Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

FOOTNOTES:

[7] “Language and the Study of Language,” by W. D. Whitney.

[8] “Lectures on the English Language.”

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

[10] South’s Sermons.

---

[CHAPTER III.]
GRAND WORDS.

The fool hath planted his memory with an army of words.—Shakespeare.

In the commerce of speech use only coin of gold and silver.... Be profound with clear terms, and not with obscure terms.—Joubert.

The more you have studied foreign languages, the more you will be disposed to keep Ollendorff in the background; the proper result of such acquirements is visible in a finer ear for words.—T. W. Higginson.

Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. Don’t whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want to tingle.—H. W. Beecher.

It is a trite remark that words are the representatives of things and thoughts, as coin represents wealth. You carry in your pocket a doubloon or a dollar, stamped by the king or state, and you are the virtual owner of whatever it will purchase. But who affixes the stamp upon a word? No prince or potentate was ever strong enough to make or unmake a single word. Cæsar confessed that with all his power he could not do it, and Claudius could not introduce even a new letter. He attempted to introduce the consonant V, as distinct from U, the Roman alphabet having but one character for both; but he could not make his subjects accept the new letter, though he could kill or plunder them at pleasure. Cicero tried his hand at word-coining; but though he proved a skilful mint-master, and struck some admirable trial pieces, which were absolutely needed to facilitate mental exchanges, yet they did not gain circulation, and were thrown back upon his hands. But that which defied the power of Cæsar and of Cicero does not transcend the ability of many writers of our own day, some of whom are adepts in the art of word-coining, and are daily minting terms and phrases which must make even Noah Webster, boundless as was his charity for new words, turn in his grave. It is doubtful, however, whether these persons do so much damage to our noble English language as those who vulgarize it by the use of penny-a-liner phrases. There is a large and growing class of speakers and writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who, apparently despising the homely but terse and telling words of their mother tongue, never use a Saxon term, if they can find what Lord Brougham calls a “long-tailed word in ’osity or ’ation” to do its work.

What is the cause of this? Is it the extraordinary, not to say excessive, attention now given by persons of all ages to foreign languages, to the neglect of our own? Is it the comparative inattention given to correct diction by the teachers in the schools of to-day; or is it because the favorite books of the young are sensational stories, made pungent, and, in a sense, natural, through the lavish use of all the colloquialisms and vulgarisms of low life? Shall we believe that it is because there is little individuality and independence in these days, that the words of so few persons are flavored with their idiosyncrasies; that it is from conscious poverty of thought that they try to trick out their ideas in glittering words and phrases, just as, by means of high-heeled boots, a laced coat, and a long feather, a fellow with a little soul and a weak body might try to pass muster as a bold grenadier? Or is it because of the prevalent mania for the sensational,—the craving for novelty and excitement, which is almost universal in these days,—that so many persons make sense subservient to sound, and avoid calling things by their proper names? Or, finally, to take a more charitable view of the case, is it because it is impossible for inaccurate minds to hit the exact truth, and describe a thing just as they have seen it,—to express degrees of feeling, to observe measures and proportions, and define a sensation as it was felt? Was Talleyrand wrong when he said that language was given to man to conceal his thought; and was it really given to hide his want of thought? Is it, indeed, the main object of expression to convey the smallest possible amount of meaning with the greatest possible amount of appearance of meaning; and, since nobody can be “so wise as Thurlow looked,” to look as wise as Thurlow while uttering the veriest truisms?

Be all this as it may, in nothing else is the lack of simplicity, which is so characteristic of our times, more marked than in the prevailing forms of expression. “The curse and the peril of language in our day, and particularly in this country,” says an American critic, who may, perhaps, croak at times, but who has done much good service as a literary policeman in the repression of verbal licentiousness, “is that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of being content to use it well, according to their honest ignorance, use it ill, according to their affected knowledge; who, being vulgar, would seem elegant; who, being empty, would seem full; who make up in pretence what they lack in reality; and whose little thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound like fire-crackers in an empty barrel.” In the estimation of many writers at the present day, the great, crowning vice in the use of words is, apparently, to employ plain, straightforward English. The simple Saxon is not good enough for their purposes, and so they array their ideas in “big, dictionary words,” derived from the Latin, and load their style with expletives as tasteless as the streamers of tattered finery that flutter about the person of a dilapidated belle. The “high polite,” in short, is their favorite style, and the good old Spartan rule of calling a spade a spade they hold in thorough contempt. Their great recipe for elegant or powerful writing is to call the most common things by the most uncommon names. Provided that a word is out-of-the-way, unusual, or far-fetched,—and especially if it is one of many syllables,—they care little whether it is apt and fit or not.

With them a fire is always “the devouring element,” or a “conflagration”; and the last term is often used where there is no meeting of flames, as when a town is fired in several places, but when only one building is burned; the fire never burns a house, but it always “consumes an edifice,” unless it is got under, in which case “its progress is arrested.” A railroad accident is always “a holocaust,” and its victims are named under the “death roll.” A man who is the first to do a thing “takes the initiative.” Instead of loving a woman, a man “becomes attached” to her; instead of losing his mother by death, he “sustains a bereavement of his maternal relative.” A dog’s tail, in the pages of these writers, is his “caudal appendage”; a dog breaker, “a kunopædist”; and a fish-pond they call by no less lofty a title than “piscine preserve.” Ladies, in their classic pages, have ceased to be married, like those poor, vulgar creatures, their grandmothers; they are “led to the hymeneal altar.” Of the existence of such persons as a man, a woman, a boy, or a girl, these writers are profoundly ignorant; though they often speak of “individuals,” “gentlemen,” “characters,” and “parties,” and often recognize the existence of “juveniles” and “juvenile members of the community.” “Individual” is another piece of pompous inanity which is very current now. In “Guesses at Truth” mention is made of a celebrated preacher, who was so destitute of all feeling for decorum in language, as to call our Saviour “this eminent individual.” “Individual” is a good Latin word, and serves a good purpose when it distinguishes a person from a people or class, as it served a good purpose in the scholastic philosophy; but would Cicero or Duns Scotus have called a great man an eminens individuum? These “individuals,” strange to say, are never dressed, but always “attired”; they never take off their clothes, but “divest themselves of their habiliments,” which is so much grander.

“In the church,” says St. Paul, “I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” Not so think some of the preachers of the Gospel of the present day, if we may judge them by the language they use in their discourses. To give their sermons a philosophical air, or because simple language is not to their taste, they invest their discourses with the technicalities of science and philosophy. They never speak of so old-fashioned a thing as the will, but always of “volition”; duty, with them, is never duty simply, but always “moral obligation”; and their sermons abound in “necessary relations,” “moral and physical necessities,” “intellectual processes,” “laws of nature,” and “arguments a priori and a posteriori.” It was a preacher of this class, who having occasion to tell his hearers that there was not one Gospel for the rich and another for the poor, informed them that, “if they would not be saved on ‘general principles,’ they could not be saved at all.” Who can doubt that such language as this is not only poorly understood, if understood it is, by the ordinary hearer, but is far less effective than the simple Saxon words which might be used to convey the same ideas? Some years ago a white minister preached in a plain, direct style to a church of negroes in the South, whose “colored” pastor was greatly addicted to the use of high-flown language in his sermons. In the season of exhortation and prayer that followed, an old negro thanked the Lord for the various blessings of the Sabbath and the sanctuary, and especially, he added, “we thank Thee that to-day we have been fed from a low crib.” Would it not be well for preachers generally to remember that many of Christ’s flock are “little ones,” whose necks are short, and that they may consequently starve, if their food, however nutritious, is placed in too lofty a crib?

But preachers are not the only anti-Saxons of our day; we may find them in nearly all the classes of society,—persons who never tell us that a man is asleep, but say that he is “locked in slumber”; who deem it vulgar, and perhaps cruel, to say that a criminal was hanged, but very elegant to say that he was “launched into eternity.” A person of their acquaintance never does so low a thing as to break his leg; he “fractures his limb.” They never see a man fall; but sometimes see “an individual precipitated.” Our Latin friends,—fortunate souls,—never have their feelings hurt, though it must be confessed that their “sensibilities” are sometimes dreadfully “lacerated.” Above the necessities of their poor fellow-creatures, they never do so vulgar a thing as to eat a meal; they always “partake of a repast,” which is so much more elegant. They never do so commonplace a thing as to take a walk; they “make a pedestrian excursion.” A conjurer with them is a “prestidigitator”; a fortune-teller, a “vaticinator.” As Pascal says, they mask all nature. There is with them no king, but an “august monarch”; no Paris, but a “capital of a kingdom.” Even our barbers have got upon stilts. They no longer sell tooth-powder and shaving-soap, like the old fogies, their fathers, but “odonto,” and “dentifrice,” and “rypophagon”; and they themselves, from the barber-ous persons they once were, have been transformed into “artists in hair.” The medical faculty, too, have caught the spirit of the age. Who would suspect that “epistaxis” means simply bleeding at the nose, and “emollient cataplasm” only a poultice? Fancy one schoolboy doubling up his fist at another, and telling him to look out for epistaxis! Who would dream that “anheidrohepseterion” (advertised in the London “Times”) means only a saucepan, or “taxidermist” a bird-stuffer? Is it not remarkable that tradesmen have ceased “sending in” their “little bills,” and now only “render their accounts”?

“There are people,” says Landor, “who think they write and speak finely, merely because they have forgotten the language in which their fathers and mothers used to talk to them.” As in dress, deportment, etc., so in language, the dread of vulgarity, as Whately has suggested, constantly besetting those who are half conscious that they are in danger of it, drives them into the opposite extreme of affected finery. They act upon the advice of Boileau:

“Quoique vous écriviez, évitez la bassesse;

Le style le moins noble a pourtant sa noblesse;”

and, to avoid the undignified, according to them, it is only necessary not to call things by their right names. Hence the use of “residence” for house, “electric fluid” for lightning, “recently deceased” for lately dead, “encomium” for praise, “location” for place, “locate” for put, “lower limb” for leg, “sacred edifice” for church, “attired” for clad,—all of which have so learned an air, and are preferred to the simpler words for the same reason, apparently, that led Mr. Samuel Weller, when writing his famous valentine to Mary, to prefer “circumscribed” to “circumvented,” as having a deeper meaning.

Such persons forget that glass will obstruct the light quite as much when beautifully painted as when discolored with dirt; and that a style studded with far-fetched epithets and high-sounding phrases may be as dark as one abounding in colloquial vulgarisms. Who does not sympathize with the indignation of Dr. Johnson, when, taking up at the house of a country friend a so called “Liberal Translation of the New Testament,” he read, in the eleventh chapter of John, instead of the simple and touching words, “Jesus wept,”—“Jesus, the Saviour of the world, overcome with grief, burst into a flood of tears”? “Puppy!” exclaimed the critic, as he threw down the book in a rage; and had the author been present, Johnson would doubtless have thrown it at his head. Yet the great literary bashaw, while he had an eagle’s eye for the faults of others, was unconscious of his own sins against simplicity, and, though he spoke like a wit, too often wrote like a pedant. He had, in fact, a dialect of his own, which has been wittily styled Johnsonese. Goldsmith hit him in a vulnerable spot when he said: “Doctor, if you were to write a fable about little fishes, you would make them talk like whales.” The faults of his pompous, swelling diction, in which the frivolity of a coxcomb is described in the same rolling periods and with the same gravity of antithesis with which he would thunder against rebellion and fanaticism, are hardly exaggerated by a wit of his own time who calls it

“A turgid style,

Which gives to an inch the importance of a mile;

Uplifts the club of Hercules—for what?

To crush a butterfly, or brain a gnat;

Bids ocean labor with tremendous roar,

To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore;

Sets wheels on wheels in motion,—what a clatter!

To force up one poor nipperkin of water;

Alike in every theme his pompous art,

Heaven’s awful thunder, or a rumbling cart.”

One of the latest “modern improvements” in speech is the substitution of “lady” and “female” for the good old English “woman.” On the front of Cooper’s Reading Room, in the city of New York, is the sign in golden letters, “Male and Female Reading Rooms.” Suppose Scott, in his noble tribute to women for their devotion and tenderness to men in their hour of suffering, had sung

“Oh, LADIES, in our hours of ease,” etc.,

would not the lines have been far more touching? An English writer says truly that the law of euphemisms is somewhat capricious; “one cannot always tell which words are decent and which are not.... It really seems as if the old-fashioned feminine of ‘man’ were fast getting proscribed. We, undiscerning male creatures that we are, might have thought that ‘woman’ was a more elegant and more distinctive title than ‘female.’ We read only the other day a report of a lecture on the poet Crabbe, in which she who was afterward Mrs. Crabbe was spoken of as ‘a female to whom he had formed an attachment.’ To us, indeed, it seems that a man’s wife should be spoken of in some way which is not equally applicable to a ewe lamb or a favorite mare. But it was a ‘female’ who delivered the lecture, and we suppose the females know best about their own affairs.”

Can any person account for the apparent antipathy which many writers and speakers have to the good Saxon verb “to begin”? Ninety-nine out of every hundred persons one talks with are sure to prefer the French words “to commence” and “to essay,” and the tendency is strong to prefer “to inaugurate” to either. Nothing in our day is begun, not even dinner; it is “inaugurated with soup.” In their fondness for the French words, many persons are betrayed into solecisms. Forgetting, or not knowing, that, while “to begin” may be followed by an infinitive or a gerund, “to commence” is transitive, and must be followed by a noun or its equivalent, they talk of “commencing to do” a thing, “essaying to do well,” etc. Persons who think that “begin” is not stately enough, or that it is even vulgar, would do well to look into the pages of Milton and Shakespeare. With all his fondness for Romanic words, the former hardly once uses “commence” and “commencement”; and the latter is not only content with the idiomatic word, but even shortens it, as in the well known line that depicts so vividly the guilt-wasted soul of Macbeth:

“I ’gin to grow a-weary of the sun.”

What a shock would every right-minded reader receive if, upon opening his Bible, he should find, in place of the old familiar words, the following: “In the commencement God created the heavens and the earth,”—“The fear of the Lord is the commencement of wisdom!” Well did Coleridge say: “Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style.” “Commence” is a good word enough, but, being of outlandish origin, should never take the place of “begin,” except for the sake of rhythm or variety.

Another of these grand words is “imbroglio.” It is from the Italian, and means an intricate or complicated plot. Why, then, should a quarrel in the Cabinet at Washington, or a prospective quarrel with France or England, be called an “imbroglio”? Again, will any one explain to us the meaning of “interpellation,” so often used by the correspondents of our daily newspapers? The word properly means an interruption; yet when an opposition member of the French or Italian Parliament asks a question of a minister, he is said “to put an interpellation.” Why should an army be said to be “decimated,” without regard to the number or nature of its losses? The original meaning of this term was grave, and often terrible; it meant no less than taking the tenth of a man’s substance, or shooting every tenth man in a mutinous regiment, the victims being called out by lot. “This appalling character of decimation lay in the likelihood that innocent persons, slain in cold blood, might suffer for the guilty. But the peculiar horror vanishes when we alter the conditions; and a regiment which has taken part in a hard-fought battle, and comes off the field only decimated,—that is to say, with nine living and unscathed for each man left on the field,—might be accounted rather fortunate than the reverse.” Why, again, should “donate” be preferred to “give”? Does it show a larger soul, a more magnificent liberality, to “donate” than to give? Must we “donate the devil his due,” when we would be unusually charitable? Why should “elect” be preferred to “choose,” when there is no election whatever; or why is “balance” preferable to “remainder”? As a writer has well said: “Would any man in his senses dare to quote King David as saying: ‘They are full of children, and leave the balance of their substance unto their babes’? or read, ‘Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: the balance of wrath thou shalt restrain,’ where the translators of our Bible wrote ‘the remainder’? And if any one went into the nursery, and telling that tale of perennial interest of the little boys that ‘a-sliding went, a-sliding went, a-sliding went, all on a summer’s day,’ should, after recounting how ‘they all fell in, they all fell in, they all fell in,’ add ‘the balance ran away,’ would there not go up a chorus of tiny but indignant protests against this mutilation, which would enlist a far wider sympathy than some of the proposed changes in the texts of classic authors, which have set editors and commentators at loggerheads?”

Again, why should one say “rendition” for performance, “enactment” for acting, or “nude” for naked? In the seventeenth century, certain fanatics in England ran about without clothes, crying: “We are the naked Truth.” Had they lived in this age of refinement, instead of shocking their countrymen with such indelicate expressions, they would have said, “We are Verity in a nude condition”; and had any person clothed them, he would have been said to have “rehabilitated” them. More offensive than any of these grandiose words is “intoxicated” in place of “drunk,” which it has nearly banished. A man can be intoxicated only when he has lost his wits, not by quantity, but by quality,—by drinking liquor that has been drugged. “Intoxicated,” however, has five syllables; drunk has but one; so the former carries the day by five to one. No doubt nine-tenths of those who drink to excess in this country, are, in fact, intoxicated, or poisoned; still, the two words should not be confounded. “Ovation” is a word often used incorrectly, as when an emperor, empress, king or queen, on making a triumphal entry into the capital of a state amid great popular enthusiasm, is said to receive an “ovation,” though such an honor is distinctively reserved for meritorious subjects of the ruler. Sometimes we find a word of Latin origin used in a sense precisely opposite to the true one, as when “culminate,” which can be applied only to something which has reached the limit of its possible height, is used regarding the career of some wrong-doer, which is said to “culminate” in the lowest depths of degradation.

Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the sun; and this itching for pompous forms of expression, this contempt for plainness and simplicity of style, is as old as Aristotle. In the third book of his “Rhetoric,” discussing the causes of frigidity of style, he speaks of one Alcidamas, a writer of that time, as “employing ornaments, not as seasonings to discourse, but as if they were the only food to live upon. He does not say ‘sweat,’ but ‘the humid sweat’; a man goes not to the Isthmian games, but to ‘the collected assembly of the Isthmian solemnity’; laws are ‘the legitimate kings of commonwealths’; and a race, ‘the incursive impulse of the soul.’ A rich man is not bountiful, but the ‘artificer of universal largess.’” Is it not curious that our modern Quicklys and Malaprops, who often pride themselves upon their taste for swelling words and phrases, and their skill in using them, should have been anticipated by Alcidamas two thousand years ago?

The abuse of the queen’s English, to which we have called attention, did not begin with Americans. It began with our transatlantic cousins, who employed “ink-horn” terms and outlandish phrases at a very early period. In “Harrison’s Chronicle” we are told that after the Norman conquest “the English tongue grew into such contempt at court that most men thought it no small dishonor to speak any English there; which bravery took his hold at the last likewise in the country with every ploughman, that even the very carters began to wax weary of their mother tongue, and labored to speak French, which was then counted no small token of gentility.”

The English people of to-day are quite as much addicted to the grandiose style as the Americans. Gough, in one of his lectures, speaks of a card which he saw in London, in which a man called himself “Illuminating Artist to Her Majesty,” the fact being that he lighted the gas lamps near the palace. Mr. E. A. Freeman, the English historian, complained in a recent lecture that our language had few friends and many foes, its only friends being ploughboys and a few scholars. The pleasant old “inns” of England, he said, had disappeared, their places being supplied by “hotels,” or “establishments”; while the landlord had made way for the “lessee of the establishment.” A gentleman going into a shop in Regent street to buy half-mourning goods was referred by the shopman to “the mitigated affliction department.” The besetting sin of some of the ablest British writers of this century is their lack of simplicity of language. Sydney Smith said of Sir James Mackintosh, that if he were asked for a definition of “pepper,” he would reply thus: “Pepper may philosophically be described as a dusty and highly pulverized seed of an oriental fruit; an article rather of condiment than diet, which, dispersed lightly over the surface of food, with no other rule than the caprice of the consumer, communicates pleasure, rather than affords nutrition; and by adding a tropical flavor to the gross and succulent viands of the North, approximates the different regions of the earth, explains the objects of commerce, and justifies the industry of man.”

Francis Jeffrey, the celebrated critic, had, even in conversation, an artificial style and language, which were fit only for books and a small circle of learned friends. His diction and pronunciation, it is said, were unintelligible to the mass of his countrymen, and in the House of Commons offensive and ridiculous. An anecdote told in illustration of this peculiarity strikingly shows the superiority of simple to high-flown language in the practical business of life. In a trial, which turned upon the intellectual competency of a testator, Jeffrey asked a witness, a plain countryman, whether the testator was “a man of intellectual capacity,”—“an intelligent, shrewd man,”—“a man of capacity?” “Had he ordinary mental endowments?” “What d’ye mean, sir?” asked the witness. “I mean,” replied Jeffrey, testily, “was the man of sufficient ordinary intelligence to qualify him to manage his own affairs?” “I dinna ken,” replied the chafed and mystified witness,—“Wad ye say the question ower again, sir?” Jeffrey being baffled, Cockburn took up the examination. He said: “Ye kenned Tammas ——?” “Ou, ay; I kenned Tammas weel; me and him herded together when we were laddies [boys].” “Was there onything in the cretur?” “De’il a thing but what the spune [spoon] put into him.” “Would you have trusted him to sell a cow for you?” “A cow! I wadna lippened [trusted] him to sell a calf.” Had Jeffrey devoted a review article to the subject, he could not have given a more vivid idea of the testator’s incapacity to manage his own affairs.

Our readers need not be told how much Carlyle has done to teutonize our language with his “yardlongtailed” German compounds. It was a just stroke of criticism when a New York auctioneer introduced a miscellaneous lot of books to a crowd with the remark: “Gentlemen, of this lot I need only say, six volumes are by Thomas Carlyle; the seventh is written in the English language.” Some years ago, a learned doctor of divinity and university professor in Canada wrote a work in which, wishing to state the simple fact that the “rude Indian” had learned the use of firing, he delivered himself as follows: “He had made slave of the heaven-born element, the brother of the lightning, the grand alchemist and artificer of all times, though as yet he knew not all the worth or magical power that was in him. By his means the sturdy oak, which flung abroad its stalwart arms and waved its leafy honors defiant in the forest, was made to bow to the behest of the simple aborigines.” As the plain Scotchwoman said of De Quincey, “the bodie has an awfu’ sicht o’ words!” This style of speaking and writing has become so common that it can no longer be considered wholly vulgar. It is gradually working upward; it is making its way into official writings and grave octavos; and is even spoken with unction in pulpits and senates. Metaphysicians are wont to define words as the signs of ideas; but with many persons, they appear to be, not so much the signs of their thought, as the signs of the signs of their thought. Such, doubtless, was the case with the Scotch clergyman, whom a bonneted abhorrer of legal preaching was overheard eulogizing: “Man, John, wasna yon preachin’!—yon’s something for a body to come awa wi’. The way that he smashed down his text into so mony heads and particulars, just a’ to flinders! Nine heads and twenty particulars in ilka head—and sic mouthfu’s o’ grand words!—an’ every ane o’ them fu’ o’ meaning, if we but kent them. We hae ill improved our opportunities; man, if we could just mind onything he said, it would do us guid.”

The whole literature of notices, handbills, and advertisements, in our day, has apparently declared “war to the knife” against every trace of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons. We have no schoolmasters now; they are all “principals of collegiate institutes”; no copy-books, but “specimens of caligraphy”; no ink, but “writing fluid”; no physical exercise, but “calisthenics” or “gymnastics.” A man who opens a groggery at some corner for the gratification of drunkards, instead of announcing his enterprise by its real name, modestly proclaims through the daily papers that his “saloon” has been fitted up for the reception of customers. Even the learned architects of log cabins and pioneer cottages can find names for them only in the sonorous dialects of oriental climes. Time was when a farmhouse was a farmhouse and a porch a porch; but now the one is a “villa” or “hacienda,” and the other nothing less than a “veranda.” In short, this genteel slang pursues us from the cradle to the grave. In old times, when our fathers and mothers died, they were placed in coffins, and buried in the graveyard or burying ground; now, when an unfortunate “party” or “individual” “deceases” or “becomes defunct,” he is deposited in a “burial casket” and “interred in a cemetery.” It matters not that the good old words “grave” and “graveyard” have been set in the pure amber of the English classics,—that the Bible says, “There is no wisdom in the grave,” “Cruel as the grave,” etc. How much more pompous and magniloquent the Greek: “There is no wisdom in the cemetery,” “Cruel as the cemetery!”

Seriously, let us eschew all these vulgar fineries of style, as we would eschew the fineries of a dandy. Their legitimate effect is to barbarize our language, and to destroy all the peculiar power, distinctiveness, and appropriateness of its terms. Words that are rarely used will at last inevitably disappear; and thus, if not speedily checked, this grandiloquence of expression will do an irreparable injury to our dear old English tongue. Poetry may for a while escape the effects of this vulgar coxcombry, because it is the farthest out of the reach of such contagion; but, as prose sinks, so must poetry, too, be ultimately dragged down into the general gulf of feebleness and inanition.

It was a saying of John Foster that “eloquence resides in the thought, and no words, therefore, can make that eloquent which will not be so in the plainest that could possibly express the same.” Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the notion that the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of pompous and sonorous language are necessary to the expression of the sublime and powerful in eloquence and poetry. So far is this from being true, that the finest, noblest, and most spirit-stirring sentiments ever uttered, have been couched, not in sounding polysyllables from the Greek or Latin, but in the simplest Saxon,—in the language we hear hourly in the streets and by our firesides. Dr. Johnson once said that “big thinkers require big words.” He did not think so at the time of the great Methodist movement in the last century, when “the ice period” of the establishment was breaking up. He attributed the Wesleys’ success to their plain, familiar way of preaching, “which,” he says, “clergymen of genius and learning ought to do from a principle of duty.” Arthur Helps tells a story of an illiterate soldier at the chapel of Lord Morpeth’s castle in Ireland. Whenever Archbishop Whately came to preach, it was observed that this rough private was always in his place, mouth open, as if in sympathy with his ears. Some of the gentlemen playfully took him to task for it, supposing it was due to the usual vulgar admiration of a celebrated man. But the man had a better reason, and was able to give it. He said, “That isn’t it at all. The Archbishop is easy to understand. There are no fine words in him. A fellow like me, now, can follow along and take every bit of it in.” “Whately’s simplicity,” observes a writer to whom we are indebted for this illustration, “meant no lack of pith or power. The whole momentum of his large and healthy brain went into those homely sentences, rousing and feeding the rude and the cultured hearer’s hunger alike, as sweet bread and juicy meat satisfy a natural appetite.”

Emerson observes that as any orator at the bar or the senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language; that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of passion, he comes down to a level with the ear of all his audience. “It is the oratory of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln, the one at Charleston, the other at Gettysburg, in the two best specimens of oratory we have had in this country.” Daniel Webster, in his youth, was a little bombastic in his speeches; but he very soon discovered that the force of a sentence depends chiefly on its meaning, and that great writing is that in which much is said in few words, and those the simplest that will answer the purpose. Having made this discovery, he became “a great eraser of adjectives”; and whether convincing juries, or thundering in the senate,—whether demolishing Hayne, or measuring swords with Calhoun,—on all occasions used the plainest words. “You will find,” said he to a friend, “in my speeches to juries, no hard words, no Latin phrases, no fieri facias; and that is the secret of my style, if I have any.”

Chaucer says, in praise of his Virginia, that

“No contrefited termes had she

To semen wise;”

and if any one would write or speak well, his English should be genuine, not counterfeit. The simplest words that will convey one’s ideas are always best. What can be simpler and yet more sublime than the “Let there be light, and there was light!” of Moses, which Longinus so admired? Would it be an improvement to say, “Let there be light, and there was a solar illumination”? “I am like a child picking up pebbles on the seashore,” said Newton. Had he said he was like an awe-struck votary, lying prostrate before the stupendous majesty of the cosmical universe, and the mighty and incomprehensible Ourgos which had created all things, we might think it very fine, but should not carry in our memories such a luggage of words. The fiery eloquence of the field and the forum springs upon the vulgar idiom as a soldier leaps upon his horse. “Trust in the Lord, and keep your powder dry,” said Cromwell to his soldiers on the eve of a battle. “Silence, you thirty voices!” roars Mirabeau to a knot of opposers around the tribune. “I’d sell the shirt off my back to support the war!” cries Lord Chatham; and again, “Conquer the Americans! I might as well think of driving them before me with this crutch.” “I know,” says Kossuth, speaking of the march of intelligence, “that the light has spread, and that even the bayonets think.” “You may shake me, if you please,” said a little Yankee constable to a stout, burly culprit whom he had come to arrest, and who threatened violence, “but recollect, if you do it, you don’t shake a chap of five-feet-six; you’ve got to shake the whole State of Massachusetts!” When a Hoosier was asked by a Yankee how much he weighed,—“Well,” said he, “commonly I weigh about one hundred and eighty; but when I’m mad I weigh a ton!” “Were I to die at this moment,” wrote Nelson after the battle of the Nile, “‘more frigates’ would be found written on my heart.” The “Don’t give up the ship!” of our memorable sea-captain stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet. Had he exhorted the men to fight to the last gasp in defence of their imperilled liberties, their altars, and the glory of America, the words might have been historic, but they would not have been quoted vernacularly, as they have been, for over threescore years and ten.

There is another phase of the popular leaning to the grandiose style, which is not less reprehensible than that which we have noticed; we mean the affectation of foreign words and phrases. As foreign travel has increased, and the study of foreign languages has become fashionable in our country, this vice has spread till society in some places, like Armado and Holofernes, seems to have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. Many persons scarcely deign to call anything by its proper English name, but, as if they believed with Butler, that

“He that’s but able to express

No sense at all in several languages,

Will pass for learneder than he that’s known

To speak strongest reason in his own,”—

they apply to it some German, French, or Italian word. In their dialect people are blasés, and passés, or have un air distingué; in petto, dolce far niente, are among their pet phrases; and not infrequently they betray their ignorance by some ludicrous blunder, as when they use boquet for bouquet, soubriquet for sobriquet, and talk of a sous, instead of a sou, a mistake as laughable as the Frenchman’s “un pence.” Some of the modern fashionable novelists and writers of books of travel have even shown so bad a taste as to state in German, French, or Italian, whatever is supposed to have been said by Germans, Frenchmen, or Italians. In Currer Bell’s “Villette” a large proportion of the dialogue, even in pages containing the very marrow of the plot, is thus written in French, making the book, though an English book, unintelligible to an Englishman, however familiar with his native tongue, unless he has mastered a foreign one also, and that not in its purity, but “after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe.” In striking contrast to this taste for exotics is the rooted dislike which the French have to foreign words and idioms. It is only in cases of the direst necessity that they consent to borrow from their neighbors, whether in perfide Angleterre or elsewhere. Even when they deign to adopt a new word, they so disguise it that the parent language would not know it again. They strip it gradually of its foreign dress, and make it assume the costume of the country. “Beefsteak” is turned into bifteck; “plum-pudding” is metamorphosed into pouding de plomb; “partner” becomes partenaire; “riding-coat” becomes redingote; and now fashionable English tailors advertise these “redingotes,” never for a moment dreaming that they are borrowing an expression which the French stole from the English. It was their contempt for the practice of borrowing foreign words that enabled the Greeks to preserve their native tongue so long in its purity; while on the contrary, by an affectation in the Romans of Greek words and idioms, the Latin language was not only corrupted, but lost in a few centuries much of the beauty and majesty it had in the Augustan age.

It is said that the Spaniards, in all ages, have been distinguished for their love of long and high-flown names,—the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of appellative glory and honor. In looking at the long string of titles fastened like the tail of a kite to the name of some Don or other grandee, one is puzzled to tell whether it is the man that belongs to the name, or the name to the man. There is nothing odd, therefore, in the conduct of that Spaniard, who, whenever his name was mentioned, always took off his hat in token of respect to himself,—that is, as the possessor of so many appellations. A person of high diplomatic talent, with the unpretending and rather plebeian name of “Bubb,” was once nominated to represent Great Britain at Madrid. Lord Chesterfield was then a minister of state, and on seeing the newly appointed minister remarked,—“My dear fellow, your name will damn you with the Spaniards; a one-syllable patronymic will infallibly disgust the grandees of that hyperbolic nation.” “What shall I do?” said Bubb. “Oh, that is easily managed,” rejoined the peer; “get yourself dubbed, before you start on your mission, as Don Vaco y Hijo Hermoso y Toro y Sill y Bubb, and on your arrival you will have all the Spanish Court at your feet.”

The effort of the Spaniards to support their dignity by long and sounding titles is repeated daily, in a slightly different form, by many democratic Americans. Writers and speakers are constantly striving to compensate for poverty of thought by a multitude of words. Magniloquent terms, sounding sentences, unexpected and startling phrases, are dropped from pen and tongue, as gaudy and high-colored goods are displayed in shop windows, to attract attention. “Ruskin,” says an intelligent writer, “long ago cried out against the stuccoed lies which rear their unblushing fronts on so many street corners, shaming our civilization, and exerting their whole influence to make us false and pretentious. Mrs. Stowe and others have warned us against the silken lies that, frizzled, flounced, padded, compressed, lily-whitened and rouged, flit about our drawing rooms by gaslight, making us familiar with sham and shoddy, and luring us away from real and modest worth. Let there be added to these complaints the strongest denunciation of the kindred literary lies which hum about our ears and glitter before our eyes, which corrupt the language, and wrong every man and woman who speaks it by robbing it of some portion of its beauty and power.”

When shall we learn that the secret of beauty and of force, in speaking and in writing, is not to say simple things finely, but to say fine things as simply as possible? “To clothe,” says Fuller, “low creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It rather loads than raises a wren to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings.” It is a significant fact that the books over which generation after generation of readers has hung with the deepest delight,—which have retained their hold, amid all the fluctuations of taste, upon all classes,—have been written in the simplest and most idiomatic English, that English for which the “fine school” of writers would substitute a verbose and affected phraseology. Such books are “Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which Macaulay has justly characterized as treasures of pure English. Fitz-Greene Halleck tells us that some years ago a letter fell into his hands which a Scotch servant girl had written to her lover. The style charmed him, and his literary friends agreed that it was fairly inimitable. Anxious to clear up the mystery of its beauty, and even elegance, he searched for its author, who thus solved the enigma: “Sir, I came to this country four years ago. Then I did not know how to read or write. Since then I have learned to read and write, but I have not yet learned how to spell; so always when I sit down to write a letter, I choose those words which are so short and simple that I am sure to know how to spell them.” This was the whole secret. The simple-minded Scotch girl knew more of rhetoric than Blair or Campbell. As Halleck forcibly says: “Simplicity is beauty. Simplicity is power.”

It is through the arts and sciences, whose progress is so rapid, that many words of “learned length and thundering sound” force their way in these days into the language. The vocabulary of science is so repugnant to the ear and so hard to the tongue, that it is a long while before its terms become popularized. We may be sure that many years will elapse before “aristolochioid,” “megalosaurus,” “acanthopterygian,” “nothoclæna-trichomanoides,” “monopleurobranchian,” “anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphæoid,” and other such “huge verbal blocks, masses of syllabic aggregations, which both the tongue and the taste find it difficult to surmount,” will establish themselves in the language of literature and common life. Still, while the lover of Anglo-Saxon simplicity is rarely shocked by such terms, there are hundreds of others, less stupendous, such as “phenomenon,” “demonstrative,” “inverse proportion,” “transcendental,” “category,” “predicament,” “exorbitant,” which, once heard only in scientific lecture rooms or in schools, are now the common currency of the educated; and it is said that in one of our Eastern colleges, the learned mathematical professor, on whom the duty devolved one morning of making the chapel prayer, startled his hearers by asking Divine Goodness to enable them to know its length, its breadth, and its superficial contents. Should popular enlightenment go on for some ages with the prodigious strides it has lately made, a future generation may hear lovers addressing their mistresses in the terms predicted by Punch:

“I love thee, Mary, and thou lovest me.

Our mutual flame is like the affinity

That doth exist between two simple bodies.

I am Potassium to thine Oxygen.

... Sweet, thy name is Briggs,

And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we

Agree to form a Johnsonate of Briggs?

We will. The day, the happy day is nigh,

When Johnson shall with beauteous Briggs combine.”

It is useless, of course, to complain of the terminology of science, since inaccurate names, that connote too many things, or that are otherwise lacking in precision, would be productive of continual mischief. But indispensable as this distinctive nomenclature is, it is, no doubt, often needlessly uncouth, and it has been well said that if the language of common life were equally invariable and unelastic, imagination would be cancelled, and genius crushed. How barbarous and repulsive appear many of the long, polysyllabic, technical names of plants and flowers in our treatises on botany, when compared with such popular names as “Stag-beetle,” “Rosemary,” and “Forget-me-not!” To express the results of science without the ostentation of its terms, is an admirable art, known, unfortunately, to but few. How few surgeons can communicate in simple, intelligible language to a jury, in a law case, the results of a post-mortem examination! Almost invariably the learned witness finds a wound “in the parieties of the abdomen, opening the peritoneal cavity”; or an injury of some “vertebra in the dorsal or lumbar region”; or something else equally frightful. Some years ago, in one of the English courts, a judge rebuked a witness of this kind by saying, “You mean so and so, do you not, sir?”—at the same time translating his scientific barbarisms into a few words of simple English. “I do, my Lord.” “Then why can’t you say so?” He had said so, but in a foreign tongue.

To all the writers and speakers who needlessly employ grandiose or abstract terms, instead of plain Saxon ones, we would say, as Falstaff said to Pistol: “If thou hast any tidings whatever to deliver, prithee deliver them like a man of this world!” Never, perhaps, did a college professor give a better lesson in rhetoric than was given by a plain farmer in Kennebec County, Maine, to a schoolmaster. “You are excavating a subterranean channel, it seems,” said the pedagogue, as he saw the farmer at work near his house. “No, sir,” was the reply, “I am only digging a ditch.” A similar rebuke was once administered by the witty Governor Corwin, of Ohio, to a young lady who addressed him in high-flown terms. During a political tour through the State, he and the Hon. Thomas Ewing stayed at night at the house of a leading politician, but found no one at home but his niece, who presided at the tea-table. Having never conversed with “great men” before, she supposed she must talk to them in elephantine language. “Mr. Ewing, will you take condiments in your tea, sir?” inquired the young lady. “Yes, miss, if you please,” replied the Senator. Corwin’s eyes twinkled. Here was a temptation that could not be resisted. Gratified at the apparent success of her trial in talking to the United States Senator, the young lady addressed Mr. Corwin in the same manner,—“Will you take condiments in your tea, sir?” “Pepper and salt, but no mustard,” was the prompt reply, which the lady, it is said, never forgave, declaring that the Governor was “horridly vulgar.”

The faults of all those who thus barbarize our tongue would be comparatively excusable, were it so barren of resources that any man whose conceptions are clear need find difficulty in wreaking them upon expression. But the language in which Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson have sung; in which Hume, Gibbon, Froude, Motley, and Prescott have narrated; in which Addison, Swift, Newman, and Ruskin have written; and in which Bolingbroke, Chatham, Fox, Pitt, and Webster have spoken, needs not to ask alms of its neighbors. Not only these, but a hundred other masters, have shown that it is rich enough for all the exigencies of the human mind; that it can express the loftiest conceptions of the poet, portray the deepest emotions of the human heart; that it can convey, if not the fripperies, at least the manly courtesies of polite life, and make palpable the profoundest researches of the philosopher. It is not, therefore, because of the poverty of our vocabulary that so many writers Gallicize and Germanize our tongue; the real cause is hinted at in the answer of Handel to an ambitious musician, who attributed the hisses of his hearers to a defect in the instrument on which he was playing: “The fault is not there, my friend,” said the composer, jealous of the honor of the organ, on which he himself performed; “the fact is, you have no music in your soul.”

We are aware that the English tongue,—our own cartilaginous tongue, as some one has quaintly styled it,—has been decried, even by poets who have made it discourse the sweetest music, for its lack of expressive terms, and for its excess in consonants, guttural, sibilant, or mute. It was this latter peculiarity, doubtless, which led Charles V, three centuries ago, to compare it to the whistling of birds; and others since, from the predominance of the s, to the continued hissing of red-hot iron in water. Madame de Stael likens it to the monotonous sound of the surge breaking on the sea-shore; and even Lord Byron,—whose own burning verse, distinguished not less by its melody than by its incomparable energy, has signally revealed the hidden harmony that lies in our short Saxon words,—turns traitor to his native language, and in a moment of caprice denounces it for its harshness:

“I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,

Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,

And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,

With syllables that breathe of the sweet South,

And gentle liquids, gliding all so pat in,

That not a single accent seems uncouth,

Like our harsh, Northern, whistling, grunting guttural,

Which we’re obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.”

It is strange that the poet could not see that, in this very selection of condemnatory terms, he has strikingly shown the wondrous expressiveness of the tongue he censures. What can be softer, more musical, or more beautifully descriptive, than the “gentle liquids gliding,” and the words “breathe of the sweet South”; and where among all the languages of the “sweet South” would he have found words so well fitted to point his sarcasm, so saturated with harshness, as the terms “harsh,” “uncouth,” “northern,” “whistling,” “grunting,” “guttural,” “hiss,” “spit,” and “sputter?” It has been well said that “the hand that possesses strength and power may have as delicate a touch, when needed, as the hand of nervous debility. The English language can drop the honeyed words of peace and gentleness, and it can visit with its withering, scathing, burning, blasting curse.” Again, even Addison, who wrote so musical English, contrasting our own tongue with the vocal beauty of the Greek, and forgetting that the latter is the very lowest merit of a language, being merely its sensuous merit, calls it brick as against marble. Waller, too, ungrateful to the noble tongue that has preserved his name, declares that

“Poets that lasting marble seek,

Must carve in Latin or in Greek.”

Because smoothness is one of the requisites of verse, it has been hastily concluded that languages in which vowels and liquids predominate must be better adapted to poetry, and that the most mellifluous must also be the most melodious. But so far is this from being true, that, as Henry Taylor has remarked, in dramatic verse our English combinations of consonants are invaluable, both in giving expression to the harsher passions, and in impairing keenness and significancy to the language of discrimination, and especially to that of scorn.

The truth is, our language, so far from being harsh, or poor and limited in its vocabulary, is the richest and most copious now spoken on the globe. As Sir Thomas More long ago declared: “It is plenteous enough to expresse our myndes in anythinge whereof one man hath used to speak with another.” Owing to its composite character, it has a choice of terms expressive of every shade of difference in the idea, compared with which the vocabulary of many other modern tongues is poverty itself. But for the impiety of the act, those who speak it might well raise a monument to the madcaps who undertook the tower of Babel; for, as the mixture of many bloods has made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the mingling of divers tongues given them a language which is one of the noblest vehicles of thought ever vouchsafed to man. This very mingling of tongues in our language has been made the ground of an accusation against it; and the Anglo-Saxon is sometimes told by foreigners that he “has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps”; that his dialect is “the alms-basket of wit,” made up of beggarly borrowings, and is wholly lacking in originality.

It is true that the Anglo-Saxon has pillaged largely from the speech of other peoples; that he has a craving desire to annex, not only states and provinces, even whole empires, to his own, but even the best parts of their languages; that there is scarce a tongue on the globe which his absorbing genius has not laid under contribution to enrich the exchequer of his all-conquering speech. Strip him of his borrowings,—or “annexations,” if you will,—and he would neither have a foot of soil to stand upon, nor a rag of language in which to clothe his shivering ideas. To say nothing of the Greek, Latin, and French, which enter so largely into the woof of the tongue, we are indebted to the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindoo, and even the North American Indian dialects, for many words which we cannot do without. The word-barks of our language are daily increasing in size, and terms that sprang up at Delhi and Benares four thousand years ago are to-day scaling the cliffs of the Rocky Mountains. But while the English has thus borrowed largely from other tongues, and the multifarious etymology of “its Babylonish vocabulary,” as its enemies are pleased to call it, renders it, of all modern languages, one of the most difficult to master in all its wealth and power, yet it makes up in eclecticism, vigor, and abundance far more than it loses in apparent originality. Mosaic-like and heterogeneous as are its materials, it is yet no mingle-mangle or patchwork, but is as individual as the French or the German. Though the rough materials are gathered from a hundred sources, yet such is its digestive and assimilative energy that the most discordant aliments, passing through its anaconda-like stomach, are as speedily identified with its own independent existence as the beefsteak which yesterday gave roundness to the hinder symmetry of a prize ox becomes to-morrow part and parcel of the proper substance,—the breast, leg, or arm,—of an Illinois farmer.

In fact the very caprices and irregularities of our idiom, orthography, and pronunciation, which make foreigners “stare and gasp,” and are ridiculed by our own philological ultraists, are the strongest proofs of the nobleness and perfection of our language. It is the very extent to which these caprices, peculiar idioms, and exceptions prevail in any tongue, that forms the true scale of its worth and beauty; and hence we find them more numerous in Greek than in Latin,—in French or Italian than in Irish or Indian. There is less symmetry in the rugged, gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its branches, which has defied the storms of a thousand years, than in the smoothly clipped Dutch yew tree; but it is from the former that we hew out the knees of mighty line-of-battle ships, while a vessel built of the latter would go to pieces in the first storm. It was our own English that sustained him who soared “above all Greek, above all Roman fame”; and the same “well of English undefiled” did not fail the myriad-minded dramatist, when

“Each scene of many colored life he drew,

Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new.”

Nor have even these great writers, marvellous and varied as is their excellence, fathomed the powers of the language for grand and harmonious expression, or used them to the full. It has “combinations of sound grander than ever rolled through the mind of Milton; more awful than the mad gasps of Lear; sweeter than the sighs of Desdemona; more stirring than the speech of Antony; sadder than the plaints of Hamlet; merrier than the mocks of Falstaff.” To those, therefore, who complain of the poverty or harshness of our tongue, we may say, in the words of George Herbert:

“Let foreign nations of their language boast,

What fine variety each tongue affords;

I like our language, as our men and coast:—

Who cannot dress it well, want WIT, not WORDS.”

---

[CHAPTER IV.]
SMALL WORDS.

It is with words as with sunbeams,—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.—Southey.

Language is like the minim immortal among the infusoria, which keeps splitting itself into halves.—Coleridge.

Among the various forms of ingratitude, one of the commonest is that of kicking down the ladder by which one has climbed the steeps of celebrity; and a good illustration of this is the conduct of the author of the following lines, who, though indebted in no small degree for his fame to the small words, the monosyllabic music of our tongue, sneers at them as low:

“While feeble expletives their aid do join,

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.”

“How ingenious! how felicitous!” the reader exclaims; and, truly, Pope has shown himself wonderfully adroit in ridiculing the Saxon part of the language with words borrowed from its own vocabulary. But let no man despise little words, even though he echo the little wasp of Twickenham. Alexander Pope is a high authority in English literature; but it is long since he was regarded as having the infallibility of a Pope Alexander. The multitude of passages in his works, in which the small words form not only the bolts, pins, and hinges, but the chief material in the structure of his verse, show that he knew well enough their value; but it was hard to avoid the temptation of such a line as that quoted. “Small words,” he elsewhere says, “are generally stiff and languishing, but they may be beautiful to express melancholy.” It is the old story of

“—— the ladder

Whereto the climber upward turns his face,

But when he once attains the utmost round,

He then unto the ladder turns his back,

Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees

By which he did ascend.”

The truth is, the words most potent in life and literature,—in the mart, in the senate, in the forum, and at the fireside,—are small words, the monosyllables which the half-educated speaker and writer despises. All passionate expression,—the outpouring of the soul when moved to its depths,—is, for the most part, in monosyllables. They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the brain, made visible by utterance. The will makes its giant victory strokes in little monosyllables, deciding for the right and against the wrong. In the hour of fierce temptation, at the ballot-box, in the court-room, in all the crises of life, how potent for good or evil are the little monosyllables, “Yes” and “No”! “‘Yes’ is the Olympian nod of approval which fills heaven with ambrosia and light; ‘no’ is the stamp of Jupiter which shakes heaven and darkens the faces of the gods. ‘Yes:’ how it trembles from the maiden’s lips, the broken utterance, the key-syllable of a divine song which her heart only sings; how it echoes in the ecstatic pulses of the doubtful lover, and makes Paradise open its gates for the royal entry of the triumphing conqueror, Love. ‘No,’—well might Miles Standish say that he could not stand fire if ‘No’ should come ‘point-blank from the mouth of a woman’; what ‘captain, colonel or knight-at-arms’ could? ‘No:’ ’tis the impregnable fortress,—the very Malakoff of the will; it is the breastwork and barrier thrown up, which the charge must be fierce indeed to batter down or overleap. It is the grand and guarded tower against temptation; it is the fierce and sudden arrow through all the rings, that dismays the suitors of the dear and long-cherished and faithful Penelope, and makes the unforgotten king start from the disguise of a beggar.”

Again, there is a whole class of words, and those among the most expressive in the language, of which the great majority are monosyllables. We refer to the interjections. We are aware that some philologists deny that interjections are language. Horne Tooke sneers at this whole class of words as “brutish and inarticulate,” as “the miserable refuge of the speechless,” and complains that, “because beautiful and gaudy,” they have been suffered to usurp a place among words. “Where will you look for it” (the interjection), he triumphantly asks; “will you find it among laws, or in books of civil institutions, in history, or in any treatise of useful arts or sciences? No: you must seek for it in rhetoric and poetry, in novels, plays and romances.” This acute writer has forgotten one book in which interjections abound, and awaken in the mind emotions of the highest grandeur and pathos,—namely, the Bible. But the use of this part of speech is not confined to books. It is heard wherever men interchange thought and feeling, whether on the gravest or the most trivial themes; in tones of the tenderest love and of the deadliest hate; in shouts of joy and ecstasies of rapture, and in the expression of deep anguish, remorse and despair; in short, in the outburst of every human feeling. More than this, not only is it heard in daily life, but we are told by the highest authority that it is heard in the hallelujahs of angels, and in the continual “Holy! Holy! Holy!” of the cherubim.

What word in the English language is fuller of significance, has a greater variety of meanings, than the diminutive “Oh”? Uttered by the infant to express surprise or delight, it is used by the man to indicate fear, aspiration or appeal, and, indeed, according to the tone in which it is uttered, may voice almost any one of the emotions of which he is capable. What a volume of meaning is condensed in the derisive “Oh! oh!” which greets a silly utterance in the House of Commons! In no other assembly, perhaps, are the powers of human speech more fully exhibited; yet it was in that body that one of the most famous of interjections originated,—we mean the cry of “Hear! hear!” which, though at first an imperative verb, is now “nothing more or less than a great historical interjection,” indicating, according to the tone in which it is uttered, admiration, acquiescence, indignation or derision. It has been truly said that when a large assembly is animated by a common sentiment which demands instantaneous utterance, it can find that utterance only through interjections.

Again, how many exquisite passages in poetry owe to the interjection their beauty, their pathos, or their power! “The first sincere hymn,” says M. Taine, “is the one word ‘O.’” This “O,” the sign of the vocative, must not be confounded with “Oh!” the emotional interjection, which expresses a sentiment, as of appeal, entreaty, expostulation, etc. What depth of meaning is contained in that little word, as an expression of grief, in the following lines by Wordsworth:

“She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be!

Now she is in her grave,—and oh!

The difference to me.”

What possible combination of words could be more significant than the reply “Pooh! pooh!” to a controversialist’s theory, or the contemptuous “Fudge!” with which Mr. Churchill, in “The Vicar of Wakefield,” sums up the pretensions of the languishing Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs:

“Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is that to be found?”

“Fudge!”

How full of pathos is the “Alack, alack!” of Jeanie Deans at the supreme moment in her sister’s trial; and how forcibly “Oho!” expresses exasperating self-felicitation at the discovery of a carefully guarded secret! What volumes of meaning are sometimes condensed into the little word “psha”! “Doubt,” says Thackeray, “is always crying ‘psha,’ and sneering.” How expressive are those almost infinitesimal words which epitomize the alternations of human life, “ah!” and “ha!” As Fuller beautifully moralizes: “‘Ha!’ is the interjection of laughter; ‘ah!’ is an interjection of sorrow. The difference between them is very small, as consisting only in the transposition of what is no substantial letter, but a bare aspiration. How quickly, in the age of a minute, in the very turning of our breath, is our mirth changed to mourning!”

“Nature in many tones complains,

Has many sounds to tell her pains;

But for her joys has only three,

And those but small ones, Ha! ha! he!”

The truth is that, so far is this class of words from being, as Max Müller contends, the mere outskirts of language, they are more truly words than any others. These little words, so expressive of joy, of hope, of doubt, of fear, which leap from the heart like fiery jets from volcanic isles,—these surviving particles of the ante-Babel tongues, which spring with the flush or blanching of the face to all lips, and are understood by all men,—these “silver fragments of a broken voice,” to use an expression of Tennyson’s, “the only remains of the Eden lexicon in the dictionaries of all races,”—

“The only words

Of Paradise that have survived the fall,”—

are emphatically and preëminently language. It is doubtless true that civilization, with its freezing formalities, tends to diminish the use of interjections, as well as their natural accompaniments, gesture and gesticulation; but on the other hand, it should be noted, that there are certain interjections which are the fruits of the highest and most mature forms of human culture. Interjections, in truth, are not so much “parts of speech” as entire expressions of feeling or thought. They are preëminently pictorial. If I pronounce the words “house,” “strike,” “black,” “beautifully,” without other words or explanatory gestures, I say nothing distinctly; I may mean any one of a hundred things; but if I utter an interjectional exclamation, denoting joy or sorrow, surprise or fear, every person who hears me knows at once by what affection I am moved. I communicate a fact by a single syllable. Instead of ranking below other words, the interjection stands on a higher plane, because its significance is more absolute and immediate. Moreover, from these despised parts of speech has been derived a whole class of words; as, for example, in the natural interjection “ah”! ach! we have the root of a large class of words in the Aryan languages, such as ἄχος, achen! “ache,” “anguish,” “anxious,” angustus, and the word “agony” itself. Many words are used interjectionally which are not interjections, such as “Farewell!” “Adieu!” “Welcome!” which are to be looked upon as elliptical forms of expression. They are, in fact, abbreviated sentences, resembling the Ο for οὐ, “not,” with which the poet Philoxenus is said to have replied in writing to the tyrant Dionysius who had invited him to the court of Syracuse. The true interjection is an apostrophe, condensed into a syllable. It is the effort of Nature to unburden herself of some intense, pressing emotion. It is the sigh of humanity for what it cannot have or hope for; for what it has lost; for what it did not value till it lost it. George Eliot thus defines it when she speaks of certain deeds as “little more than interjections, which give vent to the long passion of a life.” In oratory, poetry, and the drama, the interjection plays an important part. Public speakers, especially, find it indispensable to their success. “As the most eloquent men are apt to find their language inadequate to their needs,—as still, after they have exhausted their vocabulary of other words,

‘There hover in these restless heads

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the best,

Which into words no virtue can digest,’

they find great need of the interjection. In their hands it deepens all assertions, gives utterance to intense longings, carries the hearer away into ultimate possibilities, and expresses the most passionate emotions in the instant of their most overwhelming power.” Who that is familiar with the history of oratory, does not remember instances when these little words, so despised by grammarians, have been more impressive, more to the point, more eloquent than a long speech? The interjections of Whitefield,—his “Ah!” of pity for the unrepentant sinner, and his “Oh!” of encouragement and persuasion for the almost converted listener,—were words of tremendous power, and formed a most potent engine in his pulpit artillery.[11] Garrick used to say that he would give a hundred guineas if he could say “Oh!” as Whitefield did. The condensed force of interjections,—their inherent expressiveness,—entitles them, therefore, to be regarded as the appropriate language, the mother-tongue of passion; and hence the effect of good acting depends largely on the proper introduction and just articulation of this class of words.

Shakespeare’s interjections exact a rare command of modulation, and cannot be rendered with any truth except by one who has mastered the whole play. What a profound insight of the masterpiece of the poet is required of him who would adequately utter the word “indeed” in the following passage of Othello! “It contains in it,” says an English writer, “the gist of the chief action of the play, and it implies all that the plot develops. It ought to be spoken with such an intonation as to suggest the diabolic scheme of Iago’s conduct. There is no thought of the grammatical structure of the compound, consisting of the preposition ‘in’ and the substantive ‘deed,’ which is equivalent to ‘act,’ ‘fact,’ or ‘reality.’ All this vanishes and is lost in the mere iambic dissyllable which is employed as a vehicle for the feigned tones of surprise.”

“Iago. I did not think he had been acquainted with her.

Oth. O, yes, and went between us very oft.

Iago. Indeed!

Oth. Indeed? ay, indeed. Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest?

Iago. Honest, my lord?

Oth. Honest? ay, honest!”

The Greek and Latin languages abound with interjections, which are used by the orators and poets with great effect. To gratify the Athenians, as they behold their once proud enemy humbled to the dust, and draining the cup of affliction to the very last dregs, Æschylus, in his “Persai,” employs almost every form of ejaculation in which abject misery can be expressed.

The English language is preëminently a language of small words. It has more monosyllables than any other modern tongue, a peculiarity which gives it a strikingly direct and straightforward character, equally removed from the indirect French and the intricate, lumbering German. Its fondness for this class of words is even greater than that of the Anglo-Saxon. Not a few of our present monosyllables, such as the verbs “to love,” “bake,” “beat,” “slide,” “swim,” “bind,” “blow,” “brew,” were, in the Anglo-Saxon, dissyllables. The English language, impatient of all superfluities, cuts down its words to the narrowest possible limits,—lopping and condensing, never expanding. Sometimes it cuts off an initial syllable, as in “gin” for “engine,” “van” for “caravan,” “prentice” for “apprentice,” “’bus” for “omnibus,” “wig” for “periwig”; sometimes it cuts off a final syllable or syllables, as in “aid” for “aidedecamp,” “prim” for “primitive,” “cit” for “citizen,” “grog” for “grogram,” “pants” for “pantaloons,” “tick” for (pawnbroker’s) “ticket”; sometimes it strikes out a letter, or letters, from the middle of a word, or otherwise contracts it, as in “last” for “latest,” “lark” for “laverock,” “since” for “sithence,” “fortnight” for “fourteen nights,” “lord” for “hlaford,” “morning” for “morrowning,” “sent” for “sended,” “chirp” for “chirrup” or “cheer up,” “fag” for “fatigue,” “consols” for “consolidated annuities.” The same abbreviating processes are followed, when English words are borrowed from the Latin. Thus we have the monosyllable “strange” from the trisyllable extraneus; “spend” from expendo; “scour” from exscorio; “stop” from obstipo; “funnel” from infundibulum; “ply” from plico; “jetty” from projectum; “dean” from decanus; “count” from computo; “stray” from extravagus; “proxy” from procurator; “spell” from syllabare, etc. Not only are single Latin words thus maimed when converted into English, and their letters changed, transposed, or omitted, but often two English words are clipped and squeezed into one word. Thus from “proud” and “dance” we have “prance”; from “grave” and “rough” we have “gruff”; from “scrip” and “roll” comes “scroll”; from “tread,” or “trot,” and “drudge,” we have “trudge.” Even in the construction of its primitive monosyllables the English language manifests the same economy, and forms words of a totally different meaning by the simple change of a vowel; as, bag, beg, big, bog, bug; bat, bet, bit, bot, but; ball, bell, bill, boll, bull; or, again, by the change of the first letter; as, fight, light, might, night, right, tight,—dash, hash, lash, gash, rash, sash, wash. The final “ed” of our participles is rapidly disappearing, as a distinct syllable. Not content with suppressing half the letters of our syllables, and half the syllables of our words, we clip our vowels, in speaking, shorter than any other people, so that our language threatens to become a kind of stenology, or algebraic condensation of thought,—a pemmican of ideas. Voltaire said that the English gained two hours a day by clipping their words. The same love of brevity has shown itself in rendering the final e in English always mute. In Chaucer the final e must often be sounded as a separate syllable, or the verse will limp. To the same cause we owe such expressions as “ten o’clock,” instead of “of the clock,” or “on the clock,” and the hissing s, so offensive to foreign ears. The old termination of the verb, th, has given way to s in the third person singular, and en to a single letter in the third person plural.

The Anglo-Saxon, the substratum of our modern English, is emphatically monosyllabic; yet many of the grandest passages in our literature are made up almost exclusively of Saxon words. The English Bible abounds in grand, sublime, and tender passages, couched almost entirely in words of one syllable. The passage in Ezekiel, which Coleridge is said to have considered the sublimest in the whole Bible: “And he said unto me, son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest,”—contains seventeen monosyllables to three others. What passage in Holy Writ surpasses in energetic brevity that which describes the death of Sisera,—“At her feet he bowed, he fell; at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; where he bowed, there he fell down dead”? Here are twenty-two monosyllables to one dissyllable thrice repeated, and that a word which is usually pronounced as a monosyllable. The lament of David over Saul and Jonathan is not surpassed in pathos by any similar passage in the whole range of literature; yet a very large proportion of these touching words are of one or two syllables:—“The beauty of Israel is slain upon the high places; how are the mighty fallen!... Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offering.... Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.... They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.... How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Occasionally a long word is used in the current version, where a more vivid or picturesque short one might have been employed, as where our Saviour exclaims: “Oh, ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” In one of the older versions “brood” is used in place of “generation,” with far greater effect.

The early writers, the “pure wells of English undefiled,” abound in small words. Shakespeare employs them in his finest passages, especially when he would paint a scene with a few masterly touches. Hear Macbeth:

“Here lay Duncan,

His silver skin laced with his golden blood;

And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in Nature

For ruin’s wasteful entrance. There the murderers,

Steep’d in the colors of their trade, their daggers

Unmannerly breech’d with gore.”

Are monosyllables passionless? Listen, again, to the “Thane of Cawdor”:

“That is a step

On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,

For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires,

Let not light see my black and deep desires.

The eye winks at the hand. Yet, let that be

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”

Two dissyllables only among fifty-two words!

Bishop Hall, in one of his most powerful satires, speaking of the vanity of “adding house to house and field to field,” has these beautiful lines:

“Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store,

And he that cares for most shall find no more.”

“What harmonious monosyllables!” exclaims the critic, Gifford; yet they may be paralleled by others in the same writer, equally musical and equally expressive.

Was Milton tame? He knew when to use polysyllables of “learned length and thundering sound”; but he knew also when to produce the grandest effects by the small words despised by inferior artists. Read his account of the journey of the fallen angels:

“Through many a dark and dreary vale

They passed, and many a region dolorous,

O’er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,—

A universe of death.”

In what other language shall we find in the same number of words a more vivid picture of desolation than this? Hear, again, the lost archangel calling upon hell to receive its new possessor:

“One who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

What matter where, if I be still the same,

And what I should be—all but less than He

Whom thunder hath made greater? Here, at least,

We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built

Here for His envy; will not drive us hence;

Here we may reign secure, and, in my choice,

To reign is worth ambition, though in hell;

Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”

Did Collins lack lyric beauty, grace, or power? Read the following exquisite lines, in which the truth of the sentiment that “poetry is the short-hand of thought” is strikingly illustrated:

“How sleep the brave who sink to rest

By all their country’s wishes blest!

When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,

Returns to deck their hallow’d mould,

She there shall dress a sweeter sod

Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod.

By fairy hands their knell is rung,

By forms unseen their dirge is sung;

There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray,

To bless the turf that wraps their clay;

And Freedom shall a while repair,

To dwell a weeping hermit there.”

Where, in the whole range of English poetry, shall we find anything more perfect than these lines? What a quantity and variety of thought are here condensed into two verses, like a cluster of rock crystals, sparkling and distinct, yet receiving and reflecting lustre by the combination! Poetry and picture, pathos and fancy, grandeur and simplicity, are combined in verse, the melody of which has never been surpassed. Yet, out of the seventy-nine words in these lines, sixty-two are monosyllables.

Did Byron lack force or fire? His skilful use of monosyllables is often the very secret of his charm. It is true that he too frequently resorts to quaint, obsolete, and outlandish terms, thinking thereby to render his style more gorgeous or grand. But his chief strength lies in his despotic command over the simplest forms of speech. Listen to the words in which he describes the destruction of Sennacherib:

“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill,

And their hearts beat but once, and forever lay still.”

Here, out of forty-two words, all but four are monosyllables; and yet how exquisitely are all these monosyllables linked into the majestic and animated movement of the anapestic measure! Again, what can be more musical and more melancholy than the opening verse of the lines in which the same poet bids adieu to his native land?

“Adieu! adieu! my native shore

Fades o’er the waters blue,

The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,

And shrieks the wild sea-mew.

Yon sun that sets upon the sea

We follow in his flight;

Farewell awhile to him and thee,

My native land, good night!

With thee, my bark, I’ll swiftly go

Athwart the foaming brine;

Nor care what land thou bear’st me to,

So not again to mine.

Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves

And when you fail my sight,

Welcome, ye deserts and ye caves!

My native land, good night!”

Two Latin words, “native” and “desert”; one French, “adieu”; the rest, English purely. The third and fourth lines paint the scene to the life; yet all the words but one are monosyllables.

How graceful, tender, thoughtful, and melancholy, are the following lines by Moore, of which the monosyllabic music is one of the principal charms:

“Those evening bells! those evening bells!

How many a tale their music tells,

Of youth and home, and that sweet time,

When last I heard their soothing chime.

Those joyous hours have passed away;

And many a heart, that then was gay,

Within the tomb now darkly dwells,

And hears no more those evening bells.

And so ’twill be when I am gone;

That tuneful peal will still ring on,

While other bards shall walk those dells,

And sing your praise, sweet evening bells!”

The following brief passage from one of Landor’s poems strikingly illustrates the metrical effect of simple words of one syllable:

“She was sent forth

To bring that light which never wintry blast

Blows out, nor rain, nor snow extinguishes—

The light that shines from loving eyes upon

Eyes that love back, till they can see no more.”

Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one; nearly all the rest are monosyllables.

Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the “Philosophy of Style,” has pointed out the superior forcibleness of Saxon-English to Latin-English, and shown that it is due largely to the comparative brevity of the Saxon. If a thought gains in energy in proportion as it is expressed in fewer words, it must also gain in energy in proportion as the words in which it is expressed have fewer syllables. If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract his attention, and diminish the strength of the impression made upon him, it matters not whether they consist of entire words or of parts of words. “Formerly,” says an able writer, “when armies engaged in battle, they were drawn up in one long line, fighting from flank to flank; but a great general broke up this heavy mass into several files, so that he could bend his front at will, bring any troops he chose into action, and, even after the first onslaught, change the whole order of the field; and though such a broken line might not have pleased an old soldier’s eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it carried the day, and is everywhere now the arrangement. There will thus be an advantage, the advantage of suppleness, in having the parts of a word to a certain degree kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the way with all languages as they become more refined; and so far are monosyllabic languages from being lame and ungainly, that such are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of Asia; and the most rough and untamed (those of North America) abound in huge unkempt words,—yardlongtailed, like fiends.”

I have spoken in the previous chapter of Johnson’s fondness for big, swelling words, the leviathans of the lexicon, and also of certain speakers and writers in our own day, who have an equal contempt for small words, and never use one when they can find a pompous polysyllable to take its place. It is evident from the passages I have cited, that these Liliputians,—these Tom Thumbs of the dictionary,—play as important a part in our literature as their bigger and more magniloquent brethren. Horne Tooke admitted their force, when, on his trial for high treason, he said that he was “the miserable victim of two prepositions and a conjunction.” Like the infusoria of our globe, so long unnoticed, which are now known to have raised whole continents from the depths of the ocean, these words, once so despised, are now rising in importance, and are admitted by scholars to form an important class in the great family of words.

The class of small words which were once contemptuously called “particles,” are now acknowledged to be the very bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure of language. Their significance increases just in the degree that a nation thinks acutely and expresses its thought accurately. An uncultivated idiom can do without them; but as soon as a people becomes thoughtful, and wishes to connect and modify its ideas,—in short, to pursue metaphysical inquiries, and to reason logically,—the microscopic parts of speech become indispensable. In some kinds of writing the almost exclusive use of small words is necessary. What would have been the fate of Bunyan’s immortal book, had he told the story of the Pilgrim’s journey in the ponderous, elephantine “osities” and “ations” of Johnson, or the gorgeous Latinity of Taylor? It would have been like building a boat out of timbers cut out for a ship. It is owing to this grandiose style, as much as to any other cause, that the author of the “Rambler,” in spite of his sturdy strength and grasp of mind, “lies like an Egyptian king, buried and forgotten in the pyramid of his fame.” When a man half understands the subject of which he speaks or writes, he will, like Goldsmith’s schoolmaster, use words of “learned length and thundering sound.” But when he is master of his theme, and when he feels deeply, he will use short, plain words which all can understand. Rage and fear, it has been happily said, strike out their terms like the sharp crack of the rifle when it sends its bullets straight to the point.[12] When, after wearily waiting in Chesterfield’s ante-room, Johnson wrote his indignant letter, he broke away, to a considerable extent, from his usual elephantine style, and used short, sharp, and stinging terms.

In conclusion, when we remember that the Saxon language, the soul of the English, is essentially monosyllabic; that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by the vowel a alone, more than five hundred; by the vowel e, some four hundred and fifty; by the vowel i, about four hundred; by the vowel o, over four hundred; and by the vowel u, more than two hundred and fifty; we must admit that these seemingly petty and insignificant words, even the microscopic particles, so far from meriting to be treated as “creepers,” are of high importance, and that to know when and how to use them is of no less moment to the speaker or writer than to know when to use the grandiloquent expressions which we have borrowed from the language of Greece and Rome. To every man who has occasion to teach or move his fellow-men by tongue or pen, I would say in the words of Dr. Addison Alexander,—themselves a happy example of the thing he commends:

“Think not that strength lies in the big round word,

Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak.

To whom can this be true who once has heard

The cry for help, the tongue that all men speak

When want or woe or fear is in the throat,

So that each word gasped out is like a shriek

Pressed from the sore heart, or a strange, wild note

Sung by some fay or fiend? There is a strength

Which dies if stretched too far or spun too fine,

Which has more height than breadth, more depth than length;

Let but this force of thought and speech be mine,

And he that will may take the sleek, fat phrase,

Which glows and burns not, though it gleam and shine,—

Light, but no heat—a flash, but not a blaze!

Nor is it mere strength that the short word boasts;

It serves of more than fight or storm to tell,

The roar of waves that clash on rock-bound coasts,

The crash of tall trees when the wild winds swell,

The roar of guns, the groans of men that die

On blood-stained fields. It has a voice as well

For them that far off on their sick beds lie;

For them that weep, for them that mourn the dead;

For them that laugh, and dance, and clap their hand;

To joy’s quick step, as well as grief’s slow tread.

The sweet, plain words we learned at first keep time;

And though the theme be sad, or gay, or grand,

With each, with all, these may be made to chime,

In thought, or speech, or song, in prose or rhyme.”