At the end of the nineteenth century the battle was still raging over standpoint, for example, and over reliable and over lengthy, and over a score of others, all of which bid fair to establish themselves ultimately because they supply a demand more or less insistent. The fate is more doubtful of photo for photograph and of phone for telephone; they both strike us now as vulgarisms, just as mob (and for the same reason) struck Swift as vulgar; and it may be that in time they will live down this stigma of illegitimacy just as mob has survived it. Then there is the misbegotten verb, to enthuse, in my sight the most hideous of vocables. What is to be its fate? Altho I have detected it in the careful columns of the ‘Nation,’ it has not as yet been adopted by any acknowledged master of English; none the less, I fear me greatly, it has all the vitality of other ill weeds. And is bike going to get itself recognized as a substitute for bicycle, both as verb and as noun? It seems to be possible, since a monosyllable has always an advantage over a trisyllable in our impatient mouths.
Swift objected sharply to the curtailing of words “when we are already overloaded with monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our language.” Then he wittily characterizes the process by which mob had been made, cab was to be made, and photo is now in the making: “Thus we cram one syllable and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened her mice after she had bit off their legs to prevent them from running away; and if ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer the end: for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them.” Swift was rash enough to assert that speculation, operation, preliminaries, ambassador, communication, and battalion were words newly introduced, and also to prophesy that they were too poly-syllabic to be able to endure many more campaigns. As it happens no attempt has been made to shorten any one of them except speculation, and it can hardly be maintained that spec has established itself. Certainly it has not disestablished speculation, as mob has driven out mobile vulgus.
Dryden declared that he traded “both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language”; but he denied that he Latinized too much; and most of the Gallicisms he attempted have not won acceptance. Lowell thought that Dryden did not add a single word to the language, unless “he first used magnetism in its present sense of moral attraction.” Dr. Holmes also discovered that it is not enough to make a new word when it is needed and to fashion it fitly; its fortune still depends on public caprice or popular instinct. “I’ve sometimes made new words,” he told a friend; “I made chrysocracy, thinking it would take its place, but it didn’t; plutocracy, meaning the same thing, was adopted instead.” But anesthesia is a word of Dr. Holmes’s making which has won its way not only in English but in most of the other modern languages. It may be doubted whether a like fortune will follow another word to be found quoted in one of his letters, aproposity, a bilingual hybrid not without analogues in our language.
It is with surprise that in Stevenson’s very Scotch romance ‘David Balfour’ we happen upon another malformation—come-at-able, hitherto supposed to be Yankee in its origin and in its aroma. Elsewhere in the same story we read “you claim to be innocent,” a form which the cockney critics are wont to call American. Stevenson in this novel uses both the modern jeopardize and the ancient enjeopardy. Just why to jeopardize should have driven to jeopard out of use, it is not easy to declare, nor why leniency is supplanting lenity. As drunk seems to suggest total intoxication, it is possible to discover the cause of the increasing tendency to say “I have drank.” No defense is easy of in our midst for in the midst of us, and yet it will prevail inevitably, for it is a convenient short-cut. Dr. Holmes confessed to Richard Grant White that he had used it once, and that Edward Everett (who had also once fallen from grace) made him see the error of his ways. It is to be found twice in Stevenson’s ‘Amateur Emigrant,’ and again in the ‘Res Judicatæ’ of Mr. Augustine Birrell, a brisk essayist, altho not an impeccable stylist.
It is nothing against a noun that it is new. To call it a neologism is but begging the question. Of necessity every word was new once. It was “struck in the die of human experience,” to come back to Dr. Holmes’s figure; and it is at its best before it is “worn smooth by innumerable contacts.” Lowell thought it was a chief element of Shakspere’s greatness that “he found words ready to his use, original and untarnished—types of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions.” He “found a language already established but not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mongers.” For the same reason Mérimée delighted in Russian, because it was “young, the pedants not having had time to spoil it; it is admirably fit for poetry.”
This native relish for the uncontaminated word it was that led Hugo and Gautier to ransack all sorts of special vocabularies. This thirst for the unhackneyed epithet it is that urges Mr. Rudyard Kipling to avail himself of the technical terms of trade, which serve his purpose, not merely because they are exact, but also because they are unexpected. The device is dangerous, no doubt, but a writer of delicate perceptions can find his advantage in it. Perhaps George Eliot was a little too fond of injecting into fiction the terminology of science, but there was nothing blameworthy in the desire to enlarge the vocabulary which should be at the command of the novelist. Professor Dowden records that when she used in a story words and phrases like dynamic and natural selection, the reviewer pricked up his delicate ears and shied; and he makes bold to suggest that “if the thoroughbred critic could only be led close up to dynamic, he would find that dynamic would not bite.” Every lover of our language will sympathize with Professor Dowden’s assertion that “a protest of common sense is really called for against the affectation which professes to find obscurity in words because they are trisyllabic or because they carry with them scientific associations. Language, the instrument of literary art, is an instrument of ever-extending range, and the truest pedantry, in an age when the air is saturated with scientific thought, would be to reject those accessions to the language which are the special gain of the time.”
Where George Eliot erred—if err she did at all in this matter—was in the use of scientific terms inappropriately, or, so to say, boastfully, whereby she aroused an association of ideas foreign to the purpose in hand. Every writer needs to consider most carefully both the obvious and the remote associations of the phrases he employs, that these may intensify the thought he wishes to convey. A word is known by the company it has kept. Especially must a poet have a keen nose for the fragrant word, or else his stanzas will lack savor. The magic of his art lies largely in the syllables he selects, in their sound and in their color. Not their meanings merely are important to him, but their suggestions also—not what they denote more than what they connote. An American psychologist has recently told us that every word has not only its own note but also its overtones. With unconscious foresight, the great poets have always acted on this theory.
Perhaps this is a reason why the poets have ever been ready to rescue a cast-off word from the rubbish-heap of the past. Professor Earle (of Oxford) declares that “it has been one of the most interesting features of the new vigor and independence of American literature, that it has often displayed in a surprising manner what springs of novelty there are in reserve and to be elicited by novel combinations”—a statement more complimentary in its intent than felicitous in its phrasing. And Professor Earle praises Emerson and Lowell and Holmes for their skill in enriching our modern English with the old words locked up out of sight in the treasuries of the past. Lowell said of Emerson that “his eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself.”
Of course this effort to recover the scattered pearls of speech, dropped by the wayside in the course of the centuries, is peculiar neither to the United States nor to the nineteenth century—altho perhaps it has been carried further in our country and in our time than anywhere else. Modern Greek has recalled to its aid as much old Greek as it can assimilate. Sallust was accused by an acrid critic of having made a list of obsolete words, which he strove deliberately to reintroduce into Latin. This is, in effect, what Spenser sought to do with Chaucer’s vocabulary; and it is curious to reflect that, owing, it may be, in part, to the example set by the author of the ‘Faerie Queene,’ the language of the ‘Canterbury Tales’ is far less strange, less remote, less archaic to us to-day than it was to the Elizabethans.
A rapid consumption of the vocabulary is going on constantly. Words are swiftly worn out and used up and thrown aside. New words are made or borrowed to fill the vacancies; and old words are impressed into service and forced to do double duty. No sooner is a new dictionary completed than the editor sets about his inevitable supplement. And the dictionary is not only of necessity incomplete: it is also inadequate in its definitions, for it may happen that a word will take on an added meaning while the big book is at the bindery. Our language is fluctuating always; and now one word and now another has expanded its content or has shrunk away into insignificance. No definition is surely stable for long. When Cotton Mather wrote in defense of his own style disgust was fairly equivalent to dislike; “and if a more massy way of writing be never so much disgusted at this day, a better gust will come on.”