Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

[CHAPTER XII.]
THE FALLACIES IN WORDS—(continued).

I never learned rhetorike certain;

Things that I speke, it mote be bare and plain.—Chaucer.

Here is our great infelicity, that, when single words signify complex ideas, one word can never distinctly manifest all the parts of a complex idea.—Isaac Watts.

If reputation attend these conquests which depend on the fineness and niceties of words, it is no wonder if the wit of men so employed should perplex and subtilize the signification of sounds.—Locke.

It has been remarked by Archbishop Whately that the words whose ambiguity is the most frequently overlooked, and produces the greatest amount of confusion of thought and fallacy, are the commonest,—the very ones whose meaning is supposed to be best understood. “Familiar acquaintance is perpetually mistaken for accurate knowledge.” Such a word is “luxury.”

A favorite theme for newspaper declamations in these days is the luxury and extravagance of the American people, especially of the nouveaux riches whose fortunes have been of mushroom growth. It is easy to declaim thus against luxury,—that is, against the use of things which, at any particular period, are not deemed indispensable to life, health, and comfort; but what do those who indulge in this cheap denunciation mean by the term? Is not luxury a purely relative term? Is there a single article of dress, food or furniture which can be pronounced an absolute luxury, without regard to the wealth or poverty of him who enjoys it? Are not the luxuries of one generation or country the necessaries of another? Persons who are familiar with history know that Alfred the Great had not a chair to sit down upon, nor a chimney to carry off his smoke; that William the Conquerer was unacquainted with the luxury of a feather bed, if it can be called one; that the early aristocracy of England lived on the ground floor, without drainage; that in the Middle Ages shirts were deemed a useless superfluity, and men were even put in the pillory for wearing them; that night-shirts were esteemed a still more needless luxury, and persons of all ranks and classes slept in the first costume of Adam; that travelling carriages are an ingenious invention of modern effeminacy; that the men who first carried umbrellas in the streets, even in the severest rain-storms, were hooted at as dandies and coxcombs; that the nobles and dames of the most brilliant epochs of England’s annals ate with their fingers, generally in couples, out of one trencher on a bare table; and that when forks were introduced, they were long hotly opposed as an extravagance, and even denounced by many as a device of Satan, to offer an affront to Providence, who had provided man with fingers to convey his food to his mouth. In the introduction to Hollinshed’s “Chronicles,” published in 1577, there is a bitter complaint of the multitude of chimneys lately erected, of the exchange of straw pallets for mattresses or flock beds, and of wooden platters for earthenware and pewter. In another place, the writer laments that oak only is used for building, instead of willow as heretofore; adding, that “formerly our houses indeed were of willow, but our men were of oak; but now that our houses are of oak, our men are not only of willow, but some altogether of straw, which is a sore alteration.”

Erasmus tells us that salt beef and strong ale constituted the chief part of Queen Elizabeth’s breakfast, and that similar refreshments were served to her in bed for supper. There is not a single able-bodied workingman in the United States who does not enjoy fare which would have been deemed luxurious by men of high station in the iron reign of the Tudors; hardly a thriving shopkeeper who does not occupy a house which English nobles in 1650 would have envied; hardly a domestic servant or factory girl who does not on Sundays adorn herself with apparel which would have excited the admiration of the duchesses in Queen Elizabeth’s ante-rooms. Xenophon accounts for the degeneracy of the Persians by their luxury, which, he says, was carried to such a pitch that they used gloves to protect their hands. Tea and coffee were once denounced as idle and injurious luxuries; and throughout the larger part of the world tooth-brushes, napkins, suspenders, bathing-tubs, and a hundred other things now deemed indispensable to the health or comfort of civilized man, would be regarded as proofs of effeminacy and extravagance.