Etymology, which has thus brushed away what one might have taken to be a thoroughly characteristic expression, also supplies a matter-of-fact explanation for another modification of the phrase. “Don’t care a curse,” or “Not worth a curse,” we might fondly imagine to possess something of poetic imagery. The learned in derivations undeceive us. They say that the word curse is here identical with the plant “cress.” In that sense, “not worth a curse” will be found in Piers Ploughman’s Vision, the remarkable work of the fourteenth century.
Since the days when City madams and Fleet Street apprentices flocked round the dusty scaffold of the Blackfriars play-house, and laughed and rallied one another, or possibly took passing umbrage at the satire that was being levelled at this newly-nurtured word, what a remarkable, what an astounding ascendancy has it not enjoyed? No mint has ever issued its metal more swiftly than has this exchequer of bad language, or given it a more unmistakable impression. And yet there is nothing healthful, nothing good in it. From the disorders which first environed it, it has never yet recovered. It lives only by disease and unhealthiness, and when it has rid itself of disease and unhealthiness it will die.
CHAPTER IV.
WHICH GIVES A DOG A BAD NAME.
We have already adverted to that foreign and slanderous tradition which lays all the grosser sins of vituperation at the Englishman’s door. It has been seen how the “damns” and “goddams” of a marauding soldiery, though scattered upon the winds of many centuries ago, have continued to be held up in judgment against the English-speaking race. There remains to be noticed one other item of continental asperity that has enjoyed in its day a full measure of approbation owing to the delightful assumption that it savoured of perfidious Britain.
Parisian caricaturists have always affected to believe that the inhabitants of these islands are usually accompanied in their travels abroad by some member of the canine species. The British bull-dog has figured again and again in pictorial skits that are supposed to represent the idiosyncrasies of the travelling Englishman. But the notion may very well be of older date than this period of facile illustration. Examples can be quoted of the occurrence of the word dog, or dogue, as a malediction similar to that of “goddam,” and at a date nearly as distant.[15] There can be little doubt as to the inspired origin of the phrase. So grateful is the demon of animosity for every new-shaped weapon of attack, that in course of time it came to be levelled indifferently at any object whether insular or otherwise that it happened to be the speaker’s intention to abuse. The inoffensive word was the more readily adopted by the classes who had least notion of its signification. As Dr. Johnson, when he wished to get the better of a fishwife in a wordy encounter, would call her a parallelogram or a hypothenuse, so the Seine boatmen and the market-women of the Halles would denounce their antagonist as a “dogue.” “Je laisserais plutôt ma roupille en gage,” exclaims one of the characters in the farce of ‘Piarot et Janin,’[16] “que de te laisser payer mon quartier. La dogue! tu ne me connais pas.”
What actual necessity can there have been for so invidiously employing an imported word, when the French equivalent was already firmly established as a particle of abuse? Although in our own vernacular the epithet “dog!” is seldom to be met with outside the histories of Miss Porter or of Mr. James, elsewhere the Gallic “chien!” has always been in brisk demand. Both before and since the composition of ‘Piarot and Janin,’ has it been customary among a numerous class to grind it in the teeth of persons who have been the cause of annoyance or affront. In conjunction also with other substantives, it has served as a powerful degree of comparison and denotes a superlative expression of contempt. In the most polite language, quel chien de temps indicates weather of a most deplorable description; quel chien d’auteur, an author whose stupidity is exasperating. The oath of Jarnichien! passed for a term of the very darkest complexion; while in sacré chien, we have an expletive as forcible as any that a Frenchman can utter.