For indeed these changes to which words in the progress of time are submitted are not changes at random, but for the most part are obedient to certain laws, are capable of being distributed into certain classes, being the outward transcripts and witnesses of mental and moral processes inwardly going forward in those who bring them about. Many, it is true, will escape any classification of ours, the changes which have taken place in their meaning being, or at least seeming to us, the result of mere caprice; and not explicable by any principle which we can appeal to as habitually at work in the mind. But, admitting all this, a majority will still remain which are reducible to some law or other, and with these we will occupy ourselves now.
‘Duke’, ‘Corpse’, ‘Weed’
And first, the meaning of a word oftentimes is gradually narrowed. It was once as a generic name, embracing many as yet unnamed species within itself, which all went by its common designation. By and bye it is found convenient that each of these should have its own more special sign allotted to it[209]. It is here just as in some newly enclosed country, where a single household will at first loosely occupy a whole district; while, as cultivation proceeds, this district is gradually parcelled out among a dozen or twenty, and under more accurate culture employs and sustains them all. Thus, for example, all food was once called ‘meat’; it is so in our Bible, and ‘horse-meat’ for fodder is still no unusual phrase; yet ‘meat’ is now a name given only to flesh. Any little book or writing was a ‘libel’ once; now only such a one as is scurrilous and injurious. Any leader was a ‘duke’ (dux); thus “duke Hannibal” (Sir Thomas Eylot), “duke Brennus” (Holland), “duke Theseus” (Shakespeare), “duke Amalek”, with other ‘dukes’ (Gen. xxxvi.). Any journey, by land as much as by sea, was a ‘voyage’. ‘Fairy’ was not a name restricted, as now, to the Gothic mythology; thus “the fairy Egeria” (Sir J. Harrington). A ‘corpse’ might be quite as well living as dead[210]. ‘Weeds’ were whatever covered the earth or the person; while now as respects the earth, those only are ‘weeds’ which are noxious, or at least self-sown; as regards the person, we speak of no other ‘weeds’ but the widow’s[211]. In each of these cases, the same contraction of meaning, the separating off and assigning to other words of large portions of this, has found place. ‘To starve’ (the German ‘sterben’, and generally spelt ‘sterve’ up to the middle of the seventeenth century), meant once to die any manner of death; thus Chaucer says, Christ “sterved upon the cross for our redemption”; it now is restricted to the dying by cold or by hunger. Words not a few were once applied to both sexes alike, which are now restricted to the female. It is so even with ‘girl’, which was once a young person of either sex[212]; while other words in this list, such for instance as ‘hoyden’[213] (Milton, prose), ‘shrew’ (Chaucer), ‘coquet’ (Phillips, New World of Words), ‘witch’ (Wiclif), ‘termagant’ (Bale), ‘scold’, ‘jade’, ‘slut’ (Gower), must be regarded in their present exclusive appropriation to the female sex as evidences of men’s rudeness, and not of women’s deserts.
Words used more accurately
The necessities of an advancing civilization demand a greater precision and accuracy in the use of words having to do with weight, measure, number, size. Almost all such words as ‘acre’, ‘furlong’, ‘yard’, ‘gallon’, ‘peck’, were once of a vague and unsettled use, and only at a later day, and in obedience to the requirements of commerce and social life, exact measures and designations. Thus every field was once an ‘acre’; and this remains so still with the German ‘acker’, and in our “God’s acre”, as a name for a churchyard[214]; it was not till about the reign of Edward the First that ‘acre’ was commonly restricted to a determined measure and portion of land. Here and there even now a glebeland will be called “the acre”; and this, even while it contains not one but many of our measured acres. A ‘furlong’ was a ‘furrowlong’, or length of a furrow[215]. Any pole was a ‘yard’, and this vaguer use survives in ‘sailyard’, ‘halyard’, and in other sea-terms. Every pitcher was a ‘galon’ (Mark xiv. 13, Wiclif), while a ‘peck’ was no more than a ‘poke’ or bag[216]. And the same has no doubt taken place in all other languages. I will only remind you how the Greek ‘drachm’ was at first a handful (δραχμή = ‘manipulus’, from δράσσω, to grasp); its later word for ‘ten thousand’ (μύριοι) implied in Homer’s time any great multitude; and with the accent on a different syllable always retained this meaning.
Words used less accurately
Opposite to this is a counter-process by which words of narrower intention gradually enlarge the domain of their meaning, becoming capable of much wider application than any which once they admitted. Instances in this kind are fewer than in that which we have just been considering. The main stream and course of human thoughts and human discourse tends the other way, to discerning, distinguishing, dividing; and then to the permanent fixing of the distinctions gained, by the aid of designations which shall keep apart for ever in word that which has been once severed and sundered in thought. Nor is it hard to perceive why this process should be the more frequent. Men are first struck with the likenesses between those things which are presented to them, with their points of resemblance; on the strength of which they bracket them under a common term. Further acquaintance reveals their points of unlikeness, the real dissimilarities which lurk under superficial resemblances, the need therefore of a different notation for objects which are essentially different. It is comparatively much rarer to discover real likeness under what at first appeared as unlikeness; and usually when a word moves forward, and from a specialty indicates now a generality, it is not in obedience to any such discovery of the true inner likeness of things,—the steps of successful generalizations being marked and secured in other ways. But this widening of a word’s meaning is too often a result of those elements of disorganization and decay which are at work in a language. Men forget a word’s history and etymology; its distinctive features are obliterated for them, with all which attached it to some thought or fact which by right was its own. Appropriated and restricted once to some striking specialty which it vigorously set out, it can now be used in a wider, vaguer, more unsettled way. It can be employed twenty times for once when it would have been possible formerly to employ it. Yet this is not gain, but pure loss. It has lost its place in the disciplined army of words, and become one of a loose and disorderly mob.
Let me instance the word ‘preposterous’. It is now no longer of any practical service at all in the language, being merely an ungraceful and slipshod synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to its old use; let it designate that one peculiar branch of absurdity which it designated once, namely the reversing of the true order of things, the putting of the last first, and, by consequence, of the first last, and of what excellent service the word would be capable. Thus it is ‘preposterous’, in the most accurate use of the word, to put the cart before the horse, to expect wages before the work is done, to hang a man first and try him afterwards; and in this strict and accurate sense the word was always used by our elder writers[217].
In like manner ‘to prevaricate’ was never employed by good writers of the seventeenth century without nearer or more remote allusion to the uses of the word in the Roman law courts, where a ‘prævaricator’ (properly a straddler with distorted legs) did not mean generally and loosely, as now with us, one who shuffles, quibbles, and evades; but one who plays false in a particular manner; who, undertaking, or being by his office bound, to prosecute a charge, is in secret collusion with the opposite party; and, betraying the cause which he affects to support, so manages the accusation as to obtain not the condemnation, but the acquittal, of the accused; a “feint pleader”, as, I think, in our old law language he would have been termed. How much force would the keeping of this in mind add to many passages in our elder divines.
Or take ‘equivocal’, ‘equivocate’, ‘equivocation’. These words, which belonged at first to logic, have slipped down into common use, and in so doing have lost all the precision of their first employment. ‘Equivocation’ is now almost any such dealing in ambiguous words with the intention of deceiving, as falls short of an actual lie; but according to its etymology and in its primary use ‘equivocation’, this fruitful mother of so much error, is the calling by the same name, of things essentially diverse, hiding intentionally or otherwise a real difference under a verbal resemblance[218]. Nor let it be urged in defence of its present looser use, that only so could it have served the needs of our ordinary conversation; on the contrary, had it retained its first use, how serviceable an implement of thought would it have been in detecting our own fallacies, or those of others; all which it can be now no longer.