IMPERFECT UNDERSTANDING OF WORDS AND THE REMEDIES THEREFOR.—DIALECTIC.—DEFINITION.
We cannot inquire far into the meaning of proverbs or traditional sayings without discovering that the common understanding of general and abstract names is loose and uncertain. Common speech is a quicksand.
Consider how we acquire our vocabulary, how we pick up the words that we use from our neighbours and from books, and why this is so soon becomes apparent. Theoretically we know the full meaning of a name when we know all the attributes that it connotes, and we are not justified in extending it except to objects that possess all the attributes. This is the logical ideal, but between the ought to be of Logic and the is of practical life, there is a vast difference. How seldom do we conceive words in their full meaning! And who is to instruct us in the full meaning? It is not as in the exact sciences, where we start with a knowledge of the full meaning. In Geometry, for example, we learn the definitions of the words used, point, line, parallel, etc., before we proceed to use them. But in common speech, we learn words first in their application to individual cases. Nobody ever defined good to us, or fair, or kind, or highly educated. We hear the words applied to individual objects: we utter them in the same connexion: we extend them to other objects that strike us as like without knowing the precise points of likeness that the convention of common speech includes. The more exact meaning we learn by gradual induction from individual cases. Ugly, beautiful, good, bad—we learn the words first as applicable to things and persons: gradually there arises a more or less definite sense of what the objects so designated have in common. The individual's extension of the name proceeds upon what in the objects has most impressed him when he caught the word: this may differ in different individuals; the usage of neighbours corrects individual eccentricities. The child in arms shouts Da at the passing stranger who reminds him of his father: for him at first it is a general name applicable to every man: by degrees he learns that for him it is a singular name.
The mode in which words are learnt and extended may be studied most simply in the nursery. A child, say, has learnt to say mambro when it sees its nurse. The nurse works a hand-turned sewing machine, and sings to it as she works. In the street the child sees an organ-grinder singing as he turns his handle: it calls mambro: the nurse catches the meaning and the child is overjoyed. The organ-grinder has a monkey: the child has an india-rubber monkey toy: it calls this also mambro. The name is extended to a monkey in a picture-book. It has a toy musical box with a handle: this also becomes mambro, the word being extended along another line of resemblance. A stroller with a French fiddle comes within the denotation of the word: a towel-rail is also called mambro from some fancied resemblance to the fiddle. A very swarthy hunch-back mambro frightens the child: this leads to the transference of the word to a terrific coalman with a bag of coals on his back. In a short time the word has become a name for a great variety of objects that have nothing whatever common to all of them, though each is strikingly like in some point to a predecessor in the series. When the application becomes too heterogeneous, the word ceases to be of use as a sign and is gradually abandoned, the most impressive meaning being the last to go. In a child's vocabulary where the word mambro had a run of nearly two years, its last use was as an adjective signifying ugly or horrible.
The history of such a word in a child's language is a type of what goes on in the language of men. In the larger history we see similar extensions under similar motives, checked and controlled in the same way by surrounding usage.
It is obvious that to avoid error and confusion, the meaning or connotation of names, the concepts, should somehow be fixed: names cannot otherwise have an identical reference in human intercourse. We may call this ideal fixed concept the Logical Concept: or we may call it the Scientific Concept, inasmuch as one of the main objects of the sciences is to attain such ideals in different departments of study. But in actual speech we have also the Personal Concept, which varies more or less with the individual user, and the Popular or Vernacular Concept, which, though roughly fixed, varies from social sect to social sect and from generation to generation.
The variations in Popular Concepts may be traced in linguistic history. Words change with things and with the aspects of things, as these change in public interest and importance. As long as the attributes that govern the application of words are simple, sensible attributes, little confusion need arise: the variations are matters of curious research for the philologist, but are logically insignificant. Murray's Dictionary, or such books as Trench's English Past and Present, supply endless examples, as many, indeed as there are words in the language. Clerk has almost as many connotations as our typical mambro: clerk in holy orders, church clerk, town clerk, clerk of assize, grocer's clerk. In Early English, the word meant "man in a religious order, cleric, clergyman"; ability to read, write, and keep accounts being a prominent attribute of the class, the word was extended on this simple ground till it has ceased altogether to cover its original field except as a formal designation. But no confusion is caused by the variation, because the property connoted is simple.[1] So with any common noun: street, carriage, ship, house, merchant, lawyer, professor. We might be puzzled to give an exact definition of such words, to say precisely what they connote in common usage; but the risk of error in the use of them is small.
When we come to words of which the logical concept is a complex relation, an obscure or intangible attribute, the defects of the popular conception and its tendencies to change and confusion, are of the greatest practical importance. Take such words as Monarchy, tyranny, civil freedom, freedom of contract, landlord, gentleman, prig, culture, education, temperance, generosity. Not merely should we find it difficult to give an analytic definition of such words: we might be unable to do so, and yet flatter ourselves that we had a clear understanding of their meaning. But let two men begin to discuss any proposition in which any such word is involved, and it will often be found that they take the word in different senses. If the relation expressed is complex, they have different sides or lines of it in their minds; if the meaning is an obscure quality, they are guided in their application of it by different outward signs.
Monarchy, in its original meaning, is applied to a form of government in which the will of one man is supreme, to make laws or break them, to appoint or dismiss officers of state and justice, to determine peace or war, without control of statute or custom. But supreme power is never thus uncontrolled in reality; and the word has been extended to cover governments in which the power of the titular head is controlled in many different modes and degrees. The existence of a head, with the title of King or Emperor, is the simplest and most salient fact: and wherever this exists, the popular concept of a monarchy is realised. The President of the United States has more real power than the Sovereign of Great Britain; but the one government is called a Republic and the other a Monarchy. People discuss the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy without first deciding whether they take the word in its etymological sense of unlimited power, or its popular sense of titular kingship, or its logical sense of power definitely limited in certain ways. And often in debate, monarchy is really a singular term for the government of Great Britain.
Culture, religious, generous, are names for inward states or qualities: with most individuals some simple outward sign directs the application of the word—it may be manner, or bearing, or routine observances, or even nothing more significant than the cut of the clothes or of the hair. Small things undoubtedly are significant, and we must judge by small things when we have nothing else to go by: but instead of trying to get definite conceptions for our moral epithets, and suspending judgment till we know that the use of the epithet is justified, the trifling superficial sign becomes for us practically the whole meaning of the word. We feel that we must have a judgment of some sort at once: only simple signs are suited to our impatience.