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

'painter,' 'pernicious,' 'plot,' 'pulse,' 'punch,' 'rush,' 'scale,' 'scrip,' 'shingle,' 'shock,' 'shrub,' 'smack,' 'soil,' 'stud,' 'swallow,' 'tap,' 'tent,' 'toil,' 'trinket,' 'turtle.' You will find it profitable to follow these up at home, to trace out the two or more words which have clothed themselves in exactly the same outward garb, and on what etymologies they severally repose; so too, as often as you suspect the existence of homonyms, to make proof of the matter for yourselves, gradually forming as complete a list of these as you can. [Footnote: For a nearly complete list of homonyms in English see List of Homonyms at the end of Skeat's Etym. Dict.; Kock's Historical Grammar of the English Language, vol. i. p. 223; Mätzner's Engl. Grammatik, vol. i. pp. 187-204; and compare Dwight's Modern Philology, vol. ii. p. 311.] You may usefully do the same in any other language which you study, for they exist in all. In them the identity is merely on the surface and in sound, and it would, of course, be lost labour to seek for a point of contact between meanings which have no closer connexion with one another in reality than they have in appearance.

Let me suggest some further exercises in this region of words. There are some which at once provoke and promise to reward inquiry, by the evident readiness with which they will yield up the secret, if duly interrogated by us. Many, as we have seen, have defied, and will probably defy to the end, all efforts to dissipate the mystery which hangs over them; and these we must be content to leave; but many announce that their explanations cannot be very far to seek. Let me instance 'candidate.' Does it not argue an incurious spirit to be content that this word should be given and received by us a hundred times, as at a contested election it is, and we never ask ourselves, What does it mean? why is one offering himself to the choice of his fellows called a 'candidate'? If the word lay evidently beyond our horizon, we might acquiesce in our ignorance; but resting, as manifestly it does, upon the Latin 'candidus,' it challenges inquiry, and a very little of this would at once put us in possession of the Roman custom for which it witnesses—namely, that such as intended to claim the suffrages of the people for any of the chief offices of the State, presented themselves beforehand to them in a white toga, being therefore called 'candidati.' And as it so often happens that in seeking information upon one subject we obtain it upon another, so will it probably be here; for in fully learning what this custom was, you will hardly fail to learn how we obtained 'ambition,' what originally it meant, and how Milton should have written—

'To reign is worth ambition, though in hell.

Or again, any one who knows so much as that 'verbum' means a word, might well be struck by the fact (and if he followed it up would be led far into the relation of the parts of speech to one another), that in grammar it is not employed to signify any word whatsoever, but restricted to the verb alone; 'verbum' is the verb. Surely here is matter for reflection. What gives to the verb the right to monopolize the dignity of being 'the word'? Is it because the verb is the animating power, the vital principle of every sentence, and that without which understood or uttered, no sentence can exist? or can you offer any other reason? I leave this to your own consideration.

We call certain books 'classics.' We have indeed a double use of the word, for we speak of the Greek and Latin as the 'classical' languages, and the great writers in these as 'the classics'; while at other times you hear of a 'classical' English style, or of English 'classics.' Now 'classic' is connected plainly with 'classis.' What then does it mean in itself, and how has it arrived at this double use? 'The term is drawn from the political economy of Rome. Such a man was rated as to his income in the third class, such another in the fourth, and so on; but he who was in the highest was emphatically said to be of the class, "classicus"—a class man, without adding the number, as in that case superfluous; while all others were infra classem. Hence, by an obvious analogy, the best authors were rated as "classici," or men of the highest class; just as in English we say "men of rank" absolutely, for men who are in the highest ranks of the state.' The mental process by which this title, which would apply rightly to the best authors in all languages, came to be restricted to those only in two, and these two to be claimed, to the seeming exclusion of all others, as the classical languages, is one constantly recurring, making itself felt in all regions of human thought; to which therefore I would in passing call your attention, though I cannot now do more.

There is one circumstance which you must by no means suffer to escape your own notice, nor that of your pupils—namely, that words out of number, which are now employed only in a figurative sense, did yet originally rest on some fact of the outward world, vividly presenting itself to the imagination; which fact the word has incorporated and knit up with itself for ever. If I may judge from my own experience, few intelligent boys would not feel that they had gained something, when made to understand that 'to insult' means properly to leap as on the prostrate body of a foe; 'to affront,' to strike him on the face; that 'to succour' means by running to place oneself under one that is falling; 'to relent,' (connected with 'lentus,') to slacken the swiftness of one's pursuit; [Footnote: 'But nothing might relent his hasty flight,' Spenser F. Q. iii. 4.] 'to reprehend,' to lay hold of one with the intention of forcibly pulling him back; 'to exonerate,' to discharge of a burden, ships being exonerated once; that 'to be examined' means to be weighed. They would be pleased to learn that a man is called 'supercilious,' because haughtiness with contempt of others expresses itself by the raising of the eyebrows or 'supercilium'; that 'subtle' (subtilis for subtexilis) is literally 'fine-spun'; that 'astonished' (attonitus) is properly thunderstruck; that 'sincere' is without wax, (sine cera,) as the best and finest honey should be; that a 'companion,' probably at least, is one with whom we share our bread, a messmate; that a 'sarcasm' is properly such a lash inflicted by the 'scourge of the tongue' as brings away the flesh after it; with much more in the same kind.

'Trivial' is a word borrowed from the life. Mark three or four persons standing idly at the point where one street bisects at right angles another, and discussing there the idle nothings of the day; there you have the living explanation of 'trivial,' 'trivialities,' such as no explanation not rooting itself in the etymology would ever give you, or enable you to give to others. You have there the 'tres viae,' the 'trivium'; and 'trivialities' properly mean such talk as is holden by those idle loiterers that gather at this meeting of three roads. [Footnote: But 'trivial' may be from 'trivium' in another sense; that is, from the 'trivium,' or three preparatory disciplines,—grammar, arithmetic, and geometry,—as distinguished from the four more advanced, or 'quadrivium'; these and those together being esteemed in the Middle Ages to constitute a complete liberal education. Preparatory schools were often called 'trivial schools,' as occupying themselves with the 'trivium.'] 'Rivals' properly are those who dwell on the banks of the same river. But as all experience shows, there is no such fruitful source of contention as a water-right, and these would be often at strife with one another in regard of the periods during which they severally had a right to the use of the stream, turning it off into their own fields before the time, or leaving open the sluices beyond the time, or in other ways interfering, or being counted to interfere, with the rights of their neighbours. And in this way 'rivals' came to be applied to any who were on any grounds in unfriendly competition with one another.

By such teaching as this you may often improve, and that without turning play-time into lesson-time, the hours of relaxation and amusement. But 'relaxation,' on which we have just lighted as by chance, must not escape us. How can the bow be 'relaxed' or slackened (for this is the image), which has not been bent, whose string has never been drawn tight? Having drawn tight the bow of our mind by earnest toil, we may then claim to have it from time to time 'relaxed.' Having been attentive and assiduous then, but not otherwise, we may claim 'relaxation' and amusement. But 'attentive' and 'assiduous' are themselves words which will repay us to understand exactly what they mean. He is 'assiduous' who sits close to his work; he is 'attentive,' who, being taught, stretches out his neck that so he may not lose a word. 'Diligence' too has its lesson. Derived from 'diligo,' to love, it reminds us that the secret of true industry in our work is love of that work. And as truth is wrapped up in 'diligence,' what a lie, on the other hand, lurks in 'indolence,' or, to speak more accurately, in our present employment of it! This, from 'in' and 'doleo,' not to grieve, is properly a state in which we have no grief or pain; and employed as we now employ it, suggests to us that indulgence in sloth constitutes for us the truest negation of pain. Now no one would wish to deny that 'pain' and 'pains' are often nearly allied; but yet these pains hand us over to true pleasures; while indolence is so far from yielding that good which it is so forward to promise, that Cowper spoke only truth, when, perhaps meaning to witness against the falsehood I have just denounced, he spoke of

'Lives spent in indolence, and therefore sad,'

not 'therefore glad,' as the word 'indolence' would fain have us to believe.

There is another way in which these studies I have been urging may be turned to account. Doubtless you will seek to cherish in your scholars, to keep lively in yourselves, that spirit and temper which find a special interest in all relating to the land of our birth, that land which the providence of God has assigned as the sphere of our life's task and of theirs. Our schools are called 'national,' [Footnote: This was written in England, and in the year 1851.] and if we would have them such in reality, we must neglect nothing that will foster a national spirit in them. I know not whether this is sufficiently considered among us; yet certainly we cannot have Church-schools worthy the name, least of all in England, unless they are truly national as well. It is the anti-national character of the Roman Catholic system which perhaps more than all else offends Englishmen; and if their sense of this should ever grow weak, their protest against that system would soon lose much of its energy and strength. But here, as everywhere else, knowledge must be the food of love. Your pupils must know something about England, if they are to love it; they must see some connexion of its past with its present, of what it has been with what it is, if they are to feel that past as anything to them.

And as no impresses of the past are so abiding, so none, when once attention has been awakened to them, are so self-evident as those which names preserve; although, without this calling of the attention to them, the most broad and obvious of these foot-prints which the past time has left may continue to escape our observation to the end of our lives. Leibnitz tells us, and one can quite understand, the delight with which a great German Emperor, Maximilian I., discovered that 'Habsburg,' or 'Hapsburg,' the ancestral name of his house, really had a meaning, one moreover full of vigour and poetry. This he did, when he heard it by accident on the lips of a Swiss peasant, no longer cut short and thus disguised, but in its original fulness, 'Habichtsburg,' or 'Hawk's- Tower,' being no doubt the name of the castle which was the cradle of his race. [Footnote: Opp. vol. vi. pt. 2. p. 20.] Of all the thousands of Englishmen who are aware that Angles and Saxons established themselves in this island, and that we are in the main descended from them, it would be curious to know how many have realized to themselves a fact so obvious as