Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature

by Unknown

OUR LANGUAGE

Lingua Anglicana

Apelles, striving to paint Venus’ face,

Before him ranged the Virgins of the place.

Whate’er of good or fair in each was seen,

He thence transferred to make the Paphian Queen;

His work, a paragon we well might call,

Derived from many, but surpassing all.

Such as that Venus, in whose form was found

The gathered graces of the Virgins round,

The English language shows the magic force

Of blended beauties cull’d from every source.

The Alphabet

“The Egyptian Origin of our Alphabet” was the subject of a paper read before the New York Academy of Sciences by Dr. Charles E. Moldeuke, the Egyptologist. Two large charts on the wall showed in forty parallel columns the evolution of the various letters of the alphabet from the Egyptian hieroglyph through the Phœnician, Hebrew, and Greek to the Latin forms.

The common opinion, said the lecturer, that the Phœnicians invented the alphabet, is entirely unfounded; they merely adopted twenty-two letters from the Egyptians in 600 B.C. and then spread them as their own alphabet through Greece and Italy. The letters we use now go back to Egypt before the time of Moses and have represented practically the sounds in the same order for six thousand years.

Phonetic Changes

No nation keeps the sound of its language unaltered through many centuries; sounds change as well as grammatical forms, though they may endure longer, so that the symbols do not retain their proper values; often, too, several different sounds come to be denoted by the same symbol; and in strictness the alphabet should be changed to correspond to all these changes. But little inconvenience is practically caused by the tacit acceptance of the old symbol to express the new sound; indeed, the change in language is so gradual that the variations in the values of the symbols is imperceptible. It is only when we attempt to reproduce the exact sounds of the English language of less than three centuries ago that we realize the fact that if Shakespeare could now stand on our stage he would seem to us to speak in an unknown tongue; though one of his plays, when written, is as perfectly intelligible now as then.

Professor W. D. Whitney remarks that the intent of the alphabet is to furnish a sign for every articulate sound of the spoken language, whether vowel or consonant; and its ideal is realized when there are practically just as many written characters as sounds, and each has its own unvarying value, so that the written language is an accurate and unambiguous reflection of the spoken. This state of things is not wont to prevail continuously in any given language; for, in the history of a literary language, the words change their mode of utterance, or their spoken form, while their mode of spelling, or their written form, remains unaltered; so that the spelling comes to be historical instead of phonetic, or to represent former instead of present pronunciation. Such is, to a certain extent, the character of our English spelling, but very incompletely and irregularly, and with intermixture of arbitrariness and even blunders of every kind; it is an evil that is tolerated, and by many even clung to and extolled, because it is familiar, and a reform would be attended with great difficulties, and productive for a time of yet greater inconvenience.

Americanisms

Richard Grant White classifies so-called Americanisms as follows:

1. Words and phrases of American origin.

2. Perverted English words.

3. Obsolete English words commonly used in America.

4. English words American by inflection or modification.

5. Sayings of American origin.

6. Vulgarisms, cant, and slang.

7. Words brought by colonists from the continent of Europe.

8. Names of American things.

9. Individualisms.

10. Doubtful and miscellaneous.

All words and phrases that could by the largest and most liberal use of the term be called Americanisms may be properly ranked in one of these classes.

Spelling Exercises

The following short sentence was dictated by the late Lord Palmerston to eleven Cabinet ministers, not one of whom, it is said, spelled it correctly:

“It is disagreeable to witness the embarrassment of a harassed pedler gauging the symmetry of a peeled potato.”

Lord Cecil, in the House of Commons, quoted the following lines, which he said were given as a dictation exercise by an assistant commissioner to the children of a school in Ipswich:

“While hewing yew Hugh lost his ewe, and put it in the Hue and Cry.

To name its face’s dusky hues

Was all the effort he could use.

You brought the ewe back, by-and-bye,

And only begged the hewer’s ewer,

Your hands to wash in water pure,

Lest nice-nosed ladies, not a few,

Should cry, on coming near you, ‘Ugh!’”

The absurdity of that Indian grunt in our language, “ugh,” is shown in the following:

Hugh Gough, of Boroughbridge, was a rough soldier on furlough, but a man of doughty deeds in war, though before he fought for this country he was a thorough dough-faced ploughman. His horse having been houghed in an engagement with the enemy, Hugh was taken prisoner, and, I ought to add, was kept on a short enough clough of food, and suffered from drought as well as from hunger. Having, on his return home, drank too large a draught of usquebaugh, he became intoxicated, and was laughing, coughing, and hiccoughing by a trough, against which he sought to steady himself. There he was accosted by another rough, who showed him a chough which he had caught on a clough near, also the slough of a snake, which he held at the end of a tough bough of eugh-tree, and which his shaggy shough had found and had brought to him from the entrance to a sough which ran through and drained a slough that was close to a lough in the neighborhood.

A Spelling Lesson

The most skilful gauger we ever knew was a maligned cobbler, armed with a poniard, who drove a pedler’s wagon, using a mullein-stalk as an instrument of coercion, to tyrannize over his pony shod with calks. He was a Galilean Sadducee, and he had a phthisicky catarrh, diphtheria, and the bilious intermittent erysipelas. A certain Sibyl, with the sobriquet of “Gypsy,” went into ecstasies of cachinnation at seeing him measure a bushel of peas; and separate saccharine tomatoes from a heap of peeled potatoes, without dyeing or singeing the ignitible queue which he wore, or becoming paralyzed with a hemorrhage. Lifting her eyes to the ceiling of the cupola of the Capitol to conceal her unparalleled embarrassment, making a rough courtesy, and not harassing him with mystifying, rarefying, and stupefying innuendoes, she gave him a couch, a bouquet of lilies, mignonette, and fuchsias, a treatise on mnemonics, a copy of the Apocrypha in hieroglyphics, daguerreotypes of Mendelssohn and Kosciusko, a kaleidoscope, a dramphial of ipecacuanha, a teaspoonful of naphtha, for deleble purposes, a ferrule, a clarionet, some licorice, a surcingle, a carnelian of symmetrical proportions, a chronometer with a movable balance-wheel, a box of dominoes, and a catechism. The gauger, who was also a trafficking rectifier and a parishioner of a distinguished ecclesiastic, preferring a woollen surtout (his choice was referable to a vacillating occasionally occurring idiosyncrasy), wofully uttered this apothegm: “Life is checkered; but schism, apostasy, heresy, and villany shall be punished.” The Sibyl apologizingly answered, “There is a ratable and allegeable difference between a conferrable ellipsis and a trisyllabic diæresis.” We replied in trochees, not impugning her suspicion.

Dream of a Spelling-Bee

Menageries where sleuth-hounds caracole,

Where jaguar phalanx and phlegmatic gnu

Fright ptarmigan and kestrels cheek by jowl,

With peewit and precocious cockatoo.

Gaunt seneschals, in crotchety cockades,

With seine net trawl for porpoise in lagoons;

While scullions gauge erratic escapades

Of madrepores in water-logged galloons.

Flamboyant triptychs groined with gherkins green,

In reckless fracas with coquettish bream,

Ecstatic gargoyles, with grotesque chagrin,

Garnish the gruesome nightmare of my dream!

The Longest Words

The following sentence won a prize offered in England for the longest twelve-word telegram: “Administrator-General’s counter-revolutionary intercommunications uncircumstantiated. Quartermaster-General’s disproportionableness characteristically contra-distinguished unconstitutionalist’s incomprehensibilities.” It is said that the telegraph authorities accepted it as a despatch of twelve words.

The statement, upon the publication of a new English dictionary, that the longest word in the language is “disproportionableness” was met by pointing to a still longer word employed by the Parnellites at the time of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, in 1S71,—“disestablishmentarianism,” which found its way into the House of Commons, and another, quoted from a theological work,—“anthropomorphologically.” These are likely to hold the record, at least outside of the names of chemical compounds and their derivatives, such as trioxymethylanthraquinonic, or dichlorhydroquinonedisulphonic, which outstrip all reckoning.

There is an old farce called “Cryptochonchoidsyphonostomata” which was revived by Mr. Charles Collette, a London actor, several years ago, and was extensively advertised in the London press, to the dismay of the compositors and proof-readers.

One of the funniest long words is necrobioneopaleonthydrockthonanthropopithekology. That, of course, is not an English word, though it is in an English book,—Kingsley’s “Water Babies.” It means the science of life and death of man and monkeys in by-gone times, as well as one can make it out. It is a word invented by Kingsley.

The clown Costard, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, addressing the schoolmaster, says, “Thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus.”

In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Mad Lover, the Fool says,—

“The iron age returned to Erebus,

And Honorificabilitudinitatibus

Thrust out the kingdom by the head and shoulders.”

Referring to Shakespeare’s appropriation of this ponderous word, which first appeared in a volume entitled “The Complaynt of Scotland,” published at St. Andrew’s in 1548, a commentator says,—

“The splendid procession-word honorificabilitudinitatibus has been pressed into the service of the Baconian theory as containing the cipher initiohi ludi Fr. Bacona, or some other silly trash. The word was no doubt a stock example of the longest Latin word, as the Aristophanic compound ὀρθοφοιτοσυχοφαντοδιχοταλαιπωροι is of the longest Greek word, and was very probably a reminiscence of Shakespeare’s school-days, as the distich

Conturbabantur Constantinopolitani

Innumerabilibus sollicitudinibus

is of our own.”

Trifles

A smart girl in Vassar claims that Phtholognyrrh should be pronounced Turner, and gives this little table to explain her theory:

First—Pbth (as in phthisis) is	T
Second—olo (as in colonel) is	UR
Third—gn (as in gnat) is	N
Fourth—yrrh (as in myrrh) is	ER

An ignorant Yorkshireman, having occasion to go to France, was surprised on his arrival to hear the men speaking French, the women speaking French, and the children jabbering away in the same tongue. In the height of the perplexity which this occasioned he retired to his hotel, and was awakened in the morning by the cock crowing, whereupon he burst into a wild exclamation of astonishment and delight, crying, “Thank goodness, there’s English at last!”

An Irish gentleman writes to Truth to say that he has never found a Frenchman who can pronounce this: “Thimblerig Thristlethwaite thievishly thought to thrive through thick and thin by throwing his thimbles about, but he was thwarted and thwacked and thumped and thrashed with thirty-three thousand thistles and thorns for thievishly thinking to thrive through thick and through thin by throwing the thimbles about.”

Scene at Continental kursaal: English party at card table—“Hello, we are two to two.” English party at opposite table—“We are two to two, to.” German spectator, who “speaks English,” to companion who is acquiring the language—“Vell, now you see how dis is. Off you want to gife expression to yourself in English all you have to do is to blay mit der French horn!”

A Perplexing Word

In the “Reminiscences of Holland House” is the following anecdote of Voltaire: “While learning the English language (which he did not love), finding that the word plague, with six letters, was monosyllabic, and ague, with only the last four letters of plague, dissyllabic, he expressed a wish that the plague might take one-half of the English language, and the ague the other.”

Verbal Conceits

“Bob,” said Tom, “which is the most dangerous word to pronounce in the English language?”

“Don’t know,” said Bob, “unless it’s a swearing word.”

“Pooh!” said Tom, “it’s stumbled, because you are sure to get a tumble between the first and last letter.”

“Ha! ha!” said Bob. “Now I’ve one for you. I found it one day in the paper. Which is the longest word in the English language?”

“Valetudinarianism,” said Tom, promptly.

“No, sir; it’s smiles, because there’s a whole mile between the first and the last letter.”

“Ho! ho!” cried Tom, “that’s nothing. I know a word that has over three miles between its beginning and ending.”

“What’s that?” asked Bob, faintly.

“Beleaguered,” said Tom.

Philological Contrarieties

A gentleman, having an appointment with another who was habitually unpunctual, to his great surprise found him waiting. He thus addressed him: “Why, I see you are here first at last. You were always behind before, but I am glad to see you have become early of late.”

The Aspirate

When Mr. Justice Hawkins of the English Queen’s Bench was a leader at the bar, he appeared in a shipping case before the late Baron Channel, who was a little shaky with his aspirates. The name of the vessel about which the dispute had arisen was Hannah; but Hawkins’s “junior,” in utter desperation, said to him, “Is the ship the Anna or the Hannah, for his lordship says one thing and every one else says another?” “The ship,” said Hawkins, in reply, “was named the Hannah, but the H has been lost in the chops of the Channel!”

In “Much Ado About Nothing,” where Beatrice is touched with her first love longing for Benedict, occurs this passage:

“Beat. ’Tis almost five o’clock, cousin. ’Tis time you were ready. By my troth I am exceeding ill; heigh ho!

Margaret. For a hawk, a horse, or a husband?

Beat. For the letter that begins them all, h.”

This is supposed to be a poor pun on ache, but be that as it may, it seems clear that Margaret must have been supposed to sound the aspirate clearly in each of the words she used. Had she said, “For an ’awk, an ’orse, or an ’usband,” Beatrice’s joke about the letter h, which in that case would not have been used at all, would have been absurd. On this single illustration one might build quite an argument to show that Shakespeare did not drop his h’s.

Alliterative Tribute to Swinburne

Lord of the lyre! of languaged lightning lord!

Master of matchless melting melody!

Philosopher of Freedom! foe of falsity!

Smiter of sin with song’s swift sleepless sword!—

Lo, tyrants tremble as they turn toward

Thee, pearled and panoplied in poesy,

Winged for the warfield, waiting wistfully

Thy ripe Republic of all rights restored.

Vulcan

“Lo! from Lemnos limping lamely

Lags the lowly lord of fire.”

Roared the fire before the bellows; glowed the forge’s dazzling crater;

Rang the hammers on the anvils, both the lesser and the greater;

Fell the sparks around the smithy, keeping rhythm to the clamor,

To the ponderous blows and clanging of each unrelenting hammer,

While the diamonds of labor, from the curse of Adam borrowed,

Glittered like a crown of honor on each iron-beater’s forehead.

Compressing the Alphabet

When the following sentence of forty-eight letters first appeared, it was regarded as the shortest in the English language capable of containing all the letters of the alphabet:—

“John P. Brady gave me a black walnut box of quite a small size.”

But this was improved upon by a sentence of thirty-three letters containing the twenty-six letters of the alphabet:

“A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

Another sentence of thirty-three letters is the following:

“J. Gray—Pack with my box five dozen quills.”

With a change in construction this is reduced by one letter, making thirty-two:

“Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”

Alphabetical Fancies

A gentleman travelling in a railway carriage was endeavoring, with considerable earnestness, to impress some argument upon a fellow-passenger who was seated opposite to him, and who appeared rather dull of apprehension. At length, being slightly irritated, he exclaimed, in a louder tone, “Why, sir, it’s as plain as A B C!” “That may be,” quietly replied the other, “but I am D E F!”

This alphabetical rhyme on “Naughty Janie” appeared in Longman’s Magazine:

Anger, baseness, craft, disdain,

Every fault { God hates } is Janie’s;

{ girls have }

Kind language moves not—only pain

Quite rightly serves—these uppish vain

Worthless Xantippes, yawning zanies.

If an S and an I and an O and a U,

With an X at the end, spell Su;

And an E and a Y and an E spell I,

Pray, what is a speller to do?

Then, if also an S and an I and a G

And an H E D spell cide,

There’s nothing much left for a speller to do

But to go and commit siouxeyesighed.

A laughable incident once took place upon a trial in Lancashire, where the Rev. Mr. Wood was examined as a witness. Upon giving his name, Ottiwell Wood, the judge, addressing the reverend parson, said, “Pray, Mr. Wood, how do you spell your name?” The old gentleman replied, “O double T, I double U, E double L, double U, double O, D.” Upon which the astonished lawyer laid down his pen, saying it was the most extraordinary name he had ever met in his life, and after two or three attempts, declared he was unable to record it. The court was convulsed with laughter.

A saloon-keeper, having started business in a place where trunks had been made, asked a friend what he had better do with the old sign, “Trunk Factory.”

“Oh,” said the friend, “just change the T to D, and it will suit you exactly.”

Palindromes

A palindrome is a word, sentence, or verse that reads the same, forward and backward, from left to right, or from right to left. The Latin language abounds with palindromes, but there are few good ones in English. The following will serve as specimens.

Madam, I’m Adam. (Adam to Eve.)

Able was I ere I saw Elba. (Napoleon loq.)

Name no one man.

Red root put up to order.

Draw pupil’s lip upward.

No, it is opposition.

The last has been extended to: “No, it is opposed; art sees trade’s opposition.” In Yreka, California, is a baker’s sign which maybe called a natural palindrome: “Yreka Bakery.”

Words Wrong, Pronunciation Right

The following is an illustration of pronunciation and spelling in the use of wrong words which have the same pronunciation as the right words, and which, properly read, would sound right. A rite suite little buoy, the sun of a grate kernal, with a rough about his neck, flue up the rode swift as eh dear. After a thyme he stopped at a gnu house and wrang the belle. His tow hurt hymn, and he kneaded wrest. He was two tired to raze his fare pail face. A feint mown of pane rows from his lips. The made who herd the belle was about to pair a pare, but she through it down and ran with all her mite, for fear her guessed would not weight. Butt, when she saw the little won, tiers stood in her eyes at the site. “Ewe poor dear! Why, due yew lye hear! Are yew dyeing?” “Know,” he said, “I am feint two thee corps.” She boar him inn her arms, as she aught, too a room where he mite bee quiet, gave him bred and meet, held cent under his knows, tied his choler, rapped him warmly, gave him some suite drachm from a viol, till at last he went fourth hail as a young hoarse. His eyes shown, his cheek was as read as a flour, and he gambled a hole our.

The Power of Short Words

Secretary Stanton, while in charge of the War Department during our sectional conflict, had a curt way of doing things and a desire to attain his ends by the shortest possible roads. Hence his fondness for monosyllables. Ex-Governor Letcher, of Virginia, was taken prisoner during the war and confined in prison in Washington. After the lapse of two months and a half, he managed to get released on parole, and this was Stanton’s characteristic order and the whole of it,—

Washington, D. C., July 25, 1863.—John Letcher is hereby paroled. He will go home by the same road he came here, and will stay there and keep quiet.

Edwin M. Stanton.

Twenty-one words in all, besides the proper names and date, and eighteen of them monosyllables.

During the life of John Bright the Pall Mall Gazette said, “An admirer of Mr. Bright writes to a Manchester paper that he discovered the secret of the power this great speaker possessed of riveting the attention of his audience. This he believes to lie in the fact that he used monosyllables very largely. The grand passage in Mr. Bright’s speech on the Burials bill describing a Quaker funeral begins, ‘I will take the case of my own sect,’ and on counting the words of that remarkable oration it will be found that out of one hundred and ninety words one hundred and forty-nine, more than seventy-five per cent., were monosyllables. On this it is urged that those in charge of youth should teach them the use of monosyllables. An American journal lately mentioned a school where such pains had been taken to instruct the boys in the art of public speaking that if they had learned nothing else they had acquired the greatest contempt for all the devices of stump oratory. The prescribed course of study leaves much to the imagination, but doubtless includes the translation into monosyllables of the ponderous verbiage which passes current in most political assemblies as genuine eloquence. It would, however, be cruel to insist on the introduction of such teaching into any of the ‘standards.’ Many are obliged to speak who have less to say than Mr. Bright, and to them the sesquipedalia verba are indispensable.”

Legal Verbosity

An old Missouri deed for forty acres of land is a good illustration of legal verbiage. It conveys “all and singular—appurtenances, appendages, advowsons, benefits, commons, curtilages, cow-houses, corncribs, dairies, dovecotes, easements, emoluments, freeholds, features, furniture, fixtures, gardens, homestalls, improvements, immunities, limekilns, meadows, marshes, mines, minerals, orchards, parks, pleasure grounds, pigeon houses, pigstyes, quarries, remainders, reversions, rents, rights, ways, water courses, windmills, together with every other necessary right, immunity, privilege and advantage of whatsoever name, nature or description.”

Prayers Constructed with Elaborate Skill

Dean Goulburn points out that the words employed in the Collects in the Book of Common Prayer are the purest and best English known, “representing to us our language when it was in full vigor and just about reaching its prime;” and that in the arrangement of the words, the balancing of clauses, and the giving unity to the whole composition, the composers and translators have been as happy as in their choice of words. “Let any one,” he adds, “try to write (say) an epitaph with as much unity of design, as much point, as much elegance, and as much brevity as the Collects are written with, and in proportion to the difficulty which he finds in achieving such a task will the elaborate skill with which these prayers have been constructed rise in his estimation.” Dean Goulburn has not exaggerated the rhythmical movement and the singular felicity of expression which mark the Collects; indeed, one has only to compare them with the prayers published on special occasions by modern archbishops, or with any modern forms of prayer, to see their superiority, not only in choice of language, but in compression of thought.

Its

The word ITS, the possessive case of the neuter pronoun it, originally written his, appears neither in Cruden’s nor in Young’s Concordance. It was not known to the translators of King James’ version of the Bible, who had to resort to circumlocution for want of that little pronoun. It has been assumed, therefore, that it is not to be found in the Sacred Scriptures. Nevertheless, it occurs in the fifth verse of the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus, as follows:

“That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap.”

Rough

Dickens, in “All the Year Round,” objects to the “softening of ruffian into rough, which has lately become popular.” Yet the use of the noun rough as applied to a coarse, violent, riotous fellow, a bully, instead of being a recent creation, dates back to the Elizabethan period. In Motley’s “History of the United Netherlands” in the description of the death of Queen Elizabeth (iv. 183), we are told:

“The great queen, moody, despairing, dying, wrapt in profoundest thought, with eyes fixed upon the ground or already gazing into infinity, was besought by the counsellors around her to name the man to whom she chose that the crown should devolve. ‘Not to a Rough,’ said Elizabeth, sententiously and grimly.”

Either and Neither

Richard Grant White, in his “Words and Their Uses,” says, “The pronunciation of either and neither has been much disputed, but, it would seem, needlessly. The best usage is even more controlling in pronunciation than in other departments of language; but usage itself is guided, although not constrained, by analogy. The analogically correct pronunciation of these words is what is called the Irish one, ayther and nayther; the diphthong having the sound it has in a large family of words in which the diphthong ei is the emphasized vowel sound—weight, freight, deign, vein, obeisance, etc. This sound, too, has come down from Anglo-Saxon times, the word in that language being aegper; and there can be no doubt that in this, as in some other respects, the language of the educated Irish Englishman is analogically correct, and in conformity to ancient custom. His pronunciation of certain syllables in ei which have acquired in English usage the sound of e long, as, for example, conceit, receive, and which he pronounces consayt, resayve, is analogically and historically correct. E had of old the sound of a long and i the sound of e, particularly in words which came to us from or through the Norman French. But ayther and nayther, being antiquated and Irish, analogy and the best usage require the common pronunciation eether and neether. For the pronunciation i-ther and ni-ther, with the i long, which is sometimes heard, there is no authority either of analogy or of the best speakers. It is an affectation, and in this country, a copy of a second-rate British affectation. Persons of the best education and the highest social position in England generally say eether and neether.”

If

When Philip of Macedon wrote to the Spartan ephors, “If I enter Laconia I will level Lacedæmon to the ground,” he received for answer the single but significant “If.” This is, perhaps, the finest example of laconic utterance on record, and was, indeed, worthy of the people who gave not only a local habitation but name to pithy and sententious speech.

Words that will not be put Down

Allusions to the introductions and changes of words meet us constantly in our reading. Thus “banter,” “mob,” “bully,” “bubble,” “sham,” “shuffling,” and “palming” were new words in the Tatler’s day, who writes: “I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of ‘mob’ and ‘banter,’ but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me.” Reconnoitre, and other French terms of war, are ridiculed as innovations in the Spectator. Skate was a new word in Swift’s day. “To skate, if you know what that means,” he writes to Stella. “There is a new word coined within a few months,” says Fuller, “called fanatics.” Locke was accused of affectation in using idea instead of notion. “We have been obliged,” says the World, “to adopt the word police from the French.” We read in another number, “I assisted at the birth of that most significant word flirtation, which dropped from the most beautiful mouth in the world, and which has since received the sanction of our most accurate Laureate in one of his comedies.” Ignore was once sacred to grand juries. “In the interest of” has been quoted in our time as a slang phrase just coming into meaning. Bore has wormed itself into polite use within the memory of man. Wrinkle is quietly growing into use in its secondary slang sense. Muff may be read from the pen of a grave lady, writing on a grave subject, to express her serious scorn.

Changes in Pronunciation

Tea was pronounced tay. In Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” we have:

“And thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,

Dost sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea” (tay).

Also, in the same poem:

“Soft yielding minds to water glide away,

And sip, with myths, their elemental tea (tay);”

a rhyme which cannot be accounted for by negligence in Pope, for Pope was never negligent in his rhymes.

A hundred and fifty years ago, are was pronounced air. Note, for example, the following couplet of George Withers:

“Shall my cheeks grow wan with care

’Cause another’s rosy are?” (air).

Pronunciation of Proper Names

The Mexican Indians pronounce the name of their country with the accent on the second syllable (the penult), Mex-i´co. The Dakotas pronounce their name Dak´o-ta. The accent on Wy-o´ming is on the second syllable, though Campbell places it on the first:

“On Susquehanna’s side, fair Wy´oming.”

Goldsmith, in The Traveller, accents the penult in Niagara:

“Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around,

And Niaga´ra stuns with thundering sound.”

Moore, in “The Fudge Family,” conforms to the modern pronunciation:

“Taking instead of rope, pistol, or dagger, a

Desperate dash down the Falls of Niagara.”

In Braham’s song, “The Death of Nelson,” the second syllable is accented:

“’Twas in Trafalgar Bay

We saw the foemen lay.”

But Byron, in “Childe Harold,” lays stress on the last syllable:

“Alike the Armada’s pride and spoils of Trafalgar.”

Repeated in “Don Juan,” i. 4; also in the Prologue to Scott’s Marmion.

In the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Carlisle is accented on the first syllable:

“The sun shines far on Carlisle wall.”

Pope, in his translation of the “Iliad,” says,—

“Then called by thee, the monster Titan came,

Whom gods Briar´eus, men Ægeon name.”

Shakespeare employs the name as a dissyllable:

“He is a gouty Briareus; many hands,

And of no use.”—Troilus and Cressida.

Lady M. Wortley Montagu following Spenser’s “Then came hot Ju´ly boiling like to fire,” accented July on the first syllable:

“The day when hungry friar wishes

He might eat other food than fishes,

Or to explain the date more fully,

The twenty-second instant July.”

Bryant’s Index Expurgatorious

During William C. Bryant’s editorial management of the New York Evening Post, he attached to the walls of the rooms of the sub-editors and reporters a list of prohibited words. It would be a substantial benefit to “English undefiled” if a similar list were adopted and insisted upon by every American newspaper. For our newspapers have a manifest influence in determining the growth and character of our language, and it behooves them to do their best to preserve its purity. But this is a far less easy thing to do than most persons would imagine; and, if forbidden words do occasionally slip into the columns of the newspaper, it must be a blemish such as, in some shape and degree, is supposed to be inseparable from all human productions. Most of the writing on the modern daily newspaper is necessarily the work of that enterprising, wide-a-wake class known as reporters. They “shoot on the wing,” look more to present effect than to classic correctness in their writing, and are, none of them, purists in literary style.

The English language has never had any well defined and universally recognized laws of its own. In its literature it began with the time when every writer was a law unto himself, and it has never fully outgrown that condition. Nor can all the Trenches and Goulds and Grant Whites in existence mould it into any arbitrarily correct shape. It is a mixture of various tongues, and is drawing to itself, every year, a considerable number of additional words from the most diverse and curious sources, and especially from the other leading languages. It may in time—who knows?—become the universal language, the one which is to be the lingual Moses to lead the world out of the wilderness of the curse of Babel, and give to all people a common vehicle of communication. In this view of the case, the liberties taken by the ingenious and inventive newspaper reporter may be regarded as important and useful. The dictionaries wait upon the newspapers, and slowly accept and take to themselves, as English words, the intruders which a year or two before looked so strange in the newspapers, but which custom has rendered not only familiar, but seemingly necessary.

Here is Mr. Bryant’s list of forbidden words:

Aspirant.

Authoress.

“Being” done, built, etc.

Bogus.

Bagging, for “capturing.”

Balance, for “remainder.”

Banquet, for “dinner.”

Collided.

Commenced, for “begun.”

Couple, for “two.”

Debut.

Donate and donation.

Employee.

“Esq.”

Indorse, for “approve.”

Gents, for “gentlemen.”

“Hon.”

Inaugurated, for “begun.”

Initiated, for “begun.”

In our midst.

Ignore.

Jeopardize.

Juvenile, for “boy.”

Jubilant, for “rejoicing.”

Lady, for “wife.”

Lengthy.

Loafer.

Loan or loaned, for “lend” or “lent.”

Located.

Measurable, for “in a measure.”

Ovation.

Obituary, for “death.”

Parties, for “persons.”

Posted for “informed.”

Poetess.

Portion, for “part.”

Predicate.

Progressing.

Pants, for “pantaloons.”

Quite, prefixed to “good,” “large,” etc.

Raid, for “attack.”

Realized, for “obtained.”

Reliable for “trustworthy.”

Repudiate, for “reject” or “disown.”

Retire, for “withdraw.”

Rôle, for “part.”

Rowdies.

Roughs.

A success, for “successful.”

States, for “says.”

Taboo.

Transpire, for “occur.”

To progress.

Tapis.

Talented.

The deceased.

Vicinity, for “neighborhood.”

Wall Street slang generally: “Bulls, bears, long, short, flat, corner, tight, etc.”

To this list might be added without as the synonym of unless,—e. g., “I would not proceed without he agreed;” directly for as soon as,—e. g., “I gave him the letter directly I saw him;” apprehend for think, fancy, believe, imagine; from hence, from thence, from whence; mutual applied to persons (“our mutual friend”) instead of limiting it to actions, sentiments, affections; try and for try to; but that,—e. g., “he never doubts but that he knows their intentions;” widow-lady or widow-woman, though those who use these expressions never say widower-gentleman or widower-man. To the phrase in Mr. Bryant’s list in our midst, which is no better than in our middle, and very different from “in the midst of,” etc., may be added the never ending, still beginning in this connection, instead of “in connection with the foregoing,” etc. Even more careless and more thoughtless on the part of our best writers and speakers—not the vulgarians who use like in place of as—is the constant misuse of the phrase of all others. As Mr. Gould remarks, “How one thing can be of other things, is the question. One thing can be above other things, but it cannot be of them. A thing can be of all things, the most; or of all things, the richest, etc., or, of a class, the best; but the introduction of ‘others’ into the phrases in question excludes from the ‘class’ or from the ‘all,’ the very thing named.” A common blunder is the use of the past for the present tense when the writer or speaker wishes to express an existing fact,—e. g., “the truth was that A struck the first blow,” instead of the truth is. What is the more remarkable is the use of a verb in the past tense with an infinitive in the past tense, which is frequently met with in English literature. For example, Dr. Johnson says, “Had this been the fate of Tasso, he would have been able to have celebrated the condescension of your majesty in noble language.” Alison says, “It was expected that his first act would have been to have sent for Lords Grey and Grenville.” How much more simple as well as more correct to say to celebrate and to send.

Stilted Scientific Phraseology

The “big words” of science are often necessary and useful, expressing what cannot be made clear to the student in any other way, but they are sometimes mere verbiage and mean no more than their common equivalents. It goes without saying that in this latter case the true scholar uses the short, plain word. He who writes in six-syllabled words for the mere pleasure of astounding the multitude is not apt to have very much solid thought to express. Some good advice on this subject, which is worthy the serious attention of other scientific men than students of medicine, was given to the students of the Chicago Medical College by Dr. Edmund Andrews, in an introductory address, from which the following paragraphs are taken:

It is amusing and yet vexatious to see a worthy medical gentleman, whose ordinary conversation is in a simple and good style, suddenly swell up when he writes a medical article. He changes his whole dialect and fills his pages with a jangle of harsh technical terms, not one-third of which are necessary to express his meaning. He tries to be solemn and imposing. For instance, a physician recently devised a new instrument, and wrote it up for a medical journal under the title, “A New Apparatus for the Armamentarium of the Clinician,” by which heading he doubtless hopes to make the fame of his invention “go thundering down the ages,” as Guiteau said.

Another writer wanted to say that cancer is an unnatural growth of epithelium. He took a big breath and spouted the following: “Carcinoma arises from any subepithelial proliferation by which epithelial cells are isolated and made to grow abnormally.” Now, then, you know all about cancer.

A writer on insanity illuminates the subject as follows: “The prodromic delirium is a quasi-paranoiac psychosis in a degenerate subject. A psychosis of exhaustion being practically a condition of syncope.”

The following is an effort to say that certain microbes produce the poison of erysipelas: “The streptococcus erysipelatosus proliferating in the interspaces of the connective tissue is the etiologic factor in the secretion of the erysipelatous toxins.”

A large cancer of the liver was found at a postmortem examination and reported about as follows: “A colossal carcinomatous degeneration of the hepatic mechanism.”

Still, the man of big swelling words is not always up in the clouds. If called to a case of accident, he examines the injury, and may inform the family in quite a simple and dignified manner that their father was thrown sidewise from his carriage breaking his leg and putting his ankle out of joint, but if he writes out the case for his medical journal, he gets up straightway on his stilts and says, “The patient was projected transversely from his vehicle, fracturing the tibia and fibula and luxating the tibio-tarsal articulation.”

Your man of solemn speech is peculiar. He does not keep a set of instruments—not he—he has an armamentarium. His catheters never have a hole or an eye in them, but always a fenestrum. In gunshot injuries a bullet never makes a hole in his patient, but only a perforation. He does not disinfect his armamentarium by boiling, but by submerging it in water elevated to the temperature of ebullition. He never distinguishes one disease from another, but always differentiates or diagnosticates it. His patient’s mouth is an oral cavity. His jaw is a maxilla. His brain is a cerebrum, his hip-joint is a coxo-femoral articulation. If his eyelids are adherent, it is a case of ankylosymblepharon. If he discovers wrinkles on the skin, they are corrugations or else rugosities. He never sees any bleeding, but only hemorrhage or sanguineous effusion. He does not examine a limb by touch or by handling—he palpates or manipulates it. If he finds it hopelessly diseased he does not cut it off—that is undignified. He gets out his armamentarium and amputates it.

Metaphorical Conceits

A Chicago critic addicted to figurative fancies was very much affected by the play of Arrah na Pogue. “There are passages in it,” he writes, “which thunder at the heart like the booming of the Atlantic tide, and drown it in floods of bitter tears.” This idea of being drowned in floods of tears, by the way, has been always very popular with struggling muses who long to launch into bolder strains. Lee describes a young lady with an exuberance of tears:

“I found her on the floor

In all the storm of grief, yet beautiful;

Pouring forth tears at such a lavish rate

That, were the world on fire, they might have drowned

The wrath of heaven, and quenched the mighty ruin.”

Cowley makes a sighing lover sigh in an excessively gusty manner:

“By every wind that comes this way,

Send me at least a sigh or two,

Such and so many I’ll repay

As shall themselves make winds to get to you.”

But Shakespeare, who always surpasses, unites the tears and sighs, and makes a perfect rain tempest:

“Aumerle, thou weepest, my tender-hearted cousin!

We’ll make foul-weather with despised tears;

Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn,

And make a dearth in this revolting land.”

The play mentioned by a Chicago critic could hardly have been as affecting as the oratory of a preacher who is described by an admiring editor. “I have,” he says, “repeatedly heard the most famous men in America, but there are times when the flame of his pathos licks the everlasting hills with a roar that moves your soul to depths fathomed by few other men.” Evidently this preacher should go to Congress; he is imbued with the spirit of oratory, and would be an antidote, on the principle of “similia similibus curantur,” for a politician who, in announcing himself a candidate for Congress, remarked in his card: “I am an orator, and yearn to roar in the capitol, and clap my wings like Shakespeare’s rooster, or the eagle on his celestial cliff, gazing at the prey my arrows did slay.”

An excellent specimen of hyperbole is mentioned by a Houston (Maine) paper, which says, on the question of a new town-hall, that one gentleman urged the measure in order, as he expressed it, “that the young men of our town may have a suitable place to assemble, and be so imbued with the spirit of liberty and patriotism that every hair of their head will be a liberty-pole with the star-spangled banner floating from it.”

A Leavenworth paper thus confusedly mixed things animate and inanimate: “The fall of corruption has been dispelled, and the wheels of the State government will no longer be trammelled by sharks that have beset the public prosperity like locusts.” And a Nebraska paper, in a fervent article upon the report of a legislative committee, said, “The apple of discord is now fairly in our midst, and if not nipped in the bud it will burst forth in a conflagration which will deluge society in an earthquake of bloody apprehension.”

In the words of an English poet is this rather too exaggerated hyperbole:

“Those overwhelming armies whose command

Said to one empire, ‘Fall,’ another, ‘Stand,’

Whose rear lay wrapped in night while breaking dawn

Roused the broad front and called the battle on.”

But these metaphorical rhapsodies were eclipsed soon after our Civil War by The Crescent Monthly in an article on Lee’s surrender. The writer thus laughs to scorn all competitors:

“The supreme hour has now come when, from across Fame’s burning ecliptic, where it had traced in flaming sheen its luminous path of glory, the proud Aldebaran of Southern hope, in all the splendors of its express, Hyades brightness, should sink to rest behind lurid war-clouds, in the fateful western heaven, there to bring out on death’s dark canopy the immortal lights of immortal deeds, and spirits great and glorious shining forever down upon a cause in darkness, like the glittering hosts upon a world in night.”

This gushing sentence comes from a novel called “Heart or Head:”

“And she, leaning on his strong mind, and giving up her whole soul to him, was so happy in this spoiling of herself, so glad to be thus robbed, offering him the rich milk of love in a full udder of trust, and lowing for him to come and take it!”

A grotesque simile is sometimes very expressive. We may mention those of Daniel Webster, who likened the word “would,” in Rufus Choate’s handwriting, to a small gridiron struck by lightning; of a sailor, who likened a gentleman whose face was covered with whiskers up to his very eyes, to a rat peeping out of a bunch of oakum; of a Western reporter who, in a weather item on a cold day, said that the sun’s rays in the effort to thaw the ice were as futile as the dull reflex of a painted yellow dog; and of a conductor who, in a discussion as to speed, said that the last time he ran his engine from Syracuse the telegraph poles on the side looked like a fine-tooth comb.

Similes of a like character are often heard among the common people, and are supposed to be the peculiar property of Western orators. Instances: As sharp as the little end of nothing; big as all out-doors; it strikes me like a thousand of bricks; slick as grease, or as greased lightning; melancholy as a Quaker meeting by moonlight; flat as a flounder; quick as a wink; not enough to make gruel for a sick grasshopper; not clothes enough to wad a gun; as limp and limber as an india-rubber stove-pipe; uneasy as a cat in a strange garret; not strong enough to haul a broiled codfish off a gridiron; after you like a rat-terrier after a chipmunk squirrel; useless as whistling psalms to a dead horse; no more than a grasshopper wants knee-buckles; no more than a frog wants an apron; don’t make the difference of the shake of a frog’s tail; soul bobbing up and down in the bosom like a crazy porpoise in a pond of red-hot grease; enthusiasm boils over like a bottle of ginger-pop; as impossible to penetrate his head as to bore through Mont Blanc with a boiled carrot; as impossible as to ladle the ocean dry with a clam-shell, or suck the Gulf of Mexico through a goose-quill; or to stuff butter in a wild-cat with a hot awl; or for a shad to swim up a shad-pole with a fresh mackerel under each arm; or for a cat to run up a stove-pipe with a teasel tied to his tail; or for a man to lift himself over a fence by the strap of his boots. A simile resembling these was used by Lady Montague when, getting impatient in a discussion with Fox, she told him she did not care three skips of a louse for him, to which he replied in a few minutes with the following:

“Lady Montague told me, and in her own house,

‘I do not care for you three skips of a louse.’

I forgive her, for women, however well-bred,

Will still talk of that which runs most in their head.”

There is another class of similes scarcely as pertinent, as, for instance: straight as a ram’s horn; it will melt in your mouth like a red-hot brickbat; talk to him like a Dutch uncle; smiling as a basket of chips; odd as Dick’s hatband; happy as a clam at high water; quicker than you can say Jack Robinson; like all possessed; like fury; like blazes; like all natur’; like all sixty; as quick as anything; mad as hops; mad as Halifax; sleep like a top; run like thunder; deader than a door-nail. Thunder is a very accommodating word. A person may be told to go to thunder, or may be thundering proud, or thundering sensible, or thundering good-looking, or thundering smart, or thundering mean, or thundering anything; and anything may be likened to thunder. The epitaph quoted from a tombstone in Vermont over a man’s two wives was quite proper, but was rendered ludicrous by this common use of the word:

“This double call is loud to all,

Let none surprise or wonder;

But to the youth it speaks a truth

In accents loud as thunder.”

“Dead as a door-nail” would not seem to be very expressive, and yet it has long been used. In “Henry IV.” we read the following dialogue:

“Falstaff.—What! is the old king dead?

Pistol.—As nail in door.”

Dickens, in his “Christmas Carol,” wonders why Scrooge should be dead as a door-nail rather than any other kind of nail. Probably the explanation is in the fact that proverbs are often pointed by alliteration, and that door-nail gratifies this conceit while any other nail would not.

Guess

The word guess, popularly supposed to be a Yankeeism, is as old as the English language, not only in its true and specified sense, but in use for “think” or “believe.” Wycliffe, in his translation of the Bible, says, “To whom shall I gesse this generacion lyk?” Chaucer frequently uses it in the modern sense, as, for example, in describing Emelie in “The Knighte’s Tale:”

“Hire yelwe here was broided in a tresse

Behind hire back, a yerde long, I gesse.”

Spenser uses it in a similar way in the “Fairie Queene.” Bishop Jewell, Bishop Hale, John Locke, and other sixteenth century writers, left well known passages in which it occurs. Shakespeare, as every student of the great dramatist knows, used it repeatedly. Examples of such use may also be found in some modern English novels.

A Message from England

Beyond the vague Atlantic deep,

Far as the farthest prairies sweep,

Where mountain wastes the sense appal,

Where burns the radiant Western Fall,

One duty lies on old and young—

With filial piety to guard,

As on its greenest native sward,

The glory of the English tongue!

That ample speech, that subtle speech,

Apt for the needs of all and each,

Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend,

Wherever human feelings tend,

Preserve its force, expand its powers,

And through the maze of civil life,

In letters, commerce, e’en in strife,

Remember, it is yours and ours!

—Richard Monckton Milnes.