And first, the desire of greater clearness is a frequent motive and inducement to this. It has been well and truly said: “Every new term, expressing a fact or a difference not precisely or adequately expressed by any other word in the same language, is a new organ of thought for the mind that has learned it”[121]. The limits of their vocabulary are in fact for most men the limits of their knowledge; and in a great degree for us all. Of course I do not affirm that it is absolutely impossible to have our mental conceptions clearer and more distinct than our words; but it is very hard to have, and still harder to keep, them so. And therefore it is that men, conscious of this, so soon as ever they have learned to distinguish in their minds, are urged by an almost irresistible impulse to distinguish also in their words. They feel that nothing is made sure till this is done.
Dissimilation of Words
The sense that a word covers too large a space of meaning, is the frequent occasion of the introduction of another, which shall relieve it of a portion of this. Thus, there was a time when ‘witch’ was applied equally to male and female dealers in unlawful magical arts. Simon Magus, for example, and Elymas are both ‘witches’, in Wiclif’s New Testament (Acts viii. 9; xiii. 8), and Posthumus in Cymbeline: but when the medieval Latin ‘sortiarius’ (not ‘sortitor’ as in Richardson), supplied another word, the French ‘sorcier’, and thus our English ‘sorcerer’ (originally the “caster of lots”), then ‘witch’ gradually was confined to the hag, or female practiser of these arts, while ‘sorcerer’ was applied to the male.
New necessities, new evolutions of society into more complex conditions, evoke new words; which come forth, because they are required now; but did not formerly exist, because they were not required in the period preceding. For example, in Greece so long as the poet sang his own verses ‘singer’ (ἀοιδὸς) sufficiently expressed the double function; such a ‘singer’ was Homer, and such Homer describes Demodocus, the bard of the Phæacians; that double function, in fact, not being in his time contemplated as double, but each part of it so naturally completing the other, that no second word was required. When, however, in the division of labour one made the verses which another chaunted, then ‘poet’ or ‘maker’, a word unknown in the Homeric age, arose. In like manner, when ‘physicians’ were the only natural philosophers, the word covered this meaning as well as that other which it still retains; but when the investigation of nature and natural causes detached itself from the art of healing, became an independent study of itself, the name ‘physician’ remained to that which was as the stock and stem of the art, while the new offshoot sought out a new name for itself.
Another motive to the invention of new words, is the desire thereby to cut short lengthy[122] explanations, tedious circuits of language. Science is often an immense gainer by words, which say singly what it would have taken whole sentences otherwise to have said. Thus ‘isothermal’ is quite of modern invention; but what a long story it would be to tell the meaning of ‘isothermal lines’, all which is summed up in and saved by the word. We have long had the word ‘assimilation’ in our dictionaries; ‘dissimilation’ has not yet found its way into them, but it speedily will. It will appear first, if it has not already appeared, in our books on language[123]. I express myself with this confidence, because the advance of philological enquiry has rendered it almost a matter of necessity that we should possess a word to designate a certain process, and no other word would designate it at all so well. There is a process of ‘assimilation’ going on very extensively in language; it occurs where the organs of speech find themselves helped by changing a letter for another which has just occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not ‘adfiance’ but ‘affiance’, not ‘renowm’, as our ancestors did when the word ‘renommée’ was first naturalized, but ‘renown’. At the same time there is another opposite process, where some letter would recur too often for euphony or comfort in speaking, if the strict form of the word were too closely held fast, and where consequently this letter is exchanged for some other, generally for some nearly allied; thus it is at least a reasonable suggestion, that ‘cœruleum’ was once ‘cœluleum’, from cœlum: so too the Italians prefer ‘veleno’ to ‘veneno’; and we ‘cinnamon’ to ‘cinnamom’ (the earlier form); in ‘turtle’ and ‘purple’ we have shrunk from the double ‘r’ of ‘turtur’ and ‘purpura’; and this process of making unlike, requiring a term to express it, will create, or indeed has created, the word ‘dissimilation’, which probably will in due time establish itself among us in far wider than its primary use.
‘Watershed’ has only recently begun to appear in books of geography; and yet how convenient it must be admitted to be; how much more so than ‘line of water parting’, which it has succeeded; meaning, as I need hardly tell you it does, not merely that which sheds the waters, but that which divides them (‘wasserscheide’); and being applied to that exact ridge and highest line in a mountain region, where the waters of that region separate off and divide, some to one side, and some to the other; as in the Rocky Mountains of North America there are streams rising within very few miles of one another, which flow severally east and west, and, if not in unbroken course, yet as affluents to larger rivers, fall at least severally into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It must be allowed, I think, that not merely geographical terminology, but geography itself, had a benefactor in him who first endowed it with so expressive and comprehensive a word, bringing before us a fact which we should scarcely have been aware of without it.
There is another word which I have just employed, ‘affluent’, in the sense of a stream which does not flow into the sea, but joins a larger stream, as for instance, the Isis is an ‘affluent’ of the Thames, the Moselle of the Rhine. It is itself an example in the same kind of that whereof I have been speaking, having been only recently constituted a substantive, and employed in this sense, while yet its utility is obvious. ‘Confluents’ would perhaps be a fitter name, where the rivers, like the Missouri and the Mississippi, were of equal or nearly equal importance up to the time of their meeting[124].
‘Selfishness’, ‘Suicide’
Again, new words are coined out of the necessity which men feel of filling up gaps in the language. Thoughtful men, comparing their own language with that of other nations, become conscious of deficiencies, of important matters unexpressed in their own, and with more or less success proceed to supply the deficiency. For example, that sin of sins, the undue love of self, with the postponing of the interests of all others to our own, had for a long time no word to express it in English. Help was sought from the Greek, and from the Latin. ‘Philauty’ (φιλαυτία) had been more than once attempted by our scholars; but found no popular acceptance. This failing, men turned to the Latin; one writer trying to supply the want by calling the man a ‘suist’, as one seeking his own things (‘sua’), and the sin itself, ‘suicism’. The gap, however, was not really filled up, till some of the Puritan writers, drawing on our Saxon, devised ‘selfish’ and ‘selfishness’, words which to us seem obvious enough, but which yet are little more than two hundred [and fifty] years old[125].
Notices of New Words