word.] Could the Magdalen have ever bequeathed us ‘maudlin’ in its present contemptuous application, if the tears of penitential sorrow had been held in due honour by the world? ‘Tinsel,’ the French ‘etincelle,’ meant once anything that sparkled or glistened; thus, ‘cloth of _tinsel_’ would be cloth inwrought with silver and gold; but the sad experience that ‘all is not gold that glitters, that much showing fair to the eye is worthless in reality, has caused that by ‘tinsel,’ literal or figurative, we ever mean now that which has no realities of sterling worth underlying the specious shows which it makes. ‘Specious’ itself, let me note, meant beautiful at one time, and not, as now, presenting a deceitful appearance of beauty. ‘Tawdry,’ an epithet applied once to lace or other finery bought at the fair of St. Awdrey or St. Etheldreda, has run through the same course: it at one time conveyed no suggestion of _mean_ finery or _shabby_ splendour, as now it does. ‘Voluble’ was an epithet which had nothing of slight in it, but meant what ‘fluent’ means now; ‘dapper’ _was_ what in German ‘tapfer’ _is_; not so much neat and spruce as brave and bold; ‘plausible’ was worthy of applause; ‘pert’ is now brisk and lively, but with a very distinct subaudition, which once it had not, of sauciness as well; ‘lewd’ meant no more than unlearned, as the lay or common people might be supposed to be. [Footnote: Having in mind what ‘dirne,’ connected with ‘dienen,’ ‘dienst,’ commonly means now in German, one almost shrinks from mentioning that it was once a name of honour which could be and was used of the Blessed Virgin Mary (see Grimm, _Wörterbuch_, s. v.). ‘Schalk’ in like manner had no evil subaudition in it at the first; nor did it ever obtain such during the time that it survived in English; thus in _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_, the peerless Gawayne is himself on more than one a ‘schalk’ (424, 1776). The word survives in the last syllable of ‘seneschal,’ and indeed of ‘marshal’ as well.] ‘To carp’ is in Chaucer’s language no more than to converse; ‘to mouth’ in _Piers Plowman_ is simply to speak; ‘to garble’ was once to sift and pick out the best; it is now to select and put forward as a fair specimen the worst.
This same deterioration through use may be traced in the verb ‘to resent.’ Barrow could speak of the good man as a faithful ‘resenter’ and requiter of benefits, of the duty of testifying an affectionate ‘resentment’ of our obligations to God. But the memory of benefits fades from us so much more quickly than that of injuries; we remember and revolve in our minds so much more predominantly the wrongs, real or imaginary, men have done us, than the favours we owe them, that ‘resentment’ has come in our modern English to be confined exclusively to that deep reflective displeasure which men entertain against those that have done, or whom they fancy to have done, them a wrong. And this explains how it comes to pass that we do not speak of the ‘retaliation’ of benefits at all so often as the ‘retaliation’ of injuries. ‘To retaliate’ signifies no more than to render again as much as we have received; but this is so much seldomer practised in the matter of benefits than of wrongs, that ‘retaliation’ though not wholly strange in this worthier sense, has yet, when so employed, an unusual sound in our ears. ‘To retaliate’ kindnesses is a language which would not now be intelligible to all. ‘Animosity’ as originally employed in that later Latin which gave it birth, was spiritedness; men would speak of the ‘animosity’ or fiery courage of a horse. In our early English it meant nothing more; a divine of the seventeenth century speaks of ‘due Christian animosity.’ Activity and vigour are still implied in the word; but now only as displayed in enmity and hate. There is a Spanish proverb which says, ‘One foe is too many; a hundred friends are too few.’ The proverb and the course which this word ‘animosity’ has travelled may be made mutually to illustrate one another. [Footnote: For quotations from our earlier authors in proof of many of the assertions made in the few last pages, see my _Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in senses different from their present_, 5th edit. 1879.]
How mournful a witness for the hard and unrighteous judgments we habitually form of one another lies in the word ‘prejudice.’ It is itself absolutely neutral, meaning no more than a judgment formed beforehand; which judgment may be favourable, or may be otherwise. Yet so predominantly do we form harsh unfavourable judgments of others before knowledge and experience, that a ‘prejudice’ or judgment before knowledge and not grounded on evidence, is almost always taken in an ill sense; ‘prejudicial’ having actually acquired mischievous or injurious for its secondary meaning.
As these words bear testimony to the _sin_ of man, so others to his _infirmity_, to the limitation of human faculties and human knowledge, to the truth of the proverb, that ‘to err is human.’ Thus ‘to retract’ means properly no more than to handle again, to reconsider. And yet, so certain are we to find in a subject which we reconsider, or handle a second time, that which was at first rashly, imperfectly, inaccurately, stated, which needs therefore to be amended, modified, or withdrawn, that ‘to retract’ could not tarry long in its primary meaning of reconsidering; but has come to signify to withdraw. Thus the greatest Father of the Latin Church, wishing toward the close of his life to amend whatever he might then perceive in his various published works incautiously or incorrectly stated, gave to the book in which he carried out this intention (for authors had then no such opportunities as later editions afford us now), this very name of ‘_Retractations_’, being literally ‘rehandlings,’ but in fact, as will be plain to any one turning to the work, withdrawings of various statements by which he was no longer prepared to abide.
But urging, as I just now did, the degeneration of words, I should seriously err, if I failed to remind you that a parallel process of purifying and ennobling has also been going forward, most of all through the influences of a Divine faith working in the world. This, as it has turned _men_ from evil to good, or has lifted them from a lower earthly goodness to a higher heavenly, so has it in like manner elevated, purified, and ennobled a multitude of the words which they employ, until these, which once expressed only an earthly good, express now a heavenly. The Gospel of Christ, as it is the redemption of man, so is it in a multitude of instances the redemption of his word, freeing it from the bondage of corruption, that it should no longer be subject to vanity, nor stand any more in the service of sin or of the world, but in the service of God and of his truth. Thus the Greek had a word for ‘humility’; but for him this humility meant–that is, with rare exceptions–meanness of spirit. He who brought in the Christian grace of humility, did in so doing rescue the term which expressed it for nobler uses and a far higher dignity than hitherto it had attained. There were ‘angels’ before heaven had been opened, but these only earthly messengers; ‘martyrs’ also, or witnesses, but these not unto blood, nor yet for God’s highest truth; ‘apostles,’ but sent of men; ‘evangels,’ but these good tidings of this world, and not of the kingdom of heaven; ‘advocates,’ but not ‘with the Father.’ ‘Paradise’ was a word common in slightly different forms to almost all the nations of the East; but it was for them only some royal park or garden of delights; till for the Jew it was exalted to signify the mysterious abode of our first parents; while higher honours awaited it still, when on the lips of the Lord, it signified the blissful waiting-place of faithful departed souls (Luke xxiii. 43); yea, the heavenly blessedness itself (Rev. ii. 7). A ‘regeneration’ or palingenesy, was not unknown to the Greeks; they could speak of the earth’s ‘regeneration’ in spring-time, of recollection as the ‘regeneration’ of knowledge; the Jewish historian could describe the return of his countrymen from the Babylonian Captivity, and their re-establishment in their own land, as the ‘regeneration’ of the Jewish State. But still the word, whether as employed by Jew or Greek, was a long way off from that honour reserved for it in the Christian dispensation–namely, that it should be the vehicle of one of the most blessed mysteries of the faith. [Footnote: See my _Synonyms of the N.T._ Section 18.] And many other words in like manner there are, ‘fetched from the very dregs of paganism,’ as Sanderson has it (he instances the Latin ‘sacrament,’ the Greek ‘mystery’), which the Holy Spirit has not refused to employ for the setting forth of the glorious facts of our redemption; and, reversing the impious deed of Belshazzar, who profaned the sacred vessels of God’s house to sinful and idolatrous uses (Dan. v. 2), has consecrated the very idol-vessels of Babylon to the service of the sanctuary.
Let us now proceed to contemplate some of the attestations to God’s truth, and then some of the playings into the hands of the devil’s falsehood, which lurk in words. And first, the attestations to God’s truth, the fallings in of our words with his unchangeable Word; for these, as the true uses of the word, while the other are only its abuses, have a prior claim to be considered.
Thus, some modern ‘false prophets,’ willing to explain away all such phenomena of the world around us as declare man to be a sinner, and lying under the consequences of sin, would fain have them to believe that pain is only a subordinate kind of pleasure, or, at worst, a sort of needful hedge and guardian of pleasure. But a deeper feeling in the universal heart of man bears witness to quite another explanation of the existence of pain in the present economy of the world–namely, that it is the correlative of sin, that it is _punishment_; and to this the word ‘pain,’ so closely connected with ‘poena,’ bears witness. [Footnote: Our word _pain_ is actually the same word as the Latin _poena_, coming to us through the French _peine_.] Pain _is_ punishment; for so the word, and so the conscience of every one that is suffering it, declares. Some will not hear of great pestilences being scourges of the sins of men; and if only they can find out the immediate, imagine that they have found out the ultimate, causes of these; while yet they have only to speak of a ‘plague’ and they implicitly avouch the very truth which they have set themselves to deny; for a ‘plague,’ what is it but a stroke; so called, because that universal conscience of men which is never at fault, has felt and in this way confessed it to be such? For here, as in so many other cases, that proverb stands fast, ‘Vox populi, vox Dei’; and may be admitted to the full; that is, if only we keep in mind that this ‘people’ is not the populace either in high place or in low; and this ‘voice of the people’ no momentary outcry, but the consenting testimony of the good and wise, of those neither brutalized by ignorance, nor corrupted by a false cultivation, in many places and in various times.
To one who admits the truth of this proverb it will be nothing strange that men should have agreed to call him a ‘miser’ or miserable, who eagerly scrapes together and painfully hoards the mammon of this world. Here too the moral instinct lying deep in all hearts has borne testimony to the tormenting nature of this vice, to the gnawing pains with which even in this present time it punishes its votaries, to the enmity which there is between it and all joy; and the man who enslaves himself to his money is proclaimed in our very language to be a ‘miser,’ or miserable man. [Footnote: ‘Misery’ does not any longer signify avarice, nor ‘miserable’ avaricious; but these meanings they once possessed (see my _Select Glossary_, s. vv.). In them men said, and in ‘miser’ we still say, in one word what Seneca when he wrote,– ‘Nulla avaritia sine poena est, _quamvis satis sit ipsa poenarum_’– took a sentence to say.] Other words bear testimony to great moral truths. St. James has, I doubt not, been often charged with exaggeration for saying, ‘Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all’ (ii. 10). The charge is an unjust one. The Romans with their ‘integritas’ said as much; we too say the same who have adopted ‘integrity’ as a part of our ethical language. For what is ‘integrity’ but entireness; the ‘integrity’ of the body being, as Cicero explains it, the full possession and the perfect soundness of _all_ its members; and moral ‘integrity’ though it cannot be predicated so absolutely of any sinful child of Adam, is this same entireness or completeness transferred to things higher. ‘Integrity’ was exactly that which Herod had _not_ attained, when at the Baptist’s bidding he ‘did many things gladly’ (Mark vi. 20), but did _not_ put away his brother’s wife; whose partial obedience therefore profited nothing; he had dropped one link in the golden chain of obedience, and as a consequence the whole chain fell to the ground.
It is very noticeable, and many have noticed, that the Greek word signifying wickedness (_ponaeria_) comes of another signifying labour (_ponos_). How well does this agree with those passages in Scripture which describe sinners as ‘_wearying themselves_ to commit iniquity,’ as ‘_labouring_ in the very fire’; ‘the martyrs of the devil,’ as South calls them, being at more pains to go to hell than the martyrs of God to go to heaven. ‘St. Chrysostom’s eloquence,’ as Bishop Sanderson has observed, ‘enlarges itself and triumphs in this argument more frequently than in almost any other; and he clears it often and beyond all exception, both by Scripture and reason, that the life of a wicked or worldly man is a very drudgery, infinitely more toilsome, vexatious, and unpleasant than a godly life is.’ [Footnote: _Sermons_, London, 1671, vol. ii. p. 244.]
How deep an insight into the failings of the human heart lies at the root of many words; and if only we would attend to them, what valuable warnings many contain against subtle temptations and sins! Thus, all of us have felt the temptation of seeking to please others by an unmanly _assenting_ to their opinion, even when our own independent convictions did not agree with theirs. The existence of such a temptation, and the fact that too many yield to it, are both declared in the Latin for a flatterer–‘assentator’–that is, ‘an assenter’; one who has not courage to say _No_, when a _Yes_ is expected from him; and quite independently of the Latin, the German, in its contemptuous and precisely equivalent use of ‘Jaherr,’ a ‘yea-Lord,’ warns us in like manner against all such unmanly compliances. Let me note that we also once possessed ‘assentation’ in the sense of unworthy flattering lip- assent; the last example of it in our dictionaries is from Bishop Hall: ‘It is a fearful presage of ruin when the prophets conspire in assentation;’ but it lived on to a far later day, being found and exactly in the same sense in Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his son; he there speaks of ‘abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation.’ [Footnote: _August_ 10, 1749. [In the _New English Dictionary_ a quotation for the word is given as late as 1859. I. Taylor, in his _Logic in Theology_, p. 265, says: ‘A safer anchorage may be found than the shoal of mindless assentation’]] The word is well worthy to be revived.
Again, how well it is to have that spirit of depreciation, that eagerness to find spots and stains in the characters of the noblest and the best, who would otherwise oppress and rebuke us with a goodness and a greatness so immensely superior to our own,–met and checked by a word at once so expressive, and so little pleasant to take home to ourselves, as the French ‘dénigreur,’ a ‘blackener.’ This also has fallen out of use; which is a pity, seeing that the race which it designates is so far from being extinct. Full too of instruction and warning is our present employment of ‘libertine.’ A ‘libertine,’ in earlier use, was a speculative free-thinker in matters of religion and in the theory of morals. But as by a process which is seldom missed free-_thinking_ does and will end in free-_acting_, he who has cast off one yoke also casting off the other, so a ‘libertine’ came in two or three generations to signify a profligate, especially in relation to women, a licentious and debauched person. [Footnote: See the author’s _Select Glossary_ (s.v.)]
Look a little closely at the word ‘passion,’ We sometimes regard a ‘passionate’ man as a man of strong will, and of real, though ungoverned, energy. But ‘passion’ teaches us quite another lesson; for it, as a very solemn use of it declares, means properly ‘suffering’; and a ‘passionate’ man is not one who is doing something, but one suffering something to be done to him. When then a man or child is ‘in a passion,’ this is no outcoming in him of a strong will, of a real energy, but the proof rather that, for the time at least, he is altogether wanting in these; he is _suffering_, not doing; suffering his anger, or whatever evil temper it may be, to lord over him without control. Let no one then think of ‘passion’ as a sign of strength. One might with as much justice conclude a man strong because he was often well beaten; this would prove that a strong man was putting forth his strength on him, but certainly not that he was himself strong. The same sense of ‘passion’ and feebleness going together, of the first as the outcome of the second, lies, I may remark by the way, in the twofold use of ‘impotens’ in the Latin, which meaning first weak, means then violent, and then weak and violent together. For a long time ‘impotent’ and ‘impotence’ in English embodied the same twofold meaning.
Or meditate on the use of ‘humanitas,’ and the use (in Scotland at least) of the ‘humanities,’ to designate those studies which are esteemed the fittest for training the true humanity in every man. [Footnote: [Compare the use of the term _Litterae Humaniores_ in the University of Oxford to designate the oldest and most characteristic of her examinations or ‘Schools.’]] We have happily overlived in England the time when it was still in debate among us whether education is a good thing for every living soul or not; the only question which now seriously divides Englishmen being, in what manner that mental and moral training, which is society’s debt to each one of its members, may be most effectually imparted to him. Were it not so, were there any still found to affirm that it was good for any man to be left with powers not called out and faculties untrained, we might appeal to this word ‘humanitas,’ and the use to which the Roman put it, in proof that he at least was not of this mind. By ‘humanitas’ he intended the fullest and most harmonious development of all the truly human faculties and powers. Then, and then only, man was truly man, when he received this; in so far as he did not receive this, his ‘humanity’ was maimed and imperfect; he fell short of his ideal, of that which he was created to be.
In our use of ‘talents,’ as when we say ‘a man of talents,’ there is a clear recognition of the responsibilities which go along with the possession of intellectual gifts and endowments, whatever these may be. We owe our later use of ‘talent’ to the parable (Matt. xxv. 14), in which more or fewer of these are committed to the several servants, that they may trade with them in their master’s absence, and give account of their employment at his return. Men may choose to forget the ends for which their ‘talents’ were given them; they may count them merely something which they have gotten; [Footnote: An [Greek: hexis], as the heathen did, not a [Greek: dorema], as the Christian does; see a remarkable passage in Bishop Andrewes’ _Sermons_, vol. iii. p. 384.] they may turn them to selfish ends; they may glorify themselves in them, instead of glorifying the Giver; they may practically deny that they were given at all; yet in this word, till they can rid their vocabulary of it, abides a continual memento that they were so given, or rather lent, and that each man shall have to render an account of their use.
Again, in ‘oblige’ and ‘obligation,’ as when we speak of ‘being obliged,’ or of having ‘received an obligation,’ a moral truth is asserted–this namely, that having received a benefit or a favour at the hands of another, we are thereby morally _bound_ to show ourselves grateful for the same. We cannot be ungrateful without denying not merely a moral truth, but one incorporated in the very language which we employ. Thus South, in a sermon, _Of the odious Sin of Ingratitude_, has well asked, ‘If the conferring of a kindness did not _bind_ the person upon whom it was conferred to the returns of gratitude, why, in the universal dialect of the world, are kindnesses called _obligations_?’ [Footnote: _Sermons_, London, 1737, vol. i. p. 407.]
Once more–the habit of calling a woman’s chastity her ‘virtue’ is significant. I will not deny that it may spring in part from a tendency which often meets us in language, to narrow the whole circle of virtues to some one upon which peculiar stress is laid; [Footnote: Thus in Jewish Greek [Greek: eleaemosnuae] stands often for [Greek: dikaosnuae] (Deut. vi. 25; Ps. cii. 6, LXX), or almsgiving for righteousness.] but still, in selecting this peculiar one as _the_ ‘virtue’ of woman, there speaks out a true sense that this is indeed for her the citadel of the whole moral being, the overthrow of which is the overthrow of all; that it is the keystone of the arch, which being withdrawn, the whole collapses and falls.
Or consider all which is witnessed for us in ‘kind.’ We speak of a ‘kind’ person, and we speak of man-‘kind,’ and perhaps, if we think about the matter at all, fancy that we are using quite different words, or the same words in senses quite unconnected. But they are connected, and by closest bonds; a ‘kind’ person is one who acknowledges his kinship with other men, and acts upon it; confesses that he owes to them, as of one blood with himself, the debt of love. [Footnote: Thus Hamlet does much more than merely play on words when he calls his father’s brother, who had married his mother, ‘A little more than _kin_, and less than _kind_.’ [For the relation between _kind_ (the adj.) and _kind_ (‘nature,’ the sb.) see Skeat’s Dict.]] Beautiful before, how much more beautiful do ‘kind’ and ‘kindness’ appear, when we apprehend the root out of which they grow, and the truth which they embody; that they are the acknowledgment in loving deeds of our kinship with our brethren; of the relationship which exists between all the members of the human family, and of the obligations growing out of the same.
But I observed just now that there are also words bearing on them the slime of the serpent’s trail; uses, too, of words which imply moral perversity–not upon their parts who employ them now in their acquired senses, but on theirs from whom little by little they received their deflection, and were warped from their original rectitude. A ‘prude’ is now a woman with an over-done affectation of a modesty which she does not really feel, and betraying the absence of the substance by this over-preciseness and niceness about the shadow. Goodness must have gone strangely out of fashion, the corruption of manners must have been profound, before matters could have come to this point. ‘Prude,’ a French word, means properly virtuous or prudent. [Footnote: [Compare French _prude_, on the etymology of which see Schelar’s _French Dict._, ed. 3 (1888)].] But where morals are greatly and generally relaxed, virtue is treated as hypocrisy; and thus, in a dissolute age, and one incredulous of any inward purity, by the ‘prude’ or virtuous woman is intended a sort of female Tartuffe, affecting a virtue which it is taken for granted none can really possess; and the word abides, a proof of the world’s disbelief in the realities of goodness, of its resolution to treat them as hypocrisies and deceits.
Again, why should ‘simple’ be used slightingly, and ‘simpleton’ more slightingly still? The ‘simple’ is one properly of a single fold; [Footnote: [Latin _simplicem_; for Lat. _sim-_, _sin-_= Greek [Greek: ha] in [Greek: ha-pax], see Brugmann, _Grundriss_, Section 238, Curtius, _Greek Etym._ No. 599.]] a Nathanael, whom as such Christ honoured to the highest (John i. 47); and, indeed, what honour can be higher than to have nothing _double_ about us, to be without _duplicities_ or folds? Even the world, which despises ‘simplicity,’ does not profess to admire ‘duplicity,’ or double-foldedness. But inasmuch as it is felt that a man without these folds will in a world like ours make himself a prey, and as most men, if obliged to choose between deceiving and being deceived, would choose the former, it has come to pass that ‘simple’ which in a kingdom of righteousness would be a world of highest honour, carries with it in this world of ours something of contempt. [Footnote: ‘Schlecht,’ which in modern German means bad, good for nothing, once meant good,–good, that is, in the sense of right or straight, but has passed through the same stages to the meaning which it now possesses, ‘albern’ has done the same (Max Müller, _Science of Language_, 2nd series, p. 274).] Nor can we help noting another involuntary testimony borne by human language to human sin. I mean this,–that an idiot, or one otherwise deficient in intellect, is called an ‘innocent’ or one who does no hurt; this use of ‘innocent’ assuming that to do hurt and harm is the chief employment to which men turn their intellectual powers, that, where they are wise, they are oftenest wise to do evil.
Nor are these isolated examples of the contemptuous use which words expressive of goodness gradually acquire. Such meet us on every side. Our ‘silly’ is the Old-English ‘saelig’ or blessed. We see it in a transition state in our early poets, with whom ‘silly’ is an affectionate epithet which sheep obtain for their harmlessness. One among our earliest calls the newborn Lord of Glory Himself, ‘this harmless _silly_ babe,’ But ‘silly’ has travelled on the same lines as ‘simple,’ ‘innocent,’ and so many other words. The same moral phenomenon repeats itself continually. Thus ‘sheepish’ in the _Ormulum_ is an epithet of honour: it is used of one who has the mind of Him who was led as a sheep to the slaughter. At the first promulgation of the Christian faith, while the name of its Divine Founder was still strange to the ears of the heathen, they were wont, some in ignorance, but more of malice, slightly to mispronounce this name, turning ‘Christus’ into ‘Chrestus’–that is, the benevolent or benign. That these last meant no honour thereby to the Lord of Life, but the contrary, is certain; this word, like ‘silly,’ ‘innocent,’ ‘simple,’ having already contracted a slight tinge of contempt, without which there would have been no inducement to fasten it on the Saviour. The French have their ‘bonhomie’ with the same undertone of contempt, the Greeks their [Greek: eyetheia]. Lady Shiel tells us of the modern Persians, ‘They have odd names for describing the moral qualities; “Sedakat” means sincerity, honesty, candour; but when a man is said to be possessed of “sedakat,” the meaning is that he is a credulous, contemptible simpleton.’ [Footnote: _Life and Manners in Persia_, p. 247.] It is to the honour of the Latin tongue, and very characteristic of the best aspects of Roman life, that ‘simplex’ and ‘simplicitas’ never acquired this abusive signification.
Again, how prone are we all to ascribe to chance or fortune those gifts and blessings which indeed come directly from God–to build altars to Fortune rather than to Him who is the author of every good thing which we have gotten. And this faith of men, that their blessings, even their highest, come to them by a blind chance, they have incorporated in a word; for ‘happy’ and ‘happiness’ are connected with ‘hap,’ which is chance;–how unworthy, then, to express any true felicity, whose very essence is that it excludes hap or chance, that the world neither gave nor can take it away. [Footnote: The heathen with their [Greek: eudaimonia], inadequate as this word must be allowed to be, put _us_ here to shame.] Against a similar misuse of ‘fortunate,’ ‘unfortunate,’ Wordsworth very nobly protests, when, of one who, having lost everything else, had yet kept the truth, he exclaims:
‘Call not the royal Swede _unfortunate_, Who never did to _Fortune_ bend the knee.’
There are words which reveal a wrong or insufficient estimate that men take of their duties, or that at all events others have taken before them; for it is possible that the mischief may have been done long ago, and those who now use the words may only have inherited it from others, not helped to bring it about themselves. An employer of labour advertises that he wants so many ‘hands’; but this language never could have become current, a man could never have thus shrunk into a ‘hand’ in the eyes of his fellow-man, unless this latter had in good part forgotten that, annexed to those hands which he would purchase to toil for him, were also heads and hearts [Footnote: A similar use of [Greek: somata] for slaves in Greek rested originally on the same forgetfulness of the moral worth of every man. It has found its way into the Septuagint and Apocrypha (Gen. xxxvi. 6; 2 Macc. viii. 11; Tob. x. 10); and occurs once in the New Testament (Rev. xviii. 13). [In Gen. xxxvi. 6 the [Greek: somata] of the Septuagint is a rendering of the Hebrew _nafshôth_, souls, so Luther translates ‘Seelen.’]]–a fact, by the way, of which, if he persists in forgetting it, he may be reminded in very unwelcome ways at the last. In Scripture there is another not unfrequent putting of a part for the whole, as when it is said, ‘The same day there were added unto them about three thousand _souls_’ (Acts ii. 41). ‘Hands’ here, ‘souls’ there–the contrast may suggest some profitable reflections.
There is another way in which the immorality of words mainly displays itself, and in which they work their worst mischief; that is, when honourable names are given to dishonourable things, when sin is made plausible; arrayed, it may be, in the very colours of goodness, or, if not so, yet in such as go far to conceal its own native deformity. ‘The tongue,’ as St. James has said, ‘is a _world_ of iniquity’ (iii. 7); or, as some would render his words, and they are then still more to our purpose, ‘_the ornament_ of iniquity,’ that which sets it out in fair and attractive colours.
How much wholesomer on all accounts is it that there should be an ugly word for an ugly thing, one involving moral condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of a little coarseness, rather than one which plays fast and loose with the eternal principles of morality, makes sin plausible, and shifts the divinely reared landmarks of right and wrong, thus bringing the user of it under the woe of them ‘that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter’ (Isai. v. 20). On this text, and with reference to this scheme, South has written four of his grandest sermons, bearing this striking title, _Of the fatal Imposture and Force of Words_. [Footnote: _Sermons_, 1737, vol. ii. pp. 313-351; vol. vi. pp. 3-120. Thus on those who pleaded that their ‘honour’ was engaged, and that therefore they could not go back from this or that sinful act:–‘Honour is indeed a noble thing, and therefore the word which signifies it must needs be very plausible. But as a rich and glistening garment may be cast over a rotten body, so an illustrious commanding word may be put upon a vile and an ugly thing–for words are but the garments, the loose garments of things, and so may easily be put off and on according to the humour of him who bestows them. But the body changes not, though the garments do.’] How awful, yea how fearful, is this ‘imposture and force’ of theirs, leading men captive at will. There is an atmosphere about them which they are evermore diffusing, a savour of life or of death, which we insensibly inhale at each moral breath we draw. [Footnote: Bacon’s words have often been quoted, but they will bear being quoted once more: Credunt enim homines rationem suam verbis imperare. Sed fit etiam ut verba vim suam super intellectum retorqueant et reflectant.] ‘Winds of the soul,’ as we have already heard them called, they fill its sails, and are continually impelling it upon its course, to heaven or to hell.
Thus how different the light in which we shall have learned to regard a sin, according as we have been wont to designate it, and to hear it designated, by a word which brings out its loathsomeness and deformity; or by one which palliates this and conceals; men, as one said of old, being wont for the most part to be ashamed not of base deeds but of base names affixed to those deeds. In the murder trials at Dublin, 1883, those destined to the assassin’s knife were spoken of by approvers as persons to be removed, and their death constantly described as their ‘removal.’ In Sussex it is never said of a man that he is drunk. He may be ‘tight,’ or ‘primed,’ or ‘crank,’ or ‘concerned in liquor,’ nay, it may even be admitted that he had taken as much liquor as was good for him; but that he was drunk, oh never. [Footnote: ‘Pransus’ and ‘potus,’ in like manner, as every Latin scholar knows, mean much more than they say.] Fair words for foul things are everywhere only too frequent; thus in ‘drug-damned Italy,’ when poisoning was the rifest, nobody was said to be poisoned; it was only that the death of this one or of that had been ‘assisted’ (aiutata). Worse still are words which seek to turn the edge of the divine threatenings against some sin by a jest; as when in France a subtle poison, by whose aid impatient heirs delivered themselves from those who stood between them and the inheritance which they coveted, was called ‘poudre de succession.’ We might suppose beforehand that such cloaks for sin would be only found among people in an advanced state of artificial cultivation. But it is not so. Captain Erskine, who visited the Fiji Islands before England had taken them into her keeping, and who gives some extraordinary details of the extent to which cannibalism then prevailed among their inhabitants, pork and human flesh being their two staple articles of food, relates in his deeply interesting record of his voyage that natural pig they called ‘_short_ pig,’ and man dressed and prepared for food, ‘_long_ pig.’ There was doubtless an attempt here to carry off with a jest the revolting character of the practice in which they indulged. For that they were themselves aware of this, that their consciences did bear witness against it, was attested by their uniform desire to conceal, if possible, all traces of the practice from European eyes.
But worst, perhaps, of all are names which throw a flimsy veil of sentiment over some sin. What a source, for example, of mischief without end in our country parishes is the one practice of calling a child born out of wedlock a ‘love-child,’ instead of a bastard. It would be hard to estimate how much it has lowered the tone and standard of morality among us; or for how many young women it may have helped to make the downward way more sloping still. How vigorously ought we to oppose ourselves to all such immoralities of language. This opposition, it is true, will never be easy or pleasant; for many who will endure to commit a sin, will profoundly resent having that sin called by its right name. Pirates, as Aristotle tells us, in his time called themselves ‘purveyors.’ [Footnote: _Rhet_. iii. 2: [Greek: oi laestai autous poriotas kalousi nun.]] Buccaneers, men of the same bloody trade, were by their own account ‘brethren of the coast.’ Shakespeare’s thieves are only true to human nature, when they name themselves ‘St. Nicholas’ clerks,’ ‘michers,’ ‘nuthooks,’ ‘minions of the moon,’ anything in short but thieves; when they claim for their stealing that it shall not be so named, but only conveying (‘convey the wise it call’); the same dislike to look an ugly fact in the face reappearing among the voters in some of our corrupter boroughs, who receive, not bribes–they are hugely indignant if this is imputed to them–but ‘head-money’ for their votes. Shakespeare indeed has said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; but there are some things which are not roses, and which are counted to smell a great deal sweeter being called by any other name than their own. Thus, to deal again with bribes, call a bribe ‘palm oil,’ or a ‘pot de vin,’ and how much of its ugliness disappears. Far more moral words are the English ‘sharper’ and ‘blackleg’ than the French ‘chevalier d’industrie’: [Footnote: For the rise of this phrase, see Lemontey, _Louis XIV_. p. 43.] and the same holds good of the English equivalent, coarse as it is, for the Latin ‘conciliatrix.’ In this last word we have a notable example of the putting of sweet for bitter, of the attempt to present a disgraceful occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its own proper deformity. [Footnote: This tendency of men to throw the mantle of an honourable word over a dishonourable thing, or, vice versa, to degrade an honourable thing, when they do not love it, by a dishonourable appellation, has in Greek a word to describe it, [Greek: hypokorizesthai], itself a word with an interesting history; while the great ethical teachers of Greece frequently occupy themselves in detecting and denouncing this most mischievous among all the impostures of words. Thus, when Thucydides (iii. 82) would paint the fearful moral ruin which her great Civil War had wrought, he adduces this alteration of the received value of words, this fitting of false names to everything–names of honour to the base, and of baseness to the honourable–as one of the most remarkable tokens of this, even as it again set forward the evil, of which it had been first the result.] Use and custom soon dim our eyes in such matters as these; else we should be deeply struck by a familiar instance of this falsehood in names, one which perhaps has never struck us at all–I mean the profane appropriation of ‘eau de vie’ (water of life), a name borrowed from some of the Saviour’s most precious promises (John iv. 14; Rev. xxii. 17), to a drink which the untutored savage with a truer instinct has named ‘fire-water’; which, sad to say, is known in Tahiti as ‘British water’; and which has proved for thousands and tens of thousands, in every clime, not ‘water of life,’ but the fruitful source of disease, crime, and madness, bringing forth first these, and when these are finished, bringing forth death. There is a blasphemous irony in this appropriation of the language of heaven to that which, not indeed in its use, but too frequent abuse, is the instrument of hell, that is almost without a parallel. [Footnote: Milton in a profoundly instructive letter, addressed by him to one of the friends whom he made during his Italian tour, encourages him in those philological studies to which he had devoted his life by such words as these: Neque enim qui sermo, purusne an corruptus, quaeve loquendi proprietas quotidiana populo sit, parvi interesse arbitrandum est, quae res Athenis non semel saluti fuit; immo vero, quod Platonis sententia est, immutato vestiendi more habituque graves in Republica motus mutationesque portendi, equidem potius collabente in vitium atque errorem loquendi usu occasum ejus urbis remque humilem et obscuram subsequi crediderim: verba enim partim inscita et putida, partim mendosa et perperam prolata, quid si ignavos et oscitantes et ad servile quidvis jam olim paratos incolarum animos haud levi indicio declarant? Contra nullum unquam audivimus imperium, nullam civitatem non mediocriter saltern floruisse, quamdiu linguae sua gratia, suusque cultus constitit. Compare an interesting Epistle (the 114th) of Seneca.] If I wanted any further evidence of this, the moral atmosphere which words diffuse, I would ask you to observe how the first thing men do, when engaged in controversy with others, be it in the conflict of the tongue or the pen, or of weapons more wounding yet, if such there be, is ever to assume some honourable name to themselves, such as, if possible, shall beg the whole subject in dispute, and at the same time to affix on their adversaries a name which shall place them in a ridiculous or contemptible or odious light. [Footnote: See p. 33.] A deep instinct, deeper perhaps than men give any account of to themselves, tells them how far this will go; that multitudes, utterly unable to weigh the arguments on one side or the other, will yet be receptive of the influences which these words are evermore, however imperceptibly, diffusing. By argument they might hope to gain over the reason of a few, but by help of these nicknames they enlist what at first are so much more potent, the prejudices and passions of the many, on their side. Thus when at the breaking out of our Civil War the Parliamentary party styled _themselves_ ‘The Godly,’ while to the Royalists they gave the title of ‘The Malignants,’ it is certain that, wherever they could procure entrance and allowance for these terms, the question upon whose side the right lay was already decided. The Royalists, it is true, made exactly the same employment of what Bentham used to call question-begging words, of words steeped quite as deeply in the passions which animated _them_. It was much when at Florence the ‘Bad Boys,’ as they defiantly called themselves, were able to affix on the followers of Savonarola the title of Piagnoni or The Snivellers. So, too, the Franciscans, when they nicknamed the Dominicans ‘Maculists,’ as denying, or at all events refusing to affirm as a matter of faith, that the Blessed Virgin was conceived without stain (sine macula), perfectly knew that this title would do much to put their rivals in an odious light. The copperhead in America is a peculiarly venomous snake. Something effectual was done when this name was fastened, as it lately was, by one party in America on its political opponents. Not otherwise, in some of our northern towns, the workmen who refuse to join a trade union are styled ‘knobsticks,’ ‘crawlers,’ ‘scabs,’ ‘blacklegs.’ Nor can there be any question of the potent influence which these nicknames of contempt and scorn exert. [Footnote: [See interesting chapter on Political Nicknames in D’Israeli’s _Curiosities of Literature_.]]
Seeing, then, that language contains so faithful a record of the good and of the evil which in time past have been working in the minds and hearts of men, we shall not err, if we regard it as a moral barometer indicating and permanently marking the rise or fall of a nation’s life. To study a people’s language will be to study _them_, and to study them at best advantage; there, where they present themselves to us under fewest disguises, most nearly as they are. Too many have had a hand in the language as it now is, and in bringing it to the shape in which we find it, it is too entirely the collective work of a whole people, the result of the united contributions of all, it obeys too immutable laws, to allow any successful tampering with it, any making of it to witness to any other than the actual facts of the case. [Footnote: Terrien Poncel, _Du Langage_, p. 231: Les langues sont faites à l’usage des peuples qui les parlent; elles sont animées chacune d’un esprit différent, et suivent un mode particulier d’action, conforme à leur principe. ‘L’esprit d’une nation et le caractère de sa langue, a écrit G. de Humboldt, ‘sont si intimement liés ensemble, que si l’un était donné, l’autre devrait pouvoir s’en déduire exactement.’ La langue n’est autre chose que la manifestation extérieure de l’esprit des peuples; leur langue est leur esprit, et leur esprit est leur langue, de telle sorte qu’en devéloppant et perfectionnant l’un, ils développent et perfectionnent nécessairement l’autre. And a recent German writer has well said, Die Sprache, das selbstgewebte Kleid der Vorstellung, in welchem jeder Faden wieder eine Vorstellung ist, kann uns, richtig betrachtet, offenbaren, welche Vorstellungen die Grundfaden bildeten (Gerber, _Die Sprache als Kunst_).] Thus the frivolity of an age or nation, its mockery of itself, its inability to comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the feebleness of its moral indignation against evil, all this will find an utterance in the employment of solemn and earnest words in senses comparatively trivial or even ridiculous. ‘Gehenna,’ that word of such terrible significance on the lips of our Lord, has in French issued in ‘gêne,’ and in this shape expresses no more than a slight and petty annoyance. ‘Ennui’ meant once something very different from what now it means. [Footnote: _Ennui_ is derived from the Late Latin phrase _in odio esse_.] Littré gives as its original signification, ‘anguish of soul, caused by the death of persons beloved, by their absence, by the shipwreck of hopes, by any misfortunes whatever.’ ‘Honnêteté,’ which should mean that virtue of all virtues, honesty, and which did mean it once, standing as it does now for external civility and for nothing more, marks a willingness to accept the slighter observances and pleasant courtesies of society in the room of deeper moral qualities. ‘Vérité’ is at this day so worn out, has been used so often where another and very different word would have been more appropriate, that not seldom a Frenchman at this present who would fain convince us of the truth of his communication finds it convenient to assure us that it is ‘la vraie vérité.’ Neither is it well that words, which ought to have been reserved for the highest mysteries of the spiritual life, should be squandered on slight and secular objects,–‘spirituel’ itself is an example in point,–or that words implying once the deepest moral guilt, as is the case with ‘perfide,’ ‘malice,’ ‘malin,’ in French, should be employed now almost in honour, applied in jest and in play.
Often a people’s use of some single word will afford us a deeper insight into their real condition, their habits of thought and feeling, than whole volumes written expressly with the intention of imparting this insight. Thus ‘idiot,’ a Greek word, is abundantly characteristic of Greek life. The ‘idiot,’ or [Greek: idiotas], was originally the _private_ man, as contradistinguished from one clothed with office, and taking his share in the management of public affairs. In this its primary sense it was often used in the English of the seventeenth century; as when Jeremy Taylor says, ‘Humility is a duty in great ones, as well as in _idiots_.’ It came then to signify a rude, ignorant, unskilled, intellectually unexercised person, a boor; this derived or secondary sense bearing witness to a conviction woven deep into the Greek mind that contact with public life, and more or less of participation in it, was indispensable even to the right development of the intellect, [Footnote: Hare, _Mission of the Comforter_, p. 552.] a conviction which would scarcely have uttered itself with greater clearness than it does in this secondary use of ‘idiot.’ Our tertiary, in which the ‘idiot’ is one deficient in intellect, not merely with intellectual powers unexercised, is only this secondary pushed a little farther. Once more, how wonderfully characteristic of the Greek mind it is that the language should have one and the same word ([Greek: kalos]), to express the beautiful and the good–goodness being thus contemplated as the highest beauty; while over against this stands another word ([Greek: aischros]) used alike for the ugly to look at and for the morally bad. Again, the innermost differences between the Greek and the Hebrew reveal themselves in the several salutations of each, in the ‘Rejoice’ of the first, as contrasted with the ‘Peace’ of the second. The clear, cheerful, world-enjoying temper of the Greek embodies itself in the first; he could desire nothing better or higher for himself, nor wish it for his friend, than to have _joy_ in his life. But the Hebrew had a deeper longing within him, and one which finds utterance in his ‘Peace.’ It is not hard to perceive why this latter people should have been chosen as the first bearers of that truth which indeed enables truly to _rejoice_, but only through first bringing _peace_; nor why from them the word of life should first go forth. It may be urged, indeed, that these were only forms, and such they may have at length become; as in our ‘good-by’ or ‘adieu’ we can hardly be said now to commit our friend to the Divine protection; yet still they were not forms at the beginning, nor would they have held their ground, if ever they had become such altogether.
How much, again, will be sometimes involved in the gradual disuse of one name, and the coming up of another in its room. Thus, little as the fact, and the moral significance of the fact, may have been noticed at the time, what an epoch was it in the history of the Papacy, and with what distinctness marking a more thorough secularizing of its whole tone and spirit, when ‘_Ecclesia_ Romana,’ the official title by which it was wont at an earlier day to designate itself, gave place to the later title, ‘_Curia_ Romana,’ the Roman _Church_ making room for the Roman _Court_. [Footnote: See on this matter _The Pope and the Council_, by Janus, p. 215.] The modifications of meaning which a word has undergone as it had been transplanted from one soil to another, so that one nation borrowing it from another, has brought into it some force foreign to it before, has deepened, or extenuated, or otherwise modified its meaning,–this may reveal to us, as perhaps nothing else would, fundamental diversities of character existing between them. The word in Greek exactly corresponding to our ‘self-sufficient’ is one of honour, and was applied to men in their praise. And indeed it was the glory of the heathen philosophy to teach man to find his resources in his own bosom, to be thus sufficient for himself; and seeing that a true centre without him and above him, a centre in God, had not been revealed to him, it was no shame for him to seek it there; far better this than to have no centre at all. But the Gospel has taught us another lesson, to find our sufficiency in God: and thus ‘self- sufficient,’ to the Greek suggesting no lack of modesty, of humility, or of any good thing, at once suggests such to us. ‘Self-sufficiency’ no man desires now to be attributed to him. The word carries for us its own condemnation; and its different uses, for honour once, for reproach now, do in fact ground themselves on the innermost differences between the religious condition of the world before Christ and after.
It was not well with Italy, she might fill the world with exquisite specimens of her skill in the arts, with pictures and statues of rarest loveliness, but all higher national life was wanting to her during those centuries in which she degraded ‘virtuoso,’ or the virtuous man, to signify one skilled in the appreciation of painting, music, and sculpture; for these, the ornamental fringe of a people’s life, can never, without loss of all manliness of character, be its main texture and woof–not to say that excellence in them has been too often dissociated from all true virtue and moral worth. The opposite exaggeration of the Romans, for whom ‘virtus’ meant predominantly warlike courage, the truest ‘manliness’ of men, was more tolerable than this; for there is a sense in which a man’s ‘valour’ is his value, is the measure of his worth; seeing that no virtue can exist among men who have not learned, in Milton’s glorious phrase,’ to hate the cowardice of doing wrong.’ [Footnote: It did not escape Plutarch, imperfect Latin scholar as he was, that ‘virtus’ far more nearly corresponded to [Greek: andreia] than to [Greek: arete] (_Coriol. I_)] It could not but be morally ill with a people among whom ‘morbidezza’ was used as an epithet of praise, expressive of a beauty which on the score of its sickly softness demanded to be admired. There was too sure a witness here for the decay of moral strength and health, when these could not merely be dissevered from beauty, but implicitly put in opposition to it. Nor less must it have fared ill with Italians, there was little joy and little pride which they could have felt in their country, at a time when ‘pellegrino,’ meaning properly the strange or the foreign, came to be of itself a word of praise, and equivalent to beautiful. [Footnote: Compare Florio’s Ital. Diet.: ‘pelegrino, excellent, noble, rare, pregnant, singular and choice.’] Far better the pride and assumption of that ancient people who called all things and persons beyond their own pale barbarous and barbarians; far better our own ‘outlandish,’ used with something of the same contempt. There may be a certain intolerance in our use of these; yet this how much healthier than so far to have fallen out of conceit with one’s own country, so far to affect things foreign, that these last, merely on the strength of being foreign, commend themselves as beautiful in our sight. How little, again, the Italians, until quite later years, can have lived in the spirit of their ancient worthies, or reverenced the most illustrious among these, we may argue from the fact that they should have endured so far to degrade the name of one among their noblest, that every glib and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture- galleries, palaces, and ruins, is called ‘cicerone,’ or a Cicero! It is unfortunate that terms like these, having once sprung up, are not again, or are not easily again, got rid of. They remain, testifying to an ignoble past, and in some sort helping to maintain it, long after the temper and tone of mind that produced them has passed away. [Footnote: See on this matter Marsh, _On the English Language_, New York, 1860, p. 224.]
Happily it is nearly impossible for us in England to understand the mingled scorn, hatred, fear, suspicion, contempt, which in time past were associated with the word ‘sbirri’ in Italian. [Footnote: [Compare V. Hugo’s allusion to Louis Napoleon in the _Châtiments_:
‘Qui pour la mettre en croix livra, _Sbire_ cruel!
Rome républicaine à Rome catholique!’]]
These ‘sbirri’ were the humble, but with all this the acknowledged, ministers of justice; while yet everything which is mean and false and oppressive, which can make the name of justice hateful, was implied in this title of theirs, was associated with their name. There is no surer sign of a bad oppressive rule, than when the titles of the administrators of law, titles which should be in themselves so honourable, thus acquire a hateful undermeaning. What a world of concussions, chicane and fraud, must have found place, before tax- gatherer, or exciseman, ‘publican,’ as in our English Bible, could become a word steeped in hatred and scorn, as alike for Greek and Jew it was; while, on the other hand, however unwelcome the visits of the one or the interference of the other may be to us, yet the sense of the entire fairness and justice with which their exactions are made, acquits these names for us of the slightest sense of dishonour. ‘Policeman’ has no evil subaudition with us; though in the last century, when a Jonathan Wild was possible, ‘catchpole,’ a word in Wiclif’s time of no dishonour at all, was abundantly tinged with this scorn and contempt. So too, if at this day any accidental profits fall or ‘escheat’ to the Crown, they are levied with so much fairness and more than fairness to the subject, that, were not the thing already accomplished, ‘escheat’ would never yield ‘cheat,’ nor ‘escheator’ ‘cheater,’ as through the extortions and injustices for which these dues were formerly a pretext, they actually have done.
It is worse, as marking that a still holier sanctuary than that of civil government has become profane in men’s sight, when words which express sacred functions and offices become redolent of scorn. How thankful we may be that in England we have no equivalent to the German ‘Pfaffe,’ which, identical with ‘papa’ and ‘pope,’ and a name given at first to any priest, now carries with it the insinuation of almost every unworthiness in the forms of meanness, servility, and avarice which can render the priest’s office and person base and contemptible.
Much may be learned by noting the words which nations have been obliged to borrow from other nations, as not having the same of home-growth– this in most cases, if not in all, testifying that the thing itself was not native, but an exotic, transplanted, like the word that indicated it, from a foreign soil. Thus it is singularly characteristic of the social and political life of England, as distinguished from that of the other European nations, that to it alone the word ‘club’ belongs; France and Germany, having been alike unable to grow a word of their own, have borrowed ours. That England should have been the birthplace of ‘club’ is nothing wonderful; for these voluntary associations of men for the furthering of such social or political ends as are near to the hearts of the associates could have only had their rise under such favourable circumstances as ours. In no country where there was not extreme personal freedom could they have sprung up; and as little in any where men did not know how to use this freedom with moderation and self-restraint, could they long have been endured. It was comparatively easy to adopt the word; but the ill success of the ‘club’ itself everywhere save here where it is native, has shown that it was not so easy to transplant or, having transplanted, to acclimatize the thing. While we have lent this and other words, political and industrial for the most part, to the French and Germans, it would not be less instructive, if time allowed, to trace our corresponding obligations to them.
And scarcely less significant and instructive than the presence of a word in a language, will be occasionally its absence. Thus Fronto, a Greek orator in Roman times, finds evidence of an absence of strong family affection on the part of the Romans in the absence of any word in the Latin language corresponding to the Greek [Greek: philostorgos] How curious, from the same point of view, are the conclusions which Cicero in his high Roman fashion draws from the absence of any word in the Greek answering to the Latin ‘ineptus’; not from this concluding, as we might have anticipated, that the character designated by the word was wanting, but rather that the fault was so common, so universal with the Greeks, that they failed to recognize it as a fault at all. [Footnote: _De Orat_. ii. 4: Quem enim nos _ineptum_ vocamus, is mihi videtur ab hoc nomen habere ductum, quod non sit aptus. Idque in sermonis nostri consuetudine perlate patet. Nam qui aut tempus quid postulet, non videt, aut plura loquitur, aut se ostentat, aut eorum quibuscum est vel dignitatis vel commodi rationem non habet, aut denique in aliquo genere aut inconcinnus aut multus est, is ineptus esse dicitur. Hoc vitio cumulata est eruditissima illa Graecorum natio. Itaque quod vim hujus mali Graeci non vident, ne nomen quidem ei vitio imposuerunt. Ut enim quasras omnia, quomodo Graeci ineptum appellent, non invenies.] Very instructive you may find it to note these words, which one people possess, but to which others have nothing to correspond, so that they have no choice but to borrow these, or else to go without altogether. Here are some French words for which it would not be easy, nay, in most cases it would be impossible, to find exact equivalents in English or in German, or probably in any language: ‘aplomb,’ ‘badinage,’ ‘borné,’ ‘chic,’ ‘chicane,’ ‘cossu,’ ‘coterie,’ ‘égarement,’ ‘élan,’ ‘espièglerie,’ ‘etourderie,’ ‘friponnerie,’ ‘gentil,’ ‘ingénue,’ ‘liaison,’ ‘malice,’ ‘parvenu,’ ‘persiflage,’ ‘prévenant,’ ‘ruse,’ ‘tournure,’ ‘tracasserie,’ ‘verve.’ It is evident that the words just named have to do with shades of thought which are to a great extent unfamiliar to us; for which, at any rate, we have not found a name, have hardly felt that they needed one. But fine and subtle as in many instances are the thoughts which these words embody, there are deeper thoughts struggling in the bosom of a people, who have devised for themselves such words as the following: ‘gemüth,’ ‘heimweh,’ ‘innigkeit,’ ‘sehnsucht,’ ‘tiefsinn,’ ‘sittsamkeit,’ ‘verhängniss,’ ‘weltschmerz,’ ‘zucht’; all these being German words which, in a similar manner, partially or wholly fail to find their equivalents in French.
The petty spite which unhappily so often reigns between nations dwelling side by side with one another, as it embodies itself in many shapes, so it finds vent in the words which they borrow from one another, and the use to which they put them. Thus the French, borrowing ‘hablár’ from the Spaniards, with whom it means simply to speak, give it in ‘hâbler’ the sense of to brag; the Spaniards paying them off in exactly their own coin, for of ‘parler’ which in like manner is but to speak in French, they make ‘parlár,’ which means to prate, to chat. [Footnote: See Darmesteter, _The Life of Words_, Eng. ed. p. 100.]
But it is time to bring this lecture to an end. These illustrations, to which it would be easy to add more, justify all that has been asserted of a moral element existing in words; so that they do not hold themselves neutral in that great conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, which is dividing the world; that they are not satisfied to be passionless vehicles, now of the truth, and now of lies. We see, on the contrary, that they continually take their side, are some of them children of light, others children of this world, or even of darkness; they beat with the pulses of our life; they stir with our passions; we clothe them with light; we steep them in scorn; they receive from us the impressions of our good and of our evil, which again they are most active still further to propagate and diffuse. [Footnote: Two or three examples of what we have been affirming, drawn from the Latin, may fitly here find place. Thus Cicero (_Tusc_. iii. 7) laments of ‘confidens’ that it should have acquired an evil signification, and come to mean bold, over-confident in oneself, unduly pushing (compare Virgil,_Georg_. iv. 444), a meaning which little by little had been superinduced on the word, but etymologically was not inherent in it at all. In the same way ‘latro,’ having left two earlier meanings behind, one of these current so late as in Virgil (_Aen_. xii. 7), settles down at last in the meaning of robber. Not otherwise ‘facinus’ begins with being simply a fact or act, something done; but ends with being some act of outrageous wickedness. ‘Pronuba’ starts with meaning a bridesmaid it ignobly ends with suggesting a procuress.] Must we not own then that there is a wondrous and mysterious world, of which we may hitherto have taken too little account, around us and about us? Is there not something very solemn and very awful in wielding such an instrument as this of language is, with such power to wound or to heal, to kill or to make alive? and may not a deeper meaning than hitherto we have attached to it, lie in that saying, ‘By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned’?
LECTURE IV.
ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
Language, being ever in flux and flow, and, for nations to which letters are still strange, existing only for the ear and as a sound, we might beforehand expect would prove the least trustworthy of all vehicles whereby the knowledge of the past has reached our present; that one which would most certainly betray its charge. In actual fact it has not proved so at all. It is the main, oftentimes the only, connecting link between the two, an ark riding above the water-floods that have swept away or submerged every other landmark and memorial of bygone ages and vanished generations of men. Far beyond all written records in a language, the language itself stretches back, and offers itself for our investigation–‘the pedigree of nations,’ as Johnson calls it [Footnote: This statement of his must be taken with a certain amount of qualification. It is not always that races are true to the end to their language; external forces are sometimes too strong. Thus Celtic disappeared before Latin in Gaul and Spain. Slavonic became extinct in Prussia two centuries ago, German taking its room; the negroes of Hayti speak French, and various American tribes have exchanged their own idioms for Spanish and Portuguese. See upon this matter Sayce’s _Principles of Comparative Philology_, pp. 175-181.]– itself in its own independent existence a far older and at the same time a far more instructive document than any book, inscription, or other writing which employs it. The written records may have been falsified by carelessness, by vanity, by fraud, by a multitude of causes; but language never deceives, if only we know how to question it aright.
Such investigations as these, it is true, lie plainly out of your sphere. Not so, however, those humbler yet not less interesting inquiries, which by the aid of any tolerable dictionary you may carry on into the past history of your own land, as attested by the present language of its people. You know how the geologist is able from the different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary, succeeding one another, which he meets, to arrive at a knowledge of the successive physical changes through which a region has passed; is, so to say, in a condition to preside at those past changes, to measure the forces that were at work to produce them, and almost to indicate their date. Now with such a language as the English before us, bearing as it does the marks and footprints of great revolutions profoundly impressed upon it, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not of gravel and chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Low German, Danish, Norman words, and then once more Latin and French, with slighter intrusions from many other quarters: and any one with skill to analyse the language might, up to a certain point, re-create for himself the history of the people speaking that language, might with tolerable accuracy appreciate the diverse elements out of which that people was made up, in what proportion these were mingled, and in what succession they followed, one upon the other.
Would he trace, for example, the relation in which the English and Norman occupants of this land stood to one another? An account of this, in the main as accurate as it would be certainly instructive, might be drawn from an intelligent study of the contributions which they have severally made to the English language, as bequeathed to us jointly by them both. Supposing all other records to have perished, we might still work out and almost reconstruct the history by these aids; even as now, when so many documents, so many institutions survive, this must still be accounted the most important, and that of which the study will introduce us, as no other can, into the innermost heart and life of large periods of our history.
Nor, indeed, is it hard to see why the language must contain such instruction as this, when we a little realize to ourselves the stages by which it has reached us in its present shape. There was a time when the languages which the English and the Norman severally spoke, existed each by the side of, but un-mingled with, the other; one, that of the small dominant class, the other that of the great body of the people. By degrees, however, with the reconciliation and partial fusion of the two races, the two languages effected a transaction; one indeed prevailed over the other, but at the same time received a multitude of the words of that other into its own bosom. At once there would exist duplicates for many things. But as in popular speech two words will not long exist side by side to designate the same thing, it became a question how the relative claims of the English and Norman word should adjust themselves, which should remain, which should be dropped; or, if not dropped, should be transferred to some other object, or express some other relation. It is not of course meant that this was ever formally proposed, or as something to be settled by agreement; but practically one was to be taken and one left. Which was it that should maintain its ground? Evidently, where a word was often on the lips of one race, its equivalent seldom on those of the other, where it intimately cohered with the whole manner of life of one, was only remotely in contact with that of the other, where it laid strong hold on one, and only slight on the other, the issue could not be doubtful. In several cases the matter was simpler still: it was not that one word expelled the other, or that rival claims had to be adjusted; but that there never had existed more than one word, the thing which that word noted having been quite strange to the other section of the nation.
Here is the explanation of the assertion made just now–namely, that we might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an analysis of our present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it. Thus we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour, and pre-eminence, with one remarkable exception (to be adduced presently), descend to us from them–‘sovereign,’ ‘sceptre,’ ‘throne,’ ‘realm,’ ‘royalty,’ ‘homage,’ ‘prince,’ ‘duke,’ ‘count,’ (‘earl’ indeed is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his ‘countess’ from the Norman), ‘chancellor,’ ‘treasurer,’ ‘palace,’ ‘castle,’ ‘dome,’ and a multitude more. At the same time the one remarkable exception of ‘king’ would make us, even did we know nothing of the actual facts, suspect that the chieftain of this ruling race came in not upon a new title, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line of its succession; that the true continuity of the nation had not, in fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due time to assert itself anew.
And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, almost all articles of luxury, all having to do with the chase, with chivalry, with personal adornment, are Norman throughout; with the broad basis of the language, and therefore of the life, it is otherwise. The great features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire; the divisions of time; three out of the four seasons, spring, summer, and winter; the features of natural scenery, the words used in earliest childhood, the simpler emotions of the mind; all the prime social relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister,–these are of native growth and un-borrowed. ‘Palace’ and ‘castle’ may have reached us from the Norman, but to the Saxon we owe far dearer names, the ‘house,’ the ‘roof,’ the ‘home,’ the ‘hearth.’ His ‘board’ too, and often probably it was no more, has a more hospitable sound than the ‘table’ of his lord. His sturdy arms turn the soil; he is the ‘boor,’ the ‘hind,’ the ‘churl’; or if his Norman master has a name for him, it is one which on his lips becomes more and more a title of opprobrium and contempt, the ‘villain.’ The instruments used in cultivating the earth, the ‘plough,’ the ‘share,’ the ‘rake,’ the ‘scythe,’ the ‘harrow,’ the ‘wain,’ the ‘sickle,’ the ‘spade,’ the ‘sheaf,’ the ‘barn,’ are expressed in his language; so too the main products of the earth, as wheat, rye, oats, bere, grass, flax, hay, straw, weeds; and no less the names of domestic animals. You will remember, no doubt, how in the matter of these Wamba, the Saxon jester in _Ivanhoe_, plays the philologer, [Footnote: Wallis, in his _Grammar_, p. 20, had done so before.] having noted that the names of almost all animals, so long as they are alive, are Saxon, but when dressed and prepared for food become Norman–a fact, he would intimate, not very wonderful; for the Saxon hind had the charge and labour of tending and feeding them, but only that they might appear on the table of his Norman lord. Thus ‘ox,’ ‘steer,’ ‘cow,’ are Saxon, but ‘beef’ Norman; ‘calf’ is Saxon, but ‘veal’ Norman; ‘sheep’ is Saxon, but ‘mutton’ Norman: so it is severally with ‘swine’ and ‘pork,’ ‘deer’ and ‘venison,’ ‘fowl’ and ‘pullet.’ ‘Bacon,’ the only flesh which perhaps ever came within the hind’s reach, is the single exception. Putting all this together, with much more of the same kind, which has only been indicated here, we should certainly gather, that while there are manifest tokens preserved in our language of the Saxon having been for a season an inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of English life, however overlaid for a while, had still made good their claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after language; and to the justice of this conclusion all other historic records, and the present social condition of England, consent in bearing witness.
Then again, who could doubt, even if the fact were not historically attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- ‘alchemy,’ ‘alcohol,’ ‘alembic,’ ‘algebra,’ ‘alkali,’ ‘almanack,’ ‘azimuth,’ ‘cypher,’ ‘elixir,’ ‘magazine,’ ‘nadir,’ ‘tariff,’ ‘zenith,’ ‘zero ‘?–for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit cleaving to them. In like manner, even though history were silent on the matter, we might conclude, and we know that we should rightly conclude, that the origins of the monastic system are to be sought in the Greek and not in the Latin branch of the Church, seeing that with hardly an exception the words expressing the constituent elements of the system, as ‘anchorite,’ ‘archimandrite,’ ‘ascetic,’ ‘cenobite,’ ‘hermit,’ ‘monastery,’ ‘monk,’ are Greek and not Latin.
But the study of words will throw rays of light upon a past infinitely more remote than any which I have suggested here, will reveal to us secrets of the past, which else must have been lost to us for ever. Thus it must be a question of profound interest for as many as count the study of man to be far above every other study, to ascertain what point of culture that Indo-European race of which we come, the _stirps generosa et historica_ of the world, as Coleridge has called it, had attained, while it was dwelling still as one family in its common home. No voices of history, the very faintest voices of tradition, reach us from ages so far removed from our own. But in the silence of all other voices there is one voice which makes itself heard, and which can tell us much. Where Indian, and Greek, and Latin, and Teutonic designate some object by the same word, and where it can be clearly shown that they did not, at a later day, borrow that word one from the other, the object, we may confidently conclude, must have been familiar to the Indo-European race, while yet these several groups of it dwelt as one undivided family together. Now they have such common words for the chief domestic animals–for ox, for sheep, for horse, for dog, for goose, and for many more. From this we have a right to gather that before the migrations began, they had overlived and outgrown the fishing and hunting stages of existence, and entered on the pastoral. They have _not_ all the same words for the main products of the earth, as for corn, wheat, barley, wine; it is tolerably evident therefore that they had not entered on the agricultural stage. So too from the absence of names in common for the principal metals, we have a right to argue that they had not arrived at a knowledge of the working of these.
On the other hand, identical names for dress, for house, for door, for garden, for numbers as far as a hundred, for the primary relations of the family, as father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, for the Godhead, testify that the common stock, intellectual and moral, was not small which they severally took with them when they went their way, each to set up for itself and work out its own destinies in its own appointed region of the earth. [Footnote: See Brugmann, _Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen_ (1886), Section 2.] This common stock may, indeed, have been much larger than these investigations declare; for a word, once common to all these languages, may have survived only in one; or possibly may have perished in all. Larger it may very well, but poorer it cannot, have been. [Footnote: Ozanam (_Les Germains avant le Christianisme_, p. 155): Dans le vocabulaire d’une langue on a tout le spectacle d’une civilisation. On y voit ce qu’un peuple sait des choses invisibles, si les notions de Dieu, de l’âme, du devoir, sont assez pures chez lui pour ne souffrir que des termes exacts. On mesure la puissance de ses institutions par le nombre et la propriété des termes qu’elles veulent pour leur service; la liturgie a ses paroles sacramentelles, la procédure a ses formules. Enfin, si ce peuple a étudié la nature, il faut voir à quel point il en a pénétré les secrets, par quelle variété d’expressions, par quels sons flatteurs ou énergiques, il a cherché à décrire les divers aspects du ciel et de la terre, à faire, pour ainsi dire, l’inventaire des richesses temporelles dont il dispose.]
This is one way in which words, by their presence or their absence, may teach us history which else we now can never know. I pass to other ways.
There are vast harvests of historic lore garnered often in single words; important facts which they at once proclaim and preserve; these too such as sometimes have survived nowhere else but in them. How much history lies in the word ‘church.’ I see no sufficient reason to dissent from those who derive it from the Greek [Greek: kyriakae], ‘that which pertains to the Lord,’ or ‘the house which is the Lord’s.’ It is true that a difficulty meets us at the threshold here. How explain the presence of a Greek word in the vocabulary of our Teutonic forefathers? for that _we_ do not derive it immediately from the Greek, is certain. What contact, direct or indirect, between the languages will account for this? The explanation is curious. While Angles, Saxons, and other tribes of the Teutonic stock were almost universally converted through contact with the Latin Church in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, or by its missionaries, some Goths on the Lower Danube had been brought at an earlier date to the knowledge of Christ by Greek missionaries from Constantinople; and this [Greek: kyriakae] or ‘church,’ did, with certain other words, pass over from the Greek to the Gothic tongue; these Goths, the first converted and the first therefore with a Christian vocabulary, lending the word in their turn to the other German tribes, to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers among the rest; and by this circuit it has come round from Constantinople to us. [Footnote: The passage most illustrative of the parentage of the word is from Walafrid Strabo (about A.D. 840): Ab ipsis autem Graecis Kyrch à Kyrios, et alia multa accepimus. Sicut domus Dei Basilica, i.e. Regia à Rege, sic etiam Kyrica, i.e. Dominica à Domino, nuncupatur. Si autem quaeritur, quâ occasione ad nos vestigia haec graecitatis advenerint, dicendum praecipuè à Gothis, qui et Getae, cùm eo tempore, quo ad fidem Christi perducti sunt, in Graecorum provinciis commorantes, nostrum, i.e. theotiscum sermonem habuerint. Cf. Rudolf von Raumer, _Einwirkung des Christenthums auf die Althochdeutsche Sprache_, p. 288; Niedner, _Kirch. Geschichte_, p. 2. [It may, however, be as well to remark that no trace of the Greek [Greek: kyriakae] occurs in the literary remains of the Gothic language which have come down to us; the Gothic Christians borrowed [Greek: ekklaesia], as the Latin and Celtic Christians did.]]
Or again, interrogate ‘pagan’ and ‘paganism,’ and you will find important history in them. You are aware that ‘pagani,’ derived from ‘pagus,’ a village, had at first no religious significance, but designated the dwellers in hamlets and villages as distinguished from the inhabitants of towns and cities. It was, indeed, often applied to _all_ civilians as contradistinguished from the military caste; and this fact may have had a certain influence, when the idea of the faithful as soldiers of Christ was strongly realized in the minds of men. But it was mainly in the following way that it grew to be a name for those alien from the faith of Christ. The Church fixed itself first in the seats and centres of intelligence, in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire; in them its earliest triumphs were won; while, long after these had accepted the truth, heathen superstitions and idolatries lingered on in the obscure hamlets and villages; so that ‘pagans’ or villagers, came to be applied to _all_ the remaining votaries of the old and decayed superstitions, although not all, but only most of them, were such. In an edict of the Emperor Valentinian, of date A.D. 368, ‘pagan’ first assumes this secondary meaning. ‘Heathen’ has run a course curiously similar. When the Christian faith first found its way into Germany, it was the wild dwellers on the _heaths_ who were the slowest to accept it, the last probably whom it reached. One hardly expects an etymology in _Piers Plowman_; but this is there:
‘_Hethene_ is to mene after _heth_, And untiled erthe.’
B. 15, 451, Skeat’s ed. (Clarendon Press).
Here, then, are two instructive notices–one, the historic fact that the Church of Christ planted itself first in the haunts of learning and intelligence; another, morally more significant, that it did not shun discussion, feared not to encounter the wit and wisdom of this world, or to expose its claims to the searching examination of educated men; but, on the contrary, had its claims first recognized by them, and in the great cities of the world won first a complete triumph over all opposing powers. [Footnote: There is a good note on ‘pagan’ in Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_, c. 21, at the end; and in Grimm’s _Deutsche Mythol_. p. 1198; and the history of the changes in the word’s use is well traced in another interest by Mill, _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 271.]
I quoted in my first lecture the saying of one who, magnifying the advantage to be derived from such studies as ours, did not fear to affirm that oftentimes more might be learned from the history of a word than from the history of a campaign. Thus follow some Latin word,. ‘imperator’ for example; as Dean Merivale has followed it in his _History of the Romans_, [Footnote: Vol. iii. pp. 441-452.] and you will own as much. But there is no need to look abroad. Words of our own out of number, such as ‘barbarous,’ ‘benefice,’ ‘clerk,’ ‘common-sense,’ ‘romance,’ ‘sacrament,’ ‘sophist,’ [Footnote: For a history of ‘sophist’ see Sir Alexander Grant’s _Ethics of Aristotle_, 2nd ed. vol. i. p. 106, sqq.] would prove the truth of the assertion. Let us take ‘sacrament’; its history, while it carries us far, will yet carry us by ways full of instruction; and these not the less instructive, while we restrict our inquiries to the external history of the word. We find ourselves first among the forms of Roman law. The ‘sacramentum’ appears there as the deposit or pledge, which in certain suits plaintiff and defendant were alike bound to make, and whereby they engaged themselves to one another; the loser of the suit forfeiting his pledge to sacred temple uses, from which fact the name ‘sacramentum,’ or thing consecrated, was first derived. The word, as next employed, plants us amidst the military affairs of Rome, designating the military oath by which the Roman soldiers mutually engaged themselves at the first enlisting never to desert their standards, or turn their backs upon the enemy, or abandon their general,–this employment teaching us the sacredness which the Romans attached to their military engagements, and going far to account for their victories. The word was then transferred from this military oath to any solemn oath whatsoever. These three stages ‘sacramentum’ had already passed through, before the Church claimed it for her own, or indeed herself existed at all. Her early writers, out of a sense of the sacredness and solemnity of the oath, transferred this name to almost any act of special solemnity or sanctity, above all to such mysteries as intended more than met eye or ear. For them the Incarnation was a ‘sacrament,’ the lifting up of the brazen serpent was a ‘sacrament,’ the giving of the manna, and many things more. It is well to be acquainted with this phase of the word’s history, depriving as it does of all convincing power those passages quoted by Roman Catholic controversialists from early church-writers in proof of their seven sacraments. It is quite true that these may have called marriage a ‘sacrament’ and confirmation a ‘sacrament,’ and we may reach the Roman seven without difficulty; but then they called many things more, which even the theologians of Rome do not include in the ‘sacraments’ properly so called, by the same name; and this evidence, proving too much, in fact proves nothing at all. One other stage in the word’s history remains; its limitation, namely, to the two ‘sacraments,’ properly so called, of the Christian Church. A reminiscence of the employment of ‘sacrament,’ an employment which still survived, to signify the plighted troth of the Roman soldier to his captain and commander, was that which had most to do with the transfer of the word to Baptism; wherein we, with more than one allusion to this oath of theirs, pledge ourselves to fight manfully under Christ’s banner, and to continue his faithful soldiers and servants to our life’s end; while the _mysterious_ character of the Holy Eucharist was mainly that which earned for it this name.
We have already found history imbedded in the word ‘frank’; but I must bring forward the Franks again, to account for the fact with which we are all familiar, that in the East not Frenchmen alone, but _all_ Europeans, are so called. Why, it may be asked, should this be? This wide use of ‘Frank’ dates from the Crusades; Michaud, the chief French historian of these, finding evidence here that his countrymen took a decided lead, as their gallantry well fitted them to do, in these romantic enterprises of the Middle Ages; impressed themselves so strongly on the imagination of the East as _the_ crusading nation of Europe, that their name was extended to all the warriors of Christendom. He is not here snatching for them more than the honour which is justly theirs. A very large proportion of the noblest Crusaders, from Godfrey of Bouillon to St. Lewis, as of others who did most to bring these enterprises about, as Pope Urban II., as St. Bernard, were French, and thus gave, in a way sufficiently easy to explain, an appellation to all. [Footnote: See Fuller, _Holy War_, b. i. c. 13.]
To the Crusades also, and to the intense hatred which they roused throughout Christendom against the Mahomedan infidels, we owe ‘miscreant,’ as designating one to whom the vilest principles and practices are ascribed. A ‘miscreant,’ at the first, meant simply a misbeliever. The name would have been applied as freely, and with as little sense of injustice, to the royal-hearted Saladin as to the vilest wretch that fought in his armies. By degrees, however, those who employed it tinged it more and more with their feeling and passion, more and more lost sight of its primary use, until they used it of any whom they regarded with feelings of abhorrence, such as those which they entertained for an infidel; just as ‘Samaritan’ was employed by the Jews simply as a term of reproach, and with no thought whether he on whom it was fastened was in fact one of that detested race or not; where indeed they were quite sure that he was not (John viii. 48). ‘Assassin’ also, an Arabic word whose story you will find no difficulty in obtaining,–you may read it in Gibbon, [Footnote: Decline and Fall, c. 64.]–connects itself with a romantic chapter in the history of the Crusades.
Various explanations of ‘cardinal’ have been proposed, which should account for the appropriation of this name to the parochial clergy of the city of Rome with the subordinate bishops of that diocese. This appropriation is an outgrowth, and a standing testimony, of the measureless assumptions of the Roman See. One of the favourite comparisons by which that See was wont to set out its relation of superiority to all other Churches of Christendom was this; it was the hinge, or ‘cardo,’ on which all the rest of the Church, as the door, at once depended and turned. It followed presently upon this that the clergy of Rome were ‘cardinales,’ as nearest to, and most closely connected with, him who was thus the hinge, or ‘cardo,’ of all. [Footnote: Thus a letter professing to be of Pope Anacletus the First in the first century, but really belonging to the ninth: Apostolica Sedes _cardo_ et caput omnium Ecclesiarum a Domino est constituta; et sicut _cardine_ ostium regitur, sic hujus S. Sedis auctoritate omnes Ecclesiae reguntur. And we have ‘cardinal’ put in relation with this ‘cardo’ in a genuine letter of Pope Leo IX.: Clerici summae Sedis _Cardinales_ dicuntur, _cardini_ utique illi quo cetera moventur, vicinius adhaerentes.]
‘Legend’ is a word with an instructive history. We all have some notion of what at this day a ‘legend’ means. It is a tale which is _not_ true, which, however historic in form, is not historic in fact, claims no serious belief for itself. It was quite otherwise once. By this name of ‘legends’ the annual commemorations of the faith and patience of God’s saints in persecution and death were originally called; these legends in this title which they bore proclaiming that they were worthy to be read, and from this worthiness deriving their name. At a later day, as corruptions spread through the Church, these ‘legends’ grew, in Hooker’s words, ‘to be nothing else but heaps of frivolous and scandalous vanities,’ having been ‘even with disdain thrown out, the very nests which bred them abhorring them.’ How steeped in falsehood, and to what an extent, according to Luther’s indignant turn of the word, the ‘legends’ (legende) must have become ‘lyings’ (lügende), we can best guess, when we measure the moral forces which must have been at work, before that which was accepted at the first as ‘worthy to be read,’ should have been felt by this very name to announce itself as most unworthy, as belonging at best to the region of fable, if not to that of actual untruth.
An inquiry into the pedigree of ‘dunce’ lays open to us an important page in the intellectual history of Europe. Certain theologians in the Middle Ages were termed Schoolmen; having been formed and trained in the cloister and cathedral _schools_ which Charlemagne and his immediate successors had founded. These were men not to be lightly spoken of, as they often are by those who never read a line of their works, and have not a thousandth part of their wit; who moreover little guess how many of the most familiar words which they employ, or misemploy, have descended to them from these. ‘Real,’ ‘virtual,’ ‘entity,’ ‘nonentity,’ ‘equivocation,’ ‘objective,’ ‘subjective,’ with many more unknown to classical Latin, but now almost necessities to us, were first coined by the Schoolmen; and, passing over from them into the speech of others more or less interested in their speculations, have gradually filtered through the successive strata of society, till now some of them have reached to quite the lowest. At the Revival of Learning, however, their works fell out of favour: they were not written in classical Latin: the forms into which their speculations were thrown were often unattractive; it was mainly in their authority that the Roman Church found support for her perilled dogmas. On all these accounts it was esteemed a mark of intellectual progress to have broken with them, and thrown off their yoke. Some, however, still clung to these Schoolmen, and to one in particular, John _Duns_ Scotus, the most illustrious teacher of the Franciscan Order. Thus it came to pass that many times an adherent of the old learning would seek to strengthen his position by an appeal to its famous doctor, familiarly called Duns; while those of the new learning would contemptuously rejoin, ‘Oh, you are a _Dunsman_’ or more briefly, ‘You are a _Duns_,’ –or, ‘This is a piece of _duncery_’; and inasmuch as the new learning was ever enlisting more and more of the genius and scholarship of the age on its side, the title became more and more a term of scorn. ‘Remember ye not,’ says Tyndal, ‘how within this thirty years and far less, the old barking curs, _Dunce’s_ disciples, and like draff called Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin, and Hebrew?’ And thus from that conflict long ago extinct between the old and the new learning, that strife between the medieval and the modern theology, we inherit ‘dunce’ and ‘duncery.’ The lot of Duns, it must be confessed, has been a hard one, who, whatever his merits as a teacher of Christian truth, was assuredly one of the keenest and most subtle-witted of men. He, the ‘subtle Doctor’ by pre- eminence, for so his admirers called him, ‘the wittiest of the school- divines,’ as Hooker does not scruple to style him, could scarcely have anticipated, and did not at all deserve, that his name should be turned into a by-word for invincible stupidity.
This is but one example of the singular fortune waiting upon words. We have another of a parallel injustice, in the use which ‘mammetry,’ a contraction of ‘Mahometry,’ obtained in our early English. Mahomedanism being the most prominent form of false religion with which our ancestors came in contact, ‘mammetry’ was used, up to and beyond the Reformation, to designate first any false religion, and then the worship of idols; idolatry being proper to, and a leading feature of, most of the false religions of the world. Men did not pause to remember that Mahomedanism is the great exception, being as it is a protest against all idol-worship whatsoever; so that it was a signal injustice to call an idol a ‘mawmet’ or a Mahomet, and idolatry ‘mammetry.’
A misnomer such as this may remind us of the immense importance of possessing such names for things as shall not involve or suggest an error. We have already seen this in the province of the moral life; but in other regions also it nearly concerns us. Resuming, as words do, the past, shaping the future, how important it is that significant facts or tendencies in the world’s history should receive their right names. It is a corrupting of the very springs and sources of knowledge, when we bind up not a truth, but an error, in the very nomenclature which we use. It is the putting of an obstacle in the way, which, however imperceptibly, is yet ever at work, hindering any right apprehension of the thing which has been thus erroneously noted.
Out of a sense of this, an eminent German scholar of the last century, writing _On the Influence of Opinions on Language_, did not stop here, nor make this the entire title of his book, but added another and further clause–_and on the Influence of Language on Opinions_; [Footnote: _Von dem Einfluss der Meinungen in die Sprache, und der Sprache in die Meinungen_, von J, D. Michaëlis, Berlin, 1760.] the matter which fulfils the promise of this latter clause constituting by far the most interesting and original portion of his work: for while the influence of opinions on words is so little called in question, that the assertion of it sounds almost like a truism, this, on the contrary, of words on opinions, would doubtless present itself as a novelty to many. And yet it is an influence which has been powerfully felt in every region of human knowledge, in science, in art, in morals, in theology. The reactive energy of words, not merely on the passions of men (for that of course), but on their opinions calmly and deliberately formed, would furnish a very curious chapter in the history of human knowledge and human ignorance.
Sometimes words with no fault of theirs, for they did not originally involve any error, will yet draw some error in their train; and of that error will afterwards prove the most effectual bulwark and shield. Let me instance–the author just referred to supplies the example–the word ‘crystal.’ The strange notion concerning the origin of the thing, current among the natural philosophers of antiquity, and which only two centuries ago Sir Thomas Browne thought it worth while to place first and foremost among the _Vulgar Errors_ that he undertook to refute, was plainly traceable to a confusion occasioned by the name. Crystal, as men supposed, was ice or snow which had undergone such a process of induration as wholly and for ever to have lost its fluidity: [Footnote: Augustine: Quid est crystallum? Nix est glacie durata per multos annos, ita ut a sole vel igne facile dissolvi non possit. So too in Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragedy of _Valentinian_, a chaste matron is said to be ‘cold as crystal _never to be thawed again_.’] and Pliny, backing up one mistake by another, affirmed that it was only found in regions of extreme cold. The fact is, that the Greek word for crystal originally signified ice; but after a while was also imparted to that diaphanous quartz which has so much the look of ice, and which alone _we_ call by this name; and then in a little while it was taken for granted that the two, having the same name, were in fact the same substance; and this mistake it took ages to correct.
Natural history abounds in legends. In the word ‘leopard’ one of these has been permanently bound up; the error, having first given birth to the name, being afterwards itself maintained and propagated by it. The leopard, as is well known, was not for the Greek and Latin zoologists a species by itself, but a mongrel birth of the male panther or pard and the lioness; and in ‘leopard’ or ‘lion-pard’ this fabled double descent is expressed. [Footnote: This error lasted into modern times; thus Fuller (_A Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, vol. i. p. 195): ‘Leopards and mules are properly no creatures.’] ‘Cockatrice’ embodies a somewhat similar fable; the fable however in this case having been invented to account for the name. [Footnote: See Wright, _The Bible Word Book_, s. v. [The word _cockatrice_ is a corrupt form of Late Latin _cocodrillus_, which again is a corruption of Latin _crocodilus_, Gr. [Greek: krokodeilos], a crocodile.]]
It was Eichhorn who first suggested the calling of a certain group of languages, which stand in a marked contradistinction to the Indo- European or Aryan family, by the common name of ‘Semitic.’ A word which should include all these was wanting, and this one was handy and has made its fortune; at the same time implying, as ‘Semitic’ does, that these are all languages spoken by races which are descended from Shem, it is eminently calculated to mislead. There are non-Semitic races, the Phoenicians for example, which have spoken a Semitic language; there are Semitic races which have not spoken one. Against ‘Indo-European’ the same objection may be urged; seeing that several languages are European, that is, spoken within the limits of Europe, as the Maltese, the Finnish, the Hungarian, the Basque, the Turkish, which lie altogether outside of this group.
‘Gothic’ is plainly a misnomer, and has often proved a misleader as well, when applied to a style of architecture which belongs not to one, but to all the Germanic tribes; which, moreover, did not come into existence till many centuries after any people called Goths had ceased from the earth. Those, indeed, who first called this medieval architecture ‘Gothic,’ had no intention of ascribing to the Goths the first invention of it, however this language may seem now to bind up in itself an assertion of the kind. ‘Gothic’ was at first a mere random name of contempt. The Goths, with the Vandals, being the standing representatives of the rude in manners and barbarous in taste, the critics who would fain throw scorn on this architecture as compared with that classical Italian which alone seemed worthy of their admiration, [Footnote: The name, as the designation of a style of architecture, came to us from Italy. Thus Fuller in his _Worthies_: ‘Let the Italians deride our English and condemn them for _Gothish_ buildings.’ See too a very curious expression of men’s sentiments about Gothic architecture as simply equivalent to barbarous, in Phillips’s _New World of Words_, 1706, s.v. ‘Gothick.’] called it ‘Gothic,’ meaning rude and barbarous thereby. We who recognize in this Gothic architecture the most wondrous and consummate birth of genius in one region of art, find it hard to believe that this was once a mere title of slight and scorn, and sometimes wrongly assume a reference in the word to the people among whom first it arose.
‘Classical’ and ‘romantic,’ names given to opposing schools of literature and art, contain an absurd antithesis; and either say nothing at all, or say something erroneous. ‘Revival of Learning’ is a phrase only partially true when applied to that mighty intellectual movement in Western Europe which marked the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth. A revival there might be, and indeed there was, of _Greek_ learning at that time; but there could not be properly affirmed a revival of Latin, inasmuch as it had never been dead; or, even as those who dissent from this statement must own, had revived nearly two centuries before. ‘Renaissance,’ applied in France to the new direction which art took about the age of Francis the First, is another question-begging word. Very many would entirely deny that the bringing back of an antique pagan spirit, and of pagan forms as the utterance of this, into Christian art was a ‘renaissance’ or new birth of it at all.
But inaccuracy in naming may draw after it more serious mischief in regions more important. Nowhere is accuracy more vital than in words having to do with the chief facts and objects of our faith; for such words, as Coleridge has observed, are never inert, but constantly exercise an immense reactive influence, whether men know it or not, on such as use them, or often hear them used by others. The so-called ‘Unitarians,’ claiming by this name of theirs to be asserters of the unity of the Godhead, claim that which belongs to us by far better right than to them; which, indeed, belonging of fullest right to us, does not properly belong to them at all. I should, therefore, without any intention of offence, refuse the name to them; just as I should decline, by calling those of the Roman Obedience ‘Catholics,’ to give up the whole question at issue between them and us. So, also, were I one of them, I should never, however convenient it might sometimes prove, consent to call the great religious movement of Europe in the sixteenth century the ‘Reformation.’ Such in _our_ esteem it was, and in the deepest, truest sense; a shaping anew of things that were amiss in the Church. But how any who esteem it a disastrous, and, on their parts who brought it about, a most guilty schism, can consent to call it by this name, has always surprised me.
Let me urge on you here the importance of seeking in every case to acquaint yourselves with the circumstances under which any body of men who have played an important part in history, above all in the history of your own land, obtained the name by which they were afterwards themselves willing to be known, or which was used for their designation by others. This you may do as a matter of historical inquiry, and keeping entirely aloof in spirit from the bitterness, the contempt, the calumny, out of which very frequently these names were first imposed. Whatever of scorn or wrong may have been at work in them who coined or gave currency to the name, the name itself can never without serious loss be neglected by any who would truly understand the moral significance of the thing; for always something, oftentimes much, may be learned from it. Learn, then, about each one of these names which you meet in your studies, whether it was one that men gave to themselves; or one imposed on them by others, but never recognized by them; or one that, first imposed by others, was yet in course of time admitted and allowed by themselves. We have examples in all these kinds. Thus the ‘Gnostics’ call _themselves_ such; the name was of their own devising, and declared that whereof they made their boast; it was the same with the ‘Cavaliers’ of our Civil War. ‘Quaker,’ ‘Puritan,’ ‘Roundhead,’ were all, on the contrary, names devised by others, and never accepted by those to whom they were attached. To the third class ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ belong. These were nicknames originally of bitterest party hate, withdrawn from their earlier use, and fastened by two political bodies in England each on the other, [Footnote: In North’s _Examen_. p. 321, is a very lively, though not a very impartial, account of the rise of these names.] the ‘Whig’ being properly a Scottish covenanter, [Footnote: [For a full account of the name see Nares, and Todd’s _Johnson_.]] the ‘Tory’ an Irish bog-trotting freebooter; while yet these nicknames in tract of time so lost and let go what was offensive about them, that in the end they were adopted by the very parties themselves. Not otherwise the German ‘Lutherans’ were originally so called by their antagonists. [Footnote: Dr. Eck, one of the earliest who wrote against the Reformation, first called the Reformed ‘Lutherani.’] ‘Methodist,’ in like manner, was a title not first taken by the followers of Wesley, but fastened on them by others, while yet they have been subsequently willing, though with a certain reserve, to accept and to be known by it. ‘Momiers’ or ‘Mummers,’ a name in itself of far greater offence, has obtained in Switzerland something of the same allowance. Exactly in the same way ‘Capuchin’ was at first a jesting nickname, given by the gamins in the streets to that reformed branch of the Franciscans which afterwards accepted it as their proper designation. It was provoked by the peaked and pointed hood (‘cappuccio,’ ‘cappucino’) which they wore. The story of the ‘Gueux,’ or ‘Beggars,’ of Holland, and how they appropriated their name, is familiar, as I doubt not, to many. [Footnote: [See chapter on Political Nicknames in D’Israeli’s _Curiosities of Literature_.]]
A ‘Premier’ or ‘Prime Minister,’ though unknown to the law of England, is at present one of the institutions of the country. The acknowledged leadership of one member in the Government is a fact of only gradual growth in our constitutional history, but one in which the nation has entirely acquiesced,–nor is there anything invidious now in the title. But in what spirit the Parliamentary Opposition, having coined the term, applied it first to Sir Robert Walpole, is plain from some words of his spoken in the House of Commons, Feb. 11, 1742: ‘Having invested me with a kind of mock dignity, and styled me a _Prime Minister_, they [the Opposition] impute to me an unpardonable abuse of the chimerical authority which they only created and conferred.’
Now of these titles some undoubtedly, like ‘Capuchin’ instanced just now, stand in no very intimate connexion with those who bear them; and such names, though seldom without their instruction, yet plainly are not so instructive as others, in which the innermost heart of the thing named so utters itself, that, having mastered the name, we have placed ourselves at the central point, from whence best to master everything besides. It is thus with ‘Gnostic’ and ‘Gnosticism’; in the prominence given to _gnôsis_ or knowledge, as opposed to faith, lies the key to the whole system. The Greek Church has loved ever to style itself the Holy ‘Orthodox’ Church, the Latin, the Holy ‘Catholic’ Church. Follow up the thoughts which these words suggest. What a world of teaching they contain; above all when brought into direct comparison and opposition one with the other. How does all which is innermost in the Greek and Roman mind unconsciously reveal itself here; the Greek Church regarding as its chief blazon that its speculation is right, the Latin that its empire is universal. Nor indeed is it merely the Greek and Latin Churches which utter themselves here, but Greece and Rome in their deepest distinctions, as these existed from their earliest times. The key to the whole history, Pagan as well as Christian, of each is in these words. We can understand how the one established a dominion in the region of the mind which shall never be overthrown, the other founded an empire in the world whose visible effects shall never be done away. This is an illustrious example; but I am bold to affirm that, in their degree, all parties, religious and political, are known by names that will repay study; by names, to understand which will bring us far to an understanding of their strength and their weakness, their truth and their error, the idea and intention according to which they wrought. Thus run over in thought a few of those which have risen up in England. ‘Puritans,’ ‘Fifth-Monarchy men,’ ‘Seekers,’ ‘Levellers,’ ‘Independents,’ ‘Friends,’ ‘Rationalists,’ ‘Latitudnarians,’ ‘Freethinkers,’ these titles, with many more, have each its significance; and would you get to the heart of things, and thoroughly understand what any of these schools and parties intended, you must first understand what they were called. From this as from a central point you must start; even as you must bring back to this whatever further knowledge you may acquire; putting your later gains, if possible, in subordination to the name; at all events in connexion and relation with it.
You will often be able to glean information from names, such as, if not always important, will yet rarely fail to be interesting and instructive in its way. Thus what a record of inventions, how much of the past history of commerce do they embody and preserve. The ‘magnet’ has its name from Magnesia, a district of Thessaly; this same Magnesia, or else another like-named district in Asia Minor, yielding the medicinal earth so called. ‘Artesian’ wells are from the province of Artois in France, where they were long in use before introduced elsewhere. The ‘baldachin’ or ‘baudekin’ is from Baldacco, the Italian form of the name of the city of Bagdad, from whence the costly silk of this canopy originally came. [Footnote: [See Devic’s Supplement to Littré; the Italian _l_ is an attempt to pronounce the Arabic guttural Ghain. In the Middle Ages _Baldacco_ was often supposed to be the same as ‘Babylon’; see Florio’s _Ital. Dict._ (s.v. _baldacca_).]] The’ bayonet’ suggests concerning itself, though perhaps wrongly, that it was first made at Bayonne–the ‘bilbo,’ a finely tempered Spanish blade, at Bilbao–the ‘carronade’ at the Carron Ironworks in Scotland– ‘worsted’ that it was spun at a village not far from Norwich– ‘sarcenet’ that it is a Saracen manufacture–‘cambric’ that it reached us from Cambray–‘copper’ that it drew its name from Cyprus, so richly furnished with mines of this metal–‘fustian’ from Fostat, a suburb of Cairo–‘frieze’ from Friesland–‘silk’ or ‘sericum’ from the land of the Seres or Chinese–‘damask’ from Damascus–‘cassimere’ or ‘kersemere’ from Cashmere–‘arras’ from a town like-named–‘duffel,’ too, from a town near Antwerp so called, which Wordsworth has immortalized–‘shalloon’ from Chalons–‘jane’ from Genoa–‘gauze’ from Gaza. The fashion of the ‘cravat’ was borrowed from the Croats, or Crabats, as this wild irregular soldiery of the Thirty Years’ War used to be called. The ‘biggen,’ a plain cap often mentioned by our early writers, was first worn by the Beguines, communities of pietist women in the Low Countries in the twelfth century. The ‘dalmatic’ was a garment whose fashion was taken to be borrowed from Dalmatia. (_See_ Marriott.) England now sends her calicoes and muslins to India and the East; yet these words give standing witness that we once imported them from thence; for ‘calico’ is from Calicut, a town on the coast of Malabar, and ‘muslin’ from Mossul, a city in Asiatic Turkey. ‘Cordwain’ or ‘cordovan’ is from Cordova–‘delf’ from Delft–‘indigo’ (indicum) from India–‘gamboge’ from Cambodia–the ‘agate’ from a Sicilian river, Achates–the ‘turquoise’ from Turkey–the ‘chalcedony’ or onyx from Chalcedon–‘jet’ from the river Gages in Lycia, where this black stone is found. [Footnote: In Holland’s _Pliny_, the Greek form ‘gagates’ is still retained, though he oftener calls it ‘jeat’ or ‘geat.’] ‘Rhubarb’ is a corruption of Rha barbarum, the root from the savage banks of the Rha or Volga–‘jalap’ is from Jalapa, a town in Mexico–‘tobacco’ from the island Tobago–‘malmsey’ from Malvasia, for long a flourishing city in the Morea–‘sherry,’ or ‘sherris’ as Shakespeare wrote it, is from Xeres–‘macassar’ oil from a small Malay kingdom so named in the Eastern Archipelago–‘dittany’ from the mountain Dicte, in Crete– ‘parchment’ from Pergamum–‘majolica’ from Majorca–‘faience’ from the town named in Italian Faenza. A little town in Essex gave its name to the ’tilbury’; another, in Bavaria, to the ‘landau.’ The ‘bezant’ is a coin of Byzantium; the ‘guinea’ was originally coined (in 1663) of gold brought from the African coast so called; the pound ‘sterling’ was a certain weight of bullion according to the standard of the Easterlings, or Eastern merchants from the Hanse Towns on the Baltic. The ‘spaniel’ is from Spain; the ‘barb’ is a steed from Barbary; the pony called a ‘galloway’ from the county of Galloway in Scotland; the ‘tarantula’ is a poisonous spider, common in the neighbourhood of Tarentum. The ‘pheasant’ reached us from the banks of the Phasis; the ‘bantam’ from a Dutch settlement in Java so called; the ‘canary’ bird and wine, both from the island so named; the ‘peach’ (persica) declares itself a Persian fruit; ‘currants’ derived their name from Corinth, whence they were mostly shipped; the ‘damson’ is the ‘damascene’ or plum of Damascus; the ‘bergamot’ pear is named from Bergamo in Italy; the ‘quince’ has undergone so many changes in its progress through Italian and French to us, that it hardly retains any trace of Cydon (malum Cydonium), a town of Crete, from which it was supposed to proceed. ‘Solecisms,’ if I may find room for them here, are from Soloe, an Athenian colony in Cilicia, whose members soon forgot the Attic refinement of speech, and became notorious for the ungrammatical Greek which they talked.
And as things thus keep record in the names which they bear of the quarters from which they reached us, so also will they often do of the persons who, as authors, inventors, or discoverers, or in some other way, stood in near connexion with them. A collection in any language of all the names of persons which have since become names of things–from nomina _apellativa_ have become nomina _realia_–would be very curious and interesting, I will enumerate a few. Where the matter is not familiar to you, it will not be unprofitable to work back from the word or thing to the person, and to learn more accurately the connexion between them.
To begin with mythical antiquity–the Chimaera has given us ‘chimerical,’ Hermes ‘hermetic,’ Pan ‘panic,’ Paean, being a name of Apollo, the ‘peony,’ Tantalus ‘to tantalize,’ Hercules ‘herculean,’ Proteus ‘protean,’ Vulcan ‘volcano’ and ‘volcanic,’ and Daedalus ‘dedal,’ if this word, for which Spenser, Wordsworth, and Shelley have all stood godfathers, may find allowance with us. The demi-god Atlas figures with a world upon his shoulders in the title-page of some early works on geography; and has probably in this way lent to our map-books their name. Gordius, the Phrygian king who tied the famous ‘gordian’ knot which Alexander cut, will supply a natural transition from mythical to historical. The ‘daric,’ a Persian gold coin, very much of the same value as our own rose noble, had its name from Darius. Mausolus, a king of Caria, has left us ‘mausoleum,’ Academus ‘academy,’ Epicurus ‘epicure,’ Philip of Macedon a ‘philippic,’ being such a discourse as Demosthenes once launched against the enemy of Greece, and Cicero ‘cicerone.’ Mithridates, who had made himself poison-proof, gave us the now forgotten ‘mithridate’ (Dryden) for antidote; as from Hippocrates we derived ‘hipocras,’ or ‘ypocras,’ often occurring in our early poets, being a wine supposed to be mingled after the great physician’s receipt. Gentius, a king of Illyria, gave his name to the plant ‘gentian,’ having been, it is said, the first to discover its virtues. [Footnote: Pliny, _H. N._ xxv. 34.] Glaubers, who has bequeathed his salts to us, was a Dutch chemist of the seventeenth century. A grammar used to be called a ‘donat’ or ‘donet’ (Chaucer), from Donatus, a Roman grammarian of the fourth century, whose Latin grammar held its place as a school-book during a large part of the Middle Ages. Othman, more than any other the grounder of the Turkish dominion in Europe, reappears in our ‘Ottoman’; and Tertullian, strangely enough, in the Spanish ‘tertulia.’ The beggar Lazarus has given us ‘lazar’ and ‘lazaretto’; Veronica and the legend connected with her name, a ‘vernicle,’ being a napkin with the Saviour’s face impressed upon it. Simon Magus gave us ‘simony’; this, however, as we understand it now, is not a precise reproduction of his sin as recorded in Scripture. A common fossil shell is called an ‘ammonite’ from the fanciful resemblance to the twisted horns of Jupiter Ammon which was traced in it; Ammon again appearing in ‘ammonia.’ Our ‘pantaloons’ are from St. Pantaleone; he was the patron saint of the Venetians, who therefore very commonly received Pantaleon as their Christian name; it was from them transferred to a garment which they much affected. ‘Dunce,’ as we have seen, is derived from Duns Scotus. To come to more modern times, and not pausing at Ben Jonson’s ‘chaucerisms,’ Bishop Hall’s ‘scoganisms,’ from Scogan, Edward the Fourth’s jester, or his ‘aretinisms,’ from Aretin; these being probably not intended even by their authors to endure; a Roman cobbler named Pasquin has given us the ‘pasquil’ or ‘pasquinade.’ Derrick was the common hangman in the time of Charles II.; he bequeathed his name to the crane used for the lifting and moving of heavy weights. [Footnote: [But _derick_ in the sense of ‘gallows’ occurs as early as 1606 in Dekker’s _Seven Deadly Sins of London_, ed. Arber, p. 17; see Skeat’s _Etym. Dict._, ed. 2, p. 799.]] ‘Patch,’ a name of contempt not unfrequent in Shakespeare, was, it is said, the proper name of a favourite fool of Cardinal Wolsey’s. [Footnote: [The Cardinal’s two fools were occasionally called _patch_, a term for a ‘domestic fool,’ from the patchy, parti-coloured dress; see Skeat (s. v.).]] Colonel Negus in Queen Anne’s time is reported to have first mixed the beverage which goes by his name. Lord Orrery was the first for whom an ‘orrery’ was constructed; Lord Spencer first wore, or first brought into fashion, a ‘spencer’; and the Duke of Roquelaure the cloak which still bears his name. Dahl, a Swede, introduced from Mexico the cultivation of the ‘dahlia’; the ‘fuchsia’ is named after Fuchs, a German botanist of the sixteenth century; the ‘magnolia’ after Magnol, a distinguished French botanist of the beginning of the eighteenth; while the ‘camelia’ was introduced into Europe from Japan in 1731 by Camel, a member of the Society of Jesus; the ‘shaddock’ by Captain Shaddock, who first transplanted this fruit from the West Indies. In ‘quassia’ we have the name of a negro sorcerer of Surinam, who in 1730 discovered its properties, and after whom it was called. An unsavoury jest of Vespasian has attached his name in French to an unsavoury spot. ‘Nicotine,’ the poison recently drawn from tobacco, goes back for its designation to Nicot, a physician, who first introduced the tobacco-plant to the general notice of Europe. The Gobelins were a family so highly esteemed in France that the manufactory of tapestry which they had established in Paris did not drop their name, even after it had been purchased and was conducted by the State. A French Protestant refugee, Tabinet, first made ‘tabinet’ in Dublin; another Frenchman, Goulard, a physician of Montpellier, gave his to the soothing lotion, not unknown in our nurseries. The ‘tontine’ was conceived by Tonti, an Italian; another Italian, Galvani, first noted the phenomena of animal electricity or ‘galvanism’; while a third, Volta, lent a title to the ‘voltaic’ battery. Dolomieu, a French geologist, first called attention to a peculiar formation of rocks in Eastern Tyrol, called ‘dolomites’ after him. Colonel Martinet was a French officer appointed by Louvois as an army inspector; one who did his work excellently well, but has left a name bestowed often since on mere military pedants. ‘Macintosh,’ ‘doyly,’ ‘brougham,’ ‘hansom,’ ‘to mesmerize,’ ‘to macadamize,’ ‘to burke,’ ‘to boycott,’ are all names of persons or words formed from their names, and then transferred to things or actions, on the ground of some sort of connexion between the one and the other. [Footnote: Several other such words we have in common with the French. Of their own they have ‘sardanapalisme,’ any piece of profuse luxury, from Sardanapalus. For ‘lambiner,’ to dally or loiter over a task, they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the sixteenth century, but accused of sluggish movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of Pascal’s _Provincial Letters_ will remember Escobar, the famous casuist of the Jesuits, whose convenient devices for the relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the notoriety which he thus acquired, he owes his introduction into the French language; where ‘escobarder’ is used in the sense of to equivocate, and ‘escobarderie’ of subterfuge or equivocation. A pale green colour is in French called ‘céladon’ from a personage of this name, of a feeble and _fade_ tenderness, who figures in _Astrée_, a popular romance of the seventeenth century. An unpopular minister of finance, M. de Silhouette, unpopular because he sought to cut down unnecessary expenses in the State, saw his name transferred to the slight and thus cheap black outline portrait called a ‘silhouette’ (Sismondi, _Hist, des Français_, vol. xix, pp. 94, 95). In the ‘mansarde’ roof we are reminded of Mansart, the architect who introduced it. In ‘marivaudage’ the name of Marivaux is bound up, who was noted for the affected euphuism which goes by this name; very much as the sophist Gorgias gave [Greek: gorgiazein] to the Greek. The point of contact between the ‘fiacre’ and St. Fiacre is well known: hackney carriages, when first established in Paris, waited for their hiring in the court of an hotel which was adorned with an image of the Scottish saint.] To these I may add ‘guillotine,’ though Dr. Guillotin did not invent this instrument of death, even as it is a baseless legend that he died by it. Some improvements in it he made, and it thus happened that it was called after him.
Nor less shall we find history, at all events literary history, in the noting of the popular characters in books, who have supplied words that have passed into common speech. Thus from Homer we have ‘mentor’ for a monitor; ‘stentorian’ for loud-voiced; and inasmuch as, with all of Hector’s nobleness, there is a certain amount of big talk about him, he has given us ‘to hector’; [Footnote: See Col. Mure, _Language and Literature of Ancient Greece_, vol. i. p. 350.] while the medieval romances about the siege of Troy ascribe to Pandarus that shameful traffic out of which his name has passed into the words ‘to pander’ and ‘pandarism.’ ‘Rodomontade’ is from Rodomonte, a hero of Boiardo; who yet, it must be owned, does not bluster and boast, as the word founded on his name seems to imply; adopted by Ariosto, it was by him changed into Rodamonte. ‘Thrasonical’ is from Thraso, the braggart of Roman comedy. Cervantes has given us ‘quixotic’; Swift ‘lilliputian’; to Molière the French language owes ‘tartuffe’ and ‘tartufferie.’ ‘Reynard’ with us is a sort of duplicate for fox, while in French ‘renard’ has quite excluded the old ‘volpils’ being originally no more than the proper name of the fox-hero, the vulpine Ulysses, in that famous beast-epic of the Middle Ages, _Reineke Fuchs_. The immense popularity of this poem we gather from many evidences–from none more clearly than from this. ‘Chanticleer’ is the name of the cock, and ‘Bruin’ of the bear in the same poem. [Footnote: See Génin, _Des Variations du Langage Français_, p.12] These have not made fortune to the same extent of actually putting out of use names which before existed, but contest the right of existence with them.
Occasionally a name will embody and give permanence to an error; as when in ‘America’ the discovery of the New World, which belonged to Columbus, is ascribed to another eminent discoverer, but one who had no title to this honour, even as he was entirely guiltless of any attempt to usurp it for himself. [Footnote: Humboldt has abundantly shown this (_Kosmos_, vol. ii. note 457). He ascribes its general reception to its introduction into a popular work on geography, published in 1507. The subject has also been very carefully treated by Major, _Life of Prince Henry the Navigator_, 1868. pp. 382-388] Our ‘turkeys’ are not from Turkey, as was assumed by those who so called them, but from that New World where alone they are native. This error the French in another shape repeat with their ‘dinde’ originally ‘poulet _d’Inde_,’ or Indian fowl. There lies in ‘gipsy’ or Egyptian, the assumption that Egypt was the original home of this strange people; as was widely believed when they made their first appearance in Europe early in the fifteenth century. That this, however, was a mistake, their language leaves no doubt; proclaiming as it does that they are wanderers from a more distant East, an outcast tribe from Hindostan. ‘Bohemians’ as they are called by the French, testifies to a similar error, to the fact that at their first apparition in Western Europe they were supposed by the common people in France to be the expelled Hussites of Bohemia.
Where words have not embodied an error, it will yet sometimes happen that the sound or spelling will _to us_ suggest one. Against such in these studies it will be well to be on our guard. Thus many of us have been tempted to put ‘domus’ and ‘dominus’ into a connexion which really does not exist. There has been a stage in most boys’ geographical knowledge, when they have taken for granted that ‘Jutland’ was so called, not because it was the land of the Jutes, but on account of its _jutting_ out into the sea in so remarkable a manner. At a much later period of their education, ‘Aborigines,’ being the proper name of an Italian tribe, might very easily lead astray. [Footnote: See Pauly, _Encyclop._ s. v. Latium.] Who is there that has not mentally put the Gulf of Lyons in some connexion with the city of the same name? We may be surprised that the Gulf should have drawn its title from a city so remote and so far inland, but we accept the fact notwithstanding: the river Rhone, flowing by the one, and disemboguing in the other, seems to offer to us a certain link of connexion. There is indeed no true connexion at all between the two. In old texts this Gulf is generally called _Sinus Gallicus_; in the fourteenth century a few writers began to call it _Sinus Leonis_, the Gulf of the Lion, possibly from the fierceness of its winds and waves, but at any rate by a name having nothing to do with Lyons on the Rhone. The oak, in Greek [Greek: drys], plays no inconsiderable part in the Ritual of the Druids; it is not therefore wonderful if most students at one time of their lives have put the two in etymological relation. The Greeks, who with so characteristic a vanity assumed that the key to the meaning of words in all languages was to be found in their own, did this of course. So, too, there have not been wanting those who have traced in the name ‘Jove’ a heathen reminiscence of the awful name of Jehovah; while yet, however specious this may seem, on closer scrutiny the words declare that they have no connexion with one another, any more than ‘Iapetus’ and ‘Japheth,’ or, I may add, than ‘God’ and ‘good,’ which yet by an honourable moral instinct men can hardly refrain from putting into an etymological relation with each other.
Sometimes a falsely-assumed derivation of a word has reacted upon and modified its spelling. Thus it may have been with ‘hurricane.’ In the tearing up and _hurrying_ away of the _canes_ in the sugar plantations