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

condition, has more things to designate, more thoughts to utter, and more distinctions to draw, it is felt as a waste of resources to employ two or more words for the designating of one and the same thing. Men feel, and rightly, that with a boundless world lying around them and demanding to be catalogued and named, and which they only make truly their own in the measure and to the extent that they do name it, with infinite shades and varieties of thought and feeling subsisting in their own minds, and claiming to find utterance in words, it is a wanton extravagance to expend two or more signs on that which could adequately be set forth by one—an extravagance in one part of their expenditure, which will be almost sure to issue in, and to be punished by, a corresponding scantness and straitness in another. Some thought or feeling or fact will wholly want one adequate sign, because another has two. [Footnote: We have a memorable example of this in the history of the great controversy of the Church with the Arians, In the earlier stages of this, the upholders of the orthodox faith used [Greek: ousia] and [Greek: hypostasis] as identical in force and meaning with one another, Athanasius, in as many words, affirming them to be such. As, however, the controversy went forward, it was perceived that doctrinal results of the highest importance might be fixed and secured for the Church through the assigning severally to these words distinct modifications of meaning. This, accordingly, in the Greek Church, was done; while the Latin, desiring to move pari passu did yet find itself most seriously embarrassed and hindered in so doing by the fact that it had, or assumed that it had, but the one word, 'substantia,' to correspond to the two Greek.] Hereupon that which has been well called the process of 'desynonymizing' begins—that is, of gradually discriminating in use between words which have hitherto been accounted perfectly equivalent, and, as such, indifferently employed. It is a positive enriching of a language when this process is at any point felt to be accomplished; when two or more words, once promiscuously used, have had each its own peculiar domain assigned to it, which it shall not itself overstep, upon which others shall not encroach. This may seem at first sight only as a better regulation of old territory; for all practical purposes it is the acquisition of new.

This desynonymizing process is not carried out according to any prearranged purpose or plan. The working genius of the language accomplishes its own objects, causes these synonymous words insensibly to fall off from one another, and to acquire separate and peculiar meanings. The most that any single writer can do, save indeed in the terminology of science, is to assist an already existing inclination, to bring to the clear consciousness of all that which already has been obscurely felt by many, and thus to hasten the process of this disengagement, or, as it has been well expressed, 'to regulate and ordinate the evident nisus and tendency of the popular usage into a severe definition'; and establish on a firm basis the distinction, so that it shall not be lost sight of or brought into question again. Thus long before Wordsworth wrote, it was obscurely felt by many that in 'imagination' there was more of the earnest, in 'fancy' of the play, of the spirit, that the first was a loftier faculty and power than the second. The tendency of the language was all in this direction. None would for some time back have employed 'fancy' as Milton employs it, [Footnote: Paradise Lost, v. 102-105 5 so too Longinus, De Subl. 15.] ascribing to it operations which we have learned to reserve for 'imagination' alone, and indeed subordinating 'imaginations' to fancy, as a part of the materials with which it deals. Yet for all this the words were continually, and not without injury, confounded. Wordsworth first, in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads, rendered it impossible for any, who had read and mastered what he had written on the matter, to remain unconscious any longer of the essential difference between them. [Footnote: Thus De Quincey (Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been neglected): 'All languages tend to clear themselves of synonyms, as intellectual culture advances; the superfluous words being taken up and appropriated by new shades and combinations of thought evolved in the progress of society. And long before this appropriation is fixed and petrified, as it were, into the acknowledged vocabulary of the language, an insensible clinamen (to borrow a Lucretian word) prepares the way for it. Thus, for instance, before Mr. Wordsworth had unveiled the great philosophic distinction between the powers of fancy and imagination, the two words had begun to diverge from each other, the first being used to express a faculty somewhat capricious and exempted from law, the other to express a faculty more self-determined. When, therefore, it was at length perceived, that under an apparent unity of meaning there lurked a real dualism, and for philosophic purposes it was necessary that this distinction should have its appropriate expression, this necessity was met half way by the clinamen which had already affected the popular usage of the words.' Compare what Coleridge had before said on the same matter, Biogr. Lit. vol. i. p. 90; and what Ruskin, Modern Painters part 3, Section 2, ch. 3, has said since. It is to Coleridge that we owe the word 'to desynonymize' (Biogr. Lit. p. 87)—which is certainly preferable to Professor Grote's 'despecificate.' Purists indeed will object that it is of hybrid formation, the prefix Latin, the body of the word Greek; but for all this it may very well stand till a better is offered. Coleridge's own contributions, direct and indirect, in this province are perhaps more in number and in value than those of any other English writer; thus to him we owe the disentanglement of 'fanaticism' and 'enthusiasm' (Lit. Rem. vol. ii. p. 365); of 'keenness' and 'subtlety' (Table-Talk, p. 140); of 'poetry' and 'poesy' (Lit. Rem. vol. i. p. 219); of 'analogy' and 'metaphor' (Aids to Reflection, 1825, p. 198); and that on which he himself laid so great a stress, of 'reason' and 'understanding.'] This is but one example, an illustrious one indeed, of what has been going forward in innumerable pairs of words. Thus in Wiclif's time and long after, there seems to have been no difference recognized between a 'famine' and a 'hunger'; they both expressed the outward fact of a scarcity of food. It was a genuine gain when, leaving to 'famine' this meaning, by 'hunger' was expressed no longer the outward fact, but the inward sense of the fact. Other pairs of words between which a distinction is recognized now which was not recognized some centuries ago, are the following: 'to clarify' and 'to glorify'; 'to admire' and 'to wonder'; 'to convince' and 'to convict'; 'reign' and 'kingdom'; 'ghost' and 'spirit'; 'merit' and 'demerit'; 'mutton' and 'sheep'; 'feminine' and 'effeminate'; 'mortal' and 'deadly'; 'ingenious' and 'ingenuous'; 'needful' and 'needy'; 'voluntary' and 'wilful.' [footnote: For the exact difference between these, and other pairs or larger groups of words, see my Select Glossary.]

A multitude of words in English are still waiting for a similar discrimination. Many in due time will obtain it, and the language prove so much the richer thereby; for certainly if Coleridge had right when he affirmed that 'every new term expressing a fact or a difference not precisely or adequately expressed by any other word in the same language, is a new organ of thought for the mind that has learned it.' [footnote: Church and State, p. 200.] we are justified in regarding these distinctions which are still waiting to be made as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue. Thus how real an ethical gain would it be, how much clearness would it bring into men's thoughts and actions, if the distinction which exists in Latin between 'vindicta' and 'ultio,' that the first is a moral act, the just punishment of the sinner by his God, of the criminal by the judge, the other an act in which the self-gratification of one who counts himself injured or offended is sought, could in like manner be fully established (vaguely felt it already is) between our 'vengeance' and 'revenge'; so that 'vengeance' (with the verb 'to avenge') should never be ascribed except to God, or to men acting as the executors of his righteous doom; while all retaliation to which not zeal for his righteousness, but men's own sinful passions have given the impulse and the motive, should be termed 'revenge.' As it now is, the moral disapprobation which cleaves, and cleaves justly, to 'revenge,' is oftentimes transferred almost unconsciously to 'vengeance'; while yet without vengeance it is impossible to conceive in a world so full of evil-doing any effectual assertion of righteousness, any moral government whatever.

The causes mentioned above, namely that our modern English, Teutonic in its main structure, yet draws so large a portion of its verbal wealth from the Latin, and has further welcomed, and found place for, many later accessions, these causes have together effected that we possess a great many duplicates, not to speak of triplicates, or of such a quintuplicate as that which I adduced just now, where the Teutonic, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek had each yielded us a word. Let me mention a few duplicate substantives, Old-English and Latin: thus we have 'shepherd' and 'pastor'; 'feeling' and 'sentiment'; 'handbook' and 'manual'; 'ship' and 'nave'; 'anger' and 'ire'; 'grief' and 'sorrow'; 'kingdom,' 'reign,' and 'realm'; 'love' and 'charity'; 'feather' and 'plume'; 'forerunner' and 'precursor'; 'foresight' and 'providence'; 'freedom' and 'liberty'; 'bitterness' and 'acerbity'; 'murder' and 'homicide'; 'moons' and 'lunes.' Sometimes, in theology and science especially, we have gone both to the Latin and to the Greek, and drawn the same word from them both: thus 'deist' and 'theist'; 'numeration' and 'arithmetic'; 'revelation' and 'apocalypse'; 'temporal' and 'chronic'; 'compassion' and 'sympathy'; 'supposition' and 'hypothesis'; 'transparent' and 'diaphanous'; 'digit' and 'dactyle.' But to return to the Old-English and Latin, the main factors of our tongue. Besides duplicate substantives, we have duplicate verbs, such as 'to whiten' and 'to blanch'; 'to soften' and 'to mollify'; 'to unload' and 'to exonerate'; 'to hide' and 'to conceal'; with many more. Duplicate adjectives also are numerous, as 'shady' and 'umbrageous'; 'unreadable' and 'illegible'; 'unfriendly' and 'inimical'; 'almighty' and 'omnipotent'; 'wholesome' and 'salubrious'; 'unshunnable' and 'inevitable.' Occasionally our modern English, not adopting the Latin substantive, has admitted duplicate adjectives; thus 'burden' has not merely 'burdensome' but also 'onerous,' while yet 'onus' has found no place with us; 'priest' has 'priestly' and 'sacerdotal'; 'king' has 'kingly,' 'regal,' which is purely Latin, and 'royal,' which is Latin distilled through the French. 'Bodily' and 'corporal,' 'boyish' and 'puerile,' 'fiery' and 'igneous,' 'wooden' and 'ligneous,' 'worldly' and 'mundane,' 'bloody' and 'sanguine,' 'watery' and 'aqueous,' 'fearful' and 'timid,' 'manly' and 'virile,' 'womanly' and 'feminine,' 'sunny' and 'solar,' 'starry' and 'stellar,' 'yearly' and 'annual,' 'weighty' and 'ponderous,' may all be placed in the same list. Nor are these more than a handful of words out of the number which might be adduced. You would find both pleasure and profit in enlarging these lists, and, as far as you are able, making them gradually complete.

If we look closely at words which have succeeded in thus maintaining their ground side by side, and one no less than the other, we shall note that in almost every instance they have little by little asserted for themselves separate spheres of meaning, have in usage become more or less distinct. Thus we use 'shepherd' almost always in its primary meaning, keeper of sheep; while 'pastor' is exclusively used in the tropical sense, one that feeds the flock of God; at the same time the language having only the one adjective, 'pastoral,' that is of necessity common to both. 'Love' and 'charity' are used in our Authorized Version of Scripture promiscuously, and out of the sense of their equivalence are made to represent one and the same Greek word; but in modern use 'charity' has come predominantly to signify one particular manifestation of love, the ministry to the bodily needs of others, 'love' continuing to express the affection of the soul. 'Ship' remains in its literal meaning, while 'nave' has become a symbolic term used in sacred architecture alone. 'Kingdom' is concrete, as the 'kingdom' of Great Britain; 'reign' is abstract, the 'reign' of Queen Victoria. An 'auditor' and a 'hearer' are now, though they were not once, altogether different from one another. 'Illegible' is applied to the handwriting, 'unreadable' to the subject-matter written; a man writes an 'illegible' hand; he has published an 'unreadable' book. 'Foresight' is ascribed to men, but' providence' for the most part designates, as pronoia also came to do, the far-looking wisdom of God, by which He governs and graciously cares for his people. It becomes boys to be 'boyish,' but not men to be 'puerile.' 'To blanch' is to withdraw colouring matter: we 'blanch'