by this West-Indian tornado, many have seen an explanation of the name; just in the same way as the Latin ‘calamitas’ has been derived from ‘calamus,’ the stalk of the corn. In both cases the etymology is faulty; ‘hurricane,’ originally a Carib word, is only a transplanting into our tongue of the Spanish ‘huracan.’
It is a signal evidence of the conservative powers of language, that we may continually trace in speech the record of customs and states of society which have now passed so entirely away as to survive in these words alone. For example, a ‘stipulation’ or agreement is so called, as many affirm, from ‘stipula,’ a straw; and tells of a Roman custom, that when two persons would make a mutual engagement with one another, [Footnote: See on this disputed point, and on the relation between the Latin ‘stipulatio’ and the old German custom not altogether dissimilar, J. Grimm, _Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer_, pp. 121, sqq. [This account of the derivation of ‘stipulatio’ is generally given up now; for Greek cognates of the word see Curtius, _Greek Etymology_, No. 224.]] they would break a straw between them. We all know what fact of English history is laid up in ‘curfew,’ or ‘couvre-feu.’ The ‘limner,’ or ‘illuminer,’ for so we find the word in Fuller, throws us back on a time when the _illumination_ of manuscripts was a leading occupation of the painter. By ‘lumber,’ we are reminded that Lombards were the first pawnbrokers, even as they were the first bankers, in England: a ‘lumber’-room being a ‘lombard’-room, or a room where the pawnbroker stored his pledges. [Footnote: See my _Select Glossary_, s. v. Lumber.] Nor need I do more than remind you that in our common phrase of ‘_signing_ our name,’ we preserve a record of a time when such first rudiments of education as the power of writing, were the portion of so few, that it was not as now an exception, but the custom, of most persons to make their mark or ‘sign’; great barons and kings themselves not being ashamed to set this _sign_ or cross to the weightiest documents. To ‘subscribe’ the name would more accurately express what now we do. As often as we term arithmetic the science of calculation, we implicitly allude to that rudimental stage in this science, when pebbles (calculi) were used, as now among savage tribes they often are, to help the practice of counting; the Greeks made the same use of one word of theirs ([Greek: psephizein]); while in another ([Greek: pempazein]) they kept record of a period when the _five_ fingers were so employed. ‘Expend,’ ‘expense,’ tell us that money was once weighed out (Gen. xxiii. 16), not counted out as now; ‘pecunia,’ ‘peculatus,’ ‘fee’ (vieh) keep record all of a time when cattle were the main circulating medium. In ‘library’ we preserve the fact that books were once written on the bark (liber) of trees; in ‘volume’ that they were mostly rolls; in ‘paper,’ that the Egyptian papyrus, ‘the paper-reeds by the brooks,’ furnished at one time the ordinary material on which they were written.
Names thus so often surviving things, we have no right to turn an etymology into an argument. There was a notable attempt to do this in the controversy so earnestly carried on between the Greek and Latin Churches, concerning the bread, whether it should be leavened or unleavened, that was used at the Table of the Lord. Those of the Eastern Church constantly urged that the Greek word for bread (and in Greek was the authoritative record of the first institution of this sacrament), implied, according to its root, that which was raised or lifted up; not, therefore, to use a modern term, ‘sad’ or set, or, in other words, unleavened bread; such rather as had undergone the process of fermentation. But even if the etymology on which they relied (artos from airo, to raise) had been as certain as it is questionable, they could draw no argument of the slightest worth from so remote an etymology, and one which had so long fallen out of the consciousness of those who employed the word.
Theories too, which long since were utterly renounced, have yet left their traces behind them. Thus ‘good humour.’ ‘bad humour.’ ‘humours,’ and, strangest contradiction of all, ‘_dry_ humour,’ rest altogether on a now exploded, but a very old and widely accepted, theory of medicine; according to which there were four principal moistures or ‘humours’ in the natural body, on the due proportion and combination of which the disposition alike of body and mind depended. [Footnote: See the _Prologue_ to Ben Jonson’s _Every Man out of His Humour_.] Our present use of ‘temper’ has its origin in the same theory; the due admixture, or right tempering, of these humours gave what was called the happy temper, or mixture, which, thus existing inwardly, manifested itself also outwardly; while ‘distemper,’ which we still employ in the sense of sickness, was that evil frame either of a man’s body or his mind (for it was used of both), which had its rise in an unsuitable mingling of these humours. In these instances, as in many more, the great streams of thought and feeling have changed their course, flowing now in quite other channels from those which once they filled, but have left these words as abiding memorials of the channels wherein once they ran. Thus ‘extremes,’ ‘golden mean,’ ‘category,’ ‘predicament,’ ‘axiom,’ ‘habit’–what are these but a deposit in our ethical terminology which Aristotle has left behind him?
But we have not exhausted our examples of the way in which the record of old errors, themselves dismissed long ago, will yet survive in language–being bound up in words that grew into use when those errors found credit, and that maintain their currency still. The mythology which Saxon or Dane brought with them from their German or Scandinavian homes is as much extinct for us as are the Lares, Larvae, and Lemures of heathen Rome; yet the deposit it has permanently left behind it in the English language is not inconsiderable. ‘Lubber,’ ‘dwarf,’ ‘oaf,’ ‘droll,’ ‘wight,’ ‘puck,’ ‘urchin,’ ‘hag,’ ‘night-mare,’ ‘gramary,’ ‘Old Nick,’ ‘changeling’ (wechselkind), suggest themselves, as all bequeathed to us by that old Teutonic demonology. [Footnote: [But the words _puck_, _urchin_, _gramary_, are not of Teutonic origin. The etymology of _puck_ is unknown; _urchin_ means properly ‘a hedgehog,’ being the old French _eriçon_ (in modern French _hérisson_), a derivative from the Latin _ericius_, ‘a hedgehog’; _gramary_ is simply Old French _gramaire_, ‘grammar’ = Lat. _grammatica_ (_ars_), just as Old French _mire_, ‘a medical man’ = Lat. _medicum_.]] Few now have any faith in astrology, or count that the planet under which a man is born will affect his temperament, make him for life of a disposition grave or gay, lively or severe. Yet our language affirms as much; for we speak of men as ‘jovial’ or ‘saturnine,’ or ‘mercurial’–‘jovial,’ as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star, and of happiest augury of all: [Footnote: ‘Jovial’ in Shakespeare’s time (see _Cymbeline_, act 5, sc. 4) had not forgotten its connexion with Jove.] a gloomy severe person is said to be ‘saturnine,’ born, that is, under the planet Saturn, who makes those that own his influence, having been born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself: another we call ‘mercurial,’ or light- hearted, as those born under the planet Mercury were accounted to be. The same faith in the influence of the stars survives in ‘disastrous,’ ‘ill-starred,’ ‘ascendancy,’ ‘lord of the ascendant,’ and, indeed, in ‘influence’ itself. What a record of old speculations, old certainly as Aristotle, and not yet exploded in the time of Milton, [Footnote: See _Paradise Lost_, iii. 714-719.] does the word ‘quintessence’ contain; and ‘arsenic’ the same; no other namely than this that metals are of different sexes, some male ([Greek: arsenika]), and some female. Again, what curious legends belong to the ‘sardonic’ [Footnote: See an excellent history of this word, in Rost and Palm’s _Greek Lexicon_, s. v. [Greek: sardonios].] or Sardinian, laugh; a laugh caused, as was supposed, by a plant growing in Sardinia, of which they who ate, died laughing; to the ‘barnacle’ goose, [Footnote: For a full and most interesting study on this very curious legend, see Max Müller’s _Lectures on Language_, vol. ii. pp. 533-551; [for the etymology of the word _barnacle_ in this connexion see the _New English Dictionary_ (s. v.).]] to the ‘amethyst’ esteemed, as the word implies, a preventive or antidote of drunkenness; and to other words not a few, which are employed by us still.
A question presents itself here, and one not merely speculative; for it has before now become a veritable case of conscience with some whether they ought to use words which originally rested on, and so seem still to affirm, some superstition or untruth. This question has practically settled itself; the words will keep their ground: but further, they have a right to do this; for no word need be considered so to root itself in its etymology, and to draw its sap and strength from thence, that it cannot detach itself from this, and acquire the rights of an independent existence. And thus our _weekly_ newspapers commit no absurdity in calling themselves ‘journals,’ or ‘diurnals’; and we as little when we name that a ‘journey’ which occupies not one, but several days. We involve ourselves in no real contradiction, speaking of a ‘quarantine’ of five, ten, or any number of days more or fewer than _forty_; or of a population ‘decimated’ by a plague, though exactly a tenth of it has not perished. A stone coffin may be still a ‘sarcophagus,’ without thereby implying that it has any special property of consuming the flesh of bodies which are laid within it. [Footnote: See Pliny, _H. N._ ii. 96; xxxvi. 17.] In like manner the wax of our ‘candles’ (‘candela,’ from ‘candeo’) is not necessarily _white_; our ‘rubrics’ retain their name, though seldom printed in _red_ ink; neither need our ‘miniatures’ abandon theirs, though no longer painted with _minium_ or carmine; our ‘surplice’ is not usually worn over an undergarment of skins; our ‘stirrups’ are not ropes by whose aid we climb upon our horses; nor are ‘haversacks’ sacks for the carrying of oats; it is not barley or bere only which we store up in our ‘barns,’ nor hogs’ fat in our ‘larders’; a monody need not be sung by a single voice; and our lucubrations are not always by candlelight; a ‘costermonger’ or ‘costardmonger’ does not of necessity sell costards or apples; there are ‘palaces’ which are not built on the Palatine Hill; and ‘nausea’ [Footnote: [From _nausea_ through the French comes our English _noise_; see Bartsch and Horning, Section 90.]] which is not sea-sickness. I remember once asking a class of school-children, whether an announcement which during one very hard winter appeared in the papers, of a ‘_white_ _black_bird’ having been shot, might be possibly correct, or was on the face of it self-contradictory and absurd. The less thoughtful members of the class instantly pronounced against it; while after a little consideration, two or three made answer that it might very well be, that, while without doubt the bird had originally obtained this name from its blackness, yet ‘blackbird’ was now the name of a species, and a name so cleaving to it, as not to be forfeited, even when the blackness had quite disappeared. We do not question the right of the ‘_New_ Forest’ to retain this title of New, though it has now stood for eight hundred years; nor of ‘Naples’ to be _New_ City (Neapolis) still, after an existence three or four times as long.
It must, then, be esteemed a piece of ethical prudery, and an ignorance of the laws which languages obey, when the early Quakers refused to employ the names commonly given to the days of the week, and substituted for these, ‘first day,’ ‘second day,’ and so on. This they did, as is well known, on the ground that it became not Christian men to give that sanction to idolatry which was involved in the ordinary style–as though every time they spoke of Wednesday they were rendering homage to Woden, of Thursday to Thor, of Friday to Friga, and thus with the rest; [ Footnote: It is curious to find Fuller prophesying, a very few years before, that at some future day such a protest as theirs might actually be raised (_Church History_, b. ii. cent. 6): ‘Thus we see the whole week bescattered with Saxon idols, whose pagan gods were the godfathers of the days, and gave them their names. This some zealot may behold as the object of a necessary reformation, desiring to have the days of the week new dipt, and called after other names. Though, indeed, this supposed scandal will not offend the wise, as beneath their notice; and cannot offend the ignorant, as above their knowledge.’] or at all events recognizing their existence. Now it is quite intelligible that the early Christians, living in the midst of a still rampant heathenism, should have objected, as we know they did, to ‘dies _Solis_,’ or Sunday, to express the first day of the week, their Lord’s-Day. But when the later Friends raised _their_ protest, the case was altogether different. The false gods whose names were bound up in these words had ceased to be worshipped in England for about a thousand years; the words had wholly disengaged themselves from their etymologies, of which probably not one in a thousand had the slightest suspicion. Moreover, had these precisians in speech been consistent, they could not have stopped where they did. Every new acquaintance with the etymology or primary use of words would have entangled them in some new embarrassment, would have required a new purging of their vocabulary. ‘To charm,’ ‘to bewitch,’ ‘to fascinate,’ ‘to enchant,’ would have been no longer lawful words for those who had outlived the belief in magic, and in the power of the evil eye; nor ‘lunacy,’ nor ‘lunatic,’ for such as did not count the moon to have anything to do with mental unsoundness; nor ‘panic’ fear, for those who believed that the great god Pan was indeed dead; nor ‘auguries,’ nor ‘auspices,’ for those to whom divination was nothing; while to speak of ‘initiating’ a person into the ‘mysteries’ of an art, would have been utterly heathenish language. Nay, they must have found fault with the language of Holy Scripture itself; for a word of honourable use in the New Testament expressing the function of an interpreter, and reappearing in our ‘hermeneutics,’ is directly derived from and embodies the name of Hermes, a heathen deity, and one who did not, like Woden, Thor, and Friga, pertain to a long extinct mythology, but to one existing in its strength at the very time when he wrote. And how was it, as might have been fairly asked, that St. Paul did not protest against a Christian woman retaining the name of Phoebe (Rom. xvi. I), a goddess of the same mythology?
The rise and fall of words, the honour which in tract of time they exchanged for dishonour, and the dishonour for honour–all which in my last lecture I contemplated mainly from an ethical point of view–is in a merely historic aspect scarcely less remarkable. Very curious is it to watch the varying fortune of words–the extent to which it has fared with them, as with persons and families; some having improved their position in the world, and attained to far higher dignity than seemed destined for them at the beginning, while others in a manner quite as notable have lost caste, have descended from their high estate to common and even ignoble uses. Titles of dignity and honour have naturally a peculiar liability to be some lifted up, and some cast down. Of words which have risen in the world, the French ‘maréchal’ affords us an excellent example. ‘Maréchal,’ as Howell has said, ‘at first was the name of a smith-farrier, or one that dressed horses’–which indeed it is still–‘but it climbed by degrees to that height that the chiefest commanders of the gendarmery are come to be called marshals.’ But if this has risen, our ‘alderman’ has fallen. Whatever the civic dignity of an alderman may now be, still it must be owned that the word has lost much since the time that the ‘alderman’ was only second in rank and position to the king. Sometimes a word will keep or even improve its place in one language, while at the same time it declines from it in another. Thus ‘demoiselle’ (dominicella) cannot be said to have lost ground in French, however ‘donzelle’ may; while ‘damhele,’ being the same word, designates in Walloon the farm-girl who minds the cows. [Footnote: See Littré, _Etudes et Glanures_, p. 16; compare p. 30. Elsewhere he says: Les mots ont leurs déchéances comme les families.] ‘Pope’ is the highest ecclesiastical dignitary in the Latin Church; every parish priest is a ‘pope’ in the Greek. ‘Queen’ (gunae) has had a double fortune. Spelt as above it has more than kept the dignity with which it started, being the title given to the lady of the kingdom; while spelt as ‘quean’ it is a designation not untinged with contempt. [Footnote: [_Queen_ and _quean_ are not merely different spellings of the same Old English word; for _queen_ represents Anglo- Saxon _cwe:n_, Gothic _qens_, whereas _quean_ is the phonetic equivalent of Anglo-Saxon _cwene_ Gothic _qino_]] ‘Squatter’ remains for us in England very much where it always was; in Australia it is now the name by which the landed aristocracy are willing to be known. [Footnote: Dilke, _Greater Britain_, vol. ii. p. 40]
After all which has thus been adduced, you will scarcely deny that we have a right to speak of a history in words. Now suppose that the pieces of money which in the intercourse and traffic of daily life are passing through our hands continually, had each one something of its own that made it more or less worthy of note; if on one was stamped some striking maxim, on another some important fact, on the third a memorable date; if others were works of finest art, graven with rare and beautiful devices, or bearing the head of some ancient sage or hero king; while others, again, were the sole surviving monuments of mighty nations that once filled the world with their fame; what a careless indifference to our own improvement–to all which men hitherto had felt or wrought–would it argue in us, if we were content that these should come and go, should stay by us or pass from us, without our vouchsafing to them so much as one serious regard. Such a currency there is, a currency intellectual and spiritual of no meaner worth, and one with which we have to transact so much of the higher business of our lives. Let us take care that we come not in this matter under the condemnation of any such incurious indifference as that which I have imagined.
LECTURE V.
ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
If I do not much mistake, you will find it not a little interesting to follow great and significant words to the time and place of their birth. And not these alone. The same interest, though perhaps not in so high a degree, will cleave to the upcoming of words not a few that have never played a part so important in the world’s story. A volume might be written such as few would rival in curious interest, which should do no more than indicate the occasion upon which new words, or old words employed in a new sense–being such words as the world subsequently heard much of–first appeared; with quotation, where advisable, of the passages in proof. A great English poet, too early lost, ‘the young Marcellus of our tongue,’ as Dryden so finely calls him, has very grandly described the emotion of
‘some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken.’
Not very different will be our feeling, as we watch, at the moment of its rising above the horizon, some word destined, it may be, to play its part in the world’s story, to take its place for ever among the luminaries in the moral and intellectual firmament above us.
But a caution is necessary here. We must not regard as certain in every case, or indeed in most cases, that the first rise of a word will have exactly consented in time with its first appearance within the range of our vision. Such identity will sometimes exist; and we may watch i the actual birth of some word, and may affirm with confidence that at such a time and on such an occasion it first saw the light–in this book, or from the lips of that man. Of another we can only say, About this time and near about this spot it first came into being, for we first meet it in such an author and under such and such conditions. So mere a fragment of ancient literature has come down to us, that, while the earliest appearance there of a word is still most instructive to note, it cannot in all or in nearly all cases be affirmed to mark the exact moment of its nativity. And even in the modern world we must in most instances be content to fix a period, we may perhaps add a local habitation, within the limits of which the term must have been born, either in legitimate scientific travail, or the child of some flash of genius, or the product of some _generatio aequivoca_, the necessary result of exciting predisposing causes; at the same time seeking by further research ever to narrow more and more the limits within which this must have happened.
To speak first of words religious and ecclesiastical. Very noteworthy, and in some sort epoch-making, must be regarded the first appearance of the following:–‘Christian’; [Footnote: Acts xi. 26.] ‘Trinity’; [Footnote: Tertullian, _Adv. Prax._ 3.] ‘Catholic,’ as applied to the Church; [Footnote: Ignatius, _Ad Smyrn_. 8.] ‘canonical,’ as a distinctive title of the received Scriptures; [Footnote: Origen, _Opp_. vol. iii. p. 36 (ed. De la Rue).] ‘New Testament,’ as describing the complex of the sacred books of the New Covenant; [Footnote: Tertullian, _Adv. Marc._ iv. I; _Adv. Prax._ xv. 20.] ‘Gospels,’ as applied to the four inspired records of the life and ministry of our Lord. [Footnote: Justin Martyr, _Apol_. i. 66.] We notice, too, with interest, the first coming up of ‘monk’ and ‘nun,’ [Footnote: ‘Nun’ (nonna) first appears in Jerome (_Ad Eustoch. Ep._ 22); ‘monk’ (monachus) a little earlier: Rutilius, a Latin versifier of the fifth century, who still clung to the old Paganism, gives the derivation: Ipsi se _monachos_ Graio cognomine dicunt, Quod _soli_ nullo vivere teste volunt.] marking as they do the beginnings of the monastic system;–of ‘transubstantiation,’ [Footnote: Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours (d. 1134), is the first to use it (_Serm_. 93).] of ‘concomitance,’ [Footnote: Thomas Aquinas is reported to have been the first to use this word.] expressing as does this word the grounds on which the medieval Church defended communion in one kind only for the laity; of ‘limbo’ in its theological sense; [Footnote: Thomas Aquinas first employs ‘limbus’ in this sense.] witnessing as these do to the _consolidation_ of errors which had long been floating in the Church.
Not of so profound an interest, but still very instructive to note, is the earliest apparition of names historical and geographical, above all of such as have since been often on the lips of men; as the first mention in books of ‘Asia’; [Footnote: Aeschylus, _Prometheus Vinctus_, 412.] of ‘India’; [Footnote: Id. _Suppl_. 282.] of ‘Europe’; [Footnote: Herodotus, iv. 36.] of ‘Macedonia’; [Footnote: Id. v. 17.] of ‘Greeks’; [Footnote: Aristotle, _Meteor_, i. 14. But his _Graikoi_ are only an insignificant tribe, near Dodona. How it came to pass that Graeci, or Graii, was the Latin name by which all the Hellenes were known, must always remain a mystery.] of ‘Germans’ and ‘Germany’; [Footnote: Probably first in the _Commentaries_ of Caesar; see Grimm, _Gesch. d. Deutschen Sprache_, p. 773.] of ‘Alemanni’; [Footnote: Spartian, _Caracalla_, c. 9.] of ‘Franks’; [Footnote: Vopiscus, _Aurel_. 7; about A.D. 240.] of ‘Prussia’ and ‘Prussians’; [Footnote: ‘Pruzia’ and ‘Pruzzi’ first appear in the _Life of S. Adalbert_, written by his fellow-labourer Gaudentius, between 997-1006.] of ‘Normans’; [Footnote: The _Geographer of Ravenna_.] the earliest notice by any Greek author of Rome; [Footnote: Probably in Hellanicus, a contemporary of Herodotus.] the first use of ‘Italy’ as comprehending the entire Hesperian peninsula; [Footnote: In the time of Augustus Caesar; see Niebuhr, _History of Rome_, Engl. Translation, vol. i. p. 12.] of ‘Asia Minor’ to designate Asia on this side Taurus. [Footnote: Orosius, i. 2: in the fifth century of our era.] ‘Madagascar’ may hereafter have a history, which will make it interesting to know that this name was first given, so far as we can trace, by Marco Polo to the huge African island. Neither can we regard with indifference the first giving to the newly-discovered continent in the West the name of ‘America’; and still less should we Englishmen fail to take note of the date when this island exchanged its earlier name of Britain for ‘England’; or again, when it resumed ‘Great Britain’ as its official designation. So also, to confirm our assertion by examples from another quarter, it cannot be unprofitable to mark the exact moment at which ‘tyrant’ and ‘tyranny,’ forming so distinct an epoch as this did in the political history of Greece, first appeared; [Footnote: In the writings of Archilochus, about 700 B.C. A ‘tyrant’ was not for Greeks a bad king, who abused a rightful position to purposes of lust or cruelty or other wrong. It was of the essence of a ‘tyrant’ that he had attained supreme dominion through a violation of the laws and liberties of the state; having done which, whatever the moderation of his after-rule, he would not escape the name. Thus the mild and bounteous Pisistratus was ‘tyrant’ of Athens, while a Christian II. of Denmark, ‘the Nero of the North,’ would not in Greek eyes have been one. It was to their honour that they did not allow the course of the word to be arrested or turned aside by occasional or partial exceptions in the manner of the exercise of this ill-gotten dominion; but in the hateful secondary sense which ‘tyrant’ with them acquired, and which has passed over to us, the moral conviction, justified by all experience, spake out, that the ill-gotten would be ill-kept; that the ‘tyrant’ in the earlier sense of the word, dogged by suspicion, fear, and an evil conscience, must, by an almost inevitable law, become a ‘tyrant’ in our later sense of the word.] or again, when, and from whom, the fabric of the external universe first received the title of ‘cosmos,’ or beautiful order; [ Footnote: Pythagoras, born B.C. 570, is said to have been the first who made this application of the word. For much of interest on its history see Humboldt, _Kosmos_, 1846, English edit., vol. i. p. 371.] a name not new in itself, but new in this application of it; with much more of the same kind.
Let us go back to one of the words just named, and inquire what may be learned from acquaintance with the time and place of its first appearance. It is one the coming up of which has found special record in the Book of life: ‘The disciples,’ as St. Luke expressly tells us, ‘were called Christians first in Antioch’ (Acts xi. 26). That we have here a notice which we would not willingly have missed all will acknowledge, even as nothing can be otherwise than curious which relates to the infancy of the Church. But there is here much more than an interesting notice. Question it a little closer, and how much it will be found to contain, how much which it is waiting to yield up. What light it throws on the whole story of the apostolic Church to know where and when this name of ‘Christians’ was first imposed on the faithful; for imposed by adversaries it certainly was, not devised by themselves, however afterwards they may have learned to glory in it as the name of highest dignity and honour. They did not call themselves, but, as is expressly recorded, they ‘were called,’ Christians first at Antioch; in agreement with which statement, the name occurs nowhere in Scripture, except on the lips of those alien from, or opposed to, the faith (Acts xxvi. 28; I Pet. iv. 16). And as it was a name imposed by adversaries, so among these adversaries it was plainly heathens, and not Jews, who were its authors; for Jews would never have called the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, ‘Christians,’ or those of Christ, the very point of their opposition to Him being, that He was _not_ the Christ, but a false pretender to the name. [Footnote: Compare Tacitus (_Annal_, xv. 24): Quos _vulgus_ … Christianos appellabat. It is curious too that, although a Greek word and coined in a Greek city, the termination is Latin. Christianos is formed on the model of Romanus, Albanus, Pompeianus, and the like.]
Starting then from this point, that ‘Christians’ was a title given to the disciples by the heathen, what may we deduce from it further? At Antioch they first obtained this name–at the city, that is, which was the head-quarters of the Church’s missions to the heathen, in the same sense as Jerusalem had been the head-quarters of the mission to the seed of Abraham. It was there, and among the faithful there, that a conviction of the world-wide destination of the Gospel arose; there it was first plainly seen as intended for all kindreds of the earth. Hitherto the faithful in Christ had been called by their adversaries, and indeed often were still called, ‘Galileans,’ or ‘Nazarenes,’–both names which indicated the Jewish cradle wherein the Church had been nursed, and that the world saw in the new Society no more than a Jewish sect. But it was plain that the Church had now, even in the world’s eyes, chipped its Jewish shell. The name ‘Christians,’ or those of Christ, while it told that Christ and the confession of Him was felt even by the heathen to be the sum and centre of this new faith, showed also that they comprehended now, not all which the Church would be, but something of this; saw this much, namely, that it was no mere sect and variety of Judaism, but a Society with a mission and a destiny of its own. Nor will the thoughtful reader fail to observe that the coming up of this name is by closest juxtaposition connected in the sacred narrative, and still more closely in the Greek than in the English, with the arrival at Antioch, and with the preaching there, of that Apostle, who was God’s appointed instrument for bringing the Church to a full sense that the message which it had, was not for some men only, but for all. As so often happens with the rise of new names, the rise of this one marked a new epoch in the Church’s life, and that it was entering upon a new stage of its development. [Footnote: Renan (_Les Apôtres_ pp. 233-236) has much instruction on this matter. I quote a few words; though even in them the spirit in which the whole book is conceived does not fail to make itself felt: L’heure où une création nouvelle reçoit son nom est solennelle; car le nom est le signe définitif de l’existence. C’est par le nom qu’un être individuel ou collectif devient lui-même, et sort d’un autre. La formation du mot ‘chrétien’ marque ainsi la date précise où l’Eglise de Jésus se sépara du judaïsme…. Le christianisme est complètement détaché du sein de sa mère; la vraie pensée de Jésus a triomphé de l’indécision de ses premiers disciples; l’Eglise de Jérusalem est dépassée; l’Araméen, la langue de Jésus, est inconnue à une partie de son école; le christianisme parle grec; il est lancé définitivement dans le grand tourbillon du monde grec et romain; d’où il ne sortira plus.] It is a small matter, yet not without its own significance, that the invention of this name is laid by St. Luke,–for so, I think, we may confidently say,–to the credit of the Antiochenes. Now the idle, frivolous, and witty inhabitants of the Syrian capital were noted in all antiquity for the invention of nicknames; it was a manufacture for which their city was famous. And thus it was exactly the place where beforehand we might have expected that such a title, being a nickname or little better in their mouths who devised it should first come into being.
This one example is sufficient to show that new words will often repay any amount of attention which we may bestow upon them, and upon the conditions under which they were born. I proceed to consider the causes which suggest or necessitate their birth, the periods when a language is most fruitful in them, the sources from which they usually proceed, with some other interesting phenomena about them.
And first of the causes which give them birth. Now of all these causes the noblest is this–namely, that in the appointments of highest Wisdom there are epochs in the world’s history, in which, more than at other times, new moral and spiritual forces are at work, stirring to their central depths the hearts of men. When it thus fares with a people, they make claims on their language which were never made on it before. It is required to utter truths, to express ideas, remote from it hitherto; for which therefore the adequate expression will naturally not be forthcoming at once, these new thoughts and feelings being larger and deeper than any wherewith hitherto the speakers of that tongue had been familiar. It fares with a language then, as it would fare with a river bed, suddenly required to deliver a far larger volume of waters than had hitherto been its wont. It would in such a case be nothing strange, if the waters surmounted their banks, broke forth on the right hand and on the left, forced new channels with a certain violence for themselves. Something of the kind they must do. Now it was exactly thus that it fared–for there could be no more illustrious examples–with the languages of Greece and Rome, when it was demanded of them that they should be vehicles of the truths of revelation.
These languages, as they already existed, might have sufficed, and did suffice, for heathenism, sensuous and finite; but they did not suffice for the spiritual and infinite, for the truths at once so new and so mighty which claimed now to find utterance in the language of men. And thus it continually befell, that the new thought must weave a new garment for itself, those which it found ready made being narrower than that it could wrap itself in them; that the new wine must fashion new vessels for itself, if both should be preserved, the old being neither strong enough, nor expansive enough, to hold it. [ Footnote: Renan, speaking on this matter, says of the early Christians: La langue leur faisait défaut. Le Grec et le Sémitique les trahissaient également. De là cette énorme violence que le Christianisme naissant fit au langage (_Les Apôtres_, p. 71)] Thus, not to speak of mere technical matters, which would claim an utterance, how could the Greek language possess a word for ‘idolatry,’ so long as the sense of the awful contrast between the worship of the living God and of dead things had not risen up in their minds that spoke it? But when Greek began to be the native language of men, to whom this distinction between the Creator and the creature was the most earnest and deepest conviction of their souls, words such as ‘idolatry,’ ‘idolater,’ of necessity appeared. The heathen did not claim for their deities to be ‘searchers of hearts,’ did not disclaim for them the being ‘accepters of persons’; such attributes of power and righteousness entered not into their minds as pertaining to the objects of their worship. The Greek language, therefore, so long as they only employed it, had not the words corresponding. [Footnote: [Greek: Prosopolaeptaes, kardiognostaes.]] It, indeed, could not have had them, as the Jewish Hellenistic Greek could not be without them. How useful a word is ‘theocracy’; what good service it has rendered in presenting a certain idea clearly and distinctly to the mind; yet where, except in the bosom of the same Jewish Greek, could it have been born? [Footnote: We preside at its birth in a passage of Josephus, _Con. Apion._ ii. 16.]
These difficulties, which were felt the most strongly when the thought and feeling that had been at home in the Hebrew, the original language of inspiration, needed to be transferred into Greek, reappeared, though not in quite so aggravated a form, when that which had gradually woven for itself in the Greek an adequate clothing, again demanded to find a suitable garment in the Latin. An example of the difficulty, and of the way in which the difficulty was ultimately overcome, will illustrate this far better than long disquisitions. The classical language of Greece had a word for ‘saviour’ which, though often degraded to unworthy uses, bestowed as a title of honour not merely on the false gods of heathendom, but sometimes on men, such as better deserved to be styled ‘destroyers’ than ‘saviours’ of their fellows, was yet in itself not unequal to the setting forth the central office and dignity of Him, who came into the world to _save_ it. The word might be likened to some profaned temple, which needed a new consecration, but not to be abolished, and another built in its room. With the Latin it was otherwise. The language seemed to lack a word, which on one account or another Christians needed continually to utter: indeed Cicero, than whom none could know better the resources of his own tongue, remarkably enough had noted its want of any single equivalent to the Greek ‘saviour.’ [Footnote: Hoc [Greek: soter] quantum est? ita magnum ut Latinè uno verbo exprimi non possit.] ‘Salvator’ would have been the natural word; but the classical Latin of the best times, though it had ‘salus’ and ‘salvus,’ had neither this, nor the verb ‘salvare’; some, indeed, have thought that ‘salvare’ had always existed in the common speech. ‘Servator’ was instinctively felt to be insufficient, even as ‘Preserver’ would for us fall very short of uttering all which ‘Saviour’ does now. The seeking of the strayed, the recovery of the lost, the healing of the sick, would all be but feebly and faintly suggested by it, if suggested at all. God ‘_preserveth_ man and beast,’ but He is the ‘Saviour’ of his own in a more inward and far more endearing sense. It was long before the Latin Christian writers extricated themselves from this embarrassment, for the ‘Salutificator’ of Tertullian, the ‘Sospitator’ of another, assuredly did not satisfy the need. The strong good sense of Augustine finally disposed of the difficulty. He made no scruple about using ‘Salvator’; observing with a true insight into the conditions under which new words should be admitted, that however ‘Salvator’ might not have been good Latin before the Saviour came, He by his coming and by the work had made it such; for, as shadows wait upon substances, so words wait upon things. [Footnote: _Serm_. 299. 6: Christus Jesus, id est Christus Salvator: hoc est enim Latine Jesus. Nec quaerant grammatici quam sit Latinum, sed Christiani, quam verum. Salus enim Latinum nomen est; salvare et salvator non fuerunt haec Latina, antequam veniret Salvator: quando ad Latinos venit, et haec Latina fecit. Cf. _De Trin_. 13. 10: Quod verbum [salvator] Latina lingua antea non habebat, sed habere poterat; sicut potuit quando voluit. Other words which we owe to Christian Latin, probably to the Vulgate or to the earlier Latin translations, are these–‘carnalis,’ ‘clarifico,’ ‘compassio,’ ‘deitas’ (Augustine, _Civ. Dei_, 7. i), ‘glorifico,’ ‘idololatria,’ ‘incarnatio,’ ‘justifico,’ ‘justificatio,’ ‘longanimitas,’ ‘mortifico,’ ‘magnalia,’ ‘mundicors,’ ‘passio,’ ‘praedestinatio,’ ‘refrigerium’ (Ronsch, _Vulgata_, p. 321), ‘regeneratio,’ ‘resipiscentia,’ ‘revelatio,’ ‘sanctificatio,’ ‘soliloquium,’ ‘sufficientia,’ ‘supererogatio,’ ‘tribulatio.’ Many of these may seem barbarous to the Latin scholar, but there is hardly one of them which does not imply a new thought, or a new feeling, or the sense of a new relation of man to God or to his fellow-man. Strange too and significant that heathen Latin could get as far as ‘peccare’ and ‘peccatum,’ but stopped short of ‘peccator’ and ‘peccatrix.’] Take another example. It seemed so natural a thing, in the old heathen world, to expose infants, where it was not found convenient to rear them, the crime excited so little remark, was so little regarded as a crime at all, that it seemed not worth the while to find a name for it; and thus it came to pass that the word ‘infanticidium’ was first born in the bosom of the Christian Church, Tertullian being the earliest in whose writings it appears.
Yet it is not only when new truth, moral or spiritual, has thus to fit itself to the lips of men, that such enlargements of speech become necessary: but in each further unfolding of those seminal truths implanted in man at the first, in each new enlargement of his sphere of knowledge, outward or inward, the same necessities make themselves felt. The beginnings and progressive advances of moral philosophy in Greece, [Footnote: See Lobeck, _Phrynichus_, p. 350.] the transplantation of the same to Rome, the rise of the scholastic, and then of the mystic, theology in the Middle Ages, the discoveries of modern science and natural philosophy, these each and all have been accompanied with corresponding extensions in the domain of language. Of the words to which each of these has in turn given birth, many, it is true, have never travelled beyond their own peculiar sphere, having remained purely technical, or scientific, or theological to the last; but many, too, have passed over from the laboratory and the school, from the cloister and the pulpit, into everyday use, and have, with the ideas which they incorporate, become the common heritage of all. For however hard and repulsive a front any study or science may present to the great body of those who are as laymen in regard of it, there is yet inevitably such a detrition as this continually going forward, and one which it would be well worth while to trace in detail.
Where the movement is a popular one, stirring the heart and mind of a people to its depths, there these new words will for the most part spring out of their bosom, a free spontaneous birth, seldom or never capable of being referred to one man more than another, because in a manner they belong to all. Where, on the contrary, the movement is more strictly theological, or has for its sphere those regions of science and philosophy, where, as first pioneers and discoverers, only a few can bear their part, there the additions to the language and extensions of it will lack something of the freedom, the unconscious boldness, which mark the others. Their character will be more artificial, less spontaneous, although here also the creative genius of a single man, as there of a nation, will oftentimes set its mark; and many a single word will come forth, which will be the result of profound meditation, or of intuitive genius, or of both in happiest combination–many a word, which shall as a torch illuminate vast regions comparatively obscure before, and, it may be, cast its rays far into the yet unexplored darkness beyond; or which, summing up into itself all the acquisitions in a particular direction of the past, shall furnish a mighty vantage- ground from which to advance to new conquests in those realms of mind or of nature, not as yet subdued to the intellect and uses of man.
‘Cosmopolite’ has often now a shallow or even a mischievous use; and he who calls himself ‘cosmopolite’ may mean no more than that he is _not_ a patriot, that his native country does _not_ possess his love. Yet, as all must admit, he could have been no common man who, before the preaching of the Gospel, launched this word upon the world, and claimed this name for himself. Nor was he a common man; for Diogenes the Cynic, whose sayings are among quite the most notable in antiquity, was its author. Being demanded of what city or country he was, Diogenes answered that he was a ‘cosmopolite’; in this word widening the range of men’s thoughts, bringing in not merely a word new to Greek ears, but a thought which, however commonplace and familiar to us now, must have been most novel and startling to those whom he addressed. I am far from asserting that contempt for his citizenship in its narrower sense may not have mingled with this his challenge for himself of a citizenship wide as the world; but there was not the less a very remarkable reaching out here after truths which were not fully born into the world until _He_ came, in whom and in whose Church all national differences and distinctions are done away.
As occupying somewhat of a middle place between those more deliberate word-makers and the multitude whose words rather grow of themselves than are made, we must not omit him who is a _maker_ by the very right of his name–I mean, the poet. That creative energy with which he is endowed, ‘the high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet,’ will not fail to manifest itself in this region as in others. Extending the domain of thought and feeling, he will scarcely fail to extend that also of language, which does not willingly lag behind. And the loftier his moods, the more of this maker he will be. The passion of such times, the all-fusing imagination, will at once suggest and justify audacities in speech, upon which in calmer moods he would not have ventured, or, venturing, would have failed to carry others with him: for it is only the fluent metal that runs easily into novel shapes and moulds. Nor is it merely that the old and the familiar will often become new in the poet’s hands; that he will give the stamp of allowance, as to him will be free to do, to words which hitherto have lived only on the lips of the people, or been confined to some single dialect and province; but he will enrich his native tongue with words unknown and non-existent before–non-existent, that is, save in their elements; for in the historic period of a language it is not permitted to any man to do more than work on pre-existent materials; to evolve what is latent therein, to combine what is apart, to recall what has fallen out of sight.
But to return to the more deliberate coining of words. New necessities have within the last few years called out several of these deliberate creations in our own language. The almost simultaneous discovery of such large abundance of gold in so many quarters of the world led some nations so much to dread an enormous depreciation of this metal, that they ceased to make it the standard of value–Holland for instance did so for a while, though she has since changed her mind; and it has been found convenient to invent a word, ‘to demonetize’ to express this process of turning a precious metal from being the legal standard into a mere article of commerce. So, too, diplomacy has recently added more than one new word to our vocabulary. I suppose nobody ever heard of ‘extradition’ till within the last few years; nor of ‘neutralization’ except, it might be, in some treatise upon chemistry, till in the treaty of peace which followed the Crimean War the ‘neutralization’ of the Black Sea was made one of the stipulations. ‘Secularization,’ in like manner, owes its birth to the long and weary negotiations which preceded the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Whenever it proved difficult to find anywhere else compensation for some powerful claimant, there was always some abbey or bishopric which with its revenues might be seized, stripped of its ecclesiastical character, and turned into a secular possession. Our manifold points of contact with the East, the necessity that has thus arisen of representing oriental words to the western world by means of an alphabet not its own, with the manifold discussions on the fittest equivalents, all this has brought with it the need of a word which should describe the process, and ‘transliteration’ is the result.
We have long had ‘assimilation’ in our dictionaries; ‘dissimilation’ has as yet scarcely found its way into them, but it speedily will. [It has already appeared in our books on language. [Footnote: See Skeat’s _Etym. Dict_. (s. v. _truffle_). Pott (_Etym. Forsch_. vol. ii. p. 65) introduced the word ‘dissimilation’ into German.]] Advances in philology have rendered it a matter of necessity that we should possess a term to designate a certain process which words unconsciously undergo, and no other would designate it at all so well. There is a process of ‘assimilation’ going on very extensively in language; the organs of speech finding themselves helped by changing one letter for another which has just occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not ‘a_df_iance,’ but ‘a_ff_iance,’ not ‘re_n_ow_m_,’ as our ancestors did when ‘renom’ was first naturalized, but ‘re_n_ow_n_’; we say too, though we do not write it, ‘cu_b_board’ and not ‘cu_p_board,’ ‘su_t_tle’ and not ‘su_b_tle.’ But side by side with this there is another opposite process, where some letter would recur too often for euphony or ease in speaking, were the strict form of the word too closely held fast; and where consequently this letter is exchanged for some other, generally for some nearly allied; thus ‘cae_r_uleus’ was once ‘cae_l_uleus,’ from caelum [Footnote: The connexion of _caeruleus_ with _caelum_ is not at all certain.] ‘me_r_idies’ is for ‘me_d_idies/ or medius dies. In the same way the Italians prefer ‘ve_l_eno’ to ‘ve_n_eno’; the Germans ‘_k_artoffel’ to ‘_t_artüffel,’ from Italian ‘tartufola’ = Latin terrae tuber, an old name of the potato; and we ‘cinnamo_n_’ to ‘cinnamo_m_’ (the earlier form). So too in ‘turtle,’ ‘marble,’ ‘purple,’ we have shrunk from the double ‘_r_’ of ‘turtur,’ ‘marmor,’ ‘purpura.’ [Footnote: See Dwight, _Modern Philology_, 2nd Series, p. 100; Heyse, _System der Sprachwissenschaft_, Section 139- 141; and Peile, _Introduction to Greek and Latin Etymology_, pp. 357- 379.] New necessities, new evolutions of society into more complex conditions, evoke new words; which come forth, because they are required now; but did not formerly exist, because in an anterior period they were not required. For example, in Greece so long as the poet sang his own verses, ‘singer’ (aoidos) sufficiently expressed the double function; such a ‘singer’ was Homer, and such Homer describes Demodocus, the bard of the Phaeacians; that double function, in fact, not being in his time contemplated as double, but each of its parts so naturally completing the other, that no second word was required. When, however, in the division of labour one made the verses which another chaunted, then ‘poet’ or ‘maker,’ a word unknown to the Homeric age, arose. In like manner, when ‘physicians’ were the only natural philosophers, the word covered this meaning as well as that other which it still retains; but when the investigation of nature and natural causes detached itself from the art of healing, became an independent study, the name ‘physician’ remained to that which was as the stock and stem of the art, while the new offshoot sought out and obtained a new name for itself.
But it is not merely new things which will require new names. It will often be discovered that old things have not got a name at all, or, having one, are compelled to share it with something else, often to the serious embarrassment of both. The manner in which men become aware of such deficiencies, is commonly this. Comparing their own language with another, and in some aspects a richer, compelled, it may be, to such comparison through having undertaken to transfer treasures of that language into their own, they become conscious of much worthy to be uttered in human speech, and plainly utterable therein, since another language has found utterance for it; but which hitherto has found no voice in their own. Hereupon with more or less success they proceed to supply the deficiency. Hardly in any other way would the wants in this way revealed make themselves felt even by the most thoughtful; for language is to so large an extent the condition and limit of thought, men are so little accustomed, indeed so little able, to contemplate things, except through the intervention, and by the machinery, of words, that the absence of words from a language almost necessarily brings with it the absence of any sense of that absence. Here is one advantage of acquaintance with other languages besides our own, and of the institution that will follow, if we have learned those other to any profit, of such comparisons, namely, that we thus become aware that names are not, and least of all the names in any one language, co- extensive with things (and by ‘things’ I mean subjects as well as objects of thought, whatever one can _think_ about), that innumerable things and aspects of things exist, which, though capable of being resumed and connoted in a word, are yet without one, unnamed and unregistered; and thus, vast as may be the world of names, that the world of realities, and of realities which are nameable, is vaster still. Such discoveries the Romans made, when they sought to transplant the moral philosophy of Greece to an Italian soil. They discovered that many of its terms had no equivalents with them; which equivalents thereupon they proceeded to devise for themselves, appealing for this to the latent capabilities of their own tongue. For example, the Greek schools had a word, and one playing no unimportant part in some of their philosophical systems, to express ‘apathy’ or the absence of all passion and pain. As it was absolutely necessary to possess a corresponding word, Cicero invented ‘indolentia,’ as that ‘if I may so speak’ with which he paves the way to his first introduction of it, sufficiently declares. [Footnote: _Fin_. ii. 4; and for ‘qualitas’ see _Acad_. i. 6.] Sometimes, indeed, such a skilful mint-master of words, such a subtle watcher and weigher of their force as was Cicero, [Footnote: Ille verborum vigilantissimus appensor ac mensor, as Augustine happily terms him.] will have noticed even apart from this comparison with other languages, an omission in his own, which thereupon he will endeavour to supply. Thus the Latin had two adjectives which, though not kept apart as strictly as they might have been, possessed each its peculiar meaning, ‘invidus’ one who is envious, ‘invidiosus’ one who excites envy in others; [Footnote: Thus the monkish line:
_Invidiosus_ ego, non _invidus_ esse laboro.] at the same time there was only one substantive, ‘invidia’ the correlative of them both; with the disadvantage, therefore, of being employed now in an active, now in a passive sense, now for the envy which men feel, and now for the envy which they excite. The word he saw was made to do double duty; under a seeming unity there lurked a real dualism, from which manifold confusions might follow. He therefore devised ‘invidentia,’ to express the active envy, or the envying, no doubt desiring that ‘invidia’ should be restrained to the passive, the being envied. ‘Invidentia’ to all appearance supplied a real want; yet Cicero himself did not succeed in giving it currency; does not seem himself to have much cared to employ it again. [Footnote: _Tusc._ iii. 9; iv. 8; cf. Döderlein, _Synon._ vol. iii, p. 68.] We see by this example that not every word, which even an expert in language proposes, finds acceptance; [Footnote: Quintilian’s advice, based on this fact, is good (i. 6. 42): Etiamsi potest nihil peccare, qui utitur iis verbis quae summi auctores tradiderunt, multum tamen refert non solum quid _dixerint_, sed etiam quid _persuaserint_. He himself, as he informs us, invented ‘vocalitas’ to correspond with the Greek [Greek: euphonia] (_Instit._ i. 5. 24), but I am not conscious that he found any imitators here.] for, as Dryden, treating on this subject, has well observed, ‘It is one thing to draw a bill, and another to have it accepted.’ Provided some words live, he must be content that others should fall to the ground and die. Nor is this the only unsuccessful candidate for admission into the language which Cicero put forward. His ‘indolentia’ which I mentioned just now, hardly passed beyond himself; [Footnote: Thus Seneca a little later is unaware, or has forgotten, that Cicero made any such suggestion. Taking no notice of it, he proposes ‘impatientia’ as an adequate rendering of [Greek: apatheia]. There clung this inconvenience to the word, as he himself allowed, that it was already used in exactly the opposite sense (_Ep_. 9). Elsewhere he claims to be the inventor of ‘essentia’ (_Ep_. 38;.)] his ‘vitiositas,’ [Footnote: _Tusc_. iv. 15.] ‘indigentia,’ [Footnote: _Ibid_. iv. 9. 21.] and ‘mulierositas,’ [Footnote: _Ibid_. iv. ii.] not at all. ‘Beatitas’ too and ‘beatitudo,’ [Footnote: Nat. Dear. i. 34.] both of his coining, yet, as he owns himself, with something strange and unattractive about them, found almost no acceptance at all in the classical literature of Rome: ‘beatitude,’ indeed, obtained a home, as it deserved to do, in the Christian Church, but ‘beatitas’ none. Coleridge’s ‘esemplastic,’ by which he was fain to express the all-atoning or unifying power of the imagination, has not pleased others at all in the measure in which it pleased himself; while the words of Jeremy Taylor, of such Latinists as Sir Thomas Browne and Henry More, born only to die, are multitudinous as the fallen leaves of autumn. [Footnote: See my _English Past and Present_, 13th edit. p. 113.] Still even the word which fails is often an honourable testimony to the scholarship, or the exactness of thought, or the imagination of its author; and Ben Jonson is over-hard on ‘neologists,’ if I may bring this term back to its earlier meaning, when he says: ‘A man coins not a new word without some peril, and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured,’ [Footnote: Therefore the maxim: Moribus antiquis, praesentibus utere verbis.]
I spoke just now of comprehensive words, which should singly say what hitherto it had taken many words to say, in which a higher term has been reached than before had been attained. The value of these is incalculable. By the cutting short of lengthy explanations and tedious circuits of language, they facilitate mental processes, such as would often have been nearly or quite impossible without them; and such as have invented or put these into circulation, are benefactors of a high order to knowledge. In the ordinary traffic of life, unless our dealings are on the smallest scale, we willingly have about us our money in the shape rather of silver than of copper; and if our transactions are at all extensive, rather in gold than in silver: while, if we were setting forth upon a long and costly journey, we should be best pleased to turn even our gold coin itself into bills of exchange or circular notes; in fact, into the highest denomination of money which it was capable of assuming. How many words with which we are now perfectly familiar are for us what the circular note or bill of exchange is for the traveller or the merchant. As innumerable pence, a multitude of shillings, not a few pounds are gathered up and represented by one of these, so have we in some single word the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental processes, ascending one above the other, until all have been at length summed up for us in that single word. This last may be compared to nothing so fitly as to some mighty river, which does not bring its flood of waters to the sea, till many rills have been swallowed up in brooks, and brooks in streams, and streams in tributary rivers, each of these affluents having lost its separate name and existence in that which at last represents and contains them all.
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 assist 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 illustration 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 distinguishing 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 _identity_, 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 Débats_ 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 assumed, 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 (Génin, _Récréations 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 bottée), 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 ‘réfugiés’ 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 ‘roué’ throws light on another curious and shameful page of French history. The ‘roué,’ 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 assures us, he was wont to call his ‘roués’; 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 ‘roués’ 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 ‘pétroleuse,’ 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 passages 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 title, and were called “the mob” in the assemblies 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. ccxxx. ‘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 assist 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 multitude, swayed hither and thither by each gust of passion or caprice, this, which _The Spectator_ hardly expected, while he confessed it possible, has actually come to pass. ‘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 pass 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, ‘fustitudinus,’ ‘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 scholarship 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 pronounced 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’Académie repousse de son Dictionnaire les mots _blague, blagueur_, laissant gronder à sa porte ces fils effrontés 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.]
Littré, 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 ‘flâneur,’ and for ‘rococo,’ and for many more, bearing similar marks of a popular origin. [Footnote: A work by Darmesteter, _De la Création actuelle de Mots nouveaux dans la Langue Française_, Paris, 1877, is well worth consulting here.] And with good right; for though fashions may descend from the upper classes to the lower, words, such I mean as constitute 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 assert 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 circumstances, 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; ‘urbanus,’ 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 classical 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 passage 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 Laërtius, 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._] with more to the same effect. ‘Christology’ has been lately characterized as a monstrous importation from Germany. I am quite of the remonstrant’s mind that English theology does not need, and can do excellently well without it; yet this novelty it is not; for in the _Preface_ to the works of that illustrious Arminian divine of the seventeenth century, Thomas Jackson, written by Benjamin Oley, his friend and pupil, the following passage occurs: ‘The reader will find in this author an eminent excellence in that part of divinity which I make bold to call _Christology_, in displaying the great mystery of godliness, God the Son manifested in human flesh.’ [Footnote: _Preface to Dr. Jackson’s Works_, vol. i. p. xxvii. A work of Fleming’s, published in 1700, bears the title, _Christology_.] In their power of taking up foreign words into healthy circulation and making them truly their own, languages differ much from one another, and the same language from itself at different periods of its life. There are languages of which the appetite and digestive power, the assimilative energy, is at some periods almost unlimited. Nothing is too hard for them; everything turns to good with them; they will shape and mould to their own uses and habits almost any material offered to them. This, however, is in their youth; as age advances, the assimilative energy diminishes. Words are still adopted; for this process of adoption can never wholly cease; but a chemical amalgamation of the new with the old does not any longer find place; or only in some instances, and very partially even in them. The new comers lie upon the surface of the language; their sharp corners are not worn or rounded off; they remain foreign still in their aspect and outline, and, having missed their opportunity of becoming otherwise, will remain so to the end. Those who adopt, as with an inward misgiving about their own gift and power of stamping them afresh, make a conscience of keeping them in exactly the same form in which they have received them; instead of conforming them to the laws of that new community into which they are now received. Nothing will illustrate this so well as a comparison of different words of the same family, which have at different periods been introduced into our language. We shall find that those of an earlier introduction have become English through and through, while the later introduced, belonging to the same group, have been very far from undergoing the same transforming process. Thus ‘bishop’ [A.S. biscop], a word as old as the introduction of Christianity into England, though derived from ‘episcopus,’ is thoroughly English; while ‘episcopal,’ which has supplanted ‘bishoply,’ is only a Latin word in an English dress. ‘Alms,’ too, is thoroughly English, and English which has descended to us from far; the very shape in which we have the word, one syllable for ‘eleëmosyna’ of six, sufficiently testifying this; ‘letters,’ as Horne Tooke observes,’ like soldiers, being apt to desert and drop off in a long march.’ The seven-syllabled and awkward ‘eleëmosynary’ is of far more recent date. Or sometimes this comparison is still more striking, when it is not merely words of the same family, but the very same word which has been twice adopted, at an earlier period and a later–the earlier form will be thoroughly English, as ‘palsy’; the later will be only a Greek or Latin word spelt with English letters, as ‘paralysis.’ ‘Dropsy,’ ‘quinsy,’ ‘megrim,’ ‘squirrel,’ ‘rickets,’ ‘surgeon,’ ‘tansy,’ ‘dittany,’ ‘daffodil,’ and many more words that one might name, have nothing of strangers or foreigners about them, have made themselves quite at home in English. So entirely is their physiognomy native, that it would be difficult even to suspect them to be of Greek descent, as they all are. Nor has ‘kickshaws’ anything about it now which would compel us at once to recognize in it the French ‘quelques choses’ [Footnote: ‘These cooks have persuaded us their coarse fare is the best, and all other but what they dress to be mere _quelques choses_, made dishes of no nourishing’ (Whitlock, _Zootomia_, p. 147).]–‘French _kickshose_,’ as with allusion to the quarter from which it came, and while the memory of that was yet fresh in men’s minds, it was often called by our early writers. A very notable fact about new words, and a very signal testimony of their popular origin, of their birth from the bosom of the people, is the difficulty so often found in tracing their pedigree. When the _causae vocum_ are sought, as they very fitly are, and out of much better than mere curiosity, for the _causae rerum_ are very often wrapt up in them, those continually elude our research. Nor does it fare thus merely with words to which attention was called, and interest about their etymology awakened, only after they had been long in popular use–for that such should often give scope to idle guesses, should altogether refuse to give up their secret, is nothing strange–but words will not seldom perplex and baffle the inquirer even where an investigation of their origin has been undertaken almost as soon as they have come into existence. Their rise is mysterious; like almost all acts of _becoming_, it veils itself in deepest obscurity. They emerge, they are in everybody’s mouth; but when it is inquired from whence they are, nobody can tell. They are but of yesterday, and yet with inexplicable rapidity they have already lost all traces of the precise circumstances under which they were born.
The rapidity with which this comes to pass is nowhere more striking than in the names of political or religious parties, and above all in names of slight or of contempt. Thus Baxter tells us that when he wrote there already existed two explanations of ‘Roundhead,’ [Footnote: _Narrative of my Life and Times_, p. 34; ‘The original of which name is not certainly known. Some say it was because the Puritans then commonly wore short hair, and the King’s party long hair; some say, it was because the Queen at Stafford’s trial asked who that _round-headed_ man was, meaning Mr. Pym, because he spake so strongly.’] a word not nearly so old as himself. How much has been written about the origin of the German ‘ketzer’ (= our ‘heretic’), though there can scarcely be a doubt that the Cathari make their presence felt in this word. [Footnote: See on this word Kluge’s _Etym. Dict_.] Hardly less has been disputed about the French ‘cagot.’ [Footnote: The word meant in old times ‘a leper’; see Cotgrave’s _Dictionary_, also _Athenceum_, No. 2726.] Is ‘Lollard,’ or ‘Loller’ as we read it in Chaucer, from ‘lollen,’ to chaunt? that is, does it mean the chaunting or canting people? or had the Lollards their title from a principal person among them of this name, who suffered at the stake?–to say nothing of ‘lolium,’ found by some in the name, these men being as _tares_ among the wholesome wheat. [Footnote: Hahn, _Ketzer im Mittelalter_ vol. ii. p. 534.] The origin of ‘Huguenot’ as applied to the French Protestants, was already a matter of doubt and discussion in the lifetime of those who first bore it. A distinguished German scholar has lately enumerated fifteen explanations which have been offered of the word. [Footnote: Mahn, _Etymol. Untersuch_. p. 92. Littré, who has found the word in use as a Christian name two centuries before the Reformation, has no doubt that here is the explanation of it. At any rate there is here what explodes a large number of the proposed explanations, as for instance that Huguenot is another and popular shape of ‘Eidgenossen.’] [How did the lay sisters in the Low Countries, the ‘Beguines’ get their name? Many derivations have been suggested, but the most probable account is that given in Ducange, that the appellative was derived from ‘le Bègue’ the Stammerer, the nickname of Lambert, a priest of Liège in the twelfth century, the founder of the order. (See the document quoted in Ducange, and the ‘New English Dictionary’ (s. v.).)] Were the ‘Waldenses’ so called from one Waldus, to whom these ‘Poor Men of Lyons’ as they were at first called, owed their origin? [Footnote: [It is not doubted now that the Waldenses got their name from Peter Waldez or Valdo, a native of Lyons in the twelfth century. Waldez was a rich merchant who sold his goods and devoted his wealth to furthering translations of the Bible, and to the support of a set of poor preachers. For an interesting account of the Waldenses see in the _Guardian_, Aug. 18, 1886, a learned review by W. A. B. C. of _Histoire Littéraire des Vaudois_, par E. Montet.]] As little can any one tell us with any certainty why the ‘Paulicians’ and the ‘Paterines’ were severally named as they are; or, to go much further back, why the ‘Essenes’ were so called. [Footnote: Lightfoot, _On the Colossians_, p. 114 sqq.] From whence had Johannes Scotus, who anticipated so much of the profoundest thinking of later times, his title of ‘Erigena,’ and did that title mean Irish-born, or what? [Footnote: [There is no doubt whatever that _Erigena_ in this case means ‘Irish-born.’]] ‘Prester John’ was a name given in the Middle Ages to a priest-king, real or imaginary, of wide dominion in Central Asia. But whether there was ever actually such a person, and what was intended by his name, is all involved in the deepest obscurity. How perplexing are many of the Church’s most familiar terms, and terms the oftenest in the mouth of her children; thus her ‘Ember’ days; her ‘Collects’; [Footnote: Freeman, _Principles of Divine Service_, vol. i. p. 145.] her ‘Breviary’; her ‘Whitsunday’; [Footnote: See Skeat, s. v.] the derivation of ‘Mass’ itself not being lifted above all question. [Footnote: Two at least of the ecclesiastical terms above mentioned are no longer perplexing, and are quite lifted above dispute: _ember_ in ‘Ember Days’ represents Anglo-Saxon _ymb-ryne_, literally ‘a running round, circuit, revolution, anniversary’; see Skeat (s. v.); and _Whitsunday_ means simply ‘White Sunday,’ Anglo-Saxon _hwita Sunnan-daeg_.] As little can any one inform us why the Roman military standard on which Constantine inscribed the symbols of the Christian faith should have been called ‘Labarum.’ And yet the inquiry began early. A father of the Greek Church, almost a contemporary of Constantine, can do no better than suggest that ‘labarum’ is equivalent to ‘laborum,’ and that it was so called because in that victorious standard was the end of _labour_ and toil (finis laborum)! [Footnote: Mahn, _Elym. Untersuch_. p. 65; cf. Kurtz, _Kirchen-geschichte_, 3rd edit. p. 115.] The ‘ciborium’ of the early Church is an equal perplexity; [Footnote: The word is first met in Chrysostom, who calls the silver models of the temple at Ephesus (Acts xix, 24) [Greek: mikra kiboria]. [A primary meaning of the Greek [Greek: kiborion] was the cup-like seed-vessel of the Egyptian water- lily, see _Dict. of Christian Antiquities_, p. 65.]] and ‘chapel’ (capella) not less. All later investigations have failed effectually to dissipate the mystery of the ‘Sangraal.’ So too, after all that has been written upon it, the true etymology of ‘mosaic’ remains a question still.
And not in Church matters only, but everywhere, we meet with the same oblivion resting on the origin of words. The Romans, one might beforehand have assumed, must have known very well why they called themselves ‘Quirites,’ but it is manifest that this knowledge was not theirs. Why they were addressed as Patres Conscripti is a matter unsettled still. They could have given, one would think, an explanation of their naming an outlying conquered region a ‘province.’ Unfortunately they offer half a dozen explanations, among which we may make our choice. ‘German’ and ‘Germany’ were names comparatively recent when Tacitus wrote; but he owns that he has nothing trustworthy to say of their history; [Footnote: _Germania_, 2.] later inquirers have not mended the matter, [Footnote: Pott, _Etymol. Forsch._ vol. ii. pt. 2, pp. 860-872.]
The derivation of words which are the very key to the understanding of the Middle Ages, is often itself wrapt in obscurity. On ‘fief’ and ‘feudal’ how much has been disputed. [Footnote: Stubbs, _Constitutional History of England_, vol. i. p. 251.] ‘Morganatic’ marriages are recognized by the public law of Germany, but why called ‘morganatic’ is unsettled still. [Footnote: [There is no mystery about this word; see a good account of the term in Skeat’s _Diet_. (s. v.).]] Gypsies in German are ‘zigeuner’; but when this is resolved into ‘zichgauner,’ or roaming thieves, the explanation has about as much scientific value as the not less ingenious explanation of ‘Saturnus’ as satur annis, [Footnote: Cicero, _Nat. Deor._ ii. 25.] of ‘severitas’ as saeva veritas (Augustine); of ‘cadaver’ as composed of the first syllables of _ca_ro _da_ta, _ver_mibus. [Footnote: Dwight, _Modern Philology_, lst series, p. 288.] Littré has evidently little confidence in the explanation commonly offered of the ‘Salic’ law, namely, that it was the law which prevailed on the banks of the Saal. [Footnote: For a full and learned treatment of the various derivations of ‘Mephistopheles’ which have been proposed, and for the first appearance of the name in books, see Ward’s _Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus_, p. 117.]
And the modern world has unsolved riddles innumerable of like kind. Why was ‘Canada’ so named? And whence is ‘Yankee’ a title little more than a century old? having made its first appearance in a book printed at Boston, U.S., 1765. Is ‘Hottentot’ an African word, or, more probably, a Dutch or Low Frisian; and which, if any, of the current explanations of it should be accepted? [Footnote: See _Transactions of the Philological Society_, 1866, pp. 6-25.] Shall we allow Humboldt’s derivation of ‘cannibal,’ and find ‘Carib’ in it? [Footnote: See Skeat, s. v.] Whence did the ‘Chouans,’ the insurgent royalists of Brittany, obtain their title? When did California obtain its name, and why? Questions such as these, to which we can give no answer or a very doubtful one, might be multiplied without end. Littré somewhere in his great Dictionary expresses the misgiving with which what he calls ‘anecdotal etymology’ fills him; while yet it is to this that we are continually tempted here to have recourse.
But consider now one or two words which have _not_ lost the secret of their origin, and note how easily they might have done this, and having once lost, how unlikely it is that any searching would have recovered it. The traveller Burton tells us that the coarse cloth which is the medium of exchange, in fact the money of Eastern Africa, is called ‘merkani.’ The word is a native corruption of ‘American,’ the cloth being manufactured in America and sold under this name. But suppose a change should take place in the country from which this cloth was brought, men little by little forgetting that it ever had been imported from America, who then would divine the secret of the word? So too, if the tradition of the derivation of ‘paraffin’ were once let go and lost, it would, I imagine, scarcely be recovered. Mere ingenuity would scarcely divine the fact that a certain oil was so named because ‘parum affinis,’ having little affinity which chemistry could detect, with any other substance.
So, too, it is not very probable that the derivation of ‘licorice,’ once lost, would again be recovered. It would exist, at the best, but as one guess among many. There can be no difficulty about it when we find it spelt, as we do in Fuller, ‘glycyrize or liquoris.’
Those which I cite are but a handful of examples of the way in which words forget, or under predisposing conditions might forget, the circumstances of their birth. Now if we could believe in any merely _arbitrary_ words, standing in connexion with nothing but the mere lawless caprice of some inventor, the impossibility of tracing their derivation would be nothing strange. Indeed it would be lost labour to seek for the parentage of all words, when many probably had none. But there is no such thing; there is no word which is not, as the Spanish gentleman loves to call himself, an ‘hidalgo,’ or son of something. [Footnote: The Spanish _hijo dalgo_, a gentleman, means a son of wealth, or an estate; see Stevens’ _Dict_. (s. v.)] All are embodiments, more or less successful, of a sensation, a thought, or a fact; or if of more fortuitous birth, still they attach themselves somewhere to the already subsisting world of words and things, [Footnote: J. Grimm, in an interesting review of a little volume dealing with what the Spaniards call ‘Germanía’ with no reference to Germany, the French ‘argot,’ and we ‘Thieves’ Language,’ finds in this language the most decisive evidence of this fact (_Kleine Schrift_. vol. iv. p. 165): Der nothwendige Zusammenhang aller Sprache mit Ueberlieferung zeigt sich auch hier; kaum ein Wort dieser Gaunermundart scheint leer erfunden, und Menschen eines Gelichters, das sich sonst kein Gewissen aus Lügen macht, beschämen manchen Sprachphilosophen, der von Erdichtung einer allgemeinen Sprache geträumt hat. Van Helmont indeed, a sort of modern Paracelsus, is said to have _invented_ the word ‘gas’; but it is difficult to think that there was not a feeling here after ‘geest’ or ‘geist,’ whether he was conscious of this or not.] and have their point of contact with it and departure from it, not always discoverable, as we see, but yet always existing. [Footnote: Some will remember here the old dispute–Greek I was tempted to call it, but in one shape or another it emerges everywhere–whether words were imposed on things [Greek: thesei] or [Greek: physei], by arbitrary arrangement or by nature. We may boldly say with Bacon, Vestigia certe rationis verba sunt, and decide in favour of nature. If only they knew their own history, they could always explain, and in most cases justify, their existence. See some excellent remarks on this subject by Renan, _De l’Origine du Langage_, pp. 146-149; and an admirable article on ‘Slang’ in the _Times_, Oct. 18, 1864.] And thus, when a word entirely refuses to tell us anything about itself, it must be regarded as a riddle which no one has succeeded in solving, a lock of which no man has found the key–but still a riddle which has a solution, a lock for which there is a key, though now, it may be, irrecoverably lost. And this difficulty– it is oftentimes an impossibility–of tracing the genealogy even of words of a very recent formation, is, as I observed, a strong argument for the birth of the most notable of these out of the heart and from the lips of the people. Had they first appeared in books, something in the context would most probably explain them. Had they issued from the schools of the learned, these would not have failed to leave a recognizable stamp and mark upon them.
There is, indeed, another way in which obscurity may rest on a new word, or a word employed in a new sense. It may tell the story of its birth, of the word or words which compose it, may so bear these on its front, that there can be no question here, while yet its purpose and intention may be hopelessly hidden from our eyes. The secret once lost, is not again to be recovered. Thus no one has called, or could call, in question the derivation of ‘apocryphal’ that it means ‘hidden away.’ When, however, we begin to inquire why certain books which the Church either set below the canonical Scriptures, or rejected altogether, were called ‘apocryphal’ then a long and doubtful discussion commences. Was it because their origin was _hidden_ to the early Fathers of the Church, and thus reasonable suspicions of their authenticity entertained? [Footnote: Augustine (_De Civ. Dei_, xv. 23): Apocrypha nuncupantur eo quod eorum occulta origo non claruit Patribus. Cf. _Con. Faust_, xi. 2.] Or was it because they were mysteriously kept out of sight and _hidden_ by the heretical sects which boasted themselves in their exclusive possession? Or was it that they were books not laid up in the Church chest, but _hidden away_ in obscure corners? Or were they books _worthier to be hidden_ than to be brought forward and read to the faithful? [Footnote: For still another reason for the epithet ‘apocryphal’ see Skeat’s _Etym. Dict_.]–for all these explanations have been offered, and none with such superiority of proof on its side as to have deprived others of all right to be heard. In the same way there is no question that ‘tragedy’ is the song of the goat; but why this, whether because a goat was the prize for the best performers of that song in which the germs of Greek tragedy lay, or because the first actors were dressed like satyrs in goatskins, is a question which will now remain unsettled to the end. [Footnote: See Bentley, _Works_, vol. i. p. 337.] You know what ‘leonine’ verses are; or, if you do not, it is very easy to explain. They are Latin hexameters into which an internal rhyme has forced its way. The following, for example, are all ‘leonine’:
Qui pingit _florem_ non pingit floris _odorem_: Si quis det _mannos_, ne quaere in dentibus _annos_. Una avis in _dextra_ melior quam quattuor _extra_.
The word has plainly to do with ‘leo’ in some shape or other; but are these verses leonine from one Leo or Leolinus, who first composed them? or because, as the lion is king of beasts, so this, in monkish estimation, was the king of metres? or from some other cause which none have so much as guessed at? [Footnote: See my _Sacred Latin Poetry_, 3rd edit. p. 32.] It is a mystery which none has solved. That frightful system of fagging which made in the seventeenth century the German Universities a sort of hell upon earth, and which was known by the name of ‘pennalism,’ we can scarcely disconnect from ‘penna’; while yet this does not help us to any effectual scattering of the mystery which rests upon the term. [Footnote: See my _Gustavus Adolphus in Germany_, p. 131. [_Pennal_ meant ‘a freshman,’ a term given by the elder students in mockery, because the student in his first year was generally more industrious, and might be often seen with his _pennal_ or pen-case about him.]] The connexion of ‘dictator’ with ‘dicere’, ‘dictare,’ is obvious; not so the reason why the ‘dictator’ obtained his name. ‘Sycophant’ and ‘superstition’ are words, one Greek and one Latin, of the same character. No one doubts of what elements they are composed; and yet their secret has been so lost, that, except as a more or less plausible guess, it can never now be recovered. [Footnote: For a good recapitulation of what best has been written on ‘superstitio’ see Pott, _Etym. Forschungen_, vol. ii. p. 921.]
But I must conclude. I may seem in this present lecture a little to have outrun your needs, and to have sometimes moved in a sphere too remote from that in which your future work will lie. And yet it is in truth very difficult to affirm of any words, that they do not touch us, do not in some way bear upon our studies, on what we shall hereafter have to teach, or shall desire to learn; that there are any conquests which language makes that concern only a select few, and may be regarded indifferently by all others. For it is here as with many inventions in the arts and luxuries of life; which, being at the first the exclusive privilege and possession of the wealthy and refined, gradually descend into lower strata of society, until at length what were once the elegancies and luxuries of a few, have become the decencies, well-nigh the necessities, of all. Not otherwise there are words, once only on the lips of philosophers or theologians, of the deeper thinkers of their time, or of those directly interested in their speculations, which step by step have come down, not debasing themselves in this act of becoming popular, but training and elevating an ever-increasing number of persons to enter into their meaning, till at length they have become truly a part of the nation’s common stock, ‘household words,’ used easily and intelligently by nearly all.
I cannot better conclude this lecture than by quoting a passage, one among many, which expresses with a rare eloquence all I have been labouring to utter; for this truth, which many have noticed, hardly any has set forth with the same fulness of illustration, or the same sense of its importance, as the author of _The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_. ‘Language,’ he observes, ‘is often called an instrument of thought, but it is also the nutriment of thought; or rather, it is the atmosphere in which thought lives; a medium essential to the activity of our speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its operation; and an element modifying, by its qualities and changes, the growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds. In this way the influence of preceding discoveries upon subsequent ones, of the past upon the present, is most penetrating and universal, although most subtle and difficult to trace. The most familiar words and phrases are connected by imperceptible ties with the reasonings and discoveries of former men and distant times. Their knowledge is an inseparable part of ours: the present generation inherits and uses the scientific wealth of all the past. And this is the fortune, not only of the great and rich in the intellectual world, of those who have the key to the ancient storehouses, and who have accumulated treasures of their own, but the humblest inquirer, while he puts his reasonings into words, benefits by the labours 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 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.’
LECTURE VI.
ON THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
Synonyms, and the study of synonyms, with the advantages to be derived from a careful noting of the distinction between them, constitute the subject with which in my present Lecture I shall deal. But what, you may ask, is meant when, comparing certain words with one another, we affirm of them that they are synonyms? We imply that, with great and essential resemblances of meaning, they have at the same time small, subordinate, and partial differences–these differences being such as either originally, and on the strength of their etymology, were born with them; or differences which they have by usage acquired; or such as, though nearly or altogether latent now, they are capable of receiving at the hands of wise and discreet masters of language. Synonyms are thus words of like significance in the main; with a large extent of ground which they occupy in common, but also with something of their own, private and peculiar, which they do not share with one another. [Footnote: The word ‘synonym’ only found its way into the English language about the middle of the seventeenth century. Its recent incoming is marked by the Greek or Latin termination which for a while it bore; Jeremy Taylor writing ‘synonymon,’ Hacket ‘synonymum,’ and Milton (in the plural) ‘synonyma.’ Butler has ‘synonymas.’ On the subject of this chapter see Marsh, _Lectures on the English Language_, New York, 1860, p. 571, sqq.]
So soon as the term ‘synonym’ is defined thus, it will be at once perceived by any acquainted with its etymology, that, strictly speaking, it is a misnomer, and is given, with a certain inaccuracy and impropriety, to words which stand in such relations as I have just traced to one another; since in strictness of speech the terms, ‘synonyms’ and ‘synonymous’ applied to words, affirm of them that they cover not merely almost, but altogether, the same extent of meaning, that they are in their signification perfectly identical and coincident; circles, so to speak, with the same centre and the same circumference. The term, however, is not ordinarily so used; it evidently is not so by such as undertake to trace out the distinction between synonyms; for, without venturing to deny that there may be such perfect synonyms, words, that is, with this absolute coincidence of the one with the other, yet these could not be the objects of any such discrimination; since, where no real difference exists, it would be lost labour and the exercise of a perverse ingenuity to attempt to draw one out.
There are, indeed, those who assert that words in one language are never exactly synonymous, or in all respects commensurate, with words in another; that, when they are compared with one another, there is always something more, or something less, or something different, in one as compared with the other, which hinders this complete equivalence. And, those words being excepted which designate objects in their nature absolutely incapable of a more or less and of every qualitative difference, I should be disposed to consider other exceptions to this assertion exceedingly rare. ‘In all languages whatever,’ to quote Bentley’s words, ‘a word of a moral or of a political significance, containing several complex ideas arbitrarily joined together, has seldom any correspondent word in any other language which extends to all these ideas.’ Nor is it hard to trace reasons sufficient why this should be so. For what, after all, is a word, but the enclosure for human use of a certain district, larger or smaller, from the vast outfield of thought or feeling or fact, and in this way a bringing of it under human cultivation, a rescuing of it for human uses? But how extremely unlikely it is that nations, drawing quite independently of one another these lines of enclosure, should draw them in all or most cases exactly in the same direction, neither narrower nor wider; how almost inevitable, on the contrary, that very often the lines should not coincide–and this, even supposing no moral forces at work to disturb the falling of the lines.
How immense and instructive a field of comparison between languages does this fact lay open to us; while it is sufficient to drive a translator with a high ideal of the task which he has undertaken well- nigh to despair. For indeed in the transferring of any matter of high worth from one language to another there are losses involved, which no labour, no skill, no genius, no mastery of one language or of both can prevent. The translator may have worthily done his part, may have ‘turned’ and not ‘overturned’ his original (St. Jerome complains that in his time many _versiones_ deserved to be called _eversiones_ rather); he may have given the lie to the Italian proverb, ‘Traduttori Traditori,’ or ‘Translators Traitors,’ men, that is, who do not ‘render’ but’ surrender’ their author’s meaning, and yet for all this the losses of which I speak will not have been avoided. Translations, let them have been carried through with what skill they may, are, as one has said, _belles infideles_ at the best.
How often in the translation of Holy Scripture from the language wherein it was first delivered into some other which offers more words than one whereby some all-important word in the original record may be rendered, the perplexity has been great which of these should be preferred. Not, indeed, that there was here an embarrassment of riches, but rather an embarrassment of poverty. Each, it may be, has advantages of its own, but each also its own drawbacks and shortcomings. There is nothing but a choice of difficulties anyhow, and whichever is selected, it will be found that the treasure of God’s thought has been committed to an earthen vessel, and one whose earthiness will not fail at this point or at that to appear; while yet, with all this, of what far- reaching importance it is that the best, that is, the least inadequate, word should be chosen. Thus the missionary translator, if he be at all aware of the awful implement which he is wielding, of the tremendous crisis in a people’s spiritual life which has arrived, when their language is first made the vehicle of the truths of Revelation, will often tremble at the work he has in hand; he will tremble lest he should permanently lower or confuse the whole spiritual life of a people, by choosing a meaner and letting go a nobler word for the setting forth of some leading truth of redemption; and yet the choice how difficult, the nobler itself falling how infinitely below his desires, and below the truth of which he would make it the bearer.
Even those who are wholly ignorant of Chinese can yet perceive how vast the spiritual interests which are at stake in China, how much will be won or how much lost for the whole spiritual life of its people, it may be for ages to come, according as the right or the wrong word is selected by our missionaries there for designating the true and the living God. As many of us indeed as are ignorant of the language can be no judges in the controversy which on this matter is, or was lately, carried on; but we can all feel how vital the question, how enormous the interests at stake; while, not less, having heard the allegations on the one side and on the other, we must own that there is only an alternative of difficulties here. Nearer home there have been difficulties of the same kind. At the Reformation, for example, when Latin was still more or less the language of theology, how earnest a controversy raged round the word in the Greek Testament which we have rendered ‘repentance’; whether ‘poenitentia’ should be allowed to stand, hallowed by long usage as it was, or ‘resipiscentia,’ as many of the Reformers preferred, should be substituted in its room; and how much on either side could be urged. Not otherwise, at an earlier date, ‘Sermo’ and ‘Verbum’ contended for the honour of rendering the ‘Logos’ of St. John; though here there can be no serious doubt on which side the advantage lay, and that in ‘Verbum’ the right word was chosen.
But this of the relation of words in one language to words in another, and of all the questions which may thus be raised, is a sea too large for me to launch upon now; and with thus much said to invite you to have open eyes and ears for such questions, seeing that they are often full of teaching, [Footnote: Pott in his _Etymol. Forschungen_, vol. v. p. lxix, and elsewhere, has much interesting instruction on the subject. There were four attempts to render [Greek: eironeia], itself, it is true, a very subtle word. They are these: ‘dissimulatio’ (Cicero); ‘illusio’ (Quintilian); ‘simulatio’ and ‘irrisio.’] I must leave this subject, and limit myself in this Lecture to a comparison between words, not in different languages, but in the same.
Synonyms then, as the term is generally understood, and as I shall use it, are words in the same language with slight differences either already established between them, or potentially subsisting in them. They are not on the one side words absolutely identical, for such, as has been said already, afford no room for discrimination; but neither on the other side are they words only remotely similar to one another; for the differences between these last will be self-evident, will so lie on the surface and proclaim themselves to all, that it would be as superfluous an office as holding a candle to the sun to attempt to make this clearer than it already is. It may be desirable to trace and fix the difference between scarlet and crimson, for these might easily be confounded; but who would think of so doing between scarlet and green? or between covetousness and avarice; while it would be idle and superfluous to do the same for covetousness and pride. They must be words more or less liable to confusion, but which yet ought not to be confounded, as one has said; in which there originally inhered a difference, or between which, though once absolutely identical, such has gradually grown up, and so established itself in the use of the best writers, and in the instinct of the best speakers of the tongue, that it claims to be openly recognized by all.
But here an interesting question presents itself to us: How do languages come to possess synonyms of this latter class, which are differenced not by etymology, nor by any other deep-lying cause, but only by usage? Now if languages had been made by agreement, of course no such synonyms as these could exist; for when once a word had been found which was the adequate representative of a thought, feeling, or fact, no second one would have been sought. But languages are the result of processes very different from this, and far less formal and regular. Various tribes, each with its own dialect, kindred indeed, but in many respects distinct, coalesce into one people, and cast their contributions of language into a common stock. Thus the French possess many synonyms from the _langue d’Oc_ and _langue d’Oil_, each having contributed its word for one and the same thing; thus ‘atre’ and ‘foyer,’ both for hearth. Sometimes different tribes of the same people have the same word, yet in forms sufficiently different to cause that both remain, but as words distinct from one another; thus in Latin ‘serpo’ and ‘repo’ are dialectic variations of the same word; just as in German, ‘odem’ and ‘athem’ were no more than dialectic differences at the first. Or again, a conquering people have fixed themselves in the midst of a conquered; they impose their dominion, but do not succeed in imposing their language; nay, being few in number, they find themselves at last compelled to adopt the language of the conquered; yet not so but that a certain compromise between the two languages finds place. One carries the day, but on the condition that it shall admit as naturalized denizens a number of the words of the other; which in some instances expel, but in many others subsist as synonyms side by side with, the native words.
These are causes of the existence of synonyms which reach far back into the history of a nation and a language; but other causes at a later period are also at work. When a written literature springs up, authors familiar with various foreign tongues import from one and another words which are not absolutely required, which are oftentimes rather luxuries than necessities. Sometimes, having a very sufficient word of their own, they must needs go and look for a finer one, as they esteem it, from abroad; as, for instance, the Latin having its own expressive ‘succinum’ (from ‘succus’), for amber, some must import from the Greek the ambiguous ‘electrum.’ Of these thus proposed as candidates for admission, some fail to obtain the rights of citizenship, and after longer or shorter probation are rejected; it may be, never advance beyond their first proposer. Enough, however, receive the stamp of popular allowance to create embarrassment for a while; until, that is, their relations with the already existing words are adjusted. As a single illustration of the various quarters from which the English has thus been augmented and enriched, I would instance the words ‘wile,’ ‘trick,’ device,’ finesse,’ ‘artifice,’ and ‘stratagem.’ and remind you of the various sources from which we have drawn them. Here ‘wile,’ is Old-English, ‘trick’ is Dutch, ‘devise’ is Old-French, ‘finesse’ is French, ‘artificium’ is Latin, and ‘[Greek: stratagema]’ Greek.
By and by, however, as a language becomes itself an object of closer attention, at the same time that society, advancing from a simpler to a more complex condition, has more things to designate, more thoughts to utter, and more distinctions to draw, it is felt as a waste of resources to employ two or more words for the designating of one and the same thing. Men feel, and rightly, that with a boundless world lying around them and demanding to be catalogued and named, and which they only make truly their own in the measure and to the extent that they do name it, with infinite shades and varieties of thought and feeling subsisting in their own minds, and claiming to find utterance in words, it is a wanton extravagance to expend two or more signs on that which could adequately be set forth by one–an extravagance in one part of their expenditure, which will be almost sure to issue in, and to be punished by, a corresponding scantness and straitness in another. Some thought or feeling or fact will wholly want one adequate sign, because another has two. [Footnote: We have a memorable example of this in the history of the great controversy of the Church with the Arians, In the earlier stages of this, the upholders of the orthodox faith used [Greek: ousia] and [Greek: hypostasis] as identical in force and meaning with one another, Athanasius, in as many words, affirming them to be such. As, however, the controversy went forward, it was perceived that doctrinal results of the highest importance might be fixed and secured for the Church through the assigning severally to these words distinct modifications of meaning. This, accordingly, in the Greek Church, was done; while the Latin, desiring to move _pari passu_ did yet find itself most seriously embarrassed and hindered in so doing by the fact that it had, or assumed that it had, but the one word, ‘substantia,’ to correspond to the two Greek.] Hereupon that which has been well called the process of ‘desynonymizing’ begins–that is, of gradually discriminating in use between words which have hitherto been accounted perfectly equivalent, and, as such, indifferently employed. It is a positive enriching of a language when this process is at any point felt to be accomplished; when two or more words, once promiscuously used, have had each its own peculiar domain assigned to it, which it shall not itself overstep, upon which others shall not encroach. This may seem at first sight only as a better regulation of old territory; for all practical purposes it is the acquisition of new.
This desynonymizing process is not carried out according to any prearranged purpose or plan. The working genius of the language accomplishes its own objects, causes these synonymous words insensibly to fall off from one another, and to acquire separate and peculiar meanings. The most that any single writer can do, save indeed in the terminology of science, is to assist an already existing inclination, to bring to the clear consciousness of all that which already has been obscurely felt by many, and thus to hasten the process of this disengagement, or, as it has been well expressed, ‘to regulate and ordinate the evident nisus and tendency of the popular usage into a severe definition’; and establish on a firm basis the distinction, so that it shall not be lost sight of or brought into question again. Thus long before Wordsworth wrote, it was obscurely felt by many that in ‘imagination’ there was more of the earnest, in ‘fancy’ of the play, of the spirit, that the first was a loftier faculty and power than the second. The tendency of the language was all in this direction. None would for some time back have employed ‘fancy’ as Milton employs it, [Footnote: _Paradise Lost_, v. 102-105 5 so too Longinus, _De Subl._ 15.] ascribing to it operations which we have learned to reserve for ‘imagination’ alone, and indeed subordinating ‘imaginations’ to fancy, as a part of the materials with which it deals. Yet for all this the words were continually, and not without injury, confounded. Wordsworth first, in the _Preface_ to his _Lyrical Ballads_, rendered it impossible for any, who had read and mastered what he had written on the matter, to remain unconscious any longer of the essential