Chapter VIII: Preface: To the First Edition (7)

And first, the meaning of a word oftentimes is gradually narrowed. It was once as a generic name, embracing many as yet unnamed species within itself, which all went by its common designation. By and bye it is found convenient that each of these should have its own more special sign allotted to it{209}. It is here just as in some newly enclosed country, where a single household will at first loosely occupy a whole district; while, as cultivation proceeds, this district is gradually parcelled out among a dozen or twenty, and under more accurate culture employs and sustains them all. Thus, for example, all food was once called ‘meat’; it is so in our Bible, and ‘horse-meat’ for fodder is still no unusual phrase; yet ‘meat’ is now a name given only to flesh. Any little book or writing was a ‘libel’ once; now only such a one as is scurrilous and injurious. Any leader was a ‘duke’ (dux); thus “_duke_ Hannibal” (Sir Thomas Eylot), “_duke_ Brennus” (Holland), “_duke_ Theseus” (Shakespeare), “_duke_ Amalek”, with other ‘dukes’ (Gen. xxxvi.). Any journey, by land as much as by sea, was a ‘voyage’. ‘Fairy’ was not a name restricted, as now, to the _Gothic_ mythology; thus “the _fairy_ Egeria” (Sir J. Harrington). A ‘corpse’ might be quite as well living as dead{210}. ‘Weeds’ were whatever covered the earth or the person; while now as respects the earth, those only are ‘weeds’ which are noxious, or at least self-sown; as regards the person, we speak of no other ‘weeds’ but the widow’s{211}. In each of these cases, the same contraction of meaning, the separating off and assigning to other words of large portions of this, has found place. ‘To starve’ (the German ‘sterben’, and generally spelt ‘sterve’ up to the middle of the seventeenth century), meant once to die any manner of death; thus Chaucer says, Christ “_sterved_ upon the cross for our redemption”; it now is restricted to the dying by cold or by hunger. Words not a few were once applied to both sexes alike, which are now restricted to the female. It is so even with ‘girl’, which was once a young person of either sex{212}; while other words in this list, such for instance as ‘hoyden’{213} (Milton, prose), ‘shrew’ (Chaucer), ‘coquet’ (Phillips, _New World of Words_), ‘witch’ (Wiclif), ‘termagant’ (Bale), ‘scold’, ‘jade’, ‘slut’ (Gower), must be regarded in their present exclusive appropriation to the female sex as evidences of men’s rudeness, and not of women’s deserts.

{Sidenote: _Words used more accurately_}

The necessities of an advancing civilization demand a greater precision and accuracy in the use of words having to do with weight, measure, number, size. Almost all such words as ‘acre’, ‘furlong’, ‘yard’, ‘gallon’, ‘peck’, were once of a vague and unsettled use, and only at a later day, and in obedience to the requirements of commerce and social life, exact measures and designations. Thus every field was once an ‘acre’; and this remains so still with the German ‘acker’, and in our “God’s acre”, as a name for a churchyard{214}; it was not till about the reign of Edward the First that ‘acre’ was commonly restricted to a determined measure and portion of land. Here and there even now a glebeland will be called “the acre”; and this, even while it contains not one but many of our measured acres. A ‘furlong’ was a ‘furrowlong’, or length of a furrow{215}. Any pole was a ‘yard’, and this vaguer use survives in ‘sail_yard_’, ‘hal_yard_’, and in other sea-terms. Every pitcher was a ‘galon’ (Mark xiv. 13, Wiclif), while a ‘peck’ was no more than a ‘poke’ or bag{216}. And the same has no doubt taken place in all other languages. I will only remind you how the Greek ‘drachm’ was at first a handful (δραχμή = ‘manipulus’, from δράσσω, to grasp); its later word for ‘ten thousand’ (μύριοι) implied in Homer’s time any great multitude; and with the accent on a different syllable always retained this meaning.

{Sidenote: _Words used less accurately_}

Opposite to this is a counter-process by which words of narrower intention gradually enlarge the domain of their meaning, becoming capable of much wider application than any which once they admitted. Instances in this kind are fewer than in that which we have just been considering. The main stream and course of human thoughts and human discourse tends the other way, to discerning, distinguishing, dividing; and then to the permanent fixing of the distinctions gained, by the aid of designations which shall keep apart for ever in word that which has been once severed and sundered in thought. Nor is it hard to perceive why this process should be the more frequent. Men are first struck with the likenesses between those things which are presented to them, with their points of resemblance; on the strength of which they bracket them under a common term. Further acquaintance reveals their points of unlikeness, the real dissimilarities which lurk under superficial resemblances, the need therefore of a different notation for objects which are essentially different. It is comparatively much rarer to discover real likeness under what at first appeared as unlikeness; and usually when a word moves forward, and from a specialty indicates now a generality, it is not in obedience to any such discovery of the true inner likeness of things,--the steps of successful generalizations being marked and secured in other ways. But this widening of a word’s meaning is too often a result of those elements of disorganization and decay which are at work in a language. Men forget a word’s history and etymology; its distinctive features are obliterated for them, with all which attached it to some thought or fact which by right was its own. Appropriated and restricted once to some striking specialty which it vigorously set out, it can now be used in a wider, vaguer, more unsettled way. It can be employed twenty times for once when it would have been possible formerly to employ it. Yet this is not gain, but pure loss. It has lost its place in the disciplined _army_ of words, and become one of a loose and disorderly _mob_.

Let me instance the word ‘preposterous’. It is now no longer of any practical service at all in the language, being merely an ungraceful and slipshod synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to its old use; let it designate that one peculiar branch of absurdity which it designated once, namely the reversing of the true order of things, the putting of the last first, and, by consequence, of the first last, and of what excellent service the word would be capable. Thus it is ‘preposterous’, in the most accurate use of the word, to put the cart before the horse, to expect wages before the work is done, to hang a man first and try him afterwards; and in this strict and accurate sense the word was always used by our elder writers{217}.

In like manner ‘to prevaricate’ was never employed by good writers of the seventeenth century without nearer or more remote allusion to the uses of the word in the Roman law courts, where a ‘prævaricator’ (properly a straddler with distorted legs) did not mean generally and loosely, as now with us, one who shuffles, quibbles, and evades; but one who plays false in a particular manner; who, undertaking, or being by his office bound, to prosecute a charge, is in secret collusion with the opposite party; and, betraying the cause which he affects to support, so manages the accusation as to obtain not the condemnation, but the acquittal, of the accused; a “feint pleader”, as, I think, in our old law language he would have been termed. How much force would the keeping of this in mind add to many passages in our elder divines.

Or take ‘equivocal’, ‘equivocate’, ‘equivocation’. These words, which belonged at first to logic, have slipped down into common use, and in so doing have lost all the precision of their first employment. ‘Equivocation’ is now almost any such dealing in ambiguous words with the intention of deceiving, as falls short of an actual lie; but according to its etymology and in its primary use ‘equivocation’, this fruitful mother of so much error, is the calling by the same name, of things essentially diverse, hiding intentionally or otherwise a real difference under a verbal resemblance{218}. Nor let it be urged in defence of its present looser use, that only so could it have served the needs of our ordinary conversation; on the contrary, had it retained its first use, how serviceable an implement of thought would it have been in detecting our own fallacies, or those of others; all which it can be now no longer.

{Sidenote: ‘_Idea_’}

What now is ‘idea’ for us? How infinite the fall of this word since the time when Milton sang of the Creator contemplating his newly created world,

“how it showed,
Answering his great _idea_”,

to its present use when this person “has an _idea_ that the train has started”, and the other “had no _idea_ that the dinner would be so bad”. But this word ‘idea’ is perhaps the worst case in the English language. Matters have not mended here since the times of Dr. Johnson; of whom Boswell tells us: “He was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or _opinion_, when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something of which an image can be formed in the mind”. There is perhaps no word in the whole compass of English, so seldom used with any tolerable correctness; in none is the distance so immense between the frequent sublimity of the word in its proper use, and the triviality of it in its slovenly and its popular.

This tendency in words to lose the sharp, rigidly defined outline of meaning which they once possessed, to become of wide, vague, loose application instead of fixed, definite, and precise, to mean almost anything, and so really to mean nothing, is among the most fatally effectual which are at work for the final ruin of a language, and, I do not fear to add, for the demoralization of those that speak it. It is one against which we shall all do well to watch; for there is none of us who cannot do something in keeping words close to their own proper meaning, and in resisting their encroachment on the domain of others.

The causes which bring this mischief about are not hard to trace. We all know that when a piece of our silver money has long fulfilled its part, as “pale and common drudge ’tween man and man”, whatever it had at first of sharper outline and livelier impress is in the end wholly obliterated from it. So it is with words, above all with words of science and theology. These getting into general use, and passing often from mouth to mouth, lose the “image and superscription” which they had, before they descended from the school to the market-place, from the pulpit to the street. Being now caught up by those who understand imperfectly and thus incorrectly their true value, who will not be at the pains of understanding that, or who are incapable of doing so, they are obliged to accommodate themselves to the lower sphere in which they circulate, by laying aside much of the precision and accuracy and depth which once they had; they become weaker, shallower, more indefinite; till in the end, as exponents of thought and feeling, they cease to be of any service at all.

* * * * *

{Sidenote: ‘_Bombast_’, ‘_Garble_’}

Sometimes a word does not merely narrow or extend its meaning, but altogether changes it; and this it does in more ways than one. Thus a secondary figurative sense will quite put out of use and extinguish the literal, until in the entire predominance of that it is altogether forgotten that it ever possessed any other. I may instance ‘bombast’ as a word about which this forgetfulness is nearly complete. What ‘bombast’ now means is familiar to us all, namely inflated words, “full of sound and fury”, but “signifying nothing”. This, at present its sole meaning, was once only the secondary and superinduced; ‘bombast’ being properly the cotton plant, and then the cotton wadding with which garments were stuffed out and lined. You remember perhaps how Prince Hal addresses Falstaff, “How now, my sweet creature of _bombast_”; using the word in its literal sense; and another early poet has this line:

“Thy body’s bolstered out with _bombast_ and with bags”.

‘Bombast’ was then transferred in a vigorous image to the big words without strength or solidity wherewith the discourses of some were stuffed out, and has now quite forgone any other meaning. So too ‘to garble’ was once “to cleanse from dross and dirt, as grocers do their spices, to pick or cull out”{219}. It is never used now in this its primary sense, and has indeed undergone this further change, that while once ‘to garble’ was to sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it is now to sift with a view of picking out the worst{220}. ‘Polite’ is another word which in the figurative sense has quite extinguished the literal. We still speak of ‘polished’ surfaces; but not any more, with Cudworth, of “_polite_ bodies, as looking glasses”. Neither do we now ‘exonerate’ a ship (Burton); nor ‘stigmatize’, at least otherwise than figuratively, a ‘malefactor’ (the same); nor ‘corroborate’ our health (Sir Thomas Elyot).

Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly progressive courses of change, itself a faithful index of changes going on in society and in the minds of men, till at length everything is changed about it. The process of this it is often very curious to observe; capable as not seldom it is of being watched step by step in its advances to the final consummation. There may be said to be three leading phases which the word successively presents, three steps in its history. At first it grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with its own natural meaning. Presently the word allows another meaning, one superinduced on the former, and foreign to its etymology, to share with the other in the possession of it, on the ground that where the former exists, the latter commonly co-exists with it. At the third step, the newly introduced meaning, not satisfied with its moiety, with dividing the possession of the word, has thrust out the original and rightful possessor altogether, and remains in sole and exclusive possession. The three successive stages may be represented by _a_, _ab_, _b_; in which series _b_, which was wanting altogether at the first stage, and was only admitted as secondary at the second, does at the third become primary and indeed alone.

{Sidenote: _Gradual Change of Meaning_}

We are not to suppose that in actual fact the transitions from one signification to another are so strongly and distinctly marked, as I have found it convenient to mark them here. Indeed it is hard to imagine anything more gradual, more subtle and imperceptible, than the process of change. The manner in which the new meaning first insinuates itself into the old, and then drives out the old, can only be compared to the process of petrifaction, as rightly understood--the water not gradually turning what is put into it to stone, as we generally take the operation to be; but successively displacing each several particle of that which is brought within its power, and depositing a stony particle, in its stead, till, in the end, while all appears to continue the same, all has in fact been thoroughly changed. It is precisely thus, by such slow, gradual, and subtle advances that the new meaning filters through and pervades the word, little by little displacing entirely that which it before possessed.

No word would illustrate this process better than that old example, familiar probably to us all, of ‘villain’. The ‘villain’ is, first, the serf or peasant, ‘villanus’, because attached to the ‘villa’ or farm. He is, secondly, the peasant who, it is further taken for granted, will be churlish, selfish, dishonest, and generally of evil moral conditions, these having come to be assumed as always belonging to him, and to be permanently associated with his name, by those higher classes of society who in the main commanded the springs of language. At the third step, nothing of the meaning which the etymology suggests, nothing of ‘villa’, survives any longer; the peasant is wholly dismissed, and the evil moral conditions of him who is called by this name alone remain; so that the name would now in this its final stage be applied as freely to peer, if he deserved it, as to peasant. ‘Boor’ has had exactly the same history; being first the cultivator of the soil; then secondly, the cultivator of the soil who, it is assumed, will be coarse, rude, and unmannerly; and then thirdly, any one who is coarse, rude, and unmannerly{221}. So too ‘pagan’; which is first villager, then heathen villager, and lastly heathen. You may trace the same progress in ‘churl’, ‘clown’, ‘antic’, and in numerous other words. The intrusive meaning might be likened in all these cases to the egg which the cuckoo lays in the sparrow’s nest; the young cuckoo first sharing the nest with its rightful occupants, but not resting till it has dislodged and ousted them altogether.

{Sidenote: ‘_Gossip_’}

I will illustrate by the aid of one word more this part of my subject. I called your attention in my last lecture to the true character of several words and forms in use among our country people, and claimed for them to be in many instances genuine English, though English now more or less antiquated and overlived. ‘Gossip’ is a word in point. I have myself heard this name given by our Hampshire peasantry to the sponsors in baptism, the godfathers and godmothers. I do not say that it is a usual word; but it is occasionally employed, and well understood. This is a perfectly correct employment of ‘gossip’, in fact its proper and original one, and involves moreover a very curious record of past beliefs. ‘Gossip’, or ‘gossib’, as Chaucer spelt it, is a compound word, made up of the name of ‘God’, and of an old Anglo-Saxon word, ‘sib’, still alive in Scotland, as all readers of Walter Scott will remember, and in some parts of England, and which means, akin; they were said to be ‘sib’, who are related to one another. But why, you may ask, was the name given to sponsors? Out of this reason;--in the middle ages it was the prevailing belief (and the Romish Church still affirms it), that those who stood as sponsors to the same child, besides contracting spiritual obligations on behalf of that child, also contracted spiritual affinity one with another; they became _sib_, or akin, in _God_; and thus ‘gossips’; hence ‘gossipred’, an old word, exactly analogous to ‘kindred’. Out of this faith the Roman Catholic Church will not allow (unless indeed by dispensations procured for money), those who have stood as sponsors to the same child, afterwards to contract marriage with one another, affirming them too nearly related for this to be lawful.

Take ‘gossip’ however in its ordinary present use, as one addicted to idle tittle-tattle, and it seems to bear no relation whatever to its etymology and first meaning. The same three steps, however, which we have traced before will bring us to its present use. ‘Gossips’ are, first, the sponsors, brought by the act of a common sponsorship into affinity and near familiarity with one another; secondly, these sponsors, who being thus brought together, allow themselves one with the other in familiar, and then in trivial and idle talk; thirdly, any who allow themselves in this trivial and idle talk,--called in French ‘commérage’, from the fact that ‘commére’ has run through exactly the same stages as its English equivalent.

It is plain that words which designate not things and persons only, but these as they are contemplated more or less in an ethical light, words which tinge with a moral sentiment what they designate, are peculiarly exposed to change; are constantly liable to take a new colouring, or to lose an old. The gauge and measure of praise or blame, honour or dishonour, admiration or abhorrence, which they convey, is so purely a mental and subjective one, that it is most difficult to take accurate note of its rise or of its fall, while yet there are causes continually at work leading it to the one or the other. There are words not a few, but ethical words above all, which have so imperceptibly drifted away from their former moorings, that although their position is now very different from that which they once occupied, scarcely one in a hundred of casual readers, whose attention has not been specially called to the subject, will have observed that they have moved at all. Here too we observe some words conveying less of praise or blame than once, and some more; while some have wholly shifted from the one to the other. Some were at one time words of slight, almost of offence, which have altogether ceased to be so now. Still these are rare by comparison with those which once were harmless, but now are harmless no more; which once, it may be, were terms of honour, but which now imply a slight or even a scorn. It is only too easy to perceive why these should exceed those in number.

{Sidenote: ‘_Imp_’, ‘_Brat_’}

Let us take an example or two. If any were to speak now of royal children as “royal _imps_”, it would sound, and with our present use of the word would be, impertinent and unbecoming enough; and yet ‘imp’ was once a name of dignity and honour, and not of slight or of undue familiarity. Thus Spenser addresses the Muses in this language,

“Ye sacred _imps_ that on Parnasso dwell”;

and ‘imp’ was especially used of the scions of royal or illustrious houses. More than one epitaph, still existing, of our ancient nobility might be quoted, beginning in such language as this, “Here lies that noble _imp_”. Or what should we say of a poet who commenced a solemn poem in this fashion,

“Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord,
Oh Abraham’s _brats_, oh brood of blessed seed”?

Could we conclude anything else but that he meant, by using low words on lofty occasions, to turn sacred things into ridicule? Yet this was very far from the intention of Gascoigne, the poet whose lines I have just quoted. “Abraham’s _brats_” was used by him in perfect good faith, and without the slightest feeling that anything ludicrous or contemptuous adhered to the word ‘brat’, as indeed in his time there did not, any more than adheres to ‘brood’, which is another form of the same word now{222}.

Call a person ‘pragmatical’, and you now imply not merely that he is busy, but _over_-busy, officious, self-important, and pompous to boot. But it once meant nothing of the kind, and ‘pragmatical’ (like πραγματικός) was one engaged in affairs, being an honourable title, given to a man simply and industriously accomplishing the business which properly concerned him{223}. So too to say that a person ‘meddles’ or is a ‘meddler’ implies now that he interferes unduly in other men’s matters, without a call mixing himself up with them. This was not insinuated in the earlier uses of the word. On the contrary three of our earlier translations of the Bible have, “_Meddle_ with your own business” (1 Thess. iv. 11); and Barrow in one of his sermons draws at some length the distinction between ‘meddling’ and “being _meddlesome_”, and only condemns the latter.

{Sidenote: ‘_Proser_’}

Or take again the words, ‘to prose’ or a ‘proser’. It cannot indeed be affirmed that they convey any _moral_ condemnation, yet they certainly convey no compliment now; and are almost among the last which any one would desire should with justice be applied either to his talking or his writing. For ‘to prose’, as we all now know too well, is to talk or write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a ‘proser’ the antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would have ‘prosed’ and been a ‘proser’, in the language of our ancestors. Thus Drayton writes of his contemporary Nashe:

“And surely Nashe, though he a _proser_ were,
A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear”;

that is, the ornament not of a ‘proser’, but of a poet. The tacit assumption that vigour, animation, rapid movement, with all the precipitation of the spirit, belong to verse rather than to prose, and are the exclusive possession of it, is that which must explain the changed uses of the word.

{Sidenote: ‘_Knave_’}

Still it is according to a word’s present signification that we must apply it now. It would be no excuse, having applied an insulting epithet to any, if we should afterwards plead that, tried by its etymology and primary usage, it had nothing offensive or insulting about it; although indeed Swift assures us that in his time such a plea was made and was allowed. “I remember”, he says, “at a trial in Kent, where Sir George Rooke was indicted for calling a gentleman ‘knave’ and ‘villain’, the lawyer for the defendant brought off his client by alleging that the words were not injurious; for ‘knave’ in the old and true signification imported only a servant{224}; and ‘villain’ in Latin is villicus, which is no more than a man employed in country labour, or rather a baily”. The lawyer may have deserved his success for his ingenuity and his boldness; though, if Swift reports him aright, not certainly on the ground of the strict accuracy either of his Anglo-Saxon or his Latin.

The moral sense and conviction of men is often at work upon their words, giving them new turns in obedience to these convictions, of which their changed use will then remain a permanent record. Let me illustrate this by the history of our word ‘sycophant’. You probably are acquainted with the story which the Greek scholiasts invented by way of explaining a word of which they knew nothing, namely that the ‘sycophant’ was a “manifester of figs”, one who detected others in the act of exporting figs from Attica, an act forbidden, they asserted, by the Athenian law; and accused them to the people. Be this explanation worth what it may, the word obtained in Greek a more general sense; any accuser, and then any _false_ accuser, was a ‘sycophant’; and when the word was first adopted into the English language, it was in this meaning: thus an old English poet speaks of “the railing route of _sycophants_”; and Holland: “The poor man that hath nought to lose, is not afraid of the _sycophant_”. But it has not kept this meaning; a ‘sycophant’ is now a fawning flatterer; not one who speaks ill of you behind your back; rather one who speaks good of you before your face, but good which he does not in his heart believe. Yet how true a moral instinct has presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and the flatterer, although they seem so opposed to one another, how closely united they really are. They grow out of the same root. The same baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak evil of you behind your back, will lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your face; there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb, “Who flatters me before, spatters me behind”.

{Sidenote: _Weakening of Words_}

But it is not the moral sense only of men which is thus at work, modifying their words; but the immoral as well. If the good which men have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant tendency--in too many cases it has been a successful one--to empty words employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation which they once conveyed. Men’s too easy toleration of sin, the feebleness of their moral indignation against it, brings about that the blame which words expressed once, has in some of them become much weaker now than once, has from others vanished altogether. “To do a _shrewd_ turn”, was once to do a _wicked_ turn; and Chaucer, using ‘shrewdness’ by which to translate the Latin ‘improbitas’, shows that it meant wickedness for him; nay, two murderers he calls two ‘shrews’,--for there were, as already noticed, male shrews once as well as female. But “a _shrewd_ turn” now, while it implies a certain amount of sharp dealing, yet implies nothing more; and ‘shrewdness’ is applied to men rather in their praise than in their dispraise. And not ‘shrewd’ and ‘shrewdness’ only, but a multitude of other words,--I will only instance ‘prank’ ‘flirt’, ‘luxury’, ‘luxurious’, ‘peevish’, ‘wayward’, ‘loiterer’, ‘uncivil’,--conveyed once a much more earnest moral disapproval than now they do.

But I must bring this lecture to a close. I have but opened to you paths, which you, if you are so minded, can follow up for yourselves. We have learned lately to speak of men’s ‘antecedents’{225}; the phrase is newly come up; and it is common to say that if we would know what a man really now is, we must know his ‘antecedents’, that is, what he has been in time past. This is quite as true about words. If we would know what they now are, we must know what they have been; we must know, if possible, the date and place of their birth, the successive stages of their subsequent history, the company which they have kept, all the road which they have travelled, and what has brought them to the point at which now we find them; we must know, in short, their antecedents.

{Sidenote: _Changes of Meaning_}

And let me say, without attempting to bring back school into these lectures which are out of school, that, seeking to do this, we might add an interest to our researches in the lexicon and the dictionary which otherwise they could never have; that taking such words, for example, as ἐκκλησία, or παλιγγενεσία, or εὐτραπελία, or σοφιστής, or σχολαστικός, in Greek; as ‘religio’, or ‘sacramentum’, or ‘urbanitas’, or ‘superstitio’, in Latin; as ‘libertine’, or ‘casuistry’{226}, or ‘humanity’, or ‘humorous’, or ‘danger’, or ‘romance’, in English, and endeavouring to trace the manner in which one meaning grew out of and superseded another, and how they arrived at that use in which they have finally rested (if indeed before our English words there is not a future still), we shall derive, I believe, amusement, I am sure, instruction; we shall feel that we are really getting something, increasing the moral and intellectual stores of our minds; furnishing ourselves with that which may hereafter be of service to ourselves, may be of service to others--than which there can be no feeling more pleasurable, none more delightful. I shall be glad and thankful, if you can feel as much in regard of that lecture, which I now bring to its end{227}.

{FOOTNOTES}

{198} [‘Frampold’, peevish, perverse (_Merry Wives of Windsor_, 1598,
ii, 2, 94) is supposed to be another form of ‘from-polled’, as if
‘wrong-headed’. ‘Garboil’, a tumult or hubbub, was originally
_garboyl_, and came from old French _garbouil_ (Italian
_garbuglio_). ‘Brangle’, a brawl, stands for ‘brandle’ from Old
Fr. _brandeler_, akin to ‘brandish’.]

{199} [‘Dutch’ i.e. Teutonic, Mid. High-German _diutsch_, old
High-German _diut-isk_ from _diot_, people, and so the people-ish
or popular language the mother-tongue, founded on a primitive
_teuta_, ‘people’. See Kluge _s.v. Deutsch_.]

{200} So in Herrick’s _Electra_:

“More white than are the whitest creams,
Or moonlight _tinselling_ the streams”.

{201} [Hence also the epidemic of malefic power supposed to be
air-borne, ‘influenza’.]

{202} See Holinshed’s _Chronicles_, vol. iii, pp. 827, 1218; Ann. 1513,
1570.

{203} _Fairy Queen_, vi, 7, 27; cf. v. 3, 37.

{204} [The two words are intimately related, ‘king’, contracted for
_kining_ (Anglo-Saxon _cyn-ing_), ‘son of the kin’ or ‘tribe’, one
of the people, cognate with _cynde_, true-born, native, ‘kind’,
and _cynd_, nature ‘kind’, whence ‘kindly’, natural.]

{205} See Sir W. Scott’s edition of Swift’s _Works_, vol. ix, p. 139.

{206} θηριακή, from θηρίον, a designation given to the viper, see Acts
xxviii, 4. ‘Theriac’ is only the more rigid form of the same word,
the scholarly, as distinguished from the popular, adoption of it.
Augustine (_Con. duas Epp. Pelag._ iii, 7): Sicut fieri consuevit
antidotum etiam de serpentibus contra venena serpentum.

{207} And Chaucer, more solemnly still:

“Christ, which that is to every harm _triacle_”.

The _antidotal_ character of treacle comes out yet more in these
lines of Lydgate:

“There is no _venom_ so parlious in sharpnes,
As whan it hath of _treacle_ a likenes”.

{208} “A slave that within these twenty years rode with the _black
guard_ in the Duke’s carriage, ’mongst spits and dripping pans”.
(Webster’s _White Devil_.) [First ed. 1612. “The Black Guard of
the King’s Kitchen” is mentioned in a State Paper of 1535
(N.E.D.).]

{209} Génin (_Lexique de la Langue de Molière_, p. 367) says well: “En
augmentant le nombre des mots, il a fallu restreindre leur
signification, et faire aux nouveaux un apanage aux dépens des
anciens”.

{210} [Accordingly there is nothing tautological in the “dead corpses”
of 2 Kings xix, 35, in the A.V.]

{211} [‘Weed’, vegetable growth, Anglo-Saxon _weód_, is here confounded
with a perfectly distinct word ‘weed’, clothing, which is the
Anglo-Saxon _waéd_, a garment.]

{212} And no less so in French with ‘dame’, by which form not ‘domina’
only, but ‘dominus’, was represented. Thus in early French poetry,
“_Dame_ Dieu” for “_Dominus_ Deus” continually occurs. We have
here the key to the French exclamation, or oath, as we now
perceive it to be, ‘Dame’! of which the dictionaries give no
account. See Génin’s _Variations du Langage Français_, p. 347.

{213} [‘Hoyden’ seems to be derived from the old Dutch _heyden_, a
heathen, then a clownish, boorish fellow.]

{214} [This “ancient Saxon phrase”, as Longfellow calls it, has not been
found in any old English writer, but has been adopted from the
Modern German. Neither is it known in the dialects, E.D.D.]

{215} “A _furlong_, quasi _furrowlong_, being so much as a team in
England plougheth going forward, before they return back again”.
(Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, p. 42.) [‘Furlong’ in St.
Luke xxiv, 13, already occurs in the Anglo-Saxon version of that
passage as _furlanga_.]

{216} [Recent etymologists cannot see any connexion between ‘peck’ and
‘poke’.]

{217} [e. g. “One said thus _preposterously_: ‘when we had climbed the
clifs and were a shore’” (Puttenham, _Arte of Eng. Poesie_, 1589,
p. 181, ed. Arber). “It is a _preposterous_ order to teach first
and to learn after” (_Preface to Bible_, 1611). “Place not the
coming of the wise men, _preposterously_, before the appearance of
the star” (Abp. Secker, _Sermons_, iii, 85, ed. 1825).]

{218} Thus Barrow: “Which [courage and constancy] he that wanteth is no
other than _equivocally_ a gentleman, as an image or a carcass is
a man”.

{219} Phillips, _New World of Words_, 1706. [‘Garble’ comes through old
French _garbeler_, _grabeler_ (Italian _garbellare_) from Latin
_cribellare_, to sift, and that from _cribellum_, a sieve,
diminutive of _cribrum_.]

{220} “But his [Gideon’s] army must be _garbled_, as too great for God
to give victory thereby; all the fearful return home by
proclamation” (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, b. ii, c. 8).

{221} [Compare the transitions of meaning in French _manant_ = (1) a
dweller (where he was born--from _manoir_ to dwell), the
inhabitant of a homestead, (2) a countryman, (3) a clown or boor,
a coarse fellow.]

{222} [These words lie totally apart. ‘Brat’, an infant, seems a
figurative use of ‘brat’, a rag or pinafore, just as ‘bantling’
comes from ‘band’, a swathe.]

{223} “We cannot always be contemplative, or _pragmatical_ abroad: but
have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged
soul may leave off awhile her severe schooling”. (Milton,
_Tetrachordon_.)

{224} [Anglo-Saxon _cnafa_, or _cnapa_, a boy.]

{225} [Mr. Fitzedward Hall in 1873 says ‘antecedents’ is “not yet a
generation old” (_Mod. English_, 303). Landor in 1853 says “the
French have lately taught (it to) us” (_Last Fruit of an Old
Tree_, 176). De Quincey, in 1854 calls it “modern slang” (_Works_
xiv, 449); and the earliest quotation, 1841, given in the N.E.D.,
introduces it as “what the French call their antecedents”.]

{226} See Whewell, _History of Moral Philosophy in England_, pp.
xxvii.-xxxii.

{227} For a fuller treatment of the subject of this lecture, see my
_Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in senses
different from their present_, 2nd ed. London, 1859.

V

CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS

When I announce to you that the subject of my lecture to-day will be English orthography, or the spelling of the words in our native language, with the alterations which this has undergone, you may perhaps think with yourselves that a weightier, or, if not a weightier, at all events a more interesting subject might have occupied this our concluding lecture. I cannot admit it to be wanting either in importance or in interest. Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage, as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far higher acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure it ought as little to be this; and would never prove so in competent hands{228}. Let us then address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope that it may yield us both profit and pleasure.

I know not who it was that said, “The invention of printing was very well; but, as compared to the invention of writing, it was no such great matter after all”. Whoever it was who made this observation, it is clear that for him use and familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which there is in that, whereat we probably have long ceased to wonder at all--the power, namely, of representing sounds by written signs, of reproducing for the eye that which existed at first only for the ear: nor was the estimate which he formed of the relative value of these two inventions other than a just one. Writing indeed stands more nearly on a level with speaking, and deserves rather to be compared with it, than with printing; which, with all its utility, is yet of altogether another and inferior type of greatness: or, if this is too much to claim for writing, it may at any rate be affirmed to stand midway between the other two, and to be as much superior to the one as it is inferior to the other.

The intention of the written word, that which presides at its first formation, the end whereunto it is a mean, is by aid of symbols agreed on beforehand, to represent to the eye with as much accuracy as possible the spoken word.

{Sidenote: _Imperfection of Writing_}

It never fulfils this intention completely, and by degrees more and more imperfectly. Short as man’s spoken word often falls of his thought, his written word falls often as short of his spoken. Several causes contribute to this. In the first place, the marks of imperfection and infirmity cleave to writing, as to every other invention of man. All alphabets have been left incomplete. They have superfluous letters, letters, that is, which they do not want, because other letters already represent the sound which they represent; they have dubious letters, letters, that is, which say nothing certain about the sounds they stand for, because more than one sound is represented by them--our ‘c’ for instance, which sometimes has the sound of ‘s’, as in ‘_c_ity’, sometimes of ‘k’, as in ‘_c_at’; they are deficient in letters, that is, the language has elementary sounds which have no corresponding letters appropriated to them, and can only be represented by combinations of letters. All alphabets, I believe, have some of these faults, not a few of them have all, and more. This then is one reason of the imperfect reproduction of the spoken word by the written. But another is, that the human voice is so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is able to mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so infinitely to modify and vary these sounds, that were an alphabet complete as human art could make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of four and twenty letters, there would still remain a multitude of sounds which it could only approximately give back{229}.

{Sidenote: _Alphabets Inadequate_}

But there is a further cause for the divergence which comes gradually to find place between men’s spoken and their written words. What men do often, they will seek to do with the least possible trouble. There is nothing which they do oftener than repeat words; they will seek here then to save themselves pains; they will contract two or more syllables into one; (‘toto opere’ will become ‘topper’; ‘vuestra merced’, ‘usted’; and ‘topside the other way’, ‘topsy-turvey’{230}); they will slur over, and thus after a while cease to pronounce, certain letters; for hard letters they will substitute soft; for those which require a certain effort to pronounce, they will substitute those which require little or none. Under the operation of these causes a gulf between the written and spoken word will not merely exist; but it will have the tendency to grow ever wider and wider. This tendency indeed will be partially counterworked by approximations which from time to time will by silent consent be made of the written word to the spoken; here and there a letter dropped in speech will be dropped also in writing, as the ‘s’ in so many French words, where its absence is marked by a circumflex; a new shape, contracted or briefer, which a word has taken on the lips of men, will find its representation in their writing; as ‘chirurgeon’ will not merely be pronounced, but also spelt, ‘surgeon’, and ‘synodsman’ ‘sidesman’. Still for all this, and despite of these partial readjustments of the relations between the two, the anomalies will be infinite; there will be a multitude of written letters which have ceased to be sounded letters; a multitude of words will exist in one shape upon our lips, and in quite another in our books.

It is inevitable that the question should arise--Shall these anomalies be meddled with? shall it be attempted to remove them, and bring writing and speech into harmony and consent--a harmony and consent which never indeed in actual fact at any period of the language existed, but which yet may be regarded as the object of written speech, as the idea which, however imperfectly realized, has, in the reduction of spoken sounds to written, floated before the minds of men? If the attempt is to be made, it is clear that it can only be made in one way. The alternative is not open, whether Mahomet shall go to the mountain, _or_ the mountain to Mahomet. The spoken word is the mountain; it will not stir; it will resist all interference. It feels its own superior rights, that it existed the first, that it is, so to say, the elder brother; and it will never be induced to change itself for the purpose of conforming and complying with the written word. Men will not be persuaded to pronounce ‘wou_l_d’ and ‘de_b_t’, because they write ‘would’ and ‘debt’ severally with an ‘l’ and with a ‘b’: but what if they could be induced to write ‘woud’ and ‘det’, because they pronounce so; and to deal in like manner with all other words, in which there exists at present a discrepancy between the word as it is spoken, and the word as it is written?

{Sidenote: _Phonetic Systems_}

Here we have the explanation of that which in the history of almost all literatures has repeated itself more than once, namely, the endeavour to introduce phonetic writing. It has certain plausibilities to rest on; it has its appeal to the unquestionable fact that the written word was intended to picture to the eye what the spoken word sounded in the ear. At the same time I believe that it would be impossible to introduce it; and, even if it _were_ possible, that it would be most undesirable, and this for two reasons; the first being that the losses consequent upon its introduction, would far outweigh the gains, even supposing those gains as great as the advocates of the scheme promise; the second, that these promised gains would themselves be only very partially realized, or not at all.

{Sidenote: _Alphabets Imperfect_}

In the first place, I believe it to be impossible. It is clear that such a scheme must begin with the reconstruction of the alphabet. The first thing that the phonographers have perceived is the necessity for the creation of a vast number of new signs, the poverty of all existing alphabets, at any rate of our own, not yielding a several sign for all the several sounds in the language. Our English phonographers have therefore had to invent ten of these new signs or letters, which are henceforth to take their place with our _a_, _b_, _c_, and to enjoy equal rights with them. Rejecting two (_q_, _x_), and adding ten, they have raised their alphabet from twenty-six letters to thirty-four. But to procure the reception of such a reconstructed alphabet is simply an impossibility, as much an impossibility as would be the reconstitution of the structure of the language in any points where it was manifestly deficient or illogical. Sciolists or scholars may sit down in their studies, and devise these new letters, and prove that we need them, and that the introduction of them would be a great gain, and a manifest improvement; and this may be all very true; but if they think they can induce a people to adopt them, they know little of the ways in which its alphabet is entwined with the whole innermost life of a people. One may freely own that all present alphabets are redundant here, are deficient there; our English perhaps is as greatly at fault as any, and with that we have chiefly to do. Unquestionably it has more letters than one to express one and the same sound; it has only one letter to express two or three sounds; it has sounds which are only capable of being expressed at all by awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the same time we must accept the fact, as we accept any other which it is out of our power to change--with regret, indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence: as one accepts the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or forty miles nearer to England--that it is so difficult to get round Cape Horn--that the climate of Africa is so fatal to European life. A people will no more quit their alphabet than they will quit their language; they will no more consent to modify the one _ab extra_ than the other. Cæsar avowed that with all his power he could not introduce a new word, and certainly Claudius could not introduce a new letter. Centuries may sanction the bringing in of a new one, or the dropping of an old. But to imagine that it is possible to suddenly introduce a group of ten new letters, as these reformers propose--they might just as feasibly propose that the English language should form its comparatives and superlatives on some entirely new scheme, say in Greek fashion, by the terminations ‘oteros’ and ‘otatos’; or that we should agree to set up a dual; or that our substantives should return to our Anglo-Saxon declensions. Any one of these or like proposals would not betray a whit more ignorance of the eternal laws which regulate human language, and of the limits within which deliberate action upon it is possible, than does this of increasing our alphabet by ten entirely novel signs.

But grant it possible, grant our six and twenty letters to have so little sacredness in them that Englishmen would endure a crowd of upstart interlopers to mix themselves on an equal footing with them, still this could only be from a sense of the greatness of the advantage to be derived from this introduction. Now the vast advantage claimed by the advocates of the system is, that it would facilitate the learning to read, and wholly save the labour of learning to spell, which “on the present plan occupies”, as they assure us, “at the very lowest calculation from three to five years”. Spelling, it is said, would no longer need to be learned at all; since whoever knew the sound, would necessarily know also the spelling, this being in all cases in perfect conformity with that. The anticipation of this gain rests upon two assumptions which are tacitly taken for granted, but both of them erroneous.

The first of these assumptions is, that all men pronounce all words alike, so that whenever they come to spell a word, they will exactly agree as to what the outline of its sound is. Now we are sure men will not do this from the fact that, before there was any fixed and settled orthography in our language, when therefore everybody was more or less a phonographer, seeking to write down the word as it sounded to _him_, (for he had no other law to guide him,) the variations of spelling were infinite. Take for instance the word ‘sudden’; which does not seem to promise any great scope for variety. I have myself met with this word spelt in the following fifteen ways among our early writers: ‘sodain’, ‘sodaine’, ‘sodan’, ‘sodayne’, ‘sodden’, ‘sodein’, ‘sodeine’, ‘soden’, ‘sodeyn’, ‘suddain’, ‘suddaine’, ‘suddein’, ‘suddeine’, ‘sudden’, ‘sudeyn’. Again, in how many ways was Raleigh’s name spelt, or Shakespeare’s? The same is evident from the spelling of uneducated persons in our own day. They have no other rule but the sound to guide them. How is it that they do not all spell alike; erroneously, it may be, as having only the sound for their guide, but still falling all into exactly the same errors? What is the actual fact? They not merely spell wrong, which might be laid to the charge of our perverse system of spelling, but with an inexhaustible diversity of error, and that too in the case of simplest words. Thus the little town of Woburn would seem to give small room for caprice in spelling, while yet the postmaster there has made, from the superscription of letters that have passed through his hands, a collection of two hundred and forty-four varieties of ways in which the place has been spelt{231}. It may be replied that these were all or nearly all from the letters of the ignorant and uneducated. Exactly so;--but it is for their sakes, and to place them on a level with the educated, or rather to accelerate their education by the omission of a useless yet troublesome discipline, that the change is proposed. I wish to show you that after the change they would be just as much, or almost as much, at a loss in their spelling as now.

{Sidenote: _Pronouncing Dictionaries_}