Words and their uses, past and present. A study of the English language

Front matter

Class _h^_Lv.i_

Book-iVJLSL-

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Preface

THE following pages contain the substance of the articles which appeared in The Galaxy in the years 1867, 1868, and 1869, under the title now borne by this volume. Some changes in the arrangement of the subjects of those articles, some excisions, and a few additions, have been made ; but after reading, with a willingness to learn, nearly all the criticisms with which I was favored, I have found reason for abandoning or modifying very few of my previously expressed opinions.

The purpose of the book is the consideration of the right use and the abuse of words and idioms, with an occasional examination of their origin and their history. It is occupied almost exclusively with the correctness and fitness of verbal expression, and any excursion into higher walks of philology is transient and incidental.

Soon after taking up this subject I heard a story of a professor at Oxford, who, being about to address a miscellaneous audience at that seat of learning, illustrated some of his positions by quotations in the original from Arabic writers. A friend venturing to hint that this

4 PREFACE.

might be caviare to his audience, he replied, " O, everybody knows a little Arabic.'' Now, I have discovered that everybody does not know a little Arabic ; and more, that there are men all around me, of intelligence and character, who, although they cannot be called illiterate, — as peasants are illiterate, — know so very little of the right use of English, that, without venturing beyond the limits of my own yet imperfect knowledge of my mother tongue, I might undertake to give the instruction that I find many of them not only need, but desire.

The need is particularly great in this country ; of which fact I have not only set forth the reasons, but have endeavored to explain them with such detail as would enable my readers to see them for themselves, and take them to heart, instead of merely accepting or rejecting my assertion. Since I first gave these reasons in The Galaxy, they have been incidentally, but earnestly and impressively, presented by Professor Whitney in his book on Language and the Study of Language. Summing up his judgment on this point, that eminent philologist says, " The low-toned party newspaper is too much the type of the prevailing literary influence by which the style of speech of our rising generation is moulding. A tendency to slang, to colloquial inelegances, and even vulgarities, is the besetting sin against which we, as Americans, have especially to guard and to struggle."

What Professor Whitney thus succinctly declares, I have endeavored to set forth at large and to illustrate. Usage in the end makes language ; determining not

PREFACE. 5

only the meaning of words, but their suggestiveness, and also their influence. For the influence of man upon language is reciprocated by the influence of language upon man ; and the mental tone of a community may be vitiated by a yielding to the use of loose, coarse, low, and frivolous phraseology. Into this people fall by the mere thoughtless imitation of slovenly exemplars. A case in point — trifling and amusing, but not, therefore, less suggestive — recently attracted my attention. Professor Whitney mentions, as one of his many illustrations of the historical character of word-making, that we put on a " pair of rubbers" because, when caoutchouc was first brought to us, we could find no better use for it than the rubbing out of pencil-marks. But overshoes of this material are not universally called " rubbers." In Philadelphia, with a reference to the nature of the substance of which they are made, they are- called "gums." A Philadelphia gentleman and his wife going to make a visit at a house in New York, where they' were very much at home, he entered the parlor alone ; and to the question, " Why, where is Emily?" answered, " O, Emily is outside cleaning her gums upon the mat ; " whereupon there was a momentary look of astonishment, and then a peal of laughter. Now, there is no need whatever of the use of either of the poor words rubbers or gums in this sense. The proper word is simply overshoes, which expresses all that there is occasion to tell, except to a manufacturer or a salesman. There is neither necessity nor propriety in our going into the question of the fabric of what we wear for the protection of our feet,

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and of saying that a lady is either rubbing her rubbers or cleaning her gums upon the mat ; no more than there is in our saying that a gentleman is brushing his wool (meaning his coat), or a lady drying her eyes with her linen (meaning her handkerchief). Language is generally formed by indirect and unconscious effort ; but when a language is subjected to the constant action of such degrading influences as those which threaten ours, it may be well to introduce into its development a little consciousness. The difference between saying, He donated the balance of the lumber, and He gave the rest of the timber, is perhaps trifling; but man's language, like man himself, grows by a gradual accretion of trifles, and the sum of these, in our case, is on the one hand good English, and on the other bad. Therefore they are not unworthy of any man's serious attention.

Language is rarely corrupted, and is often enriched, by the simple, unpretending, ignorant man, who takes no thought of his parts of speech. It is from the man who knows just enough to be anxious to square his sentences by the line and plummet of grammar and dictionary that his mother tongue suffers most grievous injury. It is his influence chiefly which is resisted in this book. I have little hope, I must confess, of undoing any of the harm that he has done, or of plucking up any monstrosity that, planted by him, has struck root into the popular speech ; particularly if it seems fine, and is not quite understood by those who use it.

Transpire and predicate — worthy pair — will be used, I fear, the one to mean happen, and the other found ;

PREFACE. 7

things will continue to be being" done, and the gentle* manly barkeeper of the period will call his grog-shop a sample-room, notwithstanding all that I have said, and all that abler men and better scholars than I am maysay, to the contrary. But, although I do not expect to purge away corruption, I do hope to arrest it in some measure by giving hints that help toward wholesomeness.

This book may possibly correct some of the prevailing evils against which it is directed ; but I shall be satisfied if it awakens an attention to its subject that will prevent evil in the future. Scholars and philologists need not be told that it is not addressed to them ; but neither is it written for the unintelligent and entirely uninstructed. It is intended to be of some service to intelligent, thoughtful, educated persons, who are interested in the study of the English language, and in the protection of it against pedants on the one side and coarse libertines in language on the other.

On the etymology of words I have said little, because little was needed. The points from which I have regarded words are in general rather those of taste and reason than of history ; and my discussions are philological only as all study of words must be philological. The few suggestions which I have made in etymology I put forth with no affectation of timidity, but with little concern as to their fate. Etymology, which, as it is now practised, is a product of the last thirty years, fulfils towards language the function which the antiquarian and the genealogist discharge in the making of the world's history. The etymologist of the present

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day follows, as he should follow, his word up step by step through the written records of past years, until he finds its origin in the fixed form of a parent language. The disappearance of every letter, the modification of every sound, the introduction of every new letter, must be accounted for in accordance with the analogy of the language at the period when the change, real or supposed, took place. Thus etymology has at last been placed upon its only safe bases, — research and comparison, — and the origin of most words in modern languages is as surely determinable as that of a member of any family which has a recorded history.

I have only to add he're that in my remai'ks on what I have unavoidably called, by way of distinction, British English and " American " English, and in my criticism of the style of some eminent British authors, no insinuation of a superiority in the use of their mother tongue by men of English race in " America " is intended, no right to set up an independent standard is implied. Of the latter, indeed, there is no fear. When that new "American" thing, so eagerly sought, and hitherto so vainly, does appear, if it ever do appear, it will not be a language, or even a literature.

This bookjwas prepared for the press in the autumn of 1869. An unavoidable and unexpected delay in its appearance has enabled me to add a few examples in illustration of my views, which I have met with since that time ; but it has received no other additions.

R. G. W.

New York, July 8, 1870.

Appendix

I. How the Exception proves the Rule 403

II. Controversy , . . . 412

Index 427

(ii)

"They be not wise, therefore that say, what care I for man's wordes and utterance, if hys matter and reasons be good ? Such men, say so, not so much of ignorance, as eyther of some singular pride in themselves, or some speciall malice of other, or for some private and parciall matter, either in Religion or other kynde of learning. For good and choice meates, be no more requisite for helthy bodyes, than proper and apt wordes be for good matters, and also playne and sensible utterance for the best and deepest reasons ; in which two poyntes standeth perfect eloquence, one of the fayrest and rarest giftes that God doth geve to man."

Ascham's Scholemaster, fol. 46, ed. 1571.

"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 himselfe entangled in words as a bird in lime-twiggs. The more he struggles the more belimed."

Hobbes's Leviathan, I. 4.

"F. Must we always be seeking after the meaning of words?

"H. Of important words we must, if we wish to avoid important error. The meaning of these words especially is of the greatest consequence to mankind, and seems to have been strangely neglected by those who have made most use of them." Tooke, Diversions of Purley, Part II., ch. 1.

" Mankind in general are so little in the habit of looking steadily at their own meaning, or of weighing the words by which they express it, that the writer who is careful to do both will sometimes mislead his readers through the very excellence which qualifies him to be their instructor ; and this with no other fault on his part than the modest mistake on his part of supposing in those to whom he addresses himself an intellect as watchful as his own."

Coleridge, The Friend, II., 2d Landing Place.

Introduction

ONE of the last judgments pronounced in philology is, that words are merely arbitrary sounds for the expression and communication of ideas ; that, for instance, a man calls the source of light and heat the sun, because his mother taught him so to call it, and that is the name by which it is known to the people around him, and that if he had been taught in his childhood, and by example afterwards, to call it the moon, he would have done so without question. But this truth was declared more than two hundred years ago by Oliver Cromwell in his reply to the committee that waited upon him from Parliament to ask him to take the title of king. In the course of his refusal to yield to their request, he said, —

" Words have not their import from the natural power of particular combinations of characters, or from the real efficacy of certain sounds, but from the consent of those that use them, and arbitrarily annex certain ideas to them, which might have been signified with equal propriety by any other."

This conclusion, be it new or old, is sound; but it would be very weak reasoning that would draw from the fact that language is formed, on the whole, by consent and custom, an argument in favor

x3 of indifference as to the right or wrong of usage. For, although he was so earnestly entreated thereto, and although it would have obviated some difficulty in the administration of the government, Cromwell, notwithstanding his opinion as to the arbitrary meaning of words, refused to be called a king, because king meant something that he was not, and had associations which he wished not to bring up. And although words are arbitrary to the individual, to the race or the nation, they are growths, and are themselves the fruit and the sign of the growth of the race or the nation itself, and have, like its members, a history, and alliances, and rights of birth, and inherent powers which endure as long as they live, and which they can transmit, although somewhat modified, to their rightful successors.

But although most words are more immutable, as well as more enduring, than men are, some of them within the memory of one generation vary both in their forms and in the uses which they serve, doing so according to the needs and even the neglect of the users. And thus it is that living languages are always changing. Spoken words acquire, by use and from the varying circumstances of those who use them, other and wider significations than those which they had originally ; inflections are dropped, and construction is modified, its tendency being generally towards simplicity. Changes in inflection and construction are found not to be casual or capricious, but processes according to laws of development; which, however, as in the case of all laws, physical or moral, are deduced from the processes themselves. The apparent operation of these laws is recognized so submissively by some philologists that Dr. Latham has propounded the dogma that in language whatever is, is right; to which he adds another, as a corollary to the former, that whatever was, was wrong. But even if we admit that in language whatever is — that is, whatever usage obtains generally among the people who speak a language as their mother tongue — is right, that is, fulfils the true function of language, which is to serve as a communication between man and man, it certainly therefore follows that, whatever was, was also right; because it did, at one time, obtain generally, and did fulfil the function of language.

The truth is, that, although usage may be compulsory in its behests, and thus establish a government de facto , which men have found that they must recognize whether they will or no, in language, as in all other human affairs, that which is may be wrong. There is some other law in language than the mere arbitrary will of the users. Language is made for man, and not man for language ; but yet no man, no number of men, however great, can of purpose change the meaning of one monosyllable. For, unless the meaning of words is fixed during a generation, language will fail to impart ideas, and even to communicate facts. Unless it is traceable through the writings of many generations in a connected course of normal development, language becomes a mere temporary and arbitrary mode of intercourse ; it fails to be an exponent of a people's intellectual growth ; and the speech of our immediate forefathers dies upon their lips, and is forgotten. Of such misfortune there is, however, not the remotest probability.

The recognition of the changes that the English language has been undergoing from the time when our Anglo-Saxon, or rather our English forefathers, took possession of the southern part of Britain, is no discovery of modern philology. The changes, and the inconvenience which follows them, wrere noticed four hundred years ago by William Caxton, our first printer — a "simple person," as he describes himself, but an observant, a thoughtful, and a very intelligent man, and one to whom English literature is much indebted. He was not only a printer, but a writer ; and as a part of his literary labor he translated into English a French version of the ^Eneid, and published it in the year 1490. In Caxton's preface to that book is a passage which is interesting in itself, and also germane to our subject. I will give the passage entire, and in our modern orthography : —

" And when I had advised me in this said book, I deliberated and concluded to translate it into English, and forthwith took a pen and ink and wrote a leaf or twain, which I oversaw again to correct it; and when I saw the fair and strange terms therein, I doubted that it should not please some gentlemen which late blamed me, saying, that in my translations I had over-curious terms which could not be understonden of common people, and desired me to use old and homely terms in my translations ; and fain would I satisfy every man ; and so to do, took an old book and read therein; and certainly the English was so rude and broad that I could not well understand it. And also my Lord Abbot of Westminster did shew to me of late certain evidences written in old English, for to reduce it into our English now used, and certainly it was written in such wise that it was more like Dutch than English. I could not reduce ne bring it to be understonden. And certainly our language now used varyeth far from what was used and spoken when I was born. For we Englishmen ben born under the domination of the Moon, which is never steadfast, but ever wavering, waxynge one season and waneth and decreaseth another season, and that common English that is spoken in one Shire varieth from another. Insomuch that in my days it happened that certain merchants were in a ship in Tamis [Thames] for to have sailed over the sea into Zealand, and for lack of wind they tarried at Forland, and went to land for to refresh them. And one of them named Sheffield, a mercer, came into an house and axed for meat, and specially he axed for eggs. And the good wife answered that she could speak no French; and the merchant was angry; for he also could speak no French, but would have had the eggs, and she understood him not. And then at last another said that he would have eyren ; then the good wife said that she understood him well. Lo, what should a man in these days write? eggs or cyren f Certainly it is hard to please every man, because of diversity and change of language. For in these days every man that is in any reputation in this country will utter his communication and matters in such manner and terms that few men shall understand them ; and some honest and great clerks have been with me and desired me to write the most curious terms that I could find. And thus between plain, rude, and curious, I stand abashed."

My chief purpose in giving this passage in our regulated spelling is, that the reader may notice how entirely it is written in the English of to-day. Except axed, which we have heard used ourselves, and eyren, which Caxton himself notices as obsolete, ben, ne, and under stonden, are the only words in it which have not just the form and the meaning that we now give to them ; and but for these five words and a little quaintness of style, the passage in its construction and its idiom might have been written yesterday. And yet the writer was born in the reign of Henry IV., and died a hundred years before Shakespeare wrote his first play. He says, too, in another part of his preface, that he wrote in 2 the idiom and with the vocabulary in use among educated people of his day, in ,?Englishe not over rude," on the one hand, "ne curyous," that is, affected and elaborately fine, on the other. If the changes in language which took place during his life were as great as he seems to have thought them, if they were as great as those with which in the present day we seem to be threatened, certainly the period intervening between the time which saw him a middle-aged man and now — four hundred years — seems by contrast to have been one of almost absolute linguistic stagnation. This, however, is mere seeming. The period of which Caxton speaks was one in which the language was crystallizing into its present form, and becoming the English known to literature ; and changes then were rapid and noticeable. The changes of our day are mostly the result of the very superficial instruction of a large body of people, who read much and without discrimination, whose reading is chiefly confined to newspapers hastily written b}r men also very insufficiently educated, and who are careless of accuracy in their ordinary speaking and writing, and ambitious of literary excellence when they make any extraordinary effort. The tendency of this intellectual condition of a great and active race is to the degradation of language, the utter abolition of simple, clear, and manly speech. Against this tendency it behooves all men who have means and opportunity to strive, almost as if it were a question of morals. For there is a kind of dishonesty in the careless and incorrect use of language.

Purity, however, is not a quality which can be accurately predicated of language. What the phrase so often heard, " pure English," really means, it would, probably, puzzle those who use it to explain. For our modern tongues are like many buildings that stand upon sites long swept over by the ever-advancing, though backward and forward shifting tide of civilization. They are built out of the ruins of the work of previous generations, to which we and our immediate predecessors have added something of our own. This process has been going on since the disappearance of the first generation of speaking men ; and it will never cease. But there will be a change in its mode and rate. The change has begun already. The invention of printing, the instruction of the mass of the people, and the ease of popular intercommunication, will surely prevent any such corruption and detrition of language as that which has resulted in the modern English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian tongues. Phonetic degradation will play a less important part than it has heretofore played in the history of language. Changes in the forms, and variation in the meanings of wrords will be slow, and if not deliberate, at least half conscious ; and the corruptions that we have to guard against are chiefly those consequent upon pretentious ignorance and aggressive vulgarity.

It may be reasonably doubted whether there ever was a pure language twro generations old ; that is, a language homogeneous, of but one element. All tongues known to philology show, if not the mingling in considerable and nearly determinable proportions of two or three linguistic elements, at least the adoption and adaptation of numerous foreign words. English has for many centuries been far from being a simple language. Chaucer's "well of English undefiled" is very pleasant and wholesome drinking; but, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and " auxiliary " verbs aside, it is a mixture in which Normanized, Gallicized Latin is mingled in large proportion with a base of degraded Anglo- Saxon. And yet the result of this hybridity and degradation is the tongue in which Shakespeare wrote, and the translators of the Bible, and Milton, and Bunyan, and Burke, and Goldsmith, and Irving, and Hawthorne ; making in a language without a superior a literature without an equal.

But the presence in our language of two elements, both of which are essential to its present fulness and force, no less than to its fineness and flexibility, does not make it sure that these are of equal or of nearly equal importance. Valuable as the Latin adjuncts to our language are, in the appreciation of their value it should never be forgotten that they are adjuncts. The frame, the sinews, the nerves, the heart's blood, in brief, the body and soul of our language is English ; Latin and Greek furnish only its limbs and outward flourishes. If what has come to us through the Normans, and since their time from France and Italy and the Latin lexicon, were turned out of our vocabulary, we could live, and love, and work, and talk, and sing, and have a folk-lore and a higher literature. But take out the former, the movement of our lives would be clogged, and the language would fall to pieces for lack of framework and foundation, and we could do none of those things. We might teach in the lecture-room, and formulate the results of our work in the laboratory, but we should be almost mute at home, and our language and our literature would be no more ours than it would be France's, or Spain's, or Italy's.

To the Latin we owe, as the most cursory student of our language must have observed, a great proportion of the vocabulary of philosophy, of art, of science, and of morals ; and by means of words derived from the Latin we express, as it is assumed, shades of thought and of feeling finer than those of which our simple mother tongue is capable. But it may at least be doubted whether we do not turn too quickly to the Latin lexicon when we wish a name for a new thought or a new thing, and whether out of the simples of our ancient English, or Anglo- Saxon, so called, we might not have formed a language copious enough for all the needs of the highest civilization, and subtle enough for all the requisitions of philosophy. For instance, what we call, in Latinish phrase, remorse of conscience, our forefathers called againbite of inwit ; and in using the former we express exactly the same ideas as are expressed by the latter. As the corresponding compounds and the corresponding elements have the same meaning, what more do we gain by putting together re and morse, con and science, than by doing the same with again and bite, in and wit ? The English words now sound uncouth, and provoke a smile, but they do so only because we are accustomed to the Latin derivatives.

No other advantage seems likely to be pleaded for the use of the latter than that they produce a single impression on the mind of the English-speaking man, causing him to accept remorse and conscience as simple words, expressing simple things, without the suggestion of a biting again and an inner witting. But it may first .be doubted whether this thoughtless, unanalytic acceptance of a word is without some drawback of dissipating and enfeebling disadvantage ; and next, and chiefly, it may be safely asserted that the English compounds would produce, if in common use, as single and as strong an impression as the Latin do. Who that does not stop to think and take to pieces, receives other than a single impression from such words as insight (bereaved twin of inwit), gosf el, falsehood, worship, homely , breakfast, truthful, boyhood, household, brimstone, twilight, acorn, chestnut, instead, homestead, and the like, of which our current common English would furnish numberless examples?

In no way is our language more wronged than by the weak readiness with which many of those who, having neither a hearty love nor a ready mastery of it, or lacking both, fly to the Latin tongue or to the Greek for help in the naming of a new thought or thing, or the partial concealment of an old one, calling, for instance, nakedness nudity, and a bathing-tub a lavatory. By so doing they help to deface the characteristic traits of our mother tongue, and to mar and stunt its kindly growth.

No one denies — certainly I do not deny — the value of the Latin element of our modern English in the expression of abstract ideas and general notions.

It gives also amplitude, and ease, and grace to a language which without it might be admirable only for compact and rugged strength. All which being granted, it still remains to be shown that there is not in simple English — that is, Anglo-Saxon without inflections — the power of developing a vocabulary competent to all the requirements of philosophy, of science, of art, no less than of society and of sentiment. I believe that pure English has, in this respect at least, the full capacity of the German language. Nevertheless, one of the advantages of English over German, in form and euphony, is in this very introduction of Anglicized Latin and Greek words for the expression of abstract ideas, which relieves us of such quintuple compounds, for instance, as s^prachwissenschaftseinkeit. With the expression of abstract ideas and scientific facts, however, the Latinization of our language should stop, or it will lose its home character, and kin traits, and become weak, flabby, and inflated, and thus, ridiculous.