few recognized standards of expression, writers coined words
without license, supplying the place of correct terms, when
they did not occur to their minds, by analogy and invention.
But a bill must not only be drawn by the word-maker; it
must also be accepted. The Emperor Tiberius was very
properly told that he might give citizenship to men, but not
to words. All innovations in speech, every new term introduced,
should harmonize with the general principles of the
language. No new phrase should be admitted which is not
consonant with its peculiar genius, or which does violence
to its fundamental integrity. Nor should any form of
expression be tolerated that violates the universal laws of
language. As Henry lingers has well said, a philosophical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[434]</a></span>
mind will consider that, whatever deflection may have taken
place in the original principles of a language, whatever
modification of form it may have undergone, it is, at each
period of its history, the product of a slow accumulation and
countless multitude of associations, which can neither be
hastily formed nor hastily dismissed; that these associations
extend even to the modes of spelling and pronouncing, of
inflecting and combining words; and that anything which
does violence to such associations impairs, for the time, at
least, the power of the language.</p>

<p>Even good usage itself is but a proximate and strongly
presumptive test of purity. Custom is not an absolute
despotism, though it approaches very nearly to that character.
Its decisions are generally authoritative; but, as
there are extreme measures which even oriental despots
cannot put into execution without endangering the safety
of their possessions, so there are things which custom cannot
do without endangering the fixity and purity of language.
If grammatical monstrosities exist in a language,
a correct taste will shun them, as it does physical deformities
in the arts of design. Dean Alford defends some of
his own indefensible expressions by citing the authority
of the Scripture; but authority for the most vicious forms
of speech can be found in all our writers, not excepting
King James’s translators,&mdash;as Mr. Harrison has shown by
hundreds of examples in his work on “The English Language.”
Take, for example, the following sentence, or
part of a sentence, from so great a writer as Dean Swift:
“Breaking a constitution by the very same errors, <em>that</em>
so many have been <em>broke</em> before.” Here, in a sentence of
only fifteen words, we have three grammatical errors,
glaring, and, in such a writer, unpardonable. We smile<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[435]</a></span>
at the rustic ignorance which has engraved on a Hampshire
tombstone such lines as</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“<em>Him</em> shall never come again to <em>we</em>;</p>
<p class="verse0">But <em>us</em> shall one day surely go to <em>he</em>;”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">but is this couplet a whit more ungrammatical than Scott’s
“I know not <em>whom</em> else are expected,” in “the Pirate”;
or Southey’s sentence in “the Doctor,” “Gentle reader, let
you and <em>I</em>, in like manner, endeavor to improve the enclosure
of the Carr;” or Professor Aytoun’s</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“But it were vain for you and <em>I</em></p>
<p class="verse0">In single fight our strength to try.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>A writer in “Blackwood” affirms that, “with the exception
of Wordsworth, there is not one celebrated author of
this day who has written two pages consecutively without
some flagrant impropriety in the grammar;” and the
statement, we believe, is undercharged. The usage, therefore,
of a good writer is only <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">prima facie</i> evidence of the
correctness of a disputed word or phrase; for he may have
used the word carelessly or inadvertently, and it is altogether
probable that, were his attention called to it, he
would be prompt to admit his error. It has been remarked
that “nowadays” and “had have” meet all the
conditions of good usage, being reputable, national, and
present; but one is a solecism, the other a barbarism.
Again, if the writer is an old writer, like Shakespeare,
Milton, Dryden, or Addison, his authority must always be
received with caution, and with increasing caution as we
recede from the age in which he flourished. The great
changes which our language has undergone within even
a hundred years, show that the writers of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries are unsafe guides for the nineteenth,
unless they are corroborated by contemporary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[436]</a></span>
usage. Let the English language he enriched in the
spirit, and according to the principles of which we have
spoken, and it will be, not a tank, but a living stream,
casting out everything effete and impure, refreshed by new
sources of inspiration and wealth, keeping pace with the
stately march of the ages, and still retaining much of its
original sweetness, expression and force.</p>

<p>It is our intention in this chapter, not to notice all the
improprieties of speech that merit censure,&mdash;to do which
would require volumes,&mdash;but to criticise some of those
which most frequently offend the ear of the scholar in this
country. The term <em>impropriety</em> we shall use, not merely
in the strictly rhetorical sense of the word, but in the
popular meaning, to include in it all inaccuracies of speech,
whether offences against etymology, lexicography, or syntax.
To pillory such offences, to point out the damage
which they inflict upon our language, and to expose the
moral obliquity which often lurks beneath them, is, we
believe, the duty of every scholar who knows how closely
purity of speech, like personal cleanliness, is allied to
purity of thought and rectitude of action. To say that
every person who aspires to be esteemed a gentleman
should carefully shun all barbarisms, solecisms, and other
faults in his speech, is to utter the merest truism. The
man who habitually deviates from the custom of his
country in expressing his thoughts, is hardly less ridiculous
than one who walks the streets in a Spanish cloak
or a Roman toga. An accurate knowledge and a correct
and felicitous use of words are, of themselves, almost sure
proofs of good breeding. No doubt it marks a weak mind
to care more for the casket than for the jewel it contains,&mdash;to
prefer elegantly turned sentences to sound sense;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[437]</a></span>
but sound sense always acquires additional value when
expressed in pure English. Moreover, he who carefully
studies accuracy of expression, the proper choice and
arrangement of words in any language, will be also
advancing toward accuracy of thought, as well as toward
propriety and energy of speech; “for divers philosophers
hold,” says Shakespeare, “that the lip is parcel of the
mind.” Few things are more ludicrous than the blunders
by which even persons moving in refined society often
betray the grossest ignorance of very common words. A
story is told in England of an over-classical Member of
Parliament, who, not knowing or forgetting that “omnibus”
is the plural of the Latin “<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">omnis</i>,” and means “for
all,”&mdash;that is, a vehicle in which people of all ranks may
sit together,&mdash;spoke of “two omnibi.” There are hundreds
of educated persons who speak of the “banister” of
a staircase, when they mean “balustrade,” or “baluster”;
there is no such word as “banister.” There are hundreds
of others who never <em>eat</em> anything, not even an apple, but
always <em>partake</em>, even though they consume all the food
before them; and even the London “Times,” in one of its
issues, spoke of a jury “immersing” a defendant in damages.
We once knew an old lady in a New England village,
quite aristocratic in her feelings and habits, who complained
to her physician that “her blood seemed to have all
<em>stackpoled</em>;” and we have heard of another descendant of
Mrs. Malaprop, who, in answer to the question whether she
would be sure to keep an appointment, replied, “I will
come,&mdash;<em>alluding</em> it does not rain.”</p>

<p>Goldsmith is one of the most charming writers in our
language; yet in his “History of England,” the following
statement occurs in a chapter on the reign of Elizabeth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[438]</a></span>
Speaking of a communication to Mary, Queen of Scots, he
says: “This they effected by conveying their letters to her
by means of a brewer, <em>that supplied the family with ale
through a chink in the wall of her apartment</em>.” A queer
brewer that, to supply his ale through a chink in the wall!
Again, we read in Goldsmith’s “History of Greece”: “<em>He</em>
wrote to that distinguished philosopher in terms polite and
flattering, begging of <em>him</em> to come and undertake <em>his</em> education,
and bestow on <em>him</em> those useful lessons of magnanimity
and virtue which every great man ought to
possess, and which <em>his</em> numerous avocations rendered impossible
for <em>him</em>.” In this sentence the pronoun <em>he</em> is
employed six times, under different forms; and as, in each
case, it may refer to either of two antecedents, the meaning,
but for our knowledge of the facts, would be involved
in hopeless confusion. First, the pronoun stands for Philip,
then for Aristotle, then for Alexander, again for Alexander,
and then twice for Philip. A still greater offender against
clearness in the use of pronouns is Lord Clarendon; <em>e.g.</em>,
“On which, with the king’s and queen’s so ample promises
to <em>him</em> (the Treasurer) so few hours before, conferring the
place upon another, and the Duke of York’s manner of
receiving <em>him</em> (the Treasurer), after <em>he</em> (the Chancellor) had
been shut up with <em>him</em> (the Duke), as <em>he</em> (the Treasurer)
was informed might very well excuse <em>him</em> (the Treasurer)
from thinking <em>he</em> (the Chancellor) had some share in the
effront <em>he</em> (the Treasurer) had undergone.” It would be
hard to match this passage even in the writings of the
humblest penny-a-liner; it is “confusion, worse confounded.”</p>

<p>Solecisms so glaring as these may not often disfigure
men’s writing or speech; and some of the faults we shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[439]</a></span>
notice may seem so petty and microscopic that the reader
may deem us “word-catchers that live on syllables.” But
it is the little foxes that spoil the grapes, in the familiar
speech of the people as well as in Solomon’s vineyards;
and, as a garment may be honey-combed by moths, so the
fine texture of a language may be gradually destroyed, and
its strength impaired, by numerous and apparently insignificant
solecisms and inaccuracies. Nicety in the use of
particles is one of the most decisive marks of skill and
scholarship in a writer; and the accuracy, beauty, and
force of many a fine passage in English literature depend
largely on the use of the pronouns, prepositions, and articles.
How emphatic and touching does the following
enumeration become through the repetition of one petty
word! “<em>By</em> thine agony and bloody sweat; <em>by</em> thy cross
and passion; <em>by</em> thy precious death and burial; <em>by</em> thy glorious
resurrection and ascension; and <em>by</em> the coming of
the Holy Ghost.” How much pathos is added to the prayer
of the publican by the proper translation of the Greek
article,&mdash;“God be merciful to me <em>the</em> sinner!”</p>

<p>De Quincey strikingly observes: “People that have
practised composition as much, and with as vigilant an
eye as myself, know also, by thousands of cases, how infinite
is the disturbance caused in the logic of a thought
by the mere position of a word as despicable as the word
<em>even</em>. A mote that is in itself invisible, shall darken the
august faculty of sight in a human eye,&mdash;the heavens
shall be hid by a wretched atom that dares not show itself,&mdash;and
the station of a syllable shall cloud the judgment
of a council. Nay, even an ambiguous emphasis falling
to the right-hand word, or the left-hand word, shall
confound a system.” It is a fact well known to lawyers,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[440]</a></span>
that, the omission or misplacement of a monosyllable in a
legal document has rendered many a man bankrupt. Fifteen
years ago an expensive lawsuit arose in England, on
the meaning of two phrases in the will of a deceased
nobleman. In the one he gives his property “to my
brother and <em>to</em> his children in succession”; in the other,
“to my brother and his children in succession.” This
diversity gives rise to quite different interpretations. In
another case, by omitting the letter <em>s</em> in a legal document,
an English attorney is said to have inflicted on a client a
loss of £30,000.</p>

<p>In language, as in the fine arts, there is but one way
to attain to excellence, and that is by study of the most
faultless models. As the air and manner of a gentleman
can be acquired only by living constantly in good society,
so grace and purity of expression must be attained by a
familiar acquaintance with the standard authors. It is
astonishing how rapidly we may by this practice enrich
our vocabularies, and how speedily we imitate and unconsciously
reproduce in our language the niceties and
delicacies of expression which have charmed us in a favorite
author. Like the sheriff whom Rufus Choate satirized
for having “overworked the participle,” most persons
make one word act two, ten or a dozen parts; yet there
is hardly any man who may not, by moderate painstaking,
learn to express himself in terms as precise, if not as
vivid, as those of Pitt, whom Fox so praised for his accuracy.<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a>
The account which Lord Chesterfield gives of the
method by which he became one of the most elegant and
polished talkers and orators of Europe, strikingly shows
what miracles may be achieved by care and practice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[441]</a></span>
Early in life he determined not to speak one word in conversation
which was not the fittest he could recall; and he
charged his son never to deliver the commonest order to a
servant, but in the best language he could find, and with
the best utterance. For years Chesterfield wrote down
every brilliant passage he met with in his reading, and
translated it into French, or, if it was in a foreign language,
into English. By this practice a certain elegance
became habitual to him, and it would have given him more
trouble, he says, to express himself inelegantly than he
had ever taken to avoid the defect. Lord Bolingbroke,
who had an imperial dominion over all the resources of
expression, and could talk all day just as perfectly as he
wrote, told Chesterfield that he owed the power to the
same cause,&mdash;an early and habitual attention to his style.
When Boswell expressed to Johnson his surprise at the
constant force and propriety of the Doctor’s words, the
latter replied that he had long been accustomed to clothe
his thoughts in the fittest words he could command, and
thus a vivid and exact phraseology had become habitual.</p>

<p>It has been affirmed by a high authority that a knowledge
of English grammar is rather a matter of convenience
as a nomenclature,&mdash;a medium of thought and discussion
<em>about</em> the language,&mdash;than a guide to the actual
use of it; and that it is as impossible to acquire the
complete command of our own tongue by the study of
grammatical precept, as to learn to walk or swim by
attending a course of lectures on anatomy. “Undoubtedly
I have found,” says Sir Philip Sydney, “in divers smal
learned courtiers a more sound stile than in some possessors
of learning; of which I can ghesse no other cause,
but that the courtier following that which by practice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[442]</a></span>
he findeth fittest to nature, therein (though he know it
not) doth <em>according</em> to art, though not <em>by</em> art; where the
other, using art to shew art, and not to hide art (as in
these cases he should doe), flieth from nature, and indeed
abuseth art.”</p>

<p>Let it not be inferred, however, from all this that
grammatical knowledge is unnecessary. A man of refined
taste may detect many errors by the ear; but there are
other errors, equally gross, that have not a harsh sound,
and consequently cannot be detected without a knowledge
of the rules that are violated. Besides, it often happens,
as we have already seen, that even the purest writers
inadvertently allow some inaccuracies to creep into their
productions. The works of Addison, Swift, Bentley, Pope,
Young, Blair, Hume, Gibbon, and even Johnson, that leviathan
of literature, are disfigured by numberless instances
of slovenliness of style. Cobbett, in his “Grammar of the
English Language,” says that he noted down about two
hundred improprieties of language in Johnson’s “Lives of
the Poets” alone; and he points out as many more, at
least, in the “Rambler,” which the author says he revised
and corrected with extraordinary care. Sydney Smith, one
of the finest stylists of this century, has not a few flagrant
solecisms; and, strange to say, some of them occur in a
passage in which he is trying to show that the English
language “may be learned, practically and <em>unerringly</em>,”
without a knowledge of grammatical rules. “When,” he
asks, “do we ever find a well educated Englishman <em>or</em>
Frenchman embarrassed by an ignorance of the grammar
of <em>their</em> respective languages? <em>They</em> first learn it practically
and unerringly; and then, if <em>they</em> chose (choose?)
to look back and smile at the idea of having proceeded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[443]</a></span>
by a number of rules, without knowing one of them by
heart, or being conscious that they had any rule at all,
this is a philosophical amusement; but who ever <em>thinks</em>
of learning the grammar of <em>their</em> own tongue, before <em>they</em>
are very good grammarians!” The best refutation of the
reasoning in this passage is found in the bad grammar
of the passage itself.</p>

<p>Even the literary detectives, who spend their time in
hunting down and showing up the mistakes of others,
enjoy no immunity from error. Harrison, in his excellent
work on “The English Language,” written expressly to
point out some of the most prevalent solecisms in its
literature, has such solecisms as the following: “The
<em>authority</em> of Addison, in matters of grammar; of Bentley,
who never made the English grammar his study; of
Bolingbroke, Pope, and others, <em>are</em> as nothing.” Breen,
who in his “Modern English Literature: its Blemishes and
Defects,” has shown uncommon critical acumen, writes
thus: “There is <em>no</em> writer so addicted to this blunder as
Isaac D’Israeli.” Again, in criticising a faulty expression
of Alison, he sins almost as grievously himself by saying:
“It would have been correct to say: ‘Suchet’s administration
was incomparably less oppressive than that of <em>any</em> of
the French generals in the Peninsula.’” This reminds
one of the statement that “Noah and his family outlived
all who lived before the flood,”&mdash;that is, they outlived
themselves. Latham, in his profound treatise on “The
English Language,” has such sentences as this: “The
logical and historical <em>analysis</em> of a language generally in
some degree <em>coincides</em>.” Here the syntax is correct; but
the sense is sacrificed, since a coincidence implies at least
two things. In the London “Saturday Review,” which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[444]</a></span>
“is nothing if not critical,” we find such a cacophonous
sentence as the following: “In personal relations Mr.
Bright is probab<em>ly</em> general<em>ly</em> kind<em>ly</em>.” Blair’s “Rhetoric”
has been used as a text-book for half a century; yet it
swarms with errors of grammar and rhetoric, against
almost every law of which he has sinned. Moon, in his
review of Alford, has pointed out hundreds of faults in
“The Dean’s English,” as censurable as any which he has
censured; and newspaper critics, at home and abroad,
have pointed out scores of obscurations, as well as of
glaring faults, in Moon.</p>

<p>It has been well observed by Professor Marsh that most
men would be unable to produce a good caricature of
their own individual speech, and that the shibboleth of
our personal dialect is unknown to ourselves, however
ready we may be to remark the characteristic phraseology
of others. “It is a mark of weakness, of poverty of speech,
or, at least, of bad taste, to continue the use of pet words,
or other peculiarities of language, after we have once
become conscious of them as such.” There are certain
stock phrases, also, which, though not objectionable in
themselves, have been so worn to shreds by continual
repetition in speech and in the press, that a man of
taste will shun using them as instinctively as he shuns a
solecism. A few examples are the following: “History
repeats itself,” “The irony of fate,” “That goes without
saying,” “Ample scope and verge enough,” “We are free
to confess,” “Conspicuous by its absence,” “The courage
of his convictions.”</p>

<p>We proceed to notice some of the common improprieties
of speech. Many of them are of recent origin, others are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[445]</a></span>
old offenders that have been tried and condemned at the
bar of criticism again and again:&mdash;</p>

<p><em>But</em>, for that, or if. Example: “I have no doubt but
he will come to-night.” “I should not wonder but that
was the case.”</p>

<p><em>Agriculturalist</em>, for agriculturist, is an impropriety of
the grossest sort. Nine-tenths of our writers on agriculture
use the former expression. They might as well say
geologicalist, instead of geologist, or chemicalist, instead
of chemist.</p>

<p><em>Deduction</em>, for induction. <em>Induction</em> is the mental process
by which we ascend to the discovery of general truths;
<em>deduction</em> is the process by which the law governing particulars
is derived from a knowledge of the law governing
the class to which particulars belong.</p>

<p><em>Illy</em> is a gross barbarism, quite common in these days,
especially with newly fledged poets. There is no such word
as <em>illy</em> in the language. The noun, adjective, and adverb,
are <em>ill</em>.</p>

<p><em>Plenty</em>, for plentiful. Stump politicians tell us that the
adoption of a certain measure “will make money plenty in
every man’s pocket.”</p>

<p><em>I have got</em>, for I have. Hardly any other word in the
language is so abused as the word <em>get</em>. A man says, “I
have got a cold”; he means simply, “I have a cold.”
Another says that a certain lady “has got a fine head of
hair,” which may be true if the hair is false, but it is probably
intended as a compliment. A third says: “I have got
to leave the city for New York this evening,” meaning only
that he <em>has</em> to leave the city, etc. Nine out of ten ladies
who enter a dry-goods store, ask, “Have you got” such or
such an article? If such a phrase as “I have possess” were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[446]</a></span>
used, all noses would turn up together; but “I have got,”
when used to signify “I have,” is equally a departure from
propriety. A man may say, “I have got more than my
neighbor has, because I have been more industrious”; but
he cannot with propriety say, “I have got a long nose,”
however long his nose may be, unless it be an artificial one.
Even so able a writer as Prof. Whitney expresses himself
thus: “Who ever yet got through learning his mother
tongue, and could say, ‘The work is done’?”</p>

<p><em>Recommend.</em> This word is used in a strange sense by
many persons. Political conventions often pass resolutions
beginning thus: “Resolved, that the Republicans (or Democrats)
of this county be recommended to meet,” etc.</p>

<p><em>Differ with</em> is often used, in public debate, instead of
<em>differ from</em>. Example: “I differ with the learned gentleman,
entirely,”&mdash;which is intended to mean, that the
speaker holds views different from those of the gentleman;
not that he agrees with the gentleman in differing from
the views of a third person. <em>Different to</em> is often spoken
and written in England, and occasionally in this country,
instead of <em>different from</em>. An example of this occurs in
Queen Victoria’s book, edited by Mr. Helps.</p>

<p><em>Corporeal</em>, for corporal, is a gross vulgarism, the use of
which at this day should almost subject an educated man to
the kind of punishment which the latter adjective designates.
<em>Corporeal</em> means, having a body corporal, or belonging
to a body.</p>

<p><em>Wearies</em>, for is wearied. Example: “The reader soon
wearies of such stuff.”</p>

<p><em>Any how</em> is an exceedingly vulgar phrase, though used
even by so elegant a writer as Blair. Example: “If the
damage can be any how repaired,” etc. The use of this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[447]</a></span>
expression, <em>in any manner</em>, by one who professes to write
and speak the English tongue with purity, is unpardonable.</p>

<p><em>It were</em>, for it is. Example: “It were a consummation
devoutly to be wished for.” Dr. Chalmers says: “It were
an intolerable spectacle, even to the inmates of a felon’s
cell, did they behold one of their fellows in the agonies of
death.” For <em>were</em> put <em>would be</em>, and for <em>did</em> put <em>should</em>.</p>

<p><em>Doubt</em> is a word much abused by a class of would-be
laconic speakers, who affect an Abernethy-like brevity of
language. “I doubt such is the true meaning of the Constitution,”
say our “great expounders,” looking wondrous
wise. They mean, “I doubt whether,” etc.</p>

<p><em>Lie</em>, <em>lay</em>. Gross blunders are committed in the use of
these words; <em>e.g.</em>, “He laid down on the grass,” instead of
“he laid himself down,” or, “he lay down.” The verb <em>to
lie</em> (to be in a horizontal position) is <em>lay</em> in the preterite.
The book does not <em>lay</em> on the table; it <em>lies</em> there. Some
years ago an old lady consulted an eccentric Boston physician,
and, in describing her disease, said: “The trouble,
Doctor, is that I can neither lay nor set.” “Then, Madam,”
was the reply, “I would respectfully suggest the propriety
of roosting.”</p>

<p>“<em>Like I did</em>,” is a gross western and southern vulgarism
for “as I did.” “You will feel like lightning ought
to strike you,” said a learned Doctor of Divinity at a meeting
in the East. Even so well informed a writer as R. W.
Dale, D.D., says: “A man’s style, if it is a good one, fits
his thought <em>like</em> a good coat fits his figure.” <em>Like</em> is a
preposition, and should not be used as a conjunction.</p>

<p><em>Less</em>, for fewer. “Not less than fifty persons.” <em>Less</em>
relates to quantity; <em>fewer</em>, to number.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[448]</a></span></p>

<p><em>Balance</em>, for remainder. “I’ll take the balance of the
goods.”</p>

<p><em>Revolt</em>, for are revolting to. “Such doctrines revolt us.”</p>

<p><em>Alone</em>, for only. Quackenboss, in his “Course of Composition
and Rhetoric,” says, in violation of one of his own
rules: “This means of communication, as well as that
which follows, is employed by man alone.” <em>Only</em> is often
misplaced in a sentence. Miss Braddon says, in the prospectus
of “Belgravia,” her English magazine, that “it will
be written in good English. In its pages papers of sterling
merit will only appear.” A poor beginning this! She
means that “only papers of sterling merit will appear.”
Bolingbroke says: “Believe me, the providence of God has
established such an order in the world, that, of all that
belongs to us, the least valuable parts can alone fall under
the will of others.” The last clause should be, “only the
least valuable parts can fall under the will of others.”
The word <em>merely</em> is misplaced in the following sentence
from a collegiate address on eloquence: “It is true of men
as of God, that words merely meet no response,&mdash;only such
as are loaded with thought.”</p>

<p><em>Likewise</em>, for also. <em>Also</em> classes together things or
qualities, whilst <em>likewise</em> couples actions or states of being.
“He did it likewise,” means he did it in like manner. An
English Quaker was once asked by a lawyer whether he
could tell the difference between <em>also</em> and <em>likewise</em>. “O,
yes,” was the reply, “Erskine is a great lawyer; his talents
are universally admired. You are a lawyer also, but not
like-<em>wise</em>.”</p>

<p><em>Avocation</em>, for vocation, or calling. A man’s <em>avocations</em>
are those pursuits or amusements which engage his attention<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[449]</a></span>
when he is “called away from” his regular business
or profession,&mdash;as music, fishing, boating.</p>

<p><em>Crushed out</em>, for crushed. “The rebellion has been
crushed out.” Why <em>out</em>, rather than <em>in</em>? If you tread
on a worm, you simply crush him,&mdash;that is all. It ought
to satisfy the most vengeful foe of “the rebels” that they
have been crushed, without adding the needless cruelty of
crushing them <em>out</em>, which is to be as vindictive as Alexander,
of whom Dryden tells us that</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Thrice he routed all his foes,</p>
<p class="verse0">And thrice he slew the slain.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><em>Of</em>, for from. Example: “Received of John Smith fifty
dollars.” Usage, perhaps, sanctions this.</p>

<p><em>At all</em> is a needless expletive, which is employed by
many writers of what may be called the forcible-feeble
school. For example: “The coach was upset, but, strange
to say, not a passenger received the slightest injury at all.”
“It is not at all strange.”</p>

<p><em>But that</em>, for that. This error is quite common among
those who think themselves above learning anything more
from the dictionary and grammar. Trench says: “He
never doubts but that he knows their intention.” A worse
error is <em>but what</em>, as in the reply of Mr. Jobling, of “Bleak
House”: “Thank you, Guppy, I don’t know but what I will
take a marrow pudding.” “He would not believe but what
I was joking.”</p>

<p><em>Convene</em> is used by many persons in a strange sense.
“This road will convene the public.”</p>

<p><em>Evidence</em> is a word much abused by learned judges and
attorneys,&mdash;being continually used for <em>testimony</em>. <em>Evidence</em>
relates to the convictive view of any one’s mind;
<em>testimony</em>, to the knowledge of another concerning some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[450]</a></span>
fact. The evidence in a case is often the reverse of the
testimony.</p>

<p><em>Had have.</em> <em>E.g.</em> The London “Times” says “Sir
Wilfred Lawson <em>had</em> better <em>have</em> kept to his original proposal.”
This is a very low vulgarism, notwithstanding it
has the authority of Addison. It is quite common to say
“Had I have seen him,” “Had you have known it,” etc.
We can say, “I have been,” “I had been,” but what sort
of a tense is <em>had have</em> been?</p>

<p><em>Had ought</em>, <em>had better</em>, <em>had rather</em>. All these expressions
are absurdities, no less gross than <em>hisn</em>, <em>tother</em>, <em>baint</em>, <em>theirn</em>.
No doubt there is plenty of good authority for <em>had better</em>
and <em>had rather</em>; but how can future action be expressed by
a verb that signifies past and completed possession?</p>

<p><em>At</em>, for by. <em>E.g.</em>, “Sales at auction.” The word auction
signifies a <em>manner</em> of sale; and this signification seems
to require the preposition <em>by</em>.</p>

<p><em>The above</em>, as an adjective. “The above extract is sufficient
to verify my assertion.” “I fully concur in the above
statement” (the statement above, or the foregoing statement).
Charles Lamb speaks of “the above boys and the
below boys.”</p>

<p><em>Then</em>, as an adjective. “The then King of Holland.”
This error, to which even educated men are addicted,
springs from a desire of brevity; but verbal economy is
not commendable when it violates the plainest rules of
language.</p>

<p><em>Final completion.</em> As every completion is final, the
adjective is superfluous. A similar objection applies to
<em>first beginning</em>. Similar to these superabundant forms of
expression is another, in which <em>universal</em> and <em>all</em> are brought
into the same construction. A man is said to be “universally<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[451]</a></span>
esteemed by all who know him.” If <em>all</em> esteem him,
he is, of course, <em>universally</em> esteemed; and the converse is
equally true.</p>

<p><em>Party</em>, for man or woman. This error, so common in
England, is becoming more and more prevalent here. An
English witness once testified that he saw “a short party”
(meaning person) “go over the bridge.” Another Englishman,
who had looked at a portrait of St. Paul in a
gallery at Florence, being asked his opinion of the picture,
said that he thought “the party was very well executed.”
It is hardly necessary to say that it takes several persons to
make a party.</p>

<p><em>Celebrity</em> is sometimes applied to celebrated persons,
instead of being used abstractly; <em>e.g.</em>, “Several celebrities
are at the Palmer House.”</p>

<p><em>Equanimity of mind.</em> As equanimity (<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">æquus animus</i>)
means evenness of mind, why should “of mind” be repeated?
“Anxiety of mind” is less objectionable, but the
first word is sufficient.</p>

<p><em>Don’t</em> for doesn’t, or does not. Even so scholarly a
divine as the Rev. Dr. Bellows, of New York, employs
this vulgarism four times in an article in the “Independent.”
“A man,” he says, “who knows only his family
and neighbors, don’t know them; a man who only
knows the present don’t know that.... Many a man,
with a talent for making money, don’t know whether he
is rich or poor, because he don’t understand bookkeeping,”
etc.</p>

<p><em>Predicate</em>, for found. <em>E.g.</em>, “His argument was predicated
on the assumption,” etc.</p>

<p><em>Try</em>, for make. <em>E.g.</em>, “Try the experiment.”</p>

<p><em>Superior</em>, for able, virtuous, etc. <em>E.g.</em>, “He is a superior<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[452]</a></span>
man.” Not less vulgar is the expression, “an inferior
man,” for a man of small abilities.</p>

<p><em>Deceiving</em>, for trying to deceive. <em>E.g.</em>, a person says
to another, “You are deceiving me,” when he means
exactly the opposite, namely, “You are trying to deceive
me, but you cannot succeed, for your trickery is transparent.”</p>

<p><em>The masses</em>, for the people generally. “The masses
must be educated.” The masses of what?</p>

<p><em>In our midst.</em> This vulgarism is continually heard in
prayer-meetings, and from the lips of Doctors of Divinity,
though its incorrectness has been exposed again and again.
The second chapter in Prof. Schele De Vere’s excellent
“Studies in English” begins thus: “When a man rises
to eminence in our midst,” etc.,&mdash;which is doubtless one
of the few errors in his book <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">quas incuria fudit</i>. The
possessive pronoun can properly be used only to indicate
possession or appurtenance. “The midst” of a company
or society is not a thing belonging or appurtenant to the
company, or to the individuals composing it. It is a mere
term of relation of an adverbial, not of a substantive
character, and is an intensified form of expression for
<em>among</em>. Would any one say, “In our middle”?</p>

<p><em>Excessively</em>, for exceedingly. Ladies often complain
that the weather is “excessively hot,” thereby implying
that they do not object to the heat, but only to the excess
of heat. They mean simply that the weather is <em>very</em> hot.</p>

<p><em>Either</em> is applicable only to two objects; and the same
remark is true of <em>neither</em> and <em>both</em>. “Either of the
three” is wrong; so is this,&mdash;“Ten burglars broke into
the house, but neither of them could be recognized.” Say,
“<em>none</em> of them,” or “<em>not one</em> of them could be recognized.”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[453]</a></span>
<em>Either</em> is sometimes improperly used for <em>each</em>; <em>e.g.</em>, “On
either side of the river was the tree of life,”&mdash;Rev. xxi, 2.
Here it is not meant that if you do not find that the
tree of life was on <em>this</em> side, it was on <em>that</em>; but that
the tree of life was on each side,&mdash;on this side, and on
that. The proper use of <em>either</em> was vindicated some years
ago in England, by the Court of Chancery. A certain
testator left property, the disposition of which was affected
by “the death of either” of two persons. One learned
counsel contended that the word “either” meant both;
in support of this view he quoted Richardson, Webster,
Chaucer, Dryden, Southey, the history of the crucifixion,
and a passage from the Revelation. The learned judge
suggested that there was an old song in the “Beggar’s
Opera,” known to all, which took the opposite view:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“How happy could I be with either,</p>
<p class="verse0">Were t’other dear charmer away.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">In pronouncing judgment, the judge dissented entirely
from the argument of the learned counsel. “Either,” he
said, “means one of two, and does not mean both.”
Though occasionally, by poets and some other writers, the
word was employed to signify <em>both</em>, it did not in the case
before the court.</p>

<p><em>Whether</em> is a contraction of <em>which of either</em>, and
therefore cannot be correctly applied to more than two
objects.</p>

<p><em>Never</em>, for ever. <em>E.g.</em>, “Charm he never so wisely”;
“Let the offence be of never so high a nature.” Many
grammarians approve of this use of <em>never</em>; but its correctness,
to say the least, is doubtful. In such sentences
as these, “He was deaf to the voice of the charmer, charm
he ever so wisely,” “Were it ever so fine a day, I would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[454]</a></span>
not go out,” the word <em>ever</em> is an adverb of degree, and has
nothing to do with time. “If I take ever so little of this
drug, it will kill me,” is equivalent to “however little,”
or “how little soever I take of this drug, it will kill me.”
Harrison well says on this point: “Let any one translate
one of these phrases into another language, and he will
find that ‘ever’ presents itself as a term expressive of degree,
and not of time at all. ‘Charm he ever so wisely’:
<span lang="la" xml:lang="la">Quamvis incantandi sit <em>peritus</em> aut <em>peritissimus</em>.</span>”</p>

<p><em>Seldom, or never</em> is a common vulgarism. Say “seldom,
if ever.”</p>

<p><em>Sit</em>, <em>sat</em>, are much abused words. It is said that the
brilliant Irish lawyer, Curran, once carelessly observed in
court, “an action lays,” and the judge corrected him by
remarking: “Lies, Mr. Curran,&mdash;hens lay;” but when
afterward the judge ordered a counsellor to “set down,”
Curran retaliated, “Sit down, your honor,&mdash;hens set.”
The retort was characterized by more wit than truth.
Hens do not set; they sit. It is not unusual to hear persons
say, “The coat sets well”; “The wind sets fair.”
<em>Sits</em> is the proper word. The preterite of <em>sit</em> is often
incorrectly used for that of <em>set</em>; <em>e.g.</em>, “He sat off for
Boston.”</p>

<p><em>From thence</em>, <em>from whence</em>. As the adverbs <em>thence</em> and
<em>whence</em> literally supply the place of a noun and preposition,
there is a solecism in employing a preposition in
conjunction with them.</p>

<p><em>Conduct.</em> In conversation, this verb is frequently used
without the personal pronoun; as, “he conducts well,”
for “he conducts himself well.”</p>

<p><em>Least</em>, for less. “Of two evils, choose the least.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[455]</a></span></p>

<p><em>A confirmed invalid.</em> Can weakness be strong? If not,
how can a man be a <em>confirmed</em>, or strengthened, invalid?</p>

<p><em>Proposition</em>, for proposal. This is not a solecism, but,
as a univocal word is preferable to one that is equivocal,
<em>proposal</em>, for a thing offered or proposed, is better than
<em>proposition</em>. Strictly, a proposal is something offered to
be done; a proposition is something submitted to one’s
consideration. <em>E.g.</em>, “He rejected the proposal of his
friend;” “he demonstrated the fifth proposition in Euclid.”</p>

<p><em>Previous</em>, for previously. “Previous to my leaving
America.”</p>

<p><em>Appreciates</em>, for rises in value. “Gold appreciated
yesterday.” Even the critical London Athenæum is guilty
of this solecism. It says: “A book containing personal
reminiscences of one of our great schools appeals to a public
limited, no doubt, but certain, and sure <em>to appreciate</em>.”</p>

<p><em>Proven</em> for proved, and <em>plead</em> for pleaded, are clearly
vulgarisms.</p>

<p><em>Bound</em>, for ready or determined. “I am bound to do
it.” We may say properly that a ship is “bound to Liverpool”;
but in that case we do not employ, as many
suppose, the past participle of the verb <em>to bind</em>, but the
old northern participial adjective, <i>buinn</i>, from the verb,
<i>at bua</i>, signifying “to make ready, or prepare.” The
term is strictly a nautical one, and to employ it in a sense
that unites the significations both of <i>buinn</i> and the English
participle <em>bound</em> from <em>bind</em>, is a plain abuse of language.</p>

<p><em>No</em>, for not. <em>E.g.</em>, “Whether I am there or no.”
Cowper writes:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“I will not ask Jean Jacques Rousseau,</p>
<p class="verse0">Whether birds confabulate or no.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">By supplying the ellipsis, we shall see that <em>not</em> is here<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[456]</a></span>
the proper word. “Whether birds confabulate, or do not
confabulate,” “whether I am there, or not there.” <em>No</em>
never properly qualifies a verb.</p>

<p><em>Such</em> for so. <em>E.g.</em>, “I never saw such a high spire.”
This means, “I never saw a high spire of such a form,”
or “of such architecture” whereas the speaker, in all
probability, means only that he never saw <em>so</em> high a spire.
<em>Such</em> denotes quality; <em>so</em>, degree.</p>

<p><em>Incorrect orthography.</em> Orthography means “correct
writing, or spelling.” “Incorrect orthography” is, therefore,
equivalent to “incorrect correct writing.”</p>

<p><em>How</em> for that. “I have heard <em>how</em> some critics have
been pacified with claret and a supper.”</p>

<p><em>Directly</em>, for as soon as. “Directly he came, I went
away with him.”</p>

<p><em>Equally as well</em>, for equally well. <em>E.g.</em>, “It will do
equally as well.”</p>

<p><em>Supplement</em>, used as a verb. There is considerable
authority for this use of the word; but it is a case where
usage is clearly opposed to the very principles of the
language.</p>

<p><em>Greet</em> and <em>greeting</em> are often improperly used. A greeting
is a salutation; to say, therefore, as newspaper reporters
often do, that a speaker in the Legislature, or on
the platform, was “greeted with hisses,” or “with groans,”
is a decided “malapropism.”</p>

<p><em>To a degree</em> is a phrase often used by English writers
and speakers. <em>E.g.</em>, “Mr. Gladstone is sensitive to a degree.”
To what degree?</p>

<p><em>Farther</em> for <em>further</em>. “Farther” is the comparative of
far, and should be used in speaking of bodies relatively
at rest; as, “Jupiter is farther from the earth than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[457]</a></span>
Mars.” “<em>Further</em>” is the comparative of “forth,” and
should be used when motion is expressed; as “He ran
further than you.”</p>

<p><em>Quite</em> for very. <em>E.g.</em>, In Mrs. Stowe’s “Sunny Memories
of Foreign Lands,” we read: “The speeches were
<em>quite</em> interesting”; “we had <em>quite</em> a sociable time up in
the gallery”; and we are told that at Mrs. Cropper’s, “in
the evening, <em>quite</em> a circle came in,” etc., etc. The true
meaning of “quite” is <em>completely</em>, <em>entirely</em>.</p>

<p><i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Effluvium.</i> The plural of this word is often used as if
it meant bad odors; whereas an “effluvium” may be a
stream either of pure air or of foul air,&mdash;of pure water
or of impure, etc.</p>

<p><em>None</em> is a contraction of <em>no one</em>, and therefore to say
“none are,” or “none were,” is just as improper as to say
“no one are,” or “no one were.”</p>

<p><em>I watched him do it.</em> This is an impropriety of speech
rarely heard in this country, but often in England.</p>

<p><em>Looks beautifully.</em> In spite of the frequency with
which this impropriety has been censured, one hears it
almost daily from the lips of educated men and women.
The error arises from confounding <em>look</em> in the sense of to
direct the eye, and look in the sense of to seem, to appear.
In English, many verbs take an adjective with them to
form the predicate, where in other languages an adverb
would be used; <em>e.g.</em>, “he fell ill”; “he feels cold”; “her
smiles amid the blushes lovelier show.” No cultivated
person would say, “she is beautifully,” or “she seems
beautifully,” yet these phrases are no more improper than
“she looks beautifully.” We qualify what a person does
by an adverb; what a person <em>is</em>, or <em>seems to be</em>, by an
adjective; <em>e.g.</em>, “she looks coldly on him”; “she looks cold.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[458]</a></span></p>

<p><em>Leave</em>, as an intransitive verb. <em>E.g.</em>, “He left yesterday.”
Many persons who use this phrase are misled by
what they deem the analogous expression, <em>to write</em>, <em>to read</em>.
These verbs express an occupation, as truly as <em>to run</em>, <em>to
walk</em>, <em>to stand</em>. In answer to the question, “What is A.
B. doing?” it is sufficient to say, “He is reading.” Here
a complete idea is conveyed, which is not true of the
phrase, “He left yesterday.”</p>

<p><em>Myself</em>, for I. <em>E.g.</em>, “Mrs. Jones and myself will be
happy to dine with you”; “Prof. S. and myself have
examined the work.” The proper use of <em>myself</em> is either
as a reflective pronoun, or for the sake of distinction and
emphasis; as when Juliet cries, “Romeo, doff thy name,
and for that name, which is no part of thee, take all
myself”; or, in Milton’s paradisiacal hymn: “These are
thy glorious works, Parent of Good, Almighty! Thine this
universal frame thus wondrous fair! Thyself how wondrous
then!”</p>

<p><em>Restive.</em> This word, which means <em>inclined to rest</em>, <em>obstinate</em>,
<em>unwilling to go</em>, is employed, almost constantly, in a
sense directly the reverse of this; that is, for restless.</p>

<p><em>Quantity</em>, for number. <em>E.g.</em>, “A quantity of books”;
“a quantity of postage stamps.” In speaking of a collection,
or mass, it is proper to use <em>quantity</em>; but in speaking
of individual objects, however many, we must use the
word number. “A quantity of meat,” or “a quantity of
iron” is good English, but not “a quantity of bank-notes.”
We may say “a quantity of wood,” but we should say a
“number of sticks.”</p>

<p><em>Carnival.</em> This word literally means “Farewell to
meat,” or, as some etymologists think, “Flesh, be strong!”
In Catholic countries it signifies a festival celebrated with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[459]</a></span>
merriment and revelry during the week before Lent. In
this country, especially in newspaper use, it is employed
in the sense of fun, frolic, spree, festival; and that so
generally as almost to have banished some of these words
from the language. If many persons are skating, that is
a carnival; so, if they take a sleigh-ride, or if there is a
rush to Long Branch in the summer. As we have a plenty
of legitimate words to describe these festivities, the use of
this outlandish term has not a shadow of justification.</p>

<p><em>All of them.</em> As <em>of</em> here means <em>out of</em>, corresponding
with the Latin preposition <em>e</em>, or <em>ex</em>, it cannot be correct to
say <em>all of them</em>. We may say, “take one of them” or
“take two of them,” or “take them all”; but the phrase
we are criticising is wholly unjustifiable.</p>

<p><em>To allude.</em> Among the improprieties of speech which
even those sharp-eyed literary detectives, Alford, Moon,
and Gould have failed to pounce upon and pillory, are
the misuses of the word that heads this paragraph. Once the
verb had a distinct, well defined meaning, but it is now
rapidly losing its true signification. <em>To allude</em> to a thing,&mdash;what
is it? Is it not to speak of it <em>darkly</em>,&mdash;to <em>hint</em> at it
playfully (from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ludo</i>, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ludere</i>,&mdash;to play), without any direct
mention? Yet the word is used in a sense directly opposite
to this. Suppose you lose in the street some package, and
advertise its loss in the newspapers. The person who finds
the package is sure to reply to your advertisement by
speaking of “the package you alluded to in your advertisement,”
though you have alluded to nothing, but have
told your story in the most distinct and straightforward
manner possible, without an approximation to a hint or
innuendo. Newspaper reporters, by their abuse of this
unhappy word, will transform a bold and daring speech in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[460]</a></span>
Congress, in which a senator has taken some bull by the
horns,&mdash;in other words, dealt openly and manfully with
the subject discussed,&mdash;into a heap of dark and mysterious
innuendoes. The honorable gentleman <em>alluded to</em> the currency&mdash;to
the war&mdash;to Andrew Johnson&mdash;to the New
Orleans massacre; he <em>alluded to</em> the sympathizers with the
South, though he denounced them in the most caustic
terms; he <em>alluded to</em> the tax-bill, and he <em>alluded to</em> fifty
other things, about every one of which he spoke out his
mind in emphatic and unequivocal terms. An English
journal tells a ludicrous story of an M.P. who, his health
having been drunk by name, rose on his legs, and spoke of
“the flattering way in which he had been alluded to.”
Another public speaker spoke of a book which had been
<em>alluded to</em> by name. But the climax of absurdity in the
use of this word was attained by an Irish M.P., who wrote
a life of an Italian poet. Quoting Byron’s lines about
“the fatal gift of beauty,” he then goes on to talk about
“the fatal gift which has been already alluded to!”</p>

<p><em>Either alternative.</em> <em>E.g.</em>, “You may take either alternative.”
“Two alternatives were presented to me.” <em>Alternative</em>
evidently means a choice,&mdash;one choice,&mdash;between
two things. If there be only one offered, we say there is
<em>no alternative</em>. <em>Two alternatives</em> is, therefore, a palpable
contradiction in terms; yet some speakers talk of “several
alternatives” having been presented to them.</p>

<p><em>Whole</em>, for all. The “Spectator” says: “The Red-Cross
Knight runs through the whole steps of the Christian
life.” Alison, who is one of the loosest writers in our
literature, declares, in his “History of the French Revolution,”
that “the whole Russians are inspired with the
belief that their mission is to conquer the world.” This<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[461]</a></span>
can only mean that those Russians who are entire,&mdash;who
have not lost a leg, an arm, or some other part of the body,&mdash;are
inspired with the belief of which he speaks. <em>Whole</em>
refers to the component parts of a single body, and is therefore
singular in meaning.</p>

<p><em>Jeopardize.</em> There is considerable authority for this
word, which is beginning to supplant the good old English
word <i>jeopard</i>. But why is it more needed than <em>perilize</em>,
<em>hazardize</em>?</p>

<p><em>Preventative</em>, for preventive; <em>conversationalist</em>, for converser;
<em>underhanded</em>, for underhand; <em>casuality</em>, for casualty;
<em>speciality</em>, for specialty; <em>leniency</em>, for lenity; <em>firstly</em>,
for first; are all base coinages, barbarisms which should
be excommunicated by “bell, book, and candle.”</p>

<p><em>Dangerous</em>, for in danger. A leading Boston paper says
of a deceased minister: “His illness was only of a week’s
duration, and was pleurisy and rheumatism. He was not
supposed to be dangerous.”</p>

<p><em>Nice.</em> One of the most offensive barbarisms now prevalent
is the use of this as a pet word to express almost every
kind of approbation, and almost every quality. Strictly,
<em>nice</em> can be used only in a subjective, not in an objective,
sense; though both of our leading lexicographers approve
of such expressions as “a nice bit of cheese.” Of the vulgarity
of such expressions as “a nice man” (meaning a
good or pleasing man), “a nice day,” “a nice party,” etc.,
there cannot be a shadow of doubt. “A nice man” means
a fastidious man; a “nice letter” is a letter very delicate
in its language. Some persons are more nice than wise.
Archdeacon Hare complains that “this characterless domino,”
as he stigmatizes the word <em>nice</em>, is continually used
by his countrymen, and that “a universal deluge of <i>niaserie</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[462]</a></span>
(for the word was originally <i>niais</i>) threatens to whelm the
whole island.” The Latin word <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">elegans</i> seems to have had
a similar history; being derived from <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">elego</i>, and meaning
primarily <em>nice</em> or <em>choice</em>, and subsequently <em>elegant</em>.</p>

<p><em>Mutual</em>, for common, or reciprocal. Dean Alford justly
protests against the stereotyped vulgarism, “a mutual
friend.” Mutual is applicable to sentiments and acts, but
not to persons. Two friends may have a mutual love, but
for either to speak of a third person as being “their mutual
friend,” is sheer nonsense. Yet Dickens entitled one of his
novels, “Our Mutual Friend.”</p>

<p><em>Stopping</em>, for staying. “The Hon. John Jones is stopping
at the Sherman House.” In reading such a statement
as this, we are tempted to ask, When will Mr. Jones stop
stopping? A man may stop a dozen times at a place, or on
a journey, but he cannot <em>continue</em> stopping. One may stop
at a hotel without becoming a guest. The true meaning of
the word <em>stop</em> was well understood by the man who did not
invite his professed friend to visit him: “If you come, at
any time, within ten miles of my house, just stop.”</p>

<p><em>Trifling minutiæ.</em> Archbishop Whately, in his “Rhetoric,”
speaks of “trifling minutiæ of style.” In like
manner, Henry Kirke White speaks of his poems as being
“the juvenile efforts of a youth,” and Disraeli, the author
of “The Curiosities of Literature,” speaks of “the battles
of logomachy,” and of “the mysteries of the arcana of
alchemy.” The first of these phrases may be less palpably
tautological than the other three; yet as <em>minutiæ</em> means
nearly the same things as <em>trifles</em>, a careful writer would be
as adverse to using such an expression as Whately’s, as he
would be to talking, like Sir Archibald Alison, of representative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[463]</a></span>
institutions as having been reëstablished in our time
“by the influence of English <em>Anglo</em>mania.”</p>

<p><em>Indices</em>, for indexes. “We have examined our indices,”
etc., say the Chicago abstract-makers. <em>Indices</em> are algebraic
signs; tables of contents are indexes.</p>

<p><em>Rendition</em>, for rendering. <em>E.g.</em>, “Mr. Booth’s rendition
of Hamlet was admirable.” <em>Rendition</em> means surrender,
giving up, relinquishing to another; as when we speak of
the rendition of a beleaguered town to the besieger, or of a
pledge upon the satisfaction of a debt.</p>

<p><em>Extend</em>, for give. Lecture committees, instead of simply
inviting a public speaker, or giving him an invitation,
almost universally <em>extend</em> an invitation; perhaps, because
he is generally at a considerable distance. Richard Grant
White says pertinently; “As extend (from <em>ex</em> and <em>tendo</em>)
means merely to stretch forth, it is much better to say that
a man put out, offered, or stretched forth his hand than
that he extended it. Shakespeare makes the pompous,
pragmatical <em>Malvolio</em> say: ‘I extend my hand to him
thus’; but ‘Paul stretched forth the hand, and answered
for himself.’ This, however, is a question of taste, not of
correctness.”</p>

<p><em>Except</em>, for unless. <em>E.g.</em>, “No one, except he has served
an apprenticeship, need apply.” The former word is a
preposition, and must be followed by a noun or pronoun,
and not by a proposition.</p>

<p><em>Couple</em>, for a pair or brace. When two persons or
things are joined or linked together, they form a <em>couple</em>.
The number of things that can be coupled is comparatively
small, yet the expression is in constant use; as “a
couple of books,” “a couple of partridges,” “a couple of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[464]</a></span>
weeks,” etc. One might as well speak of “a pair of
dollars.”</p>

<p><em>Every.</em> <em>E.g.</em>, “I have every confidence in him”; “they
rendered me every assistance.” <em>Every</em> denotes all the individuals
of a number greater than two, separately considered.
Derived from the Anglo-Saxon, <i>œfer</i>, ever, <i>œlc</i>,
each, it means each of all, not all in mass. By “every
confidence” is meant simply perfect confidence; by “every
assistance,” all possible assistance.</p>

<p><em>Almost</em>, as an adjective. Prof. Whitney, in his able
work on “Language, and the Study of Language,” speaks
of “the almost universality of instruction among us.”</p>

<p><em>Condign.</em> <em>E.g.</em>, “He does not deserve the condign punishment
he has received.” As the meaning of <em>condign</em> is
that which is deserved, we have here a contradiction in
terms, the statement being equivalent to this: “he does
not deserve the deserved punishment he has received.”</p>

<p><em>Paraphernalia.</em> This is a big, sounding word from the
Greek, which some newspaper writers are constantly misusing.
It is strictly a law-term, and means whatever the
wife brings with her at marriage in addition to her dower.
Her dress and her ornaments are <em>paraphernalia</em>. To apply
the term to an Irishman’s sash on St. Patrick’s day, or to a
Freemason’s hieroglyphic apron, it has been justly said,
is not only an abuse of language, but a clear invasion of
woman’s rights.</p>

<p><em>Setting-room</em>, for sitting-room, is a gross vulgarism,
which is quite common, even with those who deem themselves
<em>nice</em> people. “I saw your children in the setting-room,
as I went past,” said a well-dressed woman in our
hearing, in a horse-car. How <em>could</em> she go <em>past</em>? It is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[465]</a></span>
not difficult to go <em>by</em> any object; but to go <em>past</em> is a contradiction
in terms.</p>

<p><em>An innumerable number</em> is an absurd expression, which
is used by some persons,&mdash;not, it is to be hoped, “an innumerable
number” of times.</p>

<p><em>Seraphim</em>, for seraph; the plural for the singular.
Even Addison says: “The zeal of the seraphim breaks
forth,” etc. This is as ludicrous as the language of the
Indiana justice, who spoke of “the first claw of the statute,”
or the answer of the man who, when asked whether
he had no politics, replied, “Not a single politic.”</p>

<p><em>People</em>, for persons, “Many people think so.” Better,
persons; people means a body of persons regarded collectively,
a nation.</p>

<p><em>Off of</em>, for off. “Cut a yard off of the cloth.”</p>

<p><em>More perfect</em>, <em>most perfect</em>. What shall be said of these
and similar forms of expression? Doubtless they should
be discouraged, though used by Shakespeare and Milton.
It may be argued in their favor, that, though not logically
correct, yet they are rhetorically so. It is true that, as
“twenty lions cannot be more twenty than twenty flies,”
so nothing can be more perfect than perfection. But we
do not object to say that one man is <em>braver</em> than another,
or <em>wiser</em>, though, if we had an absolute standard of
bravery or wisdom,&mdash;that is, a clear idea of them,&mdash;we
should pronounce either of the two persons to be simply
brave or not brave, wise or not wise. We say that Smith
is a <em>better</em> man than Jones, though no one is absolutely
good but God. These forms are used because language is
inadequate to express the intensity of the thought,&mdash;as in
Milton’s “most wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best,” or
the lines,</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[466]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“And <em>in the lowest deep a lower deep</em>,</p>
<p class="verse0">Still threatening to devour me, opens wide,</p>
<p class="verse0">To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Milton abounds in these illogical expressions, as do the
best Greek poets; and one of the happiest verses in the
poems of W. W. Story is a similar intentional contradiction,
as</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Of every noble work the silent part is best;</p>
<p class="verse0">Of all expression, that which cannot be expressed.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><em>Ugly</em>, for ill-tempered. A leading New York divine is
reported as saying of an ill-tempered child, that “he wants
all he sees, and screams if he does not get it; ugly as he
can be, no matter who is disturbed by it.”</p>

<p><em>Is</em>, for are. One of the most frequent blemishes in
English prose is the indiscriminate use of singulars and
plurals. <em>E.g.</em>, Junius writes: “Both minister and magistrate
is compelled to choose between his duty and his
reputation.” Even Lindley Murray writes: “Their general
scope and tendency is not remembered at all”; and
Milton sings:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“For their mind and spirit remains invincible.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">Some grammarians defend these forms of expression on
the ground that when two or more nouns singular represent
a <em>single</em> idea, the verb to which they are the nominative
may be put in the singular. The answer to this is,
that if the nouns express the <em>same</em> idea, one of them is
superfluous; if <em>different</em> ideas, then they form a plural,
and the verb should be plural also. Another quibble
employed to justify such expressions, is that the verb,
which is expressed after the last noun, is considered as
understood <em>after</em> the first. But we are not told how this
process of subaudition can go on in the mind of the reader,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[467]</a></span>
<em>before</em> he knows what the verb is to be; and while ellipsis
not only is in many cases permissible, but gives conciseness
and energy to style, yet there is a limit beyond which
it cannot be pushed without leading to literary anarchy.</p>

<p><em>Caption</em>, for heading. <em>E.g.</em>, “The caption of this newspaper
article.” <em>Caption</em> means that part of a legal instrument
which shows where, when, and by what authority it
was taken, found, or executed.</p>

<p><em>To extremely maltreat.</em> This phrase from Trench is an
example of a very common solecism. <em>To</em>, the sign of the
infinitive, should never be separated from the verb. Say
“to maltreat extremely,” or “extremely to maltreat.”</p>

<p><em>Accord</em>, for grant. “He accorded them (or to them)
all they asked for.” <em>To accord with</em> means properly to
agree or to suit; as, “He accorded with my views.”</p>

<p><em>Enthuse</em>, a word used by some clergymen, is not to be
found either in Worcester’s Dictionary or in Webster’s
“Unabridged.”</p>

<p><em>Personalty.</em> This word is supposed by some persons
to mean articles worn on one’s person. Some years ago,
a lady, in England, who had made this mistake, and who
wished to leave to her servant her clothing, jewels, etc.,
described them as her <em>personalty</em>, and unwittingly included
in her bequest ten thousand pounds.</p>

<p><em>Do.</em> This verb is often used incorrectly as a substitute
for other verbs; as, “I did not say, as some have done.”
We may properly say, “I did not say, as some do” (<em>say</em>),
for here the ellipsis of the preceding verb may be supplied.</p>

<p><em>On to</em>, for on, or upon. “He got on to an omnibus;”
“He jumped on to a chair.” The preposition <em>to</em> is superfluous.
Say, “He got upon an omnibus,” etc. Some persons<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[468]</a></span>
speak of “continuing on,” which is as objectionable
as “He went to Boston for to see the city.”</p>

<p><em>Older</em>, for elder. <em>Older</em> is properly applied to objects,
animate and inanimate; <em>elder</em>, to rational beings.</p>

<p><em>Overflown</em>, for overflowed. “The river has overflown.”
<em>Flowed</em> is the participle of “to flow”; <em>flown</em>, of “to fly.”</p>

<p><em>Spoonsful</em>, for spoonfuls, and <em>effluvia</em> for effluvium, are
very common errors. “A disagreeable effluvia” is as gross
a mistake as “an inexplicable phenomena.”</p>

<p><em>Scarcely</em>, for hardly. <em>Scarcely</em> pertains to quantity;
<em>hardly</em>, to degree; as, “There is scarcely a bushel”; “I
shall hardly finish my job by night-fall.”</p>

<p><em>Fare thee well</em>, which has Byron’s authority, is plainly
wrong.</p>

<p><em>Community</em>, for the community; as “Community will
not submit to such outrages.” Prof. Marsh has justly
censured this vulgarism. Who would think of saying,
“Public is interested in this question”? When we <em>personify</em>
common nouns used definitely in the singular number,
we may omit the article, as when we speak of the
doings of Parliament, or of Holy Church. “During the
Revolution,” says Professor M., “while the federal government
was a body of doubtful authority and permanence, ... the
phrase used was always ‘<em>the</em> Congress,’
and such is the form of expression in the Constitution
itself. But when the Government became consolidated,
and Congress was recognized as the paramount legislative
power of the Union, ... it was personified, and the article
dropped, and, in like manner, the word Government
is often used in the same way.”</p>

<p><em>Folks</em> for folk. As <em>folk</em> implies plurality, the <em>s</em> is
needless.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[469]</a></span></p>

<p><em>Mussulmen.</em> Mussulman is not a compound of man, and,
therefore, like <em>German</em>, it forms its plural by adding <em>s</em>.</p>

<p><em>Drive</em>, for ride. A lady says that “she is going to drive
in the park,” when she intends that her servant shall drive
(not her, but) the horses.</p>

<p><em>Try and</em>, for try to. <em>E.g.</em>, “Try and do it.”</p>

<p><em>Whole</em>, <em>entire</em>, <em>complete</em>, and <em>total</em>, are words which are
used almost indiscriminately by many persons. That is
<em>whole</em>, from which nothing has been taken; that is <em>entire</em>,
which has not been divided; that is <em>complete</em>, which has all
its parts. <em>Total</em> refers to the aggregate of the parts.
Thus we say, a <em>whole</em> loaf of bread; an <em>entire</em> set of
spoons; a <em>complete</em> harness; the <em>total</em> cost or expense.</p>

<p><em>Succeed</em>, for give success to, or cause to succeed. <em>E.g.</em>,
“If Providence succeed us in this work.” Both Webster
and Worcester justify this use of <em>succeed</em> as a transitive
verb; but if not now grammatically objectionable, as
formerly, it is still to be avoided on the ground of ambiguity.
In the phrase quoted, <em>succeed</em> may mean either
cause to succeed, or follow.</p>

<p><em>Tartar</em> should be, strictly, <em>Tatar</em>. When the Tatar
hordes, in the thirteenth century, burst forth from the
Asiatic steppes, this fearful invasion was thought to be a
fulfilment of the prediction of the opening of the bottomless
pit, as portrayed in the ninth chapter of Revelations.
To bring the name into relation with Tartarus, <em>Tatar</em> was
written, as it still continues to be written, <em>Tartar</em>.</p>

<p>The following is an example of a very common error in
the arrangement of words:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Dead in sins and in transgressions</p>
<p class="verse2">Jesus cast his eyes on me,</p>
<p class="verse0">And of his divine possessions</p>
<p class="verse2">Bade me then a sharer be;” etc.</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[470]</a></span></p>

<p class="noindent">Though such is not the writer’s intention, he really
speaks of Jesus as being “dead in sins and in transgressions”;
for the syntax of the verse admits of no other
meaning.</p>

<p><em>Numerous</em>, for many. To speak of “our numerous
friends” is to say that each friend is numerous.</p>

<p><em>That of</em>; as, “He chose for a profession <em>that of</em> the
law.” This is equivalent to saying: He chose for a profession
the profession of law; or, he chose a profession for
a profession. Why not say, “He chose law for a profession”?</p>

<p><em>Fellow countrymen.</em> What is the difference between
“countrymen” and “fellow countrymen?”</p>

<p><em>Distinguish</em>, for discriminate. To distinguish is to
mark broad and plain differences; to discriminate is to
notice minute and subtle shades of difference.</p>

<p><em>Transpire</em>, for to happen. “Transpire” meant originally
to emit insensible vapor through the pores of the
skin. Afterward it was used metaphorically in the sense
of to become known, to pass from secrecy into publicity.
But to say that a certain event “transpired yesterday,”
meaning that it occurred then, is a gross vulgarism.</p>

<p><em>Ventilate</em>, for discuss.</p>

<p><em>Hung</em>, for hanged. “Hang,” when it means to take
away life by public execution, is a regular verb.</p>

<p><em>Bid</em>, for bade. <em>E.g.</em>, The London “Times” says: “He
called his servants, and <em>bid</em> them procure fire-arms.”</p>

<p><em>Dare</em>, for durst. “Neither her maidens nor the priest
<em>dare</em> speak to her for half an hour,” says the Rev.
Charles Kingsley, in one of his novels.</p>

<p><em>In</em>, for within. <em>E.g.</em>, “Is Mr. Smith in?”</p>

<p><em>Notwithstanding</em>, for although. <em>E.g.</em>, “<em>Notwithstanding</em><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[471]</a></span>
they fought bravely, they were defeated.” “Notwithstanding”
is a preposition, and cannot be correctly used as a
conjunction.</p>

<p><em>Two good ones.</em> “Among all the apples there were but
two good ones.” Two <em>ones</em>?</p>

<p><em>Raising the rent</em>, for increasing the rent. A landlord
notified his tenant that he should raise his rent. “Thank
you,” was the reply; “I find it very hard to raise it myself.”</p>

<p><em>Was</em>, for is. “Two young men,” says Swift, “have
made a discovery, that there was a God.” That there <em>was</em>
a God? When? This year, or last year, or ages ago?
All general truths should be expressed by the use of verbs
in the present tense.</p>

<p><em>Shall</em> and <em>will</em>. There are, perhaps, no two words in
the language which are more frequently confounded or
used inaccurately, than <em>shall</em> and <em>will</em>. Certain it is, that
of all the rocks on which foreigners split in the use of the
Queen’s English, there is none which so puzzles and perplexes
them as the distinction between these little words.
Originally both words were employed for the same purpose
in other languages of the same stock with ours; but their
use has been worked out by the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons,
until it has attained a degree of nicety remarkable
in itself, and by no means easy of acquisition even by the
subjects of Victoria or by Americans. Every one has heard
of the Dutchman who, on falling into a river, cried out,
“I will drown, and nobody shall help me.” The Irish are
perpetually using <em>shall</em> for <em>will</em>, while the Scotch use of
<em>will</em> for <em>shall</em> is equally inveterate and universal. Dr.
Chalmers says: “I am not able to devote as much time
and attention to other subjects as I will be under the necessity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[472]</a></span>
of doing next winter.” The use of <em>shall</em> for <em>will</em>, in
the following passage, has led some critics strongly to suspect
that the author of the anonymous work, “Vestiges
of Creation,” is a Scotchman: “I do not expect that any
word of praise which this work may elicit shall ever be
responded to by me; or that any word of censure shall
ever be parried or deprecated.” This awkward use of
<em>shall</em>, we have seen, is not a Scotticism; yet it is curious
to see how a writer who pertinaciously shrouds himself in
mystery, may be detected by the blundering use of a monosyllable.
So the use of the possessive neuter pronoun
<em>its</em> in the poems which Chatterton wrote and palmed off
as the productions of one Rowlie, a monk in the fifteenth
century, betrayed the forgery,&mdash;inasmuch as that little
monosyllable, <em>its</em>, now so common and convenient, did not
find its way into the language till about the time of Shakespeare.
Milton never once uses it, nor, except as a misprint,
is it to be found anywhere in the Bible.</p>

<p>Gilfillan, a Scotch writer, thus uses <em>will</em> for shall: “If
we look within the rough and awkward outside, we will
be richly rewarded by its perusal.” So Alison, the historian:
“We know to what causes our past reverses have
been owing, and we will have ourselves to blame if they
are again incurred.” Macaulay observes that “not one
Londoner in a thousand ever misplaces his <em>will</em> and <em>shall</em>.
Doctor Robinson could, undoubtedly, have written a luminous
dissertation on the use of those words. Yet, even in
his latest work, he sometimes misplaced them ludicrously.”
But Doctor Johnson was a Londoner, and he did not always
use his <em>shalls</em> and <em>wills</em> correctly, as will be seen by the
following extract from a letter to Boswell in 1774: “You
must make haste and gather me all you can, and do it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[473]</a></span>
quickly, or I <em>will</em> and <em>shall</em> do without it.” In this anti-climax
Johnson meant to emphasize the latter of the auxiliaries.
But <em>shall</em> (Saxon, <i>sceal</i> = <i>necesse est</i>) in the first
person, simply foretells; as, “I shall go to New York to-morrow.”
On the other hand, <em>will</em>, in the first person,
not only foretells, but promises, or declares the resolution
to do a thing; as, “I will pay you what I owe you.” The
Doctor should have said: “I shall and will do without it.”
putting the strongest term last. The confusion of the
two words is steadily increasing in this country. Formerly
the only Americans who confounded them were
Southerners; now, the misuse of the word is stealing
through the North. <em>E.g.</em>, “I will go to town to-morrow,
and shall take an early opportunity of calling on your
friend there.” “We will never look on his like again.”
A writer in a New York paper says: “None of our coal
mines are deep, but the time is coming when we will have
to dig deeper in search of both coal and metallic ores.”
Again, we hear persons speak thus: “Let us keep a sharp
lookout, and we will avoid all danger.”</p>

<p>Shakespeare rarely confounded the two words; for example,
in “Coriolanus”:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“<em>Cor.</em> Shall remain!</p>
<p class="verse4">Hear you this Triton of the minnows? mark you</p>
<p class="verse4">His absolute <em>shall</em>?”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Again, in Antony and Cleopatra:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“<em>Meno.</em> Wilt thou be lord of the whole world?</p>
</div><div class="stanza">
<p class="verse0"><em>Senator.</em> He shall to the market-place.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Wordsworth, too, who is one of the most accurate
writers in our literature, nicely discriminates in his use
of <em>shall</em> and <em>will</em>:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[474]</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“This child I to myself will take;</p>
<p class="verse0">She shall be mine, and I will make</p>
<p class="verse0">A lady of my own.</p>
<p class="verse0">The stars of midnight shall be dear</p>
<p class="verse0">To her; and she shall lean her ear</p>
<p class="verse0">In many a secret place</p>
<p class="verse0">Where rivulets dance their wayward round,</p>
<p class="verse0">And beauty born of murmuring sound</p>
<p class="verse0">Shall pass into her face.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="noindent">In the last passage determination is expressed, and therefore
<em>shall</em> is properly used.</p>

<p>When the Bible was translated, the language was in
a state of transition; hence we read in Kings ii: “Ahab
shall slay me,” for <em>will</em>. In Genesis xliii, 3-5, the two
words are nicely discriminated. The distinction between
them, strange to say, is entirely ignored in the Revised
Version; as <em>e.g.</em>, Peter is told, “Thou shalt deny me
thrice”; and we read: “One of you shall betray me,”
where futurity only is expressed in the Greek.</p>

<p>According to Grimm, “shall” is derived from <i>skalan</i>,
the Scandinavian word for the pain of death, which is also
the source of our word “kill.” The predominant idea in
“shall” is that of doom. When choosing a term to express
the inevitable future, the founders of our language
chose a term the most expressive possible of
a fatal, inevitable future. As “shall” contains the
idea of doom, “will” conveys the idea of choice. The
general rule to be followed in the use of the two words
is, that when the simple idea of future occurrence is to
be expressed, unconnected with the speaker’s resolve, we
must use <em>shall</em> in the first person, and <em>will</em> in the second
and third; as, “I shall die, you will die, he will die”; but
when the idea of compulsion or necessity is to be conveyed,&mdash;a
futurity connected with the will of the speaker,&mdash;<em>will</em>
must be employed in the first person, and <em>shall</em> in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[475]</a></span>
second and third; as, “I will go, you shall go, he shall go.”
“I shall attain to thirty at my next birthday” merely
foretells the age to which the speaker will have reached
at his next birthday; “I will attain to thirty at my next
birthday” would imply a determination to be so old at
the time mentioned. “You shall have some money to-morrow”
would imply a promise to pay it; “you will
have some money to-morrow” would only imply an
expectation that the person addressed would receive some
money.</p>

<p>Similar to the misuse of <em>shall</em> and <em>will</em>, is that of <em>would</em>
for should; as, “You promised that it would be done;”
“But for reinforcements we would have been beaten.”
Mr. Brace, in his work on Hungary, makes the people of
that country say of Kossuth: “He ought to have known
that we would be ruined,”&mdash;which can only mean “we
wished to be ruined.”</p>

<p>The importance of attending to the distinction of <em>shall</em>
and <em>will</em>, and to the nice distinctions of words generally,
is strikingly illustrated by an incident in Massachusetts.
In 1844, Abner Rogers was tried in that state for the
murder of the warden of the penitentiary. The man who
had been sent to search the prisoner, said in evidence:
“He (Rogers) said, ‘I have fixed the warden, and I’ll have
a rope round my neck.’ On the strength of what he said,
I took his suspenders from him.” Being cross-examined,
the witness said his words were: “I will have a rope,”
not “I shall have a rope.” The counsel against the prisoner
argued that he declared an intention of suicide, to
escape from the penalty of the law, which he knew he had
incurred. On the other hand, <em>shall</em> would, no doubt, have
been regarded as a betrayal of his consciousness of having<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[476]</a></span>
incurred a felon’s doom. The prisoner was acquitted on
the ground of insanity. Strange that the fate of an
alleged murderer should turn upon the question which
he used of two little words that are so frequently confounded,
and employed one for the other! It would be
difficult to conceive of a more pregnant comment on
the importance of using words with discrimination and
accuracy.</p>

<p>It would be impossible, in the limits to which we are
restricted, to give all the nice distinctions to be observed in
the use of <em>shall</em> and <em>will</em>. For a full explanation of the
subject we must refer the unlearned reader to the various
English grammars, and such works as Sir E. W. Head’s
treatise on the two words, and the works on Synonyms
by Graham, Crabb, and Whately. Prof. Schele DeVere,
in his late “Studies in Language,” expresses the opinion
that this double future is a great beauty of the English
language, but that it is impossible to give any rule for its
use, which will cover all cases, and that the only sure
guide is “that instinct which is given to all who learn a
language with their mother’s milk, or who acquire it so
successfully as to master its spirit as well as its form.”
His use of <em>will</em> for <em>shall</em>, in this very work, verifies the
latter part of this statement, and shows that a foreigner
may have a profound knowledge of the genius and constitution
of a language, and yet be sorely puzzled by its
niceties and subtleties. “If we go back,” he says, “for
the purpose of thus tracing the history of nouns to the
oldest forms of English, we <em>will</em> there find the method
of forming them from the first and simplest elements”
(page 140). The “Edinburgh Review” denounces the
distinction of <em>shall</em> and <em>will</em>, by their neglect of which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[477]</a></span>
Scotch are so often bewrayed, as one of the most capricious
and inconsistent of all imaginable irregularities, and as at
variance not less with original etymology than with former
usage. Prof. Marsh regards it as a verbal quibble, which
will soon disappear from our language. It is a quibble
just as any distinction is a quibble to persons who are too
dull, too lazy, or too careless to apprehend it. With as
much propriety might the distinction between the indicative
and subjunctive forms of the verb, or the distinction
between <em>farther</em> and <em>further</em>, <em>strong</em> and <em>robust</em>, <em>empty</em> and
<em>vacant</em>, be pronounced a verbal quibble. Sir Edmund W.
Head has shown that the difference is not one which has
an existence only in the pedagogue’s brain, but that it is as
real and legitimate as that between <em>be</em> and <em>am</em>, and dates
back as far as Wicliffe and Chaucer, while it has also the
authority of Shakespeare.</p>

<p>We conclude this chapter with the following lines by
an English poet:</p>

<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="verseq">“Beyond the vague Atlantic deep,</p>
<p class="verse0">Far as the farthest prairies sweep,</p>
<p class="verse0">Where forest glooms the nerves appall,</p>
<p class="verse0">Where burns the radiant western fall,</p>
<p class="verse0">One duty lies on old and young,&mdash;</p>
<p class="verse0">With filial piety to guard,</p>
<p class="verse0">As on its greenest native sward,</p>
<p class="verse0">The glory of the English tongue.</p>
<p class="verse0">That ample speech! That subtle speech!</p>
<p class="verse0">Apt for the need of all and each:</p>
<p class="verse0">Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend</p>
<p class="verse0">Wherever human feelings tend.</p>
<p class="verse0">Preserve its force,&mdash;conserve its powers;</p>
<p class="verse0">And through the maze of civic life,</p>
<p class="verse0">In letters, commerce, even in strife,</p>
<p class="verse0">Forget not it is yours and ours.”</p>
</div></div>
</div>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>

<div class="footnote">

<p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> See <a href="#Page_26">page 26</a>.</p></div></div>


<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[478]</a></span><br />
   <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[479]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk"><a name="PRINCIPAL_BOOKS_CONSULTED" id="PRINCIPAL_BOOKS_CONSULTED"></a>PRINCIPAL BOOKS CONSULTED.</h2>
<hr class="r20" />

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Joseph Angus.</span> <cite>Hand-Book of the English Tongue.</cite> London, 1863.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Aristotle.</span> <cite>Rhetoric.</cite> Translated by John Gillies. London, 1823.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Samuel Bailey.</span> <cite>Discourses on Various Subjects.</cite> London, 1862.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">W. L. Blackley.</span> <cite>Word-Gossip.</cite> London, 1869.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Francis Bowen.</span> <cite>Treatise on Logic.</cite> Boston, 1874.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Breen.</span> <cite>Modern English Literature.</cite> London.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">John Earle.</span> <cite>Philology of the English Tongue.</cite> Oxford, 1871.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">William C. Fowler.</span> <cite>The English Language in its Elements and Forms.</cite> New York, 1860.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">F. W. Farrar.</span> <cite>The Origin of Language.</cite> London, 1860.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="pad3">“</span><span class="pad2"><cite>Chapters on Language.</cite> London, 1873.</span></p>

<p class="book"><span class="pad3">“</span><span class="pad2"><cite>Families of Speech.</cite> London, 1873.</span></p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">I. Plant Fleming.</span> <cite>Analysis of the English Language.</cite> London, 1869.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">G. F. Graham.</span> <cite>A Book about Words.</cite> London, 1869.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Richard Garnett.</span> <cite>Philological Essays.</cite> London, 1859.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Matthew Harrison.</span> <cite>The Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English Language.</cite> London, 1848.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Edward N. Hoare.</span> <cite>Exotics, or English Words Derived from Latin Roots.</cite> London, 1863.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Edmund W. Head.</span> <cite>“Shall” and “Will.”</cite> London, 1858.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">R. G. Latham.</span> <cite>The English Language.</cite> London, 1873.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">George C. Lewis.</span> <cite>Remarks on the Use and Abuse of Some Political Terms.</cite> Oxford, 1877.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Mark A. Lower.</span> <cite>An Essay on Family Nomenclature.</cite> (Two Volumes.) London, 1875.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">George P. Marsh.</span> <cite>Lectures on the English Language.</cite> New York, 1860.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="pad4">“</span><span class="pad3"><cite>The Origin and History of the English Language.</cite> New York, 1862.</span></p>

<p class="book"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[480]</a></span>
                <span class="smcap">J. S. Mill.</span> <cite>A System of Logic.</cite> New York, 1869.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Max Müller.</span> <cite>Lectures on the Science of Language.</cite> (First and Second Series.) New York, 1865.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">J. H. Newman.</span> <cite>The Idea of a University.</cite> London, 1873.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Notes and Queries.</span> London, 1852.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Ernest Renan.</span> <cite>De l’Origine du Langage.</cite> Paris, 1864.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">W. T. Shedd.</span> <cite>Homiletics and Pastoral Theology.</cite> New York, 1867.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Archdeacon Smith.</span> <cite>Common Words with Curious Derivations.</cite> London, 1865.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">John Stoddard.</span> <cite>The Philosophy of Language.</cite> London, 1854.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">William Thomson.</span> <cite>Outline of the Necessary Laws of Thought.</cite> London, 1857.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">John Horne Tooke.</span> <cite>The Diversions of Purley.</cite> London, 1860.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Richard Chenevix Trench.</span> <cite>On the Study of Words.</cite> London, 1869.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="pad4">“</span><span class="pad3"><cite>English, Past and Present.</cite> 6th ed. London, 1868.</span></p>

<p class="book"><span class="pad4">“</span><span class="pad3"><cite>Select Glossary of English Words.</cite> 3d ed. London, 1865.</span></p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Richard Whately.</span> <cite>Elements of Logic.</cite> New York, 1865.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="pad4">“</span><span class="pad3"><cite>Elements of Rhetoric.</cite> New York, 1866.</span></p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Hensleigh Wedgwood.</span> <cite>Etymological Dictionary.</cite> London, 1872.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">W. D. Whitney.</span> <cite>Language and the Study of Language.</cite> New York, 1867.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="pad3">“</span><span class="pad3"><cite>The Life and Growth of Language.</cite> New York, 1875.</span></p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">E. P. Whittle.</span> <cite>Essays and Reviews.</cite> Boston, 1856.</p>

<p class="book"><span class="pad3">“</span><span class="pad3"><cite>Literature and Life.</cite> Boston, 1871.</span></p>

<p class="book"><span class="smcap">Essays by a Barrister.</span> London, 1862.</p>


    <div class="chapter"></div>
<hr class="chap pg-brk" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[481]</a></span></p>

<h2 class="no-brk fs180"><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">INDEX.</a></h2>
<hr class="r20" />

<div class="fs90">
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">A.</span><br />
<br />
abdicate and desert, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.<br />
<br />
abominable, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>.<br />
<br />
accord, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>.<br />
<br />
a confirmed invalid, <a href="#Page_455">455</a>.<br />
<br />
Addington, nicknamed by Sheridan, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>.<br />
<br />
Adullamites, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.<br />
<br />
agriculturalist, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>.<br />
<br />
alert, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.<br />
<br />
Alexander, Addison, D.D., his lines on small words, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.<br />
<br />
alligator, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>.<br />
<br />
all of them, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>.<br />
<br />
all right, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br />
<br />
almost, <a href="#Page_464">464</a>.<br />
<br />
alms, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.<br />
<br />
alone, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>.<br />
<br />
American orators, their diffuseness, <a href="#Page_179">179-181</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">their exaggeration, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Americans, spendthrifts of language, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">their exaggeration, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Amphibolous sentences, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.<br />
<br />
and, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br />
<br />
anecdote, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>.<br />
<br />
Animals, cannot generalize, or designate things by signs, <a href="#Page_1">1-2</a>.<br />
<br />
an innumerable number, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>.<br />
<br />
animosity, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>.<br />
<br />
antecedents, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>.<br />
<br />
anyhow, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>.<br />
<br />
apology, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.<br />
<br />
apple-pie order, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.<br />
<br />
appreciates, <a href="#Page_455">455</a>.<br />
<br />
Aristotle, on frigidity of style, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.<br />
<br />
Armstrong, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>.<br />
<br />
Arnold, Dr. Thomas, on the styles of historians, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>.<br />
<br />
artesian, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>.<br />
<br />
artillery, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br />
<br />
assassin, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.<br />
<br />
astonish, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>.<br />
<br />
atom, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.<br />
<br />
at all, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>atte</em>, <em>at</em>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.<br />
<br />
attraction, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br />
<br />
avocation, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">B.</span><br />
<br />
Bacon, Lord, his command of language, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on the power of words, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Bailey, Samuel, on Berkeley’s theory of vision, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.<br />
<br />
balance, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>.<br />
<br />
Balzac, on the witchery of words, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.<br />
<br />
banister, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>.<br />
<br />
bankrupt, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>.<br />
<br />
Barrow, Isaac, D.D., his word-coinings, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>.<br />
<br />
bedlam, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>.<br />
<br />
belfry, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>.<br />
<br />
Bentley, Richard, D.D., <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>berg</em>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.<br />
<br />
bib, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.<br />
<br />
bid, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
bishop, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.<br />
<br />
bit, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>.<br />
<br />
bitter end, the, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>.<br />
<br />
blackguards, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>.<br />
<br />
blanket, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
blue-stocking, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>.<br />
<br />
blunderbuss, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>.<br />
<br />
Boileau, quoted, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.<br />
<br />
Bolingbroke, Lord, his attention to his style, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>.<br />
<br />
bombast, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>bonhomme</em>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br />
<br />
booby, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.<br />
<br />
bosh, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>.<br />
<br />
Botany, its nomenclature, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br />
<br />
boudoir, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.<br />
<br />
bound, <a href="#Page_455">455</a>.<br />
<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[482]</a></span>Bowen, Prof. Francis, on a fallacy of Darwin’s, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on second causes, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.</span><br />
<br />
bran-new, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
<br />
brat, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br />
<br />
bravery, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>.<br />
<br />
Brown, John, his moderation of language, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.<br />
<br />
Browne, Sir Thomas, on scholars, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br />
<br />
Buckle, on the dialect of English scholars, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.<br />
<br />
buffoon, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.<br />
<br />
Bulwer, Lytton, on the power of words, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on children’s names, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</span><br />
<br />
bumper, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>.<br />
<br />
Bunsen, on poetry, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br />
<br />
Burr, Aaron, saying of, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br />
<br />
but, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>.<br />
<br />
but that, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>.<br />
<br />
by-laws, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.<br />
<br />
Byron, Lord, on Keats’s death, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his denunciation of the English Language, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his use of monosyllables, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his subscription for Greece, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the inadequacy of language, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">C.</span><br />
<br />
Cæsar, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.<br />
<br />
caitiff, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br />
<br />
caloric, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.<br />
<br />
canard, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>.<br />
<br />
Canning, George, his command of words, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">extract from, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</span><br />
<br />
canon, cannon, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.<br />
<br />
Cant, political, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">ethical, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Seneca’s, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">religious, <a href="#Page_170">170-173</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Spurgeon on, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">in art, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">etymology of the word, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>.</span><br />
<br />
caption, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>.<br />
<br />
Capuchin, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>.<br />
<br />
carat, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
Carbo, anecdote of, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.<br />
<br />
Carlyle, Thomas, satirized by an auctioneer, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.<br />
<br />
carnival, <a href="#Page_458">458</a>.<br />
<br />
caucus, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>.<br />
<br />
causeway, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.<br />
<br />
ceiling, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>.<br />
<br />
celebrity, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>.<br />
<br />
chaffer, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.<br />
<br />
chagrin, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.<br />
<br />
Chalmers, Thomas, D.D., on John Foster, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his dispute with Stuart, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Charles V, saying of, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br />
<br />
Chatham, Lord, his study of words, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his words, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his speeches, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.</span><br />
<br />
cheat, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.<br />
<br />
Chesterfield, Lord, anecdote of, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his efforts to improve his language, <a href="#Page_440">440</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<em>chevalier d’industrie</em>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br />
<br />
Choate, Rufus, on the diction suitable to lawyers, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his prodigality of words, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Christian, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.<br />
<br />
Cicero, his choice of words, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his word-coining, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</span><br />
<br />
civilization, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.<br />
<br />
Clarendon, Lord, his solecisms, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>.<br />
<br />
cleave, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>.<br />
<br />
Climate, its effects on language, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.<br />
<br />
Cobbett, William, his mastery of narration and invective, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his nicknames of Peel, Stanley, and others, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>.</span><br />
<br />
cock, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.<br />
<br />
Coke, Sir Edward, his characterization of Raleigh, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.<br />
<br />
Coleridge, Hartley N., his characterization of the Greek and Latin languages, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his lines on speech, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Coleridge, S. T., on Shakespeare’s language, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his witchery of phrase, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the study of the Bible, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on religious cant, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his word-coinings, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on Youth and Age, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Collins, William, lines from, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.<br />
<br />
Combe, Dr. Andrew, on Cowper’s and Wilberforce’s letters, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br />
<br />
commerce, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.<br />
<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[483]</a></span>Common Improprieties of Speech, <a href="#Page_424">424-477</a>.<br />
<br />
community, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>.<br />
<br />
compulsory, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.<br />
<br />
concede, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>.<br />
<br />
condign, <a href="#Page_464">464</a>.<br />
<br />
conduct, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>.<br />
<br />
constable, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.<br />
<br />
convene, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>.<br />
<br />
Conversation, religious defined, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>convivium</em>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.<br />
<br />
Cooper, Sir Astley, anecdote of, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br />
<br />
coquet, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.<br />
<br />
corporeal, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>.<br />
<br />
corpse, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.<br />
<br />
Corwin, Thomas, Gov., <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.<br />
<br />
Council of Basle, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br />
<br />
country-dance, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.<br />
<br />
couple, <a href="#Page_463">463</a>.<br />
<br />
Courier, P. L., on abusive epithets, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.<br />
<br />
court, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.<br />
<br />
Couthon, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.<br />
<br />
Cowper, William, his translation of Homer, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his poetry, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his letters, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</span><br />
<br />
craft, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br />
<br />
Craik, Prof., on the revivification of human speech, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
<br />
crawfish, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>.<br />
<br />
creative, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.<br />
<br />
Crockett, David, anecdote of, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.<br />
<br />
Crowe, W., lines from, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
<br />
crushed out, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>.<br />
<br />
cunning, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>.<br />
<br />
cur, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
Curiosities of Language, <a href="#Page_367">367-423</a>.<br />
<br />
curmudgeon, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>.<br />
<br />
Curran, his encounter with a fish-woman, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>.<br />
<br />
Currer Bell, her “Villette” criticised, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.<br />
<br />
Cuvier, anecdote of, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">D.</span><br />
<br />
dandelion, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.<br />
<br />
dangerous, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>.<br />
<br />
Dante, his language, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.<br />
<br />
dare, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
Darwin, Charles, his fallacious use of “tend,” <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.<br />
<br />
deceiving, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>.<br />
<br />
decimated, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br />
<br />
deduction, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>.<br />
<br />
defalcation, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.<br />
<br />
delinquents, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.<br />
<br />
De Maistre, Count Joseph, on Locke, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on Pagan ideas of holiness and sin, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</span><br />
<br />
De Medicis, Catherine, sayings of, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br />
<br />
Demosthenes, his choice of words, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his speeches, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his ignorance of foreign tongues, and study of Thucydides, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.</span><br />
<br />
demure, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br />
<br />
De Quincey, his mastery of words, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on translation, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the word “humbug,” <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on Cardinal Mezzofanti, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the French language of passion, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the choice of Saxon or Romanic words, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the inadequacy of language, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the style of women’s letters, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">saying of, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on improprieties of speech, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Denmark, capture of her fleet by the British, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
<br />
Desbrosses, on Roman hereditary names, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.<br />
<br />
dexterity, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.<br />
<br />
“Dick Swiveller style,” <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.<br />
<br />
differ with, different to, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>.<br />
<br />
directly, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>.<br />
<br />
Disraeli, Benjamin, quoted, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br />
<br />
distinguish, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
do, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>.<br />
<br />
doing good, <a href="#Page_307">307-309</a>.<br />
<br />
dollar, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.<br />
<br />
Domenech, the Abbé, on the language of savages, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.<br />
<br />
Dominicans, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>.<br />
<br />
don’t, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>.<br />
<br />
dormouse, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>.<br />
<br />
“Double Procession.” the, controversy concerning it, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br />
<br />
doubt, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>.<br />
<br />
drive, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>.<br />
<br />
Dryden, John, his scientific language, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[484]</a></span><span class="pad1">his translation of the “Æneid,” <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his version of “Paradise Lost,” <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his modernization of Chaucer, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">lines from, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Willmott on his versification, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</span><br />
<br />
dun, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>.<br />
<br />
dunce, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>.<br />
<br />
Du Ponceau, on the inadequacy of language, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.<br />
<br />
Dyer, lines from his “Ruins of Rome,” <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">E.</span><br />
<br />
Easter, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.<br />
<br />
education, <a href="#Page_280">280-282</a>.<br />
<br />
effluvium, <a href="#Page_457">457</a>.<br />
<br />
egregious, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>.<br />
<br />
either, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a>.<br />
<br />
either alternative, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>.<br />
<br />
electricity, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.<br />
<br />
Eloquence, uses simple language, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.<br />
<br />
Emerson, R. W., on Montaigne’s words, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on Shakespeare’s suggestiveness, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on oratory, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.</span><br />
<br />
English Bible, richness of its vocabulary, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">F. W. Faber on, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</span><br />
<br />
English Language, few of its words in common use, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">its copiousness, <a href="#Page_132">132-138</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">decried by Charles V, Madame de Stael and Byron, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Addison and Waller on, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its composite character, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its irregularities, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">illustrations of its monosyllabic character, <a href="#Page_147">147-157</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its capabilities, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</span><br />
<br />
English Literature, its looseness of diction, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>.<br />
<br />
English race, its intolerance of restraints, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>.<br />
<br />
Ennius, saying of, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.<br />
<br />
enthuse, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>.<br />
<br />
equally as well, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>.<br />
<br />
equanimity of mind, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>.<br />
<br />
Erskine, Lord, his mastery of English, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.<br />
<br />
ether, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.<br />
<br />
Etymological knowledge, its value in the use of words, <a href="#Page_231">231-234</a>.<br />
<br />
Etymology, rules of, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">errors based on, <a href="#Page_285">285-289</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Euripides, on character, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.<br />
<br />
every, <a href="#Page_464">464</a>.<br />
<br />
evidence, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>.<br />
<br />
Exaggeration of language, <a href="#Page_184">184-193</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">F. W. Robinson on, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</span><br />
<br />
except, <a href="#Page_463">463</a>.<br />
<br />
excessively, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>.<br />
<br />
exchequer, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.<br />
<br />
exorbitant, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>.<br />
<br />
experience, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.<br />
<br />
Expletives, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.<br />
<br />
extend, <a href="#Page_463">463</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">F.</span><br />
<br />
faint, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.<br />
<br />
Fallacies in Words, <a href="#Page_257">257-322</a>.<br />
<br />
farce, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>.<br />
<br />
farther, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>.<br />
<br />
fast, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>.<br />
<br />
fatherland, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>.<br />
<br />
Federalist, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.<br />
<br />
fellow, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>.<br />
<br />
fellow countrymen, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
female, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.<br />
<br />
final completion, <a href="#Page_450">450</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>Fitz</em>, <em>witz</em>, and <em>sky</em>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.<br />
<br />
folks, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>.<br />
<br />
Fortescue, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>.<br />
<br />
Foster, John, on the words of a man of genius, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on eloquence, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Fox, C. J., on Pitt’s words, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his eloquence, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Frank, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>.<br />
<br />
Franklin, Dr. Benjamin, his style, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.<br />
<br />
Freeman, Dr. E. A., on the English Language, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.<br />
<br />
freemason, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.<br />
<br />
French Academy, the, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>.<br />
<br />
French language, its lack of words for “bribe,” “sober,” “listener,” “home,” etc., <a href="#Page_70">70-72</a>.<br />
<br />
French Literature, its method and lucidity, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>.<br />
<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[485]</a></span>Frenchmen, their distaste for foreign words, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br />
<br />
from thence, from whence, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>Frondeurs</em>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.<br />
<br />
frontispiece, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
<br />
Fuller, Dr. Thomas, on the Italian and Swiss languages, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on high-flown language, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on “ah!” and “ha!” 143;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the schoolmen, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his etymologies, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his story of John Cuts, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>.</span><br />
<br />
fur, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">G.</span><br />
<br />
Garrick, David, saying of, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.<br />
<br />
Gautier, Theophile, his study of words, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>gêne</em>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br />
<br />
gentleman, <a href="#Page_97">97-99</a>.<br />
<br />
George I, of England, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br />
<br />
Gesticulation, its expressiveness, <a href="#Page_19">19-21</a>.<br />
<br />
gibberish, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>.<br />
<br />
Gibbon, Edward, his historical insinuations and suppressions, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br />
<br />
girl, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>.<br />
<br />
go ahead, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br />
<br />
Goethe, saying of, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">lines from, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on study of foreign tongues, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">a poor linguist, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Goldsmith, Oliver, his solecisms, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>.<br />
<br />
gooseberry, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
<br />
gossip, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.<br />
<br />
Gothic, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br />
<br />
Greek and Latin, contrasted, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">a knowledge of them not necessary to the command of English, <a href="#Page_229">229-241</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their value for culture, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Greek, its subtle distinctions, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.<br />
<br />
Greek words, Roman affectation for, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.<br />
<br />
Greeks, their perversions of words, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">their ignorance of grammar and etymology, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</span><br />
<br />
greet, greeting, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>.<br />
<br />
Gregory VII, Pope, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br />
<br />
Guelphs and Ghibellines, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.<br />
<br />
gutted, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>.<br />
<br />
gypsies, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">H.</span><br />
<br />
haberdasher, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>.<br />
<br />
hack, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
had have, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>, <a href="#Page_450">450</a>.<br />
<br />
had ought, <a href="#Page_450">450</a>.<br />
<br />
Halifax, Lord, on trimming, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.<br />
<br />
Hall, Robert, D.D., anecdotes of, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on his aping of Johnson, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on Saxon-English, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, his anecdote of a Scotch girl, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.<br />
<br />
Hamilton, Alexander, his legal arguments, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br />
<br />
Hamilton, “Single Speech,” <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br />
<br />
Hamilton, Sir William, on certain philosophical terms, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br />
<br />
Handel, saying of, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.<br />
<br />
handkerchief, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.<br />
<br />
harden, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.<br />
<br />
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, on the spells in words, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.<br />
<br />
hawk, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.<br />
<br />
Haydon, anecdote of, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.<br />
<br />
Hazlitt, William, on words, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his “Tiddy-doll” story, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>.</span><br />
<br />
helter-skelter, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.<br />
<br />
Herder, his nickname of Goethe, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>.<br />
<br />
hermetically, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
Higginson, T. W., on words, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.<br />
<br />
hip, hip, hurrah! 388.<br />
<br />
Historians, their characters shown by their styles, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.<br />
<br />
hoax, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>.<br />
<br />
Hobbes, his language, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on words, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</span><br />
<br />
hocuspocus, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.<br />
<br />
Hollinshed, his “Chronicles” quoted, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.<br />
<br />
Homer, his “winged words,” <a href="#Page_5">5</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his onomatopœia, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</span><br />
<br />
“Homoousians” and “Homoiusians,” <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>homo</em>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>honnêteté</em>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.<br />
<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[486]</a></span>Horne Tooke, saying of, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.<br />
<br />
horrent, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>.<br />
<br />
hospital, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.<br />
<br />
host, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
how, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>.<br />
<br />
Huguenot, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>.<br />
<br />
humble-pie, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.<br />
<br />
humbug, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.<br />
<br />
Hume, David, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his argument against miracles, <a href="#Page_265">265-270</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his history of England, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the term “delinquents,” <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.</span><br />
<br />
humility, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br />
<br />
hung, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
hypocrite, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">I.</span><br />
<br />
idiot, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br />
<br />
I have got, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>.<br />
<br />
imagination, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.<br />
<br />
imbecile, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.<br />
<br />
imbroglio, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.<br />
<br />
Imitation, in literature, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.<br />
<br />
imp, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br />
<br />
impertinent, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.<br />
<br />
in, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
inaugurate, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.<br />
<br />
incomprehensible, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>.<br />
<br />
incorrect orthography, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>.<br />
<br />
indices, <a href="#Page_463">463</a>.<br />
<br />
individual, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>ing</em>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.<br />
<br />
in our midst, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>.<br />
<br />
instances, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>.<br />
<br />
Interjections, <a href="#Page_141">141-146</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">Horne Tooke on, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Max Müller on, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Whitefield’s, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Shakespeare’s, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Greek and Latin, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</span><br />
<br />
intoxicated, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.<br />
<br />
inveterate, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>.<br />
<br />
is, <a href="#Page_466">466</a>.<br />
<br />
island, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
<br />
Italian language, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">its debasement, <a href="#Page_76">76-79</a>.</span><br />
<br />
its, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>.<br />
<br />
it were, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">J.</span><br />
<br />
jacket, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
Jansenists, their disputes with the Jesuits, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.<br />
<br />
Jeffrey, Francis, his artificial style, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">anecdote of, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</span><br />
<br />
jeopardize, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>.<br />
<br />
Jerusalem artichoke, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.<br />
<br />
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, his grandiose style, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">anecdote of, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his Johnsonese dialect, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">satirized by Dr. Wolcott, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">sayings of, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his spoken and written language contrasted, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his advice on style, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on imitative harmony, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on Mrs. Barbauld’s name, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his care of his speech, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">improprieties in his “Rambler,” <a href="#Page_442">442</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his nickname of a fish-woman, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Johnson, Edward, M. D., on “right,” <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
<br />
jolly, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>.<br />
<br />
Joubert, on Rousseau’s words, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his verbal economy, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<em>jour</em>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">K.</span><br />
<br />
Keats, John, his love of fine phrases, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.<br />
<br />
kennel, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.<br />
<br />
kidnap, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>kin</em>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.<br />
<br />
King, T. Starr, on the mystery of style, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.<br />
<br />
knave, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">L.</span><br />
<br />
lady, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>.<br />
<br />
landed proprietor, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br />
<br />
Landor, W. S., on fine words, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">lines from, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Language, its value to man, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">its power, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">not indispensable to thought and its expression, <a href="#Page_19">19-21</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">elaborated by successive generations, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">abbreviates the processes and preserves the results of thought, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its educational value, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the limit of thought, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">of savages, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">not the dress of thought, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[487]</a></span><span class="pad1">unity of language essential to national unity, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">gains by time and culture, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">no new additions to, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">formed out of twenty elementary sounds, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">an index to individual character, <a href="#Page_62">62-67</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">an index to national character, <a href="#Page_67">67-82</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">how enriched and impoverished, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">debasement of the Italian, <a href="#Page_68">68-70</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the Greek and the Latin characterized, <a href="#Page_73">73-75</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">reveals the climate of a country, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the Italian contrasted with the Swiss, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its influence on opinion, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its lubricity, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">mischiefs caused by its debasement, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">barbarized by fineries of style, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">of art and science, <a href="#Page_129">129-131</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">expressiveness of the English, <a href="#Page_132">132-138</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">transcendental, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">inadequate for the expression of thought, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">obscure caused by obscurity of thought, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its virtues moral, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its suggestive power, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Goldwin Smith on, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its magical effects, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">stamped with local influences, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">an imperfect vehicle of thought, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Emerson on, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">contains the history of nations, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">mirrors the tastes, customs and opinions of a people, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">of savages, <a href="#Page_410">410-412</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">over-nicety in its use, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">is living and organic, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">is ever growing, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">defies all shackles, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Henry Rogers on, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">how to use it well, <a href="#Page_440">440</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Languages, of conquered peoples not easily extirpated, <a href="#Page_48">48-50</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">the study of foreign, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Lavoisier, his chemical terminology, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.<br />
<br />
least, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>.<br />
<br />
leave, <a href="#Page_458">458</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>Les Gueulx</em>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.<br />
<br />
less, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>.<br />
<br />
let, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>.<br />
<br />
Lewes, G. H., on frankness, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br />
<br />
lie, lay, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>.<br />
<br />
lieutenant, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
<br />
light, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.<br />
<br />
like I did, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>.<br />
<br />
likewise, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>.<br />
<br />
Lincoln, Abraham, anecdote of, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>.<br />
<br />
Literature, effete, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.<br />
<br />
Locke, John, his “Essay on the Human Understanding,” <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.<br />
<br />
London, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.<br />
<br />
looks beautifully, <a href="#Page_457">457</a>.<br />
<br />
£. s. d., <a href="#Page_387">387</a>.<br />
<br />
Louis XIV, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br />
<br />
Lower, Mark A., quoted, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">anecdotes by, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the origin of certain historical names, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>.</span><br />
<br />
lust, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.<br />
<br />
Luttrell, Henry, lines by, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.<br />
<br />
luxury, <a href="#Page_295">295-298</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">M.</span><br />
<br />
Macaulay, T. B., on Milton’s words, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on Dryden’s, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on Johnson’s language, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his eulogy on Saxon-English, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">quoted, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on disputes in Parliament concerning James II and William, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Macready, W. C., his elocution, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.<br />
<br />
malignants, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.<br />
<br />
manumit, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.<br />
<br />
Marsh, Prof. G. T., on Demosthenes, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on the Italian language, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on Goethe as a linguist, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Martineau, James, D.D., on words, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.<br />
<br />
martinet, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
Materialism, derives no support from language, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.<br />
<br />
maudlin, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>.<br />
<br />
megrim, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.<br />
<br />
menial, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.<br />
<br />
Methodist, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>.<br />
<br />
Mezzofanti, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br />
<br />
Michaelis, J. D., remarks of, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
<br />
Mill, J. S., on the misuse of certain words, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br />
<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[488]</a></span>Miller, Hugh, his style, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.<br />
<br />
Milton, the suggestiveness of his verse, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">Macaulay on his words, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his versification, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his necromantic power over language, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his use of monosyllables, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his use of words in their etymological sense, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his prose style, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">extracts from his “Paradise Lost,” <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">from “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro,” <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Mirabeau, his words, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.<br />
<br />
miscreant, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.<br />
<br />
mistaken, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>.<br />
<br />
money, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br />
<br />
mongrel, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
monomania, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.<br />
<br />
Monosyllables, their potency in life and literature, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">how constructed in English, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their number in English, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Montaigne, on verbal definitions and explanations, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.<br />
<br />
Montgomery, James, on Milton’s versification, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.<br />
<br />
Moon-Alford controversy, the, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>.<br />
<br />
Moore, Thomas, anecdote of, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">verses of, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">saying of, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</span><br />
<br />
more perfect, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>.<br />
<br />
Morris, Gouverneur, anecdote by, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
<br />
Motley, J. L., on “The Beggars,” <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.<br />
<br />
mountebank, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.<br />
<br />
Müller, Max, on “The Supernatural,” and “To Know and To Believe,” <a href="#Page_264">264</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on etymology, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.</span><br />
<br />
murder, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.<br />
<br />
muriatic acid, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.<br />
<br />
musket, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.<br />
<br />
mussulmen, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>.<br />
<br />
mutual, <a href="#Page_462">462</a>.<br />
<br />
myself, <a href="#Page_458">458</a>.<br />
<br />
mystery, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">N.</span><br />
<br />
Names, of children, <a href="#Page_323">323-325</a>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">of things, once names of persons, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">of places&mdash;how corrupted, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Names of Men, <a href="#Page_323">323-344</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">how regarded by the Jews and the Romans, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their suggestiveness, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">all originally significant, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Roman, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">surnames, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Saxon, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">obsolete words preserved in, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">ending in <em>er</em>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">ending in <em>ward</em>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">derived from offices, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">disguised, denoting mean occupations, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">from personal qualities, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Puritan, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">derived from oaths, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">indicating personal blemishes or moral obliquities, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">some changes of, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">“Erasmus” and “Melanchthon,” <a href="#Page_336">336</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">corruption of, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">queer conjunctions of, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">that harmonize with, or are antagonistic to, their owners’ occupations, <a href="#Page_339">339-341</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">puns upon, <a href="#Page_341">341-343</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">not mere labels, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Goethe on, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their influence on their wearers, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Napier, extract from his History of the Peninsular War, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.<br />
<br />
Napoleon, his love of glory, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his hypocrisy, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his style, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on epithets, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.</span><br />
<br />
naturalist, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>.<br />
<br />
nature and art, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>.<br />
<br />
nature and law of nature, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.<br />
<br />
nervous, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>.<br />
<br />
never, <a href="#Page_453">453</a>.<br />
<br />
Newman, Prof. J. H., verses by, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
<br />
nice, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>.<br />
<br />
Nicknames, <a href="#Page_345">345-366</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">their influence in controversy, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Goethe on, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">of Van Buren, Tyler, Gen. Scott and Bonaparte, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">why effective, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">theological, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">loving, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Cobbett’s skill in, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Carlyle’s, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">meaningless, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their origin, <a href="#Page_352">352-354</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">felicitous, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">fondness</span><br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[489]</a></span><span class="pad1">of the Italians for them, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">memorable English, <a href="#Page_360">360-363</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">originally complimentary, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Southey’s “Doctor Dove” on, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>.</span><br />
<br />
no, <a href="#Page_455">455</a>.<br />
<br />
none, <a href="#Page_457">457</a>.<br />
<br />
notwithstanding, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
numerous, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">O.</span><br />
<br />
<em>ock</em>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.<br />
<br />
O’Connell, Daniel, his “Lax Weir” case, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his stock phrases, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</span><br />
<br />
off of, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>.<br />
<br />
oh!, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br />
<br />
old, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.<br />
<br />
older, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>O</em>, <em>Mac</em>, and <em>Ap</em>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.<br />
<br />
Onomatopes, <a href="#Page_242">242-256</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">objections to the theory of, <a href="#Page_245">245-247</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">why they vary in different languages, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their expressiveness, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">abound in poetry, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">examples of in English poetry, <a href="#Page_249">249-254</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Homer’s, Virgil’s and Aristophanes’s, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Dr. Johnson on, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">no rules for their choice, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</span><br />
<br />
on to, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>.<br />
<br />
opposite and contrary, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.<br />
<br />
or, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.<br />
<br />
Oratory, an important law of, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.<br />
<br />
originality, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.<br />
<br />
ostracize, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>.<br />
<br />
ovation, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.<br />
<br />
overflow, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>.<br />
<br />
owl, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.<br />
<br />
oxygen, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">P.</span><br />
<br />
pagan, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>.<br />
<br />
palace, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
palfrey, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
palsy, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.<br />
<br />
Pambos, anecdote of, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
<br />
pander, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
pantaloon, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.<br />
<br />
pantheist, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.<br />
<br />
paradise, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.<br />
<br />
paraphernalia, <a href="#Page_464">464</a>.<br />
<br />
parasite, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.<br />
<br />
parliament, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>.<br />
<br />
parlor, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.<br />
<br />
parson, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.<br />
<br />
partake, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>.<br />
<br />
parts, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.<br />
<br />
party, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>.<br />
<br />
Pascal, quoted, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.<br />
<br />
pasquinade, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
<a name="PAT" id="PAT"></a>
Patkul, and Charles XII., <a href="#Page_167"><ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: '(page number was missing)'">167</ins></a>.<br />
<br />
pensive, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>.<br />
<br />
people, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>.<br />
<br />
person, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>.<br />
<br />
personalty, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>.<br />
<br />
pet, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.<br />
<br />
petrels, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.<br />
<br />
Phidias, saying of, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.<br />
<br />
Philologists, their dangers, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>.<br />
<br />
Phillips, his “World of Words,” <a href="#Page_429">429</a>.<br />
<br />
Pinkney, William, his study of words, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.<br />
<br />
Pitt, Christopher, lines by, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.<br />
<br />
plagiarism, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.<br />
<br />
Plantagenet, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>.<br />
<br />
plenty, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>.<br />
<br />
Poetry, English, of the 18th century, <a href="#Page_163">163-165</a>.<br />
<br />
policy, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
<br />
Political economists, their disputes, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.<br />
<br />
poltroon, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>.<br />
<br />
pontiff, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.<br />
<br />
Pope, Alexander, his translation of Homer, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">saying of, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his use of small words, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his circumlocutions, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">lines from, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Popes, their management of theological controversies, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br />
<br />
porpoise, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>.<br />
<br />
post, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>.<br />
<br />
Practical men, and theorists, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.<br />
<br />
Preachers, their use of philosophical words, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.<br />
<br />
predicate, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>.<br />
<br />
premier, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.<br />
<br />
prevent, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>.<br />
<br />
preventative, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>.<br />
<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[490]</a></span>previous, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>.<br />
<br />
priest, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br />
<br />
Proctor, Adelaide, on words, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.<br />
<br />
property, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>.<br />
<br />
proposition, <a href="#Page_455">455</a>.<br />
<br />
proven, <a href="#Page_455">455</a>.<br />
<br />
punctual, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br />
<br />
puny, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>.<br />
<br />
Puritan, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">Q.</span><br />
<br />
quaker, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.<br />
<br />
quandary, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.<br />
<br />
quantity, <a href="#Page_458">458</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>quamquam</em>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.<br />
<br />
quinsy, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.<br />
<br />
<em>Quirites</em>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.<br />
<br />
quite, <a href="#Page_457">457</a>.<br />
<br />
quiz, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">R.</span><br />
<br />
raising the rent, <a href="#Page_471">471</a>.<br />
<br />
rascal, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>.<br />
<br />
raven, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.<br />
<br />
reasons, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.<br />
<br />
recommend, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>.<br />
<br />
regeneration, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.<br />
<br />
relevant, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>.<br />
<br />
rendition, <a href="#Page_463">463</a>.<br />
<br />
resent, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>.<br />
<br />
restive, <a href="#Page_458">458</a>.<br />
<br />
retaliate, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>.<br />
<br />
revolt, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>.<br />
<br />
rhinoceros, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.<br />
<br />
right, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.<br />
<br />
ringleader, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.<br />
<br />
rip, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>.<br />
<br />
Robertson, Rev. F. W., on calumny, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on talk without deeds, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the use of superlatives, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Robinson, “Boot-jack,” <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br />
<br />
rodomontade, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>.<br />
<br />
Romanic words in English, <a href="#Page_197">197-201</a>.<br />
<br />
Romans, the, degeneracy of their language, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">their ideas of virtue and vice, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">had no idea of sin, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Roscius, the Roman actor, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.<br />
<br />
rosemary, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.<br />
<br />
Rossini, saying of, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.<br />
<br />
rostrum, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
Roundhead, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br />
<br />
Rump, the, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">S.</span><br />
<br />
sagacious, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>.<br />
<br />
Sainte-Beuve, C. A., on Napoleon’s style, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.<br />
<br />
salary, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.<br />
<br />
salmon, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
Salutation, its forms an index to national character, <a href="#Page_77">77-79</a>.<br />
<br />
same, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.<br />
<br />
sandwich, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
sarcasm, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.<br />
<br />
saunterer, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
Savages, no ethical nomenclatures in their languages, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">their poverty of language, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Saxon-English, its merits and defects, <a href="#Page_196">196-197</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201-208</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">the basis of the language, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its witchery, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its obsolete pictorial words, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Robert Hall on, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Macaulay on, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">its freedom from equivocation, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Saxon Words, or Romanic?, <a href="#Page_194">194-209</a>.<br />
<br />
scarcely, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>.<br />
<br />
Scarlett, Sir James, on brevity in jury addresses, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.<br />
<br />
Schiller, on the study of foreign languages, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br />
<br />
Scholarship, the error of modern, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br />
<br />
schooner, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.<br />
<br />
Science, influence of its names and phrases, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br />
<br />
scrupulous, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.<br />
<br />
second causes, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.<br />
<br />
secret, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>.<br />
<br />
Secret of Apt Words, the, <a href="#Page_210">210-241</a>.<br />
<br />
Selden, John, saying of, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.<br />
<br />
seldom, or never, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>.<br />
<br />
selfishness, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.<br />
<br />
Seneca, his moral discourses, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his wealth, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[491]</a></span><span class="pad1">his crimes, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</span><br />
<br />
seraphim, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>.<br />
<br />
servant, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.<br />
<br />
servitude, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.<br />
<br />
setting-room, <a href="#Page_464">464</a>.<br />
<br />
sexton, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.<br />
<br />
shacklebone, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>.<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, his words, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">suggestiveness of his diction, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">not a classical scholar, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">quoted, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</span><br />
<br />
shall, will, <a href="#Page_471">471-477</a>.<br />
<br />
Sharp, Dr., saying of, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.<br />
<br />
Shenstone, on melody of style, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
<br />
Shibboleths, their influence with the people, <a href="#Page_87">87-89</a>.<br />
<br />
shoot, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>.<br />
<br />
Siddons, Mrs., on one of Haydon’s pictures, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.<br />
<br />
Sidney, Sir Philip, on the ballad of “Chevy Chase,” <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">saying of, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>.</span><br />
<br />
signing one’s name, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.<br />
<br />
silhouettes, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>.<br />
<br />
silly, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.<br />
<br />
simple, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.<br />
<br />
simplicity, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.<br />
<br />
sincere, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.<br />
<br />
sit, sat, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>.<br />
<br />
slave, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.<br />
<br />
Small Words, <a href="#Page_139">139-157</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">when necessary, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their potency, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">abound in English, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Smith, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.<br />
<br />
Smith, Prof. Goldwin, on language, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.<br />
<br />
Smith, Sydney, saying of, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his word-coinings, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on Sir James Macintosh’s style, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his solecisms, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>.</span><br />
<br />
snob, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.<br />
<br />
Solecisms, in eminent writers, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442-444</a>.<br />
<br />
solidarity, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>.<br />
<br />
Some Abuses of Words, <a href="#Page_177">177-193</a>.<br />
<br />
somerset, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>.<br />
<br />
son, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>.<br />
<br />
sophist, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.<br />
<br />
South, Robert, D. D., on verbal magic, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">extract from, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Spaniards, their love for long names, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>.<br />
<br />
“Spasmodic School” of Poetry, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.<br />
<br />
specialty, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>.<br />
<br />
species, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>.<br />
<br />
speculation, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.<br />
<br />
spencer, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
Spencer, Herbert, on Saxon-English, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.<br />
<br />
Spenser, his “Abode of Sleep,” <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.<br />
<br />
spoonsful, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>.<br />
<br />
Spurgeon, Rev. C. H., on religious cant, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.<br />
<br />
squatter, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>.<br />
<br />
squirrel, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.<br />
<br />
Stanhope, Lady Hester, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.<br />
<br />
Stanley, Lord, on Saxon words, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.<br />
<br />
starvation, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br />
<br />
stentorian, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>.<br />
<br />
stipulation, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>.<br />
<br />
stopping, <a href="#Page_462">462</a>.<br />
<br />
Story, Judge Joseph, anecdote told by, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.<br />
<br />
Story, W. W., quoted, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br />
<br />
stranger, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>.<br />
<br />
strong, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.<br />
<br />
Style, the most vital element of literary immortality, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">Gibbon’s and Hume’s, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Starr King on its mystery, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">an index to character, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">intensity of, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the transcendental, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">how to form a good, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">no model, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">varieties of, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Joubert on, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the kind demanded to-day, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">not to be cultivated for its own sake, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">images the writer’s nature, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Ruskin on, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">a question concerning it, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">perspicuity its first law, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">should be vivid, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</span><br />
<br />
succeed, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>.<br />
<br />
succession powder, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.<br />
<br />
such, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>.<br />
<br />
suffrage, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.<br />
<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[492]</a></span>sunstroke, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.<br />
<br />
supercilious, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>.<br />
<br />
superior, <a href="#Page_457">457</a>.<br />
<br />
supplement, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>.<br />
<br />
surname, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.<br />
<br />
Swinburne, A. C., his command of words, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br />
<br />
sycophant, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.<br />
<br />
Synonyms, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">T.</span><br />
<br />
tabby, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.<br />
<br />
tale, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>.<br />
<br />
Tartar, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>.<br />
<br />
tawdry, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
Taylor, “Chicken,” <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.<br />
<br />
Taylor, Henry, on the writers of the 17th century, <a href="#Page_13">13-14</a>.<br />
<br />
Taylor, Jeremy, his latinistic style, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br />
<br />
team, <a href="#Page_313">313-316</a>.<br />
<br />
telescope, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>.<br />
<br />
tend, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.<br />
<br />
Tennyson, his command of words, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his use of onomatopœia, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on words, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</span><br />
<br />
terrier, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>.<br />
<br />
that of, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
the above, <a href="#Page_450">450</a>.<br />
<br />
the church, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br />
<br />
the masses, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>.<br />
<br />
theory, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.<br />
<br />
then, <a href="#Page_450">450</a>.<br />
<br />
Theological disputes, <a href="#Page_260">260-264</a>.<br />
<br />
thing, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.<br />
<br />
Thomson, James, his list of obsolete words, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
<br />
Thought, difficulty of expressing it, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.<br />
<br />
thrall, thraldom, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>.<br />
<br />
tidy, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.<br />
<br />
toad-eater, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.<br />
<br />
to a degree, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>.<br />
<br />
to allude, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>.<br />
<br />
to curry favor, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>.<br />
<br />
to extremely maltreat, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>.<br />
<br />
Tooke, Horne, on “truth,” <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.<br />
<br />
topsy-turvy, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.<br />
<br />
Tory, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>.<br />
<br />
Townsend, Lady, on Whitefield, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.<br />
<br />
Translations, their inadequacy, <a href="#Page_31">31-43</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">of the New Testament, <a href="#Page_32">32-34</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">of Horace, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">blunders in, <a href="#Page_39">39-41</a>.</span><br />
<br />
transpire, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
treacle, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.<br />
<br />
tribulation, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.<br />
<br />
trifling minutiæ, <a href="#Page_462">462</a>.<br />
<br />
trivial, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>.<br />
<br />
True Blue, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>.<br />
<br />
truth, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.<br />
<br />
try, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>.<br />
<br />
try and, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>.<br />
<br />
two good ones, <a href="#Page_471">471</a>.<br />
<br />
tyrant, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">U.</span><br />
<br />
ugly, <a href="#Page_466">466</a>.<br />
<br />
underhanded, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>.<br />
<br />
unity, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.<br />
<br />
upon, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
<br />
Usage, a presumptive test of purity of speech, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">of old writers, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>.</span><br />
<br />
usury, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.<br />
<br />
utopian, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">V.</span><br />
<br />
vagabond, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>.<br />
<br />
ventilate, <a href="#Page_470">470</a>.<br />
<br />
villain, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.<br />
<br />
violation of nature, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.<br />
<br />
Virgil, his “Æneid,” <a href="#Page_28">28</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">his onomatopœia, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</span><br />
<br />
virtual representation, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.<br />
<br />
Vocabularies, of different men and callings, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.<br />
<br />
Vocal Organs, the, their adaptation to the atmosphere, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.<br />
<br />
volcano, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">W.</span><br />
<br />
Walton, Izaak, his style, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.<br />
<br />
was, <a href="#Page_471">471</a>.<br />
<br />
watched him do it, <a href="#Page_457">457</a>.<br />
<br />
we, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.<br />
<br />
wealth, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>.<br />
<br />
wearies, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>.<br />
<br />
Webster, Daniel, his study of words, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[493]</a></span><span class="pad1">the impressiveness of his words, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his early speeches bombastic, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his use of plain words, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his temperance of language, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Wellington, on his “duty,” <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br />
<br />
Whately, Archbishop, his simplicity in preaching, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.<br />
<br />
whether, <a href="#Page_453">453</a>.<br />
<br />
Whipple, E. P., on the words of Chaucer, Edwards, and Barrow, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">on the suggestiveness of Shakespeare’s diction, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">on the styles of Sydney Smith, Bacon, Locke, etc., <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his style, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">his knowledge of English literature, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Whitney, W. D., quoted, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.<br />
<br />
Whittington and his cat, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>.<br />
<br />
whole, entire, complete, total, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>.<br />
<br />
William, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.<br />
<br />
Willmott, Rev. Robert A., on Dryden’s and Pope’s versification, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.<br />
<br />
window, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.<br />
<br />
wiseacre, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.<br />
<br />
wit, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.<br />
<br />
Wolcott, Dr., his lines on Johnson, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.<br />
<br />
woman, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>.<br />
<br />
women, their language, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.<br />
<br />
Words, their significance, <a href="#Page_1">1-61</a>;<br />
<span class="pad1">their range and power, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">are things, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Mirabeau on, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Hazlitt on, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">more enduring than sculpture or painting, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Homer’s, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the incarnation of thought, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Milton’s, <a href="#Page_7">7-9</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Montgomery on Milton’s, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Bacon’s, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Dryden’s, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Montaigne’s, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Rousseau’s, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Coleridge’s, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Tennyson’s, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Swinburne’s, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">De Quincey’s mastery of them, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">of the 17th century writers, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">difficulty of defining, <a href="#Page_14">14-16</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Daniel Webster’s study of, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Lord Chatham’s study of, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">William Pinkney’s study of, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Theophile Gautier’s fondness for picturesque, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">comprehensive, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their use a test of culture, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">should fit close to the thought, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">never strictly synonymous, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Wm. Pitt’s use of, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Robert Hall’s use of, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">John Foster’s scrutiny of, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Thomas Moore’s use of, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">how used by the ancient writers, <a href="#Page_27">27-30</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Demosthenes’s choice of, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Cicero’s use of, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Cowper on, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their necromantic power, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">how regarded by the ancients, <a href="#Page_43">43-45</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">use of in “the black art,” <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">T. W. Higginson on, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Prof. Maurice on, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Hawthorne on their spells, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their meaning and force depend upon the man who uses them, <a href="#Page_50">50-56</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">E. P. Whipple on the transfiguration of common, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">suggestiveness of Shakespeare’s, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">media for the emission of character, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">no new ones can be invented, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">difficulty of restoring obsolete, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their significance disclosed by life, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their morality, <a href="#Page_62">62-104</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">an index to character, <a href="#Page_62">62-104</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their power over the popular imagination, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">test of thought, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">embalm mistaken opinions, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Bacon on their power, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Balzac on their witchery, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">South on the enchantment of popular ones, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">illustrations of their power, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their influence in theology, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their influence in science, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their influence upon authors, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">employed as expletives, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">calumnious, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their power in politics, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Bulwer on their influence, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their perversions by the Greeks and Romans, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">used to gloss over vices, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">auctioneers’ use of, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">criminality of their corruptors, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">James Martineau on, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[494]</a></span><span class="pad1">a startling fact about them, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">grand, <a href="#Page_105">105-138</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the mania for big, <a href="#Page_106">106-108</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">St. Paul on, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the simplest best, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the affectation of foreign, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">uncouthness of scientific, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">small, <a href="#Page_139">139-157</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">conventional, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">used without meaning, <a href="#Page_162">162-176</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">lose their significance by handling, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">some abuses of, <a href="#Page_177">177-193</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the secret of apt, <a href="#Page_210">210-241</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">only symbols, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their arrangement on the battle-fields of thought, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>;</span><br />
<a name="ONO" id="ONO"></a>
<span class="pad1"><ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note&mdash;Original text: 'onomatopoetic'">onomatopœic</ins>, <a href="#Page_242">242-256</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">phonetic corruption of, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">fallacies in, <a href="#Page_257">257-322</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">effect of equivocal in theology, <a href="#Page_257">257-264</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">and in philosophy, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their changes of meaning, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">dictionary definitions of, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">“rabble-charming,” <a href="#Page_275">275</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">question-begging, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">derivative and primitive, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">mere hieroglyphics, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">shadow forth more than they express, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their insinuations of error, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">in legal instruments, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their ambiguity in statutes, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">express only the relations of things, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">imperfect signs of our conceptions, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">convey different ideas to different minds, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">denote but part of an object, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their power in the French revolution, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">fascination of their study, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">concentrated poems, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">knowledge embodied in, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Arab in English, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">changes in their meaning, <a href="#Page_374">374-382</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their degradation, <a href="#Page_382">382-397</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">common with curious derivations, <a href="#Page_387">387-412</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">of illusive etymology, <a href="#Page_412">412-420</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">causes of their corruption, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">Anglicizing of foreign, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">their contradictory meanings, <a href="#Page_420">420-423</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">origin of new, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">legitimate once denounced, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">coined by poets, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">advantages of their accurate use, <a href="#Page_436">436-440</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the use of pet, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>;</span><br />
<span class="pad1">the coining of, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432-434</a>.</span><br />
<br />
Words without meaning, <a href="#Page_158">158-176</a>.<br />
<br />
Wordsworth, lines from, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br />
<br />
Wotton, Sir Henry, his definition of an ambassador, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">Y.</span><br />
<br />
Youth and Age, Coleridge’s lines on, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="pad30pc fs120 bold">Z.</span><br />
<br />
zero, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.<br />
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