HISTORY OF NEW WORDS.
Neology, or the novelty of words and phrases, is an innovation, which, with the opulence of our present language, the English philologer is most jealous to allow; but we have puritans or precisians of English, superstitiously nice! The fantastic coinage of affectation or caprice will cease to circulate from its own alloy; but shall we reject the ore of fine workmanship and solid weight? There is no government mint of words, and it is no statutable offence to invent a felicitous or daring expression unauthorised by Mr. Todd! When a man of genius, in the heat of his pursuits or his feelings, has thrown out a peculiar word, it probably conveyed more precision or energy than any other established word, otherwise he is but an ignorant pretender!
Julius Cæsar, who, unlike other great captains, is authority on words as well as about blows, wrote a large treatise on “Analogy,” in which that fine genius counselled to “avoid every unusual word as a rock!”[19] The cautious Quintilian, as might be expected, opposes all innovation in language. “If the new word is well received, small is the glory; if rejected, it raises laughter.”[20] This only marks the penury of his feelings in this species of adventure. The great legislator of words, who lived when his own language was at its acmé, seems undecided, yet pleaded for this liberty. “Shall that which the Romans allowed to Cæcilius and to Plautus be refused to Virgil and Varius?” The answer to the question might not be favourable to the inquirer. While a language is forming, writers are applauded for extending its limits; when established, for restricting themselves to them. But this is to imagine that a perfect language can exist! The good sense and observation of Horace perceived that there may be occasions where necessity must become the mother of invented words:—
| ————Si forte necesse est Indiciis monstrare recentibus abdita rerum. If you write of things abstruse or new, Some of your own inventing may be used, So it be seldom and discreetly done. Roscommon. |
But Horace’s canon for deciding on the legality of the new invention, or the standard by which it is to be tried, will not serve to assist the inventor of words:—
| ————licuit, semperque licebit, Signatum præsente nota procudere nummum.[21] |
This præsens nota, or public stamp, can never be affixed to any new coinage of words: for many received at a season have perished with it.[22] The privilege of stamping words is reserved for their greatest enemy—Time itself! and the inventor of a new word must never flatter himself that he has secured the public adoption, for he must lie in his grave before he can enter the dictionary.
In Willes’ address to the reader, prefixed to the collection of Voyages published in 1577, he finds fault with Eden’s translation from Peter Martyr, for using words that “smelt too much of the Latine.” We should scarcely have expected to find among them ponderouse, portentouse, despicable, obsequious, homicide, imbibed, destructive, prodigious. The only words he quotes, not thoroughly naturalised, are dominators, ditionaries, (subjects), solicitute (careful).
The Tatler, No. 230, introduces several polysyllables introduced by military narrations, “which (he says), if they attack us too frequently, we shall certainly put them to flight, and cut off the rear;” every one of them still keep their ground.