{145} As a proof of the excellent service which an accurate acquaintance
with provincial usages may render in the investigation of the
innumerable perplexing phenomena of the English language, I would
refer to the admirable article _On English Pronouns Personal_ in
_Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. i. p. 277.
{146} [We now have the good fortune to possess a complete collection of
this valuable class of words in the splendid “English Dialect
Dictionary”, edited by Professor Joseph Wright of Oxford, which is
an essential supplement to all existing dictionaries of our
language.]
{147} This last very curious usage, which served as a kind of
stepping-stone to ‘its’, and of which another example occurs in
the Geneva Version (Acts xii. 10), and three or four in
Shakespeare, has been abundantly illustrated by those who have
lately written on the early history of the word ‘its’; thus see
Craik, _On the English of Shakespeare_, p. 91; Marsh, _Manual of
the English Language_ (Eng. Edit.), p. 278; _Transactions of the
Philological Society_, vol. 1. p. 280; and my book _On the
Authorized Version of the New Testament_, p. 59.
{148} Thus Fuller (_Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, vol. ii. p. 190): “Sure
I am this city [the New Jerusalem] as presented by the prophet,
was fairer, finer, _slicker_, smoother, more exact, than any
fabric the earth afforded”.
{149} [In the United States ‘plunder’ is used for personal effects,
baggage and luggage (Webster). This is not noticed in the E.D.D.]
{150} [But we have acquired, in some quarters, the abomination ‘an
invite’.]
{151} How many words modern French has lost which are most vigorous and
admirable, the absence of which can only now be supplied by a
circumlocution or by some less excellent word--‘Oseur’,
‘affranchisseur’ (Amyot), ‘mépriseur’, ‘murmurateur’,
‘blandisseur’ (Bossuet), ‘abuseur’ (Rabelais), ‘désabusement’,
‘rancœur’, are all obsolete at the present. So ‘désaimer’, to
cease to love (‘disamare’ in Italian), ‘guirlander’, ‘stériliser’,
‘blandissant’, ‘ordonnément’ (Montaigne), with innumerable others.
{152} [It has now attained a fair currency.]
{153} [‘Gainly’ is still used by nineteenth century writers, 1855-86;
see N.E.D.]
{154} [‘Dehort’ has been used in modern times by Southey (_Letters_,
1825, iii, 462), and Cheyne (_Isaiah, introd._ 1882, xx.)--N.E.D.]
{155} [Tennyson has endeavoured to resuscitate the word--“_Rathe_ she
rose”--_Lancelot and Elaine_--but with no great success.]
{156} For other passages in which ‘rathest’ occurs, see the _State
Papers_, vol. ii. pp. 92, 170.
{157} [‘Buxom’ for old English _buc-sum_ or _buch-sum_, i.e. ‘bow-some’,
yielding, compliant, obedient. “Sara was _buxom_ to Abraham”, 1
Pet. iii, 6 (xiv. Cent. Version, ed. Pawes, p. 216).]
{158} [‘Lissome’ for _lithe-some_, like Wessex _blissom_ for
_blithe-some_. Tennyson has “as _lissome_ as a hazel wand”--_The
Brook_, l. 70.]
{159} Jamieson’s _Dictionary_ gives a large number of words with this
termination which I should suppose were always peculiar to
Scotland, as ‘bangsome’, i.e. quarrelsome, ‘freaksome’, ‘drysome’,
‘grousome’ (the German ‘grausam’) [Now in common use as
‘gruesome’.]
{160} [A list of some of these reduplicated words was given by Dr. Booth
in his “Analytical Dictionary of the English Language”, 1835; but
a full collection of nearly six hundred was published by Mr. H. B.
Wheatley in the _Transactions of the Philological Society_ for
1865.]
{161} Many languages have groups of words formed upon the same scheme,
although, singularly enough, they are altogether absent from the
Anglo-Saxon. (J. Grimm, _Deutsche Gramm._, vol. ii. p. 976). The
Spaniards have a great many very expressive words of this
formation. Thus with allusion to the great struggle in which
Christian Spain was engaged for so many centuries, a vaunting
braggart is a ‘matamoros’, a ‘slaymoor’; he is a ‘matasiete’, a
‘slayseven’; a ‘perdonavidas’, a ‘sparelives’. Others may be added
to these, as ‘azotacalles’, ‘picapleytos’, ‘saltaparedes’,
‘rompeesquinas’, ‘ganapan’, ‘cascatreguas’.
{162} [This stands for ‘peak-goose’ (_peek goos_ in Ascham,
_Scholemaster_, 1570, p. 54, ed. Arber), a _goose_ that _peaks_ or
pines, used for a sickly, delicate person, and a simpleton. In
Chapman, Cotgrave and others it appears as ‘pea-goose’.]
{163} The mistake is far earlier; long before Cowper wrote the sound
suggested first this sense, and then this spelling. Thus
Stanihurst, _Description of Ireland_, p. 28: “They are taken for
no better than _rakehels_, or _the devil’s black guard_”; and
often elsewhere.
{164} [i.e. in Joshua Sylvester’s translation of “Du Bartas, his Diuine
Weekes and Workes”, 1621.]
{165} As not, however, turning on a _very_ coarse matter, and
illustrating the subject with infinite wit and humour, I might
refer the Spanish scholar to the discussion between Don Quixote
and his squire on the dismissal of ‘regoldar’, from the language
of good society, and the substitution of ‘erutar’ in its room
(_Don Quixote_, 4. 7. 43). In a letter of Cicero to Pætus (_Fam._
ix. 22) there is a subtle and interesting disquisition on
forbidden words, and their philosophy.
{166} _Literature of Greece_, p. 5.
{167} [Notwithstanding the analogous instance of ‘abbess’ for ‘abbatess’
this account of ‘lass’ must be abandoned. It is the old English
_lasce_ (akin to Swedish _lösk_), meaning (1) one free or
disengaged, (2) an unmarried girl (N.E.D.)]
{168} In Cotgrave’s _Dictionary_ I find ‘praiseress’, ‘commendress’,
‘fluteress’, ‘possesseress’, ‘loveress’, but have never met them
in use.
{169} On this termination see J. Grimm, _Deutsche Gramm._, vol. ii. p.
134; vol. iii. p. 339.
{170} [_The Knightes Tale_, ed. Skeat, l. 2017.]
{171} [Yes; so in N.E.D.]
{172} I am indebted for these last four to a _Nominale_ in the _National
Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 216.
{173} The earliest example which Richardson gives of ‘seamstress’ is
from Gay, of ‘songstress’, from Thomson. I find however
‘sempstress’ in the translation of Olearius’ _Voyages and
Travels_, 1669, p. 43. It is quite certain that as late as Ben
Jonson, ‘seamster’ and ‘songster’ expressed the _female_ seamer
and singer; a single passage from his _Masque of Christmas_ is
evidence to this. One of the children of Christmas there is
“Wassel, like a neat _sempster_ and _songster_; _her_ page bearing
a brown bowl”. Compare a passage from _Holland’s Leaguer_, 1632:
“A _tyre-woman_ of phantastical ornaments, a _sempster_ for
ruffes, cuffes, smocks and waistcoats”.
{174} This was about the time of Henry VIII. In proof of the confusion
which reigned on the subject in Shakespeare’s time, see his use of
‘spinster’ as--‘spinner’, the _man_ spinning, _Henry VIII_, Act.
i. Sc. 2; and I have no doubt that it is the same in _Othello_,
Act i. Sc. 1. And a little later, in Howell’s _Vocabulary_, 1659,
‘spinner’ and ‘spinster’ are _both_ referred to the male sex, and
the barbarous ‘spinstress’ invented for the female.
{175} I have included ‘huckster’, as will be observed, in this list. I
certainly cannot produce any passage in which it is employed as
the _female_ pedlar. We have only, however, to keep in mind the
existence of the verb ‘to huck’, in the sense of to peddle (it is
used by Bishop Andrews), and at the same time not to let the
present spelling of ‘hawker’ mislead us, and we shall confidently
recognize ‘hucker’ (the German ‘höker’ or ‘höcker’), in hawker,
that is, the _man_ who ‘hucks’, ‘hawks’, or peddles, as in
‘huckster’ the _female_ who does the same. When therefore Howell
and others employ ‘hucksteress’, they fall into the same barbarous
excess of expression, whereof we are all guilty, when we use
‘seamstress’ and ‘songstress’.--The note stood thus in the third
edition. Since that was published, I have met in the _Nominale_
referred to p. 155, the following, “hæc auxiatrix, a _hukster_”.
[Huckster, xiii. cent. _huccster_, it may be noted is an older
word in the language than _hukker_ (hucker) and _to huck_, both
first appearing in the xiv. cent. N.E.D.]
{176} [Preserved in the surnames Baxter and Brewster. See C. W.
Bardsley, _English Surnames_, 2nd ed. 364, 379.]
{177} _Notes and Queries_, No. 157.
{178} [‘Welkin’ is possibly a plural, but in Anglo-Saxon _wolcen_ is a
cloud, and the plural _wolcnu_.]
{179} When Wallis wrote, it was only beginning to be forgotten that
‘chick’ was the singular, and ‘chicken’ the plural: “_Sunt qui
dicunt_ in singulari ‘chicken’, et in plurali ‘chickens’”; and
even now the words are in many country parts correctly employed.
In Sussex, a correspondent writes, they would as soon think of
saying ‘oxens’ as ‘chickens’. [‘Chicken’ is properly a singular,
old English _cicen_, the _-en_ being a diminutival, not a plural,
suffix (as in ‘kitten’, ‘maiden’). Thus ‘chicken’ was originally
‘a little chuck’ (or cock), out of which ‘chick’ was afterwards
developed.]
{180} See Chaucer’s _Romaunt of the Rose_, 1032, where Richesse, “an
high lady of great noblesse”, is one of the persons of the
allegory; and compare Rev. xviii. 17, Authorized Version. This has
so entirely escaped the knowledge of Ben Jonson, English scholar
as he was, that in his _Grammar_ he cites ‘riches’ as an example
of an English word wanting a singular.
{181} “Set shallow brooks to surging seas,
An orient pearl to a white _pease_”.
_Puttenham._
{182} [‘Eaves’ (old English _efes_) from which an imaginary singular
‘eave’ has sometimes been evolved, as when Tennyson speaks of a
‘cottage-eave’ (_In Memoriam_, civ.), and Cotgrave of ‘an
house-eave’.]
{183} It is curious that despite of this protest, one of his plays has
for its name, _Sejanus his Fall_.
{184} Even this does not startle Addison, or cause him any misgiving; on
the contrary he boldly asserts (_Spectator_, No. 135), “The same
single letter ‘s’ on many occasions does the office of a whole
word, and represents the ‘his’ _or ‘her’_ of our forefathers”.
{185} Nothing can be better than the way in which Wallis disposes of
this scheme, although less successful in showing what this ‘s’
does mean than in showing what it cannot mean (_Gramm. Ling.
Anglic._, c. 5); Qui autem arbitrantur illud s, loco _his_
adjunctum esse (priori scilicet parte per aphæresim abscissâ),
ideoque apostrophi notam semper vel pingendam esse, vel saltem
subintelligendam, omnino errant. Quamvis enim non negem quin
apostrophi nota commode nonnunquam affigi possit, ut ipsius
litteræ s usus distinctius, ubi opus est, percipiatur; ita tamen
semper fieri debere, aut etiam ideo fieri quia vocem _his_ innuat,
omnino nego. Adjungitur enim et fœminarum nominibus propriis, et
substantivis pluralibus, ubi vox _his_ sine solœcismo locum habere
non potest: atque etiam in possessivis _ours_, _yours_, _theirs_,
_hers_, ubi vocem _his_ innui nemo somniaret.
{186} See the proofs in Marsh’s _Manual of the English Language_,
English Edit., pp. 280, 293.
{187} I cannot think that it would exceed the authority of our
University Presses, if this were removed from the Prayer Books
which they put forth, as certainly it is supprest by many of the
clergy in the reading. Such a liberty they have already assumed
with the Bible. In all earlier editions of the Authorized Version
it stood at 1 Kin. xv. 24: “Nevertheless _Asa his_ heart was
perfect with the Lord”; it is “_Asa’s_ heart” now. In the same way
“_Mordecai his_ matters” (Esth. iii. 4) has been silently changed
into “_Mordecai’s_ matters”; and in some modern editions, but not
in all, “_Holofernes his_ head” (Judith xiii. 9) into
“_Holofernes’_ head”.
{188} In a good note on the matter, p. 6, in the _Comprehensive Grammar_
prefixed to his _Dictionary_, London, 1775.
{189} See Grimm. _Deut. Gramm._, vol. ii. pp. 609, 944.
{190} The existence of ‘stony’--‘lapidosus’, ‘steinig’, does not make
‘stonen’--‘lapideus’, ‘steinern’, superfluous, any more than
‘earthy’ makes ‘earthen’. That part of the field in which the good
seed withered so quickly (Matt. xiii. 5) was ‘stony’. The vessels
which held the water that Christ turned into wine (John iii. 6)
were ‘stonen’.
{191} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i, p. 1040): Dass die starke form
die ältere, kräftigere, innere; die schwache die spätere,
gehemmtere und mehr äusserliche sey, leuchtet ein. Elsewhere,
speaking generally of inflections by internal vowel change, he
characterizes them as a ‘chief beauty’ (hauptschönheit) of the
Teutonic languages. Marsh (_Manual of the English Language_, p.
233, English ed.) protests, though, as it seems to me, on no
sufficient grounds, against these terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, as
themselves fanciful and inappropriate.
{192} The entire ignorance as to the past historic evolution of the
language, with which some have undertaken to write about it, is
curious. Thus the author of _Observations upon the English
Language_, without date, but published about 1730, treats all
these strong præterites as of recent introduction, counting ‘knew’
to have lately expelled ‘knowed’, ‘rose’ to have acted the same
part toward ‘rised’, and of course esteeming them as so many
barbarous violations of the laws of the language; and concluding
with the warning that “great care must be taken to prevent their
increase”!!--p. 24. Cobbett does not fall into this absurdity, yet
proposes in his _English Grammar_, that they should all be
abolished as inconvenient. [Now many others are rapidly becoming
obsolescent. How seldom do we hear ‘drank’, ‘shrank’, ‘sprang’,
‘stank’.]
{193} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i. p. 839): “Die starke flexion
stufenweise versinkt und ausstirbt, die schwache aber um sich
greift”. Cf. i. 994, 1040; ii. 5; iv. 509.
{194} [See also J. C. Hare, _Two Essays in Eng. Philology_ i. 47-56.]
{195} Thus Wallis (_Gramm. Ling. Anglic._, 1654): Singulari numero
siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, vel
familiariter blandientis. [For a good discussion of the old use of
‘thou’, see the Hares, _Guesses at Truth_, 1847, pp. 169-90. Even
at the present day a Wessex matron has been known to resent the
too familiar address of an inferior with the words, “Who bist thou
_a-theein’_ of”? (_The Spectator_, 1904, Sept. 3, p. 319).]
{196} What the actual position of the compellation ‘thou’ was at that
time, we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller’s
_Church History, Dedication of Book_ vii.: “In opposition
whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that _thou_ from
superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command; from
equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity; but from
inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack
of clownishness; if from affectation, a tone of contempt”.
{197} See on this subject of the dropping of grammatical gender, Pott,
_Etymologische Forschungen_, part 2, pp. 404, _sqq._
IV
CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS
I propose, according to the plan sketched out in my first lecture, to
take for my subject in the present those changes which in the course of
time have found place, or now are finding place, in the meaning of many
among our English words; so that, whether we are aware of it or not, we
employ them at this day in senses very different from those in which our
forefathers employed them of old. You observe that it is not _obsolete_
words, words quite fallen out of present use, which I propose to
consider; but such, rather, as are still on the lips of men, but with
meanings more or less removed from those which once they possessed. My
subject is far more practical, has far more to do with your actual life,
than if I had taken obsolete words, and considered them. These last have
an interest indeed, but it is an interest of an antiquarian character.
They constituted a part of the intellectual money with which our
ancestors carried on the business of their life; but now they are rather
medals for the cabinets and collections of the curious than current
money for the needs and pleasures of all. Their wings are clipped, so
that they are “_winged_ words” no more; the spark of thought or
feeling, kindling from mind to mind, no longer runs along them, as along
the electric wires of the soul.
{Sidenote: _Obsolete Words_}
And then, besides this, there is little or no danger that any should be
misled by them. A reader lights for the first time on one of these
obsolete English words, as ‘frampold’, or ‘garboil’, or ‘brangle’{198};
he is at once conscious of his ignorance; he has recourse to a glossary,
of if he guesses from the context at the word’s signification, still his
guess is as a guess to him, and no more. But words that have changed
their meaning have often a deceivableness about them; a reader not once
doubts but that he knows their intention, has no misgiving but that they
possess for him the same force which they possessed for their writer,
and conveyed to _his_ contemporaries, when indeed it is quite otherwise.
The old life has gone out of them and a new life entered in.
Thus, for example, a reader of our day lights upon such a passage as the
following (it is from the _Preface_ to Howell’s _Lexicon_, 1660):
“Though the root of the English language be _Dutch_{199}, yet it may be
said to have been inoculated afterwards on a French stock”. He may know
that the Dutch is a sister language or dialect to our own; but this
that it is the mother or root of it will certainly perplex him, and he
will hardly know what to make of the assertion; perhaps he ascribes it
to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly lowered in his esteem.
But presently in the course of his reading he meets with the following
statement, this time in Fuller’s _Holy War_, being a history of the
Crusades: “The French, _Dutch_, Italian, and English were the four
elemental nations, whereof this army [of the Crusaders] was compounded”.
If the student has sufficient historical knowledge to know that in the
time of the Crusades there were no Dutch in our use of the word, this
statement would merely startle him; and probably before he had finished
the chapter, having his attention once aroused, he would perceive that
Fuller with the writers of his time used ‘Dutch’ for German; even as it
was constantly so used up to the end of the seventeenth century; and as
the Americans use it to this present day; what we call now a Dutchman
being then a Hollander. But a young student might very possibly want
that amount of previous knowledge, which should cause him to receive
this announcement with misgiving and surprise; and thus he might carry
away altogether a wrong impression, and rise from a perusal of the book,
persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part in
the Crusades, while the Germans took little or no part in them at all.
{Sidenote: _Miscreant_}
And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more often will it
happen with the subtler changes which words have undergone. Out of this
it will continually happen that they convey now much more blame and
condemnation, or convey now much less, than formerly they did; or of a
different kind; and a reader not aware of the altered value which they
now possess, may be in continual danger of misreading his author, of
misunderstanding his intentions, while he has no doubt whatever that he
perfectly apprehends and takes it in. Thus when Shakespeare in _1 Henry
VI_ makes the gallant York address Joan of Arc as a ‘miscreant’, how
coarse a piece of invective this sounds; how unlike what the chivalrous
soldier would have uttered; or what one might have supposed Shakespeare,
even with his unworthy estimate of the holy warrior Maid, would have put
into his mouth. But a ‘miscreant’ in Shakespeare’s time had nothing of
the meaning which now it has. It was simply, in agreement with its
etymology, a misbeliever, one who did not believe rightly the Articles
of the Catholic Faith. And I need not remind you that this was the
constant charge which the English brought against Joan,--namely, that
she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such had fallen
from the faith. On this plea they burnt her, and it is this which York
means when he calls her a ‘miscreant’, and not what we should intend by
the name.
In reading of poetry above all what beauties are often missed, what
forces lost, through this assumption that the present of a word is
always equivalent to its past. How often the poet is wronged in our
estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once
would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the
emphasis which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For
example, Milton ascribes in _Comus_ the “_tinsel-slippered_ feet” to
Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How comparatively poor an epithet this
‘tinsel-slippered’ sounds for those who know of ‘tinsel’ only in its
modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery, affecting a splendour
which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning
its derivation, bring it back to the French ‘étincelle’, and the Latin
‘scintillula’; see in it, as Milton and the writers of his time saw,
‘the sparkling’, and how exquisitely beautiful a title does this become
applied to a goddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our
mind’s eye the quick glitter and sparkle of the waves under the light of
sun or moon{200}. It is Homer’s ‘silver-footed’ (ἀργυρόπεζα), not
servilely transferred, but reproduced and made his own by the English
poet, dealing as one great poet will do with another; who will not
disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows will add often a further grace
of his own.
{Sidenote: ‘_Influence_’}
Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even aware, that whenever the
word ‘influence’ occurs in our English poetry, down to comparatively a
modern date, there is always more or less remote allusions to invisible
illapses of power, skyey, planetary effects, supposed to be exercised by
the heavenly luminaries upon the lives of men{201}? How many a passage
starts into new life and beauty and fulness of allusion, when this is
present with us; even Milton’s
“store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain _influence_”,
as spectators of the tournament, gain something, when we regard
them--and using this language, he intended we should--as the luminaries
of this lower sphere, shedding by their propitious presence strength and
valour into the hearts of their knights.
{Sidenote: ‘_Baffle_’}
The word even in its present acceptation may yield, as here, a
convenient and even a correct sense; we may fall into no positive
misapprehension about it; and still, through ignorance of its past
history and of the force which it once possessed, we may miss a great
part of its significance. We are not _beside_ the meaning of our author,
but we are _short_ of it. Thus in Beaumont and Fletcher’s _King and no
King_, (Act iii. Sc. 2,) a cowardly braggart of a soldier describes the
treatment he experienced, when like Parolles he was at length found out,
and stripped of his lion’s skin:--“They hung me up by the heels and beat
me with hazel sticks, ... that the whole kingdom took notice of me for a
_baffled_, whipped fellow”. The word to which I wish here to call your
attention is ‘baffled’. Were you reading this passage, there would
probably be nothing here to cause you to pause; you would attach to
‘baffled’ a sense which sorts very well with the context--“hung up by
the heels and beaten, all his schemes of being thought much of were
_baffled_ and defeated”. But “baffled” implies far more than this; it
contains allusion to a custom in the days of chivalry, according to
which a perjured or recreant knight was either in person, or more
commonly in effigy, hung up by the heels, his scutcheon blotted, his
spear broken, and he himself or his effigy made the mark and subject of
all kinds of indignities; such a one being said to be ‘baffled’{202}.
Twice in Spenser recreant knights are so dealt with. I can only quote a
portion of the shorter passage, in which this infamous punishment is
described: