History in English words

by Owen Barfield

Similar, but less conspicuous and rapid, alterations of mood must have been at work when silly lost its old meaning of ‘blessed’; when demure changed from ‘grave’ or ‘sober’ to ‘affectedly modest’; and when the kindly officious acquired its modern sense of bustling interference. Trench regards it as a tribute to the Roman character that theirs is the only civilized language in which the word for ‘simple’ never acquired a contemptuous signification alongside of its ordinary one. And at the opposite pole from Thucydides we have another Aryan historian, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, good-humouredly suggesting what might be called a semantic method of slipping off a Semitic incubus:

As for sin, let us call it folly and have done with it, for until we call it folly we never shall have done with it. The conception of sin flatters us grossly. There is something grandiose in it that cannot but appeal to the child in every man. That we infinitesimal creatures, scrambling like ants over the face of this minor planet in pursuit of our personal aims—that we have it in our power to affront the majesty of the universe is a most preposterous, delightful fancy....

It may be remarked in passing that there is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man’s character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words. Each of us would no doubt choose his own list of test words—and the lists themselves, if we were foolish enough to reveal them, would probably present a fairly accurate diagram of our own leading propensities. Fortunately the subject is too long to elaborate.

Ogle is another new word which appeared soon after the Restoration; and at the same time intrigue, which had come into the language earlier in the century in the general sense of ‘intricacy’, was seized upon to express an illicit love-affair. The steady growth of “polite” society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is also—curiously enough—indicated by the gradual appearance of bearish, countrified, fatuous, flippant, gawky, mawkish, prude, and other such terms. Hoyden was first used of a girl by Wycherley in 1676.

But outside the limelit circle this period was one of rapid intellectual development. That the novel interest in the external world, typified in the sixteenth century by such new words as analyse, distinguish, investigate[44], expanded continuously during the next hundred years is suggested by the addition to our vocabulary of inspect, remark, and scrutinize, together with the modern meanings of perception and scrutiny, which had meant up till then respectively ‘the collection of rents’ and ‘the taking of a vote.’ We also find a group of new words to describe the inherent conditions and qualities of external objects, such as acid, astringency, cohesion, elasticity, equilibrium, fluid (as a noun), intensity, polarity, pressure, spontaneous, static, temperature, tendency, tension, volatile, besides the physical and impersonal meanings of energy and force. The old verb to discover, which originally signified simply to ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal,’[45] was used attributively in the sixteenth century of travellers ‘discovering’ foreign lands and customs. Shortly after the Restoration the new metaphor, so it would seem, was itself applied metaphorically to the results of a chemical experiment, and in this way the ordinary modern meaning arose. The creation of the new word gas by the Dutch chemist van Helmont marks a definite epoch in the evolution of the scientific outlook. He used it, however, to describe an occult principle—a sort of ultra-rarefied water—which he supposed to be contained in all matter. It was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century that the word acquired its modern meaning of ‘matter in the condition of an aeriform fluid’, at which time the word gaseous also appeared. Ether (Greek ‘aithēr’, ‘the upper air’ above the clouds), which had been practically a synonym for the Aristotelian quintessence[46], was now adopted to express the mechanical substitute for that spiritual medium required by modern science in order to explain the phenomenon of action at a distance. These are among the first attempts which were made to describe the outer world objectively—from its own point of view instead of from the point of view of divinity or of human souls; it is interesting, therefore, to reflect that the success achieved is really only a relative one, as all the words mentioned, with the possible exception of gas,[47] are in the first place metaphors drawn from human activities such as those of ‘cutting’, ‘stretching’, and ‘pulling’.

In about the year 1660 the spirit of curious inquiry which was abroad prompted the foundation of the Royal Society, for the purpose, as its title announced, of “Improving Natural Knowledge,” and it is notable that the word improve should have been employed. Originating, as we saw, in Lawyer’s French, it had been used up to about 1620 to denote merely “the enclosure and cultivation of waste land”. So that when we find its old meaning butchered to make a striking metaphor, it is reasonable to assume that some new idea or feeling had come to the front, to which men were struggling to give the outward expression that is life, that their outlook had changed somewhat, and that they were groping for a means of readjusting their cosmos accordingly.

We have attempted so far to trace the evolution of Western outlook from the earliest days of Greece down to the Revival of Learning in England. It must not be forgotten that this process is hitherto an unconscious one. Up to the seventeenth century the outlook of the European mind upon the world, fluid as it has always been, has yet always felt itself to be at rest, just as men have hitherto believed that the earth on which they trod was a solid and motionless body. The first appearance of a distinction between ancient and modern, and of the word progressive, in Bacon’s Essays has already been noted, and we find that progress itself had only begun to emerge a few years before from its relatively parochial meaning of ‘royal journey’ or, as we still say, ‘progress’. To the seventeenth century, as Mr. Pearsall Smith has pointed out, we owe the words antiquated, century, decade, epoch, Gothic, out-of-date, primeval, and we may add to these contemporary, contemporaneous, synchronise, synchronous, and a queer jungle-growth of words with similar meanings which sprang up about the middle of the seventeenth century and has since vanished: contemporal, co-temporary, contemporize, isochronal, synchronal, synchronical, synchronism, synchronistic. A curious feature about these latter words is the number of them which first appeared in theological writings, the mystic philosopher, Henry More, being alone responsible for three. They seem to have arisen chiefly from an interest in comparing the dates of different events recorded in Scripture, and they may thus be placed beside the epithet primitive, applied by the Reformers to the early Church, which Mr. Pearsall Smith has pointed to as “probably the first word in which our modern historical sense finds expression”.

When we try combing the dictionaries—Greek, Latin, English, and others—for words expressing a sense of the “march of history”, or indeed of a past or future differing at all essentially from the present, we are forced to the conclusion that this kind of outlook on time is a surprisingly recent growth. We saw how the Greek ‘historia’ could mean practically any kind of knowledge; in the same way, when ‘periodos’ (literally ‘way round’) was used of time, it meant a cycle, one of a recurring series; it was not till the eighteenth century that a period of history acquired its modern sense of an indefinite portion cut from a continuous process. Labels like Middle Ages, Renaissance, ... are none of them earlier than the eighteenth century, which also saw the new expressions develop and development, and the fact that the significant words anachronism,[48] evolution,[48] and prehistoric, with the new perspectives they denote, only appeared during the nineteenth century may make us doubtful whether the mists of time have even yet fallen wholly from our eyes.

In order to enter sympathetically into the outlook of an educated medieval gentleman, we have to perform the difficult feat of undressing, as it were, our own outlook by divesting it of all those seemingly innate ideas of progress and evolution, of a movement of some sort going on everywhere around us, which make our cosmos what it is. This is more difficult even than it sounds, because so many of these thoughts and feelings have become sub-conscious. We have imbibed them with our vocabulary and cannot without much labour and research disentangle the part that is due to them from the rest of our consciousness. Let us try, for a moment, to realize with our imaginations as well as with our intellects the world in which our fathers dwelt—a world created abruptly at a fixed moment in time, and awaiting a destruction equally abrupt, its inhabitants for ever to be the same, and for ever struggling, not to progress or to evolve into something different, but merely to become once more exactly like the first man and woman. Where we speak of progress and evolution, the Middle Ages could speak only of regeneration and amendment. Their evolution was like Alice’s race with the Red Queen. It took all their energies to keep still; and even in this they had very little hope of succeeding, for they believed that the world was getting steadily worse.