On the study of words

Front matter

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Preface

purge the book of all erroneous etymologies, and to correct in the text small matters of detail. There have also been added some footnotes, in which difficult points are discussed and where reference is given to recent authorities. All editorial additions, whether in the text or in the notes, are enclosed in square brackets. It is hoped that the book as it now stands does not contain in its etymological details anything inconsistent with the latest discoveries of English scholars.

A. L. Mayhew.

I Wadham College, Oxford:

August , 1888.

Prefatory Note

IT is now twenty-six years since Dean Trench’s book “ On the Study of Words ” was first given to the public. Originally addressed to the pupils of the Diocesan Training School at Winchester, in the shape of lectures, and retaining that form in publication, the book was but poorly adapted for use in the school-room as a text-book. The editor has long deplored this, in common with many other teachers ; hence no apology is necessary for the appearance of the present volume. The advantages claimed for it, over all other editions, are about as follows :

i. A complete and exhaustive analysis of the revised text has been added.

2. A set of questions has been prepared, designed not only to call forth the facts stated by the author, but also to follow up lines of thought suggested by him.

3. At the end of each lecture a list of words has been added, illustrating its various topics, and intended to encourage original research on the part of the pupil.

The nevr arrangement of the text, analysis, and questions cannot fail to be of great assistance both to the teacher and

PREFATORY NOTE.

pupil. It is recommended that the latter be compelled to commit the outlines and exercises to memory, place them on the blackboard, and then, assuming the role of lecturer, proceed to expand the leading ideas. In this way the best results of the analytical method of teaching are secured, and the pupil is trained to think and talk while on the floor.

As these helps have already been of great service to the editor in the work of teaching, it is hoped that they may also assist others, now that they are associated with the following lectures.

Benicia, Cal., July 4, 1877.

Thomas D. SupiJse.

Preface To The First Edition

THESE lectures will not, I trust, be found anywhere to have left out of sight seriously, or for long, the peculiar needs of those for whom they were originally intended, and to whom they were primarily addressed. I am conscious, indeed, here and there, of a certain departure from my first intention, having been in part seduced to this by a circumstance which I had not in the least contemplated when I obtained permission to deliver them, by finding, namely, that I should have other hearers besides the pupils of the Training-School. Some matter adapted for those rather than for these I was thus led to introduce — which afterwards I was unwilling, in preparing for the press, to remove ; on the contrary adding to it rather, in the hope of obtaining thus a somewhat wider circle of readers than I could have hoped, had I more rigidly restricted myself in the choice of my materials. Yet I should greatly regret to have admitted so much of this as should deprive these lectures of their fitness for those whose profit in writing and in publishing I had mainly in view, namely, schoolmasters and those preparing to be such.

Had I known any book entering with any fulness,

IO

PREFACE.

and in a popular manner, into the subject-matter of these pages, and making it its exclusive theme, I might still have delivered these lectures, but should scarcely have sought for them a wider audience than their first, gladly leaving the matter in their hands, whose studies in language had been fuller and riper than my own. But abundant and ready to hand as are the materials for such a book, I did not ; while yet it seems to me that the subject is one to which it is beyond measure desirable that their attention, who are teaching, or shall have hereafter to teach others, should be directed ; so that they shall learn to regard language as one of the chiefest organs of their own education and that of others. For I am persuaded that I have used no exaggeration in saying, that for many a young man “his first discovery that words are living powers, has been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into a new world,” — while yet all this maybe indefinitely deferred, may, indeed, never find place at all, unless there is some one at hand to help for him, and to hasten the process ; and he who so does, will ever after be esteemed by him as one of his very foremost benefactors. Whatever maybe Horne Tooke’s shortcomings (and they are great), whether in details of etymology, or in the philosophy of grammar, or in matters more serious still, yet, with all this, what an epoch in many a student’s intellectual life has been his first acquaintance with The Diversions of Purley . And they were not among the least of the obligations which the young men of our time owed to Coleridge, that he so often himself

PREFACE.

II weighed words in the balances, and so earnestly pressed upon all with whom his voice went for anything, the profit which they would find in so doing. Nor, with the certainty that I am anticipating much in my little volume, can I refrain from quoting some words which were not present with me during its composition, although I must have been familiar with them long ago ; words which express excellently well why it is that these studies profit so much, and which will also explain the motives which induced me to add my little contribution to their furtherance :

“ A language will often be wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Being like amber in its efficacy to circu~ late the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber in embalming and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom, although one is not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents. Sometimes it locks up truths, which were once well known, but which, in the course of ages, have passed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of divination. A meditative man cannot refrain from wonder, when he digs down to the deep thought lying at the root of many a metaphorical tqrm, employed for the designation of spiritual things, even of those \yith regard to which professing philosophers have blundered grossly ; and often it would seem as though rays of truth, which were still below the intellectual horizon, had dawned upon the imagination as it was looking up to heaven.

PREFACE.

Hence they who feel an inward call to teach and enlighten their countrymen, should deem it an important part of their duty to draw out the stores of thought which are already latent in their native language, to purify it from the corruptions which Time brings upon all things, and from which language has no exemption, and to endeavor to give distinctness and precision to whatever in it is confused, or obscure, or dimly seen.” — Guesses at Truth , First Series , p. 295.

Itchenstoke, Oct. 9, 1851.

GENERAL OUTLINE OF LECTURES.

LECTURE I.

INTRODUCTORY.

I. Study of words not tedious.

II. Language fossil poetry.

III. “ “ ethics.

IV. “ “ history.

V. Origin of language.

VI. Language of savage tribes.

VII. Poverty of languages.

VIII. Savage vocabularies.

IX. Words the guardians of thoughts.

X. The birth of language.

XI. Greatness of a language.

XII. Agreement between names and things.

XIII. Names changed to worse.

XIV. Prophecy in names.

XV. Significance of names.

XVI. Words, implements of teaching.

LECTURE II.

ON THE POETRY IN WORDS.

I. Unconscious poetry.

II. Poetry of popular language.

III. “ in the names of places.

IV. “ “ “ flowers.

V. ** “ “ animals.

VI. Poetic legends in words.

VII. Revival of poetry in words.

OUTLINE OF LECTURES.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XV. Poetr,j- of nomenclature

“ in architectural terms.

“ “ the changes of words.

Man a born poet.

LECTURE III.

ON THE MORALITY IN WORDS.

The witness of language.

Records of sin in language.

Degeneration of words.

Elevation of words.

Attestations to God’s truth in words.

Failings of the human heart shown by words* Moral perversity in words.

The fatalist’s use of words.

Fair words for ugly things.

Question-begging words.

National morals in words.

Absence of words from a language.

Potency of words.

LECTURE IV.

ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS.

Consanguinity of languages.

Saxon and Norman relations.

Language the oldest history.

History in single words.

Contributions of the Crusades.

“ “ Church.

“ “ Schoolmen.

Influence of words on opinions.

Legends in natural history.

Historical misnomers.

Importance of correctness in naming.

Names of parties, sects, and officials.

History of commerce in words.

Transformation of proper names.

Names drawn from books.

OUTLINE OF LECTURES. 1$

XVI. Mistakes in words and etymologies.

XVII. Words embodying past customs and errors XVIII. Legends in words.

XIX. Needless scruples about words.

XX. Rise and fall of words.

LECTURE V.

ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.

I. First appearance of words.

II. Rise of the term “ Christians.”

III. How new words become necessary.

IV Christianity and the classical languages.

V. Effect of increased knowledge on words.

VI. Deliberate coining of words.

VII. Wants detected and supplied.

VIII. Cicero’s coinings.

IX. Comprehensive words.

X. Scientific gains.

XI. New things require new names.

XII. French contributions.

XIII. Contributions of English history.

XIV. Comic words.

XV. Resistance to new words.

XVI. Late birth of new words.

XVII. Naturalization of words.

XVIII. Popular origin of words.

XIX. Derivations forgotten or lost sight ofL XX. **■ irrecoverable.

XXI. Parentage of words.

XXII. Testimony of Whewell.

LECTURE VI.

ON THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.

I. Definition and discussion of synonyms.

II. Difficulties of translation.

III. Words liable to be confounded.

IV. How synonyms exist.

OUTLINE OF LECTURES.

V. Process of desynonymizing.

VI. Words which require nice discrimination.

VII. Duplicate words.

VIII. Words once synonymous.

IX. Greek and Latin synonyms.

X. Synonyms having fundamental etymological distinctions.

XI. Improper synonyms.

XII. Present value of words.

XIII. Milton’s etymologies.

XIV. Moral gain of synonyms.

XV. Synonyms in controversy.

XVI. Historical synonyms.

XVII. Habit of distinguishing synonyms.

XVIII. Words left unemployed.

XIX. Truth and falsehood of words.

LECTURE VII.

THE SCHOOLMASTER’S USE OF WORDS.

I. The material helps of education.

II. Learning and teaching.

III. Etymological resemblances.

IV. Random etymologies.

V. Accidental coincidences.

VI. Phonetic spelling.

VII. Relationship of words.

VIII. Heterodynamic words.

IX. Words which provoke and reward inquiry.

X. Classics, why so called.

XI. Words borrowed from life.

XII. Relaxation and amusement in the study of words.

XIII. Significance of the names of places.

XIV. Social and political changes in names.

XV. Words compared to money.

XVI. Church words.

XVII. Latin words in an English dress.

ON

THE STUDY OF WORDS.

HERE are few who would not readily ac-

X knowledge that mainly in worthy books are preserved and hoarded the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which the world has accumulated ; and that chiefly by aid of books they are handed down from one generation to another. I shall urge on you in these lectures something different from this ; namely, that not in books only, which all acknowledge, nor yet in connected oral discourse, but often also in words contemplated singly, there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination, laid up — that from these, lessons of infinite worth may be derived, if only our attention is roused to their existence. I shall urge on you how well it will repay you to study the words which you are in the habit of using or of meeting, be they such as relate to highest spiritual things, or our common words of the shop and the market, and of all the familiar intercourse of daily life. It will indeed repay you far better

I g INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

than you can easily believe. I am sure, at least, that for many a young man his first discovery of the fact that words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves, has been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into a new world ; he is never able to cease wondering at the moral marvels that surround him on every side, and ever reveal themselves more and more to his gaze.

We indeed hear it not seldom said that ignorance is the mother of admiration. No falser word was ever spoken, and hardly a more mischievous one ; implying, as it does, that this healthiest exercise of the mind rests, for the most part, on a deceit and a delusion, and that with larger knowledge it would cease ; while, in truth, for once that ignorance leads us to admire that which with fuller insight we should perceive to be a common thing, one demanding no such tribute from us, a hundred, nay, a thousand times, it prevents us from admiring that which is admirable indeed. And this is so, whether we are moving in the region of nature, which is the region of God’s wonders, or in the region of art, which is the region of man’s wonders ; and nowhere truer than in this sphere and region of language, which is about to claim us now. Oftentimes here we walk up and down in the midst of intellectual and moral marvels with a vacant eye and a careless mind ; even as some traveller passes unmoved over fields of fame, or through cities of ancient renown — • unmoved, because utterly unconscious of the lofty

STUDY OF WORDS NOT TEDIOUS.

deeds which there have been wrought, of the great hearts which spent themselves there. We, like him, wanting the knowledge and insight which would have served to kindle admiration in us, are oftentimes deprived of this pure and elevating excitement of the mind, and miss no less that manifold instruction which ever lies about our path, and nowhere more largely than in our daily words, if only we knew how to put forth our hands and make it our own. ‘ What riches,’ one exclaims, ‘ lie hidden in the vulgar tongue of our poorest and most ignorant ! What flowers of paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and their parts undistinguished and undiscerned, from having been daily trodden on.’

And this subject upon which we are thus entering ought not to be a dull or uninteresting one in the handling, or one to which only by an effort you will yield the attention which I shall claim. If it shall prove so, this I fear must be through the fault of my manner of treating it ; for certainly in itself there is no study which may be made at once more instructive and entertaining than the study of the use and abuse, the origin and distinction of words, with an investigation, slight though it may be, of the treasures contained in them ; which is exactly that which I now propose to myself and to you. I remember a very learned scholar, to whom we owe one of our best Greek lexicons, a book which must have cost him years, speaking in the preface of his completed work with a just disdain of some, who complained of the irksome drudgery of such toils as

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

those which had engaged him so long, — toils irksome, forsooth, because they only had to do with words. He disclaims any part with those who asked pity for themselves, as so many galley-slaves chained to the oar, or martyrs who had offered themselves for the good of the literary world. He declares that the task of classing, sorting, grouping, comparing, tracing the derivation and usage of words,, had been to him no drudgery, but a delight and labor of love.*

And if this may be true in regard of a foreign tongue, how much truer ought it to be in regard of our own, of our ‘ mother tongue,’ as we affectionately call it. A great writer not very long departed from us has borne witness at once to the pleasantness and profit of this study. ‘ In a language,’ he says,

‘ like ours, where so many words are derived from other languages, there are few modes of instruction more useful or more amusing than that of accustoming young people to seek for the etymology or primary meaning of the words they use. There are cases in which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign.’ So writes Coleridge ; and impressing the same truth, Emerson has somewhere characterized language as ‘fossil poetry.’ He evidently means that just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern or the finely vertebrated

* It is well worth the while to read on this same subject the pleasant causerie of Littre, ‘ Comment j’ai fait mon Dictionnaire.’ It is to be found pp. 390-442 of his Glanures.

LANGUAGE FOSSIL POETRY.

lizard, such as now, it may be, have been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would else have been their portion, — so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished, there are these, which might so easily have perished too, preserved and made safe for ever. The phrase is a striking one ; the only fault one can find with it is that it is too narrow. Language may be, and indeed is, this ‘fossil poetry’ ; but it may be affirmed of it with exactly the same truth that it is fossil ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and as effectually embody facts of history, or convictions of the moral sense, as of the imagination or passion of men ; even as, so far as that moral sense may be perverted, they will bear witness and keep a record of that perversion. On all these points I shall enter at full in after lectures; but I may give by anticipation a specimen or two of what I mean, to make from the first my purpose and plan more fully intelligible to all.

Language then is ‘ fossil poetry ’ ; in other words, we are not to look for the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, or its poetical customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some deep analogy of things natural and things spiritual ; bringing those to illustrate and to give an abiding form

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

and body to these. The image may have grown trite and ordinary now : perhaps through the help of this very word may have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem little better than a commonplace ; yet not the less he who first discerned the relation, and devised the new word which should express it, or gave to an old, never before but literally used, this new and figurative sense, this man was in his degree a poet — a maker, that is, of things which were not before, which would not have existed but for him, or for some other gifted with equal powers. He who spake first of a * dilapidated ’ fortune, what an image must have risen up before his mind’s eye of some falling house or palace, stone detaching itself from stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin. Or he who to that Greek word which signifies ‘ that which will endure to be held up to and judged by the sunlight,’ gave first its ethical signification of ‘ sincere,’ ‘ truthful,’ or as we sometimes say, ‘ transparent,’ can we deny to him the poet’s feeling and eye ? Many a man had gazed, we are sure, at the jagged and indented mountain ridges of Spain, before one called them ‘ sierras’ or ‘saws,’ the name by which now they are known, as Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada ; but that man coined his imagination into a word which will endure as long as the everlasting hills which he named.

But it was said just now that words often contain a witness for great moral truths — God having pressed such a seal of truth upon language that men are continually uttering deeper things than

BISHOP BUTLER'S USE OF PASTIME.

they know, asserting mighty principles, it may be asserting them against themselves, in words that to them may seem nothing more than the current coin of society. Thus to what grand moral purposes Bishop Butler turns the word ‘ pastime ’; how solemn the testimony which he compels the world, out of its own use of this word, to render against itself — obliging it to own that its amusements and pleasures do not really satisfy the mind and fill it with the sense of an abiding and satisfying joy : * they are only ‘pastime’; they serve only, as this word confesses, to pass away the time , to prevent it from hanging, an intolerable burden, on men’s hands : all which they can do at the best is to prevent men from discovering and attending to their own internal poverty and dissatisfaction and want. He might have added that there is the same acknowledgment in the word ‘ diversion,’ which means no more than that which diverts or turns us aside from ourselves, and in this way helps us to forget ourselves for a little. And thus it would appear that, even according to the world’s own

* Sermon xiv. Upon the Love of God. Curiously enough, Montaigne has, in his Essays , drawn the same testimony out of the word : ‘ This ordinary phrase of Pass-time, and passing away the time, represents the custom of those wise sort of people, who think they cannot have a better account of their lives than to let them run out and slide away, to pass them over and to baulk them, and as much as they can to take no notice of them, and to shun them as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality. But I know it to be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious even in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it, and nature has delivered it into our hands in such and so favorable circumstances that we commonly complain of ourselves, if it be troublesome to us or slide unprofitably away.’

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

confession, all which it proposes is — not to make us happy, but a little to prevent us from remembering that we are unhappy, to pass away our time, to divert us from ourselves. While on the other hand we declare that the good which will really fill our souls and satisfy them to the uttermost, is not in us, but without us and above us, in the words which we use to set forth any transcending delight. Take three or four of these words — ‘ transport/ ‘ rapture/

* ravishment/ ‘ ecstasy/ — ‘ transport/ that which carries us, as 4 rapture * or ‘ ravishment,’ that which snatches us out of and above ourselves, and

* ecstasy’ is very nearly the same, only drawn from the Greek.

And not less, where a perversion of the moral sense has found place, words preserve oftentimes a record of this perversion. We have a signal example of this in the use, or rather misuse, of the words ‘ religion ’ and ‘ religious ’ during the Middle Ages, and indeed in many parts of Christendom still. A ‘ religious ’ person did not then mean any one who felt and owned the bonds that bound him to God and to his fellow-men, but one who had taken peculiar vows upon him, the member of a monastic order, of a ‘ religion ’ as it was called. As little did a religious house then mean, nor does it now mean in the Church of Rome, a Christian household, ordered in the fear of God, but a house in which these persons were gathered together according to the rule of some man. What a light does this one word so used throw on the entire state of mind and habits of thought in those ages ! That then was

LANGUAGE FOSSIL HISTORY.

4 religion,’ and alone deserved the name! And ‘religious’ was a title which might not be given to parents and children, husbands and wives, men and women fulfilling faithfully and holily in the world the duties of their several stations, but only to those who had devised a self-chosen service for themselves.*

But language is fossil history as well. What a record of great social revolutions, revolutions in nations and in the feelings of nations, the one word ‘ frank ’ contains, which is used, as we all know, to express aught that is generous, straightforward, and free. The Franks, I need not remind you, were a powerful German tribe, or association of tribes, who gave themselves f this proud name of the ‘ franks ’ or the free ; and who, at the breaking up of the Roman Empire, possessed themselves of Gaul, to which they gave their own name. They were the ruling conquering people, honorably distinguished from the Gauls and degenerate Romans

* A reviewer in Fraser's Magazine , Dec. 1851, doubts whether I have not here pushed my assertion too far. So far from this, it was not merely the ‘ popular language ’ which this corruption had invaded, but a decree of the great Fourth Lateran Council (a. d. 1215), forbidding the further multiplication of monastic orders, runs thus : Ne nimia religionum diversitas gravem in Ecclesia Dei confusionem inducat, firmiter prohibemus, ne quis de cetero novam religionem rnvemat, sed quicunque voluerit ad religionem converti, unam de approbate assumat.

f [This explanation of the name Franks is now generally given up. The name is probably a derivative from a lost O.H.G. * f rancho, a spear or javelin: compare A.S. franca , Icel. frakka ; similarly the Saxons are supposed to have derived their name from a weapon — Seax , a knife; see Kluge’s Diet . (s .y.frank)\.

2 6

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

among whom they established themselves by their independence, their love of .freedom, their scorn of a lie ; they had, in short, the virtues which belong to a conquering and dominant race in the midst of an inferior and conquered one. And thus it came to pass that by degrees the name ‘ frank ’ indicated not merely a national, but involved a moral, distinction as well ; and a ‘ frank ’ man was synonymous not merely with a man of the conquering German race, but was an epithet applied to any man possessed of certain high moral qualities, which for the most part appertained to, and were found only in men of that stock ; and thus in men’s daily discourse, when they speak of a person as being ‘ frank,’ or when they use the words ‘ franchise,’ ‘ enfranchisement,’ to express civil liberties and immunities, their language here is the outgrowth, the record, and the result of great historic changes, bears testimony to facts of history, whereof it may well happen that the speakers have never heard.* The word ‘ slave ’ has undergone a process entirely analogous, although in an opposite direction. ‘The martial superiority of the Teutonic races enabled them to keep their slave markets supplied with captives taken from the Sclavonic tribes. Hence, in all the languages of Western Europe, the once glorious name of Slave has come to express the most degraded condition of men. What cen-

* ‘ Frank,’ though thus originally a German word, only came back to Germany from France in the seventeenth century. With us it is found in the sixteenth, but scarcely earlier.

ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.

turies of violence and warfare does the history of this word disclose.’ *

Having given by anticipation this handful of examples in illustration of what in these lectures I propose, I will, before proceeding further, make a few observations on a subject which, if we would go at all to the root of the matter, we can scarcely leave altogether untouched, — I mean the origin of language, in which however we will not entangle ourselves deeper than we need. There are, or rather there have been, two theories about this. One, and that which rather has been than now is, for few maintain it still, would put language on the same level with the various arts and inventions with which man has gradually adorned and enriched his life. It would make him by degrees to have invented it, just as he might have invented any of these, for himself ; and from rude, imperfect beginnings, the inarticulate cries by which he expressed his natural wants, the sounds by which he sought to imitate the impression of natural objects upon him, little by little to have arrived at that wondrous