Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

In a listening heart it nestled,

And it lived forever there.

Not the beating of its prison

Stirred it ever, night or day;

Only with the heart’s last throbbing

Could it ever fade away.”

A late writer has truly said that “there may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter; there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence.”

“Nothing,” says Hawthorne, “is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind so distinctly that no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take the profoundest interest; but as long as it remains unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a drowned body out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been aware of the horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface.”

The significance of words is illustrated by nothing, perhaps, more strikingly than by the fact that unity of speech is essential to the unity of a people. Community of language is a stronger bond than identity of religion, government, or interests; and nations of one speech, though separated by broad oceans, and by creeds yet more widely divorced, are one in culture, one in feeling. Prof. Marsh has well observed that the fine patriotic effusion of Arndt, “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?” was founded upon the idea that the oneness of the Deutsche Zunge, the German speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of aims, and of duties; and the universal acceptance with which the song was received showed that the poet had struck a chord to which every Teutonic heart responded. When a nation is conquered by another, which would hold it in subjection, it has to be again conquered, especially if its character is essentially opposed to that of its conqueror, and the second conquest is often the more difficult of the two. To kill it effectually, its nationality must be killed, and this can be done only by killing its language; for it is through its language that its national prejudices, its loves and hates, and passions live. When this is not done, the old language, slowly dying out,—if, indeed, it dies at all,—has time to convey the national traditions into the new language, thus perpetuating the enmities that keep the two nations asunder. We see this illustrated in the Irish language, which, with all the ideas and feelings of which that language is the representative and the vehicle, has been permitted by the English government to die a lingering death of seven or eight centuries. The coexistence of two languages in a state is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall it. The settlement of townships and counties in our country by distinct bodies of foreigners is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily newspaper, with an Irish, German, or French prefix, or in a foreign language, is a perpetual breeder of national animosities, and an effectual bar to the Americanization of our foreign population.