On the Study of Words

by Richard Chenevix Trench

But I observed just now that there are also words bearing on them the slime of the serpent's trail; uses, too, of words which imply moral perversity—not upon their parts who employ them now in their acquired senses, but on theirs from whom little by little they received their deflection, and were warped from their original rectitude. A 'prude' is now a woman with an over-done affectation of a modesty which she does not really feel, and betraying the absence of the substance by this over-preciseness and niceness about the shadow. Goodness must have gone strangely out of fashion, the corruption of manners must have been profound, before matters could have come to this point. 'Prude,' a French word, means properly virtuous or prudent. [Footnote: [Compare French prude, on the etymology of which see Schelar's French Dict., ed. 3 (1888)].] But where morals are greatly and generally relaxed, virtue is treated as hypocrisy; and thus, in a dissolute age, and one incredulous of any inward purity, by the 'prude' or virtuous woman is intended a sort of female Tartuffe, affecting a virtue which it is taken for granted none can really possess; and the word abides, a proof of the world's disbelief in the realities of goodness, of its resolution to treat them as hypocrisies and deceits.

Again, why should 'simple' be used slightingly, and 'simpleton' more slightingly still? The 'simple' is one properly of a single fold; [Footnote: [Latin simplicem; for Lat. sim-, sin-= Greek [Greek: ha] in [Greek: ha-pax], see Brugmann, Grundriss, Section 238, Curtius, Greek Etym. No. 599.] a Nathanael, whom as such Christ honoured to the highest (John i. 47); and, indeed, what honour can be higher than to have nothing double about us, to be without duplicities or folds? Even the world, which despises 'simplicity,' does not profess to admire 'duplicity,' or double-foldedness. But inasmuch as it is felt that a man without these folds will in a world like ours make himself a prey, and as most men, if obliged to choose between deceiving and being deceived, would choose the former, it has come to pass that 'simple' which in a kingdom of righteousness would be a world of highest honour, carries with it in this world of ours something of contempt. [Footnote: 'Schlecht,' which in modern German means bad, good for nothing, once meant good,—good, that is, in the sense of right or straight, but has passed through the same stages to the meaning which it now possesses, 'albern' has done the same (Max Müller, Science of Language, 2nd series, p. 274).] Nor can we help noting another involuntary testimony borne by human language to human sin. I mean this,—that an idiot, or one otherwise deficient in intellect, is called an 'innocent' or one who does no hurt; this use of 'innocent' assuming that to do hurt and harm is the chief employment to which men turn their intellectual powers, that, where they are wise, they are oftenest wise to do evil.

Nor are these isolated examples of the contemptuous use which words expressive of goodness gradually acquire. Such meet us on every side. Our 'silly' is the Old-English 'saelig' or blessed. We see it in a transition state in our early poets, with whom 'silly' is an affectionate epithet which sheep obtain for their harmlessness. One among our earliest calls the newborn Lord of Glory Himself, 'this harmless silly babe,' But 'silly' has travelled on the same lines as 'simple,' 'innocent,' and so many other words. The same moral phenomenon repeats itself continually. Thus 'sheepish' in the Ormulum is an epithet of honour: it is used of one who has the mind of Him who was led as a sheep to the slaughter. At the first promulgation of the Christian faith, while the name of its Divine Founder was still strange to the ears of the heathen, they were wont, some in ignorance, but more of malice, slightly to mispronounce this name, turning 'Christus' into 'Chrestus'—that is, the benevolent or benign. That these last meant no honour thereby to the Lord of Life, but the contrary, is certain; this word, like 'silly,' 'innocent,' 'simple,' having already contracted a slight tinge of contempt, without which there would have been no inducement to fasten it on the Saviour. The French have their 'bonhomie' with the same undertone of contempt, the Greeks their [Greek: eyetheia]. Lady Shiel tells us of the modern Persians, 'They have odd names for describing the moral qualities; "Sedakat" means sincerity, honesty, candour; but when a man is said to be possessed of "sedakat," the meaning is that he is a credulous, contemptible simpleton.' [Footnote: Life and Manners in Persia, p. 247.] It is to the honour of the Latin tongue, and very characteristic of the best aspects of Roman life, that 'simplex' and 'simplicitas' never acquired this abusive signification.

Again, how prone are we all to ascribe to chance or fortune those gifts and blessings which indeed come directly from God—to build altars to Fortune rather than to Him who is the author of every good thing which we have gotten. And this faith of men, that their blessings, even their highest, come to them by a blind chance, they have incorporated in a word; for 'happy' and 'happiness' are connected with 'hap,' which is chance;—how unworthy, then, to express any true felicity, whose very essence is that it excludes hap or chance, that the world neither gave nor can take it away. [Footnote: The heathen with their [Greek: eudaimonia], inadequate as this word must be allowed to be, put us here to shame.] Against a similar misuse of 'fortunate,' 'unfortunate,' Wordsworth very nobly protests, when, of one who, having lost everything else, had yet kept the truth, he exclaims:

'Call not the royal Swede unfortunate,
Who never did to Fortune bend the knee.'

There are words which reveal a wrong or insufficient estimate that men take of their duties, or that at all events others have taken before them; for it is possible that the mischief may have been done long ago, and those who now use the words may only have inherited it from others, not helped to bring it about themselves. An employer of labour advertises that he wants so many 'hands'; but this language never could have become current, a man could never have thus shrunk into a 'hand' in the eyes of his fellow-man, unless this latter had in good part forgotten that, annexed to those hands which he would purchase to toil for him, were also heads and hearts [Footnote: A similar use of [Greek: somata] for slaves in Greek rested originally on the same forgetfulness of the moral worth of every man. It has found its way into the Septuagint and Apocrypha (Gen. xxxvi. 6; 2 Macc. viii. 11; Tob. x. 10); and occurs once in the New Testament (Rev. xviii. 13). [In Gen. xxxvi. 6 the [Greek: somata] of the Septuagint is a rendering of the Hebrew nafshôth, souls, so Luther translates 'Seelen.']—a fact, by the way, of which, if he persists in forgetting it, he may be reminded in very unwelcome ways at the last. In Scripture there is another not unfrequent putting of a part for the whole, as when it is said, 'The same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls' (Acts ii. 41). 'Hands' here, 'souls' there—the contrast may suggest some profitable reflections.

There is another way in which the immorality of words mainly displays itself, and in which they work their worst mischief; that is, when honourable names are given to dishonourable things, when sin is made plausible; arrayed, it may be, in the very colours of goodness, or, if not so, yet in such as go far to conceal its own native deformity. 'The tongue,' as St. James has said, 'is a world of iniquity' (iii. 7); or, as some would render his words, and they are then still more to our purpose, 'the ornament of iniquity,' that which sets it out in fair and attractive colours.

How much wholesomer on all accounts is it that there should be an ugly word for an ugly thing, one involving moral condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of a little coarseness, rather than one which plays fast and loose with the eternal principles of morality, makes sin plausible, and shifts the divinely reared landmarks of right and wrong, thus bringing the user of it under the woe of them 'that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter' (Isai. v. 20). On this text, and with reference to this scheme, South has written four of his grandest sermons, bearing this striking title, Of the fatal Imposture and Force of Words. [Footnote: Sermons, 1737, vol. ii. pp. 313-351; vol. vi. pp. 3-120. Thus on those who pleaded that their 'honour' was engaged, and that therefore they could not go back from this or that sinful act:—'Honour is indeed a noble thing, and therefore the word which signifies it must needs be very plausible. But as a rich and glistening garment may be cast over a rotten body, so an illustrious commanding word may be put upon a vile and an ugly thing—for words are but the garments, the loose garments of things, and so may easily be put off and on according to the humour of him who bestows them. But the body changes not, though the garments do.'] How awful, yea how fearful, is this 'imposture and force' of theirs, leading men captive at will. There is an atmosphere about them which they are evermore diffusing, a savour of life or of death, which we insensibly inhale at each moral breath we draw. [Footnote: Bacon's words have often been quoted, but they will bear being quoted once more: Credunt enim homines rationem suam verbis imperare. Sed fit etiam ut verba vim suam super intellectum retorqueant et reflectant.] 'Winds of the soul,' as we have already heard them called, they fill its sails, and are continually impelling it upon its course, to heaven or to hell.

Thus how different the light in which we shall have learned to regard a sin, according as we have been wont to designate it, and to hear it designated, by a word which brings out its loathsomeness and deformity; or by one which palliates this and conceals; men, as one said of old, being wont for the most part to be ashamed not of base deeds but of base names affixed to those deeds. In the murder trials at Dublin, 1883, those destined to the assassin's knife were spoken of by approvers as persons to be removed, and their death constantly described as their 'removal.' In Sussex it is never said of a man that he is drunk. He may be 'tight,' or 'primed,' or 'crank,' or 'concerned in liquor,' nay, it may even be admitted that he had taken as much liquor as was good for him; but that he was drunk, oh never. [Footnote: 'Pransus' and 'potus,' in like manner, as every Latin scholar knows, mean much more than they say.] Fair words for foul things are everywhere only too frequent; thus in 'drug-damned Italy,' when poisoning was the rifest, nobody was said to be poisoned; it was only that the death of this one or of that had been 'assisted' (aiutata). Worse still are words which seek to turn the edge of the divine threatenings against some sin by a jest; as when in France a subtle poison, by whose aid impatient heirs delivered themselves from those who stood between them and the inheritance which they coveted, was called 'poudre de succession.' We might suppose beforehand that such cloaks for sin would be only found among people in an advanced state of artificial cultivation. But it is not so. Captain Erskine, who visited the Fiji Islands before England had taken them into her keeping, and who gives some extraordinary details of the extent to which cannibalism then prevailed among their inhabitants, pork and human flesh being their two staple articles of food, relates in his deeply interesting record of his voyage that natural pig they called 'short pig,' and man dressed and prepared for food, 'long pig.' There was doubtless an attempt here to carry off with a jest the revolting character of the practice in which they indulged. For that they were themselves aware of this, that their consciences did bear witness against it, was attested by their uniform desire to conceal, if possible, all traces of the practice from European eyes.

But worst, perhaps, of all are names which throw a flimsy veil of sentiment over some sin. What a source, for example, of mischief without end in our country parishes is the one practice of calling a child born out of wedlock a 'love-child,' instead of a bastard. It would be hard to estimate how much it has lowered the tone and standard of morality among us; or for how many young women it may have helped to make the downward way more sloping still. How vigorously ought we to oppose ourselves to all such immoralities of language. This opposition, it is true, will never be easy or pleasant; for many who will endure to commit a sin, will profoundly resent having that sin called by its right name. Pirates, as Aristotle tells us, in his time called themselves 'purveyors.' [Footnote: Rhet. iii. 2: [Greek: oi laestai autous poriotas kalousi nun.] Buccaneers, men of the same bloody trade, were by their own account 'brethren of the coast.' Shakespeare's thieves are only true to human nature, when they name themselves 'St. Nicholas' clerks,' 'michers,' 'nuthooks,' 'minions of the moon,' anything in short but thieves; when they claim for their stealing that it shall not be so named, but only conveying ('convey the wise it call'); the same dislike to look an ugly fact in the face reappearing among the voters in some of our corrupter boroughs, who receive, not bribes—they are hugely indignant if this is imputed to them—but 'head-money' for their votes. Shakespeare indeed has said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; but there are some things which are not roses, and which are counted to smell a great deal sweeter being called by any other name than their own. Thus, to deal again with bribes, call a bribe 'palm oil,' or a 'pot de vin,' and how much of its ugliness disappears. Far more moral words are the English 'sharper' and 'blackleg' than the French 'chevalier d'industrie': [Footnote: For the rise of this phrase, see Lemontey, Louis XIV. p. 43.] and the same holds good of the English equivalent, coarse as it is, for the Latin 'conciliatrix.' In this last word we have a notable example of the putting of sweet for bitter, of the attempt to present a disgraceful occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its own proper deformity. [Footnote: This tendency of men to throw the mantle of an honourable word over a dishonourable thing, or, vice versa, to degrade an honourable thing, when they do not love it, by a dishonourable appellation, has in Greek a word to describe it, [Greek: hypokorizesthai], itself a word with an interesting history; while the great ethical teachers of Greece frequently occupy themselves in detecting and denouncing this most mischievous among all the impostures of words. Thus, when Thucydides (iii. 82) would paint the fearful moral ruin which her great Civil War had wrought, he adduces this alteration of the received value of words, this fitting of false names to everything—names of honour to the base, and of baseness to the honourable—as one of the most remarkable tokens of this, even as it again set forward the evil, of which it had been first the result.] Use and custom soon dim our eyes in such matters as these; else we should be deeply struck by a familiar instance of this falsehood in names, one which perhaps has never struck us at all—I mean the profane appropriation of 'eau de vie' (water of life), a name borrowed from some of the Saviour's most precious promises (John iv. 14; Rev. xxii. 17), to a drink which the untutored savage with a truer instinct has named 'fire-water'; which, sad to say, is known in Tahiti as 'British water'; and which has proved for thousands and tens of thousands, in every clime, not 'water of life,' but the fruitful source of disease, crime, and madness, bringing forth first these, and when these are finished, bringing forth death. There is a blasphemous irony in this appropriation of the language of heaven to that which, not indeed in its use, but too frequent abuse, is the instrument of hell, that is almost without a parallel. [Footnote: Milton in a profoundly instructive letter, addressed by him to one of the friends whom he made during his Italian tour, encourages him in those philological studies to which he had devoted his life by such words as these: Neque enim qui sermo, purusne an corruptus, quaeve loquendi proprietas quotidiana populo sit, parvi interesse arbitrandum est, quae res Athenis non semel saluti fuit; immo vero, quod Platonis sententia est, immutato vestiendi more habituque graves in Republica motus mutationesque portendi, equidem potius collabente in vitium atque errorem loquendi usu occasum ejus urbis remque humilem et obscuram subsequi crediderim: verba enim partim inscita et putida, partim mendosa et perperam prolata, quid si ignavos et oscitantes et ad servile quidvis jam olim paratos incolarum animos haud levi indicio declarant? Contra nullum unquam audivimus imperium, nullam civitatem non mediocriter saltern floruisse, quamdiu linguae sua gratia, suusque cultus constitit. Compare an interesting Epistle (the 114th) of Seneca.] If I wanted any further evidence of this, the moral atmosphere which words diffuse, I would ask you to observe how the first thing men do, when engaged in controversy with others, be it in the conflict of the tongue or the pen, or of weapons more wounding yet, if such there be, is ever to assume some honourable name to themselves, such as, if possible, shall beg the whole subject in dispute, and at the same time to affix on their adversaries a name which shall place them in a ridiculous or contemptible or odious light. [Footnote: See p. 33.] A deep instinct, deeper perhaps than men give any account of to themselves, tells them how far this will go; that multitudes, utterly unable to weigh the arguments on one side or the other, will yet be receptive of the influences which these words are evermore, however imperceptibly, diffusing. By argument they might hope to gain over the reason of a few, but by help of these nicknames they enlist what at first are so much more potent, the prejudices and passions of the many, on their side. Thus when at the breaking out of our Civil War the Parliamentary party styled themselves 'The Godly,' while to the Royalists they gave the title of 'The Malignants,' it is certain that, wherever they could procure entrance and allowance for these terms, the question upon whose side the right lay was already decided. The Royalists, it is true, made exactly the same employment of what Bentham used to call question-begging words, of words steeped quite as deeply in the passions which animated them. It was much when at Florence the 'Bad Boys,' as they defiantly called themselves, were able to affix on the followers of Savonarola the title of Piagnoni or The Snivellers. So, too, the Franciscans, when they nicknamed the Dominicans 'Maculists,' as denying, or at all events refusing to affirm as a matter of faith, that the Blessed Virgin was conceived without stain (sine macula), perfectly knew that this title would do much to put their rivals in an odious light. The copperhead in America is a peculiarly venomous snake. Something effectual was done when this name was fastened, as it lately was, by one party in America on its political opponents. Not otherwise, in some of our northern towns, the workmen who refuse to join a trade union are styled 'knobsticks,' 'crawlers,' 'scabs,' 'blacklegs.' Nor can there be any question of the potent influence which these nicknames of contempt and scorn exert. [Footnote: [See interesting chapter on Political Nicknames in D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature.]