Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

A volume might be filled with illustrations of the truth that the language of nations is a mirror, in which may be seen reflected with unerring accuracy all the elements of their intellectual as well as of their moral character. What scholar that is familiar with Greek and Latin has failed to remark how indelibly the contrariety of character in the two most civilized nations of antiquity is impressed on their languages, distinguished as is the one by exuberant originality, the other by innate poverty of thought? In the Greek, that most flexible and perfect of all the European tongues,—which surpasses every other alike in its metaphysical subtlety, its wealth of inflections, and its capacity for rendering the minutest and most delicate shades of meaning,—the thought controls and shapes the language; while the tyrannous objectivity of the Latin, rigid and almost cruel, like the nation whose voice it is, and whose words are always Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas, coerces rather than simply syllables the thought. “Greek,” says Henry Nelson Coleridge, “the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of indefatigable strength; with the complication and distinctness of nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind like English; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer, the gloom and intensity of Æschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato, not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardors under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes himself. And Latin,—the voice of Empire and of Law, of War and of the State,—the best language for the measured research of History, and the indignant declamation of moral satire; rigid in its constructions, parsimonious in its synonyms; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit of nations, and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.”

It is a noteworthy fact that, as the Romans were the most majestic of nations, so theirs is the only ancient language that contains the word “majesty,” the Greek having nothing that exactly corresponds to it; and the Latin language is as majestic as were the Romans themselves. Cicero, or some other Latin writer, finds an argument to show that the intellectual character of the Romans was higher than that of the Greeks, in the fact that the word convivium means “a living together,” while the corresponding Greek term, συμπόσιον, means “a drinking together.” While the Romans retained their early simplicity and nobility of soul, their language was full of power and truth; but when they became luxurious, sensual, and corrupt, their words degenerated into miserable and meaningless counters, without intrinsic value, and serving only as a conventional medium of exchange. It has been said truly that “in the pedantry of Statius, in the puerility of Martial, in the conceits of Seneca, in the poets who would go into emulous raptures on the beauty of a lap-dog and the apotheosis of a eunuch’s hair, we read the hand-writing of an empire’s condemnation.”

The climate of a country, as well as the mind and character of its people, is clearly revealed in its speech. The air men breathe, the temperature in which they live, and the natural scenery amid which they pass their lives, acting incessantly upon body and mind, and especially upon the organs of speech, impart to them a soft or a harsh expression. The languages of the South, as we should expect them to be, “are limpid, euphonic, and harmonious, as though they had received an impress from the transparency of their heaven, and the soft sweet sounds of the winds that sigh among the woods. On the other hand, in the hirrients and gutturals, the burr and roughness of the Northern tongues, we catch an echo of the breakers bursting on their crags, and the crashing of the pine branch over the cataract.” The idiom of Sybaris cannot be that of Sparta. The Attic Greek was softer than the Doric, the dialect of the mountains; the Ionic, spoken in the voluptuous regions of Asia Minor, was softer and more sinuous than the Attic. The Anglo-Saxon, the language of a people conversant chiefly with gloomy forests and stormy seas, and prone to silence, was naturally harsh and monosyllabic. The roving sea-king of Scandinavia, cradled on the ocean and rocked by its storms, could no more speak in the soft and melting accents of a Southern tongue than the screaming eagle could utter the liquid melody of a nightingale’s song.

It is said that in the South Sea Islands version of the New Testament there are whole chapters with no words ending in consonants, except the proper names of the original. Italian has been called the love-talk of the Roman without his armor. Fuller, contrasting the Italians and the Swiss, quaintly remarks that the former, “whose country is called ‘the country of good words,’ love the circuits of courtesy, that an ambassador should not, as a sparrow hawk, fly outright to his prey, and meddle presently with the matter in hand; but, like the noble falcon, mount in language, soar high, fetch compasses of compliment, and then in due time stoop to game, and seize on the business propounded. Clean contrary, the Switzers (who sent word to the king of France not to send them an ambassador with stores of words, but a treasurer with plenty of money) count all words quite out which are not straight on, have an antipathy against eloquent language, the flowers of rhetoric being as offensive to them as sweet perfume to such as are troubled with the mother; yea, generally, great soldiers have their stomachs sharp set to feed on the matter; loathing long speeches, as wherein they conceive themselves to lose time, in which they could conquer half a country; and, counting bluntness their best eloquence, love to be accosted in their own kind.”

It is in the idioms of a people, its peculiar turns of expression, and the modifications of meaning which its borrowed words have undergone, that its distinctive genius is most strikingly seen. The forms of salutation used by different nations are saturated with their idiosyncrasies, and of themselves alone essentially reveal their respective characters. How clearly is the innermost distinction between the Greek mind and the Hebrew brought out in their respective salutations, “Rejoice!” and “Peace!” How vividly are contrasted, in the two salutations, the sunny, world-enjoying temper of the one people with the profound religious feeling of the other! The formula of the robust, energetic, valiant Roman,—with whom virtue was manliness, and whose value was measured by his valor,—was Salve! Vale! that is, “Be well,” “Be strong.” In the expression, “If God will it, you are well,” is betrayed the fatalism of the Arab; while the greeting of the Turk, “May your shadow never be less!” speaks of a sunny clime. In the hot, oppressive climate of Egypt perspiration is essential to health, and you are asked, “How do you perspire?” The Italian asks, Come sta? literally, “How does he stand?” an expression originally referring to the standing of the Lombard merchants in the market place, and which seems to indicate that one’s well-being or health depends on his business prosperity. Some writers, however, have regarded the word “stand” in this formula as meaning no more than “exist”; mere life itself, in the land of far niente, being a blessing. The Genoese, a trading people, and at one time the bankers of Europe, used in former days to say, Sanita e guadagno, or “Health and gain!” a phrase in which the ideals of the countrymen of Columbus are tersely summed up. The dreamy, meditative German, dwelling amid smoke and abstractions, salutes you with the vague, impersonal, metaphysical Wie gehts?—“How goes it?” Another salutation which he uses is, Wie befinden sie sich?—“How do you find yourself?” A born philosopher, he is so absent-minded, so lost in thought and clouds of tobacco smoke, that he thinks you cannot tell him of the state of your health till you have searched for and found it.

The trading Hollander, who scours the world, asks, Hoe vaart’s-ge? “How do you go?” an expression eminently characteristic of a trading, travelling people, devoted to business, and devoid of sentiment. The thoughtful Swede inquires, “How do you think?” They also inquire, Hur mär ni?—literally “How can you?” that is, “Are you strong?” The lively, restless, vivacious Frenchman, who lives in other people’s eyes, and is more anxious about appearances than about realities,—who has never to hunt himself up like the German, and desires less to do, like the Anglo-Saxon, than to be lively, to show himself,—says frankly, Comment vous portez-vous?—“How do you carry yourself?” In these few words we have the pith and essence, the very soul, of the French character. Externals, the shapes and shows of things,—for what else could we expect a people to be solicitous, who are born actors, and who live, to a great extent, for stage effect; who unite so much outward refinement with so much inward coarseness; who have an exquisite taste for the ornamental, and an almost savage ignorance of the comfortable; who invented, as Emerson says, the dickey, but left it to the English to add the shirt? It has been said that a man would be owl-blind, who in the “Hoo’s a’ wi’ ye” of the kindly Scot, could not perceive the mixture of national pawkiness with hospitable cordiality. “One sees, in the mind’s eye, the canny chield, who would invite you to dinner three days in the week, but who would look twice at your bill before he discounted it.” What can be more unmistakably characteristic than the Irish peasant’s “Long life to your honor; may you make your bed in glory!” After such a grandiose salute, we need no mouser among the records of antiquity to certify to us that the Hibernian is of Oriental origin, nor do we need any other key to his peculiar vivacity and impressionableness of feeling, his rollicking, daredevil, hyperbole-loving enthusiasm. Finally, of all the national forms of salutation, the most signally characteristic,—the one which reveals the very core, the inmost “heart of heart” of a people,—is the Englishman’s “How do you do?” In these four little monosyllables the activity, the intense practicality of the Englishman, the very quintessence of his character, are revealed as by a lightning’s flash. To do! Not to think, to stand, to carry yourself, but to do; and this doing is so universal among the English,—its necessity is so completely recognized,—that no one dreams of asking whether you are doing, or what you are doing, but all demand, “How do you do?”

It has been well observed by the learned German writer, J. D. Michaelis, that “some virtues are more sedulously cultivated by moralists, when the language has fit names for indicating them; whereas they are but superficially treated of, or rather neglected, in nations where such virtues have not so much as a name. Languages may obviously do injury to morals and religion by their equivocation; by false accessories, inseparable from the principal idea; and by their poverty.” It is a striking fact, noted by an English traveller, that the native language of Van Dieman’s Land has four words to express the idea of taking life, not one of which indicates the deep-lying distinction between to kill and to murder; while any word for love is wanting to it altogether. One of the most formidable obstacles which Christian missionaries have encountered in teaching the doctrines and precepts of the Gospel to the heathen, has been the absence from their languages of a spiritual and ethical nomenclature. It is in vain that the religious teachers of a people present to them a doctrinal or ethical system inculcating virtues and addressed to faculties, whose very existence their language, and consequently the conscious self-knowledge of the people, do not recognize. Equally vain is it to reprehend vices which have no name by which they can be described and denounced, as things to be loathed and shunned. Hence, in translating the Bible into the languages of savage nations, the translators have been compelled to employ merely provisional phrases, until they could develop a dialect fitted to convey moral as well as intellectual truth. It is said that the Ethiopians, having but one word for “person” and “nature,” could not apprehend the doctrine of the union of Christ’s two natures in one single person. There are languages of considerable cultivation in which it is not easy to find a term for the Supreme Being. Seneca wrote a treatise on “Providence,” which had not even a name at Rome in the time of Cicero. It is a curious fact that the English language, rich as it is in words to express the most complex religious ideas, as well as in terms characterizing vices and crimes, had until about two centuries ago no word for “selfishness,” the root of all vices, nor any single word for “suicide.” The Greeks and Romans had a clear conception of a moral ideal, but the Christian idea of “sin” was utterly unknown to the Pagan mind. Vice they regarded as simply a relaxed energy of the will, by which it yielded to the allurements of sensual pleasure; and virtue, literally “manliness,” was the determined spirit, the courage and vigor with which it resisted such temptations. But the idea of “holiness” and the antithetic idea of sin were such utter strangers to the Pagan mind that it would have been impossible to express them in either of the classical tongues of antiquity. As De Maistre has strikingly observed, man knew well that he could “irritate” God or “a god,” but not that he could “offend” him. The words “crime” and “criminal” belong to all languages: those of “sin” and “sinner” belong only to the Christian tongue. For a similar reason, man could always call God “Father,” which expresses only a relation of creation and of power; but no man, of his own strength, could say “my Father”! for this is a relation of love, foreign even to Mount Sinai, and which belongs only to Calvary.

Again, the Greek language, as we have already seen, had no term for the Christian virtue of “humility”; and when the apostle Paul coined one for it, he had to employ a root conveying the idea, not of self-abasement before a just and holy God, but of positive debasement and meanness of spirit. On the other hand, there is a word in our own tongue which, as De Quincey observes, cannot be rendered adequately either by German or Greek, the two richest of human languages, and without which we should all be disarmed for one great case, continually recurrent, of social enormity. It is the word “humbug.” “A vast mass of villany, that cannot otherwise be reached by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric of scorn, would go at large with absolute impunity, were it not through the stern Rhadamanthian aid of this virtuous and inexorable word.”

There is no way in which men so often become the victims of error as by an imperfect understanding of certain words which are artfully used by their superiors. Cynicism is seldom shallower than when it sneers at what it contemptuously calls the power of words over the popular imagination. If men are agreed about things, what, it is asked, can be more foolish than to dispute about names? But while it is true that in the physical world things dominate over names, and are not at the mercy of a shifting vocabulary, yet in the world of ideas,—of history, philosophy, ethics and poetry,—words triumph over things, are even equivalent to things, and are as truly the living organism of thought as the eyes, lips, and entire physiognomy of a man, are the media of the soul’s expression. Hence words are the only certain test of thought; so much so that we often stop in the midst of an assertion, an exclamation, or a request, startled by the form it assumes in words. Thus, in Shakespeare, King John says to Hubert, who pleaded his sovereign’s order for putting the young prince to death, that if, instead of receiving the order in signs,