Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

Like a long team of snowy swans on high,

Which clap their wings and cleave the liquid sky.”

Spenser, Roscommon, Martineau, and other authorities, were also cited to the same purport, and all the light which English literature could throw upon the point was converged upon it. The learned judges were divided in their opinions, one deciding that the word “team” clearly implied the cart as well as the horses, two other judges deciding that it was enough if the farmer sent the horse and the driver to be put to such service as the duke’s agent might please. The arguments by which each supported his conclusion were so acute, cogent, and weighty, that their disagreement seems to have been inevitable.

The English historian, Hallam, says of the language of Hobbes that it is so lucid and concise that it would be almost as improper to put an algebraical process in different terms as some of his metaphysical paragraphs. Having illustrated his precept by his practice, Hobbes speaks with peculiar authority on the importance of discrimination in the use of words. In a memorable passage of the “Leviathan,” from which we have already quoted, he says: “Seeing that truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth had need to remember what every name he useth stands for, and to place it accordingly; or else he will find himself entangled in words as a bird in limetwigs,—the more he struggles, the more belimed. Words are wise men’s counters,—they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever.” Fuller quaintly suggests that the reason why the Schoolmen wrote in so bald a style was, “that the vermin of equivocation might not hide themselves in the nap of their words.” The definition of words has been often regarded as a mere pedagogue’s exercise; but when we call to mind the persecutions, proscriptions, tortures, and even massacres, which have resulted from mistakes about the meaning of certain words, the office of the lexicographer assumes a grave and dignified aspect. It is not enough, however, in guarding against error, to discriminate our words, so as to understand their exact force. We must also keep constantly in mind the fact that language, when used with the utmost precision, is at best but an imperfect representation of thought. Words are properly neither the “names of things,” as modern writers have defined them, nor, as the ancients viewed them, the “pictures of ideas.” The most they can do is to express the relations of things; they are, as Hobbes said, “the signs of our conceptions,” serving as a mark to recall to ourselves the likeness of a former thought, and as a sign to make it known to others.

Even as the signs of our conceptions, they are at best imperfect and unsatisfactory, representing only approximately what we think, and never coordinating with the conceptions they are used to represent. “Seizing on some characteristic mark of the conception, they always express too little or too much. They are sometimes distinctly metaphorical, sometimes indefinitely assertive; sometimes too concrete, sometimes too abstract.” Our sentences are not images of thought, reflected in a perfect mirror, nor photographs which lack coloring only; they are but the merest skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, tentative signs, which can put another only into a partial possession of our consciousness. To apprehend perfectly the thought of another man, even one who uses language with the utmost nicety and accuracy, we need to know his individuality, his entire past history; we must interpret and supplement his meaning by all that we know of his intellectual and moral constitution, his ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking; we must be en rapport with him; and even then we may fail to penetrate to the central meaning of his words, the very core of his thought.

The soul of every man is a mystery which no other man can fathom; we are, as one has said, spirits in prison, able only to make signals to each other, but with a world of things to think and say which our signals cannot describe at all. There is hardly an abstract term in any language which conveys precisely the same meaning to two different minds; every word is sure to awaken in one mind more or less different associations from those it awakens in another. Words mean the same thing only to persons who are psychologically the same, and who have had the same experiences. It is obvious that no word can explain any sensation, pleasant or painful, to one who has never felt the sensation. When Saunderson, who was born blind, tried to define “red,” he compared that color to the blowing of a trumpet, or the crowing of a cock. In like manner Massieu, the deaf-mute, in trying to describe the sound of a trumpet, said that it was “red.” The statement that words have to two persons a common meaning only when they suggest ideas of a common experience, is true even of the terms we stop to ponder; how much more true, then, of words whose full and exact meaning we no more pause to consider, than we reflect that the gold eagle which passes through our hands is a thousand cents. Try to ascertain the meaning of the most familiar words which are dropping from men’s lips, and you find that each has its history, and that many are an epitome of the thoughts and observations of ages.

What two persons, for example, attach the same meaning to the words “democracy,” “conservatism,” “radicalism,” “education”? What is the meaning of “gentleman,” “comfortable,” “competence”? De Quincey says that he knew several persons in England with annual incomes bordering on twenty thousand pounds, who spoke of themselves, and seemed seriously to think themselves, “unhappy paupers.” Lady Hester Stanhope, with an income of two thousand seven hundred pounds a year, thought herself an absolute pauper in London, and went to live in the mountains of Syria; “for how, you know,” she would say pathetically, “could the humblest of spinsters live decently on that pittance?” Do the chaste and the licentious, the amiable and the revengeful, mean the same thing when they speak of “love” or “hate”? With what precious meaning are the words “home” and “heaven” flooded to some persons, and with what icy indifference are they heard by others!

So imperfect is language that it is doubtful whether such a thing as a self-evident verbal proposition, the absolute truth of which can never be contested, is possible; for it can never be absolutely certain what is the meaning of the words in which the proposition is expressed, and the assertion that it is founded on partial observation, or that the words imperfectly express the observation on which it is founded, or are incomplete metaphors, or are defective in some other respect, must always be open to proof.

Even words that designate outward, material objects, cognizable by the senses, do not always call up similar thoughts in different minds. The meaning they convey depends often upon the mental qualities of the hearer. Thus the word “sun” uttered to an unlettered man of feeble mental powers, conveys simply the idea of a ball of light and heat, which rises in the sky in the morning, and goes down at evening; but to the man of vivid imagination, who is familiar with modern scientific discoveries, it suggests, more or less distinctly, all that science has revealed concerning that luminary. If we estimate words according to their etymological meaning, we shall still more clearly see how inadequate they are in themselves to involve the mass of facts which they connote,—as inadequate as is a thin and worthless bit of paper, which yet may represent a thousand pounds. In no case is the whole of an object expressed or characterized by its appellation, but only some salient feature or phenomenon is suggested, which is sometimes real, at others only apparent. Take the name of an animal, and it may probably express some trivial fact about its nose or its tail, as in “rhinoceros” we express nothing but the horn in its nose, and in “squirrel” we note only its shady tail; but each of these animals has other important characteristics, and other animals may have the very characteristics which these names import. The Latin word Homo means, etymologically, a creature made of earth, which is but metaphorically true; but for what an infinity, almost, of complex conceptions and relations does it stand! The Sanskrit has four names for “elephant,” from different petty characteristics of the animal, and yet how few of its qualities do they describe! “Take a word expressive of the smallest possible modification of matter,—a word invented in the most expressive language in the world, and invented by no less eminent a philosopher than Democritus, and that, too, with great applause,—the word ‘atom,’ meaning that which cannot be cut. Yet simple as is the notion to be expressed, and great as were the resources at command, what a failure the mere word is! It expresses too much and too little, too much as being applicable to other things, and consequently ambiguous; too little, because it does not express all the properties even of an atom. Its inadequacy cannot be more forcibly illustrated than by the fact that its precise Latin equivalent is by us confined to the single acceptation ‘insect’!”[37]

But if words are but imperfect symbols for designating material objects, how much more unequal must they be to the task of expressing that which lies above and behind matter and sensation, especially as all abstract terms are metaphors taken from sensible objects! How many feelings do we have, in the course of our lives, which beggar description! How many apprehensions, limitations, distinctions, opinions are clearly present, at times, to our consciousness, which elude every attempt to give them verbal expression! Even the profoundest thinkers and the most accurate, hair-splitting writers, who weigh and test to the bottom every term they use, are baffled in the effort so to convey their conclusions as to defy all misapprehension or successful refutation. Beginning with definitions, they find that the definitions themselves need defining; and just at the triumphant moment when the structure of argument seems complete and logic-proof, some lynx-eyed adversary detects an inaccuracy or a contradiction in the use of some keystone term, and the whole magnificent pile, so painfully reared, tumbles into ruins.