Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

Let no one, then, underrate the importance of the study of words. Daniel Webster was often seen absorbed in the study of an English dictionary. Lord Chatham read the folio dictionary of Bailey twice through, examining each word attentively, dwelling on its peculiar import and modes of construction, and thus endeavoring to bring the whole range of our language completely under his control. One of the most distinguished American authors is said to be in the habit of reading the dictionary through about once a year. His choice of fresh and forceful terms has provoked at times the charge of pedantry; but, in fact, he has but fearlessly used the wealth of the language that lies buried in the pages of Noah Webster. It is only by thus working in the mines of language that one can fill his storehouses of expression, so as to be above the necessity of using cheap and common words, or even using these with no subtle discrimination of their meanings. William Pinkney, the great American advocate, studied the English language profoundly, not so much to acquaint himself with the nice distinctions of its philosophical terms, as to acquire copiousness, variety, and splendor of expression. He studied the dictionary, page after page, content with nothing less than a mastery of the whole language, as a body of expression, in its primitive and derivative stock. Rufus Choate once said to one of his students; “You don’t want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.” The leading languages of the world are full of such words, “opulent, microcosmic, in which histories are imaged, which record civilizations. Others recall to us great passages of eloquence, or of noble poetry, and bring in their train the whole splendor of such passages, when they are uttered.”

Mr. Disraeli says of Canning, that he had at command the largest possible number of terms, both “rich and rare,”—words most vivid and effective,—really spirit-stirring words; for words there are, as every poet knows, whose sound is an echo to the sense,—words which, while by their literal meaning they convey an idea to the mind, have also a sound and an association which are like music to the ear, and a picture to the eye,—vivid, graphic, and picturesque words, that make you almost see the thing described. It is said of Keats, that when reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, he became a critic of their thoughts, their words, their rhymes, and their cadences. He brooded over fine phrases like a lover; and often, when he met a quaint or delicious word in the course of his reading, he would take pains to make it his own by using it, as speedily as possible, in some poem he was writing. Upon expressions like “the sea-shouldering whale” of Spenser, he would dwell with an ecstasy of delight. It is said of Theophile Gautier, whose language is remarkable for its copiousness and splendor, that he enriched his picturesque vocabulary from the most recondite sources, and that his favorite reading was the dictionary. He loved words for themselves, their look, their aroma, their color, and kept a supply of them constantly on hand, which he introduced at effective points.

The question has been often discussed whether, if man were deprived of articulate speech, he would still be able to think, and to express his thought. The example of the deaf and dumb, who evidently think, not by associations of sound, but of touch,—using combinations of finger-speech, instead of words, as the symbols of their thought,—appears to show that he might find a partial substitute for his present means of reflection. The telegraph and railway signals are, in fact, new modes of speech, which are quickly familiarized by practice. The engine driver shuts off the steam at the warning signal, without thinking of the words to which it is equivalent; a particular signal becomes associated with a particular act, and the interposition of words becomes useless. It is well known that persons skilled in gesticulation can communicate by it a long series of facts and even complicated trains of thought. Roscius, the Roman actor, claimed that he could express a sentiment in a greater variety of ways by significant gestures than Cicero could by language. During the reign of Augustus, both tragedies and comedies were acted, with powerful effect, by pantomime alone. When the Megarians wanted help from the Spartans, and threw down an empty meal-bag before the assembly, declaring that “it lacked meal,” these verbal economists said that “the mention of the sack was superfluous.” When the Scythian ambassadors wished to convince Darius of the hopelessness of invading their country, they made no long harangue, but argued with far more cogency by merely bringing him a bird, a mouse, a frog, and two arrows, to imply that unless he could soar like a bird, burrow like a mouse, and hide in the marshes like a frog, he would never be able to escape their shafts. Every one has heard of the Englishman in China, who, wishing to know the contents of a dish which lay before him, asked “Quack, quack?” and received in reply the words “Bow-wow.” The language of gesture is so well understood in Italy that it is said that when King Ferdinand returned to Naples after the revolutionary movements of 1822, he made an address to the lazzaroni from the balcony of the palace, wholly by signs; and though made amidst the most tumultuous shouts, they were perfectly intelligible to the assemblage. It is traditionally affirmed that the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers was organized wholly by facial signs, not even the hand being employed. Energetic and faithful, however, as gesture is as a means of expression, it is in the domain of feeling and persuasion, and for embellishing and enforcing our ordinary language, that it is chiefly useful. The conventionality of language, which can be parroted where there is little thought or feeling, deprives it in many cases of its force; and it is a common remark that a look, a tone, or a gesture is often more eloquent than the most elaborate speech. But it is only the most general facts of a situation that gesture can express; it is incapable of distinguishing or decomposing them, and utterly fails to express the delicate shades of difference of which verbal expression is capable. Natural expression, from the cry and groan, and laugh and smile, up to the most delicate variations of tone and feature which the elocutionist uses, is emotional, subjective, and cannot convey an intellectual conception, a judgment, or a cognition.

Facts like these tend to show that man might still have been, as the root of the word “man” implies in Sanskrit, “a thinking being,” though he had never been a “speech-dividing” being; but it is evident that his range of thought would have been exceedingly narrow, and that his mightiest triumphs over nature would have been impossible. While it may be true, as Tennyson says, that

“Thought leapt out to wed with thought,

Ere thought could wed itself to speech,”

yet there is an intimate relation between ratio and oratio, and it may well be doubted whether, without some signs, verbal or of another sort, thought, except of the simplest kind, would not have been beyond man’s power. Long use has so familiarized us with language, we employ it so readily, and without conscious effort, that we are apt to regard it as a matter of course, and become blind to its mystery and deep significance. We rarely think of the long and changeful history through which each word we utter has passed,—of the many changes in form and changes in signification it has undergone,—and of the time and toil spent in its invention and elaboration by successive generations of thinkers and speakers. Still less do we think how different man’s history would have been, how comparatively useless would have been all his other endowments, had God not given him the faculties “which, out of the shrieks of birds in the forest, the roar of beasts, the murmur of rushing waters, the sighing of the wind, and his own impulsive ejaculations, have constructed the great instrument that Demosthenes, and Shakespeare, and Massillon wielded, the instrument by which the laws of the universe are unfolded, and the subtle workings of the human heart brought to light.” Language is not only a means of communication between man and man, but it has other functions hardly less important. It is only by its aid that we are able to analyze our complex impressions, to preserve the results of the analysis, and to abbreviate the processes of thought.

Were we content with the bare reception of visual impressions, we could to some extent dispense with words; but as the mind does not receive its impressions passively, but reflects upon them, decomposes them into their parts, and compares them with notions already stored up, it becomes necessary to give to each of these elements a name. By virtue of these names we are able to keep them apart in the mind, and to recall them with precision and facility, just as the chemist by the labels on his jars, or the gardener by those on his flower-pots, is enabled to identify the substances these vessels contain. Thus reflections which when past might have been dissipated forever, are by their connection with language brought always within reach. Who can estimate the amount of investigation and thought which are represented by such words as gravitation, chemical affinity, atomic weight, capital, inverse proportion, polarity, and inertia,—words which are each the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental processes, and which may be compared to the paper money, or bills of exchange, by which the world’s wealth may be inclosed in envelopes and sent swiftly to the farthest centres of commerce? Who can estimate the inconvenience that would result, and the degree in which mental activity would be arrested, were we compelled to do without these comprehensive words which epitomize theories, sum up the labors of the past, and facilitate and abridge future mental processes? The effect would be to restrict all scientific discovery as effectually as commerce and exchange would be restricted, if all transactions had to be carried on with iron or copper as the sole medium of mercantile intercourse.

Language has thus an educational value, for in learning words we are learning to discriminate things. “As the distinctions between the relations of objects grow more numerous, involved, and subtle, it becomes more analytic, to be able to express them; and, inversely, those who are born to be the heirs of a highly analytic language, must needs learn to think up to it, to observe and distinguish all the relations of objects, for which they find the expressions already formed; so that we have an instructor for the thinking powers in that speech which we are apt to deem no more than their handmaid and minister.” No two things, indeed, are more closely connected than poverty of language and poverty of thought. Language is, on one side, as truly the limit and restraint of thought, as on the other that which feeds and sustains it. Among the “inarticulate ones” of the world, there may be, for aught we know, not a few in whose minds are ideas as grand, pictures as vivid and beautiful, as ever haunted the brain of a poet; but lacking the words which only can express their conceptions, or reveal them in their true majesty to themselves, they must remain “mute, inglorious Miltons” forever. A man of genius who is illiterate, or who has little command of language, is like a painter with no pigments but gray and dun. How, then, shall he paint the purple and crimson of the sunset? Though he may have made the circuit of the world, and gazed on the main wonders of Nature and of Art, he will have little to say of them beyond commonplace. In bridging the chasm between such a man and one of high culture, the acquisition of words plays as important a part as the acquisition of ideas.

It has been justly said that no man can learn from or communicate to another more than the words they are familiar with either express or can be made to express. The deep degradation of the savage is due as much to the brutal poverty of his language as to other causes. This poverty, again, is due to that deficiency of the power of abstraction which characterizes savages of every land. A savage may have a dozen verbs for “I am here,” “I am well,” “I am thirsty,” etc.; but he has no word for “am”: he may have a dozen words for “my head,” “your head,” etc.; but he can hardly conceive of a head apart from its owner. Nearly all the tongues of the American savages are polysynthetic; that is, whole clauses and even whole sentences are compressed together so violently, that often no single syllable would be capable of separate use. The Abbé Domenech states that such is the absolute deficiency of the simplest abstractions in some of these languages that an Indian cannot say “I smoke” without using such a number of concrete pictures that his immensely long word to represent that monosyllabic action means: “I breathe the vapor of a fire of herb which burns in a stone bowl wedged into a pierced stone.” To express the idea of “day,” the Pawnees use such a word as shakoorooceshairet, and their word for “tooth” is the fearful polysyllable khotsiakatatkhusin! The word for “tongue” in Tlatskanai has twenty-two letters. Though these vocables, which bristle with more consonants than the four sneezes of a Russian name of note, would be enough, as De Quincey says, “to splinter the teeth of a crocodile,” yet Mexican has sounds even more ear-splitting. In this language the common address to a priest is the one word Notlazomahuizteopixcatatzin; that is, “Venerable priest, whom I honor as a father.” A fagot is tlatlatlalpistiteutli, and “if the fagot were of green wood, it could hardly make a greater splutter in the fire.” A lover would have been obliged to say “I love you,” in this language, in this style, ni-mits-tsikāwakā-tlasolta; and instead of a kiss he would have had to ask for a tetenna-miquilitzli. “Dieu merci!” exclaims the French writer who states this fact, “quand on a prononcé le mot on a bien mérité la chose.”