Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

and words used for the occasion in their primary sense, are all his ministers, and obedient to his will. An American writer, Mr. E. C. Stedman, in speaking of Swinburne’s marvellous gift of melody, asks: “Who taught him all the hidden springs of melody? He was born a tamer of words, a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most copious of the literary tongues. In his poetry we discover qualities we did not know were in the language—a softness that seemed Italian, a rugged strength we thought was German, a blithe and debonair lightness we despaired of capturing from the French. He has added a score of new stops and pedals to the instrument. He has introduced, partly from other tongues, stanzaic forms, measures and effects untried before, and has brought out the swiftness and force of metres like the anapestic, carrying each to perfection at a single trial. Words in his hands are like the ivory balls of a juggler, and all words seem to be in his hands.”

Words, with such men, are “nimble and airy servitors,” not masters, and from the exquisite skill with which they are chosen, and the firmness with which they are knit together, are sometimes “half battles, stronger than most men’s deeds.” What is the secret of the weird-like power of De Quincey? Is it not that, of all late English writers, he has the most imperial dominion over the resources of expression; that he has weighed, as in a hair-balance, the precise significance of every word he uses; that he has conquered so completely the stubbornness of our vernacular as to render it a willing slave to all the whims and caprices, the ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic variations of his thought? Turn to whatever page you will of his writings, and it is not the thorough grasp of his subject, the enormous erudition, the extraordinary breadth and piercing acuteness of intellect which he displays, that excite your greatest surprise; but you feel that here is a man who has gauged the potentiality of every word he uses, who has analyzed the simples of his every compound phrase. In his hands our stiff Saxon language becomes almost as ductile as the Greek. Ideas that seem to defy expression,—ideas so subtile, or so vague and shifting, that most thinkers find it difficult to contemplate them at all,—are conveyed on his page with a nicety, a felicity of phrase, that might almost provoke the envy of Shakespeare. In the hands of a great sculptor marble and bronze become as soft and elastic as living flesh, and not unlike this is the dominion which the great writers possess over language. In their verse our rugged but pithy and expressive English breathes all sounds, all melodies;

“And now ’tis like all instruments,

Now like a lonely flute,

And now it is an angel’s song,

That makes the heavens be mute.”

The superiority of the writers of the seventeenth century to those of our own day is due not less to their choice and collocation of words than to their weight of thought. There was no writing public nor reading populace in that age; the writers were few and intellectual, and they addressed themselves to learned, or, at least, to studious and thoughtful readers. “The structure of their language,” says Henry Taylor, “is itself an evidence that they counted upon another frame of mind, and a different pace and speed in reading, from that which can alone be looked to by the writers of these days. Their books were not written to be snatched up, run through, talked over, and forgotten; and their diction, therefore, was not such as lent wings to haste and impatience, making everything so clear that he who ran or flew might read. Rather was it so constructed as to detain the reader over what was pregnant and profound, and compel him to that brooding and prolific posture of mind by which, if he had wings, they might help him to some more genial and profitable employment than that of running like an ostrich through a desert. And hence those characteristics of diction by which these writers are made more fit than those who have followed them to train the ear and utterance of a poet. For if we look at the long-suspended sentences of those days, with all their convolutions and intertextures,—the many parts waiting for the ultimate wholeness,—we shall perceive that without distinctive movement and rhythmical significance of a very high order, it would be impossible that they could be sustained in any sort of clearness. One of these writers’ sentences is often in itself a work of art, having its strophes and antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, by which the reader, though conscious of plural voices and running divisions of thought, is not, however, permitted to dissociate them from their mutual concert and dependency, but required, on the contrary, to give them entrance into his mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, as one compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences thus elaborately constructed, and complex, though musical, are not easy to a remiss reader, but they are clear and delightful to an intent reader.”

Few persons are aware how much knowledge is sometimes necessary to give the etymology and definition of a word. In 1839 the British Court of Queen’s Bench,—Sir F. Pollock, Mr. Justice Coleridge, the Attorney General, Sir J. Campbell, and other learned lawyers,—disputed for some hours about the meaning of the word “upon,” as a preposition of time; whether it meant “after” or “before.” It is easy to define words as certain persons satirized by Pascal have defined light: “A luminary movement of luminous bodies”; or as a Western judge once defined murder to a jury: “Murder, gentlemen, is when a man is murderously killed. It is the murdering that constitutes murder in the eye of the law. Murder, in short, is—murder.” We have all smiled at Johnson’s definition of network: “Network—anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” Many of the definitions in our dictionaries remind one of Bardolph’s attempt to analyze the term accommodation: “Accommodation,—that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is being whereby he may be thought to be accommodated, which is an excellent thing.” Brimstone, for example, the lexicographer defines by telling us that it is sulphur; and then rewards us for the trouble we have had in turning to sulphur, by telling us that it is brimstone. The eccentric Davy Crockett, whose exterior roughness veiled a great deal of mother wit, happily characterized this whole tribe of lexicographers by a remark he once made to a Western member of Congress. When the latter, in a speech on a bill for increasing the number of hospitals, wearied his hearers by incessant repetition,—“Sit down,” whispered Crockett, “you are coming out of the same hole you went in at.” There is a mythical story that the forty members of the French Academy once undertook to define the word crab, and hit upon this, which they deemed quite satisfactory: “Crab,—a small red fish, which walks backward.” “Perfect, gentlemen,” said Cuvier, when interrogated touching the correctness of the definition; “perfect,—only I will make one small observation in natural history. The crab is not a fish, it is not red, and it does not walk backward. With these exceptions, your definition is admirable.” Too many easily made definitions are liable to similar damaging exceptions.

The truth is, no word can be truly defined until the exact idea is understood, in all its relations, which the word is designed to represent. Let a man undertake to define the word “alkali” or “acid,” for instance, and he will have to encounter some pretty hard problems in chemistry. Lavoisier, the author of the terminology of modern chemistry, tells us that when he undertook to form a nomenclature of that science, and while he proposed to himself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, his work transformed itself by degrees, and without his being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the elements of chemistry. Often a theory or an argument, which seems clear and convincing in its disembodied form, is found to be incoherent and altogether unsatisfactory as soon as it is fixed in words on paper. Samuel Bailey, who held a derivative opinion in favor of Berkeley’s “Theory of Vision,” tells us that having, in the course of a philosophical discussion, occasion to explain it, he found, on attempting to state in his own language the grounds on which it rested, that they no longer appeared to him to be so clear and conclusive as he had fancied them to be. He determined, therefore, to make them the subject of a patient and dispassionate examination; and the result was a clear conviction of the erroneousness of Berkeley’s theory, the philosophical grounds for which conviction he has so ably and luminously set forth in his book on the subject. The truth is, accurate definitions of the terms of any science can only follow accurate and sharply defined notions of the science itself. Try to define the words matter, substance, idea, will, cause, conscience, virtue, right, and you will soon ascertain whether you have grappled with the grand problems or only skimmed the superficies of metaphysics and ethics.

Daniel O’Connell once won a law-suit by the knowledge furnished him of the etymology of a word. He was engaged in a case where the matter at issue was certain river-rights, especially touching a branch of the stream known by the name of the “Lax Weir.” His clients were in possession of rights formerly possessed by a defunct salmon-fishing company, formed by strangers from Denmark, and they claimed the privilege of obstructing the “Lax Weir” for the purposes of their fishery, while the opposite party contended that it should be open to navigation. A natural inference from the name of the piece of water in question seemed to turn the scale against O’Connell; for how could he establish the right to make that a close weir which, ever since the first existence of the fishery, had been notoriously a lax one? His cause seemed desperate, and he had given up all hope of success, when victory was wrested from his adversaries by a couple of lines on a scrap of paper that was handed to him across the court. These lines informed him that in the language of Germany, and the north of Europe, lachs, or lax, means a salmon. The “Lax Weir” was simply a salmon weir. By the aid of this bit of philological knowledge, O’Connell won not only a verdict for his client, but for himself a great and sudden growth of his reputation as a young advocate.