Dr. Johnson would not admit fun into his Dictionary as he deemed it a “low word”: I turn up my nose at nothing, being convinced that it is to low origins that the great lexicographers will eventually have to stoop. In truth, the innate strength of the English language, which is becoming more and more the Master Tongue of the world, lies in its homely, trivial, and democratic origin.[59] This origin, as I have elsewhere endeavoured to show, is due largely to symbolism, which is merely another term for metaphor. We used to be taught that every language was a dictionary of faded metaphor, and such an origin is undoubtedly more true than the current theory of barbaric yawps. The essence of symbolism is its simplicity. Who, for instance, does not understand that the Lion is the symbol of High Courage, and the Bull-dog of Tenacity, or holding on? At the present day the badge of one of His Majesty’s warships is the picture of a butting goat, accompanied by the words “Butt in”. This, as the authorities rightly describe it, is “pure symbolism,” but to a symbolist the legend “Butt in” is superfluous, as the mere butting goat adequately carries the idea. As Prof. Petrie has well said: “To understand the position and movement of thought in a primitive age, it must be approached on a far simpler plane than that of our present familiarity with writing. To reach the working of the childhood of our races we should look to the minds of children. If the child passes through ancestral changes in its bodily formation, so certainly it passes through such stages in the growth and capacity of its brain.”[60] I shall push the childish and extremely simple theory of symbolism to its logical conclusions, and shall show, for instance, that the Boar, because it burrowed with its plough-like snout, was the emblem of the ploughman, and that thus, boar and boer are the same word. Or, to take another instance, I shall show that probably because the cat sits washing herself, and is a model of cleanliness in sanitary respects, the cat who figures on the head of the Magna Mater of Crete was elevated into a symbol of the Immaculate or Pure One, and that the word cat, German kater, is identical with the name Kate or Caterina which means purity. The Sanscrit word for cat means literally the cleanser, whence it is obvious that the cleanly habits of the cat strongly impressed the Aryan imagination.
Whether or not my theories are right, it is undeniable that the etymologies of Skeat and Murray are very often painfully wrong. The standard explanation, for instance, of the word haha, meaning a sunk fence, is that it is from the French ha-ha, “an interjection of laughter, hence a surprise in the form of an unexpected obstacle that laughs at one”. This may be so, but it is a far wilder guess than anything to be found in my pages, or that I should ever dare to venture. In 1913 I suggested in Notes and Queries that the word ha-ha or haw-haw was simply a re-duplication or superlative of the French haie, a fence or hedge, old English haw. In the new edition of Skeat I am glad to find this suggestion accepted, and that ha-ha! has been expunged. It still figures in Dr. Murray.
In his Canons of Etymology, Prof. Skeat observes:—“The history of a nation accounts for the constituent parts of its language. When an early English word is compared with Hebrew or Coptic, as used to be done in the old editions of Webster’s Dictionary, history is set at defiance; and it was a good deed to clear the later editions of all such rubbish”.
This is curiously parochial, yet it seems to have been seriously accepted by etymologers. But what would Science say nowadays to that geologist or anthropologist who committed the foul deed of discarding or suppressing a vast body of facts simply because they clashed with, or “set at defiance,” the “historic” assertions of the Pentateuch? It is true that the history of a nation, if it were fully known, must account for the constituent parts of its language, but how much British history do we pretend to know? To suggest that philology must limit its conclusions by the Roman invasion, or bound its findings by the pages of Mrs. Markham, is ludicrous, yet, nevertheless, these fictitious boundaries are the mediæval and pre-Darwinian limits within which the Science of Language is now coffined. Prof. Skeat was reluctantly compelled to recognise a Semitic trace in words such as bad and target, but was unable to accept the connection owing to the absence of any historic point of contact between Syria and this country prior to the Crusades! So, too, M. Sebhlani observed numerous close similarities between Arabic and English, but was “unable to press them for lack of a theory as to how they got into English!”
As history must be constructed from facts, and facts must not be peremptorily suppressed simply because at present they clash with the meagre record of historians, I shall have no scruples in noting a word from Timbuctoo if it means precisely what it does in English, and proves reasonably to be a missing piece. As Gerald Massey thirty or forty years ago very properly observed: “We have to dig and descend mine under mine beneath the surface scratched with such complacent twitterings over their findings by those who have taken absolute possession of this field, and proceeded to fence it in for themselves, and put up a warning against everybody else as trespassers. We get volume after volume on the ‘science of language’ which only make us wonder when the ‘science’ is going to begin. At present it is an opera that is all overture. The comparative philologists have not gone deep enough, as yet, to see that there is a stage where likeness may afford guidance, because there was a common origin for the primordial stock of words. They assume that Grimm’s Law goes all the way back. They cling to their limits, as the old Greek sailors hugged the shore, and continually insist upon imposing these on all other voyagers, by telling terrible tales of the unknown dangers beyond.”[61]
As soon as etymologists appreciate the value of the comparative method it is undeniable that a marked advance will be made in the “Science of Language,” but during the last few decades it must be confessed that that science—pace the bombastic language of some of its adherents—has retrogressed rather than moved forward.
Prof. Skeat was admittedly a high authority on early English, and his Dictionary of the English Language is thus almost inevitably conspicuous for its Anglo-Saxon colouring. Had, however, the influence of the Saxons been as marked and immediate as he assumes, the language of Anglo-Saxondom would have coincided exactly or very closely with the contemporary German. But, according to Dr. Wm. Smith, “There is no proof that Anglo-Saxon was ever spoken anywhere but on the soil of Great Britain; for the ‘Heliend,’ and other remains of old Saxon, are not Anglo-Saxon, and I think it must be regarded, not as a language which the colonists, or any of them, brought with them from the Continent, but as a new speech resulting from the fusion of many separate elements. It is, therefore indigenous, if not aboriginal, and as exclusively local and national in its character as English itself.”[62]
That modern English contains innumerable traces of pure Celtic words used to be a matter of common acceptance, and in the words of Davies, the stoutest assertor of a pure Anglo-Saxon or Norman descent is convicted by the language of his daily life, of belonging to a race that partakes largely of Celtic blood. If he calls for his coat (W. cota, Germ. rock), or tells of the basket of fish he has caught (W. basged, Germ. korb), or the cart he employs on his land (W. cart, from càr, a dray, or sledge, Germ. wagen), or of the pranks of his youth, or the prancing of his horse (W. prank, a trick, prancio, to frolic), or declares that he was happy when a gownsman at Oxford (W. hap, fortune, chance, Germ. glück, W. gwn), or that his servant is pert (W. pert, spruce, dapper, insolent); or if, descending to the language of the vulgar, he affirms that such assertions are balderdash, and the claim a sham (W. baldorddus, idle prating; siom, shom, a deceit, a sham), he is unconsciously maintaining the truth he would deny. Like the M. Jourdain of Molière, who had been talking prose all his life without knowing it, he has been speaking very good Celtic without any suspicion of the fact.[63]
It is noteworthy that in his determination to ignore the Celtic influence, Prof. Skeat concedes only one among the above-mentioned words to the British—(gwn). The Welsh hap “must,” he says, be borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon gehoep, and the remainder he ascribes to Middle English or to an “origin unknown”.