“Wit,” now used in a more limited sense, at first signified the mental powers collectively; e.g., “Will puts in practice what the wit deviseth.” Later it came to denote quickness of apprehension, beauty or elegance in composition, and Pope defined it as
“Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”
Another meaning was a man of talents or genius. The word “parts,” a hundred years ago, was used to denote genius or talents. Horace Walpole, in one of his letters, says of Goldsmith that “he was an idiot, with once or twice a fit of ‘parts.’” The word “loyalty” has undergone a marked change within a few centuries. Originally it meant in English, as in French, fair dealing, fidelity to engagements; now it means, in England, fidelity to the throne, and, in the United States, to the Union or the Constitution. “Relevant,” which formerly meant relieving or assisting, is now used in the sense of “relative” or “relating” to, with which, from a similarity of sound, though without the least etymological connection, it appears to have been confounded. The word “exorbitant” once meant deviating from a track or orbit; it is now used exclusively in the sense of excessive.
The word “coincide” was primarily a mathematical term. If one mathematical point be superposed upon another, or one straight line upon another between the same two points, the two points in the first case and the two lines in the latter are said to coincide. The word was soon applied figuratively to identity of opinion, but, according to Prof. Marsh, was not fully popularized, at least in America, till 1826. On the Fourth of July in that year, the semi-centennial jubilee of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, the author of that manifesto, and John Adams, its principal champion on the floor of Congress, both also Ex-Presidents, died; and this fact was noticed all over the world, and especially in the United States, as a remarkable “coincidence.” The death of Ex-President Monroe, also, on the Fourth of July five years after, gave increased currency to the word. Our late civil war has led to some striking mutations in the meaning of words. “Contraband,” from its general signification of any article whose importation or exportation is prohibited by law, became limited to a fugitive slave within the United States’ military lines. “Secede” and “secession,” “confederate” and “confederacy,” have also acquired new special meanings.
DEGRADATION OF WORDS.
Another striking characteristic of words is their tendency to contract in form and degenerate in meaning. Sometimes they are ennobled and purified in signification; but more frequently they deteriorate, and from an honorable fall into a dishonorable meaning. I will first note a few examples of the former:—“Humility,” with the Greeks and Romans, meant meanness of spirit; “Paradise,” in oriental tongues, meant only a royal park; “regeneration” was spoken by the Greeks only of the earth in the springtime, and of the recollection of forgotten knowledge; “sacrament” and “mystery” are words “fetched from the very dregs of paganism” to set forth the great truths of our redemption. On the other hand, “thief” (Anglo-Saxon, theow) formerly signified only one of the servile classes; and “villain” or “villein,” meant peasant,—the serf who, under the feudal system, was adscriptus glebæ. The scorn of the landholders, the half-barbarous aristocracy, for these persons, led them to ascribe to them the most hateful qualities, some of which their degrading situation doubtless tended to foster. Thus the word “villein” became gradually associated with ideas of crime and guilt, till at length it became a synonym for knaves of every class in society. A “menial” was one of the many; “insolent” meant unusual; “silly,” blessed,—the infant Jesus being termed by an old English poet “that harmless ‘silly’ babe”; “officious” signified ready to do kindly offices. “Demure” was used once in a good sense, without the insinuation which is now almost latent in it, that the external shows of modesty and sobriety rest on no corresponding realities. “Facetious,” which now has the sense of buffoonish, originally meant urbane. “Idiot,” from the Greek, originally signified only a private man, as distinguished from an office-holder. “Homely” formerly meant secret and familiar; and “brat,” now a vulgar and contemptuous word, had anciently a very different signification, as in the following lines from an old hymn by Gascoigne:
“O Israel, O household of the Lord,
O Abraham’s brats, O brood of blessed seed,
O chosen sheep that loved the Lord indeed.”