On the Study of Words

by Richard Chenevix Trench

Or again, any one who knows so much as that 'verbum' means a word, might well be struck by the fact (and if he followed it up would be led far into the relation of the parts of speech to one another), that in grammar it is not employed to signify any word whatsoever, but restricted to the verb alone; 'verbum' is the verb. Surely here is matter for reflection. What gives to the verb the right to monopolize the dignity of being 'the word'? Is it because the verb is the animating power, the vital principle of every sentence, and that without which understood or uttered, no sentence can exist? or can you offer any other reason? I leave this to your own consideration.

We call certain books 'classics.' We have indeed a double use of the word, for we speak of the Greek and Latin as the 'classical' languages, and the great writers in these as 'the classics'; while at other times you hear of a 'classical' English style, or of English 'classics.' Now 'classic' is connected plainly with 'classis.' What then does it mean in itself, and how has it arrived at this double use? 'The term is drawn from the political economy of Rome. Such a man was rated as to his income in the third class, such another in the fourth, and so on; but he who was in the highest was emphatically said to be of the class, "classicus"—a class man, without adding the number, as in that case superfluous; while all others were infra classem. Hence, by an obvious analogy, the best authors were rated as "classici," or men of the highest class; just as in English we say "men of rank" absolutely, for men who are in the highest ranks of the state.' The mental process by which this title, which would apply rightly to the best authors in all languages, came to be restricted to those only in two, and these two to be claimed, to the seeming exclusion of all others, as the classical languages, is one constantly recurring, making itself felt in all regions of human thought; to which therefore I would in passing call your attention, though I cannot now do more.

There is one circumstance which you must by no means suffer to escape your own notice, nor that of your pupils—namely, that words out of number, which are now employed only in a figurative sense, did yet originally rest on some fact of the outward world, vividly presenting itself to the imagination; which fact the word has incorporated and knit up with itself for ever. If I may judge from my own experience, few intelligent boys would not feel that they had gained something, when made to understand that 'to insult' means properly to leap as on the prostrate body of a foe; 'to affront,' to strike him on the face; that 'to succour' means by running to place oneself under one that is falling; 'to relent,' (connected with 'lentus,') to slacken the swiftness of one's pursuit; [Footnote: 'But nothing might relent his hasty flight,' Spenser F. Q. iii. 4.] 'to reprehend,' to lay hold of one with the intention of forcibly pulling him back; 'to exonerate,' to discharge of a burden, ships being exonerated once; that 'to be examined' means to be weighed. They would be pleased to learn that a man is called 'supercilious,' because haughtiness with contempt of others expresses itself by the raising of the eyebrows or 'supercilium'; that 'subtle' (subtilis for subtexilis) is literally 'fine-spun'; that 'astonished' (attonitus) is properly thunderstruck; that 'sincere' is without wax, (sine cera,) as the best and finest honey should be; that a 'companion,' probably at least, is one with whom we share our bread, a messmate; that a 'sarcasm' is properly such a lash inflicted by the 'scourge of the tongue' as brings away the flesh after it; with much more in the same kind.

'Trivial' is a word borrowed from the life. Mark three or four persons standing idly at the point where one street bisects at right angles another, and discussing there the idle nothings of the day; there you have the living explanation of 'trivial,' 'trivialities,' such as no explanation not rooting itself in the etymology would ever give you, or enable you to give to others. You have there the 'tres viae,' the 'trivium'; and 'trivialities' properly mean such talk as is holden by those idle loiterers that gather at this meeting of three roads. [Footnote: But 'trivial' may be from 'trivium' in another sense; that is, from the 'trivium,' or three preparatory disciplines,—grammar, arithmetic, and geometry,—as distinguished from the four more advanced, or 'quadrivium'; these and those together being esteemed in the Middle Ages to constitute a complete liberal education. Preparatory schools were often called 'trivial schools,' as occupying themselves with the 'trivium.'] 'Rivals' properly are those who dwell on the banks of the same river. But as all experience shows, there is no such fruitful source of contention as a water-right, and these would be often at strife with one another in regard of the periods during which they severally had a right to the use of the stream, turning it off into their own fields before the time, or leaving open the sluices beyond the time, or in other ways interfering, or being counted to interfere, with the rights of their neighbours. And in this way 'rivals' came to be applied to any who were on any grounds in unfriendly competition with one another.

By such teaching as this you may often improve, and that without turning play-time into lesson-time, the hours of relaxation and amusement. But 'relaxation,' on which we have just lighted as by chance, must not escape us. How can the bow be 'relaxed' or slackened (for this is the image), which has not been bent, whose string has never been drawn tight? Having drawn tight the bow of our mind by earnest toil, we may then claim to have it from time to time 'relaxed.' Having been attentive and assiduous then, but not otherwise, we may claim 'relaxation' and amusement. But 'attentive' and 'assiduous' are themselves words which will repay us to understand exactly what they mean. He is 'assiduous' who sits close to his work; he is 'attentive,' who, being taught, stretches out his neck that so he may not lose a word. 'Diligence' too has its lesson. Derived from 'diligo,' to love, it reminds us that the secret of true industry in our work is love of that work. And as truth is wrapped up in 'diligence,' what a lie, on the other hand, lurks in 'indolence,' or, to speak more accurately, in our present employment of it! This, from 'in' and 'doleo,' not to grieve, is properly a state in which we have no grief or pain; and employed as we now employ it, suggests to us that indulgence in sloth constitutes for us the truest negation of pain. Now no one would wish to deny that 'pain' and 'pains' are often nearly allied; but yet these pains hand us over to true pleasures; while indolence is so far from yielding that good which it is so forward to promise, that Cowper spoke only truth, when, perhaps meaning to witness against the falsehood I have just denounced, he spoke of

'Lives spent in indolence, and therefore sad,'

not 'therefore glad,' as the word 'indolence' would fain have us to believe.

There is another way in which these studies I have been urging may be turned to account. Doubtless you will seek to cherish in your scholars, to keep lively in yourselves, that spirit and temper which find a special interest in all relating to the land of our birth, that land which the providence of God has assigned as the sphere of our life's task and of theirs. Our schools are called 'national,' [Footnote: This was written in England, and in the year 1851.] and if we would have them such in reality, we must neglect nothing that will foster a national spirit in them. I know not whether this is sufficiently considered among us; yet certainly we cannot have Church-schools worthy the name, least of all in England, unless they are truly national as well. It is the anti-national character of the Roman Catholic system which perhaps more than all else offends Englishmen; and if their sense of this should ever grow weak, their protest against that system would soon lose much of its energy and strength. But here, as everywhere else, knowledge must be the food of love. Your pupils must know something about England, if they are to love it; they must see some connexion of its past with its present, of what it has been with what it is, if they are to feel that past as anything to them.

And as no impresses of the past are so abiding, so none, when once attention has been awakened to them, are so self-evident as those which names preserve; although, without this calling of the attention to them, the most broad and obvious of these foot-prints which the past time has left may continue to escape our observation to the end of our lives. Leibnitz tells us, and one can quite understand, the delight with which a great German Emperor, Maximilian I., discovered that 'Habsburg,' or 'Hapsburg,' the ancestral name of his house, really had a meaning, one moreover full of vigour and poetry. This he did, when he heard it by accident on the lips of a Swiss peasant, no longer cut short and thus disguised, but in its original fulness, 'Habichtsburg,' or 'Hawk's- Tower,' being no doubt the name of the castle which was the cradle of his race. [Footnote: Opp. vol. vi. pt. 2. p. 20.] Of all the thousands of Englishmen who are aware that Angles and Saxons established themselves in this island, and that we are in the main descended from them, it would be curious to know how many have realized to themselves a fact so obvious as that this 'England' means 'Angle-land,' or that in the names 'Essex,' 'Sussex,' and 'Middlesex,' we preserve a record of East Saxons, South Saxons, and Middle Saxons, who occupied those several portions of the land; or that 'Norfolk' and 'Suffolk' are two broad divisions of 'northern' and 'southern folk,' into which the East Anglian kingdom was divided. 'Cornwall' does not bear its origin quite so plainly upon its front, or tell its story so that every one who runs may read. At the same time its secret is not hard to attain to. As the Teutonic immigrants advanced, such of the British population as were not either destroyed or absorbed by them retreated, as we all have learned, into Wales and Cornwall, that is, till they could retreat no further. The fact is evidently preserved in the name of 'Wales', which means properly 'The foreigners,'—the nations of Teutonic blood calling all bordering tribes by this name. But though not quite so apparent on the surface, this fact is also preserved in 'Cornwall', written formerly 'Cornwales', or the land inhabited by the Welsh of the Corn or Horn. The chroniclers uniformly speak of North Wales and Corn-Wales. [Footnote: See Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, year 997, where mention is made of the Cornwealas, the Cornish people.] These Angles, Saxons, and Britons or Welshmen, about whom our pupils may be reading, will be to them more like actual men of flesh and blood, who indeed trod this same soil which we are treading now, when we can thus point to traces surviving to the present day, which they have left behind them, and which England, as long as it is England, will retain.

The Danes too have left their marks on the land. We all probably, more or less, are aware how much Danish blood runs in English veins; what large colonies from Scandinavia (for as many may have come from Norway as from modern Denmark), settled in some parts of this island. It will be interesting to show that the limits of this Danish settlement and occupation may even now be confidently traced by the constant recurrence in all such districts of the names of towns and villages ending in 'by,' which signified in their language a dwelling or single village; as Nether_by_, Apple_by_, Der_by_, Whit_by_, Rug_by_. Thus if you examine closely a map of Lincolnshire, one of the chief seats of the Danish settlement, you will find one hundred, or well nigh a fourth part, of the towns and villages to have this ending, the whole coast being studded with them—they lie nearly as close to one another as in Sleswick itself; [Footnote: Pott, Etym. Forsch. vol. ii. pt. 2, p.1172] while here in Hampshire 'by' as such a termination, is utterly unknown. Or again, draw a line transversely through England from Canterbury by London to Chester, the line, that is, of the great Roman road, called Watling Street, and north of this six hundred instances of the occurrence of the same termination may be found, while to the south there are almost none. 'Thorpe,' equivalent to the German 'dorf' as Bishops_thorpe_, Al_thorp_, tells the same tale of a Norse occupation of the soil; and the terminations, somewhat rarer, of 'thwaite,' 'haugh,' 'garth,' 'ness,' do the same no less. On the other hand, where, as in this south of England, the 'hams' abound (the word is identical with our 'home'), as Bucking_ham_, Eg_ham_, Shore_ham_, there you may be sure that not Norsemen but West Germans took possession of the soil. 'Worth,' or 'worthy,' tells the same story, as Bos_worth_, Kings_worthy_; [Footnote: See Sweet's Oldest English Texts (index).] the 'stokes' in like manner, as Basing_stoke_, Itchen_stoke_, are Saxon, being (as some suppose) places _stock_aded, with stocks or piles for defence. You are yourselves learning, or hereafter you may be teaching others, the names and number of the English counties or shires. What a dull routine task for them and for you this may be, supplying no food for the intellect, no points of attachment for any of its higher powers to take hold of! And yet in these two little words, 'shire' and 'county,' if you would make them render up even a small part of their treasure, what lessons of English history are contained! One who knows the origin of these names, and how we come to possess such a double nomenclature, looks far into the social condition of England in that period when the strong foundations of all that has since made England glorious and great were being laid; by aid of these words may detect links which bind its present to its remotest past; for of lands as of persons it may be said, 'the child is father of the man,' 'Shire' is connected with 'shear,' 'share,' and is properly a portion 'shered' or 'shorn' off. [Footnote: It must be confessed that there are insuperable difficulties in the way of connecting Anglo-Saxon scir with the verb sceron, to shear, and of explaining it as equivalent to 'shorn off.' The derivation of 'shire' has not yet been ascertained.] When a Saxon king would create an earl, it did not lie in men's thoughts, accustomed as they were to deal with realities, that such could be a merely titular creation, or exist without territorial jurisdiction; and a 'share' or 'shire' was assigned him to govern, which also gave him his title. But at the Conquest this Saxon officer was displaced by a Norman, the 'earl' by the 'count'—this title of 'count,' borrowed from the later Roman empire, meaning originally 'companion' (comes), one who had the honour of being closest companion to his leader; and the 'shire' was now the 'county' (comitatus), as governed by this 'comes.' In that singular and inexplicable fortune of words, which causes some to disappear and die out under the circumstances apparently most favourable for life, others to hold their ground when all seemed against them, 'count' has disappeared from the titles of English nobility, while 'earl' has recovered its place; although in evidence of the essential identity of the two titles, or offices rather, the wife of the earl is entitled a 'countess'; and in further memorial of these great changes that so long ago came over our land, the two names 'shire' and 'county' equally survive as in the main interchangeable words in our mouths.