Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

It has been justly said that the corrupter of a language stabs straight at the very heart of his country. He commits a crime against every individual of a nation, for he poisons a stream from which all must drink; and the poison is more subtle and more dangerous, because more likely to escape detection, than the deadliest venom with which the destructive philosophy of our day is assailing the moral or the religious interests of humanity. “Let the words of a country,” says Milton in a letter to an Italian scholar, “be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare but, by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of servility?”

Sometimes the spirit which governs employers or employed, and other classes of men, in their mutual relations, is indicated by the names they give each other. Some years ago the legislature of Massachusetts made a law requiring that children of a certain age, employed in the factories of that State, should be sent to school a certain number of weeks in the year. While visiting the factories to ascertain whether this wise provision of the State government was complied with, an officer of the State inquired of the agent of one of the principal factories at New Bedford, whether it was the custom to do anything for the physical, intellectual, or moral welfare of the work people. The reply would not have been inappropriate from the master of a plantation, or the captain of a coolie ship: “We never do; as for myself, I regard my work people as I regard my machinery.... They must look out for themselves, as I do for myself. When my machinery gets old and useless, I reject it and get new: and these people are a part of my machinery.” Another agent in another part of the State replied to a similar question, that “he used his mill hands as he used his horse; as long as the horse was in good condition and rendered good service, he treated him well; otherwise he got rid of him as soon as he could, and what became of him afterward was no affair of his.”

But we need not multiply illustrations to show the moral power of words. As the eloquent James Martineau says: “Power they certainly have. They are alive with sweetness, with terror, with pity. They have eyes to look at you with strangeness or with response. They are even creative, and can wrap a world in darkness for us, or flood it with light. But in all this, they are not signs of the weakness of humanity: they are the very crown and blossom of its supreme strength; and the poet whom this faith possesses will, to the end of time, be master of the critic whom it deserts. The whole inner life of men moulds the forms of language, and is moulded by them in turn; and as surely pines when they are rudely treated as the plant whose vessels you bruise or try to replace with artificial tubes. The grouping of thought, the musical scale of feeling, the shading and harmonies of color in the spectrum of imagination, have all been building, as it were, the molecules of speech into their service; and if you heedlessly alter its dispositions, pulverize its crystals, fix its elastic media, and turn its transparent into opaque, you not only disturb expression, you dislodge the very things to be expressed. And in proportion as the idea or sentiment thus turned adrift is less of a mere personal characteristic, and has been gathering and shaping its elements from ages of various affection and experience, does it become less possible to replace it by any equivalents, or dispense with its function by any act of will.”

To conclude: there is one startling fact connected with words, which should make all men ponder what they utter. Not only is every wise and every idle word recorded in the book of divine remembrance, but modern science has shown that they produce an abiding impression on the globe we inhabit. Plunge your hand into the sea, and you raise its level, however imperceptibly, at the other side of the globe. In like manner, the pulsations of the air, once set in motion, never cease; its waves, raised by each sound, travel the entire round of earth’s and ocean’s surface; and in less than twenty-four hours, every atom of atmosphere takes up the altered movement resulting from that sound. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are written in imperishable characters all that man has spoken, or even whispered. Not a word that goes from the lips into the air can ever die, until the atmosphere which wraps our huge globe in its embrace has passed away forever, and the heavens are no more. There, till the heavens are rolled together as a scroll, will still live the jests of the profane, the curses of the ungodly, the scoffs of the atheist, “keeping company with the hours,” and circling the earth with the song of Miriam, the wailing of Jeremiah, the low prayer of Stephen, the thunders of Demosthenes, and the denunciations of Burke.

“Words are mighty, words are living;

Serpents, with their venomous stings,

Or, bright angels, crowding round us

With heaven’s light upon their wings;

Every word has its own spirit,

True or false, that never dies;