But to look now nearer home for our examples. The little raisins brought from Greece, which play so important a part in one of the national dishes of England, the Christmas plum-pudding, used to be called ‘corinths’; and so you would find them in mercantile lists of a hundred years ago: either that for the most part they were shipped from Corinth, the principal commercial city in Greece, or because they grew in large abundance in the immediate district round about it. Their likeness in shape and size and general appearance to our own currants, working together with the ignorance of the great majority of English people about any such place as Corinth, soon brought the name ‘corinths’ into ‘currants’, which now with a certain unfitness they bear; being not currants at all, but dried grapes, though grapes of diminutive size[260].
‘Court-cards’
‘Court-cards’, that is, the king, queen, and knave in each suit, were once ‘coat-cards’[261]; having their name from the long splendid ‘coat’ (vestis talaris) with which they were arrayed. Probably ‘coat’ after a while did not perfectly convey its original meaning and intention; being no more in common use for the long garment reaching down to the heels; and then ‘coat’ was easily exchanged for ‘court’, as the word is now both spelt and pronounced, seeing that nowhere so fitly as in a Court should such splendidly arrayed personages be found. A public house in the neighbourhood of London having a few years since for its sign “The George Canning” is already “The George and Cannon”,—so rapidly do these transformations proceed, so soon is that forgotten which we suppose would never be forgotten. “Welsh rarebit” becomes “Welsh rabbit”[262]; and ‘farced’ or stuffed ‘meat’ becomes “forced meat”. Even the mere determination to make a word look English, to put it into an English shape, without thereby so much as seeming to attain any result in the way of etymology, this is very often sufficient to bring about a change in its spelling, and even in its form[263]. It is thus that ‘sipahi’ has become ‘sepoy’; and only so could ‘weissager’ have taken its present form of ‘wiseacre’[264].
Transformation of Words
It is not very uncommon for a word, while it is derived from one word, to receive a certain impulse and modification from another. This extends sometimes beyond the spelling, and in cases where it does so, would hardly belong to our present theme. Still I may notice an instance or two. Thus our ‘obsequies’ is the Latin ‘exequiæ’, but formed under a certain impulse of ‘obsequium’, and seeking to express and include the observant honour of that word. ‘To refuse’ is ‘recusare’, while yet it has derived the ‘f’ of its second syllable from ‘refutare’; it is a medley of the two[265]. The French ‘rame’, an oar, is ‘remus’, but that modified by an unconscious recollection of ‘ramus’. ‘Orange’ is no doubt a Persian word, which has reached us through the Arabic, and which the Spanish ‘naranja’ more nearly represents than any form of it existing in the other languages of Europe. But what so natural as to think of the orange as the golden fruit, especially when the “aurea mala” of the Hesperides were familiar to all antiquity? There cannot be a doubt that ‘aurum’, ‘oro’, ‘or’, made themselves felt in the shapes which the word assumed in the languages of the West, and that here we have the explanation of the change in the first syllable, as in the low Latin ‘aurantium’, ‘orangia’, and in the French ‘orange’, which has given us our own.
It is foreign words, or words adopted from foreign languages, as might beforehand be expected, which are especially subjected to such transformations as these. The soul which the word once had in its own language, having, for as many as do not know that language, departed from it, or at least not being now any more to be recognized by such as employ the word, these are not satisfied till they have put another soul into it, and it has thus become alive to them again. Thus—to take first one or two very familiar instances, but which serve as well as any other to illustrate my position—the Bellerophon becomes for our sailors the ‘Billy Ruffian’, for what can they know of the Greek mythology, or of the slayer of Chimæra? an iron steamer, the Hirondelle, now or lately plying on the Tyne, is the ‘Iron Devil’. ‘Contre danse’, or dance in which the parties stand face to face with one another, and which ought to have appeared in English as ‘counter dance’, does become ‘country dance’[266], as though it were the dance of the country folk and rural districts, as distinguished from the quadrille and waltz and more artificial dances of the town[267]. A well known rose, the “rose des quatre saisons”, or of the four seasons, becomes on the lips of some of our gardeners, the “rose of the quarter sessions”, though here it is probable that the eye has misled, rather than the ear. ‘Dent de lion’, (it is spelt ‘dentdelyon’ in our early writers) becomes ‘dandylion’, “chaude melée”, or an affray in hot blood, “chance-medley”[268], ‘causey’ (chaussée) becomes ‘causeway’[269], ‘rachitis’ ‘rickets’[270], and in French ‘mandragora’ ‘main de gloire’[271].
‘Necromancy’
‘Necromancy’ is another word which, if not now, yet for a long period was erroneously spelt, and indeed assumed a different shape, under the influence of an erroneous derivation; which, curiously enough, even now that it has been dismissed, has left behind it the marks of its presence, in our common phrase, “the Black Art”. I need hardly remind you that ‘necromancy’ is a Greek word, which signifies, according to its proper meaning, a prophesying by aid of the dead, or that it rests on the presumed power of raising up by potent spells the dead, and compelling them to give answers about things to come. We all know that it was supposed possible to exercise such power; we have a very awful example of it in the story of the witch of Endor, and a very horrid one in Lucan[272]. But the Latin medieval writers, whose Greek was either little or none, spelt the word, ‘nigromantia’, as if its first syllables had been Latin: at the same time, not wholly forgetting the original meaning, but in fact getting round to it though by a wrong process, they understood the dead by these ‘nigri’, or blacks, whom they had brought into the word[273]. Down to a rather late period we find the forms, ‘negromancer’ and ‘negromancy’ frequent in English.
Words Misspelt
‘Pleurisy’ used often to be spelt, (I do not think it is so now,) without an ‘e’ in the first syllable, evidently on the tacit assumption that it was from plus pluris[274]. When Shakespeare falls into an error, he “makes the offence gracious”; yet, I think, he would scarcely have written,