We have picked out a few instances in which we think Mr. Wedgwood demonstrably mistaken, because they show the temptation which is ever lying in wait to lead the theoretical etymologist astray. Mr. Wedgwood sometimes seems to reverse the natural order of things, and to reason backward from the simple to the more complex. He does not always respect the boundaries of legitimate deduction. On the other hand, his case becomes very strong where he finds relations of thought as well as of sound between whole classes of words in different languages. But it is very difficult to say how long ago instinctive imitation ceased and other elements are to be admitted as operative. We see words continually coming into vogue whose apparent etymologies, if all historical data of their origin were lost, would inevitably mislead. If we did not know, for example, the occasion which added the word chouse to the English language, we have little doubt that the twofold analogy of form and meaning would have led etymologists to the German kosen, (with the very common softening of the k to ch,) and that the derivation would have been perfectly satisfactory to most minds.—Tantrums would look like a word of popular coinage, and yet we find a respectable Old High German verb tantarôn, delirare, (Graff, V. 437,) which may perhaps help us to make out the etymology of dander, in our vulgar expression of "getting one's dander up," which is equivalent to flying into a passion.—Jog, in the sense of going, (to jog along,) has a vulgar look. Richardson derives it from the same root with the other jog, which means to shake, ("A. S. sceac-an, to shake, or shock, or shog.") Shog has nothing whatever to do with shaking, unless when Nym says to Pistol, "Will you shog off?" he may be said to have shaken him off. When the Tinker in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Coxcomb" says, "Come, prithee, let's shog off," what possible allusion to shaking is there, except, perhaps, to "shaking stumps"? The first jog and shog are identical in meaning and derivation, and may be traced, by whosoever chooses, to the Gothic tiuhan, (Germ, ziehen,) and are therefore near of kin to our tug. Togs and toggery belong here also. (The connecting link may be seen in the preterite form zog.) The other jog probably comes to us immediately from the French choquer; and its frequentative joggle answers to the German schutkeln, It. cioccolare. Whether they are all remotely from the same radical is another question. We only cited it as a monosyllabic word, having the air of being formed by the imitative process, while its original tiuhan makes quite another impression.—Had the word ramose been a word of English slang-origin, (and it might easily have been imported, like so many more foreign phrases, by sailors,) we have as little doubt that a derivation of it from the Spanish vamos would have failed to convince the majority of etymologists. This word is a good example of the way in which the people (and it is always the people, never the scholars, who succeed in adding to the spoken language) proceed in naturalizing a foreign term. The accent has gone over to the last syllable, in accordance with English usage in verbs of two syllables; and though the sharp sound of the s has been thus far retained, it is doubtful how long it will maintain itself against a fancied analogy with the grave sound of the same letter in such words as inclose and suppose.—We should incline to think the slang verb to mosey a mere variety of form, and that its derivation from a certain absconding Mr. Moses (who broke the law of his great namesake through a blind admiration of his example in spoiling the Egyptians) was only a new instance of that tendency to mythologize which is as strong as ever among the uneducated. Post, ergo propter, is good people's-logic; and if an antecedent be wanting, it will not be long before one is invented.
If we once admit the principle of onomatopoeia, the difficulty remains of drawing the line which shall define the territory within which those capable of judging would limit its operation. Its boundary would be a movable one, like that of our own Confederacy. Some students, from natural fineness of ear, would be quicker to recognize resemblances of sound; others would trace family likeness in spite of every disguise; others, whose exquisiteness of perception was mental, would find the scent in faint analogies of meaning, where the ordinary brain would be wholly at fault. In the original genesis of language, also, we should infer the influence of the same idiosyncrasies. We were struck with this the other day in a story we heard of a little boy, who, during a violent thunder-storm, asked his father what that was out there,—all the while winking rapidly to explain his meaning. Had his vocabulary been more complete, he would have asked what that winking out there was. The impression made upon him by the lightning was not the ordinary one of brightness, (as in blitz, (?) éclair, fulmen, flash,) but of the rapid alternations of light and dark. Had he been obliged to make a language for himself, like the two unfortunate children on whom King Psarnmetichus made his linguistic experiment, he would have christened the phenomenon accordingly.
Mr. Wedgwood has by no means carried out his theory fully even in reference to the words contained in his first volume, nor does the volume itself nearly exhaust the vocabulary of the letters it includes (A to D). Sometimes, where we should have expected him to apply his system, he refrains, whether from caution or oversight it is not easy to discover. The word cow, which is commonly referred to an imitative radical, he is provokingly reserved about; and under chew he hints at no relation between the name of the action and that of the capital ruminant animal.[a] Even where he has derived a word from an imitative radical, he sometimes fails to carry the process on to some other where it would seem equally applicable, sometimes pushes it too far. For instance, "Crag. 1. The neck, the throat.—Jam. Du. kraeghe, the throat; Pol. kark, the nape, crag, neck; Bohem. krk, the neck; Icel. krage, Dan. krave, the collar of a coat. The origin is an imitation of the noise made by clearing the throat. Bohem. krkati, to belch, krcati, to vomit; Pol. krzakaé, to hem, to hawk. The same root gives rise to the Fr. cracher, to spit, and It. recere, to vomit; E. reach, to strain in vomiting; Icel. hraki, spittle; A. S. hrara, cough, phlegm, the throat, jaws; G. rachen, the jaws." (As crag is not an English word, all this should have come under the head of craw.) "Crag. 2. A rock. Gael. creag, a rock; W. careg, a stone; caregos, pebbles." We do not see why the rattling sound of stones should not give them a claim to the same pedigree,—the name being afterwards transferred to the larger mass, the reverse of which we see in the popular rock for stone. Nay, as Mr. Wedgwood (sub voce draff, p. 482) assumes rac (more properly rk) as the root, it would answer equally well for rock also. Indeed, as the chief occupation of crags, and their only amusement, in mountainous regions, is to pelt unwary passengers and hunters of scenery with their débris, we might have creag, quasi caregos faciens sive dejiciens, sicut rupes a rumpere. Indeed, there is an analogous Sanscrit root, meaning break, crack. But though Mr. Wedgwood lets off this coughing, hawking, spitting, and otherwise unpleasant old patriarch Rac so easily in the case of the foundling Crag, he has by no means done with him. Stretched on the unfilial instrument of torture that bears his name, he is made to confess the paternity of draff, and dregs, and dross, and so many other uncleanly brats, that we feel as if he ought to be nailed by the ear to the other side of the same post on which Mr. Carlyle has pilloried August der starke forever. But we honestly believe the old fellow to be belied, and that he is as guiltless of them as of that weak-witted Hebrew Raca who looks so much like him in the face.
[Footnote a: An etymology of this kind would have been particularly interesting in the hands of so learned and acute a man as Mr. Wedgwood. It would have afforded him a capital example of the fact that considerable differences in the form and sound of words meaning the same thing prove nothing against the onomatopoeic theory, but merely that the same sound represents a different thing to different ears. L. Boare, mugire, E. moo; F. beugler, E. bellow; G. leuen, L. lugere, E. low, are all attempts at the same sound, or, which would not affect the question, variations of an original radical gô or gu. For a full discussion of the matter, admirable for its thorough learning, see Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Européennes, Vol. I. Section 86.]
In the case of crag, Mr. Wedgwood argues from a sound whose frequency and marked character (and colds must have been frequent when the fig-tree was the only draper) gave a name to the organ producing it. We can easily imagine it. One of these early pagans comes home of an evening, heated from the chase, and squats himself on the damp clay floor of a country-seat imperfectly guarded against draughts. The next morning he says to his helpmeet, "Mrs. Barbar, I have a dreadful cold in my—hrac! hrac!" Here he is interrupted by a violent fit of coughing, and resorts to semeiology by pointing to his throat. Similar incidents carrying apprehension (as Lord Macaulay would say) to the breezy interiors of a thousand shanties on the same fatal morning, the domestic circle would know no name so expressive as hrac for that fatal tube through which man, ingenious in illegitimate perversion, daily compels the innocent breath to discharge a plumbeous hail of rhetoric.
But seriously, we think Mr. Wedgwood's derivation of crag (or rather, that which he adopts, for it has had other advocates) a very probable one, at least for more northern tribes. There is no reason why men should have escaped the same law of nomenclature which gave names to the cuckoo and the pavo.[a] But when he approaches draff, he gets upon thinner ice. Where a metaphorical appropriateness is plainly wanting to one etymology and another as plainly supplies it, other considerations being equal, probability may fairly turn the scale in favor of the latter. Mr. Wedgwood is here dealing with a sound translated to another meaning by an intellectual process of analogy; and no one knows better than he—for his book shows everywhere the fair-mindedness of a thorough scholar—the extreme difficulty of convincing other minds in such matters. He seems to have been unconsciously influenced in this case by a desire to give more support to a very ingenious etymology of the word dream. His process of reasoning may be briefly stated thus: draff and dregs are refuse, they are things thrown away, sometimes (as in German dreck, sordes) they are even disgustful; and as there is no expression of contempt and disgust so strong as spitting, the sound rac transferred itself by a natural association of ideas from the act to the object of it. He cites Du. drabbe, Dan. drav, Ger. träbern, Icel. dregg, Prov. draco, Ger., Du. dreck, O. F. drache, drêche, (and he might have added E. trash,) E. dross, all with nearly the same meaning. We have selected such as would show the different forms of the word. To the same radical Mr. Wedgwood refers G. trüjen, betrügen, and this would carry with it our English trick (Prov. tric, in Diez, Fr. triche). In our opinion he is wrong, doubly wrong, inasmuch as we think he has confounded two widely different roots. He has taken his O. Fr. forms from Roquefort (Gloss. Rom. I. 411,) but has omitted one of his definitions, coque qui enveloope le grain, that is, the husk, or hull. Mr. Wedgwood might perhaps found an argument on this in support of our old friend Rac and his relation to huskiness; but it seems to us one of those trifles, the turned leaf, or broken twig, that put one on the right trail. We accept Mr. Wedgwood's derivative signification of refuse, worthless, contemptible, and ask if all these terms do not apply equally well to the chaff of the threshing-floor? It is more satisfactory to us, then, to attribute a part of the words given above to the Gothic dragan, (L. trahere, G. tragen,) to drag, to draw, and a part to Goth. thriskan, to thresh. The conjecture of Diez, (cited by Diefenbach,) that the Italian trescare (to stamp with the feet, to dance) should be referred to the same root, is confirmed by the ancient practice of threshing grain by treading it out with cattle. We might, indeed, refer all to one root, by deriving dross (a provincial form of which is drass) through the O. Fr. drache, (as in O. Fr. treche, Fr. tresse, E. tress,) but we have A. S. dresten, which is better accounted for by therscan. The other forms, such as drabbe, dregg, and dragan, the b and v being analogous to E. draggle, drabble, draught, draft, all equally from dragan. We have a suspicion that dragon is to be referred to the same root. Mr. Wedgwood follows Richardson, who follows Vossius in a fanciful etymology from the Greek [Greek: derkomai = blepein] to see. Sharpness of sight, it is true, was attributed to the mythologized reptile, but the primitive draco was nothing but a large serpent, supposed to be the boa. This sense must accordingly be comparatively modern. The eagle is the universal type of keenness of vision. The reptile's way of moving himself without legs is his most striking peculiarity; and if we derive dragon from the root meaning to drag, to draw, (because he draws himself along,) we find it analogous to serpent, reptile, snake. The relation between [Greek: trechein] and dragan may be seen in G. ziehen, meaning both to draw and to go. Mr. Wedgwood says that he finds it hard to conceive any relation between the notion of treachery, betrayal, (trügen, betrügen,) and that of drawing. It would seem that to draw into an ambush, the drawing of a fowler's net, and the more sublimated drawing a man on to his destruction, supplied analogies enough. The contempt we feel for treachery (for it is only in this metaphysical way that Mr. Wedgwood can connect the word with his radical rac[c]) is a purely subsidiary, derivative, and comparatively modern notion. Many, perhaps most, kinds of treachery were looked upon as praiseworthy in early times, and are still so regarded among savages. Does Mr. Wedgwood believe that Romulus lost caste by the way in which he made so many respectable Sabines fathers-in-law against their will, or that the wise Odysseus was a perfectly admirable gentleman in our sense of the word? Even in the sixteenth century, in the then most civilized country of the world, the grave irony with which Macchiavelli commends the frightful treacheries of Cæsar Borgia would have had no point, if he had not taken it for granted that almost all who read his treatise would suppose him to be in earnest. In the same way dregs is explained simply as the sediment left after drawing off liquids. Dredge also is certainly, in one of its meanings, a derivative of dragan; so, too, trick in whist, and perhaps trudge. Indeed, all the words above-cited are more like each other than Fr. toit and E. deck, both from one root, or the Neapol. sciù and the Lat. flos, from which it is corrupted.
[Footnote a: The German pfau retains the imitative sound which the English pea-cock has lost, and of which our system of pronunciation robs the Latin.]
[Footnote b: And to worm, (another word for dragon,) if, as has been conjectured, there be any radical affinity between that and schwärmen, whose primitive sense of crawl or creep is seen in the swarming of bees, and swarming up a tree.]
[Footnote c: That is, unless he takes the rag in dragan to be the same thing, which he might support with several plausible analogies, such as E. rake, It. recare, etc.]
But the same subtilty of mind, which sometimes seduces Mr. Wedgwood into making distinctions without a difference and preferring an impalpable relation of idea to a plain derivative affinity, is of great advantage to him when the problem is to construct an etymology by following the gossamer clews that lead from sensual images to the metaphorical and tropical adaptations of them to the demands of fancy and thought. The nice optics that see what is not to be seen have passed into a sarcastic proverb; yet those are precisely the eyes that are in the heads and brains of all who accomplish much, whether in science, poetry, or philosophy. With the kind of etymologies we are speaking of, it is practically useful to have the German gift of summoning a thing up from the depths of one's inward consciousness. It is when Mr. Wedgwood would reverse the order of Nature, and proceed from the tropical to the direct and simple, that we are at issue with him. For it is not philosophers who make language, though they often unmake it.