On the Study of Words by Richard Chenevix Trench (great book club books .TXT) 📖

It is very noticeable, and many have noticed, that the Greek word signifying wickedness (ponaeria) comes of another signifying labour (ponos). How well does this agree with those passages in Scripture which describe sinners as 'wearying themselves to commit iniquity,' as 'labouring in the very fire'; 'the martyrs of the devil,' as South calls them, being at more pains to go to hell than the martyrs of God to go to heaven. 'St. Chrysostom's eloquence,' as Bishop Sanderson has observed, 'enlarges itself and triumphs in this argument more frequently than in almost any other; and he clears it often and beyond all exception, both by Scripture and reason, that the life of a wicked or worldly man is a very drudgery, infinitely more toilsome, vexatious, and unpleasant than a godly life is.' [Footnote: Sermons, London, 1671, vol. ii. p. 244.]

How deep an insight into the failings of the human heart lies at the root of many words; and if only we would attend to them, what valuable warnings many contain against subtle temptations and sins! Thus, all of us have felt the temptation of seeking to please others by an unmanly assenting to their opinion, even when our own independent convictions did not agree with theirs. The existence of such a temptation, and the fact that too many yield to it, are both declared in the Latin for a flatterer—'assentator'—that is, 'an assenter'; one who has not courage to say No, when a Yes is expected from him; and quite independently of the Latin, the German, in its contemptuous and precisely equivalent use of 'Jaherr,' a 'yea-Lord,' warns us in like manner against all such unmanly compliances. Let me note that we also once possessed 'assentation' in the sense of unworthy flattering lip- assent; the last example of it in our dictionaries is from Bishop Hall: 'It is a fearful presage of ruin when the prophets conspire in assentation;' but it lived on to a far later day, being found and exactly in the same sense in Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his son; he there speaks of 'abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation.' [Footnote: August 10, 1749. [In the New English Dictionary a quotation for the word is given as late as 1859. I. Taylor, in his Logic in Theology, p. 265, says: 'A safer anchorage may be found than the shoal of mindless assentation']] The word is well worthy to be revived.

Again, how well it is to have that spirit of depreciation, that eagerness to find spots and stains in the characters of the noblest and the best, who would otherwise oppress and rebuke us with a goodness and a greatness so immensely superior to our own,—met and checked by a word at once so expressive, and so little pleasant to take home to ourselves, as the French 'dénigreur,' a 'blackener.' This also has fallen out of use; which is a pity, seeing that the race which it designates is so far from being extinct. Full too of instruction and warning is our present employment of 'libertine.' A 'libertine,' in earlier use, was a speculative free-thinker in matters of religion and in the theory of morals. But as by a process which is seldom missed free-thinking does and will end in free-acting, he who has cast off one yoke also casting off the other, so a 'libertine' came in two or three generations to signify a profligate, especially in relation to women, a licentious and debauched person. [Footnote: See the author's Select Glossary (s.v.)]

Look a little closely at the word 'passion,' We sometimes regard a 'passionate' man as a man of strong will, and of real, though ungoverned, energy. But 'passion' teaches us quite another lesson; for it, as a very solemn use of it declares, means properly 'suffering'; and a 'passionate' man is not one who is doing something, but one suffering something to be done to him. When then a man or child is 'in a passion,' this is no outcoming in him of a strong will, of a real energy, but the proof rather that, for the time at least, he is altogether wanting in these; he is suffering, not doing; suffering his anger, or whatever evil temper it may be, to lord over him without control. Let no one then think of 'passion' as a sign of strength. One might with as much justice conclude a man strong because he was often well beaten; this would prove that a strong man was putting forth his strength on him, but certainly not that he was himself strong. The same sense of 'passion' and feebleness going together, of the first as the outcome of the second, lies, I may remark by the way, in the twofold use of 'impotens' in the Latin, which meaning first weak, means then violent, and then weak and violent together. For a long time 'impotent' and 'impotence' in English embodied the same twofold meaning.

Or meditate on the use of 'humanitas,' and the use (in Scotland at least) of the 'humanities,' to designate those studies which are esteemed the fittest for training the true humanity in every man. [Footnote: [Compare the use of the term Litterae Humaniores in the University of Oxford to designate the oldest and most characteristic of her examinations or 'Schools.']] We have happily overlived in England the time when it was still in debate among us whether education is a good thing for every living soul or not; the only question which now seriously divides Englishmen being, in what manner that mental and moral training, which is society's debt to each one of its members, may be most effectually imparted to him. Were it not so, were there any still found to affirm that it was good for any man to be left with powers not called out and faculties untrained, we might appeal to this word 'humanitas,' and the use to which the Roman put it, in proof that he at least was not of this mind. By 'humanitas' he intended the fullest and most harmonious development of all the truly human faculties and powers. Then, and then only, man was truly man, when he received this; in so far as he did not receive this, his 'humanity' was maimed and imperfect; he fell short of his ideal, of that which he was created to be.

In our use of 'talents,' as when we say 'a man of talents,' there is a clear recognition of the responsibilities which go along with the possession of intellectual gifts and endowments, whatever these may be. We owe our later use of 'talent' to the parable (Matt. xxv. 14), in which more or fewer of these are committed to the several servants, that they may trade with them in their master's absence, and give account of their employment at his return. Men may choose to forget the ends for which their 'talents' were given them; they may count them merely something which they have gotten; [Footnote: An [Greek: hexis], as the heathen did, not a [Greek: dorema], as the Christian does; see a remarkable passage in Bishop Andrewes' Sermons, vol. iii. p. 384.] they may turn them to selfish ends; they may glorify themselves in them, instead of glorifying the Giver; they may practically deny that they were given at all; yet in this word, till they can rid their vocabulary of it, abides a continual memento that they were so given, or rather lent, and that each man shall have to render an account of their use.

Again, in 'oblige' and 'obligation,' as when we speak of 'being obliged,' or of having 'received an obligation,' a moral truth is asserted—this namely, that having received a benefit or a favour at the hands of another, we are thereby morally bound to show ourselves grateful for the same. We cannot be ungrateful without denying not merely a moral truth, but one incorporated in the very language which we employ. Thus South, in a sermon, Of the odious Sin of Ingratitude, has well asked, 'If the conferring of a kindness did not bind the person upon whom it was conferred to the returns of gratitude, why, in the universal dialect of the world, are kindnesses called obligations?' [Footnote: Sermons, London, 1737, vol. i. p. 407.]

Once more—the habit of calling a woman's chastity her 'virtue' is significant. I will not deny that it may spring in part from a tendency which often meets us in language, to narrow the whole circle of virtues to some one upon which peculiar stress is laid; [Footnote: Thus in Jewish Greek [Greek: eleaemosnuae] stands often for [Greek: dikaosnuae] (Deut. vi. 25; Ps. cii. 6, LXX), or almsgiving for righteousness.] but still, in selecting this peculiar one as the 'virtue' of woman, there speaks out a true sense that this is indeed for her the citadel of the whole moral being, the overthrow of which is the overthrow of all; that it is the keystone of the arch, which being withdrawn, the whole collapses and falls.

Or consider all which is witnessed for us in 'kind.' We speak of a 'kind' person, and we speak of man-'kind,' and perhaps, if we think about the matter at all, fancy that we are using quite different words, or the same words in senses quite unconnected. But they are connected, and by closest bonds; a 'kind' person is one who acknowledges his kinship with other men, and acts upon it; confesses that he owes to them, as of one blood with himself, the debt of love. [Footnote: Thus Hamlet does much more than merely play on words when he calls his father's brother, who had married his mother, 'A little more than kin, and less than kind.' [For the relation between kind (the adj.) and kind ('nature,' the sb.) see Skeat's Dict.]] Beautiful before, how much more beautiful do 'kind' and 'kindness' appear, when we apprehend the root out of which they grow, and the truth which they embody; that they are the acknowledgment in loving deeds of our kinship with our brethren; of the relationship which exists between all the members of the human family, and of the obligations growing out of the same.

But I observed just now that there are also words bearing on them the slime of the serpent's trail; uses, too, of words which imply moral perversity—not upon their parts who employ them now in their acquired senses, but on theirs from whom little by little they received their deflection, and were warped from their original rectitude. A 'prude' is now a woman with an over-done affectation of a modesty which she does not really feel, and betraying the absence of the substance by this over-preciseness and niceness about the shadow. Goodness must have gone strangely out of fashion, the corruption of manners must have been profound, before matters could have come to this point. 'Prude,' a French word, means properly virtuous or prudent. [Footnote: [Compare French prude, on the etymology of which see Schelar's French Dict., ed. 3 (1888)].] But where morals are greatly and generally relaxed, virtue is treated as hypocrisy; and thus, in a dissolute age, and one incredulous of any inward purity, by the 'prude' or virtuous woman is intended a sort of female Tartuffe, affecting a virtue which it is taken for granted none can really possess; and the word abides, a proof of the world's disbelief in the realities of goodness, of its resolution to treat them as hypocrisies and deceits.

Again, why should 'simple' be used slightingly, and 'simpleton' more slightingly still? The 'simple' is one properly of a single fold; [Footnote: [Latin simplicem; for Lat. sim-, sin-= Greek [Greek: ha] in [Greek: ha-pax], see Brugmann, Grundriss, Section 238, Curtius, Greek Etym. No. 599.]] a Nathanael, whom as such Christ honoured to the highest (John i. 47); and, indeed, what honour can be higher than to have nothing double about us, to be without duplicities or folds? Even the world, which despises 'simplicity,' does not profess to admire 'duplicity,' or double-foldedness. But inasmuch as it is felt that a man without these folds will in a world like ours make himself a prey, and as most men, if obliged to choose between deceiving and being deceived, would choose the former, it has come to pass that 'simple' which in a kingdom of righteousness would be a world of highest honour, carries with it in this world of ours something of contempt. [Footnote: 'Schlecht,' which in modern German means bad, good for nothing, once meant good,—good, that is, in the sense of right or straight, but has passed through the same stages to the meaning which it now possesses, 'albern' has done the same (Max Müller, Science of Language, 2nd series, p. 274).] Nor can we help noting another involuntary testimony borne by human language to human sin. I mean this,—that an idiot, or one otherwise deficient in intellect, is called an 'innocent' or one who does