The light thrown by certain words on the social history of England, as opposed to her political history, is a clear and often a new one. To look up in the Oxford Dictionary such words as blackguard, carol, club, morris, teetotal, or a thousand others which seem to have no particular historical significance, and to read through the many illustrative quotations, is to take a wonderfully easy and intimate peep into the past; while the dates at which such words as magazine, news-letter, newspaper, novelist, press, or again, callers, small talk, tea-party, snob, antimacassar, ... appeared, together with quotations showing the particular shades of meaning with which they have been used, are in themselves a little history of the English people. What could be more suggestive, for instance, than the fact that the adjective improper was first applied to human beings in the early fifties?
Words which are derived from the names of real individuals, as bowdlerize, boycott, burke, derrick, dunce,[20] galvanize, mesmerism, morse, sandwich, tawdry, or fictitious ones, as gamp, knickerbocker, lilliputian, quixotic, pamphlet, pickwickian, are sometimes, but not always historically interesting. Again, the place-names of England, whether of country villages or London streets, are heavily loaded with the past, but the subject is such a vast and disconnected one that it would require a volume to itself.
The characteristics of nations, as of races, are fairly accurately reflected linguistically in the metaphors and idioms they choose, in their tricks of grammar, in their various ways of forming new words. It is, for obvious reasons, easier to apply this principle to other nations than to one’s own; nevertheless there are a few such points which English people can observe even in the English language. The number of words and expressions drawn from sport is a phenomenon which has already been touched upon, and it is at any rate a question whether humour has not played a larger part in the creation of English and American words than in those of other languages. The French ‘tête’[21] is humorous in origin, and there must be other French and Latin-French words with a similar history, but English has really quite a number of words in which humour has taken a hand. One way in which this comes about is the process known as back-formation. We realize the humorous intention when somebody invents from the noun swashbuckler a verb to swashbuckle, or to buttle and cuttle from butler and cutler, but it is not so well known that the same process (probably with the same humorous intent behind it) gave us such sober words as burgle, sidle, edit, grovel, beg, and greed. One of the most interesting back-formations is the verb to maffick, formed from the supposed present participle mafficking, which was coined to describe the festivities that greeted the arrival in London of the news of the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War. The well-known humorous device of understatement is responsible for the modern meaning of hit and most of its synonyms. The notion of striking was once conveyed by the verb to slay; by Tudor times, however, smite, which in Old English meant to ‘smear’ or ‘rub over’, had become the commoner word. Strike itself in Old English meant ‘to stroke’ or ‘to rub gently’, and hit, which is now universal in serious colloquial speech, meant to ‘meet with’ or ‘light upon’—‘not to miss’, in fact; just as to win (‘not to lose’) something means, or recently meant, in the British Army, to steal it. Blow and thrash are both sly agricultural metaphors, and the present popularity of such slang phrases as wipe, meaning a blow, and to wipe out, suggests that this pleasing and rather simple form of humour is still active in English word-formation.
But the number of these little etymological sidetracks is almost infinite. We might, for instance, ask ourselves whether the colloquial use of chap for ‘individual’ (from the Old English ‘cheapen’ to ‘buy’, cognate with chapman, cheap, Cheapside, ...) is really the unconscious self-expression of a nation of shopkeepers, or whether it is purely accidental; in which connection we should have to notice the modern tendency to renew a faded metaphor by substituting the word merchant, and so on. But the truly scientific way of approaching this part of our subject is to study the various English words which have been adopted by foreign nations, and the meanings they have developed there.
These were few enough up to the end of the seventeenth century, but from then on their number and importance increased; and we cannot help being interested in them, whether on the one hand the foreigner has merely employed them in despair of finding any word in his own language adequate to describe the object or idiosyncrasy in question, or whether his adoption of them implies that he has also borrowed the things of which they are the names. In the first of these classes we should probably put cant, comfort, gentleman, humbug, humour, respectability, romantic, sentimental, snobbism, spleen,...; in the second, ale, beefsteak, gin, grog, mackintosh, pudding, riding-coat (redingote), roast-beef, rum, sport, sportsman, waterproof, whisky, and various technical terms of sport such as box, Derby, handicap, jockey,...
To the second group also would belong our most important contributions to foreign languages—the political words. When we find bill, budget, committee, jury, lock-out, meeting, pamphlet, speech, strike, trade-union, ... on the Continent, and realize that the modern meanings of European words such as constitution, represent, vote, or of Old French words like address, majority, minority, motion, parliament, ... are derived from English, we feel ourselves in the presence, not so much of something peculiarly English as of something universal which England has been the means of bringing to earth. That vast theoretical terms like liberty, equality, and fraternity should be borrowed by England from France in return for committee, jury, meeting, ... that the French idéalogue and doctrinaire should be bartered for utilitarian and experimental—these facts have been taken to indicate a certain division of function in the economy of European social evolution, the Frenchman producing the abstract moral ideals and the Englishman attempting to clothe them with reality. And it may be that in such important loan-words as club and freemason and sport, but, above all, in committee—that sensitive instrument for maintaining the balance as between individual and associative personality—we can perceive the Englishman’s secret: his power of voluntary co-operation, and his innate understanding of the give-and-take it requires.
While we can hardly expect to see an undistorted reflection of ourselves in the first group of words mentioned above, yet the grotesque meanings which many of them have acquired abroad are interesting partly for that very reason. They enable us, if studied carefully, to see ourselves not only as others see us, but as others saw us. And from both groups together we can re-create, as Mr. Pearsall Smith has pointed out, something of the curious England which was ‘discovered’ about the middle of the eighteenth century by the rest of Europe, can rejoice with Voltaire in her atmosphere of religious toleration and personal liberty, and admire with Montesquieu her haphazard constitution; we can take back to our native France or Germany romantic and sentimental memories of le ‘lovely moon’ des Anglois, or, better still, delving farther into the past, we can stride across the Italian stage in our top boots and our redingote, a moody and spleenful English milord, liable to commit suicide at any moment.
Important as they are, however, we must not be misled by this little group of words into supposing that English is a language which has given away much. On the contrary, surveying it as a whole, we are struck, above all, by the ease with which it has itself appropriated the linguistic products of others. Like Mr. Shaw’s Shakespeare, its genius seems to have lain not so much in originality as in the snapping up of unconsidered trifles; and where it has excelled all the other languages of Europe, possibly of the world, is in the grace with which it has hitherto digested these particles of foreign matter and turned them into its own life’s blood. Historically, the English language is a muddle; actually it is a beautiful, personal, and highly sensitive creature.