Many popular authors, presuming on their own authority, have endeavoured to introduce new and strange terms into the English language. Coleridge, in his work ‘On Church and State,’ makes use of the following extraordinary words:—‘Influencive,’ ‘extroitive, ‘retroitive,’ and ‘productivity.’ Bentley uses:—‘Commentitious,’ ‘aliene,’ ‘negoce,’ and ‘exscribe.’ But no other writers adopted these words: a clear proof that they were not wanted.
Charles Lamb used, in his writings, several words which have not succeeded in maintaining a place in the language. Among them may be named, ‘agnise,’ ‘burgeon,’ and ‘arride.’
Again, any subject of temporary excitement will generally give birth to some new words. The Indian Mutiny gave us ‘to loot;’ and during the American civil war, we made our first acquaintance with ‘secesh,’ ‘skedaddle,’ and ‘stampede.’ Words born under such circumstances may be long- or short-lived: some maintain a place in the language, others have but a brief existence; they ‘fret their hour upon the stage,’ and then are heard no more.
We have also many examples of words which originated in some question of passing interest, and which, though the causes of their first appearance have long since passed away, still remain in our language, and do us excellent service there. The general belief in astrology in the Middle Ages left us several words of this class. Though we no longer believe that the position of the stars can affect our fortunes, we still use the word ‘disaster,’ in the sense of a calamity or misfortune. From the same source come the adjectives, ‘jovial,’ ‘mercurial,’ ‘martial,’ and ‘saturnine.’ These express qualities supposed to belong to those heathen gods whose names were given to the constellation under which any one was born. In astrological phraseology a man’s fortune is still said to be in the ascendant, or to culminate. Both these expressions were first used by the astrologers, and referred to certain stars which, when they had risen to their greatest height, were believed to portend prosperity. The word ‘aspect,’ though now expressing the general appearance of things, was first applied, astrologically, to the physical appearance or outward view of the heavens; and ‘lunatic’ was first used in the sense of one supposed to be mentally affected by a change of the moon.
Other superstitions have produced words of a like nature. The ancient Roman divination may be still traced in our English words ‘augur,’ ‘auspice,’ ‘omen,’ &c. The left hand was always regarded by the ancients as portending ill-luck; and hence our modern word ‘sinister,’ which at first meant simply ‘left-handed,’ has now come to signify ‘foreboding evil.’
‘Its,’ the possessive form of the neuter personal pronoun, is of comparatively late introduction into our language. In Anglo-Saxon, the same form served for both the masculine and neuter possessive; thus:—
| m. | f. | n. | |
| Nom. | He | heo | hit. |
| Gen. | His | hire | his. |
At first, the nominative neuter, ‘it,’ was used for the possessive neuter, of which many instances occur in Shakspere. See ‘King John,’ act. ii. sc. 1: ‘Go to it grandame, child.’ The same may be found in the authorised version of the Scriptures (of 1611); see Leviticus xxv. 5: ‘That which groweth of “it” own accord.’ But in this translation the word ‘its’ is not once found. Genesis i. 11: ‘The tree yielding fruit after his kind.’ Mark. ix. 50: ‘If the salt have lost his saltness,’ &c. Milton avoids the use of ‘its.’ It seldom occurs in his prose works, and there are not more than three or four instances of it in his poems. The precise date and occasion of the first introduction of ‘its’ into the English language have not been ascertained, but it was probably early in the seventeenth century. It is said that the ‘Rowley’s Poems’ of Chatterton was detected to be a forgery by the presence of the word ‘its’ several times in the MS. Rowley was represented as a monk of the fifteenth century, when the word was certainly not in the language.
New French Words.
M. Génin, in his chapter on the age of certain French words and phrases, mentions the following cases:[1]—