sentences might with difficulty have succeeded in saying. Thus
'isothermal' is quite a modern invention; but how much is summed up by
the word; what a long story is saved, as often as we speak of
'isothermal' lines. Physiologists have given the name of 'atavism' to
the emerging again of a face in a family after its disappearance during
two or three generations. What would have else needed a sentence is
here accomplished by a word. Lord Bacon somewhere describes a certain
candidate for the Chair of St. Peter as being 'papable.' There met,
that is, in him all the conditions, and they were many, which would
admit the choice of the Conclave falling upon him. When Bacon wrote,
one to be 'papable' must have been born in lawful wedlock; must have no
children nor grandchildren living; must not have a kinsman already in
the Conclave; must be already a Cardinal; all which facts this single
word sums up. When Aristotle, in the opening sentences of his
_Rhetoric_, declares that rhetoric and logic are antistrophic,' what a
wonderful insight into both, and above all into their relations to one
another, does the word impart to those who have any such special
training as enables them to take in all which hereby he intends. Or
take a word so familiar as 'circle,' and imagine how it would fare with
us, if, as often as in some long and difficult mathematical problem we
needed to refer to this figure, we were obliged to introduce its entire
definition, no single word representing it; and not this only, but the
definition of each term employed in the definition;--how well nigh
impossible it would prove to carry the whole process in the mind, or to
take oversight of all its steps. Imagine a few more words struck out of
the vocabulary of the mathematician, and if all activity and advance in
his proper domain was not altogether arrested, yet would it be as
effectually restrained and hampered as commercial intercourse would be,
if in all its transactions iron or copper were the sole medium of
exchange. Wherever any science is progressive, there will be progress
in its nomenclature as well. Words will keep pace with things, and with
more or less felicity resuming in themselves the labours of the past,
will at once assist and abridge the labours of the future; like tools
which, themselves the result of the finest mechanical skill, do at the
same time render other and further triumphs of art possible, oftentimes
such as would prove quite unattainable without them. [Footnote: See
Mill, _System of Logic_, iv. 6, 3.]
It is not merely the widening of men's intellectual horizon, which,
bringing new thoughts within the range of their vision, compels the
origination of corresponding words; but as often as regions of this
outward world hitherto closed are laid open, the novel objects of
interest which these contain will demand to find their names, and not
merely to be catalogued in the nomenclature of science, but, so far as
they present themselves to the popular eye, will require to be
popularly named. When a new thing, a plant, or fruit, or animal, or
whatever else it may be, is imported from some foreign land, or so
comes within the sphere of knowledge that it needs to be thus named,
there are various ways by which this may be done. The first and
commonest way is to import the name and the thing together,
incorporating the former, unchanged, or with slight modification, into
the language. Thus we did with the potato, which is only another form
of 'batata,' in which shape the original Indian word appears in our
earlier voyagers. But this is not the only way of naming; and the
example on which I have just lighted affords good illustration of
various other methods which may be adopted. Thus a name belonging to
something else, which the new object nearly resembles, may be
transferred to it, and the confusion arising from calling different
things by the same name disregarded. It was thus in German, 'kartoffel'
being only a corruption, which found place in the last century, of
'tartuffel' from the Italian 'tartiiffolo'(Florio), properly the name
of the truffle; but which not the less was transferred to the potato,
on the ground of the many resemblances between them. [Footnote: [See
Kluge, _Etym. Dict_. (s. v. _Kartoffel_).]] Or again this same transfer
may take place, but with some qualifying or distinguishing addition.
Thus in Italy also men called the potato 'tartufo,' but added 'bianco,'
the white truffle; a name now giving way to 'patata.' Thus was it, too,
with the French; who called it apple, but 'apple of the earth'; even as
in many of the provincial dialects of Germany it bears the name of
'erdapfel' or earth-apple to this day.
It will sometimes happen that a language, having thus to provide a new
name for a new thing, will seem for a season not to have made up its
mind by which of these methods it shall do it. Two names will exist
side by side, and only after a time will one gain the upper hand of the
other. Thus when the pineapple was introduced into England, it brought
with it the name of 'ananas' erroneously 'anana' under which last form
it is celebrated by Thomson in his _Seasons_. [Footnote: [The word
ananas is from a native Peruvian name _nanas_. The pineapple was first
seen by Europeans in Peru; see the _New English Dictionary_ (s. v.).]]
This name has been nearly or quite superseded by 'pineapple' manifestly
suggested by the likeness of the new fruit to the cone of the pine. It
is not a very happy formation; for it is not _likeness_, but _identity_,
which 'pineapple' suggests, and it gives some excuse to an error, which
up to a very late day ran through all German-English and French-English
dictionaries; I know not whether even now it has disappeared. In all of
these 'pineapple' is rendered as though it signified not the anana, but
this cone of the pine; and not very long ago, the _Journal des Débats_
made some uncomplimentary observations on the voracity of the English,
who could wind up a Lord Mayor's banquet with fir-cones for dessert.
Sometimes the name adopted will be one drawn from an intermediate
language, through which we first became acquainted with the object
requiring to be named. 'Alligator' is an example of this. When that
ugly crocodile of the New World was first seen by the Spanish
discoverers, they called it, with a true insight into its species, 'el
lagarto,' _the_ lizard, as being the largest of that lizard species to
which it belonged, or sometimes 'el lagarto de las Indias,' the Indian
lizard. In Sir Walter Raleigh's _Discovery of Guiana_ the word still
retains its Spanish form. Sailing up the Orinoco, 'we saw in it,' he
says, 'divers sorts of strange fishes of marvellous bigness, but for
_lagartos_ it exceeded; for there were thousands of these ugly serpents,
and the people call it, for the abundance of them, the river of
_lagartos_, in their language.' We can explain the shape which with us
the word gradually assumed, by supposing that English sailors who
brought it home, and had continually heard, but may have never seen it
written, blended, as in similar instances has often happened, the
Spanish article 'el' with the name. In Ben Jonson's 'alligarta,' we
note the word in process of transformation. [Footnote: 'Alcoran'
supplies another example of this curious annexation of the article.
Examples of a like absorption or incorporation of it are to be found in
many languages; in our own, when we write 'a newt,' and not an ewt, or
when our fathers wrote 'a nydiot' (Sir T. More), and not an idiot; in
the Italian, which has 'lonza' for onza; but they are still more
numerous in French. Thus 'lierre,' ivy, was written by Ronsard,
'l'hierre,' which is correct, being the Latin 'hedera.' 'Lingot' is our
'ingot,' but with fusion of the article; in 'larigot' and 'loriot' the
word and the article have in the same manner grown together. In old
French it was l'endemain,' or, le jour en demain: 'le lendemain,' as
now written, is a barbarous excess of expression. 'La Pouille,' a name
given to the southern extremity of Italy, and in which we recognize
'Apulia,' is another variety of error, but moving in the same sphere
(Génin, _Récréations Philologiques_, vol. i. pp. 102-105); of the same
variety is 'La Natolie,' which was written 'L'Anatolie' once. An Irish
scholar has observed that in modern Irish 'an' (='the') is frequently
thus absorbed in the names of places, as in 'Nenagh, 'Naul'; while
sometimes an error exactly the reverse of this is committed, and a
letter supposed to be the article, but in fact a part of the word,
dropt: thus 'Oughaval,' instead of 'Noughhaval' or New Habitation. [See
Joyce, _Irish Local Names_.]]
Less honourable causes than some which I have mentioned, give birth to
new words; which will sometimes reflect back a very fearful light on
the moral condition of that epoch in which first they saw the light. Of
the Roman emperor, Tiberius, one of those 'inventors of evil things,'
of whom St. Paul speaks (Rom. i. 30), Tacitus informs us that under his
hateful dominion words, unknown before, emerged in the Latin tongue,
for the setting out of wickednesses, happily also previously unknown,
which he had invented. It was the same frightful time which gave birth
to 'delator,' alike to the thing and to the word.
The atrocious attempt of Lewis XIV. to convert the Protestants in his
dominions to the Roman Catholic faith by quartering dragoons upon them,
with license to misuse to the uttermost those who refused to conform,
this 'booted mission' (mission bottée), as it was facetiously called at
the time, has bequeathed 'dragonnade' to the French language. 'Refugee'
had at the same time its rise, and owed it to the same event. They were
called 'réfugiés' or 'refugees' who took refuge in some land less
inhospitable than their own, so as to escape the tender mercies of
these missionaries. 'Convertisseur' belongs to the same period. The
spiritual factor was so named who undertook to convert the Protestants
on a large scale, receiving so much a head for the converts whom he
made.
Our present use of 'roué' throws light on another curious and shameful
page of French history. The 'roué,' by which word now is meant a man of
profligate character and conduct, is properly and primarily one broken
on the wheel. Its present and secondary meaning it derived from that
Duke of Orleans who was Regent of France after the death of Lewis XIV.
It was his miserable ambition to gather round him companions worse, if
possible, and wickeder than himself. These, as the Duke of St. Simon
assures us, he was wont to call his 'roués'; every one of them
abundantly deserving to be broken on the wheel,--which was the
punishment then reserved in France for the worst malefactors.
[Footnote: The 'roués' themselves declared that the word expressed
rather their readiness to give any proof of their affection, even to
the being broken upon the wheel, to their protector and friend.] When
we have learned the pedigree of the word, the man and the age rise up
before us, glorying in their shame, and not caring to pay to virtue
even that hypocritical homage which vice finds it sometimes convenient
to render.
The great French Revolution made, as might be expected, characteristic
contributions to the French language. It gives us some insight into its
ugliest side to know that, among other words, it produced the
following: 'guillotine,' 'incivisme,' 'lanterner,' 'noyade,'
'sansculotte,' 'terrorisme.' Still later, the French conquests in North
Africa, and the pitiless severities with which every attempt at
resistance on the part of the free tribes of the interior was put down
and punished, have left their mark on it as well; 'razzia' which is
properly an Arabic word, having been added to it, to express the swift
and sudden sweeping away of a tribe, with its herds, its crops, and all
that belongs to it. The Communist insurrection of 1871 bequeathed one
contribution almost as hideous as itself, namely 'pétroleuse,' to the
language. It is quite recently that we have made any acquaintance with
'recidivist'--one, that is, who falls back once more on criminal
courses.
But it would ill become us to look only abroad for examples in this
kind, when perhaps an equal abundance might be found much nearer home.
Words of our own keep record of passages in our history in which we
have little reason to glory. Thus 'mob' and 'sham' had their birth in
that most disgraceful period of English history, the interval between
the Restoration and the Revolution. 'I may note,' says one writing
towards the end of the reign of Charles II., 'that the rabble first
changed their title, and were called "the mob" in the assemblies of
this [The Green Ribbon] Club. It was their beast of burden, and called
first "mobile vulgus," but fell naturally into the contraction of one
syllable, and ever since is become proper English.' [Footnote: North,
_Examen_, p. 574; for the origin of 'sham' see p. 231. Compare Swift in
_The Tatler_, No. ccxxx. 'I have done the utmost,' he there says, 'for
some years past to stop the progress of "mob" and "banter"; but have
been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised
to assist me.'] At a much later date a writer in _The Spectator_ speaks
of 'mob' as still only struggling into existence. 'I dare not answer,'
he says, 'that mob, rap, pos, incog., and the like, will not in time be
looked at as part of our tongue.' In regard of 'mob,' the mobile
multitude, swayed hither and thither by each gust of passion or caprice,
this, which _The Spectator_ hardly expected, while he confessed it
possible, has actually come to pass. 'It is one of the many words
formerly slang, which are now used by our best writers, and received,
like pardoned outlaws, into the body of respectable citizens.' Again,
though the murdering of poor helpless lodgers, afterwards to sell their
bodies for dissection, can only be regarded as the monstrous wickedness
of one or two, yet the verb 'to burke,' drawn from the name of a wretch
who long pursued this hideous traffic, will be evidence in all after
times, unless indeed its origin should be forgotten, to how strange a
crime this age of ours could give birth. Nor less must it be
acknowledged that 'to ratten' is no pleasant acquisition which the
language within the last few years has made; and as little 'to
boycott,' which is of still later birth. [Footnote: This word has found
its way into most European languages, see the New English Dictionary (s.
v.)]
We must not count as new words properly so called, although they may
delay us for a minute, those comic words, most often comic combinations
formed at will, wherein, as plays and displays of power, writers
ancient and modern have delighted. These for the most part are meant to
do service for the moment, and, this done, to pass into oblivion; the
inventors of them themselves having no intention of fastening them
permanently on the language. Thus Aristophanes coined [Greek:
mellonikiao], to loiter like Nicias, with allusion to the delays by
whose aid this prudent commander sought to put off the disastrous
Sicilian expedition, with other words not a few, familiar to every
scholar. The humour will sometimes consist in their enormous
length, [Footnote: As in the [Greek: amphiptolemopedesistratos] of
Eupolis; the [Greek: spermagoraiolekitholachanopolis] of Aristophanes.
There are others a good deal longer than these.] sometimes in their
mingled observance and transgression of the laws of the language, as in
the [Greek: danaotatos], in the [Greek: autotatos] of the Greek comic
poet, the 'patruissimus' and 'oculissimus,' comic superlatives of
patruus and oculus, 'occisissimus' of occisus; 'dominissimus' of
dominus; 'asinissimo' (Italian) of asino; or in superlative piled on
superlative, as in the 'minimissimus' and 'pessimissimus' of Seneca,
the 'ottimissimo' of the modern Italian; so too in the 'dosones,'
'dabones,' which in Greek and in medieval Latin were names given to
those who were ever promising, ever saying 'I will give,' but never
crowning promise with performance. Plautus, with his exuberant wit, and
exulting in his mastery of the Latin language, is rich in these,
'fustitudinus,' 'ferricrepinus' and the like; will put together four or
five lines consisting wholly of comic combinations thrown off for the
occasion. [Footnote: _Persa_, iv. 6, 20-23.] Of the same character is
Chaucer's 'octogamy,' or eighth marriage; Butler's 'cynarctomachy,' or
battle of a dog and bear; Southey's 'matriarch,' for by this name he
calls the wife of the Patriarch Job; but Southey's fun in this line of
things is commonly poor enough; his want of finer scholarship making
itself felt here. What humour for example can any one find in
'philofelist' or lover of cats? Fuller, when he used 'to avunculize,'
meaning to tread in the footsteps of one's uncle, scarcely proposed it
as a lasting addition to the language; as little did Pope intend more
than a very brief existence for 'vaticide,' or Cowper for 'extra-
foraneous,' or Carlyle for 'gigmanity,' for 'tolpatchery,' or the like.
Such are some of the sources of increase in the wealth of a language;
some of the quarters from which its vocabulary is augmented. There have
been, from time to time, those who have so little understood what a
language is, and what are the laws which it obeys, that they have
sought by arbitrary decrees of their own to arrest its growth, have
pronounced that it has reached the limits of its growth, and must not
henceforward presume to develop itself further. Even Bentley with all
his vigorous insight into things is here at fault. 'It were no
difficult contrivance,' he says, 'if the public had any regard to it,
to make the English tongue immutable, unless hereafter some foreign
nation shall invade and overrun us.' [Footnote: Works, vol. II. p. 13.]
But a language has a life, as truly as a man, or as a tree. As a man,
it must grow to its full stature; unless indeed its life is prematurely
abridged by violence from without; even as it is also submitted to his
conditions of decay. As a forest tree, it will defy any feeble bands
which should attempt to control its expansion, so long as the principle
of growth is in it; as a tree too it will continually, while it casts
off some leaves, be putting forth others. And thus all such attempts to
arrest have utterly failed, even when made under conditions the most
favourable for success. The French Academy, numbering all or nearly all
the most distinguished writers of France, once sought to exercise such
a domination over their own language, and might have hoped to succeed,
if success had been possible for any. But the language heeded their
decrees as little as the advancing tide heeded those of Canute. Could
they hope to keep out of men's speech, or even out of their books,
however they excluded from their own _Dictionary_, such words as
'blague,' 'blaguer,' 'blagueur,' because, being born of the people,
they had the people's mark upon them? After fruitless resistance for a
time, they have in cases innumerable been compelled to give way--though
in favour of the words just cited they have not yielded yet--and in
each successive edition of their _Dictionary_ have thrown open its
doors to words which had established themselves in the language, and
would hold their ground there, altogether indifferent whether they
received the Academy's seal of allowance or not. [Footnote: Nisard
(_Curiosites de l'Etym. Franc._ p. 195) has an article on these words,
where with the epigrammatic neatness which distinguishes French prose,
he says, Je regrette que l'Académie repousse de son Dictionnaire les
mots _blague, blagueur_, laissant gronder à sa porte ces fils effrontés
du peuple, qui finiront par l'enfoncer. On this futility of struggling
against popular usage in language Montaigne has said, 'They that will
fight custom with grammar are fools'; and, we may add, not less fools,
as engaged in as hopeless a conflict, they that will fight it with
dictionary.]
Littré, the French scholar who single-handed has given to the world a
far better Dictionary than that on which the Academy had bestowed the
collective labour of more than two hundred years, shows a much juster
estimate of the actual facts of language. If ever there was a word born
in the streets, and bearing about it tokens of the place of its birth,
it is 'gamin'; moreover it cannot be traced farther back than the year
1835; when first it appeared in a book, though it may have lived some
while before on the lips of the people. All this did not hinder his
finding room for it in the pages of his _Dictionary_. He did the same
for 'flâneur,' and for 'rococo,' and for many more, bearing similar
marks of a popular origin. [Footnote: A work by Darmesteter, _De la
Création actuelle de Mots nouveaux dans la Langue Française_, Paris,
1877, is well worth consulting here.] And with good right; for though
fashions may descend from the upper classes to the lower, words, such I
mean as constitute real additions to the wealth of a language, ascend
from the lower to the higher; and of these not a few, let fastidious
scholars oppose or ignore them for a while as they may, will assert a
place for themselves therein, from which they will not be driven by the
protests of all the scholars and all the academicians in the world. The
world is ever moving, and language has no choice but to move with it.
[Footnote: One has well said, 'The subject of language, the instrument,
but also the restraint, of thought, is endless. The history of language,
the mouth speaking from the fulness of the heart, is the history of
human action, faith, art, policy, government, virtue, and crime. When
society progresses, the language of the people necessarily runs even
with the line of society. You cannot unite past and present, still less
can you bring back the past; moreover, the law of progress is the law
of storms, it is impossible to inscribe an immutable statute of
language on the periphery of a vortex, whirling as it advances. Every
political development induces a concurrent alteration or expansion in
conversation and composition. New principles are generated, new
authorities introduced; new terms for the purpose of explaining or
concealing the conduct of public men must be created: new
responsibilities arise. The evolution of new ideas renders the change
as easy as it is irresistible, being a natural change indeed, like our
own voice under varying emotions or in different periods of life: the
boy cannot speak like the baby, nor the man like the boy, the wooer
speaks otherwise than the husband, and every alteration in
circumstances, fortune or misfortune, health or sickness, prosperity or
adversity, produces some corresponding change of speech or inflection
of tone.']
Those who make attempts to close the door against all new comers are
strangely forgetful of the steps whereby that vocabulary of the
language, with which they are so entirely satisfied that they resent
every endeavour to enlarge it, had itself been gotten together--namely
by that very process which they are now seeking by an arbitrary decree
to arrest. We so take for granted that words with which we have been
always familiar, whose right to a place in the language no one dreams
now of challenging or disputing, have always formed part of it, that it
is oftentimes a surprise to discover of how very late introduction many
of these actually are; what an amount, it may be, of remonstrance and
resistance some of them encountered at the first. To take two or three
Latin examples: Cicero, in employing 'favor,' a word soon after used by
everybody, does it with an apology, evidently feels that he is
introducing a questionable novelty, being probably first applied to
applause in the theatre; 'urbanus,' too, in our sense of urbane, had in
his time only just come up; 'obsequium' he believes Terence to have
been the first to employ. [Footnote: On the new words in classical
Latin, see Quintilian, Inst. viii. 3. 30-37.] 'Soliloquium' seems to us
so natural, indeed so necessary, a word, this 'soliloquy,' or talking
of a man with himself alone, something which would so inevitably demand
and obtain its adequate expression, that we learn with surprise that no
one spoke of a 'soliloquy' before Augustine; the word having been
coined, as he distinctly informs us, by himself. [Footnote: Solil. 2.
7.]