violate the laws of the language, but only that they have taken their
_permanent_ stand at a point which was only a point of transition, and
which it has now left behind, and overlived. Thus, to take examples
which you may hear at the present day in almost any part of England--a
countryman will say, “He made me _afeard_”; or “The price of corn _ris_
last market day”; or “I will _axe_ him his name”; or “I tell _ye_”. You
would probably set these phrases down for barbarous English. They are
not so at all; in one sense they are quite as good English as “He made
me _afraid_”; or “The price of corn _rose_ last market day”; or “I will
_ask_ him his name”. ‘Afeard’, used by Spenser, is the regular
participle of the old verb to ‘affear’, still existing as a law term, as
‘afraid’ is of to ‘affray’, and just as good English{140}; ‘ris’ or
‘risse’ is an old præterite of ‘to rise’; to ‘axe’ is not a
mispronunciation of ‘to ask’, but a genuine English form of the word,
the form which in the earlier English it constantly assumed; in Wiclif’s
Bible almost without exception; and indeed ‘axe’ occurs continually, I
know not whether invariably, in Tyndale’s translation of the Scriptures;
there was a time when ‘ye’ was an accusative, and to have used it as a
nominative or vocative, the only permitted uses at present, would have
been incorrect. Even such phrases as “Put _them_ things away”; or “The
man _what_ owns the horse” are not bad, but only antiquated
English{141}. Saying this, I would not in the least imply that these
forms are open to you to employ, or that they would be good English for
_you_. They would not; inasmuch as they are contrary to present use and
custom, and these must be our standards in what we speak, and in what we
write; just as in our buying and selling we are bound to employ the
current coin of the realm, must not attempt to pass that which long
since has been called in, whatever merits or intrinsic value it may
possess. All which I affirm is that the phrases just brought forward
represent past stages of the language, and are not barbarous violations
of it.
{Sidenote: _Luncheon_, _Nuncheon_}
The same may be asserted of certain ways of pronouncing words, which are
now in use among the lower classes, but not among the higher; as, for
example, ‘contrāry’, ‘mischiēvous’, ‘blasphēmous’, instead of
‘contrăry’, ‘mischiĕvous’, ‘blasphĕmous’. It would be abundantly easy to
show by a multitude of quotations from our poets, and those reaching
very far down, that these are merely the retention of the earlier
pronunciation by the people, after the higher classes have abandoned
it{142}. And on the strength of what has just been spoken, let me here
suggest to you how well worth your while it will prove to be on the
watch for provincial words and inflexions, local idioms and modes of
pronunciation, and to take note of these. Count nothing in this kind
beneath your notice. Do not at once ascribe anything which you hear to
the ignorance or stupidity of the speaker. Thus if you hear ‘nuncheon’,
do not at once set it down for a malformation of ‘luncheon’{143}, nor
‘yeel’{144}, of ‘eel’. Lists and collections of provincial usage, such
as I have suggested, always have their value. If you are not able to
turn them to any profit yourselves, and they may not stand in close
enough connexion with your own studies for this, yet there always are
those who will thank you for them; and to whom the humblest of these
collections, carefully and intelligently made, will be in one way or
another of real assistance{145}. And there is the more need to urge this
at the present, because, notwithstanding the tenacity with which our
country folk cling to their old forms and usages, still these forms and
usages must now be rapidly growing fewer; and there are forces, moral
and material, at work in England, which will probably cause that of
those which now survive the greater part will within the next fifty
years have disappeared{146}.
{Sidenote: _‘Its’ of Late Introduction_}
Before quitting this subject, let me instance one example more of that
which is commonly accounted ungrammatical usage, but which is really the
retention of old grammar by some, where others have substituted new; I
mean the constant application by our rustic population in the south, and
I dare say through all parts of England, of ‘his’ to inanimate objects,
and to these not personified, no less than to persons; where ‘its’ would
be employed by others. This was once the manner of speech among all; for
‘its’ is a word of very recent introduction, many would be surprised to
learn of how recent introduction, into the language. You will look for
it in vain through the whole of our Authorized Version of the Bible;
the office which it now fulfils being there accomplished, as our rustics
accomplish it at the present, by ‘his’ (Gen. i. 11; Exod. xxxvii. 17;
Matt. v. 15) or ‘her’ (Jon. i. 15; Rev. xxii. 2) applied as freely to
inanimate things as to persons, or else by ‘thereof’ (Ps. lxv. 10) or
‘of it’ (Dan. vii. 5). Nor may Lev. xx. 5 be urged as invalidating this
assertion; for reference to the exemplar edition of 1611, or indeed to
any earlier editions of King James’ Bible, will show that in them the
passage stood, “of _it_ own accord”{147}. ‘Its’ occurs very rarely in
Shakespeare, in many of his plays it will not once be found. Milton also
for the most part avoids it, and this, though in his time others freely
allowed it. How soon all this was forgotten we have striking evidence in
the fact that when Dryden, in one of his fault-finding moods with the
great men of the preceding generation, is taking Ben Jonson to task for
general inaccuracy in his English diction, among other counts of his
indictment, he quotes this line from _Catiline_
“Though heaven should speak with all _his_ wrath at once”,
and proceeds, “_heaven_ is ill syntax with _his_”; while in fact up to
within forty or fifty years of the time when Dryden began to write, no
other syntax was known; and to a much later date was exceedingly rare.
Curious also, is it to note that in the earnest controversy which
followed on Chatterton’s publication of the poems ascribed by him to a
monk Rowlie, who should have lived in the fifteenth century, no one
appealed to such lines as the following,
“Life and all _its_ goods I scorn”,
as at once deciding that the poems were not of the age which they
pretended. Warton, who denied, though with some hesitation, the
antiquity of the poems, giving many and sufficient reasons for this
denial, failed to take note of this little word; while yet there needed
no more than to point it out, for the disposing of the whole question;
the forgery at once was betrayed.
{Sidenote: _American English_}
What has been here affirmed concerning our provincial English, namely
that it is often _old_ English rather than _bad_ English, may be
affirmed with equal right of many so-called Americanisms. There are
parts of America where ‘het’ is used, or was used a few years since, as
the perfect of ‘to heat’; ‘holp’ as the perfect of ‘to help’; ‘stricken’
as the participle of ‘to strike’. Again there are the words which have
become obsolete during the last two hundred years, which have not become
obsolete there, although many of them probably retain only a provincial
existence. Thus ‘slick’, which indeed is only another form of ‘sleek’,
was employed by our good writers of the seventeenth century{148}. Other
words again, which have remained current on both sides of the Atlantic,
have yet on our side receded from their original use, while they have
remained true to it on the other. ‘Plunder’ is a word in point{149}.
In the contemplation of facts like these it has been sometimes asked,
whether a day will ever arrive when the language spoken on this side of
the Atlantic and on the other, will divide into two languages, an old
English and a new. We may confidently answer, No. Doubtless, if those
who went out from us to people and subdue a new continent, had left our
shores two or three centuries earlier than they did, when the language
was very much farther removed from that ideal after which it was
unconsciously striving, and in which, once reached, it has in great
measure acquiesced; if they had not carried with them to their distant
homes their English Bible, and what else of worth had been already
uttered in the English tongue; if, having once left us, the intercourse
between Old and New England had been entirely broken off, or only rare
and partial; there would then have unfolded themselves differences
between the language spoken here and there, which in tract of time
accumulating and multiplying, might in the end have justified the
regarding of the languages as no longer one and the same. It could not
have failed but that such differences should have displayed themselves;
for while there is a law of _necessity_ in the evolution of languages,
while they pursue certain courses and in certain directions, from which
they can be no more turned aside by the will of men than one of the
heavenly bodies could be pushed from its orbit by any engines of ours,
there is a law of _liberty_ no less; and this liberty must inevitably
have made itself in many ways felt. In the political and social
condition of America, so far removed from our own, in the many natural
objects which are not the same with those which surround us here, in
efforts independently carried out to rid the language of imperfections,
or to unfold its latent powers, even in the different effects of soil
and climate on the organs of speech, there would have been causes enough
to have provoked in the course of time not immaterial divergencies of
language.
As it is, however, the joint operation of those three causes referred to
already, namely, that the separation did not take place in the infancy
or youth of the language, but only in its ripe manhood, that England and
America owned a body of literature, to which they alike looked up and
appealed as containing the authoritative standards of the language, that
the intercourse between the one people and the other has been large and
frequent, hereafter probably to be larger and more frequent still, has
effectually wrought. It has been strong enough so to traverse, repress,
and check all those causes which tended to divergence, that the
_written_ language of educated men on both sides of the water remains
precisely the same, their _spoken_ manifesting a few trivial
differences of idiom; while even among those classes which do not
consciously acknowledge any ideal standard of language, there are
scarcely greater differences, in some respects far smaller, than exist
between inhabitants of different provinces in this one island of
England; and in the future we may reasonably anticipate that these
differences, so far from multiplying, will rather diminish and
disappear.
{Sidenote: _Extinct English_}
But I must return from this long digression. It seems often as if an
almost unaccountable caprice presided over the fortunes of words, and
determined which should live and which die. Thus in instances out of
number a word lives on as a verb, but has ceased to be employed as a
noun; we say ‘to embarrass’, but no longer an ‘embarrass’; ‘to revile’,
but not, with Chapman and Milton, a ‘revile’; ‘to dispose’, but not a
‘dispose’{150}; ‘to retire’ but not a ‘retire’; ‘to wed’, but not
a ‘wed’; we say ‘to infest’, but use no longer the adjective ‘infest’.
Or with a reversed fortune a word lives on as a noun, but has perished
as a verb--thus as a noun substantive, a ‘slug’, but no longer ‘to slug’
or render slothful; a ‘child’, but no longer ‘to child’, (“_childing_
autumn”, Shakespeare); a ‘rape’, but not ‘to rape’ (South); a ‘rogue’,
but not ‘to rogue’; ‘malice’, but not ‘to malice’; a ‘path’, but not ‘to
path’; or as a noun adjective, ‘serene’, but not ‘to serene’, a beautiful
word, which we have let go, as the French have ‘sereiner’{151}; ‘meek’,
but not ‘to meek’ (Wiclif); ‘fond’, but not ‘to fond’ (Dryden); ‘dead’,
but not ‘to dead’; ‘intricate’, but ‘to intricate’ (Jeremy Taylor) no
longer.
Or again, the affirmative remains, but the negative is gone; thus
‘wisdom’, ‘bold’, ‘sad’, but not any more ‘unwisdom’, ‘unbold’, ‘unsad’
(all in Wiclif); ‘cunning’, but not ‘uncunning’; ‘manhood’, ‘wit’,
‘mighty’, ‘tall’, but not ‘unmanhood’, ‘unwit’, ‘unmighty’, ‘untall’
(all in Chaucer); ‘buxom’, but not ‘unbuxom’ (Dryden); ‘hasty’, but not
‘unhasty’ (Spenser); ‘blithe’, but not ‘unblithe’; ‘ease’, but not
‘unease’ (Hacket); ‘repentance’, but not ‘unrepentance’; ‘remission’,
but not ‘irremission’ (Donne); ‘science’, but not ‘nescience’
(Glanvill){152}; ‘to know’, but not ‘to unknow’ (Wiclif); ‘to give’, but
not ‘to ungive’. Or once more, with a curious variation from this, the
negative survives, while the affirmative is gone; thus ‘wieldy’
(Chaucer) survives only in ‘unwieldy’; ‘couth’ and ‘couthly’ (both in
Spenser), only in ‘uncouth’ and ‘uncouthly’; ‘rule’ (Foxe) only in
‘unruly’; ‘gainly’ (Henry More) in ‘ungainly’; these last two were both
of them serviceable words, and have been ill lost{153}; ‘gainly’ is
indeed still common in the West Riding of Yorkshire; ‘exorable’
(Holland) and ‘evitable’ only in ‘inexorable’ and ‘inevitable’;
‘faultless’ remains, but hardly ‘faultful’ (Shakespeare). In like
manner ‘semble’ (Foxe) has, except as a technical law term,
disappeared; while ‘dissemble’ continues. So also of other pairs one
has been taken and one left; ‘height’, or ‘highth’, as Milton better
spelt it, remains, but ‘lowth’ (Becon) is gone; ‘righteousness’, or
‘rightwiseness’, as it would once more accurately have been written,
for ‘righteous’ is a corruption of ‘rightwise’, remains, but its
correspondent ‘wrongwiseness’ has been taken; ‘inroad’ continues, but
‘outroad’ (Holland) has disappeared; ‘levant’ lives, but ‘ponent’
(Holland) has died; ‘to extricate’ continues, but, as we saw just now,
‘to intricate’ does not; ‘parricide’, but not ‘filicide’ (Holland).
Again, of whole groups of words formed on some particular scheme it
may be only a single specimen will survive. Thus ‘gainsay’, that is,
again say, survives; but ‘gainstrive’ (Foxe), ‘gainstand’, ‘gaincope’
(Golding), and other similarly formed words exist no longer. It is the
same with ‘foolhardy’, which is but one, though now indeed the only
one remaining, of at least five adjectives formed on the same
principle; thus ‘foollarge’, quite as expressive a word as prodigal,
occurs in Chaucer, and ‘foolhasty’, found also in him, lived on to the
time of Holland; while ‘foolhappy’ is in Spencer; and ‘foolbold’ in
Bale. ‘Steadfast’ remains, but ‘shamefast’, ‘rootfast’, ‘bedfast’
(=bedridden), ‘homefast’, ‘housefast’, ‘masterfast’ (Skelton), with
others, are all gone. ‘Exhort’ remains; but ‘dehort’ a word whose
place neither ‘dissuade’ nor any other exactly supplies, has escaped
us{154}. We have ‘twilight’, but ‘twibill’ = bipennis (Chapman) is
extinct.
Let me mention another real loss, where in like manner there remains in
the present language something to remind us of that which is gone. The
comparative ‘rather’ stands alone, having dropped on one side its
positive ‘rathe’{155}, and on the other its superlative ‘rathest’.
‘Rathe’, having the sense of early, though a graceful word, and not
fallen quite out of popular remembrance, inasmuch as it is embalmed in
the _Lycidas_ of Milton,
“And the _rathe_ primrose, which forsaken dies”,
might still be suffered without remark to share the common lot of so many
words which have perished, though worthy to have lived; but the disuse
of ‘rathest’ has left a real gap in the language, and the more so,
seeing that ‘liefest’ is gone too. ‘Rather’ expresses the Latin ‘potius’;
but ‘rathest’ being out of use, we have no word, unless ‘soonest’ may
be accepted as such, to express ‘potissimum’, or the preference not of
one way over another or over certain others, but of one over all; which
we therefore effect by aid of various circumlocutions. Nor has ‘rathest’
been so long out of use, that it would be playing the antic to attempt
to revive it. It occurs in the _Sermons_ of Bishop Sanderson, who in the
opening of that beautiful sermon from the text, “When my father and my
mother forsake me, the Lord taketh me up”, puts the consideration, “why
these”, that is, father and mother, “are named the _rathest_, and the
rest to be included in them”{156}.
It is sometimes easy enough, but indeed oftener hard, and not seldom
quite impossible, to trace the causes which have been at work to bring
about that certain words, little by little, drop out of the language of
men, come to be heard more and more rarely, and finally are not heard
any more at all--to trace the motives which have induced a whole people
thus to arrive at a tacit consent not to employ them any longer; for
without this tacit consent they could never have thus become obsolete.
That it is not accident, that there is a law here at work, however
hidden it may be from us, is plain from the fact that certain families
of words, words formed on certain patterns, have a tendency thus to fall
into desuetude.
{Sidenote: _Words in ‘-some’_}
Thus, I think, we may trace a tendency in words ending in ‘some’, the
Anglo-Saxon and early English ‘sum’, the German ‘sam’ (‘friedsam’,
‘seltsam’) to fall out of use. It is true that a vast number of these
survive, as ‘gladsome’, ‘handsome’, ‘wearisome’, ‘buxom’ (this last
spelt better ‘bucksome’, by our earlier writers, for its present
spelling altogether disguises its true character, and the family to
which it belongs); being the same word as the German ‘beugsam’ or
‘biegsam’, bendable, compliant{157}; but a larger number of these words
than can be ascribed to accident, many more than the due proportion of
them, are either quite or nearly extinct. Thus in Wiclif’s Bible alone
you might note the following, ‘lovesum’, ‘hatesum’, ‘lustsum’, ‘gilsum’
(guilesome), ‘wealsum’, ‘heavysum’, ‘lightsum’, ‘delightsum’; of these
‘lightsome’ long survived, and indeed still survives in provincial
dialects; but of the others all save ‘delightsome’ are gone; and that,
although used in our Authorized Version (Mal. iii, 12), is now only
employed in poetry. So too ‘mightsome’ (see Coleridge’s _Glossary_),
‘brightsome’ (Marlowe), ‘wieldsome’, and ‘unwieldsome’ (Golding),
‘unlightsome’ (Milton), ‘healthsome’ (_Homilies_), ‘ugsome’ and
‘ugglesome’ (both in Foxe), ‘laboursome’ (Shakespeare), ‘friendsome’,
‘longsome’ (Bacon), ‘quietsome’, ‘mirksome’ (both in Spenser),
‘toothsome’ (Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘gleesome’, ‘joysome’ (both in
Browne’s _Pastorals_), ‘gaysome’ (_Mirror for Magistrates_), ‘roomsome’,
‘bigsome’, ‘awesome’, ‘timersome’, ‘winsome’, ‘viewsome’, ‘dosome’
(=prosperous), ‘flaysome’ (=fearful), ‘auntersome’ (=adventurous),
‘clamorsome’ (all these still surviving in the North), ‘playsome’
(employed by the historian Hume), ‘lissome’{158}, have nearly or quite
disappeared from our English speech. They seem to have held their
ground in Scotland in considerably larger numbers than in the south of
the Island{159}.
{Sidenote: _Words in ‘-ard’_}
Neither can I esteem it a mere accident that of a group of depreciatory
and contemptuous words ending in ‘ard’, at least one half should have
dropped out of use; I refer to that group of which ‘dotard’, ‘laggard’,
‘braggard’, now spelt ‘braggart’, ‘sluggard’, ‘buzzard’, ‘bastard’,
‘wizard’, may be taken as surviving specimens; ‘blinkard’ (_Homilies_),
‘dizzard’ (Burton), ‘dullard’ (Udal), ‘musard’ (Chaucer), ‘trichard’
(_Political Songs_), ‘shreward’ (Robert of Gloucester), ‘ballard’ (a
bald-headed man, Wiclif); ‘puggard’, ‘stinkard’ (Ben Jonson), ‘haggard’,
a worthless hawk, as extinct.
Thus too there is a very curious province of our language, in which we
were once so rich, that extensive losses here have failed to make us
poor; so many of its words still surviving, even after as many or more
have disappeared. I refer to those double words which either contain
within themselves a strong rhyming modulation, such for example as
‘willy-nilly’, ‘hocus-pocus’, ‘helter-skelter’, ‘tag-rag’,
‘namby-pamby’, ‘pell-mell’, ‘hodge-podge’; or with a slight difference
from this, though belonging to the same group, those of which the
characteristic feature is not this internal likeness with initial
unlikeness, but initial likeness with internal unlikeness; not rhyming,
but strongly alliterative, and in every case with a change of the
interior vowel from a weak into a strong, generally from _i_ into _a_
or _o_; as ‘shilly-shally’, ‘mingle-mangle’, ‘tittle-tattle’,
‘prittle-prattle’, ‘riff-raff’, ‘see-saw’, ‘slip-slop’. No one who is
not quite out of love with the homelier yet more vigorous portions of
the language, but will acknowledge the life and strength which there is
often in these and in others still current among us. But of the same
sort what vast numbers have fallen out of use, some so fallen out of all
remembrance that it may be difficult almost to find credence for them.
Thus take of rhyming the following: ‘hugger-mugger’, ‘hurly-burly’,
‘kicksy-wicksy’ (all in Shakespeare); ‘hibber-gibber’, ‘rusty-dusty’,
‘horrel-lorrel’, ‘slaump paump’ (all in Gabriel Harvey), ‘royster-doyster’
(Old Play), ‘hoddy-doddy’ (Ben Jonson); while of alliterative might be
instanced these: ‘skimble-skamble’, ‘bibble-babble’ (both in
Shakespeare), ‘twittle-twattle’, ‘kim-kam’ (both in Holland), ‘hab-nab’
(Lilly), ‘trim-tram’, ‘trish-trash’, ‘swish-swash’ (all in Gabriel
Harvey), ‘whim-wham’ (Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘mizz-mazz’ (Locke),
‘snip-snap’ (Pope), ‘flim-flam’ (Swift), ‘tric-trac’, and others{160}.
{Sidenote: _Words under Ban_}
Again, there was once a whole family of words whereof the greater number
are now under ban; which seemed at one time to have been formed almost
at pleasure, the only condition being that the combination should be a
happy one--I mean all those singularly expressive words formed by a
combination of verb and substantive, the former governing the latter; as
‘telltale’, ‘scapegrace’, ‘turncoat’, ‘turntail’, ‘skinflint’,
‘spendthrift’, ‘spitfire’, ‘lickspittle’, ‘daredevil’ (=wagehals),
‘makebate’ (=störenfried), ‘marplot’, ‘killjoy’. These with a certain
number of others, have held their ground, and may be said to be still
more or less in use; but what a number more are forgotten; and yet,
though not always elegant, they constituted a very vigorous portion of
our language, and preserved some of its most genuine idioms{161}. It
could not well be otherwise; they are almost all words of abuse, and the
abusive words of a language are always among the most picturesque and
vigorous and imaginative which it possesses. The whole man speaks out in
them, and often the man under the influence of passion and excitement,
which always lend force and fire to his speech. Let me remind you of a
few of them; ‘smellfeast’, if not a better, is yet a more graphic, word
than our foreign parasite; as graphic indeed for us as τρεχέδειπνος to
Greek ears; ‘clawback’ (Hackett) is a stronger, if not a more graceful,
word than flatterer or sycophant; ‘tosspot’ (Fuller), or less frequently
‘reel-pot’ (Middleton), tells its own tale as well as drunkard; and
‘pinchpenny’ (Holland), or ‘nipfarthing’ (Drant), as well as or better
than miser. And then what a multitude more there are in like kind;
‘spintext’, ‘lacklatin’, ‘mumblematins’, all applied to ignorant
clerics; ‘bitesheep’ (a favourite word with Foxe) to such of these as
were rather wolves tearing, than shepherds feeding, the flock;
‘slip-string’ = pendard (Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘slip-gibbet’,
‘scapegallows’; all names given to those who, however they might have
escaped, were justly owed to the gallows, and might still “go upstairs
to bed”.
{Sidenote: _Obsolete Compounds_}