Once upon a time to aggravate meant to increase an offense; now it is often used as tho it meant to irritate. Formerly calculated—as in the sentence “it was calculated to do harm”—implied a deliberate intention to injure; now the idea of intention has been eliminated and the sentence is held to be roughly equivalent to “it was likely to do harm.” Verbal is slowly getting itself accepted as synonymous with oral, in antithesis to written. Lurid was really pale, wan, ghastly; but how often of late has it been employed as tho it signified red or ruddy or bloody?
At first these new uses of these old words were slovenly and inadmissible inaccuracies, but by sheer insistence they are winning their pardon, until at last they will gain authority as they broaden down from precedent to precedent. It is well to be off with the old word before you are on with the new; and no writer who respects his mother-tongue is ever in haste to take up with words thus wrested from the primitive propriety.
But, as Dryden declared when justifying his modernizing of Chaucer’s vocabulary, “Words are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to be removed; customs are changed, and even statutes are silently repealed when the reason ceases for which they were enacted.” It was Dryden’s “Cousin Swift” who once declared that “a nice man is a man of nasty ideas”—an assertion which I venture to believe to be wholly incomprehensible to-day to the young ladies of England in whose mouths nice means agreeable and nasty means disagreeable. Nice has suffered this inexplicable metamorphosis in the United States as well as in Great Britain, but nasty has not yet been emptied of its original offensiveness here as it has over there. And even in British speech the transformation is relatively recent; I think Stevenson was guilty of an anachronism in ‘Weir of Hermiston’ when he put it in the mouth of a young Scot.
If the Scotch have followed the evil example of the English in misusing nasty, the English in turn have twisted the ilk of North Britain to serve their own ends. Of that ilk is a phrase added to a man’s surname to show that this name and the name of his estate are the same; thus Bradwardine of Bradwardine would be called “Bradwardine of that ilk.” But it is not uncommon now to see a phrase like “people of that ilk,” meaning obviously “people of that sort.”
In like manner awful and terrible and elegant have been so misused as mere intensives that a careful writer now strikes them out when they come off the end of his pen in their original meaning. So quite no longer implies completely but is almost synonymous with somewhat—quite poor meaning somewhat poor and quite good meaning pretty good. Unique is getting to imply merely excellent or perhaps only unusual; its exact etymological value is departing forever. Creole, which should be applied only to Caucasian natives of tropical countries born of Latin parents, is beginning to carry with it in the vulgar tongue of to-day a vague suspicion of negro blood.
While the perversion of nice and nasty is British, there is an American perversion of dirt not unlike it. To most Americans, I think, dirt suggests earth or soil or clay or dust; to most Americans, I think, dirt no longer carries with it any suggestion of dirtiness. I have heard a mother send her little boy off to make mud-pies on condition that he used only “clean dirt”; and I know that a lawn-tennis ground of compacted earth is called a dirt court. Yet, tho the noun has thus been defecated, the adjective keeps its earlier force; and there even lingers something of the pristine value in the noun itself when it is employed in the picturesque idiom of the Rocky Mountains, where to be guilty of an underhand injury against any one is to do him dirt. Lovers of Western verse will recall how the frequenters of Casey’s table d’hôte went to see “Modjesky as Cameel,” and how they sat in silence until the break occurs between the lover and his mistress:
At that Three-fingered Hoover says: “I’ll chip into this game,
And see if Red Hoss Mountain cannot reconstruct the same.
I won’t set by and see the feelin’s of a lady hurt—
Gol durn a critter, anyhow, that does a woman dirt!”
Here no doubt, we have crossed the confines of slang; but having done so, I venture upon an anecdote which will serve to show how completely sometimes the newer meaning of a word substitutes itself for the older. Two friends of mine were in a train of the elevated railroad, passing through that formerly craggy part of upper New York which was once called Shantytown and which now prefers to be known as Harlem. One of them drew the attention of the other to the capering young capricorns that sported over the blasted rocks by the side of the lofty track. “Just look at those kids,” were the words he used. He was overheard by a boy of the streets sitting in the next seat, who glanced out of the window at once, but failed to discover the children he expected to behold. Whereupon he promptly looked up and corrected my friend. “Them’s not kids,” declared the urchin of Manhattan; “them’s little goats!” In the mind of this native youngster there was no doubt at all as to the meaning of the word kid; to him it meant child; and he would have scorned any explanation that it ever had meant young goat.
In ignorance is certainty, and with increase of wisdom comes hesitancy. For example, what does the word romantic really mean? Few adjectives are harder worked in the history of modern literature; and no two of those who use it would agree upon its exact context. It suggests one set of circumstances to the student of English literature, a second set to a student of German literature, and a third to a student of French literature; while every student of comparative literature must echo Professor Kuno Francke’s longing for “the formation of an international league for the suppression of the terms both romanticism and classicism.”
Other words there are almost as ambiguous—philology, for example, and college and chapel. By classical philology we understand the study of all that survives of the civilizations of Greece and Rome, their languages, their literature, their laws, their arts. But has Romance philology or Germanic philology so broad a basis? Has English philology? To nine out of ten of us, this use of the word now seems to put stress on the study of linguistics as against the study of literature; to ninety-nine out of a hundred, I think, philologist suggests the narrow student of linguistics; and therefore the wider meaning seems likely soon to fall into innocuous desuetude.