Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Karl Hildebrand.

[2] ἀγαπάω and φιλέω.

[3] “Companion to the Revised Version of the English New Testament,” by Alexander Roberts, D.D.

[4] “University Sermons,” by J. H. Newman.

[5] We have heard of an Englishman’s deploring with the deepest pathos his having been named “James,” asserting that it had to some extent made a flunkey of his very soul, against his will.

[6] “Literature and Life,” by Edwin P. Whipple.

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[CHAPTER II.]
THE MORALITY IN WORDS.

Genus dicendi imitatur publicos mores.... Non potest alius esse ingenio, alius animo 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 accounts, 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, 20.

The fact that a man’s language is a part of his character,—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 disposition and temper; and not without reason did the Greeks teach that as a man lived so would he speak.” Profert enim mores plerumque oratio, et animi secreta detegit. Nec sine causa Græci prodiderunt, ut vivat, quemque etiam dicere. 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 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 frequently 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 hypocritical, 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 mysterious way,—by some impalpable element which we instinctively detect, but cannot point out to others,—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 hollowness 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 biography! 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 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 thousand distinct terms,—each man selects his own favorite expressions, his own forms of syntax, by a peculiar law which is part of the essential difference between him and all other men; and in the verbal stock in trade of each individual 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 private history. How often is a man’s character revealed by the adjectives he uses! Like the inscriptions on a thermometer, these words of themselves reveal the temperament. The conscientious man weighs his words as in a hair-balance; the boaster and the enthusiast employ extreme phrases, as if there were no degree but the superlative. 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, emphatic 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 invariably 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 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, delusions, 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 flaming Kremlin, he seemed unconscious that he was himself a created and responsible being.

An author’s style is an open window through which we can look in upon him, and estimate his character. The cunning reader reads between the lines, and finds out secrets about the writer, as if he were overhearing his soliloquies. He marks the pet phrase or epithet, draws conclusions from asseveration and emphasis, notes the half-perceptible sneer or insinuation, detects the secret misery that is veiled by a jest, and learns the writer’s idiosyncrasies even when he tries hardest to mask them. We know a passage from Sir Thomas Browne, as we know a Rembrandt or a Dürer. Macaulay is betrayed by his antitheses, and Cicero by his esse videatur.

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 cumbrous, 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 antithetical 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 furnish 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.” It has been said of Gibbon’s style that it was one in which it was impossible to speak the truth.

A writer in the “Edinburgh Review” observes that the statement that a man’s language is part of his character, holds true, not only in regard to the usage of certain shibboleths of a party, whether in religion or politics, but also in regard to a general vocabulary. “There is a school vocabulary and a college vocabulary; certain phrases brought home to astound and perplex the uninitiated, and passing now and then into general currency. In this age of examinations,—army, navy, civil-service, and middle-class,—the verb ‘to pluck’ is well-nigh incorporated with the vernacular, and must take its place in dictionaries. The sportsman Nimrod has his esoteric vocabulary, and so has likewise the angler Walton. The man of the world has his own set of phrases, understood and recognized by the fraternity; and so has the gourmand; and so also has the fancier of wines, who, in opposition to one of the laws of nature, speaks to you of wine, a fluid, as being ‘dry.’ The connoisseur in painting tells you also of ‘dryness’ in a picture, and he uses other terms which seem as if they had been invented to puzzle the uninitiated. Your favorite landscape may have ‘tones’ in it, as well as your violin. With shoulders that are ‘broad,’ and with cloth that is ‘broad’ covering those broad shoulders, you stand and observe that a painting is ‘broad.’ You sit down at dinner with a ‘delicious bit’ of venison before you on the table, and looking up see a ‘delicious bit’ of Watteau or Wouvermans before you on the wall.”

As with individuals, so with nations: the language of a people is often a moral barometer, which marks with marvellous 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 reasonings, in the worlds of matter and of mind. “As our material condition varies, as our ways of life, our institutions, 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 pictures, 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 every one’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 expanded and contracted in precise adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those who use it; it is enriched or impoverished, in every part, along with the enrichment or impoverishment of their minds.”[7] Every race has its own organic growth, its own characteristic ideas and opinions, which are impressed on its political constitution, its legislation, its manners and its customs, its modes of religious worship; and the expression of all these peculiarities 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 subtle to discourse, its language will exhibit all these qualities; while, on the other hand, if it is frivolous and 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 betray themselves in its speech, as truly as would the opposite 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 comparatively 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 objects; 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 pellegrino, “foreign,” as a synonym 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 man who murders in secret is “a brave man,” bravo; that a virtuoso, or “virtuous man,” is one who is accomplished in music, painting, and sculpture,—arts which should be the mere embroidery, and not the web and woof, of a nation’s life; that, in their magnificent indigence, they call a cottage with three or four acres of land un podere, “a power”; that they term every house with a large door un palazzo, “a palace,” a lamb’s fry una cosa stupenda, “a stupendous thing,” and that a message sent by a footman to his tailor through a scullion is una ambasciata, “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 emancipated, 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.”[8]

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 “temperate” 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 appellation, consequently they do not possess it. Again, the French boast that they have no such word as “bribe,” as if this implied their exemption from that sin; and such, indeed, 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 offense, 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 people 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 consciousness? 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 condemn 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 language has no word equivalent to “listener”? Is it not a noteworthy circumstance, shedding light upon national character, that among thirty-seven millions of talkers, no provision, except the awkward paraphrase, celui qui écoute, “he who hears,” should have been made for hearers? Is there any other explanation of this blank than the supposition that every Frenchman talks from the pure love of talking, and not to be heard; that, reversing the proverb, he believes that silence is silver, but talking is golden; and that, not caring whether he is listened to or not, he has never recognized that he has no name for the person to whom he chatters? Again, is it not remarkable that, among the French, bonhomme, “a good man,” is a term of contempt; that the fearful Hebrew word, “gehenna,” has been condensed into gêne, and means only a petty annoyance; and that honnêteté, which once meant honesty, now means only civility? It was in the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV that the word honnête exchanged its primitive for its present meaning. Till then, according to good authority, when a man’s descent was said to be honnête, he was complimented on the virtuousness 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 belonged to the middle ranks of society, not a suggestion that they were plebeians. Again, how significant is the fact that the French has 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 spirituel 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 brillant, “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 Cooper, the great British surgeon, on visiting the French capital, was 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 expressions are somewhat expressive of the respective moods of the two nations. The two phrases are, indeed, 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 station, and who would hardly object to being fired off 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 Right!” 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 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 character in the two most civilized nations of antiquity is impressed 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,—which surpasses every other alike in its metaphysical subtlety, its wealth of inflections, and its capacity for rendering the minutest and most delicate shades of meaning,—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, and whose words are always Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas, coerces rather than simply syllables the thought. “Greek,” says Henry Nelson Coleridge, “the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of indefatigable strength; with the complication and distinctness of nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind like English; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer, the gloom and intensity of Æschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato, not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardors under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes himself. And Latin,—the voice of Empire and of Law, of War and of the State,—the best language for the measured research of History, and the indignant declamation of moral satire; rigid in its constructions, parsimonious in its synonyms; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit of nations, and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.”

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. Cicero, or some other Latin writer, finds an argument to show that the intellectual character of the Romans was higher than that of the Greeks, in the fact that the word convivium means “a living together,” while the corresponding Greek term, συμπόσιον, means “a drinking together.” 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 corrupt, their words degenerated into miserable and meaningless counters, without intrinsic value, and serving only as a conventional medium of exchange. It has been said truly that “in the pedantry of Statius, in the puerility of Martial, in the conceits of Seneca, in the poets who would go into emulous raptures 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.”

The climate of a country, as well as the mind and character of its people, is clearly revealed in its speech. The air men breathe, the temperature in which they live, and the natural scenery amid which they pass their lives, acting incessantly upon body and mind, and especially upon the organs of speech, impart to them a soft or a harsh expression. The languages of the South, as we should expect them to be, “are limpid, euphonic, and harmonious, as though they had received an impress from the transparency of their heaven, and the soft sweet sounds of the winds that sigh among the woods. On the other hand, in the hirrients and gutturals, the burr and roughness of the Northern tongues, we catch an echo of the breakers bursting on their crags, and the crashing of the pine branch over the cataract.” The idiom of Sybaris cannot be that of Sparta. The Attic Greek was softer than the Doric, the dialect of the mountains; the Ionic, spoken in the voluptuous regions of Asia Minor, was softer and more sinuous than the Attic. The Anglo-Saxon, the language of a people conversant chiefly with gloomy forests and stormy seas, and prone to silence, was naturally harsh and monosyllabic. The roving sea-king of Scandinavia, cradled on the ocean and rocked by its storms, could no more speak in the soft and melting accents of a Southern tongue than the screaming eagle could utter the liquid melody of a nightingale’s song.

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, like 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 contrary, the Switzers (who sent word to the king of France not to send them an ambassador with stores of words, but a treasurer with plenty of money) count all words quite out which are not straight on, have an antipathy against eloquent language, the flowers of rhetoric being as offensive 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 bluntness their best eloquence, love to be accosted in their own kind.”

It is in the idioms of a people, its peculiar turns of expression, and the modifications of meaning which its borrowed words have undergone, that its distinctive genius is most strikingly seen. The forms of salutation used by different nations are saturated with their idiosyncrasies, and of themselves alone essentially reveal their respective characters. How clearly is the innermost distinction between the Greek mind and the Hebrew brought out in their respective salutations, “Rejoice!” and “Peace!” 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 virtue was manliness, and whose value was measured by his valor,—was Salve! Vale! that is, “Be well,” “Be strong.” In the expression, “If God will 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 perspiration is essential to health, and you are asked, “How do you perspire?” The Italian asks, Come sta? literally, “How does he stand?” an expression originally referring to the standing of the Lombard merchants in the market place, and which seems to indicate that one’s well-being or health depends on his business prosperity. Some writers, however, have regarded the word “stand” in this formula as meaning no more than “exist”; mere life itself, in the land of far niente, being a blessing. The Genoese, a trading people, and at one time the bankers of Europe, used in former days to say, Sanita e guadagno, or “Health and gain!” a phrase in which the ideals of the countrymen of Columbus are tersely summed up. The dreamy, meditative German, dwelling amid smoke and abstractions, salutes you with the vague, impersonal, metaphysical Wie gehts?—“How goes it?” Another salutation which he uses is, Wie befinden sie sich?—“How do you find yourself?” A born philosopher, he is so absent-minded, so lost in thought and clouds of tobacco smoke, 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, Hoe vaart’s-ge? “How do you go?” an expression eminently characteristic of a trading, travelling people, devoted to business, and devoid of sentiment. The thoughtful Swede inquires, “How do you think?” They also inquire, Hur mär ni?—literally “How can you?” that is, “Are you strong?” The lively, restless, vivacious Frenchman, who lives in other people’s eyes, and is more anxious about appearances than about realities,—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?” In these few words we have the pith and essence, the very soul, of the French character. Externals, the shapes and shows of things,—for what else could we expect a people to be solicitous, who are born actors, and who live, to a great extent, for stage effect; who unite so much outward refinement with so much inward coarseness; who have an exquisite taste for the ornamental, and an almost savage ignorance of the comfortable; who invented, as Emerson says, the dickey, but left it to the English to add the shirt? 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 cordiality. “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 impressionableness of feeling, his rollicking, daredevil, hyperbole-loving enthusiasm. Finally, of all the national forms of salutation, the most signally characteristic,—the one which reveals the very core, the inmost “heart of heart” of a people,—is the Englishman’s “How do you do?” In these four little monosyllables the activity, the intense practicality of the Englishman, the very quintessence of his character, 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 completely 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 virtues have not so much as a name. Languages may obviously do injury to morals and religion by their equivocation; by false accessories, inseparable from the principal idea; and by their poverty.” It is a striking fact, noted by an English traveller, that the native language of Van Dieman’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 obstacles 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 faculties, whose very existence their language, and consequently the conscious self-knowledge of the people, do not recognize. Equally vain is it to reprehend vices which have no name by which they can be described and denounced, as things to be loathed and shunned. Hence, in translating the Bible into the languages of savage nations, the translators have been compelled to employ merely provisional phrases, until they could develop a dialect fitted to convey moral as well as intellectual truth. It is said that the Ethiopians, having but one word for “person” and “nature,” could not apprehend the doctrine of the union of Christ’s two natures in one single person. There are languages of considerable cultivation in which it is not easy to find a term for the Supreme Being. Seneca wrote a treatise on “Providence,” which had not even a name at Rome in the time of Cicero. It is a curious fact that the English language, rich as it is in words to express the most complex religious ideas, as well as in terms characterizing vices and crimes, had until about two centuries ago no word for “selfishness,” the root of all vices, nor any single word for “suicide.” The Greeks and Romans had a clear conception of a moral ideal, but the Christian idea of “sin” was utterly unknown to the Pagan mind. Vice they regarded 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 courage 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 strikingly 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 employ 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 villany, that cannot otherwise be reached by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric of scorn, 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 certain 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 popular 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 dominate over names, and are not at the mercy of a shifting vocabulary, yet in the world of ideas,—of history, philosophy, ethics and poetry,—words triumph over things, are even equivalent to things, and are as truly the living organism 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 we often stop in the midst of an assertion, an exclamation, or a request, startled by the form it assumes in words. Thus, in Shakespeare, King John says to Hubert, who pleaded his sovereign’s order for putting the young prince to death, that if, instead 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 as

“Faults in the life breed errors in the brain,

And these reciprocally those again,”

so the sentiments we cherish mould our language, and our words react upon our opinions and feelings. Let a man go into a foreign country, give up his own language, and adopt another, and he will gradually and unconsciously change his opinions, too. He will neither be able to express his old ideas adequately in the new words, nor to prevent the new words of themselves putting new ideas in his brain. Who has failed to notice that the opinion we entertain of an object does not more powerfully influence the mind in applying to it a name or an 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 thunder,” 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 technical terms we employ. Fiery words, it has been truly said, 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. In personal quarrels, it is the stimulus men give themselves by stinging words that impels them to violent deeds; and in argumentative discussions it is the positive affirmation and reaffirmation of our views which, more than the reasons we give, deepen our convictions. 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 are words which have exercised a more iron rule, swayed with a more despotic power, than Cæsar or the Russian 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 protracted opposition in France to the Newtonian theory arose chiefly from the influence of the word “attraction”; the contemptuous misnomer, “Gothic,” applied to northern mediæval architecture, perpetuated the dislike with which it was regarded; and the introduction of the term “landed proprietor” into Bengal caused a disorganization of society which had never been caused by its most barbarous invaders.

Macaulay, in his “History of England,” mentions a circumstance 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 reciprocal 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 judgment.” 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 Austerlitz and Marengo, thousands have rushed to a forlorn hope, and met death at the cannon’s mouth.

When Haydon’s picture of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem was exhibited in London in 1820, Mrs. Siddons, the famous actress, entering the exhibition room, said: “The paleness of your Christ gives it a supernatural look.” This, says the painter, settled its success. There is great value in the selection of terms; many a man’s fortune has been made by a happy phrase. Thousands thronged to see the great work with “a supernatural look.”

South, in his eloquent sermons on “The Fatal Imposture and Force of Words,” observes that any one 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 whistle them backward and forward, upward and downward, till he is weary; and get upon their backs when he is so. When Cæsar’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 shameful, 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 carried 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 such unrighteous gains; the moment they were touched, they were religiously given away. But then, we must add, the gift was always made to some other winner of her own sex. By carefully avoiding the words “interchange 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 ministry; yet their preachers must be warmed, fed and clothed by “donation parties”; reminding one of the snob gentleman in Molière, 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 shibboleth or battle cry, to be dinned continually in their ears. Persons familiar with British history will remember certain 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 revolution than the most perfect syllogism that was ever constructed 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 blow it up.” “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” “No More Compromise,” “The Higher Law,” “The Irrepressible Conflict,” “Squatter Sovereignty,” and other similar phrases, have roused and moved the public mind as much as the pulpit and the press.

Gouverneur 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 orator 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 kingdom.” 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 American (?) 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 ‘Nirvâna.’ 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 “transubstantiation,” the error which had so long been held in solution was precipitated, and became henceforth a fixed and influential 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 advancing or retarding the growth of certain religious sects at this day? Many of even the most “advanced thinkers,” who reject the supernatural element of the Bible, put all religions upon the same level, and deem Shakespeare 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 “lexical 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 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 “sovereign sway and masterdom” over words, are often bewitched and led captive by them. Thus Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth were bent on establishing their Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, not because they knew anything of that locality, but because Susquehanna 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 convicted of misrepresentation, will sooner stick to the lie than part with a jeu d’esprit, or forego a verbal felicity. Thus Byron, alluding to Keats’s death, which was supposed to have been caused by Gifford’s savage criticism in the “Quarterly,” said:

“Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle,

Should let itself be snuffed out by an article!”

Though he was afterward 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 laughter 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, perhaps, they imagine that a certain degree of distension of the intellectual stomach is required to enable it to act with its full powers,—just as some of the Russian peasantry mix sawdust with the train oil they drink, or as hay and straw, as well as corn, are given to horses, 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, observe 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 punished 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. The apostle James was so impressed with the significance of speech that he regarded it as an unerring sign of character. “If any man offend not in word,” he declares, “the same is a perfect man, and able 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 misery.” So, he adds, there are words of calumny and slander, apparently insignificant, yet so venomous and deadly that they not only inflame hearts and fever human existence, but poison human society at the very fountain springs of life. It was said with the deepest feeling of the utterers 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 dust 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

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.”

How often have thoughtless words set empires ablaze, and kindled furious wars among nations! 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 Chancellor 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 speechifying. It’s words that make another man’s mare go your road. Augh! that must have been a clever man as invented 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 taskmasters. 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 opposites. “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.”[9] 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 symbols 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 men with fancies and paradoxes, even in spite of nature and experience.”[10]

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 naïveté 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 cantum 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 instructive 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 estimate 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 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 national deterioration, by perversions of the customary meanings 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 disburdening 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.

The use of classical names for vices has done no little harm to the public morals. We may say of these names, what Burke said with doubtful correctness of vices themselves, that “they lose half their deformity by losing all their grossness.” If any person is in doubt about the moral quality of an act, let him characterize it in plain Saxon, and he will see it in its true colors.

Some time ago a Wisconsin clergyman, being detected in stealing books from a bookstore, confessed the truth, 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 synonym 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 classes, 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 indiscriminately 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 lexicographer would be puzzled to tell its meaning. Not only does every person of decent exterior and deportment assume 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 society have so far disappeared that even the porter who lounges in 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 gentleman.” 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 gentleman 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 gentlemen,” and of “dying like gentlemen,”—that most persons will think it is quite time for the abolition of that heartless conventionality, that pretentious cheat and barbarian, 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 “gentleman” 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 another, he was quietly shot down, and there was the last of it.” The gentle Isaiah Rynders, who acted as marshal at the time the pirate Hicks was executed in New York, had doubtless similar notions of gentility; for, after conversing a moment with the culprit, he said to the bystanders: “I asked the gentlemen if he desired to address the audience, but he declined.” In a similar spirit Booth, the assassin of Lincoln, 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. When the Duke of Saxe-Weimar 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 meanness, how convenient to dignify it by the terms “economy” and “wise forecast of the future”! 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 does not possess, in the expectation of a speedy fall, who would be thunderstruck if told that, while considering himself only a shrewd speculator, he is, 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 offence 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 traitors. So Pistol objected to the odious word “steal,”—“convey the wise it call.” There are multitudes of persons who can sit for hours at a festive table, gorging themselves, Gargantua-like, “with links and chitterlings,” and guzzling whole bottles of champagne, under the impression 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 understand how much significance lies in certain shades of expression. It is told of Robins, the famous London auctioneer, who in selling his wares revelled in an oriental 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 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, gentlemen, that there are two drawbacks to this splendid property,—the litter of the rose leaves and the noise of the nightingales.”

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 systematically applied to all that is contemptible and vile, who can doubt that these high qualities themselves will ultimately share in the debasement to which their proper names are subjected? Who does not see how vast a difference it must make in our estimate of any species of wickedness, whether we are wont to designate it, and to hear it designated, by some word which brings out its hatefulness, or by one which palliates and glosses over its foulness and deformity? How much better to characterize an ugly thing by an ugly word, that 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 libertinism, were far less hurtful than the ceremonious delicacy which has taught men to abuse each other with the utmost 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 commits 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,” says 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 employed, 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 government 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 reply would not have been inappropriate from the master of a plantation, or the captain of a coolie ship: “We never do; as for myself, I regard my work people 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 the horse 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 blossom 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 spectrum of imagination, have all been building, as it were, the molecules of speech into their service; and if you heedlessly 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 sentiment thus turned adrift is less of a mere personal characteristic, and has been gathering and shaping its elements from ages of various affection and experience, does it become 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. Plunge your hand into the sea, and you raise its level, however imperceptibly, at the other side of the globe. In like manner, 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 denunciations 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.”