On the Study of Words

by Richard Chenevix Trench

'Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat,
Until the chaff be purgèd from the wheat,
Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear,
The richness of the flour will scarce appear.
So, till men's persons great afflictions touch,
If worth be found, their worth is not so much,
Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet
That value which in threshing they may get.
For till the bruising flails of God's corrections
Have threshèd out of us our vain affections;
Till those corruptions which do misbecome us
Are by Thy sacred Spirit winnowed from us;
Until from us the straw of worldly treasures,
Till all the dusty chaff of empty pleasures,
Yea, till His flail upon us He doth lay,
To thresh the husk of this our flesh away;
And leave the soul uncovered; nay, yet more,
Till God shall make our very spirit poor,
We shall not up to highest wealth aspire;
But then we shall; and that is my desire.'

This deeper religious use of the word 'tribulation' was unknown to classical antiquity, belonging exclusively to the Christian writers; and the fact that the same deepening and elevating of the use of words recurs in a multitude of other, and many of them far more signal, instances, is one well deserving to be followed up. Nothing, I am persuaded, would more mightily convince us of the new power which Christianity proved in the world than to compare the meaning which so many words possessed before its rise, and the deeper meaning which they obtained, so soon as they were assumed as the vehicles of its life, the new thought and feeling enlarging, purifying, and ennobling the very words which they employed. This is a subject which I shall have occasion to touch on more than once in these lectures, but is itself well worthy of, as it would afford ample material for, a volume.

On the suggestion of this word 'tribulation', I will quote two or three words from Coleridge, bearing on the matter in hand. He has said, 'In order to get the full sense of a word, we should first present to our minds the visual image that forms its primary meaning.' What admirable counsel is here! If we would but accustom ourselves to the doing of this, what a vast increase of precision and force would all the language which we speak, and which others speak to us, obtain; how often would that which is now obscure at once become clear; how distinct the limits and boundaries of that which is often now confused and confounded! It is difficult to measure the amount of food for the imagination, as well as gains for the intellect, which the observing of this single rule would afford us. Let me illustrate this by one or two examples. We say of such a man that he is 'desultory.' Do we attach any very distinct meaning to the word? Perhaps not. But get at the image on which 'desultory' rests; take the word to pieces; learn that it is from 'desultor,' [Footnote: Lat. desultor is from desult-, the stem of desultus, past part, of desilire, to leap down.] one who rides two or three horses at once, leaps from one to the other, being never on the back of any one of them long; take, I say, the word thus to pieces, and put it together again, and what a firm and vigorous grasp will you have now of its meaning! A 'desultory' man is one who jumps from one study to another, and never continues for any length of time in one. Again, you speak of a person as 'capricious,' or as full of 'caprices.' But what exactly are caprices? 'Caprice' is from capra, a goat. [Footnote: The etymology of caprice has not been discovered yet; the derivation from capra is unsatisfactory, as it does not account for the latter part of the word.] If ever you have watched a goat, you will have observed how sudden, how unexpected, how unaccountable, are the leaps and springs, now forward, now sideward, now upward, in which it indulges. A 'caprice' then is a movement of the mind as unaccountable, as little to be calculated on beforehand, as the springs and bounds of a goat. Is not the word so understood a far more picturesque one than it was before? and is there not some real gain in the vigour and vividness of impression which is in this way obtained? 'Pavaner' is the French equivalent for our verb 'to strut,' 'fourmiller' for our verb 'to swarm.' But is it not a real gain to know further that the one is to strut as the peacock does, the other to swarm as do ants? There are at the same time, as must be freely owned, investigations, moral no less than material, in which the nearer the words employed approach to an algebraic notation, and the less disturbed or coloured they are by any reminiscences of the ultimate grounds on which they rest, the better they are likely to fulfil the duties assigned to them; but these are exceptions. [Footnote: A French writer, Adanson, in his Natural History of Senegal complains of the misleading character which names so often have, and urges that the only safety is to give to things names which have and can have no meaning at all. His words are worth quoting as a curiosity, if nothing else: L'expérience nous apprend, que la plupart des noms significatifs qu'on a voulu donner à différens objets d'histoire naturelle, sont devenus faux à mesure qu'on a découvert des qualités, des propriétés nouvelles ou contraires à celles qui avaient fait donner ces noms: il faut donc, pour se mettre à l'abri des contradictions, éviter les termes figurés, et même faire en sorte qu'on ne puisse les rapporter à quelque étymologie, a fin que ceux, qui ont la fureur des étymologies, ne soient pas tenus de leur attribuer une idée fausse. II en doit être des noms, comme des coups des jeux de hazard, qui n'ont pour l'ordinaire aucune liaison entre eux: ils seraient d'autant meilleurs qu'ils seraient moins significatifs, moins relatifs à d'autres noms, ou à des choses connues, par ce que l'idée ne se fixant qu'à un seul objet, le saisit beaucoup plus nettement, que lorsqu'elle se lie avec d'autres objets qui y ont du rapport. There is truth in what he says, but the remedy he proposes is worse than the disease.]

The poetry which has been embodied in the names of places, in those names which designate the leading features of outward nature, promontories, mountains, capes, and the like, is very worthy of being elicited and evoked anew, latent as it now has oftentimes become. Nowhere do we so easily forget that names had once a peculiar fitness, which was the occasion of their giving. Colour has often suggested the name, as in the well-known instance of our own 'Albion,'—'the silver- coasted isle,' as Tennyson so beautifully has called it,—which had this name from the white line of cliffs presented by it to those approaching it by the narrow seas. [Footnote: The derivation of the name Albion has not been discovered yet; it is even uncertain whether the word is Indo-European; see Rhys, Celtic Britain, p. 200.] 'Himalaya' is 'the abode of snow.' Often, too, shape and configuiation are incorporated in the name, as in 'Trinacria' or 'the three- promontoried land,' which was the Greek name of Sicily; in 'Drepanum' or 'the sickle,' the name which a town on the north-west promontory of the island bore, from the sickle-shaped tongue of land on which it was built. But more striking, as the embodiment of a poetical feeling, is the modern name of the great southern peninsula of Greece. We are all aware that it is called the 'Morea'; but we may not be so well aware from whence that name is derived. It had long been the fashion among ancient geographers to compare the shape of this region to a platane leaf; [Footnote: Strabo, viii. 2; Pliny, H.N. iv. 5; Agathemerus, I.i. p. 15; echein de omoion schaema phullps platanan] and a glance at the map will show that the general outline of that leaf, with its sharply- incised edges, justified the comparison. This, however, had remained merely as a comparison; but at the shifting and changing of names, that went with the breaking up of the old Greek and Roman civilization, the resemblance of this region to a leaf, not now any longer a platane, but a mulberry leaf, appeared so strong, that it exchanged its classic name of Peloponnesus for 'Morea' which embodied men's sense of this resemblance, morus being a mulberry tree in Latin, and morea in Greek. This etymology of 'Morea' has been called in question; [Footnote: By Fallmerayer, Gesck. der Halbinsel Morea, p. 240, sqq. The island of Ceylon, known to the Greeks as Taprobane, and to Milton as well (P. L. iv. 75), owed this name to a resemblance which in outline it bore to the leaf of the betel tree. [This is very doubtful.] but, as it seems to me, on no sufficient grounds. Deducing, as one objector does, 'Morea' from a Slavonic word 'more,' the sea, he finds in this derivation a support for his favourite notion that the modern population of Greece is not descended from the ancient, but consists in far the larger proportion of intrusive Slavonic races. Two mountains near Dublin, which we, keeping in the grocery line, have called the Great and the Little Sugarloaf, are named in Irish 'the Golden Spears.'

In other ways also the names of places will oftentimes embody some poetical aspect under which now or at some former period men learned to regard them. Oftentimes when discoverers come upon a new land they will seize with a firm grasp of the imagination the most striking feature which it presents to their eyes, and permanently embody this in a word. Thus the island of Madeira is now, I believe, nearly bare of wood; but its sides were covered with forests at the time when it was first discovered, and hence the name, 'madeira' in Portuguese having this meaning of wood. [Footnote: [Port. madeira, 'wood,' is the same word as the Lat. materia.] Some have said that the first Spanish discoverers of Florida gave it this name from the rich carpeting of flowers which, at the time when first their eyes beheld it, everywhere covered the soil. [Footnote: The Spanish historian Herrera says that Juan Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida, gave that name to the country for two reasons: first, because it was a land of flowers, secondly, because it was discovered by him on March 27, 1513, Easter Day, which festival was called by the Spaniards, 'Pascua Florida,' or 'Pascua de Flores,' see Herrera's History, tr. by Stevens, ii. p. 33, and the Discovery of Florida by R. Hakluyt, ed. by W. B. Rye for the Hakluyt Soc., 1851, introd. p. x.; cp. Larousse (s.v.), and Pierer's Conversations Lexicon. It is stated by some authorities that Florida was so called because it was discovered on Palm Sunday; this is due to a mistaken inference from the names for that Sunday—Pascha Florum, Pascha Floridum (Ducange), Pasque Fleurie (Cotgrave); see Dict. Géog. Univ., 1884, and Brockhaus.] Surely Florida, as the name passes under our eye, or from our lips, is something more than it was before, when we may thus think of it as the land of flowers. [Footnote: An Italian poet, Fazio degli Uberti, tells us that Florence has its appellation from the same cause:

Poichè era posta in un prato di fiori,
Le denno il nome bello, oude s' ingloria.

It would be instructive to draw together a collection of etymologies which have been woven into verse. These are so little felt to be alien to the spirit of poetry, that they exist in large numbers, and often lend to the poem in which they find a place a charm and interest of their own. In five lines of Paradise Lost Milton introduces four such etymologies, namely, those of the four fabled rivers of hell, though this will sometimes escape the notice of the English reader:

'Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate,
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep,
Cocytus, named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon,
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.'

'Virgil, that great master of the proprieties,' as Bishop Pearson has so happily called him, does not shun, but rather loves to introduce them, as witness his etymology of 'Byrsa,' Aen. i. 367, 368; v. 59, 63 [but the etymology here is imaginative, the name Byrsa being of Punic, that is of Semitic, origin, and meaning 'a fortress'; compare Heb. Bozrah]; of 'Silvius,' Aen. vi. 763, 765; of 'Argiletum,' where he is certainly wrong (Aen. viii. 345); of 'Latium,' with reference to Saturn having remained latent there (Aen. viii. 322; of. Ovid, Fasti, i. 238); of 'Laurens' (Aen. vii. 63):

Latiumque vocari
Maluit, his quoniam latuisset tutus in oris: