FOOTNOTES
[38] Thus Alexander Gil, head-master of St. Paul’s School, in his book, Logonomia Anglica, 1621, Preface: Huc usque peregrinæ voces in linguâ Anglicâ inauditæ. Tandem circa annum 1400 Galfridus Chaucerus, infausto omine, vocabulis Gallicis et Latinis poësin suam famosam reddidit. The whole passage, which is too long to quote, as indeed the whole book, is curious. Gil was an earnest advocate of phonetic spelling, and has adopted it in all his English quotations in this book.
[39] We may observe exactly the same in Plautus: a multitude of Greek words are used by him, which the Latin language did not want, and therefore refused to take up; thus ‘clepta’, ‘zamia’ (ζημία), ‘danista’, ‘harpagare’, ‘apolactizare’, ‘nauclerus’, ‘strategus’, ‘morologus’, ‘phylaca’, ‘malacus’, ‘sycophantia’, ‘euscheme’ (εὐσχήμως), ‘dulice’ (δουλικῶς), [so ‘scymnus’ by Lucretius], none of which, I believe, are employed except by him; ‘mastigias’ and ‘techna’ appear also in Terence. Yet only experience could show that they were superfluous; and at the epoch of Latin literature in which Plautus lived, it was well done to put them on trial.
[40] [Modern poets have given ‘amort’ a new life; it is used by Keats, by Bailey (Festus, xxx), and by Browning (Sordello, vi).]
[41] [‘Bruit’ has been revived by Carlyle and Chas. Merivale. Its verbal form is used by Cowper, Byron and Dickens.]
[42] Let me here observe once for all that in adding the name of an author, which I shall often do, to a word, I do not mean to affirm the word in any way peculiar to him; although in some cases it may be so; but only to give one authority for its use. [Coleridge uses ‘eloign’.]
[43] Essay on English Poetry, p. 93.
[44] Dedication of the Translation of the Æneid.
[45] [i.e. the promoters of Classical learning.]
[46] We have notable evidence in some lines of Waller of the sense which in his time scholars had of the rapidity with which the language was changing under their hands. Looking back at what the last hundred years had wrought of alteration in it, and very naturally assuming that the next hundred would effect as much, he checked with misgivings such as these his own hope of immortality:
“Who can hope his lines should long
Last in a daily changing tongue?
While they are new, envy prevails,
And as that dies, our language fails.
“Poets that lasting marble seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek:
We write in sand; our language grows,
And like the tide our work o’erflows”.
Such were his misgivings as to the future, assuming that the rate of change would continue what it had been. How little they have been fulfilled, every one knows. In actual fact two centuries, which have elapsed since he wrote, have hardly antiquated a word or a phrase in his poems. If we care very little for them now, that is to be explained by quite other causes—by the absence of all moral earnestness from them.
[47] In his Art of English Poesy, London, 1589, republished in Haslewood’s Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, London, 1811, vol. i. pp. 122, 123; [and in Arber’s English Reprints, 1869].
[48] London, 1601. Besides this work Holland translated the whole of Plutarch’s Moralia, the Cyropœdia of Xenophon, Livy, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Camden’s Britannia. His works make a part of the “library of dullness” in Pope’s Dunciad:
“De Lyra there a dreadful front extends,
And here the groaning shelves Philemon bends”—
very unjustly; the authors whom he has translated are all more or less important, and his versions of them a mine of genuine idiomatic English, neglected by most of our lexicographers, wrought to a considerable extent, and with eminent advantage by Richardson; yet capable, as it seems to me, of yielding much more than they hitherto have yielded.
[49] And so too in French it is surprising to find of how late introduction are many words, which it seems as if the language could never have done without. ‘Désintéressement’, ‘exactitude’, ‘sagacité’, ‘bravoure’, were not introduced till late in the seventeenth century. ‘Renaissance’, ‘emportement’, ‘sçavoir-faire’, ‘indélébile’, ‘désagrément’, were all recent in 1675 (Bouhours); ‘indévot’, ‘intolérance’, ‘impardonnable’, ‘irréligieux’, were struggling into allowance at the end of the seventeenth century, and were not established till the beginning of the eighteenth. ‘Insidieux’ was invented by Malherbe; ‘frivolité’ does not appear in the earlier editions of the Dictionary of the Academy; the Abbé de St. Pierre was the first to employ ‘bienfaisance’, the elder Balzac ‘féliciter’, Sarrasin ‘burlesque’. Mad. de Sevigné exclaims against her daughter for employing ‘effervescence’ in a letter (comment dites-vous cela, ma fille? Voilà un mot dont je n’avais jamais ouï parler). ‘Demagogue’ was first hazarded by Bossuet, and was counted so bold a novelty that it was long before any ventured to follow him in its use. Somewhat earlier Montaigne had introduced ‘diversion’ and ‘enfantillage’, though not without being rebuked by cotemporaries on the score of the last. Desfontaines was the first who employed ‘suicide’; Caron gave to the language ‘avant-propos’, Ronsard ‘avidité’, Joachim Dubellay ‘patrie’, Denis Sauvage ‘jurisconsulte’, Menage ‘gracieux’ (at least so Voltaire affirms) and ‘prosateur’, Desportes ‘pudeur’, Chapelain ‘urbanité’, and Etienne first brought in, apologizing at the same time for the boldness of it, ‘analogie’ (si les oreilles françoises peuvent porter ce mot). ‘Préliber’ (prælibare) is a word of our own day; and it was Charles Nodier who, if he did not coin, yet revived the obsolete ‘simplesse’.—See Génin, Variations du Langage Français, pp. 308-19.
[50] [Resuscitated in vain by Charles Lamb.]
[51] J. Grimm (Wörterbuch, p. xxvi.): Fällt von ungefähr ein fremdes wort in den brunnen einer sprache, so wird es so lange darin umgetrieben, bis es ihre farbe annimmt, und seiner fremden art zum trotze wie ein heimisches aussieht.
[52] Have we here an explanation of the ‘battalia’ of Jeremy Taylor and others? Did they, without reflecting on the matter, regard ‘battalion’ as a word with a Greek neuter termination? It is difficult to think they should have done so; yet more difficult to suggest any other explanation. [‘Battalia’ was sometimes mistaken as a plural, which indeed it was originally, the word being derived through the Italian battaglia, from low Latin battalia, which (like biblia, gaudia, etc.) was afterwards regarded as a feminine singular (Skeat, Principles, ii, 230). But Shakespeare used it as a singular, “Our battalia trebles that account” (Rich. III, v. 3, 11); and so Sir T. Browne, “The Roman battalia was ordered after this manner” (Garden of Cyrus, 1658, p. 113).]
“And old heroës, which their world did daunt”.
Sonnet on Scanderbeg.
[54] [By J. H(ealey), 1610, who has “centones ... of diuerse colours”, p. 605.]
[55] [The identity of these two words, notwithstanding the analogy of corona and crown, is denied by Skeat, Kluge and Lutz.]
[56] Skinner (Etymologicon, 1671) protests against the word altogether, as purely French, and having no right to be considered English at all.
[57] It is curious how effectually the nationality of a word may by these slight alterations in spelling be disguised. I have met an excellent French and English scholar, to whom it was quite a surprise to learn that ‘redingote’ was ‘riding-coat’.
[58] [Compare French marsouin (= German meer-schwein), “sea-pig”, the dolphin; Breton mor-houc’h; Irish mucc mara, “pig of the sea”, the dolphin (W. Stokes, Irish Glossaries, p. 118); French truye de mer (Cotgrave); old English brun-swyne (Prompt. Parv.), “brown-pig”, the dolphin or seal.]
[59] He is not indeed perfectly accurate in this statement, for the Greeks spoke of ἐν κύκλῳ παιδεία and ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, but had no such composite word as ἐγκυκλοπαδεία. We gather however from these expressions, as from Lord Bacon’s using the term ‘circle-learning’ (=‘orbis doctrinæ’, Quintilian), that ‘encyclopædia’ did not exist in their time. [But ‘encyclopedia’ occurs in Elyot, Governour, 1531, vol. i, p. 118 (ed. Croft); ‘encyclopædie’ in J. Sylvester, Workes, 1621, p. 660.]
[60] See the passages quoted in my paper, On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, p. 38.
[61] [This prediction has been verified. ‘Ethos’ is used by Sir F. Palgrave, 1851, and in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’, 1875. N.E.D.]
[62] We may see the same progress in Greek words which were being incorporated in the Latin. Thus Cicero writes ἀντίποδες (Acad. ii, 39, 123), but Seneca (Ep. 122), ‘antipodes’; that is, the word for Cicero was still Greek, while in the period that elapsed between him and Seneca, it had become Latin: so too Cicero wrote εἴδωλον, the Younger Pliny ‘idolon’, and Tertullian ‘idolum’.
[63] [This rash prophecy has not been fulfilled. English speakers are still no more inclined to say ‘préstige’ than ‘pólice’.]
[64] See in Coleridge’s Table Talk, p. 3, the amusing story of John Kemble’s stately correction of the Prince of Wales for adhering to the earlier pronunciation, ‘obleege,’—“It will become your royal mouth better to say oblige.”
“In this great académy of mankind”.
Butler, To the Memory of Du Val.
“‘Twixt that and reason what a nice barrier”.
[67] [A fairly complete collection of these and similar semi-naturalized foreign words will be found in The Stanford Dictionary of Anglicized Words, edited by Dr. C. A. M. Fennell, 1892.]
[68] [This is quite wrong. Mr. Fitzedward Hall shows that ‘inimical’ was used by Gaule in 1652, as well as by Richardson in 1758 (Modern English, p. 287). The N.E.D. quotes an instance of it from Udall in 1643.]
[69] [The word had been already naturalized by H. More, 1647, Cudworth, 1678, Tucker 1765, and Carlyle, 1831.—N.E.D.]
[70] [The earliest citation for ‘abnormal’ in the N.E.D. is dated 1835. The older word was ‘abnormous’. Curious to say it is unrelated to ‘normal’ to which it has been assimilated, being merely an alteration of ‘anomal-ous’.]
[71] [Fuller says of ‘plunder’, “we first heard thereof in the Swedish wars”, and that it came into England about 1642 (Church History, bk. xi, sec. 4, par. 33). It certainly occurs under that date in Memoirs of the Verney Family, “It is in danger of plonderin” (vol. i, p. 71, also p. 151). It also occurs in a document dated 1643, “We must plunder none but Roundheads” (Camden Soc. Miscellany, iii, 31). Drummond (died 1649) has “Go fight and plunder” (Poems, ed. Turnbull, p. 330). It appears in a quotation from The Bellman of London (no reference) given in Timbs, London and Westminster, vol. i, p. 254.]
[72] [It is rather from the old Dutch trecker, a ‘puller’. Very few English words come to us from German.]
[73] [So Skeat, Etym. Dict. But the Germans themselves take their schwindler (in the sense of cheat) to have been adopted from the English ‘swindler’. Dr. Dunger asserts that it was introduced into their language by Lichtenberg in his explanation of Hogarth’s engravings, 1794-99 (Englanderei in der Deutschen Sprache, 1899, p. 7).]
[74] Pisgah Sight of Palestine, 1650, p. 217.
[75] [This word introduced as a ‘pure neologism’ by D’Israeli (Curiosities of Literature, 1839, 11th ed. p. 384) as a companion to ‘mother-tongue’, had been already used by Sir W. Temple in 1672 (Hall, Mod. English, p. 44). Nay, even by Tyndale, see T. L. K. Oliphant, The New English, i, 439.]
[76] [‘Folk-lore’ was introduced by Mr. W. J. Thoms, editor of Notes and Queries, in 1846. Still later came ‘Folk-etymology’, the earliest use of which in N.E.D. is given as 1883, but the editor’s work bearing that title appeared in 1882.]
[77] Holy State, b. 2, c. 6. There was a time when the Latin promised to display, if not an equal, yet not a very inferior, freedom in this forming of new words by the happy marriage of old. But in this, as in so many respects, it seemed possessed at the period of its highest culture with a timidity, which caused it voluntarily to abdicate many of its own powers. Where do we find in the Augustan period of the language so grand a pair of epithets as these, occurring as they do in a single line of Catullus: Ubi cerva silvicultrix, ubi aper nemorivagus? or again, as his ‘fluentisonus’? Virgil’s vitisator (Æn. 7, 179) is not his own, but derived from one of the earlier poets. Nay, the language did not even retain those compound epithets which it once had formed, but was content to let numbers of them drop: ‘parcipromus’; ‘turpilucricupidus’, and many more, do not extend beyond Plautus. On this matter Quintilian observes (i. 5, 70): Res tota magis Græcos decet, nobis minus succedit; nec id fieri naturâ puto, sed alienis favemus; ideoque cum κυρταύχενα mirati sumus, incurvicervicum vix a risu defendimus. Elsewhere he complains, though not with reference to compound epithets, of the little generative power which existed in the Latin language, that its continual losses were compensated by no equivalent gains (viii. 6, 32): Deinde, tanquum consummata sint omnia, nihil generare audemus ipsi, quum multa quotidie ab antiquis ficta moriantur. Notwithstanding this complaint, it must be owned that the silver age of the language, which sought to recover, and did recover to some extent the abdicated energies of its earlier times, reasserted among other powers that of combining words with a certain measure of success.
[78] [For Shakespearian compounds see Abbott’s Shakespearian Grammar, pp. 317-20.]
[79] [Writing in the year 1780 Bentham says: “The word it must be acknowledged is a new one”.]
[80] Collection of Scarce Tracts, edited by Sir W. Scott, vol. vii, p. 91.
[81] [Hardly a novelty, as the word occurs in J. Gaule, Πῦς-μαντια, 1652, p. 30. See F. Hall, Mod. English, p. 131.]
[82] [First used apparently by Grote, 1847, and Mrs. Gaskell, 1857, N.E.D.]
[83] See Letters of Horace Walpole and Mann, vol. ii. p. 396, quoted in Notes and Queries, No. 225; and another proof of the novelty of the word in Pegge’s Anecdotes of the English Language, 1814, p. 38.
[84] Postscript to his Translation of the Æneid.
Multa renascentur, quæ jam cecidere.
De A. P. 46-72; cf. Ep. 2, 2, 115.
[86] Etymologicon vocum omnium antiquarum quæ usque a Wilhelmo Victore invaluerunt, et jam ante parentum ætatem in usu esse desierunt.
[87] [As a matter of fact the N.E.D. fails to give any quotation for this word in the period named.]
[88] [The verb ‘to advocate’ had long before been employed by Nash, 1598, Sanderson, 1624, and Heylin, 1657 (F. Hall, Mod. English, p. 285).]
[89] In like manner La Bruyère, in his Caractères, c. 14, laments the extinction of a large number of French words which he names. At least half of these have now free course in the language, as ‘valeureux’, ‘haineux’, ‘peineux’, ‘fructueux’, ‘mensonger’, ‘coutumier’, ‘vantard’, ‘courtois’, ‘jovial’, ‘fétoyer’, ‘larmoyer’, ‘verdoyer’. Two or three of these may be rarely used, but every one would be found in a dictionary of the living language.
[90] Preface to Juvenal.
[91] Preface to Troilus and Cressida. In justice to Dryden, and lest it should be said that he had spoken poetic blasphemy, it ought not to be forgotten that ‘pestered’ had not in his time at all so offensive a sense as it would have now. It meant no more than inconveniently crowded; thus Milton: “Confined and pestered in this pinfold here”.
[92] Thus in North’s Plutarch, p. 499: “After the fire was quenched, they found in niggots of gold and silver mingled together, about a thousand talents”; and again, p. 323: “There was brought a marvellous great mass of treasure in niggots of gold”. The word has not found its way into our dictionaries or glossaries.
[93] [‘Niggot’ rather stands for ‘ningot’, due to a coalescence of the article in ‘an ingot’ (as if ‘a ningot’); just as, according to some, in French l’ingot became lingot.]
[94] [Such collections were essayed in J. C. Hare’s Two Essays in English Philology, 1873, “Words derived from Names of Persons”, and in R. S. Charnock’s Verba Nominalia, pp. 326.]
[95] [In a strangely similar way the stone-worshipper in the Malay Peninsula gives to his sacred boulder the title of Mohammed (Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. ii. 254).]
[96] [But Wolsey’s jester was most probably so called from his wearing a varicoloured or patchwork coat; compare the Shakespearian use of ‘motley’. Similarly the maquereaux of the old French comedy were clothed in a mottled dress like our harlequin, just as the Latin maccus or mime wore a centunculus or patchwork coat, his name being perhaps connected with macus (in macula), a spot (Gozzi, Memoirs, i, 38). In stage slang the harlequin was called patchy, as his Latin counterpart was centunculus.]
[97] [An error. Prof. Skeat shows that ‘tram’ was an old word in Scottish and Northern English (Etym. Dict., 655 and 831).]
[98] Several of these we have in common with the French. Of their own they have ‘sardanapalisme’, any piece of profuse luxury, from Sardanapalus; while for ‘lambiner’, to dally or loiter over a task, they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of Pascal’s Provincial Letters will remember Escobar, the great casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges for the relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the notoriety which he thus acquired he owes his introduction into the French language; where ‘escobarder’ is used in the sense of to equivocate, and ‘escobarderie’ of subterfuge or equivocation. The name of an unpopular minister of finance, M. de Silhouette, unpopular because he sought to cut down unnecessary expenses in the state, was applied to whatever was cheap, and, as was implied, unduly economical; it has survived in the black outline portrait which is now called a ‘silhouette’. (Sismondi, Histoire des Français, tom. xix, pp. 94, 95.) In the ‘mansarde’ roof we have the name of Mansart, the architect who introduced it. I need hardly add ‘guillotine’.
[99] See Col. Mure, Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, vol. i, p. 350.
[100] See Génin, Des Variations du Langage Français, p. 12.
[101] [Dr. Murray in the N.E.D. calls these by the convenient term ‘nonce-words’.]
[102] Persa, iv. 6, 20-23. At the same time these words may be earnest enough; such was the ἐλαχιστότερος of St. Paul (Ephes. iii, 8); just as in the Middle Ages some did not account it sufficient to call themselves “fratres minores, minimi, postremi”, but coined ‘postremissimi’ to express the depth of their “voluntary humility”.
[103] It is curious that a correspondent of Skinner (Etymologicon, 1671), although quite ignorant of this story, and indeed wholly astray in his application, had suggested that ‘chouse’ might be thus connected with the Turkish ‘chiaus’. I believe Gifford, in his edition of Ben Jonson, was the first to clear up the matter. A passage in The Alchemist (Act i. Sc. 1) will have put him on the right track. [But Dr. Murray notes that Gifford’s story, as given above, has not hitherto been substantiated from any independent source, and is so far open to doubt.]
[104] [These are quite distinct words, though perhaps distantly related.]
[105] If there were any doubt about this matter, which indeed there is not, a reference to Latimer’s famous Sermon on Cards would abundantly remove it, where ‘triumph’ and ‘trump’ are interchangeably used.
[106] [Dr. Murray does not regard these words as ultimately identical.]
[107] [‘Rant’ (old Dutch ranten) has no connection with ‘rend’ (Anglo-Saxon hrendan) (Skeat).]
[108] On these words see a learned discussion in English Retraced, Cambridge, 1862.
[109] [These are quite unconnected (Skeat).]
[110] [Neither are these words to be confused with one another.]
[111] The appropriating of ‘Frances’ to women and ‘Francis’ to men is quite of modern introduction; it was formerly nearly as often Sir Frances Drake as Sir Francis, while Fuller (Holy State, b. iv, c. 14) speaks of Francis Brandon, eldest daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; and see Ben Jonson’s New Inn, Act. ii, Sc. 1.
[112] [Not connected.]
[113] [‘Sad’ akin to ‘sated’ bears no relationship to ‘set’; neither does ‘medley’ to ‘motley’.]
[114] [On the connection of these words see my Folk and their Word-Lore, p. 110.]
[115] [Not connected, see Skeat.]
[116] Were there need of proving that these both lie in ‘beneficium’, which there is not, for in Wiclif’s translation of the Bible the distinction is still latent (1 Tim. vi. 2), one might adduce a singularly characteristic little trait of Papal policy, which once turned upon the double use of this word. Pope Adrian the Fourth writing to the Emperor Frederic the First to complain of certain conduct of his, reminded the Emperor that he had placed the imperial crown upon his head, and would willingly have conferred even greater ‘beneficia’ upon him than this. Had the word been allowed to pass, it would no doubt have been afterwards appealed to as an admission on the Emperor’s part, that he held the Empire as a feud or fief (for ‘beneficium’ was then the technical word for this, though the meaning had much narrowed since) from the Pope—the very point in dispute between them. The word was indignantly repelled by the Emperor and the whole German nation, whereupon the Pope appealed to the etymology, that ‘beneficium’ was but ‘bonum factum’, and protested that he meant no more than to remind the Emperor of the ‘benefits’ which he had done him, and which he would have willingly multiplied still more. [‘Benefice’ from Latin beneficium, and ‘benefit’ from Latin bene-factum, are here confused.]
[117] [‘Hoard’ (Anglo-Saxon hord) cannot be equated with ‘horde’ (from Persian órdú).]
[118] [These words have been differentiated in comparatively modern times. ‘Ingenuity’ was once used for ‘ingenuousness’.]
[119] [The words are really unconnected, ‘to gamble’ being ‘to gamle’ or ‘game’, and ‘to gambol’ being akin to French gambiller, to fling up the legs (gambes or jambes) like a frisking lamb.]
[120] The same happens in other languages. Thus in Greek ‘ἀνάθεμα’ and ‘ἀνάθημα’ both signify that which is devoted, though in very different senses, to the gods; ‘θάρσος’, boldness, and ‘θράσος’, temerity, were no more at first than different spellings of the same word; not otherwise is it with γρῖπος and γρῖφος, ἔθος and ἦθος, βρύκω and βρύχω, while ὀβελὸς and ὀβολὸς, σορὸς and σωρὸς, are probably the same words. So too in Latin ‘penna’ and ‘pinna’ differ only in form, and signify alike a ‘wing’; while yet ‘penna’ has come to be used for the wing of a bird, ‘pinna’ (its diminutive ‘pinnaculum’, has given us ‘pinnacle’) for that of a building. So is it with ‘Thrax’ a Thracian, and ‘Threx’ a gladiator; with ‘codex’ and ‘caudex’; ‘forfex’ and ‘forceps’; ‘anticus’ and ‘antiquus’; ‘celeber’ and ‘creber’; ‘infacetus’ and ‘inficetus’; ‘providentia’, ‘prudentia’, and ‘provincia’; ‘columen’ and ‘culmen’; ‘coitus’ and ‘cœtus’; ‘ægrimonia’ and ‘ærumna’; ‘Lucina’ and ‘luna’; ‘navita’ and ‘nauta’; in German with ‘rechtlich’ and ‘redlich’; ‘schlecht’ and ‘schlicht’; ‘ahnden’ and ‘ahnen’; ‘biegsam’ and ‘beugsam’; ‘fürsehung’ and ‘vorsehung’; ‘deich’ and ‘teich’; ‘trotz’ and ‘trutz’; ‘born’ and ‘brunn’; ‘athem’ and ‘odem’; in French with ‘harnois’ the armour, or ‘harness’, of a soldier, ‘harnais’ of a horse; with ‘Zéphire’ and ‘zéphir’, and with many more.
[121] Coleridge, Church and State, p. 200.
[122] [One hardly expects to find this otiose Americanism (first used by J. Adams in 1759) in the work of a verbal purist, when ‘longish’ or the old ‘longsome’ were at hand. No one, as yet, has ventured on ‘strengthy’ or ‘breadthy’ for somewhat strong or broad.]
[123] [This prediction was correct. ‘Dissimilation’ is first found in philological works published in the decade 1874-85. See N.E.D.]
[124] [Coblenz, at the junction of the Moselle and Rhine (from Confluentes), reminds us that the word was so used.]
[125] A passage from Hacket’s Life of Archbishop Williams, part 2, p. 144, marks the first rise of this word, and the quarter from whence it arose: “When they [the Presbyterians] saw that he was not selfish (it is a word of their own new mint), etc”. In Whitlock’s Zootomia (1654) there is another indication of it as a novelty, p. 364: “If constancy may be tainted with this selfishness (to use our new wordings of old and general actings)”—It is he who in his striking essay, The Grand Schismatic, or Suist Anatomized, puts forward his own words, ‘suist’, and ‘suicism’, in lieu of those which have ultimately been adopted. ‘Suicism’, let me observe, had not in his time the obvious objection of resembling another word nearly, and being liable to be confused with it; for ‘suicide’ did not then exist in the language, nor indeed till some twenty years later. The coming up of ‘suicide’ is marked by this passage in Phillips’ New World of Words, 1671, 3rd ed.: “Nor less to be exploded is the word ‘suicide’, which may as well seem to participate of sus a sow, as of the pronoun sui”. In the Index to Jackson’s Works, published two years later, it is still ‘suicidium’—“the horrid suicidium of the Jews at York”. ‘Suicide’ is apparently of much later introduction into French. Génin (Récréations Philol. vol. i, p. 194) places it about the year 1728, and makes the Abbé Desfontaines its first sponsor. He is wrong, as the words just quoted show, in supposing that we borrowed it from the French, or that the word did not exist in English till the middle of last century. The French sometimes complain that the fashion of suicide was borrowed from England. It would seem at all events probable that the word was so borrowed.
Let me urge here the advantage of a complete collection, or one as nearly complete as the industry of the collectors would allow, of all the notices in our literature, which mark, and would serve as dates for, the first incoming of new words into the language. These notices are of the most various kinds. Sometimes they are protests and remonstrances, as that just quoted, against a new word’s introduction; sometimes they are gratulations at the same; while many hold themselves neuter as to approval or disapproval, and merely state, or allow us to gather, the fact of a word’s recent appearance. There are not a few of these notices in Richardson’s Dictionary: thus one from Lord Bacon under ‘essay’; from Swift under ‘banter’; from Sir Thomas Elyot under ‘mansuetude’; from Lord Chesterfield under ‘flirtation’; from Davies and Marlowe’s Epigrams under ‘gull’; from Roger North under ‘sham’ (Appendix); the third quotation from Dryden under ‘mob’; one from the same under ‘philanthropy’, and again under ‘witticism’, in which he claims the authorship of the word; that from Evelyn under ‘miss’; and from Milton under ‘demagogue’. There are also notices of the same kind in Todd’s Johnson. The work, however, is one which no single scholar could hope to accomplish, which could only be accomplished by many lovers of their native tongue throwing into a common stock the results of their several studies. The sources from which these illustrative passages might be gathered cannot beforehand be enumerated, inasmuch as it is difficult to say in what unexpected quarter they would not sometimes be found, although some of these sources are obvious enough. As a very slight sample of what might be done in this way by the joint contributions of many, let me throw together references to a few passages of the kind which I do not think have found their way into any of our dictionaries. Thus add to that which Richardson has quoted on ‘banter’, another from The Tatler, No. 230. On ‘plunder’ there are two instructive passages in Fuller’s Church History, b. xi, § 4, 33; and b. ix, § 4; and one in Heylin’s Animadversions thereupon, p. 196. On ‘admiralty’ see a note in Harington’s Ariosto, book 19; on ‘maturity’ Sir Thomas Elyot’s Governor, b. i, c. 22; and on ‘industry’ the same, b. i, c. 23; on ‘neophyte’ a notice in Fulke’s Defence of the English Bible, Parker Society’s edition, p. 586; and on ‘panorama’, and marking its recent introduction (it is not in Johnson), a passage in Pegge’s Anecdotes of the English Language, first published in 1803, but my reference is to the edition of 1814, p. 306; on ‘accommodate’, and supplying a date for its first coming into popular use, see Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV. Act 3, Sc. 2; on ‘shrub’, Junius’ Etymologicon, s. v. ‘syrup’; on ‘sentiment’ and ‘cajole’ Skinner, s. vv., in his Etymologicon (‘vox nuper civitate donata’); and on ‘opera’ Evelyn’s Memoirs and Diary, 1827, vol. i, pp. 189, 190. In such a collection should be included those passages of our literature which supply implicit evidence for the non-existence of a word up to a certain moment. It may be urged that it is difficult, nay impossible, to prove a negative; and yet a passage like this from Bolingbroke makes certain that when it was written the word ‘isolated’ did not exist in our language: “The events we are witnesses of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very often original, unprepared, signal and unrelative: if I may use such a word for want of a better in English. In French I would say isolés” (Notes and Queries, No. 226). Compare Lord Chesterfield in a letter to Bishop Chenevix, of date March 12, 1767: “I have survived almost all my cotemporaries, and as I am too old to make new acquaintances, I find myself isolé”. So, too, it is pretty certain that ‘amphibious’ was not yet English, when one writes (in 1618): “We are like those creatures called ἀμφίβια, who live in water or on land”. Ζωολογία, the title of a book published in 1649, makes it clear that ‘zoology’ was not yet in our vocabulary, as ζωόφυτον (Jackson) proves the same for ‘zoophyte’, and πολυθεϊσμος (Gell) for ‘polytheism’. One precaution, let me observe, would be necessary in the collecting, or rather in the adopting of any statements about the newness of a word—for the passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not the less to be noted—namely, that, where there is the least motive for suspicion, no one’s affirmation ought to be accepted simply and at once as to the novelty of a word; for all here are liable to error. Thus more than one which Sir Thomas Elyot indicates as new in his time, ‘magnanimity’ for example (The Governor, 2, 14), are to be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed of ‘sentiment’ that it had only recently obtained the rights of English citizenship from the translators of French books, he was altogether mistaken, this word being also one of continual recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent gives in Notes and Queries, No. 225, a useful catalogue of recent neologies in our speech, which yet would require to be used with caution, for there are at least half a dozen in the list which have not the smallest right to be so considered.
[126] There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this view (Opera, vol. vi, part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and German, with this title, Considérations sur la Culture et la Perfection de la Langue Allemande.
[127] Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwörter im Deutschen, von. Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85-91.