GRAND WORDS.
The fool hath planted his memory with an army of
words.--SHAKESPEARE.
In the commerce of speech use only coin of gold and silver.... Be
profound with clear terms, and not with obscure terms.--JOUBERT.
The more you have studied foreign languages, the more you will be
disposed to keep Ollendorff in the background; the proper result
of such acquirements is visible in a finer ear for words.--T. W.
HIGGINSON.
Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching
truth. Don’t whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you
want to tingle.--H. W. BEECHER.
It is a trite remark that words are the representatives of things
and thoughts, as coin represents wealth. You carry in your pocket
a doubloon or a dollar, stamped by the king or state, and you are
the virtual owner of whatever it will purchase. But who affixes the
stamp upon a word? No prince or potentate was ever strong enough
to make or unmake a single word. Cæsar confessed that with all his
power he could not do it, and Claudius could not introduce even a
new letter. He attempted to introduce the consonant V, as distinct
from U, the Roman alphabet having but one character for both;
but he could not make his subjects accept the new letter, though
he could kill or plunder them at pleasure. Cicero tried his hand
at word-coining; but though he proved a skilful mint-master, and
struck some admirable trial pieces, which were absolutely needed to
facilitate mental exchanges, yet they did not gain circulation, and
were thrown back upon his hands. But that which defied the power of
Cæsar and of Cicero does not transcend the ability of many writers
of our own day, some of whom are adepts in the art of word-coining,
and are daily minting terms and phrases which must make even Noah
Webster, boundless as was his charity for new words, turn in his
grave. It is doubtful, however, whether these persons do so much
damage to our noble English language as those who vulgarize it by
the use of penny-a-liner phrases. There is a large and growing
class of speakers and writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who,
apparently despising the homely but terse and telling words of
their mother tongue, never use a Saxon term, if they can find what
Lord Brougham calls a “long-tailed word in _’osity_ or _’ation_” to
do its work.
What is the cause of this? Is it the extraordinary, not to say
excessive, attention now given by persons of all ages to foreign
languages, to the neglect of our own? Is it the comparative
inattention given to correct diction by the teachers in the schools
of to-day; or is it because the favorite books of the young are
sensational stories, made pungent, and, in a sense, natural,
through the lavish use of all the colloquialisms and vulgarisms
of low life? Shall we believe that it is because there is little
individuality and independence in these days, that the words of
so few persons are flavored with their idiosyncrasies; that it
is from conscious poverty of thought that they try to trick out
their ideas in glittering words and phrases, just as, by means
of high-heeled boots, a laced coat, and a long feather, a fellow
with a little soul and a weak body might try to pass muster as a
bold grenadier? Or is it because of the prevalent mania for the
sensational,--the craving for novelty and excitement, which is
almost universal in these days,--that so many persons make sense
subservient to sound, and avoid calling things by their proper
names? Or, finally, to take a more charitable view of the case, is
it because it is impossible for inaccurate minds to hit the exact
truth, and describe a thing just as they have seen it,--to express
degrees of feeling, to observe measures and proportions, and define
a sensation as it was felt? Was Talleyrand wrong when he said that
language was given to man to conceal his thought; and was it really
given to hide his want of thought? Is it, indeed, the main object
of expression to convey the smallest possible amount of meaning
with the greatest possible amount of appearance of meaning; and,
since nobody can be “so wise as Thurlow looked,” to look as wise as
Thurlow while uttering the veriest truisms?
Be all this as it may, in nothing else is the lack of simplicity,
which is so characteristic of our times, more marked than in
the prevailing forms of expression. “The curse and the peril of
language in our day, and particularly in this country,” says an
American critic, who may, perhaps, croak at times, but who has
done much good service as a literary policeman in the repression
of verbal licentiousness, “is that it is at the mercy of men who,
instead of being content to use it well, according to their honest
ignorance, use it ill, according to their affected knowledge;
who, being vulgar, would seem elegant; who, being empty, would
seem full; who make up in pretence what they lack in reality;
and whose little thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound
like fire-crackers in an empty barrel.” In the estimation of many
writers at the present day, the great, crowning vice in the use of
words is, apparently, to employ plain, straightforward English.
The simple Saxon is not good enough for their purposes, and so
they array their ideas in “big, dictionary words,” derived from the
Latin, and load their style with expletives as tasteless as the
streamers of tattered finery that flutter about the person of a
dilapidated belle. The “high polite,” in short, is their favorite
style, and the good old Spartan rule of calling a spade a spade
they hold in thorough contempt. Their great recipe for elegant or
powerful writing is to call the most common things by the most
uncommon names. Provided that a word is out-of-the-way, unusual, or
far-fetched,--and especially if it is one of many syllables,--they
care little whether it is apt and fit or not.
With them a fire is always “the devouring element,” or a
“conflagration”; and the last term is often used where there is no
meeting of flames, as when a town is fired in several places, but
when only one building is burned; the fire never burns a house, but
it always “consumes an edifice,” unless it is got under, in which
case “its progress is arrested.” A railroad accident is always “a
holocaust,” and its victims are named under the “death roll.” A man
who is the first to do a thing “takes the initiative.” Instead of
loving a woman, a man “becomes attached” to her; instead of losing
his mother by death, he “sustains a bereavement of his maternal
relative.” A dog’s tail, in the pages of these writers, is his
“caudal appendage”; a dog breaker, “a kunopædist”; and a fish-pond
they call by no less lofty a title than “piscine preserve.” Ladies,
in their classic pages, have ceased to be married, like those poor,
vulgar creatures, their grandmothers; they are “led to the hymeneal
altar.” Of the existence of such persons as a man, a woman, a
boy, or a girl, these writers are profoundly ignorant; though
they often speak of “individuals,” “gentlemen,” “characters,”
and “parties,” and often recognize the existence of “juveniles”
and “juvenile members of the community.” “Individual” is another
piece of pompous inanity which is very current now. In “Guesses
at Truth” mention is made of a celebrated preacher, who was so
destitute of all feeling for decorum in language, as to call our
Saviour “this eminent _individual_.” “Individual” is a good Latin
word, and serves a good purpose when it distinguishes a person from
a people or class, as it served a good purpose in the scholastic
philosophy; but would Cicero or Duns Scotus have called a great
man an _eminens individuum_? These “individuals,” strange to say,
are never dressed, but always “attired”; they never take off their
clothes, but “divest themselves of their habiliments,” which is so
much grander.
“In the church,” says St. Paul, “I had rather speak five words
with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also,
than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” Not so think some
of the preachers of the Gospel of the present day, if we may judge
them by the language they use in their discourses. To give their
sermons a philosophical air, or because simple language is not to
their taste, they invest their discourses with the technicalities
of science and philosophy. They never speak of so old-fashioned a
thing as the will, but always of “volition”; duty, with them, is
never duty simply, but always “moral obligation”; and their sermons
abound in “necessary relations,” “moral and physical necessities,”
“intellectual processes,” “laws of nature,” and “arguments _a
priori_ and _a posteriori_.” It was a preacher of this class, who
having occasion to tell his hearers that there was not one Gospel
for the rich and another for the poor, informed them that, “if
they would not be saved on ‘general principles,’ they could not be
saved at all.” Who can doubt that such language as this is not only
poorly understood, if understood it is, by the ordinary hearer,
but is far less effective than the simple Saxon words which might
be used to convey the same ideas? Some years ago a white minister
preached in a plain, direct style to a church of negroes in the
South, whose “colored” pastor was greatly addicted to the use of
high-flown language in his sermons. In the season of exhortation
and prayer that followed, an old negro thanked the Lord for the
various blessings of the Sabbath and the sanctuary, and especially,
he added, “we thank Thee that to-day we have been fed from _a low
crib_.” Would it not be well for preachers generally to remember
that many of Christ’s flock are “little ones,” whose necks are
short, and that they may consequently starve, if their food,
however nutritious, is placed in too lofty a crib?
But preachers are not the only anti-Saxons of our day; we may find
them in nearly all the classes of society,--persons who never tell
us that a man is asleep, but say that he is “locked in slumber”;
who deem it vulgar, and perhaps cruel, to say that a criminal
was hanged, but very elegant to say that he was “launched into
eternity.” A person of their acquaintance never does so low a
thing as to break his leg; he “fractures his limb.” They never
see a man fall; but sometimes see “an individual precipitated.”
Our Latin friends,--fortunate souls,--never have their feelings
hurt, though it must be confessed that their “sensibilities” are
sometimes dreadfully “lacerated.” Above the necessities of their
poor fellow-creatures, they never do so vulgar a thing as to eat
a meal; they always “partake of a repast,” which is so much more
elegant. They never do so commonplace a thing as to take a walk;
they “make a pedestrian excursion.” A conjurer with them is a
“prestidigitator”; a fortune-teller, a “vaticinator.” As Pascal
says, they mask all nature. There is with them no king, but an
“august monarch”; no Paris, but a “capital of a kingdom.” Even our
barbers have got upon stilts. They no longer sell tooth-powder and
shaving-soap, like the old fogies, their fathers, but “odonto,”
and “dentifrice,” and “rypophagon”; and they themselves, from
the barber-ous persons they once were, have been transformed
into “_artists_ in hair.” The medical faculty, too, have caught
the spirit of the age. Who would suspect that “epistaxis” means
simply bleeding at the nose, and “emollient cataplasm” only a
poultice? Fancy one schoolboy doubling up his fist at another,
and telling him to look out for epistaxis! Who would dream that
“anheidrohepseterion” (advertised in the London “Times”) means only
a saucepan, or “taxidermist” a bird-stuffer? Is it not remarkable
that tradesmen have ceased “sending in” their “little bills,” and
now only “render their accounts”?
“There are people,” says Landor, “who think they write and speak
finely, merely because they have forgotten the language in which
their fathers and mothers used to talk to them.” As in dress,
deportment, etc., so in language, the dread of vulgarity, as
Whately has suggested, constantly besetting those who are half
conscious that they are in danger of it, drives them into the
opposite extreme of affected finery. They act upon the advice of
Boileau:
“Quoique vous écriviez, évitez la bassesse;
Le style le moins noble a pourtant sa noblesse;”
and, to avoid the undignified, according to them, it is only
necessary not to call things by their right names. Hence the use of
“residence” for house, “electric fluid” for lightning, “recently
deceased” for lately dead, “encomium” for praise, “location” for
place, “locate” for put, “lower limb” for leg, “sacred edifice”
for church, “attired” for clad,--all of which have so learned an
air, and are preferred to the simpler words for the same reason,
apparently, that led Mr. Samuel Weller, when writing his famous
valentine to Mary, to prefer “circumscribed” to “circumvented,” as
having a deeper meaning.
Such persons forget that glass will obstruct the light quite as
much when beautifully painted as when discolored with dirt; and
that a style studded with far-fetched epithets and high-sounding
phrases may be as dark as one abounding in colloquial vulgarisms.
Who does not sympathize with the indignation of Dr. Johnson, when,
taking up at the house of a country friend a so called “Liberal
Translation of the New Testament,” he read, in the eleventh
chapter of John, instead of the simple and touching words, “Jesus
wept,”--“Jesus, the Saviour of the world, overcome with grief,
burst into a flood of tears”? “_Puppy!_” exclaimed the critic, as
he threw down the book in a rage; and had the author been present,
Johnson would doubtless have thrown it at his head. Yet the great
literary bashaw, while he had an eagle’s eye for the faults of
others, was unconscious of his own sins against simplicity, and,
though he spoke like a wit, too often wrote like a pedant. He
had, in fact, a dialect of his own, which has been wittily styled
_Johnsonese_. Goldsmith hit him in a vulnerable spot when he said:
“Doctor, if you were to write a fable about little fishes, you
would make them talk like whales.” The faults of his pompous,
swelling diction, in which the frivolity of a coxcomb is described
in the same rolling periods and with the same gravity of antithesis
with which he would thunder against rebellion and fanaticism, are
hardly exaggerated by a wit of his own time who calls it
“A turgid style,
Which gives to an inch the importance of a mile;
Uplifts the club of Hercules--for what?
To crush a butterfly, or brain a gnat;
Bids ocean labor with tremendous roar,
To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore;
Sets wheels on wheels in motion,--what a clatter!
To force up one poor nipperkin of water;
Alike in every theme his pompous art,
Heaven’s awful thunder, or a rumbling cart.”
One of the latest “modern improvements” in speech is the
substitution of “lady” and “female” for the good old English
“woman.” On the front of Cooper’s Reading Room, in the city of
New York, is the sign in golden letters, “Male and Female Reading
Rooms.” Suppose Scott, in his noble tribute to women for their
devotion and tenderness to men in their hour of suffering, had sung
“Oh, LADIES, in our hours of ease,” etc.,
would not the lines have been far more touching? An English writer
says truly that the law of euphemisms is somewhat capricious; “one
cannot always tell which words are decent and which are not....
It really seems as if the old-fashioned feminine of ‘man’ were
fast getting proscribed. We, undiscerning male creatures that
we are, might have thought that ‘woman’ was a more elegant and
more distinctive title than ‘female.’ We read only the other day
a report of a lecture on the poet Crabbe, in which she who was
afterward Mrs. Crabbe was spoken of as ‘a female to whom he had
formed an attachment.’ To us, indeed, it seems that a man’s wife
should be spoken of in some way which is not equally applicable to
a ewe lamb or a favorite mare. But it was a ‘female’ who delivered
the lecture, and we suppose the females know best about their own
affairs.”
Can any person account for the apparent antipathy which many
writers and speakers have to the good Saxon verb “to begin”?
Ninety-nine out of every hundred persons one talks with are sure
to prefer the French words “to commence” and “to essay,” and the
tendency is strong to prefer “to inaugurate” to either. Nothing in
our day is begun, not even dinner; it is “inaugurated with soup.”
In their fondness for the French words, many persons are betrayed
into solecisms. Forgetting, or not knowing, that, while “to begin”
may be followed by an infinitive or a gerund, “to commence” is
transitive, and must be followed by a noun or its equivalent, they
talk of “commencing to do” a thing, “essaying to do well,” etc.
Persons who think that “begin” is not stately enough, or that it
is even vulgar, would do well to look into the pages of Milton and
Shakespeare. With all his fondness for Romanic words, the former
hardly once uses “commence” and “commencement”; and the latter is
not only content with the idiomatic word, but even shortens it, as
in the well known line that depicts so vividly the guilt-wasted
soul of Macbeth:
“I ’gin to grow a-weary of the sun.”
What a shock would every right-minded reader receive if, upon
opening his Bible, he should find, in place of the old familiar
words, the following: “In the _commencement_ God created
the heavens and the earth,”--“The fear of the Lord is the
_commencement_ of wisdom!” Well did Coleridge say: “Intense study
of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of
style.” “Commence” is a good word enough, but, being of outlandish
origin, should never take the place of “begin,” except for the sake
of rhythm or variety.
Another of these grand words is “imbroglio.” It is from the
Italian, and means an intricate or complicated plot. Why, then,
should a quarrel in the Cabinet at Washington, or a prospective
quarrel with France or England, be called an “imbroglio”? Again,
will any one explain to us the meaning of “interpellation,” so
often used by the correspondents of our daily newspapers? The word
properly means an interruption; yet when an opposition member of
the French or Italian Parliament asks a question of a minister,
he is said “to put an interpellation.” Why should an army be
said to be “decimated,” without regard to the number or nature
of its losses? The original meaning of this term was grave, and
often terrible; it meant no less than taking the tenth of a man’s
substance, or shooting every tenth man in a mutinous regiment,
the victims being called out by lot. “This appalling character of
decimation lay in the likelihood that innocent persons, slain in
cold blood, might suffer for the guilty. But the peculiar horror
vanishes when we alter the conditions; and a regiment which has
taken part in a hard-fought battle, and comes off the field only
decimated,--that is to say, with nine living and unscathed for
each man left on the field,--might be accounted rather fortunate
than the reverse.” Why, again, should “donate” be preferred to
“give”? Does it show a larger soul, a more magnificent liberality,
to “donate” than to give? Must we “_donate_ the devil his due,”
when we would be unusually charitable? Why should “elect” be
preferred to “choose,” when there is no election whatever; or why
is “balance” preferable to “remainder”? As a writer has well said:
“Would any man in his senses dare to quote King David as saying:
‘They are full of children, and leave the _balance_ of their
substance unto their babes’? or read, ‘Surely the wrath of man
shall praise thee: the _balance_ of wrath thou shalt restrain,’
where the translators of our Bible wrote ‘the remainder’? And if
any one went into the nursery, and telling that tale of perennial
interest of the little boys that ‘a-sliding went, a-sliding went,
a-sliding went, all on a summer’s day,’ should, after recounting
how ‘they all fell in, they all fell in, they all fell in,’ add
‘the _balance_ ran away,’ would there not go up a chorus of tiny
but indignant protests against this mutilation, which would enlist
a far wider sympathy than some of the proposed changes in the texts
of classic authors, which have set editors and commentators at
loggerheads?”
Again, why should one say “rendition” for performance, “enactment”
for acting, or “nude” for naked? In the seventeenth century,
certain fanatics in England ran about without clothes, crying: “We
are the naked Truth.” Had they lived in this age of refinement,
instead of shocking their countrymen with such indelicate
expressions, they would have said, “We are Verity in a nude
condition”; and had any person clothed them, he would have been
said to have “rehabilitated” them. More offensive than any of these
grandiose words is “intoxicated” in place of “drunk,” which it has
nearly banished. A man can be intoxicated only when he has lost his
wits, not by quantity, but by quality,--by drinking liquor that
has been drugged. “Intoxicated,” however, has five syllables;
drunk has but one; so the former carries the day by five to one.
No doubt nine-tenths of those who drink to excess in this country,
are, in fact, intoxicated, or poisoned; still, the two words should
not be confounded. “Ovation” is a word often used incorrectly, as
when an emperor, empress, king or queen, on making a triumphal
entry into the capital of a state amid great popular enthusiasm, is
said to receive an “ovation,” though such an honor is distinctively
reserved for meritorious subjects of the ruler. Sometimes we find
a word of Latin origin used in a sense precisely opposite to
the true one, as when “culminate,” which can be applied only to
something which has reached the limit of its possible height, is
used regarding the career of some wrong-doer, which is said to
“culminate” in the lowest depths of degradation.
Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the sun; and
this itching for pompous forms of expression, this contempt for
plainness and simplicity of style, is as old as Aristotle. In the
third book of his “Rhetoric,” discussing the causes of frigidity
of style, he speaks of one Alcidamas, a writer of that time, as
“employing ornaments, not as seasonings to discourse, but as if
they were the only food to live upon. He does not say ‘sweat,’
but ‘the humid sweat’; a man goes not to the Isthmian games,
but to ‘the collected assembly of the Isthmian solemnity’; laws
are ‘the legitimate kings of commonwealths’; and a race, ‘the
incursive impulse of the soul.’ A rich man is not bountiful, but
the ‘artificer of universal largess.’” Is it not curious that our
modern Quicklys and Malaprops, who often pride themselves upon
their taste for swelling words and phrases, and their skill in
using them, should have been anticipated by Alcidamas two thousand
years ago?
The abuse of the queen’s English, to which we have called
attention, did not begin with Americans. It began with our
transatlantic cousins, who employed “ink-horn” terms and outlandish
phrases at a very early period. In “Harrison’s Chronicle” we are
told that after the Norman conquest “the English tongue grew into
such contempt at court that most men thought it no small dishonor
to speak any English there; which bravery took his hold at the last
likewise in the country with every ploughman, that even the very
carters began to wax weary of their mother tongue, and labored to
speak French, which was then counted no small token of gentility.”
The English people of to-day are quite as much addicted to the
grandiose style as the Americans. Gough, in one of his lectures,
speaks of a card which he saw in London, in which a man called
himself “Illuminating Artist to Her Majesty,” the fact being that
he lighted the gas lamps near the palace. Mr. E. A. Freeman, the
English historian, complained in a recent lecture that our language
had few friends and many foes, its only friends being ploughboys
and a few scholars. The pleasant old “inns” of England, he said,
had disappeared, their places being supplied by “hotels,” or
“establishments”; while the landlord had made way for the “lessee
of the establishment.” A gentleman going into a shop in Regent
street to buy half-mourning goods was referred by the shopman to
“the mitigated affliction department.” The besetting sin of some
of the ablest British writers of this century is their lack of
simplicity of language. Sydney Smith said of Sir James Mackintosh,
that if he were asked for a definition of “pepper,” he would
reply thus: “Pepper may philosophically be described as a dusty
and highly pulverized seed of an oriental fruit; an article rather
of condiment than diet, which, dispersed lightly over the surface
of food, with no other rule than the caprice of the consumer,
communicates pleasure, rather than affords nutrition; and by adding
a tropical flavor to the gross and succulent viands of the North,
approximates the different regions of the earth, explains the
objects of commerce, and justifies the industry of man.”
Francis Jeffrey, the celebrated critic, had, even in conversation,
an artificial style and language, which were fit only for
books and a small circle of learned friends. His diction and
pronunciation, it is said, were unintelligible to the mass of his
countrymen, and in the House of Commons offensive and ridiculous.
An anecdote told in illustration of this peculiarity strikingly
shows the superiority of simple to high-flown language in the
practical business of life. In a trial, which turned upon the
intellectual competency of a testator, Jeffrey asked a witness, a
plain countryman, whether the testator was “a man of intellectual
capacity,”--“an intelligent, shrewd man,”--“a man of capacity?”
“Had he ordinary mental endowments?” “What d’ye mean, sir?” asked
the witness. “I mean,” replied Jeffrey, testily, “was the man of
sufficient ordinary intelligence to qualify him to manage his
own affairs?” “I dinna ken,” replied the chafed and mystified
witness,--“Wad ye say the question ower again, sir?” Jeffrey being
baffled, Cockburn took up the examination. He said: “Ye kenned
Tammas ----?” “Ou, ay; I kenned Tammas weel; me and him herded
together when we were laddies [boys].” “Was there onything in the
cretur?” “De’il a thing but what the spune [spoon] put into him.”
“Would you have trusted him to sell a cow for you?” “A cow! I wadna
lippened [trusted] him to sell a calf.” Had Jeffrey devoted a
review article to the subject, he could not have given a more vivid
idea of the testator’s incapacity to manage his own affairs.
Our readers need not be told how much Carlyle has done to teutonize
our language with his “yardlongtailed” German compounds. It was a
just stroke of criticism when a New York auctioneer introduced a
miscellaneous lot of books to a crowd with the remark: “Gentlemen,
of this lot I need only say, six volumes are by Thomas Carlyle;
the seventh is written in the _English_ language.” Some years ago,
a learned doctor of divinity and university professor in Canada
wrote a work in which, wishing to state the simple fact that the
“rude Indian” had learned the use of firing, he delivered himself
as follows: “He had made slave of the heaven-born element, the
brother of the lightning, the grand alchemist and artificer of all
times, though as yet he knew not all the worth or magical power
that was in him. By his means the sturdy oak, which flung abroad
its stalwart arms and waved its leafy honors defiant in the forest,
was made to bow to the behest of the simple aborigines.” As the
plain Scotchwoman said of De Quincey, “the bodie has an awfu’ sicht
o’ words!” This style of speaking and writing has become so common
that it can no longer be considered wholly vulgar. It is gradually
working upward; it is making its way into official writings and
grave octavos; and is even spoken with unction in pulpits and
senates. Metaphysicians are wont to define words as the signs of
ideas; but with many persons, they appear to be, not so much the
signs of their thought, as the signs of the signs of their thought.
Such, doubtless, was the case with the Scotch clergyman, whom a
bonneted abhorrer of legal preaching was overheard eulogizing:
“Man, John, wasna yon preachin’!--yon’s something for a body to
come awa wi’. The way that he smashed down his text into so mony
heads and particulars, just a’ to flinders! Nine heads and twenty
particulars in ilka head--and _sic mouthfu’s o’ grand words!_--an’
every ane o’ them fu’ o’ meaning, if we but kent them. We hae ill
improved our opportunities; man, if we could just mind onything he
said, it would do us guid.”
The whole literature of notices, handbills, and advertisements, in
our day, has apparently declared “war to the knife” against every
trace of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons. We have no schoolmasters
now; they are all “principals of collegiate institutes”; no
copy-books, but “specimens of caligraphy”; no ink, but “writing
fluid”; no physical exercise, but “calisthenics” or “gymnastics.”
A man who opens a groggery at some corner for the gratification of
drunkards, instead of announcing his enterprise by its real name,
modestly proclaims through the daily papers that his “saloon” has
been fitted up for the reception of customers. Even the learned
architects of log cabins and pioneer cottages can find names for
them only in the sonorous dialects of oriental climes. Time was
when a farmhouse was a farmhouse and a porch a porch; but now the
one is a “villa” or “hacienda,” and the other nothing less than
a “veranda.” In short, this genteel slang pursues us from the
cradle to the grave. In old times, when our fathers and mothers
died, they were placed in coffins, and buried in the graveyard or
burying ground; now, when an unfortunate “party” or “individual”
“deceases” or “becomes defunct,” he is deposited in a “burial
casket” and “interred in a cemetery.” It matters not that the good
old words “grave” and “graveyard” have been set in the pure amber
of the English classics,--that the Bible says, “There is no wisdom
in the grave,” “Cruel as the grave,” etc. How much more pompous
and magniloquent the Greek: “There is no wisdom in the cemetery,”
“Cruel as the cemetery!”
Seriously, let us eschew all these vulgar fineries of style, as we
would eschew the fineries of a dandy. Their legitimate effect is
to barbarize our language, and to destroy all the peculiar power,
distinctiveness, and appropriateness of its terms. Words that are
rarely used will at last inevitably disappear; and thus, if not
speedily checked, this grandiloquence of expression will do an
irreparable injury to our dear old English tongue. Poetry may for
a while escape the effects of this vulgar coxcombry, because it
is the farthest out of the reach of such contagion; but, as prose
sinks, so must poetry, too, be ultimately dragged down into the
general gulf of feebleness and inanition.
It was a saying of John Foster that “eloquence resides in the
thought, and no words, therefore, can make that eloquent which
will not be so in the plainest that could possibly express the
same.” Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the notion that
the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of pompous and sonorous
language are necessary to the expression of the sublime and
powerful in eloquence and poetry. So far is this from being true,
that the finest, noblest, and most spirit-stirring sentiments ever
uttered, have been couched, not in sounding polysyllables from
the Greek or Latin, but in the simplest Saxon,--in the language we
hear hourly in the streets and by our firesides. Dr. Johnson once
said that “big thinkers require big words.” He did not think so
at the time of the great Methodist movement in the last century,
when “the ice period” of the establishment was breaking up. He
attributed the Wesleys’ success to their plain, familiar way of
preaching, “which,” he says, “clergymen of genius and learning
ought to do from a principle of duty.” Arthur Helps tells a story
of an illiterate soldier at the chapel of Lord Morpeth’s castle
in Ireland. Whenever Archbishop Whately came to preach, it was
observed that this rough private was always in his place, mouth
open, as if in sympathy with his ears. Some of the gentlemen
playfully took him to task for it, supposing it was due to the
usual vulgar admiration of a celebrated man. But the man had a
better reason, and was able to give it. He said, “That isn’t it at
all. The Archbishop is easy to understand. There are no fine words
in him. A fellow like me, now, can follow along and take every bit
of it in.” “Whately’s simplicity,” observes a writer to whom we are
indebted for this illustration, “meant no lack of pith or power.
The whole momentum of his large and healthy brain went into those
homely sentences, rousing and feeding the rude and the cultured
hearer’s hunger alike, as sweet bread and juicy meat satisfy a
natural appetite.”
Emerson observes that as any orator at the bar or the senate rises
in his thought, he descends in his language; that is, when he
rises to any height of thought or of passion, he comes down to a
level with the ear of all his audience. “It is the oratory of John
Brown and of Abraham Lincoln, the one at Charleston, the other at
Gettysburg, in the two best specimens of oratory we have had in
this country.” Daniel Webster, in his youth, was a little bombastic
in his speeches; but he very soon discovered that the force of a
sentence depends chiefly on its meaning, and that great writing is
that in which much is said in few words, and those the simplest
that will answer the purpose. Having made this discovery, he became
“a great eraser of adjectives”; and whether convincing juries, or
thundering in the senate,--whether demolishing Hayne, or measuring
swords with Calhoun,--on all occasions used the plainest words.
“You will find,” said he to a friend, “in my speeches to juries, no
hard words, no Latin phrases, no _fieri facias_; and that is the
secret of my style, if I have any.”
Chaucer says, in praise of his Virginia, that
“No contrefited termes had she
To semen wise;”
and if any one would write or speak well, his English should be
genuine, not counterfeit. The simplest words that will convey one’s
ideas are always best. What can be simpler and yet more sublime
than the “Let there be light, and there was light!” of Moses,
which Longinus so admired? Would it be an improvement to say, “Let
there be light, and there was a solar illumination”? “I am like
a child picking up pebbles on the seashore,” said Newton. Had he
said he was like an awe-struck votary, lying prostrate before the
stupendous majesty of the cosmical universe, and the mighty and
incomprehensible _Ourgos_ which had created all things, we might
think it very fine, but should not carry in our memories such a
luggage of words. The fiery eloquence of the field and the forum
springs upon the vulgar idiom as a soldier leaps upon his horse.
“Trust in the Lord, and keep your powder dry,” said Cromwell to
his soldiers on the eve of a battle. “Silence, you thirty voices!”
roars Mirabeau to a knot of opposers around the tribune. “I’d sell
the shirt off my back to support the war!” cries Lord Chatham; and
again, “Conquer the Americans! I might as well think of driving
them before me with this crutch.” “I know,” says Kossuth, speaking
of the march of intelligence, “that the light has spread, and that
_even the bayonets think_.” “You may shake me, if you please,”
said a little Yankee constable to a stout, burly culprit whom he
had come to arrest, and who threatened violence, “but recollect,
if you do it, you don’t shake a chap of five-feet-six; you’ve _got
to shake the whole State of Massachusetts_!” When a Hoosier was
asked by a Yankee how much he weighed,--“Well,” said he, “commonly
I weigh about one hundred and eighty; but _when I’m mad I weigh
a ton_!” “Were I to die at this moment,” wrote Nelson after the
battle of the Nile, “‘_more frigates_’ would be found written
on my heart.” The “Don’t give up the ship!” of our memorable
sea-captain stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet. Had he
exhorted the men to fight to the last gasp in defence of their
imperilled liberties, their altars, and the glory of America, the
words might have been historic, but they would not have been quoted
vernacularly, as they have been, for over threescore years and ten.
There is another phase of the popular leaning to the grandiose
style, which is not less reprehensible than that which we have
noticed; we mean the affectation of foreign words and phrases. As
foreign travel has increased, and the study of foreign languages
has become fashionable in our country, this vice has spread till
society in some places, like Armado and Holofernes, seems to have
been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. Many
persons scarcely deign to call anything by its proper English name,
but, as if they believed with Butler, that
“He that’s but able to express
No sense at all in several languages,
Will pass for learneder than he that’s known
To speak strongest reason in his own,”--
they apply to it some German, French, or Italian word. In their
dialect people are _blasés_, and _passés_, or have _un air
distingué_; _in petto, dolce far niente_, are among their pet
phrases; and not infrequently they betray their ignorance by
some ludicrous blunder, as when they use _boquet_ for _bouquet_,
_soubriquet_ for _sobriquet_, and talk of a _sous_, instead of
a _sou_, a mistake as laughable as the Frenchman’s “un pence.”
Some of the modern fashionable novelists and writers of books
of travel have even shown so bad a taste as to state in German,
French, or Italian, whatever is supposed to have been said by
Germans, Frenchmen, or Italians. In Currer Bell’s “Villette” a
large proportion of the dialogue, even in pages containing the
very marrow of the plot, is thus written in French, making the
book, though an English book, unintelligible to an Englishman,
however familiar with his native tongue, unless he has mastered a
foreign one also, and that not in its purity, but “after the scole
of Stratford-atte-Bowe.” In striking contrast to this taste for
exotics is the rooted dislike which the French have to foreign
words and idioms. It is only in cases of the direst necessity that
they consent to borrow from their neighbors, whether in _perfide
Angleterre_ or elsewhere. Even when they deign to adopt a new
word, they so disguise it that the parent language would not know
it again. They strip it gradually of its foreign dress, and make
it assume the costume of the country. “Beefsteak” is turned into
_bifteck_; “plum-pudding” is metamorphosed into _pouding de plomb_;
“partner” becomes _partenaire_; “riding-coat” becomes _redingote_;
and now fashionable English tailors advertise these “redingotes,”
never for a moment dreaming that they are borrowing an expression
which the French stole from the English. It was their contempt for
the practice of borrowing foreign words that enabled the Greeks
to preserve their native tongue so long in its purity; while on
the contrary, by an affectation in the Romans of Greek words and
idioms, the Latin language was not only corrupted, but lost in a
few centuries much of the beauty and majesty it had in the Augustan
age.
It is said that the Spaniards, in all ages, have been distinguished
for their love of long and high-flown names,--the sounding brass
and tinkling cymbal of appellative glory and honor. In looking at
the long string of titles fastened like the tail of a kite to the
name of some Don or other grandee, one is puzzled to tell whether
it is the man that belongs to the name, or the name to the man.
There is nothing odd, therefore, in the conduct of that Spaniard,
who, whenever his name was mentioned, always took off his hat in
token of respect to himself,--that is, as the possessor of so
many appellations. A person of high diplomatic talent, with the
unpretending and rather plebeian name of “Bubb,” was once nominated
to represent Great Britain at Madrid. Lord Chesterfield was then
a minister of state, and on seeing the newly appointed minister
remarked,--“My dear fellow, your name will damn you with the
Spaniards; a one-syllable patronymic will infallibly disgust the
grandees of that hyperbolic nation.” “What shall I do?” said Bubb.
“Oh, that is easily managed,” rejoined the peer; “get yourself
dubbed, before you start on your mission, as Don Vaco y Hijo
Hermoso y Toro y Sill y Bubb, and on your arrival you will have all
the Spanish Court at your feet.”
The effort of the Spaniards to support their dignity by long and
sounding titles is repeated daily, in a slightly different form,
by many democratic Americans. Writers and speakers are constantly
striving to compensate for poverty of thought by a multitude of
words. Magniloquent terms, sounding sentences, unexpected and
startling phrases, are dropped from pen and tongue, as gaudy and
high-colored goods are displayed in shop windows, to attract
attention. “Ruskin,” says an intelligent writer, “long ago cried
out against the stuccoed lies which rear their unblushing fronts
on so many street corners, shaming our civilization, and exerting
their whole influence to make us false and pretentious. Mrs. Stowe
and others have warned us against the silken lies that, frizzled,
flounced, padded, compressed, lily-whitened and rouged, flit about
our drawing rooms by gaslight, making us familiar with sham and
shoddy, and luring us away from real and modest worth. Let there be
added to these complaints the strongest denunciation of the kindred
literary lies which hum about our ears and glitter before our eyes,
which corrupt the language, and wrong every man and woman who
speaks it by robbing it of some portion of its beauty and power.”
When shall we learn that the secret of beauty and of force, in
speaking and in writing, is not to say simple things finely, but
to say fine things as simply as possible? “To clothe,” says Fuller,
“low creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy,
but flat foolery. It rather loads than raises a wren to fasten the
feathers of an ostrich to her wings.” It is a significant fact
that the books over which generation after generation of readers
has hung with the deepest delight,--which have retained their
hold, amid all the fluctuations of taste, upon all classes,--have
been written in the simplest and most idiomatic English, that
English for which the “fine school” of writers would substitute a
verbose and affected phraseology. Such books are “Robinson Crusoe,”
“Gulliver’s Travels,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which Macaulay has
justly characterized as treasures of pure English. Fitz-Greene
Halleck tells us that some years ago a letter fell into his hands
which a Scotch servant girl had written to her lover. The style
charmed him, and his literary friends agreed that it was fairly
inimitable. Anxious to clear up the mystery of its beauty, and even
elegance, he searched for its author, who thus solved the enigma:
“Sir, I came to this country four years ago. Then I did not know
how to read or write. Since then I have learned to read and write,
but I have not yet learned how to spell; so always when I sit down
to write a letter, I choose those words which are so short and
simple that I am sure to know how to spell them.” This was the
whole secret. The simple-minded Scotch girl knew more of rhetoric
than Blair or Campbell. As Halleck forcibly says: “Simplicity is
beauty. Simplicity is power.”
It is through the arts and sciences, whose progress is so rapid,
that many words of “learned length and thundering sound” force
their way in these days into the language. The vocabulary of
science is so repugnant to the ear and so hard to the tongue,
that it is a long while before its terms become popularized. We
may be sure that many years will elapse before “aristolochioid,”
“megalosaurus,” “acanthopterygian,” “nothoclæna-trichomanoides,”
“monopleurobranchian,” “anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphæoid,” and
other such “huge verbal blocks, masses of syllabic aggregations,
which both the tongue and the taste find it difficult to surmount,”
will establish themselves in the language of literature and
common life. Still, while the lover of Anglo-Saxon simplicity
is rarely shocked by such terms, there are hundreds of others,
less stupendous, such as “phenomenon,” “demonstrative,” “inverse
proportion,” “transcendental,” “category,” “predicament,”
“exorbitant,” which, once heard only in scientific lecture rooms or
in schools, are now the common currency of the educated; and it is
said that in one of our Eastern colleges, the learned mathematical
professor, on whom the duty devolved one morning of making the
chapel prayer, startled his hearers by asking Divine Goodness to
enable them to know its length, its breadth, and its superficial
contents. Should popular enlightenment go on for some ages with the
prodigious strides it has lately made, a future generation may hear
lovers addressing their mistresses in the terms predicted by Punch:
“I love thee, Mary, and thou lovest me.
Our mutual flame is like the affinity
That doth exist between two simple bodies.
I am Potassium to thine Oxygen.
... Sweet, thy name is Briggs,
And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we
Agree to form a _Johnsonate of Briggs_?
We will. The day, the happy day is nigh,
When Johnson shall with beauteous Briggs combine.”
It is useless, of course, to complain of the terminology of
science, since inaccurate names, that connote too many things,
or that are otherwise lacking in precision, would be productive
of continual mischief. But indispensable as this distinctive
nomenclature is, it is, no doubt, often needlessly uncouth, and
it has been well said that if the language of common life were
equally invariable and unelastic, imagination would be cancelled,
and genius crushed. How barbarous and repulsive appear many of
the long, polysyllabic, technical names of plants and flowers in
our treatises on botany, when compared with such popular names as
“Stag-beetle,” “Rosemary,” and “Forget-me-not!” To express the
results of science without the ostentation of its terms, is an
admirable art, known, unfortunately, to but few. How few surgeons
can communicate in simple, intelligible language to a jury, in
a law case, the results of a _post-mortem_ examination! Almost
invariably the learned witness finds a wound “in the parieties
of the abdomen, opening the peritoneal cavity”; or an injury of
some “vertebra in the dorsal or lumbar region”; or something else
equally frightful. Some years ago, in one of the English courts, a
judge rebuked a witness of this kind by saying, “You mean so and
so, do you not, sir?”--at the same time translating his scientific
barbarisms into a few words of simple English. “I do, my Lord.”
“Then why can’t you _say_ so?” He _had_ said so, but in a foreign
tongue.
To all the writers and speakers who needlessly employ grandiose
or abstract terms, instead of plain Saxon ones, we would say, as
Falstaff said to Pistol: “If thou hast any tidings whatever to
deliver, prithee deliver them like a man of this world!” Never,
perhaps, did a college professor give a better lesson in rhetoric
than was given by a plain farmer in Kennebec County, Maine, to
a schoolmaster. “You are excavating a subterranean channel, it
seems,” said the pedagogue, as he saw the farmer at work near his
house. “No, sir,” was the reply, “I am only digging a ditch.” A
similar rebuke was once administered by the witty Governor Corwin,
of Ohio, to a young lady who addressed him in high-flown terms.
During a political tour through the State, he and the Hon. Thomas
Ewing stayed at night at the house of a leading politician, but
found no one at home but his niece, who presided at the tea-table.
Having never conversed with “great men” before, she supposed she
must talk to them in elephantine language. “Mr. Ewing, will you
take condiments in your tea, sir?” inquired the young lady. “Yes,
miss, if you please,” replied the Senator. Corwin’s eyes twinkled.
Here was a temptation that could not be resisted. Gratified
at the apparent success of her trial in talking to the United
States Senator, the young lady addressed Mr. Corwin in the same
manner,--“Will you take condiments in _your_ tea, sir?” “Pepper and
salt, but no mustard,” was the prompt reply, which the lady, it
is said, never forgave, declaring that the Governor was “horridly
vulgar.”
The faults of all those who thus barbarize our tongue would be
comparatively excusable, were it so barren of resources that
any man whose conceptions are clear need find difficulty in
wreaking them upon expression. But the language in which Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson have sung; in which
Hume, Gibbon, Froude, Motley, and Prescott have narrated; in which
Addison, Swift, Newman, and Ruskin have written; and in which
Bolingbroke, Chatham, Fox, Pitt, and Webster have spoken, needs not
to ask alms of its neighbors. Not only these, but a hundred other
masters, have shown that it is rich enough for all the exigencies
of the human mind; that it can express the loftiest conceptions of
the poet, portray the deepest emotions of the human heart; that it
can convey, if not the fripperies, at least the manly courtesies of
polite life, and make palpable the profoundest researches of the
philosopher. It is not, therefore, because of the poverty of our
vocabulary that so many writers Gallicize and Germanize our tongue;
the real cause is hinted at in the answer of Handel to an ambitious
musician, who attributed the hisses of his hearers to a defect in
the instrument on which he was playing: “The fault is not there, my
friend,” said the composer, jealous of the honor of the organ, on
which he himself performed; “the fact is, you have no music in your
_soul_.”
We are aware that the English tongue,--our own cartilaginous
tongue, as some one has quaintly styled it,--has been decried,
even by poets who have made it discourse the sweetest music, for
its lack of expressive terms, and for its excess in consonants,
guttural, sibilant, or mute. It was this latter peculiarity,
doubtless, which led Charles V, three centuries ago, to compare it
to the whistling of birds; and others since, from the predominance
of the _s_, to the continued hissing of red-hot iron in water.
Madame de Stael likens it to the monotonous sound of the surge
breaking on the sea-shore; and even Lord Byron,--whose own
burning verse, distinguished not less by its melody than by its
incomparable energy, has signally revealed the hidden harmony
that lies in our short Saxon words,--turns traitor to his native
language, and in a moment of caprice denounces it for its harshness:
“I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,
With syllables that breathe of the sweet South,
And gentle liquids, gliding all so pat in,
That not a single accent seems uncouth,
Like our harsh, Northern, whistling, grunting guttural,
Which we’re obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.”
It is strange that the poet could not see that, in this very
selection of condemnatory terms, he has strikingly shown the
wondrous expressiveness of the tongue he censures. What can be
softer, more musical, or more beautifully descriptive, than the
“gentle liquids gliding,” and the words “breathe of the sweet
South”; and where among all the languages of the “sweet South”
would he have found words so well fitted to point his sarcasm,
so saturated with harshness, as the terms “harsh,” “uncouth,”
“northern,” “whistling,” “grunting,” “guttural,” “hiss,” “spit,”
and “sputter?” It has been well said that “the hand that possesses
strength and power may have as delicate a touch, when needed,
as the hand of nervous debility. The English language can drop
the honeyed words of peace and gentleness, and it can visit with
its _withering, scathing, burning, blasting curse_.” Again, even
Addison, who wrote so musical English, contrasting our own tongue
with the vocal beauty of the Greek, and forgetting that the latter
is the very lowest merit of a language, being merely its _sensuous_
merit, calls it brick as against marble. Waller, too, ungrateful to
the noble tongue that has preserved his name, declares that
“Poets that lasting marble seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek.”
Because smoothness is one of the requisites of verse, it has been
hastily concluded that languages in which vowels and liquids
predominate must be better adapted to poetry, and that the most
mellifluous must also be the most melodious. But so far is this
from being true, that, as Henry Taylor has remarked, in dramatic
verse our English combinations of consonants are invaluable, both
in giving expression to the harsher passions, and in impairing
keenness and significancy to the language of discrimination, and
especially to that of scorn.
The truth is, our language, so far from being harsh, or poor and
limited in its vocabulary, is the richest and most copious now
spoken on the globe. As Sir Thomas More long ago declared: “It
is plenteous enough to expresse our myndes in anythinge whereof
one man hath used to speak with another.” Owing to its composite
character, it has a choice of terms expressive of every shade of
difference in the idea, compared with which the vocabulary of
many other modern tongues is poverty itself. But for the impiety
of the act, those who speak it might well raise a monument to the
madcaps who undertook the tower of Babel; for, as the mixture of
many bloods has made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has
the mingling of divers tongues given them a language which is one
of the noblest vehicles of thought ever vouchsafed to man. This
very mingling of tongues in our language has been made the ground
of an accusation against it; and the Anglo-Saxon is sometimes told
by foreigners that he “has been at a great feast of languages
and stolen the scraps”; that his dialect is “the alms-basket of
wit,” made up of beggarly borrowings, and is wholly lacking in
originality.
It is true that the Anglo-Saxon has pillaged largely from the
speech of other peoples; that he has a craving desire to annex,
not only states and provinces, even whole empires, to his own, but
even the best parts of their languages; that there is scarce a
tongue on the globe which his absorbing genius has not laid under
contribution to enrich the exchequer of his all-conquering speech.
Strip him of his borrowings,--or “annexations,” if you will,--and
he would neither have a foot of soil to stand upon, nor a rag of
language in which to clothe his shivering ideas. To say nothing of
the Greek, Latin, and French, which enter so largely into the woof
of the tongue, we are indebted to the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindoo, and even the North American Indian
dialects, for many words which we cannot do without. The word-barks
of our language are daily increasing in size, and terms that
sprang up at Delhi and Benares four thousand years ago are to-day
scaling the cliffs of the Rocky Mountains. But while the English
has thus borrowed largely from other tongues, and the multifarious
etymology of “its Babylonish vocabulary,” as its enemies are
pleased to call it, renders it, of all modern languages, one of
the most difficult to master in all its wealth and power, yet it
makes up in eclecticism, vigor, and abundance far more than it
loses in apparent originality. Mosaic-like and heterogeneous as are
its materials, it is yet no mingle-mangle or patchwork, but is as
individual as the French or the German. Though the rough materials
are gathered from a hundred sources, yet such is its digestive and
assimilative energy that the most discordant aliments, passing
through its anaconda-like stomach, are as speedily identified with
its own independent existence as the beefsteak which yesterday
gave roundness to the hinder symmetry of a prize ox becomes
to-morrow part and parcel of the proper substance,--the breast,
leg, or arm,--of an Illinois farmer.
In fact the very caprices and irregularities of our idiom,
orthography, and pronunciation, which make foreigners “stare and
gasp,” and are ridiculed by our own philological ultraists, are the
strongest proofs of the nobleness and perfection of our language.
It is the very extent to which these caprices, peculiar idioms,
and exceptions prevail in any tongue, that forms the true scale
of its worth and beauty; and hence we find them more numerous
in Greek than in Latin,--in French or Italian than in Irish or
Indian. There is less symmetry in the rugged, gnarled oak, with
the grotesque contortions of its branches, which has defied the
storms of a thousand years, than in the smoothly clipped Dutch yew
tree; but it is from the former that we hew out the knees of mighty
line-of-battle ships, while a vessel built of the latter would go
to pieces in the first storm. It was our own English that sustained
him who soared “above all Greek, above all Roman fame”; and the
same “well of English undefiled” did not fail the myriad-minded
dramatist, when
“Each scene of many colored life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new.”
Nor have even these great writers, marvellous and varied as is
their excellence, fathomed the powers of the language for grand
and harmonious expression, or used them to the full. It has
“combinations of sound grander than ever rolled through the mind
of Milton; more awful than the mad gasps of Lear; sweeter than the
sighs of Desdemona; more stirring than the speech of Antony; sadder
than the plaints of Hamlet; merrier than the mocks of Falstaff.”
To those, therefore, who complain of the poverty or harshness of
our tongue, we may say, in the words of George Herbert:
“Let foreign nations of their language boast,
What fine variety each tongue affords;
I like our language, as our men and coast:--
_Who cannot dress it well, want_ WIT, _not_ WORDS.”