CHAPTER V.
ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE VARIATIONS IN THE MEANING OF TERMS.
[§ 1.] It is not only in the mode which has now been pointed out, namely by gradual inattention to a portion of the ideas conveyed, that words in common use are liable to shift their connotation. The truth is, that the connotation of such words is perpetually varying; as might be expected from the manner in which words in common use acquire their connotation. A technical term, invented for purposes of art or science, has, from the first, the connotation given to it by its inventor; but a name which is in every one's mouth before any one thinks of defining it, derives its connotation only from the circumstances which are habitually brought to mind when it is pronounced. Among these circumstances, the properties common to the things denoted by the name, have naturally a principal place; and would have the sole place, if language were regulated by convention rather than by custom and accident. But besides these common properties, which if they exist are certainly present whenever the name is employed, any other circumstance may casually be found along with it, so frequently as to become associated with it in the same manner, and as strongly, as the common properties themselves. In proportion as this association forms itself, people give up using the name in cases in which those casual circumstances do not exist. They prefer using some other name, or the same name with some adjunct, rather than employ an expression which will call up an idea they do not want to excite. The circumstance originally casual, thus becomes regularly a part of the connotation of the word.
It is this continual incorporation of circumstances originally accidental, into the permanent signification of words, which is the cause that there are so few exact synonymes. It is this also which renders the dictionary meaning of a word, by universal remark so imperfect an exponent of its real meaning. The dictionary meaning is marked out in a broad, blunt way, and probably includes all that was originally necessary for the correct employment of the term; but in process of time so many collateral associations adhere to words, that whoever should attempt to use them with no other guide than the dictionary, would confound a thousand nice distinctions and subtle shades of meaning which dictionaries take no account of; as we notice in the use of a language in conversation or writing by a foreigner not thoroughly master of it. The history of a word, by showing the causes which determine its use, is in these cases a better guide to its employment than any definition; for definitions can only show its meaning at the particular time, or at most the series of its successive meanings, but its history may show the law by which the succession was produced. The word gentleman, for instance, to the correct employment of which a dictionary would be no guide, originally meant simply a man born in a certain rank. From this it came by degrees to connote all such qualities or adventitious circumstances as were usually found to belong to persons of that rank. This consideration at once explains why in one of its vulgar acceptations it means any one who lives without labour, in another without manual labour, and in its more elevated signification it has in every age signified the conduct, character, habits, and outward appearance, in whomsoever found, which, according to the ideas of that age, belonged or were expected to belong to persons born and educated in a high social position.
It continually happens that of two words, whose dictionary meanings are either the same or very slightly different, one will be the proper word to use in one set of circumstances, another in another, without its being possible to show how the custom of so employing them originally grew up. The accident that one of the words was used and not the other on a particular occasion or in a particular social circle, will be sufficient to produce so strong an association between the word and some speciality of circumstances, that mankind abandon the use of it in any other case, and the speciality becomes part of its signification. The tide of custom first drifts the word on the shore of a particular meaning, then retires and leaves it there.
An instance in point is the remarkable change which, in the English language at least, has taken place in the signification of the word loyalty. That word originally meant in English, as it still means in the language from whence it came, fair, open dealing, and fidelity to engagements; in that sense the quality it expressed was part of the ideal chivalrous or knightly character. By what process, in England, the term became restricted to the single case of fidelity to the throne, I am not sufficiently versed in the history of courtly language to be able to pronounce. The interval between a loyal chevalier and a loyal subject is certainly great. I can only suppose that the word was, at some period, the favourite term at court to express fidelity to the oath of allegiance; until at length those who wished to speak of any other, and as it was probably deemed, inferior sort of fidelity, either did not venture to use so dignified a term, or found it convenient to employ some other in order to avoid being misunderstood.
[§ 2.] Cases are not unfrequent in which a circumstance, at first casually incorporated into the connotation of a word which originally had no reference to it, in time wholly supersedes the original meaning, and becomes not merely a part of the connotation, but the whole of it. This is exemplified in the word pagan, paganus; which originally, as its etymology imports, was equivalent to villager; the inhabitant of a pagus, or village. At a particular era in the extension of Christianity over the Roman empire, the adherents of the old religion, and the villagers or country people, were nearly the same body of individuals, the inhabitants of the towns having been earliest converted; as in our own day, and at all times, the greater activity of social intercourse renders them the earliest recipients of new opinions and modes, while old habits and prejudices linger longest among the country people: not to mention that the towns were more immediately under the direct influence of the government, which at that time had embraced Christianity. From this casual coincidence, the word paganus carried with it, and began more and more steadily to suggest, the idea of a worshipper of the ancient divinities; until at length it suggested that idea so forcibly that people who did not desire to suggest the idea avoided using the word. But when paganus had come to connote heathenism, the very unimportant circumstance, with reference to that fact, of the place of residence, was soon disregarded in the employment of the word. As there was seldom any occasion for making separate assertions respecting heathens who lived in the country, there was no need for a separate word to denote them; and pagan came not only to mean heathen, but to mean that exclusively.
A case still more familiar to most readers is that of the word villain or villein. This term, as everybody knows, had in the middle ages a connotation as strictly defined as a word could have, being the proper legal designation for those persons who were the subjects of the less onerous forms of feudal bondage. The scorn of the semibarbarous military aristocracy for these their abject dependants, rendered the act of likening any person to this class of people a mark of the greatest contumely: the same scorn led them to ascribe to the same people all manner of hateful qualities, which doubtless also, in the degrading situation in which they were held, were often not unjustly imputed to them. These circumstances combined to attach to the term villain, ideas of crime and guilt in so forcible a manner, that the application of the epithet even to those to whom it legally belonged became an affront, and was abstained from whenever no affront was intended. From that time guilt was part of the connotation; and soon became the whole of it, since mankind were not prompted by any urgent motive to continue making a distinction in their language between bad men of servile station and bad men of any other rank in life.
These and similar instances in which the original signification of a term is totally lost—another and an entirely distinct meaning being first engrafted upon the former, and finally substituted for it—afford examples of the double movement which is always taking place in language: two counter-movements, one of Generalization, by which words are perpetually losing portions of their connotation, and becoming of less meaning and more general acceptation; the other of Specialization, by which other, or even these same words, are continually taking on fresh connotation; acquiring additional meaning, by being restricted in their employment to a part only of the occasions on which they might properly be used before. This double movement is of sufficient importance in the natural history of language, (to which natural history the artificial modifications ought always to have some degree of reference,) to justify our dwelling a little longer on the nature of the twofold phenomenon, and the causes to which it owes its existence.
[§ 3.] To begin with the movement of generalization. It is unnecessary to dwell on the changes in the meaning of names which take place merely from their being used ignorantly, by persons who, not having properly mastered the received connotation of a word, apply it in a looser and wider sense than belongs to it. This, however, is a real source of alterations in the language; for when a word, from being often employed in cases where one of the qualities which it connotes does not exist, ceases to suggest that quality with certainty, then even those who are under no mistake as to the proper meaning of the word, prefer expressing that meaning in some other way, and leave the original word to its fate. The word 'Squire as standing for an owner of a landed estate; Parson, as denoting not the rector of the parish, but clergymen in general; Artist, to denote only a painter or sculptor; are cases in point.[15] Independently, however, of the generalization of names through their ignorant misuse, there is a tendency in the same direction, consistently with a perfect knowledge of their meaning; arising from the fact, that the number of things known to us, and of which we feel a desire to speak, multiply faster than the names for them. Except on subjects for which there has been constructed a scientific terminology, with which unscientific persons do not meddle, great difficulty is generally found in bringing a new name into use; and independently of that difficulty, it is natural to prefer giving to a new object a name which at least expresses its resemblance to something already known, since by predicating of it a name entirely new we at first convey no information. In this manner the name of a species often becomes the name of a genus; as salt, for example, or oil; the former of which words originally denoted only the muriate of soda, the latter, as its etymology indicates, only olive oil; but which now denote large and diversified classes of substances resembling these in some of their qualities, and connote only those common qualities, instead of the whole of the distinctive properties of olive oil and sea salt. The words glass and soap are used by modern chemists in a similar manner, to denote genera of which the substances vulgarly so called are single species. And it often happens, as in those instances, that the term keeps its special signification in addition to its more general one, and becomes ambiguous, that is, two names instead of one.