Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

The degree to which this lawlessness has been carried will be seen more strikingly if we compare our English literature with the literature of France. It has been justly said that the language of that country is a science in itself, and the labor bestowed on the acquisition of it has the effect of vividly impressing on the mind both the faults and the beauties of every writer’s style. Method and perspicuity are its very essence; and there is hardly a writer of note who does not attend to these requisites with scrupulous care. Let a French writer of distinction violate any cardinal rule of grammar, and he is pounced upon instantly by the critics, and laughed at from Calais to Marseilles. When Boileau, who is a marvel of verbal and grammatical correctness, made a slip in the first line of his Ninth Satire,

“C’est à vous, mon Esprit, à qui je veux parler,”

the grammatical sensibility of the French ear was shocked to a degree that we, who tolerate the grossest solecisms, find it hard to estimate. For two centuries the blunder has been quoted by every writer on grammar, and impressed on the memory of every schoolboy. Indeed, such is the national fastidiousness on this subject, that it has been doubted whether a single line in Boileau has been so often quoted for its beauty, as this unfortunate one for its lack of grammar. When did an English or an American writer thus offend the critical ears of his countrymen, even though he were an Alison, sinning against Lindley Murray on every page?

We are no friends to hypercriticism, or to that finical niceness which cares more for the body than for the soul of language, more for the outward expression than for the thought which it incarnates. Too much rigor is as unendurable as laxity. It is, no doubt, possible to be so over-nice in the use of words and the construction of sentences as to sap the vitality of our speech. We may so refine our expression, by continual straining in our critical sieves, as to impair both the strength and the flexibility of our noble English tongue. There are some verbal critics, who, apparently go so far as to hold that every word must have an invariable meaning, and that all relations of thoughts must be indicated by absolute and invariable formulas, thus reducing verbal expression to the rigid inflexibility of a mathematical equation. If we understand Mr. Moon’s censures of Murray and Alford, some of them are based on the assumption that an ellipsis is rarely, if ever, permissible in English speech. We have no sympathy with such extremists, nor with the verbal purists who challenge all words and phrases that cannot be found in the “wells of English undefiled,” that have been open for more than a hundred years. We must take the good with the bad in the incessant changes and masquerades of language. “The severe judgment of the scholar may condemn as verbiage that undergrowth of words which threatens to choke up and impoverish the great roots that have occupied the soil from the earliest times; he may apprehend wreck and disaster to the fixedness of language when he sees words loosened from their etymons, and left to drift upon the ocean at the mercy of wind and tide; and he is justified in every seasonable and reasonable attempt he makes to reconcile current and established significations with the sanction of authority.” But it must not be forgotten that language is a living, organic thing, and by the very law of its life must always be in a fluctuating state. To petrify it into immutable forms, to preserve it as one preserves fruits and flowers in spirits of wine and herbariums, is as hopeless as it would be undesirable, if we would have it a medium for the ever-changing thoughts of man.

Language is a growing thing, as truly as a tree; and as a tree, while it casts off some leaves, will continually put forth others, so a language will be perpetually growing and expanding with the discoveries of science, the extension of commerce, and the progress of thought. Such events as the growth of the Roman Empire, the introduction of Christianity, the rise of the scholastic and of the mystic theology in the middle ages, the irruption of the northern barbarians into Italy, the establishment, of the Papacy, the introduction of the feudal system, the Crusades, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, give birth to new ideas, which clamor for new words to express them. Every age thus enriches language with new accessions of beauty and strength. Not only are new words coined, but old ones continually take on new senses; and it is only in the transition period, before they have established themselves in the general favor of good speakers and writers, that purity of style requires them to be shunned. Those who are so ignorant of the laws of language as to resist its expansion,—who declare that it has attained at any time the limit of its development, and seek by philological bulls to check its growth,—will find that, like a vigorous forest tree, it will defy any shackles that men may bind about it; that it will reck as little of their decrees as did the advancing ocean of those of Canute. The critics who make such attempts do not see that the immobility of language would be the immobility of history. They forget that many of the purest words in our language were at one time startling novelties, and that even the dainty terms in which they challenge each new-comer, though now naturalized, had once to fight their way inch by inch. Shakespeare ridicules “element”; Fulke, in the seventeenth century, objects to such ink-horn terms as “rational,” “scandal,” “homicide,” “ponderous,” and “prodigious”; Dryden censures “embarrass,” “grimace,” “repartee,” “foible,” “tour,” and “rally”; Swift denounces “hoax” as low and vulgar; Pope condemns “witless,” “welkin,” and “dulcet”; and Franklin, who could draw from the clouds the electric fluid which now carries language with the speed of lightning from land to land, vainly struggled against the introduction of the words “to advocate” and “to notice.” In the “New World of Words,” by Edward Phillips, published in 1678, there is a long list of words which he declared should be either used warily or rejected as barbarous. Among these words are the following, which are all in good use to-day: autograph, aurist, bibliograph, circumstantiate, evangelize, ferocious, holograph, inimical, misanthropist, misogynist, and syllogize.

The word “Fatherland” seems so natural that we are apt to regard it as an old word; yet the elder Disraeli claims the honor of having introduced it. Macaulay tells us that the word “gutted,” which was doubtless objected to as vulgar, was first used on the night in which James II fled from London: “The king’s printing-house ... was, to use a coarse metaphor, which then, for the first time, came into fashion, completely gutted.” How much circumlocution is saved by the word “antecedents” (formerly a grammatical term only), in its new sense, denoting a man’s past history; with reference to which Punch says it would be more satisfactory to know something of a suspected man’s relatives than of his antecedents! What a happy, ingenious use of an old word is that of “telescope” to describe a railway accident, when the force of a collision causes the cars to run or fit into each other, like the shortening slides of a telescope! The term is so picturesque and so convenient in avoiding a periphrasis, that it cannot fail to be stamped with the seal of good usage. How admirably was a real void in the vocabulary filled by the word “squatter,” when it was first coined! The man who first uttered it gave vivid expression to an idea which had existed vaguely in the brains of thousands; and it was hardly spoken before it was on every tongue. Coleridge observes truly that any new word expressing a fact or relationship, not expressed by any other word in the language, is a new organ of thought; and how true is this of the terms “solidarity” (as in the phrase “solidarity of the peoples”), and “international,” both of which express novel and characteristic conceptions of our own century. The latter word is a coinage of Jeremy Bentham, to whom we are also indebted for “codify,” “maximise,” and “minimise.” The little word “its” had to force its way into the language, against the opposition of “correct” speakers and writers, on the ground of its apparent analogy with the other English possessives.

Dr. Johnson objected to the word “dun” in Lady Macbeth’s famous soliloquy, declaring that the “efficacy of this invocation is destroyed by the insertion of an epithet now seldom heard but in the stable:—”

“Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell.”

It was a notion of the great critic and lexicographer, with which his mind was long haunted, that the language should be refined and fixed so as finally to exclude all rustic and vulgar elements from the authorized vocabulary of the lettered and polite. Dryden had hinted at the establishment of an academy for this purpose, and Swift thought the Government “should devise some means for ascertaining and fixing the language forever,” after the necessary alterations should be made in it.