Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

I am Potassium to thine Oxygen.

... Sweet, thy name is Briggs,

And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we

Agree to form a Johnsonate of Briggs?

We will. The day, the happy day is nigh,

When Johnson shall with beauteous Briggs combine.”

It is useless, of course, to complain of the terminology of science, since inaccurate names, that connote too many things, or that are otherwise lacking in precision, would be productive of continual mischief. But indispensable as this distinctive nomenclature is, it is, no doubt, often needlessly uncouth, and it has been well said that if the language of common life were equally invariable and unelastic, imagination would be cancelled, and genius crushed. How barbarous and repulsive appear many of the long, polysyllabic, technical names of plants and flowers in our treatises on botany, when compared with such popular names as “Stag-beetle,” “Rosemary,” and “Forget-me-not!” To express the results of science without the ostentation of its terms, is an admirable art, known, unfortunately, to but few. How few surgeons can communicate in simple, intelligible language to a jury, in a law case, the results of a post-mortem examination! Almost invariably the learned witness finds a wound “in the parieties of the abdomen, opening the peritoneal cavity”; or an injury of some “vertebra in the dorsal or lumbar region”; or something else equally frightful. Some years ago, in one of the English courts, a judge rebuked a witness of this kind by saying, “You mean so and so, do you not, sir?”—at the same time translating his scientific barbarisms into a few words of simple English. “I do, my Lord.” “Then why can’t you say so?” He had said so, but in a foreign tongue.

To all the writers and speakers who needlessly employ grandiose or abstract terms, instead of plain Saxon ones, we would say, as Falstaff said to Pistol: “If thou hast any tidings whatever to deliver, prithee deliver them like a man of this world!” Never, perhaps, did a college professor give a better lesson in rhetoric than was given by a plain farmer in Kennebec County, Maine, to a schoolmaster. “You are excavating a subterranean channel, it seems,” said the pedagogue, as he saw the farmer at work near his house. “No, sir,” was the reply, “I am only digging a ditch.” A similar rebuke was once administered by the witty Governor Corwin, of Ohio, to a young lady who addressed him in high-flown terms. During a political tour through the State, he and the Hon. Thomas Ewing stayed at night at the house of a leading politician, but found no one at home but his niece, who presided at the tea-table. Having never conversed with “great men” before, she supposed she must talk to them in elephantine language. “Mr. Ewing, will you take condiments in your tea, sir?” inquired the young lady. “Yes, miss, if you please,” replied the Senator. Corwin’s eyes twinkled. Here was a temptation that could not be resisted. Gratified at the apparent success of her trial in talking to the United States Senator, the young lady addressed Mr. Corwin in the same manner,—“Will you take condiments in your tea, sir?” “Pepper and salt, but no mustard,” was the prompt reply, which the lady, it is said, never forgave, declaring that the Governor was “horridly vulgar.”

The faults of all those who thus barbarize our tongue would be comparatively excusable, were it so barren of resources that any man whose conceptions are clear need find difficulty in wreaking them upon expression. But the language in which Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson have sung; in which Hume, Gibbon, Froude, Motley, and Prescott have narrated; in which Addison, Swift, Newman, and Ruskin have written; and in which Bolingbroke, Chatham, Fox, Pitt, and Webster have spoken, needs not to ask alms of its neighbors. Not only these, but a hundred other masters, have shown that it is rich enough for all the exigencies of the human mind; that it can express the loftiest conceptions of the poet, portray the deepest emotions of the human heart; that it can convey, if not the fripperies, at least the manly courtesies of polite life, and make palpable the profoundest researches of the philosopher. It is not, therefore, because of the poverty of our vocabulary that so many writers Gallicize and Germanize our tongue; the real cause is hinted at in the answer of Handel to an ambitious musician, who attributed the hisses of his hearers to a defect in the instrument on which he was playing: “The fault is not there, my friend,” said the composer, jealous of the honor of the organ, on which he himself performed; “the fact is, you have no music in your soul.”