Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

DEGRADATION OF WORDS.

Another striking characteristic of words is their tendency to contract in form and degenerate in meaning. Sometimes they are ennobled and purified in signification; but more frequently they deteriorate, and from an honorable fall into a dishonorable meaning. I will first note a few examples of the former:—“Humility,” with the Greeks and Romans, meant meanness of spirit; “Paradise,” in oriental 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 signified only one of the servile classes; and “villain” or “villein,” meant peasant,—the serf who, under the feudal system, was adscriptus glebæ. The scorn of the landholders, 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 synonym 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 corresponding 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 following 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 Shakespeare:

“Thou hast no speculation in those eyes.”

Next it was metaphorically transferred to mental vision, and finally denoted, without a metaphor, the reflections and theories of philosophers. From the domain of philosophy it has finally travelled downward 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 Wedgewood, is seen in the notion of seizing, expressed by the Italian, graffiare, Welsh, craff, a hook, brace, holdfast. The term is then applied to seizing with the mind, as in the Latin term “apprehend,” “comprehend,” from prehendere, to seize in a material way. “Cunning” once conveyed no idea of sinister or crooked wisdom. “The three Persons of the Trinity,” says a reverent writer of the fifteenth century, “are of equal cunning.” 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, unsteady, and reckless in their habits, the term has degenerated 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 Wicliffe’s 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 kindnesses done them in sand, the word “retaliate” is applied only to offences or indignities, and never to favors. The word “resent,” to feel in return, has undergone a similar deterioration. A Frenchman would say, “Il ‘ressentit’ une vive douleur,” for “He felt acute pain”; whereas we use the word only to express the sentiment of anger.

So “animosity,” which etymologically means only spiritedness, is now applied to only one kind of vigor and activity, 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 “defalcation in the 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 “critic” and “criticise” are commonly associated with a carping, fault-finding spirit. “Lust” has undergone a signal deterioration. In Chaucer it is used both as a noun and a verb, and signifies wish, desire, pleasure, enjoyment, without any evil connotation. “Parson” (persona ecclesiæ) had originally no undertone of contempt. In the eighteenth century 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. Shakespeare did not mean to disparage 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, and 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 successors, 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 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 mediæval 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 synonym for stupidity and obstinate dulness, was a fate of which even his bitterest enemies could never have dreamed.