know that when a piece of our silver money has long fulfilled its part,
as “pale and common drudge ’tween man and man”, whatever it had at first
of sharper outline and livelier impress is in the end wholly obliterated
from it. So it is with words, above all with words of science and
theology. These getting into general use, and passing often from mouth
to mouth, lose the “image and superscription” which they had, before
they descended from the school to the market-place, from the pulpit to
the street. Being now caught up by those who understand imperfectly and
thus incorrectly their true value, who will not be at the pains of
understanding that, or who are incapable of doing so, they are obliged
to accommodate themselves to the lower sphere in which they circulate,
by laying aside much of the precision and accuracy and depth which once
they had; they become weaker, shallower, more indefinite; till in the
end, as exponents of thought and feeling, they cease to be of any
service at all.
* * * * *
{Sidenote: ‘_Bombast_’, ‘_Garble_’}
Sometimes a word does not merely narrow or extend its meaning, but
altogether changes it; and this it does in more ways than one. Thus a
secondary figurative sense will quite put out of use and extinguish the
literal, until in the entire predominance of that it is altogether
forgotten that it ever possessed any other. I may instance ‘bombast’ as
a word about which this forgetfulness is nearly complete. What ‘bombast’
now means is familiar to us all, namely inflated words, “full of sound
and fury”, but “signifying nothing”. This, at present its sole meaning,
was once only the secondary and superinduced; ‘bombast’ being properly
the cotton plant, and then the cotton wadding with which garments were
stuffed out and lined. You remember perhaps how Prince Hal addresses
Falstaff, “How now, my sweet creature of _bombast_”; using the word in
its literal sense; and another early poet has this line:
“Thy body’s bolstered out with _bombast_ and with bags”.
‘Bombast’ was then transferred in a vigorous image to the big words
without strength or solidity wherewith the discourses of some were
stuffed out, and has now quite forgone any other meaning. So too ‘to
garble’ was once “to cleanse from dross and dirt, as grocers do their
spices, to pick or cull out”{219}. It is never used now in this its
primary sense, and has indeed undergone this further change, that while
once ‘to garble’ was to sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it
is now to sift with a view of picking out the worst{220}. ‘Polite’ is
another word which in the figurative sense has quite extinguished the
literal. We still speak of ‘polished’ surfaces; but not any more, with
Cudworth, of “_polite_ bodies, as looking glasses”. Neither do we now
‘exonerate’ a ship (Burton); nor ‘stigmatize’, at least otherwise than
figuratively, a ‘malefactor’ (the same); nor ‘corroborate’ our health
(Sir Thomas Elyot).
Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly progressive courses
of change, itself a faithful index of changes going on in society and in
the minds of men, till at length everything is changed about it. The
process of this it is often very curious to observe; capable as not
seldom it is of being watched step by step in its advances to the final
consummation. There may be said to be three leading phases which the
word successively presents, three steps in its history. At first it
grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with its own natural
meaning. Presently the word allows another meaning, one superinduced on
the former, and foreign to its etymology, to share with the other in the
possession of it, on the ground that where the former exists, the latter
commonly co-exists with it. At the third step, the newly introduced
meaning, not satisfied with its moiety, with dividing the possession of
the word, has thrust out the original and rightful possessor altogether,
and remains in sole and exclusive possession. The three successive
stages may be represented by _a_, _ab_, _b_; in which series _b_, which
was wanting altogether at the first stage, and was only admitted as
secondary at the second, does at the third become primary and indeed
alone.
{Sidenote: _Gradual Change of Meaning_}
We are not to suppose that in actual fact the transitions from one
signification to another are so strongly and distinctly marked, as I
have found it convenient to mark them here. Indeed it is hard to imagine
anything more gradual, more subtle and imperceptible, than the process
of change. The manner in which the new meaning first insinuates itself
into the old, and then drives out the old, can only be compared to the
process of petrifaction, as rightly understood--the water not gradually
turning what is put into it to stone, as we generally take the operation
to be; but successively displacing each several particle of that which
is brought within its power, and depositing a stony particle, in its
stead, till, in the end, while all appears to continue the same, all has
in fact been thoroughly changed. It is precisely thus, by such slow,
gradual, and subtle advances that the new meaning filters through and
pervades the word, little by little displacing entirely that which it
before possessed.
No word would illustrate this process better than that old example,
familiar probably to us all, of ‘villain’. The ‘villain’ is, first, the
serf or peasant, ‘villanus’, because attached to the ‘villa’ or farm. He
is, secondly, the peasant who, it is further taken for granted, will be
churlish, selfish, dishonest, and generally of evil moral conditions,
these having come to be assumed as always belonging to him, and to be
permanently associated with his name, by those higher classes of society
who in the main commanded the springs of language. At the third step,
nothing of the meaning which the etymology suggests, nothing of ‘villa’,
survives any longer; the peasant is wholly dismissed, and the evil moral
conditions of him who is called by this name alone remain; so that the
name would now in this its final stage be applied as freely to peer, if
he deserved it, as to peasant. ‘Boor’ has had exactly the same history;
being first the cultivator of the soil; then secondly, the cultivator of
the soil who, it is assumed, will be coarse, rude, and unmannerly; and
then thirdly, any one who is coarse, rude, and unmannerly{221}. So too
‘pagan’; which is first villager, then heathen villager, and lastly
heathen. You may trace the same progress in ‘churl’, ‘clown’, ‘antic’,
and in numerous other words. The intrusive meaning might be likened in
all these cases to the egg which the cuckoo lays in the sparrow’s nest;
the young cuckoo first sharing the nest with its rightful occupants, but
not resting till it has dislodged and ousted them altogether.
{Sidenote: ‘_Gossip_’}
I will illustrate by the aid of one word more this part of my subject. I
called your attention in my last lecture to the true character of
several words and forms in use among our country people, and claimed for
them to be in many instances genuine English, though English now more
or less antiquated and overlived. ‘Gossip’ is a word in point. I have
myself heard this name given by our Hampshire peasantry to the sponsors
in baptism, the godfathers and godmothers. I do not say that it is a
usual word; but it is occasionally employed, and well understood. This
is a perfectly correct employment of ‘gossip’, in fact its proper and
original one, and involves moreover a very curious record of past
beliefs. ‘Gossip’, or ‘gossib’, as Chaucer spelt it, is a compound word,
made up of the name of ‘God’, and of an old Anglo-Saxon word, ‘sib’,
still alive in Scotland, as all readers of Walter Scott will remember,
and in some parts of England, and which means, akin; they were said to
be ‘sib’, who are related to one another. But why, you may ask, was the
name given to sponsors? Out of this reason;--in the middle ages it was
the prevailing belief (and the Romish Church still affirms it), that
those who stood as sponsors to the same child, besides contracting
spiritual obligations on behalf of that child, also contracted spiritual
affinity one with another; they became _sib_, or akin, in _God_; and
thus ‘gossips’; hence ‘gossipred’, an old word, exactly analogous to
‘kindred’. Out of this faith the Roman Catholic Church will not allow
(unless indeed by dispensations procured for money), those who have
stood as sponsors to the same child, afterwards to contract marriage
with one another, affirming them too nearly related for this to be
lawful.
Take ‘gossip’ however in its ordinary present use, as one addicted to
idle tittle-tattle, and it seems to bear no relation whatever to its
etymology and first meaning. The same three steps, however, which we
have traced before will bring us to its present use. ‘Gossips’ are,
first, the sponsors, brought by the act of a common sponsorship into
affinity and near familiarity with one another; secondly, these
sponsors, who being thus brought together, allow themselves one with the
other in familiar, and then in trivial and idle talk; thirdly, any who
allow themselves in this trivial and idle talk,--called in French
‘commérage’, from the fact that ‘commére’ has run through exactly the
same stages as its English equivalent.
It is plain that words which designate not things and persons only, but
these as they are contemplated more or less in an ethical light, words
which tinge with a moral sentiment what they designate, are peculiarly
exposed to change; are constantly liable to take a new colouring, or to
lose an old. The gauge and measure of praise or blame, honour or
dishonour, admiration or abhorrence, which they convey, is so purely a
mental and subjective one, that it is most difficult to take accurate
note of its rise or of its fall, while yet there are causes continually
at work leading it to the one or the other. There are words not a few,
but ethical words above all, which have so imperceptibly drifted away
from their former moorings, that although their position is now very
different from that which they once occupied, scarcely one in a hundred
of casual readers, whose attention has not been specially called to the
subject, will have observed that they have moved at all. Here too we
observe some words conveying less of praise or blame than once, and
some more; while some have wholly shifted from the one to the other.
Some were at one time words of slight, almost of offence, which have
altogether ceased to be so now. Still these are rare by comparison with
those which once were harmless, but now are harmless no more; which
once, it may be, were terms of honour, but which now imply a slight or
even a scorn. It is only too easy to perceive why these should exceed
those in number.
{Sidenote: ‘_Imp_’, ‘_Brat_’}
Let us take an example or two. If any were to speak now of royal
children as “royal _imps_”, it would sound, and with our present use of
the word would be, impertinent and unbecoming enough; and yet ‘imp’ was
once a name of dignity and honour, and not of slight or of undue
familiarity. Thus Spenser addresses the Muses in this language,
“Ye sacred _imps_ that on Parnasso dwell”;
and ‘imp’ was especially used of the scions of royal or illustrious
houses. More than one epitaph, still existing, of our ancient nobility
might be quoted, beginning in such language as this, “Here lies that
noble _imp_”. Or what should we say of a poet who commenced a solemn
poem in this fashion,
“Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord,
Oh Abraham’s _brats_, oh brood of blessed seed”?
Could we conclude anything else but that he meant, by using low words on
lofty occasions, to turn sacred things into ridicule? Yet this was very
far from the intention of Gascoigne, the poet whose lines I have just
quoted. “Abraham’s _brats_” was used by him in perfect good faith, and
without the slightest feeling that anything ludicrous or contemptuous
adhered to the word ‘brat’, as indeed in his time there did not, any
more than adheres to ‘brood’, which is another form of the same word
now{222}.
Call a person ‘pragmatical’, and you now imply not merely that he is
busy, but _over_-busy, officious, self-important, and pompous to boot.
But it once meant nothing of the kind, and ‘pragmatical’ (like
πραγματικός) was one engaged in affairs, being an honourable title,
given to a man simply and industriously accomplishing the business which
properly concerned him{223}. So too to say that a person ‘meddles’ or is
a ‘meddler’ implies now that he interferes unduly in other men’s
matters, without a call mixing himself up with them. This was not
insinuated in the earlier uses of the word. On the contrary three of our
earlier translations of the Bible have, “_Meddle_ with your own
business” (1 Thess. iv. 11); and Barrow in one of his sermons draws at
some length the distinction between ‘meddling’ and “being _meddlesome_”,
and only condemns the latter.
{Sidenote: ‘_Proser_’}
Or take again the words, ‘to prose’ or a ‘proser’. It cannot indeed be
affirmed that they convey any _moral_ condemnation, yet they certainly
convey no compliment now; and are almost among the last which any one
would desire should with justice be applied either to his talking or his
writing. For ‘to prose’, as we all now know too well, is to talk or
write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but
once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a ‘proser’ the
antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid
and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would
have ‘prosed’ and been a ‘proser’, in the language of our ancestors.
Thus Drayton writes of his contemporary Nashe:
“And surely Nashe, though he a _proser_ were,
A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear”;
that is, the ornament not of a ‘proser’, but of a poet. The tacit
assumption that vigour, animation, rapid movement, with all the
precipitation of the spirit, belong to verse rather than to prose, and
are the exclusive possession of it, is that which must explain the
changed uses of the word.
{Sidenote: ‘_Knave_’}
Still it is according to a word’s present signification that we must
apply it now. It would be no excuse, having applied an insulting epithet
to any, if we should afterwards plead that, tried by its etymology and
primary usage, it had nothing offensive or insulting about it; although
indeed Swift assures us that in his time such a plea was made and was
allowed. “I remember”, he says, “at a trial in Kent, where Sir George
Rooke was indicted for calling a gentleman ‘knave’ and ‘villain’, the
lawyer for the defendant brought off his client by alleging that the
words were not injurious; for ‘knave’ in the old and true signification
imported only a servant{224}; and ‘villain’ in Latin is villicus, which
is no more than a man employed in country labour, or rather a baily”.
The lawyer may have deserved his success for his ingenuity and his
boldness; though, if Swift reports him aright, not certainly on the
ground of the strict accuracy either of his Anglo-Saxon or his Latin.
The moral sense and conviction of men is often at work upon their words,
giving them new turns in obedience to these convictions, of which their
changed use will then remain a permanent record. Let me illustrate this
by the history of our word ‘sycophant’. You probably are acquainted with
the story which the Greek scholiasts invented by way of explaining a
word of which they knew nothing, namely that the ‘sycophant’ was a
“manifester of figs”, one who detected others in the act of exporting
figs from Attica, an act forbidden, they asserted, by the Athenian law;
and accused them to the people. Be this explanation worth what it may,
the word obtained in Greek a more general sense; any accuser, and then
any _false_ accuser, was a ‘sycophant’; and when the word was first
adopted into the English language, it was in this meaning: thus an old
English poet speaks of “the railing route of _sycophants_”; and Holland:
“The poor man that hath nought to lose, is not afraid of the
_sycophant_”. But it has not kept this meaning; a ‘sycophant’ is now a
fawning flatterer; not one who speaks ill of you behind your back;
rather one who speaks good of you before your face, but good which he
does not in his heart believe. Yet how true a moral instinct has
presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and
the flatterer, although they seem so opposed to one another, how closely
united they really are. They grow out of the same root. The same
baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak evil of you behind your
back, will lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your face;
there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb, “Who flatters me
before, spatters me behind”.
{Sidenote: _Weakening of Words_}
But it is not the moral sense only of men which is thus at work,
modifying their words; but the immoral as well. If the good which men
have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit
there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant tendency--in
too many cases it has been a successful one--to empty words employed in
the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral
reprobation which they once conveyed. Men’s too easy toleration of sin,
the feebleness of their moral indignation against it, brings about that
the blame which words expressed once, has in some of them become much
weaker now than once, has from others vanished altogether. “To do a
_shrewd_ turn”, was once to do a _wicked_ turn; and Chaucer, using
‘shrewdness’ by which to translate the Latin ‘improbitas’, shows that it
meant wickedness for him; nay, two murderers he calls two ‘shrews’,--for
there were, as already noticed, male shrews once as well as female. But
“a _shrewd_ turn” now, while it implies a certain amount of sharp
dealing, yet implies nothing more; and ‘shrewdness’ is applied to men
rather in their praise than in their dispraise. And not ‘shrewd’ and
‘shrewdness’ only, but a multitude of other words,--I will only instance
‘prank’ ‘flirt’, ‘luxury’, ‘luxurious’, ‘peevish’, ‘wayward’,
‘loiterer’, ‘uncivil’,--conveyed once a much more earnest moral
disapproval than now they do.
But I must bring this lecture to a close. I have but opened to you
paths, which you, if you are so minded, can follow up for yourselves. We
have learned lately to speak of men’s ‘antecedents’{225}; the phrase is
newly come up; and it is common to say that if we would know what a man
really now is, we must know his ‘antecedents’, that is, what he has been
in time past. This is quite as true about words. If we would know what
they now are, we must know what they have been; we must know, if
possible, the date and place of their birth, the successive stages of
their subsequent history, the company which they have kept, all the road
which they have travelled, and what has brought them to the point at
which now we find them; we must know, in short, their antecedents.
{Sidenote: _Changes of Meaning_}
And let me say, without attempting to bring back school into these
lectures which are out of school, that, seeking to do this, we might add
an interest to our researches in the lexicon and the dictionary which
otherwise they could never have; that taking such words, for example, as
ἐκκλησία, or παλιγγενεσία, or εὐτραπελία, or σοφιστής, or σχολαστικός,
in Greek; as ‘religio’, or ‘sacramentum’, or ‘urbanitas’, or
‘superstitio’, in Latin; as ‘libertine’, or ‘casuistry’{226}, or
‘humanity’, or ‘humorous’, or ‘danger’, or ‘romance’, in English, and
endeavouring to trace the manner in which one meaning grew out of and
superseded another, and how they arrived at that use in which they have
finally rested (if indeed before our English words there is not a future
still), we shall derive, I believe, amusement, I am sure, instruction;
we shall feel that we are really getting something, increasing the moral
and intellectual stores of our minds; furnishing ourselves with that
which may hereafter be of service to ourselves, may be of service to
others--than which there can be no feeling more pleasurable, none more
delightful. I shall be glad and thankful, if you can feel as much in
regard of that lecture, which I now bring to its end{227}.
{FOOTNOTES}
{198} [‘Frampold’, peevish, perverse (_Merry Wives of Windsor_, 1598,
ii, 2, 94) is supposed to be another form of ‘from-polled’, as if
‘wrong-headed’. ‘Garboil’, a tumult or hubbub, was originally
_garboyl_, and came from old French _garbouil_ (Italian
_garbuglio_). ‘Brangle’, a brawl, stands for ‘brandle’ from Old
Fr. _brandeler_, akin to ‘brandish’.]
{199} [‘Dutch’ i.e. Teutonic, Mid. High-German _diutsch_, old
High-German _diut-isk_ from _diot_, people, and so the people-ish
or popular language the mother-tongue, founded on a primitive
_teuta_, ‘people’. See Kluge _s.v. Deutsch_.]
{200} So in Herrick’s _Electra_:
“More white than are the whitest creams,
Or moonlight _tinselling_ the streams”.
{201} [Hence also the epidemic of malefic power supposed to be
air-borne, ‘influenza’.]
{202} See Holinshed’s _Chronicles_, vol. iii, pp. 827, 1218; Ann. 1513,
1570.
{203} _Fairy Queen_, vi, 7, 27; cf. v. 3, 37.
{204} [The two words are intimately related, ‘king’, contracted for
_kining_ (Anglo-Saxon _cyn-ing_), ‘son of the kin’ or ‘tribe’, one
of the people, cognate with _cynde_, true-born, native, ‘kind’,
and _cynd_, nature ‘kind’, whence ‘kindly’, natural.]
{205} See Sir W. Scott’s edition of Swift’s _Works_, vol. ix, p. 139.
{206} θηριακή, from θηρίον, a designation given to the viper, see Acts
xxviii, 4. ‘Theriac’ is only the more rigid form of the same word,
the scholarly, as distinguished from the popular, adoption of it.
Augustine (_Con. duas Epp. Pelag._ iii, 7): Sicut fieri consuevit
antidotum etiam de serpentibus contra venena serpentum.
{207} And Chaucer, more solemnly still:
“Christ, which that is to every harm _triacle_”.
The _antidotal_ character of treacle comes out yet more in these
lines of Lydgate:
“There is no _venom_ so parlious in sharpnes,
As whan it hath of _treacle_ a likenes”.
{208} “A slave that within these twenty years rode with the _black
guard_ in the Duke’s carriage, ’mongst spits and dripping pans”.
(Webster’s _White Devil_.) [First ed. 1612. “The Black Guard of
the King’s Kitchen” is mentioned in a State Paper of 1535
(N.E.D.).]
{209} Génin (_Lexique de la Langue de Molière_, p. 367) says well: “En
augmentant le nombre des mots, il a fallu restreindre leur
signification, et faire aux nouveaux un apanage aux dépens des
anciens”.
{210} [Accordingly there is nothing tautological in the “dead corpses”
of 2 Kings xix, 35, in the A.V.]
{211} [‘Weed’, vegetable growth, Anglo-Saxon _weód_, is here confounded
with a perfectly distinct word ‘weed’, clothing, which is the
Anglo-Saxon _waéd_, a garment.]
{212} And no less so in French with ‘dame’, by which form not ‘domina’
only, but ‘dominus’, was represented. Thus in early French poetry,
“_Dame_ Dieu” for “_Dominus_ Deus” continually occurs. We have
here the key to the French exclamation, or oath, as we now
perceive it to be, ‘Dame’! of which the dictionaries give no
account. See Génin’s _Variations du Langage Français_, p. 347.
{213} [‘Hoyden’ seems to be derived from the old Dutch _heyden_, a
heathen, then a clownish, boorish fellow.]
{214} [This “ancient Saxon phrase”, as Longfellow calls it, has not been
found in any old English writer, but has been adopted from the
Modern German. Neither is it known in the dialects, E.D.D.]
{215} “A _furlong_, quasi _furrowlong_, being so much as a team in
England plougheth going forward, before they return back again”.
(Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, p. 42.) [‘Furlong’ in St.
Luke xxiv, 13, already occurs in the Anglo-Saxon version of that
passage as _furlanga_.]
{216} [Recent etymologists cannot see any connexion between ‘peck’ and
‘poke’.]
{217} [e. g. “One said thus _preposterously_: ‘when we had climbed the
clifs and were a shore’” (Puttenham, _Arte of Eng. Poesie_, 1589,
p. 181, ed. Arber). “It is a _preposterous_ order to teach first
and to learn after” (_Preface to Bible_, 1611). “Place not the
coming of the wise men, _preposterously_, before the appearance of
the star” (Abp. Secker, _Sermons_, iii, 85, ed. 1825).]
{218} Thus Barrow: “Which [courage and constancy] he that wanteth is no
other than _equivocally_ a gentleman, as an image or a carcass is
a man”.
{219} Phillips, _New World of Words_, 1706. [‘Garble’ comes through old
French _garbeler_, _grabeler_ (Italian _garbellare_) from Latin
_cribellare_, to sift, and that from _cribellum_, a sieve,
diminutive of _cribrum_.]
{220} “But his [Gideon’s] army must be _garbled_, as too great for God
to give victory thereby; all the fearful return home by
proclamation” (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, b. ii, c. 8).