Chapter IV: Modern England

_Sport._ _Caddie._ _Cannibal._ _Tory._ _Finance._

The English language has been facetiously described as “French badly pronounced”. At the death of Chaucer, and for nearly a hundred years afterwards, this description would have been very nearly a true one. Apart from the adoption of a few Latin words, changes seem to have been few and insignificant during the fifteenth century, and we may assume that, for the first half of it at any rate, the Hundred Years’ War was occupying too many of our energies to leave much time for cultural growth. Nevertheless, from developments such as those which have been pointed out in some of our legal terminology we can feel something of the way in which the genius of the English language was steadily, if slowly, reasserting itself and claiming its right to a separate personality. At the Reformation, when England finally shook herself free from the dangerous embraces of the Holy Roman Empire, the period of excessive French influence came to an end. The general effect of Protestantism on our language, subtle and profound as it has been, will be dealt with later, but the Reformation cannot be passed over here without recording one instance in which a word—perhaps a misunderstood word—has had extraordinarily lasting results. It is the confusion of the English _Sunday_ with the Jewish _Sabbath_[16] and the consequent fastening upon that day of rest of many of the sombre inhibitions entailed by Sabbatic Law.

There is, however, another historical event which had a far more universal and direct bearing on English words, and that is the Revival of Learning. The new intercourse with the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome naturally brought into English a positive stream of “literary borrowings”. At first these were mostly Latin words. If we try to imagine an English from which such words as _accommodate_, _capable_, _capacious_, _compute_, _corroborate_, _distinguish_, _efficacy_, _estimate_, _experiment_, _insinuate_, _investigate_, and a host of others equally common are as yet absent, we may partly realize what an important part was played by the Renaissance in producing the language in which we speak and think. There is indeed good evidence that the stream of new words flowed too fast at this time for ordinary people to keep up with it. For instance, many of the Latin words that were borrowed have since fallen out of use. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Francis Bacon, who is not a fantastic writer, was using such unfamiliar expressions as _contentation_, _contristation_, _digladiation_, _morigeration_, _redargution_, _ventosity_, ... and somewhat before this, when the Classical influx was at its height, it was conspicuous enough to call forth several amusing parodies. We remember Shakespeare’s Holofernes in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, and Sir Thomas Wilson includes in his _Arte of Rhetorike_ a fictitious letter applying for a church benefice, in which he satirizes as follows the Klondyke rush after fashionable Latinity:

Pondering, expending, and revoluting with myself, your ingent
affability, and ingenious capacity for mundane affairs: I cannot
but celebrate and extoll your magnifical dexterity above all other.
For how could you have adepted such illustrate prerogative, and
domestical superiority, if the fecundity of your ingeny had not
been so fertile and wonderful pregnant?...

Now this outcrop of linguistic parody is significant for other reasons too. It reminds us that the English language had at last become “self-conscious”. In former times the struggle between different ways of saying the same thing, between the old and the new, the native and the foreign, had generally worked itself out under the surface, amid the unconscious preferences of the mass of the people. Thus, the old English translators who rendered the Latin ‘exodus’ as _outfaring_ and ‘discipulus’ (disciple) as _learning-boy_, were not consciously trying to keep the Latin words out; nor did the fourteenth-century author of a book, which he called the _Againbite of Inwit_, have any academic horror, as far as we know, of the new Latin borrowings _remorse_ and _conscience_, with one of which, at least, he must have been familiar. The same may be said of Wyclif, who translated ‘resurrectio’ _againrising_ and ‘immortalitas’ _undeadliness_. These old writers anglicized because it came natural to them to anglicize, just as the next generation began to prefer the Latin words. But it was not so in Italy, nor in France, in both of which countries poets had long ago written careful treatises on the beloved medium of their art, their native language. And now, after the Revival of Learning, in England, too, scholars and literary men began to notice such things. Counterbalancing the enthusiasm for Latin and Greek, there arose a “Purist” movement of just the kind which has had such a powerful effect on the development of modern German. People tried to expel all “foreign” words from the language; Sir John Cheke began a translation of the New Testament in which none but native words were to be used; and we find in his _Matthew_ _moond_ for _lunatic_, _hundreder_ for _centurion_, _frosent_ (from-sent) for _apostle_, _crossed_ for _crucified_, _freshman_ for _proselyte_, and many other equally odd-sounding concoctions. To look back in this way on the uncertainty and chaos which reigned at the beginning of the seventeenth century is to intensify our admiration for the scholarship and poetic taste displayed by the devout compilers of the Authorised Version.

If we were to look for another symptom of this sometimes pedantic self-consciousness, we could find it in the modern way of spelling _debt_ and _doubt_. The old orthography, _det_ and _dout_, is a perfectly correct English rendering of the French words from which they are taken, but the scholars of the Renaissance, anxious to show the ultimate derivation from the Latin stems ‘deb’ and ‘dub’, inserted an entirely unnecessary “b” into the words, and there it has stayed ever since. Sometimes, too, these Elizabethan dons made learned howlers, as in the now abandoned spelling _abhominable_, which arose from a quite false idea that that adjective is derived from the Latin ‘ab’ (from) and ‘homo’ (man).

One can also get a curiously vivid sense of the way in which new Latin words had been streaming into the language during the sixteenth century from Bacon’s literary style. He is so fond of placing a Latin and an English word side by side, in order to express what is virtually a single idea, that two consecutive pages of the _Advancement of Learning_ supply no less than ten examples of this habit. Among them are _immoderate and overweening_, _action and business_, _charge and accusation_, _eloquence and speech_. To understand the exact effect which this kind of writing must have had on the ears of his contemporaries we must try and realize the faintly novel and difficult sound with which many of these Latin syllables would still be ringing. No such effort is required, however, to comprehend the way in which this deliberate duplication must have helped to familiarize English people with the sound and meaning of the new words.

Very soon the Greek language too began to be drawn upon, though never to quite the same extent as Latin. Thus, English of the fifteenth century must also be thought of as a language in which hundreds of familiar words like _apology_, _apostrophe_, _bucolic_, _climax_, _drama_, _emphasis_, _encyclopedia_, _epidemic_, _epilogue_, _episode_, _hypothesis_, _hysterical_, _paragraph_, _parallel_, _paraphrase_, _physical_, do not yet exist, for these are all examples of words which came in with the Renaissance.[17] The number of technical terms of art and literature is particularly noticeable, and it was now that the foundations were laid of that almost automatic system whereby a new Greek-English word is coined to mark each advance that is made in science, and especially in mechanical science. _Automatic_ is itself an example, and it is hardly necessary to add _chronometer_, _dynamo_, _magneto_, _metronome_, _telescope_, _theodolite_, _thermometer_,...

But though the stern lovers of their native tongue were thus hopelessly outclassed, yet the mere existence of the conservative feeling which they tried to voice must have acted as a useful brake on the too indiscriminate adoption of new words. The English language was, in fact, settling down. It was in the future to receive countless additions—never to change its very essence as it had done in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And thus, as we look on towards the modern period, we find only fewer and more scattered historical vestiges. But if we can no longer expect etymology to tell us anything approaching to a complete and coherent tale, it will nevertheless still light up for us from different angles different little portions of that dark, mysterious mass, the past.

By the sixteenth century, for example, that peculiarly English characteristic, the love of sport, had already begun to make its mark on the language. _Sport_ itself is an abbreviation of ‘disport’, a French word meaning ‘to carry oneself in a different direction from that of one’s ordinary business’. It is interesting to observe how both the form and meaning of the English word have diverged from their origin, and how they have since been reborrowed into French and most of the other languages of Europe. Italian tailors will even use the vocable to describe a roll of loud check cloth! Of the older sports, hawking has given us _allure_, _haggard_, _rebate_, and _reclaim_. The Latin ‘reclamare’ had meant ‘to cry out against’ or ‘to contradict’; it was only in hawking that it acquired its present sense of ‘calling back’ from the cries that were uttered to summon the hawk back to the wrist. _Allure_ is from the old _lure_, an apparatus for recalling the birds, and _haggard_ is a word of obscure etymology which was used of a wild hawk. _Forte_ and _foible_ are old fencing terms, describing the strong and weak (_feeble_) points of a sword. _Couple_, _muse_, _relay_, _retrieve_ (French ‘retrouver’), _run riot_, _ruse_, _sagacious_, _tryst_, and _worry_ we owe to hunting, as also the development of the Latin ‘sentire’ into the English word _scent_. Of these the most interesting are perhaps _muse_, which is supposed to be derived from the same word as _muzzle_, and _ruse_, another form of _rush_. The hounds were said to ‘muzzle’ when they sniffed the air in doubt about the scent, and a _ruse_ was a doubling of the hunted animal on its own tracks. _Rove_ (but not _rover_) is from archery, meaning in the first place ‘to shoot arrows at an arbitrarily selected target’. _Bias_, _bowl over_, and _rub_ in the phrase ‘there’s the rub’ are from bowls, _crestfallen_ and _white feather_ from cockfighting, and _chess_, _check_, _checkmate_, _cheque_, and _chequer_ come to us through the Arabian from Persian, the central word being a corruption of the Persian ‘Shah mat’, meaning ‘The Shah (the King) is dead’. It is not so generally known that all the varied meanings of these words are metaphors taken either from the game or from the board on which it is played.

The more modern sports do not yet seem to have provided us with many new words, but there is a promising tendency to transmute some of their technical terms into lively idiom. In this way we can use, for example, to _sprint_, to _put on a spurt_, the _last lap_, _clean bowled_, to _take his middle stump_, to _skate on thin ice_, to _kick off_, to _tee off_, _one up_,...; and modern games have also been instrumental in preserving from oblivion the odd old French word _bisque_, of unknown origin, which came over to England with the now nearly obsolete game of tennis, as well as the French-Scottish _caddie_.

When we hear a golfer use this word, when we hear a Scotch person ask for an _aschet_, instead of a dish, or see the queer expression _petticoat-tales_ on a tin of Edinburgh shortbread, we are taken back to the close connection between the French and Scottish Courts which existed in the days of Mary Stuart. For _caddie_ is a corruption of the French “cadet” (younger son), whence also modern English _cad_ and _cadet_; _aschet_ is a form of the French ‘assiette’; and _petticoat-tales_ a corruption of ‘petits gateaux’ (little cakes).

Another phenomenon of history which is very faithfully preserved in the English language is our long-standing and not always creditable nautical relations with the Dutch. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century Dutch sea words continued to trickle into the language, the fourteenth seeing the arrival of _bowsprit_ and _skipper_, the fifteenth of _freight_, _hoy_, _keel_, _lighter_, _pink_, _pump_, _scout_, _marline_, and _buoy_, the sixteenth of _aloof_, _belay_, _dock_, _mesh_, _reef_, _rover_, and _flyboat_, while the seventeenth century, when Van Tromp nailed his broom to the mast, the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway, and William of Orange sat upon the English throne, gave us _avast_, _bow_, _boom_, _cruise_, _cruiser_, _gybe_, and _keelhaul_. Besides these maritime words English possesses certain military memories of the Dutch. _Freebooter_ goes back to the war with Spain in the reign of Elizabeth, and _cashier_, _domineer_, _drill_, _furlough_, and _onslaught_ are also among the words brought back from the Low Countries by English soldiers. A particularly freakish Dutch borrowing is the apparently English _forlorn hope_, which is in reality a popular corruption of the Flemish ‘verloren hoop’, a phrase that has nothing to do with hope and means a ‘lost expedition’.

The Spanish words in the English language, like the Dutch, are few in number, but often full of history. Those which came originally from Arabic—the most interesting of all—will be dealt with in another chapter. We received them for the most part through the French. _Alligator_,[18] _chocolate_, _cocoa_, and _tomato_, which come through Spanish from Mexican, commemorate the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and the poetic _breeze_ is a sixteenth-century adaptation of the Spanish ‘briza’, a name for the north-east trade wind in the Spanish Main. Of the other words which come to us through Spanish _cannibal_, _hammock_, _hurricane_, _maize_, and _savannah_ are Caribbean, while _canoe_, _potato_, and _tobacco_ are South American. _Cannibal_, like the names _West Indies_ and _Indian_ (meaning ‘aboriginal inhabitant of America’), hides a more detailed history. It was brought back by Christopher Columbus, who believed, when he reached the islands of the Caribbean Sea, that he had sailed right round the world, back to the east coast of India. The name ‘Caniba’—a variant of ‘Carib’ or ‘Caribes’—he took as a proof that the inhabitants were subjects of the Grand Khan of Tartary.

We can see, then, how the new impulse towards travel and exploration which followed the Renaissance left behind, when it ebbed, many exotic and exotic-sounding words whose etymologies can tell us not a little of the nationality of those adventurous mariners who led the way to the East and to the new world. The Spaniards were not the only explorers. The Indian words _coolie_ and _curry_ come to us through Portuguese; _banana_ and _negro_ reached us from Africa, possibly by the same route; and _cocoanut_ is from the Portuguese ‘coco’, a bugbear or bogy—alluding to the nut’s monkey-like face. _Drub_—once used only of the bastinado—is thought to be an Arabic word brought back by suffering Christians from the Barbary States. _Amuck_, _bamboo_, and _cockatoo_, come from Malayan through Portuguese, and _caddy_ (the receptacle) from Malayan direct. _Moccasin_, _tomahawk_, and _hickory_ are among the words sent back to us by the seventeenth-century English settlers in North America. _Taboo_, _tattoo_, and _kangaroo_ came home with Captain Cook from the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the civil and political history of England has been growing steadily. _Political_, _politics_, _politician_, and _parliamentary_ first appear in the sixteenth century, and _Cabinet Council_ seems to have been introduced at the accession of Charles I. _Cabal_, one of the few Hebrew words in the English language, probably owes its familiarity to two historical events. It was applied in Charles II’s reign to a small committee of the Privy Council, also known as the “Committee for Foreign Affairs”, which afterwards became the Cabinet; moreover, a little later on it happened that the names of the five Ministers who signed the Treaty of Alliance with France against Holland were Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. Their initials thus arranged spell the word _cabal_, which was humorously used to describe them. Another far commoner expression which dates back to the Civil War is the phrase ‘the _army_.’ It reminds us that we had no standing army until after the foundation of the Parliamentary Forces. _Cavalier_ and _Roundhead_ are words which carry their history, so to speak, on their sleeves. They were both coined as terms of abuse, and among other uncivil relics of the Civil War which have found a more extended application, _fanatic_ and _Puritan_ were invented by the Royalists and _malignant_ by the Roundheads. _Independent_ and _independence_ are also Puritan words, and the useful _demagogue_ first appeared in the _Eikon Basilike_, the famous pamphlet in defence of the Crown, which Milton answered with his _Eikonoklastes_. The expression _to send to Coventry_ is probably a gift from the rebellious citizens of Birmingham, who, according to Clarendon, frequently “rose upon small parties of the King’s” and either killed them or sent them, as prisoners, to Coventry, which was a Parliamentary stronghold.

Spite, which always loves a rich vocabulary, is also the father of those venerable labels _tory_ and _whig_. The old Celtic word _tory_ was first applied in the seventeenth century to the unfortunate Irish Catholics, dispossessed by Cromwell, who became savage outlaws living chiefly upon plunder; after that it was used for some time of bandits in general, and at the close of James II’s reign the “Exclusioners” found it a conveniently offensive nickname for those who favoured the succession of the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York. Thus, when William of Orange finally succeeded in reaching the throne, it became the approved name of one of the two great political parties in Great Britain. _Whig_ is a shortened form of _whiggamore_, a name given to certain Scotchmen from the word _whiggam_, which they used in driving their horses. It was first used of the rebellious Scottish Covenanters who marched to Edinburgh in 1648; then of the Exclusioners, who were opposed to the accession of James; and finally, from 1689 onwards, of the other great political party or one of its adherents.

That the seventeenth century saw the true genesis of many of our commercial and financial institutions is suggested by the fact that their names first appear at this time. Such are _capital_, which is a doublet of _cattle_—the very oldest Aryan form of wealth[19]—_commercial_, _discount_, _dividend_, _insurance_, _investment_, and lastly the modern meaning of _bank_, which, like the names of so many protective and responsible institutions—the _Assizes_, the _Bench_, the _Consulate_, the _Council_, the _Chair_ at a public meeting, a _Seat_ in Parliament, and the _Throne_—is based etymologically on what we may call one of the oldest and safest of human occupations. The old Teutonic word which subsequently became modern English _bench_ was adopted into Italian, probably from the Teutonic Lombards of northern Italy, in the form ‘banco’. It soon acquired the special sense of a moneychanger’s ‘bench’ or table and found its way, together with the object it represents, into most of the countries of Europe. Thus, like the name _Lombard Street_, the little word carries us back with it to the origin of banking in northern Italy and to Edward I’s substitution of Italian _bankers_ for Jewish moneylenders. _Bankruptcy_, _currency_, and _remittance_ appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century, and in the second _bonus_, _capitalist_, _consols_, and _finance_. The history of _finance_ is again interesting. The word goes right back to the Latin ‘finis’ (end). When it first appeared in English, it had the sense of a ‘fine’ or forfeit, but its modern significance was developed in eighteenth-century France among the tax-farmers or ‘financiers’, as they were called, to whom the king delegated the duty of collecting his taxes. As time went on, these shrewd individuals amalgamated into a sort of limited company, which, by a judicious application of the principles of usury, gradually gained more and more control over the revenue, until “toutes les finances du royaume”, as Voltaire says, “dépendirent d’une compagnie de commerce”. In England the phrase _Bank of England_ first appears in 1694, describing a body of individuals associated for the purpose of lending money to the Government; and about thirty years later this still (1925) outstanding loan began to be known as the _National Debt_.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century commercial and financial considerations seem to have played a steadily increasing part in determining the nation’s policy. Horace Walpole is the first person known to have used _speculation_ in the sense of buying and selling stocks and shares; and _budget_ (a little bag or pocket) may owe its modern political meaning to a pamphlet sarcastically entitled _The Budget Opened_, in which his brother Robert’s financial policy received some severe handling. _Prime Minister_ also takes us back to Sir Robert Walpole, to whom it was applied with derisive innuendo, for it had in those days more the sense of ‘Grand Vizier’ or despot’s tool. In the old-fashioned _nabob_, as a synonym for ‘plutocrat’, we have a memory of the latter days of the East India Company when the squandering of large sums of money in London often rounded off a life of empire-building in Bombay or Calcutta. The dictionary suggests, however, that later generations of Anglo-Indians preferred to bring back with them less questionable impedimenta, such as _pyjamas_ and _shampoo_.

The phrase, the _Rights of Man_, takes us back to the American Declaration of Independence. The borrowing of _aristocrat_ and _democrat_ from French, the French word _guillotine_, and the appearance in English of _revolutionize_ and _terrorize_ are enduring relics of the French Revolution, and the word _sectional_, which came in in the nineteenth century, is closely bound up with the history of France, for it is derived (together with the geographical use of _section_) from the division of France into electoral sections under the Directory. The military meaning of _conscription_ goes back to the France of the same period. To the campaigns in the Soudan we owe _zareeba_, and to the Boer War the Dutch words _kopje_ and _spoor_. It is too early yet to say what verbal legacy the European War has left us, but the anonymous _stunt_ and _gadget_ (small mechanical contrivance), and the French _camouflage_ seem to have taken a fairly firm hold, while the expressions _eyewash_, to _scrounge_ (meaning to ‘steal’), to _get the wind up_, to _go west_, and possibly to _swing the lead_ (to be idle at somebody else’s expense), are idioms which show no signs of departing from us yet. President Wilson’s _self-determination_ has probably been added to half the languages of the world.

A list of new words like _anaesthetic_, _galvanometer_, _morse_, _railroad_, _telephone_, _turbine_, ... which appeared in the nineteenth century, would tell a full and fairly accurate story of its extraordinarily sudden mechanical and scientific development, but such a list has yet to be compiled. More interesting in many ways are the appearance of new metaphors and idioms, such as to _peter out_, to _pan out_ (from mining), to _blow off_ or _get up steam_, and to _go off the rails_ from the steam engine, and many electrical metaphors such as those mentioned in Chapter I. For new ways of doing are bound up with new ways of knowing and thinking, and the true story of the nineteenth century, as of every other century, is the story of its mental and emotional outlook. To this long and intricate story the rest of this book is devoted, but before passing on to it a few aspects of our subject, with which there is not space to deal fully, may perhaps be mentioned.

The light thrown by certain words on the social history of England, as opposed to her political history, is a clear and often a new one. To look up in the _Oxford Dictionary_ such words as _blackguard_, _carol_, _club_, _morris_, _teetotal_, or a thousand others which seem to have no particular historical significance, and to read through the many illustrative quotations, is to take a wonderfully easy and intimate peep into the past; while the dates at which such words as _magazine_, _news-letter_, _newspaper_, _novelist_, _press_, or again, _callers_, _small talk_, _tea-party_, _snob_, _antimacassar_, ... appeared, together with quotations showing the particular shades of meaning with which they have been used, are in themselves a little history of the English people. What could be more suggestive, for instance, than the fact that the adjective _improper_ was first applied to human beings in the early fifties?

Words which are derived from the names of real individuals, as _bowdlerize_, _boycott_, _burke_, _derrick_, _dunce_,[20] _galvanize_, _mesmerism_, _morse_, _sandwich_, _tawdry_, or fictitious ones, as _gamp_, _knickerbocker_, _lilliputian_, _quixotic_, _pamphlet_, _pickwickian_, are sometimes, but not always historically interesting. Again, the place-names of England, whether of country villages or London streets, are heavily loaded with the past, but the subject is such a vast and disconnected one that it would require a volume to itself.

The characteristics of nations, as of races, are fairly accurately reflected linguistically in the metaphors and idioms they choose, in their tricks of grammar, in their various ways of forming new words. It is, for obvious reasons, easier to apply this principle to other nations than to one’s own; nevertheless there are a few such points which English people can observe even in the English language. The number of words and expressions drawn from sport is a phenomenon which has already been touched upon, and it is at any rate a question whether humour has not played a larger part in the creation of English and American words than in those of other languages. The French ‘tête’[21] is humorous in origin, and there must be other French and Latin-French words with a similar history, but English has really quite a number of words in which humour has taken a hand. One way in which this comes about is the process known as back-formation. We realize the humorous intention when somebody invents from the noun _swashbuckler_ a verb to _swashbuckle_, or to _buttle_ and _cuttle_ from _butler_ and _cutler_, but it is not so well known that the same process (probably with the same humorous intent behind it) gave us such sober words as _burgle_, _sidle_, _edit_, _grovel_, _beg_, and _greed_. One of the most interesting back-formations is the verb to _maffick_, formed from the supposed present participle _mafficking_, which was coined to describe the festivities that greeted the arrival in London of the news of the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War. The well-known humorous device of understatement is responsible for the modern meaning of _hit_ and most of its synonyms. The notion of striking was once conveyed by the verb to _slay_; by Tudor times, however, _smite_, which in Old English meant to ‘smear’ or ‘rub over’, had become the commoner word. _Strike_ itself in Old English meant ‘to stroke’ or ‘to rub gently’, and _hit_, which is now universal in serious colloquial speech, meant to ‘meet with’ or ‘light upon’—‘not to miss’, in fact; just as to _win_ (‘not to lose’) something means, or recently meant, in the British Army, to _steal_ it. _Blow_ and _thrash_ are both sly agricultural metaphors, and the present popularity of such slang phrases as _wipe_, meaning a blow, and to _wipe out_, suggests that this pleasing and rather simple form of humour is still active in English word-formation.

But the number of these little etymological sidetracks is almost infinite. We might, for instance, ask ourselves whether the colloquial use of _chap_ for ‘individual’ (from the Old English ‘cheapen’ to ‘buy’, cognate with _chapman_, _cheap_, _Cheapside_, ...) is really the unconscious self-expression of a nation of shopkeepers, or whether it is purely accidental; in which connection we should have to notice the modern tendency to renew a faded metaphor by substituting the word _merchant_, and so on. But the truly scientific way of approaching this part of our subject is to study the various English words which have been adopted by foreign nations, and the meanings they have developed there.

These were few enough up to the end of the seventeenth century, but from then on their number and importance increased; and we cannot help being interested in them, whether on the one hand the foreigner has merely employed them in despair of finding any word in his own language adequate to describe the object or idiosyncrasy in question, or whether his adoption of them implies that he has also borrowed the things of which they are the names. In the first of these classes we should probably put _cant_, _comfort_, _gentleman_, _humbug_, _humour_, _respectability_, _romantic_, _sentimental_, _snobbism_, _spleen_,...; in the second, _ale_, _beefsteak_, _gin_, _grog_, _mackintosh_, _pudding_, _riding-coat_ (redingote), _roast-beef_, _rum_, _sport_, _sportsman_, _waterproof_, _whisky_, and various technical terms of sport such as _box_, _Derby_, _handicap_, _jockey_,...

To the second group also would belong our most important contributions to foreign languages—the political words. When we find _bill_, _budget_, _committee_, _jury_, _lock-out_, _meeting_, _pamphlet_, _speech_, _strike_, _trade-union_, ... on the Continent, and realize that the modern meanings of European words such as _constitution_, _represent_, _vote_, or of Old French words like _address_, _majority_, _minority_, _motion_, _parliament_, ... are derived from English, we feel ourselves in the presence, not so much of something peculiarly English as of something universal which England has been the means of bringing to earth. That vast theoretical terms like _liberty_, _equality_, and _fraternity_ should be borrowed by England from France in return for _committee_, _jury_, _meeting_, ... that the French _idéalogue_ and _doctrinaire_ should be bartered for _utilitarian_ and _experimental_—these facts have been taken to indicate a certain division of function in the economy of European social evolution, the Frenchman producing the abstract moral ideals and the Englishman attempting to clothe them with reality. And it may be that in such important loan-words as _club_ and _freemason_ and _sport_, but, above all, in _committee_—that sensitive instrument for maintaining the balance as between individual and associative personality—we can perceive the Englishman’s secret: his power of voluntary co-operation, and his innate understanding of the give-and-take it requires.

While we can hardly expect to see an undistorted reflection of ourselves in the first group of words mentioned above, yet the grotesque meanings which many of them have acquired abroad are interesting partly for that very reason. They enable us, if studied carefully, to see ourselves not only as others see us, but as others saw us. And from both groups together we can re-create, as Mr. Pearsall Smith has pointed out, something of the curious England which was ‘discovered’ about the middle of the eighteenth century by the rest of Europe, can rejoice with Voltaire in her atmosphere of religious toleration and personal liberty, and admire with Montesquieu her haphazard constitution; we can take back to our native France or Germany romantic and sentimental memories of _le ‘lovely moon’ des Anglois_, or, better still, delving farther into the past, we can stride across the Italian stage in our top boots and our _redingote_, a moody and spleenful English _milord_, liable to commit suicide at any moment.

Important as they are, however, we must not be misled by this little group of words into supposing that English is a language which has given away much. On the contrary, surveying it as a whole, we are struck, above all, by the ease with which it has itself appropriated the linguistic products of others. Like Mr. Shaw’s Shakespeare, its genius seems to have lain not so much in originality as in the snapping up of unconsidered trifles; and where it has excelled all the other languages of Europe, possibly of the world, is in the grace with which it has hitherto digested these particles of foreign matter and turned them into its own life’s blood. Historically, the English language is a muddle; actually it is a beautiful, personal, and highly sensitive creature.