“I ’gin to grow a-weary of the sun.”
What a shock would every right-minded reader receive if, upon opening his Bible, he should find, in place of the old familiar words, the following: “In the commencement God created the heavens and the earth,”—“The fear of the Lord is the commencement of wisdom!” Well did Coleridge say: “Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style.” “Commence” is a good word enough, but, being of outlandish origin, should never take the place of “begin,” except for the sake of rhythm or variety.
Another of these grand words is “imbroglio.” It is from the Italian, and means an intricate or complicated plot. Why, then, should a quarrel in the Cabinet at Washington, or a prospective quarrel with France or England, be called an “imbroglio”? Again, will any one explain to us the meaning of “interpellation,” so often used by the correspondents of our daily newspapers? The word properly means an interruption; yet when an opposition member of the French or Italian Parliament asks a question of a minister, he is said “to put an interpellation.” Why should an army be said to be “decimated,” without regard to the number or nature of its losses? The original meaning of this term was grave, and often terrible; it meant no less than taking the tenth of a man’s substance, or shooting every tenth man in a mutinous regiment, the victims being called out by lot. “This appalling character of decimation lay in the likelihood that innocent persons, slain in cold blood, might suffer for the guilty. But the peculiar horror vanishes when we alter the conditions; and a regiment which has taken part in a hard-fought battle, and comes off the field only decimated,—that is to say, with nine living and unscathed for each man left on the field,—might be accounted rather fortunate than the reverse.” Why, again, should “donate” be preferred to “give”? Does it show a larger soul, a more magnificent liberality, to “donate” than to give? Must we “donate the devil his due,” when we would be unusually charitable? Why should “elect” be preferred to “choose,” when there is no election whatever; or why is “balance” preferable to “remainder”? As a writer has well said: “Would any man in his senses dare to quote King David as saying: ‘They are full of children, and leave the balance of their substance unto their babes’? or read, ‘Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: the balance of wrath thou shalt restrain,’ where the translators of our Bible wrote ‘the remainder’? And if any one went into the nursery, and telling that tale of perennial interest of the little boys that ‘a-sliding went, a-sliding went, a-sliding went, all on a summer’s day,’ should, after recounting how ‘they all fell in, they all fell in, they all fell in,’ add ‘the balance ran away,’ would there not go up a chorus of tiny but indignant protests against this mutilation, which would enlist a far wider sympathy than some of the proposed changes in the texts of classic authors, which have set editors and commentators at loggerheads?”
Again, why should one say “rendition” for performance, “enactment” for acting, or “nude” for naked? In the seventeenth century, certain fanatics in England ran about without clothes, crying: “We are the naked Truth.” Had they lived in this age of refinement, instead of shocking their countrymen with such indelicate expressions, they would have said, “We are Verity in a nude condition”; and had any person clothed them, he would have been said to have “rehabilitated” them. More offensive than any of these grandiose words is “intoxicated” in place of “drunk,” which it has nearly banished. A man can be intoxicated only when he has lost his wits, not by quantity, but by quality,—by drinking liquor that has been drugged. “Intoxicated,” however, has five syllables; drunk has but one; so the former carries the day by five to one. No doubt nine-tenths of those who drink to excess in this country, are, in fact, intoxicated, or poisoned; still, the two words should not be confounded. “Ovation” is a word often used incorrectly, as when an emperor, empress, king or queen, on making a triumphal entry into the capital of a state amid great popular enthusiasm, is said to receive an “ovation,” though such an honor is distinctively reserved for meritorious subjects of the ruler. Sometimes we find a word of Latin origin used in a sense precisely opposite to the true one, as when “culminate,” which can be applied only to something which has reached the limit of its possible height, is used regarding the career of some wrong-doer, which is said to “culminate” in the lowest depths of degradation.
Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the sun; and this itching for pompous forms of expression, this contempt for plainness and simplicity of style, is as old as Aristotle. In the third book of his “Rhetoric,” discussing the causes of frigidity of style, he speaks of one Alcidamas, a writer of that time, as “employing ornaments, not as seasonings to discourse, but as if they were the only food to live upon. He does not say ‘sweat,’ but ‘the humid sweat’; a man goes not to the Isthmian games, but to ‘the collected assembly of the Isthmian solemnity’; laws are ‘the legitimate kings of commonwealths’; and a race, ‘the incursive impulse of the soul.’ A rich man is not bountiful, but the ‘artificer of universal largess.’” Is it not curious that our modern Quicklys and Malaprops, who often pride themselves upon their taste for swelling words and phrases, and their skill in using them, should have been anticipated by Alcidamas two thousand years ago?
The abuse of the queen’s English, to which we have called attention, did not begin with Americans. It began with our transatlantic cousins, who employed “ink-horn” terms and outlandish phrases at a very early period. In “Harrison’s Chronicle” we are told that after the Norman conquest “the English tongue grew into such contempt at court that most men thought it no small dishonor to speak any English there; which bravery took his hold at the last likewise in the country with every ploughman, that even the very carters began to wax weary of their mother tongue, and labored to speak French, which was then counted no small token of gentility.”
The English people of to-day are quite as much addicted to the grandiose style as the Americans. Gough, in one of his lectures, speaks of a card which he saw in London, in which a man called himself “Illuminating Artist to Her Majesty,” the fact being that he lighted the gas lamps near the palace. Mr. E. A. Freeman, the English historian, complained in a recent lecture that our language had few friends and many foes, its only friends being ploughboys and a few scholars. The pleasant old “inns” of England, he said, had disappeared, their places being supplied by “hotels,” or “establishments”; while the landlord had made way for the “lessee of the establishment.” A gentleman going into a shop in Regent street to buy half-mourning goods was referred by the shopman to “the mitigated affliction department.” The besetting sin of some of the ablest British writers of this century is their lack of simplicity of language. Sydney Smith said of Sir James Mackintosh, that if he were asked for a definition of “pepper,” he would reply thus: “Pepper may philosophically be described as a dusty and highly pulverized seed of an oriental fruit; an article rather of condiment than diet, which, dispersed lightly over the surface of food, with no other rule than the caprice of the consumer, communicates pleasure, rather than affords nutrition; and by adding a tropical flavor to the gross and succulent viands of the North, approximates the different regions of the earth, explains the objects of commerce, and justifies the industry of man.”
Francis Jeffrey, the celebrated critic, had, even in conversation, an artificial style and language, which were fit only for books and a small circle of learned friends. His diction and pronunciation, it is said, were unintelligible to the mass of his countrymen, and in the House of Commons offensive and ridiculous. An anecdote told in illustration of this peculiarity strikingly shows the superiority of simple to high-flown language in the practical business of life. In a trial, which turned upon the intellectual competency of a testator, Jeffrey asked a witness, a plain countryman, whether the testator was “a man of intellectual capacity,”—“an intelligent, shrewd man,”—“a man of capacity?” “Had he ordinary mental endowments?” “What d’ye mean, sir?” asked the witness. “I mean,” replied Jeffrey, testily, “was the man of sufficient ordinary intelligence to qualify him to manage his own affairs?” “I dinna ken,” replied the chafed and mystified witness,—“Wad ye say the question ower again, sir?” Jeffrey being baffled, Cockburn took up the examination. He said: “Ye kenned Tammas ——?” “Ou, ay; I kenned Tammas weel; me and him herded together when we were laddies [boys].” “Was there onything in the cretur?” “De’il a thing but what the spune [spoon] put into him.” “Would you have trusted him to sell a cow for you?” “A cow! I wadna lippened [trusted] him to sell a calf.” Had Jeffrey devoted a review article to the subject, he could not have given a more vivid idea of the testator’s incapacity to manage his own affairs.
Our readers need not be told how much Carlyle has done to teutonize our language with his “yardlongtailed” German compounds. It was a just stroke of criticism when a New York auctioneer introduced a miscellaneous lot of books to a crowd with the remark: “Gentlemen, of this lot I need only say, six volumes are by Thomas Carlyle; the seventh is written in the English language.” Some years ago, a learned doctor of divinity and university professor in Canada wrote a work in which, wishing to state the simple fact that the “rude Indian” had learned the use of firing, he delivered himself as follows: “He had made slave of the heaven-born element, the brother of the lightning, the grand alchemist and artificer of all times, though as yet he knew not all the worth or magical power that was in him. By his means the sturdy oak, which flung abroad its stalwart arms and waved its leafy honors defiant in the forest, was made to bow to the behest of the simple aborigines.” As the plain Scotchwoman said of De Quincey, “the bodie has an awfu’ sicht o’ words!” This style of speaking and writing has become so common that it can no longer be considered wholly vulgar. It is gradually working upward; it is making its way into official writings and grave octavos; and is even spoken with unction in pulpits and senates. Metaphysicians are wont to define words as the signs of ideas; but with many persons, they appear to be, not so much the signs of their thought, as the signs of the signs of their thought. Such, doubtless, was the case with the Scotch clergyman, whom a bonneted abhorrer of legal preaching was overheard eulogizing: “Man, John, wasna yon preachin’!—yon’s something for a body to come awa wi’. The way that he smashed down his text into so mony heads and particulars, just a’ to flinders! Nine heads and twenty particulars in ilka head—and sic mouthfu’s o’ grand words!—an’ every ane o’ them fu’ o’ meaning, if we but kent them. We hae ill improved our opportunities; man, if we could just mind onything he said, it would do us guid.”
The whole literature of notices, handbills, and advertisements, in our day, has apparently declared “war to the knife” against every trace of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons. We have no schoolmasters now; they are all “principals of collegiate institutes”; no copy-books, but “specimens of caligraphy”; no ink, but “writing fluid”; no physical exercise, but “calisthenics” or “gymnastics.” A man who opens a groggery at some corner for the gratification of drunkards, instead of announcing his enterprise by its real name, modestly proclaims through the daily papers that his “saloon” has been fitted up for the reception of customers. Even the learned architects of log cabins and pioneer cottages can find names for them only in the sonorous dialects of oriental climes. Time was when a farmhouse was a farmhouse and a porch a porch; but now the one is a “villa” or “hacienda,” and the other nothing less than a “veranda.” In short, this genteel slang pursues us from the cradle to the grave. In old times, when our fathers and mothers died, they were placed in coffins, and buried in the graveyard or burying ground; now, when an unfortunate “party” or “individual” “deceases” or “becomes defunct,” he is deposited in a “burial casket” and “interred in a cemetery.” It matters not that the good old words “grave” and “graveyard” have been set in the pure amber of the English classics,—that the Bible says, “There is no wisdom in the grave,” “Cruel as the grave,” etc. How much more pompous and magniloquent the Greek: “There is no wisdom in the cemetery,” “Cruel as the cemetery!”