‘Idea’
What now is ‘idea’ for us? How infinite the fall of this word since the time when Milton sang of the Creator contemplating his newly created world,
“how it showed,
Answering his great idea”,
to its present use when this person “has an idea that the train has started”, and the other “had no idea that the dinner would be so bad”. But this word ‘idea’ is perhaps the worst case in the English language. Matters have not mended here since the times of Dr. Johnson; of whom Boswell tells us: “He was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word idea in the sense of notion or opinion, when it is clear that idea can only signify something of which an image can be formed in the mind”. There is perhaps no word in the whole compass of English, so seldom used with any tolerable correctness; in none is the distance so immense between the frequent sublimity of the word in its proper use, and the triviality of it in its slovenly and its popular.
This tendency in words to lose the sharp, rigidly defined outline of meaning which they once possessed, to become of wide, vague, loose application instead of fixed, definite, and precise, to mean almost anything, and so really to mean nothing, is among the most fatally effectual which are at work for the final ruin of a language, and, I do not fear to add, for the demoralization of those that speak it. It is one against which we shall all do well to watch; for there is none of us who cannot do something in keeping words close to their own proper meaning, and in resisting their encroachment on the domain of others.
The causes which bring this mischief about are not hard to trace. We all know that when a piece of our silver money has long fulfilled its part, as “pale and common drudge ’tween man and man”, whatever it had at first of sharper outline and livelier impress is in the end wholly obliterated from it. So it is with words, above all with words of science and theology. These getting into general use, and passing often from mouth to mouth, lose the “image and superscription” which they had, before they descended from the school to the market-place, from the pulpit to the street. Being now caught up by those who understand imperfectly and thus incorrectly their true value, who will not be at the pains of understanding that, or who are incapable of doing so, they are obliged to accommodate themselves to the lower sphere in which they circulate, by laying aside much of the precision and accuracy and depth which once they had; they become weaker, shallower, more indefinite; till in the end, as exponents of thought and feeling, they cease to be of any service at all.
‘Bombast’, ‘Garble’
Sometimes a word does not merely narrow or extend its meaning, but altogether changes it; and this it does in more ways than one. Thus a secondary figurative sense will quite put out of use and extinguish the literal, until in the entire predominance of that it is altogether forgotten that it ever possessed any other. I may instance ‘bombast’ as a word about which this forgetfulness is nearly complete. What ‘bombast’ now means is familiar to us all, namely inflated words, “full of sound and fury”, but “signifying nothing”. This, at present its sole meaning, was once only the secondary and superinduced; ‘bombast’ being properly the cotton plant, and then the cotton wadding with which garments were stuffed out and lined. You remember perhaps how Prince Hal addresses Falstaff, “How now, my sweet creature of bombast”; using the word in its literal sense; and another early poet has this line:
“Thy body’s bolstered out with bombast and with bags”.