English Past and Present

by Richard Chenevix Trench

‘Bombast’ was then transferred in a vigorous image to the big words without strength or solidity wherewith the discourses of some were stuffed out, and has now quite forgone any other meaning. So too ‘to garble’ was once “to cleanse from dross and dirt, as grocers do their spices, to pick or cull out”[219]. It is never used now in this its primary sense, and has indeed undergone this further change, that while once ‘to garble’ was to sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it is now to sift with a view of picking out the worst[220]. ‘Polite’ is another word which in the figurative sense has quite extinguished the literal. We still speak of ‘polished’ surfaces; but not any more, with Cudworth, of “polite bodies, as looking glasses”. Neither do we now ‘exonerate’ a ship (Burton); nor ‘stigmatize’, at least otherwise than figuratively, a ‘malefactor’ (the same); nor ‘corroborate’ our health (Sir Thomas Elyot).

Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly progressive courses of change, itself a faithful index of changes going on in society and in the minds of men, till at length everything is changed about it. The process of this it is often very curious to observe; capable as not seldom it is of being watched step by step in its advances to the final consummation. There may be said to be three leading phases which the word successively presents, three steps in its history. At first it grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with its own natural meaning. Presently the word allows another meaning, one superinduced on the former, and foreign to its etymology, to share with the other in the possession of it, on the ground that where the former exists, the latter commonly co-exists with it. At the third step, the newly introduced meaning, not satisfied with its moiety, with dividing the possession of the word, has thrust out the original and rightful possessor altogether, and remains in sole and exclusive possession. The three successive stages may be represented by a, ab, b; in which series b, which was wanting altogether at the first stage, and was only admitted as secondary at the second, does at the third become primary and indeed alone.

Gradual Change of Meaning

We are not to suppose that in actual fact the transitions from one signification to another are so strongly and distinctly marked, as I have found it convenient to mark them here. Indeed it is hard to imagine anything more gradual, more subtle and imperceptible, than the process of change. The manner in which the new meaning first insinuates itself into the old, and then drives out the old, can only be compared to the process of petrifaction, as rightly understood—the water not gradually turning what is put into it to stone, as we generally take the operation to be; but successively displacing each several particle of that which is brought within its power, and depositing a stony particle, in its stead, till, in the end, while all appears to continue the same, all has in fact been thoroughly changed. It is precisely thus, by such slow, gradual, and subtle advances that the new meaning filters through and pervades the word, little by little displacing entirely that which it before possessed.

No word would illustrate this process better than that old example, familiar probably to us all, of ‘villain’. The ‘villain’ is, first, the serf or peasant, ‘villanus’, because attached to the ‘villa’ or farm. He is, secondly, the peasant who, it is further taken for granted, will be churlish, selfish, dishonest, and generally of evil moral conditions, these having come to be assumed as always belonging to him, and to be permanently associated with his name, by those higher classes of society who in the main commanded the springs of language. At the third step, nothing of the meaning which the etymology suggests, nothing of ‘villa’, survives any longer; the peasant is wholly dismissed, and the evil moral conditions of him who is called by this name alone remain; so that the name would now in this its final stage be applied as freely to peer, if he deserved it, as to peasant. ‘Boor’ has had exactly the same history; being first the cultivator of the soil; then secondly, the cultivator of the soil who, it is assumed, will be coarse, rude, and unmannerly; and then thirdly, any one who is coarse, rude, and unmannerly[221]. So too ‘pagan’; which is first villager, then heathen villager, and lastly heathen. You may trace the same progress in ‘churl’, ‘clown’, ‘antic’, and in numerous other words. The intrusive meaning might be likened in all these cases to the egg which the cuckoo lays in the sparrow’s nest; the young cuckoo first sharing the nest with its rightful occupants, but not resting till it has dislodged and ousted them altogether.

‘Gossip’

I will illustrate by the aid of one word more this part of my subject. I called your attention in my last lecture to the true character of several words and forms in use among our country people, and claimed for them to be in many instances genuine English, though English now more or less antiquated and overlived. ‘Gossip’ is a word in point. I have myself heard this name given by our Hampshire peasantry to the sponsors in baptism, the godfathers and godmothers. I do not say that it is a usual word; but it is occasionally employed, and well understood. This is a perfectly correct employment of ‘gossip’, in fact its proper and original one, and involves moreover a very curious record of past beliefs. ‘Gossip’, or ‘gossib’, as Chaucer spelt it, is a compound word, made up of the name of ‘God’, and of an old Anglo-Saxon word, ‘sib’, still alive in Scotland, as all readers of Walter Scott will remember, and in some parts of England, and which means, akin; they were said to be ‘sib’, who are related to one another. But why, you may ask, was the name given to sponsors? Out of this reason;—in the middle ages it was the prevailing belief (and the Romish Church still affirms it), that those who stood as sponsors to the same child, besides contracting spiritual obligations on behalf of that child, also contracted spiritual affinity one with another; they became sib, or akin, in God; and thus ‘gossips’; hence ‘gossipred’, an old word, exactly analogous to ‘kindred’. Out of this faith the Roman Catholic Church will not allow (unless indeed by dispensations procured for money), those who have stood as sponsors to the same child, afterwards to contract marriage with one another, affirming them too nearly related for this to be lawful.

Take ‘gossip’ however in its ordinary present use, as one addicted to idle tittle-tattle, and it seems to bear no relation whatever to its etymology and first meaning. The same three steps, however, which we have traced before will bring us to its present use. ‘Gossips’ are, first, the sponsors, brought by the act of a common sponsorship into affinity and near familiarity with one another; secondly, these sponsors, who being thus brought together, allow themselves one with the other in familiar, and then in trivial and idle talk; thirdly, any who allow themselves in this trivial and idle talk,—called in French ‘commérage’, from the fact that ‘commére’ has run through exactly the same stages as its English equivalent.

It is plain that words which designate not things and persons only, but these as they are contemplated more or less in an ethical light, words which tinge with a moral sentiment what they designate, are peculiarly exposed to change; are constantly liable to take a new colouring, or to lose an old. The gauge and measure of praise or blame, honour or dishonour, admiration or abhorrence, which they convey, is so purely a mental and subjective one, that it is most difficult to take accurate note of its rise or of its fall, while yet there are causes continually at work leading it to the one or the other. There are words not a few, but ethical words above all, which have so imperceptibly drifted away from their former moorings, that although their position is now very different from that which they once occupied, scarcely one in a hundred of casual readers, whose attention has not been specially called to the subject, will have observed that they have moved at all. Here too we observe some words conveying less of praise or blame than once, and some more; while some have wholly shifted from the one to the other. Some were at one time words of slight, almost of offence, which have altogether ceased to be so now. Still these are rare by comparison with those which once were harmless, but now are harmless no more; which once, it may be, were terms of honour, but which now imply a slight or even a scorn. It is only too easy to perceive why these should exceed those in number.

‘Imp’, ‘Brat’