Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN
 
 WORDS; 
 
 THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 WILLIAM MATHEWS, LL.D., 
 
 AUTHOR OP "GETTING ON IN THE WORLD," AND "THE GREAT CONVERSERS, 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS." 
 
 Die Sprache ist nichts anderes als der in die Erscheinung tretende Gedanke 
 and beide sind innerlich nur eins und dasselbe. BECKER. 
 
 FOURTH THOUSAND. 
 
 CHICAGO: 
 S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 
 
 1876.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1876, 
 BY S. C. QRIGGS AND COMPANY. 
 
 KM'iHT & LEONARD, PRINTERS, CHICAGO. 
 
 Electrotjptd by A. ZEESE i CO.,
 
 Stack 
 Anne* 
 
 TO 
 
 MARTIN B. ANDERSON, LL.D. 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KOCUESTEK, 
 
 THIS WORK IS INSCRIBED 
 WITH THE SINCERE REGARDS OF 
 
 THE AUTHOR.
 
 Words are lighter than the cloud foam 
 
 Of the restless ocean spray; 
 Vainer than the trembling shadow 
 
 That the next hour steals away; 
 By the fall of summer rain-drops 
 
 Is the air as deeply stirred; 
 And the rose leaf that we tread on 
 
 Will outlive a word. 
 
 Yet on the dull silence breaking 
 
 With a lightning flash, a word, 
 Bearing endless desolation 
 
 On its blighting wings, I heard. 
 Earth can forge no keener weapon, 
 
 Dealing surer death and pain, 
 And the cruel echo answered 
 
 Through long years again. 
 
 I have known one word hang star-like 
 
 O'er a dreary waste of years, 
 And it only shone the brighter 
 
 Looked at through a mist of tears, 
 While a weary wanderer gathered 
 
 Hope and heart on life's dark way, 
 By its faithful promise shining 
 
 Clearer day by day. 
 
 I have known a spirit calmer 
 
 Then the calmest lake, and clear 
 As the heavens that gazed upon it, 
 
 With no wave of hope or fear; 
 But a storm had swept across it, 
 
 And its deepest depths were stirred, 
 Never, never more to slumber, 
 
 Only by a word. 
 
 ADELAIDE A. PROCTER.
 
 Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead 
 sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to 
 speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate. MAX MUL.LER. 
 
 A winged word hath struck ineradically in a million hearts, and enven- 
 omed every hour throughout their hard pulsation. On a winged word hath 
 hung the destiny of nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been 
 willing to cast the immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future 
 happiness. W. S. LANDOR. 
 
 Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, 
 produces that which makes thousand, perhaps millions, think. BYRON. 
 
 A dead language is full of all monumental remembrances of the people 
 who spoke it. Their swords and their shields are in it; their faces are pic- 
 tured on its walls; and their very voices ring still through its recesses. 
 B. W. DWIGHT. 
 
 Every sentence of the great writer is like an autograph. . . If Milton had 
 endorsed a bill of exchange with half-a-dozen blank verse lines, it would be as 
 good as his name, and would be accepted as good evidence in court. ALEX- 
 ANDER SMITH. 
 
 If there be a human talent, let it get into the tongue, and make melody 
 with that organ. The talent that can say nothing for itself, what is it? Noth- 
 ing; or a thing that can do mere drudgeries, and at best make money by 
 railways. CARLTLE. 
 
 Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted with diffi- 
 culty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself be- 
 come so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every sentence 
 shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables. T. W. 
 
 HlGGINSON. 
 
 Six little words do claim me every day, 
 
 Shall, must and can, with will and ought and may. 
 
 SHALL is the law within inscribed by heaven, 
 
 The goal to which I by myself am driven. 
 
 MUST is the bound not to be overpast, 
 
 Where by the world and nature I'm held fast. 
 
 CAN is the measure of my personal dower 
 
 Of deed and art, science and practised power. 
 
 WILL is my noblest crown, my brightest, best, 
 
 Freedom's my own seal upon my soul imprest; 
 
 OUGHT the inscription on the seal set fair 
 
 On Freedom's open door, a bolt 'tis there. 
 
 And lastly, MAT, 'mong many courses mixed, 
 
 The vaguely possible by the moment fixed. 
 
 SHALL, MUST and CAN, with WILL and OUGHT and MAT, 
 
 These are the six that claim me every day. 
 
 Only when God doth teach, do I know what each day, 
 
 I shall, I must, I can, I will, I ought, I may. 
 
 Translated from the German for the N. Y. School Journal.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 origin of this book is as follows: Some 
 -L twenty years ago, the author, having considera- 
 ble leisure, wrote a lecture on "Words, their Sig- 
 nificance, Use and Abuse," which he delivered before 
 a number of Literary Societies and Lecture Associa- 
 tions. Being very much interested in the subject, he 
 continued from time to time to make notes of his 
 thoughts and readings upon it, till at length the lecture 
 grew into a volume. 
 
 The author is well aware that in his criticisms on 
 the misuses and abuses of words, he has exposed him- 
 self to criticism ; and it may be that he has been guilty 
 of some of the very sins which he has condemned. 
 If so, he sins in good company, since nearly all of 
 his predecessors, who have written on the same theme, 
 have been found guilty of a similar inconsistency, from 
 Lindley Murray down to Dean Alford, Moon, Marsh, 
 and Fowler. If the public is to hear no philological 
 sermons till the preachers are faultless, it will have 
 to wait forever. " The only impeccable authors," says 
 Hazlitt, "are those that never wrote." Any just, 
 well-meant criticism, however severe, the author will
 
 8 PREFACE. 
 
 gratefully welcome; to that which springs from an 
 instinctive love of fault-finding, he is apt to be thick- 
 skinned. In the words of Erasmus : " Nos ad utrum- 
 que juxta parati sumus, ut vel rationem reddamus, si 
 quid recte monuimus, vel ingenue confiteamur errorem, 
 sicubi lapsi deprehendimur." 
 
 It is hardly necessary to add that the work is de- 
 signed for popular reading, rather than for scholars. 
 How much the author is indebted to others, he can- 
 not say. He has been traveling, in his own way, 
 over old and well-worn ground, and has picked up 
 his materials freely from all the sources within his 
 reach. Non nova, sed nove, has been his aim ; he 
 regrets that he has not accomplished it more to his 
 satisfaction. The world, it has been truly said, does 
 not need new thoughts so much as it needs that old 
 thoughts be recast. There are some writers, however, 
 to whom he has been particularly indebted ; and 
 therefore a list of their names, with the books con- 
 sulted, has been appended at the end of the volume.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS 11 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS . . . . . . .56 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 (TRAND WORDS . ..... 94 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 SMALL WORDS 123 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 WORDS WITHOUT MEANING 137 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 SOME ABUSES OF WORDS 152 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 168 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS 182
 
 1(1 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS (continued) .... 200 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS ' . . 212 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS (continued) 236 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 NICKNAMES 263 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE 280 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH 326 
 
 INDEX . 372
 
 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 
 
 "Speech is morning to the mind; 
 It spreads the beauteous images abroad, 
 Which else lie dark and buried in the soul." 
 
 La parole, cette main de 1'esprit. CHABBON. 
 Syllables govern the world. COKE. 
 
 TO the thoughtful man, who has reflected on the com- 
 mon operations of life, which, but for their common- 
 ness, would be deemed full of marvel, few things are more 
 wonderful than the origin, structure, history and signifi- 
 cance of words. The tongue is the glory of man; for 
 though animals have memory, will and intellect, yet lan- 
 guage, which gives us a duplicate and multipliable exist- 
 ence, enabling mind to communicate with mind, is the 
 Rubicon which they never have dared to cross. The dog 
 barks as it barked at the creation, and the crow of the cock 
 is the same to-day as when it startled the ear of repentant 
 Peter. The song of the lark and the howl of the leop- 
 ard have continued as unchangeable as the concentric 
 circles of the spider and the waxen hexagon of the bee; 
 and even the stoutest champion of the ourang-outang the- 
 ory of man's origin will admit that no process of natu-
 
 12 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 ral selection has yet distilled significant words out of the 
 cries of beasts or the notes of birds. Speech is a divine 
 gift. It is the last seal of dignity stamped by God upon 
 His intelligent offspring, and proves, more conclusively 
 than his upright form, or his looks " commercing with 
 the skies," that he was made in the image of God. With- 
 out this crowning gift to man, even reason would have 
 been comparatively valueless; for he would have felt him- 
 self to be imprisoned even when at large, solitary in the 
 midst of a crowd; and the society of the wisest of his 
 race would have been as uninstructive as that of barbari- 
 ans and savages. The rude tongue of a Patagonian or 
 Australian is full of wonders to the philosopher; but as 
 we ascend in the scale of being from the uncouth sounds 
 which express the desires of a savage to the lofty periods 
 of a Cicero or a Chatham, the power of words expands 
 until it attains to regions far above the utmost range of 
 our capacity. It designates, as Novalis has said, God with 
 three letters, and the infinite with as many syllables, 
 though the ideas conveyed by these words are immeasur- 
 ably beyond the utmost grasp of man. In every relation 
 of life, at every moment of our active being, in every 
 thing we think or do, it is on the meaning and inflection 
 of a word that the direction of our thoughts, and the ex- 
 pression of our will, turn. The soundness of our reason- 
 ings, the clearness of our belief and of our judgment, 
 the influence we exert upon others, and the manner in 
 which we are impressed by our fellow-men, all depend 
 upon a knowledge of the value of words. It is in lan- 
 guage that the treasures of human knowledge, the dis- 
 coveries of Science, and the achievements of Art are 
 chiefly preserved; it is language that furnishes the poet
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 13 
 
 with the airy vehicle for his most delicate fancies, the 
 orator with the elements of his electrifying eloquence, 
 the savant with the record of his classification, the meta- 
 physician with the means of his sharp distinction, the 
 statesman with the drapery of his vast design, and the 
 philosopher with the earthly instrument of his heaven- 
 reaching induction. 
 
 " Words," said the fierce Mirabeau, in reply to an oppo- 
 nent in the National Assembly, " are things;" and truly they 
 were such when he thundered them forth from the Tribune, 
 full of life, meaning and power. Words are always things, 
 when coming from the lips of a master-spirit, and instinct 
 with his own individuality. Especially is this true of so 
 impassioned orators as Mirabeau, who have thoughts impa- 
 tient for words, not words starving for thoughts, and who 
 but give utterance to the spirit breathed by the whole Third 
 Estate of a nation. Their words are not merely things, but 
 living things, endowed with power not only to communicate 
 ideas, but to convey, as by spiritual conductors, the shock 
 and thrill which attended their birth. Look at the " winged 
 words " of old Homer, into which he breathed the breath 
 of his own spiritual life, how long have they kept on the 
 wing ! For twenty-five or thirty centuries they have main- 
 tained their flight across gulfs of time in which empires 
 have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life 
 have sunk into oblivion; and they are still full of the life- 
 blood of immortal youth. 
 
 " How forcible," says Job, " are right words! " " A word 
 fitly spoken," says Solomon, " is like apples of gold in 
 pictures of silver." Few persons have duly estimated the 
 power of words. In anatomical museums one will some- 
 times see the analysis of a man 7 that is, the mere chem-
 
 14 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 ical constituents, so much lime, so much albumen, so much 
 phosphorus, etc. These dead substances fail not more 
 utterly in representing a living man, with his mental and 
 moral force, than do the long rows of words in the lexicon of 
 exhibiting the power with which, as signs of ideas, they 
 may be endowed. Language has been truly pronounced 
 the armory of the human mind, which contains at once 
 the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future con- 
 quests. Look at a Webster or a Calhoun, when his mighty 
 enginery of thought is in full operation; how his words 
 tell upon his adversary, battering down the intrenchments 
 of sophistry like shot from heavy ordnance! Cannon-shot 
 are very harmless things when piled up for show; so are 
 words when tiered up in the pages of a dictionary, with 
 no mind to select and send them home to the mark. But 
 let them receive the vitalizing touch of genius, and how 
 they leap with life; with what tremendous energy are 
 they endowed! When the little Corsican bombarded Cadi/ 
 at the distance of five miles, it was deemed the very tri- 
 umph of engineering; but what was this paltry range to 
 that of words, which bombard the ages yet to come? 
 " Scholars," says Sir Thomas Browne, " are men of peace. 
 They carry no arms, but their tongues are sharper than 
 Actus his razors; their pens carry further and make a 
 louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock 
 of a basalisco than the fury of a merciless pen." 
 
 The words which a man of genius selects are as much 
 his own as his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the 
 incarnation, of his thought, as the body contains the soul. 
 Analyze a speech by either of the great orators we have 
 just named, and a critical study will satisfy you that the 
 crushing force of his arguments lies not less in the nicety
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 15 
 
 and skill with which the words are chosen, than in the 
 granite- like strength of thought. Attempt to substitute 
 other words for those that are used, and you will find 
 that the latter are part and parcel of the author's mind 
 and conception; that every word is accommodated with 
 marvellous exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; 
 that not the least of them can be changed without marr- 
 ing the completeness and beauty of the author's idea. If 
 any other words can be used than those which a writer 
 does use, he is a bungling rhetorician, and skims only the 
 surface of his theme. True as this is of the best prose, 
 it is doubly true of the best poetry: it is a linked strain 
 throughout. It has been said by one who was himself a 
 consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection 
 of any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your 
 memory, you may hunt through the forty thousand words 
 in the language, and not one shall fit the vacant place but 
 that which the poet put there. Though he uses only the 
 simplest and homeliest terms, yet "you might as well 
 think," says Coleridge, " of pushing a brick out of a wall 
 with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of 
 any of the finished passages of Shakespeare." Who needs 
 to be told how much the wizard sorcery of Milton depends 
 on the words he uses ? It is not in what he directly tells 
 us that his spell lies, but in the immense suggestiveness 
 of his verse. 
 
 In Homer, it has been justly said, there are no hidden 
 meanings, no deeps of thought into which the soul descends 
 for lingering contemplation; no words which are key- 
 notes, awakening the spirit's melodies, 
 
 "Untwisting all the links that tie 
 The hidden soul of harmony."
 
 16 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 But here is the realm of Milton's mastery. He electrifies 
 the mind through conductors. His words, as Macaulay 
 declares, are charmed. Their meaning bears no proportion 
 to their effect. " No sooner are they pronounced, than the 
 past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty 
 start at once into existence, and all the burial places of the 
 memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the 
 sentence, substitute one synonyme for another, and the 
 whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he 
 who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself 
 as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he 
 stood crying ' Open Wheat,' ' Open Barley,' to the door 
 which obeyed no sound but ' Open Sesame.' " 
 
 The force and significance which Milton can infuse into 
 the simplest word are strikingly shown in his description 
 of the largest of land animals, in " Paradise Lost." In a 
 single line the unwieldy monster is so represented as coming 
 from the ground, that we almost involuntarily start aside 
 from fear of being crushed by the living mass: 
 
 "Behemoth, the biggest born of earth, upheaved 
 His vastnese." 
 
 It is this necromantic power over language, this skill 
 in striking " the electric chain with which we are darkly 
 bound," till its vibrations thrill along the chords of the 
 heart, and its echoes ring in all the secret chambers of the 
 soul, which blinds us to the absurdities of " Paradise 
 Lost." While following this mighty magician of language 
 through 
 
 "many a winding bout 
 
 Of linked Bweetness long drawn out," 
 
 we overlook the incongruity with which he makes angels 
 fight with " villainous saltpetre " and divinities talk Gal-
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 17 
 
 vinism. puts the subtleties of Greek syntax into the >mouth 
 of Eve, and exhibits the Omnipotent Father arguing like a 
 school divine. As with Milton, so with his great prede- 
 cessor, Dante. Wondrous as is his power of creating pic- 
 tures in a few lines, he owes it mainly to the directness, 
 simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him " the in- 
 visible becomes visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence 
 describes a character; a word acts as a flash of lightning, 
 which displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower 
 is standing, with dreadful faces at the window." 
 
 The difference in the use of words by different writers 
 is as great as that in the use of paints by great and poor 
 artists; and there is as great a difference in the effect upon 
 the understanding and the sensibilities of their readers. 
 Who that is familiar with Bacon's writings can ever fail to 
 recognize one of his sentences, so dense with pith, and 
 going to the mark as if from a gun? In him, it has been 
 remarked, language was always the flexible and obedient 
 instrument of the thought; not, as in the productions of a 
 lower order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave. 
 "All authors below the highest seem to use the mighty gift 
 of expression with a certain secret timidity, lest the lever 
 should prove too ponderous for the hand that essays to 
 wield it; or rather, they resemble the rash student in the 
 old legend, who was overmastered by the demons which he 
 had unguardedly provoked." Emerson, in speaking of the 
 intense vitality of Montaigne's words, says that if you cut 
 them, they would bleed. Joubert, in revealing the secret 
 of Rousseau's charm, says: "He imparted, if I may so 
 speak, bowels of feeling to the words he used (donna des 
 entrailles a tous les mots), and poured into them such a 
 charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that
 
 18 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 his writings have an effect upon the soul something like 
 that of those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste and 
 intoxicate our reason." 
 
 How much is the magic of Tennyson's verse due to 
 " the fitting of aptest words to things," which we find on 
 every page of his poetry! He has not only the vision. 
 but the faculty divine, and no secret of his art is hid 
 from him. Foot and pause, rhyme and rhythm, allitera- 
 tion; subtle, penetrative words that touch the very quick 
 of the truth; cunning words that have a spell in them 
 for the memory and the imagination: old words, with 
 their weird influence, 
 
 " Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years," 
 
 and words used for the occasion in their primary sense, 
 are all his ministers, and obedient to his will. An Ameri- 
 can writer, Mr. E. C. Stedman, in speaking of Swin- 
 burne's marvellous gift of melody, asks: " Who taught 
 him all the hidden springs of melody? He was born a 
 tamer of words, a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most 
 copious of the literary tongues. In his poetry we dis- 
 cover qualities we did not know were in the language 
 a softness that seemed Italian, a rugged strength we 
 thought was German, a blithe and debonair lightness \vc 
 despaired of capturing from the French. He has added 
 a score of new stops and pedals to the instrument. He 
 lias introduced, partly from other tongues, stanzaic forms, 
 measures and effects untried before, and has brought out 
 the swiftness and force of metres like the anapestic, car- 
 rying each to perfection at a single trial. Words in his 
 hands are like the ivory balls of a juggler, and all words 
 seem to be in his hands." 
 
 Words, with such men, are "nimble and airy servitors."
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 19 
 
 not masters, and from the exquisite skill with which they 
 are chosen, and the firmness with which they are knit 
 together, are sometimes " half battles, stronger than most 
 men's deeds." What is the seoret of the weird-like power 
 of De Quincey ? Is it not that, of all late English writers, he 
 has the most imperial dominion over the resources of ex- 
 pression, that he has weighed, as in a hair- balance, the 
 precise significance of every word he uses; that he has 
 conquered so completely the stubbornness of our vernacu- 
 lar as to render it a willing slave to all the whims and 
 caprices, the ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic variations of his 
 thought? Turn to whatever page you will of his writ- 
 ings, and it is not the thorough grasp of his subject, the 
 enormous erudition, the extraordinary breadth and pierc- 
 ing acuteness of intellect which he displays, that excite 
 your greatest surprise; but you feel that here is a man 
 who has gauged the potentiality of every word he u.-.-: 
 who has analyzed the simples of his every compound 
 phrase. In his 'hands our stiff Saxon language becomes 
 almost as ductile as the Greek. Ideas that seem to defy 
 expression, ideas so subtile, or so vague and shifting, 
 that most thinkers find it difficult to contemplate them 
 at all, are conveyed on his page with a nicety, a felicity 
 of phrase, that might almost provoke the envy of Shaks- 
 peare. In the hands of a great sculptor, marble and 
 bronze become as soft and elastic as living flesh, and not 
 unlike this is the dominion which the great writers pos- 
 sess over language. In their verse our rugged but pithy 
 and expressive English breathes all sounds, all melodies; 
 
 "And now 'tis like all instrument*, 
 
 Now like a lonely flute, 
 And now it is an angel's song, 
 That makes the heavens be mnte."
 
 20 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 The superiority of the writers of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury to those of our own day is due not less to their 
 choice and collocation of words than to their weight of 
 thought. There was no writing public nor reading popu- 
 lace in that age; the writers were few and intellectual. 
 and they addressed themselves to learned, or, at least, to 
 studious and thoughtful readers. " The structure of their 
 language," says Henry Taylor, " is itself an evidence that 
 they counted upon another frame of mind, and a different 
 pace and speed in reading, from that which can alone be 
 looked to by the writers of these days. Their books were 
 not written to be snatched up, run through, talked over, 
 and forgotten; and their diction, therefore, was not such 
 as lent wings to haste and impatience, making every- 
 thing so clear that he who ran or flew might read. 
 Rather was it so constructed as to detain the reader over 
 what was pregnant and profound, and compel him to that 
 brooding and prolific posture of mind by which, if he 
 had wings, they might help him to some more genial 
 and profitable employment than that of running like an 
 ostrich through a desert. And hence those characteristics 
 of diction by which these writers are made more fit than 
 those who have followed them to train the ear and utter- 
 ance of a poet. For if we look at the long-suspended 
 sentences of those days, with all their convolutions and 
 intertextures, the many parts waiting for the ultimate 
 wholeness, .we shall perceive that without distinct i\<> 
 movement and rhythmical significance of a very high 
 order, it would be impossible that they could be sustained 
 in any sort of clearness. One of these writers' sentences 
 is often in itself a work of art, having its strophes and 
 antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, by which
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 21 
 
 the reader, though conscious of plural voices and running 
 divisions of thought, is not, however, permitted to disso- 
 ciate them from their mutual concert and dependency, but 
 required, on the contrary, to give them entrance into his 
 mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, as one 
 compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences thus elab- 
 orately constructed, and complex, though musical, are not 
 easy to a remiss reader, but they are clear and delight- 
 ful to an intent reader." 
 
 Few persons are aware how much knowledge is some- 
 times necessary to give the etymology and definition of a 
 word. It is easy to define words, as certain persons satir- 
 ized by Pascal have defined light: "A luminary movement 
 of luminous bodies": or as a Western judge once defined 
 murder to a jury: " Murder, gentlemen, is when a man is 
 murderously killed. It is the murdering that constitutes 
 murder in the eye of the law. Murder, in short, is 
 murder." We have all smiled at Johnson's definition of 
 network: "Network anything reticulated or decussed at 
 equal distances, with interstices between the intersections." 
 Many of the definitions in our dictionaries remind one of 
 Bardolph's attempt to analyze the term accommodation: 
 " Accommodation, that is, when a man is, as they say, 
 accommodated; or when a man is being whereby he 
 may be thought to be accommodated, which is an excel- 
 lent thing." Brimstone, for example, the lexicographer 
 defines by telling us that it is sulphur; and then rewards 
 us for the trouble we have had in turning to sulphur, 
 by telling us that it is brimstone. The eccentric Davy 
 Crockett, whose exterior roughness veiled a great deal 
 of mother wit, happily characterized this whole tribe of 
 lexicographers by a remark he once made to a Western
 
 22 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 member of Congress. When the latter, in a speech on a 
 bill for increasing the number of hospitals, wearied his 
 hearers by incessant repetition, " Sit down," whispered 
 Crockett, "you are coming out of the same hole you 
 went in at." There is a mythical story that the forty 
 members of the French Academy once undertook to define 
 the word crab, and hit upon this, which they deemed quite 
 satisfactory: "Crab, a small- red fish, which walks lock- 
 ward." " Perfect, gentlemen," said Cuvier, when inter- 
 rogated touching the correctness of the definition; "per- 
 fect, only I will make one small observation in natural 
 history. The crab is not a fish, it is not red, and it does not 
 walk backward. With these exceptions, your definition is 
 admirable." Too many easily-made definitions are liable to 
 similar damaging exceptions. 
 
 The truth is, no word can be truly defined until the 
 exact idea is understood, in all its relations, which the word 
 is designed to represent. Let a man undertake to define 
 the word " alkali " or " acid," for instance, and he will have 
 to encounter some pretty hard problems in chemistry. 
 Lavoisier, the author of the terminology of modern chem- 
 istry, tells us that when he undertook to form a nomencla- 
 ture of that science, and while he proposed to himself 
 nothing more than to improve the chemical language, his 
 work transformed itself by degrees, and without his beirrg 
 able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the elements of 
 chemistry. A similar experience was that of Samuel 
 Bailey, who held a derivative opinion in favor of Berkeley's 
 "Theory of Vision"; but having, in the course of a phil- 
 osophical discussion, occasion to explain it, he found, on at- 
 tempting to state in his own language the grounds on which 
 it rested, that they no longer appeared to him to be so clear
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 23 
 
 and conclusive as he had fancied them to be. He deter- 
 mined, therefore, to make them the subject of a patient and 
 dispassionate examination; and the result was a clear con- 
 viction of the erroneousness of Berkeley's theory, the phil- 
 osophical grounds for which 'conviction he has so ably and 
 luminously set forth in his book on the subject. The truth 
 is, accurate definitions of the terms of any science can only 
 follow accurate and sharply-defined notions of the science 
 itself. Try to define the words matter, substance, idea, ivill, 
 ctnixi; <-<>iixi-'n>)ice, virtue, right, and you will soon ascertain 
 whether you have grappled with the grand problems or 
 only skimmed the superficies of metaphysics and ethics. 
 
 Let no one, then, underrate the importance of the 
 study of words. Daniel Webster was often seen absorbed 
 in the study of an English Dictionary. Lord Chatham 
 read the folio dictionary of Bailey twice through, exam- 
 ining each word attentively, dwelling on its peculiar im- 
 port and modes of construction, and thus endeavoring to 
 bring the whole range of our language completely under 
 his control. One of the most distinguished American au- 
 thors is said to be in the habit of reading the dictionary 
 through about once a year. His choice of fresh and force- 
 ful terms has provoked at times the charge of pedantry; 
 but, in fact, he has but fearlessly used the wealth of the 
 language that lies buried in the pages of Noah Webster. 
 It is only by thus working in the mines of language that 
 one can fill his storehouses of expression, so as to be above 
 the necessity of using cheap and common words, or even 
 using these with no subtle discrimination of their mean- 
 ings. Rufus Choate once said to one of his students: " You 
 don't want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught 
 from the air, common and unsuggestive ; but you want
 
 24 WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion 
 and association, with beauty and power." The leading 
 languages of the world are full of such words, " opulent, 
 microcosmic, in which histories are imaged, which record 
 civilizations. Others recall to us great passages of elo- 
 quence, or of noble poetry, and bring in their train the 
 whole splendor of such passages, when they are uttered." 
 Mr. Disraeli says of Canning, that he had at command 
 the largest possible number of terms, both " rich and 
 rare," words most vivid and effective, really spirit- 
 stirring words ; for words there are, as every poet knows, 
 whose sound is an echo to the sense, words which, while by 
 their literal meaning they convey an idea to the mind, have 
 also a sound and association which are like music to the 
 ear, and a picture to the eye, vivid, graphic, and pic- 
 turesque words that make you almost see the thing de- 
 scribed. It is said of Keats, that when reading Chaucer, 
 Spenser, and Milton, he became a critic of their thoughts, 
 their words, their rhymes, and their cadences. He brooded 
 over fine phrases like a lover; and often, when he met a 
 quaint or delicious word in the course of his reading, he 
 would take pains to make it his own by using it, as 
 speedily as possible, in some poem he was writing. Upon 
 expressions like " the sea-shouldering whale " of Spenser. 
 he would dwell with an ecstasy of delight. 
 
 The question has been often discussed whether, if man 
 were deprived of articulate speech, he would still be able 
 to think. The example of the deaf and dumb, who evi- 
 dently think, not by associations of sound, but of touch. 
 using combinations of finger-speech, instead of words, 
 as the symbols of their thought, appears to show that 
 he might find an efficient substitute for his present means
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 25 
 
 of reflection. The telegraph and railway signals, are, in 
 fact, new modes of speech, which are quickly familiarized 
 by practice. The engine driver shuts off the steam at the 
 warning signal, without thinking of the words to which 
 it is equivalent; a particular signal becomes associated 
 with a particular act, and the interposition of words be- 
 comes useless. It is well known that persons skilled in 
 gesticulation can communicate by it a long series of facts 
 and even complicated trains of thought. Roscius, the Ro- 
 man actor, claimed that he could express a sentiment in 
 a greater variety of ways by significant gestures than 
 Cicero could by language. During the reign of Augustus, 
 both tragedies and comedies were acted, with powerful 
 effect, by pantomime alone. When the Megarians wanted 
 help from the Spartans, and threw down an empty meal- 
 bag before the assembly, declaring that " it lacked meal," 
 these verbal economists said that " the mention of the 
 sack was superfluous." When the Scythian ambassadors 
 wished to convince Darius of the hopelessness of invading 
 their country, they made no long harangue, but argued 
 with far more cogency by merely bringing him a bird, 
 a mouse, a frog, and two arrows, to imply that unless 
 he could soar like a bird, burrow like a mouse, and hide 
 in the marshes like a frog, he would never be able to 
 escape their shafts. 
 
 Facts like these tend to show that man might still 
 have been, as the root of the word " man " implies in 
 Sanskrit, " a thinking being," though he had never been 
 a "speech-dividing" being; but, it is evident that his 
 range of thought would have been exceedingly narrow, 
 and that his mightiest triumphs over nature would have 
 I
 
 26 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 been impossible. While it may be true, as Tennyson 
 says, that 
 
 " Thought leapt out to wed with thought, 
 Ere thought could wed itself to speech, " 
 
 yet there is an intimate relation between " ratio " and 
 " oratio," and it may be doubted whether, without some 
 signs, verbal or of another sort, thought, except of the 
 simplest kind, would not have been beyond man's power. 
 Long use has so familiarized us with language, we em- 
 ploy it so readily, and without conscious effort, that we 
 are apt to regard it as a matter of course, and become 
 blind to its mystery and deep significance. We rarely 
 think of the long and changeful history through which 
 each word we utter has passed, of the many changes 
 in form and changes in signification it has undergone, 
 and of the time and toil spent in its invention and elabo- 
 ration by successive generations of thinkers and speakers. 
 Still less do we think how different man's history would 
 have been, how comparatively useless would have been 
 all his other endowments, had God not given him the 
 faculties " which, out of the shrieks of birds in the forest, 
 the roar of beasts, the murmur of rushing waters, the 
 sighing of the wind, and his own impulsive ejaculations, 
 have constructed the great instrument that Demosthenes, 
 and Shakspeare, and Massillon wielded, the instrument 
 by which the laws of the universe are unfolded, and the 
 subtle workings of the human heart brought to light.'' 
 Language is not only a means of comnmnication between 
 man and man, but it has other functions hardly less 
 important. It is only by its aid that we are able to an- 
 alyze our complex impressions, to preserve the results of 
 the analysis, and to abbreviate the processes of thought.
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 27 
 
 Were we content with the bare reception of visual im- 
 pressions, we could to some extent dispense with words; 
 but as the mind does not receive its impressions passively, 
 but reflects upon them, decomposes them into their parts, 
 and compares them with notions already stored up, it 
 becomes necessary to give to each of these elements a name. 
 By virtue of these names we are able to keep them apart 
 in the mind, and to recall them with precision and facility, 
 just as the chemist by the labels on his jars, or the gar- 
 dener by those on his flower-pots, is enabled to identify the 
 substances these vessels contain.* Thus reflections which 
 when past might have been dissipated forever, are by their 
 connection with language brought always within reach. 
 Who can estimate the amount of investigation and thought 
 which are represented by such words as gravitation, chem- 
 ical affinity, atomic weight, capital, inverse proportion, polar- 
 ity, and inertia, words which are each the quintessence 
 and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental 
 processes, and which may be compared to the paper money 
 or bills of exchange by which the world's wealth may be 
 inclosed in envelopes and sent swiftly to the farthest cen- 
 tres of commerce? Who can estimate the inconvenience 
 that would result, and the degree in which mental activity 
 would be arrested, were we compelled to do without these 
 comprehensive words which epitomize theories, sum up the 
 labors of the past, and facilitate and abridge future mental 
 processes? The effect, as Archbishop Trench has observed, 
 would be to restrict all scientific discovery as effectually as 
 commerce and exchange would be restricted, if all transac- 
 tions had to be carried on with iron or copper as the sole 
 medium of mercantile intercourse. 
 
 f "Outline of the Lavs of Thought," by William Thomson, D.D., p. 53,
 
 28 WOUDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Language has thus an educational value, for in learning 
 words we are learning to discriminate things. " As the 
 distinctions between the relations of objects grow more 
 numerous, involved, and subtle, it becomes more analytic, 
 to be able to express them; and, inversely, those who are 
 born to be the heirs of a highly analytic language, must 
 needs learn to think up to it, to observe and distinguish all 
 the relations of objects, for which they find the expressions 
 already formed; so that we have an instructor for the 
 thinking powers in that speech which we are apt to deem 
 no more than their handmaid and minister." No two 
 things, indeed, are more closely connected than poverty of 
 language and poverty of thought. Language is, on one 
 side, as truly the limit and restraint of thought, as on 
 the other that which feeds and sustains it. When an 
 illiterate person sits down to write, his fund of words 
 being small, the paucity of his thoughts is sure to cor- 
 respond to it. Though he may have made the circuit 
 of the globe, and gazed on the main wonders of Nature 
 and of Art, yet he has hardly more to write to his friends 
 at home than the old pleonastic phrases, " I am well, and 
 I hope you are well, and enjoying the same blessing." 
 In bridging the chasm between such a man and one of high 
 culture, the acquisition of words plays as important a part 
 as the acquisition of ideas. 
 
 It has been justly said that no man can learn from or 
 communicate to another more than the words they are 
 familiar with either express or can be made to express. 
 The deep degradation of the savage is due as much to the 
 brutal poverty of his language as to other causes. Hence 
 the knowledge of words is not an elegant accomplishment 
 only, not a. luxury, but a positive necessity of the civilized.
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 29 
 
 and cultivated man. It is necessary not only to him who 
 would express himself, but to him who would think, with 
 precision and effect. There is, indeed, no higher proof, of 
 thorough and accurate culture than the tact that a writer, 
 instead of employing words loosely and at hap-hazard, 
 chooses only those which are the exact vesture of his 
 thought. As he only can be called a. well-dressed man 
 whose clothes exactly fit him, being neither small and 
 shrunken, nor loose and baggy, so it is the first charac- 
 teristic of a good style that the words fit close to the ideas. 
 They will be neither too big here, hanging like a giant's 
 robe on the limbs of a dwarf, nor too small there, like a 
 boy's garments into which a man has painfully squeezed 
 himself; but will be the exact correspondents and perfect 
 exponents of his thought. Between the most synonymous 
 words a careful writer will have a choice; for, strictly 
 speaking, there are no synonyms in a language, the most 
 closely resembling and apparently equivalent terms having 
 some nice shade of distinction, a fine illustration of which 
 is found in Ben Jonson's line, " Men may securely sin, but 
 safely never"; and again, in the reply with which Sydney 
 Smith used to meet the cant about popular education in 
 England: " Pooh, pooh! it is the worst educated country in 
 the world, I grant you; but it is the best instructed." Will- 
 iam Pitt was a remarkable example of this precision of 
 style. Fox said of him: " Though I am myself never at a 
 loss for a word, Pitt not only has a word, but the word, 
 the very word, to express his meaning." Eobert Hall 
 chose his words with a still more fastidious nicety, and he 
 gave as one reason for his writing so little, that he could 
 so rarely approach the realization of his own beau-ideal of 
 a perfect style. It is related of him that, when he was cor-
 
 30 WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 reeling the proofs of his sermon on " Modern Infidelity," on 
 coming to the famous passage, " Eternal God, on what are 
 thine enemies intent? What are those enterprises of guilt 
 and horror, that, for the safety of their performers, require 
 to be enveloped in a darkness which the eye of Heaven 
 must not penetrate?" he exclaimed to his friend, Dr. Greg- 
 ory: "Penetrate! did I say penetrate, sir, when I preached 
 it? " " Yes." " Do you think, sir, I may venture to alter 
 it? for no man who considers the force of the English 
 language would use a word of three syllables there but 
 from absolute necessity. F 'or penetrate put pierce: pierce is 
 the word, sir, and the only word, to be used there." 
 
 John Foster was a yet more striking example of this 
 conscientiousness and severity in discriminating words. 
 Never, perhaps, was there a writer the electric action of 
 whose mind, telegraphing with all nature's works, was so 
 in contrast with its action in writing. Here it was al- 
 most painfully slow, like the expression of some costly oil, 
 drop by drop. He would spend whole days on a few 
 short sentences, passing each word under his concentrated 
 sci'utiny, so that each, challenged and examined, took its 
 place in the structure like an inspected soldier in the 
 ranks. When Chalmers, after a visit to London, was 
 asked what Foster was about, he replied: "Hard at it, 
 at the rate of a line a week." Read a page of the essay 
 on " Decision of Character," and you will feel that this 
 was scarcely an exaggeration, that he stood by the ring- 
 ing anvil till every word was forged into a bolt. Few 
 persons know how hard easy writing is. Who that reads 
 the light, sparkling verse of Thomas Moore, dreams of the 
 mental pangs, the long and anxious thought, which a 
 single word often cost him! Irving tells us that he was
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 31 
 
 once riding with the Irish poet in the streets of Paris, 
 when the hackney-coach went suddenly into a deep rut, 
 out of which it came with such a jolt as to send their 
 pates bump against the roof. "By Jove, Ire got it!" 
 cried Moore, clapping his hands with great glee. "Got 
 what?" said Irving. "Why," said the poet, "that tvotd 
 I've been hunting for six weeks, to complete my last song. 
 That rascally driver has jolted it out of me." 
 
 The ancient writers and speakers were even more nice 
 and fastidious than the moderns, in their choice and 
 arrangement of words. Virgil, after having spent eleven 
 years in the composition of the ^Eneid, intended to de- 
 vote three years to its revision; but, being prevented by 
 his last sickness from giving it the finishing touches 
 which his exquisite judgment deemed necessary, he di- 
 rected his friends to burn it. The great orator of Athens, 
 to form his style, transcribed Thucydides again and again. 
 He insisted that it was not enough that the orator, in 
 order to prepare for delivery in public, should write 
 down his thoughts, he must, as it were, sculpture them 
 in brass. He must not content himself with that loose 
 use of language which characterizes a thoughtless fluency, 
 but his words must have a precise and exact look, like 
 newly-minted coin, with sharply-cut edges and devices. 
 That Demosthenes himself " recked his own rede " in this 
 matter we have abundant proof in almost every page of 
 his great speeches. In his masterpieces we are introduced 
 to mysteries of prose composition of which the moderns 
 know nothing. We find him, as a German critic has 
 remarked, bestowing incredible pains, not only upon the 
 choice of words, but upon the sequence of long and short 
 syllables, not in order to produce a regularly recurring
 
 32 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 metre, but to express the most various emotions of the 
 rnind by a suitable and ever-changing rhythm. It is in this 
 art of ordering words with reference to their effect, even 
 more, perhaps, than in the action for which his name is 
 a synonyme, that he exhibits his consummate dexterity as 
 an orator. Change their order, and you at once break 
 the charm. The rhythm, in fact, is the sense. You de- 
 stroy the significance of the sentence as well as its ring; 
 you lessen the intensity of the meaning as well as the 
 verbal force. " At his pleasure," says Professor Marsh, 
 " he separates his lightning and his thunder by an inter- 
 val that allows his hearer half to forget the coming 
 detonation, or he instantaneously follows up the dazzling 
 flash with a pealing explosion that stuns, prostrates and 
 crushes the stoutest opponent." 
 
 Not less did the Roman orators consult the laws of 
 euphonic sequence or metrical convenience, and arrange 
 their words in such a succession of articulate sounds as 
 would fall most pleasingly on the ear. The wonderful 
 effects which sometimes attended their elocution were, in 
 all probability, chiefly owing to their exquisite choice of 
 words and their skill in musical concords. It was by the 
 charm of numbers, as well as by the strength of reason, 
 that Cicero confounded Catiline and silenced the eloquent 
 Hortensius. It was this that deprived Curio of all power 
 of recollection when he rose to oppose that great master 
 of enchanting rhetoric; it was this that made even Caesar 
 himself tremble, and at last change his determined pur- 
 pose, and acquit the man he had resolved to condemn. 
 When the Roman orator, Carbo, pronounced, on a certain 
 occasion, the sentence, " Patris dictum sapiens temeritas 
 filii comprobavit" it was astonishing, says Cicero, to ob-
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 33 
 
 serve the general applause which followed that harmonious 
 close. Doubtless we are ignorant of the art of pronounc- 
 ing that period with its genuine emphasis; but Cicero 
 assures us that had the final measure, what is techni- 
 cally called a dichoree, been changed, and the words 
 placed in a different order, their whole effect would have 
 been absolutely destroyed. With the same exquisite sensi- 
 bility to numbers, an ancient writer says that a similar 
 result would follow, if, in reading the first line of the 
 jEneid, 
 
 "Arma virumquc cano, Trojae qni primus ab oris," 
 
 instead of primus we were to pronounce it primis (is 
 being long, and us short). 
 
 It is this cunning choice, along with the skillful ar- 
 rangement of words, that, even more than the thought, 
 eternizes the name of an author. Style is, and ever has 
 been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. 
 More than any other quality it is a writer's own prop- 
 erty; and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or 
 even diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learn- 
 ing grow commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere 
 truisms; but a grand or beautiful style can never lose 
 its freshness or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even 
 more than for his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; 
 it is " the ordered march of his lordly prose " that is the 
 secret of Macaulay's charm ; and it is the unstudied grace 
 of Hume's periods which renders him, in spite of his 
 imperfect learning, in spite of his willful perversions of 
 truth, in spite of his infidelity and his toryism, the popu- 
 lar historian of England. 
 
 From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to sup- 
 pose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces of
 
 34 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 literature by means of translations. Among the argu- 
 ments against the study of the dead languages, none is 
 more pertinaciously urged by the educational red repub- 
 licans of the day than this, that the study is useless, 
 because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity, 
 have been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot 
 enjoy Carlyle's version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth's 
 Cicero, Morris's Virgil, Martin's Horace, or Carter's Epic- 
 tetus, must be either a prodigious scholar or a prodigious 
 dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator even improves 
 upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opinion of 
 many, upon Schiller's " Wallenstein." All this seems 
 plausible enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar knows 
 it to be fallacious and false. He knows that the finest 
 passages in an author, the exquisite thoughts, the curious 
 verbal felicities, are precisely those which defy reproduc- 
 tion in another tongue. The most masterly translations 
 of them are no more like the original than a walking- 
 stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence of a 
 writer, the life and spirit, all that is idiomatic, pecu- 
 liar, or characteristic, all that is Homerian in Homer, 
 or Horatian in Horace, evaporates in a translation. 
 
 It is true that, judging by dictionaries only, almost 
 every word in one language has equivalents in every 
 other; but a critical study of language shows, that, with 
 the exception of terms denoting sensible objects and acts, 
 there is rarely a precise coincidence in meaning between 
 any two words in different tongues. Compare any two 
 languages, and you will find that there are, as the mathe- 
 maticians would say, many incommensurable quantities, 
 many words in each untranslatable into the other, and 
 that it is often impossible, by a paraphrase, to supply an
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 35 
 
 equivalent. To use De Quincey's happy image from the 
 language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk 
 of the original word and its translated representative, is, 
 in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not 
 coincide; the words overlap. 
 
 Above all does poetry defy translation. It is too subtle 
 an essence to be poured from one vessel into another 
 without loss. Of Cicero's elegant and copious rhetoric, of 
 the sententious wisdom of Tacitus, of the keen philosophic 
 penetration and masterly narrative talent of Thucydides, 
 of the thunderous eloquence of Demosthenes, and even of 
 Martial's jokes, it may be possible to give some inkling 
 through an English medium; but of the beauties and 
 splendors of the Greek and Latin poets, never. As soon 
 will another Homer appear on earth, as a translator echo 
 the marvellous music of his lyre. Imitations of the " Iliad," 
 more or less accurate, may be given, or another poem may 
 be substituted in its place; but a perfect transfusion into 
 English is impossible. For, as Goethe somewhere says, 
 Art depends on Form, and you cannot preserve the form 
 in altering the form. Language is a strangely suggestive 
 medium, and it is through the reflex and vague operation 
 of words upon the mind that the translator finds himself 
 baffled. Words, especially in poetry, have a potency of 
 association, a kind of necromantic power, aside from 
 their significance as representative signs. There is a min- 
 gling of sound and sense, a delicacy of shades of meaning, 
 and a power of awakening associations, to which the 
 instinct of the poet is the key, and which cannot be 
 passed into a foreign language if the meaning be also 
 preserved. You may as easily make lace ruffles out of 
 hemp. Language, it cannot be too often repeated, is not
 
 36 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 the dress of thought; it is its 'living expression, and con- 
 trols both the physiognomy and the organization of the 
 idea it utters. 
 
 How many abortive attempts have been made to translate 
 the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" into English verse! AVL;it, 
 havoc have even Pope and Cowper made of some of the 
 grandest passages in the old bard! The one, it has been 
 well said, turned his lines into a series of brilliant epi- 
 grams, sparkling and cold as the Heroic Epistles of Ovid; 
 the other chilled the warmth and toned down the colors 
 of Homer into a sober, drab-tinted hue, through which 
 gods and men loom feebly, and the camp of the Achaeans, 
 the synod of the Trojans, and the deities in council, have 
 much of the air of a Quaker meeting-house. Regarded as 
 an English poem, Pope's translation of the " Iliad " is unques- 
 tionably a brilliant and exquisitely versified production; 
 but viewed as a transfusion of the old bard into another 
 language, it is but a caput mortuum, containing but little 
 more of Homer than the names and events. The fervid 
 and romantic tone, the patriarchal simplicity, the mytho- 
 logic coloring, the unspeakable audacity and freshness of 
 the images, all that breathes of an earlier world, and of 
 the sunny shores, and laughing waves, and blue sky, of the 
 old jEgean, all this, as a critic has observed, " is vanished 
 and obliterated, as is the very swell and fall of the versi- 
 fication, regular in its very irregularity, like the roll of 
 the ocean. Instead of the burning, picture-like words of 
 the old Greek, we have the dainty diction of a literary 
 artist; instead of the ever-varied, resounding swell of the 
 hexameter, the neat, elegant, nicely-balanced modern couplet. 
 In short, the old bard is stripped. of his flowing chlamys 
 and ' his fillets, and is imprisoned in the high-heeled shoes,
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 37 
 
 the laced velvet coat, and flowing periwig, of the eighteenth 
 century." Chapman, who has more of the spirit of Homer, 
 occasionally catches a note or two from the Ionian trum- 
 pet; but presently blows so discordant a blast that it would 
 have grated on the ear of Stentor himself. Lord Derby 
 and William C. Bryant have been more successful in many 
 respects than Pope or Cowper; but each has gained some 
 advantages by compensating defects. 
 
 Did Dryden succeed better when he put the "JEneid" 
 into verse? Did he give us that for which Virgil toiled 
 during eleven long years? Did he give us the embodi- 
 ment of those vulgar impressions which, when the old 
 Latin was read, made the Roman soldier shiver in all his 
 manly limbs? All persons who are familiar with English 
 literature know what havoc Dryden made of tl Paradise 
 Lost," when he attempted, even in the same language, to 
 put it into rhyme, a proposal to do which drew from 
 Milton the contemptuous remark: " Ay, young man; you 
 can tag my rhymes." A man of genius never made a 
 more signal failure. He could not draw the bow of 
 Ulysses. His rhyming, rhetorical manner, splendid and 
 powerful as it confessedly is, proved an utterly inadequate 
 vehicle for the high argument of the great Puritan. So 
 with his modernizations of Chaucer. His reproductions 
 of " the first finder of our faire langage " contain much 
 admirable verse; but it is not Chaucer's. They are sim- 
 ply elaborate paraphrases, in which the idiomatic colors 
 and forms, the distinctive beauties of the old poet, 
 above all, the simplicity and sly grace of his language, 
 the exquisite tone of naivete, which, like the lispings of 
 infancy, give such a charm to his verse, utterly vanish. 
 Dryden failed, not from lack of genius, but simply
 
 38 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 because failure was inevitable, because this aroma of 
 antiquity, in the process of transfusion into modern lan- 
 guage, is sure to evaporate. 
 
 All such changes involve a loss of some subtle trait of 
 expression, or some complexional peculiarity, essential to 
 the truthful exhibition of the original. The outline, the 
 story, the bones remain; but the soul is gone, the essence, 
 the ethereal light, the perfume is vanished. As well might 
 a painter hope, by using a different kind of tint, to give 
 the expression of one of Raphael's or Titian's master- 
 pieces, as any man expect, by any other words than those 
 which a great poet has used, to convey the same mean- 
 ing. Even the humblest writer has an idiosyncrasy, a 
 manner of his own, without which the identity and truth 
 of his work are lost. If, then, the meaning and spirit of 
 a poem cannot be transferred from one place to another, 
 so to speak, under the roof of a common language, must 
 it not a fortiori be impossible -to transport them faith- 
 fully across the barriers which divide one language from 
 another, and antiquity from modern times? 
 
 How many ineffectual attempts have been made to 
 translate Horace into English and French! It is easy to 
 give the right meaning, or something like the meaning, 
 of his lyrics; but they are cast in a mould of such ex- 
 quisite delicacy that their ease and elegance defy imita- 
 tion. All experience shows that the tradittore must 
 necessarily be traduttore, the translator, a traducer of 
 the Sabine bard. As well might you put a violet into a 
 crucible, and expect to reproduce its beauty and perfume, 
 as expect to reproduce in another tongue the mysterious 
 synthesis of sound and sense, of meaning and suggested 
 association, which constitutes the vital beauty of a lyric,
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 39 
 
 The special imagination of the poet, it has been well 
 said, is an imagination inseparably bound up with lan- 
 guage; possessed by the infinite beauty and the deepest, 
 subtlest meanings of words ; skilled in their finest sympa- 
 thies; powerful to make them yield a meaning which 
 another never could have extracted from them. It is of 
 the very essence of the poet's art, so that, in the highest 
 exercise of that art, there is no such thing as the ren- 
 dering of an idea in appropriate language; but the con- 
 ception, and the words in which it is conveyed, are a 
 simultaneous creation, and the idea springs forth full- 
 grown, in its panoply of radiant utterance. 
 
 The works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakspeare, and 
 Goethe, exist in the words as the mind in conjunction 
 with the body. Separation is death. Alter the melody 
 ever so skillfully, and you change the effect. You cannot 
 translate a sound; you cannot give an elegant version of 
 a melody. Prose, indeed, suffers less from paraphrase than 
 poetry; but even in translating a prose work, unless one 
 containing facts or reasoning merely, the most skillful 
 linguist can be sure of hardly more than of transferring 
 the raw material of the original sentiment into his own 
 tongue. The bullion may be there, but its shape is al- 
 tered; the flower is preserved, but the aroma is gone; 
 there, to be sure, is the arras, with its Gobelin figures, 
 but it is the wrong side out. It is hardly an exaggeration 
 to say that there is as much contrast between the best 
 translation and the original of a great author, as between 
 a wintry landscape, with its dead grass and withered 
 foliage, and the same landscape arrayed in the green 
 robes of summer. Nay, we prefer the humblest original 
 painting to a feeble copy of a great picture, a barely
 
 40 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 " good " original book to any lifeless translation. A liv- 
 ing dog is better than a dead lion; for the external 
 attributes of the latter are nothing without the spirit 
 that makes them terrible. 
 
 The difficulty of translating from a dead language, of 
 whose onomatopo3ia we are ignorant, will appear still more 
 clearly, when we consider what gross and ludicrous blunders 
 are made in translating even from one living language 
 into another. It has been well said that few English- 
 speaking persons can understand the audacity of Racine, 
 so highly applauded by the French, in introducing the 
 words chien and sel into poetry; " dog " and " salt " may be 
 used by us without danger ; but, on the other hand, we may 
 not talk of entrails in the way the French do. Every one 
 has heard of the Frenchman, who translated the majestic 
 exclamation of Milton's Satan, " Hail ! horrors, hail ! " by 
 " Comment vous portez-vous, Messieurs les Horreurs, comment 
 vous portez vous?" " How do you do, horrors, how do you 
 do?" Another Frenchman, in reproducing the following 
 passage from Shakespeare in his own tongue, 
 
 " Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless, 
 So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone," 
 
 translated the italicized words thus: "So, grief, be off with 
 you ! " Hardly less ridiculous is the blunder made by a 
 translator of Alexander Smith's " Life-Drama," who meta- 
 morphoses the expression, " clothes me with kingdoms," into 
 me fait un vetement de royaumes, " makes me a garment 
 of kingdoms." What can be more expressive than one of 
 the lines in which Milton describes the lost angels crowd- 
 ing into Pandemonium, where, he says, the air was 
 
 ''Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings," 
 
 a line which it is impossible to translate into words that
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WOHDS. 41 
 
 will convey precisely the same emotions and suggestions 
 that are roused by a perusal of the original. Suppose the 
 translator to hit so near to the original as to write 
 
 " Stirred with the noise of quivering wings," 
 
 will not the line afl'ect you altogether differently? Let 
 one translate into another language the following line of 
 Shakespeare, 
 
 " The learned pate ducks to the golden fool," 
 
 and is it at all likely that the quaint, comic effect of the 
 words we have italicized would be reproduced'? 
 
 The inadequacy of translations will be more strikingly 
 exemplified by comparing the following exquisite lines of 
 Shakespeare with such a version as we might expect in 
 another language : 
 
 "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! 
 Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music 
 Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night 
 Become the touches of sweet harmony." 
 
 A foreign translator, says Leigh Hunt, would dilute 
 and take all taste and freshness out of this draught of 
 poetry, after some such fashion as the following : 
 
 "With what a charm the moon serene and bright 
 Lends on the bank its soft reflected light! 
 Sit we, I pray, and let us sweetly hear 
 The strains melodious, with a raptured ear; 
 For soft retreats, and n'ght's impressive hour, 
 To harmony impart divinest power." 
 
 In view of all these considerations, what can be more 
 untrue than the statement so often made, that to be 
 capable of easy translation is a test of the excellence of 
 a composition? This doctrine, it has been well observed, 
 goes upon the assumption that one language is just like 
 another language, that every language has all the ideas, 
 turns of thought, delicacies of expression, figures, associa-
 
 42 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 tions, abstractions, points of view which every other lan- 
 guage has. " Now, as far as regards Science, it is true 
 that all languages are pretty much alike for the purpn-rs 
 of Science; but even in this respect some are more suit- 
 able than others, which have to coin words or to borrow 
 them, in order to express scientific ideas. But if languages 
 are not all equally adapted even to furnish symbols for 
 those universal and eternal truths in which Science con- 
 sists, how can they be reasonably expected to be all equally 
 rich, equally forcible, equally musical, equally exact, equally 
 happy, in expressing the idiosyncratic peculiarities of 
 thought of some original and fertile mind, who has availed 
 himself of one of them? A great author takes his native 
 language, masters it, partly throws himself into it, partly 
 moulds and partly adapts it, and pours out his multitude 
 of ideas through the variously ramified and delicately mi- 
 nute channels of expression which he has found or framed: 
 does it follow that this his personal presence (as it may be 
 called) can forthwith be transferred to every other language 
 under the sun? Then we may reasonably maintain that 
 Beethoven's piano music is not really beautiful, because it 
 cannot be played on the hurdy-gurdy. . . 
 
 " It seems that a really great author must admit of 
 translation, and that we have a test of his excellence when 
 he reads to advantage in a foreign language as well as in 
 his own. Then Shakspeare is a genius because he can be 
 translated into German, and not a genius because he cannot 
 be translated into French. The multiplication-table is the 
 most gifted of all conceivable compositions, because it !<>-<* 
 nothing by translation, and can hardly be said to belong to 
 any one language whatever. Whereas I should rather have 
 conceived that, in proportion as ideas are novel and recon-
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 43 
 
 dite, they would be difficult to put into words, and that the 
 very fact of their having insinuated themselves into one 
 language would diminish the chance of that happy accident 
 being repeated in another. In the language of savages you 
 can hardly express any idea or act of the intellect at all. Is 
 the tongue of the Hottentot or Esquimau to be made the 
 measure of the genius of Plato, Pindar, Tacitus, St. Jerome, 
 Dante, or Cervantes?" * 
 
 The truth is, music written for one instrument cannot 
 be played upon another. To the most cunning writer that 
 ever tried to translate the beauties of an author into a 
 foreign tongue, we may say in the language of a French 
 critic: " You are that ignorant musician" who plays his part 
 exactly, not skipping a single note, nor 'neglecting a rest, 
 only what is written in the key of /a, he plays in the key of 
 sol. Faithful translator!" 
 
 When we think of the marvellous moral influence which 
 words have exercised in all ages, we cannot wonder that 
 the ancients believed there was a subtle sorcery in them, 
 " a certain bewitchery or fascination," indicating that lan- 
 guage is of mystic origin. The Gothic nations supposed 
 that even their mysterious alphabetical characters, called 
 " Runes," possessed magical powers; that they could stop 
 a sailing vessel or a flying arrow; that they could excite 
 love or hate, or even raise the dead. The Romans, in their 
 levies, took care to enrol first names of good omen, such as 
 Victor, Valerius, Salvius, Felix, and Faustus. Csesar gave 
 a command in Spain to an obscure Scipio, merely for the 
 omen which his name involved. When an expedition had 
 been planned under the leadership of Atrius Niger, the 
 soldiers absolutely refused to proceed under a commander 
 
 * J. H. Newman.
 
 44 WORDS ; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 of so ill-omened a name, dux abominandi nominis, it 
 being, as De Quincey says, " a pleonasm of darkness/ 1 The 
 same deep conviction that words are powers is seen in the 
 favete linguis and bona verba quceso of the Romans, by 
 which they endeavored to repress the utterance of any 
 word suggestive of ill-fortune, lest the event so suggested 
 to the imagination should actually occur. So they were 
 careful to avoid, by euphemisms, the utterance of any 
 word directly expressive of death or other calamity, saying 
 vixit instead of mortuus est, and " be the event fortunate or 
 otherwise," instead of adverse. The name Egesta they 
 changed into Segesta, Maleventum into Beneventum, Axei- 
 nos into Euxine, and Epidamnus into Dyrrhachium, to 
 escape the perils of a word suggestive of damnum, or 
 detriment. Even in later times the same feeling has pre- 
 vailed, an illustration of which we have in the life of 
 Pope Adrian VI., who, when elected, dared not retain his 
 own name, as he wished, because he was told by his cardi- 
 nals that every Pope who had done so had died in the first 
 year of his reign. 
 
 That there is a secret instinct which leads even the 
 most illiterate peoples to recognize the potency of words, 
 is illustrated by the use made of names, in the East, in 
 " the black art." In the Island of Java, a fearful influ- 
 ence, it is said, attaches to names, and it is believed that 
 demons, invoked in the name of a living individual, can be 
 made to appear. One of the magic arts practised there 
 is to write a man's name on a skull, a bone, a shroud, a 
 bier, an image made of paste, and then put it in a place 
 where two roads meet, when a fearful enchantment, it is 
 believed, will be wrought against the person whose name 
 is so inscribed.
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 45 
 
 But we need not go to antiquity or to barbarous nations 
 to learn the mystic power of words. There is not a day, 
 hardly an hour of our lives, which does not furnish exam- 
 ples of their ominous force. Shakspeare makes one of his 
 characters say of another, " She speaks poniards, and every 
 word stabs " ; and there are, indeed, words which are 
 sharper than drawn swords, which give moi~e pain than a 
 score of blows; and, again, there are words by which pain 
 of soul is relieved, hidden grief removed, sympathy con- 
 veyed, counsel imparted, and courage infused. How often 
 has a word of recognition to the struggling confirmed a 
 sublime yet undecided purpose, a word of sympathy 
 opened a new vista to the desolate, that let in a prospect 
 of heaven, a word of truth fired a man of action to do a 
 deed which has saved a nation or a cause, or a genius to 
 write words which have gone ringing down the ages! 
 
 " I have known a word more gentle 
 
 Than the breath of summer air; 
 In a listening heart it nestled, 
 
 And it lived forever there. 
 Not the beating of its prison 
 
 Stirred it ever, night or day; 
 Only with the heart's last throbbing 
 
 Could it ever fade away." 
 
 A late writer has truly said that " there may be phrases 
 which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to 
 explore; a single word may be a window from which one 
 may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory 
 of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated 
 volumes have labored in vain to utter; there may be years 
 of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence." 
 
 " Nothing," says Hawthorne, " is more unaccountable 
 than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A 
 thought may be present to the mind so distinctly that no
 
 46 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be 
 conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take 
 the profbundest interest; but as long as it remains un- 
 spoken, their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden 
 idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something 
 sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like 
 bringing up a drowned body out of the deepest pool of the 
 rivulet, which has been aware of the horrible secret all 
 along, in spite of its smiling surface.". 
 
 The significance of words is illustrated by nothing, 
 perhaps, more strikingly than by the fact that unity of 
 speech is essential to the unity of a people. Community of 
 language is a stronger bond than identity of religion, 
 government, or interests; and nations of one speech, 
 though separated by broad oceans and by creeds yet more 
 widely divorced, are one in culture, one in feeling. Prof. 
 Marsh has well observed that the fine patriotic effusion of 
 Arndt, " Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland," was founded 
 upon the idea that the oneness of the Deutsche Zunge, 
 the German speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of aims, 
 and of duties; and the universal acceptance with which 
 the song was received showed that the poet had struck a 
 chord to which every Teutonic heart responded. \Vlit-n 
 a nation is conquered by another, which would hold it in 
 subjection, it has to be again conquered, especially if its 
 character is essentially opposed to that of its conqueror, 
 and the second conquest is often the more difficult of the 
 two. To kill it effectually, its nationality must be killed, 
 and this can be done only by killing its language; for it 
 U through its language that its national prejudices, its 
 loves and hates, and passions live. When this is not done, 
 the old language, slowly dying out, if, indeed, it dies at
 
 T'HE SIGNIFICANCE OF WOEDS. 47 
 
 all, has time to convey the national traditions into the 
 new language, thus perpetuating the enmities that keep 
 the two nations asunder. We see this illustrated in the 
 Irish language, which, with all the ideas and feelings of 
 which that language is the representative and the vehicle, 
 lias been permitted by the English government to die a 
 lingering death of seven or eight centuries. The co- 
 existence of two languages in a State, is one of the great- 
 est misfortunes that can befall it. The settlement of 
 townships and counties in our country, by distinct bodies 
 of foreigners, is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily 
 newspaper, with an Irish, German, or French prefix, or 
 in a foreign language, is a perpetual breeder of national 
 animosities, and an effectual bar to the Americanization of 
 our foreign population. 
 
 The languages of conquered peoples, like the serfs of 
 the middle ages, appear to be glebae adscriptitiae, and to 
 extirpate them, except by extirpating the native race itself, 
 is an almost impossible task. Rome, though she con- 
 quered Greece, could not plant her language there. The 
 barbarians who overran the Roman Empire, adopted the 
 languages of their new subjects; the Avars and Slaves 
 who settled in Greece became Hellenized in language; 
 the Northmen in France adopted a Romanic tongue; and 
 the Germans in France and northern Italy, as well as 
 the Goths in Spain, conformed to the speech of the tribes 
 they had vanquished. It is asserted, on not very good 
 authority, that William the Conqueror fatigued his ear 
 and exhausted his patience, during the first years of his 
 sovereignty, in trying to learn the Saxon language; but, 
 failing, ordered the Saxons to speak Norman-French. He 
 might as well have ordered his new subjects to walk on
 
 48 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 their heads. Charles the Fifth, in all the plenitude of 
 his power, could not have compelled all his subjects, 
 Dutch, Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., to learn 
 his language; he had to learn theirs, though a score in 
 number, as had Charlemagne before him. 
 
 England has maintained her dominion in the East for 
 more than a hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of 
 Hindoos know no more of her language than of the Greek. 
 In the last century, Joseph II., of Austria, issued an edict 
 that all his subjects, German, Slavonic, or Magyar, should 
 speak and write one language, German; but the people 
 recked his decree as little as did the sea that of Canute. 
 Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and 
 the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were 
 for a long period under the Austrian yoke; but they 
 spoke as pure Italian as did any of their independent 
 countrymen, and they never detested their rulers more 
 heartily than at the time of their deliverance. Were 
 different languages spoken in the different sections of the 
 United States, the task of allaying the bitter feeling of 
 hostility at the South, which led to the late outbreak, 
 and of fusing the citizens of the North and of the South 
 into one homogeneous people, would be almost hopeless. 
 
 A volume might be filled with illustrations of the 
 power of words; but, great as is their power, and though, 
 when nicely chosen, they have an intrinsic force, it is, 
 after all, the man who makes them potent. As it was 
 not the famous needle-gun, destructive as it is, which 
 won the late Prussian victories, but the intelligence 
 and discipline of the Prussian soldier, the man bi-liiml 
 the gun, educated in the best common schools in the 
 world, so it is the latent heat of character, the man
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 49 
 
 behind the words, that gives them momentum and pro- 
 jectile force. The same words, coming from one person, 
 are as the idle wind that kisses the cheeks; coming from 
 another, they are the cannon-shot that pierces the target 
 in the bull's-eye. The thing said is the same in each 
 case; the enormous difference lies in the man who says 
 it. The man fills out, crowds his words with meaning, 
 and sends them out to do a giant's work; or he makes 
 them void and nugatory, impotent to reach their destina- 
 tion, or to do any execution should they hit the mark. 
 The weight and value of opinions and sentiments depend 
 oftentimes less upon their intrinsic worth than upon the 
 degree in which they have been organized into the nature 
 of the person who utters them; their force, less upon 
 their inherent power than upon the latent heat stored 
 away in their formation, which is liberated in their pub- 
 lication. 
 
 There is in character a force which is felt as deeply, 
 and which is as irresistible, as the mightiest physical 
 force, and which makes the plainest expressions of some 
 men like consuming fire. Their words, instead of being 
 the barren signs of abstract ideas, are the media through 
 which the life of one mind is radiated into other minds. 
 They inspire, as well as inform; electrify, as well as en- 
 lighten. Even truisms from their lips have the effect of 
 original perceptions; and old saws and proverbs, worn to 
 shreds by constant repetition, startle the ear like brilliant 
 fancies. Some of the greatest effects recorded in the his- 
 tory of eloquence have been produced by words which, 
 when read, strike us as tame and commonplace. White- 
 field could thrill an audience by saying "Mesopotamia!" 
 Even his interjections, his Ah! of pity and his Oh! of 
 3
 
 50 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 encouragement for the sinner, were words of tremen- 
 dous power, and formed a most potent engine in his 
 pulpit artillery. Garrick used to say that he would give 
 a hundred guineas if he could say Oh! as Whitefield did. 
 Grattan said of the eloquence of Charles James Fox, 
 that "every sentence came rolling like a wave of the 
 Atlantic, three thousand miles long." Willis says that 
 every word of Webster weighs a pound. College sopho- 
 mores, newly-fledged lawyers, and representatives from 
 Bunkumville, often display more fluency than the New 
 Hampshire giant; but his words are to theirs as the roll 
 of thunder to the patter of rain. What makes his argu- 
 ment so ponderous and destructive to his opponents, is 
 not its own weight alone, but in a great degree the 
 added weight of his temper and constitution, the trip- 
 hammer momentum with which he makes it fall upon the 
 theory he means to crush. Even the vast mass of the 
 man helped, too, to make his words impressive. " He 
 carried men's minds, and overwhelmingly pressed his 
 thought upon them, with the immense current of his 
 physical energy." When the great champion of New 
 England said, in the United States Senate, " There are 
 Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, and there they 
 will remain forever," it was the weight of character, and 
 of all the associations connected with it, which changed 
 that which, uttered by another, would have been the 
 merest truism, into a lofty and memorable sentiment. 
 The majesty of the utterance, which is said to have 
 quickened the pulse even of " the great Nullifier," Calhoun, 
 is due to the fact that it came from a mighty nature, 
 which had weighed and felt all the meaning which those 
 three spots represent in the stormy history of the world.
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 51 
 
 It was this which gave such prodigious power to the 
 words of Chatham, and made them smite his adversaries 
 like an electric battery. It was the haughty assumption 
 of superiority, the scowl of his imperial brow, the omi- 
 nous growl of his voice, " like thunder heard remote," 
 the impending lightnings which seemed ready to dart 
 from his eyes, and, above all, the evidence which these 
 furnished of an imperious and overwhelming will, that 
 abashed the proudest peers in the House of Lords, and 
 made his words perform the office of stabs and blows. 
 The same words, issuing from other lips, would have 
 been as harmless as pop-guns. 
 
 In reading the quotations from Chalmers, which are 
 reported to have so overwhelmingly oppressed those who 
 heard them, almost every one is disappointed. It is the 
 creative individuality projected into the words that makes 
 the entire difference between Kean or Kemble and the 
 poorest stroller that murders Shakspeare. It is said that 
 Macready never produced a more thrilling effect than by 
 the simple words, "Who said that?" An acute American 
 writer observes that when Sir Edward Coke, a man essen- 
 tially commonplace in his intellect and prejudices, though 
 of vast acquirement and giant force of character, calls 
 Sir Walter Raleigh " a spider of hell," the metaphor may 
 not seem remarkable; but it has a terrible significance 
 when we see the whole roused might of Sir Edward Coke 
 glaring through it.* What can be more effective than 
 the speech of Thersites in the first book of the " Iliad " ? 
 Yet the only effect was to bring down upon the speaker's 
 shoulders the staff of Ulysses. Pope well observes that, 
 had Ulysses made the same speech, the troops would have 
 
 * " Literature and Life," by Edwin P. Whipple.
 
 52 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 sailed for Greece that very night. The world considers not 
 merely what is said, but who speaks, and whence he says it. 
 
 " Let but a lord once own the happy lines, 
 How the wit brightens, how the style refines!" 
 
 says the same poet of a servile race; and Euripides ex- 
 presses the same belief in the efficacy of position and 
 character when he makes Hecuba entreat tllysses to in- 
 tercede for her; " for the arguments," says she, " which are 
 uttered by men of repute, are very different in strength 
 from those uttered by men unknown." 
 
 The significance of the simplest epithet depends upon 
 the character of the man that uses it. Let two men of 
 different education, tastes, and habits of thought, utter the 
 word " grand," and our sense of the word is modified ac- 
 cording to our knowledge of the men. 
 
 Mr. Whipple says truly that " there are no more simple 
 words than 'green,' ' sweetness,' and ' rest,' yet what depth 
 and intensity of significance shines in Chaucer's ' green '- 
 what a still ecstasy of religious bliss irradiates ' sweetnr,' 
 as it drops from the pen of Jonathan Edwards: what celes- 
 tial repose beams from ' rest' as it lies on the page of Bar- 
 row! The moods seem to transcend the resources of lan- 
 guage; yet they are expressed in common words, transfig- 
 ured, sanctified, imparadised by the spiritual vitality which 
 streams through them." The same critic, in speaking of 
 style as the measure of a writer's power, observes that 
 " the marvel of Shakspeare's diction is its immense suggrst- 
 iveness, his power of radiating through new verbal com- 
 binations, or through single expressions, a life and meaning 
 which they do not retain in their removal to dictionaries. 
 When the thought is so subtle, or the emotion so evanescent, 
 or the imagination so remote, that it cannot be flashed upon
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 53 
 
 the ' inward eye,' it is hinted to the inward ear by some 
 exquisite variation of tone. An American essayist on Shak- 
 speare, Mr. Emerson, in speaking of the impossibility of 
 acting or reciting his plays, refers to this magical sug- 
 gestiveness in a sentence almost as remarkable as the thing 
 it describes. 'The recitation,' he says, 'begins; one golden 
 word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, 
 inn/ sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessi- 
 ble homes!' He who has not felt this witchery in Shak- 
 speare's style has never read him. He may have looked at 
 the words, but has never looked into them." 
 
 The fact that words are never taken absolutely, that 
 they are expressions, not simply of thoughts or feelings, 
 but of natures, that they are media for the emission and 
 transpiration of character, is one that cannot be too 
 deeply pondered by young speakers and writers. Fluent 
 young men who wonder that the words which they utter 
 with such glibness and emphasis have so little weight with 
 their hearers, should ask themselves whether their char- 
 acters are such as to give weight to their words. As in 
 engineering it is a rule that a cannon should be at least one 
 hundred times heavier than its shot, so a man's character 
 should be a hundred times heavier than what he says. 
 When a La Place or a Humboldt talks of the " universe," 
 the word has quite another meaning than when it is used 
 by plain John Smith, whose ideas have never extended be- 
 yond the town of Hull. So, when a man's friend gives him 
 religious advice, and talks of " the solemn responsibilities 
 of life," it makes a vast difference in the weight of the 
 words whether they come from one who has been tried and 
 proved in the world's fiery furnace, and whose whole life 
 has been a trip-hammer to drive home what he says, or
 
 54 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 from a callow youth who prates of that which he feels not, 
 and testifies to things which are not realities to his own 
 consciousness. There is a hollow ring in the words of the 
 Cleverest man who talks of " trials and tribulations " which 
 he has never felt. " Words," says the learned Selden, 
 " must be fitted to a man's mouth. 'Twas well said by the 
 fellow that was to make a speech for my Lord Mayor, that 
 he desired first to take measure of his Lordship's mouth." 
 
 We are accustomed to go to the dictionary for the mean- 
 ing of words ; but it is life that discloses to us their signifi- 
 cance in all the vivid realities of experience. It is the 
 actual world, with its joys and sorrows, its pleasures and 
 pains, that reveals to us their joyous or terrible meanings 
 meanings not to be found in Worcester or Webster. Does 
 the young and light-hearted maiden know the meaning of 
 " sorrow," or the youth just entering on a business career 
 understand the significance of the words " failure " and 
 " protest " ? Go to the hod-carrier, climbing the many-storied 
 building under a July sun, for the meaning of " toil " ; and, 
 for a definition of " overwork," go to the pale seamstress 
 who 
 
 " In midnight's chill and murk 
 Stitches her life into her work; 
 Bending backwards from her toil, 
 Lest her tears the silk might soil; 
 Shaping from her hitter thought 
 Heart' s-ease and forget-me-not; 
 Satirizing her despair 
 With the emblems woven there!" 
 
 Ask the hoary-headed debauchee, bankrupt in purse, friends, 
 and reputation, with disease racking every limb, for the 
 definition of " remorse"; and go to the bedside of the invalid 
 for the proper understanding of "health." Life, with its 
 inner experience, reveals to us the tremendous force of
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. *55 
 
 words, and writes upon our hearts the ineffaceable records 
 of their meanings. Man is a dictionary, and human expe- 
 rience the great lexicographer. Hundreds of human beings 
 pass from their cradles to their graves who know not the 
 force of the commonest terms ; while to others their terrible 
 significance comes home .like an electric flash, and sends a 
 thrill to the innermost fibres of their being. 
 
 To conclude, it is one of the marvels of language, 
 that out of the twenty plain elementary sounds of which 
 the human voice is capable, have been formed all the 
 articulate voices which, for six thousand or more years, 
 have sufficed to express all the sentiments of the human 
 race. Few as are these sounds, it has been calculated 
 that one thousand million writers, in one thousand mill- 
 ion years, could not write out all the combinations of 
 the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, if each writer 
 were daily to write out forty pages of them, and if 
 each page should contain different orders of the twenty- 
 four letters. Another remarkable fact is that the vocal 
 organs are so constructed as to be exactly adapted to the 
 properties of the atmosphere which conveys their sounds, 
 while at the same time the organs of hearing are fitted 
 to receive with pleasure the sounds conveyed. Who can 
 estimate the misery that man would experience were his 
 sense of hearing so acute that the faintest whisper would 
 give him pain, and a peal of thunder strike him deaf or 
 dead? 
 
 " If Nature thunder'd in his opening ears, 
 And stunn'd him with the magic of the spheres, 
 How would he wish that Heaven had left him still, 
 The whispering zephyr and the purling rill!"
 
 56 WOEDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 
 
 Genus dicendi imitatur publicos mores. . . Non potest alius esse ingenio, 
 alius anirao color. SENECA. 
 
 The world is satisfied with words; few care to dive beneath the surface. 
 PASCAL. 
 
 Words are the signs and symbols of things; and as in account*, ciphers 
 and symbols pass for real sums, so, in the course of human affairs, words 
 and names pass for things themselves. ROBERT SOUTH. 
 
 Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil. ISAIAH v. 30. 
 
 E fact that a man's language is a part of his charac- 
 -L ter, that the words he uses are an index to his mind 
 and heart, must have been noted long before language 
 was made a subject of investigation. " Discourse," says 
 Quintilian, " reveals character, and discloses the secret dis- 
 position and temper; and not without reason did the Greeks 
 teach that as a man lived so would he speak." Prof* rt 
 enim mores plerumque oratio, et animi secreta deter/it. \/ < 
 sine causa Greed prodiderunt, ut vivat, quemque etiani dicci-f. 
 When a clock is foul and disordered, its wheels warped or 
 cogs broken, the bell-hammer and the hands will proclaim 
 the fact; instead of being a guide, it will mislead, and, 
 while the disorder continues, will continually betray its own 
 infirmity. So when a man's mind is disordered or his heart 
 corrupted, there will gather on his face and in his language 
 an expression corresponding to the irregularities within. 
 There is, indeed, a physiognomy in the speech as well as in 
 the face. As physicians judge of the state of the body, so 
 may we judge of the mind, by the tongue. Except under
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 57 
 
 peculiar circumstances, where prudence, shame, or delicacy, 
 seals the mouth, the objects dearest to the heart, the pet 
 words, phrases, or shibboleths, the terms expressing our 
 strongest appetencies and antipathies, will rise most fre- 
 quently to the lips; and Ben Jonson, therefore, did not 
 exaggerate in saying that no glass renders a man's form 
 and likeness so true as his speech. "As a man speaks, so 
 he thinks; and as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." 
 
 If a man is clear-headed, noble-minded, sincere, just, 
 and pure in thought and feeling, these qualities will be 
 symbolized in his words; and, on the other hand, if he has 
 a confused habit of thought, is mean, grovelling, and hypo- 
 critical, these characteristics will reveal themselves in his 
 speech. The door-keeper of an alien household said to 
 Peter, " Thou art surely a Galilean; thy speech bewrayeth 
 thee" ; and so in spite of all masks and professions, in spite 
 of his reputation, the essential nature of every person will 
 stamp itself on his language. How often do the words and 
 tones of a professedly religious man, who gives liberally to 
 the church, prays long and loud in public, and attends 
 rigidly to every outward observance, betray in some myste- 
 rious way the utter worldliness of his character! How 
 frequently do words uttered volubly, and with a pleasing 
 elocution, affect us as mere sounds, suggesting only the 
 hollo wness and unreality of the speaker's character! How 
 often does the use of a single word flash more light upon a 
 man's motives and principles of action, give a deeper insight 
 into his habits of thought and feeling, than an entire biog- 
 raphy! How often when a secret sorrow preys upon the 
 heart, which we would fain hide from the world by a 
 smiling face, do we betray it unconsciously by a trivial or 
 parenthetical word ! Fast locked do we deem our Bluebeard 
 3*
 
 58 WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 chamber to be, the key and the secret of which we have in 
 our own possession; yet all the time a crimson stream is 
 flowing across the door-sill, telling of murdered hopes 
 within. 
 
 Out of the immense magazine of words furnished by 
 our English vocabulary, embracing over a hundred thou- 
 sand distinct terms, each man selects his own favorite 
 expressions, his own forms of syntax, by a peculiar law 
 which is part of the essential diiference between him and 
 all other men; and in the verbal stock-in-trade of each in- 
 dividual we should find, could it once be laid open to us, 
 a key that would unlock many of the deepest mysteries of 
 his humanity, many of the profoundest secrets of his pri- 
 vate history. How often is a man's character revealed by 
 the adjectives he uses! Like the inscriptions on a ther- 
 mometer, these words of themselves reveal the tempera- 
 ment. The conscientious man weighs his words as in a 
 hair-balance; the boaster and the enthusiast employ ex- 
 treme phrases, as if there were no degree but the super- 
 lative. The cautious man uses words as the rifleman does 
 bullets; he utters but few words, but they go to the mark 
 like a gunshot, and then he is silent again, as if he were 
 reloading. The dogmatist is known by his sweeping, em- 
 phatic language, and the absence of all qualifying terms, 
 such as " perhaps " and " it may be." The fact that the 
 word "glory" predominates in all of Bonaparte's dispatches, 
 while in those of his great adversary, Wellington, which fill 
 twelve enormous volumes, it never once occurs not even 
 after the hardest won victory, but " duty," " duty," is inva- 
 riably named as the motive for every action, speaks volumes 
 touching their respective characters. It was to work out 
 the problem of self-aggrandizement that Napoleon devoted
 
 THE MORALITY IX WORDS. 59 
 
 all his colossal powers; and conscience, responsibility, and 
 kindred terms, seem never to have found their way into 
 his vocabulary. Men, with their physical and moral force, 
 their bodily energies, and their passions, prejudices, delu- 
 sions, and enthusiasms, were to him but as fuel to swell 
 the blaze on the altar of that ambition of which he was 
 at once the priest and deity. Of duties to them he never 
 for a moment dreamed; for, from the hot May-day of Lodi 
 to the autumnal night of Moscow, when he fled the flam- 
 ing Kremlin, he' seemed unconscious that he was himself 
 a created and responsible being. 
 
 Dr. Arnold has strikingly shown how we may judge of 
 a historian by his style, his language being an infallible 
 index to his character. " If it is very heavy and cum- 
 brous, it indicates either a dull man or a pompous man, 
 or at least a slow and awkward man; if it be tawdry 
 and full of commonplaces enunciated with great solemnity, 
 the writer is most likely a silly man; if it be highly an- 
 tithetical and full of unusual expressions, or artificial ways 
 of stating a plain thing, the writer is clearly an affected 
 man. If it be plain and simple, always clear, but never 
 eloquent, the writer may be a very sensible man, but is 
 too hard and dry to be a very great man. If, on the 
 other hand, it is always elegant, rich in illustrations, and 
 without the relief of simple and great passages, we must 
 admire the writer's genius in a very high degree, but we 
 may fear that he is too continually excited to have attained 
 to the highest wisdom, for that is necessarily calm. In 
 this manner the mere language of a historian will fur- 
 nish us with something of a key to his mind, and will 
 tell us, or at least give us cause to presume, in what his 
 main strength lies, and in what he is deficient."
 
 60 WORDS; THEIE USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 As with individuals, so with nations: the language of a 
 people is often a moral barometer, which marks with mar- 
 vellous precision the rise or fall of the national life. The 
 stock of words composing any language corresponds to the 
 knowledge of the community that speaks it, and shows with 
 what objects it is familiar, what generalizations it has made, 
 what distinctions it has drawn, all its cognitions and rea- 
 sonings, in the worlds of matter and of mind. "As our 
 material condition varies, as our ways of life, our institu- 
 tions, public and private, become other than they have 
 been, all is necessarily reflected in our language. In these 
 days of railroads, steamboats, and telegraphs, of sun pic- 
 tures, of chemistry and geology, of improved wearing stuffs, 
 furniture, styles of building, articles of food and luxury 
 of every description, how many words and phrases are in 
 everyone's mouth which would be utterly unintelligible to 
 the most learned man of a century ago, were he to rise 
 from his grave and walk our streets ! ... Language is ex- 
 panded and contracted in precise adaptation to the cir- 
 cumstances and needs of those who use it; it is enriched 
 or impoverished, in every part, along with the enrichment 
 or impoverishment of their minds."* Every race has its 
 own organic growth, its own characteristic ideas and 
 opinions, which are impressed on its political constitu- 
 tion, its legislation, its manners and its customs, its modes 
 of religious worship; and the expression of all these pecu- 
 liarities is found in its speech. If a people is, as Milton 
 said of the English, a noble and a puissant nation, of a 
 quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent and 
 subtile to discourse, its language will exhibit all these 
 qualities ;. while, on the other hand, if it is frivolous and 
 
 * " Language and the Study of Language," by W. D. Whitney.
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 61 
 
 low-thoughted, if it is morally bankrupt and dead to all 
 lofty sentiments, its mockery of virtue, its inability to 
 comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the 
 feebleness of its moral indignation, will all inevitably be- 
 tray themselves in its speech, as truly as would the oppo- 
 site qualities of spirituality of thought and exaltation of 
 soul. These discreditable qualities will find an utterance 
 " in the use of solemn and earnest words in senses com- 
 paratively trivial or even ridiculous; in the squandering 
 of such as ought to have been reserved for the highest 
 mysteries of the spiritual life, on slight and secular ob- 
 jects; and in the employment, almost in jest and play, of 
 words implying the deepest moral guilt." 
 
 Could anything be more significant of the profound 
 degradation of a people than the abject character of the 
 complimentary and social dialect of the Italians, and the 
 pompous appellations with which they dignify things in 
 themselves insignificant, as well as their constant use of 
 intensives and superlatives on the most trivial occasions? 
 Is it not a notable fact that they, who for so long a time 
 had no country, on whose altars the fires of patriotism 
 have, till of late, burned so feebly, use the word pelle- 
 <l>'inOj (foreign,) as a synonyme for " excellent "? Might we 
 not almost infer a priori the servile condition to which,- 
 previous to their late uprising, centuries of tyranny had 
 reduced them, from the fact that with the same people, so 
 many of whom are clothed in rags, a man of honor is " a 
 well-dressed man"; that a virtuoso, or virtuous man, is 
 one who is accomplished in music, painting, and sculpt- 
 ure, arts which should be the mere embroidery, and not 
 the web and woof, of a nation's life; that, in their mag- 
 nificent indigence, they call a cottage with three or four
 
 62 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 acres of land " a power " ; that they term every house 
 with a large door tin palazzo (a palace), a lamb's fry itna 
 cosa stupenda, (a stupendous thing), and that a message 
 sent by a footman to his tailor through a scullion is "an 
 embassy"? 
 
 Let us not, however, infer the hopeless depravity of any 
 people from the baseness of the tongue they have inherited, 
 not chosen. It makes a vast difference, as Prof. Marsh 
 justly observes, whether words expressive of noble thoughts 
 and mighty truths do not exist in a language, or whether 
 ages of soul-crushing tyranny have compelled their disuse 
 and the employment of the baser part of the national 
 vocabulary. The mighty events that have lately taken 
 place in Italy " show that a tone of hypocrisy may cling 
 to the tongue, long after the spirit of a nation is eman- 
 cipated, and that where grand words are found in a speech, 
 there grand thoughts, noble purposes, high resolves exist 
 also, or, at least, the spark slumbers which a favoring 
 breath may, at any moment, kindle into a cherishing and 
 devouring flame."* 
 
 A late writer calls attention to the fact that the French 
 language, while it has such positive expressions as "drunk" 
 and "tipsy," conveyed by ivre and gris, contains no such 
 negative term as " sober." Sobre means always " temper- 
 ate" or "abstemious," never the opposite condition to 
 intoxication. The English, it is argued, drink enough to 
 need a special illustrative title for a man who has not 
 drunk; but though the Parisians began to drink alcohol 
 freely during the sieges, the French " have never yet felt 
 the necessity of forming any such curious subjective ap- 
 pellation, consequently they have not got it." Again, the 
 
 *" Lectures on the English Language."
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 63 
 
 French boast that they have no such word as bribe f as if 
 this implied their exemption from that sin; and such, in- 
 deed, may be the fact. But may not the absence of this 
 word from their vocabulary prove, on the contrary, their 
 lack of sensibility to the heinous nature of the offence, 
 just as the lack of the word humility in the language of 
 the Greeks, usually so rich in terms, proves that they 
 lacked the thing itself, or as the fact that the same peo- 
 ple had no word corresponding to the Latin ineptus, argues, 
 as Cicero thought, not that the character designated by the 
 word was wanting among them, but that the fault was 
 so universal with them that they failed to recognize it as 
 such? Is it not a great defect in a language that it lacks 
 the words by which certain forms of baseness or sinfulness, 
 in those who speak it, may be brought home to their con- 
 sciousness? Can we properly hate or abhor any wicked 
 act till we have given it a specific objective existence by 
 giving it a name which shall at once designate and con- 
 demn it? The pot-de-vin, and other jesting phrases which 
 the French have coined to denote bribery, can have no 
 effect but to encourage this wrong. 
 
 What shall we think of the fact that the French lan- 
 guage has no word equivalent to "listener"? Is it not 
 a noteworthy circumstance, shedding light upon national 
 character, that among thirty-seven million of talkers, no 
 provision, except the awkward paraphrase celui qui ecoute 
 (he who hears), should have been made for hearers? Is 
 there any other explanation of this blank than the sup- 
 position that every Frenchman talks from the pure love 
 of talking, and not to be heard; that, reversing the pro- 
 verb, he believes that " silence is silver, but talking is 
 golden"; and that, not caring whether he is listened to
 
 64 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 or not, he has never recognized that he has no name for 
 the person to whom he chatters? Again, is it not remark- 
 able that, among the French, bonhomme (a good man) is 
 a term of contempt; that the fearful Hebrew word, 
 " gehenna," has been condensed into gene, and means only 
 a petty annoyance; and that Iwnnetete, which once meant 
 honesty, now means only civility? It was in the latter 
 half of the reign of Louis XIV. that the word honnete 
 exchanged its primitive for its present meaning. Till then, 
 according to good authority, when a man's descent was 
 said to be honnete, he was complimented on the virtuous- 
 ness of his progenitors, not reminded of the mediocrity 
 of their condition; and when the same term was applied 
 to his family, it was an acknowledgment that they be- 
 longed to the middle ranks of society, not a suggestion 
 that they were plebeians. Again: how significant is the 
 fact that the French have no such words as "home," 
 "comfort," "spiritual," and but one word for "love" and 
 " like," compelling them to put Heaven's last gift to man 
 on a par with an article of diet; as, "I love Julia,"- -"I 
 love a leg of mutton"? Couple with these peculiarities 
 of the language the circumstance that the French term 
 x/>irituel means simply witty, with a certain quickness, 
 delicacy, and versatility of mind,- and have you not a real 
 insight into the national character? 
 
 It is said that the word oftenest on a Frenchman's 
 lips is la gloire, and next to that, perhaps, is hrilhtut 
 brilliant. The utility of a feat or achievement in literature 
 or science, in war or politics, surgery or mechanics, is 
 of little moment in his eyes unless it also dazzles and 
 excites surprise. It is said that Sir Astley COOJXT. tin' 
 great British surgeon, on visiting the French capital, was
 
 THE MORALITY 1ST WORDS. 65 
 
 asked by the surgeon en chef of the empire how many 
 times he had performed some feat of surgery that required 
 a rare union of dexterity and nerve. He replied that he 
 had performed the operation thirteen times. "Ah! but, 
 Monsieur, I have performed him one hundred and sixty 
 time. How many time did you save his life?" continued 
 the curious Frenchman, as he saw the blank amazement 
 of Sir Astley's face. " I," said the Englishman, " saved 
 eleven out of the thirteen. How many did you save out 
 of a hundred and sixty?" "Ah! Monsieur, I lose dem 
 all; but de operation was very brillant!" 
 
 The author of " Pickwick " tells us that in America 
 the sign vocal for starting a coach, steamer, railway train, 
 etc., is "Go Ahead!" while with John Bull the ritual 
 form is "All Right!" and he adds that these two ex- 
 pressions are perfect embodiments of the respective moods 
 of the two nations. There is some exaggeration in this; 
 yet the two phrases are, on the whole, vivid miniatures of 
 John Bull and his restless brother, who sits on the safety- 
 valve that he may travel faster, pours oil and rosin into 
 his steam-furnaces, leaps from the cars before they have 
 entered the depot, and who would hardly object to being 
 fired oif from a cannon or in a bombshell, provided there 
 were one chance in fifty of getting sooner to the end of his 
 journey. Let us hope that the day may yet come when 
 our " two-forty " people will exchange a little of their fiery 
 activity for a bit of Bull's caution, and when our Yankee 
 Herald's College, if we ever have one, may declare "All 
 Eight!" to be the motto of our political escutcheon, with 
 as much propriety as it might now inscribe "Go Ahead!" 
 beneath that fast fowl, the annexing and screaming eagle, 
 that hovers over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, dips
 
 66 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 its wings in two oceans, and has one eye on Cuba and the 
 other on Quebec. 
 
 A volume might be filled with illustrations of the truth 
 that the language of nations is a mirror, in which may 
 be seen reflected with unerring accuracy all the elements 
 of their intellectual as well as of their moral character. 
 What scholar that is familiar with Greek and Latin has 
 failed to remark how indelibly the contrariety of char- 
 acter in the two most civilized nations of antiquity is im- 
 pressed on their languages, distinguished as is the one 
 by exuberant originality, the other by innate poverty of 
 thought? In the Greek, that most flexible and perfect of 
 all the European tongues, the thought controls and shapes" 
 the language; while the tyrannous objectivity of the Latin, 
 rigid and almost cruel, like the nation whose voice it is, 
 coerces rather than simply syllables the thought. The 
 words of the latter, as Prof. Marsh remarks, are always 
 
 "Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratkme voluntas"; 
 
 and " it is almost as much by the imperatorial character 
 of the language itself, the speech of masters, not of 
 men, as by the commanding position of the people to 
 whom it was vernacular, and of the church which saga- 
 ciously adopted it, that it has so powerfully influenced 
 the development and the existing tendencies of all modern 
 European tongues, even of those which have borrowed the 
 fewest words from it." 
 
 It is a noteworthy fact that, as the Romans were the 
 most majestic of nations, so theirs is the only ancient 
 language that contains the word majesty, the Greek having 
 nothing that exactly corresponds to it; and the Latin 
 language is as majestic as were the Romans themselves.
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 67 
 
 While the Romans retained their early simplicity and 
 nobility of soul, their language was full of power and 
 truth; but when they became luxurious, sensual, and cor- 
 rupt, their words degenerated into miserable and meaning- 
 less counters, without intrinsic value, and serving only as 
 a conventional medium of exchange. " In the pedantry 
 of Statius, in the puerility of Martial, in the conceits of 
 Seneca, in the poets who would go into emulous rapt- 
 ures on the beauty of a lap-dog and the apotheosis of a 
 eunuch's hair, we read the hand-writing of an empire's 
 condemnation." 
 
 Both the climate of a country and the mind of its 
 people are revealed in its speech. " The mountain Greek 
 has no tone of the soft Ionic. The Anglo-Saxon casts 
 abroad in its short, stern, and solemn words, the awful- 
 ness of the forests where it grew." It is said that in the 
 South Sea Islands version of the New Testament there 
 are whole chapters with no words ending in consonants, 
 except the proper names of the original. Italian has been 
 called the love-talk of the Roman without his armor. 
 Fuller, contrasting the Italians and the Swiss, quaintly 
 remarks that the former, " whose country is called the 
 country of good words, love the circuits of courtesy, that 
 an ambassador should not, as a sparrow-hawk, fly outright 
 to his prey, and meddle presently with the matter in hand; 
 but, with the noble falcon, mount in language, soar high, 
 fetch compasses of compliment, and then in due time stoop 
 to game, and seize on the business propounded. Clean con- 
 trary the Switzers (who sent word to the king of France 
 not to send them an ambassador with store of words, but 
 a treasurer with plenty of money,) count all words quite 
 out which are not straight on, have an antipathy against
 
 68 WOBDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 eloquent language, the flowers of rhetoric being as offen- 
 sive to them as sweet perfume to such as are troubled 
 with the mother; yea, generally, great soldiers have their 
 stomachs sharp set to feed on the matter; loathing long 
 speeches, as wherein they conceive themselves to lose time, 
 in which they could conquer half a country; and, counting 
 bluntiress their best eloquence, love to be accosted in their 
 own kind." 
 
 It is in the idioms of a people, its peculiar turns of ex- 
 pression, and the modifications of meaning which its bor- 
 rowed words have undergone, that its distinctive genius is 
 most strikingly seen. The forms of salutation used by dif- 
 ferent nations are saturated with their idiosyncrasies, and 
 of themselves alone essentially reveal their respective char- 
 acters. How clearly is the innermost distinction between 
 the Greek mind and the Hebrew brought out in the " Re- 
 joice" of the one and the "Peace" of the other! How 
 vividly are contrasted, in the two salutations, the sunny, 
 world-enjoying temper of the one people with the profound 
 religious feeling of the other! The formula of the robust, 
 energetic, valiant Roman, with whom health was another 
 name for happiness, was " Salve! " that is, " Be well," " Be 
 strong." In the expression, " If God wills it, you are well," 
 is betrayed the fatalism of the Arab; while the greeting of 
 the Turk, " May your shadow never be less! " speaks of a 
 sunny clime. In the hot, oppressive climate of Egypt, per- 
 spiration is necessary to health, and you are asked, " How 
 do you perspire ?" The Italian asks, "Comesta?" liter- 
 ally, "How does he stand?" an expression originally refer- 
 'ring to the standing of the Lombard merchants in the mar- 
 ket-place, and which seems to indicate that one's well-being 
 or health depends on his business prosperity. The dreamy,
 
 THE MOKALITY IN WORDS. 69 
 
 meditative German, dwelling among abstractions, salutes 
 you with the vague, impersonal, metaphysical, " Wie 
 gehts?" "How goes it?" Another salutation which he 
 uses is " Wie befinden sie sich?" literally, " How do they 
 find themselves?" A born philosopher, he is so absent- 
 minded, so lost in thought, that he thinks you cannot tell 
 him of the state of your health till you have searched for 
 and found it. 
 
 The trading Hollander, who scours the world, asks, 
 "How. do you go?" The thoughtful Swede inquires, 
 " How do you think? " The Frenchman, who lives in oth- 
 ers' eyes, and is more anxious about appearances than real- 
 ities, who has never to hunt himself up like the German, 
 and desires less to do, like the Anglo-Saxon, than to be 
 lively, to show himself, says frankly, "Comment vous 
 portez-vous? " "How do you carry yourself?" It has 
 been said that a man would be owl-blind, who, in the 
 " Hoo's a' wi' ye?" of the kindly Scot, could not perceive 
 the mixture of national pawkiness with hospitable cordial- 
 ity. " One sees, in the mind's eye, the canny chield, who 
 would invite you to dinner, three days in the week, but 
 who would look twice at your bill before he discounted it." 
 What can be more unmistakably characteristic than the 
 Irish peasant's "Long life to your honor; may you make 
 your bed in glory!" .After such a grandiose salute, we 
 need no mouser among the records of antiquity to certify 
 to us that the Hibernian is of Oriental origin, nor do we 
 need any other key to his peculiar vivacity and impression- 
 ableness of feeling, his rollicking, daredevil, hyperbole-lov- 
 ing enthusiasm. Finally, of all the national forms of salu- 
 tation, the most signally characteristic, the one which 
 reveals the very core, the inmost " heart of heart " of a
 
 70 WORDS; THEIR USE AHD ABUSE. 
 
 people, is the Englishman's " How do you do? " In these 
 four little monosyllables the activity, the intense practical- 
 ity of the Englishman, the very quintessence of his charac- 
 ter, are revealed as by a lightning's flash. To do ! Not to 
 think, to stand, to carry yourself, but to do ; and this doing 
 is so universal among the English, its necessity is so com- 
 pletely recognized, that no one dreams of asking whether 
 you are doing, or what you are doing, but all demand, 
 "How do you do? " 
 
 It has been well observed by the learned German writer, 
 J. D. Michaelis, that " some virtues are more sedulously 
 cultivated by moralists, when the language has fit names 
 for indicating them; whereas they are but superficially 
 treated of, or rather neglected, in nations where such vir- 
 tues have not so much as a name. Languages may obvi- 
 ously do injury to morals and religion by their equivoca- 
 tion; by false accessories, inseparable from the principal 
 idea; and by their poverty." It is a striking fact, noted 
 by an English traveler, that the native language of Van 
 Diemen's Land has four words to express the idea of taking 
 life, not one of which indicates the deep-lying distinction 
 between to kill and to murder; while any word for love is 
 wanting to it altogether. One of the most formidable ob- 
 stacles which Christian missionaries have encountered in 
 teaching the doctrines and precepts of the Gospel to the 
 heathen, has been the absence from their languages of a 
 spiritual and ethical nomenclature. It is in vain that the 
 religious teachers of a people present to them a doctrinal or 
 ethical system inculcating virtues and addressed to facul- 
 ties, whose very existence their language, and consequently 
 the conscious self-knowledge of the people, do not recog- 
 nize. The Greeks and Romans, for example, had a clear
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 71 
 
 conception of a moral ideal, but the Christian idea of sin 
 was utterly unknown to the Pagan mind. Vice they re- 
 garded as simply a relaxed energy of the will, by which it 
 yielded to the allurements of sensual pleasure ; and virtue, 
 literally " manliness," was the determined spirit, the cour- 
 age and vigor with which it resisted such temptations. 
 But the idea of holiness and the antithetic idea of sin were 
 such utter strangers to the Pagan mind that it would 
 have been impossible to express them in either of the 
 classical tongues of antiquity. As De Maistre has strik- 
 ingly observed, man knew well that he could irritate God 
 or a god, but not that he could offend him. The words 
 crime and criminal belong to all languages: those of sin 
 and sinner belong only to the Christian tongue. For a 
 similar reason, man could always call God father, which 
 expresses only a relation of creation and of power ; but 
 no man, of his own strength, could say my father! for 
 this is a relation of love, foreign even to Mount Sinai, 
 and which belongs only to Calvary. 
 
 Again the Greek language, as we have already seen, 
 had no term for the Christian virtue of humility; and 
 when the apostle Paul coined one for it, he had to em- 
 ploy a root conveying the idea, not of self-abasement 
 before a just and holy God, but of positive debasement 
 and meanness of spirit. On the other hand, there is a 
 word in our own tongue which, as De Quincey observes, 
 cannot be rendered adequately either by German or Greek, 
 the two richest of human languages, and without which 
 we should all be disarmed for one great case, continually 
 recurrent, of social enormity. It is the word humbug. 
 "A vast mass of villainy, that cannot otherwise be reached 
 by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric of scorn,
 
 72 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 would go at large with absolute impunity, were it not 
 through the stern Rhadamanthian aid of this virtuous 
 and inexorable word." 
 
 There is no way in which men so often become the 
 victims of error as by an imperfect understanding of cer- 
 tain words which are artfully used by their superiors. 
 Cynicism is seldom shallower than when it sneers at what 
 it contemptuously calls the power of words over the popu- 
 lar imagination. If men are agreed about things, what, it 
 is asked, can be more foolish than to dispute about names? 
 But while it is true that in the physical world things domi- 
 nate over names, and are not at the mercy of a shifting 
 vocabulary, yet in the world of ideas, of history, philoso- 
 phy, ethics, and poetry, words triumph over things, are 
 even equivalent to things, and are as truly the living organ- 
 ism of thought as the eyes, lips, and entire physiognomy of 
 a man, are the media of the soul's expression. Hence words 
 are the only certain test of thought ; so much so, that, as one 
 has well said, we often stop short in the midst of an asser- 
 tion, an exclamation, or a request, startled by the form it 
 assumes in words. Thus, in Shakspeare, King John says 
 to Hubert, who pleaded his sovereign's order for putting 
 the young prince to death, that, if 5nftead of receiving the 
 order in signs, 
 
 " Thou 
 
 Hadst bid me tell my tale in express words, 
 Deep shame had struck me dumb." 
 
 Words are often not only the vehicle of thought, but 
 the very mirror in which we see our ideas, and behold the 
 beauty or ugliness of our inner selves. 
 
 A volume might be written on the mutual influence of 
 language and opinion, showing that the opinion we enter- 
 tain of an object does not more powerfully influence the
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 73 
 
 mind in applying to it a name or epithet, than the epithet 
 or name influences the opinion. Call thunder " the bolt of 
 God's wrath," and you awaken a feeling of terror; call it, 
 with the German peasant, das liebe gewitter (the dear thun- 
 der), and you excite a different emotion. As the forms in 
 which we clothe the outward expression of our feelings 
 react with mighty force upon the heart, so our speculative 
 opinions are greatly confirmed or invalidated by the tech- 
 nical terms we employ. Fiery words, it has been truly 
 remarked, are the hot blast that inflames the fuel of our 
 passionate nature, and formulated doctrine a hedge that 
 confines the discursive wanderings of the thoughts. The 
 words that have helped us to conquer the truth, often 
 become the very tyrants of our convictions; and phrases 
 once big with meaning are repeated till they " ossify the 
 very organs of intelligence." False or partial definitions 
 often lead into dangerous errors; an impassioned polemic 
 falls a victim to his own logic, and a wily advocate becomes 
 the dupe of his own rhetoric. 
 
 Words, in short, are excellent servants, but the most 
 tyrannical of masters. Some men command them, but a 
 vast majority are commanded by them. There ar.e words 
 which have exercised a more iron rule, swayed with a more 
 despotic power, than Ca?sar or the Eussian Czar. Often an 
 idle word has conquered a host of facts; and a mistaken 
 theory, embalmed in a widely-received word, has retarded 
 for centuries the progress of knowledge. Thus the pro- 
 tracted opposition in France to the Newtonian theory arose 
 chiefly from the influence of the word "attraction"; the 
 contemptuous misnomer, "Gothic," applied to northern 
 mediaeval architecture, perpetuated the dislike with which 
 it was regarded; and the introduction of the term "landed 
 4
 
 74 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 proprietor " into Bengal, caused a disorganization of society 
 which had never been caused by its most barbarous in- 
 vaders. 
 
 Macaulay, in his " History of England,'' mentions a cir- 
 cumstance strikingly illustrative of the connection between 
 language and opinion, that no large society of which the 
 language is not Teutonic has ever turned Protestant, and 
 that wherever a language derived from ancient Rome is 
 spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day prevails. 
 " Men believe," says Bacon, " that their reason is lord over 
 their words, but it happens, too, that words exercise a recip- 
 rocal and reactionary power over the intellect. . . Words, 
 as a Tartar's bow, do shoot back upon the understanding 
 of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judg- 
 ment." Not only every language, but every age, has its 
 charmed words, its necromantic terms, which give to the 
 cunning speaker who knows how to ring the changes upon 
 them, instant access to the hearts of men, as at " Open 
 Sesame!" the doors of the cave flung themselves open to 
 the thieves in the Arabian tale. " There are words," says 
 Balzac, " which, like the trumpets, cymbals, and bass-drums 
 of mountebanks, attract the public ; the words ' beauty,' 
 ' glory,' ' poetry,' have witcheries that seduce the grossest 
 minds." At the utterance of the magic names of Auster- 
 litz and Marengo, thousands have rushed to a forlorn hope, 
 and met death at the cannon's mouth. 
 
 South, in his eloquent sermons on " The Fatal Impos- 
 ture and Force of Words," observes that anyone who 
 wishes to manage " the rabble," need never inquire, so 
 long as they have ears to hear, whether they have any 
 understanding whereby to judge. With two or three 
 popular, empty words, well-tuned and humored, he may
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 75 
 
 whistle them backward and forward, upward and down- 
 ward, till he is weary; and get upon their backs when he 
 is so. When Caesar's army mutinied, no argument from 
 interest or reason could persuade them; but upon his 
 addressing them as Quirites, the tumult was instantly 
 hushed, and they took that word in payment of all. " In 
 the thirtieth chapter of Isaiah we find some arrived at 
 that pitch of sottishness, and so much in love with their 
 own ruin, as to own plainly and roundly say what they 
 would be at. In the tenth verse, 'Prophesy not unto 
 us,' say they, ' right things, but prophesy to us smooth 
 things.' As if they had said, ' Do but oil the razor for 
 us, and let us alone to cut our own throats.' Such an 
 enchantment is there in words; and so fine a thing does 
 it seem to some to be ruined plausibly, and to be ushered 
 to destruction with panegyric and acclamation: a shame- 
 ful, though irrefragable argument of the absurd empire 
 and usurpation of words over things ; and that the greatest 
 affairs and most important interests of the world are car- 
 ried on by things, not as they are, but as they are called." 
 The Romans, after the expulsion of Tarquin, could not 
 brook the idea of being governed by a king; yet they 
 submitted to the most abject slavery under an emperor. 
 Cromwell was too sagacious to disgust the republicans by 
 calling himself King, though he doubtless laughed grimly 
 in his sleeve as, under the title of Lord Protector, he 
 exercised all the regal functions. We are told by Saint 
 Simon that at the court of the grand monarch, Louis 
 XIV., gambling was so common that even the ladies took 
 part in it. The gentlemen did not scruple to cheat at 
 cards; but the ladies had a peculiar tenderness on the 
 subject. No lady could for a moment think of retaining
 
 76 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 such unrighteous gains; the moment they were touched, 
 they were religiously given away. But then, we niusl 
 add, the gift was always made to some other winner of 
 her own sex. By carefully avoiding the words " inter- 
 change of winnings," the charming casuists avoided all 
 self-reproach, and all sharp censure by their discreet and 
 lenient confessors. There are sects of Christians at the 
 present day that protest vehemently against a hired min- 
 istry; yet their preachers must be warmed, fed and clothed 
 by " donation parties," like the snob-gentleman in Mo- 
 liere, whose father was no shop-keeper, but kindly chose 
 goods for his friends, which he let them have for money. 
 Party and sectarian leaders know that the great secret 
 of the art of swaying the people is to invent a good shib- 
 boleth or battle-cry, to be dinned continually in their ears. 
 Persons familiar with British history will remember cer- 
 tain talismanic vocables, such as " Wilkes and Liberty," 
 the bare utterance of which has been sufficient at times 
 to set a whole population in a flame; while the solemn 
 and sepulchral cadences in which Pitt repeated the cuckoo 
 song of " thrones and altars," " anarchy and dissolution of 
 social order," were more potent arguments against revo- 
 lution than the most perfect syllogism that was ever con- 
 structed in mood and figure. So in our own country 
 this verbal magic has been found more convincing than 
 arguments in " Barbara " or " Baralipton." Patriots and 
 demagogues alike have found that it was only necessary. 
 in South's phrase, to take any passion of the people, when 
 it was predominant and just at the critical height of it, 
 " and nick it with some lucky or unlucky word," and they 
 might " as certainly overrule it to their own purpose as 
 a spark of fire, falling upon gunpowder, will infallibly
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 77 
 
 blow it up." " Free Trade and Sailors' Rights," " No 
 More Compromise," " The Higher Law," " The Irrepres- 
 sible Conflict," " Squatter Sovereignty," and other similar 
 phrases, have roused and moved the public mind as much 
 as the pulpit and the press. 
 
 Gouyerneur Morris, in his Parisian journal of 1789, 
 tells an anecdote which strikingly illustrates this influence 
 of catch-words upon the popular mind. A gentleman, in 
 walking, came near to a knot of people whom a street ora- 
 tor was haranguing on the power of a qualified veto (veto 
 suspensif) which the constituent assembly had just granted 
 to the king. " Messieurs," said the orator, " we have not a 
 supply of bread. Let me tell you the reason. It has been 
 but three days since the king obtained this qualified veto, 
 and during that time the aristocrats have bought up some 
 of these suspensions, and carried the grain out of the king- 
 dom." To this profound discourse the people assented by 
 loud cheers. Not only shibboleths, but epithets, are often 
 more convincing than syllogisms. The term Utopian or 
 Quixotic, associated in the minds of the people with any 
 measure, even the wisest and most practicable, is as fatal to 
 it as what some one calls the poisonous sting of the Ameri- 
 can humbug. 
 
 So in theology; false doctrines and true doctrines have 
 owed their currency or non-currency, in a great measure, 
 to the coinage of happy terms, by which they have been 
 summed up and made attractive or offensive. Trench 
 observes that " the entire secret of Buddhism is in the 'Nir- 
 vana.' Take away the word, and it is not too much to say 
 that the keystone to the whole arch is gone." When the 
 Roman Catholic church coined the term " transubstantia- 
 tion," the error which had so long been held in solution
 
 78 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 was precipitated, and became henceforth a fixed and influ- 
 ential dogma. What a potent watchword was the term 
 "Reformation," in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries! 
 Who can estimate the influence of the phrases " Broad 
 Church," " Liberal Church," " Close Communion," in ad- 
 vancing or retarding the growth of certain religious sects 
 at this day? Even the most " advanced thinkers," who 
 reject the supernatural element of the Bible, put all reli- 
 gions upon the same level, and deem Shakspeare as truly 
 inspired as the Apostles, style themselves " Christians." 
 
 Even in science happy names have had much to do with 
 the general reception of truth. " Hardly any original 
 thoughts on mental or social subjects," says a writer, " ever 
 make their way among mankind, or assume their proper 
 proportions even in the minds of their inventors, until 
 aptly selected words or phrases have, as it were, nailed 
 them down and held them fast." How much is the study 
 of the beautiful science of botany hindered by such " lexi- 
 cal superfetations " as "chrysanthemum leukanthemum," 
 " Myosotis scorpioeides " (scorpion-shaped mouse's ear); and 
 how much is that of astronomy promoted by such popular 
 terms as "the bear," "the serpent," "the milky way"! 
 How much knowledge is gathered up in the compact and 
 easily remembered phrase, "correlation of forces"; and to 
 what an extent the wide diffusion of Darwin's speculations 
 is owing to two or three felicitous and comprehensive 
 terms, such as " the struggle for existence," " survival of 
 the fittest," " the process of natural selection"! Who that 
 has felt the painfulness of doubt has not desired to know 
 something of "the positive philosophy" of Comte? On the 
 other hand, the well-known anatomist, Professor Owen, 
 complains with just reason of the embarrassments produced
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 79 
 
 in his science by having to use a long description instead of 
 a name. Thus a particular bone is called by Soemmering 
 " pars occipitalis stricte sic dicta partis occipitalis ossis 
 spheno-occipitalis," a description so clumsy that only the 
 direst necessity would lead one to use it. 
 
 Even great authors, who are supposed to have " sov- 
 ereign sway and masterdom " over words, are often be- 
 witched and led captive by them. Thus Southey, Cole- 
 ridge and Wordsworth were bent on establishing their 
 Pantesocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, not because 
 they knew anything of that locality, but because Sus- 
 quehanna was " such a pretty name." Again, to point an 
 epigram or give edge to a sarcasm, a writer will stab a 
 rising reputation as with a poniard; and even when con- 
 victed of misrepresentation, will sooner stick to the lie 
 than part with a jeu < esprit, or forego a verbal felicity. 
 Thus Byron, alluding to Keats's death, which was sup- 
 posed to have been caused by Giftbrd's savage criticism 
 in the "Quarterly," said: 
 
 " Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle, 
 Should let Itself be snufied out by an article! " 
 
 Though he was afterwards informed of the untruth of 
 these lines, Byron, plethoric as he was with poetic wealth 
 and wit, could not willingly let them die ; and so the 
 witticism yet remains to mislead and provoke the laugh- 
 ter of his readers. 
 
 Again: there are authors who, to meet the necessities 
 of rhyme, or to give music to a period, will pad out their 
 sentences with meaningless expletives. They employ words 
 as carpenters put false windows into houses ; not to let 
 in light upon their meaning, but for symmetry. Or, per' 
 haps, they imagine that a certain degree of distension of
 
 80 WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 the intellectual stomach is required to enable it to act 
 with its full powers, just as some of the Russian peas- 
 antry mix sawdust with the train-oil they drink, or as 
 hay and straw are given to horses, as well as corn, to 
 supply the necessary bulk. Thus Dr. Johnson, imitating 
 Juvenal, says: 
 
 " Let observation, with extensive view, 
 Survey mankind from China to Peru." 
 
 This, a lynx-eyed critic contended, was equivalent to 
 saying: "Let observation, with extensive observation, ob- 
 serve mankind extensively." If the Spartans, as we are 
 told, fined a citizen because he used three words where 
 two would have done as well, how would they have pun- 
 ished such prodigality of language? 
 
 It -is an impressive truth which has often been noticed 
 by moralists that indulgence in verbal vice speedily leads 
 to corresponding vices in conduct. If a man talk of 
 any mean, sensual, or criminal practice in a familiar or 
 flippant tone, the delicacy of his moral sense is almost 
 sure to be lessened, he loses his horror of the vice, and, 
 when tempted to do the deed, he is far more likely to 
 yield. Many a man, without dreaming of such a result, 
 has thus talked himself into vice, into sensuality, and even 
 into ruin. " Bad language," says an able divine, " easily 
 runs into bad deeds. Select any iniquity you please; suffer 
 yourself to converse in its dialect, to use its slang, to speak 
 in the character of one who approves or relishes it, and 
 I need not tell you how soon your moral sense may lower 
 down its level." The apostle James was so impressed with 
 the significance of speech that he regarded it as an un- 
 erring sign of character. "If any man offend not in 
 word," he declares, " the same is a perfect man, and able
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 81 
 
 also to bridle the whole body." Again he declares that 
 "the tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison"; 
 commenting upon which, Rev. F. W. Robertson observes: 
 " The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is 
 known; there are poisons so destructive that a single 
 drop insinuated into the veins produces death in three 
 seconds. . . In that drop of venom which distils from the 
 sting of the smallest insect or the spikes of the nettle- 
 leaf, there is concentrated the quintessence of a poison so 
 subtle that the microscope cannot distinguish it, and yet 
 so virulent that it can inflame the blood, irritate the whole 
 constitution, and convert night and day into restless mis- 
 ery." So, he adds, there are words of calumny and slan- 
 der, apparently insignificant, yet so venomous and deadly 
 that they not only inflame hearts and fever human exist- 
 ence, but poison human society at the very fountain springs 
 of life. It was said with the deepest feeling of the utter- 
 ers of such words, by one who had smarted under their 
 sting: "Adders' poison is under their lips." 
 
 Who can estimate the amount of misery which has been 
 produced in society by merely idle words, uttered without 
 malice, and by words uttered in jest? A poet, whose name 
 is unknown to us, has vividly painted the effects of such 
 utterances : 
 
 "A frivolous word, a sharp retort, 
 
 A flash from a passing cloud, 
 Two hearts are scathed to their inmost core, 
 Are ashes and dnst forevermore; 
 
 Two faces turn to the crowd, 
 Masked by pride with a lifelong lie, 
 To hide the scars of that agony. 
 
 "A frivolous word, a sharp retort, 
 
 An arrow at random sped; 
 It has cut in twain the mystic tie 
 4*
 
 82 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 That had bound two souls in harmony, 
 
 Sweet love lies bleeding or dead. 
 A poisoned shaft with scarce an aim, 
 Has done a mischief sad as shame." 
 
 It was one of the virtues of George Washington that he 
 knew how to be silent. John Adams said he had the most 
 remarkable mouth he had ever seen; for he had the art of 
 controlling his lips. One of the rules of conduct to which 
 David Hume inflexibly adhered, was never to reply to any 
 attack made upon him or his writings. It was creditable 
 to him that he had no anxiety to have " the last word,"- 
 that which in family circles has been pronounced to be 
 " the most dangerous of infernal machines." 
 
 It is not, however, in the realm of literature and morals 
 only that the power of words is seen. Who is ignorant of 
 their sway in the world of politics? Is not fluency of 
 speech, in many communities, more than statesmanship? 
 Are not brains, with a little tongue, often far less potent 
 than "tongue with a garnish of brains"? Need any one 
 be told that a talent for speech-making has stood in place 
 of all other acquirements; that it is this which has made 
 judges without law, and diplomatists without French; which 
 has sent to the army brigadiers who knew not a cannon 
 from a mortar, and to the legislature men who could not 
 tell a bank-note from a bill of exchange; which, according 
 to Macaulay, made a Foreign Minister of Mr. Pitt, who 
 never opened Vattel, and which was near making a Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not 
 work a sum in long division? " To be a man of the world," 
 says Corporal Bunting, a character in one of Bulwer's 
 novels, " you must know all the ins and outs of speechify- 
 ing. It's words that make another man's mare go your 
 road. Augh ! that must have been a clever man as invented
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 83 
 
 language. It is a marvel to think how much a man does 
 in the way of cheating, if he only has the gift of the gab; 
 wants a missus, talks her over ; wants your horse, talks 
 you out of it; wants a place, talks himself into it. . . 
 Words make even them 'ere authors, poor creatures, in 
 every man's mouth. Augh ! sir, take note of the words, 
 and the things will take care of themselves." 
 
 It is true that " lying words " are not always responsible 
 for the mischief they do; that they often rebel and growl 
 audibly against the service into which they are pressed, and 
 testify against their task- masters. The latent nature of a 
 man struggles often through his own words, so that even 
 truth itself comes blasted from his lips, and vulgarity, 
 malignity, and littleness of soul, however anxiously cloaked, 
 are betrayed by the very phrases and images of their oppo- 
 sites. " A satanic drop in the blood," it has been said, 
 " makes a clergyman preach diabolism from scriptural texts, 
 and a philanthropist thunder hate from the rostrum of 
 reform." * But though the truth often leaks out through 
 the most hypocritical words, it is yet true that they are 
 successfully employed, as decoy-ducks, to deceive, and the 
 dupes who are cheated by them are legion. There are men 
 fond of abstractions, whom words seem to enter and take 
 possession of, as their lords and owners. Blind to every 
 shape but a shadow, deaf to every sound but an echo, they 
 invert the legitimate order, and regard things as the sym- 
 bols of words, not words as the symbols of things. There 
 is, in short, "a besotting intoxication which this verbal 
 magic, if I may so call it, brings upon the mind of man. . . 
 Words are able to persuade men out of what they find and 
 feel, to reverse the very impressions of sense, and to amuse 
 
 * " Literature and Life," by Edwin P. Whipple.
 
 84 WORDS ; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 men with fancies and paradoxes, even in spite of nature and 
 experience." * 
 
 All who are familiar with Dickens will recollect the reply 
 of the shrewd Samuel Weller, when asked the meaning of 
 the word monomania: " When a poor fellow takes a piece 
 of goods from a shop, it is called theft; but if a wealthy 
 lady does the same thing, it is called monomania." There 
 is biting satire as well as naivete and dry humor in the 
 reply, and it strikingly shows the moral power of language; 
 how the same act may be made to appear in wholly different 
 lights, according to the phraseology used to describe it. The 
 same character may be made to look as spotless as an angel, 
 or as black as " the sooty spirits that troop under Acheron's 
 flag," through the lubricity of language. " Timidus, says 
 Seneca, " se cautum vocat; sordidus, parcum" Thousands 
 who would shrink back with disgust or horror from a vice 
 which has an ugly name, are led " first to endure, then pity, 
 then embrace," when men have thrown over it the mantle 
 of an honorable appellation. A singular but most in- 
 structive dictionary might be compiled by taking one after 
 another the honorable and the sacred words of a language, 
 and showing for what infamies, basenesses, crimes, or follies, 
 each has been made a pretext. Is there no meaning in the 
 fact that, among the ancient Romans, the same word was 
 employed to designate a crime and a great action, and that 
 a softened expression for "a thief" was " a man of three 
 letters" (f. u. r.)? Does it make no difference in our esti- 
 mate of the gambler and his profession, whether we call 
 him by the plain, unvarnished Saxon " blackleg," or by the 
 French epithet, "industrious chevalier"? Can any one 
 doubt that in Italy, when poisoning was rifest, the crime 
 
 *8outh'8 Sermons.
 
 THE MORALITY IX WORDS. 85 
 
 was fearfully increased by the fact that, in place of this 
 term, not to be breathed in ears polite, the death of some- 
 one was said to be " assisted"? Or can any one doubt the 
 moral effect of a similar perversion of words in France, 
 when a subtle poison, by which impatient heirs delivered 
 themselves from persons who stood between them and the 
 inheritance they coveted, was called "succession powder"? 
 
 Juvenal indignantly denounces the polished Romans for 
 relieving the consciences of rich criminals by softening the 
 names of their crimes; and Thucydides, in a well-known 
 passage of his history, tells how the morals of the Greeks 
 of his day were sapped, and how they concealed the na- 
 tional deterioration, by perversions of the customary mean- 
 ings of words. Unreasoning rashness, he says, passed as 
 " manliness " and " esprit de corps," and prudent caution 
 for specious cowardice; sobermindedness was a mere "cloak 
 for effeminacy," and general prudence was " inefficient 
 inertness." The Athenians, at one time, were adepts in 
 the art of coining agreeable names for disagreeable things. 
 "Taxes" they called "subscriptions" or "contributions"; 
 the prison was "the house"; the executioner a "public 
 servant"; and a general abolition of debt was "a disbur- 
 dening ordinance." Devices like these are common to all 
 countries; and in our own, especially, one is' startled to 
 see what an amount of ingenuity has been expended in 
 perfecting this " devil's vocabulary," and how successful 
 the press has been in its efforts to transmute acts of 
 wickedness into mere peccadilloes, and to empty words 
 employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and 
 earnestness of the moral reprobation they convey. 
 
 Some time ago a Wisconsin clergyman, being detected 
 in stealing books from a bookstore, confessed the truth,
 
 86 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 and added that he left his former home in New Jersey 
 under disgrace for a similar theft. This fact a New York 
 paper noted under the head of "A Peculiar Misfortune.'' 
 About the same time a clerk in Richmond. Va., being 
 sent to deposit several hundreds of dollars in a bank, ran 
 away with the money to the North. Having been pursued, 
 overtaken, and compelled to return the money, he was 
 spoken of by " the chivalry " as the young man " who had 
 lately met with an accident." Is it not an alarming sign 
 of the times, when, in the Legislature of one of our largest 
 Eastern States, a member declares that he has been asked 
 by another member for his vote, and told that he would 
 get "five hundred reasons for giving it"; thus making the 
 highest word in our language, that which signifies divinely- 
 given power of discrimination and choice, the synonyme 
 of bribery? 
 
 Perhaps no honorable term in the language has been 
 more debased than " gentleman." Originally the word 
 meant a man born of a noble family, or gens, as the Romans 
 called it; but as such persons were usually possessed of 
 wealth and leisure, they were generally distinguished by 
 greater refinement of manners than the working clash's, 
 and a more tasteful dress. As in the course of ages their 
 riches and legal privileges diminished, and the gulf which 
 separated them from the citizens of the trading towns was 
 bridged by the increasing wealth and power of the latter, 
 the term " gentleman " came at last to denote indiscrim- 
 inately all persons who kept up the state and observed the 
 social forms which had once characterized men of rank. 
 To-day the term has sunk so low that the acutest lexicog- 
 rapher would be puzzled to tell its meaning. Not only 
 does every person of decent exterior and deportment as-
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 87 
 
 sume to be a gentleman, but the term is applied to the 
 vilest criminals and the most contemptible miscreants, as 
 well as to the poorest and most illiterate persons in the 
 community. 
 
 In aristocratic England the artificial distinctions of so- 
 ciety have so far disappeared that even the porter who 
 lounges hi his big chair, and condescends to show you out, 
 is " the gentleman in the hall " ; Jeames is the " gentleman 
 in uniform " ; while the valet is the " gentleman's gentle- 
 man.'' Even a half a century ago, George IV., who was 
 so ignorant that he could hardly spell, and who in heart 
 and soul was a thorough snob, was pronounced, upon the 
 ground of his grand and suave manners, " the first gentle- 
 man of Europe." But in the United States the term has 
 been so emptied of its original meaning, especially in 
 some of the Southern States, where society has hardly 
 emerged from a feudal state, and where men who shoot 
 each other in a street fray still babble of being " born gen- 
 tlemen," and of " dying like gentlemen," that most per- 
 sons will think it is quite time for the abolition of " that 
 heartless conventionality, that absurd humbug and barba- 
 rian, the gentleman." Cowper declared, a hundred years 
 ago, in regard to duelling: 
 
 "A gentleman 
 Will not insult me, and no other can." 
 
 A Southern newspaper stated some years ago that a u gen- 
 tleman" was praising the town of Woodville, Mississippi, 
 and remarked that " it was the most quiet, peaceable place 
 he ever saw; there was no quarrelling or rowdyism, no 
 fighting about the streets. If a gentleman insulted an- 
 other, he was quietly shot down, and there was the last of 
 it." The gentle Isaiah Rynders, who acted as Marshal at
 
 88 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 the time the pirate Hicks was executed in New York, 
 had doubtless similar notions of gentility; for, after con- 
 versing a moment with the culprit, he said to the by- 
 standers: " I asked the gentleman if he desired to address 
 the audience, but he declined." In a similar spirit Booth, 
 the assassin, when he was surrounded in the barn, where 
 he was shot like a beast, offered to pledge his word " as a 
 gentleman" to come out and try to shoot one or two of his 
 captors. The Duke of Saxe-Weimar states that when he 
 visited the United States about fifty years ago, he was 
 asked by a hackman: "Are you the man that's going to 
 ride with me; for I am the gentleman that's to drive?" 
 
 When a young man becomes a reckless spendthrift, 
 how easy it is to gloss over his folly by talking of his 
 " generosity," his " big-heartedness," and " contempt for 
 trifles"; or, if he runs into the opposite vice of miserly 
 niggardliness, how convenient to dignify it by the terms 
 " economy " and " wise forecast of the future " ! A man 
 with a good income becomes extravagant in his expendi- 
 tures, and contracts hundreds of debts, which he fails tn 
 liquidate, for fine furniture and clothes, fast horses and 
 champagne suppers; or, perhaps, he deliberately fails in 
 business, and swindles his victims out of fifty or a hun- 
 dred thousand dollars: who, even of the sufferers, can be 
 so cruel as to pronounce him a " scoundrel," when he 
 was manifestly only " a little fast," or there was merely 
 "a confusion in his affairs"? 
 
 Many a man has blown out another's brains in "an 
 affair of honor," who, if accused of murder, would have 
 started back with horror. Many a person stakes his all 
 on a public stock, or sells wheat or corn which he dot's 
 not possess, in the expectation of a speedy fall, who would
 
 THE MORALITY IX WORDS. 89 
 
 be thunderstruck if told that, while considering himself 
 only a shrewd speculator, he was, in everything save 
 decency of appearance, on a par with the haunter of a 
 " hell," and as much a gambler as if he were staking his 
 money on " rouge-et-noir " or " roulette/' Hundreds of 
 officials have been tempted to defraud the government 
 by the fact that the harshest term applied to the offense 
 is the rose-water one, " defaulting " ; and men have plotted 
 without compunction the downfall of the government, and 
 plundered its treasury, as " secessionists," who would have 
 expected to dangle at the rope's end, or to be shot down 
 like dogs, had they regarded themselves as rebels or trai- 
 tors. So Pistol objected to the odious word steal " con- 
 vey, the wise it call." There are multitudes of persons 
 who can sit for hours at a festive table, gorging them- 
 selves, Gargantua-like, " with links and chitterlings," and 
 guzzling whole bottles of champagne, under the impres- 
 sion that they are "jolly fellows," "true epicureans," and 
 " connoisseurs in good living," whose cheeks would tingle 
 with indignation and shame if they were accused, in 
 point-blank terms, of vices so disgusting as intemperance 
 or gluttony. " I *am not a slut," boasts Audrey, in "As 
 You Like It," " though I thank the gods I am foul." 
 
 Of all classes of men whose callings tempt them to 
 juggle with words, none better than auctioneers under- 
 stand how much significance lies in certain shades of 
 expression. It is told of Eobins, the famous London 
 auctioneer, who in selling his wares revelled in an ' ori- 
 ental luxury of expression, that in puffing an estate he 
 described a certain ancient gallows as " a hanging wood." 
 At another time, having made the beauties of the earthly 
 paradise which he was commissioned to sell too gorgeously
 
 90 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 enchanting, and finding it necessary to blur it by a fault 
 or two, lest it should prove " too good for human nature's 
 daily food, the Hafiz of the mart paused a moment, and 
 reluctantly added: "But candor compels me to add, gen- 
 tlemen, that there are two drawbacks to this splendid 
 property, the litter of the rose-leaves and the noise of I he 
 nightingales.' 1 ' 1 
 
 It is hardly possible to estimate the mischief which is 
 done to society by the debasement of its language in the 
 various ways we have indicated. When the only words 
 we have by which to designate the personifications of 
 nobleness, manliness, courtesy and truth are systemat- 
 ically applied to all that is contemptible and vile, who 
 can doubt that these high qualities themselves will ulti- 
 mately share in the debasement to which their proper 
 names are subjected? Who does not see how vast a dif- 
 ference it must make in our estimate of any species of 
 wickedness, whether we are wont to designate it, arid to 
 hear it designated, by some word which brings out its 
 hatefulness, or by one which palliates and glosses over ils 
 foulness and deformity? How much better to character- 
 ize an ugly thing by an ugly word, tha/t expresses moral 
 condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of some 
 coarseness, than to call evil good and good evil, to put 
 darkness for light, and light for darkness, by the use of 
 a term that throws a veil of sentiment over a sin? In 
 reading the literature of former days, we are shocked 
 occasionally by the bluntness and plain-speaking of our 
 fathers; but even their coarsest terms, the "naked words, 
 stript from their shirts," in which they denounced liber- 
 tinism, were far less hurtful than the ceremonious delicacy 
 which has taught men to abuse each other with the ut-
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 91 
 
 most politeness, to hide the loathsomeness of vice, and to 
 express the most indecent ideas in the most modest terms. 
 
 It has been justly said that the corrupter of a language 
 stabs straight at the very heart of his country. He com- 
 mits a crime against every individual of a nation,- for he 
 poisons a stream from which all must drink; and the 
 poison is more subtle and more dangerous, because more 
 likely to escape detection, than the deadliest venom with 
 which the destructive philosophy of our day is assailing 
 the moral or the religious interests of humanity. " Let 
 the words of a country," sa} 7 s Milton in a letter to an 
 Italian scholar, "be in part unhandsome and offensive in 
 themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, 
 and what do they declare but, by no light indication, that 
 the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly- 
 yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any 
 amount of servility?" 
 
 Sometimes the spirit which governs employers or em- 
 ployed, and other classes of men, in their mutual relations, 
 is indicated by the names they give each other. Some 
 years ago the Legislature of Massachusetts made a law 
 requiring that children of a certain, age employed in the 
 factories of that State, should be sent to school a certain 
 number of weeks in the year. While visiting the factories 
 to ascertain whether this wise provision of the State gov- 
 ernment was complied with, an officer of the State inquired 
 of the agent of one of the principal factories at New 
 Bedford, whether it was the custom to do anything for 
 the physical, intellectual, or moral welfare of the work- 
 people. The answer would not have b.een out of place in 
 the master of a plantation, or the captain of a coolie ship : 
 " We never do ; as for myself, I regard my work-people
 
 92 WORDS; THEIB USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 as I regard my machinery. , . They must look out for 
 themselves, as I do for myself. When my machinery gets 
 old and useless, I reject it and get new; and these people 
 are a part of my machinery.'' Another agent in another 
 part of 'the State replied to a similar question: ''That he 
 used his mill-hands as he used his horse- as long as he was 
 in good condition and rendered good service, he treated 
 him well; otherwise he got rid of him as soon as he could, 
 and what became of him afterward was no affair of his." 
 
 But we need not multiply illustrations to show the 
 moral power of words. As the eloquent James Martineau 
 says: " Power they certainly have. They are alive with 
 sweetness, with terror, with pity. They have eyes to look 
 at you with strangeness or with response. They are even 
 creative, and can wrap a world in darkness for us, or flood 
 it with light. But in all this, they are not signs of the 
 weakness of humanity; they are the very crown and blos- 
 som of its supreme strength; and the poet whom this faith 
 possesses will, to the end of time, be master of the critic 
 whom it deserts. The whole inner life of men moulds the 
 forms of language, and is moulded by them in turn; and 
 as surely pines when they are rudely treated as the plant 
 whose vessels you bruise or try to replace with artificial 
 tubes. The grouping of thought, the musical scale of 
 feeling, the shading and harmonies of color in the spec- 
 trum of imagination, have all been building, as it were, 
 the molecules of speech into their service; and if you heed- 
 lessly alter its dispositions, pulverize its crystals, fix its 
 elastic media, and turn its transparent into opaque, you 
 not only disturb expression, you dislodge the very things 
 to be expressed. And in proportion as the idea or senti- 
 ment thus turned adrift is less of a mere personal char-
 
 THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 93 
 
 acteristic, and has been gathering and shaping its elements 
 from ages of various aft'ection and experience, does it be- 
 come less possible to replace it by any equivalents, or 
 dispense with its function by any act of will." 
 
 To conclude: there is one startling fact connected with 
 words, which should make all men ponder what they utter. 
 Not only is every wise and every idle word recorded in the 
 book of divine remembrance, but modern science has shown 
 that they produce an abiding impression on the globe we 
 inhabit. The pulsations of the air, once set in motion, 
 never cease; its waves, raised by each sound, travel the 
 entire round of earth's and ocean's surface; and, in less 
 than twenty-four hours, every atom of atmosphere takes up 
 the altered movement resulting from that sound. The air 
 itself is one vast library, on whose pages are written in 
 imperishable characters all that man has spoken, or even 
 whispered. Not a word that goes from the lips into the 
 air can ever die, until the atmosphere which wraps our 
 huge globe in its embrace has passed away forever, and the 
 heavens are no more. There, till the heavens are rolled 
 together as a scroll, will still live the jests of the profane, 
 the curses of the ungodly, the scoffs of the atheist, " keeping 
 company with the hours," and circling the earth with the 
 song of Miriam, the wailing of Jeremiah, the low prayer of 
 Stephen, the thunders of Demosthenes, and the denuncia- 
 tions of Burke. 
 
 " Words are mighty, words are living; 
 
 Serpents, with their venomous stings, 
 Or, bright angels, crowding round us 
 
 With heaven's light upon their wings; 
 Every word has its own spirit, 
 
 True or false, that never dies: 
 Every word man's lips have uttered 
 
 Echoes in God's skies."
 
 94 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 GRAND WORDS. 
 
 The fool hath planted his memory with an army of words. SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 In the commerce of speech use only coin of gold and silver. . . Be pro- 
 found with clear terms, and not with obscure terms. JOUBERT. 
 
 I observe that all distinguished poetry is written in the oldest and simplest 
 English words. There is a point, above coarseness and below refinement, where 
 propriety abides. EMERSON. 
 
 Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. 
 Don't whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want to tingle. H. W. 
 BEECHER. 
 
 Let, then, clerks enditen in Latin, for they have the property of science and 
 the knowledge in that faculty: and let Frenchmen in their French, also, enditen 
 their quaint terms, for it is kindly to their mouths; and let us show our fanta- 
 sies in such words as we learneden of our dame's tongue. CHAUCER. 
 
 IT is a trite remark that words are the representatives 
 of things and thoughts, as coin represents wealth. You 
 carry in your pocket a doubloon or a dollar, stamped by 
 the king or state, and you are the virtual owner of what- 
 ever it will purchase. But who affixes the stamp upon a 
 word? No prince or potentate was ever strong enough to 
 make or unmake a single word. Caesar confessed that with 
 all his power he could not do it, and Claudius could not 
 introduce even a new letter. Cicero tried his hand at it; 
 but though he proved himself a skillful mint-master, and 
 struck some admirable trial-pieces, which were absolutely 
 needed to facilitate mental exchanges, yet they did not gain 
 circulation, and were thrown back upon his hands. But 
 that which defied the power of Caesar and of Cicero does not 
 transcend the ability of many writers of our own day, some
 
 GRAND WORDS. 95 
 
 of whom are adepts in the art of word-coining, and are 
 daily minting terms and phrases which must make even 
 Noah Webster, boundless as was his charity for new words, 
 turn in his grave. It is doubtful, however, whether these 
 persons do so much damage to our noble English language 
 as those who vulgarize it by the use of penny-a-liner phrases. 
 There is a large and growing class of speakers and writers, 
 on both sides of the Atlantic, who, apparently despising the 
 homely but terse and telling words of their mother tongue, 
 never use a Saxon term, if they can find what Lord 
 Brougham calls a " long-tailed word in 'osity or Cation " to 
 do its work. 
 
 What is the cause of this? Is it the extraordinary, not 
 to say excessive, attention now given by persons of all ages 
 to foreign languages, to the neglect of our own? Is it the 
 comparative inattention given to correct diction by the 
 teachers in the schools of to-day; or is it because the 
 favorite books of the young are sensational stories, made 
 pungent, and in a sense, natural, through the lavish use of 
 all the colloquialisms and vulgarisms of low life? Shall 
 we believe that it is because there is little individuality and 
 independence in these days, that the words of so few per- 
 sons are flavored with their idiosyncrasies; that it is from 
 conscious poverty of thought, that they try to trick out 
 their ideas in glittering words and phrases, just as by 
 means of high-heeled boots, a laced coat, and a long feather, 
 a fellow with a little soul and a weak body might try to 
 pass muster as a bold grenadier? Or, again, is it because 
 of the prevalent mania for the sensational, the craving 
 for novelty and excitement, which is almost universal in 
 these days, that so many persons make sense subservient 
 to sound, and avoid calling things by their proper names?
 
 96 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Was Talleyrand wrong when he said that language was 
 given to man to conceal his thought; and was it really 
 given to hide his want of thought? Is it, indeed, the main 
 object of expression to convey the smallest possible amount 
 of meaning with the greatest possible amount of appearance 
 of meaning; and since nobody can be "so wise as Thurlow 
 looked," to look as wise as Thurlow while uttering the 
 veriest truisms? 
 
 Be all this as it may, in nothing else is the lack of sim- 
 plicity, which is so characteristic of our times, more marked 
 than in the prevailing forms of expression. " The curse 
 and the peril of language in our day, and particularly in 
 this country," says an American critic, who may, perhaps, 
 croak at times, but who has done much good service as a 
 literary policeman in the repression of verbal licentious- 
 ness, " is that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of 
 being content to use it well, according to their honest 
 ignorance, use it ill according to their affected knowledge ; 
 who, being vulgar, would seem elegant; who, being empty, 
 would seem full; who make up in pretence what they lack 
 in reality; and whose little thoughts let off in enormous 
 phrases, sound like fire-crackers in an empty barrel." In 
 the estimation of many writers at the present day, the 
 great, crowning vice in the use of words is, apparently, to 
 employ plain, straightforward English. The simple Saxon is 
 not good enough for their purposes, and so they array their 
 ideas in " big, dictionary words," derived from the Latin, 
 and load their style with expletives as tasteless as the 
 streamers of tattered finery that flutter about the person 
 of a dilapidated belle. The "high-polite," in short, is their 
 favorite style, and the good old Spartan rule of calling a 
 spade a spade they hold in thorough contempt. Their great
 
 GRAND WORDS. 97 
 
 recipe for elegant or powerful writing is to call the most 
 common things by the most uncommon names. Provided 
 that a word is out-of-the-way, unusual, or far-fetched, and 
 especially if it is one of many syllables, they care little 
 whether it is apt and fit or not. 
 
 With them a fire is always ''the devouring element:" it 
 never burns a house, but it always " consumes an edifice," 
 unless it is got under, in which case "its progress is 
 arrested." A railroad accident is always " a holocaust," 
 and its victims are named under the " death-roll." A 
 man who is the first to do a thing " takes the initiative." 
 Instead of loving a woman, a man " becomes attached " to 
 her; instead of losing his mother by death, he "sustains a 
 bereavement of his maternal relative." A dog's tail, in the 
 pages of these writers, is his "caudal appendage"; a dog- 
 breaker, "a kunopaedist " ; and a fish-pond they call by no 
 less lofty a title than " piscine preserve." Ladies, in their 
 classic pages, have ceased to be married, like those poor, 
 vulgar creatures, their grandmothers, they are " led to 
 the hymeneal altar." Of the existence of such persons as 
 a man, a woman, a T)oy or a girl, these writers are pro- 
 foundly ignorant : though they often speak of " individuals," 
 " gentlemen," " characters," and " parties," and often recog- 
 nize the existence of "juveniles" and "juvenile members 
 of the community." " Individual" is another piece of " pomp- 
 ous inanity " which is very current now. In " Guesses at 
 Truth " mention is made of a celebrated preacher, who was 
 so destitute of all feeling for decorum in language, as to 
 call our Saviour " this eminent individual." " Individual " 
 is a good Latin word, and serves a good purpose when it 
 distinguishes a person from a people or class, as it served 
 a good purpose in the scholastic philosophy; but would
 
 98 WORDS; THEIR USB AND ABUSE. 
 
 Cicero or Duns Scotus have called a great man an 
 individuum? These " individuals,'' strange' to say, are never 
 dressed, but always "attired"; they never take off their 
 clothes, but " divest themselves of their habiliments," which 
 is so much grander. 
 
 Again: the Anti-Saxons, if we may so call them, never 
 tell us that a man was asleep, but say that he was " locked 
 in slumber"; they deem it vulgar, and perhaps cruel, to 
 say that a criminal was hanged: but very elegant to say 
 that he was " launched into eternity." A person of their 
 acquaintance never does so low a thing as to break his 
 leg; he "fractures his limb." They never see a man fall: 
 but sometimes see " an individual precipitated." Our Latin 
 friends, fortunate souls, never have their feelings hurt, 
 though it must be confessed that their " sensibilities " are 
 sometimes dreadfully " lacerated." Above the necessities of 
 their poor fellow-creatures, they never do so vulgar a thing 
 as to eat a meal; they always " partake of a repast," which 
 is so much more elegant. They never do so commonplace 
 a thing as to take a walk ; they " make a pedestrian ex- 
 cursion." A conjurer with them is a "prestidigitator"; a 
 fortune-teller, a " vaticinator." As Pascal says, they mask 
 all nature. There is with them no king, but an " august 
 monarch"; no Paris, but a "capital of a kingdom." Even 
 our barbers have got upon stilts. They no longer sell 
 tooth-powder and shaving-soap, like the old fogies, their 
 fathers, but " odonto," and " dentifrice," and " rypophagon"; 
 and they themselves, from the barber-ous persons they 
 once were, have been transformed into " artists in hair." 
 The medical faculty, too, have caught the spirit of the age. 
 Who would suspect that " epistaxis " means simply bleed- 
 ing at the nose, and "emollient cataplasm" only a poul-
 
 GRAND WORDS. 99 
 
 tice? Fancy one school-boy doubling up his fist at another, 
 and telling him to look out for epistaxis! Who would 
 dream that " anheidro-hepseterion " (advertised in the 
 London " Times ") means only a saucepan, or " taxider- 
 mist" a bird-stufFer? Is it not remarkable that tradesmen 
 have ceased "sending in" their "little bills," and now 
 only " render their accounts " ? 
 
 " There are people," says Landor, " who think they 
 write and speak finely, merely because they have forgotten 
 the language in which their fathers and mothers used to 
 talk to them." As in dress, deportment, etc., so in lan- 
 guage, the dread of vulgarity, as Whately has suggested, 
 constantly besetting those who are half conscious that they 
 are in danger of it, drives them into the opposite extreme 
 of affected finery. They act upon the advice of Boileau: 
 
 "Quoiqne vous ecriyiez, evitez la bassesse; 
 Le style le moins noble a pourtant sa noblesse;" 
 
 and, to avoid the undignified, according to them, it is only 
 necessary not to call things by their right names. 
 
 Such persons forget that glass will obstruct the light 
 quite as much when beautifully painted as when discol- 
 ored with dirt ; and that a style studded with far-fetched 
 epithets and high-sounding phrases may be as dark as one 
 abounding in colloquial vulgarisms. Who does not sym- 
 pathize with the indignation of Dr. Johnson, when, taking 
 up at the house of a country friend a so-called " Liberal 
 Translation of the New Testament," he read, in the 
 eleventh chapter of John, instead of the simple and 
 touching words, "Jesus wept," "Jesus, the Saviour of 
 the world, overcome with grief, burst into a flood of 
 tears"? "Puppy!" exclaimed the critic, as he threw 
 down the book in a rage; and had the author been pres-
 
 100 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 ent, Johnson would doubtless have thrown it at his head. 
 Yet the great literary bashaw, while he had an eagle's 
 eye for the faults of others, was unconscious of his own 
 sins against simplicity, and, though he spoke like a wit, 
 too often wrote like a pedant. He had, in fact, a dialect 
 of his own, which has been wittily styled Johnsonese. 
 Goldsmith hit him in a vulnerable spot when he said: 
 " Doctor, if you were to write a fable about little fishes, 
 you would make them talk like whales." The faults of 
 his pompous, swelling diction, in which the frivolity of a 
 coxcomb is described in the same rolling periods and with 
 the same gravity of antithesis with which he would thun- 
 der against rebellion or fanaticism, are hardly exaggerated 
 by a wit of his own time who calls it 
 
 "a turgid style, 
 
 Which gives to an inch the importance of a mile; 
 Uplifts the club of Hercules for what? 
 To crush a butterfly, or brain a gnat; 
 Bids ocean labor with tremendous roar, 
 To hi'ave a cockle-shell upon the shore; 
 Sets wheels on wheels in motion, what a clatter! 
 To force up one poor nipperkin of water; 
 Alike in every theme his pompous art, 
 Heaven's awful thunder, or a rumbling cart." 
 
 One of the latest " modern improvements " in speech 
 is the substitution of "lady 1 ' and "female" for the good 
 old English " woman." On the front of Cooper's Reading- 
 Room, in the city of New York, is the sign in golden let- 
 ters, " Male and Female Reading-Rooms." Suppose Scott, 
 in his noble tribute to women for their devotion and 
 tenderness to men in the hour of suffering, had sung 
 
 " Oh, LADIES, in our hours of ease," etc., 
 
 would not the lines have been far more touching? An 
 English writer says truly that the law of euphemisms is
 
 GRAND WOKDS. 101 
 
 somewhat capricious; "one cannot always tell which words 
 are decent and which are not. . . It really seems as if the 
 old-fashioned feminine of ' man ' were fast getting pro- 
 scribed. We, undiscerning male creatures that we are, 
 might have thought that ' woman ' was a more elegant 
 and more distinctive title than ' female.' We read only 
 the other day a report of a lecture on the poet Crabbe, 
 in which she who was afterwards Mrs. Crabbe was spoken 
 of as 'a female to whom he had formed an attachment.' 
 To us, indeed, it seems that a man's wife should be spoken 
 of in some way which is not equally applicable to a ewe 
 lamb or a favorite mare. But it was a ' female ' who 
 delivered the lecture, and we suppose the females know 
 best about their own affairs." 
 
 Can any person account for the apparent antipathy 
 which many writers and speakers have to the good Saxon 
 verb "to begin"? Ninety-nine out of every hundred per- 
 sons one talks with are sure to prefer the French words 
 " to commence" and " to essay," and the tendency is strong 
 to prefer " to inaugurate " to either. Nothing in our day 
 is begun, not even dinner; it is "inaugurated with soup." 
 In their fondness for the French words, many persons are 
 betrayed into solecisms. Forgetting, or not knowing, that, 
 while " to begin " may be followed by an infinitive or a 
 gerund, " to commence " is transitive, and must be followed 
 by a noun or its equivalent, they talk of " commencing to 
 do" a thing, "essaying to do well," etc. Persons who 
 think that "begin" is not stately enough, or that it is 
 even vulgar, would do well to look into the pages of Mil- 
 ton and Shakspeare. With all his fondness for Romanic 
 words the former hardly once uses " commence " and 
 " commencement " ; and the latter is not only content with
 
 102 WOKDS; THEIE USE ANT ABUSE. 
 
 the idiomatic word, but even shortens it, as in the well- 
 known line that depicts so vividly the guilt-wasted soul 
 of Macbeth: 
 
 "I 'gin to grow a-weary of the sun." 
 
 What a shock would every right-minded reader receive, if, 
 upon opening his Bible, he should find, in place of the old 
 familiar words, the following: "In the commencement God 
 created the heavens and the earth," "The fear of the 
 Lord is the commencement of wisdom." Well did Coleridge 
 say: "Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer 
 from being vulgar in point of style." " Commence " is a 
 good word enough, but, being of outlandish origin, should 
 never take the place of " begin,'' except for the sake of 
 rhythm or variety. 
 
 Another of these grand words is " imbroglio." It is 
 from the Italian, and means an intricate or complicated 
 plot. Why, then, should a quarrel in the Cabinet at 
 Washington, or a prospective quarrel with France or 
 England, be called an "imbroglio"? Again, will any one 
 explain to us the meaning of " interpellation," so often 
 used by the correspondents of our daily newspapers? The 
 word properly means an interruption ; yet when an oppo- 
 sition member of the French or Italian Parliament asks a 
 question of a minister, he is said " to put an interpella- 
 tion." Why should an army be said to be " decimated," 
 without regard to the number or nature of its losses? 
 Why, again, should "donate" be preferred to "give"? 
 Does it show a larger soul, a more magnificent liberality, 
 to "donate" than to give? Must we "donate the devil 
 his due," when we would be unusually charitable? Why 
 should " elect " be preferred to " choose," when there is no 
 election whatever; -or why is " balance " preferable to " re-
 
 GRAND WORDS. 103 
 
 mainder"? As a writer has well said: "Would any man 
 in his senses dare to quote King David as saying: 'They 
 are full of children, and leave the balance of their sub- 
 stance unto their babes ' ? or read, ' Surely the wrath of 
 man shall praise thee: the balance of wrath thou shalt 
 restrain,' where the translators of our Bible wrote ' the 
 remainder ' ? And if any one went into the nursery, and 
 telling that tale of perennial interest of the little boys that 
 a-sliding went, a-sliding went, a-sliding went, all on a 
 summer's day, should, after recounting how they all fell 
 in, they all fell in, they all fell in, add ' the balance ran 
 away,' would there not go up a chorus of tiny but indig- 
 nant protests against this mutilation, which would enlist 
 a far wider sympathy than some of the proposed changes 
 in the texts of classic authors which have set editors and 
 commentators at loggerheads?" 
 
 Again: why should one say "rendition" for perform- 
 ance, "enactment" for acting, "or "nude" for naked? In 
 the seventeenth century, certain fanatics in England ran 
 about without clothes, crying: " We are the naked Truth." 
 Had they lived in this age of refinement, instead of shock- 
 ing their countrymen with such indelicate expressions, they 
 would have said, "We are Verity in a nude condition"; 
 and had any person clothed them, he would have been said 
 to have " rehabilitated " them. More offensive than any 
 of these grandiose words is "intoxicated" in place of 
 drunk, which it has nearly banished. A man can be in- 
 toxicated only when he has lost his wits, not by quantity, 
 but by quality, by drinking liquor that has been drugged. 
 "Intoxicated," however, has five syllables; drunk has but 
 one; so the former carries the day by five to one. No 
 doubt nine-tenths of those who drink to excess in this
 
 104 WORDS; THEIK USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 country are, in fact, intoxicated or poisoned; still, the two 
 words should not be confounded. 
 
 Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the 
 sun; and this itching for pompous forms of expression, 
 this contempt for plainness and simplicity of style, is as 
 old as Aristotle. In the third book of his Rhetoric, discuss- 
 ing the causes of frigidity of style, he speaks of one Alcida- 
 mas, a writer of that time, as " employing ornaments, not 
 as seasonings to discourse, but as if they were the only food 
 to live upon. He does not say ' sweat,' but ' the humid 
 sweat;' a man goes not to the Isthmian games, but to 
 ' the collected assembly of the Isthmian solemnity ' ; laws 
 are ' the legitimate kings of commonwealths ' ; and a race, 
 ' the incursive impulse of the soul.' A rich man is not 
 bountiful, but the ' artificer of universal largess.' " Is it 
 not curious that our modern refiners of language, who 
 often pride themselves upon their taste for swelling words 
 and phrases, and their skill in using them, should have 
 been anticipated by Alcidamas two thousand years ago? 
 
 The abuse of the Queen's English to which we have 
 called attention, did not begin with Americans. It began 
 with our trans- Atlantic cousins, who employed " ink-horn " 
 terms and outlandish phrases at a very early period. In 
 " Harrison's Chronicle " we are told that after the Norman 
 Conquest " the English tongue grew into such contempt at 
 court that most men thought it no small dishonor to speak 
 any English there ; which bravery took his hold at the last 
 likewise in the country with every plowman, that even the 
 very carters began to wax weary of their mother-tongue, 
 and labored to speak French, which was then counted no 
 small token of gentility." 
 
 The English people of to-day are quite as much addicted
 
 GKAND WOKDS. 105 
 
 to the grandiose style as the Americans. Gough, in one of 
 his lectures, speaks of a card which he saw in London, in 
 which a man called himself " Illuminating artist to Her 
 Majesty," the fact being that he lighted the gas-lamps 
 near the palace. Mr. E. A. Freeman, the English historian, 
 complained in a recent lecture that our language had few 
 friends and many foes, its only friends being plow-boys and 
 a few scholars. The pleasant old " inns " of England, he 
 said, had disappeared, their places being supplied by 
 "hotels," or "establishments"; while the landlord had 
 made way for the " lessee of the establishment." A gentle- 
 man going into a shop in Regent street to buy half-mourn- 
 ing goods, was referred by the shopman to " the mitigated 
 affliction department." The besetting sin of some of the 
 ablest British writers of this century is their lack of sim- 
 plicity of language. Sydney Smith said of Sir James Mack- 
 intosh, that if he were asked for a definition of " pepper," 
 he would reply thus : " Pepper may philosophically be 
 described as a dusty and highly pulverized seed of an ori- 
 ental fruit ; an article rather of condiment than diet, which, 
 dispersed lightly over the surface of food, with no other 
 rule than the caprice of the consumer, communicates pleas- 
 ure, rather than affords nutrition; and by adding a tropical 
 flavor to the gross and succulent viands of the north, 
 approximates the different regions of the earth, explains 
 the objects of commerce, and justifies the industry of 
 man." 
 
 Francis Jeffrey, the celebrated critic, had, even in con- 
 versation, an artificial style and language, which were fit 
 only for books and a small circle of learned friends. His 
 diction and pronunciation, it is said, were unintelligible to 
 the mass of his countrymen, and in the House of Commons 
 5*
 
 106 WOItDS; THEIR USE AXD ABUSE. 
 
 offensive and ridiculous. An anecdote told in illustration 
 of this peculiarity strikingly shows the superiority of sim- 
 ple to high-flown language in the practical business of life. 
 In a trial, which turned upon the intellectual competency 
 of a testator, Jeffrey asked a witness, a plain countryman, 
 whether the testator was " a man of intellectual capacity," 
 "an intelligent, shrewd man," "a man of capacity?" 
 "Had he ordinary mental endowments?" "What d'ye 
 mean, sir"? asked the witness. "I mean," replied Jeffrey, 
 testily, " was the man of sufficient ordinary intelligence to 
 qualify him to manage his own affairs?" "I dinna ken," 
 replied the chafed and mystified witness, " Wad ye say the 
 question ower again, sir?" Jeffrey being baffled, Cockburn 
 took up the examination. He said: "Ye kenned Tammas 
 
 ?" " Ou, ay; I kenned Tammas weel; me and him 
 
 herded together when we were laddies (boys)." " Was 
 there onything in the cretur?" " De'il a thing but what 
 the spune (spoon) put into him." " Would you have trust- 
 ed him to sell a cow for you?" "A cow! I wadna lip- 
 pened (trusted) him to sell a calf/' Had Jeffrey devoted a 
 review article to the subject, he could not have given a 
 more vivid idea of the testator's incapacity to manage his 
 own affairs. 
 
 Our readers need not be told how much Carlyle has 
 done to Teutonize our language with his " yardlongtailed " 
 German compounds. It was a just stroke of criticism 
 when a New York auctioneer introduced a miscellaneous 
 lot of books to a crowd with the remark: "Gentlemen, of 
 this lot I need only say, six volumes are by Thomas Carlyle ; 
 the seventh is written in the English language." Some years 
 ago, a learned doctor of divinity and university professor 
 in Canada wrote a work in which, wishing to state the
 
 GKAXD WORDS. 107 
 
 simple fact that the " rude Indian " had learned the use 
 of firing, he delivered himself as follows: "He had made 
 slave of the heaven- born element, the brother of the 
 lightning, the grand alchemist and artificer of all times, 
 though as yet he knew not all the worth or magical 
 power that was in him. By his means the sturdy oak, 
 which flung abroad its stalwart arms and waved its leafy 
 honors defiant in the forest, was made to bow to the 
 behest of the simple aborigines." As the plain Scotch- 
 woman said of De Quincey, " the bodie has an awfu' sicht 
 o' words! " This style of speaking and writing has become 
 so common that it can no longer be considered wholly 
 vulgar. It is gradually working upward; it is making its 
 way into official writings and grave octavos; and is even 
 spoken with unction in pulpits and senates. Metaphysi- 
 cians are wont to define words as the signs of ideas ; but, 
 with many persons, they appear -to be, not so much the 
 signs of their thought, as the signs of the signs of their 
 thought. Such, doubtless, was the case with the Scotch 
 clergyman, whom a bonneted abhorrer of legal preaching 
 was overheard eulogizing: "Man, John, wasna yon 
 preachin' ! yon 's something for a body to come awa wi'. 
 The way that he smashed down his text into so mony heads 
 and particulars, just a' to flinders! Nine heads and twenty 
 particulars in ilka head and sic mouthfu's o' grand words ! 
 an' every ane o' them fu' o' meaning, if we but kent 
 them. We hae ill improved our opportunities ; man, if 
 we could just mind onything he said, it would do us guid." 
 The whole literature of notices, handbills, and adver- 
 tisements, in our day, has apparently declared " war to 
 the knife," against every trace of the Angles, Jutes and 
 Saxons. We have no schoolmasters now; they are all
 
 108 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 " principals of collegiate institutes " ; no copy-books, but 
 "specimens of caligraphy"; no ink, but "writing-fluid"; 
 no physical exercise, but Calisthenics or Gymnastics. A 
 man who opens a groggery at some corner for the gratifi- 
 cation of drunkards, instead of announcing his enterprise 
 by its real name, modestly proclaims through the daily 
 papers that his saloon has been fitted up for the reception 
 of customers. Even the learned architects of log-cabins 
 and pioneer cottages can find names for them only in the 
 sonorous dialects of oriental climes. Time was when a 
 farm-house was a farm-house and a porch a porch ; but now 
 the one is a villa or haciendah, and the other nothing less 
 than a verandah. In short, this genteel slang pursues us 
 from the cradle to the grave. In old times, when our 
 fathers and mothers died, they were placed in coffins, and 
 buried in the graveyard or burying-ground; now, when an 
 unfortunate " party " or " individual " " deceases " or " be- 
 comes defunct," he is deposited in a " burial-casket " and 
 " interred in a cemetery." It matters not that the good old 
 words grave and graveyard have been set in the pure amber 
 of the English classics, that the Bible says, "There is no 
 wisdom in the grave," " Cruel as the grave," etc. How 
 much more pompous and magniloquent the Greek: " There 
 is no wisdom in the cemetery," " Cruel as the cemetery !" 
 Seriously, let us eschew all these vulgar fineries of style, 
 as we would eschew the fineries of a dandy. Their legiti- 
 mate effect is to barbarize our language, and to destroy all 
 the peculiar power, distinctiveness, and appropriateness of 
 its terms. Words that are rarely used will at last inevi- 
 tably disappear; and thus, if not speedily checked, this 
 grandiloquence of expression will do an irreparable injury 
 to our dear old English tongue. Poetry may for a while
 
 GRAND WORDS. 109 
 
 escape the effects of this vulgar coxcombry, because it is 
 the farthest out of the reach of such contagion; but, as prose 
 sinks, so must poetry, too, be ultimately dragged down 
 into the general gulf of feebleness and inanition. . 
 
 It was a saying of John Foster that " eloquence resides 
 in the thought, and no words, therefore, can make that elo- 
 quent which will not be so in the plainest that could possi- 
 bly express the same." Nothing, therefore, can be more 
 absurd than the notion that the sounding brass and tink- 
 ling cymbal of pompous and sonorous language are necessary 
 to the expression of the sublime and powerful in eloquence 
 and poetry. So far is this from being true, that the finest, 
 noblest, and most spirit-stirring sentiments ever uttered, 
 have been couched, not in sounding polysyllables from the 
 Greek or Latin, but in the simplest Saxon, in the lan- 
 guage we hear hourly in the streets and by our firesides. 
 Dr. Johnson once said that " big thinkers require big 
 words." He did not think so at the time of the great 
 Methodist movement in the last century, when " the ice 
 period of the establishment was breaking up." He attrib- 
 uted the Wesleys' success to their plain, familiar way of 
 preaching, " which," he says, " clergymen of genius and 
 learning ought to do from a principle of duty." Arthur 
 Helps tells a story of an illiterate soldier at the chapel of 
 Lord Morpeth's castle in Ireland. Whenever Archbishop 
 Whately came to preach, it was observed that this rough 
 private was always in his place, mouth open, as if in sym- 
 pathy with his ears. Some of the gentlemen playfully took 
 him to task for it, supposing it was due to the usual vulgar 
 admiration of a celebrated man. But the man had a better 
 reason, and was able to give it. He said, " That isn't it at 
 all. The Archbishop is easy to understand. There are no
 
 110 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 fine words in him. A fellow like me, now, can follow along 
 and take every bit of it in." " Whately's simplicity," 
 observes a writer to whom we are indebted for this illus- 
 tration, " meant no lack of pith or power. - The whole 
 momentum of his large and healthy brain went into those 
 homely sentences, rousing and feeding the rude and the 
 cultured hearer's hunger alike, as sweet bread and juicy 
 meat satisfy a natural appetite." 
 
 Emerson observes that as any orator at the bar or the 
 senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language; 
 that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of pas- 
 sion, he comes down to a level with the ear of all his audi- 
 ence. " It is the oratory of John Brown and of Abraham 
 Lincoln, the one at Charleston, the other at Gettysburg, 
 in the two best specimens of oratory we have had in this 
 country." Daniel Webster, in his youijj, was a little bom- 
 bastic in his speeches ; but he very soon discovered that 
 the force of a sentence depends chiefly on its meaning, 
 and that great writing is that in which much is said in 
 few words, and those the simplest that will answer the 
 purpose. Having made this discovery, he became " a great 
 eraser of adjectives"; and whether convincing juries, or 
 thundering in the senate, whether demolishing Hayne, 
 or measuring swords with Calhoun, on all occasions used 
 the plainest words. " You will find," said he to a friend, 
 " in my speeches to juries, no hard words, no Latin phrases, 
 no fieri facias; and that is the secret of my style, if I have 
 any." 
 
 What can be simpler and yet more sublime than the 
 "Let there be light, and there was light!" of Moses, 
 which Longinus so admired? Would it be an improve- 
 ment to say, " Let there be light, nnd there was a, solar
 
 GRAND WORDS. Ill 
 
 illumination!" "lam like a child picking up pebbles on 
 the seashore," said Newton. Had he said he was like an 
 awe-struck votary, lying prostrate before the stupendous 
 majesty of the cosmical universe, and the mighty, and in- 
 comprehensible Ourgos which had created all things, we 
 might think it very fine, but should not carry in our 
 memories such a luggage of words. The fiery eloquSnce 
 of the field and the forum springs upon the vulgar idiom 
 as a soldier leaps upon his horse. " Trust in the Lord, 
 and keep your powder dry," said Cromwell to his soldiers 
 on the eve of a battle. " Silence, you thirty voices ! " roars 
 Mirabeau to a knot of opposers around the tribune. " I'd 
 sell the shirt off my back to support the war! " cries Lord 
 Chatham; and again, "Conquer the Americans! I might 
 as well think of driving them before me with this crutch." 
 " I know," says Kossuth, speaking of the march of intel- 
 ligence, " that the light has spread, and that even the bayo- 
 nets think." " You may shake me, if you please," said a 
 little Yankee constable to a stout, burly culprit whom he 
 had come to arrest, and who threatened violence, " but 
 recollect, if you do it, you don't shake a chap of five-feet- 
 six; you've got to shake the whole State of Massachusetts!" 
 When a Hoosier was asked by a Yankee how much he 
 weighed, " Well," said he, " commonly I weigh about one 
 hundred and eighty; but tvhen I'm mad I weigh a ton!" 
 " Were I to die at this moment," wrote Nelson after the 
 battle of the Nile, " more frigates would be found written 
 on my heart." The "Don't give up the ship!" of our 
 memorable sea-captain stirs the heart like the sound of 
 a trumpet. Had he exhorted the men to fight to the 
 last gasp in defence of their imperilled liberties, their 
 altars, and the glory f America, the words might have
 
 112 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 been historic, but they never would have been quoted 
 vernacularly. 
 
 There is another phase of the popular leaning to the 
 grandiose style, which is not less reprehensible than that 
 which we have noticed; we mean the affectation of for- 
 eign words and phrases. Many persons scarcely deign to 
 call* any thing by its proper English name, but, as if they 
 believed with Butler, that 
 
 "he that's but able to express 
 No sense at all in several languages, 
 Will pass for learneder than he that's known 
 To speak strongest reason in his own," 
 
 they apply to it some German, French, or Italian word. 
 In their dialect people are biases, passes, or have m> 
 distingue- in petto, dolce far niente, are among their pet 
 phrases; and not infrequently they betray their ignorance 
 by some ludicrous blunder, as when they use boqitef for 
 bouquet, soubriquet for sobriquet, and talk of " a sous," in- 
 stead of " a sou" a mistake as laughable as the French- 
 man's " un pence. 1 ' In striking contrast to this taste for 
 exotics, is the rooted dislike which the French have to for- 
 eign words and idioms. It is only in cases of the direst 
 necessity that they consent to borrow from their neighbors, 
 whether in perfide Angleterre or elsewhere. Even when 
 they deign to adopt a new word, they so disguise it that 
 the parent language would not know it again. They strip 
 it gradually of its foreign dress, and make it assume the 
 costume of the country. " Beefsteak " is turned into 
 bifteck; "plum-pudding" is metamorphosed into /jom/hn/ 
 de plomb; " partner " becomes partenaire; " riding-coat " 
 becomes redingote; and now fashionable English tailors 
 advertise these " redingotes," never for a moment dreaming
 
 GRAND WORDS. 113 
 
 that they are borrowing an expression which the French 
 stole from the English. 
 
 It is said that the Spaniards, in all ages, have been 
 distinguished for their love of long and high-flown names, 
 the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of appellative glory 
 and honor. In looking at the long string of titles fast- 
 ened like the tail of a kite to the name of some Don or 
 other grandee, one is puzzled to tell whether it is the man 
 that belongs to the name or the name to the man. There 
 is nothing odd, therefore, in the conduct of that Spaniard, 
 who, whenever his name was mentioned, always took off 
 his hat in token of respect to himself, that is, as the pos- 
 sessor of so many appellations. A person of high diplo- 
 matic talent, with the unpretending and rather plebeian 
 name of " Bubb," was once nominated to represent Great 
 Britain at Madrid. Lord Chesterfield was then a Minister 
 of State, and on seeing the newly appointed minister re- 
 marked, " My dear fellow, your name will damn you with 
 the Spaniards ; a one-syllable patronymic will infallibly dis- 
 gust the grandees of that hyperbolic nation." " What 
 shall I do?" said Bubb. "Oh! that is easily managed," 
 rejoined the peer: "get yourself dubbed, before you start 
 on your mission, as Don Vaco y Hijo Hermoso y toro y 
 Sill y Bubb, and on your arrival you will have all the 
 Spanish Court at your feet." 
 
 The effort of the Spaniards to support their dignity by 
 long and sounding titles is repeated daily, in a slightly 
 different form, by many democratic Americans. Writers 
 and speakers are constantly striving to compensate for 
 poverty of thought by a multitude of words. Magnilo- 
 quent terms, sounding sentences, unexpected and startling 
 phrases, are dropped from pen and tongue, as gaudy and
 
 114 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 high-colored goods are displayed in shop-windows, to at- 
 tract attention. " Ruskin," says an intelligent writer, 
 "long ago cried out against the stuccoed lies which rear 
 their unblushing fronts on so many street-corners, sham- 
 ing our civilization, and exerting their whole influence to 
 make us false and pretentious. Mrs. Stowe and others 
 have warned us against the silken lies that, frizzled, 
 flounced, padded, compressed, lily-whitened and rouged, 
 flit about our drawing-rooms by gas-light, making us 
 familiar with sham and shoddy, and luring us away from 
 real and modest worth. Let there be added to these com- 
 plaints the strongest denunciation of the kindred literary 
 lies which hum about our ears and glitter before our eyes, 
 which corrupt the language, and wrong every man and 
 woman who speaks it by robbing it of some portion of its 
 beauty and power." 
 
 When shall we learn that the secret of beauty and of 
 force, in speaking and in writing, is not to say simple 
 things finely, but to say fine things as simply as possible? 
 " To clothe," says Fuller, " low creeping matter with high- 
 flown language is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It rather 
 loads than raises a wren to fasten the feathers of an 
 ostrich to her wings." It is a significant fact that the 
 books over which generation after generation of readers 
 has hung with the deepest delight, which have retained 
 their hold, amid all the fluctuations of taste, upon all 
 classes, have been written in the simplest and most 
 idiomatic English, that English for which the " fine school " 
 of writers would substitute a verbose and affected phrase- 
 ology. Such books are " Robinson Crusoe," " Gulliver's 
 Travels," and " Pilgrim's Progress," which Macaulay has 
 justly characterized as treasures of pure English. Fitz-
 
 GRAND WORDS. 115 
 
 Greene Halleck tells us that some years ago a letter fell 
 into his hands which a Scotch servant-girl had written to 
 her lover. The style charmed him, and his literary friends 
 agreed that it was fairly inimitable. Anxious to clear up 
 the mystery of its beauty, and even elegance, he searched 
 for its author, who thus solved the enigma: " Sir, I came to 
 this country four years ago. Then I did not know how 
 to read or write. Since then I have learned to read and 
 write, but I have not yet learned how to spell; so always 
 when I sit down to write a letter, I choose those words 
 which are so short and simple that I am sure to know 
 how to spell them."- This was the whole secret. The 
 simple-minded Scotch girl knew more- of rhetoric than 
 Blair or Campbell. As Halleck forcibly says: "Simplicity 
 is beauty. Simplicity is power." 
 
 It is through the arts and sciences, whose progress is 
 so rapid, that many words of " learned length and thun- 
 dering sound " force their way in these days into the 
 language. The vocabulary of science is so repugnant to 
 the ear and so hard to the tongue, that it is a long while 
 before its terms become popularized. We may be sure that 
 many years will elapse before aristolochioid, megalosaurius, 
 acanthopterygian, nothoclcena-trichomanoides, monopleuro- 
 branchian, anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphceoid, and other 
 such " huge verbal blocks, masses of syllabic aggregations, 
 which both the tongue and the taste find it difficult to 
 surmount," will establish themselves in the language of 
 literature and common life. Still, while the lover of 
 Anglo-Saxon simplicity is rarely shocked by such terms, 
 there are hundreds of others, less stupendous, such as 
 phenomenon, demonstrative, inverse proportion, transcendental, 
 category, predicament, exorbitant, which, once heard only in
 
 116 WORDS; THEIR USE AND AHUSE. 
 
 scientific lecture rooms or in schools, are now the common 
 currency of the educated; and it is said that, in one of 
 our Eastern colleges, the learned mathematical professor, 
 on whom the duty devolved one morning of making the 
 chapel prayer, startled his hearers by asking Divine Good- 
 ness " to enable them to know its length, its breadth, and 
 its superficial contents." Should popular enlightenment 
 go on for some ages with the prodigious strides it has 
 lately made, a future generation may hear lovers address- 
 ing their mistresses in the terms predicted by Punch: 
 
 '' I love thee, Mary, and thou lovest me. 
 Our mutual flame is like the affinity 
 That cloth exist between two simple bodies. 
 I am Potassium to thine Oxygen. 
 . . . Sweet, thy name is Briggs, 
 And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we 
 Agree to form a Johnsonate of Briggsf 
 We will. The day, the happy day is nigh, 
 When Johnson shall with beauteous Briggs combine." 
 
 Indispensable as the technical terms of science unques- 
 tionably are, there is no doubt they are often employed 
 where simpler and plainer words would do as well or 
 better. To express the results of science without the 
 ostentation of its terms, is an admirable art, known, un- 
 fortunately, to but few. How few surgeons can commu- 
 nicate in simple, intelligible language to a jury, in a 
 law-case, the results of a post-mortem examination! Al- 
 most invariably the learned witness finds a wound " in the 
 parieties of the abdomen, opening the peritoneal cavity"; 
 or an injury of some "vertebra in the dorsal or lumbar 
 region"; or something else equally frightful. Some years 
 ago, in one of the English courts, a judge rebuked a wit- 
 ness of this kind by saying, " You mean so and so, do you 
 not, sir?" at the same time translating his scientific
 
 GRAND WORDS. 117 
 
 barbarisms into a few words of simple English. " I do, 
 my Lord." "Then why can't you say so?" He had said 
 so, but in a foreign tongue. 
 
 To all the writers and speakers who needlessly employ 
 grandiose or abstract terms, instead of plain Saxon ones, 
 we would say, as FalstaflF said to Pistol: "If thou hast 
 any tidings whatever to deliver, prithee deliver them like 
 a man of this world!" Some years ago a white minister 
 preached in a plain, direct style to a church of negroes 
 in the South, whose " colored " pastor was greatly ad- 
 dicted to the use of high-flown language in his sermons. 
 In the season of exhortation and prayer that followed, an 
 old negro thanked the Lord for the various blessings of 
 the Sabbath and the Sanctuary, and especially, he added, 
 " we thank Thee that to-day we have been fed from a 
 loir o-ih."' Would it not be well for preachers generally 
 to remember that many of Christ's flock are " little ones," 
 whose necks are short, and that they may consequently 
 starve, if their food, however nutritious, is placed in too 
 lofty a crib? Never, perhaps, did a college professor give 
 a better lesson in rhetoric than was given by a plain 
 farmer in Kennebec county, Maine, to a schoolmaster. 
 " You are excavating a subterranean channel," it seems, 
 said the pedagogue, as he saw the farmer at work near 
 his house. " No, sir," was the reply, " I am only digging 
 a ditch." A similar rebuke was once administered by 
 the witty Governor Corwin, of Ohio, to a young lady 
 who addressed him in high-flown terms. Being on a 
 political tour through the State with the Hon. Thomas 
 Ewing, they stopped at night at the house of a leading 
 politician, but found no one at home except his niece, 
 who presided at the tea table. Having never conversed
 
 118 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 with " great men " before, she supposed she must talk to 
 them in elephantine language. " Mr. Ewing, will you 
 take condiments in your tea, sir?" inquired the young 
 lady. " Yes, miss, if you please," replied the Senator. 
 Corwin's eyes twinkled. Here was a temptation that 
 could not be resisted. Gratified at the apparent success 
 of her trial in talking to the United States Senator, the 
 young lady addressed Mr. Corwin in the same manner 
 "Will you take condiments in your tea, sir?" "Pepper 
 and salt, but no mustard," was the prompt reply, which 
 the lady, it is said, never forgave, declaring that the 
 Governor was " horridly vulgar." 
 
 The faults of all those who thus barbarize our tongue 
 would be comparatively excusable, were it so barren of 
 resources that any man whose conceptions are clear need 
 find difficulty in wreaking them upon expression. But 
 Shakespeare and Milton, Bacon and Locke, have shown 
 that, whether we look to its flexibility and harmony, or 
 to its gigantic strength, its exquisite delicacy and won- 
 drous wealth of words, it is rich enough for all the exi- 
 gencies of the human mind; that it can express the loftiest 
 conceptions of the poet, portray the deepest emotions of 
 the human heart; that it can convey, if not the frip- 
 peries, at least the manly courtesies of polite life, and 
 make palpable the profoundest researches of the philoso- 
 pher. It is not, therefore, because of the poverty of our 
 vocabulary that so many writers Gallicize and Germanize 
 our tongue; the real cause is hinted at in the answer of 
 Handel to an ambitious musician who attributed the hisses 
 of his hearers to a defect in the instrument on which he 
 was playing: "The fault is not there, my friend," said the 
 composer, jealous of the honor of the organ, on which he
 
 GRAND WORDS. 119 
 
 himself performed: " the fact is, you have no music in your 
 soul." 
 
 We are aware that the English tongue, our own car- 
 tilaginous tongue, as some one has quaintly styled it, 
 has been decried, even by poets who have made it dis- 
 course the sweetest music, for its lack of expressive terms, 
 and for its excess in consonants, guttural, sibilant, or 
 mute. It was this latter peculiarity, doubtless, which led 
 Charles V., three centuries ago, to compare it to the whis- 
 tling of birds; and even Lord Byron, whose own burning 
 verse, distinguished not less by its melody than by its in- 
 comparable energy, has signally revealed the hidden har- 
 mony that lies in our short Saxon words, turns traitor 
 to his native language, and in a moment of caprice de- 
 nounces it as 
 
 " Our harsh, northern, grunting guttural, 
 Which we are obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all," 
 
 not thinking that in this very selection of condemnator3 r 
 words he has strikingly shown the wondrous expressiveness 
 of the tongue. Even Addison, who wrote so musical Eng- 
 lish, contrasting our own tongue with the vocal beauty of 
 the Greek, and forgetting that the latter is the very low- 
 est merit of a language, being merely its sensuous merit, 
 calls it brick as against marble. Waller, too, ungrateful 
 to the noble tongue that has preserved his name, declares 
 that 
 
 " Poets that lasting marble seek, 
 Must carve in Latin or in Greek." 
 
 Because smoothness is one of the requisites of verse, it has 
 been hastily concluded that languages in which vowels and 
 liquids predominate must be better adapted to poetry, and 
 that the most mellifluous must also be the most melodious. 
 But so far is this from being true, that, as Henry Taylor
 
 120 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 has remarked, in dramatic verse our English combinations 
 of consonants are invaluable, both in giving expression to 
 the harsher passions, and in imparting keenness and sig- 
 nificancy to the language of discrimination, and especially 
 to that of scorn. 
 
 The truth is, our language, so far from being harsh. 
 or poor and limited in its vocabulary, is the richest and 
 most copious now spoken on the globe. As Sir -Thomas 
 More long ago declared: "It is plenteous enough to ex- 
 presse our myndes in anythinge whereof one man hath 
 used to speak with another." Owing to its composite 
 character, it has a choice of terms expressive of every 
 shade of difference in the idea, compared with which the 
 vocabulary of many other modern tongues is poverty itself. 
 . But for the impiety of the act, those who speak it might 
 well raise a monument to the madcaps who undertook the 
 tower of Babel ; for, as the mixture of many bloods has 
 made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the 
 mingling of divers tongues given them a language which 
 is the noblest vehicle of thought ever vouchsafed to man. 
 This very mingling of tongues in our language has been 
 made the ground of an accusation against it ; and the 
 Anglo-Saxon is sometimes told by foreigners that he " has 
 been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps"; 
 that his dialect is " the alms-basket of wit," made up of 
 beggarly borrowings, and is wholly lacking in originality. 
 
 It is true that the Anglo-Saxon has pillaged largely 
 from the speech of other peoples ; that he has a craving 
 desire to annex, not only states and provinces, even whole 
 empires, to his own, but even the best parts of their lan- 
 guages; that there is scarce a tongue on the globe which 
 his absorbing genius has not laid under contribution to
 
 GKAXD WORDS. 121 
 
 enrich the exchequer of his all-conquering speech. Strip 
 him of his borrowings, or "annexations," if you will, 
 and he would neither have a foot of soil to stand upon, 
 nor a rag of language in which to clothe his shivering 
 ideas. To say nothing of the Greek, Latin and French 
 which enter so largely into the woof of the tongue, we are 
 indebted to the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Ara- 
 bic, Hebrew, Hindoo, and even the North American Indian 
 dialects, for many words which we cannot do without. 
 The word-barks of our language are daily increasing in 
 size, and terms that sprang up at Delhi and Benares four 
 thousand years ago are to-day scaling the cliffs of the 
 Rocky Mountains. But while the English has thus bor- 
 rowed largely from other tongues, and the multifarious 
 etymology of " its Babylonish vocabulary," as its enemies 
 are pleased to call it, renders it, of all modern languages, 
 one of the most difficult to master in all its wealth and 
 power, yet it makes up in eclecticism, vigor, and abun- 
 dance, far more than it loses in apparent originality. 
 Mosaic-like and heterogeneous as are its materials, it is 
 yet no mingle-mangle or patchwork, but is as individual as 
 the French or the German. Though the rough materials 
 are gathered from a hundred sources, yet such is its digest- 
 ive and assimilative energy that the most discordant ali- 
 ments, passing through its anaconda-like stomach, are as 
 speedily identified with its own independent existence as 
 the beefsteak which yesterday gave roundness to the hinder 
 symmetry of a prize ox, becomes to-morrow part and parcel 
 of the proper substance, the breast,leg, or arm, of an 
 Illinois farmer. 
 
 In fact, the very caprices and irregularities of our 
 idiom, orthography, and pronunciation, which make for- 
 6
 
 122 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 eigners " stare and gasp," and are ridiculed by our own 
 philological ultraists, are the strongest proofs of the noble- 
 ness and perfection of our language. It is the very extent 
 to which these caprices, peculiar idioms, and exceptions 
 prevail in any tongue, that forms the true scale of its 
 worth and beauty; and hence we find them more numerous 
 in Greek than in Latin, in French or Italian than in 
 Irish or Indian. There is less symmetry in the rugged, 
 gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its branches, 
 which has defied the storms of a thousand years, than in 
 the smoothly clipped Dutch yew tree; but it is from the 
 former that we hew out the knees of mighty line-of-battle 
 ships, while a vessel built of the latter would go to pieces 
 in the first storm. It was our own English that sustained 
 him who soared " above all Greek, above all Roman fame "; 
 and the same " well of English undefiled " did not fail 
 the myriad-minded dramatist, when 
 
 " Each scene of many-colored life he drew, 
 Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new." 
 
 Nor have even these great writers, marvellous and varied 
 as is their excellence, fathomed the powers of the language 
 for grand and harmonious expression, or used them to the 
 full. It has " combinations of sound grander than ever 
 rolled through the mind of Milton; more awful than the 
 mad gasps of Lear; sweeter than the sighs of Desdemona; 
 more stirring than the speech of Antony; sadder than the 
 plaints of Hamlet; merrier than the mocks of Falstaff." 
 To those, therefore, who complain of the poverty or harsh- 
 ness of our tongue, we may say, in the words of George 
 Herbert: 
 
 " Let foreign nations of their language boast, 
 
 What fine variety each tongue affords; 
 I like our language, as our men and coast; 
 Who cannot dress it well, want WIT, not WORDS."
 
 SMALL WOBDS. 123 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SMALL WORDS. 
 
 N 
 
 It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they arc condensed, the 
 deeper they burn. SOUTHEY. 
 
 The pompous march of blank verse admits the accompaniment of rolling 
 and diffusive expressions; but energy, and condensation, and tenderness, 
 must be sought for in the pithy, monosyllabic Saxon of our fathers. REV. 
 MATTHEW HARRISON. 
 
 A MONO the various forms of ingratitude, one of the 
 -L- commonest is that of kicking down the ladder by 
 which one has climbed the steeps of celebrity; and a gcod 
 illustration of this is the conduct of the author of the 
 following lines, who, though indebted in no small degree 
 for his fame to the small words, the monosyllabic music, 
 of our tongue, sneers at them as low: 
 
 " While feeble expletives their aid do join, 
 And ten low words oft creep in one dull line." 
 
 How ingenious! how felicitous! the reader exclaims; and, 
 truly, Pope has shown himself wonderfully adroit in ridi- 
 culing the Saxon part of the language with words bor- 
 rowed from its own vocabulary. But let no man despise 
 little words, even though he echo the little wasp of Twick- 
 enham. Alexander Pope is a high authority in English 
 literature; but it is long since he was regarded as having 
 the infallibility of a Pope Alexander. The multitude of 
 passages in his works, in which the small words form not 
 only the bolts, pins, and hinges, but the chief material in 
 the structure of his verse, show that he knew well enough 
 their value; 'but it was hard to avoid the temptation of
 
 124 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 such a line as that quoted. " Small words," he elsewhere 
 says, " are generally stiff and languishing, but they may 
 be beautiful to express melancholy." It is the old story of 
 
 " the ladder 
 
 Whereto the climber upward turns his face. 
 But wheii he once attains the utmost round, 
 He then unto the ladder turns his back, 
 Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees 
 By which he did ascend." 
 
 The truth is, the words most potent in life and liter- 
 ature, in the mart, in the Senate, in the forum, and at 
 the fireside, are small words, the monosyllables which 
 the half-educated speaker and writer despises. All pas- 
 sionate expression, the outpouring of the soul when 
 moved to its depths, is, for the most part, in monosyl- 
 lables. They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the 
 brain, made visible by utterance. The will makes its 
 giant victory- strokes in little monosyllables, deciding for 
 the right and against the wrong. In the hour of fierce 
 temptation, at the ballot-box, in the court-room, in all 
 the crises of life, how potent for good or evil are the 
 little monosyllables, Yes and No! " Yes is the Olympian 
 nod of approval which fills heaven with ambrosia and 
 light; no is the stamp of Jupiter which shakes heaven 
 and darkens the faces of the gods. Yes: how it trembles 
 from the maiden's lips, the broken utterance, the key- 
 syllable of a divine song which her heart only sings; how 
 it echoes in the ecstatic pulses of the doubtful lover, and 
 makes Paradise open its gates for the royal entry of the 
 triumphing conqueror, Love. JVb, well might Miles 
 Standish say that he could not stand fire if No should 
 come ' point-blank from the mouth of a woman ' ; what 
 'captain, colonel or knight-at-arms ' could? No: 'tis the
 
 SMALL WORDS. 125 
 
 impregnable fortress, the very Malakoff of the will; it 
 is the breastwork and barrier thrown up which the 
 charge must be fierce indeed to batter down or overleap. 
 It is the grand and guarded tower .against temptation ; it 
 is the fierce and sudden arrow through all the rings that 
 dismays the suitors of the dear and long-cherished and 
 faithful Penelope, and makes the unforgotten king start 
 from the disguise of a beggar." 
 
 Again: there is a whole class of words, and those 
 among the most expressive in the language, of which the 
 great majority are monosyllables. We refer to the inter- 
 jections. We are aware that some philologists deny that 
 interjections are language. Home Tooke sneers at this 
 whole class of words as "brutish and inarticulate," as 
 " the miserable refuge of the speechless," and complains 
 that, " because beautiful ana 1 gaudy," they have been suf- 
 fered to usurp a place among words. " Where will you 
 look for it" (the interjection), he triumphantly asks; 
 " will you find it among laws, or in books of civil insti- 
 tutions, in history, or in any treatise of useful arts or 
 sciences? No: you must seek for it in rhetoric and po-' 
 etry, in novels, plays and romances." This acute writer 
 has forgotten one book in which interjections abound, 
 and awaken in the mind emotions of the highest grand- 
 eur and pathos, namely, the Bible. But the use of this 
 part of speech is not confined to books. It is heard 
 wherever men interchange thought and feeling, whether 
 on the gravest or the most trivial themes; in tones of 
 the tenderest love and of the deadliest hate; in shouts of 
 joy and ecstacies of rapture, and in the expression of 
 deep anguish, remorse and despair; in short, in the out- 
 burst of every human feeling. More than this, not only
 
 126 WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 is it heard in daily life, but we are told by the highest 
 authority that it is heard in the hallelujahs of angels, 
 and in the continual Holy! Holy! Holy! of the cherubim. 
 
 What word in the English language is fuller of sig- 
 nificance, has a greater variety of meanings, than the 
 diminutive Oh? Uttered by the infant to express sur- 
 prise or delight, it is used by the man to indicate fear, 
 aspiration or appeal, and, indeed, according to the tone 
 in which it is uttered, may voice almost any one of the 
 emotions of which he is capable. What a volume of 
 meaning is condensed in the derisive "Oh! oh!" which 
 greets a silly utterance in the House of Commons! In 
 no other assembly, perhaps, are the powers of human 
 speech more fully exhibited; yet it was in that body that 
 one of the most famous of interjections originated, we 
 mean the cry of "Hear! hear!" which, though at first 
 an imperative verb, is now " nothing more or less than a 
 great historical interjection," indicating, according to the 
 tone in which it is uttered, admiration, acquiescence, in- 
 dignation or derision. It has been truly said that when 
 a large assembly is animated by a common sentiment 
 which demands instantaneous utterance, it can find that 
 utterance only through interjections. 
 
 Again, what depth of meaning in this little word, as 
 an expression of grief, in the following lines by Words- 
 worth : 
 
 "She lived unknown, and few could know 
 
 When Lucy ceased to be; 
 Now she is in her grave, and oh! 
 The difference to me." 
 
 What possible combination of words could be more 
 significant than the reply, "Pooh! pooh!" to a contro- 
 versialist's theory, or the contemptuous "Fudge!" with
 
 SMALL WORDS. 127 
 
 which Mr. Churchill, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," sums 
 up the pretensions of the languishing Miss Carolina Wil- 
 helmina Amelia Skeggs: 
 
 "Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is 
 that to be found?" 
 "Fudge!" 
 
 What volumes of meaning are sometimes condensed into 
 the little word psha! " Doubt," says Thackeray, " is always 
 crying psha and sneering." How expressive are those al- 
 most infinitesimal words which epitomize the alternations 
 of human life, all! and ha! As Fuller beautifully moralizes: 
 "Ha! is the interjection of laughter; all! is an interjection 
 of sorrow. The difference between them is very small, as 
 consisting only in the transposition of what is no substan- 
 tial letter, but a bare aspiration. How quickly, in the age 
 of a minute, , in the very turning of our breath, is our 
 mirth changed to mourning!" 
 
 The truth is that, so far is this class of words from 
 being, as Max Muller contends, the mere outskirts of lan- 
 guage, they are more truly words than any others. These 
 little words, so expressive of joy, of hope, of doubt, of fear, 
 which leap from the heart like fiery jets from volcanic 
 isles, these surviving particles of the ante-Babel tongues, 
 which spring with the flush or blanching of the face to 
 all lips, and are understood by all men, these " silver 
 fragments of a broken voice," to use an expression of 
 Tennyson's, " the only remains of the Eden lexicon in the 
 dictionaries of all races," 
 
 "The only words 
 Of Paradise that have survived the fall," 
 
 are emphatically and preeminently language. It is doubt- 
 less true that civilization, with its freezing formalities,
 
 128 WORDS ; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 tends to diminish the use of interjections, as well as their 
 natural accompaniments, gesture and gesticulation; but on 
 the other hand, it should be noted, that there are " certain 
 interjections which are the fruits of, and only fit to find 
 a place in, the highest and most mature forms of human 
 culture." Interjections, in truth, are not so much "_/wr/x 
 of speech" as entire expressions of feeling or thought. 
 They are preeminently pictorial. If I pronounce the 
 words house, strike, black, beautifully, without other words 
 or explanatory gestures, I say nothing distinctly; I may 
 mean any one of a hundred things; but if I utter an 
 interjectional exclamation, denoting joy or sorrow, surprise 
 or fear, every person who hears me knows at once by 
 what affection I am moved. I communicate a fact by a 
 single syllable. Max Miiller admits that interjections, 
 together with gestures, the movements of the muscles of 
 the mouth and the eye, would be quite sufficient for all 
 the purposes which language answers with the majority 
 of mankind. It is said that a late king of Naples once 
 entertained his inflammable subjects from his balcony by 
 a speech consisting of nothing but gestures and a few in- 
 terjections, and sent them away contented. Coming from 
 the lips of a great orator, these little words, so despised 
 by grammarians, may be more powerful, more to the point, 
 more eloquent, than a long speech. Their inherent ex- 
 pressiveness entitles them to be regarded as the appro- 
 priate language, the mother-tongue of passion; and hence 
 the effect of good acting depends largely on the proper 
 introduction and just articulation of this class of words. 
 Shakspeare's interjections exact a rare command of 
 modulation, and cannot be rendered with any truth ex- 
 cept by one who has mastered the whole play. What a
 
 SMALL WORDS. 129 
 
 profound insight of the masterpiece of the poet is required 
 of him who would adequately utter the word indeed in 
 the following passage of Othello! "It contains in it," 
 says an English writer, " the gist of the chief action of 
 the play, and it implies all that the plot develops. It 
 ought to be spoken with such an intonation as to suggest 
 the diabolic scheme of lago's conduct. There is no thought 
 of the grammatical structure of the compound, consisting 
 of the preposition in and the substantive deed, which is 
 equivalent to act, fact, or reality. All this vanishes and 
 is lost in the mere iambic dissyllable which is employed 
 as a vehicle for the feigned tones of surprise." 
 
 " lago. I did not think he had been acquainted with her. 
 Oth. O yes, and went between us very oft. 
 logo. INDEED! 
 
 Oth. Indeed? ay, indeed. Discern'st thou anght in that? Is he not 
 konest? 
 
 logo. Honest, my lord? 
 Oth. Honest? ay, honest!" 
 
 The English language is preeminently a language of 
 small words. Its fondness for monosyllables is even stronger 
 than that of the Anglo-Saxon. Not a few words of this 
 class, such as the verbs to love, bake, beat, slide, sivim, bind, 
 blotv, brew, were, in the Anglo-Saxon, dissyllables. The 
 English language cuts down its words to the narrowest 
 possible limits, lopping and condensing, never expanding. 
 Sometimes it cuts off an initial syllable, as in " 'gin " for 
 " engine," " 'van " for " carryvan," " 'bus " for " omnibus," 
 " 'wig" for "periwig;" sometimes it cuts off a final sylla- 
 ble, or syllables, as in " aid " for " aid-de-camp," " prim " 
 for "primitive, 1 ' "grog" for "grogram," "pants" for 
 "pantaloons," "tick" for (pawnbroker's) "ticket;" some- 
 times it strikes out a letter, or letters, from the middle 
 6*
 
 130 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 of a word; as "last" for "latest," "lark" for "laverock," 
 "since" for "sithence." Again, it contracts a word, as 
 in "sent" for "sended," "built" for "builded," "chirp" 
 for "chirrup" or "cheer up," "fag" for "fatigue," "con- 
 sols" for "consolidated annuities," etc. In speaking, we 
 clip our vowels shorter than any other people; Voltaire 
 said that the English gained two hours a day by clipping 
 their words. The same love of brevity has shown itself 
 in rendering the final e in English always mute. In 
 Chaucer the final e must often be sounded as a separate 
 syllable, or the verse will limp. To the same cause we 
 owe the hissing s, so offensive to foreign ears, and which 
 has been compared to the sound of red-hot iron plunged 
 in water. The old termination of the verb, th, has given 
 way to s in the third person singular, and en to s in the 
 third person plural. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon, the substratum of our modern En- 
 glish, is emphatically monosyllabic; yet many of the 
 grandest passages in our literature are made up almost 
 exclusively of Saxon words. The English Bible abounds 
 in grand, sublime, and tender passages, couched almost 
 entirely in words of one syllable. The passage in Ezekiel, 
 which Coleridge is said to have considered the sublimest 
 in the whole Bible: "And he said unto me, son of man, 
 can these bones live? And I answered, Lord God, thou 
 knowest," contains seventeen monosyllables to three 
 others. What passage in Holy Writ surpasses in ener- 
 getic brevity that which describes the death of Sisera, 
 "At her feet he bowed, he fell; at her feet he bowed, he 
 fell, he lay down; where he bowed, there he fell down 
 dead"? Here are twenty-two monosyllables, to one dis- 
 syllable thrice repeated, and that a word which is usually
 
 SMALL WORDS. 131 
 
 pronounced as a monosyllable. The lament of David over 
 Saul and Jonathan is not surpassed in pathos by any sim- 
 ilar passage in the whole range of literature; yet a very 
 large proportion of these touching words are of one or 
 two syllables: "The beauty of Israel is slain upon the 
 high places; how are the mighty fallen! . . Ye mountains 
 of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain 
 upon you, nor fields of offerings. . . Saul and Jonathan 
 were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death 
 they were not divided. . . They were swifter than eagles, 
 they were stronger than lions. . . How are the mighty 
 fallen in the midst of the battle! Jonathan, thou wast 
 slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my 
 brother Jonathan : very pleasant hast thou been unto me : 
 thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." 
 The early writers, the " pure wells of English unde- 
 filed," abound in small words. Shakspeare employs them 
 in his finest passages, especially when he would paint a 
 scene with a few masterly touches. Hear Macbeth: 
 
 "Here lay Duncan, 
 
 Hie silver skin laced with his golden blood; 
 And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in Nature 
 For ruin's wasteful entrance. There the murderers, 
 Steep'd in the colors of their trade, their daggers 
 Unmannerly breech'd with gore.'* 
 
 Are monosyllables passionless? Listen, again, to the 
 "Thane of Cawdor": 
 
 " That is a step 
 
 On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap, 
 For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires, 
 Let not light see my black and deep desires. 
 The eye winks at the hand. Yet, let that be 
 Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see." 
 
 Two dissyllables only among fifty-two words!
 
 132 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Bishop Hall, in one of his most powerful satires, speak- 
 ing of the vanity of " adding house to hquse and field to 
 field," has these beautiful lines: 
 
 "Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store, 
 And he that cares for most shall find no more." 
 
 " What harmonious monosyllables!" exclaims the critic, 
 Gifford; yet they may be paralleled by others in the same 
 writer, equally musical and equally expressive. 
 
 Was Milton tame? He knew when to use polysylla- 
 bles of "learned length and thundering sound"; but he 
 knew also when to produce the grandest effects by the small 
 words despised by inferior artists. Read his account of the 
 journey of the fallen angels: 
 
 "Through many a dark and dreary vale 
 They passed, and many a region dolorous, 
 O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, 
 Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, 
 A universe of death. 
 
 In what other language shall we find in the same 
 number of words a more vivid picture of desolation than 
 this? Hear, again, the lost archangel calling upon hell to 
 receive its new possessor: 
 
 "One who brings 
 
 A mind not to be changed by place or time. 
 The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. 
 What matter where, if I be still the same, 
 And what I should be all but less than he 
 Whom thunder hath made greater? Here, at least, 
 We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built 
 Here for His envy; will not drive us hence; 
 Here we may reign secure, and, in my choice, 
 To reign is worth ambition, though in hell; 
 Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven." 
 
 Did Byron lack force or fire? His skilful use of mono- 
 syllables is often the very secret of his charm. Listen to
 
 SMALL WORDS. 133 
 
 the words in which he describes the destruction of Sen- 
 nacherib: 
 
 "For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, 
 And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; 
 And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill, 
 And their hearts beat but once, and forever lay still." 
 
 Here, out of forty-three words, all but three are mono- 
 syllables; and yet how exquisitely are all these monosylla- 
 bles linked into the majestic and animated movement of 
 the anapestic measure! Again, what can be more mu- 
 sical and more melancholy than the opening verse of the 
 lines in which the same poet bids adieu to his native 
 land? 
 
 "Adieu! adien! my native shore 
 
 Fades o'er the waters blue, 
 The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar, 
 And shrieks the wild sea-mew. 
 
 "Yon sun that sets upon the sea 
 
 We follow in his flight; 
 Farewell awhile to him and thee, 
 My native land, good night!" 
 
 " With thce, my bark, I'll swiftly go 
 
 Athwart the foaming brine; 
 Nor care what land thou bear'st me to, 
 So not again to mine. 
 
 "Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves! 
 
 And when you fail my sight, 
 Welcome, ye deserts and ye caves! 
 My native land, good night!" 
 
 Two Latin words, native and desert; one French, adieu; 
 the rest, English purely. The third and fourth lines paint 
 the scene to the life; yet all the words but one are mono- 
 syllables. 
 
 The following brief passage from one of Landor's poems 
 strikingly illustrates the metrical effect of simple words of 
 one syllable:
 
 134 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 . . '-She was sent forth 
 
 To bring that light which never wintry blast 
 Blows out, nor rain, nor snow extinguishes 
 The light that shines from loving eyes upon 
 Eyes that love back, till they can see no more." 
 
 Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one; 
 nearly all the rest are monosyllables. 
 
 Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the " Philosophy 
 of Style," has pointed out the superior forcibleness of 
 Saxon-English to Latin-English, and shown that it is due 
 largely to the comparative brevity of the Saxon. If a 
 thought gains --in energy in- proportion as it is expressed 
 in fewer words, it must also gain in energy in propor- 
 tion as the words in which it is expressed have fewer syl- 
 lables. If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract 
 his attention, and diminish the strength of the impression 
 made upon him, it matters not whether they consist of 
 entire words or of parts of words. " Formerly," says an 
 able, writer, " when armies engaged in battle, they were 
 drawn up in one long line, fighting from flank to flank; 
 but a great general broke up this heavy mass into several 
 files, so that he could bend his front at will, bring any 
 troops he chose into action, and, even after the first on- 
 slaught, change the whole order of the field; and though 
 such a broken line might not have pleased an old sol- 
 dier's eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it 
 carried the day, and is everywhere now the arrangement. 
 There will thus be an advantage, the advantage of supple- 
 ness, in having the parts of a word to a certain degree 
 kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the way with all lan- 
 guages as they become more refined; and so far are mono- 
 syllabic languages from being lame and ungainly, that 
 such are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of Asia;
 
 SMALL WORDS. 135 
 
 and the most rough and untamed (those of North Amer- 
 ica) abound in huge unkempt words, yardlongtailed, like 
 fiends." 
 
 We have already spoken of Johnson's fondness for big, 
 swelling words, the leviathans of the lexicon, whatever the 
 theme upon which he was writing; and also of certain 
 speakers and writers in our own day, who have an equal 
 contempt for small words, and never use one when they 
 can find a pompous polysyllable to take its place. It is 
 evident, however, from the passages we have cited, that 
 these Liliputians, -these Tom Thumbs of the dictionary, 
 play as important a part in our literature as their bigger 
 and more magniloquent brethren. Like the infusoria of 
 our globe, so long unnoticed, which are now known to have 
 raised whole continents from the depths of the ocean, these 
 words, once so despised, are now rising in importance, and 
 are admitted by scholars to form an important class in the 
 great family of words. In some kinds of writing their 
 almost exclusive use is indispensable. What would have 
 been the fate of Bunyan's immortal book had he told the 
 story of the Pilgrim's journey in the ponderous, ele- 
 phantine "osities" and "ations" of Johnson, or the gor- 
 geous Latinity of Taylor? It would have been like build- 
 ing a boat out of timbers cut out for a ship. It is owing 
 to this grandiose style, as much as to any other cause, that 
 the author of the " Rambler," in spite of his sturdy strength 
 and grasp of mind, " lies like an Egyptian king, buried and 
 forgotten in the pyramid of his fame." When we remem- 
 ber that the Saxon language, the soul of the English, is 
 essentially monosyllabic; that our language contains, of 
 monosyllables formed by the vowel a alone, more than five 
 hundred, by the vowel e, some four hundred and fifty; by
 
 136 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 the vowel ?', about four hundred; by the vowel o, over four 
 hundred; and by the vowel u, more than two hundred and 
 fifty ; we must admit that these seemingly petty and insig- 
 nificant words, even the microscopic particles, so far from 
 meriting to be treated as " creepers," are of high impor- 
 tance, and that to know when and how to use them is of no 
 less moment to the speaker or writer than to know when to 
 use the grandiloquent expressions which we have borrowed 
 from the language of Greece and Rome. To every man who 
 has occasion to teach or move his fellow-men by tongue or 
 pen, we would *ay in the words of Dr. Addison Alexander, 
 themselves a happy example of the thing he commends: 
 
 "Think not that strength lies in the big round word, 
 
 Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak, 
 To whom can this be true who once has heard 
 
 The cry for help, the tongue that all men Bpeak, 
 When want or woe or fear is in the throat, 
 
 So that each word gasped out is like a shriek 
 Pressed from the sore heart, or a strange wild note 
 
 Sung by some fay or fiend. There is a strength 
 Which dies if stretched too far or spun too fine, 
 
 Which has more height than breadth, more depth than length. 
 Let but this force of thought and speech be mine, 
 
 And he that will may take the sleek, fat phrase, 
 Which glows and burns not, though it gleam and shine, 
 
 Light, but no heat a flash, but not a blaze! 
 Nor is it mere strength that the short word boasts; 
 
 It serves of more than fight or storm to tell. 
 The roar of waves that clash on rock-bound coasts, 
 
 The crash of tall trees when the wild winds swell, 
 The roar of guns, the groans of men that die 
 
 On blood-stained fields. It has a voice as well 
 For them that far off on their sick-beds He; 
 
 For them that weep, for them that mourn the dead; 
 For them that laugh, and dance, and clap the hand; 
 
 To joy's quick step, as well as grief's slow tread, 
 The sweet, plain words we learned at first keep time, 
 
 And, though the theme be sad, or gay, or grand. 
 With each, with all, these may be made to chime, 
 
 In thought, or speech, or song, in prose or rhyme."
 
 WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 137 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 
 
 POLONIUS. What do you read, my lord ? 
 HAJ^LET. Words, words, words. SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 Is not cant the materia prima of the Devil, from which all falsehoods, 
 imbecilities, abominations, body themselves; from which no true thing can 
 come? For cant is itself properly a double-distilled lie; the second power of 
 a lie. CARLYLE. 
 
 That virtue of originality that men so strain after is not newness, as they 
 vainly think (there is nothing new), it is only genuineness; it all depends on 
 this single glorious faculty of getting to the spring of things, and working 
 out from that; it is the coolness and clearness and deliciousness of the water 
 fresh from the fountain-head, opposed to the thick, hot, unrefreshing drainage 
 from otb^er men's meadows. RUSKIN. 
 
 SOME years ago the author of the "Biographical His- 
 tory of Philosophy," in a criticism of a certain pub- 
 lic performer in London, observed that one of his most 
 marked qualities was the priceless one of frankness. " He 
 accepts no sham. He pretends to admire nothing he does 
 not in his soul admire. He pretends to be nothing that 
 he is not. Beethoven bores him, and he says so: how 
 many are as wearied as he, but dare not confess it! Oh, 
 if men would but recognize the virtue of intrepidity! If 
 men would but cease lying in traditionary formulas, 
 pretending to admire, pretending to believe, and all in 
 sheer respectability ! " 
 
 Who does not admire the quality here commended, and 
 yet what quality, in this age of self-assertion, of sounding 
 brass and tinkling cymbal, is more rare? What an 
 amount of insincerity there is in human speech! In how
 
 138 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 few persons is the tongue an index to the heart! What 
 a meaningless conventionality pervades all the forms of 
 social intercourse! Everybody knows* that "How d'ye 
 do?" and "Good morning!" are parroted in most cases 
 without a thought of their meaning, or, at least, without 
 any positive interest in the health or prosperity of the 
 person addressed; we begin a letter to one whom we 
 secretly detest with " My dear sir," and at the end sub- 
 scribe ourselves his " obedient servant," though we should 
 resent a single word from him which implied a belief in 
 our sincerity, or bore the slightest appearance of a com- 
 mand. But not to dwell upon these phrases, the hollow- 
 ness of which may be excused on the ground that they 
 sweeten human intercourse, and prevent the roughest 
 men from degenerating into absolute boors, it is yet 
 startling to reflect how large a proportion of human 
 speech is the veriest cant. That men should use words 
 the meaning of which they have never weighed or dis- 
 criminated, is bad enough; but that they should habitu- 
 ally use words as mere counters or forms, is certainly 
 worse. There is hardly a class, a society, or a relation in 
 which man can be placed toward man, that does not rail 
 into play more or less of language without meaning. 
 The " damnable iteration " of the lawyer in a declaration 
 of assault and battery is not more a thing of form than 
 is the asseveration of one petitioner that he " will ever 
 pray," etc., and of another that he " will be a thousand 
 times obliged," if you will grant his request. Who does 
 not know to what an amount of flummery the most trifling 
 kindness done by one person to another often gives occa- 
 sion on both sides? The one racks the vocabulary for 
 words and phrases in which to express his pretended grat-
 
 WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 139 
 
 itucle, while, in fact, he is only keenly humiliated by 
 having to accept a favor, and the other as eloquently dis- 
 claims any merit in the grant, which he really grudged, 
 and will never think of without feeling that he made a 
 great sacrifice. 
 
 The secret feeling of many a " public benefactor " 
 loudly praised by the newspapers, was finely let out by 
 Lord Byron when he sent four thousand pounds to the 
 Greeks, and privately informed a friend that he did not 
 think he could well get off for less. How many wedding 
 and other presents, and subscriptions to testimonials and to 
 public enterprises, are made by those who secretly curse 
 the occasion that exacts them? With the stereotyped 
 " thanks " and " grateful acknowledgments " of the shop- 
 keeper all are familiar, as they are with "the last," the 
 " positively the last," and the " most positively the very 
 last " appearances of the dramatic stars, that shine for five 
 hundred or a thousand dollars a night. As nobody is de- 
 ceived by these phrases, it seems hypercritical to complain 
 of them, and yet one can hardly help sympathizing with 
 the country editor who scolds a celebrated musician because 
 he is now making farewell tours " once a year," whereas 
 formerly he made them " only once in five years," Con- 
 sidering the sameness of shopkeepers' acknowledgments, 
 one cannot help admiring the daring originality of the 
 Dutch commercial house of which the poet Moore tells, that 
 concluded a letter thus: " Sugars are falling more and more 
 every day; not so the respect and esteem with which we 
 are your obedient servants." The cant of public speakers 
 is so familiar to the public that it is looked for as a matter 
 of course. When a man is called on to address a public 
 meeting, it is understood that the apology for his " lack of
 
 140 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 preparation" to meet the demand so "unexpectedly" made 
 upon him, will preface the "impromptu" which he has 
 spent weeks in elaborating, as surely as the inevitable 
 " This is so unexpected " prefaces the reply of a maiden to 
 the long-awaited proposal of marriage from her lover. 
 
 Literary men are so wont to weigh their words that 
 cant in them seems inexcusable; yet where shall we find 
 more of it than in books, magazines, and newspapers? 
 How many reasons are assigned by authors for inflicting 
 their works on the public, other than the true one, namely, 
 the pleasure of writing, the hope of a little distinction or 
 of a little money! How many writers profess to welcome 
 criticism, which they nevertheless ascribe to spite, envy, 
 jealousy, if it is unfavorable! What is intrinsically more 
 deceptive than the multitudinous "WE" in which every 
 writer, great and small, hides his individuality, whether 
 his object be, as Archdeacon Hare says, "to pass himself 
 off unnoticed, like the Irishman's bad guinea in a handful 
 of halfpence," or to give to the opinions of a humble 
 individual the weight and gravity of a council? "Who 
 
 the is We?" exclaimed the elder Kean on reading a 
 
 scathing criticism upon his "Hamlet"; and the question 
 might be pertinently asked of many other nominis umbrae 
 who deliver their literary judgments as oracularly as if 
 they were lineal descendants of Minos or Rhadamanthus. 
 Who can estimate the diminution of power and influence 
 that would result, should the ten thousand editors in the 
 land, who now speak with a voice of authority, as the organs 
 of the public or a party, come down from their thrones, and 
 exchange the regal "we" for the plebeian and egotistic 
 "I"? Who is "I"? the reader might exclaim, in tones 
 even more contemptuous than Kean's. The truth is, "I"
 
 WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 141 
 
 is a nobody. He represents only himself. He may be 
 Smith or Jones, the merest cipher. He may weigh but a 
 hundred pounds, and still less morally and intellectually. 
 He may be diminutive in stature, and in intellect a Tom 
 Thumb. Who cares what such a pygmy thinks? But 
 " we " represents a multitude, an imposing crowd, a mighty 
 assembly, a congress, or a jury of sages; and we all quail 
 before the opinions of the great " we." As a writer has 
 well said: "'We have every reason to believe that beef 
 will rise to starvation prices ' is a sentiment which, when 
 read in a newspaper, will make the stoutest stomach trem- 
 ble ; but substitute an ' I ' for the ' we,' and nobody cares a 
 copper for the opinion. It has been well said that what 
 terrified Belshazzar was the hand on the wall, because he 
 couldn't see to whom it belonged; and the same may be 
 said of the editorial ' we.' It is the mystery in which it is 
 involved that invests it with potency." 
 
 The history of literature abounds with examples of 
 words used almost without meaning by whole classes of 
 writers. Who does not know how feeble and hollow Brit- 
 ish poetry had become in the eighteenth century, just 
 before the appearance of Cowper? Compelled to appear 
 in the costume of the court, it had acquired its artificiality; 
 and dealing with the conventional manners and outside 
 aspects of men, it had almost forsaken the human heart, 
 the proper haunt and main region of song. Instead of 
 being the vehicle of lofty and noble sentiments, it had 
 degenerated into a mere trick of art, a hand-organ opera- 
 tion, in which one man could grind out tunes nearly as 
 well as another. A certain monotonous smoothness, a 
 perpetually recurring assortment of images, had become 
 so much the traditional property of the versifiers, that
 
 142 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 one could set himself up in the business as a shopkeeper 
 might supply himself with his stock-in-trade. The style 
 that prevailed has been aptly termed by the poet Lowell 
 " the Dick Swiveller style." As Dick always called the 
 wine " rosy," sleep " balmy," so did these correct gentlemen 
 always employ a glib epithet or a diffuse periphrasis to 
 express the commonest ideas. The sun was never called 
 by his plain, almanac name, but always "Phcebus," or "the 
 orb of day." The moon was known only as "Cynthia." 
 " Diana," or " the refulgent lamp of night." Naiads were 
 as plenty in every stream as trout or pickerel. If these 
 poets wished to say tea, they would write 
 
 "Of China's herb the infusion hot and mild." 
 
 Coffee would be nothing less than 
 
 "The fragrant juice of Mocha's kernel gray." 
 
 A boot would be raised to 
 
 " The shining leather that the leg encased." 
 
 All women in that golden age were "nymphs"; "dryads" 
 were as common as birds; carriages were ''harnessed 
 pomps " ; houses, humble or stately " piles " ; and not a 
 wind could blow, whether the sweet South, or " Boreas, 
 Cecias, or Argestes loud," but it was " a gentle zephyr." 
 Pope satirized this conventional language in the well- 
 known lines: 
 
 " While they ring round the same unvaried chimes, 
 With sure returns of still expected rhymes: 
 Where'er you find 'the cooling western breeze,' 
 In the next Hue 'it whispers through the trees': 
 If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep.' 
 The reader's threatened, not in vain, with ' sleep.' " 
 
 Yet Pope himself was addicted to these circumlocutions 
 and to threadbare mythological allusions, quite as much 
 as the small wits whom he ridiculed. The manly genius
 
 WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 143 
 
 of Cowper broke through these traditionary fetters, and 
 relieved poetry from the spell in which Pope and his 
 imitators had bound its phraseology and rhythm. Ex- 
 pressing his contempt for the " creamy smoothness " of 
 such verse, in which sentiment was so often 
 
 " sacrificed to sound, 
 And tmth cut short to make a period round,'' 
 
 he cried: 
 
 ' Give me the line that ploughs its stately course. 
 Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force; 
 That, like some cottage brauty, strikes the heart, 
 Quite unindebted to the tricks of art." 
 
 The charm of Cowper's letters, acknowledged by all 
 competent judges to be the best in the English language, 
 lies in the simplicity and naturalness, the freedom from 
 affectation, by which they are uniformly characterized. 
 Contrasting them with those of Wilberforce, Dr. Andrew 
 Combe observes in a letter to a friend: "Cowper's lexers, 
 to my mind, do far more to excite a deep sense of religion, 
 than all the labored efforts of Wilberforce. The one gives 
 expression simply and naturally to the thoughts and feel- 
 ings which spring up spontaneously as he writes. The 
 other forces in the one topic in all his letters, and lashes 
 himself up to a due fervor of expression, whether the mind 
 wills or not. On one occasion Wilberforce dispatched a 
 very hurried letter on Saturday night, without any reli- 
 gious expressions in it. In the night-time his conscience 
 troubled him so much for the omission, that he could not 
 rest till he sat down next morning and wrote a second with 
 the piety, and apologizing for his involuntary departure 
 from his rule! Only think what a perversion of a good 
 principle this was!" 
 
 It is in the conduct of political affairs that the class of
 
 144 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 words of which we have spoken are used most frequently. 
 Sir Henry Wotton long since defined an ambassador as a 
 gentleman sent abroad to lie for the benefit of his country. 
 In Europe, so indissolubly has diplomacy' been associated 
 with trickery, that it is said Talleyrand's wonderful success 
 with the representatives of foreign courts was owing largely 
 to his frankness and fair dealing, nobody believing it pos- 
 sible that he was striving for that for which he seemed to 
 be striving. The plain, open, straightforward way in which 
 he spoke of and dealt with all public matters, completely 
 puzzled the vulgar minds, that could not dissociate from 
 diplomacy the mysterious devices that distinguish the hack 
 from the true diplomatist. In the titles and styles of 
 address used by Kings and Emperors, we have examples of 
 cant in its most meaningless forms. One sovereign is his 
 Most Christian Majesty, another Defender of the Faith, etc. 
 A monarch, forced by public opinion to issue a commission 
 of inquiry, addresses all the members of it as his well- 
 beloved, though in his heart he detests them. 
 
 Everybody knows that George I. of England obtained 
 his crown, not by hereditary title, but by an act of Parlia- 
 ment; yet, in his very first speech to that body, he had the 
 effrontery to speak of ascending " the throne of his an- 
 cestors." Well might Henry Luttrell exclaim: 
 
 "O that in England there might be 
 A duty on hypocrisy! 
 A tax on humbug, an excise 
 On solemn plausibilities, 
 A stamp on everything that canted! 
 No millions more, if these were granted, 
 Henceforward would be raised or wanted." 
 
 So an American politician, who, by caucus-packing, " wire- 
 pulling," and perhaps bribery, has contrived to get elected
 
 WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 145 
 
 to a State legislature or to Congress, will publicly thank 
 his fellow-citizens for having sent him there " by their 
 voluntary, unbiased suffrages." When the patriot, Patkul, 
 was surrendered to the vengeance of Charles XII. of Swe- 
 den, the following sentence was read over to him: "It is 
 hereby made known to be the order of his Majesty, our 
 most iiii-irifnl sovereign, that this man, who is a traitor to 
 his country, be broken on the wheel and quartered," etc. 
 "What mercy! " exclaimed the poor criminal. It was with 
 the same mockery of benevolence that the Holy Inquisition 
 was wont, when condemning a heretic to the torture, to 
 express the tenderest concern for his temporal and eternal 
 welfare. One of the most offensive forms of cant is the 
 profession of extreme humility by men who are full of 
 pride and arrogance. The haughtiest of all the Koman 
 Pontiffs styled himself "the servant of the servants of 
 God," at the very time when he humiliated the Emperor of 
 Germany by making him wait five days barefoot in his 
 ante-chamber in the depth of winter, and expected all the 
 Kings of Europe, when in his presence, to kiss his toe or 
 hold his stirrup. Catherine of Russia was always mouthing 
 the language of piety and benevolence, especially when 
 about to wage war or do some rascally deed. Louis the 
 Fourteenth's paroxysms of repentance and devotion were 
 always the occasion for fresh outrages upon the Huguenots; 
 and Napoleon was always prating of his love of peace, 
 and of being compelled to fight by his quarrelsome neigh- 
 bors. While the French revolutionists were shouting 
 "Liberty. Equality, and Fraternity!" men were executed 
 in Paris without law and against law. and heads fell by 
 cart-loads from the knife of the guillotine. The favorite 
 amusement of Couthon, one of the deadliest of Robes- 
 7
 
 146 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 pierre's fellow cut-throats, was the rearing of doves. The 
 contemplation of their innocence, he said, made the charm 
 of his existence in consoling him for the wickedness of 
 men. Even when he had reached the height of his " bad 
 preeminence" as a terrorist, he was carried to the National 
 Assembly or the Jacobin Club fondling little lapdogs, which 
 he nestled in his bosom. It is told of one of his bloody 
 compatriots, who was as fatal to men and as fond of dogs 
 as himself, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded 
 to him in vain for her husband's life, in retiring from his 
 presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel's tail, he 
 cried out, "Good heavens, Madame! have you no humanity?'" 1 
 "My children," said Dr. Johnson, "clear your minds of 
 cant." If professional politicians should follow this advice, 
 many of them would be likely to find their occupation 
 clean gone. At elections they are so wont to simulate the 
 sentiments and language of patriotism, to pretend a zeal 
 for this, an indignation for that, and a horror for another 
 thing, about which they are known to be comparatively in- 
 different, as if any flummery might be crammed down the 
 throats of the people, that the voters whom the old party 
 hacks fancy they are gulling are simply laughing in their 
 sleeves at their transparent attempts at deception. Daniel 
 O'Connell, the popular Irish orator, is said to have had 
 a large vocabulary of stockxpolitical phrases, upon which he 
 rang the changes with magical effect. He could whine, 
 and wheedle, and wink with one eye, while he wept with 
 the other; and if his flow of oratory was ever in danger of 
 halting, he had always at hand certain stereotyped catch- 
 words, such as his " own green isle," his " Irish heart," his 
 "head upon the block," his "hereditary bondsmen, know 
 ye not," etc., which never failed him in any emergency.
 
 WOKDS WITHOUT MEANING. 147 
 
 Common, however, as are meaningless phrases on the 
 stump and the platform, it is to be feared that they are 
 hardly less so in the meeting-house, and there they are 
 doubly offensive, if not unpardonable. It is a striking 
 remark of Coleridge that truths, of all others the most 
 awful and interesting, are too often considered so true 
 that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden 
 in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most 
 despised and exploded errors. Continual handling wears 
 off the beauty and significance of words, and it is only 
 by a distinct effort of the mind that we can restore their 
 full meaning. " Hence it is that the traditional maxims 
 of old experience, though seldom questioned, have often 
 so little effect on the conduct of life, because their mean- 
 ing is never, by most persons, really felt, until personal 
 experience has brought it home. And thus, also, it is 
 that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even poli- 
 tics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have 
 manifested a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless 
 dogmas, which tendency all the efforts of an education 
 expressly and skilfully directed to keeping the meaning 
 alive are barely found sufficient to counteract."* 
 
 There can be little doubt that many a man whose life 
 is thoroughly selfish cheats himself into the belief that he 
 is pious because he parrots with ease the phrases of piety 
 and orthodoxy. Who is not familiar with scores of 
 such pet phrases and cant terms, which are repeated at 
 this day apparently without a thought of their mean- 
 ing? Who ever attended a missionary meeting without 
 hearing "the Macedonian cry," and an account of some 
 "little interest," and "fields white for the harvest"? 
 
 * Mill's "Logic."
 
 148 WORDS ; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Who is not weary of the ding-dong of "^our Zion " and 
 the solecism of " in our midst " ; and who does not long 
 lor a verbal millennium when Christians shall no longer 
 "feel to take" and "grant to give"? "How much I 
 regret," says Coleridge, "that so many religious persons 
 of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain 
 cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each 
 other! They must improve this and that text, and they 
 must do so and so in a prayerful way; and so on. A 
 young lady urged upon me, the other day, that such and 
 such feelings were the marrow of all religion; upon which 
 I recommended her to try to walk to London on her 
 marrow-bones only." Mr. Spurgeon, in his "Lectures to 
 Students," remarks that "'the poor unworthy dust' is nn 
 epithet generally applied to themselves by the proudest 
 men in the congregation, and not seldom by the most mon- 
 eyed and groveling; in which case the last words are not 
 so very inappropriate. We have heard of a good man 
 who, in pleading for his children and grandchildren, was 
 so completely beclouded in the blinding influence of this 
 expression, that he exclaimed, ' Lord, save thy dust, 
 and thy dust's dust, and thy dust's dust's dust.' When 
 Abraham said, 'I have taken upon me to speak unto the 
 Lord, which am but dust and ashes,' the utterance was 
 forcible and expressive; but in its misquoted, perverted, 
 and abused form, the sooner it is consigned to its own 
 element the better." Many persons have very erroneous 
 ideas of what constitutes religious conversation. That is 
 not necessarily religious talk which is interlarded with 
 religious phrases, or which is solely about divine things: 
 but that which is permeated with religious feeling, which 
 is full of truth, reverence, and love, whatever the theme
 
 WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 149 
 
 may be. Who has not heard some men talk of the most 
 worldly things in a way that made the hearer feel the 
 electric current of spirituality playing through their words, 
 and uplifting his whole spiritual being? And who has 
 not heard other persons talk about the divinest things in 
 so dry, formal, and soulless a way that their words seemed 
 a profanation, and chilled him to the core? It is almost a 
 justification of slang that it is generally an effort to obtain 
 relief from words worn bare by the use of persons who put 
 neither knowledge nor feeling into them, and which seem 
 incapable of expressing anything real. 
 
 When Lady Townsend was asked if Whitefield had re- 
 canted, she replied, "No; he has only canted.'" Often, 
 when there is no deliberate hypocrisy, good men use lan- 
 guage so exaggerated and unreal as to do more harm 
 than the grossest worldliness. We have often, in thinking 
 upon this subject, called to mind a saying of Dr. Sharp, of 
 Boston, a Baptist preacher, who was a hater of all cant 
 
 and shams. " There's Dr. ," said he, about the time 
 
 of the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance, " who 
 went all the way to Europe to talk up brotherly love. If 
 he should meet a poor Baptist minister in the street, he 
 wouldn't speak to him." Nothing is cheaper than pious 
 or benevolent talk. A great many men would be positive 
 forces of goodness in the world, if they did not let all their 
 principles and enthusiasm escape in words. They are like 
 locomotives which let off so much steam through the escape 
 valves, that, though they fill the air with noise, they have 
 not power enough left to move the train. There is hardly 
 anything which so fritters spiritual energy as talk without 
 deeds. " The fluent boaster is not the man who is steadiest 
 before the enemy ; it is well said to him that his courage is
 
 150 WOltDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 better kept till it is wanted. Loud utterances of virtuous 
 indignation against evil from the platform, or in the 
 drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual giant; so 
 much indignation as is expressed, has found vent; it is 
 wasted; is taken away from the work of coping with evil; 
 the man has so much less left. And hence he who restrains 
 that love of talk, lays up a fund of spiritual strength."* 
 It is said that Pambos, an illiterate saint of the middle 
 ages, being unable to read, came to some one to be taught a 
 psalm. Having learned the simple verse, " I said, I will take 
 heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue," he 
 went away, saying that was enough if it was practically 
 acquired. When asked six months, and again many years 
 after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he 
 answered that he had never been able truly to master this. 
 A man may have a heart overflowing with love and sym- 
 pathy, even though he is not in the habit of exhibiting on 
 his cards " J. Good Soul, Philanthropist," and was never 
 known to unfold his cambric handkerchief with the words, 
 " Let us weep." On the other hand, nothing is easier than 
 to use a set phraseology without attaching to it any clear 
 and definite meaning, to cheat one's self with the sem- 
 blance of thought or feeling, when no thought or feeling 
 exists. It has been truly said that when good men who 
 have no deep religious fervor use fervent language, which 
 they have caught from others, or which was the natural 
 expression of what they felt in other and better years, 
 above all, when they employ on mean and trivial occasions 
 expressions which have been forged in the fires of affliction 
 and hammered out in the shock of conflict, they cannot 
 easily imagine what a disastrous impression they produce 
 
 * Sermon by Rev. F. W. Robertson.
 
 WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 151 
 
 on keen and discriminating minds. The cheat is at once 
 detected, and the hasty inference is drawn that all expres- 
 sions of religious earnestness are affected and artificial. 
 The honest and irrepressible utterance of strong convic- 
 tion and deep emotion commands respect; but intense 
 words should never be used when the religious life is not 
 intense. " Costing little, words are given prodigally, and 
 sacrificial acts must toil for years to cover the space which 
 a single fervid promise has stretched itself over. No won- 
 der that the slow acts are superseded by the available 
 words, the weighty bullion by the current paper-money. If 
 I have conveyed all I feel by language, I am tempted to 
 fancy, by the relief experienced, that feeling has attained 
 its end and realized itself. Farewell, then, to the toil of the 
 ' daily sacrifice ! ' Devotion has found for itself a vent in 
 words."* 
 
 Art, as well as literature, politics, and religion, has its 
 cant, which is as offensive as any of its other forms. 
 When Rossini was asked why he had ceased attending 
 the opera in Paris, he replied, " I am embarrassed at 
 listening to music with Frenchmen. In Italy or Ger- 
 many, I am sitting quietly in the pit, and on each side 
 of me is a man, shabbily dressed, but who feels the 
 music as I do; in Paris I have on each side of me a 
 fine gentleman in straw-colored gloves, who explains to 
 me all I feel, but who feels nothing. All he says is very 
 clever, indeed, and it is often very true; but it takes the 
 gloss off my own impression, if I have any." 
 
 " Life and Letters of P. W. Robertson."
 
 1.V2 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 
 
 He that hath knowledge spareth his words. PROVERBS xvn. 27. 
 
 Learn the value of a man's words and expressions, and you know him. . . 
 He who has a superlative for everything, wants a measure for the great or 
 small. LAVATER. 
 
 Words are women; deeds are men. GEORGE HERBERT. 
 
 He that uses many words for the explaining of any subject, doth, like the 
 cuttle-fish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. RAT. 
 
 rTIHE old Roman poet Ennius was so proud of knowing 
 -L three languages that he used to declare that he had 
 three hearts. The Emperor Charles V. expressed himself 
 still more strongly, and declared that in proportion to the 
 number of languages a man knows, is he more of a man. 
 According to this theory, Cardinal Mezzofanti, who underr 
 stood one hundred and fourteen languages, and spoke 
 thirty with rare excellence, must have been many men 
 condensed into one. Of all the human polyglots in ancient 
 or modern times, he had perhaps the greatest knowledge of 
 words. Yet, with all his marvellous linguistic knowledge, 
 he was a mere prodigy or freak of nature, and, it has been 
 well observed, scarcely deserves a higher place in the Pan- 
 theon of intellect than a blindfold chess-player or a cal- 
 culating boy. Talking foreign languages with a fluency 
 and accuracy which caused strangers to mistake him for 
 a compatriot, he attempted no work of utility, left no 
 trace of his colossal powers; and therefore, in contemplat- 
 ing them, we can but wonder at his gifts, as we wonder
 
 SOME ABUSES OF WOKDS. 153 
 
 at the Belgian giant or a five-legged lamb. In allusion 
 to his hyperbolical acquisitions, De Quincey suggests that 
 the following would be an appropriate epitaph for his 
 eminence: " Here lies a man who, in the act of dying, com- 
 mitted a robbery, absconding from his fellow-creatures 
 with a valuable polyglot dictionary.'' Enormous, however, 
 as were the linguistic acquisitions of Mezzofanti, no man 
 was ever less vain of his acquirements, priding himself, 
 as he did, less upon his attainments than most persons 
 upon a smattering of a single tongue. " What am I," 
 said he to a visitor, "but an ill-bound dictionary?" The 
 saying of Catherine de Medicis is too often suggested by 
 such prodigies of linguistic acquisition. When told that 
 Scaliger understood twenty different languages "That's 
 twenty words for one idea," said she; "I had rather have 
 twenty ideas for one word." In this reply she foreshad- 
 owed the great error of modern scholarship, which is too 
 often made the be-all and the end-all of life, when its only 
 relation to it should be that of a graceful handmaid. The 
 story of the scholar who, dying, regretted at the end of 
 his career that he had not concentrated all his energies 
 upon the dative case, only burlesques a*n actual fact. The 
 educated man is too often one who knows more of lan- 
 guage than of idea, more of the husk than of the kernel. 
 more of the vehicle than of the substance it bears. He 
 has got together a heap of symbols, of mere counters, 
 with which he feels himself to be an intellectual Roths- 
 child; but of the substance of these shadows, the sterling 
 gold of intellect, coin current throughout the realm, he 
 has not an eagle. All his wealth is in paper, paper like 
 bad scrip, marked with a high nominal amount, but use- 
 less in exchange and repudiated in real traffic. The great
 
 154 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 scholar is often an intellectual miser, who expends the spir- 
 itual energy that might make him a hero, upon the detec- 
 tion of a wrong dot, a false syllable, or an inaccurate word. 
 
 In this country, where fluency of speech is vouchsafed 
 in so large a measure to the people, and every third man is 
 an orator, it is easier to find persons with the twenty words 
 for one idea, than persons with twenty ideas for one word. 
 Of all the peoples on the globe, except perhaps the Irish, 
 Americans are the most spendthrift of language. Not 
 only in our court-houses and representative halls, but 
 everywhere, we are literally deluged with words, words, 
 words. Everybody seems born to make long speeches, 
 as the sparks to fly upward. The Aristotelian theory that 
 Nature abhors a vacuum appears to be a universal belief, 
 and all are laboring to fill up the realms of space with 
 "mouthfuls of spoken wind." The quantity of breath 
 that is wasted at our public meetings, religious, political, 
 philanthropic, and literary, is incalculable. Hardly a 
 railroad or a canal is opened, but the occasion is seized 
 on as a chance for speeches of " learned length and thun- 
 dering sound " ; and even a new hotel cannot throw open 
 its doors without an amount of breath being expended, 
 sufficient, if economically used, to waft a boat across a 
 small Jake. 
 
 One is struck, in reading the " thrilling " addresses on 
 various occasions, which are said to have " chained as with 
 hooks of steel the attention of thousands," and which 
 confer on their authors " immortal reputations " that die 
 within a year, to see what tasteless word-piling passes with 
 many for eloquence. The advice given in Racine's 
 " Plaideurs" by an ear-tortured judge to a long-winded 
 lawyer, " to skip to the deluge," might wisely be repeated
 
 SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 155 
 
 to our thousand Ciceros and Chathams. The Baconian 
 art of condensation seems nearly obsolete. Many of our 
 orators are forever breaking butterflies on a wheel, 
 raising oceans to drown a fly, loading cannon to shoot 
 at humming-birds. Thought and expression are sup- 
 planted by lungs and the dictionary. Instead of great 
 thoughts couched in a few close, home, significant sen- 
 tences, the value of a thousand pounds sterling of 
 sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond, 
 we have a mass of verbiage, delivered with a pompous 
 elocution. Instead of ideas brought before us, as South 
 expresses it, like water in a well, where you have fulness in 
 a little compass, we have the same " carried out into many 
 petty, creeping rivulets, with length and shallowness 
 together." 
 
 It is in our legislative bodies that this evil has reached 
 the highest climax. A member may have a thought or a 
 fact which may settle a question ; but if it may be couched 
 in a sentence or two, he thinks it not worth delivering. 
 Unless he can wire-draw it into a two-hours speech, or at 
 least accompany it with some needless verbiage to plump 
 it out in the report, he will sit stock-still, and leave the floor 
 to men who have fewer ideas and more words at command. 
 The public mind, too, revolts sometimes against nourish- 
 ment in highly concentrated forms; it requires bulk as 
 well as nutriment, just " as hay is given to horses as well as 
 corn, to distend the stomach, and enable it to act with its 
 full powers." Then, again, and this, perhaps, is one of 
 the main causes of long-winded speeches, there is a sort 
 of reverence entertained for a man who can "spout" two 
 or three hours on the stretch ; and the wonder is heightened, 
 if he does it without making a fool of himself. Nothing,
 
 156 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSK. 
 
 however, can be more absurd than to regard mere volubility 
 as a proof of intellectual power. So far is this from 
 being the case that it may be doubted whether any large- 
 thoughted man, who was accustomed to grapple with the 
 great problems of life and society, ever found it easy upon 
 the rostrum to deliver his thoughts with fluency and 
 grace. 
 
 Bruce, the traveler, long ago remarked of the Abyssin- 
 ians, that "they are all orators, as," he adds, " are most bar- 
 barians.'' It is often said of such tonguey men that they 
 have " a great command of language," when the simple 
 fact is that language has a great command of them. As 
 Whately says, they have the same command of language 
 that a man has of a horse that runs away with him. 
 The greatest orators of ancient and modern times have 
 been remarkable for their economy of words. Demosthenes, 
 when he 
 
 "Shook the arsenal, and fulminecl over Greece 
 To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne," 
 
 rarely spoke over thirty minutes, and Cicero took even less 
 time to blast Catiline with his lightnings. There are some 
 of the Greek orator's speeches which were spoken, as they 
 may now be read, with sufficient slowness and distinctness, 
 in less than half an hour ; yet they are the effusions of that 
 rapid and mighty genius the effect of whose words the 
 ancients exhausted their language in describing; which 
 they could adequately describe only by comparing it to the 
 workings of the most subtle and powerful agents of 
 nature, the ungovernable torrent, the resistless thunder. 
 Chatham was often briefer still, and Mirabeau, the mast'r- 
 spirit of the French tribune, condensed his thunders into 
 twenty minutes.
 
 SOME ABUSES OP WORDS. 157 
 
 It is said that not one of the three leading members of 
 the convention that formed the Constitution of the United 
 States, spoke, in the debates upon it, over twenty minutes. 
 Alexander Hamilton was reckoned one of the most diffuse 
 speakers of his day.; yet he did not occupy more than two 
 hours and a half in his longest arguments at the bar, nor 
 did his rival, Aaron Burr, occupy over half that time. A 
 judge who was intimately acquainted with Burr and his 
 practice, declares that he' repeatedly and successfully dis- 
 posed of cases involving a large amount of property in 
 half an hour. " Indeed," says he, " on one occasion he 
 talked to the jury seven minutes in such a manner, that it 
 took me. on the bench, half an hour to straighten them 
 out." He adds: "I once asked him, 'Colonel Burr, why 
 cannot lawyers always save the time and spare the patience 
 of the court and jury by dwelling only on the important 
 points in their cases ? ' to which Burr replied, ' Sir, you 
 demand the greatest faculty of the human mind, selection.' " 
 To these examples we may add that of a great English ad- 
 vocate. " I asked Sir James Scarlett," says Buxton, " what 
 was the secret of his preeminent success as an advocate. 
 He replied that he took care to press home the one principal 
 point of the case, without paying much regard to the 
 others. He also said that he knew the secret of being 
 short. ' I find.' said he, ' that when I exceed half an hour, 
 I am always doing mischief to my client. If I drive into 
 the heads of the jury unimportant matter, I drive out 
 matter more important that I had previously lodged 
 there.' " 
 
 Joubert, a French author, cultivated verbal economy to 
 such an extreme that he tried almost to do without words. 
 "If there is a man on earth," said he, "tormented by the
 
 158 WORDS; TUEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 cursed desire to get a whole book into a page, a whole page 
 into a phrase, and this phrase into one word, that man is 
 myself." The ambition of many American speakers, and 
 not a few writers, is apparently the reverse of this. We 
 do not seem to know that in many cases, as Hesiod says, a 
 half is more than the whole ; and that a speech or a treatise 
 hammered out painfully in every part, is often of less value 
 than a few bright links, suggestive of the entire chain of 
 thought. Who wants to swallow a whole ox, in order to 
 get at the tenderloin? 
 
 Prolixity, it has been well said, is more offensive now 
 than it once was, because men think more rapidly. They 
 are not more thoughtful than their ancestors, but they 
 are more vivid, direct, and animated in their thinking. 
 They are more impatient, therefore, of longwindedness, 
 of a loose arrangement, and of a heavy, dragging move- 
 ment in the presentation of truth. "A century ago men 
 would listen to speeches and sermons, to divisions and 
 subdivisions, that now would be regarded as utterly intol- 
 erable. As the human body is whisked through space at 
 the rate of a mile a minute, so the human mind travels 
 with an equally accelerated pace. Mental operations are 
 on straight lines, and are far more rapid than they once 
 were. The public audience now craves a short method, a 
 distinct sharp statement, and a rapid and accelerating 
 movement, upon the part of its teachers." * It is, in short, 
 an age of steam and electricity that we live in, not of slow 
 coaches; an age of locomotives, electric telegraphs, and 
 phonography; and hence it is the cream of a speaker's 
 thoughts that men want, the wheat, and not the chaff, 
 the kernel, and not the shell, the strong pungent essence, 
 
 * Shedd's " Homiletics,"
 
 SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 159 
 
 and not the thin, diluted mixture. The model discourse 
 to-day is that which gives, not all that can be said, even 
 well said, on a subject, but the very apices rerum, the tops 
 and sums of things reduced to their simplest expression, 
 the drop of oil extracted from thousands of roses, and 
 condensing all their odors, the healing power of a hun- 
 dred weight of bark in a few grains of quinine. 
 
 " Certainly the greatest and wisest conceptions that ever 
 issued from the mind of man," says South, " have been 
 couched under, and delivered in, a few, close, home, and 
 significant words. . . Was not the work of all the six 
 days (of creation) transacted in so many words? . . . 
 Heaven, and earth, and all the host of both, as it were, 
 dropped from God's mouth, and nature itself was but the 
 product of a word. . . The seven wise men of Greece, so 
 famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all 
 that fame, each of them by a single sentence, consisting of 
 two or three words. And yv<b$i ffeaurov still lives and 
 nourishes in the mouths of all, while many vast volumes 
 are extinct, and sunk into dust and utter oblivion." 
 
 Akin to the prolixity of style which weakens so many 
 speeches, is the habitual exaggeration of language which 
 deforms both our public and our private discourse. The 
 most unmanageable of all parts of speech, with many 
 persons, is the adjective. Voltaire has justly said that the 
 adjectives are often the greatest enemies of the substan- 
 tives, though they may agree in gender, number, and case. 
 An adjective is, indeed, an addition; but "an addition may 
 be an incumbrance, as even a dog finds out when a kettle 
 is tied to his tail." Generally the weakness of a composi-. 
 tion is just in proportion to the frequency with which this 
 abused class of words is introduced. As in gunnery the
 
 16U WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 force of the discharge is proportioned, not to the amount 
 of powder that can be used, but to the amount that can be 
 thoroughly ignited, so it is not the multitude of words, but 
 the exact number fired by the thought, that gives energy to 
 expression. There are some writers and speakers who seem 
 to have forgotten that there are three degrees of compari- 
 son. The only adjectives they ever use are the superlative, 
 and even these are raised to the third power. With them 
 there is no gradation, no lights and shadows. Every hill is 
 Alpine, every valley Tartarean; every virtue is godlike, 
 every fault a felony; every breeze a tempest, and every 
 molehill a mountain. Praise or blame beggars their vocab- 
 ulary; epithets are heightened into superlatives; superla- 
 tives stretch themselves into hyperboles; and hyperboles 
 themselves get out of breath, and die asthmatically of 
 exhaustion. 
 
 Of all the civilized peoples on the face of the globe, our 
 Hibernian friends excepted, Americans are probably t In- 
 most addicted to this exaggeration of speech. As our 
 mountains, lakes, and rivers are all on a gigantic scale, we 
 seem to think our speech must be framed after the same 
 pattern. Even our jokes are of the most stupendous kind; 
 they set one to thinking of the Alleghanies, or suggest the 
 immensity of the prairies. A Western orator, in portraying 
 the most trivial incident, rolls along a Mississippian flood 
 of eloquence, and the vastness of his metaphors makes you 
 think you are living in the age of the megatheriums and, 
 saurians, and listening to one of a pre- Adamite race. In 
 ordinary conversation, such is our enthusiasm or our 
 poverty of expression, that we cannot talk upon the most 
 ordinary themes, except in the most extravagant and en- 
 raptured terms. Everything that pleases us is positively
 
 SOME ABUSES OF WOKDS. 161 
 
 " delicious," " nice," or " charming " ; everything handsome 
 is "elegant," or "splendid"; everything that we dislike is 
 "hateful," "dreadful," " horrible," or "shocking." Listen 
 to a circle of lively young ladies for a few minutes, and 
 you will learn that, within the compass of a dozen hours, 
 they have met with more marvelous adventures and hair- 
 breadth escapes, passed through more thrilling experi- 
 ences, and seen more gorgeous spectacles, endured more 
 fright, and enjoyed more rapture, than could be crowded 
 into a whole life-time, even if spun out to threescore and 
 ten. 
 
 Ask a person what he thinks of the weather in a rainy 
 season, and he will tell you that " it rains cats and dogs," 
 or that "it beats all the storms since the flood." If his 
 clothes get sprinkled in crossing the street, he has been 
 "drenched to the skin." The days are "as dark as Egypt," 
 and the mud in the streets is everywhere " up to one's 
 knees." If a Yankee makes a shrewd or lucky speculation, 
 he is said to have cleared "heaps of money," and every- 
 body envies him " the pile of greenbacks he has bagged." 
 All our winds blow a hurricane; all our fires are confla- 
 grations, even though only a hencoop is burned; all our 
 fogs can be cut with a knife. Nobody fails in this country; 
 he "bursts up." All our orators rival Demosthenes in 
 eloquence; they beat Chillingworth in logic; and their 
 sarcasm is more " withering " than that of Junius himself. 
 Who ever heard of a public meeting in this country that 
 was not "an immense demonstration"; of an actor's benefit 
 at which the house was not " crowded from pit to dome " ; 
 of a political nomination that was not "sweeping the 
 country like wild-fire"? Where is the rich man who does 
 not "roll in wealth," or the poor man who is "worth
 
 162 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 the first red cent"? All our good men are paragons of 
 virtue, our villains, monsters of iniquity. 
 
 Many of our public speakers seem incapable of express- 
 ing themselves in a plain, calm, truthful manner on any 
 subject whatever. A great deal of our writing, too. is 
 pitched on an unnatural, falsetto key. Quiet ease of style, 
 like that of Cowley's "Essays," Goldsmith's "Vicar of 
 Wakefield," or White's "Natural History of Selborne," is 
 almost a lost art. Our newspaper literature is becoming 
 more and more sensational; and it seems sometimes as if 
 it would come to consist of head-lines and exclamation 
 points. Some of the most popular correspondents are 
 those whose communications are a perfect florilegium of 
 fine words. They rival the " tulipomania " in their love 
 of gaudy and glaring colors, and apparently care little 
 how trite or feeble their thoughts may be, provided they 
 have dragon-wings, all green and gold. It was said of 
 Rufus Choate, whose brain teemed with a marvellous 
 wealth of words, and who was very prodigal of adjectives, 
 that he "drove a substantive-and-six " whenever he spoke 
 in public, and that he would be as pathetic as the grand 
 lamentations in " Samson Agonistes " on the obstruction 
 of fishways, and rise to the cathedral music of the uni- 
 verse on the right to manufacture India-rubber suspend- 
 ers. When Chief- Justice Shaw, before whom he had often 
 pleaded, heard that there was a new edition of " Worces- 
 ter's Dictionary," containing two thousand five hundred 
 new words, he exclaimed, "For heaven's sake, don't let 
 Choate get hold of it!" 
 
 Even scientific writers, who might be expected to aim at 
 some exactness, often caricature truth with equal grossness, 
 describing things the most Liliputian by Brobdignagian
 
 SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 163 
 
 metaphors. Thus a French naturalist represents the blood 
 of a louse as "rushing through his veins like a torrent!" 
 Even ii? treating of this very subject of exaggeration, a 
 writer in an English periodical, after rebuking sharply 
 this American fault, himself outrages truth by declaring 
 that "he would walk fifty miles on foot to see the man that 
 never caricatures the subject on which he speaks!" To a 
 critic who thus fails to reck his own rede, we would say 
 with Sir Thomas Browne: " Thou who so hotly disclaimest 
 the devil, be not thyself guilty of diabolism." 
 
 Seriously, when shall we have done with this habit of 
 amplification and exaggeration, of blowing up molehills 
 into Himalayas and Chimborazos? Can anything be more 
 obvious than the dangers of such a practice? Is it not 
 evident that by applying super-superlatives to things petty 
 or commonplace, we must exhaust our vocabulary, so that 
 when a really great thing is to be described, we shall be 
 bankrupt of adjectives? It is true there is no more unpar- 
 donable sin than dulness; but, to avoid being drowsy, it is 
 not necessary that our "good Homers" should be always 
 electrifying us with a savage intensity of expression. 
 There is nothing of which a reader tires so soon as of a 
 continual blaze of brilliant periods, a style in which a 
 "qu' il mourut" and a "let there be light" are crowded 
 into every line. On the other hand, there is nothing which 
 adds so much to the beauty of style as contrast. Where all 
 men are giants, there are no giants; where all is emphatic 
 in style, there is no emphasis. Travel a few months among 
 the mountains, and you will grow as sick of the everlast- 
 ing monotony of grandeur, of beetling cliffs and yawning 
 chasms, as of an eternal succession of plains. Yet in 
 defiance of this obvious truth, the sensational writer thinks
 
 164 WORDS; THEIR USE AND AHI/SK. 
 
 the reader will deem him dull unless every sentence blazes 
 with meaning, and every paragraph is crammed with 
 power. His intellect is always armed cap-a-pie, and every 
 passage is an approved attitude of mental carte and tierce. 
 If he were able to create a world, there would probably be 
 no latent heat in it, and no twilight; and should he drop 
 his pen and turn painter, his pictures would all be fore- 
 ground, with no more perspective than those of the Chinese. 
 It is a law of oratory, and indeed of all discourse, 
 whether oral or written, that it is .the subdued expression 
 of conviction and feeling, when the speaker or writer, in- 
 stead of giving vent to his emotions, veils them in part, 
 and suffers only glimpses of them to be seen, that is the 
 most powerful. It is the man who is all but mastered by 
 his excitement, but who, at the very point of being mas- 
 tered, masters himself, apparently cool when he is at a 
 white heat, whose eloquence is most conquering. When 
 the speaker, using a gentler mode of expression than the 
 case might warrant, appears to stifle his feelings and studi- 
 ously to keep them within bounds, a reaction is produced in 
 the hearer's mind, and, rushing into the opposite extreme, 
 he is moved more deeply than by the most vehement and 
 passionate declamation. The jets of flame that escape now 
 and then, the suppressed bursts of feeling, the partial 
 eruptions of passion, are regarded as but hints or faint 
 intimations of the volcano within. Balzac, in one of his 
 tales, tells of an artist, who, by a few touches of his pencil, 
 could give to a most commonplace scene an air of over- 
 powering horror, and throw over 'the most ordinary and 
 prosaic objects a spectral air of crime and blood. Through 
 a half-opened door you see a bed with the clothes confusedly 
 heaped, as in rfome death-struggle, over an undefined object
 
 SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 165 
 
 which fancy whispers must be a bleeding corpse; on the 
 Moor you see a slipper, an upset candlestick, and a knife 
 perhaps; and these hints tell the story of blood more sig- 
 nificantly and more powerfully than the most elaborate 
 detail, because the imagination of man is more powerful 
 than art itself. So with Hood's description of the Haunted 
 House : 
 
 " Over all there hung a cloud of fear, 
 
 A sense of mystery the spirit daunted. 
 And said, as plain as whisper to the ear, 
 The place is haunted!" 
 
 Thoreau, describing an interview he had at Concord 
 with John Brown, notices as one of the latter's marked 
 peculiarities, that he did not overstate anything, but spoke 
 within bounds. " He referred to what his family had suf- 
 fered in Kansas, without ever giving the least vent to his 
 pent-up fire. It was a volcano with an ordinary chimney- 
 flue.'" In one of the published letters of the late Rev. P. 
 W. Eobertson, there are some admirable comments on a 
 letter, full of strongly-expressed religious sentiments, pious 
 resolutions, etc., which he had received from a fashionable 
 lady. The letter, he says, "is in earnest so far as it goes; 
 only that fatal facility of strong words expresses feeling 
 which will seek for itself no other expression. She believes 
 or means what she says, but the very vehemence of the 
 expression injures her, for really it expresses the penitence 
 of a St. Peter, and would not be below the mark if it were 
 meant to describe the bitter tears with which he bewailed 
 his crime; but when such language is used for trifles, there 
 remains nothing stronger for the aivful crises of human life. 
 It is like Draco's code, death for larceny, and there re- 
 mains for parricide or treason only death."
 
 166 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Let us, then, be as chary of our superlatives as of our 
 Sunday suit. Hardly a greater mistake can be made in 
 regard to expression, than to suppose that a uniform in- 
 tensity of style is a proof of mental power. So far is this 
 from being true, that it may safely be said that such inten- 
 sity not only implies a want of truthfulness and simplicity, 
 but even of earnestness and real force. Intensity is not a 
 characteristic of nature, in spirit or in matter. The sur- 
 face of the earth is not made up of mountains and valleys, 
 but, for the most part, of gentle undulations. The ocean is 
 not always in a rage, but, if not calm, its waves rise and 
 fall with gentle fluctuation. Hurricanes and tempests are 
 the extraordinary, not the usual, conditions of our atmos- 
 phere. Not only the strongest thinkers-, but the most pow- 
 erful orators, have been distinguished rather for modera- 
 tion than for exaggeration in expression. The great secret 
 of Daniel Webster's strength as a speaker lay in the fact 
 that he made it a practice to understate rather than to 
 overstate his confidence in the force of his own ai'guments, 
 and in the logical necessity of his conclusions. The sober 
 and solid tramp of his style reflected the movements of an 
 intellect that palpably respected the relations and dimen- 
 sions of things, and to which exaggeration would have 
 been an immorality. Holding that violence of language 
 is evidence of feebleness of thought and lack of reasoning 
 power, he kept his auditor constantly in advance of him, 
 by suggestion rather than by strong asseveration, and by 
 calmly stating the facts that ought to move the hearer. 
 
 * 
 
 instead of by tearing passion to tatters, the man being 
 always felt to be greater than the man's feelings. Such 
 has been the method of all great rhetoricians of ancient 
 and modern times.
 
 SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 167 
 
 The most effective speakers are not those who tell all 
 they think or feel, but those who, by maintaining an 
 austere conscientiousness of phrase, leave on their hearers 
 the impression of reserved power. On the other hand, if 
 we do the work of a pistol with a twenty-four pounder, 
 or kill cock robins with Paixhans, and, when anything 
 more formidable is to be destroyed, touch off the fusee of 
 a volcano, we shall find, when we come to the real tug 
 of war, that our instruments of offense are weak, worn 
 out and worthless. Great bastions of military strength 
 must lie at rest in times of peace, that they may be able 
 to execute their destructive agencies in times of war; and 
 so let it be with the superlatives of our tongue. Never 
 call on the " tenth legion," or " the old guard," except 
 on occasions corresponding to the dignity and weight 
 of those tremendous forces. Say plain things in a plain 
 way, and then, when you have occasion to send a sharp 
 arrow at your enemy, you will not find your quiver empty 
 of shafts which you wasted before they were wanted. 
 
 "You should not speak to think, nor think to speak; 
 But words and thoughts should of themselves ontwell 
 From inner fullness: chest and heart should swell 
 To give them birth. Better be dumb a week 
 Than idly prattle; better in leisure sleek 
 Lie fallow-minded, than a brain compel 
 To wasting plenty that hath yielded well, 
 Or strive to crop a soil too thin and bleak. 
 One true thought, from the deepest heart up-springing, 
 May from within a whole life fertilize; 
 One true word, like the lightning sudden gleaming, 
 May rend the night of a whole world of lies. 
 Much speech, much theught, may often be but seeming, 
 Bat in one truth might boundless ever lies."
 
 168 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 
 
 Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna, should be our motto regarding both our 
 country and our country's tongue. HARE. 
 
 When you doubt between words, use the plainest, the commonest, the 
 most idiomatic. Eschew tine words as you would rouge; love simple ones 
 as you would native roses on your cheek. IB. 
 
 Were I mistress of fifty languages, I would think in the deep German, con- 
 verse in the gay French, write in the copious English, sing in the majestic Span- 
 ish, deliver in the noble Greek, and make love in the soft Italian. MADAME DE 
 STAEL. 
 
 Words have their proper places, just like men ; 
 
 We listen to, not venture to reprove, 
 
 I^arge language swelling under gilded domes, 
 
 Byzantine, Syrian, Persepolitan. LANDOR. 
 
 IT is a question of deep interest to all public speakers 
 and writers, and one which has provoked not a little 
 discussion of late years, whether the Saxon or the Romanic 
 part of our language should be preferred by those who 
 would employ " the Queen's English " with potency and 
 effect. Of late it has been the fashion to cry up the native 
 element at the expense of the foreign; and among the cham- 
 pions of the former we may name Dr. Whewell, of Cam- 
 bridge, and a modern Rector of the University of Glasgow, 
 whom De Quincey censures for an erroneous direction to 
 the students to that effect. We may also add Lord Stanley, 
 one of the most brilliant and polished speakers in the 
 British Parliament, who, in an address some years ago to 
 the students of the same University, after expressing his 
 surprise that so few persons, comparatively, in Great Brit-
 
 SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 169 
 
 ain, have acquainted themselves with the origin, the his- 
 tory and the gradual development of that mother tongue 
 which is already spoken over half the world, which is des- 
 tined to yet further geographical extension, and which em- 
 bodies many of the noblest thoughts that have ever issued 
 from the brain of man, adds: " Depend upon it, it is the 
 plain Saxon phrase, not the term borrowed from Greek or 
 Roman literature, that, whether in speech or writing, goes 
 straightest and strongest to men's heads and hearts." On 
 the other hand " the Opium-Eater," commenting on a 
 remark of Coleridge that Wordsworth's "Excursion" bristles 
 beyond most poems with polysyllabic words of Greek or 
 Latin origin, asserts that so must it ever be in meditative 
 poetry upon solemn, philosophic themes. The gamut of 
 ideas needs a corresponding gamut of expressions; the scale 
 of the thinking, which ranges through every key, exacts for 
 the artist an unlimited command over the entire scale of 
 the instrument he employs. 
 
 It has been computed, he adds, that the Italian opera 
 has not above six hundred words in its whole vocabulary: 
 so narrow is the range of its emotions, and so little are 
 those emotions disposed to expand themselves into any 
 variety of thinking. The same remark applies to that class 
 of simple, household, homely passion, which belongs to the 
 early ballad poetry. " Pass from these narrow fields of the 
 intellect, where the relations of the objects are so few and 
 simple, and the whole prospect so bounded, to the immeas- 
 urable and sea-like arena upon which Shakspeare careers, 
 co-infinite with life itself, yes, and with something more 
 than life. Here is the other pole, the opposite extreme. 
 And what is the choice of diction? What is the lexis ? Is 
 it Saxon exclusively, or is it Saxon by preference? So far
 
 170 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 from that, the Latinity is intense, not, indeed, in his con- 
 struction, but in his choice of words; and so continually 
 are these Latin words used, with a critical respect to their 
 earliest (and where that happens to have existed, to their 
 unfigurative) meaning ; that, upon this one argument I 
 would rely for upsetting the else impregnable thesis of Dr. 
 Farmer as to Shakspeare's learning. . . These ' diction- 
 ary' words are indispensable to a writer, not only in the 
 proportion by which he transcends other writers as to 
 extent and as to subtilty of thinking, but also as to eleva- 
 tion and sublimity. Milton was not an extensive or dis- 
 cursive thinker, as Shakspeare was; for the motions of his 
 mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the plan- 
 ets; not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things 
 into its sphere; not multiform: repulsion was the law of 
 his intellect, he moved in solitary grandeur. Yet, merely 
 from this quality of grandeur, unapproachable grandeur, 
 his intellect demanded a larger infusion of Latinity into 
 his diction." De Quineey concludes, therefore, that the 
 true scholar will manifest a partiality for neither part of 
 the language, but will be governed in his choice of words 
 by the theme he is handling. 
 
 This we believe to be the true answer to the question. 
 The English language has a special dowry of power in its 
 double-headed origin; the Saxon part of the language ful- 
 fills one set of functions; the Latin, another. Neither is 
 good or bad absolutely, but only in its relation to its sub- 
 ject, and according to. the treatment which the subject 
 is meant to receive. The Saxon has nerve, terseness and 
 simplicity; it smacks of life and experience, and "puts 
 small and convenient handles to things, handles that 
 are easy to grasp" ; but it has neither height nor breadth
 
 SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 171 
 
 for every theme. To confine ourselves to it would be, 
 therefore, a most egregious error. The truth is, it is no 
 one element which constitutes the power and efficiency of 
 our noble and expressive tongue, but the great multitude 
 and the rich variety of the elements which enter into its 
 composition. Its architectural order is neither Doric, 
 Ionic, nor Corinthian, but essentially composite; a splendid 
 mosaic, to the formation of which many ancient and mod- 
 ern languages have contributed; defective in unity and 
 symmetrical grace of proportion, but of vast resources 
 and of immense power. With such a wealth of words at 
 our command, to confine ourselves to the pithy but limited 
 Saxon, or to employ it chiefly, would be to practice a foolish 
 economy, to be poor in the midst of plenty, like the 
 miser amid his money-bags. All experiments of this kind 
 will fail as truly, if not as signally, as that of Charles 
 James Fox, who, an intense admirer of the Saxon, at- 
 tempted to portray in that dialect the Revolution of 1688, 
 and produced a book which his warmest admirers admitted 
 to be meagre, dry, and spiritless, without picturesque- 
 ness, color, or cadence. 
 
 It is true that within a certain limited and narrow circle 
 of ideas, we can get along with Saxon words very well. 
 The loftiest poetry, the most fervent devotion, even the 
 most earnest and impassioned oratory, may all be expressed 
 in words almost purely Teutonic; but the moment we 
 come to the abstract and the technical, to discussion and 
 speculation, we cannot stir a step without drawing on 
 foreign sources. Simple narrative, a pathos resting upon 
 artless circumstances, elementary feelings, homely and 
 household affections, these are all most happily expressed 
 by the old Saxon vocabulary ; but a passion which rises
 
 172 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 into grandeur, which is complex, elaborate, and interveined 
 with high meditative feelings, would languish or abso- 
 lutely halt, without aid from the Romanic part of the 
 vocabulary. If Anglo-Saxon is the frame-work or skele- 
 ton of our language, the spine on which the structure of 
 our speech is hung, if it is the indispensable medium of 
 familiar converse and the business of life, it no more 
 fills out the full and rounded outline of our language, 
 than the skeleton, nerves, and sinews form the whole of 
 the human body. It is the classical contributions, the 
 hundreds and thousands of Romanic words which during 
 and since the sixteenth century have found a home in our 
 English speech, that have furnished its spiritual concep- 
 tions, and endowed the material body with a living soul. 
 These words would never have been adopted, had they 
 not been absolutely necessary to express new modes and 
 combinations of thought. The language has gained im- 
 mensely by the infusion, not only in richness of synonyme 
 and the power of expressing nice shades of thought and 
 feeling, but more than all, in light-footed polysyllables 
 that trip singing to the music of verse. If the saying of 
 Shakspeare, that 
 
 "The learned pate ducks to the golden fool," 
 
 is more expressive than it would be if couched in Latin 
 words, would not the fine thought that 
 
 "Nice customs courtesy to kings," 
 
 be greatly injured by substituting any other words for 
 nice and courtesy? It has been observed that Wordsworth's 
 famous ode, " Intimations of Immortality," translated into 
 Hints of Deathlessness, would hiss like an angry gander. 
 Instead of Shakspeare's
 
 SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC V 173 
 
 " Age cannot wither her, 
 Nor custom stale her infinite variety," 
 
 say " her boundless manifoldness," and would not the sen- 
 timent suffer in exact proportion with the music? With 
 what equally expressive Saxon terms would you supply the 
 place of such words as the long ones blended with the short 
 in the exclamation of the horror-stricken Macbeth: 
 
 " Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
 Clean from my hand? No! this my hand will rather 
 The multitudinous sea incarnadine, 
 Making the green one red." 
 
 As the poet Lowell justly asks, could anything be more 
 expressive than the huddling epithet which here implies 
 the tempest- tossed soul of the speaker, and at the same 
 time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean more vividly 
 than does ^Eschylus its rippling sunshine? "'Multitudinous 
 seas,' what an expression! You feel the wide weltering 
 waste of confused and tumbling waves around you in that 
 single word. What beauty and wealth of color too in 
 incarnadine, a word capable of dyeing an ocean! and then, 
 after these grand polysyllables, how terse and stern comes 
 in the solid Saxon, as if a vast cloud had condensed into 
 great heavy drops, the deep one red."* Is it not plain 
 that if you substitute any less massive words for the 
 sesquipedalia verba, the sonoYous terms "multitudinous" 
 and "incarnadine," the whole grandeur of the passage 
 would collapse at once? 
 
 Among the British orators of this century few have 
 had a greater command of language, or used it with 
 nicer discrimination, than Canning. What can be happier 
 than the blending of the native and the foreign elements 
 in the following eloquent passage? Most of the italicized 
 words are Saxon: 
 
 * W. W. Story.
 
 174 WORDS; THEIR USE AND AIJUSK. 
 
 "Our present repose is no more a proof of our inability to act than the 
 state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen tho*<- miy/ity /// </.. x 
 that Jloat in the waters above your town is a proof that they are devoid of 
 strength or incapable of being fitted for action. You well know, gentlemen, 
 how soon one of those stupendous masses now reposing on their shadows in per- 
 fect stillness how soon, upon any call c f patriotism or of necessity, it would 
 assume (he likeness of an animated thiny, instinct with life and motion how 
 soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage how quickly it would put 
 forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect Us scattered elements of strength, and 
 awake its dormant thunders. Such as is one of those magnificent machines 
 when springing from inaction into a display of its strength, such is England 
 itself, while, apparently passive and motionless, she silently causes her 
 power to be put forth on an adequate occasion." 
 
 In the famous passage in Sterne's "Tristam Shandy," 
 which has been pronounced the most musical in our lan- 
 guage, nearly all the words are Saxon: 
 
 "The accusing spirit that flew up to Heaven's chancery with the oath, blushed 
 as he gave it in, and the recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear 
 upon the word, and blotted it out forever. ' 
 
 It is true, as we have already said, that the Saxon has 
 the advantage of being the aboriginal element, the basis 
 and not the superstructure, of the language; it is the dia- 
 lect of the nursery, and its words therefore, being conse- 
 crated to 'the feelings by early use, are full of secret sug- 
 gestions and echoes, which greatly multiply their power. 
 Its words, though not intrinsically, yet to us, from associa- 
 tion, are more concrete and pictorial than those derived 
 from the Latin ; and this is particularly true of many beau- 
 tiful words we have lost. How much more expressive to 
 us is " sea-robber " than " pirate " ; " sand- waste " than 
 " desert " ; " eye-bite " than " fascinate " ; " mill-race '' than 
 " channel " ; " water- fright " than " hydrophobia " ; " moon- 
 ling" than "lunatic"; "show-holiness" than "hypocrisy"; 
 " in-wit " than " conscience " ; " gold-hoard " than " treas- 
 ure"! Therefore, as De Quincey says, "wherever the 
 passion of a poem is of that sort which uses, prrxitiiH* or
 
 SAXOX WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 175 
 
 pusfii fate* the ideas, without seeking to extend them, Saxon 
 will be the ' cocoon ' (to speak by the language applied to 
 silk-worms), which the poem spins for itself. But on the 
 other hand, where the motion of the feeling is by and 
 thronyh the ideas, where (as in religious or meditative 
 poetry, Young's, for instance, or Cowper's), the pathos 
 creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of the 
 thinking, there the Latin will predominate ; and so much 
 so that, whilst the flesh, the blood and the muscle will be 
 often almost exclusively Latin, the articulations only, or 
 hinges of connection, will be Anglo-Saxon." 
 
 Let us be thankful, then, that our language has other 
 elements than the Saxon, admirable as that is. Let us be 
 grateful for that inheritance of collateral wealth, which, 
 by engrafting our Anglo-Saxon stem with the mixed dia- 
 lect of Normandy, caused ultimately the whole opulence 
 of Roman, and even of Grecian thought, to play freely 
 through the pulses of our native tongue. No doubt the 
 immediate result was anything but pleasant. For a long 
 time after the language was thrown again into the cru- 
 cible, Britons, Saxons and Normans talked a jargon fit 
 neither for gods nor men. It was a chaos of language, 
 hissing, sputtering, bubbling like a witch's caldron. But 
 luckily the Saxon element was yet plastic and unfrozen, so 
 that the new elements could fuse with its own, thus form- 
 ing that wondrous instrument of expression which we now 
 enjoy, fitted fully to reflect the thoughts of the myriad- 
 minded Shakspeare, yet, at the same time, with enough 
 remaining of its old forest stamina for imparting a mas- 
 culine depth to the sublimities of Milton or the Hebrew 
 prophets, and to the Historic Scriptures that patriarchal 
 simplicity which is one of their greatest charms.
 
 176 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 We are aware that, in reply to all this, it may be asked, 
 Are not ninety-three words out of every hundred in the 
 Bible Anglo-Saxon; and where are the life, beauty and 
 freshness of our language to be found in so heaped a meas- 
 ure as in that pure well of English, the Bible? Nothing 
 can be plainer or simpler than its vocabulary, yet how rich 
 is it in all that concerns the moral, the spiritual and even 
 the intellectual interests of humanity! Is it logic that 
 we ask? What a range of abstract thought, what an 
 armory of dialectic weapons, what an enginery of vocal 
 implements for moving the soul, do we find in tbe epistles 
 of St. Paul! Is it rhetoric that we require? "Where," 
 in the language of South, " do we find such a natural pre- 
 vailing pathos as in the lamentations of Jeremiah? One 
 would think that every letter was written with a tear, 
 every word was the noise of a breaking heart; that the 
 author was a man compacted of sorrow, disciplined to grief 
 from his infancy, one who never breathed but in sighs, nor 
 spoke but in a groan." Yet, while our translation owes 
 much of its beauty to the Saxon, there are passages the 
 grandeur of which would be greatly diminished by the 
 substitution of Saxon words for the Latin ones. In the 
 following the Latin words italicized are absolutely neces- 
 sary to preserve one of the sublimest rhythms of the Bible. 
 " And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, 
 and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty 
 thunderings, saying, ' Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent 
 reigneth.' " 
 
 The truth is, the translators of the Bible, while they 
 have employed a large percentage of Saxon words, have 
 hit the golden mean in their version, never hesitating to 
 use a Latin word when the sense or the rhythm demanded
 
 SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC ? 177 
 
 it; and hence we have the entire volume of revelation in 
 the happiest form in which human wit and learning have 
 ever made it accessible to man. This an English Catholic 
 writer, a convert from the Anglican church, has mourn- 
 fully acknowledged in the following touching passage: 
 " Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and mar- 
 vellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the 
 great strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on 
 the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the 
 sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how 
 he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things 
 rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, 
 and the anchor of national seriousness. . . The memory of 
 the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of child- 
 hood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the 
 griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. 
 It is the representative of his best moments, and all that 
 there has been about him of soft and gentle, and pure 
 and penitent and good, speaks to him for ever out of his 
 English Bible. . . It is his sacred thing, which doubt 
 has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. In the 
 length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant 
 with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual 
 biography is not in his Saxon Bible."* 
 
 It is a very striking and suggestive fact that those very 
 writers who award the palm for expressiveness to the 
 Saxon part of our language, cannot extol the Saxon with- 
 out the help of Latin words. Dr. Gregory tells us that 
 when, in the company of Robert Hall, he chanced to use 
 the term " felicity," three or four times in rather quick 
 succession, the latter asked him: " Why do you say felicity? 
 
 * Faber.
 
 178 WOJIDS; TIIKIH USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Happiness is a better word, more musical, and genuine 
 English, coming from the Saxon." "Not more musical," 
 said Dr. Gregory. "Yes, more musical, and so are all 
 words derived from the Saxon, generally. Listen, sir: 
 ' My heart is smitten, and withered like grass.' There is 
 plaintive music. Listen again, sir: 'Under the shadow of 
 thy wings will I rejoice.' There is cheerful music." " Yes, 
 but rejoice is French." "True, but all the rest is Saxon; 
 and rejoice is almost out of time with the other woi'ds. 
 Listen again : ' Thou hast delivered my soul from death, 
 my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.' All Saxon, 
 sir, except delivered. I could think of the word tear till 
 I wept." But whence did Robert Hall get the words 
 "musical," and "plaintive music"? Are they not from 
 the Greek and the French? Is not this stabbing a man 
 with his own weapons? It is a curious fact, that, in spite 
 of this eulogy on Saxon words, a more than ordinary per- 
 centage of the words used in Mr. Hall's writings are of 
 Romanic origin. Again, even Macaulay, one of the most 
 brilliant and powerful of all English writers, finds it im- 
 possible to laud the Saxon part of the language without 
 borrowing nearly half the words of his famous panegyric 
 from the Romanic part of the vocabulary. In his article 
 on Bunyan, in a passage written in studied commendation 
 of the " pure old Saxon " English, we find, omitting the 
 particles and wheel work, one hundred and twenty-one 
 words, of which fifty-one, or over forty-two per cent., are 
 classical or alien. In other words, this great English 
 writer, than whom few have a more imperial command 
 over all the resources of expression, finds the Saxon insuf- 
 ficient for his eloquent eulogy on Saxon, and is obliged
 
 SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 179 
 
 to borrow four-tenths of his words, and those the most 
 emphatic ones, from the imported stock! 
 
 It is an important fact, that while we can readily frame 
 a sentence wholly of Anglo-Saxon, we cannot do so with 
 words entirely Latin, because the determinative particles, 
 the bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure, must be 
 Saxon. Macaulay, in his famous contrast of Dr. Johnson's 
 conversational language with that of his writings, has viv- 
 idly illustrated the superiority of a Saxon-English to a 
 highly Latinized diction. "The expressions which came 
 first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. 
 When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out 
 of English into Johnsonese. ' When we were taken up 
 stairs,' says he in one of his letters from the Hebrides, 
 ' a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of 
 us was to lie.' This incident is recorded in his published 
 Journey as follows : ' Out of one of the beds on which we 
 were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man as black 
 as a Cyclops from the forge.' Sometimes," Macaulay adds, 
 " Johnson translated aloud. ' The Rehearsal,' he said, ' has 
 not wit enough to keep it sweet;' then, after a pause, 'It 
 has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.' " 
 Doubtless Johnson, like Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon, 
 thought that he was refining the language by straining it 
 through the lees of Latin and Greek, so as to imbue it 
 with the tone and color of the learned tongues, and clear 
 it of the barbarous Saxon; while real purity rather springs 
 from such words as are our own, and peculiar to our 
 fatherland. Nevertheless, the elephantine diction of the 
 Doctor proved, in the end, a positive blessing to the lan- 
 guage : for by pushing the artificial or classic system to
 
 180 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 an extreme, it brought it into disrepute, and led men to 
 cultivate again the native idiom. 
 
 In conclusion, to sum up our views of the matter, we 
 would say to every young writer, give no fantastic pref- 
 erence to either Saxon or Latin, the two great wings on 
 which our magnificent English soars and sings, for you can 
 spare neither. The union of the two gives us an afflu- 
 ence of synonymes and a nicety of discrimination which no 
 homogeneous tongue can boast. Never use a Romanic word 
 when a Teutonic one will do as well; for the former car- 
 ries a comparatively cold and conventional signification to 
 an English ear. Between the sounding Latin and the 
 homely, idiomatic Saxon, there is often as much difference 
 in respect to a power of awakening associations, as between 
 a gong and a peal of village bells. Pleasant though it be to 
 read the pages of one who writes in a foreign tongue, as 
 it is pleasant to visit distant lands, yet there is always 
 the charm of home, with all its witchery, in the good old 
 Anglo-Saxon of our fathers. Of the words that we heard 
 in our childhood, there are some which have stored up in 
 them an ineffable sweetness and flavor which make them 
 precious ever after; there are others which are words of 
 might, of power, old, brawny, large -meaning words, 
 heavily laden with associations, which, when they strike 
 the imagination, awaken tender and tremulous memories, 
 obscure, subtle, and yet most powerful. Our language is 
 essentially Teutonic; the whole skeleton of it is thoroughly 
 So; all its grammatical forms, all its most common and 
 necessary words, are still identical with that old mother 
 tongue whose varying forms lived on the lips of Arminius 
 and of Hengest, of Harold of Norway, and of Harold of 
 England, of Alaric, of Alboin, and of Charles the Great.
 
 SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 181 
 
 On the other hand, never scruple to use a Romanic word 
 when the Saxon will not do as well; that is, do not over- 
 Teutonize from any archaic pedantry, but use the strongest, 
 the most picturesque, or the most beautiful word, from 
 whatever source it may come. The Latin words, though 
 less home-like, must nevertheless be deemed as truly den- 
 izen in the language as the Saxon, as being no alien 
 interlopers, but possessing the full right of citizenship. 
 Perhaps of all our writers Shakspeare may be deemed in 
 this matter the student's best friend. No one better knows 
 how far the Saxon can go, or so often taxes its utmost 
 resources; yet no one better knows its poverty and weak- 
 ness; and, therefore, while in treating homely and familiar 
 themes he uses simple words, and shows by his total absti- 
 nence from Latin words in some of his most beautiful 
 passages, that he understands the monosyllabic music of 
 our tongue, yet in his loftiest flights it .is on the broad 
 pinions of the Roman eagle that he soars, and, we shall 
 find, if we regard him closely, that every feather is plucked 
 from its wingr.
 
 182 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 
 
 Le style c'est de 1' homme. BUPFON. 
 
 Altogether the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; 
 therefore, if any man wish to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his 
 thoughts; and if he would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble 
 Boul. Goih-HE. 
 
 So long as no words are uttered but in faithfulness, so long the art of lan- 
 guage goes on exalting itself; but the moment it is shaped and chiselled on 
 external principles, it falls into frivolity, and perishes. ... No noble or right 
 style was ever yet founded but but of a sincere heart. KUSKIN. 
 
 IT was a saying of the wily diplomatist, Talleyrand, that 
 language was given to man to conceal his thought. 
 There is a class of writers at the present day who seem to 
 be of the same opinion, sham philosophers for the most 
 part, who have an ambition to be original without the 
 capacity, and seek to gain the credit of soaring to the 
 clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist. As all objects 
 look larger in a fog, so their thoughts " loom up through the 
 haze of their style with a sort of dusky magnificence that 
 is mistaken for sublimity." This style of writing is some- 
 times called "transcendental"; and if by this is meant that 
 it transcends all the established laws of rhetoric, and all 
 ordinary powers of comprehension, the name is certainly 
 a happy one. It is a remark often made touching these 
 shallow-profound authors, " What a pity that So-and-so 
 does not express thoughts so admirable in intelligible 
 English!" whereas, in fact, but for the strangeness and 
 obscurity of the style, which fills the ear while it famishes
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 183 
 
 the mind, the matter would seem commonplace. The sim- 
 ple truth is, that the profoundest authors are always the 
 clearest, and the chiaro-oscuro which these transcendent- 
 alists affect, instead of shrouding thoughts which mankind 
 cannot well afford to lose, is but a cloak for their intel- 
 lectual nakedness, the convenient shelter for meagreness 
 of thought and poverty of expression. As the banks and 
 shoals of the sea are the ordinary resting-place of fogs. 
 so is it with thought and language; the cloud almost in- 
 variably indicates the shallow. 
 
 But, whether language be or be not fitted to cloak our 
 ideas, as Talleyrand and Goldsmith before him supposed, 
 there are few persons to whom it has not seemed at times 
 inadequate to express them. How many ideas occur to us 
 in our daily reflections, which, though we toil after them 
 for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize them and render 
 them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand times, 
 the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled 
 birds, they have swept by him, thoughts so swift and so 
 many-hued that any attempt to arrest or describe them 
 seemed like mockery? How common it is, after reflecting 
 on some subject in one's study, or a lonely walk, till the 
 whole mind has become heated and filled with the ideas it 
 suggests, to feel a descent into the veriest tameness when 
 attempting to embody those ideas in written or spoken 
 words! A thousand bright images lie scattered in the 
 fancy, but we cannot picture them; glimpses of glorious 
 visions appear to us, but we cannot arrest them; question- 
 able shapes float by us, but, when we question them, they 
 will not answer. Even Byron, one of the greatest masters 
 of eloquent expression, who was able to condense into one 
 word, that fell like a thunderbolt, the power and anguish
 
 184 WOBDS ; THEIK USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 of emotion, experienced the same difficulty, and tells us in 
 lines of splendid declamation: 
 
 " Could I embody and unbosom now 
 That which is most within me could I wreak 
 My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw 
 Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, 
 All that I would have sought, and all I seek, 
 Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe into one word, 
 And that one word were lightning, I would speak; 
 But. as it is, I live and die unheard, 
 With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword." 
 
 So, too, that great verbal artist, Tennyson, complains: 
 
 "I sometimes hold it half a sin 
 To put in words the grief I feel; 
 For words, like Nature, half reveal, 
 And half conceal the soul within." 
 
 De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have 
 not words corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly 
 developed nature, nor can ever express themselves in acts, 
 but must lie appreciable by God only, like the silent 
 melodies in a great musician's heart, never to roll forth 
 from harp or organ. 
 
 " The sea of thought is a boundless sea, 
 Its brightest gems are not thrown on the beach; 
 The waves that would tell of the mystery 
 Die and fall on the shore of speech." 
 
 The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a 
 class of persons who have conception without expression, 
 gifted, thoughtful men, lovers of goodness and truth, who 
 have no lack of ideas, but who hesitate and stammer when 
 they would put them into language. Such men they term 
 men of " passive genius." Their minds are like black 
 glass, absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give 
 out any for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them 
 " the dumb ones of earth," for, like Zachariah, they have 
 visions of high import, but are speechless when they would
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WOEDS. 185 
 
 tell them. The infirmity of these dumb ones, is, however, the 
 infirmity, in a less degree, of all men, even the most fluent; 
 for there are thoughts which mock at all attempts to ex- 
 press them, however " well-languaged " the thinker may be. 
 It is not true, then, that language is, as Vinet character- 
 izes it, "lapensde devenue matiere;" for the very expression 
 involves a contradiction. Words are nothing but sym- 
 bols, imperfect, too, at best, and to make the symbol in 
 any way a measure of the thought is to bring down the 
 infinite to the measure of the finite. It is true that our 
 words mean more than it is in their power to express, 
 shadow forth far more than they can define; yet, when 
 their capacity has been exhausted, there is much which 
 they fail, not only to express, but even to hint. There are 
 abysses of thought which the plummet of language can 
 never fathom. Like the line in mathematics, which con- 
 tinually approaches to a curve, but, though produced for- 
 ever, does not cut it, language can never be more than an 
 asymptote to thought. Expression, even in Shakspeare, 
 has its limits. No power of language enables man to 
 reveal the features of the mystic Isis, on whose statue was 
 inscribed: "I am all which hath been, which is, and shall 
 be, and no mortal hath ever lifted my veil." 
 
 "Pull oft 
 
 Onr thoughts drown speech, like to a foaming force 
 Which thunders down the echo it creates: 
 Words are like the sea-shells on the shore; they show 
 Where the mind ends, and not how far it has been." 
 
 Notwithstanding all this, however, there is truth in 
 the lines of Boileau: 
 
 "Selon que notre idee est plus ou moins obscure, 
 L'expression la suit, ou moins nette, on plus pnre; 
 Ce que Ton conceit bien s'enonce clairement, 
 Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisement."
 
 186 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 In spite of the complaints of those who, like the great 
 poets we have quoted, have expressed in language of 
 wondrous force and felicity their feeling of the inadequacy 
 of language, it is doubtless true, as a general thing, that 
 impression and expression are relative ideas; that what 
 we clearly conceive we can clearly convey; and that the 
 failure to embody our thoughts is less the fault of our 
 mother tongue than of our own deficient genius. What 
 subject, indeed, is there in the whole boundless range of 
 imagination, which some English author has not treated in 
 his mother tongue with a nicety of definition, an accuracy 
 of portraiture, a gorgeousness of coloring, a delicacy of 
 discrimination, and a strength and force of expression 
 which fall scarcely short of perfection itself? Is there 
 not something almost like sorcery in the potent spell which 
 some of these mighty magicians of language are able to 
 exercise over the soul? Yet the right arrangement of the 
 right words is the whole secret of the witchery, a charm 
 within the reach of any one of equal genius. Possess 
 yourself of the necessary ideas, and feel them deeply, and 
 you will not often complain of the barrenness of language. 
 You will find it abounding in riches, exuberant beyond 
 the demand of your intensest thought. " The statue is 
 not more surely included in the block of marble, than is 
 all conceivable splendor of utterance in 'Webster's Una- 
 bridged.'" As Goethe says: 
 
 "Be thine to seek the honest gain, 
 
 No shallow-sounding fool; 
 Sound sense finds utterance for itself, 
 
 Without the critic's rule; 
 If to your heart your tongue be true, 
 
 Why hunt for words with much ado? 
 
 But we hear some one say, is this the only secret of
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 187 
 
 apt words? Is nothing more necessary to be done by one 
 who would obtain a command of language? Does not Dr. 
 Blair tell us to study the " Spectator," if we would learn 
 to write well; and does not Dr. Johnson, too, declare that 
 "whoever wishes to obtain an English style, familiar but 
 not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his 
 days and nights to the volumes of Addison?" Yes, and 
 it is a pity that Johnson did not act upon his own advice. 
 That it is well for a writer to familiarize himself with 
 the best models of style, (models sufficiently numerous to 
 prevent that mannerism which is apt to result from uncon- 
 scious imitation, when he is familiar with but one,) nobody 
 can doubt. A man's vocabulary depends largely on the 
 company he keeps; and without a proper vocabulary no. 
 man can be a good writer. Words are the material that 
 the author works in, and he must use as much care in 
 their selection as the sculptor in choosing his marble or 
 the painter in choosing his colors. By profound study of 
 the masterpieces of literature he may not only enrich his 
 vocabulary, but learn in some degree the secret of their 
 charm, detect his own deficiencies, and elevate and refine 
 his taste to a degree that can be reached in no other way. 
 But to suppose that a good style can be acquired by imitat- 
 ing any one writer, or any set of writers, is one of the 
 greatest follies that can be imagined. 
 
 Such a supposition is based on the notion that fine 
 writing is an addition from without to the matter treated 
 of, a kind of ornament superinduced, or luxury indulged 
 in, by one who has sufficient genius ; whereas the brilliant 
 or powerful writer is not one who has merely a copious 
 vocabulary, and can turn on at will any number of 
 splendid phrases and swelling sentences, but he is one
 
 188 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 who has something to say, and knows how to say it. 
 Whether he dashes off his compositions at a heat, or elab- 
 orates them with fastidious nicety and care, he has but one 
 aim, which he keeps steadily before him. and that is to give 
 forth what is in him. From this very earnestness it follows 
 that whatever be the brilliancy of his diction or the har- 
 mony of his periods, whether it blaze with the splendors 
 of a gorgeous rhetoric, or take the ear prisoner with its 
 musical surprises, he never makes these an end, but has 
 always the charm of an incommunicable simplicity. 
 
 Such a person " writes passionately because he feels 
 keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too 
 clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose; he can 
 analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces 
 it as a whole and in parts, and therefore he is consistent: 
 he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. 
 When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; 
 when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He 
 always has the right word for the right idea, and never a 
 word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words 
 suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its 
 mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his 
 elocution. He expresses what all feel, but what all cannot 
 say, and his sayings pass into proverbs among the people, 
 and his phrases become household words and idioms of 
 their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich frag- 
 ments of his language, as- we see in foreign lands the 
 marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and 
 pavements of modern palaces." * 
 
 It follows from all this that there is no model style, 
 and that the kind of style demanded in any composition 
 
 * " The Idea of a University." by J. H. Newman.
 
 THE SECKET OF APT WORDS. 189 
 
 depends upon the man and his theme. The first law of 
 good writing is that it should be an expression of a man's 
 self, a reflected image of his own character. If we know 
 what the man is, we know what his style should be. If 
 it mirrors his individuality, it is, relatively, good; if it is 
 not a self-portraiture, it is bad, however polished its 
 periods, or rhythmical its cadences. The graces and witch- 
 eries of expression which charm us in an original writer, 
 offend us in a copyist. Style is sometimes, though not 
 very happily, termed the dress of thought. It is really, as 
 Wordsworth long ago declared, the incarnation of thought. 
 In Greek, the same word, Logos, stands for reason and 
 speech. and why? Because they cannot be divided; be- 
 cause thought and expression are one. They each co-exist, 
 not one with the other, but in and through the other. Not 
 till we can separate the soul and the body, life and motion, 
 the convex and concave of a curve, shall we be able to 
 divorce thought from the language which only can embody 
 it. But allowing, for the moment, that style is the verbal 
 clothing of ideas, who but the most poverty-stricken person 
 would think of wearing the clothes of another? It is true 
 that there are certain general qualities, such as clearness, 
 force, flexibility, simplicity, variety, which all good styles 
 will alike possess, just as all good clothing will have cer- 
 tain qualities in common. But for all men to clothe 
 their thoughts in the same manner would be as foolish as 
 for a giant to array himself in the garments of a dwarf, a 
 stout man in those of a thin, or a brunette in those of a 
 blonde. Robert Hall, when preaching in early life at 
 Cambridge, England, for a short time aped Dr. Johnson; 
 but he soon saw the folly of it. "I might as well have 
 attempted," said he, "to dance a hornpipe in the cum-
 
 190 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 brous costume of Gog and Magog. My puny thoughts 
 could not sustain the load of words in which I tried to 
 clothe them." 
 
 It is with varieties of style as with the varieties of the 
 human face, or of the leaves of the forest; while they 
 are obvious in their general resemblance, yet there are 
 never two indistinguishably alike. Sometimes the differ- 
 ences are very slight, so minute and subtle, as almost to 
 defy characterization; yet, like the differences in musical 
 styles which closely resemble each other, they are felt by 
 the discerning reader, and so strongly that he will scarcely 
 mistake the authorship, even on a single reading. Men of 
 similar natures will have similar styles ; but think of Waller 
 aping the gait of Wordsworth, or Leigh Hunt that of 
 Milton! Can any one conceive of Hooker's style as slip- 
 shod, of Dryden's as feeble and obscure, of Gibbon's as 
 mean and vulgar, of Burke's as timid and creeping, 
 of Carlyle's as dainty and mincing, of Emerson's as 
 diffuse and pointless, or of Napier's as lacking pictur- 
 esqueness, verve, and fire? 
 
 There are some writers of a quiet, even temperament, 
 whose sentences flow gently along like a stream through a 
 level country, that hardly disturbs the stillness of the air 
 by a sound; there are others vehement, rapid, redundant, 
 that roll on like a mountain torrent forcing its way over 
 all obstacles, and filling the valleys and woods with the echoes 
 of its roar. One author, deep in one place and shallow 
 in another, reminds you of the Ohio, here unfordable, and 
 there full of sand-bars, now hurrying on with rapid 
 current, and now expanding into lovely lakes, fringed with 
 forests and overhung with hills; another, always brimming 
 with thought, reminds you of the Mississippi, which rolls
 
 THE SECKET OF APT WORDS. . 191 
 
 onward the same vast volume, with no apparent diminu- 
 tion, from Cairo to New Orleans. " Sydney Smith, concise, 
 brisk, and brilliant, has a manner of composition which 
 exactly corresponds to those qualities; but how would Lord 
 Bacon look in Smith's sentences? How grandly the soul 
 of Milton rolls and winds through the arches and labyrinths 
 of his involved and magnificent diction, waking musical 
 echoes at every new turn and variation of its progress; but 
 how could the thought of such a light trifler as Gibber 
 travel through so glorious a maze, without being lost or 
 crushed in the journey? The plain, manly language of 
 John Locke could hardly be translated into the terminology 
 of Kant, would look out of place in the rapid and 
 sparkling movement of Cousin's periods, and would 
 appear mean in the cadences of Dugald Stewart."* 
 
 Not only has every original writer his own style, which 
 mirrors his individuality, but the writers of every age 
 differ from those of every other age. Joubert has well 
 said that if the French authors of to-day were to write as 
 men wrote in the time of Louis XIV., their style would 
 lack truthfulness, for the French of to-day have not the 
 same dispositions, the same opinions, the same manners. 
 A woman who should write like Madame Sevigne would be 
 ridiculous, because she is not Madame Sevigne. The more 
 one's writing smacks of his own character and of the 
 manners of his time, the more widely must his style 
 diverge from that of the writers who were models only 
 because they excelled in manifesting in their works either 
 the manners of their own age or their own character. Who 
 would tolerate to-day a writer who should reproduce, how- 
 ever successfully, the stately periods of Johnson, the mel- 
 
 * " Essays and Reviews," by Edwin P. Whipple.
 
 192 WORDS ; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 liHuous lines of Pope, or the faultless but nerveless periods 
 of Addison? The style that is to please to-day must be 
 dense with meaning and full of color; it must be sug- 
 gestive, sharp, and incisive. So far is imitation of the old 
 masterpieces from being commendable, that, as Joubert 
 says, good taste itself permits one to avoid imitating the 
 best styles, for taste, even good taste, changes with man- 
 ners, " Le bon gout lui-meme, en ce cas, permet qu'on 
 s'^carte du meilleur gout, car le gout change avec les 
 moeurs, meme le bon gout." 
 
 Let no man, then, aim at the cultivation of style for 
 style's sake, independently of ideas, for all such aims will 
 result in failure. To suppose that noble or impressive 
 language is a communicable trick of rhetoric and accent, 
 is one of the most mischievous of fallacies. Every writer 
 has his own ideas and feelings, his own conceptions, judg- 
 ments, discriminations, and comparisons, which are per- 
 sonal, proper to himself, in the same sense that his looks, 
 his voice, his air, his gait, and his action are personal. 
 If he has a vulgar mind, he will write vulgarly; if he has 
 a noble nature, he will write nobly; in every case, the 
 beauty or ugliness of his moral countenance, the force and 
 keenness or the feebleness of his logic, will be imaged in 
 his language. It follows, therefore, as Euskin says, that 
 all the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral; it 
 becomes accurate, if the writer desires to be true; clear, if 
 he write with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible; 
 powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant, if he has a sense 
 of rhythm and order. 
 
 This sensibility of language to the impulses and qual- 
 ities of him who uses it; its flexibility in accommodating 
 itself to all the thoughts, feelings, imaginations, and aspira-
 
 THE SECKET OF APT WORDS. 193 
 
 tions which pass within him, so as to become the faithful 
 expression of his personality, indicating the very pulsation 
 and throbbing of his intellect, and attending on his own in- 
 ward world of thought as its very shadow; and, strangest, 
 perhaps, the magical power it has to suggest the idea or 
 mood it cannot directly convey, and to give forth an aroma 
 which no analysis of word or expression reveals, is one 
 of the marvels of human speech. The writer, therefore, 
 who is so magnetized by another's genius that he cannot 
 say anything in his own way, but is perpetually imitating 
 the other's structure of sentence and turns of expression, 
 confesses his barrenness. The only way to make another's 
 style one's own is to possess one's self of his mind and 
 soul. If we would reproduce his peculiarities of diction, 
 we must first acquire the qualities that produced them. 
 "Language," says Groldwin Smith, "is not a musical instru- 
 ment into which, if a fo'oi breathe, it will make melody. 
 Its tones are evoked only by the spirit of high or tender 
 thought; and though truth is not always eloquent, real 
 eloquence is always the glow of truth." As Sainte-Beuve 
 says of the plainness and brevity of Napoleon's style, 
 " Pretendre imiter le precede de diction du heros qui sut 
 abreger Caesar lui-meme . . . il convient cV avoir fait d'aussi 
 </r<i>nl<'x clioses pour avoir le droit d'etre aussi nu." 
 
 It is not imitation, but general culture, as another has 
 said, the constant submission of a teachable apprehensive 
 mind to the influence of minds of the highest order, in 
 daily life and books, that brings out upon style its dain- 
 tiest bloom and its richest fruitage. " So in the making 
 of a fine singer, after the voice has been developed, and 
 the rudiments of vocalization have been learned, farther 
 instruction is almost of no avail. But the frequent hear- 
 9
 
 194 WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABl>h. 
 
 ing of the best music given by the best singers and in- 
 strumentalists, the living in an atmosphere of art and 
 literature, will develop and perfect a vocal style in one 
 who has the gift of song ; and, for any other, all the instruc- 
 tion of all the musical professors that ever came out of 
 Italy will do no more than teach an avoidance of positive 
 errors in musical grammar."* 
 
 The Cabalists believed that whoever found the mystic 
 word for anything attained to as absolute mastery over 
 that thing as did the robbers over the door of their cave 
 in the Arabian tale. The converse is true of expression; 
 for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought becomes 
 master of the word fitted to express it, while he who has 
 but a half-possession of it vainly seeks to torture out of 
 language the. secret of that inspiration which should be in 
 himself. The secret of force in writing or speaking lies not 
 in Blair's " Rhetoric " or Roget's " Thesaurus,'' not in hav- 
 ing a copious vocabulary, or a dozen words for every idea, 
 but in having something that you earnestly wish to 
 and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. 
 Phidias, the great Athenian sculptor, said of one of his 
 pupils that he had an inspired thumb, because the model- 
 ing clay yielded to its careless touch a grace of sweep 
 which it refused to the utmost pains of others. So he who 
 has thoroughly possessed himself of his thought, will not 
 have to hunt through his dictionary for apt and expressive 
 words, a method which is but an outside remedy for an 
 inward defect, but will find language eagerly obedient to 
 him, as if every word should say. 
 
 "Bid me discourse; I will enchant thine ear;" 
 
 and fit expressions, as Milton says, " like so many nimble 
 
 * " Words and their Uses." by Richard Grant White.
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 195 
 
 and airy servitors, will trip about him at command, and, 
 in well-ordered tiles, fall aptly into their own places." It 
 was the boast of Dante that no word had ever forced him 
 to say what he would not, though he had forced many a 
 word to say what it would not; and so will every writer, 
 who as vividly conceives and as deeply feels his theme, be 
 able to conjure out of words their uttermost secret of 
 power or pathos. 
 
 The question has been sometimes discussed whether the 
 best style is a colorless medium, which, like good glass. 
 only lets the thought be distinctly seen, or whether it im- 
 parts a pleasure apart from the ideas it conveys. There 
 are those who hold that when language is simply transpa- 
 rent, when it conies to us so refined of all its dross, so 
 spiritualized in its substance, that we lose sight of it as a 
 vehicle, and the thought stands out with clearness in all its 
 proportions. we are at the very summit of the literary 
 art. This is the character of Southey's best prose, and of 
 Paley's writing, whose statement of a false theory is so 
 lucid that it becomes a refutation. There are writers, 
 however, who charm us by their language, apart from the 
 ideas it conveys. There is a kind of mysterious perfume 
 about it, a delicious aroma, which we keenly enjoy, but for 
 which we cannot account. Poetry often possesses a beauty 
 wholly unconnected with its meaning. Who has not ad 
 mired, independently of the sense, its "jewels, five words 
 long, that, on the stretched forefinger of all time, sparkle 
 forever?" There are passages in which the mere cadence 
 of the words is by itself delicious to a delicate ear, though 
 we cannot tell how and why. We are conscious of a 
 strange, di'eamy sense of enjoyment, such as one feels when 
 lying upon the grass in a June evening, while a brook
 
 196 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 tinkles over stones among the sedges and trees. Sir Philip 
 Sidney could not hear the old ballad of Chevy Chase with- 
 out his blood being stirred as by the sound of a trumpet. 
 Boyle felt a tremor at the utterance of two verses of 
 Lucan; and Spence declares that he never repeated par- 
 ticular lines of djlicate modulation without a shiver in his 
 blood, not to be expressed. Who is not sensible of certain 
 magical effects, altogether distinct from the thoughts, in 
 some of Coleridge's weird verse, in Keats's '' Nightingale," 
 and in the grand harmonies of Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy 
 Taylor, Ruskin, and De Quincey? 
 
 Perspicuity, or transparency of style, is, undoubtedly, 
 the first law of all composition; but it may be doubted 
 whether vividness, which was the ruling conception of the 
 Greeks with regard to this property of style, is not quite as 
 essential. Style, it has been well said, is not only a 
 medium; it is also a form. It is not enough that the 
 thoughts be seen through a clear medium; they must be 
 seen in a distinct shape. It is not enough that truth be 
 visible in a clear, pure air; the atmosphere must not only 
 be crystalline and sparkling, but the things in it must be 
 bounded and defined by sharply-cut lines.* 
 
 A style may be as transparent as rock- water, and yet the 
 thoughts be destitute of boldness and originality. The 
 highest degree of transparency, however, can be attained 
 only by the writer who has thoroughly mastered his theme, 
 and whose whole nature is stirred by it. As that exquisite 
 material through which we gaze from our windows on the 
 beauties of nature, obtains its crystalline beauty after 
 undergoing the furnace, as it was melted by fire before 
 the rough particles of sand disappeared, so it is with 
 
 * " Homiletics and Pastoral Theology," by W. G. Shedd, D.D.
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 197 
 
 language. It is only a burning invention that can make it 
 transparent. A powerful imagination must fuse the harsh 
 elements of composition until all foreign substances have 
 disappeared, and every coarse, shapeless word has been 
 absorbed by the heat, and then the language will brighten 
 into that clear and unclouded style through which the 
 most delicate conceptions of the mind and the faintest 
 emotions of the heart are visible. 
 
 How many human thoughts have baffled for generations 
 every attempt to give them expression! How many ideas 
 and opinions are there, which form the basis of our daily 
 reflections, the matter for the ordinary operations of our 
 minds, which were toiled after perhaps for ages, before they 
 were seized and rendered comprehensible! How many 
 subjects are there which we ourselves have grasped at, as 
 if we saw them floating in an atmosphere just above us, 
 and found the arm of our intellect just too short to reach 
 them: and then comes a happier genius, who, in a lucky 
 moment, and from some vantage ground, arrests the 
 meteor in its flight, and, grasping the floating phantom, 
 drags it from the skies to earth; condenses that which 
 was but an impalpable coruscation of spirit; fetters that 
 which was but the lightning-glance of thought; and, hav- 
 ing so mastered it, bestows it as a perpetual possession and 
 heritage on mankind! 
 
 The arrangement of words by great writers on the 
 printed page has sometimes been compared to the arrange- 
 ment of soldiers on the field; and if it is interesting to see 
 how a greav general marshals his regiments, it is certainly 
 not less so to see how the Alexanders and Napoleons of 
 letters marshal their verbal battalions on the battle-fields of 
 thought. Foremost among those who wield despotic sway
 
 198 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 over the domain of letters, is my lord Bacon, whose words 
 are like a Spartan phalanx, closely Compacted, almost 
 crowding each other, so close are their files, and all mov- 
 ing in irresistible array, without confusion or chasm, now 
 holding some Thermopylae of new truth against some 
 scholastic Xerxes, now storming some ancient Malakoff of 
 error, but always with " victory sitting eagle- winged on 
 their crests." A strain of music bursts on your ear, sweet 
 as is Apollo's lute, and lo! Milton's dazzling files, clad in 
 celestial panoply, lifting high their gorgeous ensign, which 
 "shines like a meteor, streaming to the wind,'' "brenth- 
 ing united force and fixed thought," come moving on "in 
 perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft 
 recorders." Next comes Chiilingworth, with his glittering 
 rapier, all rhetorical rule and flourish, according to the 
 schools, passado, montanso, staccato, one, two, three, 
 the third in your bosom. Then stalks along Chatham, with 
 his two-handed sword, striking with the edge, while he 
 pierces with the point, and stuns with the hilt, and wield- 
 ing the ponderous weapon as easily as you would a flail. 
 Next strides Johnson, with elephantine tread, with the club 
 of logic in one hand and a revolver in the other, hitting 
 right and left with antithetical blows, and, "when his pistol 
 misses fire, knocking you down with the butt end of it." 
 Burke, with lighted linstock in hand, stands by a Lancaster 
 gun; he touches it, and forth there burst, with loud and 
 ringing roar, missiles of every conceivable description, 
 chain-shot, stones, iron-darts, spikes, shells, grenadoes, tor- 
 pedoes, and balls, that cut down everything before them. 
 Close after him steals Jeffrey, armed cap-a-pie, carrying a 
 tomahawk in one hand and a scalping-knife in the other, 
 steeped to the eye in fight, cunning of fence, master of his
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 199 
 
 weapon and merciless in its use, and " playing it like a 
 tongue of flame" before his trembling victims. There is 
 Brougham, slaying half-a-dozen enemies at once with a tre- 
 mendous Scotch claymore; Macaulay, running under his 
 opponent's guard, and stabbing him to the heart with the 
 heavy dagger of a short, epigrammatic sentence; Hugh 
 Elliot, cracking his enemies' skulls with a sledge-hammer, 
 or pounding them to jelly with his huge fists; Sydney 
 Smith, firing his arrows, feathered with fancy and pointed 
 with the steel of the keenest wit; Disraeli, armed with 
 an oriental scimitar, which dazzles while it kills; Em- 
 erson, transfixing his adversaries with a blade of transcen- 
 dental temper, snatched from the scabbard of Plato; and 
 Carlyle, relentless iconoclast of shams, who "gangs his ain 
 gait," armed with an antique stone axe, with which he 
 smashes solemn humbugs as you would drugs with a pestle 
 and mortar.
 
 200 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS (continued}. 
 
 "To acquire a few tongues," says a French writer, "is the task of a lew 
 years; but to be eloquent in one is the labor of a life." COLTON. 
 
 When words are restrained by common usage to a particular sense, to run 
 up to etymology, and construe them by a dictionary, is wretchedly ridicu- 
 lous. JEREMY COLLIER. 
 
 Where do the words of Greece and Rome excel, 
 
 That England may not please the ear as well? 
 
 What mighty magic's in the place or air, 
 
 That all perfection neffds must centre there? CHURCHILL. 
 
 IT is an interesting question connected with the subject 
 of style, whether a knowledge of other languages is 
 necessary to give an English writer a full command of his 
 own. Among the arguments urged in behalf of the study 
 of Greek and Latin in our colleges, one of the commonest 
 is the supposed absolute necessity of a knowledge of those 
 tongues to one who would speak and write his own lan- 
 guage effectively. The English language, we are re- 
 minded, is a composite one, of whose words thirty per cent, 
 are of Roman origin, and nearly five per cent, of Greek; 
 and is it not an immense help, we are asked, to a full and 
 accurate knowledge of the meanings of the words we use, 
 to know their entire history, including their origin? Is 
 not the many-sided Goethe an authority on this subject. 
 and does he not tell us that " wer fremde spnicht- nicht 
 kennt, weiss nichts von seinen eigenen." "He who is 
 acquainted with no foreign tongues, knows nothing of his 
 own 1 '? Have we not the authority of one of the earliest
 
 THE SECKET OF APT WORDS. 201 
 
 of English schoolmasters, Roger Ascham, for the opinion 
 that, " even as a hawke fleeth not hie with one wing, even 
 so a man reacheth not to excellency with one tongue"? 
 
 In answering the general question in the negative, we 
 do not mean to question the value or profound interest of 
 philological studies, or to express any doubt concerning 
 their utility as a means of mental discipline. The value 
 of classical literature as an instrument of education has 
 been decided by an overwhelming majority of persons of 
 culture. We cannot, without prejudice to humanity, sep- 
 arate the present from the past. The nineteenth century 
 strikes its roots into the centuries gone by, and draws 
 nutriment from them. Our whole literature is closely 
 connected with that of the ancients, draws its inspiration 
 from it, and can be understood only by constant reference 
 to it. As a means of that encyclopedic culture, of that 
 thorough intellectual equipment, which is one of the most 
 imperious demands of modern society, an acquaintance 
 with foreign, and especially with classic, literature, is abso- 
 lutely indispensable; for the records of knowledge and of 
 thought are rnany-tongued, and even if a great writer 
 could have wreaked his thoughts upon expression in an- 
 other language, it is certain that another mind can only in 
 a few cases adequately translate them. It is only by the 
 study of different languages and different literatures, 
 ancient as well as modern, that we can escape that nar- 
 rowness of thought, that Chinese cast of mind, which char- 
 acterizes those persons who know no language but their 
 own, and learn to distinguish what is essentially, univer- 
 sally and eternally good and true from what is the result 
 of accident, local circumstances, or the fleeting circum- 
 stances of the time. It is useless to say that we know 
 9*
 
 202 WOKUS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 human nature thoroughly, if we know nothing of an- 
 tiquity; and we can know antiquity only by study of the 
 originals. Mitford, Grote and Mommsen differ, and the 
 reader who consults them with no knowledge of Greek or 
 Latin is at the mercy of the last author he has perused. 
 It has been frequently remarked that every school of 
 thinkers has it mannerism and its mania, for which there 
 is no cure but intercourse with those who are free from 
 them, and constant access to the models of perfect and im- 
 mutable excellence which other ages have produced and all 
 ages have acknowledged. 
 
 The question, however, is not about the general educa- 
 tional value of classical studies, but whether they are 
 indispensable to him who would write or speak English 
 with the highest force, elegance, and accuracy. We think 
 they are not. In the first place, we deny that a knowledge 
 of the etymologies of words, of their meanings a hundred 
 or five hundred years ago, is essential to their proper use 
 now. How am I aided in the use of the word "villain" 
 by knowing that it once meant peasant, in the use of 
 "wince" by knowing that it meant kick, in the use of 
 " brat," " beldam," and " pedant," by knowing that they 
 meant, respectively, child, fine lady, and tutor, in the use' 
 of " meddle," by knowing that formerly it had no oifensive 
 meaning, and that one could meddle even with his own 
 affairs? Am I more or less likely to use "ringleader" cor- 
 rectly to-day, from learning that Christ is correctly spoken 
 of by an old divine as "the ringleader of our salvation"? 
 Shall I be helped in the employment of the word mnxki-t 
 by knowing that it was once the name of a small hawk, 
 or in the use of the word tragedy by knowing that it is 
 connected in some way with the Greek word for "a goat"?
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 203 
 
 Facts like these are of deep interest to all, and of high 
 value to the scholar; but how is the knowledge of them 
 necessary that one may speak or write well? 
 
 The question with the man who addresses his fellow- 
 man by tongue or pen to-day, is not what ought to be, or 
 formerly was, the meaning of a word, but, what is it now? 
 Indeed, it may be doubted whether a reference to the old, 
 obsolete meanings, the roots and derivations, of words, 
 does not, as Archbishop Whately insists, tend to con- 
 fusion, and prove rather a hindrance than a help to the 
 correct use of our tongue. Words not only, for the most 
 part, ride very slackly at anchor on their etymologies, 
 borne, as they are, hither and thither by the shifting tides 
 and currents of usage, but they often break away from 
 their moorings altogether. The knowledge of a man's ante- 
 cedents may help us sometimes to estimate his present self; 
 but the knowledge of what a word meant three or twenty 
 centuries ago may only mislead us as to its meaning now. 
 " Hypostasis," "substance,"' and "understanding'' are 
 words that etymologically have precisely the same signifi- 
 cation; yet have they, as they are now used, the least 
 similarity of meaning? Will it be said that words be- 
 come more vivid and picturesque. that we get a firmer 
 and more vigorous grasp of their meaning, when, as 
 Coleridge advises, we present to our minds the visual 
 images that 'form their primary meanings? The reply is, 
 that long use deadens us to the susceptibility of such 
 images, and in not one case in a thousand, probably, are 
 they noticed. How many college graduates think of a 
 mixer as being etymologically a "miserable" man, of a sav- 
 age, as one living in "a wood.'' or of a desultory reader as 
 one who leaps from one study to another, as a circus rider
 
 204 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 leaps from horse to horse? A distinguished poet once con- 
 fessed that the Latin imago first suggested itself to him as 
 the root of the English word "imagination" when, after 
 having been ten years a versifier, he was asked by a friend 
 to define this most important term in the critical vocabu- 
 lary of his art. " We have had to notice over and over 
 again," says Mr. Whitney in his late work on " The Life 
 and Growth of Language," " the readiness on the part of 
 language-users to forget origins, to cast aside as cumbrous 
 rubbish the etymological suggestiveness of a term, and 
 concentrate force upon the new and more adventitious tie. 
 This is one of the most fundamental and valuable tenden- 
 cies in name-making; it constitutes an essential part of the 
 practical availability of language." 
 
 If a knowledge of Greek and Latin is necessary to him 
 who would command all the resources of our tongue, how 
 comes it that the most consummate mastery of the English 
 language is exhibited by Shakspeare? Will it be said that 
 his writings prove him to have been a classical scholar; 
 that they abound in facts and allusions which imply an 
 intimate acquaintance with the masterpieces of Greek and 
 Roman literature? We answer that this is a palpable 
 begging of the question. By the same reasoning we can 
 prove that scores of English authors, who, we know posi- 
 tively, never read a page of Latin or Greek, were, never- 
 theless, classical scholars. By similar logic we can prove 
 that Shakspeare followed every calling in life. Lawyers 
 vouch for his acquaintance with, law; physicians for his 
 skill in medicine; mad-doctors for his knowledge of the 
 phenomena of mental disease ; naturalists assert positively, 
 from the internal evidence of his works, that he was a 
 botanist and an entomologist; bishops, that he was a theo-
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 205 
 
 logian; and claims have been put forth for his dexterity in 
 cutting up sheep and bullocks. Ben Jonson- tells us that 
 he had "small Latin and less Greek 1 '; another contempo- 
 rary, that he had "little Latin and no Greek." "Small 
 Latin," indeed, it must have been, which a youth could 
 have acquired in his position, who married and entered 
 upon the duties of active life at eighteen. The fact that 
 translations were abundant in the poet's time, and that all 
 the literature of that day was steeped in classicism, will 
 fully account for Shakspeare's knowledge of Greek and 
 Roman history, as well as for the classical turns of expres- 
 sion which we find in his plays. 
 
 But it may be said that Shakspeare, the oceanic, the 
 many-souled, was phenomenal, and that no rule can be 
 based on the miracles of a cometary genius who has had no 
 peer in the ages. What shall we say, then, to Izaak Wal- 
 ton? Can purer, more idiomatic, or more attractive 
 English be found within the covers of any book than that of 
 "The Complete Angler"? Among all the controversial- 
 ists of England, is there one whose words hit harder, 
 are more like cannon-balls, than those of Cobbett? By 
 universal concession he was master of the whole vocabulary 
 of invective, and in narration his pen is pregnant with 
 the freshness of green fields and woods; yet neither he, 
 nor "honest Izaak," ever dug up a Greek root, or un- 
 earthed a Latin derivation. Again, what shall we say of 
 Keats, who could not read a line of Greek, yet who was 
 the most thoroughly classical of all English authors, 
 whose soul was so saturated with the Greek spirit, that 
 Byron said " he was a Greek himself." Or what will the 
 classicists do with Lord Erskine, confessedly the greatest 
 forensic orator since Demosthenes-? He learned but the
 
 Jix; WORDS; THEIR USE A NO A in: si-;. 
 
 elements of Latin, and in Greek went scarcely beyond the 
 alphabet; but he devoted himself in youth with intense 
 ardor to the study of Milton and Shakspeare, committing 
 whole pages of the former to memory, and so familiarizing 
 himself with the latter that he could almost, like Por.son, 
 have held conversations on all subjects for days together in 
 the phrases of the great English dramatist. It was here 
 that he acquired that fine choice of words, that richness of 
 thought, and gorgeousness of expression, that beautiful 
 rhythmus of his sentences, which charmed all who heard 
 him. 
 
 If one must learn English through the Greek and Latin, 
 how shall we account for the admirable, we had almost 
 said, inimitable, style of Franklin? Before he knew any- 
 thing of foreign languages he had formed his style, and 
 gained a wide command of words by the study of the lies I 
 English models. Is the essayist, Edwin P. Whipple, a 
 master of the English language? He was not, we believe, 
 classically educated, yet it would be hard to name an Amer- 
 ican author who has a greater command of all the resources 
 of expression. His style varies in excellence, sometimes, 
 perhaps, lacks simplicity; but, as a rule, it is singularly 
 copious, nervous, and suggestive, and clear as a pebbled rill. 
 What is the secret of this command of our tongue? It 
 is his familiarity with our English literature. His sleep- 
 less intellect has fed and fattened on the whole race 
 of English authors, from Chaucer to Currer Bell. The 
 profound, sagacious wisdom of Bacon, and the nimble, 
 brilliant wit of Sydney Smith; the sublime mysticism of 
 Sir Thomas Browne, and the rich, mellow, tranquil beauty 
 of Taylor; Jonson's learned sock and Heywood's ease; the 
 gorgeous, organ-toned eloquence of Milton, and the close,
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 207 
 
 bayonet-like logic of Chillingworth ; the sweet-blooded wit 
 of Fuller, and Butler's rattling fire of fun; Spenser's vo- 
 luptuous beauty, and the lofty rhetoric, scorching wit, and 
 crushing argument of South; Pope's neatness, brilliancy, 
 and epigrammatic point, and Dryden's energy and " full- 
 resounding line"; Byron's sublime unrest and bursts of 
 misanthropy, and Wordsworth's deep sentiment and sweet 
 humanities; Shelley's wild imaginative melody, and Scott's 
 picturesque imagery and antiquarian lore; the polished 
 witticisms of Sheridan, and the gorgeous periods of Burke, 
 with all these writers, and every other of greater or 
 lesser note, even those in the hidden nooks and crannies 
 of our literature, he has held converse, and drawn from 
 them expressions for every exigency of his thought. 
 
 To all these examples we may add one, if possible, still 
 more convincing, that of the late Hugh Miller, who, as 
 Professor Marsh justly remarks, had few contemporaneous 
 superiors as a clear, forcible, accurate and eloquent writer, 
 and who uses the most cumbrous Greek compounds as freely 
 as monosyllabic English particles. His style is literally the 
 despair of all other English scientific writers; yet it is 
 positively certain that 'he was wholly ignorant of all lan- 
 guages but that in which he wrote, and its Northern 
 provincial dialects. 
 
 As to the oft-quoted saying of Goethe, to which the 
 objector is so fond of referring, we may say with Professor 
 Marsh, that, " if by knowledge of a language is meant the 
 power of expressing or conceiving the laws of a language 
 in formal rules, the opinion may be well-founded; but, if 
 it refers to the capacity of understanding, and skill in 
 properly using our own tongue, all observation shows it to 
 be very wide of the truth." Goethe himself, the same
 
 208 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 authority declares, was an indifferent linguist; he appar- 
 ently knew little of the remoter etymological sources of his 
 own tongue, or the special philologies of the cognate lan- 
 guages; and "it is difficult to trace any of the excellencies 
 of his marvellously felicitous style to the direct imitation, 
 or even the unconscious influence, of foreign models." * 
 But he was a profound student of the great Ger 111:111 
 writers of the sixteenth century; and hence his works are 
 a test example in refutation of the theory that ascribes 
 so exaggerated a value to classical studies. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact, which throws a flood of light 
 upon this subject, that the greatest masters of style in all 
 the ages were the Greeks, who yet knew no word of any 
 language but their own. In the most flourishing period 
 of their literature, they had no grammatical system, nor 
 did they ever make any but the most trivial researches in 
 etymology. The wise and learned nations among the 
 ancients, says Locke, " made it a part of education to cul- 
 tivate their own, not foreign languages. The Greeks 
 counted all 'other nations barbarous, and had a contempt 
 for their languages. And though the Greek learning grew 
 in credit amongst the Romans, . . .'yet it was the Roman 
 tongue that was made the study of their youth; their own 
 language they were to make use of, and therefore it was 
 their own language they were instructed and exercised in." 
 Demosthenes, the greatest master of the Greek language, 
 and one of the mightiest masters of expression the world 
 has seen, knew no other tongue than his own. He mod- 
 elled his style after that of Thucydides, whose wonderful 
 compactness, terseness, and strength of diction were de- 
 rived from no study of old Pelasgic, Phoenician, Persian, or 
 
 *"Lectur8 on the English Language."
 
 THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 209 
 
 other primitive etymologies of the Attic speech, of which 
 he knew nothing, but the product of his own marvellous 
 genius wreaking itself upon expression. 
 
 No riches are without inconvenience. The men of 
 many tongues almost inevitably lose their peculiar raciness 
 of home-bred utterance, and their style, like their words, 
 has a certain polyglot character. It has been observed by 
 an acute Oxford professor, that the Romans, in exact pro- 
 portion to their study of Greek, paralyzed some of the 
 finest powers of their own language. Schiller tell us that 
 he was in the habit of reading as little as possible in 
 foreign languages, because it was his business to write 
 German, and he thought that, by reading other languages, 
 he should lose his nicer perceptions of what belonged to his 
 own. Dryden attributed most of Cowley's defects to his 
 continental associations, and said that his losses at home 
 overbalanced his gains from abroad. Thomas Moore, who 
 was a fine classical scholar, tells us that the perfect purity 
 with which the Greeks wrote their own language, was 
 justly attributed to their entire abstinence from every 
 other. It is a saying as old as Cicero, that women, being 
 accustomed solely to their native tongue, usually speak 
 and write it with a grace and purity surpassing those of 
 men. U A man who thinks the knowledge of Latin essen- 
 tial to the purity of English diction," says Macaulay, 
 " either has never conversed with an accomplished woman, 
 or does not deserve to have conversed with her. We are 
 sure that all persons who are in the habit of hearing 
 public speaking must have observed, that the orators who 
 are fondest of quoting Latin are by no means the most 
 scrupulous about marring their native tongue. We could 
 mention several members of Parliament, who never fail to
 
 210 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 usher in their scraps of Horace and Juvenal with half a 
 dozen false concords." 
 
 Mr. Buckle, in his " History of Civilization in England," 
 does not hesitate to express the opinion that " our great 
 English scholars have corrupted the English language by 
 jargon so uncouth that a plain man can hardly discern 
 the real lack of ideas which their barbarous and mottled 
 dialect strives to hide." He then adds that the principal 
 reason why well-educated women write and converse in a 
 purer style than well-educated men, is " because they have 
 not formed their taste according to those ancient classical 
 standards, which, admirable as they are in themselves, 
 should never be introduced into a state of society unfitted 
 for them." To nearly the same effect is the declaration of 
 that most acute judge of style, Thomas De Quincey, who 
 says that if you would read our noble language in its 
 native beauty, picturesque form, idiomatic propriety, racy 
 in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in its composition, 
 you must steal the mail-bags, and break open the women's 
 letters. On the other hand, who has forgotten what havoc 
 Bentley made when he laid his classic hand on " Paradise 
 Lost"? What prose style, always excepting that of the 
 Areopagitica, is worse for imitation than that of Milton, 
 with its long, involved, half- rhythmical periods, "dragging. 
 like a wounded snake, their slow length along"? Yet 
 Bentley and Milton, whose minds were imbued, saturated 
 with Greek literature through and through, were prob- 
 ably the profoundest classical scholars that England can 
 boast.
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 211 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE FALLACIES IX WORDS. 
 
 Gardons-nous de 1' equivoque ! PAUL Louis COURIER. 
 
 Words are grown so false, I am loathe to prove reason with them. 
 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 The mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is 
 the mother of all error. HOOKER. 
 
 One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt; 
 
 One trivial letter ruins all, left out; 
 
 A knot can choke a felon into clay; 
 
 A knot will save him, spelt without the k; 
 
 The smallest word has some unguarded spot, 
 
 And danger lurks in i without a dot. O.- W. HOLMES. 
 
 ON some of the great American rivers, where lumber- 
 ing operations are carried on, the logs, in floating 
 down, often get jammed up here and there, and it becomes 
 necessary to find the timber which is a kind of keystone 
 and stops all the rest. Once detach this, and away dash 
 the giant trunks, thundering headlong, helter-skelter down 
 the rapids. It is just this office which he who defines his 
 terms accurately, performs for the dead-locked questions 
 of the day. Half the controversies of the world are dis- 
 putes about words. How often do we see two persons 
 engage in what Cowper calls " a duel in the form of a 
 debate," tilting furiously at each other for hours, 
 slashing with syllogisms, stabbing with enthymemes, hook- 
 ing with dilemmas, and riddling with sorites, with no 
 apparent prospect of ever ending the fray, till suddenly 
 it occurs to one of them to define precisely what he means
 
 212 WORDS; THEIR USE AXD AlU'SK. 
 
 by a term on which the discussion hinges: when it is found 
 that the combatants had no cause for quarrel, having 
 agreed in opinion from the beginning! The juggle of all 
 sophistry lies in employing equivocal expressions, that is, 
 such as may be taken in two different meanings, using a 
 word in one sense in the premises, and in another sense in 
 the conclusion. Frequently the word on which a cont ro- 
 ve rsy turns is unconsciously made to do double duty, and 
 under a seeming unity there lurks a real dualism of 
 meaning, from which endless confusions arise. Accurately 
 to define such a term is to provide one's self with a master- 
 key which unlocks the whole dispute. 
 
 Who is not familiar with the fierce contests of the 
 Nominalists and Realists, which raged so long in the 
 Middle Ages, and which, beginning with words, came at 
 last to blows? Yet, properly understood, they maintained 
 only opposite poles of the same truth ; and were, therefore, 
 both right, and both wrong. The Nominalists, it has been 
 said, only denied what no one in his senses would affirm, 
 and the Realists only contended for what no one in his 
 sens?:; would deny; a hair's breadth parted those who, had 
 they understood each other's language, would have had no 
 altercation. Again, who can tell how far the clash of 
 opinions among political economists has been owing to the 
 use in opposite senses of a very few words? Had Smith, 
 Say, Ricardo, Malthus, M'Culloch, Mill, began framing 
 their systems by defining carefully the meanings attached 
 by them to certain terms used on every page of their 
 writings, such as Wealth, Labor, Capital, Value, Supply 
 and Demand, Over-trading, it may be doubted whether 
 they would not, to some extent, have harmonized in opin- 
 ion, instead df giving U s theories as opposite as tlio poles
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 213 
 
 How many fallacies have grown out of the ambiguity 
 of the word money, which, instead of being a simple and 
 indivisible term, has at least half-a-dozen different mean- 
 ings! Money may be either specie, bank-notes, or both 
 together, or credit, or capital, or capital offered for loan. 
 A merchant is said to fail " for lack of money,'' when, in 
 fact, he fails because he lacks credit, capital, or merchan- 
 dise, money having no more to do with the matter than the 
 carts or railway wagons by which the merchandise is trans- 
 ported. Again: money is spoken of as yielding interest. 
 which it cannot do, since wherever it is. whether in a bank, 
 in one's pocket, or in a safe, it is dead capital. The con- 
 fusion of the terms wealth and money gave birth to " the 
 mercantile system," one of the greatest curses that ever 
 befell Europe. As in popular language to grow rich is to 
 accumulate money, and to grow poor is to lose money, this 
 term became a synonyme for wealth; and, till recently, 
 at least, all the nations of Europe studied every means of 
 accumulating gold and silver in their respective countries. 
 To accomplish this they prohibited the exportation of 
 money, gave bounties on the importation, and restricted 
 the importation of other commodities, expecting thus to 
 produce "a favorable balance of trade," a conduct as 
 wise as that of a shop-keeper who should sell his goods 
 only for money, and heard every dollar, instead of replacing 
 and increasing his stock, or putting his surplus capital at 
 interest. France, under Colbert, acted upon this principle, 
 and Voltaire extolled his wisdom in thus preferring the 
 accumulation of imperishable bullion to the exchange of it 
 for articles which must, sooner or later, wear out. The 
 effect of this fallacy has been to make the nations regard 
 the wealth of their customers as a source of loss instead of
 
 214 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 profit, and an advantageous market as a curse instead of a 
 blessing, by which the improvement of Europe has been 
 more retarded than by all other causes put together. 
 
 So with the mortal theological wars in which so much 
 ink has been shed. The shelves of our public libraries 
 groan under the weight of huge folios and quartos once 
 hurled at each other by the giants of divinity, which never 
 would have been published but for their confused notions, 
 or failure to discriminate the meaning of certain technical 
 and oft-recurring terms. Beginning with discordant ideas 
 of what is meant by the words Will, Necessity, Unity, Law, 
 Person, terms vital in theology, the more they argued, 
 the farther they were apart, and while fancying they were 
 battling with real adversaries, were, Quixote-like, tilting at 
 windmills, or fighting with shadows, till at last utter 
 
 "Confusion umpire sat. 
 And by deciding worse embroiled the fray." 
 
 The whole vast science of casuistry, which once occupied 
 the brains and tongues of the Schoolmen, turned upon nice, 
 hair-splitting verbal distinctions, as ridiculous as the dis- 
 putes of the orthodox Liliputians and the heretical Blefus- 
 cudians about the big ends and the little ends of the eggs. 
 The readers of Pascal will remember the fierce wars in the 
 Sorbonne between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, touching 
 the .doctrine of "efficacious" and "sufficient" grace. The 
 question was, "Whether all men received from God suffi- 
 cient grace for their conversion?" The Jesuits maintained 
 the affirmative; the Jansenists insisted that this sufficient 
 grace would never be efficacious, unless accompanied by 
 special grace. " Then the sufficient grace, which is not 
 efficacious, is a contradiction in terms," cried the Jesuit*: 
 "and, besides, it is a heresy!" We need not trace tin-
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 215 
 
 history of the logomachy that followed, which Pascal has 
 immortalized in his u Provincial Letters," letters which 
 Do Maistre denounces as "Les Menteurs," but which the 
 Jesuits found to be both " sufficient " and " efficacious " for 
 their utter discomfiture. The theological student will 
 recall the microscopic distinctions; the fine-spun attenua- 
 tions; the spider-like threads of meaning; the delicate, 
 infinitesimal verbal shavings of the grave and angelic 
 doctors; how one subtle disputant, with syllabical pene- 
 tration, would discover a heresy in his opponent's mono- 
 syllables, while the other would detect a schism in the 
 former's conjunctions, till finally, after having filled vol- 
 umes enough with the controversy to form a library, the 
 microscopic point at issue, which had long been invisible, 
 was whittled down to nothing. 
 
 A controversy not less memorable was that which raged 
 in the church in the third and fourth centuries between the 
 " Homoousians " and the " Homoiusians " concerning the 
 nature of Christ. The former maintained that Christ was 
 of the same essence with the Father; the latter that he was 
 of like essence, a dispute which Boileau has satirized in 
 these witty lines: 
 
 " D'nne syllabe impic un saint mot angmente 
 Remplit tons les esprits d'aigreurs si menrtrieres 
 Tu fls, dans une guerre et si triste et si longne, 
 Peril- taut de Chretiens, martyrs cCiine diphthongue f " 
 
 The determination of the controversy depended on the 
 retention or rejection of the diphthong oz, or rather upon 
 the change of the letter o into /; and hence it has been 
 asserted that for centuries Christians fought like tigers, 
 and tore each other to pieces, on account of a single letter. 
 It must be admitted, however, that the dispute, though it 
 related to a mystery above human comprehension, was
 
 216 WORDS; THEIR USE AND A HUSK. 
 
 something more than a verbal one; and though it is easy 
 to ridicule " microscopic theology," yet it is evident that if 
 error employs it, truth must do the same, even if the dis- 
 tinction be as small as the difference between two animal- 
 cules fighting each other among a billion of fellows in a 
 drop of water. 
 
 Disraeli remarks, in his " Curiosities of Literature," that 
 there have been few councils or synods where the addition 
 or omission of a word or a phrase might not have termi- 
 nated an interminable logomachy. " At the Council of Basle, 
 for the convenience of the disputants, John de Secubia drew 
 up a treatise of nndedined tvords, chiefly to determine the 
 significations of the particles from, by, but, and except, 
 which it seems were perpetually occasioning fresh disputes 
 among the Hussites and the Bohemians. . . In modern 
 times the popes have more skillfully freed the church from 
 this ' confusion of words.' His holiness on one occasion, 
 standing in equal terror of the Court of France, who pro- 
 tected the Jesuits, and of the Court of Spain, who main- 
 tained the cause of the Dominicans, contrived a phrase, 
 where a comma or a full stop, placed at the beginning or 
 the end, purported that his holiness tolerated the opinions 
 which he condemned; and when the rival parties dis- 
 patched deputations to the Court of Rome to plead for the 
 period, or advocate the comma, his holiness, in this ' confu- 
 sion of words,' flung an unpunctuated copy to the parties; 
 nor was it his fault, but that of the spirit of party, if the 
 rage of the one could not subside into a comma, nor that 
 of the other close by a full period!" 
 
 The art of treaty-making appears once to have consisted 
 in a kind of verbal sleight-of-hand ; and the most dexterous 
 diplomatist was he who had always " an arriere pensde,
 
 THE FALLACIES IX WOEDS. 217 
 
 which might fasten or loosen the ambiguous expression he 
 he had so cautiously and so finely inlaid in his mosaic of 
 treachery." When the American Colonies refused to be 
 taxed by Great Britain, on the ground that they were not 
 represented in the House of Commons, a new term, " vir- 
 tual representation," was invented to silence their clamors. 
 The sophism was an ingenious one; but it cost the mother 
 country a hundred millions sterling, forty thousand lives, 
 and the most valuable of her colonial possessions. 
 
 Hume's famous argument against miracles is based en- 
 tirely upon a petitio principii, or begging of the question, 
 artfully concealed in an ambiguous use of the word " expe- 
 rience." In all our experience, he argues, we have never 
 known the laws of nature to be violated; on the other 
 hand, we have had experience, again and again, of the 
 falsity of testimony; consequently we ought to believe that 
 any amount of testimony is false rather than admit the 
 occurrence of a miracle. But whose experience does Hume 
 mean? Does he mean the experience of all the men that 
 ever lived? If so, he palpably begs the very question in 
 dispute? Does he mean that a miracle is contrary to the 
 experience of each inditridual who has never seen one? 
 This, as Whately shows in his " Logic," would lead to the 
 absurdest consequences. Not only was the King of Ban- 
 tam justified in listening to no evidence for the existence 
 of ice, but no man would be authorized, on this principle, 
 to expect his own death. His experience informs him 
 directly, only that others have died; and, as he has inva- 
 riably recovered when attacked by disease himself, why, 
 judging by his experience, should he expect any future 
 sickness to be mortal? If, again, Hume means only that a 
 miracle is contrary to the experience of men generally, as to 
 10
 
 218 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 what is common and of ordinary occurrence, the maxim 
 will only amount to this, that false testimony is a thing of 
 common occurrence, and that miracles are not. This is 
 true enough; but " too general to authorize of itself a con- 
 clusion in any particular case. In any other individual 
 question as to the admissibility of evidence, it would be 
 reckoned absurd to consider merely the average chances 
 for the truth of testimony in the abstract, without inquir- 
 ing what the testimony is, in the particular instance before 
 us. As if, e.g., any one had maintained that no testimony 
 could establish Columbus's account of the discovery of 
 America, because it is more common for travelers to lie 
 tha*n for new continents to be discovered." 
 
 Again, the terms " experience " and " contrary to expe- 
 rience," imply a contradiction fatal to the whole argument. 
 It is clear that a revelation cannot be founded, as regards 
 the external proof of its reality, upon anything else than 
 miracles; and these events must be, in a sense, contrary to 
 nature, by the very definition of the word. If they entered 
 into the ordinary operations of nature, that is, were sub- 
 jects of experience, they would no longer be miracles. 
 
 In the very phrase " a violation of nature," so cunning- 
 ly used by skeptics, there lurks a sophism. The expr^cjon 
 seems to imply that they are eifects that have no cause ; or, 
 at least, effects whose cause is foreign to the universe. But 
 if miracles disturb or interrupt the established order of 
 things, they do so only in the same way that the will of 
 man continually breaks in upon the order of nature. 
 There is not a day, an hour, nor a minute, in which man, 
 in his contact with the material word, does not divert its 
 course, or give a new direction to its order. The order of 
 nature allows an apple-tree to produce fruit; but man can
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 219 
 
 girdle the tree, and prevent it from bearing apples. The 
 order of nature allows a bird to wing its flight from tree 
 to tree; but the sportsman's rifle brings the bird to the 
 dust. Yet, in spite of this, it is asserted that the smallest 
 conceivable intervention, disturbing the fated order of na- 
 ture, linked as are its parts indissolubly from eternity in 
 one chain, must break up the entire system of the uni- 
 verse! "If only the free will of man be acknowledged, 
 then," as an able writer says, " this entire sophism comes 
 down in worthless fragments. So long as we allow our- 
 selves to speak as theists, then miracles which we attribute 
 to the will, the purpose, the power of God, are not in any 
 sense violations of nature; or they are so in the same sense 
 in which the entireness of our human existence, our 
 active converse with the material world from morning to 
 night of every day, is-also a violation of nature." 
 
 A further and not less fatal objection to Hume's argu- 
 ment is that it confounds the distinction between testimony 
 and authority, between the veracity of a witness and his 
 competency. The miraculous character of an event is not 
 a matter of intuition or observation, but of inference, and 
 cannot be decided by testimony, but only by reasoning from 
 the probabilities of the case. The testimony relates only 
 to the happening of the event; the question concerning the 
 nature of this event, whether it is, or is not, a violation of 
 physical law, can only be determined by the judgment, 
 after weighing all the circumstances of the case. No 
 event whatever, viewed simply as an event, as an external 
 phenomenon, can be so marvellous that sufficient testimony 
 will not convince us that it has really occurred. A thou- 
 sand years ago the conversion of five loaves of bread into 
 as many hundred, or the raising of a dead man to life,
 
 220 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 would not have appeared more incredible than the trans- 
 mission of a written message five thousand miles, without 
 error, within a minute of time, or from Europe to Amer- 
 ica, under the waters of the Atlantic; yet these feats, 
 miraculous as they would once have seemed, have been 
 accomplished by the electric telegraph. Hume's argument 
 against miracles, therefore, which is based entirely upon 
 an appeal to experience and testimony, without reference 
 to the competency of the conclusion that the events testified 
 to were supernatural, is altogether inapplicable.* 
 
 Hume's argument reminds us of another verbal fal- 
 lacy, that which lurks in the phrase Law of Nat ///>. 
 which is sometimes used as if it were equivalent to efficient 
 cause. There are persons who attempt to account for the 
 phenomena of the universe by the mere agency of physical 
 laws, when there is no such agency, except as a figure of 
 speech. A " Law of Nature " is only a general statement 
 concerning a large number of similar individual facts, 
 which it simply describes, but in no way accounts for or 
 explains. It is not the Law of Gravitation which can*-* 
 a stone thrown into the air to fall to the earth ; but the 
 fact that the stone so falls, is classed with many other 
 facts, which are comprehended under the general statement 
 called the Law of Gravitation. " Second causes," as phy- 
 sical laws are sometimes called, " are no causes at all ; they 
 are mere fictions of the intellect, and exist only in thought. 
 A cause, in the proper sense of the word, that is, an efficient 
 cause, as original and direct in its action, must be a First 
 cause; that through which its action is transmitted is not a 
 cause, but a portion of the effect, as it does not act. but 
 is acted upon." 
 
 *See Bowen's "Logic," p. 432.
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WOKDS. 221 
 
 The changes of meaning which words undergo in the 
 lapse of time, and the different senses in which the same 
 word is used in different countries, are a fruitful source of 
 misunderstanding and error. Hence in reading an old 
 author it is necessary to be constantly on our guard lest 
 our interpretations of his words involve a gross anachron- 
 ism, because his " pure ideas " have become our " mixed 
 modes." " The titles of "tyrant," "sophist," "parasite," 
 were originally honorable distinctions; and to attach to 
 them their modern significations would give us wholly false 
 ideas of ancient history. .When Bishop Watson, in defend- 
 ing Christianity and the Bible from the attacks of Gibbon 
 and Thomas Paine, entitled his books "An Apology for 
 Christianity" and "An Apology for the Bible," he used the 
 word " apology " in its primitive sense, and was probably 
 understood by many of his readers to be offering an excuse 
 for the faults of the Scriptures and of the Christian system, 
 instead of a vindication of their truth. When we find an 
 old English writer characterizing his opponent's argument 
 as impertinent, we are apt to attach to the word the idea of 
 insolence or rudeness; whereas the meaning is simply not 
 pertinent to the question. So a magistrate who "indiffer- 
 ently administered justice" meant formerly a magistrate 
 who administered justice impartially. 
 
 Were we to use the word gravitation in translating cer- 
 tain passages of ancient authors, we should assert that the 
 great discovery of Newton had been anticipated by hun- 
 dreds of years, though we know that these authors had 
 never dreamed of the law which that word recalls to our 
 minds. Most of the terminology of the Christian church 
 is made up of words that once had a more general meaning. 
 Bishop meant originally Overseer; Priest, or Presbyter,
 
 222 WORDS; THEIU USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 meant Elder; Deacon meant Administrator; and Sacrament, 
 a vow of allegiance. In reading the history of France, an 
 American or Englishman is constantly in danger of mis- 
 apprehension by associating with certain words common to 
 the French and English languages similar ideas. When he 
 reads of Parliaments or the Noblesse, he is apt to suppose 
 that they resembled the Parliaments and Nobility of Eng- 
 land, when their constitution was altogether different. 
 
 Mr. J. S. Mill observes that historians, travelers, and 
 all who write or speak concerning moral and social pheno- 
 mena with which they are unacquainted, are apt to con- 
 found in their descriptions things wholly diverse. Having 
 but a scanty vocabulary of words relating to such pheno- 
 mena, and never having analyzed the facts to which these 
 words correspond in their own country, they apply them 
 to other facts to which they are more or less inapplicable. 
 Thus, as we have before briefly stated, the first English 
 conquerors of Bengal carried with them the phrase landed 
 proprietor into a country where the rights of individuals 
 over the soil were extremely different in degree, and even 
 in nature, from those recognized in England. Applying 
 the term with all its English associations in such a state of 
 things, to one who had only a limited right they gave an 
 absolute right; from another, because he had not an abso- 
 lute right, they took away all right; drove whole classes of 
 men to ruin and despair; filled the country with banditti; 
 created a feeling that nothing was secure; and produced, 
 with the best intentions, a disorganization which had not 
 been produced in that country by the most ruthless of its 
 barbarian invaders.* 
 
 How often, in reading ancient history, are we misled by 
 
 * " Logic," Book IV., Chap. 5.
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 223 
 
 the application of modern terms to past institutions and 
 events! Guizot, in speaking of the towns of Europe be- 
 tween the fifth and tenth centuries, cautions his readers 
 against concluding that their state was one either of posi- 
 tive servitude or of positive freedom. He observes that 
 when a society and its language have lasted a considerable 
 time, its words acquire a complete, determinate, and precise 
 meaning, a kind of legal official signification. Time has 
 introduced into the signification of every term a thousand 
 ideas, which are suggested to us every time we hear it 
 pronounced, but which, as they do not all bear the same 
 date, are not all suitable at the same time. Thus the terms 
 " servitude " and " freedom " recall to our minds ideas far 
 more precise and definite than the facts of the eighth, 
 ninth, or tenth centuries, to which they relate. Whether 
 we say that the towns in the eighth century were in a state 
 of "freedom" or in a state of "servitude," we say, in 
 either case, too much; for they were a prey to the rapacity 
 of the strong, and yet maintained a certain degree of inde- 
 pendence and importance. 
 
 So, again, as the same writer shows, the term " civiliza- 
 tion " comprises more or fewer ideas, according to the sense, 
 popular or scientific, in which it is used. "The popular 
 signification of a word is formed by degrees, and while all 
 the facts it represents are present. As often as a fact 
 comes before us which seems to answer to the signification 
 of a known term, this term is naturally applied to it, and 
 thus its signification goes on broadening and deepening, 
 till, at last, all the various facts and ideas which, from the 
 nature of things, ought to be brought together and em- 
 bodied in the term, are collected and embodied in it. 
 When, on the contrary, the signification of a word is
 
 224 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 determined by science, it is usually done by one or a very 
 few individuals, who, at the time, are under the influence 
 of some particular fact, which has taken possession of their 
 imagination. Thus it comes to pass that scientific defini- 
 tions are, in general, much narrower, and, on that very 
 account, much less correct, than the popular significations 
 given to words." 
 
 It is this continual incorporation of new facts and 
 ideas, circumstances originally accidental, into the per- 
 manent significations of words, which makes the dictionary 
 definition of a word so poor an exponent of its real mean- 
 ing. For a time this definition suffices; but in the lapse of 
 time many nice distinctions and subtle shades of meaning 
 adhere to the word, which whoever attempts to use it with 
 no other guide than the dictionary is sure to confound. 
 Hence the ludicrous blunders made by foreigners, whoso 
 knowledge of a language is gained only from books; and 
 hence the reason wjry, in any language, there are so few 
 exact synonymes. 
 
 How many persons who oppose compulsory education, 
 have been frightened by the word " compulsory," attaching 
 to it ideas of tyranny and degradation ! How many persons 
 are there in every community, who, in the language of 
 Milton, 
 
 " Bawl for freedom In their senseless mood, 
 And still revolt when the truth would make them free; 
 License they mean when they cry liberty, 
 For who love that, must first be wise and good." 
 
 Who can estimate the amount of mischief which has been 
 done to society by such phrases as "Liberty, Equality and 
 Fraternity." and other such " rabble-charming words," as 
 South calls them, " which have so much wildfire wrapped 
 up in them"? How many persons who declaim passion-
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 225 
 
 ately about " the majesty of the people," " the sovereignty 
 of the people,'' have ever formed for themselves any definite 
 conceptions of what they mean by these expressions? 
 Locke has well said of those who have the words " Wis- 
 dom," " Glory," " Grace," constantly at their tongue's end, 
 that if they should be asked what they mean by them, they 
 would be at a stand and know not what to answer. Even 
 Locke himself, who has written so ably on the abuse of 
 words, has used some of the cardinal and vital terms in his 
 philosophy in different senses. La Harpe says that the 
 express object of the entire " Essay on the Human Under- 
 standing" is to demonstrate rigorously that Ventendement est 
 i-x[>rit et (Kune nature essentiellement distincte de la matiere; 
 yet the author has used the words reflection, mind, spirit, 
 so vaguely that he has been accused of holding doctrines 
 subversive of all moral distinctions. Even the eagle eye of 
 Newton could not penetrate the obscurity of Locke's lan- 
 guage, and on reading the "Essay" he took its author for 
 a Hobbist. De Maistre declares the title a misnomer; in- 
 stead of being called an " Essay on the Human Under- 
 standing," it should be entitled, he thinks, an " Essay on 
 the Understanding of Locke." 
 
 In treating of the difference between the disgraceful 
 and the indecent, Archbishop Whately observes that the 
 Greeks and the Romans, unfortunately, had not, like our- 
 selves, a separate word for each ; turpe and aia%pb<; served 
 to express both. Upon this ambiguity some of the ancient 
 philosophers, especially the Cynics, founded paradoxes, by 
 which they bewildered themselves and their hearers. It is 
 an interesting fact that the Saxon part of our language, 
 containing a smaller percentage of synonymous words that 
 are liable to be confounded, is much freer from equivoca- 
 10*
 
 226 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSK. 
 
 tion than the Romanic. Of four hundred and fifty words 
 discriminated by Whately, in his treatise- on synonymes, 
 less than ninety are Anglo-Saxon. On the other hand, it 
 has been noted by the same writer that the double origin of 
 our language, from Saxon and Norman, often enables a 
 sophist to seem to render a reason, when he is only repeat- 
 ing the assertion in synonymous words of a different fam- 
 ily: e.g., " To allow every man an unbounded freedom of 
 speech, must be always on the whole highly advantageous 
 to the State; for, it is extremely conducive to the interests 
 of the community that each individual should enjoy a lib- 
 erty perfectly unlimited of expressing his sentiments." So 
 the physician in Moliere accounted for opium producing 
 sleep by saying thaf it had a soporific virtue. Again: there 
 is a large class of words employed indiscriminately, neither 
 because they express precisely the same ideas, nor because 
 they enable the sophist to confound things that are essen- 
 tially different, but because they convey no distinct ideas 
 whatever, except of the moral character of him who uses 
 them. " II m'appelle," says Paul Louis Courier, speaking 
 of an opponent, "jacobin, re*volutionnaire, plagiaire, voleur, 
 empoissonneur, faussaire, pestife"re ou pestifere, enrage", 
 imposteur, calomniateur, libelliste, homme horrible, or- 
 durier, grimacier, chifonnier, . . Je vois ce qu'il voit 
 dire; il entend que lui et moi sommes d'avis different." 
 
 It is an old trick of controversialists, of which we have 
 already spoken, to employ " question-begging " words that 
 determine disputes summarily without facts or arguments. 
 Thus political parties and religious sects quietly beg the 
 questions at issue between them by dubbing themselves 
 " the Democrats " and " the Republicans," or " the Ortho- 
 dox " and the " Liberals " ; though the orthodoxy of the one
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 227 
 
 may consist only in opposition to somebody else's doxy, and 
 the liberality of the other may differ from bigotry only in 
 the fact that the bigots are liberal only to one set of opin- 
 ions, while the Liberals are bigoted against all. So with 
 the argument of what is called the Selfish School of Moral 
 Philosophers, who deny that man ever acts from purely 
 disinterested motives. The whole superstructure of their 
 degrading theory rests upon a confounding of the term 
 self-love with selfishness. If I go out to walk, and, being 
 overtaken by a shower, spread my umbrella to save myself 
 from a wetting, never once, all the while, thinking of my 
 friends, my country, or of anybody, in short, but myself, 
 will it be pretended that this act, though performed exclu- 
 sively for self, was in any sense selfish? As well might 
 you say that the cultivation of an art makes a man artful; 
 that one who gets his living by any craft is necessarily a 
 crafty man; that a man skilled in design is a designing 
 man; or that a man who forms a project is therefore a 
 projector. Derivatives do not always retain the force of 
 their primitives. Wearing woolen clothes does not make 
 a man sheepish. A representative does not, and ought not, 
 always to represent the will of his constituents, (that is, 
 in the sense of voting as they wish, or being their mere 
 spokesman;} for they may clamor for measures opposed to 
 the Constitution, which he has sworn to support. Self- 
 love, in the highest degree, implies no disregard of the 
 rights of others; whereas Selfishness is always sacrificing 
 others to itself, it contains the germ of every crime, and 
 fires its neighbor's house to roast its own eggs. 
 
 What towering structures of fallacy conservatives have 
 been built upon the twofold meaning of the word old! 
 Strictly, it denotes the length of time that any object has
 
 228 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 existed; but it is often employed, instead of "ancient," to 
 denote distance of time. Because old men are generally the 
 wisest and most experienced, opinions and practices handed 
 down to us from the " old times " of ignorance and super- 
 stition, when the world was comparatively in its youth, it is 
 thought must be entitled to the highest respect. The truth 
 is, as Sydney Smith says, "of living men the oldest has. 
 ceteris paribits, the most experience ; of generations, the old- 
 est has the least experience. Our ancestors, up to the Con- 
 quest, were children in arms; chubby boys in the time of 
 Edward the First ; striplings under Elizabeth ; men in the 
 reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the white-bearded, 
 silver-headed ancients, who have treasured up, and are pre- 
 pared to profit by, all the experience which human life can 
 supply." Again: how many tedious books, pamphlets, and 
 newspaper articles have been written, to prove that educa- 
 tion should consist of mental discipline, founded on an 
 erroneous derivation of the word from educere, "to draw 
 out." Does education, it is asked, consist in filling the 
 child's mind as a cistern is filled with water brought in 
 buckets from some other source, or in the opening up of its 
 own fountains? The fact is education comes not from <><ln- 
 cere, but from edttcare, which means "to nourish," "to fos- 
 ter," to do just what the nurse does. Educit obstetrix, says 
 Cicero, educat nutrix, imtituit pcedagogns. It is food, above 
 all things, which the growing mind craves; and the mind's 
 food is knowledge. Discipline, training, healthful develop- 
 ment is, indeed, necessary, but it should form a part only, 
 not usurp the lion's share, of education. In an ideal sys- 
 tem this and the nourishing of the mind by wholesome 
 knowledge would proceed simultaneously. The school les- 
 son would feed the mind, while the thorough, patient, and
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 229 
 
 conscientious acquisition of it would gymnaze the intellect 
 and strengthen the moral force. Why have one class of 
 studies for discipline only, and another class for nourish- 
 ment only, when there are studies which at once fill the 
 mind with the materials of thinking and develop the power 
 of thought, which, at the same time, impart useful knowl- 
 edge, and afford an intellectual gymnastic? Is a merchant, 
 whose business compels him to walk a dozen miles a day, to 
 be told that he must walk another dozen for the sake of 
 exercise, and for that alone? Yet not less preposterous, it 
 seems to us, is the reasoning of a class of educators who 
 would range on one side the practically useful, and on the 
 other the educational, and build high between them a par- 
 tition wall. 
 
 If a man, by mastering Chillingworth, learns how to rea- 
 son logically at the same time that he learns the principles 
 of Protestantism, must he study logic in Whately or Jevens? 
 One of the disadvantages of an education of which disci- 
 pline, pure and simple, is made the end, is that the disci- 
 pline, being disagreeable, too often ends with the school- 
 days; whereas the discipline gained agreeably, instead of 
 being associated with disgust, would be continued through 
 life. It is possible that the muscular discipline which the 
 gymnasium gives is greater while it lasts than that which 
 is gained by a blacksmith or other laborer in his daily 
 work; but whose muscles are more developed, the man's 
 who practices a few months or years in a gymnasium, or 
 the man's whose calling compels him to use his muscles all 
 his life? What would the graduate of the gymnasium do, 
 if hugged by a London coal-heaver? 
 
 Again: the readers of Macaulay's "History of England" 
 will recollect the hot and long-protracted debates in Parlia-
 
 230 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 ment in 1696, upon the question whether James II. had 
 "abdicated" or "deserted" the crown, the Lords insisting 
 upon the former, the Commons upon the latter, term. Ilt^ 
 will also recall the eloquent and fierce debate by the Lords 
 upon the motion that they should subscribe an instrument, 
 to which the Commons had subscribed, recognizing William 
 as " rightful and lawful king of England." This they 
 refused to do, but voted to declare that he had the right by 
 law to the English crown, and that no other person had any 
 right whatever to that crown. The distinction between the 
 two propositions, observes Macaulay, a Whig may, without 
 any painful sense of shame, acknowledge to be beyond the 
 reach of his faculties, and leave to be discussed by High 
 Churchmen. The distinction between " abdicate " and " de- 
 sert," however, is an important one, obvious almost at a 
 glance. Had Parliament declared that James had "desert- 
 ed " the throne, they would have admitted that it was not 
 only his right, but his duty, to return, as in the case of a 
 husband who had deserted his wife, or a soldier who had 
 deserted his post. By declaring that he had " abdicated " 
 the throne, they virtually asserted that he had voluntarily 
 relinquished the crown, and forfeited all right to it forever. 
 Among the ambiguous words which at this day lead to 
 confusion of thought, one of the most prominent is the 
 word unity. There are not a few Christians who confound 
 what the Apostles say concerning " unity of spirit," faith, 
 etc., with unity of church government, and infer, because 
 the church, that is, the church universal, is one, as hav- 
 ing one common Head, one Spirit, one Father, it must, 
 therefore, be one as a society. " Church unity " is a good 
 thing, so long as it does not involve the sacrifice of a denom- 
 ination's life or principles ; but there are cases where it
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 231 
 
 amounts to absorption. It sometimes resembles too closely 
 that peculiar union which the boa-constrictor is so fond of 
 consummating between itself and the goat. It is exceed- 
 ingly fond of goats; but when the union is complete, there 
 is not a trace of the goat, it is all boa-constrictor. 
 
 Again, how many systems of error in metaphysics and 
 ethics have been based upon the etymologies of words, the 
 sophist assuming that the meaning of a word must always 
 be that which it, or its root, originally bore! Thus Home 
 Tooke tries to prove by a wide induction that since all par- 
 ticles, that is, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions, 
 were originally nouns and verbs, they must be so still; a 
 species of logic which would prove that man, if the Dar- 
 winian theory be true, is still a reptile. In a similar way 
 the same writer has reached the conclusion that there is no 
 eternal truth, since truth, according to its etymology, is 
 simply what one " troweth," that is, what one thinks or be- 
 lieves. This theory, it is thought, was suggested to Tooke 
 by a conjecture that " if" is equivalent to "gif," an imper- 
 ative of the verb " to give " ; but as it has been shown, 
 from cognate forms in other languages, that this particle 
 has no connection with the verb " to give," or any other 
 verb, " any system founded on this basis is a mere castle in 
 the air." Truth, argues Tooke, supposes mankind; for 
 whom, and by whom alone the word is formed, and to whom 
 alone it is applicable. " If no man, then no truth. There 
 is no such thing as eternal, immutable, everlasting truth, 
 unless mankind, such as they are at present, be also eternal, 
 immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may contradict 
 each other, and yet both speak truth, for the truth of one 
 person may be opposite to the truth of another." 
 
 Even if we admit this derivation of " truth," the con-
 
 232 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 elusion does not follow; for whatever the word once meant, 
 it now means that which is certain, whether we think it or 
 not. But this etymology has been disputed by the very 
 highest authority. According to Mr. Garnett, an acute 
 English philologist, "truth"' is derived "from the Sanscrit 
 dhru, to be established, fixwm esse; whence dhruwa, cer- 
 tain, i.e. established; German, trauen, to rely, trust; trru 
 faithful, true; Anglo-Saxon, treorv-treowth (fides); English, 
 true, truth. To these we may add Gothic, triggons; Ice- 
 landic, trygge; (fidus, securus, tutus): all from the same 
 root, and all conveying the same idea of stability or secu- 
 rity. Truth, therefore, neither means what is thought nor 
 what is said, but that which is permanent, stable, and is 
 and ought to be relied upon, because, upon sufficient data, 
 it is capable of being demonstrated or shown to exist. If 
 we admit this explanation, Tooke's assertions . . . become 
 Vox et preterea nihil." 
 
 Some years ago a bulky volume 01 seven hundred pages 
 octavo was written by Dr. Johnson, a London physician, to 
 prove that " might makes right," that justice is the result, 
 not of divine instinct, but purely and simply of arbitrary 
 decree. The foundation for this equally fallacious and dan- 
 gerous theory was the fact that " right" is derived from the 
 'Latin, rego, to rule; therefore whatever the rex, or ruler, 
 authorizes or decrees, is right! As well might he argue 
 that only courtiers can be polite, because "courtesy'' is 
 borrowed from palaces, or that there can be no " heaven " 
 or " hell " in the scriptural sense, because, in its etymologi- 
 cal, the one is the canopy heaved over our heads, and the 
 other is the hollow space beneath our feet. Indeed, we 
 have seen an argument, founded on the etymology of the 
 latter word, to prove that there is " no hell beyond a hole
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 233 
 
 in the ground." In the same way because our primitive 
 vocabulary is derived solely from sensible images, it has 
 been assumed that the mind has no ideas except those 
 derived through the senses, and that therefore thought is 
 only sensation. But neither idealism nor materialism can 
 derive any support from the phenomena of language, for 
 the names we give either to outward objects or to our con- 
 ceptions of immaterial entities can give us no conception of 
 the things themselves. It is true that in every-day lan- 
 guage we talk of color, smell, thickness, shape, etc., not 
 only as sensations within us, but as qualities inherent in 
 the things themselves; but it has long since been shown 
 that they are only modifications of our consciousness. 
 " Things and the senses can no more transmit cognitions to 
 the mind, than a man can transmit to a beggar a guinea 
 that he has not got." If, then, our conception of an object 
 in no way resembles the object, if heat, for example, can 
 be, in no sense, like a live coal, nor pain like the pricking 
 of a pin, much less can the word by which we denote an 
 object be other than a mere hieroglyphic, or teach us a jot 
 or tittle about the world of sense or thought. Again: the 
 fact that spirit once signified breath, and animus, avs.uo?, 
 air, lends no countenance to materialism. " When we im- 
 pose on a phenomenon of the physical order a moral denom- 
 ination, we do not thereby spiritualize matter; and because 
 we assign a physical denomination to a moral phenomenon, 
 we do not materialize spirit." Even if the words by which 
 we designate mental conceptions are derived from material 
 analogies, it does not follow that our conceptions were 
 themselves originally material; and we shall in vain try to 
 account by any external source for the relations of words 
 among themselves. It is told of the metaphysician, Cud-
 
 234 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 worth, that, in reply to a person who ridiculed the doctrine 
 of innate 15eas, he told him to take down the first book that 
 came to hand in his library, open at random, and read. 
 The latter opened Cicero's "Offices," and began reading 1 1n- 
 first sentence, " Quamquam " "Stop! " cried Cudworth, 
 
 "it is enough. Tell me how through the SCUMS you 
 acquire the idea of quamquam." 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that a language is no more 
 than a mere collection of words. The terms we employ an- 
 symbols only, which can never fully express our thought. 
 but shadow forth far more than it is in their power dis- 
 tinctly to impart. Lastly, there are in every language, 
 as another has truly said, a vast number of words, such as 
 sacrifice, sacrament, mystery, eternity, which may be ex- 
 plained by the idea, though the idea cannot be discovered 
 by the word, as is the case with whatever belongs to the 
 mystery of the mind; and this of itself is enough to dis- 
 prove the conclusion which nominalists would draw from 
 the origin of words, and to prove that, whatever the 
 derivation of "truth." its etymology can establish nothing 
 concerning its essence, and that we are still at liberty to 
 regard it as independent, immutable, and eternal, having 
 its archetype in the Divine mind. 
 
 Among the terms used in literary criticism, few an- 
 more loosely employed than the word creaticr, as applied 
 to men of genius. Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, are said to 
 have "creative power"; and, as a figure of speech, the 
 remark is true enough; but, strictly speaking, only Om- 
 nipotence can create; man can only combine. The exhaust- 
 less imagination of Raphael could fill his gallery with 
 fantastic representations, but every piece of which his 
 paintings are composed exists in nature. To make a
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 235 
 
 modern statue there is a great melting down of old bronze. 
 The essence of originality is not that it creates new mate- 
 rial, or even necessarily invents new combinations of mate- 
 rial, but that it imparts new life to whatever it discovers 
 or combines, whether of new or old. Shakspeare's genius 
 is at no other time so incontestably sovereign as when he 
 borrows most, when he adapts or moulds, in a manner 
 so perfect as to resemble a new creation, the old chroni- 
 cles and " Italian originals," which have been awaiting the 
 vivida vis that makes them live and move. Non nova, sed 
 nove, sums up the whole philosophy of the subject. "Orig- 
 inality," says an able writer, " never works more fruit- 
 fully than in a soil rich and deep with the foliage of ages." 
 The word same is often used in a way that leads to 
 error. Persons say the same when they mean similar. It 
 has been asked whether the ship Argo, in which Jason 
 sought the Golden Fleece, and whose decaying timbers, as 
 she lay on the Greek shore, a grateful and reverent nation 
 had patched up, till, in process .of time, not a plank of the 
 original ship was left, was still the same ship as of old. 
 The question presents no difficulty, if we remember that 
 sameness, that is, identity, is an absolute term, and can be 
 affirmed or denied only in an absolute sense. No man is 
 the same man to-day that he was yesterday, though he 
 may be very similar to his yesterday's self.
 
 236 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS (continued}. 
 
 I never learned rhetorike certain; 
 
 Things that I speke, it mote be hare and plain. CHAUCER. 
 
 Here is our great infelicity, that, when single words signify complex ideas, 
 one word can never distinctly manifest all the parts of a complex idea. 
 ISAAC WATTS. 
 
 If reputation attend these conquests which depend on the fineness and 
 niceties of words, it is no wonder if the wit of men so employed should per- 
 plex and subtilize the signification of sounds. LOCKE. 
 
 IT has been remarked by Archbishop Whately that " the 
 words whose ambiguity is the most frequently over- 
 looked, and produces the greatest amount of confusion of 
 thought and fallacy are the commonest," the very ones 
 whose meaning is supposed to be best understood. ".Fa- 
 miliar acquaintance is perpetually mistaken for accurate 
 knowledge." Such a word is luxury. 
 
 A favorite theme for newspaper declamations in ihrsc 
 days is the luxury and extravagance of the American 
 people, especially of the nouveaux riches whose fortunes 
 have been of mushroom growth. It is easy to declaim 
 thus against luxury, that is, against the use of things 
 which, at any particular period, are not deemed indis- 
 pensable to life, health, and comfort; but what do those 
 who indulge in this cheap denunciation mean by the term? 
 Is not luxury a purely relative term? Is there a single 
 article of dress, food or furniture which can be pronounced 
 an absolute luxury, without regard to' the wealth or pov- 
 erty of him who enjoys it? Are not the luxuries of one
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 237 
 
 generation or country the necessaries of another? Persons 
 who are familiar with history know that Alfred the Great 
 had not a chair to sit down upon, nor a chimney to carry 
 off his smoke; that William the Conqueror was unac- 
 quainted with the luxury of a feather bed, if it can be 
 called one; that the early aristocracy of England lived on 
 the ground-floor, without drainage; that in the Middle 
 Ages shirts were deemed a useless superfluity, and men 
 were even put in the pillory for wearing them ; that night 
 shirts were esteemed a still more needless luxury, and 
 persons of all ranks and classes slept in the first costume 
 of Adam ; that travelling carriages are an ingenious inven- 
 tion of modern effeminacy; that the men who first carried 
 umbrellas in the streets, even in the severest rain-storms, 
 were hooted at as dandies and coxcombs; that the nobles 
 and dames of the most brilliant epochs of England's annals 
 ate with their fingers, generally in couples, out of one 
 trencher on a bare table ; and that when forks were intro- 
 duced, they were long hotly opposed as an extravagance, 
 and even denounced by many as a device of Satan, to offer 
 an affront to Providence, who had provided man with 
 fingers to convey his food to his mouth. In the intro- 
 duction to Hollinshed's "Chronicles," published in 1577, 
 there is a bitter complaint of the multitude of chimneys 
 lately erected, of the exchange of straw pallets for mat- 
 tresses or flock beds, and of wooden platters for earthen- 
 ware and pewter. In another place, the writer laments 
 that oak only is used for building, instead of willow as 
 heretofore; adding, that "formerly our houses indeed 
 were of willow, but our men were of oak; but now that 
 our houses are of oak, our men are not only of willow, 
 but some altogether of straw, which is a sore alteration."
 
 238 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Erasmus tells us that salt beef and strong ale consti- 
 tuted the chief part of Queen Elizabeth's breakfast, and 
 that similar refreshments were served to her in bed for 
 supper. There is not a single able-bodied workingman in 
 Chicago who does not enjoy fare which would have been 
 deemed luxurious by men of high station in the iron reign 
 of the Tudors; hardly a thriving shopkeeper who does not 
 occupy a house which English nobles in 1650 would have 
 envied; hardly a domestic servant or factory girl who does 
 not on Sundays adorn herself with apparel which would 
 have excited the admiration of the duchesses in Queen 
 Elizabeth's ante-rooms. Xenophon accounts for the degen- 
 eracy of the Persians by their luxury, which, he says, was 
 carried to such a pitch that they used gloves to protect 
 their hands. Tea and coffee were once denounced as idle 
 and injurious luxuries; and throughout the larger part of 
 the world tooth-brushes, napkins, suspenders, bathing-tubs, 
 and a hundred other things now deemed indispensable to 
 the health or comfort of civilized man, would be regarded 
 as proofs of effeminacy and extravagance. 
 
 Luxury has been a favorite theme of satire and denun- 
 ciation by poets and moralists from time immemorial. 
 But it may be doubted whether in nations or individuals 
 its effects, even when it rages most fiercely, are half so 
 pernicious as those springing from that indifference to 
 comforts and luxuries which is sometimes dignified with 
 the name of contentment, but which is only another name 
 for sheer laziness. While thousands are ruined by prodi- 
 gality and extravagance, tens of thousands are kept in 
 poverty by indifference to the comforts and ornaments of 
 life, by a too feeble development of those desires to 
 gratify which the mass of men are striving. It is a bad
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 239 
 
 sign when a man is content with the bare necessities of 
 life, and aspiring to nothing higher; and equally ominous 
 is it when a nation, however rich or powerful, is satisfied 
 with the capital and glories it has already accumulated. 
 Cry up as we may the virtues of simplicity and frugality, 
 it is yet quite certain that a people content to live upon 
 garlic, macaroni, or rice, are at the very lowest point in 
 the scale both of intellect and morality. A civilized man 
 differs from a savage principally in the multiplicity of his 
 wants. The truth is, man is a constitutionally lazy being, 
 and requires some stimulus to prick him into industry. 
 He must have many difficulties to contend with, many 
 clamorous appetites and tastes to gratify, if you would 
 bring out his energies and virtues; and it is because they 
 are always grumbling, because, dissatisfied amid the most 
 enviable enjoyments, they clamor and strive for more and 
 more of what Voltaire calls les superflues choses, si neces- 
 saires, that the English people have reached their present 
 pinnacle of prosperity, and accumulated a wealth which 
 almost enables them to defy a hostile world. 
 
 Among the familiar words that we employ few have 
 been more frequently made the instrument of sophistry 
 than nature and art. There are many persons who oppose 
 the teaching of elocution, because they like a natural and 
 artless eloquence, to which, they think, all elaborate train- 
 ing is opposed. Yet nothing is more certain than that 
 Nature and Art, between which there is supposed to be an 
 irreconcilable antagonism, are often the very same thing. 
 What is more natural than that a man who lacks vocal 
 power should cultivate and develop his voice by vocal exer- 
 cises; or that, if he is conscious of faults in his manner of 
 speaking, his articulation, gestures, etc. he should try,
 
 240 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 by the help of a good teacher, to overcome them? So with 
 the style of a writer; what is more natural than for one 
 who feels that he has not adequately expressed his thought, 
 to blot the words first suggested and try others, and yet 
 others, till he despairs of further improvement? A con- 
 scientious writer is continually transposing clauses, recon- 
 structing sentences, substituting words, polishing and re- 
 polishing paragraphs; and this, unquestionably, is art, or 
 the application of means to an end. But is this art incon- 
 sistent with nature? 
 
 Similar to the fallacy which lurks in the words "na- 
 ture" and "natural," as thus employed, is that which lurks 
 in a popular use of the word simplicity. It has been 
 happily said that while some men talk as if to speak nat- 
 urally* were to speak like a Natural, others talk as if to 
 speak with simplicity meant to speak like a simpleton. 
 But what is true " simplicity," as applied to literary com- 
 position? Is it old, worn-out commonplace, "straw 
 that has been thrashed a hundred times without wheat," 
 as Carlyle says, the shallowest ideas expressed in tame 
 and insipid language? Or is it not rather 
 
 " Nature to advantage dressed, 
 What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed," 
 
 in other words, a just and striking thought expressed in 
 the aptest and most impressive language? Those persons 
 who declaim against the employment of art in speaking 
 and writing, forget that we are all exceedingly artificial, 
 conventional beings. Without training, a speaker is almost 
 sure to be awkward in gesture and unnatural in utter- 
 ance. The very preacher who in the street forgets himself 
 and uses the most natural gesticulation and tones, will 
 become self-conscious the moment he ascends the pulpit.
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 241 
 
 and speak in a falsetto key. It is to get rid of these 
 artificial habits that art (which is the employment of 
 proper means) is needed. 
 
 How many controversies about the " transmutation of 
 Species" and the "fixitij of Species,-' would have been 
 avoided, had the scientists who use these phrases fully 
 pondered their meaning, or rather no-meaning! Some 
 writers have tried to explain the law of constancy in 
 transmission, and its independence of the law of variation, 
 by maintaining that it is the Species only, not the Individ- 
 ual, which is reproduced. "Species," says Buifon, " are the 
 only beings in nature." A sheep, it is said, is always and 
 everywhere a sheep, and a man a man, reproducing the 
 specific type, but not necessarily reproducing any individual 
 peculiarities. This hypothesis is a striking example of 
 the confusion which results from the introduction of old 
 metaphysical ideas into science. It is evident, as a late 
 writer has clearly shown, that Species cannot reproduce 
 itself, for Species does not exist. It is an entity, an 
 abstract idea, not a concrete fact. 
 
 The thing Species no more exists than the thing Good- 
 ness or the thing Whiteness. "Nature only knows indi- 
 viduals. A collection of individuals so closely resembling 
 each other as all sheep resemble each other, are conven- 
 iently classed under one general term, Species; but this 
 general term has no objective existence; the abstract or 
 typical sheep, apart from all concrete individuals, has no 
 existence out of our systems. Whenever an individual 
 sheep is born, it is the offspring of two individual sheep, 
 whose structures and dispositions it reproduces; it is not 
 the offspring of an abstract idea; it does not come into 
 being at the bidding of a type, which as a Species sits 
 11
 
 242 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 apart, regulating ovine phenomena. . . If, therefore, 
 ' transmutation of Species ' is absurd, ' fixity of Species ' is 
 not a whit less so. That which does not exist can neither 
 be transmuted nor maintained in fixity. Only individuals 
 exist; they resemble their parents, and they differ from 
 their parents. Out of these resemblances we create Spe- 
 cies; out of these differences we create Varieties; we do so 
 as conveniences of classification, and then believe in the 
 reality of our own figments."* 
 
 A popular fallacy, which is partly verbal, is the notion, 
 so tenaciously held by many, that exposure to hardship, 
 and even want, in youth, is the cause of the bodily vigor 
 of those men who have lived to a good age in countries 
 with a rocky soil and a bleak climate. What is more 
 natural, it is argued, than that hardships should harden the 
 constitution? Look at the Indians; how many of them 
 live till eighty or ninety! Yet no person who reasons 
 thus would think, if engaged in cattle-breeding, of neg- 
 lecting to feed and shelter his animals in their youth; 
 nor if a dozen men, out of a hundred who had faced a 
 battery, should survive and live to a good age, would he 
 think of regarding the facing of batteries as conducive to 
 longevity. The truth is, that early hardships, by destroy- 
 ing all the weak, merely prove the hardiness of the sur- 
 vivors, which latter is the cause, not the effect, of their 
 having lived through such a training. So " loading a gun- 
 barrel to the muzzle, and firing it off, does not give it 
 strength; though it proves, if it escape, that it was 
 strong." 
 
 The revelations of travelers have dissipated the illu- 
 sions which once prevailed concerning the hardiness and 
 
 '"Westminster Review," September, 1850.
 
 THE FALLACIES IX WORDS. 243 
 
 health of the Indians and other savages. The savage, it is 
 now known, lives in a condition but one degree above star- 
 vation. If he sink below it, he disappears instantaneously, 
 as if he had never been. A certain amount of hardship 
 he can endure; but it has limits, which if he passes, he 
 sinks unnoticed and unknown. There is no registrar or 
 newspaper to record that a unit has been subtracted from 
 the amount of human existence. It is true that severe 
 diseases are rarely seen by casual visitors of savage tribes, 
 and why? Because death is their doctor, and the grave 
 their hospital. When patients are left wholly to nature, 
 nature presses very hard for an immediate payment of 
 her debt. 
 
 An ambiguous word, which has been a source of not a 
 little error, is the adjective light, which is used sometimes 
 in a literal, sometimes in a figurative, sense. When writers 
 on Agricultural Chemistry declare that what are called 
 heavy soils are always specifically the lightest, the statement 
 looks like a paradox. By " heavy " soils are meant, of 
 course, not those which are the weightiest, but these which 
 are ploughed with difficulty, the effect being like that of 
 dragging a heavy weight. So some articles of food are 
 supposed to be light of digestion because they are specifically 
 light. Again, there is a popular notion that strong drink 
 must make men strong; which is a double fallacy, since the 
 word "strong" is applied to alcoholic liquors and to the 
 human body in entirely different senses, and it is assumed 
 that an effect must be like its cause, which is not true. 
 
 Another ambiguous term, at least as popularly used, is 
 murder. There are persons who assert that the coup d'etat 
 of Louis Napoleon, in 1851, was murder in the strictest 
 sense of the term. To send out into the streets of a
 
 244 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 peaceful town a party of men dressed in uniform, with 
 muskets and bayonets in their hands, and with orders to 
 kill and plunder, is just as essentially murder and robbery, 
 it is said, as to break into a house with half-a-dozen 
 companions out of uniform, and do the same things. Was 
 not Orsini's crime, they ask, as truly a murder as when a 
 burglar kills a man with a revolver in order to rob him? 
 So, again, there are Christian moralists, who, when asked 
 for proof that suicide is sinful, adduce the Scriptural 
 injunction, "Thou shalt do no murder," assuming that 
 suicide, because it is called se\{-murder, is a species of 
 murder in the primary sense of the word. It is evident, 
 however, that most, if not all, of these assertions are 
 founded on palpable fallacies. "Murder" is a technical 
 term, and means the wilful, deliberate killing, without 
 just cause, and without certain specified excuses, of a man 
 who belongs to a settled state of society, in which security 
 is afforded to life and property. In all that is said about 
 the atrocity of murder, there is a latent reference to this 
 state of things. Were the "Vigilance Committee" of San 
 Francisco murderers, when they executed criminals ille- 
 gally? Are the men who "lynch" horse-thieves on our 
 western frontiers, murderers? Were the rebels who, in 
 our late Civil War, shot down Union soldiers, murderers? 
 The common sentiment of the civilized world recog- 
 nizes a vast difference between the rights and duties of 
 sovereigns and subjects, and the relations of nations to 
 each other, on the one hand, and the rights and duties of 
 private individuals on the other; and hence the rules of 
 public and those of private morality must be essentially 
 different. According to legal authority, it is not murder 
 to kill an alien enemy in time of war; nor is it murder
 
 THE FALLACIES IX WORDS. 245 
 
 to take away a man's life by perjury. Revolutions and 
 "coups d'etat" most persons will admit to be sometimes 
 justifiable; and both, when justifiable, justify a certain 
 degree of violence to person, to property, or to previous 
 engagements. The difficulty is to tell just when, and how 
 far, violence may justify and be justified. It has been 
 well said by an acute and original writer that "it is by 
 no means the same thing whether a man is plundered 
 and wounded by burglars, or by the soldiers of an absolute 
 king who is trying to maintain his authority. The sack 
 of Perugia shocked the sensibilities of a great part of 
 Europe; but if the Pope had privately poisoned one of his 
 friends or servants from any purely personal motive, even 
 the blindest religious zeal would have denounced him as 
 a criminal unfit to live. A man must be a very bitter 
 Liberal indeed, who really maintains that the violation by 
 a Sovereign of his promissory oath of office stands on pre- 
 cisely the same footing as deliberate perjury in an ordinary 
 court of justice." Suicide, it is evident, lacks the most 
 essential characteristic of murder, namely, its inhumanity, 
 the injury done to one's neighbor, and to others, by the 
 insecurity they are made to feel. Can a man rob himself? 
 If not, how can he, in the proper sense of the word, 
 murder himself ? 
 
 There is hardly any word which is oftener turned into 
 an instrument of the fallacy of ambiguity than theory. 
 There is a class of men in every community of limited 
 education and narrow observation, who, because they 
 have mingled in the world and dealt with affairs, claim to 
 be preeminently practical men, and ridicule the opinions 
 of thinkers in their closets as the speculations of " mere 
 theorists."" In their estimation all theorizing is synony-
 
 246 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 inous with visionary speculation; while that which they 
 call " practical knowledge," and which they fancy to be 
 wholly devoid of supposition or guesswork, but which is 
 nothing else than a heap of hasty deductions from scanty 
 and inaccurately observed phenomena, they deem more 
 trustworthy than the discoveries of science and the con- 
 clusions of reason. Yet, when correctly defined, this very 
 practical knowledge, so boastfully opposed to theory, in 
 reality presupposes it. True practical knowledge is simply 
 a ready discernment of the proper modes and seasons of 
 applying to the common affairs of life those general truths 
 and principles which are deduced from an extensive and 
 accurate observation of facts, by minds stored with various 
 knowledge, accustomed to investigation, and trained to the 
 art of reasoning; or, in other words, by theorists. Every 
 man who attempts to trace the causes or effects of an 
 occurrence that falls under his personal observation, theo- 
 rizes. The only essential distinction, in most cases, between 
 " practical " men and those whom they denounce as vision- 
 ary, is, not that the latter alone indulge in speculation, 
 but that the theories of the former are based on the facts 
 of their own experience, those that happen within .a 
 narrow sphere, and in a single age; while the conclusions 
 of the latter are deduced from the facts of all ages and 
 countries, minutely analyzed and compared. 
 
 Thus the " practical " farmer does not hesitate to con- 
 sult the neighboring farmers, and to make use of the re- 
 sults of their experience concerning the best soils for certain 
 crops, the best manures for those soils, etc. ; yet if anothe* 
 farmer, instead of availing himself of his neighbors' expe- 
 riences only, consults a book or books containing the digested 
 and classified results of a thousand farmers' experiences
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 247 
 
 touching the same points, he is called, by a strange incon- 
 sistency, "a book-farmer," "a mere theorist." The truth 
 is, the "practical" man, so called, extends his views no 
 farther than the fact before him. Even when he is so for- 
 tunate as to learn its cause, the discovery is comparatively 
 useless, since it affords no light in new and more complex 
 cases. The scientific man, unsatisfied with the observation 
 of one fact, collects many, and by tracing the points of 
 resemblance, deduces a comprehensive truth of universal 
 application. "Practical" men conduct the details of ordi- 
 nary business with a masterly hand. As Burke said of 
 George Grenville, they do admirably well so long as things 
 move on in the accustomed channel, and a new and troubled 
 scene is not opened; but they are not fitted to contend suc- 
 cessfully with the difficulties of an untried and hazardous ' 
 situation. When " the high roads are broken up, and the 
 waters are out," when a new state of things is presented, 
 and "the line affords no precedent," then it is that they 
 show a mind trained in a subordinate sphere, . formed for 
 servile imitation, and destined to borrow its lights of 
 another. "Expert men," says Bacon, "can execute, and 
 perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general 
 counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best 
 from those that are learned." 
 
 Among the current phrases of the day, by which men 
 are led into error, one of the commonest is the expression 
 doing good. Properly understood, "to do good" is to do 
 right; but the phrase has acquired a technical sense which 
 is much narrower. It means, not discharging faithfully 
 the duties of one's calling, but stepping aside from its 
 routine to relieve the poor, the distressed, and the ignorant, 
 or to reform the sinful. The lawyer who, for a fee, con-
 
 248 WOEDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 scientiously gives advice, or pleads in the courts, is not 
 thought to be doing good; but he is so regarded if he gra- 
 tuitously defends a poor man or a widow. A merchant who 
 sells good articles at fair prices, and pays his notes punc- 
 tually, is not doing good; but he is doing good, if he car- 
 ries broth and blankets to beggars, teaches in a Sunday 
 School, supports a Young Men's Christian Association, or 
 distributes tracts to the irreligious. Charitable and philan- 
 thropic societies of every kind are all recognized as organs 
 for doing good; but the common pursuits of life, law, 
 medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, trading, etc. are 
 not. 
 
 The incorrectness of this view will be seen if we for a 
 moment reflect what would become of society, including its 
 charitable institutions and philanthropists, should its differ- 
 ent members refuse to perform their respective functions. 
 Society is a body corporate, which can exist, at least, in a 
 healthy state, only on condition that each man performs 
 the specific work which Providence, or his own sense of his 
 fitness for it, has assigned to him. Thus one man tills the 
 ground; another engages in manufacturing; a third gathers 
 and distributes the produce of labor in its various forms; a 
 fourth loans or exchanges money; a fifth makes or executes 
 laws; and each of these persons, as he is contributing to 
 the general good, is doing good as truly as the most 
 devoted clergyman who labors in the cure of souls, or 
 philanthropist who carries loaves of bread to hovels. To 
 deny this, it has been well said, is to say that a commis- 
 sariat or transport corps has nothing to do with carrying 
 on a war, and that this business is discharged entirely by 
 the men who stand in line of battle or mount the breach. 
 
 The popular theory proceeds upon two assumptions,
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 249 
 
 both of which are false; first, that the motives which urge 
 men to diligence in their callings are mean and paltry, 
 that selfishness is the mainspring which causes all the 
 wheels in the great machine of society to revolve; and, 
 secondly, that pursuits which benefit those who prosecute 
 them are necessarily selfish. The truth is, the best work, 
 and a very large part of the work, done in every calling, 
 is done not from a mean and sordid hunger for its emol- 
 uments, whether of money, rank, or fame, but from a 
 sincere love for it, and pride in performing its duties well 
 and creditably. The moment a man begins to lose this 
 esprit de corps, this high-minded professional pride, and to 
 find his reward in his pay, and not in his work, that 
 moment his work begins to deteriorate, and he ceases to 
 meet with the highest success. If pursuits which benefit 
 those who follow them are necessarily selfish, then phil- 
 anthropy itself is selfish, for its rewards, in popular esti- 
 mation, are of the noblest kind. No sane man will 
 depreciate the blessings that result from the labors of the 
 Howards, the Frys, and the Nightingales; but they bear 
 the same relation to the ordinary pursuits of life that 
 medicine bears to food. Doctors and surgeons are useful 
 members of society; but their services are less needed 
 than those of butchers and bakers. Let the farmer cease 
 to sow and reap, let the loom and the anvil be forsaken, 
 and the courts of justice be closed, and not only will the 
 philanthropist starve, but society will speedily become a 
 den of robbers, if it does not utterly cease to exist. 
 
 Mr. Mill notices an ambiguity in the word right, which 
 
 has been made the occasion of an ingenious sophism. A 
 
 man asserts that he has a right to publish his opinions, 
 
 which may be true in one sense, namely, that it would be 
 
 11*
 
 250 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 wrong in any other person to hinder or prevent their 
 publication; but it does not follow that, in publishing his 
 opinions, he is doing right, for this is an entirely distinct 
 proposition from the other. Its truth depends upon two 
 things; first, whether he has taken due pains to ascertain 
 that the opinions are true, and second, whether their 
 publication in this manner, and at this time, will pro- 
 bably be beneficial to the interests of truth on the whole. 
 Another sophism, based on the ambiguity of the same 
 word, is that of confounding a right of any kind with a 
 right to enforce that right by resisting or punishing any 
 violation of it, as in the case of a people whose right to 
 good government is ignored by tyrannical rulers. The 
 right or liberty of the people to turn out their rulers, is 
 so far from being the same thing as the other, that " it 
 depends upon an immense number of varying circum- 
 stances, and is altogether one of the knottiest questions 
 in practical ethics." 
 
 No two terms are more frequently confounded in these 
 days than piety and religion. Not a few persons think 
 they are religious because they have pious inclinations, 
 which no more necessarily follows than that a man has 
 learning or money because he has a desire for learning or 
 money. It has been well said that ai man has not a re- 
 ligion simply by having pious inclinations, any more than 
 he has a country simply by having philanthropy. A man 
 has not a country until he is a citizen of the State, until 
 he undertakes to follow and uphold certain laws; to obey 
 certain magistrates, and to adopt certain ways of acting 
 and living. 
 
 Montaigne complains with good reason that too many 
 definitions, explanations, and replies to difficult questions,
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 251 
 
 are purely verbal. " I demand what nature is, what pleas- 
 ure, circle, and substition are? The question is about 
 words, and is answered accordingly. A stone is a body; 
 but if a man should further urge, and what is body? Sub- 
 stance; and what is substance? and so on, he would drive 
 the respondent to the end of his calepin. We exchange 
 one word for another, and ofttimes for one less understood. 
 I better know what man is, than I know what animal is, or 
 mortal, or rational. To satisfie one doubt, they pop me in 
 the mouth with three; 'tis the Hydra's head."" 
 
 From all this it will be seen that our words are, to a 
 large extent, carelessly employed, the signs of crude and 
 indefinite generalizations. But even when the greatest 
 care is taken in the employment of words, it is nearly 
 impossible to choose and put them together so exquisitely 
 that a sophist may not wrest and pervert their meaning. 
 Those persons who have ever had a lawsuit need not be 
 told how much ingenious argument may hang on a shade 
 of meaning, to be determined objectively without refer- 
 ence to the fancied intentions of the legislator or the 
 writer. If, in ordinary life, words represent impressions 
 and ideas, in legal instruments they are things; they dis- 
 pose of property, liberty, and life; they express the will of 
 the law-giver, and become the masters of our social being. 
 Yet so carelessly are they used by lawyers and legislators, 
 that half the money spent in litigation goes to determine 
 the meanings of words and phrases. O'Connell used to 
 assert that he could drive a coach-and-six through an Act 
 of Parliament. Many of our American enactments yawn 
 with chasms wide enough for a whole railway train. But 
 even when laws have been framed with the most consum- 
 
 * " Essays," Cotton's edition.
 
 252 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 mate skill, the subtlety of a Choate or a Follett may twist 
 what appears to be the clearest and most unmistakable lan- 
 guage into a meaning the very opposite to. that which the 
 common sense of mankind would give it. 
 
 We have heard Judge Story make the following state- 
 ment to show the extreme difficulty of framing a statute 
 so as to avoid all ambiguity in its language. Being once 
 employed by Congress to draft an important law, he spent 
 six months in trying to perfect its phraseology, so that its 
 sense would be clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, leaving 
 not the smallest loophole for^ a lawyer to creep through. 
 Yet, in less than a year, after having heard the arguments 
 of two able attorneys, in a suit which came before him 
 as a Judge of the United States Supreme Court, he was 
 utterly at a loss to decide upon the statute's meaning! 
 
 A signal illustration of the ambiguity that lurks in 
 the most familiar words, is furnished by a legal question 
 that was fruitful of controversy and " costs " not long ago 
 in England. An English nobleman, Lord Henry Seymour, 
 who lived in Paris many years, executed a will in 1856, 
 wherein he made a bequest of property worth seventy 
 thousand pounds to the hospitals of London and Paris. 
 No sooner was it known that he was dead, than the ques- 
 tion was raised, what does "London" mean? Where are 
 its limits, and what is its area? What does it contain, and 
 what does it exclude? Four groups of claimants appeared, 
 each to some extent opposed by the other three. Group 
 the first said, "The gift is obviously confined to the City 
 proper of London," that is, "London within the walls," 
 comprising little more than half of a square mile. " Not 
 so," protested group the second; "it extends to all the 
 hospitals within the old bills of mortality," that is,
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WOEDS. 253 
 
 London, Westminster, Southwark, and about thirty out- 
 parishes, but excluding Marylebone, St. Pancras, Padding- 
 ton, Chelsea, and everything beyond. Group the third 
 insisted that " London " included "All the area within 
 the metropolitan boroughs " ; while group the fourth, for 
 cogent reasons of their own, were positive that the testator 
 meant, and the true construction was, nothing less than 
 the whole area included within the Registrar-General's 
 and the Census Commissioner's interpretation of the word 
 "Metropolis." The Master of the Rolls decided that the 
 testator meant to use the word " London " in its full, com- 
 plete, popular sense, as including all the busily-occupied dis- 
 tricts of what is usually called the Metropolis, as it existed 
 in the year when the will was made. No sooner, however, 
 was this vexed question settled, than another, hardly less 
 puzzling, arose, namely, What is a "Hospital"? Nearly 
 every kind of charitable institution put in its claim; but 
 it was finally decided that only such charities should share 
 in the bequest as fell within the definition of the French 
 word hospice used in the will. 
 
 Another perplexing question which came before the 
 English courts some years ago, and which not less vividly 
 shows the importance of attention to the words we use, 
 related to the meaning of the word team, as used by 
 writers generally, and used in a written agreement. A 
 certain noble duke made an agreement with one of his 
 tenants in Oxfordshire concerning the occupancy of a 
 farm, and a portion of the agreement was couched in the 
 following terms: "The tenant to perform each year for 
 
 the Duke of , at the rate of one day's team-work, 
 
 with two horses and one proper person, for every fifty 
 pounds of rent, when required (except at hay or corn
 
 254 WOKDS; THEIK USE ANI> ABUSK. 
 
 harvest), without being paid for the same. In other words, 
 the rent of the farm was made up of two portions, the 
 larger being a money payment, and the former a certain 
 amount of farm service. All went on quietly and smoothly 
 in reference to this agreement, until one particular day, 
 when the duke's agent or bailiff desired the farmer to send 
 a cart to fetch coals from a railway station to the ducal 
 mansion. "Certainly not," said the farmer. "I'll send 
 the horses and a man, but you must find the cart." " Pooh, 
 pooh! what do you mean? Does not your agreement bind 
 you to do team-work occasionally for his Grace?" "Yes, 
 and here's the team; two horses and a careful man to 
 drive them." " But there can't be a team without a cart 
 or wagon." " yes, there can, the horses are the team." 
 " No, the horses and cart together are the team." 
 
 The question which the court was called on to decide in 
 the lawsuit which followed, was, what is a team? The 
 case was at first tried at Oxford, before a common jury, 
 who gave a verdict substantially for the duke. A rule 
 was afterwards obtained, with a view to bring the question 
 of definition before the judges at the Court of Queen's 
 Bench. The counsel for the duke contended that as team- 
 work cannot be done by horses without a cart or wagon, it 
 is obvious that a team must include a vehicle as well as the 
 horses by which it is to be drawn. Mr. Justice A said 
 that, in the course of his reading, he had met with some 
 lines which tend to show that the team is separate from 
 the cart, 
 
 "Giles Jelt was sleeping, in his cart he lay; 
 Some waggish pilfrers stole his team away. 
 Giles wakes and cries, ' Ods Bodikins, what's here? 
 Why, how now; am I Giles or not? 
 If he, I've lost six geldings to my smart; 
 If not, Ods Bodikins, I've found a cart,'"
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WOKDS. 255 
 
 Mr. Justice B quoted a line from Wordsworth, 
 
 " My jolly team will work alone for me," 
 
 as proving the farmer's interpretation, seeing that, though 
 horses might possibly be jolly, a cart cannot. The counsel 
 for his Grace urged that the dictionaries of Johnson and 
 Walker both speak of a team as " a number of horses 
 drawing the same carriage." "True," said Justice A, "do 
 not these citations prove that the team and the carriage 
 are distinct things?" "No," replied the counsel on the 
 duke's side; "because a team without a cart would be of 
 no use." He cited the description given by Caesar of the 
 mode of fighting in chariots adopted by the ancient Britons, 
 and of the particular use and meaning of the word tema- 
 nem. From Caesar he came down to Gray, the English 
 poet, and cited the lines, 
 
 "Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, 
 
 Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe hath broke; 
 How jocund did they drive their team afield, 
 How bowed the wood beneath their sturdy stroke;" 
 
 and from Gray he came down to the far-famed "Bull Run" 
 affair in the recent American Civil War, a graphic account 
 of which told that "the teamsters cut the traces of the 
 horses." 
 
 The counsel for the farmer, on the other hand, referred 
 to Richardson's English dictionary, and to Bosworth's 
 Anglo-Saxon dictionary, for support to the assertion that 
 a team implies only the horses, not the vehicle also; and 
 he then gave the following citations to the same effect 
 from Spenser: 
 
 "Thee a ploughman all unmeeting found, 
 As he his toilsome team that way did guide, 
 And brought thee up a ploughman's state to bide."
 
 256 WOEDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 From Shakspeare, 
 
 "We fairies that do run, 
 By the triple Hecat's team, 
 From the presence of the sun, 
 Following darkness like a dream." 
 
 Again from Shakspeare, 
 
 "I am in love, but a team of horse shall 
 Not pluck that from me, 'nor who 't is I love." 
 
 From Dryden, 
 
 "He heaved with more than human force to move 
 A weighty straw, the labor of a team." 
 
 Again from Dryden, . 
 
 "Any number, and passing in a line: 
 Like a long team of snowy swans on high, 
 Which clap their wings and cleave the liquid sky." 
 
 Spenser, Roscommon, Martineau, and other authorities, 
 were also cited to the same purport, and all the light 
 which English literature could throw upon the point \v;is 
 converged upon it. The learned judges were divided in 
 their opinions, one deciding that the word " team " clearly 
 implied the cart as well as the horses, two other judges 
 deciding that it was enough if the farmer sent the horse 
 and the driver to be put to such service as the duke's agent 
 might please. The arguments by which each supported his 
 conclusion were so acute, cogent, and weighty, that their 
 disagreement seems to have been inevitable. 
 
 Hobbes, in a memorable passage in the " Leviathan," 
 from which we have already quoted, says: "Seeing that 
 truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our 
 affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth had need to 
 remember what every name he useth stands for, and to 
 place it accordingly; or else he will find himself entangled 
 in words as a bird in limetwigs, the more he struggles,
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WOEDS. 257 
 
 the more belirned. Words are wise men's counters, they 
 do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools, 
 that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, 
 a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever." Fuller 
 quaintly suggests that the reason why the Schoolmen 
 wrote in so bald a style was, " that the vermin of equivo- 
 cation might not hide themselves in the nap of their 
 words." The definition of words has been often regarded 
 as a mere pedagogue's exercise; but when we call to mind 
 the persecutions, proscriptions, tortures, and even massa- 
 cres, which have resulted from mistakes about the mean- 
 ing of certain words, the office of the lexicographer assumes 
 a grave and dignified aspect. It is not enough, however, 
 in guarding against error, to discriminate our words, so as 
 to understand their exact force. We must also keep con- 
 stantly in mind the fact that language, when used with 
 the utmost precision, is at best but an imperfect repre- 
 sentation of thought. Words are properly neither the 
 " names of things," as modern writers have defined them, 
 nor, as the ancients viewed them, the " pictures of ideas." 
 The most they can do is to express the relations of things; 
 they are, as Hobbes said, " the signs of our conceptions," 
 serving as a mark to recall to ourselves the likeness of a 
 former thought, and as a sign to make it known to others. 
 Even as the signs of our conceptions, they are at best 
 imperfect and unsatisfactory, representing only approxi- 
 mately what we think, and never coordinating with the 
 conceptions they are used to represent. " Seizing on some 
 characteristic mark of the conception, they always express 
 too little or too much. They are sometimes distinctly 
 metaphorical, sometimes indefinitely assertive; sometimes 
 too concrete, sometimes too abstract." Our sentences are
 
 258 WORDS ; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 not images of thought, reflected in a perfect mirror, nor 
 photographs which lack coloring only; they are but the 
 merest skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, tentative 
 signs, which can put another only into a partial possession 
 of our consciousness. To apprehend perfectly the thought 
 of another man, even one who uses language with the ut- 
 most nicety and accuracy, we need to know his individu- 
 ality, his entire past history; we must interpret and sup- 
 plement his meaning by all that we know of his intellectual 
 and moral constitution, his ways of thinking, feeling, and 
 speaking ; we must be en rapport with him ; and even then 
 we may fail to penetrate to the central meaning of his 
 words, the very core of his thought. 
 
 The soul of every man is a mystery which no other man 
 can fathom; we are, as one has said, spirits in prison, able 
 only to make signals to each other, but with a world of 
 things to think and say which our signals cannot describe 
 at all. There is hardly an abstract term in any language 
 which conveys precisely the same meaning to two different 
 minds; every word is sure to awaken in one mind more 
 or less different associations from those it awakens in 
 another. Words mean the same thing only to persons who 
 are psychologically the same, and who have had the same 
 experiences. It is obvious that no word can explain any 
 sensation, pleasant or painful, to one who has never felt 
 the sensation. When Saunderson, who was born blind, 
 tried to define red, he compared that color to the blowing 
 of a trumpet, or the crowing of a cock. In like manner 
 a deaf man in England, in trying to describe the sound of 
 a trumpet, said that it was red. The statement that 
 words have to two persons a common meaning only when 
 they suggest ideas of a common experience, is true even of
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WOKDS. 259 
 
 the terms we stop to ponder; how much more true, then, 
 of words whose full and exact meaning we no more pause 
 to consider, than we reflect that the gold eagle which passes 
 through our hands is a thousand cents. Try to ascertain 
 the meaning of the most familiar words which are drop- 
 ping from men's lips, and you find that each has its 
 history, and that many are an epitome of the thoughts 
 and observations of ages. 
 
 What two persons, for example, attach the same mean- 
 ing to the words democracy, conservatism, radicalism, educa- 
 tion? What is the meaning of gentleman, comfortable, 
 competence? De Quincey says that he knew several persons 
 in England with annual incomes bordering on twenty thou- 
 sand pounds, who spoke of themselves, and seemed seriously 
 to think themselves, " unhappy paupers/' Lady Hester 
 Stanhope, with an income of two thousand seven hundred 
 pounds a year, thought herself an absolute pauper in 
 London, and went to live in the mountains of Syria; "for 
 how, you know," she would say pathetically, " could the 
 humblest of spinsters live decently on that pittance?" Do 
 the amiable and the revengeful, the chaste and the licen- 
 tious, mean the same thing when they speak of love or hate? 
 With what precious meaning are the words home and 
 heaven flooded to some persons, and with what icy indiffer- 
 ence are they heard by others? 
 
 So imperfect is language that it is doubtful whether 
 such a thing as a self-evident verbal proposition, the abso- 
 lute truth of which can never be contested, is possible; for 
 it can never be absolutely certain what is the meaning of 
 the words in which the proposition is expressed, and the 
 assertion that it is founded on partial observation, or that 
 the words imperfectly express the observation on which it is
 
 260 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 founded, or are incomplete metaphors, or are defective in 
 some other respect, must always be open to proof. Thus, 
 for example, a late writer, criticising Mr. Hansel's doctrine 
 of consciousness, in his "Metaphysics," asks: "What is 
 meant by any one of the words which enter into the propo- 
 sitions asserted by Mr. Mansel to be absolutely and eter- 
 nally true? Consciousness, he says, assures me of my own 
 existence. But no one, as Mr. Mansel would say, is 'pre- 
 sentatively ' or directly conscious of a proposition. No one 
 feels that the words ' I exist ' are absolutely true. What we 
 all feel is something which we describe by those words, not 
 because we know that they are absolutely true, but because 
 we have always been accustomed to hear them. Our direct 
 consciousness neither does nor can decide whether any and 
 what ambiguities and mysteries lurk in the two words, 
 ' I ' and ' exist, 1 any more than that part of our conscious- 
 ness to which we give the name of a perception of water 
 tells us of whether water is or is not composed of oxygen 
 and hydrogen. What that is to which the word 'I' is 
 affixed, is a boundless question. The word 'exist' is a 
 mere metaphor. No one could say that he was conscious 
 of the proposition 'I stand out;' and who can say what is 
 the exact distance from its original meaning to which the 
 word has traveled?" 
 
 Even words that designate outward, material objects, 
 cognizable by the senses, do not always call up similar 
 thoughts in different minds. The meaning they convey 
 depends often upon the mental qualities of the hearer. 
 Thus the word sun uttered to an unlettered man of fee- 
 ble mental powers, conveys simply the idea of a ball of 
 light and heat, which rises in the sky in the morning, and 
 goes down at evening; but to the man of vivid imagina-
 
 THE FALLACIES IN WOKDS. 261 
 
 tion, who is familiar with modern scientific discoveries, it 
 suggests, more or less distinctly, all that science has re- 
 vealed concerning that luminary. If we estimate words 
 according to their etymological meaning, we shall still 
 more clearly see how inadequate they are in themselves to 
 involve the mass of facts which they connote, ."as inad- 
 equate as is a thin and worthless bit of paper which yet 
 may represent a thousand pounds. . . Take a word ex- 
 pressive of the smallest possible modification of matter, 
 a word invented in the most expressive language in the 
 world, and invented by no less eminent a philosopher than 
 Democritus, and that, too, with great applause, the word 
 atom, meaning that which cannot be cut. Yet simple as is 
 the notion to be expressed, and great as were the resources 
 at command, what a failure the mere word is! It expresses 
 too much and too little, too much as being applicable to 
 other things, and consequently ambiguous; too little, be- 
 cause it does not express all the properties even of an atom. 
 Its inadequacy cannot be more forcibly illustrated than by 
 the fact that its precise Latin equivalent is by us confined 
 to the single acceptation 'insect!'"* 
 
 But if words are but imperfect symbols for designating 
 material objects, how much more unequal must they be to 
 the task of expressing that which lies above and behind 
 matter and sensation, especially as all abstract terms are 
 metaphors taken from sensible objects! How many feel- 
 ings do we have, in the course of our lives, which beggar 
 description! How many apprehensions, limitations, dis- 
 tinctions, opinions are clearly present, at times, to our 
 consciousness, which elude every attempt to give them 
 verbal expression! Even the profoundest thinkers and the 
 
 *" Chapters on Language," by F. W. Farrar.
 
 262 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 most accurate, hair-splitting writers, who weigh and test t<> 
 the bottom every term they use, are baffled in the effort so 
 to convey their conclusions as to defy all misapprehension 
 or successful refutation. Beginning with definitions, they 
 find that the definitions themselves need defining; and just 
 at the triumphant moment when the structure of argument 
 seems complete and logic-proof, some lynx-eyed adversary 
 detects an inaccuracy or a contradiction in the use of some 
 keystone term, and the whole magnificent pile, so painfully 
 reared, tumbles into ruins. 
 
 The history of controversy, in short, in all ages and 
 nations, is a history of disputes about words. The hardest 
 problems, the keenest negotiations, the most momentous 
 decisions, have turned on the meaning of a phrase, a term, 
 or even a particle. A misapplied or sophistical expression 
 has provoked the fiercest and most interminable quarrels. 
 Misnomers have turned the tide of public opinion: verbal 
 fallacies have filled men's souls with prejudice, rage, and 
 hate; and "the sparks of artful watchwords, thrown among 
 combustible materials, have kindled the flames of deadly 
 war and changed the destiny of empires."
 
 NICKNAMES. ' 263 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 NICKNAMES. 
 
 The word nick in nickname is cognate with the German word necken, to 
 mock, to quiz, and the English word nay, to tease, or provoke. W. L. 
 BI.ACKLEY, Word- Gossip. 
 
 A good name will wear out. a bad one may be turned: a nickname lasts 
 for ever. ZIMMERMAN. 
 
 J'ai etc toujonrs etonne. que les Families qui portent tin Nom odieux on 
 ridicule, ne le quittent pa?. BATI.E. 
 
 A MONG the books that need to be written, one of the 
 -jL. most instructive would be a treatise on the history 
 and influence of nicknames. Philosophers who study the 
 great events in the world's history, are too apt, in their 
 eagerness to discover adequate causes, to overlook the ap- 
 parently trifling means by which mankind are influenced. 
 They are eloquent enough upon the dawning of a new idea 
 in the world when its effects are set forth in all the pomp 
 of elaborate histories and disquisitions; but they would do 
 a greater service by showing how and when, by being con- 
 densed into a pithy word or phrase, it wins the acceptance 
 of mankind. The influence of songs upon a people in 
 times of excitement and revolution is familiar to all. 
 " When the French mob began to sing the Marseillaise, 
 they had evidently caught the spirit of the Revolution; 
 and what a song is to a political essay, a nickname is to 
 a song." In itself such a means of influence may seem 
 trivial; and yet history shows that it is no easy thing to 
 estimate the force of these ingenious appellations.
 
 264 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 In politics, it has long been observed that no orator can 
 compare for a moment in effect with him who can give apt 
 and telling nicknames. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of 
 all eloquence a nickname is the most concise and irresist- 
 ible. It is a terse, pointed, short-hand mode of reasoning, 
 condensing a volume of meaning into an epithet, and is 
 especially popular in these days of steam and electric tele- 
 graphs, because it saves the trouble of thinking. There 
 is a deep instinct in man which prompts him, when engaged 
 in any controversy, whether of tongue or pen, to assume 
 to himself some honorable name which begs the whole 
 matter in dispute, and at the same time to fasten on his 
 adversary a name which shall render him ridiculous, odious, 
 or contemptible. By facts and logic you may command the 
 assent of the few; but by nicknames you may enlist the 
 passions of the million on your side. Who can doubt that 
 when, in the English civil wars, the Parliamentary party 
 styled themselves "the Godly" and their opponents "the 
 Malignants," the question at issue, wherever entrance could 
 be gained for these words, was already decided? Who can 
 estimate how much the Whig party in this country was 
 damaged by the derisive sarcasm, "All the decency," or its 
 opponents by the appellation of "Locofocos"? Is it not 
 certain that the odious name, "Copperheads," which was 
 so early in our late Civil War affixed to the Northern sym- 
 pathizers with the South, had an incalculable influence in 
 gagging their mouths, and in preventing their numbers 
 from multiplying? 
 
 It has been truly said that in the distracted times of 
 early revolution, any nickname, however vague, will fully 
 answer a purpose, though neither those who are blackened 
 by the odium, nor those who cast it, can define the hateful
 
 NICKKAMES. 265 
 
 appellative. When the term "delinquents" came into 
 vogue in England, "it expressed a degree and species of 
 guilt," says Hume, "not easily known or ascertained. It 
 served, however, the end of those revolutionists who had 
 coined it, by involving any person in, or coloring any 
 action by, 'delinquency'; and many of the nobility and 
 gentry were, without any questions being asked, suddenly 
 discovered to have committed the crime of ' delinquency.' " 
 The degree in which the political opinions of our country- 
 men were influenced, and their feelings embittered, some 
 forty years ago, by the appellation "Federalist" cannot be 
 easily estimated. The fact that many who heard the deri- 
 sive title knew not its origin, and some not even its mean- 
 ing, did not lessen its influence, as an incident related 
 by Judge Gaston of North Carolina well illustrates. In 
 travelling on his circuit through the backwoods of that 
 State, he learned that the people of that town had elected 
 a Democrat, in place of a Whig, to serve them in the 
 legislature. When asked the reason of this change, his 
 informant, an honest, rough-looking citizen, replied: "Oh, 
 we didn't reelect Mr. A, because he is a fetheml." "A 
 fetheral!" exclaimed the judge, "what is a fetheral?" "I 
 don't know," was the reply, "but it aint a human.' 1 '' 
 
 There is no man so insignificant that he may not blast 
 the reputation of another by fastening upon him an odious 
 or ludicrous nickname. Even the most shining character 
 may thus be dragged down by the very reptiles of the race 
 to the depths of infamy. A parrot may be taught to call 
 names, and, if you have a spite against your neighbor, 
 may be made to give him a deal of annoyance, without 
 much wit either in the employer or the puppet. Hotspur 
 would have had a starling taught to speak nothing but 
 12
 
 266 WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Mortimer in the ears of his enemy. An insulting or 
 degrading epithet will stick to a man long after it has 
 been proved malicious or false. Who could dissociate with 
 the name of Van Buren the idea of craft or cunning, after 
 he had become known as the "Kinderhook Fox,'' or who 
 ever venerated John Tyler as the Chief Magistrate of the 
 nation, after he had been politically baptized as " His Acci- 
 dency"? Who can tell how far Gen. Scott's prospects for 
 the Presidency were damaged by the contemptuous nick- 
 name of "Old Fuss and Feathers," especially after he had 
 nearly signed his own political death-warrant by that fatal 
 allusion to " a hasty plate of soup," which convulsed the 
 nation with laughter from the St. Croix to the Rio Grande? 
 The hero of Chippewa found it hard to breast the torrent 
 of ridicule which this derisive title brought down upon 
 him. It would have been easier far to stand up against 
 the iron shock of the battle-field. Who, again, has forgot- 
 ten how a would-be naval bard of America was "damned 
 to everlasting fame " by a verbal tin-pail attached to his 
 name in the form of one of his own verses?* "I have 
 heard an eminent character boast," says Hazlitt, " that he 
 did more to produce the war with Bonaparte by nick- 
 naming him The Corsican, than all the state papers arid 
 documents on the subject put together." Give a dog a bad 
 name, says the proverb, and you hang him. It was only 
 necessary to nickname Burke The Dinner Bell to make 
 even his rising to speak a signal for a general emptying of 
 the house. 
 
 The first step in overthrowing any great social wrong is 
 to fix upon it a name which expresses its character. From 
 the hour when " taxation without representation " came to 
 
 * "The snn has gone down with his battle-stained eye."
 
 NICKNAMES. 267 
 
 be regarded by our fathers as a synonyme for tyranny, 
 the cause of the colonies was safe. Had the Southern 
 slaves been called by no other name than that used by 
 their masters, namely, servants, they would have con- 
 tinued in bondage till they had won their freedom by 
 the sword. 
 
 The French Revolution of 1789 was fruitful of exam- 
 ples showing the ease with which ignorant men are led and 
 excited by words whose real import and tendency they do 
 not understand, and illustrating the truth of South's re- 
 mark, that a plausible and insignificant word in the mouth 
 of an expert demagogue is a dangerous and destructive 
 weapon. Napoleon was aware of this, when he declared 
 that "it is by epithets that you govern mankind." Destroy 
 men's reverence for the names of institutions hoary with 
 age, and you destroy the institutions themselves. " Pull 
 down the nests," John Knox used to say, "and the rooks 
 will fly away." The people of Versailles insulted with 
 impunity in the streets, and at the gates of the Assembly, 
 those whom they called Aristocrats; and the magic power 
 of the word was doubled, when aided by the further device 
 of calling the usurping Commons the National Assembly. 
 When the title of Frondeurs, or "the Slingers," was 
 given to Cardinal de Retz's party, he encouraged its 
 application, "for we observed," says he, "that the distinc- 
 tion of a name healed the minds of the people." The 
 French showman, who, when royalty and its forms were 
 abolished in France, changed the name of his "Royal 
 Tiger," so called, the pride of his menagerie, to "Na- 
 tional Tiger," showed a profound knowledge of his coun- 
 trymen and of the catchwords by which to win their 
 patronage.
 
 268 WOIIDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 A nickname is the most stinging of all species of 
 satire, because it gives no chance of reply. Attack a man 
 with specific, point-blank charges, and he can meet and 
 repel them; but a nickname baffles reply by its very 
 vagueness; it presents no tangible or definite idea to the 
 mind, no horn of a dilemma with which the victim can 
 grapple. The very attempt to defend himself only renders 
 him the more ridiculous; it looks like raising an ocean to 
 drown a fly, or discharging a cannon at a wasp, to meet 
 a petty gibe with formal testimony or elaborate argument. 
 Or, if your defence is listened to without jeers, it avails 
 you nothing. It has no effect, does not tell, excites no 
 sensation. The laugh is against you, and all your pro- 
 tests come like the physician's prescription at the funeral, 
 too late. 
 
 The significance of nicknames is strikingly illustrated 
 by the fact that, as a la,te writer suggests, .you cannot prop- 
 erly hate a man of different opinions from your own till 
 you have labelled him with some unpleasant epithet. In 
 theological debates, a heretic may be defined as a man 
 with a nickname. Till we have succeeded in fastening a 
 name upon him, he is confounded among the general mass 
 of the orthodox; his peculiarities are presumably not suffi- 
 cient to constitute him into a separate species. But let 
 the name come to us by a flash of inspiration, and how it 
 sticks to the victim through his whole life! There is a 
 refinement of cruelty in some nicknames which resembles 
 the barbarity of the old heathen persecutors, who wrapped 
 up Christians in the skins of wild beasts, so that they 
 might be worried and torn in pieces by dogs. " Do but 
 paint an angel black," says an old divine, "and that is 
 enough to make him pass for a devil." On the other hand,
 
 NICKNAMES. 269 
 
 there are loving nicknames, which are given to men by 
 their friends, especially to those who are of a frank, 
 genial, companionable nature. The name of Charles Lamb 
 was ingeniously transformed 'into the Latin diminutive 
 Carlagmiltis; and the friends of Keats, in allusion to his 
 occasional excess of fun and animal spirits, punned upon 
 his name, shortening it from John Keats into " Junkets." 
 
 That prince of polemics, Cobbett, was a masterly in- 
 ventor of nicknames, and some of his felicitous epithets 
 will not be forgotten for many years to come. Among the 
 witty labels with which he ticketed his enemies were 
 " Scorpion Stanley," " Spinning Jenny Peel," " the pink- 
 nosed Liverpool," "the unbaptized, buttonless blackguards," 
 (applied to the Quakers,) and " Prosperity Robinson." The 
 nickname, " Old Glory," given by him, stuck for life to Sir 
 Francis Burdett, his former patron and life-long creditor. 
 " ^Eolus Canning " provoked unextinguishable laughter 
 among high and low; and it is said that of all the devices 
 to annoy the brilliant but vain Lord Erskine, none was 
 more teasing than being constantly addressed by his second 
 title of " Baron Clackmannan." 
 
 The meaning of nicknames, as of many other words, is 
 often a mystery. Often they are apparently meaningless, 
 and incapable of any rational explanation; yet they are 
 probably due, in such cases, to some subtle, imperceptible 
 analogy, of which even their authors were hardly conscious. 
 When the English and French armies were encamped in 
 the Crimea, they, by common consent, called the Turks 
 " Bono Johnny " ; but it would not be easy to tell why. A 
 late French prince was called " Plomb-plomb " ; yet there 
 is no such word in the French language, and different 
 accounts have been given of its origin. To explain, again,
 
 270 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 why nicknames have such an influence, so magical an 
 effect, is equally difficult; one might as well try to explain 
 why certain combinations of colors or musical sounds im- 
 part an exquisite pleasure. ' All we know, upon both these 
 points, is, that certain persons are doomed to be known by 
 a nickname; at the time of life when the word-making 
 faculty is in the highest activity, all their acquaintances are 
 long in labor to hit off the fit appellation; suddenly it 
 comes like an electric spark, and it is felt by everybody to 
 be impossible to think of the victim without his appropriate 
 designation. In vain have his godfathers and godmothers 
 called him Robert or Thomas; "Bob," or "Tom," or some- 
 thing wholly unrelated to these, he is fated to be to the end 
 of his days. 
 
 Many of the happiest of these headmarks, which stick 
 like a burr from the moment they are invented, are from 
 sources utterly unknown; they appear, they are on every- 
 body's lips, but whence they came nobody can tell. One 
 of the commonest ways in which nicknames are suggested 
 is by some egregious blunder which one makes. Thus, a 
 schoolboy is asked who demolished Carthage, and answering 
 " Scorpio Africanus," is promptly nicknamed "Old Scorp." 
 Another way is by a glaring contradiction between a man's 
 name and his character, when he is ridiculed as sailing 
 under false colors, or claiming a merit which does not be- 
 long to him. There is in all men. as Trench has observed, 
 a sense of the significance of names, a feeling that they 
 ought to be, and in a world of absolute truth would be, 
 th'e utterance of the innermost character or qualities of 
 the persons that bear them; and hence nothing is more 
 telling in a personal controversy than the exposure of a 
 striking incongruity between a name and the person who
 
 NICKNAMES. 271 
 
 owns it. We have been told that the late President Lin- 
 coln, on being introduced to a very stout person by the 
 name of Small, remarked, "Small, Small! Well, what 
 strange names they do give men, to be sure! Why, they've 
 got a fellow down in Virginia whom they call Wise! " In 
 the same spirit, Jerome, one of the Fathers of the Church, 
 being engaged in controversy with one Vigilantius, i.e., 
 "the Watchful," about certain vigils which the latter 
 opposed, stigmatized him as " Dormitantius," or " the 
 Sleeper." But more frequently the nickname is suggested 
 by the real name where there is no such antagonism be- 
 tween them, where the latter, as it is, or by a slight 
 change, can be made to contain a confession of the igno- 
 rance or folly of the bearer. Thus, Tiberius Claudius Nero, 
 in allusion to his drunkenness, was called " Biberius Caldius 
 Mero"; and the Arians were nicknamed "Ariomanites." 
 What can be happier in this way than the "Brand of 
 Hell," applied to Pope Hildebrand; the title of "Slan- 
 ders," affixed by Fuller to Sanders, the foul-mouthed libel- 
 ler of Queen Elizabeth; the "Vanity" and "Sterility," 
 which Baxter coined from the names of Vane and Sterry; 
 and the term " Sweepnet," which that skilful master of 
 the passions, Cicero, gave to the infamous Praetor of Sicily, 
 whose name, Verres, (verro,) was prophetic of his sweeping 
 the province, declaring that others might be partial to 
 the jus verrinum (which might mean verrine law or boar 
 sauce), but not he? 
 
 There is probably no country, unless it be our own, in 
 which nicknames have flourished more than in England. 
 Every party there has had its watchwords with which to 
 rally its members, or to set on its own bandogs to worry 
 and tear those of another faction; and what is quite extra-
 
 272 WOEDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 ordinary is, that many of the names of political parties and 
 religious sects were originally nicknames given in the bit- 
 terest scorn and party hate, yet ultimately accepted by the 
 party themselves. Thus " Tory" originally meant an Irish 
 freebooting bog-trotter, an outlaw who favored the cause 
 of James II. ; and " Whig " is derived from the Scotch 
 name for sour milk, which was supposed aptly to character- 
 ize the disposition of the Republicans. " Methodists " was 
 a name given in 1729, first to John and Charles Wesley at 
 Oxford, on account of their close observance of system and 
 method in their studies and worship, and afterwards to 
 their followers. So in other countries: the highest name 
 which any man can bear, " Christian," was originally a 
 nickname, or little better, given by the idle and witty 
 inhabitants of Antioch. The Antiochenes were famous in 
 all antiquity for their nicknames, for inventing which they 
 had a positive genius. The " Lutherans " received their 
 name, in which they now glory, from their antagonists. 
 "Capuchin" was a jesting name given by the boys in the 
 streets to certain Franciscan monks, on account of the 
 peaked and pointed hood (capuccio) which they wore. The 
 Dominicans gloried all the more in their name when it was 
 resolved by their enemies into "Domini canes"; they were 
 proud to acknowledge that they were, indeed, "the Lord's 
 watchdogs," who barked at the slightest appearance of 
 heresy, and strove to drive it away. 
 
 The Dutch people long prided themselves on the humili- 
 ating nickname of " Les Gueulx" "the Beggars," which 
 was given in 1566 to the revolters against the rule of 
 Philip II. Margaret of Parma, then governor of the 
 Netherlands, being somewhat disconcerted at the numbers 
 of that party, when they presented a petition to her, was
 
 NICKNAMES. 273 
 
 reassured by her minister, who remarked to her that there 
 was nothing to be feared from a crowd of beggars. " Great 
 was the indignation of all," says Motley, " that the State 
 councillor (the Seigneur de Berlaymont) should have dared 
 to stigmatize as beggars a band of gentlemen with the best 
 blood of the land in their veins. Brederode, on the con- 
 trary, smoothing their anger, assured them with good 
 humor that nothing could be more fortunate. ' They call 
 us beggars!' said he; 'let us accept the name. We will 
 contend with the Inquisition, but remain loyal to the king, 
 till compelled to wear the beggar's sack.' . . 'Long live 
 the beggars ! ' he cried, as he wiped his beard and set the 
 bowl down: ' Vivent les gueulx!" 1 Then, for the first time, 
 from the lips of those reckless nobles rose the famous cry, 
 which was so often to ring over land and sea, amid blazing 
 cities, on blood-stained decks, through the smoke and car- 
 nage of many a stricken field. The humor of Brederode 
 was hailed with deafening shouts of applause. The shib- 
 boleth was invented. The conjuration which they had been 
 anxiously seeking was found. Their enemies had provided 
 them with a spell, which was to prove, in after days, potent 
 enough to start a spirit, from palace or hovel, as the deeds 
 of the ' wild beggars,' the ' wood beggars,' and the ' beggars 
 of the sea,' taught Philip at last to understand the nation 
 which he had driven to madness." 
 
 In like manner the French Protestants accepted and 
 gloried in the scornful nickname of the " Huguenots," as 
 did the two fierce Italian factions in those of "Guelphs" 
 and " Ghibbellines." Even the title of the British " Pre- 
 mier," or " Prime Minister," now one of the highest dig- 
 nity, was at first a nickname, given in pure mockery, the 
 statesman to whom it was applied being Sir Robert Wal- 
 12*
 
 274 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 pole, as will be seen by the following words spoken by him 
 in the House of Commons in 1742: "Having invested me 
 with a kind of mock dignity, and styled me a Prime Min- 
 ister, they (the opposition) impute to me an unpardonable 
 abuse of the chimerical authority which they only created 
 and conferred." It is remarkable that the nickname Caesar 
 has given the title to the heads of two great nations, Ger- 
 many and Russia (kaiser, czar). 
 
 It is a fortunate thing when men who have been 
 branded with names intended to make them hateful or 
 ridiculous, can thus turn the tables on their denigreurs, by 
 accepting and glorying in their new titles. It was this 
 which Lord Halifax did when he was called "a trimmer." 
 Instead of quarrelling with the nickname, he exulted in it 
 as a title of honor. Everything good, he said, trims be- 
 tween extremes. The temperate zone trims between the 
 climate in which men are roasted, and the climate in which 
 men are frozen. The English Church trims between the 
 Anabaptist madness and the Papist lethargy. The English 
 constitution trims between Turkish despotism and Polish 
 anarchy. Virtue is nothing biit a just temper between 
 propensities, any one of which, indulged to excess, becomes 
 vice. Nay, the perfection of the Supreme Being himself 
 consists in the exact equilibrium of attributes, none of 
 which could preponderate without disturbing the whole 
 moral and physical order of the world.* 
 
 The nicknames "Quaker," "Puritan," "Roundhead," 
 unlike those we have just named, were never accepted by 
 those to whom they were given. " Puritan " was first 
 heard in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and was given to a 
 party of purists who would have reformed the Reforma- 
 
 *Macaulay'8 "History of England," Vol. I.
 
 KICKNAMES. 275 
 
 tion. They were also ridiculed, from their fastidiousness 
 about trivial matters, as " Precisians "; Drayton character- 
 izes them as persons that for a painted glass window would 
 pull down the whole church. The distinction between 
 "Roundhead" and "Cavalier" first appeared during the 
 civil war between Charles I. and his Parliament. A foe to 
 all outward ornament, the " Roundhead " wore his hair 
 cropped close, while the "Cavalier" was contradistin- 
 guished by his chivalrous tone, his romantic spirit, and his 
 flowing locks. 
 
 All readers of history are familiar with " The Rump," 
 the contemptuous nickname given to the Long Parliament 
 at the close of its career. The "Rump," Mr. Disraeli 
 remarks, became a perpetual whetstone for the loyal wits, 
 till at length its former admirers, the rabble themselves, 
 in town and country, vied with each other in " burning 
 rumps" of beef, which were hung by chains on a gallows 
 with a bonfire underneath, and proved how the people, like 
 children, come at length to make a plaything of that which 
 was once their bugbear. 
 
 Ben Jonson. the sturdy old dramatist, was nicknamed 
 " The Limestone and Mortar Poet," in allusion to his having 
 begun life as a bricklayer. A member of the British Par- 
 liament in the reign of George III. is known as "Single- 
 speech Hamilton," and is referred to by that designation as 
 invariably as if it were his baptismal name. He made one, 
 and but one, good speech during his parliamentary career. 
 " Boot-jack Robinson " was the derisive title given to a 
 mediocre politician, who, during a crisis in the ministry of 
 the Duke of Newcastle, was made Home Secretary and 
 ministerial leader of the House of "Commons. " Sir Thomas 
 Robinson lead us!" indignantly exclaimed Pitt to Fox;
 
 276 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 "the duke might as well send his boot-jack to lead us!" 
 It is said that Mr. Dundas, afterwards Lord Melville, got 
 his nickname from a new word which he introduced in a 
 speech in the House of Commons, in 1775, on the Ameri- 
 can War. He was the first to use the word " starvation " 
 (a hybrid formation, in which a Saxon root was united with 
 a Latin ending), and was ever afterwards called by his 
 acquaintances, " Starvation Dundas." " Chicken Taylor " 
 was the name which, in the early part of the century, long 
 stuck to Mr. M. A. Taylor; he contended against a great 
 lawyer in the House, and then apologized that "he, a 
 chicken in the law, should venture on a fight with the 
 cock of Westminster." " Adullamites," the name given 
 by Mr. Bright to Mr. Lowe and some of his Liberal friends, 
 a name derived from the Scripture story of David and 
 his followers retiring to a cave, will probably long con- 
 tinue to be applied to the members of a discontented 
 faction. 
 
 Everybody has heard of "Ditto to Mr. Burke"; the 
 victim of this title was a Mr. Conger, who was elected with 
 Burke to represent the city of Bristol. Utterly bewildered 
 how to thank the electors, after his associate's splendid 
 speech, he condensed his own address into these significant 
 words: "Gentlemen, I say ditto to Mr. Burke, ditto to Mr. 
 Burke!" Among the other memorable English nicknames, 
 that of " Jemmy Twitcher," taken from the chief of Mac- 
 heath's gang in "The Beggar's Opera," and applied to Lord 
 Sandwich, that of " Orange Peel," given to Sir Robert Peel 
 by the Irish, the inveterate foes of the House of Orange, 
 "the stormy Petrel of debate," given to Mr. Bernal 
 Osborne, "Finality Russell," fastened upon Lord John 
 Russell because he wished a certain Reform measure to
 
 NICKNAMES. 277 
 
 be final, and the unique "Dizzy," into which his enemies 
 have condensed the name of the celebrated Jewish pre- 
 mier, are preeminently significant and telling. Among 
 the hundreds of American political nicknames, there are 
 many which are not remarkably expressive; others, like 
 "Old Bullion" and "Old Hickory," are steeped in "the 
 very brine of conceit," and sum up a character as if by 
 inspiration. 
 
 It is a curious fact that some of the most damaging 
 nicknames have been terms or epithets which were origi- 
 nally complimentary, but which, used sarcastically, have 
 been associated with more ridicule or odium than the most 
 opprobrious epithets. Men hate to be continually reminded 
 of any one virtue of a fellow- man, to hear the changes 
 rung continually upon some one great action or daring feat 
 he has performed. It seems, indeed, as if a man whose 
 name is continually dinned in our ears, coupled with some 
 complimentary epithet, some allusion to a praiseworthy 
 deed which he once did, or some excellent trait of char- 
 acter, must be distinguished for nothing else. Unless 
 this is his only virtue, why all this fuss and pother about 
 it? The Athenians banished Aristides, because they were 
 tired of hearing him called "the Just." 
 
 Some parents have so great a dread of nicknames that 
 they tax their ingenuity to invent for their children a 
 Christian name that may defy nicking or abbreviation. 
 With Southey's Doctor Dove, they think " it is not a good 
 thing to be Tom'd or Bob'd, Jack'd or Jim'd, Sam'd or 
 Ben'd, Natty'd or Batty'd, Neddy'd or Teddy'd, Will'd 
 or Bill'd, Dick'd or Nick'd, Joe'd or Jerry'd, as you go 
 through the world." The good doctor, however, had no 
 such antipathy to the shortening of female names. " He
 
 278 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 never called any woman Mary, though Mare, he said, being 
 the sea, was in many respects too emblematic of the sex. 
 It was better to use a synonyme of better omen, and Molly 
 was therefore preferred as being soft. If he accosted a 
 vixen of that name in her worst temper, he Mollyfied her! 
 On the contrary, he never could be induced to substitute 
 Sally for Sarah. Sally, he said, had a salacious sound, and, 
 moreover, it reminded him of rovers, which women ought 
 not to be. Martha he called Patty, because it came pat to 
 the tongue. Dorothy remained Dorothy, because it was 
 neither fitting that women should be made Dolls, nor 
 I-dols! Susan with him was always Sue, because women 
 were to be Sue-d, and Winnifred, Win-ny, because they 
 were to be won."* 
 
 The annoyance which may be given to a man, even by 
 an apparently meaningless nickname, which sticks to him 
 wherever he goes, is well illustrated by a story told by 
 Hazlitt in his " Conversations with Northcote," the painter. 
 A village baker got, he knew not how, the name of " Tiddy- 
 doll." He was teased and worried by it till it almost drove 
 him crazy. The boys hallooed it after him in the streets, 
 and poked their faces into his shop- windows; the parrots 
 echoed the name as he passed their cages; and even the 
 soldiers took it up (for the place was a military station), 
 and marched to parade, beating time with their feet and 
 singing Tiddy-doll, Tiddy-doll, as they passed by his door. 
 He flew out upon them at the sound with inextinguishable 
 fury, was knocked down and rolled into the kennel, and 
 got up in an agony of rage, his white clothes drabbled and 
 bespattered with mud. A respectable and friendly gentle- 
 man in the neighborhood, who pitied his weakness, called 
 
 * " The Doctor," Vol. VII.
 
 NICKNAMES. 279 
 
 him into his house one day, and remonstrated with him on 
 the subject. He advised him to take no notice of his per- 
 secutors. " What," said he, "does it signify? Suppose they 
 do call you Tiddy-doll? What harm?" " There there 
 it is again!'" burst forth the infuriated baker; "you've 
 called me so yourself. You called me in on purpose to 
 insult me!" And, saying this, he vented his rage in a 
 torrent of abusive epithets, and darted out of the house 
 in a tempest of passion. 
 
 The readers of Boswell will remember, in connection 
 with this subject, an amusing anecdote told of Dr. Johnson. 
 Being rudely jostled and profanely addressed by a stout 
 fish-woman, as he was passing through Billingsgate, he 
 looked straight at her, and said deliberately, " You are a 
 triangle!" which made her swear louder than before. He 
 then called her "a rectangle! a parallelogram!" but she 
 was more voluble still. At last he screamed out, " You are 
 a miserable, wicked hypothenuse ! " and she was struck 
 dumb. Curran had a similar ludicrous encounter with a 
 fish-woman at Cork. Taking up the gauntlet, when as- 
 sailed by her on the quay, he speedily found that he was 
 overmatched, and that he had nothing to do but to beat a 
 retreat. "This, however, was to be done with dignity; so, 
 drawing myself up disdainfully, I said ' Madam, I scorn all 
 further discourse with such an individual!' She did not 
 understand the word, and thought it, no doubt, the very 
 hyperbole of opprobrium. ' Individual, you wagabone ! ' 
 she screamed, 'what do you mean by that? I'm no more an 
 individual than your mother was!' Never was victory 
 more complete. The whole sisterhood did homage to me, 
 and I left the quay of Cork covered with glory."
 
 280 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 
 
 Language is the depository of the accumulated body of experience, to 
 which all former ages have contributed their part, and which is the inherit- 
 ance of all yet to come. J. S. MILL. 
 
 Often in words contemplated singly there are boundless stores of moral 
 and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination, laid up. TRENCH. 
 
 A THOUGHTFUL English writer tells us that, when 
 -L^~ about nine years old, he learned with much surprise 
 that the word " sincere " was derived from the practice of 
 filling up flaws in furniture with wax, whence sine cera 
 came to mean pure, not vamped up or adulterated. This 
 explanation gave him great pleasure, and abode in his 
 memory as having first shown him that there is a reason in 
 words as well as things. There are few cultivated persons 
 who have not felt, at some time in their lives, a thrill of 
 surprise and delight like that of this writer. Through- 
 out our whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, the 
 stream of our history, inner and outer, runs wonderfully 
 blended with the texture of the words we use. Dive into 
 what subject we will, we never touch the bottom. The 
 simplest prattle of a child is but the light surface of a deep 
 sea containing many treasures. It would be hard, there- 
 fore, to find in the whole range of inquiry another study 
 which at once is so fascinating, and so richly repays the 
 labor, as that of the etymology or primitive significations 
 of words. 
 
 It is an epoch in one's intellectual history when he first 
 learns that words are living and not dead things, that in
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 281 
 
 these children of the mind are incarnated the wit and wis- 
 dom, the poetic fancies and the deep intuitions, the pas- 
 sionate longings and the happy or sad experiences of many 
 generations. The discovery is " like the dropping of scales 
 from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the 
 introduction into a new world " ; he never ceases wondering 
 at the moral marvels that everywhere reveal themselves 
 to his gaze. To eyes thus opened, dictionaries, instead of 
 seeming huge masses of word-lumber, become vast store- 
 houses of historical memorials, than which none are more 
 vital in spirit or more pregnant with meaning. It is not 
 in oriental fairy-tales only that persons drop pearls every 
 time they open their mouths, like Moliere's Bourgeois 
 Gentilhomme, who had been speaking prose all his life 
 without knowing it, we are dropping gems from our lips in 
 almost every hour of the day. Not a thought or feeling or 
 wish can we utter without recalling, by an unconscious 
 sign or symbol, some historic fact, some memory of " auld 
 lang syne," some bygone custom, some vanished supersti- 
 tion, some exploded prejudice, or some ethical divination 
 that has lost its charm. Even the homeliest and most 
 familiar words, the most hackneyed phrases, are connected 
 by imperceptible ties with the hopes and fears, the reason- 
 ings and reflections, of bygone men and times. 
 
 Every generation of men inherits and uses all the scien- 
 tific wealth of the past. " It is not merely the great and 
 rich in the intellectual world who are thus blessed, but 
 the humblest inquirer, while he puts his reasonings into 
 words, benefits by the labors of the greatest. When he 
 counts his little wealth, he finds he has in his hands coins 
 which bear the image and superscription of ancient and 
 modern intellectual dynasties, and that in virtue of this
 
 282 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 possession acquisitions are in his power, solid knowledge 
 within his reach, which none could ever have attained to, 
 if it were not that the gold of truth once dug out of the 
 mine circulates more and more widely among mankind." 
 Emerson beautifully calls language "fossil poetry." The 
 etymologist, he adds, finds the deadest word to have been 
 once a brilliant picture. "As the limestone of the conti- 
 nent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, 
 so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in 
 their secondary use, have long since ceased to remind us of 
 their poetic origin." 
 
 Not only is this true, but many a single word, as" Arch- 
 bishop Trench remarks, is itself a concentrated poem, in 
 which are treasured stores of poetical thought and imagery. 
 Examine it closely, and it will be found to rest upon some 
 palpable or subtle analogy of things material and spiritual, 
 showing that, however trite the image now, the man who 
 first coined the word was a poet. The older the Word, the 
 profounder and more beautiful the meanings it will often 
 be found to enclose; for words of late growth speak to the 
 head, not to the heart; thoughts and feelings are too subtle 
 for new words. It is the use of words when new and 
 fresh from the lips of their inventors, before their vivid 
 and picturesque meanings have faded out or been obscured 
 by their many secondary significations, that gives such 
 pictorial beauty, pith, and raciness, to the early writers; 
 " and hence to recall language, to restore its early mean- 
 ings, to re-mint it in novel forms, is the secret of all effect- 
 ive writing and speaking, of all verbal expression which 
 is to leave, as was said of the eloquence of Pericles, stings 
 in the minds and memories of the hearers." 
 
 Language is not only " fossil poetry," but it is also fossil
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 283 
 
 philosophy, fossil ethics, and fossil history. As in the pre- 
 Adamite rock are bound up and preserved the vegetable 
 and animal forms of ages long gone by, so in words are 
 locked up truths once known but now forgotten, the 
 thoughts and feelings, the habits, customs, opinions, virtues 
 and vices of men long since in their graves. Compared 
 with these memorials of the past, these records of ancient 
 and modern intellectual dynasties, how poor are all other 
 monuments of human power, perseverance, skill, or genius! 
 Unlike the works of individual genius, or the cuneiform 
 inscriptions which are found in oriental countries on the 
 crumbling fragments of half-calcined stone, language gives 
 us the history not only of individuals, but of nations; not 
 only of nations, but of mankind. It is, indeed, "an admi- 
 rable poem on the history of all ages; a living monument 
 on which is written the genesis of human thought. Thus 
 'the ground on which our civilization stands is a sacred 
 one, for it is the deposit of thought. For language, as it 
 is the mirror, so it is the product of reason, and, as it 
 embodies thought, so it is the child of thought. In it are 
 embodied the sparks of that celestial fire which, from a 
 once bright centre of civilization, has ' streamed forth over 
 the inhabited earth, and which now already, after less than 
 three myriads of years, forms a galaxy round the globe, a 
 chain of light from pole to pole.' " * 
 
 How pregnant with instruction is often the history of a 
 single -word! Coleridge, who keenly appreciated the sig- 
 nificance of words, says that there are cases where more 
 knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history 
 of a word than by the history of a campaign. Sometimes 
 the germ of a nation's life, the philosophy of some polit- 
 
 * " The Origin of Language," by F. W. Farrar.
 
 284 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 ical, moral, or intellectual movement in a country, will 
 be found coiled up in a single word, just as the oak is 
 found in an acorn. The fact that the Arabs were the 
 arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, and the mer- 
 chants of the Middle Ages, is shown by the words we have 
 borrowed from them, algebra, almanac, cypher, zero, 
 zenith, alkali, alcohol, alchemy, alembic, magazine, tariff, 
 cotton, elixir; and so that the monastic system originated 
 in the Greek, and not in the Latin church, is shown by the 
 fact that the words expressing the chief elements of the 
 system, as monk, monastery, anchorite, cenobite, ascetic, 
 hermit, are Greek, not Latin. What an amount of history 
 is wrapped up in the word Pagan! The term, we learn 
 from Gibbon, is remotely derived from ndyy, in the Doric 
 dialect, signifying a fountain; and the rural neighborhood 
 which frequented the same derived the common appellation 
 of Pagus and Pagans. Soon Pagan and rural became 
 nearly synonymous, and the meaner peasants acquired that 
 name which has been corrupted into peasant in the modern 
 languages of Europe. All non-military people soon came 
 to be branded as Pagans. The Christians were the soldiers 
 of Christ; their adversaries, who refused the sacrament, or 
 military oath of baptism, might deserve the metaphorical 
 name of Pagans. Christianity gradually filled the cities of 
 the empire; the old religion retired and languished, in the 
 time of Prudentius, in obscure villages. From Pagus, as a 
 root, comes pagius, first a villager, then a rural laborer, 
 then a servant, lastly a page. Pagina, first the enclosed 
 square of cultivated land near a village, graduated into 
 the page of a book. Pagare, from denoting the field-service 
 that compensated the provider of food and raiment, was 
 applied eventually to every form in which the changes of
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 285 
 
 society required the benefited to pay for what they re- 
 ceived. 
 
 Often where history is utterly dumb concerning the past, 
 language speaks. The discovery of the foot-print on the 
 sand did not more certainly prove to Robinson Crusoe that 
 the island of which he had fancied himself the sole inhab- 
 itant contained a brother man, than the similarity of the 
 inflections in the speech of different peoples proves their 
 brotherhood. Were all the histories of England swept 
 from existence, the study of its language, developing the 
 fact that the basis of the language is Saxon, that the names 
 of the prominent objects of nature are Celtic, the terms 
 of war and government Norman- French, the ecclesiastical 
 terms Latin, would enable us to reconstruct a large part 
 of the story of the past, as it even now enables us to verify 
 many of the statements of the chroniclers. Humboldt, in 
 his " Cosmos," eulogizes the study of words as one of the 
 richest sources of historical knowledge; and it is probable 
 that what comparative philology, yet in its infancy, has 
 already discovered, will compel a rewriting of the history 
 of the world. Even now it has thrown light on many of 
 the most perplexing problems of religion, history, and eth- 
 nography; and it seems destined to triumphs of which we 
 can but dimly apprehend the consequences. On the stone 
 tablets of the universe God's own finger has written the 
 changes which millions of years have wrought on the 
 mountain and the plain; and in the fluid air, which he 
 coins into spoken words, man has preserved forever the 
 grand facts of his past history and the grand processes of 
 his inmost soul. " Nations and languages against dynasties 
 and treaties," is the cry which is remodelling the map of 
 Europe; and in our country, comparative philologists, to
 
 286 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 their shame be it said, have labored with Satanic zeal to 
 prove the impossibility of a common origin of languages 
 and races, in order to justify, by scientific arguments, the 
 theory of slavery. It has been said that the interpretation 
 of one word in the Vedas fifty years earlier would have 
 saved many Hindoo widows from being burned alive; and 
 the philologists of England and Germany yet expect to 
 prove to the Brahmins that caste is not a religious institu- 
 tion, and has no authority in their sacred writings, the 
 effect of which will be to enable the British government to 
 inflict penalties for the observance of the rules of w.s//-, 
 without violating its promise to respect the religion of the 
 natives, and thus to relieve India from the greatest incubus 
 and clog on its progress. 
 
 CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF WORDS. 
 
 Language, as it daguerreotypes human thought, shares, 
 as we have seen, in all the vicissitudes of man. It mir- 
 rors all the changes in the character, tastes, customs, and 
 opinions of a people, and shows with unerring faithful- 
 ness whether and in what degree they advance or recede 
 in culture or morality. As new ideas germinate in the 
 mind of a nation, it will demand new forms of expression; 
 on the other hand, a petrified and mechanical national 
 mind will as surely betray itself in a petrified and me- 
 chanical language. It is by no accident or caprice that 
 
 " words, whilom flourishing, 
 
 Pass now no more, but banished from the court, 
 Dwell with disgrace among the vulgar sort; 
 And those, which eld's strict doom did disallow 
 And damn for bullion, go for current now." 
 
 Often with the lapse of time the meaning of a word 
 changes imperceptibly, until after some centuries it be-
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 287 
 
 comes the very opposite of what it once was. To disinter 
 these old meanings out of the alluvium and drift of ages, 
 affords as much pleasure to the linguist as to disinter a 
 fossil does to the geologist. 
 
 An exact knowledge of the changes of signification 
 which words have undergone is not merely a source of 
 pleasure; it is absolutely indispensable to the full under- 
 standing of old authors. Thus, for example, Milton and 
 Thomson use " horrent " and " horrid " for bristling, e. g., 
 
 "With dangling ice all fiwrid." 
 
 Milton speaks of a " savage " (meaning woody, silra) hill, 
 and of " amiable " (meaning lovely) fruit. Again, in the 
 well-known lines of the "Allegro," where, Milton says, 
 amongst the cheerful sights of rural morn, 
 
 "And every shepherd tells his tale 
 Under the hawthorn in the vale," 
 
 the words " telling his tale " do not mean that he is ro- 
 mancing or making love to the milkmaid, but that he is 
 counting his sheep as they pass the hawthorn, a natural 
 and familiar occupation of shepherds on a summer's morn- 
 ing. The primary meaning of " tale " is to count or 
 number, as in the German " zahlen." It is thus used in 
 the Book of Exodus, which states that the Israelites were 
 compelled to deliver their tale of bricks. In the English 
 tale and in the French conte the secondary meaning has 
 supplanted the first, though we still speak of "keeping 
 tally," of " untold gold," and say, " Here is the sum twice- 
 told." 
 
 It has been said that one of the arts of a great poet 
 or prose-writer, who wishes to add emphasis to his style, 
 to bring out all the latent forces of his native tongue, 
 will often consist in reconnecting a word with its original
 
 288 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 derivation, in not suffering it to forget itself and its fa- 
 ther's house, though it would. This Milton does with 
 signal effect, and so frequently that we must often inter- 
 pret his words rather by their classical meanings than by 
 their English use. Thus in " Paradise Lost," when Satan 
 speaks of his having been pursued by " Heaven's afflidhn/ 
 thunder," the poet uses the word " afflicting " in its origi- 
 nal primary sense of striking down bodily. Properly the 
 word denotes a state of mind or feeling only, and is not 
 used to-day in a concrete sense. So when Milton, at the 
 opening of the same poem, speaks of 
 
 " the secret top 
 Of Oreb or of Sinai," 
 
 the meaning of the word "secret" is not that of the Eng- 
 lish adjective, but is remote, apart, lonely, as in Virgil's 
 " secretosque pios." The absurdity of supposing the word 
 to be the same as our ordinary adjective led Bentley, 
 among many ridiculous " improvements " of Milton's lan- 
 guage, to change it to " sacred." 
 
 Shakspeare, also, not unfrequently uses words in their 
 classical sense. Thus when Cleopatra speaks of 
 
 " Such gifts as we greet modern friends withal," 
 
 " modern " is used in the sense of modal, (from modus, a 
 fashion or manner;) a modern friend, compared with a 
 true friend, being what the fashion of a thing is, com- 
 pared with the substance. So, as De Quincey, to whom 
 we owe this explanation, has shown, when in the famous 
 picture of life, " All the World's a Stage," the justice 
 is described as 
 
 " Full of wise saws and modern instances," 
 
 the meaning is not, " full of wise sayings and modern 
 illustrations," but full of proverbial maxims of conduct
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 289 
 
 and of trivial arguments; i. e., of petty distinctions that 
 never touch the point at issue. Instances is from instantia, 
 which the monkish and scholastic writers always used in 
 the sense of an argument. 
 
 Mystery is derived from " mu," the imitation of closing 
 the lips. Courage is "good heart." Anecdote, from the 
 Greek dv (not), lx (out), and 86ra (given), meant once 
 a fact not given out or published; now it means a short, 
 amusing story. Procopius, a Greek historian in the reign 
 of Justinian, is said to have coined the word. Not daring, 
 for fear of torture and death, to speak of some living per- 
 sons as they deserved, he wrote a work which he called 
 "Anecdotes," or a "Secret History." The instant an an- 
 ecdote is published, it belies its title; it is no longer an 
 anecdote. Allowance formerly was used to denote praise 
 or approval; as when Shakspeare says, in " Troilus and 
 Cressida," 
 
 " A stirring dwarf we do allowance give 
 Before a sleeping giant." 
 
 To prevent, which now means to hinder or obstruct, signi- 
 fied, in its Latin etymology, to anticipate, to get the start 
 of, and is thus used in the Old Testament. Girl once 
 designated a young person of either sex. Widow was 
 applied to men as well as women. Astonished literally 
 means thunderstruck, as its derivation from "attonare" 
 shows. Holland, in his translation of Livy, speaks of a 
 knave who threw some heavy stones upon a certain king, 
 " whereof the one smote the king upon his head, the other 
 astonished his shoulder." Sagacious once meant quick- 
 smelling, as in the line 
 
 "The hound sagacious of the tainted prey." 
 13
 
 290 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Rascal, according to Verstegan, primarily meant an " il- 
 favoured, lean, and worthelesse deer." Thus Shakspeare: 
 
 "Horns! the noblest deer hath them as huge as the rascal." 
 
 Afterwards it denoted the common people, the plcbs as 
 distinguished from the populus. A naturalist was once a 
 person who rejected revealed truth, and believed only in 
 natural religion. He is now an investigator of nature and 
 her laws, and often a believer in Christianity. Blackgtir</* 
 were formerly the scullions, turnspits, and other meaner 
 retainers in a great household, who, when a change was 
 made from one residence to another, accompanied and took 
 care of the pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils, by which 
 they were smutted. Webster, in his play of " The White 
 Devil," speaks of " a lousy knave, that within these twenty 
 years rode with the black guard in the Duke's carriage, 
 amongst spits and dripping-pans." Artillery, which to-day 
 means the heavy ordnance of modern warfare, was two or 
 three centuries ago applied to any engines for throwing 
 missiles, even to the bow and arrow. Punctual, which now 
 denotes exactness in keeping engagements, formerly applied 
 to space as well as to time. Sir Thomas Browne speaks of 
 " a punctual truth " ; and we read in other writers of " a 
 punctual relation" or "description," meaning a particular 
 or circumstantial relation or description. 
 
 Bombast, now swelling talk, inflated diction without 
 substance, was originally cotton padding. It is derived 
 from the Low Latin, bombax, cotton. Chemist once meant 
 the same as alchemist. Polite originally meant polished. 
 Cudworth speaks of " polite bodies, as looking-glasses." 
 Tidy, which now means neat, well-arranged, is derived 
 from the old English word "tide," meaning time, as in
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 291 
 
 eventide. Tidy (German, zeitig,} is timely, seasonable. As 
 things in right time are apt to be in the right place, the 
 transition in the meaning of the word is a natural one. 
 Caitiff formerly meant captive, being derived from captivus 
 through the Norman-French. The change of signification 
 points to the tendency of slavery utterly to debase the 
 character, to transform the man into a cowardly mis- 
 creant. In like manner miscreant, once simply a mis- 
 believer, and applied to the most virtuous as well as to 
 the vilest, points to the deep-felt conviction that a wrong 
 belief leads to wrong living. Thus Gibbon: "The emper- 
 or's generosity to the miscreant (Soliman) was interpreted 
 as treason to the Christian cause." Thought, in early 
 English, was anxious care; e.g., "Take no thought for your 
 life" (Matt. vi. 25). Thing primarily meant discourse, 
 then solemn discussion, council, court of justice, cause, 
 matter or subject of discourse. The husting was originally 
 the house- thing, or domestic court. 
 
 Coquets were once male as well as female. Usury, which 
 now means taking illegal or excessive interest, denoted, at 
 first, the taking of any interest, however small. A tobacco- 
 nist was formerly a smoker, not a seller, of tobacco. Corpse, 
 now a body from which the breath of life has departed, 
 once denoted the body of the living also; as in Surrey, 
 
 "A valiant corpse, where force and beauty met." 
 
 Incomprehensible has undergone a striking change of 
 meaning within the last three centuries. In the Athana- 
 sian creed the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are spoken of 
 as immense. In translating the creed from the Latin, in 
 which it was first penned, the word immensus was rendered 
 " incomprehensible," a word which, at that time, was not
 
 292 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 limited to its present sense, that is, inconceivable, or be- 
 yond, or above our understanding, but meant "not com- 
 prehended within any limits," and answered to the orig- 
 inal expression and notion of immensity. 
 
 Wit, now used in a more limited sense, at first signified 
 the mental powers collectively; e. g., " Will puts in practice 
 what the wit deviseth." Later it came to denote quickness 
 of apprehension, beauty or elegance in composition, and 
 Pope defined it as 
 
 nature to advantage dressed, 
 
 What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." 
 
 Another meaning was a man of talents or genius. The 
 word parts, a hundred years ago, was used to denote genius 
 or talents. Horace Walpole, in one of his letters, says of 
 Goldsmith that " he was an idiot, with once or twice a fit of 
 parts." The word loyalty has undergone a marked change 
 within a few centuries. Originally it meant in English, as 
 in French, fair dealing, fidelity to engagements; now it 
 means, in England, fidelity to the throne, and, in the 
 United States, to the Union or the Constitution. Reler<m1. 
 which formerly meant relieving or assisting, is now used in 
 the sense of relative or relating to, with which, from a 
 similarity of sound, though without the least etymological 
 connection, it appears to have been confounded. The word 
 exorbitant once meant deviating from a track or orbit; 
 it is now used exclusively in the sense of excessive. 
 
 The word coincide was primarily a mathematical term. 
 If one mathematical point be superposed upon another, or 
 one straight line upon another between the same two 
 points, the two points in the first case and the two lines 
 in the latter, are said to coincide. The word was soon 
 applied figuratively to identity of opinion, but, according
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 293 
 
 to Prof. Marsh, was not fully popularized, at least in 
 America, till 1826. On the Fourth of July in that year, 
 the semi-centennial jubilee of the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence, Thomas Jefferson, the author of that manifesto, and 
 John Adams, its principal champion on the floor of Con- 
 gress, both also Ex-Presidents, died; and this fact was 
 noticed all over the world, and especially in the United 
 States, as a remarkable coincidence. The death of Ex- 
 President Monroe, also, on the Fourth of July five years 
 after, gave increased currency to the word. Our late 
 Civil War has led to some striking mutations in the mean- 
 ing of words. Contraband, from its general signification 
 of any article whose importation or exportation is pro- 
 hibited by law, became limited to a fugitive slave within 
 the United States' military lines. Secede and secession, 
 confederate and confederacy, have also acquired a new 
 special meaning. 
 
 DEGRADATION OF WORDS. 
 
 Another striking characteristic of words is their tend- 
 ency to contract in form and degenerate in meaning. 
 Sometimes they are ennobled and purified in signification; 
 but more frequently they deteriorate, and from an honor- 
 able fall into a dishonorable meaning. We will first note 
 a few examples of the former ; Humility, with the Greeks 
 and Romans, meant meanness of spirit; Paradise, in ori- 
 ental tongues, meant only a royal park; regeneration was 
 spoken by the Greeks only of the earth in the springtime, 
 and of the recollection of forgotten knowledge; sacrament 
 and mystery are words "fetched from the very dregs of 
 paganism " to set forth the great truths of our redemption. 
 On the other hand, thief (Anglo-Saxon, theow,} formerly
 
 294 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 signified only one of the servile classes; and villain, or 
 villein, meant peasant, the serf, who, under the feudal 
 system, was adscriptus ylebae. The scorn of the landhold- 
 ers, the half-barbarous aristocracy, for these persons, led 
 them to ascribe to them the most hateful qualities, some of 
 which their degrading situation doubtless tended to foster. 
 Thus the word villein became gradually associated with 
 ideas of crime and guilt, till at length it became a syno- 
 nyme for knaves of every class in society. A menial was 
 one of the many; insolent meant unusual; silly, blessed, 
 the infant Jesus being termed by an old English poet " that 
 harmless silly babe " ; officious signified ready to do kindly 
 offices. Demure was used once in a good sense, without the 
 insinuation which is now almost latent in it, that the 
 external shows of modesty and sobriety rest on no corre- 
 sponding realities. Facetious, which now has the sense of 
 buffoonish, originally meant urbane. Idiot, from the Greek, 
 originally signified only a private man, as distinguished 
 from an office-holder. Homely formerly meant secret and 
 familiar; and brat, now a vulgar and contemptuous word, 
 had anciently a very different signification, as in the fol- 
 lowing lines from an old hymn by Gascoigne: 
 
 " O Israel, O household of the Lord, 
 O Abraham's brats, O brood of blessed seed, 
 O chosen sheep that loved the Lord indeed." 
 
 Imp once meant graft; Bacon speaks of "those most 
 virtuous and goodly young imps, the Duke of Sussex and 
 his brother." A boor was once only a farmer; a scamp, a 
 camp-deserter. Speculation first meant the sense of sight; 
 as in Shakspeare, 
 
 "Thou hast no speculation in those eyes." 
 
 Next it was metaphorically transferred to mental vision,
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 295 
 
 and finally denoted, without a metaphor, the reflections 
 and theories of philosophers. From the domain of phi- 
 losophy it has finally traveled downwards to the offices of 
 stock-jobbers, share-brokers, and all men who get their 
 living by their wits, instead of by the sweat of their brows. 
 So craft at first meant ability, skill, or dexterity. The 
 origin of the term, according to Wedgwood, is seen in the 
 notion of seizing, expressed by the Italian, graffi&re, Welsh, 
 craft, a hook, brace, holdfast. The term is then applied to 
 seizing with the mind, as in the Latin terms apprehend, 
 comprehend, from preliendere, to seize in a material way. 
 Cunning once conveyed no idea of sinister or crooked 
 wisdom. "The three Persons of the Trinity," says a rev- 
 erent writer of the fifteenth century, "are of equal cun- 
 ning." Bacon, a century later, uses the word in its present 
 sense of fox-like wisdom; and Locke calls it "the ape of 
 wisdom." Vagabond is a word whose etymology conveys 
 no reproach. It denoted at first only a wanderer. But 
 as men who have no homes are apt to become loose, un- 
 steady, and reckless in their habits, the term has degen- 
 erated into its present signification. 
 
 Paramour meant originally only lover; a, minion was a 
 favorite ; and knave, the lowest and most contemptuous term 
 we can use when insulting another, signified originally, as 
 knabe still does in German, a "boy." Subsequently, it 
 meant servant; thus Paul, in WicliflVs version of the New 
 Testament, reverently terms himself "a knave of Jesus 
 Christ." A similar parallel to this is the word varlet, 
 which is the same as valet. Retaliate, from the Latin "re" 
 (back) and " talis " (such), naturally means to pay back in 
 kind, or such as we have received. But as, according to 
 Sir Thomas More, men write their injuries in marble, the
 
 296 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 kindnesses done them in sand, the word "retaliate" is 
 applied only to offenses or indignities, and never to favors. 
 The word resent, to feel in return, has undergone a similar 
 deterioration. A Frenchman would say, " II ressentit une 
 vive douleur," for " He felt acute pain 1 '; whereas we use 
 the word only to express the sentiment of anger. 
 
 So animosity, which etymologically means only spirit- 
 edness, is now applied to only one kind of vigor and activ- 
 ity, that displayed in enmity and hate. Defalcation, from 
 the Latin, falx, a sickle or scythe, is properly a cutting 
 off or down, a pruning or retrenchment. Thus Addison: 
 " The tea-table is set forth with its usual bill of fare, 
 and without any defalcation." To-day we read of a " defalr 
 cation in th.e revenue," or " in a treasurer's accounts," by 
 which is meant a decrease in the amount of the revenue, 
 or in the moneys accounted for, irrespective of the cause, 
 a falling off. This erroneous use of the word is probably 
 due to a confusion of it with the expression fall away, and 
 with the noun defaulter. Between the first word and 
 either of the last two, however, there is not the slightest 
 etymological relationship. Chaffer, to talk much and idly, 
 primarily meant to buy, to make a bargain, to higgle or 
 dispute about a bargain. Gossip (God-akin) once meant 
 a sponsor in baptism. Simple and simplicity have sadly 
 degenerated in meaning. A " simple " fellow, once a man 
 sine plica, (without fold, free from duplicity,) is now one 
 who lacks shrewdness, and is easily cheated or duped. 
 
 There are some words which, though not used in an 
 absolutely unfavorable sense, yet require a qualifying 
 adjective, to be understood favorably. Thus, if a man is 
 said to be noted for his curiosity, a prying, impertinent, 
 not a legitimate, curiosity is supposed to be meant. So
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 297 
 
 critic and criticise are commonly associated with a carping, 
 fault-finding spirit. Parson (persona ecclesiae) had origi- 
 nally no undertone of contempt. In the eighteenth cen- 
 tury it had become a nickname of scorn; and it was at 
 a party of a dozen parsons that the Earl of Sandwich won 
 his wager, that no one among them had brought his prayer- 
 book or forgotten his corkscrew. Fellow was originally a 
 term of respect. at least, there was in it no subaudition 
 of contempt; now it is suggestive of worthlessness, if not 
 of positively bad morals. Shakspeare did not mean to dis- 
 parage Yorick, the jester, when he said that " he was a 
 fellow of infinite jest"; Pope, on the other hand, tells us, 
 a century or more later, that 
 
 "Worth makes the man, want of it the fellow." 
 
 " By a fast man, I presume you mean a loose one," said 
 Sir Robert Inglis to one who was describing a rake. Of 
 all the words which have degenerated from their original 
 meaning, the most remarkable is the term dunce, of the 
 history of which Archbishop Trench has given a striking 
 account in his work on "The Study of Words." In the 
 Middle Ages certain theologians, educated in the cathedral 
 and cloister schools founded by Charlemagne and his suc- 
 cessors, were called Schoolmen. Though they were men 
 of great acuteness and subtlety of intellect, their works, 
 at the revival of learning, ceased to be popular, and it was 
 considered a mark of intellectual progress and advance 
 to have thrown off their yoke. Some persons, however, 
 still clung to these Schoolmen, especially to Duns Scotus, 
 the great teacher of the Franciscan order; and many times 
 an adherent of the old learning would seek to strengthen 
 his position by an appeal to its great doctor, familiarly 
 13*
 
 298 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 called Duns; while his opponents would contemptuously 
 rejoin, "Oh, you are a Duns-man" or more briefly, "You 
 are a Duns."" As the new learning was enlisting more and 
 more of the scholarship of the age on its side, the title 
 became more and more a term of scorn; and thus, from 
 that long extinct conflict between the old and the new 
 learning, the mediaeval and the modern theology, we 
 inherit the words "dunce" and "duncery." The lot of 
 poor Duns, as the Archbishop observes, was certainly a 
 hard one. That the name of " the Subtle Doctor,'' as he 
 was called, one of the keenest and most subtle-witted of 
 men, according to Hooker, "the wittiest of the "school 
 divines," should become a synonyme for stupidity and 
 obstinate dulness, was a fate of which even his bitterest 
 enemies could never have dreamed. 
 
 COMMON WORDS WITH CURIOUS DERIVATIONS. 
 
 tin loiterers were once pilgrims to the Holy Land (la 
 Sainte Terre), who, it was found, took their own time to go 
 there. Bit is that which has been bit off, and exactly cor- 
 responds to the word " morsel," used in the same sense, and 
 derived from the Latin, mordere, to bite. Bankrupt means 
 literally broken bench. It was the custom in the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries for the Lombard merchants to 
 expose their wares for sale in the market-place on benches. 
 When one of their number failed, all the other merchants 
 set upon him, drove him from the market, and broke his 
 bench to pieces. Banco rotto, the Italian for bench- 
 broken, becomes banqueroute in French, and in English 
 bankrupt. Alligator is from the Spanish, el lag art o, "the 
 lizard," being the largest of the lizard species. Stipula- 
 tion is from stipulum, a straw, which the Romans broke
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 299 
 
 when they made a mutual engagement. Dexterity is sim- 
 ply right-handedness. Mountebank means a quack-medi- 
 cine vendor, from the Italian, montare, to mount, and 
 banco, a bench. Literally, one who mounts a bench to 
 boast of his infallible skill in curing diseases. Quandary is 
 a corruption of the French, qu'en dirai (je)? "what shall I 
 say of it?" and expresses that feeling of uncertainty which 
 would naturally prompt such a question. Faint is from 
 the French, se feindre, to pretend; so that originally faint- 
 ing was a pretended weakness or inability. We have an 
 example of the thing originally indicated by the word, in 
 the French theatres, where professional fainters are em- 
 ployed, whose business it is to be overcome and to sink 
 to the floor under the powerful acting of the tragedians. 
 Topsy-turvy is said to be a contraction or corruption of 
 " top-side t'other way," just as helter-skelter is from hilar- 
 iter et celeriter, "gaily and quickly." Hip! hip! hurrah! 
 is said to have been originally a war-cry adopted by the 
 stormers of a German town, wherein a great many Jews had 
 taken refuge. The place being sacked, the Jews were all 
 put to the sword, amid the shouts of " Hiersolyma est per- 
 dita." From the first letters of these words (h. e. p.) an 
 exclamation was contrived. When the wine sparkles in 
 the cup, and patriotic or other soul-thrilling sentiments are 
 greeted with a "Hip! hip! hurrah!" it is well enough to 
 remember the origin of a cry which reminds us of the 
 cruelty of Christians towards God's chosen people. Sexton 
 is a corruption of "sacristan," which is from sacra, the 
 sacred things of a church. The sacristan's office was to 
 take care of the vessels of the service and the vestments of 
 the clergy. Since the Reformation, his duties in this respect 
 have been greatly lessened, and he has dug the graves,
 
 300 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 so that the term now commonly means grave-digger, 
 though it still retains somewhat of its old meaning. 
 
 Toad-eater is a metaphor supposed to be taken from a 
 mountebank's boy eating toads, in order to show his mas- 
 ter's skill in expelling poison. It is more probable, how- 
 ever, that the phrase is a version of the French, acaler des 
 couleuvres, which means putting up with all sorts of indig- 
 nities without showing resentment. The propriety of the 
 term rests on the fact that dependent persons are often 
 forced to do the most nauseous things to please their 
 patrons. The same trick of pretending to eat reptiles, 
 such as toads, is held by some etymologists to be the origin 
 of the terms buffoon, buffoonery, from the Latin, bufo, a 
 toad. Wedgwood derives it from the French, bouffo/i, a 
 jester, from the Italian, buffa, a puff, a blast or a blurt 
 with the mouth made at one in scorn. A puff with the 
 mouth indicates contempt; it is emblematically mak'tiiy 
 light of an object. In "David Copperfield" we read: 
 "And who minds Dick? Dick's nobody! Whoo! He 
 blew a slight, contemptuous breath, as if he blew himself 
 away." 
 
 Cant (Gaelic, cainnt, speech,) is properly the language 
 spoken by thieves and beggars among themselves, when 
 they do not wish to be understood by bystanders. Subse- 
 quently, it came to mean the peculiar terms used by any 
 other profession or community. Some etymologists derive 
 the word from the Latin, cantare, to sing, and suppose it 
 to signify the whining cry of professional beggars, though 
 it may have obtained its beggar sense from some instinct- 
 ive notion of its quasi-religious one. It has been noted 
 that the whole class of words comprising enchant, incanta- 
 tion, etc., were primarily referable to religious ceremonies
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 301 
 
 of some kind; and as once an important part of a beggar's 
 daily labor was invoking, or seeming to invoke, blessings 
 on those who gave him alms, this, with the natural tend- 
 ency to utter any oft-repeated phrases in a sing-song, 
 rhythmical tone, gave to the word cant its present signifi- 
 cation. In Scotland the word has a peculiar meaning. 
 About the middle of the seventeenth century, Andrew and 
 Alexander Cant, of Edinburgh, maintained that all refusers 
 of the covenant ought to be excommunicated, and that all 
 excommunicated might lawfully be killed; and in their 
 grace after meat they "praid for those phanaticques and 
 seditious ministers " who had been arrested and impris- 
 oned, that the Lord would pity and deliver them. From 
 these two Cants, Andrew and Alexander, it is said, all 
 seditious praying and preaching in Scotland is called 
 " Canting." 
 
 The tendency to regard money as the source of true hap- 
 piness is strikingly illustrated in the word wealth, which 
 is connected with weal, just as in Latin beatus meant both 
 blessed and rich, and oXftw; the same in Greek. Property 
 and propriety come from the same French word propriete; 
 so that the Frenchman in New York was not far out of 
 the way, when in the panic of 1857 he said he " should lose 
 all his propriety." The term blue-stocking, applied to liter- 
 ary ladies, has a curious origin. Originally, in England 
 in 1760, it was conferred on a society of literary persons 
 of both sexes. The society derived its name from the blue 
 worsted stockings always worn by Benjamin Stillingfleet, a 
 distinguished writer, who was one of the most active pro- 
 moters of this association. This term was subsequently 
 conferred on literary ladies, from the fact that the accom- 
 plished and fascinating Mrs. Jerningham wore blue stock-
 
 302 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 ings at the social and literary entertainments given by 
 Lady Montague. Woman is the wif or weft-man, who stays 
 at home to spin, as distinguished from the weop-man, who 
 goes abroad to use the weapon of war. The term "man" 
 is, of course, generic, including both male and female. 
 Lady primarily signifies bread-keeper. It is derived from 
 the Anglo-Saxon, hlafdie, i. e., hlafweardige, bread-keeper, 
 from hlaf, bread, loaf, and weardian, to keep, look after. 
 Waist is the same as waste; that part of the figure which 
 wastes, that is, diminishes. 
 
 Canard has a very curious origin. M. Quetelet, a 
 French writer, in the " Annuaire de T Academic Fran- 
 qaise," attributes the first application of this term to 
 Norbert Corneli'ssen, who, to give a sly hit at the ridicu- 
 lous pieces of intelligence in the public journals, stated 
 that an interesting experiment had just been made cal- 
 culated to prove the voracity of ducks. Twenty were 
 placed together; and one of them having been killed and 
 cut up into the smallest possible pieces, feathers and all, 
 was thrown to the other nineteen, and most gluttonously 
 gobbled up. Another was then taken from the nineteen, 
 and being chopped small like its predecessor, was served 
 up to the eighteen, and at once devoured like the other; 
 and so on to the last, who thus was placed in the position 
 of having eaten his nineteen companions. This story, 
 most pleasantly narrated, ran the round of all the jour- 
 nals of Europe. It then became almost forgotten for 
 about a score of years, when it went back from America 
 with amplifications; but the word remained in its novel 
 signification. 
 
 Abominable was once supposed to have been derived 
 from the Latin words ab (from) and homo (a man), meaning
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 303 
 
 repugnant to humanity. It really comes from abominor, 
 which again is from ab and omen; and it conveys the idea 
 of what is in a religious sense profane and detestable, in 
 short, of evil omen. Milton always applies it to devilish, 
 profane, or idolatrous objects. PoUroon is pollice truncus, 
 i. e., with the thumb cut off, pollex, Latin, meaning 
 thumb, and truncus, maimed or mutilated. When the 
 Roman empire was about falling in pieces, the valor of the 
 citizens had so degenerated, that, to escape fighting, many 
 cut off their right thumbs, thus disabling themselves from 
 using the pike. Farce is derived from farcire, a Latin word 
 meaning to stuff as with flour, herbs, and other ingredients 
 in cooking. A farce is a comedy with little plot, stuffed 
 with ludicrous incidents and expressions. Racij is from 
 " race," meaning family breed, and signifies having the 
 characteristic flavor of origin, savoring of the source. 
 
 Trivial may be from trivium, in the sense of tres vice, a 
 place where three roads meet, and thus indicate, that which 
 is common-place, or of daily occurrence. But it is more 
 probably from trivium, in the sense in which the word was 
 used in the Middle Ages, when it meant the course of three 
 arts, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which formed the com- 
 mon curriculum of the universities, as distinguished from 
 the quadrimum, which embraced four more, namely, music, 
 arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Trivial things in 
 this sense may mean things that occur ordinarily, as dis- 
 tinguished from higher or more abstruse things. The word 
 quiz has a remarkable origin, unless the etymologists who 
 give its derivation are themselves quizzing their readers. 
 It is said that many years ago, when one Daly was patentee 
 of the Irish theatres, he spent the evening of a Saturday 
 in company with many of the wits and men of fashion of
 
 304 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 the day. Gambling was introduced, when the manager 
 staked a large sum that he would have spoken, all through 
 the principal streets of Dublin, by a certain hour next day, 
 Sunday, a word having no meaning, and being derived 
 from no known language. Wagers were laid, and stakes 
 deposited. Daly repaired to the theatre, and dispatched all 
 the servants and supernumeraries with the word "Quiz," 
 which they chalked on every door and every shop window 
 in town. Shops being all shut next day, everybody going 
 to and coming from the different places of worship saw 
 the word, and everybody repeated it, so that "Quiz" was 
 heard all through Dublin; the circumstance of so strange 
 a word being on every door and window caused much sur- 
 prise, and ever since, should a strange story be attempted 
 to be passed current, it draws forth the expression, " You 
 are quizzing me." Some person who has a just aversion 
 to practical jokes, wittily defines a "quizzer" as "one who 
 believes me to be a fool because I will not believe him 
 to be a liar." 
 
 Huguenot is a word whose origin is still a vexata qucestio 
 of etymology. Of the many derivations given, some of 
 which are ridiculously fanciful, " Eignots," which Voltaire 
 and others give from the German, Eidgenossen, confeder- 
 ates, is the one generally, received. A plausible deri- 
 vation is from Huguenot, a small piece of money, which, in 
 the time of Hugo Capet, was worth less than a denier. 
 At the time of Amboisi's conspiracy, some of the petitioners 
 fled through fear; whereupon some of the countrymen said 
 they were poor fellows, not worth a Huguenot, whence 
 the nickname in question. Pensire is a picturesque word, 
 from pensare, the frequentative of pendere, to weigh. The 
 French have pens&, a thought, the result of mental weigh-
 
 CTJKIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 305 
 
 ing. A pensive figure is that in which a person appears 
 to be holding an invisible balance of reflection. Bumper 
 is a corruption of le bon pere, meaning " the Holy Father," 
 or Pope, who was once the great toast of every feast. As 
 this was commonly the first toast, it was considered that 
 the glasses would be desecrated by being again used. 
 
 Nice is derived by some etymologists from the Anglo- 
 Saxon, hnesc, soft, effeminate; but there is good reason for 
 believing that it is from the Latin, nescius, ignorant. 
 "Wise, and nothing nice," says Chaucer; that is, no wise 
 ignorant. If so, it is a curious instance of the extraordi- 
 nary changes of meaning which words undergo, that 
 "nice" should come to signify accurate or fastidious, which 
 implies knowledge and taste rather than ignorance. The 
 explanation is, that the diffidence of ignorance resembles 
 the fastidious slowness of discernment. Gibberish is from 
 a famous sage, Giber, an Arab, who sought for the phi- 
 losopher's stone, and used, perhaps, senseless incantations. 
 Alert is a picturesque word from the Italian, all 'erte, on 
 the mound or rampart. The "alert" man is one who is 
 wide-awake and watchful, like the warder on the watch- 
 tower, or the sentinel upon the rampart. By-laws are 
 not, etymologically, laws of inferior importance, but the 
 laws of "byes" or towns, as distinguished from the gen- 
 eral laws of a kingdom. By is Danish for town or vil- 
 lage: as " Whitby," White Town, "Derby," Deer Town, etc. 
 
 A writer in "Notes and Queries" suggests that the 
 word snobs may be of classical origin, derived from sine 
 obola, without a penny. It is not probable, however, that 
 it was meant as a sneer at poverty only. A more ingen- 
 ious suggestion is that, as the higher classes were called 
 "nobs," i. e., nobilitas, the nobility, the "s-nobs" were
 
 306 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 those sine nobilitate, without any blue blood in their veins, 
 or pure aristocratic breeding. Humbug is an expressive 
 word, about the origin of which etymologists are disagreed. 
 An ingenious explanation, not given in the dictionaries, 
 is, that it is derived from Hume of the Boy, a Scotch 
 laird, so called from his estate, who lived during the 
 reign of William and Anne. He was celebrated in Edin- 
 burgh circles for his marvelous stories, which, in the 
 exhausting draughts they made on his hearer's credulity, 
 out-Munchausened Munchausen. Hence, any tough story 
 was called a " a regular Hume of the Bog," or, by con- 
 traction, Humbug. Another etymology of humbug is a 
 piece of Hamburg news; i. e., a Stock Exchange canard. 
 Webster derives the word from hum, to impose on, deceive, 
 and bug, a frightful object, a bugbear. Wedgwood thinks 
 it may come from the union of hum and buzz, signifying 
 sound without sense. He cites a catch, set by Dr. Arne 
 in "Notes and Queries": 
 
 "Buz, quoth the blue fly, 
 
 Hum, quoth the bee, 
 Buz and hum they cry. 
 And so do we." 
 
 Imbecile is from the Latin, in and bacillum, a walking- 
 stick; one who through infirmity leans for support upon a 
 stick. Petrels are little Peters, because, like the apostles, 
 they can walk on the water. Hocus pocus is a corruption 
 of Hoc est corpus, "this is the body," words once used in 
 necromancy or jugglery. Chagrin is primarily a hard, 
 granulated leather, which chafes the limbs; hence, second- 
 arily, irritation or vexation. Canon is from a Greek word 
 meaning "cane"; first a hollow rule or a cane used as a 
 measure, then a law or rule. The word is identical with
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 307 
 
 "cannon," so called from its hollow, tube-like form. 
 Hence it has been wittily said that the world in the 
 Middle Ages was governed first by canons, and then by 
 cannons, first, by Saint Peter, and then by saltpetre. 
 
 Booby primarily denotes a person who gapes and stares 
 about, wondering at everything. From the syllable ba, 
 representing the opening of the mouth, are formed the 
 French words baier, beer, to gape, and thence in the patois 
 of the Hainault, baia, the mouth, and figuratively one who 
 stands staring with open mouth, boubie. Webster thinks 
 the word is derived from the French boubie, a waterfowl. 
 Pet, a darling, is from the French petit, which comes from 
 the Latin, petitus, sought after. "My pet" means literally 
 " my sought after or desired one." Petty is also from the 
 French, petit, little. Assassin is derived from the Persian, 
 hashish, an intoxicating opiate. "The Assassins" were a 
 tribe of fanatics, who lived in the mountains of Lebanon, 
 and executed with terror and subtlety every order entrusted 
 to them by their chief, the " Old Man of the Mountain." 
 They made a jest of torture when seized, and were the 
 terror alike of Turk and Christian. They resembled the 
 Thugs of India. Blunderbuss (properly thunder-buss) is 
 from the German buchse, applied to a rifle, a box; hence 
 "arque&wss" and "Brown Bess." Bosh is derived, accord- 
 ing to some etymologists, from a Turkish word meaning 
 "empty," according to others, from the German, bosse, a 
 joke or trifle. Mr. Blackley, in his " Word-Gossip," says it 
 is the pure gypsy word for "fiddle," which suggests the 
 semi-sanctioned fiddle-de-dee! Person primarily meant an 
 actor. The Roman theatres, which could hold thirty to 
 forty thousand spectators, were so large that the actors 
 wore masks containing a contrivance to render the voice
 
 308 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 louder. Such a mask was called persona, (per sonare, to 
 sound through,) because the voice sounded through it. By 
 a common figure of speech, the word meaning "mask" 
 (persona) was afterwards applied to its wearer; so per- 
 sona came to signify " actor." But as all men are 
 actors, playing each his part on the stage of life, the 
 word " person " came afterwards to signify a man or 
 woman. Parson, the "chief person" of a parish, is an- 
 other form of the same word. Curmudgeon is probably 
 from corn-merchant, one who tries to enrich himself by 
 hoarding grain and withholding it from others; or it may 
 be from the French, coeur, (the heart,) and mediant 
 (wicked). Haberdasher is from the German, Habt ihr das 
 hier? i.e., Have you this here? Hoax is from the Anglo- 
 Saxon, husc, mockery or contempt; or, perhaps it is from 
 hocus-pocus, which was at one time used to ridicule the 
 Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. 
 
 Right is from the Latin, rectus, ruled, proceeding in a 
 straight line; wrong is the perfect participle of "wring," 
 that which has been "wrung" or wrested from the right; 
 just as in French tort is from torqueo, that which is 
 twisted. Humble-pie is properly " umble-pie." The um- 
 bles were the entrails or coarser parts of the deer, the 
 perquisite of the keeper or huntsman. Pantaloon is from 
 the Italian, piante leone, (panta-leone, pantaloon,) "the 
 Planter of the Lion"; that is, the Standard-Bearer of 
 Venice. The Lion of St. Mark was the standard of Venice. 
 "Pantaloon" was a masked character in the Italian com- 
 edy, the butt of the play, who wore breeches and stockings 
 that were all of one piece. The Spanish language has 
 panalon, a slovenly fellow whose shirt hangs out of his 
 breeches. Cheat is from the Latin, cadere, to fall. The
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 309 
 
 word " escheats " first denoted lands that fell to the crown 
 by forfeiture. The " escheatours," who certified these to 
 the Exchequer, practiced so much fraud, that, by a natural 
 transition, the "escheatour" passed into "cheater," and 
 "escheat" into "cheat." 
 
 Salary is from the Latin, sal (salt), which in the reign 
 of the Emperor Augustus comprised the provisions, as well 
 as the pay, of the Roman military officers. From " salary " 
 came, probably, the expression, " He is not worth his salt" 
 that is, his pay, or wages. Kidnap is from the German, 
 kind, or Provincial English, kid, meaning "child," and nap 
 or nab, "to steal," to steal children. Hawk, in Anglo- 
 Saxon, hafoc, points to the havoc which that bird makes 
 among the smaller ones; as raven expresses the greedy or 
 " ravenous " disposition of the bird so named. Oivl is said 
 to be the past participle of " to yell," (as in Latin ulula, 
 the screech-owl, is from ululare,) and differs from " howl " 
 only in its spelling. Solecism is from Soli, a town of 
 Cilicia, the people of which corrupted the pure Greek. 
 Squirrel is from two Greek words, <rxta, a shade, and ofyd, 
 a tail. Sycophant is primarily a "fig-shower"; one who 
 informed the public officers of Attica that the law against 
 the exportation of figs had been violated. Hence the word 
 came to mean a common informer, a mean parasite. Para- 
 site, from the Greek napd beside, and alroq, food, means 
 literally one who eats at the table of another, a priv- 
 ilege which is apt to be paid for by obsequiousness and 
 flattery. 
 
 Sarcasm, from the Greek, adp^, flesh, xaZ<u, I tear, is 
 literally a tearing of the flesh. Tribulation is from the 
 Latin, tribulum, a kind of sledge or heavy roller, which 
 did the work of the English flail, by hard grinding and
 
 310 WORDS ; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 wearing, instead of by repeated light strokes. Troubles, 
 afflictions and sorrows being the divinely appointed means 
 for separating the chaff from the wheat of men's natures, 
 the light and trivial from the solid and valuable, the 
 early Christians, by a rustic but familiar metaphor, called 
 these sorrows and trials " tribulations," threshings of the 
 inner spiritual man, by which only could he be fitted for 
 the heavenly garner. As Wither beautifully sings: 
 
 "Till the mill the grains in pieces tear, 
 The richness of the flour will scarce appear; 
 So till men's persons great afflictions touch, 
 If worth be found, their worth is not much; 
 Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet 
 That. value, which in threshing they may get." 
 
 Talibij, a familiar name of cats, is the French tabi*. 
 which comes from the Persian retabi, a rich watered silk, 
 and denotes the wavy bars upon their coats. Schooner has 
 a curious derivation. In 1713 Captain Andrew Robinson 
 launched the first vessel of this kind, with gaffs instead of 
 the lateen yards until then in use, and the luif of the sail 
 bent to hoops on the mast. As she slipped down the ways 
 a bystander exclaimed, "Oh, how she scoons ! " where- 
 upon the builder, catching at the word, replied, "A SCOOH<T 
 let her be!" Originally the word was spelled without the 
 h. Supercilious, from supercilium (the eyebrow), is liter- 
 ally knitting the eyebrows in pride. Slave chronicles the 
 contest between the Teutonic and Sclavonic or Slavonic 
 races. When a German captured a Russian or Bohemian, 
 he would call him a sclave or slave, whereby the word 
 became associated with the idea Of servitude. In Oriental 
 France, in the eighth century, princes and bishops were 
 rich in these captives. 
 
 t is from semis, which the Justinian code derives
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 311 
 
 from serrare, to preserve, because the victor preserved 
 his captives alive, instead of killing them. 
 
 Scrupulous is from the Latin, scrupulus, a small, sharp 
 stone, such as might get into a Roman traveler's open 
 shoe arid distress him, whence the further meaning of 
 doubt or a source of doubt and hesitation. Afterwards the 
 word came to express a measure of weight, the twenty- 
 fourth part of an ounce; and hence to be scrupulous is to 
 pay minute, nice and exact attention to matters often in 
 themselves of small weight. Plagiarism is literally man- 
 stealing. As books are one's mental offspring, the word 
 came naturally to mean, first, the stealing of a book or 
 manuscript which the thief published as his own; secondly, 
 quoting from another man's writings without acknowledg- 
 ment. Parlor, from parler, to speak, is therefore the talk- 
 ing-room, as boudoir, from bonder, to pout, is literally the 
 pouting-rooin. Egregious is from the Latin ex, from, and 
 grege, flock or herd. An "egregious" lie is one distin- 
 guished from the common herd of lies, such as one meets 
 with in every patent- medicine advertisement and political 
 newspaper. Negotiate is from negotior, compounded of 
 ne ego otior, I am not idle. 
 
 The origin of the word caucus has long been a vexed 
 question with etymologists. Till recently it was supposed 
 by many to be a corruption of " caulkers," being derived 
 from an association of these men in Boston, who met to 
 organize resistance to England just before the Revolu- 
 tionary War. Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, of Hartford, 
 Connecticut, has suggested a new and ingenious derivation 
 of the term, which is more satisfactory, and probably cor- 
 rect. Strachey, in his " Historic of Travaile into Virginia," 
 1610-12 (printed by the Hakluyt Society, 1849), says that
 
 312 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 the Chechahamanias, a free people, acknowledging the 
 supremacy of Powhatan, were governed, not by a weroom-i'. 
 commander, sent by Powhatan, but by their priests, with 
 the assistance of their elders; and this board was called 
 cawcawwas. Captain John Smith writes cockerouse for caw- 
 cawwas, in the sense of "captain"; but the English gener- 
 ally understood it in the sense of "counselor," and adopted 
 it from the Indians, as Beverley states that it designates 
 "one that has the honor to be of the king's or queen's 
 council," a provincial councillor, just as Northern politi- 
 cians now use the word sachem, and formerly used mugwomj). 
 The verb from which cawcawwas, or cockerouse, comes means 
 primarily "to talk to," hence to "harangue," "advise," 
 "encourage," and is found in all Algonquin dialects, as 
 Abnaki kakesoo, to incite, and Chippeway gaganso (n nasal), 
 to exhort, urge, counsel. Cawcawwas, representing the 
 adjective form of this verb, is "one who advises, pro- 
 motes," a caucuser. Manumit is from manus, hand, and 
 mittere, to dismiss, to dismiss a slave with a slap of the 
 hand, on setting him free. Hypocrite comes from two 
 Greek words signifying "under a mask." It meant first 
 a stage-player, and next any one who feigns or plays a 
 part. The ancient actors wore masks, and spoke through 
 trumpets. Kennel, a dog-house, is from the Italian, cani/i-. 
 and this from the Latin, cam's, a dog. Kennel, in the sense 
 of gutter, with its kindred words, can, cane, and chaiux-l, 
 is derived from canna, a cane, which is like a tube. 
 
 Apple-pie order is a popular phrase of which few per- 
 sons know the meaning. Does it signify in order, or in 
 disorder? A writer in the "North-British Review" favors 
 the latter interpretation. He thinks that it has nothing 
 to do with apple or pie, in the common sense of those words.
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 313 
 
 He believes that it is a typographical term, and that it 
 \va.s originally " Chapel pie." A printing-house was and is 
 to this day called a chapel, perhaps from the Chapel at 
 Westminster Abbey, in which Caxton's earliest works are 
 said to have been printed, and "pie" is type after it is 
 "distributed" or broken up, and before it has been re- 
 sorted. " ' Pie ' in this sense came from the confused and 
 fti-r/tlejcing rules of the ' Pie,' that is, the order for finding 
 the lessons in Catholic times, which those who have read or 
 care to read the Preface to the ' Book of Common Prayer,' 
 will find there expressed and denounced. Here is the 
 passage : ' Moreover the number and hardness of the rules 
 called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the service, 
 was the cause that to turn the book only was so hard 
 and intricate a matter, that many times there was more 
 business to find out what should be read than to read it 
 when it was found out.' To leave your type in ' pie ' is to 
 leave it unsorted and in confusion, and ' apple-pie order,' 
 which we take to be 'chapel-pie order,' is to leave any- 
 thing in a thorough mess. Those who like to take the 
 other side, and assert that ' apple-pie order ' means in per- 
 fect order, may still find their derivation in ' chapel-pie ' ; 
 for the ordering and sorting of the ' pie' or type is enforced 
 in every ' chapel ' or printing-house by severe fines, and so 
 'chapel-pie order' would -be such order of the type as the 
 best friends of the chapel would wish to see." The bitter 
 end, a phrase often heard during the late Civil War, has 
 a remarkable etymology. A ship's cable has always two 
 ends. One end is fastened to the anchor and the other to 
 the bits, or bitts, a frame . of two strong pieces of timber 
 fixed perpendicularly in the fore part of the ship, for the 
 express purpose of holding the cables. Hence the "bil- 
 14
 
 314 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 ter," or "bitter end," is the. end fastened to the bitts; 
 and when the cable is out to the "bitter end," it is all 
 out; the extremity has come. 
 
 Few persons who utter the word stranger, suspect that 
 it has its root, as Dugald Stewart has noted, in the single 
 vowel e, the Latin preposition for " from." The links in 
 the chain are, e, ex, extra, extraneous, Stranger, stranger. 
 When a boy answers a lady, "Fes'm," he does not dream 
 that his " 'm " is a fragment of the five syllables, mea dom- 
 ina (madonna, madame, madam, ma'am, 'm). The words 
 thrall and thraldom have an interesting history. They come 
 to us from a period when it was customary to thrill or drill 
 the ear of a slave in token of servitude; and hence the 
 significance of Sir Thomas Browne's remark, " Bow not 
 to the omnipotency of gold, nor bore thy ear to its serv- 
 itude." The expression "signing one's name" takes us 
 back to an age when most persons made their mark or 
 " sign." We must not suppose that this practice was 
 then, as now, a proof of the ignorance of the signer. 
 Among the Saxons, not only illiterate persons made this 
 sign, but, as an attestation of the good faith of the per- 
 son signing, the mark of the cross was required to be 
 attached to the name of those who could write. From its 
 holy association, it was the symbol of an oath; and hence 
 the expression "God save the mark!" which so long puz- 
 zled the commentators of Shakspeare, is now understood 
 to be a form of ejaculation resembling an oath. It is 
 said that Charlemagne, being unable to write, was com- 
 pelled to dip the forefinger of his glove in ink, and smear 
 it over the parchment when it was necessary that the 
 imperial sign-manual should be fixed to an edict. 
 
 The language of savages teems with expressions of deep
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 315 
 
 interest both to the philologist and the student of human 
 nature. Speech with them is a perpetual creation of ut- 
 terances to image forth the total picture in their minds. 
 The Indian " does not analyze his thoughts or separate his 
 utterances; his thoughts rush forth in a troop. His speech 
 is as a kindling cloud, not as radiant points of light." The 
 Lenni Lenape Indians express by one polysyllable what 
 with us requires seven monosyllables and three dissyl- 
 lables, viz. : " Come with the canoe and take us across the 
 river." This polysyllable is nadholineen, and it is formed 
 by taking parts of several words and cementing them into 
 one. The natives of the Society Isles have one word for 
 the tail of a dog, another for the tail of a bird, and a third 
 for the tail of a sheep, while for tail itself, tail in the ab- 
 stract, they have no word whatever. The Mohicans have 
 words for wood-cutting, cutting the head, etc., yet no 
 verb meaning simply to cut. Some Indian tribes call a 
 squirrel by a name signifying that he " can stick fast in 
 a tree " ; a mole, by a word signifying " carrying the right 
 hand on the left shoulder " ; and they have a name for a 
 horse which means " having only one toe." Among the 
 savages of the Pacific, to think is "to speak in the stom- 
 ach." 
 
 WORDS OF ILLUSIVE ETYMOLOGY. 
 
 In the lapse of ages words undergo great changes of 
 form, so that it becomes at last difficult or impossible to 
 ascertain their origin. Terms, of which the composition 
 was originally clear, are worn and rubbed by use like the 
 pebbles which are fretted and rounded into shape and 
 smoothness by the sea waves or by a rapid stream. Like 
 the image and superscription of a coin, their meaning is.
 
 316 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 often so worn away that one cannot make even a probable 
 guess at their origin. One of the commonest causes of the 
 corruptions of words, by which their sources and original 
 meanings are disguised, is the instinctive dislike we feel to 
 the use of a word that is wholly new to us, and the conse- 
 quent tendency to fasten upon it a meaning which shall 
 remove its seemingly arbitrary character. Foreign words, 
 therefore, when adopted into a language, are especially 
 liable to these changes, being corrupted both in pronunci- 
 ation and orthography. By thus Anglicizing them, we not 
 only avoid the uncouth, barbarous sounds which are so 
 offensive to the ear, but we help the memory by associ- 
 ating the words with others already known. 
 
 The mistakes which have been made in attempting to 
 trace the origin of words thus disguised, have done not a 
 little, at times, to bring philology into contempt. The 
 philologist, unless he has much native good sense, and rules 
 his inclinations with an iron rod, is apt to become a verbo- 
 maniac. There is a strange fascination in word-hunting, 
 and his hobby-horse, it has been aptly said, is a strong- 
 goer that trifles never balk. " To him the British Channel 
 is a surface drain, the Alps and Apennines mere posts and 
 rails, the Mediterranean a simple brook, and the Hima- 
 layas only an outlying cover." Cowper justly ridicules 
 those word-hunters who, in their eagerness to make some 
 startling discovery, never pause to consider whether there 
 is any historic connection between two languages, one of 
 which is supposed to have borrowed a word from an- 
 other, 
 
 " learn'd philologists, who chase 
 A panting syllable through time and space, 
 Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, 
 TO GauJ, to Greece, and into Noah's ark,"
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 317 
 
 A fundamental rule, to be kept constantly in sight by 
 those who would not etymologize at random, is, that no 
 amount of resemblance between words in different lan- 
 guages is sufficient to prove their relationship, nor is any 
 amount of seeming unlikeness in sound or form sufficient 
 to disprove their consanguinity. Many etymologies are 
 true which appear improbable, and many appear probable 
 which are not true. As Max Miiller says: "Sound ety- 
 mology has nothing to do with sound. We know words to 
 be of the same origin which have not a single letter in 
 common, and which differ in meaning as much as black 
 and white." Fuller amusingly says that " we are not to 
 infer the Hebrew and the English to be cognate languages 
 because one of the giants, son of Anak, was called A-hi- 
 man " ; yet some of his own etymologies, though witty and 
 ingenious, are hardly more correct than this punning deri- 
 vation. Thus compliments, he says, is derived from a 
 complete mentiri, because compliments are in general com- 
 pletely mendacious; and he quotes approvingly Sir John 
 Harrington's derivation of the old English elf and goblin, 
 from the names of the two political factions of the Empire, 
 the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. 
 
 Archbishop Trench speaks of an eminent philologist 
 who deduced girl from garrula, girls being commonly talk- 
 ative. Frontispiece is usually regarded as a piece or pict- 
 ure in front of a book; whereas it means literally "a front 
 view," being from the Low Latin, frontispicium, the fore- 
 front of a house. The true origin of many words is 
 hidden by errors in the spelling. Bran-new is brand- 
 new, i. e., " burnt new." Grocer should be " grosser," 
 (one who sells in the gross); pigmy is properly "pygmy," 
 as Worcester spells it, and means a thing the size of one's
 
 318 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 fist (TTuj'fj.Tj). Policy (state-craft) is rightly spelled; but 
 "policies of insurance" ought to have the "11," the word 
 being derived from polUceor, to promise or assure. Island 
 looks as if it were compounded of isle and land; but it is 
 the same word as the Anglo-Saxon ealand (water-land), 
 compounded of ea (water) and land. So Jersey is literally 
 Ccesar's island. Lieutenant has been pronounced leftenant, 
 from a notion that this officer holds the left of the line 
 while the captain holds the right. The word comes from 
 the French, lieu-tenant, one holding the place of another. 
 
 Wiseacre has no connection with acre. The word is 
 a corruption, both in spelling and pronunciation, of the 
 German weissager, a wise-sayer, or sayer of wise maxims. 
 Gooseberry, Dr. Johnson explains as " a fruit eaten as a 
 sauce for goose." It is, however, a corruption of the 
 German, krausbeere, from kraus or gorse, crisp; and 
 the fruit gets its name from the upright hairs with which 
 it is covered. Shame-faced does not mean having a face 
 denoting shame. It is from the Anglo-Saxon, sceamfaest, 
 protected 4>y shame. Surname is from the French, surnom, 
 meaning additional name, and should not, therefore, be 
 spelled sirname, as if it meant the name of one's sire. 
 Freemason is not half Saxon, but is from the French, frere- 
 macon, brother mason. Foolscap is a corruption of the 
 Italian, foglio capo, a full-sized sheet of paper. Country- 
 dance is a corruption of the French contre-danse, in which 
 the partners stand in opposite lines. 
 
 Bishop, which looks like an Anglo-Saxon word, is from 
 the Greek. It means primarily an overseer, in Latin, epis- 
 copus, which the Saxons broke down into "biscop," and 
 then softened into "bishop." There was formerly an ad- 
 jective bishoply; but as, after the Norman Conquest, the
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 319 
 
 bishops, and those who discussed their rights and duties, 
 used French and Latin rather than English, "episcopal" 
 has taken its place. Among the foreign words most fre- 
 quently corrupted are the names of plants, which garden- 
 ers, not understanding, change into words that sound like 
 the true ones, and with which they are familiar. In their 
 new costume they often lose all their original significance 
 and beauty. To this source of corruption we owe such 
 words as dandelion, from the French, dent de lion (lion's 
 tooth); rosemary, from ros marinus; quarter-sessions rose, 
 the meaningless name of the beautiful rose des quatre 
 saisons; Jerusalem artichoke, into which, with a ludicrous 
 disregard for geography, we have metamorphosed the sun- 
 flower artichoke, articiocco girasole, which came to us from 
 Pery through Italy; and sparrowgrass, which we have 
 substituted for asparagus. 
 
 Animals have fared no better than plants; the same 
 dislike of outlandish words, which are meaningless to them, 
 leads sailors to corrupt Bellerophon into Billy Ruffian, and 
 hostlers to convert Othello and Desdemona into " Odd Fellow 
 and Thursday morning," and Lamprocles into "Lamb and 
 Pickles." The souris dormeuse, or sleeping mouse, has 
 been transformed into a dormouse; the hog-fish, or porc- 
 pisce, as Spenser terms him, is disguised as a porpoise; and 
 the French ecrevisse turns up a crayfish or crawfish. The 
 transformations of the latter word, which has passed 
 through three languages before attaining its present form, 
 are among the most surprising feats of verbal legerde- 
 main. Starting on its career as the old High German 
 krebiz, it next appears in English as crab, and in German as 
 krebs, or " crab," from the grabbing or clutching action 
 of the animal. Next it crosses the Rhine, and becomes the
 
 320 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 French dcrevisse; then crosses the Channel, and takes the 
 form of krevys; and, last of all, with a double effort at 
 Anglicizing, it appears in modern English as crawfish or 
 crayfish. The last two words noticed illustrate the ten- 
 dency which is so strong, in the corruption of words, to 
 invent new forms which shall be appropriate as well as 
 significant, other examples of which we have in wormwood 
 from wermuth, Ismthorn from laterna, beefeater from buff- 
 etier, raikehell from racaille, catchrogue from the Norman- 
 French cachreau, a bum-bailiff, and shoot for chute, a fall or 
 rapid. So the French, beffroi, a stronghold or tower, a 
 movable tower of several stories used in besieging, has 
 been corrupted into belfry, though there is no such French 
 word as bell. 
 
 Often the corrupted form gives birth to a wholly false 
 explanation. Thus in the proverbial dormir comme une 
 taupe, which has been twisted into the phrase to sleep like a 
 top, there is no trace of the mole ; nor in Penny -come-quick, 
 any hint of Penne, Coombe, and Ick, the former name for 
 Falmouth. The corruption of Chateau Vert into "Shot- 
 over" has led to the legend that Little John shot over 
 the hill of that name near Oxford, England; and the cor- 
 ruption of acheter, to buy, into achat, which in the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was in London the word 
 for trading, and was first pronounced and then written 
 acat, led to the story that Whittington, the famous lord 
 mayor, obtained his wealth by selling and re-selling a cat. 
 There is no hint in somerset of its derivation from the 
 Italian, soprasalto, an overleap, through the French, sobre- 
 sault, and the early English, "to somersault''; nor would 
 the shrewdest guesser ever discover in faire un faux jxt*. 
 to commit a blunder, the provincial saying, to imikc <t 
 fox's paw.
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 321 
 
 Among the most frequent corruptions are the names 
 of places and persons. Boulogne Mouth has been converted 
 by the British sailors into "Bull and Mouth"; and Surajah 
 Dowlah, the name of the Bengal prince who figured in 
 the famous Black Hole atrocity, the British soldiers per- 
 sisted in Anglicizing into "Sir Roger Dowlas!" Bedlam 
 is a corruption of Bethlehem, and gets its meaning from 
 a London priory, St. Mary's of Bethlehem, which was 
 converted into a lunatic asylum. Another striking illus- 
 tration of the freaks of popular usage by which the ety- 
 mology of words is obscured, is the word causeway. Mr. 
 W. W. Skeat, in a late number of " Notes and Queries," 
 states that the old spelling of the word was calcies. The 
 Latin was calceata via, a road made with lime; hence the 
 Spanish, calzada, a paved way, and the modern French, 
 chaussee. " The English word," Mr. Skeats says, " used to 
 be more often spelled causey, as for instance, by Cotgrave; 
 and popular etymology, always on the alert to infuse some 
 sort of meaning into a strange word, turned causey into 
 causeway, with the trifling drawback that, while we all 
 know what ivay means, no one can extract any sense out 
 of cause." 
 
 Words from the dead languages have naturally under- 
 gone the most signal corruptions, many of them completely 
 disguising the derivation. Sometimes the word is con- 
 densed, as in alms, from the Greek, s^noaovrj, in early 
 English, almesse, now cut down to four letters; summons, 
 a legal term, abbreviated (like the fi. fa. of the lawyers), 
 from submoneas; palsy, an abridgment of paralysis, liter- 
 ally a relaxation; quinsy, in French, esquinancie, which, 
 strange to say, is the same word as synagogue, coming, 
 like this last, from am, together, and ayta, to draw. Megrim 
 14*
 
 822 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 is a corruption of hemicrany, a pain affecting half of the 
 head. Treacle, now applied only to molasses or its sirup, 
 was originally viper's flesh made into a medicine for the 
 viper's bite. It is called in French, thdriaque, from a cor- 
 responding Greek word; in early English, triacle. Zero 
 is a contraction of the Italian zephiro, a zephyr, a breath of 
 air, a nothing. Another name for it is cipher, from the 
 Arabic, cifr, empty. 
 
 CONTRADICTORY MEANINGS. 
 
 Among the curious phenomena of language one of the 
 most singular is the use of the same word in two distinct 
 senses, directly opposed to each other. Ideas are associated 
 in the mind not only by resemblance but by contrast; and 
 thus the same root, slightly modified, may express the 
 most opposite meanings. A striking example of this, is 
 the word fast, which is full of contradictory meanings. A 
 clock is called "fast," when it goes too quickly; but a 
 man is told to stand " fast," when he is desired to stand 
 still. Men "fast" when they have nothing to eat; and 
 they eat "fast" after a long abstinence. "Fast" men, as 
 we have already seen, are apt to be very " loose " in their 
 habits. When "fast" is used in the sense of "absti- 
 nence," the idea may be, as in the Latin, abstineo, hold- 
 ing back from food; or the word may come from the 
 Gothic, fastan, "to keep" or "observe," that is, the ordi- 
 nance of the church. 
 
 The word nervous may mean either possessing, or want- 
 ing nerve. A "nervous" writer is one who has force and 
 energy; a nervous man is one who is weak, sensitive to 
 trifles, easily excited. The word post, from the Latin 
 positum, " placed," is used in the most various senses.
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LAHGUAGE. 323 
 
 We speak of a jpos^-office, of post-haste, of j>os-horses, 
 and of post-ing a ledger. The contradiction in these 
 meanings is more apparent than real. The idea of 
 placing is common to them all. Before the invention of 
 railways, letters were transmitted from place to place (or 
 post to post) by relays of horses stationed at intervals, 
 so that no delay might occur. The "post "-office used 
 this means of communication, and the horses were said to 
 travel "post "-haste. To "post" a ledger is to place or 
 register its several items. 
 
 The word to let generally means to permit; but in the 
 Bible, in Shakspsare, and in legal phraseology, it often 
 has the very opposite meaning. Thus Hamlet says, " I'll 
 make a ghost of him that lets me," that is, interferes with 
 or obstructs me; and in law-books "without let or hin- 
 drance" is a phrase' of frequent occurrence. It should 
 be remarked, however, that to let, in the first sense, is 
 from the Saxon, laetan in the second, from _ letjan. 
 The word to cleave may mean either to adhere to closely, 
 as when Cowper says, "Sophistry cleaves close and pro- 
 tects sin's rotten trunk " ; or it may mean to split or to 
 rend asunder, as in the sentence, "He cleaved the stick 
 at one blow." According to Ma'tzner, the word in the 
 first sense is from the Anglo-Saxon, cleofan, clufan; 
 in the last sense, it is from clifan, clifian. The word 
 dear has the two meanings of "prized" because you have 
 it, and " expensive " because you want it. The word lee 
 has very different acceptations in fee-side and Zee-shore. 
 
 The word mistaken has quite opposite meanings. " You 
 are mistaken " may mean " You mistake," or " You are 
 misunderstood," or "taken for somebody else." In the 
 
 line 
 
 ''Mistaken souls that dream of heaven,"
 
 324 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 in a popular hymn, the word is used, of course, in the 
 former sense. The adjective mortal means both "deadly" 
 and "liable to death." Of the large number of adjectives 
 ending in "able" or "ible" some have a subjective and 
 others an objective sense. A " terrible " sight is one that 
 is able to inspire terror; but a "readable" book is one 
 which you can read. It is said that the word wit is used 
 in Pope's "Essay on Criticism" with at least seven dif- 
 ferent meanings. 
 
 The prefixes un and in are equivocal. Commonly they 
 have a negative force, as in " unnecessary," " incomplete." 
 But sometimes, both in verbs and adjectives, they have a 
 positive or intensive meaning, as in the words " iwtense," 
 " mfatuated," " invaluable." To " invigorate " one's phys- 
 ical system by exercise, is not to lessen, but to increase 
 one's energy. The verb "unloose" should, by analogy, 
 signify " to tie," just as untie means " to loose." Tnhabit- 
 able should signify not habitable, according to the most 
 frequent sense of in. To unravel means the same as to 
 ravel; to unrip, the same as to rip. Johnson sanctions the 
 use of the negative prefix in these two words, but Rich- 
 ardson and Webster condemn it as superfluous. Walton, 
 in his " Angler," tells an amusing anecdote touching the 
 two words. " We heard," he says, " a high contention 
 amongst the beggar?, whether it was easiest to rip a cloak 
 or unrip a cloak. One beggar affirmed it was all one; but 
 that was denied, by asking her, if doing and undoing were 
 all one. Then another said, 'twas easiest to unrip a cloak, 
 for that was to let it alone ; but she was answered by ask- 
 ing how she could unrip it, if she let it alone." 
 
 This opposition in the meanings of a word is a phenom- 
 enon not altogether peculiar to the English language. In
 
 CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 325 
 
 Greek, ypzia means both " use " and " need," and /.aw means 
 both "to wish'' and ''to take"; in Latin, unicus implies 
 singularity, unitas, association. Many other examples 
 might be cited to show that " as rays of light may be 
 reflected and refracted in all possible ways from their 
 primary direction, so the meaning of a word may be de- 
 flected from its original bearing in a variety of manners: 
 and consequently we cannot well reach the primitive force 
 of the term unless we know the precise gradations through 
 which it has gone." 
 
 Several writers on our language have noticed a singu- 
 lar tendency to limit or narrow the signification of certain 
 words, whose etymology would suggest a far wider appli- 
 cation. Why should we not retaliate (that is, pay back in 
 kind, res, talis,) kindnesses as well as injuries? Why 
 should we resent (feel again) insults, and not affectionate 
 words and deeds? Why should our hate, animosity, hos- 
 tility, and other bad passions, be inveterate (that is, gain 
 strength by age), but our better feelings, love, kindness, 
 charity, never? Byron showed a true appreciation of the 
 better uses to which the word might be put, when he sub- 
 scribed a letter to a friend, " Yours inveterately, BYRON.*' 
 
 In some of our nouns there is a nice distinction of 
 meaning between the singular and the plural. A ruin nit- 
 is a fraction of time; minutes are notes of a speech, con- 
 versation, etc. The manner in which a man enters a draw- 
 ing-room may be unexceptionable, while his manners are 
 very bad. When the "Confederates" threatened to pull 
 down the American colors at New Orleans, they did it 
 under color of right. A person was once asked whether a 
 certain lawyer had got rich by his practice? "No," was 
 the sarcastic reply, " but by his practices."
 
 326 WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 
 
 In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold, 
 Alike fantastic if too new or old; 
 Be not the first by whom the new are tried, 
 Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. POPE. 
 
 If a gentleman be to study any language, it ought to be that of his own 
 country. LOCKE. 
 
 Aristocracy and exclusiveness tend to final overthrow, in language as well 
 as in politics. W. D. WHITNEY. 
 
 A tendency to slang, to colloquial inelegancies, and even vulgarities, is the 
 besetting sin against which we, as Americans, have especially to guard and 
 to- struggle. IB. 
 
 ONE of the most gratifying signs of the times is the 
 deep interest which both our scholars and our people 
 are beginning to manifest in the study of our noble English 
 tongue. Perhaps nothing has contributed more to awaken 
 a public interest in this matter, and to call attention to 
 some of the commonest improprieties of speech, than the 
 publication of "The Queen's English" and "The Dean's 
 English," and the various criticisms which have been pro- 
 voked in England and in the United States by the Moon- 
 Alford controversy. Hundreds of persons who before felt 
 a profound indifference to this subject, have had occasion 
 to thank the Dean for awakening their curiosity in regard 
 to it; and hundreds more who otherwise would never have 
 read his dogmatic small-talk, or Mr. Moon's trenchant 
 dissection of it, have suddenly found themselves, in conse- 
 quence of the newspaper criticisms of the two books, 
 deeply interested in questions of grammar, and now, with
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 327 
 
 their appetites whetted, will continue the study of their 
 own language, till they have mastered all its difficulties, 
 and familiarized themselves with all its idioms and idiot- 
 isms. Of such discussions we can hardly have too many, 
 and just now they are imperiously needed to check the 
 deluge of barbarisms, solecisms, and improprieties, with 
 which our language is threatened. Not only does political 
 freedom make every man in America an inventor, alike 
 of labor-saving machines and of labor-saving words, but 
 the mixture of nationalities is constantly coining and ex- 
 changing new forms of speech, of which our busy Bart- 
 letts, in their lists of Americanisms, find it impossible to 
 keep account. 
 
 It is not merely our spoken language that is dis- 
 figured by these blemishes; but our written language, 
 the prose of the leading English authors, exhibits more 
 slovenliness and looseness of diction, than is found in any 
 other literature. That this is due in part to the very 
 character of the language itself, there can be no doubt. 
 Its simplicity of structure and its copiousness both tend 
 to prevent its being used with accuracy and care; and it 
 is so hospitable to alien words that it needs more power- 
 ful securities against revolution than other languages of 
 less heterogeneous composition. But the chief cause must 
 be found in the character of the English-speaking race. 
 There is in our very blood a certain lawlessness, which 
 makes us intolerant of syntactical rules, and restive under 
 pedagogical restraints. "Our sturdy English ancestors," 
 says Blackstone, " held it beneath the condition of a free- 
 man to appear, or to do any other act, at the precise time 
 appointed." The same proud, independent spirit which 
 made the Saxons of old rebel against the servitude of
 
 328 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 punctuality, prompts their descendants to spurn the yoke 
 of grammar and purism. In America this scorn of obe- 
 dience, whether to political authority or philological, is 
 fostered and intensified by the very genius of our insti- 
 tutions. We seem to doubt whether we are entirely free, 
 unless we apply the Declaration of Independence to our 
 language, and carry the Monroe doctrine even into our 
 grammar. 
 
 The degree to which this lawlessness has been carried 
 will be seen more strikingly if we compare our English 
 literature with the literature of France. It has been 
 justly said that the language of that country is a science 
 in itself, and the labor bestowed on the acquisition of it 
 has the effect of vividly impressing on the mind both the 
 faults and the beauties of every writer's style. Method 
 and perspicuity are its very essence; and there is hardly 
 a writer of note who does not attend to these requisites 
 with scrupulous care. Let a French writer of distinction 
 violate any cardinal rule of grammar, and he is poumvil 
 upon instantly by the critics, and laughed at from Cnlai> 
 to Marseilles. When Boileau, who is a marvel of verbal 
 and grammatical correctness, made a slip in the first line 
 of his Ninth Satire, 
 
 " C'est a vous, mon Esprit, a qui je veux parler," 
 
 the grammatical sensibility of the French ear was shocked 
 to a degree that we, who tolerate the grossest solecisms. 
 find it hard to estimate. For two centuries the blunder 
 has been quoted by every writer on grammar, and im- 
 pressed on the memory of every schoolboy. Indeed, such 
 is the national fastidiousness on this subject, that it has 
 been doubted whether a single line in Boileau has been
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 329 
 
 so often quoted for its beauty, as this unfortunate one 
 for its lack of grammar. When did an English or an 
 American writer thus offend the critical ears of his coun- 
 trymen, even though he were an Alison, sinning against 
 Lindley Murray on every page? 
 
 We are no friend to hypercriticism, or to that finical 
 niceness which cares more for the body than for the soul 
 of language, more for the outward expression than for 
 the thought which it incarnates. It is, no doubt, possible 
 to be so over-nice in the use of words and the construc- 
 tion of sentences as to sap the vitality of our speech. We 
 may so refine our expression, by continual straining in our 
 critical sieves, as to impair both the strength and the flex- 
 ibility of our noble English tongue. There are some 
 verbal critics, who, apparently go so far as to hold that 
 every word must have an invariable meaning, and that 
 all relations of thoughts must be indicated by absolute 
 and invariable formulas, thus reducing verbal expression 
 to the rigid inflexibility of a mathematical equation. If 
 we understand Mr. Moon's censures of Murray and Alford, 
 some of them are based on the assumption that an ellipsis 
 is rarely, if ever, permissible in English speech. We have 
 no sympathy with such extremists, nor with the verbal 
 piirists who challenge all words and phrases that cannot be 
 found in the " wells of English undefiled," that have been 
 open for more than a hundred years. Language is a living, 
 organic thing, and by the very law of its life must always 
 be in a fluctuating state. To petrify it into immutable 
 forms, to preserve it as one preserves fruits and flowers in 
 spirits of wine and herbariums, is as impossible as it would 
 be undesirable, if we would have it a medium for the ever- 
 changing thoughts of man.
 
 330 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Language is a growing thing, as truly as a tree; and 
 as a tree, while it casts off some leaves, will continually 
 put forth others, so a language will be perpetually growing 
 and expanding with the discoveries of science, the extension 
 of commerce, and the progress of thought. Every age 
 will enrich it with new accessions of beauty and strength. 
 Not only will new words be coined, but old ones will con- 
 tinually take on new senses ; and it is only in the transition 
 period, before they have established themselves in the gen- 
 eral favor of good speakers and writers, that purity of 
 style requires them to be shunned. Those who are so 
 ignorant of the laws of language as to resist its expansion, 
 who declare that it has attained at any time the limit of 
 its development, and seek by philological bulls to check its 
 growth, will find that, like a vigorous forest tree, it will 
 defy any shackles that men may bind about it; that it will 
 reck as little of their decrees as did the advancing ocean 
 of those of Canute. The critics who make such attempts 
 do not see that the immobility of language would be the 
 immobility of history. They forget that many of the 
 purest words in our language were at one time startling 
 novelties, and that even the dainty terms in which they 
 challenge each new-comer, though now naturalized, had 
 once to fight their way inch by inch. Shakspeare ridicules 
 "element"; Fulke, in the seventeenth century, objects to 
 such ink-horn terms as "rational," "scandal," "homicide." 
 "ponderous," and "prodigious"; Dryden censures "embar- 
 rass," "grimace," "repartee," "foible," "tour," and 
 "rally"; Pope condemns "witless," "welkin," and "dul- 
 cet"; and Franklin, who could draw from the clouds the 
 electric fluid, which now carries language with the speed of 
 lightning from land to land, vainly struggled against the
 
 COMMON IMPKOPKIETIES OF SPEECH. 331 
 
 introduction of the verbs " to advocate " and " to notice." 
 The little word " its " had to force its way into the lan- 
 guage, against the opposition of "correct" speakers and 
 writers, on the ground of its apparent analogy with the 
 other English possessives. 
 
 Dr. Johnson objected to the word dun in Lady Macbeth's 
 famous soliloquy, declaring that " the efficacy of this invo- 
 cation is destroyed by the insertion of an epithet now 
 seldom heard but in the stable: " 
 
 " Come, thick night, 
 And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell." 
 
 It was a notion of the great critic and lexicographer, with 
 which his mind was long haunted, that the language should 
 be refined and fixed so as finally to exclude all rustic and 
 vulgar elements from the authorized vocabulary of the 
 lettered and polite. Dryden had hinted at the establish- 
 ment of an academy for this purpose, and Swift thought 
 the Government " should devise some means for ascertain- 
 ing and fixing the language forever" after the necessary 
 alterations should be made in it. 
 
 If it were possible to exclude needed new words from a 
 language, the French Academy would have succeeded in 
 its attempts to do so, consisting as it did of the chief 
 scholars of France. But in spite of all its efforts to exer- 
 cise a despotic authority over the French tongue, new 
 words have continually forced their way in, and so they 
 will continue to do while the French nation maintains its 
 vitality, in spite of the protests of all the purists and 
 academicians in France. "They that will fight custom 
 with grammar," says Montaigne, "are fools"; and, with 
 the limitations to be hereafter stated, the remark is just,
 
 332 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 and still more true of those who triumphantly appeal 
 against custom to the dictionary. 
 
 Even slang words, after long knocking, will often gain 
 admission into a language, like pardoned outlaws received 
 into the body of respectable citizens. We need not add to 
 these words coined in his lofty moods by the poet, who is a 
 maker by the very right of his name. That creative 
 energy which distinguishes him, "the high-flying liberty 
 of conceit proper to the poet," will, of course, display 
 itself here, and the all-fusing imagination will at once, as 
 Trench has remarked, suggest and justify audacities in 
 speech which would not be tolerated from creeping prose- 
 writers. Great liberties may be allowed, too, within 
 certain bounds, to the idiosyncracies of all great writers. 
 We love the rugged, gnarled oak, with the grotesque con- 
 tortions of its branches, better than the smoothly clipped 
 uniformity of the Dutch ewe tree. Carlyleisms may there- 
 fore be tolerated from the master, though not from the 
 umbrae that spaniel him at the heels, and feebly echo his 
 singularities and oddities. A style that has no smack or 
 flavor of the man that uses it, is a tasteless style. But 
 there is a limit even to the liberty of great thinkers in 
 coining words. It must not degenerate into license. Cole- 
 ridge was a skillful mint-master of words, yet not all his 
 genius can reconcile us to such expressions as the following 
 in a letter to Sir Humphrey Davy: " I was a well-meaning 
 sutor who had ultra-crepidated with more zeal than 
 wisdom." 
 
 No one would hesitate to place Isaac Barrow among the 
 greatest masters of the English tongue; yet the weighty 
 thoughts which his words represented, did not prevent 
 many of the trial pieces *vhich he coined in his verbal mint
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 333 
 
 from being returned on his hands. Who knows the mean- 
 ing of such words as "avoce," "acquist," "extund"? Sir 
 Thomas Browne abounds in such hyperlatinistic expressions 
 as "bivious," " quodlibetically," " cunctation," to which 
 even his gorgeous rhetoric does not reconcile the reader. 
 Charles Lamb has "agnise" and "bourgeon." Sydney 
 Smith was continually coining words, some of them com- 
 pounds from the homely Saxon idiom, others big-wig clas- 
 sical epithets, devised with scholar-like precision, and 
 exceedingly ludicrous in their effect. Thus he speaks of 
 " frugiverous " children, of " mastigophorous " schoolmas- 
 ters," of "fugacious" or " plumigerous " captains; of 
 "lachrymal and suspirious clergymen"; of people who are 
 " sinious," and people who are " anserous " ; he enriches the 
 language with the expressive hybrid, " Foolometer " ; and 
 he characterizes the Septembers sins of the English by the 
 awful name of " perdricide." In the early ages of our 
 literature, when the language was less fixed, and there were 
 few recognized standards of expression, writers coined 
 words without license, supplying the place of correct terms, 
 when they did not occur to their minds, by analogy and 
 invention. But a bill must not only be drawn by the word- 
 maker; it must also be accepted. The Emperor Tiberius 
 was very properly told that he might give citizenship to 
 'men, but not to words. All innovations in speech, every 
 new term introduced, should harmonize with the general 
 principles of the language. No new phrase should be 
 admitted which is not consonant with its peculiar genius, 
 or which does violence to its fundamental integrity. Nor 
 should any form of expression be tolerated that violates 
 the universal laws of language. 
 
 Even good usage itself is but.a proximate and strongly
 
 334 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 presumptive test of purity. Custom is not an absolute 
 despotism, though it approaches very nearly to that char- 
 acter. Its decisions are generally authoritative; but. as 
 there are extreme measures which even oriental despots 
 cannot put into execution without endangering the safety 
 of their possessions, so there are things which custom can- 
 not do without endangering the fixity and purity of lan- 
 guage. If grammatical monstrosities exist in a language, 
 a correct taste will shun them, as it does physical deform- 
 ities in the arts of design. Dean Alford defends some 
 of his own indefensible expressions by citing the author- 
 ity of the Scripture; but authority for the most vicious 
 forms of speech can be found in all our writers, not ex- 
 cepting King James's translators, as Mr. Harrison has 
 shown by hundreds of examples in his work on " The 
 English Language." A writer in " Blackwood " affirms 
 that, " with the exception of Wordsworth, there is not one 
 celebrated author of this day who has written two pages 
 consecutively without some flagrant impropriety in the 
 grammar"; and the statement, we believe, is xmder- 
 charged. The usage, therefore, of a good writer is only 
 prima facie evidence of the correctness of a disputed word 
 or phrase; for he may have used the word carelessly or 
 inadvertently, and it is altogether probable that, were his 
 attention called to it, he would be prompt to admit his" 
 error. It has been remarked that " nowadays " and " had 
 have" meet all the conditions of good usage, being rep- 
 utable, national and present; but one is a solecism, the 
 other a barbarism. Let the English language be enriched 
 in the spirit, and according to the principles of which we 
 have spoken, and it will be, as one has well said, a living 
 fountain, casting out everything effete and impure, re-
 
 COMMOX IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 335 
 
 freshed by new sources of inspiration and wealth, keep- 
 ing pace with the stately march of the ages, and still 
 retaining much of its original sweetness, expression and 
 force. 
 
 It is our intention in this chapter, not to notice all the 
 improprieties of speech that merit censure, to do which 
 would require volumes, but to criticise some of those 
 which most frequently ofiend the ear of the scholar in this 
 country. The term impropriety we shall use, not merely 
 in the strictly rhetorical sense of the word, but in the pop- 
 ular meaning, to include in it all inaccuracies of speech, 
 whether offences against etymology, lexicography or syn- 
 tax. To pillory such oifenses, to point out the damage 
 which they inflict upon our language, and to expose the 
 moral obliquity which often lurks beneath them, is, we 
 believe, the duty of every scholar who knows how closely 
 purity of speech, like personal cleanliness, is allied to 
 purity of thought and rectitude of action. To say that 
 every person who aspires to be esteemed a gentleman 
 should carefully shun all barbarisms, solecisms, and other 
 faults in his speech, is to utter the merest truism. An 
 accurate knowledge, and a correct and felicitous use of 
 words, are, of themselves, almost sure proofs of good 
 breeding. No doubt it marks a weak mind to care more 
 for the casket than for the jewel it contains, to prefer ele- 
 gantly turned sentences to sound sense; but sound sense 
 always acquires additional value when expressed in pure 
 English. Few things are more ludicrous than the blun- 
 ders by which even persons moving in refined society often 
 betray the grossest ignorance of very common words. 
 There are hundreds of educated people who speak of the 
 banister of a staircase, when they mean balustrade or
 
 336 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 baluster; there is no such word as banister. There are 
 hundreds of others who never eat anything, not even an 
 apple, but always partake, even though they consume all 
 the food before them; and even the London "Times," in 
 one of its issues, spoke of a jury "immersing" a defendant 
 in damages. We once knew an old lady in a New England 
 village, quite aristocratic in her feelings and habits, who 
 complained to her physician that "her blood seemed to 
 have all stackpoled" ; and we have heard of another de- 
 scendant of Mrs. Malaprop, who, in answer to the question 
 whether she would be sure to keep an appointment, replied, 
 "I will come, alluding it does not rain." 
 
 Goldsmith is one of the most charming writers in our 
 language; yet in his "History of England," the following 
 statement occurs in a chapter on the reign of Elizabeth. 
 Speaking of a communication to Mary Queen of Scots, he 
 says : " This they effected by conveying their letters to her 
 by means of a brewer, that supplied the family tcith ale 
 through a chink in the wall of her apartment." A queer 
 brewer that, to supply his ale through a chink in the wall ! 
 Again, we read, in Goldsmith's " History of Greece " : " He 
 wrote to that distinguished philosopher in terms polite and 
 flattering, begging' of him to come and undertake his 
 education, and bestow on him those useful lessons of mag- 
 nanimity and virtue which every great man ought to 
 possess, and which his numerous avocations rendered im- 
 possible for him." In this sentence the pronoun he is 
 employed six times, under different forms; and as, in each 
 case, it may refer to either of two antecedents, the mean- 
 ing, but for our knowledge of the facts, would be involved 
 in hopeless confusion. First, the pronoun stands for Philip, 
 then for Aristotle, then for Alexander, again for Alexander,
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 337 
 
 and then twice for Philip. A still greater offender 
 against clearness in the use of pronouns is Lord Claren- 
 don; e. g., "On which, with the king's and queen's so ample 
 promises to him (the Treasurer) so few hours before, con- 
 ferring the place upon another, and the Duke of York's 
 manner of receiving him (the Treasurer) after he (the 
 Chancellor) had been shut up'with him (the Duke), as he 
 (the Treasurer) was informed might very well excuse him 
 (the Treasurer) from thinking he (the Chancellor) had some 
 share in the effront he (the Treasurer) had undergone." It 
 would be hard to match this passage even in the writ- 
 ings of the humblest penny-a-liner; it is "confusion worse 
 confounded." 
 
 Solecisms so glaring as these may not often disfigure 
 men's writing or speech; and some of the faults we shall 
 notice may seem so petty and microscopic that the reader 
 may deem us " word-catchers that live on syllables." But 
 it is the little foxes that spoil the grapes, in the familiar 
 speech of the people as well as in Solomon's vineyards; 
 and, as a garment may be honey-combed by moths, so the 
 fine texture of a language may be gradually destroyed, and 
 its strength impaired, by numerous and apparently insig- 
 nificant solecisms and inaccuracies. Nicety in the use of 
 particles is one of the most decisive marks of skill and 
 scholarship in a writer; and the accuracy, beauty, and 
 force of many a fine passage in English literature depend 
 largely on the use of the pronouns, prepositions, and arti- 
 cles. How emphatic and touching does the following enu- 
 meration become through the repetition of one petty word! 
 "By thine agony and bloody sweat; by thy cross and pas- 
 sion; by thy precious death and burial; by thy glorious 
 resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the 
 15
 
 338 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Holy Ghost." How much pathos is added to the prayer 
 of the publican by the proper translation of the Greek 
 article,-^ " God be merciful to me the sinner." 
 
 De Quincey strikingly observes: "People that have 
 practiced composition as much, and with as vigilant an 
 eye as myself, know also, by thousand of cases, how infi- 
 nite is the disturbance caused in the logic of a thought 
 by the mere position of a word as despicable as the word 
 even. A mote that is in itself invisible, shall darken the 
 august faculty of sight in a human eye, the heavens shall 
 be hid by a wretched atom that dares not show itself, and 
 the station of a syllable shall cloud the judgment of a 
 council. Nay, even an ambiguous emphasis falling to the 
 right-hand word, or the left-hand word, shall confound a 
 system." It is a fact well known to lawyers, that the omis- 
 sion or misplacement of a monosyllable in a legal document 
 has rendered many a man bankrupt. Four years ago an 
 expensive lawsuit arose in England, on the meaning of 
 two phrases in the will of a deceased nobleman. In the 
 one he gives his property " to my brother and to his chil- 
 dren in, succession;" in the other, "to my brother and his 
 children in succession." This diversity gives rise to quite 
 different interpretations. 
 
 In language, as in the fine arts, there is but one way 
 to attain to excellence, and that is by study of the most 
 faultless models. As the air and manner of a gentleman 
 can be acquired only by living constantly in good society, 
 so grace and purity of expression must be attained by a 
 familiar acquaintance with the standard authors. It is 
 astonishing how rapidly we may by this practice enrich 
 our vocabularies, and how speedily weimitate and un- 
 consciously reproduce in our language the niceties and
 
 COMMOX IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 339 
 
 delicacies of expression which have charmed us in a favor- 
 ite author. Like the sheriff whom Rufus Choate satirized 
 for having "overworked the participle," most persons 
 make one word act two, ten or a dozen parts; yet there 
 is hardly any man who may not, by moderate painstaking, 
 learn to express himself in terms as precise, if not as vivid, 
 as those of Pitt, whom Fox so praised for his accuracy.* 
 The account which Lord Chesterfield gives of the method 
 by which he became one of the most elegant and polished 
 talkers and orators of Europe, strikingly shows what 
 miracles may be achieved by care and practice. Early in 
 life he determined not to speak one word in conversation 
 which was not the fittest he could recall; and he charged 
 his son never to deliver the commonest order to a servant, 
 "but in the best language he could find, and with the 
 best utterance." For years he wrote down every brilliant 
 passage he met with in his 1'eading, and translated it into 
 French, or, if it was in a foreign language, into English. 
 By this practice a certain elegance became habitual to him, 
 and it would have given him more trouble, he says, to 
 express himself inelegantly than he had ever taken to avoid 
 the defect. Lord Bolingbroke, who had an imperial domin- 
 ion over all the resources of expression, and could talk all 
 day just as perfectly as he wrote, told' Chesterfield tjiat he 
 owed the power to the same cause,- an early and habit- 
 ual attention to his style. When Boswell expressed to 
 Johnson his surprise at the constant force and propriety 
 of the Doctor's words, the latter replied that he had long 
 been accustomed to clothe his thoughts in the fittest words 
 he could command, and thus a vivid and exact phrase- 
 ology had become habitual. 
 
 * See page 29,
 
 340 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABTSI:. 
 
 It has been affirmed by a high authority that a knowl- 
 edge of English grammar is rather a matter of conven- 
 ience as a nomenclature, a medium of thought and 
 discussion about the language, than a guide to the 
 actual use of it; and that it is as impossible to acquire 
 the complete command of our own tongue by the study 
 of grammatical precept, as to learn to walk or swim by 
 attending a course of lectures 'on anatomy. " Undoubtedly 
 I have found," says Sir Philip Sydney, " in divers smal 
 learned courtiers a more sound stile than in some pos- 
 sessors of learning; of which I can ghesse no other cause, 
 but that the courtier following that 'which by practice he 
 findeth fittest to nature, therein (though he know it not) 
 doth according to art, though not by art; where the other, 
 using art to shew art, and not to hide art, (as in these 
 cases he should doe,) flieth from nature, and indeed abuseth 
 art." 
 
 Let it not be inferred, however, from all this that 
 grammatical knowledge is unnecessary. A man of refined 
 taste may detect many errors by the ear; but there are 
 other errors, equally gross, that have not a harsh sound, 
 and consequently cannot be detected without a knowledge 
 of the rules that are violated. Besides, it often happens 
 that even the purest writers inadvertently allow some in- 
 accuracies to creep into their productions. The works of 
 Addison, Swift, Bentley, Pope, Young, Blair, Hume, Gibbon, 
 and even Johnson, that leviathan of literature, are dis- 
 figured by numberless instances of slovenliness of style. 
 Cobbett, in his " Grammar of the English Language," says 
 that he noted down about two hundred improprieties of 
 language in Johnson's " Lives of the Poets " alone ; and he 
 points out as many more, at least, in the " Rambler," which
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 341 
 
 the author says he revised and corrected with extraordinary 
 care. Sydney Smith, one of the finest stylists of this 
 century, has not a few flagrant solecisms; and, strange to 
 say, some of them occur in a passage in which he is trying 
 to show that the English language "may be learned, 
 practically and unerringly^ without a knowledge of gram- 
 matical rules. "When," he asks, "do we ever find a 
 well-educated Englishman or Frenchman embarrassed by 
 an ignorance of the grammar of their respective languages? 
 They first learn it practically and unerringly; and then, 
 if they chose (choose?) to look back, and smile at the idea 
 of having proceeded by a number of rules, without know- 
 ing one of them by heart, or being conscious that they had 
 any rule at all, this is a philosophical amusement; but who 
 ever thinks of learning the grammar of their own tongue, 
 before they are very good grammarians!" The best refu- 
 tation of the reasoning in this passage is found in the bad 
 grammar of the passage itself. 
 
 Even the literary detectives, who spend their time in 
 hunting down and showing up the mistakes of others, 
 enjoy no immunity from error. Harrison, in his excellent 
 work on " The English Language," written expressly to 
 point out some of the most prevalent solecisms in its 
 literature, has such solecisms as the following: "The 
 authority of Addison, in matters of grammar; of Bentley, 
 who never made the English grammar his study; of 
 Bolingbroke, Pope, and others, are as nothing." Breen, 
 who in his "Modern English Literature: its Blemishes 
 and Defects," has shown uncommon critical acumen, writes 
 thus : " There is no writer so addicted to this blunder as 
 Isaac D'Israeli.". Again, in criticising a faulty expression 
 of Alison, he sins almost as grievously himself by saying:
 
 342 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 "It would have been correct to say: 'Suchet's adminis- 
 tration was incomparably less oppressive than that of 
 any of the French generals in the Peninsula.' " This re- 
 minds one of the statement that " Noah and his family 
 outlived all who lived before the flood," that is, they 
 outlived themselves. Latham, in his profound treatise on 
 "The English Language," has such sentences as this: 
 " The logical and historical analysis of a language gener- 
 ally in some degree coincides" Here the syntax is correct; 
 but the sense is sacrificed, since a coincidence implies, at 
 least, two things. Blair's "Rhetoric" has been used as a 
 text-book for half a century; yet it swarms with errors of 
 grammar and rhetoric, against almost every law of which 
 he has sinned. Moon, in his review of Alford, has pointed 
 out hundreds of faults in " The Dean's English " as censur- 
 able as any which he has censured; and newspaper critics. 
 at home and abroad, have pointed out scores of obscura- 
 tions, as well as of glaring faults, in Moon. 
 
 We proceed to notice some of the common improprieties 
 of speech. Many of them are of recent origin, others are 
 old offenders that have been tried and condemned at the 
 bar of criticism again and again : 
 
 But, for that, or if. Example: "I have no doubt but 
 he will come to-night." " I should not wonder but that 
 was the case." 
 
 Agriculturalist, for agriculturist, is an impropriety of 
 the grossest sort. Nine-tenths of our writers on agri- 
 culture use the former expression. They might as well say 
 geologicalist, instead of geologist, or chemicalist, instead 
 of chemist. 
 
 Deduction, for induction. Induction is the mental pro- 
 cess by which we ascend to the discovery of general truths;
 
 COMMON* IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEEC^. 343 
 
 deduction is the process by which the law governing par- 
 ticulars is derived from a knowledge of the law governing 
 the class to which particulars belong. 
 
 Illy is a gross barbarism, quite common in these days, 
 especially with newly fledged poets. There is no such word 
 as illy in the language, and it is very silly to use it. The 
 noun, adjective, and adverb, are ///. 
 
 Plenty, for plentiful. Stump politicians tell us that the 
 adoption of a certain measure " will make money plenty in 
 every man's pocket." 
 
 / have got, for I have. Hardly any other word in the 
 language is so abused as the word get. A man says, "I 
 have got a cold"; he means simply, "I have a cold." 
 Another says that a certain lady "has got a fine head of 
 hair," which may be true if the hair is false, but is proba- 
 bly intended as a compliment. A third says: "I have got 
 to leave the city for New York this evening," meaning only 
 that he has to leave the city, etc. Nine out of ten ladies 
 who enter a dry-goods store, ask, "Have you got" such 
 or such an article? If euch a phrase as "I have possess" 
 were used, all noses would turn up together; but "I have 
 got," when used to signify " I have," is equally a departure 
 from propriety. A man may say, " I have got more than 
 my neighbor has, because I have been more industrious " ; 
 but he cannot with propriety say, "I have got a long 
 nose." however long his nose may be, unless it be an arti- 
 ficial one. Even so able a writer as Prof. Whitney ex- 
 presses himself thus: "Who ever yet got through learning 
 his mother tongue, and could say, ' The work is done?' ' 
 
 Recommend. This word is used in a strange sense by 
 many persons. Political conventions often pass resolutions
 
 344 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 beginning thus: "Resolved, that the Republicans (or Dem- 
 ocrats) of this county be recommended to meet," etc. 
 
 Differ with is often used, in public debate, instead of 
 differ from. Example: "I differ with the learned gentle- 
 man, entirely," which is intended to mean, that the 
 speaker holds views different from thos.e of the gentleman; 
 not that he agrees with the gentleman in differing from the 
 views of a third person. Different to is often spoken 
 and written in England, and occasionally in this country, 
 instead of different from. An example of this occurs 
 in Queen Victoria's book, edited by Mr. Helps. 
 
 Corporeal, for corporal, is a gross vulgarism, the use of 
 which at this day should almost subject an educated man 
 to the kind of punishment which the latter adjective des- 
 ignates. Corporeal means, having a body corporal, or 
 belonging to a body. 
 
 Wearies, for is wearied. Example: "The reader soon 
 wearies of such stuff." 
 
 Any hoiv is an exceedingly vulgar phrase, though used 
 even by so elegant a writer as Blair. Example: "If the 
 damage can be any how repaired," etc. The use of this 
 expression, in any manner, by one who professes to write 
 and speak the English tongue with purity, is unpardonable. 
 
 It were, for it is. Example: "It were a consummation 
 devoutly to be wished for." Dr. Chalmers says: "It were 
 an intolerable spectacle, even to the inmates of a felon's 
 cell, did they behold one of their fellows in the agonies of 
 death." For were put would be, and for did put should. 
 
 Doubt is a word much abused by a class of would-be 
 laconic speakers, who affect an Abernethy-like brevity of 
 language. "I doubt such is the true meaning of the
 
 COM3TON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 845 
 
 Constitution,'' say our " great expounders," looking won- 
 drous wise. They mean, " I doubt whether," etc. 
 
 Lie, lay. Gross blunders are committed in the use of 
 these words; e. g., "He laid down on the grass," instead 
 of "he laid himself down," or, "he lay down." The 
 verb to lie (to be in a horizontal position) is lay in the 
 preterite. The book does not lay on the table; it I if* 
 there. Some years ago an old lady consulted an eccentric 
 Boston physician, and, in describing her disease, said: 
 "The trouble, Doctor, is that I can neither lay nor set." 
 "Then, Madam," was the reply, "I would respectfully sug- 
 gest the propriety of roosting." 
 
 " Like I did," is a gross Western and Southern vul- 
 garism for "as I did." "You will feel like lightning ought 
 to strike you," said a learned Doctor of Divinity at a 
 meeting in the East. Like is a preposition, and should 
 not be used as a conjunction. 
 
 Less, for fewer. "Not less than fifty persons." Less 
 relates to quantity; feicer, to number. 
 
 Hi/Jnurt'. for remainder. " I'll take the balance of the 
 goods." 
 
 Hcrolt, for are revolting to. " Such doctrines revolt 
 us." 
 
 Alone, for only. Quackenboss, in his "Course of Com- 
 position and Rhetoric," says, in violation of one of his 
 own rules: "This means of communication, as well as 
 that which follows, is employed by man alone." Only is 
 often misplaced in a sentence. Miss Braddon says, in the 
 prospectus of " Belgravia," her English magazine, that 
 "it will be written in good English. In its pages papers 
 of sibling merit will only appear." A poor beginning 
 this ! She means that " only papers of sterling merit will 
 15*
 
 346 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABtisE. 
 
 appear." Bolingbroke says: "Believe me, the providence 
 of God has established such an order in the world, that, 
 of all that belongs to us, the least valuable parts can alone 
 fall under the will of others." The last clause should be, 
 " only the least valuable parts can fall under the will of 
 others." The word merely is misplaced in the following 
 sentence from a collegiate address on eloquence: "It is 
 true of men as of God, that words merely meet no re- 
 sponse, only such as are loaded with thought." 
 
 Likewise, for also. Also classes together things or 
 qualities, whilst liketvise couples actions or states of 
 being. " He did it likewise," means he did it in like man- 
 ner. An English Quaker was once asked by a lawyer 
 whether he could tell the difference between also and 
 likewise. "0, yes," was the reply, "Erskine is a great 
 lawyer; his talents are universally admired. You are a 
 lawyer also, but not -like-wise." 
 
 Avocation, for vocation, or calling. A man's avocations 
 are those pursuits or amusements which engage his atten- 
 tion when he is " called away from " his regular business 
 or profession, as music, fishing, boating. 
 
 Crushed out, for crushed. "The rebellion has been 
 crushed out." Why out, rather than in? If you tread 
 on a worm, you simply crush him, that is all. It ought 
 to satisfy the most vengeful foe of "the rebels" that 
 they have been crushed, without adding the needless cru- 
 elty of crushing them jn, which is to be as vindictive 
 as Alexander, of whom Dryden tells us that 
 
 "Thrice he routed all his foes, 
 And thrice he slew the slain." 
 
 Of, for from. Example: "Received of John Smh% fifty 
 dollars." Usage, perhaps, sanctions this.
 
 COMMON IMPKOPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 347 
 
 At all is a needless expletive, which is employed by 
 many writers of what may be called the forcible-feeble 
 school. For example: "The coach was upset, but, strange 
 to say, not a passenger received the slightest injury at all." 
 "It is not at all strange." 
 
 But that, for that. This error is quite common among 
 those who think themselves above learning anything more 
 from the dictionary or grammar. Trench says: "He 
 never doubts but that he knows their intention.'' A worse 
 error is but what, as in the reply of Mr. Jobling, of Bleak 
 House: "Thank you, Guppy, I don't know but what I will 
 take a marrow pudding.'' " He would not believe but 
 what I was joking." 
 
 Convene is used by many persons in a strange sense. 
 " This road will convene the public." 
 
 Eridence is a word much abused by learned judges and 
 attorneys, being continually used for testimony. Eri- 
 dence relates to the convictive view of any one's mind; 
 testimony, to the knowledge of another concerning some 
 fact. The evidence in a case is often the reverse of the 
 testimony. 
 
 Had have. This is a very low vulgarism, notwithstand- 
 ing it has the authority of Addison. It is quite common 
 to say, " Had I have seen' him," " Had you have known 
 it," etc. We can say, "I have been," "I had been," but 
 what sort of a tense is had have been? 
 
 Had ought, had better, had rather. All these expressions 
 are absurdities, not less gross than hisn, tother, baint, theirn. 
 No doubt there is plenty of good authority for had better 
 and had rather; but how can future action be expressed 
 by a ^erb that signifies past and completed possession ? 
 
 At, for by. E. a.. "Sales at auction." The word auc-
 
 348 WOEDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 tion signifies a manner of sale; and this signification seems 
 to require the preposition by. 
 
 The above, as an adjective. "The above extract is suffi- 
 cient to verify my assertion." " I fully concur in the above 
 statement" (the statement above, or the foregoing state- 
 ment). Charles Lamb speaks of "the above boys and the 
 below boys." 
 
 Then, as an adjective. "The then king of Holland." 
 This error, to which even educated men are addicted, 
 springs from a desire of brevity; but verbal economy is 
 not commendable when it violates the plainest rules of 
 language. 
 
 Final completion. As every completion is final, the 
 adjective is superfluous. Similar to this superabundant 
 form of expression is another, in which universal and 
 all are brought into the same construction. A man is 
 said to be "universally esteemed by all who know him." 
 If all esteem him, he is, of course, unirersally esteemed; 
 and the converse is equally true. 
 
 Party, for man or woman. This error, so common in 
 England, is becoming more and more prevalent here. An 
 English witness once testified that he saw "a short party" 
 (meaning person) "go over the bridge." Another Eng- 
 lishman, who had looked at a .portrait of St. Paul in a 
 gallery at Florence, being asked his opinion of the picture, 
 said that he thought "the party was very well executed." 
 It is hardly necessary to say that it takes several persons to 
 make a party. 
 
 Celebrity is sometimes applied to celebrated persons, 
 instead of being used abstractly, e. g., " Several celebrities 
 are at the Palmer House." 
 
 Equanimity of mind. As equanimity (fpquus
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 349 
 
 means evenness of mind, why should " of mind '' be re- 
 peated; "Anxiety of mind" is less objectionable, but the 
 first word is sufficient. 
 
 Don't, for doesn't, or does not. Even so scholarly a 
 divine as the Rev. Dr. Bellows, of New York, employs 
 this vulgarism four times in an article in the " Inde- 
 pendent." "A man," he says, "who knows only his fam- 
 ily and neighbors, don't know them; a man who only knows 
 the present don't know that. . . . Many a man, with a 
 talent for making money, don't know whether he is rich 
 or poor, because he does not understand bookkeeping," etc. 
 
 Predicate, for found. E. g., " His argument was predi- 
 cated on the assumption," etc. 
 
 Try, for make. E. g., " Try the experiment." 
 
 Superior, for able, virtuous, etc. E. g., "He is a supe- 
 rior man." Not less vulgar is the expression, " an inferior 
 man," for a man of small abilities. 
 
 Deceiving, for trying to deceive. E. g., a person says 
 to another, " You are deceiving me," when he means 
 exactly the opposite, namely, " You are trying to deceive 
 me. but you cannot succeed, for your trickery is trans- 
 parent." 
 
 The masses, for the people generally. " The masses 
 must be educated." The masses of what? 
 
 In our midst. This vulgarism is continually heard in 
 prayer-meetings, and from the lips of Doctors of Divinity, 
 though its incorrectness has been exposed again and again. 
 The second chapter in Prof. Schele De Vere's excellent 
 "Studies in English" begins thus: "When a man rises to 
 eminence in our midst," etc., which is doubtless one of 
 the few errors in his book quas incuria fudit. The pos- 
 sessive pronoun can properly be used only to indicate
 
 350 WOEDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 possession or appurtenance. " The midst " of a company 
 or society is not a thing belonging or appurtenant to the 
 company, or to the individuals composing it. It is a mere 
 term of relation of an adverbial, not of a substantive char- 
 acter, and is an intensified form of expression for amomj. 
 Would any one say, " In our middle " ? 
 
 Excessively, for exceedingly. Ladies often complain that 
 the weather is " excessively hot," thereby implying that 
 they do not object to the heat, but only to the excess of 
 heat. They mean simply that the weather is very hot. 
 
 Either is applicable only to two objects; and the same 
 remark is true of neither and both. "Either of the three" 
 is wrong; so is this, "Ten burglars broke into the house, 
 but neither of them could be recognized." Say, " none of 
 them," or " not one of them, could be recognized." Either 
 is sometimes improperly used for each; e. g., " On either 
 side of the river was the tree of life," Rev. xxi. 2. Here 
 it is not meant that, if you do not find that the tree of 
 life was on this side, it was on that; but that the tree of 
 life was on each side, on this side, and on that. In 
 Thomson's "Outlines of the Laws of Thought," page 53, 
 we read: " The names we employ in speech . . . are sym- 
 bols both to speaker and hearer, the full and exact mean- 
 ing of which neither of them stop to unfold," etc. The 
 proper use of either was vindicated some years ago in Eng- 
 land, by the Court of Chancery. A certain testator left 
 property, the disposition of which was affected by " the death 
 of either " of two persons. One learned counsel contended 
 that the word "either" meant both; in support of this view 
 he quoted Richardson, Webster, Chaucer, Dryden, Southey, 
 the history of the crucifixion, and a passage from the 
 Revelation. The learned judge suggested that there was an
 
 COMMON IMPEOPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 351 
 
 old song in the " Beggar's Opera," known ' to all, which 
 took the opposite view: 
 
 "How happy could I b'e with either, 
 Were t'other dear charmer away." 
 
 In pronouncing judgment, the judge dissented entirely 
 from the argument of the learned counsel. " Either," he 
 said, "means one of two, and does not mean both." 
 Though occasionally, by poets and some other writers, the 
 word was employed to signify both, it did not in this 
 case before the court. 
 
 Whether is a contraction of which of either, and there- 
 fore cannot be correctly applied to more than two objects. 
 
 Never, for ever. E. g., "Charm he never so wisely"; 
 " Let the offence be of never so high a nature." Many 
 grammarians approve of this use of never; but its cor- 
 rectness, to say the least, is doubtful. In such sentences as 
 these, " He was deaf to the voice of the charmer, charm he 
 ever so wisely," " Were it ever so fine a day, I would not go 
 out," the word ever is an adverb of degree, and has nothing 
 to do with time. " If I take ever so little of this drug, 
 it will kill me," is equivalent to " however little," or " how 
 little soever I take of this drug, it will kill me." Harrison 
 well says on this point: "Let any one translate one of these 
 phrases into another language, and he will find that ever 
 presents itself as a term expressive of degree, and not of 
 time at all. "Charm he ever so wisely": Quamvis incan- 
 tandi sit peritus, ant peritissimus. 
 
 Seldom or never is a common vulgarism. Say, " seldom, 
 if ever." 
 
 Sit, sat, are much abused words. It is said that the 
 brilliant Irish lawyer, Curran, once carelessly observed in 
 court, "an action lays," and the judge corrected him by
 
 352 WORDS ; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 remarking, "Lies, Mr. Curran, hens lay"; but subse- 
 quently the judge ordering a counsellor to " set down," 
 Curran retaliated, "Sit down, your honor, hens set." 
 The retort was characterized by more wit than truth. 
 Hens do not set; they sit. It is not unusual to hear per- 
 sons say, "The coat sets well"; "The wind sets fair." Sits 
 is the proper word. The preterite of sit is often in- 
 correctly used for that of set; e. g., "He sat off for 
 Boston." 
 
 From thence, from whence. As the adverbs tlifuci' 
 and whence literally supply the place of a noun and 
 preposition, there is a solecism in employing a preposition 
 in conjunction with them. 
 
 Conduct. In conversation, this verb is frequently used 
 without the personal pronoun; as, "he conducts well," 
 for "he conducts himself well." 
 
 Least, for less. " Of two evils, choose the least." 
 
 A confirmed invalid. Can weakness be strong? If not, 
 how can a man be a confirmed, or strengthened, invalid? 
 
 Proposition, for proposal. This is not a solecism, but, 
 as a univocal word is preferable to one that is equivocal, 
 proposal, for a thing offered or proposed, is better than 
 proposition. Strictly, a proposal is something offered 
 to be done; a proposition is something submitted to one's 
 consideration. E. g., " He rejected the proposal of his 
 friend;" "he demonstrated the fifth proposition in Eu- 
 clid." 
 
 Previous, for previously. " Previous to my leaving 
 America." 
 
 Appreciates, for rises in value. " Gold appreciated 
 yesterday." 
 
 Proven for proved, and plead for pleaded, are clearly 
 vulgarisms.
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 353 
 
 Bound, for ready or determined. " I am bound to do 
 it." We may say properly that a ship is " bound to Liv- 
 erpool"; but in that case we do not employ, as many 
 suppose, the past participle of the verb to bind, but the 
 old northern participial adjective, buinn, from the verb, 
 at bita, signifying "to make ready, or prepare." The 
 term is strictly a nautical one, and to. employ it in a 
 sense that unites the significations both of buinn and the 
 English participle bound from bind, is a plain abuse of 
 language. 
 
 No, for not. E. g., " Whether I am there or no." 
 Cowper writes: 
 
 "I will not ask Jean Jacques Rousseau 
 Whether birds confabulate or no." 
 
 By supplying the ellipsis, we shall see that not is here 
 the proper word. " Whether birds confabulate, or do not 
 confabulate"; "Avhether I am there, or not there." No 
 never properly qualifies a verb. 
 
 Such for so. E. g., " I never saw such a high spire." 
 This means, "I never saw a high spire of such a form," 
 or "of such architecture"; whereas the speaker, in all 
 probability, means only that he never saw so high a 
 spire. 
 
 Incorrect orthography. Orthography means "correct 
 writing, or spelling." " Incorrect orthography " is, there- 
 foi*e, equivalent to " incorrect correct writing." 
 
 How for that. "I have heard how some critics have 
 been pacified with claret and a supper." 
 
 Directly, for as soon as. " Directly he came, I went 
 away with him." 
 
 Equally as well, for equally well. E. g., "It will do 
 equally as well."
 
 354 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Looks beautifully. In spite of the frequency with 
 which this impropriety has been censured, one hears it 
 almost daily from the lips of educated men and women. 
 The error arises from confounding look in the sense of 
 to direct the eye, and look in the sense of to seem, to 
 appear. In English, many verbs take an adjective with 
 them to form th.e predicate, where in other languages an 
 adverb would be used; e. g., "he fell ill"; "he feels cold 1 '; 
 "her smiles amid the blushes lovelier show." No culti- 
 vated person would say, "she is beautifully," or "she 
 seems beautifully," yet these phrases are no more im- 
 proper than "she looks beautifully." We qualify what a 
 person does by an adverb; what a person is, or seems to 
 be, by an adjective: e. g., "she looks coldly on him"; 
 "she looks cold." 
 
 Leave, as an intransitive verb. E. g., " He left yes- 
 terday." Many persons who use this phrase are misled 
 by what they deem the analogous expressions, to irrifc. 
 to read. These verbs express an occupation, as truly as 
 to run, to walk, to stand. In answer to the question, 
 "What is A. B. doing?" it is sufficient to say, "He is 
 reading." Here a complete idea is conveyed, which is 
 not true of the phrase, " He left yesterday." 
 
 Mijself, for I. E. a., " Mrs. Jones and myself will be 
 happy to dine with you"; "Prof. S. and myself have 
 examined the work." The proper use of myself is either 
 as a reflective pronoun, or for the sake of distinction and 
 emphasis; as when Juliet cries, "Romeo, doff thy name, 
 and for that name, which is no part of thee, take all 
 myself"; or in Milton's paradisiacal hymn: "These are 
 thy glorious works, Parent of Good, Almighty! thine this
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 355 
 
 universal frame thus wondrous fair! Thyself how won- 
 drous then!" 
 
 Restive. This word, which means inclined to rest, ob- 
 xtitidte, unwiUing to go, is employed, almost constantly, in 
 a sense directly the reverse of this; that is, for uneasy, 
 restless. 
 
 Quantity, for number. E. g., "A quantity of books"; 
 "a quantity of postage stamps." In speaking of a col- 
 lection or mass, it is proper to use quantity; but in 
 speaking of individual objects, however many, we must 
 use the word number. "A quantity of meat" or "a quan- 
 tity of iron" is good English, but not "a quantity of 
 bank-notes." We may say " a quantity of wood," but we 
 should say "a number of sticks." 
 
 Carnival. This word literally means "a farewell to 
 meat," or, as some etymologists think, "flesh, be strong!" 
 In Catholic countries it signifies a festival celebrated with 
 merriment and revelry during the week before Lent. In 
 this country, especially in newspaper use, it is employed 
 in the sense of fun, frolic, spree, festival; and that so 
 universally as almost to have banished some of these words 
 from the language. If many persons are skating, that is 
 a carnival; so, if they take a sleigh-ride, or if there is a 
 rush to Long Branch in the summer. As we have a plenty 
 of legitimate words to describe these festivities, the use of 
 this outlandish term has not a shadow of justification. 
 
 All of them. As of here means out of, corresponding 
 with the Latin preposition e, or ex, it cannot be correct to 
 say all of them. We may say, " take one of them " or 
 "take two of them," or "take them all"; but the phrase 
 we are criticising is wholly unjustifiable. 
 
 To allude. Among the improprieties of speech which
 
 356 AVOEDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 even those sharp-eyed literary detectives, Alford, Moon, 
 and Gould have failed to pounce upon and pillory, are 
 the misuses of the word that heads this article. Once the 
 verb had a distinct, well-defined meaning, but it is now 
 rapidly losing its true signification. To allude to a thing, 
 
 what is it? Is it not to speak of it darkly, to hint at 
 it playfully (from ludo, ludere, to play), without any 
 direct mention? Yet the word is used in a sense directly 
 opposite to this. Suppose you lose in the street some pack- 
 age, and advertise its loss in the newspapers. The person 
 who finds the package is sure to reply to your advertise- 
 ment by speaking of "the package you alluded to in your 
 advertisement," though you have alluded to nothing, but 
 have told your story in the most distinct and straightfor- 
 ward manner possible, without an approximation to a hint 
 or innuendo. Newspaper reporters, by their abuse of this 
 unhappy word, will transform a bold and daring speech in 
 Congress, in which a senator has taken some bull by the 
 horns, in other words, dealt openly and manfully with 
 the subject discussed, into a heap of dark and mysterious 
 innuendoes. The honorable gentleman alluded to the cur- 
 rency to the war to Andrew Johnson to the New 
 Orleans massacre; he alluded to the sympathizers with the 
 South, though he denounced them in the most caustic 
 terms; he alluded to the tax-bill, and he alluded to fifty 
 other things, about every one of which he spoke out his 
 mind in emphatic and unequivocal terms. An English 
 journal tells a ludicrous story of an M. P. who, his health 
 having been drunk by name, rose on his legs, and spoke of 
 "the nattering way in which he had been alluded to." 
 Another public speaker spoke of a book which had been 
 alluded to by name. But the climax of absurdity in the
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 357 
 
 use of this word was attained by an Irish M.P., who wrote 
 a life of an Italian poet. Quoting Byron's lines about 
 " the fatal gift of beauty," he then goes on to talk about 
 "the fatal gift which has been already alluded to!" 
 
 Either alternative. E. g., " You may take either alterna- 
 tive." " Two alternatives were presented to me." Alter- 
 native evidently means a choice, one choice, between 
 two things. If there be only one offered, we say there is 
 no alternative. Two alternatives is, therefore, a palpable 
 contradiction in terms; yet some speakers talk of "several 
 alternatives" having been presented to them. 
 
 Whole, for all. The "Spectator" says: "The Red-Cross 
 Knight runs through the whole steps of the Christian life." 
 Alison, who is one of the loosest writers in our literature, 
 declares, in his " History of the French Revolution," that 
 " the whole Russians are inspired with the belief *that their 
 mission is to conquer the world." This can only mean 
 that those Russians who are entire, who have not lost a 
 leg, an arm, or some other part of the body, are inspired 
 with the belief of which he speaks. Whole refers to the 
 component parts of a single body, and is therefore singular 
 in meaning. 
 
 Jeopardize. There is considerable authority for this 
 word, which is beginning to supplant the good old English 
 word jeopard. But why is it more needed than perilize, 
 hazardize ? 
 
 Preventative, for preventive; conversationalist, for con- 
 verser; underhanded, for underhand; casuality, for cas- 
 ualty; speciality, for specialty; leniency, for lenity; firstly, 
 for first; are all base coinages, barbarisms which should 
 be excommunicated by " bell, book, and candle." 
 
 Dangerous, for in danger. A leading Boston paper says
 
 358 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 of a deceased minister: "His illness was only of a week's 
 duration, and was pleurisy and rheumatism. He was not 
 supposed to be dangerous." 
 
 Nice. One of the most offensive barbarisms now preva- 
 lent, is the use of this as a pet word to express almost every 
 kind of approbation, and almost every quality. Strictly, 
 nice can be used only in a subjective, not in an objective, 
 sense; though both of our leading lexicographers approve 
 of .such expressions as "a nice bit of cheese." Of the 
 vulgarity of such expressions as "a nice man" (meaning a 
 good or pleasing man), " a nice day," " a nice party," etc., 
 there cannot be a shadow of doubt. "A nice man " means 
 a fastidious man; a "nice letter" is a letter very delicate 
 in its language. Some persons are more nice than wise. 
 Archdeacon Hare complains that " this characterless dom- 
 ino," as fee stigmatizes the word nice, is continually used 
 by his countrymen, and that " a universal deluge of niascrif 
 (for the word was originally niais) threatens to whelm the 
 whole island." The Latin word elegam seems to have had 
 a similar history; being derived from elego, and meaning 
 primarily nice or choice, and subsequently elegant. 
 
 Mutual, for common, or reciprocal. Dean Alford justly 
 protests against the stereotyped vulgarism, "a mutual 
 friend." Mutual is applicable to sentiments and acts, but 
 not to persons. Two friends may have a mutual love, but 
 for either to speak of a third person as being "their mutual 
 friend," is sheer nonsense. Yet Dickens entitled one of his 
 novels, "Our Mutual Friend." 
 
 Stopping, for staying. "The Hon. John Jones is stop- 
 ping at the Sherman House." In reading such a, statement 
 as this, we are tempted to ask, When will Mr. Jones stop 
 stopping? A man may stop a dozen times at a place, or on
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 359 
 
 a journey, but he cannot continue stopping. One may stop 
 at a hotel without becoming a guest. The true meaning of 
 the word stop was well understood by the- man who did not 
 invite his professed friend to visit him: "If you come, at 
 any time, within ten miles of my house, just stop." 
 
 Trifl'my ni'nnttiut'. Archbishop Whately, in his "Rhet- 
 oric,"' speaks of " trifling minutiae of style." In like 
 manner, Henry Kirke White speaks of his poems as being 
 " the juvenile efforts of a youth," and Disraeli, the author 
 of "The Curiosities of Literature," speaks of "the battles 
 of logomachy," and of "the mysteries of the arcana of 
 alchemy." The first of these phrases may be less palpably 
 tautological than the other three; yet as minutiae means 
 nearly the same thing as trifles, a careful writer would be 
 as averse to using such an expression as Whately's, as he 
 would to talking, like Sir Archibald Alison, of representa- 
 tive institutions as having been " reestablished in our time 
 by the influence of English vl^/0mania." 
 
 Indices, for indexes. " We have examined our indices," 
 etc., say the Chicago abstract-makers. Indices are alge- 
 braic signs; tables of contents are indexes. 
 
 Rendition, for rendering. E. g., " Mr. Booth's i-endition 
 of Hamlet was admirable." Rendition means surrender, 
 giving up, relinquishing to another; as when we speak of 
 the rendition of a beleaguered town to the besieger, or of a 
 pledge upon the satisfaction of a debt. 
 
 Extend, for give. Lecture committees, instead of sim- 
 ply inviting a public speaker, or giving him an invitation, 
 almost universally extend an invitation; perhaps, because 
 he is generally at a considerable distance. Richard Grant 
 White says pertinently: "As extend (from ex and tendo) 
 means merely to stretch forth, it is much better to say that
 
 360 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 a man put out, offered, or stretched forth his hand than 
 that he extended it. Shakspeare makes the pompous, prag- 
 matical Malvolio -say: 'I extend my hand to him thus'; 
 but Paul ' stretched forth the hand and answered for him- 
 self. 1 This, however, is a question of taste, not of cor- 
 rectness." 
 
 Except, for unless. E. g., " No one, except he has served 
 an apprenticeship, need apply." The former word is a 
 preposition, and must be followed by a noun or pronoun, 
 and not by a proposition. 
 
 Couple, for pair or brace. When two persons or things 
 are joined or linked together, they form a couple. The 
 number of things that can be coupled, is comparatively 
 small, yet the expression is in constant use; as, "a couple of 
 books," "a couple of partridges," "a couple of weeks," etc. 
 One might as well speak of "a pair of dollars." 
 
 Every. E. g., "I have every confidence in him"; 
 "they rendered me every assistance." Every denotes all 
 the individuals of a number greater than two, separately 
 considered. Derived from the Anglo-Saxon, o?fer, ever, 
 oelc, each, it means each of all, not all in mass. By " every 
 confidence " is meant simply perfect confidence.; by " every 
 assistance," all possible assistance. 
 
 Almost, as an adjective. Prof. Whitney, in his able 
 work on " Language, and the Study of Language," speaks 
 of " the almost universality of instruction among us." 
 
 Condign. E. g., " He does not deserve the condign pun- 
 ishment he has received." As the meaning of condign is 
 that which is deserved, we have here a contradiction in 
 terms, the statement being equivalent to this: "He does 
 not deserve the deserved punishment he has received." 
 Paraphernalia. This is a big, sounding word from the
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 361 
 
 Greek, which some newspaper writers are constantly mis- 
 using. It is strictly a law-term, and means whatever the 
 wife brings with her at marriage in addition to her dower. 
 Her dress and her ornaments are paraphernalia. To apply 
 the term to an Irishman's sash on St. Patrick's day, or to a 
 Freemason's hieroglyphic apron, it has been justly said, 
 is not only an abuse of language, but a clear invasion of 
 woman's rights. 
 
 Setting-room, for sitting-room, is a gross vulgarism, 
 which is quite common, even with those who deem them- 
 selves nice people. " I saw your children in the setting- 
 room as I went past," said a well-dressed woman in our 
 hearing, in a horse-car. How could she go past? It is not 
 difficult to go by any object; but to go past is a contradic- 
 tion in terms. 
 
 An innumerable number is an absurd expression, which 
 is used by some persons, not, it is to be hoped, "an innu- 
 merable number " of times. 
 
 Seraphim, for seraph; the plural for the singular. Even 
 Addison says: "The zeal of the seraphim breaks forth," 
 etc. This is as ludicrous as the language of the Indiana 
 justice, who spoke of "the first claw of the statute," or 
 the answer of the man who, when asked whether he had no 
 politics, replied, " Not a single politic." 
 
 People, for persons. " Many people think so." Better, 
 persons; people means a body of persons regarded col- 
 lectively, a nation. 
 
 Off of, for off. " Cut a yard off of the cloth." 
 
 More perfect, most perfect. What shall be said of these 
 
 and similar forms of expression? Doubtless they should 
 
 be discouraged, though used by Shakspeare and Milton. It 
 
 may be argued in their favor, that, though not logically 
 
 16
 
 362 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 correct, yet they are rhetorically so. It is true that, as 
 " twenty lions cannot be more twenty than twenty flies," so 
 nothing can be more perfect than perfection. But we do 
 not object to say that one man is braver than another, or 
 wiser, though, if we had an absolute standard of bravery or 
 wisdom, that is, a clear idea of them, we should pro- 
 nounce either of the two persons to be simply brave or not 
 brave, wise or not wise. We say that Smith is a better man 
 than Jones, though no one is absolutely good but God. 
 These forms are used because language is inadequate to 
 express the intensity of the thought, as in Milton's " most 
 wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best," or the lines 
 
 "And in the lowest deep a lower deep, 
 Still threatening to devour me, opens wide, 
 To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven." 
 
 Milton abounds in these illogical expressions, as do the best 
 Greek poets; and one of the happiest verses in the poems 
 of W. W. Story is a similar intentional contradiction, us 
 
 "Of every noble work the silent part is best; 
 Of all expression, that which cannot be expressed." 
 
 Ugly, for ill-tempered. A leading New York divine is 
 reported as saying of an ill-tempered child, that " he wants 
 all he sees, and screams if he does not get it; ugly as 
 he can be, no matter who is disturbed by it." 
 
 Is, for are. One of the most frequent blemishes in 
 English prose is the indiscriminate use of singulars and 
 plurals. E. g., Junius writes: "Both minister and mag- 
 istrate is compelled to choose between his duty and his 
 reputation." Even Lindley Murray writes: "Their gen- 
 eral scope and tendency is not remembered at all " ; and 
 Milton sings: 
 
 "For their mind and spirit remains invincible,"
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 363 
 
 Some grammarians defend these forms of expression on 
 the ground that when two or more nouns singular repre- 
 sent a single idea, the verb to which they are the nomi- 
 native may be put in the singular. The answer to this 
 is, that if the nouns express the same idea, one of them 
 is superfluous; if different ideas, then they form a plural, 
 and the verb should be plural also. Another quibble 
 employed to justify such expressions, is that the verb, which 
 is expressed after the last noun, is considered as understood 
 after the first. But we are not told how this process of 
 subaudition can go on in the mind of the reader, before- 
 he knows what the verb is to be ; and while ellipsis not 
 only is in many cases permissible, but gives conciseness 
 and energy to style, yet there is a limit beyond which it 
 cannot be pushed without leading to literary anarchy. 
 
 Caption, for heading. E. y., "The caption of this 
 newspaper article." Caption means that part of a legal 
 instrument which shows where, when, and by what 
 authority it was taken, found, or executed. 
 
 To ej'frcHu-Ii/ maltreat. This phrase from Trench is an 
 example of a very common solecism. To, the sign of the 
 infinitive, should never be separated from the verb. Say, 
 "to maltreat extremely," or "extremely to maltreat." 
 
 Accord, for grant. " He accorded them (or to them) 
 all they asked for." To accord with, means properly to 
 agree or to suit; as, "He accorded with my views." 
 
 Enthuse, a word used by some clergymen, is not to be 
 found either in Worcester's Dictionary or in Webster's 
 " Unabridged." 
 
 Personalty. This word is supposed by some persons 
 to mean articles worn on one's person. Some years ago, 
 a lady, in England, who had made this mistake, and
 
 364 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 who wished to leave to her servant her clothing, jewels, 
 etc., described them as her personalty, and unwittingly 
 included in her bequest ten thousand pounds. 
 
 Do. This verb is often used incorrectly as a substi- 
 tute for other verbs; as, "I did not say, as some have 
 done." We may properly say, "I did not say, as some 
 do" (say), for here the ellipsis of the preceding verb may 
 be supplied. 
 
 On to, for on, or upon. "He got on to an omnibus;" 
 " He jumped on to a chair." The preposition to is 
 superfluous. Say, " He got upon an omnibus," etc. 
 Some persons speak of " continuing on," which is as 
 objectionable as " He went to Boston for to see the city." 
 
 Older, for elder. Older is properly applied to objects, 
 animate and inanimate; elder, to rational beings. 
 
 Overflown, for overflowed. " The river has overflown." 
 Floived is the participle of "to flow"; flown, of ".to fly." 
 
 Spoonsful, for spoonfuls, and effluvia for effluvium, arc 
 very common errors. "A disagreeable effluvia" is a> 
 gross a mistake as " an inexplicable phenomena." 
 
 Scarcely, for hardly. Scarcely pertains to quantity; 
 hardly, to degree; as, "There is scarcely a bushel"; "I 
 shall hardly finish my job by night-fall." 
 
 Fare thee well, which has Byron's authority, is plainly 
 wrong. 
 
 Community, for the community; as, "Community will 
 not submit to such outrages." Prof. Marsh has justly 
 censured this vulgarism. Who would think of saying, 
 "Public is interested in this question"? When we per- 
 *< > a if if common nouns used definitely in the singular 
 number, we may omit the article, as when we speak of 
 the doings of Parliament, or of Holy Church. " During
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 365 
 
 the Revolution," says Professor M., "while the federal 
 government was a body of doubtful authority and per- 
 manence, . . . the phrase used was always 'the Congress,' 
 and such is the form of expression in the Constitution 
 itself. But when the Government became consolidated, 
 and Congress was recognized as the paramount legislative 
 power of the Union, ... it was personified, and the arti- 
 cle dropped, and, in like manner, the word Government 
 is often used in the same way." 
 
 Folks, for folk. As folk implies plurality, the s is 
 needless. 
 
 Mussulmen. Mussulman is not a compound of man, 
 and, therefore, like German, it forms its plural by add- 
 ing s. 
 
 Drive, for ride. A lady says that "she is going to 
 drive in the park," when she intends that her servant 
 shall drive (not her, but) the horses. 
 
 Try and, for try to. E. g., " Try and do it." 
 
 Whole, entire, complete, and total, are words which are 
 used almost indiscriminately by many persons. That is 
 whole, from which nothing has been taken; that is entire, 
 which has not been divided; that is complete, which has 
 all its parts. Total refers to the aggregate of the parts. 
 Thus we say, a whole loaf of bread; an entire set of 
 spoons; a complete harness; the total cost or expense. 
 
 Succeed, for give success to, or cause to succeed. E. g., 
 "If Providence succeed us in this work." Both Webster 
 and Worcester justify this use of succeed as a transitive 
 verb; but if not now grammatically objectionable, as 
 formerly, it is still to be avoided on the ground of am- 
 biguity. In the phrase quoted, succeed may mean either 
 cause to succeed, or follow.
 
 366 WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 Two good ones. "Among all the apples there were 
 but two good ones." Two ones? 
 
 Raising the rent, for increasing the rent. A landlord 
 notified his tenant that he should raise his rent. " Thank 
 you," was the reply; "I find it very hard to raise it 
 myself." 
 
 Was, for is. " Two young men," says Swift, " have 
 made a discovery, that there was a God." That there 
 was a God? When? This year, or last year, or ages 
 ago? All general truths should be expressed by the use 
 of verbs in the present tense. 
 
 Shall and will. There are, perhaps, no two words in 
 the language which are more frequently confounded or 
 used inaccurately, than shall and will. Certain it is, that 
 of all the rocks on which foreigners split in the use of the 
 Queen's English, there is none which so puzzles and per- 
 plexed them as the distinction between these little words. 
 Originally both words were employed for the same purpose 
 in other languages of the same stock with ours; but their 
 use has been worked out by the descendants of the Anglo- 
 Saxons, until it has attained a degree of nicety remarkable 
 in itself, and by no means easy of acquisition even by the 
 subjects of Victoria or by Americans. Every one has heard 
 of the Dutchman who, on falling into a river, cried out, 
 " I will drown, and nobody shall help me." The Irish are 
 perpetually using shall for will, while the Scotch use of trill 
 for shall is equally inveterate and universal. Dr. Chalmers 
 says: "I am not able to devote as much time and attention 
 to other subjects as I will be under the necessity of doing 
 next winter." The use of shall for tcill, in the fol- 
 lowing passage, has led some critics strongly to sus- 
 pect that the author of the anonymous work, "Vestiges
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 367 
 
 of Creation," is a Scotchman: "I do not expect that 
 any word of praise which this work may elicit shall ever 
 be responded to by me; or that any word of censure shall 
 ever be parried or deprecated." This awkward use of 
 shall, we have seen, is not a Scotticism; yet it is curious 
 to see how a writer who pertinaciously shrouds himself 
 in mystery, may be detected by the blundering use of a 
 monosyllable. So the use of the possessive neuter pronoun 
 its in the poems which Chatterton wrote and palmed off 
 as the productions of one Rowlie, a monk in the fifteenth 
 century, betrayed the forgery, inasmuch as that little 
 monosyllable, its, now so common and convenient, did not 
 find its way into the language till about the time of Shaks- 
 peare. Milton never once uses it, nor, except as a mis- 
 print, is it to be found anywhere in the Bible. 
 
 Gilfillan, a Scotch writer, thus uses will for Shall: "If 
 we look within the rough and awkward outside, we will 
 be richly rewarded by its perusal." So Alison, the his- 
 torian: " We know to what causes our past reverses have 
 been owing, and we will have ourselves to blame if they 
 are again incurred." Macaulay observes that " not one 
 Londoner in a thousand ever misplaces his ivill and shall. 
 Doctor Robinson could, undoubtedly, have written a lumi- 
 nous dissertation on the use of those words. Yet, even in 
 his latest work, he sometimes misplaced them ludicrously." 
 But Dr. Johnson was a Londoner, and he did not always 
 use his shalls and wills correctly, as will be seen by the 
 following extract from a letter to Boswell in 1774: "You 
 must make haste and gather me all you can, and do it 
 quickly, or I will and shall do without it." In this anti- 
 climax Johnson meant to emphasize the latter of the aux- 
 iliaries. But shall (Saxon, sceal=necesse est,) in the first
 
 368 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 person, simply foretells; as, "I shall go to New York to- 
 morrow." On the other hand, tcill, in the first person, 
 not only foretells, but promises, or declares the resolution 
 to do a thing; as, "I will pay you what I owe you." The 
 Doctor should have said: ''I shall and will do without it," 
 putting the strongest term last. The confusion of the 
 two words is steadily increasing in this country. Form- 
 erly the only Americans who confounded them were South- 
 erners; now, the misuse of the words is stealing through 
 the North. E. g., " I will go to town to-morrow, and 
 shall take an early opportunity of calling on your friend 
 there." " We will never look on his like again." A writer 
 in a New York paper says: "None of our coal mines are 
 deep, but the time is coming when we will have to dig 
 deeper in search of both coal and metallic ores." Again: 
 we hear persons speak thus: "Let us keep a sharp look- 
 out, and we will avoid all danger." 
 
 Shakspeare rarely confounded the two words ; for ex- 
 ample, in " Coriolanus " : 
 
 "Cor. Shall remain! 
 
 Hear you this Triton of the minnows? mark you 
 His absolute shall?" 
 
 Again, in Antony and Cleopatra: 
 
 "Meno. Wilt thou be lord of the whole world? 
 Senator. He shall to the market-place." 
 
 Wordsworth, too, who is one of the most accurate 
 writers in oxir literature, nicely discriminates in his use 
 of shall and will: 
 
 "This child I to myself will take; 
 She shall be mine, and I will make 
 A lady of my own. 
 
 The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 369 
 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
 And beauty boru of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face." 
 
 In the last passage determination is expressed, and 
 therefore shall is properly used. 
 
 When the Bible was translated, the language was in a 
 state of transition; hence we read in Kings ii.: "Ahab 
 shall slay me," for will. In Genesis xliii. 3-5, the two 
 words are nicely discriminated. 
 
 The general rule to be followed in the use of the two 
 words is, that when the simple idea of future occurrence 
 is to be expressed, unconnected with the speaker's resolve, 
 we must use shall in the first person, and will in the 
 second and third; as, "I shall die, you will die, he will 
 die"; but when the idea of compulsion or necessity is to 
 be conveyed, a futurity connected with the will of the 
 speaker, will must be employed in the first person, and 
 shall in the second and third ; as, " I will go, you shall 
 go, he shall go." " I shall attain to thirty at my next 
 birthday" merely foretells the age to which the speaker 
 will have reached at his next birthday; "I will attain to 
 thirty at my next birthday" would imply a determination 
 to be so old at the time mentioned. " You shall have some 
 money to-morrow" would imply a promise to pay it; "you 
 will have some money to-morrow" would only imply an 
 expectation that the person addressed would receive some 
 money. 
 
 Similar to the misuse of shall and tvill, is that of would 
 for should; as, "You promised that it would be done"; 
 " But for reinforcements we would have been beaten." Mr. 
 Brace, in his work on Hungary, makes the people of that 
 country sav of Kossuth: "He ought to have known that we 
 16*
 
 370 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 
 
 would be ruined," which can only mean "we wished to 
 be ruined." 
 
 The importance of attending to the distinction of shall 
 and will, and to the nice distinctions of words generally, is 
 strikingly illustrated by an incident in Massachusetts. In 
 1844, Abner Rogers was tried in that State for the murder 
 of the warden of the penitentiary. The man who had been 
 sent to search the prisoner, said in evidence: "He (Rogers) 
 said, ' I have fixed the warden, and I'll have a rope round 
 my neck.' On the strength of what he said, I took his 
 suspenders from him." Being cross-examined, the witness 
 said his words were: "I will have a rope," not "I shall 
 have a rope." The counsel against the prisoner argued 
 that he declared an intention of suicide, to escape from the 
 penalty of the law, which he knew he had incurred. On 
 the other hand, shall would, no doubt, have been regarded 
 as a betrayal of his consciousness of having incurred a 
 felon's doom. The prisoner was acquitted on the ground 
 of insanity. Strange that the fate of an alleged murderer 
 should turn upon the question which he used of two little 
 words that are so frequently confounded, and employed one 
 for the other! It would be difficult to conceive of a 
 more pregnant comment on the importance of using words 
 with discrimination and accuracy. 
 
 It would be impossible, in the limits to which we are 
 restricted, to give all the nice distinctions to be observed in 
 the use of shall and will. For a full explanation of the 
 subject we must refer the unlearned reader to the various 
 English grammars, and such works as Sir E. W. Head's 
 treatise on the two words, and the works on Synonymes 
 by Graham, Crabb, and Whately. Prof. Schele DeVere, 
 in his late "Studies in Language," expresses the opinion
 
 COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 371 
 
 that this double future is a great beauty of the English 
 language, but that it is impossible to give any rule for its 
 use, which will cover all cases, and that the only sure guide 
 is " that instinct which is given to all who learn a language 
 with their mother's milk, or who acquire it so successfully 
 as to master its spirit as well as its form." His use of will 
 for shall, in this very work, verifies the latter part of this 
 statement, and shows that a foreigner may have a profound 
 knowledge of the genius and constitution of a language, 
 and yet be sorely puzzled by its niceties and subtleties. 
 " If we go back," he says, " for the purpose of thus tracing 
 the history of nouns to the oldest forms of English, we will 
 there find the method of forming them from the first and 
 simplest elements" (page 140). The "Edinburgh Review" 
 denounces the distinction of shall and will, by their neglect 
 of which the Scotch are so often bewrayed, as one of the 
 most capricious and inconsistent of all imaginable irregu- 
 larities, and as at variance not less with original etymology 
 than with former usage. Prof. Marsh regards it as a verbal 
 quibble, which will soon disappear from our language. It 
 is a quibble just as any distinction is a quibble to persons 
 who are too dull, too lazy, or too careless to apprehend it. 
 With as much propriety might the distinction between the 
 indicative and subjunctive forms of the verb, or the dis- 
 tinction between farther and further, strong and robust, 
 empty and vacant, be pronounced a verbal quibble. Sir 
 Edmund W. .Head has shown that the difference is not one 
 which has an existence only in the pedagogue's brain, but 
 that it is as real and legitimate as that between be and 
 am, and dates back as far as Wickliffe and Chaucer, while 
 it has also the authority of Shakspeare.
 
 PRINCIPAL BOOKS CONSULTED. 
 
 Ax<;us. Hand-Book of the English Tongue. London. 
 AKISTOTLE. Rhetoric. Translated by John Gillies. London. l 
 SAMUEL BAILEY. Discourses on Variout - London. l v 'c'. 
 
 BLACKI.EY. Word-Gossip. London. 1869. New York. . 
 BOWEX. Treatise on Logic. Boston. l v 74. 
 BREEX. Modern English Literature. London. 
 M. SCHELE DE VERB. Studies in English. 
 JOHX EARLE. Philology of the English Tongue. Oxford. 1871. 
 FOWLER. English Grammar. New York. 1*60. 
 
 F. W. FARRAR. The Origin of Language. London. 1860. 
 
 Chapters on Language. London. 1S<-".. 
 
 ;AI:XETT. Philological Essays, edited by his Son. London. 1859. 
 FLEMING. Analysis of the English Language. London. 1869. 
 GOULD. Good English. New York. 1867. 
 
 G. F. GRAHAM. A Book about ir,,,Wx. Tendon. 1869. 
 HARRISON. On the English Language. London. 1848. 
 SIR EDMUXD W. HEAD. " Skatt " and " Will." London. 
 LATHAM. The English Language. 5th ed. London. 187-1. 
 MARSH. lectures on the English Language. 
 
 MAX MULLER. Lectures on the Science of Language. (First Se- 
 ries.! N.-w York. "1862. 
 
 Lectures on the Science of Language. (Second Se- 
 ries.) New York. 1865. 
 
 MILL, J. S. A System of Logic. New York. 1869. 
 J. H. NEWMAX. The Idea of a University. 3d ed. London. 1^7 '.. 
 NOTES AXD QUERIES. London. 1852. 
 
 SHEDD. Homiletics and Pastoral Theology. New York. 1867. 
 THOMSON. Outline of the Necessary Lairs of Thouglit. New York. 
 SIR JOHX STODDART. The Philosophy of Language. London. 1 s "4. 
 SMITH. Common Words triih Curious Derirations. London. 1865. 
 HuKXETooKE. Diversions of Purley. (Ed. Taylor.) London. 1860. 
 TRENCH. On the Study of Words. 13th ed. "London. 1869. 
 
 English, Past and Present. 6th ed. London. 1868. 
 Select Glossary of English Words. 3d ed. London. 1865. 
 \VHATELY. Elements of Logic. New York. 1865. 
 
 Elements of Rhetoric. New York. 1866. 
 
 HK\>I.KH;H WEDGWOOD. Etymological Dictionary. Ijondon. 1 X 7'J. 
 W. D. WHITNEY. Language and the Study of Language. New 
 
 York. 1867. 
 The L^e and Growth of Language. New York. 
 
 E. P. WHIFFLE. Essays and Rerieu-s. Boston. 1856. 
 Literature and Life. Boston. 1871. 
 ESSAYS BY A BARRISTER. London. 1862.
 
 I^DEX. 
 
 A. 
 
 abdicate, and desert. 229-30. 
 
 abominable. 3ui'. 
 
 Academy, the French, 331. 
 
 accord. 363. 
 
 Adjectives, reveal character, 58; 
 excessive use of. 159-161. 
 
 afflicting. 288. 
 
 agriculturist. 342. 
 
 ah and ha, 127. 
 
 alert. 305. 
 
 Alexander, Dr. Addison. on mon- 
 osyllables, 136. 
 
 Alford, Dean, his improprieties of 
 speech. 334. 
 
 Alfred the Great, his style of liv- 
 ing. 237. 
 
 allowance, 289. 
 
 all of them. 355. 
 
 "all right! "65. 
 
 allude, 336. 3-55-357. 
 
 almost, 360. 
 
 alms. : :-_'!. 
 
 alone. 345. 
 
 Americans, their exaggeration. 
 160-162. 
 
 among one another. 366. 
 
 anecdote. 289. 
 
 Animals, incapable of speech, 11, 
 
 animosity, 296. 
 
 anyhow, 344. 
 
 apology, 221. 
 
 apple-pie order, 312. 
 
 appreciate, 352. 
 
 aristocrats. 267. 
 
 Aristotle, on grand words. 104. 
 
 Arnold, Dr. of Rugby, on the 
 
 style of historians, 59. 
 artillery. 290. 
 Ascham. Roger, on the study of 
 
 foreign tongues, 201. 
 assassin, 307. 
 
 astonished, 289. 
 1 at, 347. 
 at all. 347. 
 atom, 261. 
 attraction. 73. 
 avocation, 346. 
 
 B. 
 
 Bacon, Lord, his words. 17; on 
 the power of words. 74; on ex- 
 pert men. 24 1. 
 
 Bailey. Samuel, on Berkeley's the- 
 ory of vision, _'_'. 
 
 balance, 102-3. 345. 
 
 Balzac, on charmed words, 74; 
 anecdote by, 164. 
 
 banister. 335. 
 
 bankrupt, 298. 
 
 Barrow, Dr. Isaac, his word-coin- 
 ages, 332. 
 
 Bedlam, 321. 
 
 beef-eater, 320. 
 
 Beggars. 27:.'-.;. 
 
 beldam, 294. 
 | belfry, 320. 
 
 Ben Jonson. nicknamed, 275. 
 
 Bentley. Richard, as a stylist. 210. 
 
 Bible, the English, abounds in 
 monosyllables, 130; beauty and 
 richness of its vocabulary* 176; 
 tribute to by a Catholic, 177. 
 
 " Billy Ruffian," 319. 
 
 bishop, 221, 318. 
 
 bit. 298. 
 
 "bitter end. "313. 
 
 blackguard. 290. 
 
 blue-stocking. 301. 
 
 blunderbuss, 307. 
 
 Boileau. on expression, 185; on 
 the " Homoousian " controver- 
 sy, 215; his solecism, 328. 
 
 Bolingbroke, his attention to his 
 style. 339. 
 
 bombast, 290.
 
 374 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 booby, 307. 
 
 boor, 294. 
 
 bosh, 307. 
 
 boudoir, 311. 
 
 bound, 353. 
 
 Boyle, Sir Richard, on Lucan, 196. 
 
 bran-new, 317. 
 
 brat, 202. 
 
 Brevity of speech, 158, 159. 
 
 bribe, 63. 
 
 brillant, 64. 
 
 Brown, John, his moderation of 
 
 language, 165. 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, on scholars, 
 
 14; his word-coinages, 333. 
 Buckle, on the style of English 
 
 scholars, 210. 
 buffoon, 300. 
 Bulwer, Lytton, his "Corporal 
 
 Bunting " on words, 83. 
 Burdett, Sir Francis, nicknamed 
 
 by O'Connell, 269. 
 Burke, nicknamed "the Dinner 
 
 Bell, " 266 ; on George Grenville, 
 
 247. 
 
 Burr, Aaron, his brevity, 157. 
 but, 342. 
 but that, 347. 
 by-law, 305. 
 Byron, on the English language, 
 
 119; his use of monosyllables, 
 
 132, 133; his aid to Greece, 139, 
 
 on the poverty of language, 183, 
 
 J.O4. 
 
 c. 
 
 Caesar, 274. 
 
 caitiff', 291. 
 
 canard, 302. 
 
 Canning, his command of lan- 
 guage, 24, 173, 174. 
 
 canon, 306. 
 
 cant, 300. 
 
 Cant. 138-140,143-151; political, 
 144-147 ; in the meeting-house, 
 147; religious, 147-151. 
 
 caption, 3(1:!. 
 
 Capuchin, 272. 
 
 Carbo, anecdote of, 32, 33. 
 
 Carlyle, his Teutonic language, 
 106, 
 
 carnival, 355. 
 
 Casuistry, 214. 
 
 caucus, 311. 
 
 causeway, 321. 
 
 Cavalier, 275. 
 
 celebrity, 348. , 
 
 chaffer, 296. 
 
 chagrin, 306. 
 
 Chalmers, his eloquence, 51. 
 
 Character, gives force to words, 
 
 49-55. 
 
 Charles V., on the English lan- 
 guage, 119; on the knowledge 
 
 of languages, 152. 
 Chatham, his study of Bailey's 
 
 Dictionary, 23; his words, 51; 
 
 his speeches, 156. 
 cheat, 309. 
 chemist, 290. 
 Chesterfield, Lord, anecdote of, 
 
 113; his efforts to improve his 
 
 language, 339. 
 chevalier <T Industrie, 84. 
 Choate, Rufus, on the choice of 
 
 words, 23; his prodigality of 
 
 words, 162. 
 Christian, 272. _ 
 Cicero, his choice of words. .">2; 
 
 his speeches, 156; 
 cipher, 322. 
 civilization, 223. 
 Clarendon, Lord, his solecisms, 
 
 337. 
 
 Classical studies, value of, 201. 
 cleave, 323. 
 Cobbett, his education and style, 
 
 205; his felicitous nicknames, 
 
 269. 
 
 coincide, 292. 
 
 Coke, Sir Edward, his denuncia- 
 tion of Raleigh, 51. 
 Coleridge, on Shakspeare' swords, 
 
 15; on bedridden truths, 147; 
 
 on the history in words, 283; 
 
 his word-coinages, 332. 
 color, 325. 
 comfortable, 258-9. 
 commence, 101. 
 community, 364. 
 competence, 258-9. 
 compulsory, 224.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 375 
 
 condign, 360. 
 
 conduct, '>">_'. 
 
 confederate. 2(1:1. 
 
 confirmed invalid, 352. 
 
 contraband. 'JitM. 
 
 Contradictory meanings, 322-325. 
 
 Controversies, usually disputes 
 about words, 261. 
 
 convene, 347. 
 
 Cooper, Sir Astley, anecdote of, 64. 
 
 copperhead, 264. 
 
 coquet, 291. 
 
 corporeal. 344. 
 
 corpse, 291. 
 
 Corwin, Gov.. anecdote of, 117. 
 
 country-dance, 318. 
 
 couple, 360. 
 
 Courier, P. L., on abusive epi- 
 thets, 226. 
 
 Couthon. 145, 146. 
 
 Cowley, his style, 209. 
 
 Cowper, William, his poetry and 
 letters, 143-4; on word-hun- 
 ters, 316. 
 
 craft. 295. 
 
 crawfish, 319. 
 
 creative, 234-5. 
 
 criticise, 297. 
 
 Crockett, David, on repetition, 22. 
 
 crushed out, 346. 
 
 Cudworth. on quamquam, 2334. 
 
 cunning. 295. 
 
 Curiosities of Language, 280-325. 
 
 curiosity, 297. 
 
 curmudgeon, 308. 
 
 Curran, anecdote of, 279. 
 
 Cuvier, anecdote of, 22. 
 
 D. 
 
 dandelion, 319. 
 
 dangerous. 357. 
 
 Dante, saying of, 195. 
 
 deacon, 222. 
 
 dear, 323. 
 
 deceiving. 349. 
 
 decimated. 102. 
 
 deduction. 342 
 
 defalcation. 296. 
 
 Definition of words, 21-24; of 
 "network" by Johnson, 21; of 
 "crab" by the French Acade- 
 
 my, 22 ; scientific and popular, 
 223; its importance, 257; offen 
 needs defining. 201. 
 
 Degradation of words, 293-298. 
 
 delinquents, 265. 
 
 De Maistre. on Locke, 225; on 
 Pagan ideas and words, 71. 
 
 De Medicis, Catherine, on Scali- 
 ger's linguistic acquisitions, 153. 
 
 Demosthenes, his choice of words, 
 31, 32; his brevity of speech, 
 156; his ignorance of foreign 
 tongues. 209. 
 
 demure, 294. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, on Romanic 
 words, 169, 170; on the inade- 
 quacy of language, 184, on the 
 literary style of women, 210, 
 on ''paupers," 259, on the 
 mischiefs arising fiom sole- 
 cisms. 338. 
 
 desultory, 204. 
 
 De Vere, Schele, on "shall " and 
 "will," 371. 
 
 dexterity. 299. 
 
 differ with. 344. 
 
 Diplomatists, their equivocation, 
 217. 
 
 directly, 353. 
 
 disgraceful and indecent. 225. 
 
 Disraeli, Benj., on the disputes of 
 synods. 216. 
 
 do, 364. 
 
 doing good, 247-249. 
 
 Dominican. 272. 
 
 donate. 102 
 
 don't. 349. 
 
 Dormitantius, 271. 
 
 dormouse. 319. 
 
 doubt. 344. 
 
 drive, 365. 
 
 Dryden, John, his translation of 
 the jEneid. 37; his moderniza- 
 tions of Milton and Chaucer, 37. 
 
 dun, 331. 
 
 dunce, 297. 
 
 Dundas, " Starvation," 276. 
 
 E. 
 
 education, 228-9. 
 egregious, 311,
 
 376 
 
 IKDEX. 
 
 either, 350. 
 
 either alternative, 357. 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, her diet, 238; 
 
 Eloquence, is in the thought, 109; 
 Emerson, on, 110; uses simple 
 language, 111; when most con- 
 quering, 164. 
 
 Emerson, R.W., on language, 282. 
 
 emigrants, 366. 
 
 English language the, 120-122, 
 129, 135, 136,171,175; new in- 
 terest in its study, 326. 
 
 enthuse, 363. 
 
 equally as well, 353. 
 
 equanimity of mind. 348; 
 
 Erskine, his education and style, 
 206; his nickname, 269. 
 
 Etymology, not a guide to present 
 meanings of words, 203, 231- 
 234; its fascination, 280-1; ex- 
 amples of illusive, 315; rules 
 of, 317. 
 
 Etymology, of phrases; "sleep 
 like a top," " Penny-come- 
 quick, " " Shotover, ' ' and ' ' to 
 make a fox's paw," 320; " Bou- 
 logne mouth," 321; 
 
 every, 360. 
 
 evidence, 347. 
 
 Exaggeration of language, 159- 
 
 166; 
 
 except, 360. 
 
 excessively, 350. 
 
 exist, 259, 360. 
 
 exorbitant, 292. 
 
 Expletives, 80. 
 
 Expression, how to acquire grace 
 
 and purity of, 838-9. 
 extend, 359. 
 
 F. 
 
 facetious, 294. 
 
 faint, 299. 
 
 Fallacies in Words, 212-262. 
 
 farce, 303. 
 
 fare thee well, 364. 
 
 fast. 297. 322. 
 
 Federalist, 265. 
 
 fellow, 297. 
 
 female, 100, 101. 
 
 final completion, 348. 
 
 folks, 365. 
 
 foolscap, 318. 
 
 Foreign philology, tiot indispen- 
 sable to mastery of English, 200. 
 211. 
 
 Foster, John, his choice of words. 
 30; on eloquence, 109. 
 
 Fox, C. J., his history of the Revo- 
 lution, 171. 
 
 Franklin, his education and style. 
 206. 
 
 freedom, 223. 
 
 Freeman, E. A., on the use of 
 grand words in England. 105. 
 
 freemason, 318. 
 
 French literature, its freedom 
 from solecisms, etc., 328. 
 
 French, the, their dislike for for- 
 eign words, 112. 
 
 from thence, 352. 
 
 Frondeurs, 267. 
 
 frontispiece, 317. 
 
 fudge, 127. 
 
 Fuller, Thomas, on high-flown 
 language, 114; on the style of 
 the schoolmen, 257; onetymolo- 
 
 gy, 317. 
 
 G. 
 
 Gambling at the court of Louis 
 
 XIV., 75. 
 
 Garnett, on "truth," 232. 
 gene, 64. 
 
 gentleman, 86-88. 
 George I., 144. 
 Gesticulation, as a vehicle of 
 
 thought, 25. 
 gibberish, 305. 
 girl, 289. 
 gloire, 64. 
 " go ahead! " 65. 
 Goethe, on the study of foreign 
 
 languages. 200; a poor linguist. 
 
 208. 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, his solecisms, 
 
 336. 
 
 gooseberry, 318. 
 gossip, 296. 
 got, for have, 343. 
 gothic, 73. 
 Grammatical knowledge, why
 
 INDEX. 
 
 377 
 
 necessary, -340; Sydney Smith, 
 on, 341. 
 
 Grand words, 94-122; use of by 
 the English. 105; of a Scotch 
 preacher, 107; effects of their 
 use, 108, 109. 
 
 gravitation, 221. 
 
 Greeks, the ancient, their igno- 
 rance of philology, 208, 209. 
 
 grocer, 317. 
 
 Guizot, on the significations of 
 words in different ages, 223. 
 
 H. 
 
 haberdasher. 308. 
 
 had have, had rather, had ought 
 and had better, 347. 
 
 Halifax, on trimmers. 274. 
 
 Halleck. Fitz-Greene, his anec- 
 dote of a Scotch girl, 115. 
 
 Hall. Robert, his choice of words. 
 29, 30; on Saxon words, 177, 
 178; his aping of Johnson. 189. 
 
 Hamilton, Alexander. 157. 
 
 Hamilton, " Single-Speech." 275. 
 
 hardships and harden, 242-3. 
 
 hawk. 309. 
 
 Hawthorne, on the spells in 
 words. 45. 
 
 Hazlitt, on Bonaparte's nickname ; 
 his story of "Tiddy-doll," 278. 
 
 heaven. 232. 
 
 Higginson, T. W., on the signifi- 
 cance of words, 45. 
 
 hill. 232. 
 
 hip! hip! hurrah! 299. 
 
 hoax. 308. 
 
 Hobbes, on words, 256. 
 
 hocus-pocus, 306. 
 
 homely, 294. 
 
 Homer, his words, 13. 
 
 "Homoousians " and ' ; Homoiusi- 
 ans." their disputes, 215. 
 
 honnetete, 64. 
 
 Horace, translations of, 38; 
 
 horrent. 287. 
 
 hospital. 252-3. 
 
 how, 353. 
 
 Huguenot, 273. 304. 
 
 Humboldt, on the study of words, 
 285. 
 
 humble-pie, 308. 
 
 humbug, 71, 306. 
 
 Hume, his style, 33; his silence 
 when attacked. 82; his argu- 
 ment against miracles, 217, 221. 
 
 humility. 71, 293. 
 
 hypocrite, 312. 
 
 hypostasis, 203. 
 
 I. 
 
 Idealism and materialism, 233. 
 
 Idioms. 68. 
 
 idiot, 294. 
 
 "I exist," 260. 
 
 Iliad, the, untranslatable, 36. 
 
 illy, 343. 
 
 imagination. 204. 
 
 imbecile, 306. 
 
 imbroglio, 102. 
 
 imp. 294. 
 
 impertinent, 221. 
 
 Improprieties of speech. 326-571, 
 their frequency in English writ- 
 ers, 327, 340. 340, 342; the mis- 
 chiefs they cause. 337-8; 
 
 incomprehensible, 291. 
 
 incorrect orthography, 353. 
 
 indeed, 129. 
 
 Indian tongues, 314, 315. 
 
 indices, 359. 
 
 indifferent, 221. 
 
 individual. 97. 
 
 "in our midst," 148, 349. 
 
 instances, 288. 
 
 Intensity, not a characteristic of 
 nature, 166. 
 
 Interjections, 125-129; Home 
 Tooke on, 125; Max M tiller on, 
 127, 128; Shakspeare's, 129,130. 
 
 intoxicated, 103. 
 
 inveterate. 325. 
 
 is for are, 362. 
 
 island, 318. 
 
 Italians, their social dialect, 61. 
 
 its, 367. 
 
 it were, 344. 
 
 J. 
 
 Jansenists and Jesuits, their dis- 
 putes, 214. 215. 
 jeopardize, 357.
 
 378 
 
 IXDEX. 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis, his artificial style. 
 105. 
 
 Jerusalem artichoke, 311. 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, anecdote of, 
 99; his ''Johnsonese "dialect, 
 100,-135; on big words, 109; on 
 cant, 146; his spoken and writ- 
 ten dialects contrasted, 179; his 
 advice on the formation of a 
 
 food style, 187; anecdote of. 
 79; on the word "dun," 331; 
 
 his attention to his language, 
 
 339; his grammatical blunders, 
 
 340. 
 Johnson. Edward, M.D., on right. 
 
 232. 
 
 Jonson, "en, 275. 
 Joubert, on Rousseau's words, 17; 
 
 his economy of words, 157; on 
 
 style, 191. 
 
 K. 
 
 Keats, his study of words, 24; his 
 education and style, 206; his 
 nickname, 269. 
 
 kennel, 312. 
 
 kidnap. 309. 
 
 knave, 295. 
 
 Knox, John, saying of, 267. 
 
 L. 
 
 lady, 302. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, his nickname,269. 
 
 " Lamb and Pickles," 319. 
 
 landed proprietor, 74, 222. 
 
 Landor, W. S., his use of mono- 
 syllables, 133. 
 
 Language, the armoury of the 
 mind, 14; its various uses, 26, 
 27; its educational value, 28; 
 the limit as well as the feeder of 
 thought, 28; community of, es- 
 sential to a people's unity. 46- 
 48; a conquered people's not 
 easily extirpated, 47, 48; an 
 index to the mental and moral 
 character, 56-72; a key to na- 
 tional character, 60-72; how 
 enriched or impoverished, 60, 
 61 ; peculiarities of the French, 
 62-65; characteristics of the 
 
 Greek and of the Latin. 66; the 
 Anglo-Saxon, 67; the Italian, 
 67; of Van Dieman's land. 70; 
 its influence upon opinion, 72- 
 74, 84; bad leads to bad deeds. 
 80; jesting, 81; effects of its de- 
 basement, 90. 91; the English 
 after the Norman conquest, 104; 
 of art and science, 115-117; ex- 
 cellence of the English, 118-122; 
 the English largely monosylla- 
 bic, 135, 136; conventional, 138; 
 excessive study of, 153; quali- 
 ties of the Saxon, 170, 171, 174. 
 178-181; the English, compos- 
 ite, 171 ; obscure caused by ob- 
 scurity of thought, 182. 183; in- 
 adequate to express exactly, or 
 all our thoughts, 183-185,257-9; 
 yet not barren to deep thinkers, 
 186; its magical effects. 193, 
 195, 196; Goldwin Smith on, 
 193; not a mere collection of 
 words, 234; curiosities of, 280- 
 325 ; changes with the change of 
 ideas, 286-329; character of the 
 French, 328 ; may be excessively 
 refined, 329; constantly grow- 
 ing, 330; how to improve in its 
 use, 338, 339 ; its marvels. 
 
 Languages, defects of Pagan, 70, 
 71 ; superiority of monosyllabic, 
 134; the study of foreign. 200. 
 202; Indian, 314, 315. 
 
 Lavoisier, his terminology. 22. 
 
 law of nature. 220. 
 
 least, 352. 
 
 leave, 354. 
 
 lee, 323. 
 
 less, 345. 
 
 let. 289, 323. 
 
 Lewes, G. H.. on frankness, 137. 
 
 " Liberty, Equality, and Frater- 
 nity," 224. 
 
 lie and lay, 345. 
 
 lieutenant, 318. 
 
 light, 243. 
 
 like I did. 345. 
 
 likewise, 346. 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, anecdote of, 
 271.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 379 
 
 listener, 63. 
 
 Locke, on the philology of the 
 
 Greeks and the Romans. 208-9; 
 
 his obscurity. 225. 
 locofoco. 204. 
 London. 252. 
 looks beautifully. 354. 
 loyalty. 292. 
 Lutheran. 272. 
 luxury. 236-239. 
 
 M. 
 
 Macaulay, on Milton's words, 16; 
 his eulogy of Saxon words. 178; 
 on Johnson's language. 179; on 
 purity of style, 210. 
 
 Mackintosh. Sir James, Sydney 
 Smith on his lack of simplicity, 
 105. 
 
 majesty, 67. 
 
 ' majesty of the people," 225. 
 
 manner. 325. 
 
 Mansel. his doctrine of conscious- 
 ness. 259. 260. 
 
 manumit. 312. 
 
 Marsh. Prof. G. P., on Demosthe- 
 nes. 32 ; on the study of English, 
 208 ; on the Italian language,62. 
 
 Martineau, James, on the power 
 of words, 92. 
 
 masses. 349. 
 
 meddle. 202. 
 
 megrim, 321. 
 
 menial. 294. 
 
 Methodist, 272. 
 
 Mezzofanti, Cardinal, 152, 153. 
 
 Mill, J. S., on traditional maxims, 
 etc., 147; on the misapplication 
 of words, 222; on right, 249. 
 
 Miller, Hugh, his education and 
 style, 207. 
 
 Milton, his words, 15, 16; on the 
 debasement of language, 91; 
 his use of monosyllables, 132; 
 his style, 191, 211. 
 
 minion. 295. 
 
 minute, 325. 
 
 Mirabeau on words, 13. 
 
 Miracles, Hume's argument 
 ayainst them considered, 211- 
 220. 
 
 miscreant, 291. 
 
 miser, 204. 
 
 mistaken, 323. 
 
 modern, 288. 
 
 money, 214. 
 
 monomania, 84. 
 
 Monosyllables, their expressive- 
 ness, 124, 125, 130-134; in the 
 Bible, 130. 
 
 Montaigne, on verbal definitions, 
 etc., 250; on usage, 331. 
 
 Moon-Alford controversy, 326. 
 
 Moore, Thomas, anecdote of 30, 3 1 ; 
 on the purity of the Greek style, 
 209. 
 
 more perfect, 361. 
 
 More, Sir Thomas, on the English 
 tongue, 120. 
 
 Morris, Gouverneur, anecdote by, 
 77. 
 
 mortal, 324. 
 
 Motley, on the origin of " the Beg- 
 gars," 273. 
 
 mountebank, 299. 
 
 Miiller, Max, on interjections; 127, 
 128; on etymology, 317. 
 
 murder, 243-245. 
 
 musket, 202. 
 
 Mussulman, 365. 
 
 mutual, 358. 
 
 myself, 354. 
 
 mystery, 289. 
 
 N. 
 
 Names, their supposed mystic im- 
 port. 43-4; among the Ro- 
 mans, 43; their effect on the 
 reception of scientific truth. 78, 
 79; invented by the Greeks and 
 the Romans for crimes, 85; 
 given by employers to em- 
 ployed, 91 ; give us no concep- 
 tions of things, 233; their sig- 
 nificance. 270. 
 
 Napoleon I., his talk of " my 
 glory," 58, 59; his style. 193; 
 his nickname, 266 ; on epithets, 
 267. 
 
 naturalist, 290. 
 
 nature and art, 239. 
 
 negotiate, 311.
 
 380 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 nervous. 322. 
 
 never, 351. 
 
 Newman, 3. H., on translation, 
 41-13. 
 
 nice. 305. 358. 
 
 Nicknames. 263-279; political. 
 264. 272: their force in contro- 
 versy, 264; why effective, 268; 
 theological, 268 ; friendly, 269; 
 their origin, 269-71 ; of Conger, 
 Sandwich. Peel, Russell, and 
 Disraeli, 276; made of compli- 
 mentary epithets, 277 ; of chil- 
 dren and women, 277. 
 
 nirvana, 77. 
 
 no, 124, 353. 
 
 Nominalists and Realists, their 
 disputes, 213. 
 
 nowadays, 334. 
 
 nude, 103. 
 
 O. 
 
 O'Connell, Daniel, his political 
 ph/ases. 146; on Acts of Park' a- 
 ment. 251. 
 
 of. 346. 
 
 officious, 294. 
 
 off of. 361. 
 
 oh, 126. 
 
 old. 227-8. 
 
 older. 364. 
 
 on to. 364. 
 
 overflown, 364. 
 
 owl, 309. 
 
 P. 
 
 Pagan, 284. 
 palsy, 321. 
 
 Pambos, story of, 150. 
 pantaloon. 308. 
 paradise. 293. 
 paramour, 295. 
 paraphernalia, 357, 358. 
 parasite, 221, 309. 
 parliament, 222. 
 parlor. 311. 
 parson. 297, 308. 
 parts. 292. 
 party. 348. 
 Patkul, 145. 
 
 pedant, 202. 
 
 pensive, 304. 
 
 people. 361. 
 
 personalty, 363. 
 
 pet, 307. 
 
 petrel. 306. 
 
 petty. 307. 
 
 Phidias, saying of. 194. 
 
 Philologists, sometimes verbo- 
 
 maniacs, 316. 
 piety, 25o. 
 plagiarism. 311. 
 Poetry, artificiality of British in 
 
 the eighteenth century, 141. 
 
 142. 
 
 policy, 318. 
 polite, 290. 
 
 Political economists, their dis- 
 putes, 213. 
 poltroon. 303. 
 Pope. Alexander, on small words, 
 
 123; on conventional language, 
 
 142. 
 Popes, the, their management of 
 
 theological controversies, 216. 
 porpoise. 319. 
 post, 322-3. 
 practical. 245, 247. 
 
 Practice, 325. 
 reaching, simplicity in, 117. 
 Premier. 273. 
 prevent, 289. 
 preventative. 357. 
 previous, 352. 
 priest, 221. 
 Prolixity, 158. 
 property. 301. 
 proposition, 352. 
 proven, 352. 
 psha, 127. 
 punctual. 290. 
 Puritan, 274. 
 
 Q. 
 
 Quaker, 274. 
 
 quandary, 299. 
 
 quantity, 355. 
 
 quarter-sessions rose, 319. 
 
 quinsy. 321. 
 
 Quintilian, on discourse. 56. 
 
 quiz, 303.
 
 IXDEX. 
 
 381 
 
 R. 
 
 racy, 303. 
 
 raising the rent, 366. 
 
 rascal. 290. 
 
 recommend, 343. 
 
 regeneration, 293. 
 
 relevant. 292. 
 
 rendition, 359. 
 
 representative, 227. 
 
 resent, 296. 
 
 restive. 355. 
 
 retaliate, 295. 325. 
 
 revolt, 345. 
 
 right. 232, 249-50.308. 
 
 ringleader, 202. 
 
 rip. 324. 
 
 Robertson, F. W.. on words of 
 
 calumny. 81; on talk without 
 
 deeds, 150-1 ; on the use of 
 
 superlatives. 165. 
 Robinson. " Bootjack." 275. 
 Romanic words, when preferable, 
 
 170-173. 176-181. 
 Roscius. the actor, 25. 
 rosemary. 319. 
 Rossini, anecdote of, 151. 
 Roundhead, 274. 
 Rump, 275. 
 Runes, their supposed magical 
 
 power, 43. 
 
 S. 
 
 sacrament. 222, 293. 
 
 sagacious. 289. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, on Napoleon's style, 
 193. 
 
 salary, 309. 
 
 Salutation, national forms of, 68- 
 70. 
 
 same, 235. 
 
 sarcasm, 309. 
 
 saunterer, 298. 
 
 savage, 203. 
 
 Savages, their language. 315. 
 
 Saxon, its brevity and simplicity, 
 134. 170. 171; its suggestive- 
 ness, 174 ; its freedom from 
 equivocation, 255, 256. 
 
 Saxon Words, or Romanic? 168- 
 181. 
 
 scamp. 294. 
 
 scarcely, 364. 
 
 Scarlett, Sir James, his speeches. 
 
 157. 
 Schiller, on the study of foreign 
 
 languages, 209. 
 Scholarship, modern, 153. 
 schooner, 310. 
 
 Science, its language, 115-117. 
 Scott, Gen., his nickname, 266. 
 scrupulous. 311. 
 secede, 293. 
 second causes, 220. 
 secret, 288. 
 
 Selden, on the fitness of words, 54. 
 seldom, or never. 351. 
 self-love and selfishness, 227. 
 self-murder, 244, 245. 
 seraphim, 361. 
 servant, 310. 
 servitude. 223. 
 setting-room. 361. 
 sexton, 299. 
 Seymour, Lord Henry, dispute 
 
 about the words in his will, 
 
 252-256. 
 Shakspeare. his words, 15, 52. 53; 
 
 his use of Saxon and Romanic 
 
 words. 181; his education, 204; 
 
 his use of "shall " and "will," 
 
 368. 
 
 shaU and will, 366-371. 
 shamefaced, 318. 
 Sharp, Dr., anecdote of. 149. 
 Shibboleths, their influence, 76, 
 
 77 ; religious, 78. 
 shoot, 320. 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, on the ballad 
 
 of Chevy Chase, 196; on style, 
 
 340. 
 
 sign, 314. 
 silly, 294. 
 simple, 296. 
 simplicity, 240. 
 sin, sinner, 70. 
 sincere, 280. 
 sit, 351. 
 Slang, 332. 
 slave, 310. 
 Small words, 123-136 ; Pope on, 
 
 123, 124; characteristic of the 
 
 English tongue. 129 : Shaks-
 
 382 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 peare's use of, 131, 132 ; By- 
 ron's use of, 132. 
 
 Smith, Sydney, his style, 191 ; on 
 the old times, 228; his word- 
 coinages, 333 ; his solecisms, 
 341; on the study of grammar, 
 841. 
 
 snob, 305. 
 
 solecism, 309. 
 
 somerset, 320. 
 
 sophist. 221. 
 
 South, Robert, on popular catch- 
 words, 74, 75; on verbal magic, 
 83, 84; on brevity of speech, 159. 
 
 Southey, Robert, on nicknaming 
 children and women, 277. 
 
 Spaniards, their love of long 
 names, 113. 
 
 sparrowgrass, 319. 
 
 species, 241. 
 
 speculation, 294. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, on the brevity 
 of Saxon words, 134. 
 
 spirit, 233. 
 
 spirituel, 64. 
 
 spoonsful, 364. 
 
 Spurgeon, Charles H., on religious 
 cant, 148. 
 
 squirrel, 309. 
 
 Stanhope, Lady Hester, on her 
 poverty, 259. 
 
 Stanley, Lord, on Saxon words, 
 168; 169. 
 
 Stedman, E. C., on Swinburne's 
 words, 18. 
 
 stopping, 358. 
 
 Story, Judge, on the difficulty of 
 framing statutes clearly, 251. 
 
 stranger, 314. 
 
 Style, characteristics of a good, 29 ; 
 the vital element of literary im- 
 mortality, 33 ; an index to a his- 
 torian's character, 59; simplici- 
 ty of, 114, 115, 164; sensation- 
 alism in, 162-164; the tran- 
 scendental, 182; how to acquire 
 a good, 187, 193-197; depends 
 on man and his theme, 188; 
 should be individual, 189; is 
 the incarnation of thought, 189; 
 differences of, 190, 191; every 
 
 age has its own, 191 ; the kind 
 
 demanded to-day, 192; should 
 
 be vivid, 196. 
 substance, 203. 
 succeed, 365. 
 such, 353. 
 summons, 321. 
 sun, 260. 
 supercilious, 310. 
 superior, 349. 
 Superlatives, 166, 167. 
 surname, 318. 
 sycophant, 309 
 Synonymes. 29. 
 Swiss, the, Fuller on language of, 
 
 67. 
 
 T. 
 
 tabby, 310. 
 
 tale, 287. 
 
 Talleyrand, why successful as a 
 diplomatist, 144. 
 
 Taylor, " Chicken," 276. 
 
 Taylor, Henry, on writers of 17th 
 century, 20. 
 
 team, 253-256. 
 
 the above, 348. 
 
 then, 348. 
 
 Theological disputes, 214-216. 
 
 theory, 245-247. 
 
 thief, 293. 
 
 thing, 291. 
 
 thought, 291. 
 
 thrall, 314. 
 
 tidy, 290. 
 
 toad-eater, 300. 
 
 tobacconist, 291. 
 
 Tooke, Home, on interjections, 
 125-6 ; on particles, 231 ; on 
 truth, 230-1. 
 
 topsy-turvy, 299. 
 
 Tory, 272. 
 
 to, sign of the infinitive, 363. 
 
 Townsend, Lady, concerning 
 Whitefield, 149. 
 
 tragedy, 202. 
 
 Translations, necessarily imper- 
 fect, 33-43; of the Iliad, by 
 Pope, Cowper, Chapman, bird 
 Derby, and Bryant, 37 ; of the 
 .Eneid, by Dryden, 37.
 
 IXDEX. 
 
 383 
 
 Translators, their blunders, 40. 
 
 " transmutation of species." 241-2. 
 
 transubstantiation, 77. 
 
 treacle, 322. 
 
 Trench, Archbishop, on the sig- 
 nificance of names, 270. 
 
 tribulation, 309. 
 
 trifling minutiae, 359. 
 
 trimmer, 274. 
 
 trivial, 303. 
 
 truth, 231-2. 
 
 try, 349. 
 
 try and, 365. 
 
 two good ones, 366. 
 
 Tyler, President, his nickname, 
 266. 
 
 tyrant, 221. 
 
 U. 
 
 n.irly, 362. 
 understanding, 203. 
 
 unity, 230. 
 
 unloose, 324. 
 
 unravel, 324 
 
 Usage, only a presumptive test of 
 
 purity of speech, 333-4. 
 usury, 291. 
 
 V. 
 
 vagabond, 295. 
 
 varlet, 295. 
 
 Verbal disputes, effects of, 261-2. 
 
 Verbal vice, its effects, 80'. 
 
 Verbiage, American, 154-5. 
 
 Vigilantius, 271. 
 
 villain, 202. 
 
 villein, 294. 
 
 violation of nature, 218. 
 
 Virgil, his attention to style, 31. 
 
 virtual representation, 217. 
 
 virtuoso, 61. 
 
 Voltaire, on English speech, 130. 
 
 Volubility, 156. 
 
 W. 
 
 Walton, Izaak, education and style 
 of, 205 ; on the word " rip," 324. 
 was, 366. 
 
 Washington, his silence, 82. 
 we, 140,141. 
 wealth, 214, 301. 
 
 wearies, 344. 
 
 Webster, Daniel, his study of the 
 Dictionary, 23; his weighty 
 words, 50; his simplicity of 
 speech, 110; his avoidance of 
 exaggeration, 166. 
 
 Wellington, his sense of duty, 58. 
 
 Whately, Archbishop, his sim- 
 plicity of language, 109; on ex- 
 perience, 217; his treatise on 
 synonymes, 226; on ambiguous 
 words, 236. 
 
 whether, 351. 
 
 Whig, 272. 
 
 Whipple, Edwin P., on Coke's 
 words, 51; on Chaucer's, Ed- 
 wards' and Barrow's words, 52; 
 on the suggestiveness of Shaks- 
 peare's diction, 52, 53 : his style, 
 806, 207. 
 
 Whitefield, his use of interjec- 
 tions, 50. 
 
 White, Richard Grant, on style, 
 193. 
 
 Whittington and his cat, origin of 
 the story, 320. 
 
 whole, 357. 
 
 whole, entire, complete and total, 
 365. 
 
 widow, 289. 
 
 Wilberforce, his letters contrasted 
 with Cowper's, 143. 
 
 William the Conqueror, his mode 
 of living, 237. 
 
 wiseacre, 318. 
 
 wit, 292, 324. 
 
 woman, 302. 
 
 Women, their style as writers, 209, 
 210. 
 
 Word-coining, 94, 95, 332, 333. 
 
 Word-hunters, 316. 
 
 Words, their significance, 11-54; 
 Novalis on, 12 ; Mirabeau on, 
 13; Homer's, 13; Job on, 13; 
 Solomon on, 13 ; the incarnation 
 of thought, 14 ; of men of genius, 
 14, 15 ; Shakspeare's, 15, 52, 53 ; 
 Milton's, 15, 16; Bacon's, 17; 
 Montaigne's, 17; Rousseau's, 
 17; Tennyson's, 18; De Quin- 
 cey's, 19; Whitefield's, 49;
 
 384 
 
 IXDEX. 
 
 Fox's, 50 ; Daniel Webster's, 
 50 ; Chatham's, 51 ; of writers 
 of 17th century, 20, 21 ; knowl- 
 edge required for their defi- 
 nition, 21-23; definition of, 
 21, 256; Rufus Choate on the 
 choice of, 23 ; Canning's com- 
 mand of, 24 ; how far necessary 
 to thought, 24-26; comprehen- 
 sive, 27 ; synonymous discrimi- 
 nated, 29 ; William Pitt's com- 
 mand of, 29; Robert Hall's 
 choice of, 29; John Foster's, 
 30; Thomas Moore's, 30; choice 
 of by the Greek and Roman 
 writers, 31-33 ; Cicero's use of, 
 32; rarely equivalent in differ- 
 ent tongues, 34, 35 ; their necro- 
 mantic power, 35; their sup- 
 posed sorcery, 43, 44 ; their mys- 
 tic power, 45-46 ; made potent 
 by the man behind them, 48-53 ; 
 their significance disclosed by 
 the experiences of life, 54, 55 ; 
 the morality in, 56-93 ; the only 
 test of thought, 72 ; their power, 
 73-80, 90 ; Bacon on their power, 
 74 ; their influence upon authors, 
 79 ; their sway in politics, 82 ; 
 hypocritical, 83 ; use of by auc- 
 tioneers, 89, 90 ; they never die, 
 93; grand, 94-122; the use of 
 foreign, 112; small, 123-136; 
 without meaning, 137-151 ; 
 their meaning worn off by 
 handling, 147 ; some abuses of, 
 152-167; 'Saxon, when to be 
 used, 134, 168-181; when Ro- 
 manic to be used, 1Q8-181 ; the 
 secret of apt, 182-211; are 
 symbols only, 185; their ar- 
 
 rangement on the battle-fields 
 of thought, 197-199; fallacies 
 in, 2 12-262; dualism in, 213; 
 their changes of meaning, 22 1, 
 223; question -begging, 226; 
 cannot inform us about things, 
 233; hint more than they ex- 
 press, 234; in legal instruments 
 are things, 251; used ambigu- 
 ously in statutes, 251; imperfect 
 representations of thought, '2~>1 ; 
 mean different things to differ- 
 ent persons, 258-261; their 
 poetry, 282; the history in, 283- 
 286 ; changes in their meaning, 
 286-298 ; their degradation, 293- 
 298 ; of illusive etymology, '> 1 5- 
 322 ; how corrupted, 316 ; with 
 contradictory meanings, 322- 
 325; nicety in their use, 329, 
 337; common, that were once 
 novelties, 330-1 ; a test of good 
 breeding, 335 ; effects of their 
 misuse, 338. 
 
 Wordsworth, his purity of lan- 
 guage, 334 ; his use of " shall 
 and "will," 369. 
 
 wormwood, 320. 
 
 would, 370. 
 
 Writer, a brilliant, described, 188. 
 
 X. 
 
 Xenophon, on the luxury of the 
 Persians, 238. 
 
 yes, 124. 
 zero, 322. 
 
 Y. 
 Z.
 
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