Part 7 (1/2)

Science is an immense gainer by words which thus say singly, what whole sentences might with difficulty have succeeded in saying. Thus 'isothermal' is quite a modern invention; but how much is summed up by the word; what a long story is saved, as often as we speak of 'isothermal' lines. Physiologists have given the name of 'atavism' to the emerging again of a face in a family after its disappearance during two or three generations. What would have else needed a sentence is here accomplished by a word. Lord Bacon somewhere describes a certain candidate for the Chair of St. Peter as being 'papable.' There met, that is, in him all the conditions, and they were many, which would admit the choice of the Conclave falling upon him. When Bacon wrote, one to be 'papable' must have been born in lawful wedlock; must have no children nor grandchildren living; must not have a kinsman already in the Conclave; must be already a Cardinal; all which facts this single word sums up. When Aristotle, in the opening sentences of his _Rhetoric_, declares that rhetoric and logic are antistrophic,' what a wonderful insight into both, and above all into their relations to one another, does the word impart to those who have any such special training as enables them to take in all which hereby he intends. Or take a word so familiar as 'circle,' and imagine how it would fare with us, if, as often as in some long and difficult mathematical problem we needed to refer to this figure, we were obliged to introduce its entire definition, no single word representing it; and not this only, but the definition of each term employed in the definition;--how well nigh impossible it would prove to carry the whole process in the mind, or to take oversight of all its steps. Imagine a few more words struck out of the vocabulary of the mathematician, and if all activity and advance in his proper domain was not altogether arrested, yet would it be as effectually restrained and hampered as commercial intercourse would be, if in all its transactions iron or copper were the sole medium of exchange. Wherever any science is progressive, there will be progress in its nomenclature as well. Words will keep pace with things, and with more or less felicity resuming in themselves the labours of the past, will at once a.s.sist and abridge the labours of the future; like tools which, themselves the result of the finest mechanical skill, do at the same time render other and further triumphs of art possible, oftentimes such as would prove quite unattainable without them. [Footnote: See Mill, _System of Logic_, iv. 6, 3.]

It is not merely the widening of men's intellectual horizon, which, bringing new thoughts within the range of their vision, compels the origination of corresponding words; but as often as regions of this outward world hitherto closed are laid open, the novel objects of interest which these contain will demand to find their names, and not merely to be catalogued in the nomenclature of science, but, so far as they present themselves to the popular eye, will require to be popularly named. When a new thing, a plant, or fruit, or animal, or whatever else it may be, is imported from some foreign land, or so comes within the sphere of knowledge that it needs to be thus named, there are various ways by which this may be done. The first and commonest way is to import the name and the thing together, incorporating the former, unchanged, or with slight modification, into the language. Thus we did with the potato, which is only another form of 'batata,' in which shape the original Indian word appears in our earlier voyagers. But this is not the only way of naming; and the example on which I have just lighted affords good ill.u.s.tration of various other methods which may be adopted. Thus a name belonging to something else, which the new object nearly resembles, may be transferred to it, and the confusion arising from calling different things by the same name disregarded. It was thus in German, 'kartoffel'

being only a corruption, which found place in the last century, of 'tartuffel' from the Italian 'tartiiffolo'(Florio), properly the name of the truffle; but which not the less was transferred to the potato, on the ground of the many resemblances between them. [Footnote: [See Kluge, _Etym. Dict_. (s. v. _Kartoffel_).]] Or again this same transfer may take place, but with some qualifying or distinguis.h.i.+ng addition.

Thus in Italy also men called the potato 'tartufo,' but added 'bianco,'

the white truffle; a name now giving way to 'patata.' Thus was it, too, with the French; who called it apple, but 'apple of the earth'; even as in many of the provincial dialects of Germany it bears the name of 'erdapfel' or earth-apple to this day.

It will sometimes happen that a language, having thus to provide a new name for a new thing, will seem for a season not to have made up its mind by which of these methods it shall do it. Two names will exist side by side, and only after a time will one gain the upper hand of the other. Thus when the pineapple was introduced into England, it brought with it the name of 'ananas' erroneously 'anana' under which last form it is celebrated by Thomson in his _Seasons_. [Footnote: [The word ananas is from a native Peruvian name _nanas_. The pineapple was first seen by Europeans in Peru; see the _New English Dictionary_ (s. v.).]]

This name has been nearly or quite superseded by 'pineapple' manifestly suggested by the likeness of the new fruit to the cone of the pine. It is not a very happy formation; for it is not _likeness_, but _ident.i.ty_, which 'pineapple' suggests, and it gives some excuse to an error, which up to a very late day ran through all German-English and French-English dictionaries; I know not whether even now it has disappeared. In all of these 'pineapple' is rendered as though it signified not the anana, but this cone of the pine; and not very long ago, the _Journal des Debats_ made some uncomplimentary observations on the voracity of the English, who could wind up a Lord Mayor's banquet with fir-cones for dessert.

Sometimes the name adopted will be one drawn from an intermediate language, through which we first became acquainted with the object requiring to be named. 'Alligator' is an example of this. When that ugly crocodile of the New World was first seen by the Spanish discoverers, they called it, with a true insight into its species, 'el lagarto,' _the_ lizard, as being the largest of that lizard species to which it belonged, or sometimes 'el lagarto de las Indias,' the Indian lizard. In Sir Walter Raleigh's _Discovery of Guiana_ the word still retains its Spanish form. Sailing up the Orinoco, 'we saw in it,' he says, 'divers sorts of strange fishes of marvellous bigness, but for _lagartos_ it exceeded; for there were thousands of these ugly serpents, and the people call it, for the abundance of them, the river of _lagartos_, in their language.' We can explain the shape which with us the word gradually a.s.sumed, by supposing that English sailors who brought it home, and had continually heard, but may have never seen it written, blended, as in similar instances has often happened, the Spanish article 'el' with the name. In Ben Jonson's 'alligarta,' we note the word in process of transformation. [Footnote: 'Alcoran'

supplies another example of this curious annexation of the article.

Examples of a like absorption or incorporation of it are to be found in many languages; in our own, when we write 'a newt,' and not an ewt, or when our fathers wrote 'a nydiot' (Sir T. More), and not an idiot; in the Italian, which has 'lonza' for onza; but they are still more numerous in French. Thus 'lierre,' ivy, was written by Ronsard, 'l'hierre,' which is correct, being the Latin 'hedera.' 'Lingot' is our 'ingot,' but with fusion of the article; in 'larigot' and 'loriot' the word and the article have in the same manner grown together. In old French it was l'endemain,' or, le jour en demain: 'le lendemain,' as now written, is a barbarous excess of expression. 'La Pouille,' a name given to the southern extremity of Italy, and in which we recognize 'Apulia,' is another variety of error, but moving in the same sphere (Genin, _Recreations Philologiques_, vol. i. pp. 102-105); of the same variety is 'La Natolie,' which was written 'L'Anatolie' once. An Irish scholar has observed that in modern Irish 'an' (='the') is frequently thus absorbed in the names of places, as in 'Nenagh, 'Naul'; while sometimes an error exactly the reverse of this is committed, and a letter supposed to be the article, but in fact a part of the word, dropt: thus 'Oughaval,' instead of 'Noughhaval' or New Habitation. [See Joyce, _Irish Local Names_.]]

Less honourable causes than some which I have mentioned, give birth to new words; which will sometimes reflect back a very fearful light on the moral condition of that epoch in which first they saw the light. Of the Roman emperor, Tiberius, one of those 'inventors of evil things,'

of whom St. Paul speaks (Rom. i. 30), Tacitus informs us that under his hateful dominion words, unknown before, emerged in the Latin tongue, for the setting out of wickednesses, happily also previously unknown, which he had invented. It was the same frightful time which gave birth to 'delator,' alike to the thing and to the word.

The atrocious attempt of Lewis XIV. to convert the Protestants in his dominions to the Roman Catholic faith by quartering dragoons upon them, with license to misuse to the uttermost those who refused to conform, this 'booted mission' (mission bottee), as it was facetiously called at the time, has bequeathed 'dragonnade' to the French language. 'Refugee'

had at the same time its rise, and owed it to the same event. They were called 'refugies' or 'refugees' who took refuge in some land less inhospitable than their own, so as to escape the tender mercies of these missionaries. 'Convertisseur' belongs to the same period. The spiritual factor was so named who undertook to convert the Protestants on a large scale, receiving so much a head for the converts whom he made.

Our present use of 'roue' throws light on another curious and shameful page of French history. The 'roue,' by which word now is meant a man of profligate character and conduct, is properly and primarily one broken on the wheel. Its present and secondary meaning it derived from that Duke of Orleans who was Regent of France after the death of Lewis XIV.

It was his miserable ambition to gather round him companions worse, if possible, and wickeder than himself. These, as the Duke of St. Simon a.s.sures us, he was wont to call his 'roues'; every one of them abundantly deserving to be broken on the wheel,--which was the punishment then reserved in France for the worst malefactors.

[Footnote: The 'roues' themselves declared that the word expressed rather their readiness to give any proof of their affection, even to the being broken upon the wheel, to their protector and friend.] When we have learned the pedigree of the word, the man and the age rise up before us, glorying in their shame, and not caring to pay to virtue even that hypocritical homage which vice finds it sometimes convenient to render.

The great French Revolution made, as might be expected, characteristic contributions to the French language. It gives us some insight into its ugliest side to know that, among other words, it produced the following: 'guillotine,' 'incivisme,' 'lanterner,' 'noyade,'

'sansculotte,' 'terrorisme.' Still later, the French conquests in North Africa, and the pitiless severities with which every attempt at resistance on the part of the free tribes of the interior was put down and punished, have left their mark on it as well; 'razzia' which is properly an Arabic word, having been added to it, to express the swift and sudden sweeping away of a tribe, with its herds, its crops, and all that belongs to it. The Communist insurrection of 1871 bequeathed one contribution almost as hideous as itself, namely 'petroleuse,' to the language. It is quite recently that we have made any acquaintance with 'recidivist'--one, that is, who falls back once more on criminal courses.

But it would ill become us to look only abroad for examples in this kind, when perhaps an equal abundance might be found much nearer home.

Words of our own keep record of pa.s.sages in our history in which we have little reason to glory. Thus 'mob' and 'sham' had their birth in that most disgraceful period of English history, the interval between the Restoration and the Revolution. 'I may note,' says one writing towards the end of the reign of Charles II., 'that the rabble first changed their t.i.tle, and were called ”the mob” in the a.s.semblies of this [The Green Ribbon] Club. It was their beast of burden, and called first ”mobile vulgus,” but fell naturally into the contraction of one syllable, and ever since is become proper English.' [Footnote: North, _Examen_, p. 574; for the origin of 'sham' see p. 231. Compare Swift in _The Tatler_, No. ccx.x.x. 'I have done the utmost,' he there says, 'for some years past to stop the progress of ”mob” and ”banter”; but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to a.s.sist me.'] At a much later date a writer in _The Spectator_ speaks of 'mob' as still only struggling into existence. 'I dare not answer,'

he says, 'that mob, rap, pos, incog., and the like, will not in time be looked at as part of our tongue.' In regard of 'mob,' the mobile mult.i.tude, swayed hither and thither by each gust of pa.s.sion or caprice, this, which _The Spectator_ hardly expected, while he confessed it possible, has actually come to pa.s.s. 'It is one of the many words formerly slang, which are now used by our best writers, and received, like pardoned outlaws, into the body of respectable citizens.' Again, though the murdering of poor helpless lodgers, afterwards to sell their bodies for dissection, can only be regarded as the monstrous wickedness of one or two, yet the verb 'to burke,' drawn from the name of a wretch who long pursued this hideous traffic, will be evidence in all after times, unless indeed its origin should be forgotten, to how strange a crime this age of ours could give birth. Nor less must it be acknowledged that 'to ratten' is no pleasant acquisition which the language within the last few years has made; and as little 'to boycott,' which is of still later birth. [Footnote: This word has found its way into most European languages, see the New English Dictionary (s.

v.)]

We must not count as new words properly so called, although they may delay us for a minute, those comic words, most often comic combinations formed at will, wherein, as plays and displays of power, writers ancient and modern have delighted. These for the most part are meant to do service for the moment, and, this done, to pa.s.s into oblivion; the inventors of them themselves having no intention of fastening them permanently on the language. Thus Aristophanes coined [Greek: mellonikiao], to loiter like Nicias, with allusion to the delays by whose aid this prudent commander sought to put off the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with other words not a few, familiar to every scholar. The humour will sometimes consist in their enormous length, [Footnote: As in the [Greek: amphiptolemopedesistratos] of Eupolis; the [Greek: spermagoraiolekitholachanopolis] of Aristophanes.

There are others a good deal longer than these.] sometimes in their mingled observance and transgression of the laws of the language, as in the [Greek: danaotatos], in the [Greek: autotatos] of the Greek comic poet, the 'patruissimus' and 'oculissimus,' comic superlatives of patruus and oculus, 'occisissimus' of occisus; 'dominissimus' of dominus; 'asinissimo' (Italian) of asino; or in superlative piled on superlative, as in the 'minimissimus' and 'pessimissimus' of Seneca, the 'ottimissimo' of the modern Italian; so too in the 'dosones,'

'dabones,' which in Greek and in medieval Latin were names given to those who were ever promising, ever saying 'I will give,' but never crowning promise with performance. Plautus, with his exuberant wit, and exulting in his mastery of the Latin language, is rich in these, 'fust.i.tudinus,' 'ferricrepinus' and the like; will put together four or five lines consisting wholly of comic combinations thrown off for the occasion. [Footnote: _Persa_, iv. 6, 20-23.] Of the same character is Chaucer's 'octogamy,' or eighth marriage; Butler's 'cynarctomachy,' or battle of a dog and bear; Southey's 'matriarch,' for by this name he calls the wife of the Patriarch Job; but Southey's fun in this line of things is commonly poor enough; his want of finer scholars.h.i.+p making itself felt here. What humour for example can any one find in 'philofelist' or lover of cats? Fuller, when he used 'to avunculize,'

meaning to tread in the footsteps of one's uncle, scarcely proposed it as a lasting addition to the language; as little did Pope intend more than a very brief existence for 'vaticide,' or Cowper for 'extra- foraneous,' or Carlyle for 'gigmanity,' for 'tolpatchery,' or the like.

Such are some of the sources of increase in the wealth of a language; some of the quarters from which its vocabulary is augmented. There have been, from time to time, those who have so little understood what a language is, and what are the laws which it obeys, that they have sought by arbitrary decrees of their own to arrest its growth, have p.r.o.nounced that it has reached the limits of its growth, and must not henceforward presume to develop itself further. Even Bentley with all his vigorous insight into things is here at fault. 'It were no difficult contrivance,' he says, 'if the public had any regard to it, to make the English tongue immutable, unless hereafter some foreign nation shall invade and overrun us.' [Footnote: Works, vol. II. p. 13.]

But a language has a life, as truly as a man, or as a tree. As a man, it must grow to its full stature; unless indeed its life is prematurely abridged by violence from without; even as it is also submitted to his conditions of decay. As a forest tree, it will defy any feeble bands which should attempt to control its expansion, so long as the principle of growth is in it; as a tree too it will continually, while it casts off some leaves, be putting forth others. And thus all such attempts to arrest have utterly failed, even when made under conditions the most favourable for success. The French Academy, numbering all or nearly all the most distinguished writers of France, once sought to exercise such a domination over their own language, and might have hoped to succeed, if success had been possible for any. But the language heeded their decrees as little as the advancing tide heeded those of Canute. Could they hope to keep out of men's speech, or even out of their books, however they excluded from their own _Dictionary_, such words as 'blague,' 'blaguer,' 'blagueur,' because, being born of the people, they had the people's mark upon them? After fruitless resistance for a time, they have in cases innumerable been compelled to give way--though in favour of the words just cited they have not yielded yet--and in each successive edition of their _Dictionary_ have thrown open its doors to words which had established themselves in the language, and would hold their ground there, altogether indifferent whether they received the Academy's seal of allowance or not. [Footnote: Nisard (_Curiosites de l'Etym. Franc._ p. 195) has an article on these words, where with the epigrammatic neatness which distinguishes French prose, he says, Je regrette que l'Academie repousse de son Dictionnaire les mots _blague, blagueur_, laissant gronder a sa porte ces fils effrontes du peuple, qui finiront par l'enfoncer. On this futility of struggling against popular usage in language Montaigne has said, 'They that will fight custom with grammar are fools'; and, we may add, not less fools, as engaged in as hopeless a conflict, they that will fight it with dictionary.]

Littre, the French scholar who single-handed has given to the world a far better Dictionary than that on which the Academy had bestowed the collective labour of more than two hundred years, shows a much juster estimate of the actual facts of language. If ever there was a word born in the streets, and bearing about it tokens of the place of its birth, it is 'gamin'; moreover it cannot be traced farther back than the year 1835; when first it appeared in a book, though it may have lived some while before on the lips of the people. All this did not hinder his finding room for it in the pages of his _Dictionary_. He did the same for 'flaneur,' and for 'rococo,' and for many more, bearing similar marks of a popular origin. [Footnote: A work by Darmesteter, _De la Creation actuelle de Mots nouveaux dans la Langue Francaise_, Paris, 1877, is well worth consulting here.] And with good right; for though fas.h.i.+ons may descend from the upper cla.s.ses to the lower, words, such I mean as const.i.tute real additions to the wealth of a language, ascend from the lower to the higher; and of these not a few, let fastidious scholars oppose or ignore them for a while as they may, will a.s.sert a place for themselves therein, from which they will not be driven by the protests of all the scholars and all the academicians in the world. The world is ever moving, and language has no choice but to move with it.

[Footnote: One has well said, 'The subject of language, the instrument, but also the restraint, of thought, is endless. The history of language, the mouth speaking from the fulness of the heart, is the history of human action, faith, art, policy, government, virtue, and crime. When society progresses, the language of the people necessarily runs even with the line of society. You cannot unite past and present, still less can you bring back the past; moreover, the law of progress is the law of storms, it is impossible to inscribe an immutable statute of language on the periphery of a vortex, whirling as it advances. Every political development induces a concurrent alteration or expansion in conversation and composition. New principles are generated, new authorities introduced; new terms for the purpose of explaining or concealing the conduct of public men must be created: new responsibilities arise. The evolution of new ideas renders the change as easy as it is irresistible, being a natural change indeed, like our own voice under varying emotions or in different periods of life: the boy cannot speak like the baby, nor the man like the boy, the wooer speaks otherwise than the husband, and every alteration in circ.u.mstances, fortune or misfortune, health or sickness, prosperity or adversity, produces some corresponding change of speech or inflection of tone.']

Those who make attempts to close the door against all new comers are strangely forgetful of the steps whereby that vocabulary of the language, with which they are so entirely satisfied that they resent every endeavour to enlarge it, had itself been gotten together--namely by that very process which they are now seeking by an arbitrary decree to arrest. We so take for granted that words with which we have been always familiar, whose right to a place in the language no one dreams now of challenging or disputing, have always formed part of it, that it is oftentimes a surprise to discover of how very late introduction many of these actually are; what an amount, it may be, of remonstrance and resistance some of them encountered at the first. To take two or three Latin examples: Cicero, in employing 'favor,' a word soon after used by everybody, does it with an apology, evidently feels that he is introducing a questionable novelty, being probably first applied to applause in the theatre; 'urba.n.u.s,' too, in our sense of urbane, had in his time only just come up; 'obsequium' he believes Terence to have been the first to employ. [Footnote: On the new words in cla.s.sical Latin, see Quintilian, Inst. viii. 3. 30-37.] 'Soliloquium' seems to us so natural, indeed so necessary, a word, this 'soliloquy,' or talking of a man with himself alone, something which would so inevitably demand and obtain its adequate expression, that we learn with surprise that no one spoke of a 'soliloquy' before Augustine; the word having been coined, as he distinctly informs us, by himself. [Footnote: Solil. 2.

7.]

Where a word has proved an unquestionable gain, it is interesting to watch it as it first emerges, timid, and doubtful of the reception it will meet with; and the interest is much enhanced if it has thus come forth on some memorable occasion, or from some memorable man. Both these interests meet in the word 'essay.' Were we asked what is the most remarkable volume of essays which the world has seen, few, capable of replying, would fail to answer, Lord Bacon's. But they were also the first collection of these, which bore that name; for we gather from the following pa.s.sage in the (intended) dedication of the volume to Prince Henry, that 'essay' was itself a recent word in the language, and, in the use to which he put it, perfectly novel: he says--'To write just treatises requireth leisure in the writer, and leisure in the reader; ... which is the cause which hath made me choose to write certain brief notes set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called _Essays_. The word is late, but the thing is ancient.'

From this dedication we gather that, little as 'essays' now can be considered a word of modesty, deprecating too large expectations on the part of the reader, it had, as 'sketches' perhaps would have now, as 'commentary' had in the Latin, that intention in its earliest use. In this deprecation of higher pretensions it resembled the 'philosopher'

of Pythagoras. Others had styled themselves, or had been willing to be styled, 'wise men.' 'Lover of wisdom' a name at once so modest arid so beautiful, was of his devising. [Footnote: Diogenes Laertius, Prooem.

Section 12.] But while thus some words surprise us that they are so new, others surprise us that they are so old. Few, I should imagine, are aware that 'rationalist,' and this in a theological, and not merely a philosophical sense, is of such early date as it is; or that we have not imported quite in these later times both the name and the thing from Germany. Yet this is very far from the case. There were 'rationalists' in the time of the Commonwealth; and these challenging the name exactly on the same grounds as those who in later times have claimed it for their own. Thus, the author of a newsletter from London, of date October 14, 1646, among other things mentions: 'There is a new sect sprung up among them [the Presbyterians and Independents], and these are the _Rationalists_, and what their reason dictates them in Church or State stands for good, until they be convinced with better;'

[Footnote: _Clarendon State Papers_, vol. ii. p. 40 of the _Appendix._]