LANGUAGE AND LIFE.
The ordinary school education in language and grammar is doubtless responsible for the impression which we find existing in so many minds that, in all matters of verbal expression, there is some one absolute standard of authority to which it implies simply ignorance not to bow—some supreme court, as it were, empowered to decide for us what words we are to use, how we are to pronounce them, and what rules of syntax we are to follow. It would be difficult, doubtless, to impart to children or very young people the wider and more scientific view of language, inasmuch as they need, in the first place, clear guidance as regards usage rather than correct theory. The idea, therefore, with which they grow up, if their school studies take any hold upon them at all and if no wider culture comes to change their way of looking at things, is that some very wise man made an infallible grammar and another very wise man an infallible dictionary, and that no one need be in doubt in regard to what is orthodox in language who has access to these tables of the law. We have known grown-up persons to turn away with a very skeptical air, and a kind of look as if they had found out a weak spot in your educational armor, when they were told that really it was impossible to say which of two pronunciations of a word was right and which was wrong—that either might be employed without mortal offense against elegance of speech or good breeding.
A hidebound view of language tends so much to narrow thought on general subjects that it seems to us of importance that the true and scientific view of the subject should be brought forward whenever opportunity offers. Mr. William Archer, the well-known English critic, contributed an article not long ago to the Pall Mall Magazine which might be read with much advantage by pedants and purists, and all blind followers of authority. He takes the broad ground that language is a transcript, as it were, of life, and that as life widens and becomes more varied, language must do the same. It must reflect the fancy, the imagination, and the humor of the day, and not merely the fancy, imagination, and humor of past generations. If we want a language that is fixed and unalterable in its forms we must seek one that has ceased to be spoken by men. Even then we can not always get absolute decisions. Cicero is perhaps the best standard of Latin prose, but no competent critic would say that his writing was flawless. We know that grammatical questions were much debated among the ancients, and we have no doubt that many such questions were left unsettled. In a living language there must be unsettled questions. There is a constant struggle for life going on among the words and phrases with which men endeavor to express their ideas, and, at a given moment, it is impossible to say which shall prosper, this or that. The word or phrase that prospers—that commends itself, after adequate trial, for expressiveness, convenience, or euphony, or for any combination of useful qualities—will survive and become classic; the expression that has nothing special to commend it, beyond its novelty and slanginess, will probably pass, after a brief and partial currency, into the vast limbo of the unfit. All we can say of a word at a given moment is how far it has actually become current and what kind of society it keeps. What its fortune will be we can only guess. Just as in the financial world great fortunes are sometimes very suddenly made and names before obscure spring into world-wide notoriety, so, in the realm of language, a word of very uncertain ancestry and no social repute may assert its right to recognition and take its place among the best.
It does not follow from this that it can ever be a matter of indifference what words we use or what tricks we play with language, any more than it can be a matter of indifference what personal habits we adopt. Language is the clothing of our thoughts, and as such it may exhibit the same qualities which attach to the clothing of our bodies. It may be marked by neatness and propriety, or by slovenliness and want of taste. Some men are over-dressed, and some affect over-fine language. Some go after the latest novelties in the tailoring world, and some after the latest slang, asserting thereby their resolution to be up to date. It is needless to draw the parallel further, but it is evident that there is wide scope in the choice of language for the exhibition of personal preference and personal character. We think it safe to say that the interests of a language, considered as an instrument of thought, will be best promoted by those who pay due respect to its established forms, and only countenance such neologisms as make good their claim to acceptance by supplying a real want. Mr. Archer, in the article we have referred to, states, and we do not doubt with truth, that the English language has been greatly enriched and strengthened by the fact that it has been spoken and written by millions of people on this side of the Atlantic, leading an intense and vigorous life of their own, under conditions very different in many respects from those prevailing in the mother country. The language moves with a freer step, beats with a stronger pulse, and assumes a more imperial bearing from the fact that it expresses the activity and sums up the life of the foremost communities of the human race in both hemispheres.
A great classical scholar not long ago wrote a letter to an English weekly newspaper expressing a very contemptuous estimate of the French language, as being only a degraded form of Latin. He thought it a great disgrace to the language that it had no better word for “much” than beaucoup, which, as he learnedly explained, came from two Latin words meaning “fine” and “blow.” The most cursory examination of any language will show that it abounds in just such verbal devices. We do not in English put the words “great” and “stroke” together, but, using them separately, we say “a great stroke” of luck and of many other things when there is no question of “striking” at all. In the same way we would say “a great hit,” when there is no question of hitting, except by remote analogy. Languages grow rich and flexible precisely by the adoption of such convenient combinations. What they may originally have meant becomes a matter of little moment when once they have become thoroughly accepted and thoroughly expressive. After they have become welded together, as sometimes happens, in one word, it is an advantage rather than otherwise if the separate meanings of their constituent parts become lost to all except the professional etymologist. As long as the separate parts retain their separate meaning some sense of incongruity will sometimes arise in connection with the use of the term. Thus to say “a handful of corn” is all right, but one might feel that it was not all right to say “a mere handful of men.” Yet it would be futile to criticise the expression which has become idiomatic English. If the word “handful” had parted with its essential meaning as completely as say the word “troop” has, for all but etymologists, there would be no kind of incongruity in its employment for any small number or quantity whatsoever.
The scientific view of language, then, is that it represents the effort of mankind to use audible symbols for the expression of thought; that it follows the development of man’s activity and enlarges with his enlarging knowledge, and comprehension of things; that while its object is essentially a practical one it gathers beauty with use and age, and begins to react on the minds of its makers; that its makers are the people, not the grammarians, these being merely its policemen, who, useful in general, are sometimes too officious; that great writers are the architects who felicitously arrange materials which the people have gathered and shaped, placing the best of such materials where they can be seen to best advantage; finally, that the language of each nation is its most precious possession, the record of its civilization, and the repository of all that is best in its moral and intellectual life, and that it is therefore the duty of all who make any pretensions to liberal training to watch over their heritage and, while allowing all reasonable scope for further development, to guard it by all means in their power against degradation and pollution. A great people will have a great language: when a language shows signs of weakness or declension, there is reason to fear for the civilization of which it is the expression.
Fragments of Science.
“Dark Lightning.”—The attention of meteorologists and photographers has been engaged to a considerable extent, within a few months past, with the appearance on photographs of lightning of what seemed to be dark flashes as well as bright ones. In the effort to account satisfactorily for the phenomenon it has been referred to photographic reversal, due to extreme brilliancy; to a predominance of infra-red radiations; to the existence of flashes deficient in actinic rays; to changes in the density of the air occasioned by the spark, when a dark line with a light line within it is shown if the air is compressed, and a light line inclosing a dark one if it is rarefied; and to some qualities of the photographic plate. The first real light was thrown on the subject by some experiments described by Mr. A. W. Clayden, who, having photographed some electric sparks of different intensities, before developing the plates exposed them to the diffused light of a gas flame. The brilliant sparks then yielded images which might either be called normal with a reversed margin, or reversed with a normal core, while the fainter images were completely reversed—or, in other words, came out darker than the background. The “fogging” of the picture, to produce this reversal, must be done after the image of the flash is impressed; for if it is done before, the image appears lighter than the background. This effect, which is called the “Clayden effect,” is accepted as a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon by two of the authors who have most studied it—Dr. W. J. S. Lockyer and Prof. R. W. Wood, of the University of Wisconsin. Professor Wood, on repeating Mr. Clayden’s experiment, obtained dark flashes without any difficulty, but as they failed to appear when the light of an incandescent lamp was substituted for the electric spark, he concludes that there is something in the spark essential to the reversal. Dr. Lockyer summarizes his conclusion by saying that dark-lightning flashes “do not exist in Nature, but their appearances on photographs are due to some chemical action which takes place in the gelatin film.”
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