History in English words

by Owen Barfield

Now suppose that there had been nothing about telephones in the letter, but that it had contained an account of a thunder-storm. If in describing the stillness just before the storm broke the writer had said that “the atmosphere was electric”, we could still be fairly positive that he was not Dr. Johnson. But this time it would not be because the thing of which the letter spoke had no existence in Johnson’s day. No doubt the heavens during a storm a hundred and fifty years ago were exactly as highly charged with electricity as they are to-day; but if we look up the word electric in the Oxford Dictionary, we find that in Johnson’s time it simply was not used in that way. Thus, in his own dictionary it is defined as:

A property in some bodies, whereby when rubbed so as to grow warm, they draw little bits of paper, or such-like substances, to them.

The world was only just beginning to connect this mysterious property of amber with the thunder and lightning, and however still and heavy the air might have been, it would have been impossible for the lexicographer to describe it by that word. Or again, supposing the letter had said nothing about a storm, but that it had described a conversation between Garrick and Goldsmith which was carried on “at high tension”, we should still have little hesitation in pronouncing it to be a forgery. The phrase “high tension”, used of the relation between human beings, is a metaphor taken from the condition of the space between two electrically charged bodies. At present many people who use such a phrase are still half-aware of its full meaning, but many years hence everybody may be using it to describe their quarrels and their nerves without dreaming that it conceals an electrical metaphor——just as we ourselves speak of a man’s “disposition” without at all knowing that the reference is to astrology.[1] Nevertheless by consulting an historical dictionary it will still be possible to “date” any passage of literature in which the phrase occurs. We shall still know for certain that the passage could not have been written in a time before certain phenomena of static electricity had become common knowledge.

Thus, the scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another. They made it possible for them to speak of the “high tension” between them. So that the discovery of electricity, besides introducing several new words (e.g. electricity itself) into our everyday vocabulary, has altered or added to the meaning of many older words, such as battery, broadcast, button, conductor, current, force, magnet, potential, tension, terminal, wire, and many others.

But apart from the way in which it is used, there is a little mine of history buried in the word electric itself. If we look it up in a dictionary we find that it is derived from a Greek word ‘ēlektron’, which meant ‘amber’. And in this etymology alone anyone who was completely ignorant of our civilization could perceive three facts—that at one time English scholars were acquainted with the language spoken by the ancient Greeks, that the Greeks did not know of electricity (for if they had there would have been nothing to prevent our borrowing their word for it), and that the idea of electricity has been connected in men’s minds with amber. Lastly, if we were completely ignorant of the quality of amber itself, the fact that ‘ēlektron’ is connected with ‘ēlektōr’, which means ‘gleaming’ or ‘the beaming sun’, might give us a faint hint of its nature. These are some of the many ways in which words may be made to disgorge the past that is bottled up inside them, as coal and wine, when we kindle or drink them, yield up their bottled sunshine.

Now the deduction of information from the presence or absence of certain words is a common practice which has been known to critics and historians of literature, under some such name as “internal evidence”, for many years. It is from such evidence, for instance, that we deduce Shakespeare’s ignorance of the details of Roman civilization. But until a few years ago—within the memory of men still living—very little use had been made of language itself, that is to say, of the historical forms and meanings of words as interpreters both of the past and of the workings of men’s minds. It has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us a knowledge of outward, dead things—such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men—language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.

In the common words we use every day the souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty. The more common a word is and the simpler its meaning, the bolder very likely is the original thought which it contains and the more intense the intellectual or poetic effort which went to its making. Thus, the word quality is used by most educated people every day of their lives, yet in order that we should have this simple word Plato had to make the tremendous effort (it is perhaps the greatest effort known to man) of turning a vague feeling into a clear thought. He invented the new word ‘poiotēs’, ‘what-ness’, as we might say, or ‘of-what-kind-ness’ and Cicero translated it by the Latin ‘qualitas’, from ‘qualis’. Language becomes a different thing for us altogether if we can make ourselves realize, can even make ourselves feel how every time the word quality is used, say upon a label in a shop window, that creative effort made by Plato comes into play again. Nor is the acquisition of such a feeling a waste of time; for once we have made it our own, it circulates like blood through the whole of the literature and life about us. It is the kiss which brings the sleeping courtiers to life.

But in order to excavate the information which is buried in a word we must have the means to ascertain its history. Until quite recently (about a hundred years ago) philology, as an exact science, was still in its infancy, and words were derived by ingenious guesswork from all kinds of impossible sources. All languages were referred to a Hebrew origin, since Hebrew was the language of the Bible. This was taken for granted. Since then, however, two new developments have revolutionized the whole study, made it accurate, and enormously extended its scope. During the eighteenth century Sanskrit, the ancient speech of the Hindoos, began for the first time to attract the attention of European scholars. In 1767 a French Jesuit named Coeurdoux pointed out certain resemblances between the European and Sanskrit languages. In 1786 Sir William Jones described that language as being

of wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could have been produced by accident—so strong that no philologer could examine all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists.