“Then called by thee, the monster Titan came,
Whom gods Briar´eus, men Ægeon name.”
Shakespeare employs the name as a dissyllable:
“He is a gouty Briareus; many hands,
And of no use.”—_Troilus and Cressida._
Lady M. Wortley Montagu following Spenser’s “Then came hot Ju´ly boiling
like to fire,” accented July on the first syllable:
“The day when hungry friar wishes
He might eat other food than fishes,
Or to explain the date more fully,
The twenty-second instant July.”
_Bryant’s Index Expurgatorious_
During William C. Bryant’s editorial management of the New York _Evening
Post_, he attached to the walls of the rooms of the sub-editors and
reporters a list of prohibited words. It would be a substantial benefit
to “English undefiled” if a similar list were adopted and insisted upon
by every American newspaper. For our newspapers have a manifest
influence in determining the growth and character of our language, and
it behooves them to do their best to preserve its purity. But this is a
far less easy thing to do than most persons would imagine; and, if
forbidden words do occasionally slip into the columns of the newspaper,
it must be a blemish such as, in some shape and degree, is supposed to
be inseparable from all human productions. Most of the writing on the
modern daily newspaper is necessarily the work of that enterprising,
wide-a-wake class known as reporters. They “shoot on the wing,” look
more to present effect than to classic correctness in their writing, and
are, none of them, purists in literary style.
The English language has never had any well defined and universally
recognized laws of its own. In its literature it began with the time
when every writer was a law unto himself, and it has never fully
outgrown that condition. Nor can all the Trenches and Goulds and Grant
Whites in existence mould it into any arbitrarily correct shape. It is a
mixture of various tongues, and is drawing to itself, every year, a
considerable number of additional words from the most diverse and
curious sources, and especially from the other leading languages. It may
in time—who knows?—become the universal language, the one which is to be
the lingual Moses to lead the world out of the wilderness of the curse
of Babel, and give to all people a common vehicle of communication. In
this view of the case, the liberties taken by the ingenious and
inventive newspaper reporter may be regarded as important and useful.
The dictionaries wait upon the newspapers, and slowly accept and take to
themselves, as English words, the intruders which a year or two before
looked so strange in the newspapers, but which custom has rendered not
only familiar, but seemingly necessary.
Here is Mr. Bryant’s list of forbidden words:
Aspirant.
Authoress.
“Being” done, built, etc.
Bogus.
Bagging, for “capturing.”
Balance, for “remainder.”
Banquet, for “dinner.”
Collided.
Commenced, for “begun.”
Couple, for “two.”
Debut.
Donate and donation.
Employee.
“Esq.”
Indorse, for “approve.”
Gents, for “gentlemen.”
“Hon.”
Inaugurated, for “begun.”
Initiated, for “begun.”
In our midst.
Ignore.
Jeopardize.
Juvenile, for “boy.”
Jubilant, for “rejoicing.”
Lady, for “wife.”
Lengthy.
Loafer.
Loan or loaned, for “lend” or “lent.”
Located.
Measurable, for “in a measure.”
Ovation.
Obituary, for “death.”
Parties, for “persons.”
Posted for “informed.”
Poetess.
Portion, for “part.”
Predicate.
Progressing.
Pants, for “pantaloons.”
Quite, prefixed to “good,” “large,” etc.
Raid, for “attack.”
Realized, for “obtained.”
Reliable for “trustworthy.”
Repudiate, for “reject” or “disown.”
Retire, for “withdraw.”
Rôle, for “part.”
Rowdies.
Roughs.
A success, for “successful.”
States, for “says.”
Taboo.
Transpire, for “occur.”
To progress.
Tapis.
Talented.
The deceased.
Vicinity, for “neighborhood.”
Wall Street slang generally: “Bulls, bears, long, short, flat, corner,
tight, etc.”
To this list might be added _without_ as the synonym of unless,—_e. g._,
“I would not proceed without he agreed;” _directly_ for as soon as,—_e.
g._, “I gave him the letter directly I saw him;” _apprehend_ for think,
fancy, believe, imagine; _from hence_, _from thence_, _from whence_;
_mutual_ applied to persons (“our mutual friend”) instead of limiting it
to actions, sentiments, affections; _try and_ for try to; _but
that_,—_e. g._, “he never doubts but that he knows their intentions;”
_widow-lady_ or _widow-woman_, though those who use these expressions
never say widower-gentleman or widower-man. To the phrase in Mr.
Bryant’s list _in our midst_, which is no better than _in our middle_,
and very different from “in the midst of,” etc., may be added the never
ending, still beginning _in this connection_, instead of “in connection
with the foregoing,” etc. Even more careless and more thoughtless on the
part of our best writers and speakers—not the vulgarians who use _like_
in place of as—is the constant misuse of the phrase _of all others_. As
Mr. Gould remarks, “How one thing can be _of other_ things, is the
question. One thing can be _above_ other things, but it cannot be _of_
them. A thing can be _of all things, the most_; or of all things, the
richest, etc., or, of a class, the best; but the introduction of
‘others’ into the phrases in question excludes from the ‘class’ or from
the ‘all,’ the very thing named.” A common blunder is the use of the
past for the present tense when the writer or speaker wishes to express
an _existing_ fact,—_e. g._, “the truth _was_ that A struck the first
blow,” instead of the truth _is_. What is the more remarkable is the use
of a verb in the past tense with an infinitive in the past tense, which
is frequently met with in English literature. For example, Dr. Johnson
says, “Had this been the fate of Tasso, he _would have been able to have
celebrated_ the condescension of your majesty in noble language.” Alison
says, “It was expected that his first act _would have been to have sent_
for Lords Grey and Grenville.” How much more simple as well as more
correct to say _to celebrate_ and _to send_.
_Stilted Scientific Phraseology_
The “big words” of science are often necessary and useful, expressing
what cannot be made clear to the student in any other way, but they are
sometimes mere verbiage and mean no more than their common equivalents.
It goes without saying that in this latter case the true scholar uses
the short, plain word. He who writes in six-syllabled words for the mere
pleasure of astounding the multitude is not apt to have very much solid
thought to express. Some good advice on this subject, which is worthy
the serious attention of other scientific men than students of medicine,
was given to the students of the Chicago Medical College by Dr. Edmund
Andrews, in an introductory address, from which the following paragraphs
are taken:
It is amusing and yet vexatious to see a worthy medical gentleman, whose
ordinary conversation is in a simple and good style, suddenly swell up
when he writes a medical article. He changes his whole dialect and fills
his pages with a jangle of harsh technical terms, not one-third of which
are necessary to express his meaning. He tries to be solemn and
imposing. For instance, a physician recently devised a new instrument,
and wrote it up for a medical journal under the title, “A New Apparatus
for the Armamentarium of the Clinician,” by which heading he doubtless
hopes to make the fame of his invention “go thundering down the ages,”
as Guiteau said.
Another writer wanted to say that cancer is an unnatural growth of
epithelium. He took a big breath and spouted the following: “Carcinoma
arises from any subepithelial proliferation by which epithelial cells
are isolated and made to grow abnormally.” Now, then, you know all about
cancer.
A writer on insanity illuminates the subject as follows: “The prodromic
delirium is a quasi-paranoiac psychosis in a degenerate subject. A
psychosis of exhaustion being practically a condition of syncope.”
The following is an effort to say that certain microbes produce the
poison of erysipelas: “The streptococcus erysipelatosus proliferating in
the interspaces of the connective tissue is the etiologic factor in the
secretion of the erysipelatous toxins.”
A large cancer of the liver was found at a postmortem examination and
reported about as follows: “A colossal carcinomatous degeneration of the
hepatic mechanism.”
Still, the man of big swelling words is not always up in the clouds. If
called to a case of accident, he examines the injury, and may inform the
family in quite a simple and dignified manner that their father was
thrown sidewise from his carriage breaking his leg and putting his ankle
out of joint, but if he writes out the case for his medical journal, he
gets up straightway on his stilts and says, “The patient was projected
transversely from his vehicle, fracturing the tibia and fibula and
luxating the tibio-tarsal articulation.”
Your man of solemn speech is peculiar. He does not keep a set of
instruments—not he—he has an armamentarium. His catheters never have a
hole or an eye in them, but always a fenestrum. In gunshot injuries a
bullet never makes a hole in his patient, but only a perforation. He
does not disinfect his armamentarium by boiling, but by submerging it in
water elevated to the temperature of ebullition. He never distinguishes
one disease from another, but always differentiates or diagnosticates
it. His patient’s mouth is an oral cavity. His jaw is a maxilla. His
brain is a cerebrum, his hip-joint is a coxo-femoral articulation. If
his eyelids are adherent, it is a case of ankylosymblepharon. If he
discovers wrinkles on the skin, they are corrugations or else
rugosities. He never sees any bleeding, but only hemorrhage or
sanguineous effusion. He does not examine a limb by touch or by
handling—he palpates or manipulates it. If he finds it hopelessly
diseased he does not cut it off—that is undignified. He gets out his
armamentarium and amputates it.
_Metaphorical Conceits_
A Chicago critic addicted to figurative fancies was very much affected
by the play of _Arrah na Pogue_. “There are passages in it,” he writes,
“which thunder at the heart like the booming of the Atlantic tide, and
drown it in floods of bitter tears.” This idea of being drowned in
floods of tears, by the way, has been always very popular with
struggling muses who long to launch into bolder strains. Lee describes a
young lady with an exuberance of tears:
“I found her on the floor
In all the storm of grief, yet beautiful;
Pouring forth tears at such a lavish rate
That, were the world on fire, they might have drowned
The wrath of heaven, and quenched the mighty ruin.”
Cowley makes a sighing lover sigh in an excessively gusty manner:
“By every wind that comes this way,
Send me at least a sigh or two,
Such and so many I’ll repay
As shall themselves make winds to get to you.”
But Shakespeare, who always surpasses, unites the tears and sighs, and
makes a perfect rain tempest:
“Aumerle, thou weepest, my tender-hearted cousin!
We’ll make foul-weather with despised tears;
Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn,
And make a dearth in this revolting land.”
The play mentioned by a Chicago critic could hardly have been as
affecting as the oratory of a preacher who is described by an admiring
editor. “I have,” he says, “repeatedly heard the most famous men in
America, but there are times when the flame of his pathos licks the
everlasting hills with a roar that moves your soul to depths fathomed by
few other men.” Evidently this preacher should go to Congress; he is
imbued with the spirit of oratory, and would be an antidote, on the
principle of “_similia similibus curantur_,” for a politician who, in
announcing himself a candidate for Congress, remarked in his card: “I am
an orator, and yearn to roar in the capitol, and clap my wings like
Shakespeare’s rooster, or the eagle on his celestial cliff, gazing at
the prey my arrows did slay.”
An excellent specimen of hyperbole is mentioned by a Houston (Maine)
paper, which says, on the question of a new town-hall, that one
gentleman urged the measure in order, as he expressed it, “that the
young men of our town may have a suitable place to assemble, and be so
imbued with the spirit of liberty and patriotism that every hair of
their head will be a liberty-pole with the star-spangled banner floating
from it.”
A Leavenworth paper thus confusedly mixed things animate and inanimate:
“The fall of corruption has been dispelled, and the wheels of the State
government will no longer be trammelled by sharks that have beset the
public prosperity like locusts.” And a Nebraska paper, in a fervent
article upon the report of a legislative committee, said, “The apple of
discord is now fairly in our midst, and if not nipped in the bud it will
burst forth in a conflagration which will deluge society in an
earthquake of bloody apprehension.”
In the words of an English poet is this rather too exaggerated
hyperbole:
“Those overwhelming armies whose command
Said to one empire, ‘Fall,’ another, ‘Stand,’
Whose rear lay wrapped in night while breaking dawn
Roused the broad front and called the battle on.”
But these metaphorical rhapsodies were eclipsed soon after our Civil War
by _The Crescent Monthly_ in an article on Lee’s surrender. The writer
thus laughs to scorn all competitors:
“The supreme hour has now come when, from across Fame’s burning
ecliptic, where it had traced in flaming sheen its luminous path of
glory, the proud Aldebaran of Southern hope, in all the splendors of its
express, Hyades brightness, should sink to rest behind lurid war-clouds,
in the fateful western heaven, there to bring out on death’s dark canopy
the immortal lights of immortal deeds, and spirits great and glorious
shining forever down upon a cause in darkness, like the glittering hosts
upon a world in night.”
This gushing sentence comes from a novel called “Heart or Head:”
“And she, leaning on his strong mind, and giving up her whole soul to
him, was so happy in this spoiling of herself, so glad to be thus
robbed, offering him the rich milk of love in a full udder of trust, and
lowing for him to come and take it!”
A grotesque simile is sometimes very expressive. We may mention those of
Daniel Webster, who likened the word “would,” in Rufus Choate’s
handwriting, to a small gridiron struck by lightning; of a sailor, who
likened a gentleman whose face was covered with whiskers up to his very
eyes, to a rat peeping out of a bunch of oakum; of a Western reporter
who, in a weather item on a cold day, said that the sun’s rays in the
effort to thaw the ice were as futile as the dull reflex of a painted
yellow dog; and of a conductor who, in a discussion as to speed, said
that the last time he ran his engine from Syracuse the telegraph poles
on the side looked like a fine-tooth comb.
Similes of a like character are often heard among the common people, and
are supposed to be the peculiar property of Western orators. Instances:
As sharp as the little end of nothing; big as all out-doors; it strikes
me like a thousand of bricks; slick as grease, or as greased lightning;
melancholy as a Quaker meeting by moonlight; flat as a flounder; quick
as a wink; not enough to make gruel for a sick grasshopper; not clothes
enough to wad a gun; as limp and limber as an india-rubber stove-pipe;
uneasy as a cat in a strange garret; not strong enough to haul a broiled
codfish off a gridiron; after you like a rat-terrier after a chipmunk
squirrel; useless as whistling psalms to a dead horse; no more than a
grasshopper wants knee-buckles; no more than a frog wants an apron;
don’t make the difference of the shake of a frog’s tail; soul bobbing up
and down in the bosom like a crazy porpoise in a pond of red-hot grease;
enthusiasm boils over like a bottle of ginger-pop; as impossible to
penetrate his head as to bore through Mont Blanc with a boiled carrot;
as impossible as to ladle the ocean dry with a clam-shell, or suck the
Gulf of Mexico through a goose-quill; or to stuff butter in a wild-cat
with a hot awl; or for a shad to swim up a shad-pole with a fresh
mackerel under each arm; or for a cat to run up a stove-pipe with a
teasel tied to his tail; or for a man to lift himself over a fence by
the strap of his boots. A simile resembling these was used by Lady
Montague when, getting impatient in a discussion with Fox, she told him
she did not care three skips of a louse for him, to which he replied in
a few minutes with the following:
“Lady Montague told me, and in her own house,
‘I do not care for you three skips of a louse.’
I forgive her, for women, however well-bred,
Will still talk of that which runs most in their head.”
There is another class of similes scarcely as pertinent, as, for
instance: straight as a ram’s horn; it will melt in your mouth like a
red-hot brickbat; talk to him like a Dutch uncle; smiling as a basket of
chips; odd as Dick’s hatband; happy as a clam at high water; quicker
than you can say Jack Robinson; like all possessed; like fury; like
blazes; like all natur’; like all sixty; as quick as anything; mad as
hops; mad as Halifax; sleep like a top; run like thunder; deader than a
door-nail. Thunder is a very accommodating word. A person may be told to
go to thunder, or may be thundering proud, or thundering sensible, or
thundering good-looking, or thundering smart, or thundering mean, or
thundering anything; and anything may be likened to thunder. The epitaph
quoted from a tombstone in Vermont over a man’s two wives was quite
proper, but was rendered ludicrous by this common use of the word:
“This double call is loud to all,
Let none surprise or wonder;
But to the youth it speaks a truth
In accents loud as thunder.”
“Dead as a door-nail” would not seem to be very expressive, and yet it
has long been used. In “Henry IV.” we read the following dialogue:
“_Falstaff._—What! is the old king dead?
_Pistol._—As nail in door.”
Dickens, in his “Christmas Carol,” wonders why Scrooge should be dead as
a door-nail rather than any other kind of nail. Probably the explanation
is in the fact that proverbs are often pointed by alliteration, and that
door-nail gratifies this conceit while any other nail would not.
_Guess_
The word guess, popularly supposed to be a Yankeeism, is as old as the
English language, not only in its true and specified sense, but in use
for “think” or “believe.” Wycliffe, in his translation of the Bible,
says, “To whom shall I gesse this generacion lyk?” Chaucer frequently
uses it in the modern sense, as, for example, in describing Emelie in
“The Knighte’s Tale:”
“Hire yelwe here was broided in a tresse
Behind hire back, a yerde long, I gesse.”
Spenser uses it in a similar way in the “Fairie Queene.” Bishop Jewell,
Bishop Hale, John Locke, and other sixteenth century writers, left well
known passages in which it occurs. Shakespeare, as every student of the
great dramatist knows, used it repeatedly. Examples of such use may also
be found in some modern English novels.
_A Message from England_
Beyond the vague Atlantic deep,
Far as the farthest prairies sweep,
Where mountain wastes the sense appal,
Where burns the radiant Western Fall,
One duty lies on old and young—
With filial piety to guard,
As on its greenest native sward,
The glory of the English tongue!
That ample speech, that subtle speech,
Apt for the needs of all and each,
Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend,
Wherever human feelings tend,
Preserve its force, expand its powers,
And through the maze of civil life,
In letters, commerce, e’en in strife,
Remember, it is yours and ours!
—RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES.