Vigorous Compound Words
A number of vigorous compounds we have dropped and let go. ‘Earsports’ for entertainments of song or music (ἀκροάματα) is a constantly recurring word in Holland’s Plutarch. Were it not for Shakespeare, we should have quite forgotten that young men of hasty fiery valour were called ‘hotspurs’; and even now we regard the word rather as the proper name of one than that which would have been once alike the designation of all[132]. Fuller warns men that they should not ‘witwanton’ with God. Severe austere old men, such as, in Falstaff’s words would “hate us youth”, were ‘grimsirs’, or ‘grimsires’ once (Massinger). ‘Realmrape’ (= usurpation), occurring in The Mirror for Magistrates, is a vigorous word. ‘Rootfast’ and ‘rootfastness’[133] were ill lost, being worthy to have lived; so too was Lord Brooke’s ‘bookhunger’; and Baxter’s ‘word-warriors’, with which term he noted those whose strife was only about words. ‘Malingerer’ is familiar enough to military men, but I do not find it in our dictionaries; being the soldier who, out of evil will (malin gré) to his work, shams and shirks and is not found in the ranks[134].
Those who would gladly have seen the Anglo-Saxon to have predominated over the Latin element in our language, even more than it actually has done, must note with regret that in many instances a word of the former stock had been dropped, and a Latin coined to supply its place; or where the two once existed side by side, the Saxon has died, and the Latin lived on. Thus Wiclif employed ‘soothsaw’, where we now use proverb; ‘sourdough’, where we employ leaven; ‘wellwillingness’ for benevolence; ‘againbuying’ for redemption; ‘againrising’ for resurrection; ‘undeadliness’ for immortality; ‘uncunningness’ for ignorance; ‘aftercomer’ for descendant; ‘greatdoingly’ for magnificently; ‘to afterthink’ (still in use in Lancashire) for to repent; ‘medeful’, which has given way to meritorious; ‘untellable’ for ineffable; ‘dearworth’ for precious; Chaucer has ‘forword’ for promise; Sir John Cheke ‘freshman’ for proselyte; ‘mooned’ for lunatic; ‘foreshewer’ for prophet; ‘hundreder’ for centurion; Jewel ‘foretalk’, where we now employ preface; Holland ‘sunstead’ where we use solstice; ‘leechcraft’ instead of medicine; and another, ‘wordcraft’ for logic; ‘starconner’ (Gascoigne) did service once, if not instead of astrologer, yet side by side with it; ‘halfgod’ (Golding) had the advantage over ‘demigod’, that it was all of one piece; ‘to eyebite’ (Holland) told its story at least as well as to fascinate; ‘shriftfather’ as confessor; ‘earshrift’ (Cartwright) is only two syllables, while ‘auricular confession’ is eight; ‘waterfright’ is a better word than our awkward Greek hydrophobia. The lamprey (lambens petram) was called once the ‘suckstone’ or the ‘lickstone’; and the anemone the ‘windflower’. ‘Umstroke’, if it had lived on (it appears as late as Fuller, though our dictionaries know nothing of it), might have made ‘circumference’ and ‘periphery’ unnecessary. ‘Wanhope’, as we saw just now, has given place to despair, ‘middler’ to mediator; and it would be easy to increase this list.
Local and Provincial English
I had occasion just now to notice the fact that many words survive in our provincial dialects, long after they have died out from the main body of the speech. The fact is one connected with so much of deep interest in the history of language that I cannot pass it thus slightly over. It is one which, rightly regarded, may assist to put us in a just point of view for estimating the character of the local and provincial in speech, and rescuing it from that unmerited contempt and neglect with which it is often regarded. I must here go somewhat further back than I could wish; but only so, only by looking at the matter in connexion with other phenomena of speech, can I hope to explain to you the worth and significance which local and provincial words and usages must oftentimes possess.
Let us then first suppose a portion of those speaking a language to have been separated off from the main body of its speakers, either through their forsaking for one cause or other of their native seats, or by the intrusion of a hostile people, like a wedge, between them and the others, forcibly keeping them asunder, and cutting off their communications one with the other, as the Saxons intruded between the Britons of Cornwall and of Wales. In such a case it will inevitably happen that before very long differences of speech will begin to reveal themselves between those to whom even dialectic distinctions may have been once unknown. The divergences will be of various kinds. Idioms will come up in the separated body, which, not being recognized and allowed by those who remain the arbiters of the language, will be esteemed by them, should they come under their notice, violations of its law, or at any rate departures from its purity. Again, where a colony has gone forth into new seats, and exists under new conditions, it is probable that the necessities, physical and moral, rising out of these new conditions, will give birth to words, which there will be nothing to call out among those who continue in the old haunts of the nation. Intercourse with new tribes and people will bring in new words, as, for instance, contact with the Indian tribes of North America has given to American English a certain number of words hardly or not at all allowed or known by us; or as the presence of a large Dutch population at the Cape has given to the English spoken there many words, as ‘inspan’, ‘outspan’[135], ‘spoor’, of which our home English knows nothing.
Antiquated English
There is another cause, however, which will probably be more effectual than all these, namely, that words will in process of time be dropped by those who constitute the original stock of the nation, which will not be dropped by the offshoot; idioms which those have overlived, and have stored up in the unhonoured lumber-room of the past, will still be in use and currency among the smaller and separated section which has gone forth; and thus it will come to pass that what seems and in fact is the newer swarm, will have many older words, and very often an archaic air and old-world fashion both about the words they use, their way of pronouncing, their order and manner of combining them. Thus after the Conquest we know that our insular French gradually diverged from the French of the Continent. The Prioress in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales could speak her French “full faire and fetishly”, but it was French, as the poet slyly adds,
“After the scole of Stratford atte bow,
For French of Paris was to hire unknowe”.