Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

A poisoned shaft, with scarce an aim,

Has done a mischief sad as shame.”

How often have thoughtless words set empires ablaze, and kindled furious wars among nations! It was one of the virtues of George Washington that he knew how to be silent. John Adams said he had the most remarkable mouth he had ever seen; for he had the art of controlling his lips. One of the rules of conduct to which David Hume inflexibly adhered, was never to reply to any attack made upon him or his writings. It was creditable to him that he had no anxiety to have “the last word,”—that which in family circles has been pronounced to be “the most dangerous of infernal machines.”

It is not, however, in the realm of literature and morals only that the power of words is seen. Who is ignorant of their sway in the world of politics? Is not fluency of speech, in many communities, more than statesmanship? Are not brains, with a little tongue, often far less potent than “tongue with a garnish of brains”? Need any one be told that a talent for speech-making has stood in place of all other acquirements; that it is this which has made judges without law, and diplomatists without French; which has sent to the army brigadiers who knew not a cannon from a mortar, and to the legislature men who could not tell a bank note from a bill of exchange; which, according to Macaulay, made a Foreign Minister of Mr. Pitt, who never opened Vattel, and which was near making a Chancellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not work a sum in long division? “To be a man of the world,” says Corporal Bunting, a character in one of Bulwer’s novels, “you must know all the ins and outs of speechifying. It’s words that make another man’s mare go your road. Augh! that must have been a clever man as invented language. It is a marvel to think how much a man does in the way of cheating, if he only has the gift of the gab; wants a missus,—talks her over; wants your horse,—talks you out of it; wants a place,—talks himself into it.... Words make even them ’ere authors, poor creatures, in every man’s mouth. Augh! sir, take note of the words, and the things will take care of themselves.”

It is true that “lying words” are not always responsible for the mischief they do; that they often rebel and growl audibly against the service into which they are pressed, and testify against their taskmasters. The latent nature of a man struggles often through his own words, so that even truth itself comes blasted from his lips, and vulgarity, malignity, and littleness of soul, however anxiously cloaked, are betrayed by the very phrases and images of their opposites. “A satanic drop in the blood,” it has been said, “makes a clergyman preach diabolism from scriptural texts, and a philanthropist thunder hate from the rostrum of reform.”[9] But though the truth often leaks out through the most hypocritical words, it is yet true that they are successfully employed, as decoy ducks, to deceive, and the dupes who are cheated by them are legion. There are men fond of abstractions, whom words seem to enter and take possession of, as their lords and owners. Blind to every shape but a shadow, deaf to every sound but an echo, they invert the legitimate order, and regard things as the symbols of words, not words as the symbols of things. There is, in short, “a besotting intoxication which this verbal magic, if I may so call it, brings upon the mind of man.... Words are able to persuade men out of what they find and feel, to reverse the very impressions of sense, and to amuse men with fancies and paradoxes, even in spite of nature and experience.”[10]

All who are familiar with Dickens will recollect the reply of the shrewd Samuel Weller, when asked the meaning of the word monomania: “When a poor fellow takes a piece of goods from a shop, it is called theft; but if a wealthy lady does the same thing, it is called monomania.” There is biting satire as well as naïveté and dry humor in the reply, and it strikingly shows the moral power of language; how the same act may be made to appear in wholly different lights, according to the phraseology used to describe it. The same character may be made to look as spotless as an angel, or as black as “the sooty spirits that troop under Acheron’s flag,” through the lubricity of language. “Timidus,” says Seneca, “se cantum vocat; sordidus parcum.” Thousands who would shrink back with disgust or horror from a vice which has an ugly name, are led “first to endure, then pity, then embrace,” when men have thrown over it the mantle of an honorable appellation. A singular but most instructive dictionary might be compiled by taking one after another the honorable and the sacred words of a language, and showing for what infamies, basenesses, crimes, or follies, each has been made a pretext. Is there no meaning in the fact that, among the ancient Romans, the same word was employed to designate a crime and a great action, and that a softened expression for “a thief” was “a man of three letters” (f. u. r.)? Does it make no difference in our estimate of the gambler and his profession, whether we call him by the plain, unvarnished Saxon “blackleg,” or by the French epithet, “industrious chevalier”? Can any one doubt that in Italy, when poisoning was rifest, the crime was fearfully increased by the fact that, in place of this term, not to be breathed in ears polite, the death of some one was said to be “assisted”? Or can any one doubt the moral effect of a similar perversion of words in France, when a subtle poison, by which impatient heirs delivered themselves from persons who stood between them and the inheritance they coveted, was called “succession powder”?

Juvenal indignantly denounces the polished Romans for relieving the consciences of rich criminals by softening the names of their crimes; and Thucydides, in a well known passage of his history, tells how the morals of the Greeks of his day were sapped, and how they concealed the national deterioration, by perversions of the customary meanings of words. Unreasoning rashness, he says, passed as “manliness” and esprit de corps, and prudent caution for specious cowardice; sobermindedness was a mere “cloak for effeminacy,” and general prudence was “inefficient inertness.” The Athenians, at one time, were adepts in the art of coining agreeable names for disagreeable things. “Taxes” they called “subscriptions,” or “contributions”; the prison was “the house”; the executioner a “public servant”; and a general abolition of debt was “a disburdening ordinance.” Devices like these are common to all countries; and in our own, especially, one is startled to see what an amount of ingenuity has been expended in perfecting this “devil’s vocabulary,” and how successful the press has been in its efforts to transmute acts of wickedness into mere peccadilloes, and to empty words employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation they convey.

The use of classical names for vices has done no little harm to the public morals. We may say of these names, what Burke said with doubtful correctness of vices themselves, that “they lose half their deformity by losing all their grossness.” If any person is in doubt about the moral quality of an act, let him characterize it in plain Saxon, and he will see it in its true colors.