Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

The truth is, the words most potent in life and literature,—in the mart, in the senate, in the forum, and at the fireside,—are small words, the monosyllables which the half-educated speaker and writer despises. All passionate expression,—the outpouring of the soul when moved to its depths,—is, for the most part, in monosyllables. They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the brain, made visible by utterance. The will makes its giant victory strokes in little monosyllables, deciding for the right and against the wrong. In the hour of fierce temptation, at the ballot-box, in the court-room, in all the crises of life, how potent for good or evil are the little monosyllables, “Yes” and “No”! “‘Yes’ is the Olympian nod of approval which fills heaven with ambrosia and light; ‘no’ is the stamp of Jupiter which shakes heaven and darkens the faces of the gods. ‘Yes:’ how it trembles from the maiden’s lips, the broken utterance, the key-syllable of a divine song which her heart only sings; how it echoes in the ecstatic pulses of the doubtful lover, and makes Paradise open its gates for the royal entry of the triumphing conqueror, Love. ‘No,’—well might Miles Standish say that he could not stand fire if ‘No’ should come ‘point-blank from the mouth of a woman’; what ‘captain, colonel or knight-at-arms’ could? ‘No:’ ’tis the impregnable fortress,—the very Malakoff of the will; it is the breastwork and barrier thrown up, which the charge must be fierce indeed to batter down or overleap. It is the grand and guarded tower against temptation; it is the fierce and sudden arrow through all the rings, that dismays the suitors of the dear and long-cherished and faithful Penelope, and makes the unforgotten king start from the disguise of a beggar.”

Again, there is a whole class of words, and those among the most expressive in the language, of which the great majority are monosyllables. We refer to the interjections. We are aware that some philologists deny that interjections are language. Horne Tooke sneers at this whole class of words as “brutish and inarticulate,” as “the miserable refuge of the speechless,” and complains that, “because beautiful and gaudy,” they have been suffered to usurp a place among words. “Where will you look for it” (the interjection), he triumphantly asks; “will you find it among laws, or in books of civil institutions, in history, or in any treatise of useful arts or sciences? No: you must seek for it in rhetoric and poetry, in novels, plays and romances.” This acute writer has forgotten one book in which interjections abound, and awaken in the mind emotions of the highest grandeur and pathos,—namely, the Bible. But the use of this part of speech is not confined to books. It is heard wherever men interchange thought and feeling, whether on the gravest or the most trivial themes; in tones of the tenderest love and of the deadliest hate; in shouts of joy and ecstasies of rapture, and in the expression of deep anguish, remorse and despair; in short, in the outburst of every human feeling. More than this, not only is it heard in daily life, but we are told by the highest authority that it is heard in the hallelujahs of angels, and in the continual “Holy! Holy! Holy!” of the cherubim.

What word in the English language is fuller of significance, has a greater variety of meanings, than the diminutive “Oh”? Uttered by the infant to express surprise or delight, it is used by the man to indicate fear, aspiration or appeal, and, indeed, according to the tone in which it is uttered, may voice almost any one of the emotions of which he is capable. What a volume of meaning is condensed in the derisive “Oh! oh!” which greets a silly utterance in the House of Commons! In no other assembly, perhaps, are the powers of human speech more fully exhibited; yet it was in that body that one of the most famous of interjections originated,—we mean the cry of “Hear! hear!” which, though at first an imperative verb, is now “nothing more or less than a great historical interjection,” indicating, according to the tone in which it is uttered, admiration, acquiescence, indignation or derision. It has been truly said that when a large assembly is animated by a common sentiment which demands instantaneous utterance, it can find that utterance only through interjections.

Again, how many exquisite passages in poetry owe to the interjection their beauty, their pathos, or their power! “The first sincere hymn,” says M. Taine, “is the one word ‘O.’” This “O,” the sign of the vocative, must not be confounded with “Oh!” the emotional interjection, which expresses a sentiment, as of appeal, entreaty, expostulation, etc. What depth of meaning is contained in that little word, as an expression of grief, in the following lines by Wordsworth:

“She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be!

Now she is in her grave,—and oh!

The difference to me.”

What possible combination of words could be more significant than the reply “Pooh! pooh!” to a controversialist’s theory, or the contemptuous “Fudge!” with which Mr. Churchill, in “The Vicar of Wakefield,” sums up the pretensions of the languishing Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs: