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

was this; it was the hinge, or 'cardo,' on which all the rest of the Church, as the door, at once depended and turned. It followed presently upon this that the clergy of Rome were 'cardinales,' as nearest to, and most closely connected with, him who was thus the hinge, or 'cardo,' of all. [Footnote: Thus a letter professing to be of Pope Anacletus the First in the first century, but really belonging to the ninth: Apostolica Sedes cardo et caput omnium Ecclesiarum a Domino est constituta; et sicut cardine ostium regitur, sic hujus S. Sedis auctoritate omnes Ecclesiae reguntur. And we have 'cardinal' put in relation with this 'cardo' in a genuine letter of Pope Leo IX.: Clerici summae Sedis Cardinales dicuntur, cardini utique illi quo cetera moventur, vicinius adhaerentes.]

'Legend' is a word with an instructive history. We all have some notion of what at this day a 'legend' means. It is a tale which is not true, which, however historic in form, is not historic in fact, claims no serious belief for itself. It was quite otherwise once. By this name of 'legends' the annual commemorations of the faith and patience of God's saints in persecution and death were originally called; these legends in this title which they bore proclaiming that they were worthy to be read, and from this worthiness deriving their name. At a later day, as corruptions spread through the Church, these 'legends' grew, in Hooker's words, 'to be nothing else but heaps of frivolous and scandalous vanities,' having been 'even with disdain thrown out, the very nests which bred them abhorring them.' How steeped in falsehood, and to what an extent, according to Luther's indignant turn of the word, the 'legends' (legende) must have become 'lyings' (lügende), we can best guess, when we measure the moral forces which must have been at work, before that which was accepted at the first as 'worthy to be read,' should have been felt by this very name to announce itself as most unworthy, as belonging at best to the region of fable, if not to that of actual untruth.

An inquiry into the pedigree of 'dunce' lays open to us an important page in the intellectual history of Europe. Certain theologians in the Middle Ages were termed Schoolmen; having been formed and trained in the cloister and cathedral schools which Charlemagne and his immediate successors had founded. These were men not to be lightly spoken of, as they often are by those who never read a line of their works, and have not a thousandth part of their wit; who moreover little guess how many of the most familiar words which they employ, or misemploy, have descended to them from these. 'Real,' 'virtual,' 'entity,' 'nonentity,' 'equivocation,' 'objective,' 'subjective,' with many more unknown to classical Latin, but now almost necessities to us, were first coined by the Schoolmen; and, passing over from them into the speech of others more or less interested in their speculations, have gradually filtered through the successive strata of society, till now some of them have reached to quite the lowest. At the Revival of Learning, however, their works fell out of favour: they were not written in classical Latin: the forms into which their speculations were thrown were often unattractive; it was mainly in their authority that the Roman Church found support for her perilled dogmas. On all these accounts it was esteemed a mark of intellectual progress to have broken with them, and thrown off their yoke. Some, however, still clung to these Schoolmen, and to one in particular, John Duns Scotus, the most illustrious teacher of the Franciscan Order. Thus it came to pass that many times an adherent of the old learning would seek to strengthen his position by an appeal to its famous doctor, familiarly called Duns; while those of the new learning would contemptuously rejoin, 'Oh, you are a Dunsman' or more briefly, 'You are a Duns,' —or, 'This is a piece of duncery'; and inasmuch as the new learning was ever enlisting more and more of the genius and scholarship of the age on its side, the title became more and more a term of scorn. 'Remember ye not,' says Tyndal, 'how within this thirty years and far less, the old barking curs, Dunce's disciples, and like draff called Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin, and Hebrew?' And thus from that conflict long ago extinct between the old and the new learning, that strife between the medieval and the modern theology, we inherit 'dunce' and 'duncery.' The lot of Duns, it must be confessed, has been a hard one, who, whatever his merits as a teacher of Christian truth, was assuredly one of the keenest and most subtle-witted of men. He, the 'subtle Doctor' by pre- eminence, for so his admirers called him, 'the wittiest of the school- divines,' as Hooker does not scruple to style him, could scarcely have anticipated, and did not at all deserve, that his name should be turned into a by-word for invincible stupidity.

This is but one example of the singular fortune waiting upon words. We have another of a parallel injustice, in the use which 'mammetry,' a contraction of 'Mahometry,' obtained in our early English. Mahomedanism being the most prominent form of false religion with which our ancestors came in contact, 'mammetry' was used, up to and beyond the Reformation, to designate first any false religion, and then the worship of idols; idolatry being proper to, and a leading feature of, most of the false religions of the world. Men did not pause to remember that Mahomedanism is the great exception, being as it is a protest against all idol-worship whatsoever; so that it was a signal injustice to call an idol a 'mawmet' or a Mahomet, and idolatry 'mammetry.'

A misnomer such as this may remind us of the immense importance of possessing such names for things as shall not involve or suggest an error. We have already seen this in the province of the moral life; but in other regions also it nearly concerns us. Resuming, as words do, the past, shaping the future, how important it is that significant facts or tendencies in the world's history should receive their right names. It is a corrupting of the very springs and sources of knowledge, when we bind up not a truth, but an error, in the very nomenclature which we use. It is the putting of an obstacle in the way, which, however imperceptibly, is yet ever at work, hindering any right apprehension of the thing which has been thus erroneously noted.

Out of a sense of this, an eminent German scholar of the last century, writing On the Influence of Opinions on Language, did not stop here, nor make this the entire title of his book, but added another and further clause—and on the Influence of Language on Opinions; [Footnote: Von dem Einfluss der Meinungen in die Sprache, und der Sprache in die Meinungen, von J, D. Michaëlis, Berlin, 1760.] the matter which fulfils the promise of this latter clause constituting by far the most interesting and original portion of his work: for while the influence of opinions on words is so little called in question, that the assertion of it sounds almost like a truism, this, on the contrary, of words on opinions, would doubtless present itself as a novelty to many. And yet it is an influence which has been powerfully felt in every region of human knowledge, in science, in art, in morals, in theology. The reactive energy of words, not merely on the passions of men (for that of course), but on their opinions calmly and deliberately formed, would furnish a very curious chapter in the history of human knowledge and human ignorance.

Sometimes words with no fault of theirs, for they did not originally involve any error, will yet draw some error in their train; and of that error will afterwards prove the most effectual bulwark and shield. Let me instance—the author just referred to supplies the example—the word 'crystal.' The strange notion concerning the origin of the thing, current among the natural philosophers of antiquity, and which only two centuries ago Sir Thomas Browne thought it worth while to place first and foremost among the Vulgar Errors that he undertook to refute, was plainly traceable to a confusion occasioned by the name. Crystal, as men supposed, was ice or snow which had undergone such a process of induration as wholly and for ever to have lost its fluidity: [Footnote: Augustine: Quid est crystallum? Nix est glacie durata per multos annos, ita ut a sole vel igne facile dissolvi non possit. So too in Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedy of Valentinian, a chaste matron is said to be 'cold as crystal never to be thawed again.'] and Pliny, backing up one mistake by another, affirmed that it was only found in regions of extreme cold. The fact is, that the Greek word for crystal originally signified ice; but after a while was also imparted to that diaphanous quartz which has so much the look of ice, and which alone we call by this name; and then in a little while it was taken for granted that the two, having the same name, were in fact the same substance; and this mistake it took ages to correct.

Natural history abounds in legends. In the word 'leopard' one of these has been permanently bound up; the error, having first given birth to the name, being afterwards itself maintained and propagated by it. The leopard, as is well known, was not for the Greek and Latin zoologists a species by itself, but a mongrel birth of the male panther or pard and the lioness; and in 'leopard' or 'lion-pard' this fabled double descent is expressed. [Footnote: This error lasted into modern times; thus Fuller (A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, vol. i. p. 195): 'Leopards and mules are properly no creatures.'] 'Cockatrice' embodies a somewhat similar fable; the fable however in this case having been invented to account for the name. [Footnote: See Wright, The Bible Word Book, s. v. [The word cockatrice is a corrupt form of Late Latin cocodrillus, which again is a corruption of Latin crocodilus, Gr. [Greek: krokodeilos], a crocodile.]]

It was Eichhorn who first suggested the calling of a certain group of languages, which stand in a marked contradistinction to the Indo- European or Aryan family, by the common name of 'Semitic.' A word which should include all these was wanting, and this one was handy and has made its fortune; at the same time implying, as 'Semitic' does, that these are all languages spoken by races which are descended from Shem, it is eminently calculated to mislead. There are non-Semitic races, the Phoenicians for example, which have spoken a Semitic language; there are Semitic races which have not spoken one. Against 'Indo-European' the same objection may be urged; seeing that several languages are European, that is, spoken within the limits of Europe, as the Maltese, the Finnish, the Hungarian, the Basque, the Turkish, which lie altogether outside of this group.

'Gothic' is plainly a misnomer, and has often proved a misleader as well, when applied to a style of architecture which belongs not to one, but to all the Germanic tribes; which, moreover, did not come into existence till many centuries after any people called Goths had ceased from the earth. Those, indeed, who first called this medieval architecture 'Gothic,' had no intention of ascribing to the Goths the first invention of it, however this language may seem now to bind up in itself an assertion of the kind. 'Gothic' was at first a mere random name of contempt. The Goths, with the Vandals, being the standing representatives of the rude in manners and barbarous in taste, the critics who would fain throw scorn on this architecture as compared with that classical Italian which alone seemed worthy of their admiration, [Footnote: The name, as the designation of a style of architecture, came to us from Italy. Thus Fuller in his Worthies: 'Let the Italians deride our English and condemn them for Gothish buildings.' See too a very curious expression of men's sentiments about Gothic architecture as simply equivalent to barbarous, in Phillips's New World of Words, 1706, s.v. 'Gothick.'] called it 'Gothic,' meaning rude and barbarous thereby. We who recognize in this Gothic architecture the most wondrous and consummate birth of genius in one region of art, find it hard to believe that this was once a mere title of slight and scorn, and sometimes wrongly assume a reference in the word to the people among whom first it arose.

'Classical' and 'romantic,' names given to opposing schools of literature and art, contain an absurd antithesis; and either say nothing at all, or say something erroneous. 'Revival of Learning' is a phrase only partially true when applied to that mighty intellectual movement in Western Europe which marked the fifteenth century and the beginning of the