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

it has now stood for eight hundred years; nor of 'Naples' to be New City (Neapolis) still, after an existence three or four times as long.

It must, then, be esteemed a piece of ethical prudery, and an ignorance of the laws which languages obey, when the early Quakers refused to employ the names commonly given to the days of the week, and substituted for these, 'first day,' 'second day,' and so on. This they did, as is well known, on the ground that it became not Christian men to give that sanction to idolatry which was involved in the ordinary style—as though every time they spoke of Wednesday they were rendering homage to Woden, of Thursday to Thor, of Friday to Friga, and thus with the rest; [ Footnote: It is curious to find Fuller prophesying, a very few years before, that at some future day such a protest as theirs might actually be raised (Church History, b. ii. cent. 6): 'Thus we see the whole week bescattered with Saxon idols, whose pagan gods were the godfathers of the days, and gave them their names. This some zealot may behold as the object of a necessary reformation, desiring to have the days of the week new dipt, and called after other names. Though, indeed, this supposed scandal will not offend the wise, as beneath their notice; and cannot offend the ignorant, as above their knowledge.'] or at all events recognizing their existence. Now it is quite intelligible that the early Christians, living in the midst of a still rampant heathenism, should have objected, as we know they did, to 'dies Solis,' or Sunday, to express the first day of the week, their Lord's-Day. But when the later Friends raised their protest, the case was altogether different. The false gods whose names were bound up in these words had ceased to be worshipped in England for about a thousand years; the words had wholly disengaged themselves from their etymologies, of which probably not one in a thousand had the slightest suspicion. Moreover, had these precisians in speech been consistent, they could not have stopped where they did. Every new acquaintance with the etymology or primary use of words would have entangled them in some new embarrassment, would have required a new purging of their vocabulary. 'To charm,' 'to bewitch,' 'to fascinate,' 'to enchant,' would have been no longer lawful words for those who had outlived the belief in magic, and in the power of the evil eye; nor 'lunacy,' nor 'lunatic,' for such as did not count the moon to have anything to do with mental unsoundness; nor 'panic' fear, for those who believed that the great god Pan was indeed dead; nor 'auguries,' nor 'auspices,' for those to whom divination was nothing; while to speak of 'initiating' a person into the 'mysteries' of an art, would have been utterly heathenish language. Nay, they must have found fault with the language of Holy Scripture itself; for a word of honourable use in the New Testament expressing the function of an interpreter, and reappearing in our 'hermeneutics,' is directly derived from and embodies the name of Hermes, a heathen deity, and one who did not, like Woden, Thor, and Friga, pertain to a long extinct mythology, but to one existing in its strength at the very time when he wrote. And how was it, as might have been fairly asked, that St. Paul did not protest against a Christian woman retaining the name of Phoebe (Rom. xvi. I), a goddess of the same mythology?

The rise and fall of words, the honour which in tract of time they exchanged for dishonour, and the dishonour for honour—all which in my last lecture I contemplated mainly from an ethical point of view—is in a merely historic aspect scarcely less remarkable. Very curious is it to watch the varying fortune of words—the extent to which it has fared with them, as with persons and families; some having improved their position in the world, and attained to far higher dignity than seemed destined for them at the beginning, while others in a manner quite as notable have lost caste, have descended from their high estate to common and even ignoble uses. Titles of dignity and honour have naturally a peculiar liability to be some lifted up, and some cast down. Of words which have risen in the world, the French 'maréchal' affords us an excellent example. 'Maréchal,' as Howell has said, 'at first was the name of a smith-farrier, or one that dressed horses'—which indeed it is still—'but it climbed by degrees to that height that the chiefest commanders of the gendarmery are come to be called marshals.' But if this has risen, our 'alderman' has fallen. Whatever the civic dignity of an alderman may now be, still it must be owned that the word has lost much since the time that the 'alderman' was only second in rank and position to the king. Sometimes a word will keep or even improve its place in one language, while at the same time it declines from it in another. Thus 'demoiselle' (dominicella) cannot be said to have lost ground in French, however 'donzelle' may; while 'damhele,' being the same word, designates in Walloon the farm-girl who minds the cows. [Footnote: See Littré, Etudes et Glanures, p. 16; compare p. 30. Elsewhere he says: Les mots ont leurs déchéances comme les families.] 'Pope' is the highest ecclesiastical dignitary in the Latin Church; every parish priest is a 'pope' in the Greek. 'Queen' (gunae) has had a double fortune. Spelt as above it has more than kept the dignity with which it started, being the title given to the lady of the kingdom; while spelt as 'quean' it is a designation not untinged with contempt. [Footnote: [Queen and quean are not merely different spellings of the same Old English word; for queen represents Anglo- Saxon cwe:n, Gothic qens, whereas quean is the phonetic equivalent of Anglo-Saxon cwene Gothic qino]] 'Squatter' remains for us in England very much where it always was; in Australia it is now the name by which the landed aristocracy are willing to be known. [Footnote: Dilke, Greater Britain, vol. ii. p. 40]

After all which has thus been adduced, you will scarcely deny that we have a right to speak of a history in words. Now suppose that the pieces of money which in the intercourse and traffic of daily life are passing through our hands continually, had each one something of its own that made it more or less worthy of note; if on one was stamped some striking maxim, on another some important fact, on the third a memorable date; if others were works of finest art, graven with rare and beautiful devices, or bearing the head of some ancient sage or hero king; while others, again, were the sole surviving monuments of mighty nations that once filled the world with their fame; what a careless indifference to our own improvement—to all which men hitherto had felt or wrought—would it argue in us, if we were content that these should come and go, should stay by us or pass from us, without our vouchsafing to them so much as one serious regard. Such a currency there is, a currency intellectual and spiritual of no meaner worth, and one with which we have to transact so much of the higher business of our lives. Let us take care that we come not in this matter under the condemnation of any such incurious indifference as that which I have imagined.

LECTURE V. ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.

If I do not much mistake, you will find it not a little interesting to follow great and significant words to the time and place of their birth. And not these alone. The same interest, though perhaps not in so high a degree, will cleave to the upcoming of words not a few that have never played a part so important in the world's story. A volume might be written such as few would rival in curious interest, which should do no more than indicate the occasion upon which new words, or old words employed in a new sense—being such words as the world subsequently heard much of—first appeared; with quotation, where advisable, of the passages in proof. A great English poet, too early lost, 'the young Marcellus of our tongue,' as Dryden so finely calls him, has very grandly described the emotion of

'some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken.'

Not very different will be our feeling, as we watch, at the moment of its rising above the horizon, some word destined, it may be, to play its part in the world's story, to take its place for ever among the luminaries in the moral and intellectual firmament above us.

But a caution is necessary here. We must not regard as certain in every case, or indeed in most cases, that the first rise of a word will have exactly consented in time with its first appearance within the range of our vision. Such identity will sometimes exist; and we may watch i the actual birth of some word, and may affirm with confidence that at such a time and on such an occasion it first saw the light—in this book, or from the lips of that man. Of another we can only say, About this time and near about this spot it first came into being, for we first meet it in such an author and under such and such conditions. So mere a fragment of ancient literature has come down to us, that, while the earliest appearance there of a word is still most instructive to note, it cannot in all or in nearly all cases be affirmed to mark the exact moment of its nativity. And even in the modern world we must in most instances be content to fix a period, we may perhaps add a local habitation, within the limits of which the term must have been born, either in legitimate scientific travail, or the child of some flash of genius, or the product of some generatio aequivoca, the necessary result of exciting predisposing causes; at the same time seeking by further research ever to narrow more and more the limits within which this must have happened.

To speak first of words religious and ecclesiastical. Very noteworthy, and in some sort epoch-making, must be regarded the first appearance of the following:—'Christian'; [Footnote: Acts xi. 26.] 'Trinity'; [Footnote: Tertullian, Adv. Prax. 3.] 'Catholic,' as applied to the Church; [Footnote: Ignatius, Ad Smyrn. 8.] 'canonical,' as a distinctive title of the received Scriptures; [Footnote: Origen, Opp. vol. iii. p. 36 (ed. De la Rue).] 'New Testament,' as describing the complex of the sacred books of the New Covenant; [Footnote: Tertullian, Adv. Marc. iv. I; Adv. Prax. xv. 20.] 'Gospels,' as applied to the four inspired records of the life and ministry of our Lord. [Footnote: Justin Martyr, Apol. i. 66.] We notice, too, with interest, the first coming up of 'monk' and 'nun,' [Footnote: 'Nun' (nonna) first appears in Jerome (Ad Eustoch. Ep. 22); 'monk' (monachus) a little earlier: Rutilius, a Latin versifier of the fifth century, who still clung to the old Paganism, gives the derivation: Ipsi se monachos Graio cognomine dicunt, Quod soli nullo vivere teste volunt.] marking as they do the beginnings of the monastic system;—of 'transubstantiation,' [Footnote: Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours (d. 1134), is the first to use it (Serm. 93).] of 'concomitance,' [Footnote: Thomas Aquinas is reported to have been the first to use this word.] expressing as does this word the grounds on which the medieval Church defended communion in one kind only for the laity; of 'limbo' in its theological sense; [Footnote: Thomas Aquinas first employs 'limbus' in this sense.] witnessing as these do to the consolidation of errors which had long been floating in the Church.

Not of so profound an interest, but still very instructive to note, is the earliest apparition of names historical and geographical, above all of such as have since been often on the lips of men; as the first mention in books of 'Asia'; [Footnote: Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus, 412.] of 'India'; [Footnote: Id. Suppl. 282.] of 'Europe'; [Footnote: Herodotus, iv. 36.] of 'Macedonia'; [Footnote: Id. v. 17.] of 'Greeks'; [Footnote: Aristotle, Meteor, i. 14. But his Graikoi are only an insignificant tribe, near Dodona. How it came to pass that Graeci, or Graii, was the Latin name by which all the Hellenes were known, must always remain a mystery.] of 'Germans' and 'Germany'; [Footnote: Probably first in the Commentaries of Caesar; see Grimm, Gesch. d. Deutschen Sprache, p. 773.] of 'Alemanni'; [Footnote: Spartian, Caracalla, c. 9.] of 'Franks'; [Footnote: Vopiscus, Aurel. 7; about A.D. 240.] of 'Prussia' and 'Prussians';