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+Project Gutenberg's English Past and Present, by Richard Chenevix  Trench
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: English Past and Present
+
+Author: Richard Chenevix  Trench
+
+Editor: A. Smythe Palmer
+
+Release Date: March 25, 2007 [EBook #20900]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Amy Cunningham, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+{TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+
+All square brackets [] are from the original text. Braces {} (“curly
+brackets”) are supplied by the transcriber. This e-text uses a number of
+special characters, including:
+
+    vowels with macrons: ā ē ō
+    vowels with breves: ă ĕ ŏ
+    accented Greek: ἀ ἔ ἦ ϊ ῦ ῳ
+    phonetic symbols: ɛ ɨ ɵ ŋ
+
+If these do not display correctly, make sure that your browser’s file
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+
+A short passage on page 222 uses some unusual phonetic symbols;
+different Unicode characters have been substituted where the original
+symbols were not available. The html version contains images of the
+original book’s symbols.
+
+In the original book, the odd-numbered pages have unique headers,
+marked here as sidenotes.
+
+Obvious printing errors involving punctuation (such as missing single
+quotes), as well as alphabetization errors in the index, have been
+corrected without notes. Other corrections of printing errors, as well
+as notes regarding spelling variations, are listed at the end of this
+file.}
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+ENGLISH
+PAST AND PRESENT
+
+
+BY
+
+RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D.
+
+
+_Edited with Emendations_
+
+BY
+
+A. SMYTHE PALMER, D.D.
+
+
+_Author of ‘The Folk and their Word-lore,’ ‘Folk-Etymology,’
+‘Babylonian Influence on the Bible,’ etc._
+
+
+{Illustration: Printer’s Mark}
+
+
+LONDON
+
+GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LIMITED
+
+NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
+
+1905
+
+
+
+
+EDITOR’S PREFACE
+
+
+In editing the present volume I have thought it well to follow the same
+rule which I laid down for myself in editing _The Study of Words_, and
+have made no alteration in the text of Dr. Trench’s work (the fifth
+edition). Any corrections or additions that seemed to be demanded owing
+to the progress of lexicographical knowledge have been reserved for the
+foot-notes, and these can always be distinguished from those in the
+original by the square brackets [thus] within which they are placed.
+
+On the whole more corrections have been required in _English Past and
+Present_ than in _The Study of Words_ owing to the sweeping statements
+which involve universal negatives--statements, e.g. that certain words
+either first came into use, or ceased to be employed, at a specific date.
+Nothing short of the combined researches of an army of co-operative
+workers, such as the _New English Dictionary_ commanded, could warrant
+the correctness of assertions of this kind, which imply an exhaustive
+acquaintance with a subject so immense as the entire range of English
+literature.
+
+Even the mistakes of a learned man are instructive to those who essay to
+follow in his steps, and it is not without use to point them out instead
+of ignoring or expunging them. Thus, when the Archbishop falls into the
+error (venial when he wrote) of assuming an etymological connexion
+between certain words which have a specious air of kinship--such as
+‘care’ and ‘cura,’ ‘bloom’ and ‘blossom,’ ‘ghastly’ and ‘ghostly,’
+‘brat’ and ‘brood,’ ‘slow’ and ‘slough’--he makes just the mistakes
+which we would be tempted to make ourselves had not Professor Skeat and
+Dr. Murray and the great German School of philologists taught us to know
+better. Our plan, therefore, has been to leave such errors in the text
+and point out the better way in the notes. In other words, we have
+treated the Archbishop’s work as a classic, and the occasional
+emendations in the notes serve to mark the progress of half a century of
+etymological investigation. It is hardly necessary to point out that the
+chronological landmarks occurring here and there need an obvious
+equation of time to make them correct for the present year of grace,
+e.g. ‘lately,’ when it occurs, must be understood to mean at least fifty
+years ago, and a similar addition must be made to other time-points when
+they present themselves.
+
+                                          A. SMYTHE PALMER.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+
+A series of four lectures which I delivered last spring to the pupils of
+the King’s College School, London, supplied the foundation to this
+present volume. These lectures, which I was obliged to prepare in haste,
+on a brief invitation, and under the pressure of other engagements,
+being subsequently enlarged and recast, were delivered in the autumn
+somewhat more nearly in their present shape to the pupils of the
+Training School, Winchester; with only those alterations, omissions and
+additions, which the difference in my hearers suggested as necessary or
+desirable. I have found it convenient to keep the lectures, as regards
+the persons presumed to be addressed, in that earlier form which I had
+sketched out at the first; and, inasmuch as it helps much to keep
+lectures vivid and real that one should have some well defined audience,
+if not actually before one, yet before the mind’s eye, to suppose myself
+throughout addressing my first hearers. I have supposed myself, that is,
+addressing a body of young Englishmen, all with a fair amount of
+classical knowledge (in my explanations I have sometimes had others with
+less than theirs in my eye), not wholly unacquainted with modern
+languages; but not yet with any special designation as to their future
+work; having only as yet marked out to them the duty in general of
+living lives worthy of those who have England for their native country,
+and English for their native tongue. To lead such through a more
+intimate knowledge of this into a greater love of that, has been a
+principal aim which I have set before myself throughout.
+
+In a few places I have been obliged again to go over ground which I had
+before gone over in a little book, _On the Study of Words_; but I
+believe that I have never merely repeated myself, nor given to the
+readers of my former work and now of this any right to complain that I
+am compelling them to travel a second time by the same paths. At least
+it has been my endeavour, whenever I have found myself at points where
+the two books come necessarily into contact, that what was treated with
+any fulness before, should be here touched on more lightly; and only
+what there was slightly handled, should here be entered on at large.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    LECTURE I                                  PAGE
+    ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE                  1
+
+    LECTURE II
+    GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE                40
+
+    LECTURE III
+    DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE         113
+
+    LECTURE IV
+    CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS     176
+
+    LECTURE V
+    CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS    212
+
+    INDEX                                       257
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE
+
+
+“A very slight acquaintance with the history of our own language will
+teach us that the speech of Chaucer’s age is not the speech of
+Skelton’s, that there is a great difference between the language under
+Elizabeth and that under Charles the First, between that under Charles
+the First and Charles the Second, between that under Charles the Second
+and Queen Anne; that considerable changes had taken place between the
+beginning and the middle of the last century, and that Johnson and
+Fielding did not write altogether as we do now. For in the course of a
+nation’s progress new ideas are evermore mounting above the horizon,
+while others are lost sight of and sink below it: others again change
+their form and aspect: others which seemed united, split into parts. And
+as it is with ideas, so it is with their symbols, words. New ones are
+perpetually coined to meet the demand of an advanced understanding, of
+new feelings that have sprung out of the decay of old ones, of ideas
+that have shot forth from the summit of the tree of our knowledge; old
+words meanwhile fall into disuse and become obsolete; others have their
+meaning narrowed and defined; synonyms diverge from each other and their
+property is parted between them; nay, whole classes of words will now
+and then be thrown overboard, as new feelings or perceptions of analogy
+gain ground. A history of the language in which all these vicissitudes
+should be pointed out, in which the introduction of every new word
+should be noted, so far as it is possible--and much may be done in this
+way by laborious and diligent and judicious research--in which such
+words as have become obsolete should be followed down to their final
+extinction, in which all the most remarkable words should be traced
+through their successive phases of meaning, and in which moreover the
+causes and occasions of these changes should be explained, such a work
+would not only abound in entertainment, but would throw more light on
+the development of the human mind than all the brainspun systems of
+metaphysics that ever were written”.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These words, which thus far are not my own, but the words of a greatly
+honoured friend and teacher, who, though we behold him now no more,
+still teaches, and will teach, by the wisdom of his writings, and the
+nobleness of his life (they are words of Archdeacon Hare), I have put in
+the forefront of my lectures; seeing that they anticipate in the way of
+masterly sketch all which I shall attempt to accomplish, and indeed draw
+out the lines of much more, to which I shall not venture so much as to
+put my hand. They are the more welcome to me, because they encourage me
+to believe that if, in choosing the English language, its past and its
+present, as the subject of that brief course of lectures which I am to
+deliver in this place, I have chosen a subject which in many ways
+transcends my powers, and lies beyond the range of my knowledge, it is
+yet one in itself of deepest interest, and of fully recognized value.
+Nor can I refrain from hoping that even with my imperfect handling, it
+is an argument which will find an answer and an echo in the hearts of
+all who hear me; which would have found this at any time; which will do
+so especially at the present. For these are times which naturally rouse
+into liveliest activity all our latent affections for the land of our
+birth. It is one of the compensations, indeed the greatest of all, for
+the wastefulness, the woe, the cruel losses of war{1}, that it causes
+and indeed compels a people to know itself a people; leading each one to
+esteem and prize most that which he has in common with his fellow
+countrymen, and not now any longer those things which separate and
+divide him from them.
+
+{Sidenote: _Love of our own Tongue_}
+
+And the love of our own language, what is it in fact, but the love of
+our country expressing itself in one particular direction? If the great
+acts of that nation to which we belong are precious to us, if we feel
+ourselves made greater by their greatness, summoned to a nobler life by
+the nobleness of Englishmen who have already lived and died, and have
+bequeathed to us a name which must not by us be made less, what exploits
+of theirs can well be nobler, what can more clearly point out their
+native land and ours as having fulfilled a glorious past, as being
+destined for a glorious future, than that they should have acquired for
+themselves and for those who come after them a clear, a strong, an
+harmonious, a noble language? For all this bears witness to
+corresponding merits in those that speak it, to clearness of mental
+vision, to strength, to harmony, to nobleness in them that have
+gradually formed and shaped it to be the utterance of their inmost life
+and being.
+
+To know of this language, the stages which it has gone through, the
+sources from which its riches have been derived, the gains which it is
+now making, the perils which have threatened or are threatening it, the
+losses which it has sustained, the capacities which may be yet latent in
+it, waiting to be evoked, the points in which it transcends other
+tongues, in which it comes short of them, all this may well be the
+object of worthy ambition to every one of us. So may we hope to be
+ourselves guardians of its purity, and not corrupters of it; to
+introduce, it may be, others into an intelligent knowledge of that, with
+which we shall have ourselves more than a merely superficial
+acquaintance; to bequeath it to those who come after us not worse than
+we received it ourselves. “Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”,--this
+should be our motto in respect at once of our country, and of our
+country’s tongue.
+
+{Sidenote: _Duty to our own Tongue_}
+
+Nor shall we, I trust, any of us feel this subject to be alien or remote
+from the purposes which have brought us to study within these walls. It
+is true that we are mainly occupied here in studying other tongues than
+our own. The time we bestow upon it is small as compared with that
+bestowed on those others. And yet one of our main purposes in learning
+them is that we may better understand this. Nor ought any other to
+dispute with it the first and foremost place in our reverence, our
+gratitude, and our love. It has been well and worthily said by an
+illustrious German scholar: “The care of the national language I
+consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege
+of the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it
+the object of his unceasing concern, to preserve his language pure and
+entire, to speak it, so far as is in his power, in all its beauty and
+perfection.... A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must
+be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation
+which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half
+of her intellectual independence, and testifies her willingness to cease
+to exist”{2}.
+
+But this knowledge, like all other knowledge which is worth attaining,
+is only to be attained at the price of labour and pains. The language
+which at this day we speak is the result of processes which have been
+going forward for hundreds and for thousands of years. Nay more, it is
+not too much to affirm that processes modifying the English which at the
+present day we write and speak have been at work from the first day that
+man, being gifted with discourse of reason, projected his thought from
+out himself, and embodied and contemplated it in his word. Which things
+being so, if we would understand this language as it now is, we must
+know something of it as it has been; we must be able to measure, however
+roughly, the forces, which have been at work upon it, moulding and
+shaping it into the forms which it now wears.
+
+At the same time various prudential considerations must determine for us
+how far up we will endeavour to trace the course of its history. There
+are those who may seek to trace our language to the forests of Germany
+and Scandinavia, to investigate its relation to all the kindred tongues
+that were there spoken; again, to follow it up, till it and they are
+seen descending from an elder stock; nor once to pause, till they have
+assigned to it its place not merely in respect of that small group of
+languages which are immediately round it, but in respect of all the
+tongues and languages of the earth. I can imagine few studies of a more
+surpassing interest than this. Others, however, must be content with
+seeking such insight into their native language as may be within the
+reach of all who, unable to make this the subject of especial research,
+possessing neither that vast compass of knowledge, nor that immense
+apparatus of books, not being at liberty to dedicate to it that
+devotion almost of a life which, followed out to the full, it would
+require, have yet an intelligent interest in their mother tongue, and
+desire to learn as much of its growth and history and construction as
+may be reasonably deemed within their reach. To such as these I shall
+suppose myself to be speaking. It would be a piece of great presumption
+in me to undertake to speak to any other, or to assume any other ground
+than this for myself.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Past explains the Present_}
+
+I know there are some, who, when they are invited to enter at all upon
+the past history of the language, are inclined to make answer--“To what
+end such studies to us? Why cannot we leave them to a few antiquaries
+and grammarians? Sufficient to us to know the laws of our present
+English, to obtain an accurate acquaintance with the language as we now
+find it, without concerning ourselves with the phases through which it
+has previously past”. This may sound plausible enough; and I can quite
+understand a real lover of his native tongue, who has not bestowed much
+thought upon the subject, arguing in this manner. And yet indeed such
+argument proceeds altogether on a mistake. One sufficient reason why we
+should occupy ourselves with the past of our language is, because the
+present is only intelligible in the light of the past, often of a very
+remote past indeed. There are anomalies out of number now existing in
+our language, which the pure logic of grammar is quite incapable of
+explaining; which nothing but a knowledge of its historic evolutions,
+and of the disturbing forces which have made themselves felt therein,
+will ever enable us to understand. Even as, again, unless we possess
+some knowledge of the past, it is impossible that we can ourselves
+advance a single step in the unfolding of the latent capabilities of the
+language, without the danger of committing some barbarous violation of
+its very primary laws.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The plan which I have laid down for myself, and to which I shall adhere,
+in this lecture and in those which will succeed it, is as follows. In
+this my first lecture I will ask you to consider the language as now it
+is, to decompose with me some specimens of it, to prove by these means,
+of what elements it is compact, and what functions in it these elements
+or component parts severally fulfil; nor shall I leave this subject
+without asking you to admire the happy marriage in our tongue of the
+languages of the north and south, an advantage which it alone among all
+the languages of Europe enjoys. Having thus presented to ourselves the
+body which we wish to submit to scrutiny, and having become acquainted,
+however slightly, with its composition, I shall invite you to go back
+with me, and trace some of the leading changes to which in time past it
+has been submitted, and through which it has arrived at what it now is;
+and these changes I shall contemplate under four aspects, dedicating a
+lecture to each;--changes which have resulted from the birth of new, or
+the reception of foreign, words;--changes consequent on the rejection or
+extinction of words or powers once possessed by the language;--changes
+through the altered meaning of words;--and lastly, as not unworthy of
+our attention, but often growing out of very deep roots, changes in the
+orthography of words.
+
+{Sidenote: _Alterations unobserved_}
+
+I shall everywhere seek to bring the subject down to our present time,
+and not merely call your attention to the changes which have been, but
+to those also which are now being, effected. I shall not account the
+fact that some are going on, so to speak, before our own eyes, a
+sufficient ground to excuse me from noticing them, but rather an
+additional reason for doing this. For indeed changes which are actually
+proceeding in our own time, and which we are ourselves helping to bring
+about, are the very ones which we are most likely to fail in observing.
+There is so much to hide the nature of them, and indeed their very
+existence, that, except it may be by a very few, they will often pass
+wholly unobserved. Loud and sudden revolutions attract and compel
+notice; but silent and gradual, although with issues far vaster in
+store, run their course, and it is only when their cycle is completed or
+nearly so, that men perceive what mighty transforming forces have been
+at work unnoticed in the very midst of themselves.
+
+Thus, to apply what I have just affirmed to this matter of language--how
+few aged persons, let them retain the fullest possession of their
+faculties, are conscious of any difference between the spoken language
+of their early youth, and that of their old age; that words and ways of
+using words are obsolete now, which were usual then; that many words are
+current now, which had no existence at that time. And yet it is certain
+that so it must be. A man may fairly be supposed to remember clearly and
+well for sixty years back; and it needs less than five of these sixties
+to bring us to the period of Spenser, and not more than eight to set us
+in the time of Chaucer and Wiclif. How great a change, what vast
+modifications in our language, within eight memories. No one,
+contemplating this whole term, will deny the immensity of the change.
+For all this, we may be tolerably sure that, had it been possible to
+interrogate a series of eight persons, such as together had filled up
+this time, intelligent men, but men whose attention had not been
+especially roused to this subject, each in his turn would have denied
+that there had been any change worth speaking of, perhaps any change at
+all, during his lifetime. And yet, having regard to the multitude of
+words which have fallen into disuse during these four or five hundred
+years, we are sure that there must have been some lives in this chain
+which saw those words in use at their commencement, and out of use
+before their close. And so too, of the multitude of words which have
+sprung up in this period, some, nay, a vast number, must have come into
+being within the limits of each of these lives. It cannot then be
+superfluous to direct attention to that which is actually going forward
+in our language. It is indeed that, which of all is most likely to be
+unobserved by us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With these preliminary remarks I proceed at once to the special subject
+of my lecture of to-day. And first, starting from the recognized fact
+that the English is not a simple but a composite language, made up of
+several elements, as are the people who speak it, I would suggest to you
+the profit and instruction which we might derive from seeking to
+resolve it into its component parts--from taking, that is, any passage
+of an English author, distributing the words of which it is made up
+according to the languages from which they are drawn; estimating the
+relative numbers and proportions, which these languages have severally
+lent us; as well as the character of the words which they have thrown
+into the common stock of our tongue.
+
+{Sidenote: _Proportions in English_}
+
+Thus, suppose the English language to be divided into a hundred parts;
+of these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon; thirty
+would be Latin (including of course the Latin which has come to us
+through the French); five would be Greek. We should thus have assigned
+ninety-five parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a residue,
+to be divided among all the other languages from which we have adopted
+isolated words{3}. And yet these are not few; from our wide extended
+colonial empire we come in contact with half the world; we have picked
+up words in every quarter, and, the English language possessing a
+singular power of incorporating foreign elements into itself, have not
+scrupled to make many of these our own{4}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Oriental Words_}
+
+Thus we have a certain number of Hebrew words, mostly, if not entirely,
+belonging to religious matters, as ‘amen’, ‘cabala’, ‘cherub’, ‘ephod’,
+‘gehenna’, ‘hallelujah’, ‘hosanna’, ‘jubilee’, ‘leviathan’, ‘manna’,
+‘Messiah’, ‘sabbath’, ‘Satan’, ‘seraph’, ‘shibboleth’, ‘talmud’. The
+Arabic words in our language are more numerous; we have several
+arithmetical and astronomical terms, as ‘algebra’, ‘almanack’,
+‘azimuth’, ‘cypher’{5}, ‘nadir’, ‘talisman’, ‘zenith’, ‘zero’; and
+chemical, for the Arabs were the chemists, no less than the astronomers
+and arithmeticians of the middle ages; as ‘alcohol’, ‘alembic’,
+‘alkali’, ‘elixir’. Add to these the names of animals, plants, fruits,
+or articles of merchandize first introduced by them to the notice of
+Western Europe; as ‘amber’, ‘artichoke’, ‘barragan’, ‘camphor’,
+‘coffee’, ‘cotton’, ‘crimson’, ‘gazelle’, ‘giraffe’, ‘jar’, ‘jasmin’,
+‘lake’ (lacca), ‘lemon’, ‘lime’, ‘lute’, ‘mattress’, ‘mummy’, ‘saffron’,
+‘sherbet’, ‘shrub’, ‘sofa’, ‘sugar’, ‘syrup’, ‘tamarind’; and some
+further terms, ‘admiral’, ‘amulet’, ‘arsenal’, ‘assassin’, ‘barbican’,
+‘caliph’, ‘caffre’, ‘carat’, ‘divan’, ‘dragoman’{6}, ‘emir’, ‘fakir’,
+‘firman’, ‘harem’, ‘hazard’, ‘houri’, ‘magazine’, ‘mamaluke’,
+‘minaret’, ‘monsoon’, ‘mosque’, ‘nabob’, ‘razzia’, ‘sahara’, ‘simoom’,
+‘sirocco’, ‘sultan’, ‘tarif’, ‘vizier’; and I believe we shall have
+nearly completed the list. We have moreover a few Persian words, as
+‘azure’, ‘bazaar’, ‘bezoar’, ‘caravan’, ‘caravanserai’, ‘chess’,
+‘dervish’, ‘lilac’, ‘orange’, ‘saraband’, ‘taffeta’, ‘tambour’,
+‘turban’; this last appearing in strange forms at its first introduction
+into the language, thus ‘tolibant’ (Puttenham), ‘tulipant’ (Herbert’s
+_Travels_), ‘turribant’ (Spenser), ‘turbat’, ‘turbant’, and at length
+‘turban’. We have also a few Turkish, such as ‘chouse’, ‘janisary’,
+‘odalisque’, ‘sash’, ‘tulip’{7}. Of ‘civet’{8} and ‘scimitar’{9} I
+believe it can only be asserted that they are Eastern. The following are
+Hindostanee, ‘avatar’, ‘bungalow’, ‘calico’, ‘chintz’, ‘cowrie’, ‘lac’,
+‘muslin’, ‘punch’, ‘rupee’, ‘toddy’. ‘Tea’, or ‘tcha’, as it was spelt
+at first, of course is Chinese, so too are ‘junk’ and ‘satin’{10}.
+
+The New World has given us a certain number of words, Indian and
+other--‘cacique’ (‘cassique’, in Ralegh’s _Guiana_), ‘canoo’,
+‘chocolate’, ‘cocoa’{11}, ‘condor’, ‘hamoc’ (‘hamaca’ in Ralegh),
+‘jalap’, ‘lama’, ‘maize’ (Haytian), ‘pampas’, ‘pemmican’, ‘potato’
+(‘batata’ in our earlier voyagers), ‘raccoon’, ‘sachem’, ‘squaw’,
+‘tobacco’, ‘tomahawk’, ‘tomata’ (Mexican), ‘wigwam’. If ‘hurricane’ is a
+word which Europe originally obtained from the Caribbean islanders{12},
+it should of course be included in this list{13}. A certain number of
+words also we have received, one by one, from various languages, which
+sometimes have not bestowed on us more than this single one. Thus
+‘hussar’ is Hungarian; ‘caloyer’, Romaic; ‘mammoth’, of some Siberian
+language;{14} ‘tattoo’, Polynesian; ‘steppe’, Tartarian; ‘sago’,
+‘bamboo’, ‘rattan’, ‘ourang outang’, are all, I believe, Malay words;
+‘assegai’{15} ‘zebra’, ‘chimpanzee’, ‘fetisch’, belong to different
+African dialects; the last, however, having reached Europe through the
+channel of the Portuguese{16}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Italian Words_}
+
+{Sidenote: _Spanish, Dutch and Celtic Words_}
+
+To come nearer home--we have a certain number of Italian words, as
+‘balcony’, ‘baldachin’, ‘balustrade’, ‘bandit’, ‘bravo’, ‘bust’ (it
+was ‘busto’ as first used in English, and therefore from the Italian,
+not from the French), ‘cameo’, ‘canto’, ‘caricature’, ‘carnival’,
+‘cartoon’, ‘charlatan’, ‘concert’, ‘conversazione’, ‘cupola’, ‘ditto’,
+‘doge’, ‘domino’{17}, ‘felucca’, ‘fresco’, ‘gazette’, ‘generalissimo’,
+‘gondola’, ‘gonfalon’, ‘grotto’, (‘grotta’ is the earliest form in
+which we have it in English), ‘gusto’, ‘harlequin’{18}, ‘imbroglio’,
+‘inamorato’, ‘influenza’, ‘lava’, ‘malaria’, ‘manifesto’, ‘masquerade’
+(‘mascarata’ in Hacket), ‘motto’, ‘nuncio’, ‘opera’, ‘oratorio’,
+‘pantaloon’, ‘parapet’, ‘pedantry’, ‘pianoforte’, ‘piazza’, ‘portico’,
+‘proviso’, ‘regatta’, ‘ruffian’, ‘scaramouch’, ‘sequin’, ‘seraglio’,
+‘sirocco’, ‘sonnet’, ‘stanza’, ‘stiletto’, ‘stucco’, ‘studio’,
+‘terra-cotta’, ‘umbrella’, ‘virtuoso’, ‘vista’, ‘volcano’, ‘zany’.
+‘Becco’, and ‘cornuto’, ‘fantastico’, ‘magnifico’, ‘impress’ (the
+armorial device upon shields, and appearing constantly in its Italian
+form ‘impresa’), ‘saltimbanco’ (=mountebank), all once common enough,
+are now obsolete. Sylvester uses often ‘farfalla’ for butterfly, but,
+as far as I know, this use is peculiar to him. If these are at all the
+whole number of our Italian words, and I cannot call to mind any
+other, the Spanish in the language are nearly as numerous; nor indeed
+would it be wonderful if they were more so; our points of contact with
+Spain, friendly and hostile, have been much more real than with Italy.
+Thus we have from the Spanish ‘albino’, ‘alligator’ (el lagarto),
+‘alcove’{19}, ‘armada’, ‘armadillo’, ‘barricade’, ‘bastinado’,
+‘bravado’, ‘caiman’, ‘cambist’, ‘camisado’, ‘carbonado’, ‘cargo’,
+‘cigar’, ‘cochineal’, ‘Creole’, ‘desperado’, ‘don’, ‘duenna’,
+‘eldorado’, ‘embargo’, ‘flotilla’, ‘gala’, ‘grandee’, ‘grenade’,
+‘guerilla’, ‘hooker’{20}, ‘infanta’, ‘jennet’, ‘junto’, ‘merino’,
+‘mosquito’, ‘mulatto’, ‘negro’, ‘olio’, ‘ombre’, ‘palaver’, ‘parade’,
+‘parasol’, ‘parroquet’, ‘peccadillo’, ‘picaroon’, ‘platina’, ‘poncho’,
+‘punctilio’, (for a long time spelt ‘puntillo’, in English books),
+‘quinine’, ‘reformado’, ‘savannah’, ‘serenade’, ‘sherry’, ‘stampede’,
+‘stoccado’, ‘strappado’, ‘tornado’, ‘vanilla’, ‘verandah’. ‘Buffalo’
+also is Spanish; ‘buff’ or ‘buffle’ being the proper English word;
+‘caprice’ too we probably obtained rather from Spain than Italy, as we
+find it written ‘capricho’ by those who used it first. Other Spanish
+words, once familiar, are now extinct. ‘Punctilio’ lives on, but not
+‘punto’, which occurs in Bacon. ‘Privado’, signifying a prince’s
+favourite, one admitted to his _privacy_ (no uncommon word in Jeremy
+Taylor and Fuller), has quite disappeared; so too has ‘quirpo’
+(cuerpo), the name given to a jacket fitting close to the _body_;
+‘quellio’ (cuello), a ruff or _neck_-collar; and ‘matachin’, the title
+of a sword-dance; these are all frequent in our early dramatists; and
+‘flota’ was the constant name of the treasure-fleet from the Indies.
+‘Intermess’ is employed by Evelyn, and is the Spanish ‘entremes’,
+though not recognized as such in our dictionaries. ‘Mandarin’ and
+‘marmalade’ are our only Portuguese words I can call to mind. A good
+many of our sea-terms are Dutch, as ‘sloop’, ‘schooner’, ‘yacht’,
+‘boom’, ‘skipper’, ‘tafferel’, ‘to smuggle’; ‘to wear’, in the sense
+of veer, as when we say ‘_to wear_ a ship’; ‘skates’, too, and
+‘stiver’, are Dutch. Celtic _things_ are for the most part designated
+among us by Celtic words; such as ‘bard’, ‘kilt’, ‘clan’, ‘pibroch’,
+‘plaid’, ‘reel’. Nor only such as these, which are all of them
+comparatively of modern introduction, but a considerable number, how
+large a number is yet a very unsettled question, of words which at a
+much earlier date found admission into our tongue, are derived from
+this quarter.
+
+Now, of course, I have no right to presume that any among us are
+equipped with that knowledge of other tongues, which shall enable us to
+detect of ourselves and at once the nationality of all or most of the
+words which we may meet--some of them greatly disguised, and having
+undergone manifold transformations in the process of their adoption
+among us; but only that we have such helps at command in the shape of
+dictionaries and the like, and so much diligence in their use, as will
+enable us to discover the quarter from which the words we may encounter
+have reached us; and I will confidently say that few studies of the
+kind will be more fruitful, will suggest more various matter of
+reflection, will more lead you into the secrets of the English tongue,
+than an analysis of a certain number of passages drawn from different
+authors, such as I have just now proposed. For this analysis you will
+take some passage of English verse or prose--say the first ten lines of
+_Paradise Lost_--or the Lord’s Prayer--or the 23rd Psalm; you will
+distribute the whole body of words contained in that passage, of course
+not omitting the smallest, according to their nationalities--writing, it
+may be, A over every Anglo-Saxon word, L over every Latin, and so on
+with the others, if any other should occur in the portion which you have
+submitted to this examination. When this is done, you will count up the
+_number_ of those which each language contributes; again, you will note
+the _character_ of the words derived from each quarter.
+
+{Sidenote: _Two Shapes of Words_}
+
+Yet here, before I pass further, I would observe in respect of those
+which come from the Latin, that it will be desirable further to mark
+whether they are directly from it, and such might be marked L¹, or only
+mediately from it, and to us directly from the French, which would be
+L², or L at second hand--our English word being only in the second
+generation descended from the Latin, not the child, but the child’s
+child. There is a rule that holds pretty constantly good, by which you
+may determine this point. It is this,--that if a word be directly from
+the Latin, it will not have undergone any alteration or modification in
+its form and shape, save only in the termination--‘innocentia’ will
+have become ‘innocency’, ‘natio’ will have become ‘nation’,
+‘firmamentum’ ‘firmament’, but nothing more. On the other hand, if it
+comes _through_ the French, it will generally be considerably altered in
+its passage. It will have undergone a process of lubrication; its
+sharply defined Latin outline will in good part have departed from it;
+thus ‘crown’ is from ‘corona’, but though ‘couronne’, and itself a
+dissyllable, ‘coroune’, in our earlier English; ‘treasure’ is from
+‘thesaurus’, but through ‘trésor’; ‘emperor’ is the Latin ‘imperator’,
+but it was first ‘empereur’. It will often happen that the substantive
+has past through this process, having reached us through the
+intervention of the French; while we have only felt at a later period
+our want of the adjective also, which we have proceeded to borrow direct
+from the Latin. Thus, ‘people’ is indeed ‘populus’, but it was ‘peuple’
+first, while ‘popular’ is a direct transfer of a Latin vocable into our
+English glossary. So too ‘enemy’ is ‘inimicus’, but it was first
+softened in the French, and had its Latin physiognomy to a great degree
+obliterated, while ‘inimical’ is Latin throughout; ‘parish’ is
+‘paroisse’, but ‘parochial’ is ‘parochialis’; ‘chapter’ is ‘chapitre’,
+but ‘capitular’ is ‘capitularis’.
+
+{Sidenote: _Doublets_}
+
+Sometimes you will find in English what I may call the double adoption
+of a Latin word; which now makes part of our vocabulary in two shapes;
+‘doppelgängers’ the Germans would call such words{21}. There is first
+the elder word, which the French has given us; but which, before it
+gave, it had fashioned and moulded, cutting it short, it may be, by a
+syllable or more, for the French devours letters and syllables; and
+there is the later word which we borrowed immediately from the Latin. I
+will mention a few examples; ‘secure’ and ‘sure’, both from ‘securus’,
+but one directly, the other through the French; ‘fidelity’ and ‘fealty’,
+both from ‘fidelitas’, but one directly, the other at second-hand;
+‘species’ and ‘spice’, both from ‘species’, spices being properly only
+_kinds_ of aromatic drugs; ‘blaspheme’ and ‘blame’, both from
+‘blasphemare’{22}, but ‘blame’ immediately from ‘blâmer’. Add to these
+‘granary’ and ‘garner’; ‘captain’ (capitaneus) and ‘chieftain’;
+‘tradition’ and ‘treason’; ‘abyss’ and ‘abysm’; ‘regal’ and ‘royal’;
+‘legal’ and ‘loyal’; ‘cadence’ and ‘chance’; ‘balsam’ and ‘balm’;
+‘hospital’ and ‘hotel’; ‘digit’ and ‘doit’{23}; ‘pagan’ and ‘paynim’;
+‘captive’ and ‘caitiff’; ‘persecute’ and ‘pursue’; ‘superficies’ and
+‘surface’; ‘faction’ and ‘fashion’; ‘particle’ and ‘parcel’;
+‘redemption’ and ‘ransom’; ‘probe’ and ‘prove’; ‘abbreviate’ and
+‘abridge’; ‘dormitory’ and ‘dortoir’ or ‘dorter’ (this last now
+obsolete, but not uncommon in Jeremy Taylor); ‘desiderate’ and ‘desire’;
+‘fact’ and ‘feat’; ‘major’ and ‘mayor’; ‘radius’ and ‘ray’; ‘pauper’
+and ‘poor’; ‘potion’ and ‘poison’; ‘ration’ and ‘reason’; ‘oration’ and
+‘orison’{24}. I have, in the instancing of these named always the Latin
+form before the French; but the reverse I suppose in every instance is
+the order in which the words were adopted by us; we had ‘pursue’ before
+‘persecute’, ‘spice’ before ‘species’, ‘royalty’ before ‘regality’, and
+so with the others{25}.
+
+The explanation of this greater change which the earlier form of the
+word has undergone, is not far to seek. Words which have been introduced
+into a language at an early period, when as yet writing is rare, and
+books are few or none, when therefore orthography is unfixed, or being
+purely phonetic, cannot properly be said to exist at all, such words for
+a long while live orally on the lips of men, before they are set down in
+writing; and out of this fact it is that we shall for the most part find
+them reshaped and remoulded by the people who have adopted them,
+entirely assimilated to _their_ language in form and termination, so as
+in a little while to be almost or quite indistinguishable from natives.
+On the other hand a most effectual check to this process, a process
+sometimes barbarizing and defacing, however it may be the only one which
+will make the newly brought in entirely homogeneous with the old and
+already existing, is imposed by the existence of a much written language
+and a full formed literature. The foreign word, being once adopted into
+these, can no longer undergo a thorough transformation. For the most
+part the utmost which use and familiarity can do with it now, is to
+cause the gradual dropping of the foreign termination. Yet this too is
+not unimportant; it often goes far to making a home for a word, and
+hindering it from wearing the appearance of a foreigner and
+stranger{26}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Analysis of English_}
+
+But to return from this digression--I said just now that you would learn
+very much from observing and calculating the proportions in which the
+words of one descent and those of another occur in any passage which you
+analyse. Thus examine the Lord’s Prayer. It consists of exactly seventy
+words. You will find that only the following six claim the rights of
+Latin citizenship--‘trespasses’, ‘trespass’, ‘temptation’, ‘deliver’,
+‘power’, ‘glory’. Nor would it be very difficult to substitute for any
+one of these a Saxon word. Thus for ‘trespasses’ might be substituted
+‘sins’; for ‘deliver’ ‘free’; for ‘power’ ‘might’; for ‘glory’
+‘brightness’; which would only leave ‘temptation’, about which there
+could be the slightest difficulty, and ‘trials’, though we now ascribe
+to the word a somewhat different sense, would in fact exactly correspond
+to it. This is but a small percentage, six words in seventy, or less
+than ten in the hundred; and we often light upon a still smaller
+proportion. Thus take the first three verses of the 23rd Psalm:--“The
+Lord is my Shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing; He shall feed me in a
+green _pasture_, and lead me forth beside the waters of _comfort_; He
+shall _convert_ my soul, and bring me forth in the paths of
+righteousness for his Name’s sake”. Here are forty-five words, and only
+the three in italics are Latin; and for every one of these too it would
+be easy to substitute a word of Saxon origin; little more, that is, than
+the proportion of seven in the hundred; while, still stronger than this,
+in five verses out of Genesis, containing one hundred and thirty words,
+there are only five not Saxon, less, that is, than four in the hundred.
+
+Shall we therefore conclude that these are the proportions in which the
+Anglo-Saxon and Latin elements of the language stand to one another? If
+they are so, then my former proposal to express their relations by sixty
+and thirty was greatly at fault; and seventy and twenty, or even eighty
+and ten, would fall short of adequately representing the real
+predominance of the Saxon over the Latin element of the language. But it
+is not so; the Anglo-Saxon words by no means outnumber the Latin in the
+degree which the analysis of those passages would seem to imply. It is
+not that there are so many more Anglo-Saxon words, but that the words
+which there are, being words of more primary necessity, do therefore so
+much more frequently recur. The proportions which the analysis of the
+_dictionary_ that is, of the language _at rest_, would furnish, are very
+different from these which I have just instanced, and which the analysis
+of _sentences_, or of the language _in motion_, gives. Thus if we
+examine the total vocabulary of the English Bible, not more than sixty
+per cent. of the words are native; such are the results which the
+Concordance gives; but in the actual translation the native words are
+from ninety in some passages to ninety-six in others per cent{27}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon the Base of English_}
+
+The notice of this fact will lead us to some very important conclusions
+as to the _character_ of the words which the Saxon and the Latin
+severally furnish; and principally to this:--that while the English
+language is thus compact in the main of these two elements, we must not
+for all this regard these two as making, one and the other, exactly the
+same _kind_ of contributions to it. On the contrary their contributions
+are of very different character. The Anglo-Saxon is not so much, as I
+have just called it, one element of the English language, as the
+foundation of it, the basis. All its joints, its whole _articulation_,
+its sinews and its ligaments, the great body of articles, pronouns,
+conjunctions, prepositions, numerals, auxiliary verbs, all smaller words
+which serve to knit together and bind the larger into sentences, these,
+not to speak of the grammatical structure of the language, are
+exclusively Saxon. The Latin may contribute its tale of bricks, yea, of
+goodly and polished hewn stones, to the spiritual building; but the
+mortar, with all that holds and binds the different parts of it
+together, and constitutes them into a house, is Saxon throughout. I
+remember Selden in his _Table Talk_ using another comparison; but to the
+same effect: “If you look upon the language spoken in the Saxon time,
+and the language spoken now, you will find the difference to be just as
+if a man had a cloak which he wore plain in Queen Elizabeth’s days, and
+since, here has put in a piece of red, and there a piece of blue, and
+here a piece of green, and there a piece of orange-tawny. We borrow
+words from the French, Italian, Latin, as every pedantic man pleases”.
+
+{Sidenote: _Composite Languages_}
+
+I believe this to be the law which holds good in respect of all
+composite languages. However composite they may be, yet they are only so
+in regard of their words. There may be a medley in respect of these,
+some coming from one quarter, some from another; but there is never a
+mixture of grammatical forms and inflections. One or other language
+entirely predominates here, and everything has to conform and
+subordinate itself to the laws of this ruling and ascendant language.
+The Anglo-Saxon is the ruling language in our present English. Thus
+while it has thought good to drop its genders, even so the French
+substantives which come among us, must also leave theirs behind them; as
+in like manner the French verbs must renounce their own conjugations,
+and adapt themselves to ours{28}. I believe that a remarkable parallel
+to this might be found in the language of Persia, since the conquest of
+that country by the Arabs. The ancient Persian religion fell with the
+government, but the language remained totally unaffected by the
+revolution, in its grammatical structure and character. Arabic vocables,
+the only exotic words in Persian, are found in numbers varying with the
+object and quality, style and taste of the writers, but pages of pure
+idiomatic Persian may be written without employing a single word from
+the Arabic.
+
+At the same time the secondary or superinduced language, even while it
+is quite unable to force any of its forms on the language which receives
+its words, may yet compel that to renounce a portion of its own forms,
+by the impossibility which is practically found to exist of making them
+fit the new comers; and thus it may exert although not a positive, yet a
+negative, influence on the grammar of the other tongue. It has been so,
+as is generally admitted, in the instance of our own. “When the English
+language was inundated by a vast influx of French words, few, if any,
+French forms were received into its grammar; but the Saxon forms soon
+dropped away, because they did not suit the new roots; and the genius of
+the language, from having to deal with the newly imported words in a
+rude state, was induced to neglect the inflections of the native ones.
+This for instance led to the introduction of the _s_ as the universal
+termination of all plural nouns, which agreed with the usage of the
+French language, and was not alien from that of the Saxon, but was
+merely an extension of the termination of the ancient masculine to other
+classes of nouns”{29}.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Anglo-Saxon Element_}
+
+If you wish to convince yourselves by actual experience, of the fact
+which I just now asserted, namely, that the radical constitution of the
+language is Saxon, I would say, Try to compose a sentence, let it be
+only of ten or a dozen words, and the subject entirely of your choice,
+employing therein only words which are of a Latin derivation. I venture
+to say you will find it impossible, or next to impossible to do it;
+whichever way you turn, some obstacle will meet you in the face. And
+while it is thus with the Latin, whole pages might be written, I do not
+say in philosophy or theology or upon any abstruser subject, but on
+familiar matters of common everyday life, in which every word should be
+of Saxon extraction, not one of Latin; and these, pages in which, with
+the exercise of a little patience and ingenuity, all appearance of
+awkwardness and constraint should be avoided, so that it should never
+occur to the reader, unless otherwise informed, that the writer had
+submitted himself to this restraint and limitation in the words which he
+employed, and was only drawing them from one section of the English
+language. Sir Thomas Browne has given several long paragraphs so
+constructed. Take for instance the following, which is only a little
+fragment of one of them: “The first and foremost step to all good works
+is the dread and fear of the Lord of heaven and earth, which through
+the Holy Ghost enlighteneth the blindness of our sinful hearts to tread
+the ways of wisdom, and lead our feet into the land of blessing”{30}.
+This is not stiffer than the ordinary English of his time. I would
+suggest to you at your leisure to make these two experiments; you will
+find it, I think, exactly as I have here affirmed.
+
+While thus I bring before you the fact that it would be quite possible
+to write English, forgoing altogether the use of the Latin portion of
+the language, I would not have you therefore to conclude that this
+portion of the language is of little value, or that we could draw from
+the resources of our Teutonic tongue efficient substitutes for all the
+words which it has contributed to our glossary. I am persuaded that we
+could not; and, if we could, that it would not be desirable. I mention
+this, because there is sometimes a regret expressed that we have not
+kept our language more free from the admixture of Latin, a suggestion
+made that we should even now endeavour to keep under the Latin element
+of it, and as little as possible avail ourselves of it. I remember Lord
+Brougham urging upon the students at Glasgow as a help to writing good
+English, that they should do their best to rid their diction of
+long-tailed words in ‘osity’ and ‘ation’{31}. He plainly intended to
+indicate by this phrase all learned Latin words, or words derived from
+the Latin. This exhortation is by no means superfluous; for doubtless
+there were writers of a former age, Samuel Johnson in the last century,
+Henry More and Sir Thomas Browne in the century preceding, who gave
+undue preponderance to the learned, or Latin, portion in our language;
+and very much of its charm, of its homely strength and beauty, of its
+most popular and truest idioms, would have perished from it, had they
+succeeded in persuading others to write as they had written.
+
+{Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon Aboriginal_}
+
+But for all this we could _almost_ as ill spare this side of the
+language as the other. It represents and supplies needs not less real
+than the other does. Philosophy and science and the arts of a high
+civilization find their utterance in the Latin words of our language,
+or, if not in the Latin, in the Greek, which for present purposes may be
+grouped with them. How they should have found utterance in the speech of
+rude tribes, which, never having cultivated the things, must needs have
+been without the words which should express those things. Granting too
+that, _cœteris paribus_, when a Latin and a Saxon word offer themselves
+to our choice, we shall generally do best to employ the Saxon, to speak
+of ‘happiness’ rather than ‘felicity’, ‘almighty’ rather than
+‘omnipotent’, a ‘forerunner’ rather than a ‘precursor’, still these
+latter must be regarded as much denizens in the language as the former,
+no alien interlopers, but possessing the rights of citizenship as fully
+as the most Saxon word of them all. One part of the language is not to
+be favoured at the expense of the other; the Saxon at the cost of the
+Latin, as little as the Latin at the cost of the Saxon. “Both are
+indispensable; and speaking generally without stopping to distinguish as
+to subject, both are _equally_ indispensable. Pathos, in situations
+which are homely, or at all connected with domestic affections,
+naturally moves by Saxon words. Lyrical emotion of every kind, which (to
+merit the name of _lyrical_) must be in the state of flux and reflux,
+or, generally, of agitation, also requires the Saxon element of our
+language. And why? Because the Saxon is the aboriginal element; the
+basis and not the superstructure: consequently it comprehends all the
+ideas which are natural to the heart of man and to the elementary
+situations of life. And although the Latin often furnishes us with
+duplicates of these ideas, yet the Saxon, or monosyllabic part, has the
+advantage of precedency in our use and knowledge; for it is the language
+of the nursery whether for rich or poor, in which great philological
+academy no toleration is given to words in ‘osity’ or ‘ation’. There is
+therefore a great advantage, as regards the consecration to our
+feelings, settled by usage and custom upon the Saxon strands in the
+mixed yarn of our native tongue. And universally, this may be
+remarked--that wherever the passion of a poem is of that sort which
+_uses_, _presumes_, or _postulates_ the ideas, without seeking to extend
+them, Saxon will be the ‘cocoon’ (to speak by the language applied to
+silk-worms), which the poem spins for itself. But on the other hand,
+where the motion of the feeling is _by_ and _through_ the ideas, where
+(as in religious or meditative poetry--Young’s, for instance, or
+Cowper’s), the pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of
+the thinking, there the Latin will predominate; and so much so that,
+whilst the flesh, the blood, and the muscle, will be often almost
+exclusively Latin, the articulations only, or hinges of connection, will
+be the Anglo-Saxon”.
+
+These words which I have just quoted are De Quincey’s--whom I must needs
+esteem the greatest living master of our English tongue. And on the same
+matter Sir Francis Palgrave has expressed himself thus: “Upon the
+languages of Teutonic origin the Latin has exercised great influence,
+but most energetically on our own. The very early admixture of the
+_Langue d’Oil_, the never interrupted employment of the French as the
+language of education, and the nomenclature created by the scientific
+and literary cultivation of advancing and civilized society, have
+Romanized our speech; the warp may be Anglo-Saxon, but the woof is Roman
+as well as the embroidery, and these foreign materials have so entered
+into the texture, that were they plucked out, the web would be torn to
+rags, unravelled and destroyed”{32}.
+
+{Sidenote: _The English Bible_}
+
+I do not know where we could find a happier example of the preservation
+of the golden mean in this matter than in our Authorized Version of the
+Bible. One of the chief among the minor and secondary blessings which
+that Version has conferred on the nation or nations drawing spiritual
+life from it,--a blessing not small in itself, but only small by
+comparison with the infinitely higher blessings whereof it is the
+vehicle to them,--is the happy wisdom, the instinctive tact, with which
+its authors have steered between any futile mischievous attempt to
+ignore the full rights of the Latin part of the language on the one
+side, and on the other any burdening of their Version with such a
+multitude of learned Latin terms as should cause it to forfeit its
+homely character, and shut up large portions of it from the
+understanding of plain and unlearned men. There is a remarkable
+confession to this effect, to the wisdom, in fact, which guided them
+from above, to the providence that overruled their work, an honourable
+acknowledgement of the immense superiority in this respect of our
+English Version over the Romish, made by one now, unhappily, familiar
+with the latter, as once he was with our own. Among those who have
+recently abandoned the communion of the English Church one has exprest
+himself in deeply touching tones of lamentation over all, which in
+renouncing our translation, he feels himself to have forgone and lost.
+These are his words: “Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and
+marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the great
+strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the ear, like a music
+that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the
+convert hardly knows how he can forgo. Its felicities often seem to be
+almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind,
+and the anchor of national seriousness.... The memory of the dead passes
+into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its
+verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden
+beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and
+all that there has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and
+penitent and good speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible.... It
+is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never
+soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant
+with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is
+not in his Saxon Bible”{33}.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Rhemish Bible_}
+
+Such are his touching words; and certainly one has only to compare this
+version of ours with the Rhemish, and the transcendent excellence of our
+own reveals itself at once. I am not extolling now its superior
+scholarship; its greater freedom from by-ends; as little would I urge
+the fact that one translation is from the original Greek, the other from
+the Latin Vulgate, and thus the translation of a translation, often
+reproducing the mistakes of that translation; but, putting aside all
+considerations such as these, I speak only here of the superiority of
+the diction in which the meaning, be it correct or incorrect, is
+conveyed to English readers. Thus I open the Rhemish version at
+Galatians v. 19, where the long list of the “works of the flesh”, and of
+the “fruit of the Spirit”, is given. But what could a mere English
+reader make of words such as these--‘impudicity’, ‘ebrieties’,
+‘comessations’, ‘longanimity’, all which occur in that passage? while
+our Version for ‘ebrieties’ has ‘drunkenness’, for ‘comessations’ has
+‘revellings’, and so also for ‘longanimity’ ‘longsuffering’. Or set over
+against one another such phrases as these,--in the Rhemish, “the
+exemplars of the celestials” (Heb. ix. 23), but in ours, “the patterns
+of things in the heavens”. Or suppose if, instead of the words _we_ read
+at Heb. xiii. 16, namely “To do good and to communicate forget not; for
+with such sacrifices God is well pleased”, we read as follows, which are
+the words of the Rhemish, “Beneficence and communication do not forget;
+for with such hosts God is promerited”!--Who does not feel that if our
+Version had been composed in such Latin-English as this, had abounded in
+words like ‘odible’, ‘suasible’, ‘exinanite’, ‘contristate’,
+‘postulations’, ‘coinquinations’, ‘agnition’, ‘zealatour’, all, with
+many more of the same mint, in the Rhemish Version, our loss would have
+been great and enduring, one which would have searched into the whole
+religious life of our people, and been felt in the very depths of the
+national mind{34}?
+
+There was indeed something still deeper than love of sound and genuine
+English at work in our Translators, whether they were conscious of it or
+not, which hindered them from presenting the Scriptures to their
+fellow-countrymen dressed out in such a semi-Latin garb as this. The
+Reformation, which they were in this translation so mightily
+strengthening and confirming, was just a throwing off, on the part of
+the Teutonic nations, of that everlasting pupilage in which Rome would
+have held them; an assertion at length that they were come to full age,
+and that not through her, but directly through Christ, they would
+address themselves unto God. The use of the Latin language as the
+language of worship, as the language in which the Scriptures might alone
+be read, had been the great badge of servitude, even as the Latin habits
+of thought and feeling which it promoted had been the great helps to the
+continuance of this servitude, through long ages. It lay deep then in
+the very nature of their cause that the Reformers should develop the
+Saxon, or essentially national, element in the language; while it was
+just as natural that the Roman Catholic translators, if they must
+translate the Scriptures into English at all, should yet translate them
+into such English as should bear the nearest possible resemblance to the
+Latin Vulgate, which Rome with a very deep wisdom of this world would
+gladly have seen as the only one in the hands of the faithful.
+
+{Sidenote: _Future of the English Language_}
+
+Let me again, however, recur to the fact that what our Reformers did in
+this matter, they did without exaggeration; even as they had shown the
+same wise moderation in still higher matters. They gave to the Latin
+side of the language its rights, though they would not suffer it to
+encroach upon and usurp those of the Teutonic part of the language. It
+would be difficult not to believe, even if many outward signs said not
+the same, that great things are in store for the one language of Europe
+which thus serves as connecting link between the North and the South,
+between the languages spoken by the Teutonic nations of the North and by
+the Romance nations of the South; which holds on to and partakes of
+both; which is as a middle term between them{35}. There are who venture
+to hope that the English Church, being in like manner double-fronted,
+looking on the one side toward Rome, being herself truly Catholic,
+looking on the other towards the Protestant communions, being herself
+also protesting and reforming, may yet in the providence of God have an
+important part to play for the reconciling of a divided Christendom. And
+if this ever should be so, if, notwithstanding our sins and unworthiness,
+so blessed a task should be in store for her, it will not be a small
+help and assistance thereunto, that the language in which her mediation
+will be effected is one wherein both parties may claim their own, in
+which neither will feel that it is receiving the adjudication of a
+stranger, of one who must be an alien from its deeper thoughts and
+habits, because an alien from its words, but a language in which both
+must recognize very much of that which is deepest and most precious of
+their own.
+
+{Sidenote: _Jacob Grimm on English_}
+
+Nor is this prerogative which I have just claimed for our English the
+mere dream and fancy of patriotic vanity. The scholar who in our days is
+most profoundly acquainted with the great group of the Gothic languages
+in Europe, and a devoted lover, if ever there was such, of his native
+German, I mean Jacob Grimm, has expressed himself very nearly to the
+same effect, and given the palm over all to our English in words which
+you will not grudge to hear quoted, and with which I shall bring this
+lecture to a close. After ascribing to our language “a veritable power
+of expression, such as perhaps never stood at the command of any other
+language of men”, he goes on to say, “Its highly spiritual genius, and
+wonderfully happy development and condition, have been the result of a
+surprisingly intimate union of the two noblest languages in modern
+Europe, the Teutonic and the Romance--It is well known in what relation
+these two stand to one another in the English tongue; the former
+supplying in far larger proportion the material groundwork, the latter
+the spiritual conceptions. In truth the English language, which by no
+mere accident has produced and upborne the greatest and most predominant
+poet of modern times, as distinguished from the ancient classical poetry
+(I can, of course, only mean Shakespeare), may with all right be called
+a world-language; and like the English people, appears destined
+hereafter to prevail with a sway more extensive even than its present
+over all the portions of the globe{36}. For in wealth, good sense, and
+closeness of structure no other of the languages at this day spoken
+deserves to be compared with it--not even our German, which is torn,
+even as we are torn, and must first rid itself of many defects, before
+it can enter boldly into the lists, as a competitor with the
+English”{37}.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{1} These lectures were first delivered during the Russian War. [See De
+    Quincey to the same effect, _Works_, 1862, vol. iv. pp. vii, 286.]
+
+{2} F. Schlegel, _History of Literature, Lecture 10_.
+
+{3} [If dictionary words be counted as apart from the spoken language,
+    the proportion of the component elements of English is very
+    different. M. Müller quotes a calculation which makes the classical
+    element about 68 per cent, the Teutonic about 30, and miscellaneous
+    about 2 (_Science of Language_, 8th ed. i, 89). See Skeat,
+    _Principles of Eng. Etymology_, ii, 15 _seq._, and _infra_ p. 25.]
+
+{4} [What here follows should be compared with the fuller and more
+    accurate lists of words borrowed from foreign sources given by Prof.
+    Skeat in his larger _Etymolog. Dictionary_, 759 _seq._; and more
+    completely in his _Principles of Eng. Etymology_, 2nd ser. 294-440.]
+
+{5} Yet see J. Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_, p. 985.
+
+{6} The word hardly deserves to be called English, yet in Pope’s time it
+    had made some progress toward naturalization. Of a real or pretended
+    polyglottist, who might thus have served as an universal
+    _interpreter_, he says:
+
+        “Pity you was not _druggerman_ at Babel”.
+
+    ‘Truckman’, or more commonly ‘truchman’, familiar to all readers of
+    our early literature, is only another form of this, one which
+    probably has come to us through ‘turcimanno’, the Italian form of
+    the word. [See my _Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 19].
+
+{7} [‘Tulip’, at first spelt _tulipan_, is really the same word as
+    _turban_ (_tulipant_ just above), which the flower was thought to
+    resemble (Persian _dulband_).]
+
+{8} [Ultimately from the Arabic _zabād_ (N.E.D.).]
+
+{9} [Apparently to be traced to the Persian _shim-shír_ or _sham-shír_
+    (“lion’s-nail”), a crooked sword (Skeat).]
+
+{10} [Rather through the French from low Latin _satinus_ or _setinus_, a
+     fabric made of _seta_, silk. But Yule holds that it may be from
+     Zayton or Zaitun (in Fokien, China), an important emporium of
+     Western trade in the Middle Ages (_Hobson-Jobson_, 602).]
+
+{11} [Probably intended for _cacao_, which is Mexican. _Cocoa_, the nut,
+     is from Portuguese _coco_.]
+
+{12} See Washington Irving, _Life and Voyages of Columbus_, b. 8, c. 9.
+
+{13} [It is from the Haytian _Hurakan_, the storm-god (_The Folk and
+     their Word-Lore_, 90).]
+
+{14} [From old Russian _mammot_, whence modern Russian _mamant_.]
+
+{15} [‘Assagai’ is from the Arabic _az-_ (_al-_) _zaghāyah_, ‘the
+     _zagāyah_’, a Berber name for a lance (N.E.D.).]
+
+{16} [This puts the cart before the horse. ‘Fetish’ is really the
+     Portuguese word _feitiço_, artificial, made-up, factitious (Latin
+     _factitius_), applied to African amulets or idols.]
+
+{17} [‘Domino’ is Spanish rather than Italian (Skeat, _Principles_, ii,
+     312).]
+
+{18} [‘Harlequin’ appears to be an older word in French than in Italian
+     (_ibid._).]
+
+{19} On the question whether this ought to have been included among the
+     Arabic, see Diez, _Wörterbuch d. Roman. Sprachen_, p. 10.
+
+{20} Not in our dictionaries; but a kind of coasting vessel well known
+     to seafaring men, the Spanish ‘urca’; thus in Oldys’ _Life of
+     Raleigh_: “Their galleons, galleasses, gallies, _urcas_, and zabras
+     were miserably shattered”.
+
+{21} [A valuable list of such doublets is given by Prof. Skeat in his
+     large _Etymological Dictionary_, p. 772 _seq._]
+
+{22} This particular instance of double adoption, of ‘dimorphism’ as
+     Latham calls it, ‘dittology’ as Heyse, recurs in Italian,
+     ‘bestemmiare’ and ‘biasimare’; and in Spanish, ‘blasfemar’ and
+     ‘lastimar’.
+
+{23} [‘Doit’, a small coin (Dutch _duit_) has no relation to, ‘digit’.
+     Was the author thinking of old French _doit_, a finger, from Latin
+     _digitus_?]
+
+{24} Somewhat different from this, yet itself also curious, is the
+     passing of an Anglo-Saxon word in two different forms into English,
+     and continuing in both; thus ‘desk’ and ‘dish’, both the
+     Anglo-Saxon ‘disc’ [a loan-word from Latin _discus_, Greek
+     _diskos_] the German ‘tisch’; ‘beech’ and ‘book’, both the
+     Anglo-Saxon ‘boc’, our first books being _beechen_ tablets (see
+     Grimm, _Wörterbuch_, s. vv. ‘Buch’, ‘Buche’); ‘girdle’ and
+     ‘kirtle’; both of them corresponding to the German ‘gürtel’;
+     already in Anglo-Saxon a double spelling, ‘gyrdel’, ‘cyrtel’, had
+     prepared for the double words; so too ‘haunch’ and ‘hinge’; ‘lady’
+     and ‘lofty’ [these last three instances are not doublets at all,
+     being quite unrelated; see Skeat, s. vv.]; ‘shirt’, and ‘skirt’;
+     ‘black’ and ‘bleak’; ‘pond’ and ‘pound’; ‘deck’ and ‘thatch’;
+     ‘deal’ and ‘dole’; ‘weald’ and ‘wood’†; ‘dew’ and ‘thaw’†;
+     ‘wayward’ and ‘awkward’†; ‘dune’ and ‘down’; ‘hood’ and ‘hat’†;
+     ‘ghost’ and ‘gust’†; ‘evil’ and ‘ill’†; ‘mouth’ and ‘moth’†;
+     ‘hedge’ and ‘hay’.
+
+     [All these suggested doublets which I have obelized must be
+     dismissed as untenable.]
+
+{25} We have in the same way double adoptions from the Greek, one
+     direct, at least as regards the forms; one modified by its passage
+     through some other language; thus, ‘adamant’ and ‘diamond’;
+     ‘monastery’ and ‘minster’; ‘scandal’ and ‘slander’; ‘theriac’ and
+     ‘treacle’; ‘asphodel’ and ‘daffodil’; ‘presbyter’ and ‘priest’.
+
+{26} The French itself has also a double adoption, or as perhaps we
+     should more accurately call it there, a double formation, from the
+     Latin, and such as quite bears out what has been said above: one
+     going far back in the history of the language, the other belonging
+     to a later and more literary period; on which subject there are
+     some admirable remarks by Génin, _Récréations Philologiques_, vol.
+     i. pp. 162-66; and see Fuchs, _Die Roman. Sprachen_, p. 125. Thus
+     from ‘separare’ is derived ‘sevrer’, to separate the child from its
+     mother’s breast, to wean, but also ‘séparer’, without this special
+     sense; from ‘pastor’, ‘pâtre’, a shepherd in the literal, and
+     ‘pasteur’ the same in a tropical, sense; from ‘catena’, ‘chaîne’
+     and ‘cadène’; from ‘fragilis’, ‘frêle’ and ‘fragile’; from
+     ‘pensare’, ‘peser’ and ‘penser’; from ‘gehenna’, ‘gêne’ and
+     ‘géhenne’; from ‘captivus’, ‘chétif’ and ‘captif’; from ‘nativus’,
+     ‘naïf’ and ‘natif’; from ‘designare’, ‘dessiner’ and ‘designer’;
+     from ‘decimare’, ‘dîmer’ and ‘décimer’; from ‘consumere’,
+     ‘consommer’ and ‘consumer’; from ‘simulare’, ‘sembler’ and
+     ‘simuler’; from the low Latin, ‘disjejunare’, ‘dîner’ and
+     ‘déjeûner’; from ‘acceptare’, ‘acheter’ and ‘accepter’; from
+     ‘homo’, ‘on’ and ‘homme’; from ‘paganus’, ‘payen’ and ‘paysan’ [the
+     latter from ‘pagensis’]; from ‘obedientia’, ‘obéissance’ and
+     ‘obédience’; from ‘strictus’, ‘étroit’ and ‘strict’; from
+     ‘sacramentum’, ‘serment’ and ‘sacrement’; from ‘ministerium’,
+     ‘métier’ and ‘ministère’; from ‘parabola’, ‘parole’ and ‘parabole’;
+     from ‘peregrinus’, ‘pélerin’ and ‘pérégrin’; from ‘factio’, ‘façon’
+     and ‘faction’, and it has now adopted ‘factio’ in a third shape,
+     that is, in our English ‘fashion’; from ‘pietas’, ‘pitié’ and
+     ‘piété’; from ‘capitulum’, ‘chapitre’ and ‘capitule’, a botanical
+     term. So, too, in Italian, ‘manco’, maimed, and ‘monco’, maimed _of
+     a hand_; ‘rifutáre’, to refute, and ‘rifiutáre’, to refuse; ‘dama’
+     and ‘donna’, both forms of ‘domina’.
+
+{27} See Marsh, _Manual of the English Language_, Engl. Ed. p. 88 _seq._
+
+{28} W. Schlegel (_Indische Bibliothek_, vol. i. p. 284): Coeunt quidem
+     paullatim in novum corpus peregrina vocabula, sed grammatica
+     linguarum, unde petitæ sunt, ratio perit.
+
+{29} J. Grimm, quoted in _The Philological Museum_ vol. i. p. 667.
+
+{30} _Works_, vol. iv. p. 202.
+
+{31} [These words are taken from the ‘Whistlecraft’ of John Hookham
+     Frere:--
+
+         “Don’t confound the language of the nation
+         With long-tail’d words in _osity_ and _ation_”.
+
+                                 (_Works_, 1872, vol. 1, p. 206).]
+
+{32} _History of Normandy and England_, vol. i, p. 78.
+
+{33} [F. W. Faber,] _Dublin Review_, June, 1853.
+
+{34} There is more on this matter in my book _On the Authorized Version
+     of the New Testament_, pp. 33-35.
+
+{35} See a paper _On the Probable Future Position of the English
+     Language_, by T. Watts, Esq., in the _Proceedings of the
+     Philological Society_, vol. iv, p. 207.
+
+{36} A little more than two centuries ago a poet, himself abundantly
+     deserving the title of ‘well-languaged’; which a cotemporary or
+     near successor gave him, ventured in some remarkable lines timidly
+     to anticipate this. Speaking of his native tongue, which he himself
+     wrote with such vigour and purity, though wanting in the fiery
+     impulses which go to the making of a first-rate poet, Daniel
+     exclaims:--
+
+         “And who, in time, knows whither we may vent
+         The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
+         This gain of our best glory shall be sent,
+         To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
+         What worlds in the yet unformèd Occident
+         May come refined with the accents that are ours?
+         Or who can tell for what great work in hand
+         The greatness of our style is now ordained?
+         What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command,
+         What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained,
+         What mischief it may powerfully withstand,
+         And what fair ends may thereby be attained”?
+
+{37} _Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache_, Berlin, 1832, p. 5.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
+
+
+It is not for nothing that we speak of some languages as _living_, of
+others as _dead_. All spoken languages may be ranged in the first class;
+for as men will never consent to use a language without more or less
+modifying it in their use, will never so far forgo their own activity as
+to leave it exactly where they found it, it will therefore, so long as
+it is thus the utterance of human thought and feeling, inevitably show
+itself alive by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition,
+loss, progress, and decay. A living language therefore is one which
+abundantly deserves this name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is
+by living men, a _vital_ formative energy is still at work. It is one
+which is in course of actual evolution, which, if the life that animates
+it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it
+anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources,
+increasing its wealth; while at the same time it is casting off useless
+and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of which it
+finds no use, rejecting from itself by a re-active energy the foreign
+and heterogeneous, which may for a while have been forced upon it. I
+would not assert that in the process of all this it does not make
+mistakes; in the desire to simplify it may let go distinctions which
+were not useless, and which it would have been better to retain; the
+acquisitions which it makes are very far from being all gains; it
+sometimes rejects words as worthless, or suffers words to die out, which
+were most worthy to have lived. So far as it does this its life is not
+perfectly healthy; there are here signs, however remote, of
+disorganization, decay, and ultimate death; but still it lives, and even
+these misgrowths and malformations, the rejection of this good, the
+taking up into itself of that ill, all these errors are themselves the
+utterances and evidences of life. A dead language is the contrary of all
+this. It is dead, because books, and not now any generation of living
+men, are the guardians of it, and what they guard, they guard without
+change. Its course has been completely run, and it is now equally
+incapable of gaining and of losing. We may come to know it better; but
+in itself it is not, and never can be, other than it was when it ceased
+from the lips of men.
+
+{Sidenote: _English a Living Language_}
+
+Our own is, of course, a living language still. It is therefore gaining
+and losing. It is a tree in which the vital sap is circulating yet,
+ascending from the roots into the branches; and as this works, new
+leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping
+away. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some
+of the evidences of this life at work in it still. As I took for the
+subject of my first lecture the actual proportions in which the several
+elements of our composite English are now found in it, and the service
+which they were severally called on to perform, so I shall consider in
+this the _sources_ from which the English language has enriched its
+vocabulary, the _periods_ at which it has made the chief additions to
+this, the _character_ of the additions which at different periods it has
+made, and the _motives_ which induced it to seek them.
+
+I had occasion to mention in that lecture and indeed I dwelt with some
+emphasis on the fact, that the core, the radical constitution of our
+language, is Anglo-Saxon; so that, composite or mingled as it must be
+freely allowed to be, it is only such in respect to words, not in
+respect of construction, inflexions, or generally its grammatical forms.
+These are all of one piece; and whatever of new has come in has been
+compelled to conform itself to these. The framework is English; only a
+part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this filling in, of these
+its comparatively more recent accessions, I now propose to speak.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Norman Conquest_}
+
+The first great augmentation by foreign words of our Saxon vocabulary,
+setting aside those which the Danes brought us, was a consequence,
+although not an immediate one, of the battle of Hastings, and of the
+Norman domination which Duke William’s victory established in our land.
+And here let me say in respect of that victory, in contradiction to the
+sentimental regrets of Thierry and others, and with the fullest
+acknowledgement of the immediate miseries which it entailed on the Saxon
+race, that it was really the making of England; a judgment, it is true,
+but a judgment and mercy in one. God never showed more plainly that He
+had great things in store for the people which should occupy this
+English soil, than when He brought hither that aspiring Norman race. At
+the same time the actual interpenetration of our Anglo-Saxon with any
+large amount of French words did not find place till very considerably
+later than this event, however it was a consequence of it. Some French
+words we find very soon after; but in the main the two streams of
+language continued for a long while separate and apart, even as the two
+nations remained aloof, a conquering and a conquered, and neither
+forgetting the fact.
+
+Time however softened the mutual antipathies. The Norman, after a while
+shut out from France, began more and more to feel that England was his
+home and sphere. The Saxon, recovering little by little from the extreme
+depression which had ensued on his defeat, became every day a more
+important element of the new English nation which was gradually forming
+from the coalition of the two races. His language partook of his
+elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority. French was no
+longer the only language in which a gentleman could speak, or a poet
+sing. At the same time the Saxon, now passing into the English language,
+required a vast addition to its vocabulary, if it were to serve all the
+needs of those who were willing to employ it now. How much was there of
+high culture, how many of the arts of life, of its refined pleasures,
+which had been strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no
+utterance in Saxon words. All this it was sought to supply from the
+French.
+
+We shall not err, I think, if we assume the great period of the
+incoming of French words into the English language to have been when the
+Norman nobility were exchanging their own language for the English; and
+I should be disposed with Tyrwhitt to believe that there is much
+exaggeration in attributing the large influx of these into English to
+one man’s influence, namely to Chaucer’s{38}. Doubtless he did much; he
+fell in with and furthered a tendency which already prevailed. But to
+suppose that the majority of French vocables which he employed in his
+poems had never been employed before, had been hitherto unfamiliar to
+English ears, is to suppose that his poems must have presented to his
+contemporaries an absurd patchwork of two languages, and leaves it
+impossible to explain how he should at once have become the popular poet
+of our nation.
+
+{Sidenote: _Influence of Chaucer_}
+
+That Chaucer largely developed the language in this direction is indeed
+plain. We have only to compare his English with that of another great
+master of the tongue, his contemporary Wiclif, to perceive how much more
+his diction is saturated with French words than is that of the Reformer.
+We may note too that many which he and others employed, and as it were
+proposed for admission, were not finally allowed and received; so that
+no doubt they went beyond the needs of the language, and were here in
+excess{39}. At the same time this can be regarded as no condemnation of
+their attempt. It was only by actual experience that it could be proved
+whether the language wanted those words or not, whether it could absorb
+them into itself, and assimilate them with all that it already was and
+had; or did not require, and would therefore in due time reject and put
+them away. And what happened then will happen in every attempt to
+transplant on a large scale the words of one language into another. Some
+will take root; others will not, but after a longer or briefer period
+will wither and die. Thus I observe in Chaucer such French words as
+these, ‘misericorde’, ‘malure’ (malheur), ‘penible’, ‘ayel’ (aieul),
+‘tas’, ‘gipon’, ‘pierrie’ (precious stones); none of which, and Wiclif’s
+‘creansur’ (2 Kings iv. 1) as little, have permanently won a place in
+our tongue. For a long time ‘mel’, used often by Sylvester, struggled
+hard for a place in the language side by side with honey; ‘roy’ side by
+side with king; this last quite obtained one in Scotch. It is curious to
+mark some of these French adoptions keeping their ground to a
+comparatively late day, and yet finally extruded: seeming to have taken
+firm root, they have yet withered away in the end. Thus it has been, for
+example, with ‘egal’ (Puttenham); with ‘ouvert’, ‘mot’, ‘ecurie’,
+‘baston’, ‘gite’ (Holland); with ‘rivage’, ‘jouissance’, ‘noblesse’,
+‘tort’ (=wrong), ‘accoil’ (accuellir), ‘sell’ (=saddle), all occurring
+in Spenser; with ‘to serr’ (serrer), ‘vive’, ‘reglement’, used all by
+Bacon; and so with ‘esperance’, ‘orgillous’ (orgueilleux), ‘rondeur’,
+‘scrimer’ (=fencer), all in Shakespeare; with ‘amort’ (this also in
+Shakespeare){40}, and ‘avie’ (Holland). ‘Maugre’, ‘congie’, ‘devoir’,
+‘dimes’, ‘sans’, and ‘bruit’, used often in our Bible, were English
+once{41}; when we employ them now, it is with the sense that we are
+using foreign words. The same is true of ‘dulce’, ‘aigredoulce’
+(=soursweet), of ‘mur’ for wall, of ‘baine’ for bath, of the verb ‘to
+cass’ (all in Holland), of ‘volupty’ (Sir Thomas Elyot), ‘volunty’
+(Evelyn), ‘medisance’ (Montagu), ‘petit’ (South), ‘aveugle’, ‘colline’
+(both in _State Papers_), and ‘eloign’ (Hacket){42}.
+
+We have seen when the great influx of French words took place--that is,
+from the time of the Conquest, although scantily and feebly at the
+first, to that of Chaucer. But with him our literature and language had
+made a burst, which they were not able to maintain. He has by Warton
+been well compared to some warm bright day in the very early spring,
+which seems to say that the winter is over and gone; but its promise is
+deceitful; the full bursting and blossoming of the springtime are yet
+far off. That struggle with France which began so gloriously, but ended
+so disastrously, even with the loss of our whole ill-won dominion there,
+the savagery of our wars of the Roses, wars which were a legacy
+bequeathed to us by that unrighteous conquest, leave a huge gap in our
+literary history, nearly a century during which very little was done for
+the cultivation of our native tongue, during which it could have made
+few important accessions to its wealth.
+
+{Sidenote: _Latin Importation_}
+
+The period however is notable as being that during which for the first
+time we received a large accession of Latin words. There was indeed
+already a small settlement of these, for the most part ecclesiastical,
+which had long since found their home in the bosom of the Anglo-Saxon
+itself, and had been entirely incorporated into it. The fact that we had
+received our Christianity from Rome, and that Latin was the constant
+language of the Church, sufficiently explains the incoming of these.
+Such were ‘monk’, ‘bishop’ (I put them in their present shapes, and do
+not concern myself whether they were originally Greek or no; they
+reached _us_ as Latin); ‘provost’, ‘minster’, ‘cloister’, ‘candle’,
+‘psalter’, ‘mass’, and the names of certain foreign animals, as
+‘camel’, or plants or other productions, as ‘pepper’, ‘fig’; which are
+all, with slightly different orthography, Anglo-Saxon words. These,
+however, were entirely exceptional, and stood to the main body of the
+language not as the Romance element of it does now to the Gothic, one
+power over against another, but as the Spanish or Italian or Arabic
+words in it now stand to the whole present body of the language--and
+could not be affirmed to affect it more.
+
+So soon however as French words were imported largely, as I have just
+observed, into the language, and were found to coalesce kindly with the
+native growths, this very speedily suggested, as indeed it alone
+rendered possible, the going straight to the Latin, and drawing directly
+from it; and thus in the hundred years which followed Chaucer a large
+amount of Latin found its way, if not into our speech, yet at all events
+into our books--words which were not brought _through_ the French, for
+they are not, and have not at any time been, French, but yet words which
+would never have been introduced into English, if their way had not been
+prepared, if the French already domesticated among us had not bridged
+over, as it were, the gulf, that would have otherwise been too wide
+between them and the Saxon vocables of our tongue.
+
+In this period, a period of great depression of the national spirit, we
+may trace the attempt at a pedantic latinization of English quite as
+clearly at work as at later periods, subsequent to the revival of
+learning. It was now that a crop of such words as ‘facundious’,
+‘tenebrous’, ‘solacious’, ‘pulcritude’, ‘consuetude’ (all these occur in
+Hawes), with many more, long since rejected by the language, sprung up;
+while other words, good in themselves, and which have been since
+allowed, were yet employed in numbers quite out of proportion with the
+Saxon vocables with which they were mingled, and which they altogether
+overtopped and shadowed. Chaucer’s hearty English feeling, his thorough
+sympathy with the people, the fact that, scholar as he was, he was yet
+the poet not of books but of life, and drew his best inspiration from
+life, all this had kept him, in the main, clear of this fault. But in
+others it is very manifest. Thus I must esteem the diction of Lydgate,
+Hawes, and the other versifiers who filled up the period between Chaucer
+and Surrey, immensely inferior to Chaucer’s; being all stuck over with
+long and often ill-selected Latin words. The worst offenders in this
+line, as Campbell himself admits, were the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
+century. “The prevailing fault”, he says, “of English diction, in the
+fifteenth century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation of
+anglicising Latin words. In this pedantry and use of “aureate terms” the
+Scottish versifiers went even beyond their brethren of the south....
+When they meant to be eloquent, they tore up words from the Latin, which
+never took root in the language, like children making a mock garden with
+flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither”{43}.
+
+To few indeed is the wisdom and discretion given, certainly it was
+given to none of those, to bear themselves in this hazardous enterprise
+according to the rules laid down by Dryden; who in the following
+admirable passage declares the motives that induced him to seek for
+foreign words, and the considerations that guided him in their
+selection: “If sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who
+shall hinder me to import them from a foreign country? I carry not out
+the treasure of the nation which is never to return, but what I bring
+from Italy I spend in England. Here it remains and here it circulates,
+for, if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand to another. I trade
+both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native
+language. We have enough in England to supply our necessity, but if we
+will have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by
+commerce. Poetry requires adornment, and that is not to be had from our
+old Teuton monosyllables; therefore if I find any elegant word in a
+classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by using it myself; and
+if the public approves of it, the bill passes. But every man cannot
+distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry: every man therefore is not fit
+to innovate. Upon the whole matter a poet must first be certain that the
+word he would introduce is beautiful in the Latin; and is to consider in
+the next place whether it will agree with the English idiom: after this,
+he ought to take the opinion of judicious friends, such as are learned
+in both languages; and lastly, since no man is infallible, let him use
+this licence very sparingly; for if too many foreign words are poured
+in upon us, it looks as if they were designed not to assist the natives,
+but to conquer them”{44}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Influence of the Reformation_}
+
+But this tendency to latinize our speech was likely to receive, and
+actually did receive, a new impulse from the revival of learning, and
+the familiar re-acquaintance with the great masterpieces of ancient
+literature which went along with this revival. Happily another movement
+accompanied, or at least followed hard on this; a movement in England
+essentially national; and which stirred our people at far deeper depths
+of their moral and spiritual life than any mere revival of learning
+could have ever done; I refer, of course, to the Reformation. It was
+only among the Germanic nations of Europe, as has often been remarked,
+that the Reformation struck lasting roots; it found its strength
+therefore in the Teutonic element of the national character, which also
+it in its turn further strengthened, purified, and called out. And thus,
+though Latin came in upon us now faster than ever, and in a certain
+measure also Greek, yet this was not without its redress and
+counterpoise, in the cotemporaneous unfolding of the more fundamentally
+popular side of the language. Popular preaching and discussion, the
+necessity of dealing with truths the most transcendent in a way to be
+understood not by scholars only, but by ‘idiots’ as well, all this
+served to evoke the native resources of our tongue; and thus the
+relative proportion between the one part of the language and the other
+was not dangerously disturbed, the balance was not destroyed; as it
+might well have been, if only the Humanists{45} had been at work, and
+not the Reformers as well.
+
+The revival of learning, which made itself first felt in Italy, extended
+to England, and was operative here, during the reigns of Henry the
+Eighth and his immediate successors. Having thus slightly anticipated in
+time, it afterwards ran exactly parallel with, the period during which
+our Reformation was working itself out. The epoch was in all respects
+one of immense mental and moral activity, and such never leave the
+language of a nation where they found it. Much is changed in it; much
+probably added; for the old garment of speech, which once served all
+needs, has grown too narrow, and serves them now no more. “Change in
+language is not, as in many natural products, continuous; it is not
+equable, but eminently by fits and starts”; and when the foundations of
+the national mind are heaving under the power of some new truth, greater
+and more important changes will find place in fifty years than in two
+centuries of calmer or more stagnant existence. Thus the activities and
+energies which the Reformation awakened among us here--and I need not
+tell you that these reached far beyond the domain of our directly
+religious life--caused mighty alterations in the English tongue{46}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Rise of New Words_}
+
+For example, the Reformation had its scholarly, we might say, its
+scholastic, as well as its popular, aspect. Add this fact to the fact of
+the revived interest in classical learning, and you will not wonder that
+a stream of Latin, now larger than ever, began to flow into our
+language. Thus Puttenham, writing in Queen Elizabeth’s reign{47}, gives
+a long list of words which, as he declares, had been quite recently
+introduced into the language. Some of them are Greek, a few French and
+Italian, but very far the most are Latin. I will not give you his whole
+catalogue, but some specimens from it; it is difficult to understand
+concerning some of these, how the language should have managed to do
+without them so long; ‘method’, ‘methodical’, ‘function’, ‘numerous’,
+‘penetrate’, ‘penetrable’, ‘indignity’, ‘savage’, ‘scientific’,
+‘delineation’, ‘dimension’--all which he notes to have recently come up;
+so too ‘idiom’, ‘significative’, ‘compendious’, ‘prolix’, ‘figurative’,
+‘impression’, ‘inveigle’, ‘metrical’. All these he adduces with praise;
+others upon which he bestows equal commendation, have not held their
+ground, as ‘placation’, ‘numerosity’, ‘harmonical’. Of those neologies
+which he disallowed, he only anticipated in some cases, as in
+‘facundity’, ‘implete’, ‘attemptat’ (‘attentat’), the decision of a
+later day; other words which he condemned no less, as ‘audacious’,
+‘compatible’, ‘egregious’, have maintained their ground. These too have
+done the same; ‘despicable’, ‘destruction’, ‘homicide’, ‘obsequious’,
+‘ponderous’, ‘portentous’, ‘prodigious’, all of them by another writer a
+little earlier condemned as “inkhorn terms, smelling too much of the
+Latin”.
+
+{Sidenote: _French Neologies_}
+
+It is curious to observe the “words of art”, as he calls them, which
+Philemon Holland, a voluminous translator at the end of the sixteenth
+and beginning of the seventeenth century, counts it needful to explain
+in a sort of glossary which he appends to his translation of Pliny’s
+_Natural History_{48}. One can hardly at the present day understand how
+any person who would care to consult the book at all would find any
+difficulty with words like the following, ‘acrimony’, ‘austere’, ‘bulb’,
+‘consolidate’, ‘debility’, ‘dose’, ‘ingredient’, ‘opiate’, ‘propitious’,
+‘symptom’, all which, however, as novelties he carefully explains. Some
+of the words in his glossary, it is true, are harder and more technical
+than these; but a vast proportion of them present no greater difficulty
+than those which I have adduced{49}.
+
+The period during which this naturalization of Latin words in the
+English Language was going actively forward, may be said to have
+continued till about the Restoration of Charles the Second. It first
+received a check from the coming up of French tastes, fashions, and
+habits of thought consequent on that event. The writers already formed
+before that period, such as Cudworth and Barrow, still continued to
+write their stately sentences, Latin in structure, and Latin in diction,
+but not so those of a younger generation. We may say of this influx of
+Latin that it left the language vastly more copious, with greatly
+enlarged capabilities, but perhaps somewhat burdened, and not always
+able to move gracefully under the weight of its new acquisitions; for as
+Dryden has somewhere truly said, it is easy enough to acquire foreign
+words, but to know what to do with them after you have acquired, is the
+difficulty.
+
+{Sidenote: _Pedantic Words_}
+
+It might have received indeed most serious injury, if _all_ the words
+which the great writers of this second Latin period of our language
+employed, and so proposed as candidates for admission into it, had
+received the stamp of popular allowance. But happily it was not so; it
+was here, as it had been before with the French importations, and with
+the earlier Latin of Lydgate and Occleve. The re-active powers of the
+language, enabling it to throw off that which was foreign to it, did not
+fail to display themselves now, as they had done on former occasions.
+The number of unsuccessful candidates for admission into, and permanent
+naturalization in, the language during this period, is enormous; and one
+may say that in almost all instances where the Alien Act has been
+enforced, the sentence of exclusion was a just one; it was such as the
+circumstances of the case abundantly bore out. Either the word was not
+idiomatic, or was not intelligible, or was not needed, or looked ill, or
+sounded ill, or some other valid reason existed against it. A lover of
+his native tongue will tremble to think what that tongue would have
+become, if all the vocables from the Latin and the Greek which were then
+introduced or endorsed by illustrious names, had been admitted on the
+strength of their recommendation; if ‘torve’ and ‘tetric’ (Fuller),
+‘cecity’ (Hooker), ‘fastide’ and ‘trutinate’ (_State Papers_),
+‘immanity’ (Shakespeare), ‘insulse’ and ‘insulsity’ (Milton, prose),
+‘scelestick’ (Feltham), ‘splendidious’ (Drayton), ‘pervicacy’ (Baxter),
+‘stramineous’, ‘ardelion’ (Burton), ‘lepid’ and ‘sufflaminate’ (Barrow),
+‘facinorous’ (Donne), ‘immorigerous’, ‘clancular’, ‘ferity’,
+‘ustulation’, ‘stultiloquy’, ‘lipothymy’ (λειποθυμία), ‘hyperaspist’
+(all in Jeremy Taylor), if ‘mulierosity’, ‘subsannation’, ‘coaxation’,
+‘ludibundness’, ‘delinition’, ‘septemfluous’, ‘medioxumous’,
+‘mirificent’, ‘palmiferous’ (all in Henry More), ‘pauciloquy’ and
+‘multiloquy’ (Beaumont, _Psyche_); if ‘dyscolous’ (Foxe), ‘ataraxy’
+(Allestree), ‘moliminously’ (Cudworth), ‘luciferously’ (Sir Thomas
+Browne), ‘immarcescible’ (Bishop Hall), ‘exility’, ‘spinosity’,
+‘incolumity’, ‘solertiousness’, ‘lucripetous’, ‘inopious’, ‘eluctate’,
+‘eximious’ (all in Hacket), ‘arride’{50} (ridiculed by Ben Johnson),
+with the hundreds of other words like these, and even more monstrous
+than are some of these, not to speak of such Italian as ‘leggiadrous’ (a
+favourite word in Beaumont’s _Psyche_), ‘amorevolous’ (Hacket), had not
+been rejected and disallowed by the true instinct of the national mind.
+
+{Sidenote: _Naturalization of Words_}
+
+A great many too _were_ allowed and adopted, but not exactly in the shape
+in which they first were introduced among us; they were made to drop
+their foreign termination, or otherwise their foreign appearance, to
+conform themselves to English ways, and only so were finally incorporated
+into the great family of English words{51}. Thus of Greek words we have
+the following: ‘pyramis’ and ‘pyramides’, forms often employed by
+Shakespeare, became ‘pyramid’ and ‘pyramids’; ‘dosis’ (Bacon) ‘dose’;
+‘distichon’ (Holland) ‘distich’; ‘hemistichion’ (North) ‘hemistich’;
+‘apogæon’ (Fairfax) and ‘apogeum’ (Browne) ‘apogee’; ‘sumphonia’
+(Lodge) ‘symphony’; ‘prototypon’ (Jackson) ‘prototype’; ‘synonymon’
+(Jeremy Taylor) or ‘synonymum’ (Hacket), and ‘synonyma’ (Milton, prose),
+became severally ‘synonym’ and ‘synonyms’; ‘syntaxis’ (Fuller) became
+‘syntax’; ‘extasis’ (Burton) ‘ecstasy’; ‘parallelogrammon’ (Holland)
+‘parallelogram’; ‘programma’ (Warton) ‘program’; ‘epitheton’ (Cowell)
+‘epithet’; ‘epocha’ (South) ‘epoch’; ‘biographia’ (Dryden) ‘biography’;
+‘apostata’ (Massinger) ‘apostate’; ‘despota’ (Fox) ‘despot’;
+‘misanthropos’ (Shakespeare) if ‘misanthropi’ (Bacon) ‘misanthrope’;
+‘psalterion’ (North) ‘psaltery’; ‘chasma’ (Henry More) ‘chasm’; ‘idioma’
+and ‘prosodia’ (both in Daniel, prose) ‘idiom’ and ‘prosody’; ‘energia’,
+‘energy’, and ‘Sibylla’, ‘Sibyl’ (both in Sidney); ‘zoophyton’ (Henry
+More) ‘zoophyte’; ‘enthousiasmos’ (Sylvester) ‘enthusiasm’; ‘phantasma’
+(Donne) ‘phantasm’; ‘magnes’ (Gabriel Harvey) ‘magnet’; ‘cynosura’
+(Donne) ‘cynosure’; ‘galaxias’ (Fox) ‘galaxy’; ‘heros’ (Henry More)
+‘hero’; ‘epitaphy’ (Hawes) ‘epitaph’.
+
+The same process has gone on in a multitude of Latin words, which
+testify by their terminations that they were, and were felt to be, Latin
+at their first employment; though now they are such no longer. Thus
+Bacon uses generally, I know not whether always, ‘insecta’ for
+‘insects’; and ‘chylus’ for ‘chyle’; Bishop Andrews ‘nardus’ for ‘nard’;
+Spenser ‘zephyrus’, and not ‘zephyr’; so ‘interstitium’ (Fuller)
+preceded ‘interstice’; ‘philtrum’ (Culverwell) ‘philtre’; ‘expansum’
+(Jeremy Taylor) ‘expanse’; ‘preludium’ (Beaumont, _Psyche_), ‘prelude’;
+‘precipitium’ (Coryat) ‘precipice’; ‘aconitum’ (Shakespeare) ‘aconite’;
+‘balsamum’ (Webster) ‘balsam’; ‘heliotropium’ (Holland) ‘heliotrope’;
+‘helleborum’ (North) ‘hellebore’; ‘vehiculum’ (Howe) ‘vehicle’;
+‘trochæus’ and ‘spondæus’ (Holland) ‘trochee’ and ‘spondee’; and
+‘machina’ (Henry More) ‘machine’. We have ‘intervalla’, not ‘intervals’,
+in Chillingworth; ‘postulata’, not ‘postulates’, in Swift; ‘archiva’,
+not ‘archives’, in Baxter; ‘demagogi’, not ‘demagogues’, in Hacket;
+‘vestigium’, not ‘vestige’, in Culverwell; ‘pantomimus’ in Lord Bacon
+for ‘pantomime’; ‘mystagogus’ for ‘mystagogue’, in Jackson; ‘atomi’ in
+Lord Brooke for ‘atoms’; ‘ædilis’ (North) went before ‘ædile’;
+‘effigies’ and ‘statua’ (both in Shakespeare) before ‘effigy’ and
+‘statue’; ‘abyssus’ (Jackson) before ‘abyss’; ‘vestibulum’ (Howe) before
+‘vestibule’; ‘symbolum’ (Hammond) before ‘symbol’; ‘spectrum’ (Burton)
+before ‘spectre’; while only after a while ‘quære’ gave place to
+‘query’; ‘audite’ (Hacket) to ‘audit’; ‘plaudite’ (Henry More) to
+‘plaudit’; and the low Latin ‘mummia’ (Webster) became ‘mummy’. The
+widely extended change of such words as ‘innocency’, ‘indolency’,
+‘temperancy’, and the large family of words with the same termination,
+into ‘innocence’, ‘indolence’, ‘temperance’, and the like, can only be
+regarded as part of the same process of entire naturalization.
+
+The plural very often tells the secret of a word, and of the light in
+which it is regarded by those who employ it, when the singular, being
+less capable of modification, would have failed to do so; thus when
+Holland writes ‘phalanges’, ‘bisontes’, ‘ideæ’, it is clear that
+‘phalanx’, ‘bison’, ‘idea’, were still Greek words for him; as ‘dogma’
+was for Hammond, when he made its plural not ‘dogmas’, but ‘dogmata’{52};
+and when Spenser uses ‘heroes’ as a trisyllable, it plainly is not yet
+thoroughly English for him{53}. ‘Cento’ is not English, but a Latin word
+used in English, so long as it makes its plural not ‘centos’, but
+‘centones’, as in the old anonymous translation of Augustin’s _City of
+God_{54}; and ‘specimen’, while it makes its plural ‘specimina’ (Howe).
+Pope making, as he does, ‘satellites’ a quadrisyllable in the line
+
+    “Why Jove’s _satellites_ are less than Jove”,
+
+must have felt that he was still dealing with it as Latin; just as
+‘terminus’, a word which the necessities of railways have introduced
+among us, will not be truly naturalized till we use ‘terminuses’, and
+not ‘termini’ for its plural; nor ‘phenomenon’, till we have renounced
+‘phenomena’. Sometimes it has been found convenient to retain both
+plurals, that formed according to the laws of the classical language,
+and that formed according to the laws of our own, only employing them in
+different senses; thus is it with ‘indices’ and ‘indexes’, ‘genii’ and
+‘geniuses’.
+
+The same process has gone on with words from other languages, as from
+the Italian and the Spanish; thus ‘bandetto’ (Shakespeare), ‘bandito’
+(Jeremy Taylor), becomes ‘bandit’; ‘ruffiano’ (Coryat) ‘ruffian’;
+‘concerto’, ‘concert’; ‘busto’ (Lord Chesterfield) ‘bust’; ‘caricatura’
+(Sir Thomas Browne) ‘caricature’; ‘princessa’ (Hacket) ‘princess’;
+‘scaramucha’ (Dryden) ‘scaramouch’; ‘pedanteria’ (Sidney) ‘pedantry’;
+‘impresa’ ‘impress’; ‘caprichio’ (Shakespeare) becomes first ‘caprich’
+(Butler), then ‘caprice’; ‘duello’ (Shakespeare) ‘duel’; ‘alligarta’
+(Ben Jonson), ‘alligator’; ‘parroquito’ (Webster) ‘parroquet’; ‘scalada’
+(Heylin) or ‘escalado’ (Holland) ‘escalade’; ‘granada’ (Hacket)
+‘grenade’; ‘parada’ (J. Taylor) ‘parade’; ‘emboscado’ (Holland)
+‘stoccado’, ‘barricado’, ‘renegado’, ‘hurricano’ (all in Shakespeare),
+‘brocado’ (Hackluyt), ‘palissado’ (Howell), drop their foreign
+terminations, and severally become ‘ambuscade’, ‘stockade’, ‘barricade’,
+‘renegade’, ‘hurricane’, ‘brocade’, ‘palisade’; ‘croisado’ in like
+manner (Bacon) becomes first ‘croisade’ (Jortin), and then ‘crusade’;
+‘quinaquina’ or ‘quinquina’, ‘quinine’. Other slight modifications of
+spelling, not in the termination, but in the body of a word, will
+indicate in like manner its more entire incorporation into the English
+language. Thus ‘shash’, a Turkish word, becomes ‘sash’; ‘colone’
+(Burton) ‘clown’{55}; ‘restoration’ was at first spelt ‘rest_au_ration’;
+and so long as ‘vicinage’ was spelt ‘voisinage’{56} (Sanderson),
+‘mirror’ ‘miroir’ (Fuller), ‘recoil’ ‘recule’, or ‘career’ ‘carriere’
+(both by Holland), they could scarcely be considered those purely
+English words which now they are{57}.
+
+Here and there even at this comparatively late period of the language
+awkward foreign words will be recast in a more thoroughly English mould;
+‘chirurgeon’ will become ‘surgeon’; ‘hemorrhoid’, ‘emerod’; ‘squinancy’
+will become first ‘squinzey’ (Jeremy Taylor) and then ‘quinsey’;
+‘porkpisce’ (Spenser), that is sea-hog, or more accurately hogfish{58}
+will be ‘porpesse’, and then ‘porpoise’, as it is now. In other words
+the attempt will be made, but it will be now too late to be attended
+with success. ‘Physiognomy’ will not give place to ‘visnomy’, however
+Spenser and Shakespeare employ this briefer form; nor ‘hippopotamus’ to
+‘hippodame’, even at Spenser’s bidding. In like manner the attempt to
+naturalize ‘avant-courier’ in the shape of ‘vancurrier’ has failed.
+Other words also we meet which have finally refused to take a more
+popular form, although such was once more or less current; or, if this
+is too much to say of all, yet hazarded by good authors. Thus Holland
+wrote ‘cirque’, but we ‘circus’; ‘cense’, but we ‘census’; ‘interreign’,
+but we ‘interregnum’; Sylvester ‘cest’, but we ‘cestus’; ‘quirry’, but
+we ‘equerry’; ‘colosse’, but we still ‘colossus’; Golding ‘ure’, but we
+‘urus’; ‘metropole’, but we ‘metropolis’; Dampier ‘volcan’, but this has
+not superseded ‘volcano’; nor ‘pagod’ (Pope) ‘pagoda’; nor ‘skelet’
+(Holland) ‘skeleton’; nor ‘stimule’ (Stubbs) ‘stimulus’. Bolingbroke
+wrote ‘exode’, but we hold fast to ‘exodus’; Burton ‘funge’, but we
+‘fungus’; Henry More ‘enigm’, but we ‘enigma’; ‘analyse’, but we
+‘analysis’. ‘Superfice’ (Dryden) has not put ‘superficies’, nor
+‘sacrary’ (Hacket) ‘sacrarium’, nor ‘limbeck’ ‘alembic’, out of use.
+Chaucer’s ‘potecary’ has given way to a more Greek formation
+‘apothecary’. Yet these and the like must be regarded quite as
+exceptions; the tendency of things is altogether the other way.
+
+Looking at this process of the reception of foreign words, with their
+after assimilation in feature to our own, we may trace, as was to be
+expected, a certain conformity between the genius of our institutions
+and that of our language. It is the very character of our institutions
+to repel none, but rather to afford a shelter and a refuge to all, from
+whatever quarter they come; and after a longer or shorter while all the
+strangers and incomers have been incorporated into the English nation,
+within one or two generations have forgotten that they were ever ought
+else than members of it, have retained no other reminiscence of their
+foreign extraction than some slight difference of name, and that often
+disappearing or having disappeared. Exactly so has it been with the
+English language. No language has shown itself less exclusive; none has
+stood less upon niceties; none has thrown open its arms wider, with a
+fuller confidence, a confidence justified by experience, that it could
+make truly its own, assimilate and subdue to itself, whatever it
+received into its bosom; and in none has this experiment in a larger
+number of instances been successfully carried out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{Sidenote: _French at the Restoration_}
+
+Such are the two great enlargements from without of our vocabulary. All
+other are minor and subordinate. Thus the introduction of French tastes
+by Charles the Second and his courtiers returning from exile, to which I
+have just adverted, though it rather modified the structure of our
+sentences than the materials of our vocabulary, gave us some new words.
+In one of Dryden’s plays, _Marriage à la Mode_, a lady full of
+affectation is introduced, who is always employing French idioms in
+preference to English, French words rather than native. It is not a
+little curious that of these, thus put into her mouth to render her
+ridiculous, not a few are excellent English now, and have nothing
+far-sought or affected about them: for so it frequently proves that what
+is laughed at in the beginning, is by all admitted and allowed at the
+last. For example, to speak of a person being in the ‘good graces’ of
+another has nothing in it ridiculous now; the words ‘repartee’,
+‘embarrass’, ‘chagrin’, ‘grimace’, do not sound novel and affected now
+as they all must plainly have done at the time when Dryden wrote.
+‘Fougue’ and ‘fraischeur’, which he himself employed--being, it is true,
+no frequent offender in this way--have not been justified by the same
+success.
+
+{Sidenote: _Greek Words Naturalized_}
+
+Nor indeed can it be said that this adoption and naturalization of
+foreign words ever ceases in a language. There are periods, as we have
+seen, when this goes forward much more largely than at others; when a
+language throws open, as it were, its doors, and welcomes strangers with
+an especial freedom; but there is never a time, when one by one these
+foreigners and strangers are not slipping into it. We do not for the
+most part observe the fact, at least not while it is actually doing.
+Time, the greatest of all innovators, manages his innovations so
+dexterously, spreads them over such vast periods, and therefore brings
+them about so gradually, that often, while effecting the mightiest
+changes, we have no suspicion that he is effecting any at all. Thus how
+imperceptible are the steps by which a foreign word is admitted into the
+full rights of an English one; the process of its incoming often
+eluding our notice altogether. There are numerous Greek words, for
+example which, quite unchanged in form, have in one way or another ended
+in finding a home and acceptance among us. We may in almost every
+instance trace step by step the naturalization of one of these; and the
+manner of this singularly confirms what has just been said. We can note
+it spelt for a while in Greek letters, and avowedly employed as a Greek
+and not an English vocable; then after it had thus obtained a certain
+allowance among us, and become not altogether unfamiliar, we note it
+exchanging its Greek for English letters, and finally obtaining
+recognition as a word which however drawn from a foreign source, is yet
+itself English. Thus ‘acme’, ‘apotheosis’, ‘criterion’, ‘chrysalis’,
+‘encyclopedia’, ‘metropolis’, ‘opthalmia’, ‘pathos’, ‘phenomena’, are
+all now English words, while yet South with many others always wrote
+ἀκμή, Jeremy Taylor ἀποθέωσις and κριτήριον, Henry More χρυσαλίς, Ben
+Jonson speaks of ‘the knowledge of the liberal arts, which the Greeks
+call ἐγκυκλοπαδείαν’{59}, Culverwell wrote μητρόπολις and ὀφθαλμία,
+Preston, φαινόμενα--Sylvester ascribes to Baxter, not ‘pathos’, but
+πάθος{60}. Ἠθος is a word at the present moment preparing for a like
+passage from Greek characters to English, and certainly before long will
+be acknowledged as an English word{61}. The only cause which has
+hindered this for some time past is the misgiving whether it will not be
+read ‘ĕthos,’ and not ‘ēthos,’ and thus not be the word intended.
+
+Let us trace a like process in some French word, which is at this moment
+becoming English. I know no better example than the French ‘prestige’
+will afford. ‘Prestige’ has manifestly no equivalent in our own
+language; it expresses something which no single word in English, which
+only a long circumlocution, could express; namely, that magic influence
+on others, which past successes as the pledge and promise of future
+ones, breed. The word has thus naturally come to be of very frequent use
+by good English writers; for they do not feel that in employing it they
+are passing by as good or a better word of their own. At first all used
+it avowedly as French, writing it in italics to indicate this. At the
+present moment some write it so still, some do not; some, that is,
+regard it still as foreign, others consider that it has now become
+English, and obtained a settlement among us{62}. Little by little the
+number of those who write it in italics will become fewer and fewer,
+till they cease altogether. It will then only need that the accent
+should be shifted, in obedience to the tendencies of the English
+language, as far back in the word as it will go, that instead of
+‘prestíge’, it should be pronounced ‘préstige’ even as within these few
+years instead of ‘depót’ we have learned to say ‘dépot’, and its
+naturalization will be complete. I have little doubt that in twenty
+years it will be so pronounced by the majority of well educated
+Englishmen{63},--some pronounce it so already,--and that our present
+pronunciation will pass away in the same manner as ‘obl_ee_ge’, once
+universal, has past away, and everywhere given place to ‘obl_i_ge’{64}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Shifting of Accents_}
+
+Let me here observe in passing, that the process of throwing the accent
+of a word back, by way of completing its naturalization, is one which we
+may note constantly going forward in our language. Thus, while Chaucer
+accentuates sometimes ‘natúre’, he also accentuates elsewhere ‘náture’,
+while sometimes ‘virtúe’, at other times ‘vírtue’. ‘Prostrate’,
+‘adverse’, ‘aspect’, ‘process’, ‘insult’, ‘impulse’, ‘pretext’,
+‘contrite’, ‘uproar’, ‘contest’, had all their accent on the last
+syllable in Milton; they have it now on the first; ‘cháracter’ was
+‘charácter’ with Spenser; ‘théatre’ was ‘theátre’ with Sylvester; while
+‘acádemy’ was accented ‘académy’ by Cowley and Butler{65}. ‘Essay’ was
+‘essáy’ with Dryden and with Pope; the first closes an heroic line with
+the word; Pope does the same with ‘barrier’{66} and ‘effort’; therefore
+pronounced ‘barríer’, ‘effórt’, by him.
+
+There are not a few other French words which like ‘prestige’ are at this
+moment hovering on the verge of English, hardly knowing whether they
+shall become such, or no. Such are ‘ennui’, ‘exploitation’, ‘verve’,
+‘persiflage’, ‘badinage’, ‘chicane’, ‘finesse’, and others; all of them
+often employed by us,--and it is out of such frequent employment that
+adoption proceeds,--because expressing shades of meaning not expressed
+by any words of our own{67}. Some of these, we may confidently
+anticipate, will complete their naturalization; others will after a time
+retreat again, and become for us avowedly French. ‘Solidarity’, a word
+which we owe to the French Communists, and which signifies a fellowship
+in gain and loss, in honour and dishonour, in victory and defeat, a
+being, so to speak, all in the same bottom, is so convenient, that
+unattractive as confessedly it is, it will be in vain to struggle
+against its reception. The newspapers already have it, and books will
+not long exclude it; not to say that it has established itself in
+German, and probably in other European languages as well.
+
+{Sidenote: _Greek in English_}
+
+Greek and Latin words also we still continue to adopt, although now no
+longer in troops and companies, but only one by one. With the lively
+interest which always has been felt in classical studies among us, and
+which will continue to be felt, so long as any greatness and nobleness
+survive in our land, it must needs be that accessions from these
+quarters would never cease altogether. I do not refer here to purely
+scientific terms; these, so long as they continue such, and do not pass
+beyond the threshold of the science or sciences for the use of which
+they were invented, being never heard on the lips, or employed in the
+writings, of any but the cultivators of these sciences, have no right to
+be properly called words at all. They are a kind of shorthand of the
+science, or algebraic notation; and will not find place in a dictionary
+of the language, constructed upon true principles, but rather in a
+technical dictionary apart by themselves. Of these, compelled by the
+advances of physical science, we have coined multitudes out of number in
+these later times, fashioning them mainly from the Greek, no other
+language within our reach yielding itself at all so easily to our needs.
+
+Of non-scientific words, both Greek and Latin, some have made their way
+among us quite in these latter times. Burke in the House of Commons is
+said to have been the first who employed the word ‘inimical’{68}. He
+also launched the verb ‘to spheterize’ in the sense of to appropriate
+or make one’s own; but this without success. Others have been more
+fortunate; ‘æsthetic’ we have got indeed _through_ the Germans, but
+_from_ the Greeks. Tennyson has given allowance to ‘æon’{69}; and ‘myth’
+is a deposit which wide and far-reaching controversies have left in the
+popular language. ‘Photography’ is an example of what I was just now
+speaking of--namely, a scientific word which has travelled beyond the
+limits of the science which it designates and which gave it birth.
+‘Stereotype’ is another word of the same character. It was invented--not
+the thing, but the word,--by Didot not very long since; but it is now
+absorbed into healthy general circulation, being current in a secondary
+and figurative sense. Ruskin has given to ‘ornamentation’ the sanction
+and authority of his name. ‘Normal’ and ‘abnormal’, not quite so new,
+are yet of recent introduction into the language{70}.
+
+{Sidenote: _German Importations_}
+
+When we consider the near affinity between the English and German
+languages, which, if not sisters, may at least be regarded as first
+cousins, it is somewhat remarkable that almost since the day when they
+parted company, each to fulfil its own destiny, there has been little
+further commerce between them in the matter of giving or taking. At any
+rate adoptions on our part from the German have been till within this
+period extremely rare. ‘Crikesman’ (Kriegsmann) and ‘brandschat’
+(Brandschatz), with some other German words common enough in the _State
+Papers_ of the sixteenth century, found no permanent place in the
+language. The explanation lies in the fact that the literary activity of
+Germany did not begin till very late, nor our interest in it till later
+still, not indeed till the beginning of the present century. Yet
+‘plunder’, as I have mentioned elsewhere, was brought back from Germany
+about the beginning of our Civil Wars, by the soldiers who had served
+under Gustavus Adolphus and his captains{71}. And ‘trigger’, written
+‘tricker’ in _Hudibras_ is manifestly the German ‘drücker’{72}, though
+none of our dictionaries have marked it as such; a word first appearing
+at the same period, it may have reached us through the same channel.
+‘Iceberg’ (eisberg) also we must have taken whole from the German, as,
+had we constructed the word for ourselves, we should have made it not
+‘ice_berg_’, but ‘ice-_mountain_’. I have not found it in our earlier
+voyagers, often as they speak of the ‘icefield’, which yet is not
+exactly the same thing. An English ‘swindler’ is not exactly a German
+‘schwindler’, yet the notion of the ‘nebulo’, though more latent in the
+German, is common to both; and we must have drawn the word from
+Germany{73} (it is not an old one in our tongue) during the course of
+the last century. If ‘_life_-guard’ was originally, as Richardson
+suggests, ‘_leib_-garde’, or ‘_body_-guard’, and from that transformed,
+by the determination of Englishmen to make it significant in English,
+into ‘_life_-guard’, or guard defending the _life_ of the sovereign,
+this will be another word from the same quarter. Yet I have my doubts;
+‘leibgarde’ would scarcely have found its way hither before the
+accession of the House of Hanover, or at any rate before the arrival of
+Dutch William with his memorable guards; while ‘lifeguard’, in its
+present shape, is certainly an older word in the language; we hear often
+of the ‘lifeguards’ in our Civil Wars; as witness too Fuller’s words:
+“The Cherethites were a kind of _lifegard_ to king David”{74}.
+
+Of late our German importations have been somewhat more numerous. With
+several German compound words we have been in recent times so well
+pleased, that we must needs adopt them into English, or imitate them in
+it. We have not always been very happy in those which we have selected
+for imitation or adoption. Thus we might have been satisfied with
+‘manual’, and not called back from its nine hundred years of oblivion
+that ugly and unnecessary word ‘handbook’. And now we are threatened
+with ‘word-building’, as I see a book announced under the title of
+“Latin _word-building_”, and, much worse than this, with ‘stand-point’.
+‘Einseitig’ (itself a modern word, if I mistake not, or at any rate
+modern in its secondary application) has not, indeed, been adopted, but
+is evidently the pattern on which we have formed ‘onesided’--a word to
+which a few years ago something of affectation was attached; so that any
+one who employed it at once gave evidence that he was more or less a
+dealer in German wares; it has however its manifest conveniences, and
+will hold its ground. ‘Fatherland’ (Vaterland) on the contrary will
+scarcely establish itself among us, the note of affectation will
+continue to cleave to it, and we shall go on contented with ‘native
+country’ to the end{75}. The most successful of these compounded words,
+borrowed recently from the German, is ‘folk-lore’, and the substitution
+of this for popular superstitions, must be esteemed, I think, an
+unquestionable gain{76}.
+
+To speak now of other sources from which the new words of a language are
+derived. Of course the period when absolutely new roots are generated
+will have past away, long before men begin by a reflective act to take
+any notice of processes going forward in the language which they speak.
+This pure productive energy, creative we might call it, belongs only to
+the earlier stages of a nation’s existence,--to times quite out of the
+ken of history. It is only from materials already existing either in its
+own bosom, or in the bosom of other languages, that it can enrich itself
+in the later, or historical stages of its life.
+
+{Sidenote: _Compound Words_}
+
+And first, it can bring its own words into new combinations; it can join
+two, and sometimes even more than two, of the words which it already
+has, and form out of them a new one. Much more is wanted here than
+merely to attach two or more words to one another by a hyphen; this is
+not to make a new word: they must really coalesce and grow together.
+Different languages, and even the same language at different stages of
+its existence, will possess this power of forming new words by the
+combination of old in very different degrees. The eminent felicity of
+the Greek in this respect has been always acknowledged. “The joints of
+her compounded words”, says Fuller, “are so naturally oiled, that they
+run nimbly on the tongue, which makes them though long, never tedious,
+because significant”{77}. Sir Philip Sidney boasts of the capability of
+our English language in this respect--that “it is particularly happy in
+the composition of two or three words together, near equal to the Greek”.
+No one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, or to make
+manifest what may be effected by this marriage of words. Many of his
+compound epithets, as ‘golden-tressed’, ‘tinsel-slippered’, ‘coral-paven’,
+‘flowry-kirtled’, ‘violet-embroidered’, ‘vermeil-tinctured’, are
+themselves poems in miniature. Not unworthy to be set beside these are
+Sylvester’s “_opal-coloured_ morn”, Drayton’s “_silver-sanded_ shore”,
+and perhaps Marlowe’s “_golden-fingered_ Ind”{78}.
+
+Our modern inventions in the same kind are for the most part very
+inferior: they could hardly fail to be so, seeing that the formative,
+plastic powers of a language are always waning and diminishing more and
+more. It may be, and indeed is, gaining in other respects, but in this
+it is losing; and thus it is not strange if its later births in this
+kind are less successful than its earlier. Among the poets of our own
+time Shelley has done more than any other to assert for the language
+that it has not quite renounced this power; while among writers of prose
+in these later days Jeremy Bentham has been at once one of the boldest,
+but at the same time one of the most unfortunate, of those who have
+issued this money from their mint. Still we ought not to forget, while
+we divert ourselves with the strange and formless progeny of his brain,
+that we owe ‘international’ to him--a word at once so convenient and
+supplying so real a need, that it was, and with manifest advantage, at
+once adopted by all{79}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Adjectives ending in al_}
+
+Another way in which languages increase their stock of vocables is by
+the forming of new words according to the analogy of formations, which
+in seemingly parallel cases have been already allowed. Thus long since
+upon certain substantives such as ‘congregation’, ‘convention’, were
+formed their adjectives, ‘congregational’, ‘conventional’; yet these
+also at a comparatively modern period; ‘congregational’ first rising up
+in the Assembly of Divines, or during the time of the Commonwealth{80}.
+These having found admission into the language, it is attempted to repeat
+the process in the case of other words with the same ending. I confess
+the effect is often exceedingly disagreeable. We are now pretty well used
+to ‘educational’, and the word is sometimes serviceable enough; but I can
+perfectly remember when some twenty years ago an “_Educational_ Magazine”
+was started, the first impression on one’s mind was, that a work having
+to do with education should not thus bear upon its front an offensive, or
+to say the best, a very dubious novelty in the English language{81}.
+These adjectives are now multiplying fast. We have ‘inflexional’,
+‘seasonal’, ‘denominational’, and, not content with this, in dissenting
+magazines at least, the monstrous birth, ‘denominationalism’; ‘emotional’
+is creeping into books{82}, ‘sensational’, and others as well, so that
+it is hard to say where this influx will stop, or whether all our words
+with this termination will not finally generate an adjective. Convenient
+as you may sometimes find these, I would yet certainly counsel you to
+abstain from all but the perfectly well recognized formations of this
+kind. There may be cases of exception; but for the most part Pope’s
+advice is good, as certainly it is safe, that we be not among the last
+to use a word which is going out, nor among the first to employ one that
+is coming in.
+
+‘Starvation’ is another word of comparatively recent introduction,
+formed in like manner on the model of preceding formations of an
+apparently similar character--its first formers, indeed, not observing
+that they were putting a Latin termination to a Saxon word. Some have
+supposed it to have reached us from America. It has not however
+travelled from so great a distance, being a stranger indeed, yet not
+from beyond the Atlantic, but only from beyond the Tweed. It is an old
+Scottish word, but unknown in England, till used by Mr. Dundas, the
+first Viscount Melville, in an American debate in 1775. That it then
+jarred strangely on English ears is evident from the nickname,
+“_Starvation_ Dundas”, which in consequence he obtained{83}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Revival of Words_}
+
+Again, languages enrich themselves, our own has done so, by recovering
+treasures which for a while had been lost by them or forgone. I do not
+mean that all which drops out of use _is_ loss; there are words which it
+is gain to be rid of; which it would be folly to wish to revive; of
+which Dryden, setting himself against an extravagant zeal in this
+direction, says in an ungracious comparison--they do “not deserve this
+redemption, any more than the crowds of men who daily die, or are slain
+for sixpence in a battle, merit to be restored to life, if a wish could
+revive them”{84}. There are others, however, which it is a real gain to
+draw back again from the temporary oblivion which had overtaken them;
+and this process of their setting and rising again, or of what, to use
+another image, we might call their suspended animation, is not so
+unfrequent as at first might be supposed.
+
+You may perhaps remember that Horace, tracing in a few memorable lines
+the history of words, while he notes that many once current have now
+dropped out of use, does not therefore count that of necessity their
+race is for ever run; on the contrary he confidently anticipates a
+_palingenesy_ for many among them{85}; and I am convinced that there has
+been such in the case of our English words to a far greater extent than
+we are generally aware. Words slip almost or quite as imperceptibly back
+into use as they once slipped out of it. Let me produce a few facts in
+evidence of this. In the contemporary gloss which an anonymous friend of
+Spenser’s furnished to his _Shepherd’s Calendar_, first published in
+1579, “for the exposition of old words”, as he declares, he thinks it
+expedient to include in his list, the following, ‘dapper’, ‘scathe’,
+‘askance’, ‘sere’, ‘embellish’, ‘bevy’, ‘forestall’, ‘fain’, with not a
+few others quite as familiar as these. In Speght’s _Chaucer_ (1667),
+there is a long list of “old and obscure words in Chaucer explained”;
+including ‘anthem’, ‘blithe’, ‘bland’, ‘chapelet’, ‘carol’, ‘deluge’,
+‘franchise’, ‘illusion’, ‘problem’, ‘recreant’, ‘sphere’, ‘tissue’,
+‘transcend’, with very many easier than these. In Skinner’s
+_Etymologicon_ (1671), there is another list of obsolete, words{86}, and
+among these he includes ‘to dovetail’, ‘to interlace’, ‘elvish’,
+‘encombred’, ‘masquerade’ (mascarade), ‘oriental’, ‘plumage’, ‘pummel’
+(pomell), and ‘stew’, that is, for fish. Who will say of the verb ‘to
+hallow’ that it is now even obsolescent? and yet Wallis two hundred
+years ago observed--“It has almost gone out of use” (fer. desuevit). It
+would be difficult to find an example of the verb, ‘to advocate’,
+between Milton and Burke{87}. Franklin, a close observer in such
+matters, as he was himself an admirable master of English style,
+considered the word to have sprung up during his own residence in
+Europe. In this indeed he was mistaken; it had only during this period
+revived{88}. Johnson says of ‘jeopardy’ that it is a “word not now in
+use”; which certainly is not any longer true{89}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Dryden and Chaucer’s English_}
+
+I am persuaded that in facility of being understood, Chaucer is not
+merely as near, but much nearer, to us than Dryden and his cotemporaries
+felt him to be to them. He and the writers of his time make exactly the
+same sort of complaints, only in still stronger language, about his
+archaic phraseology and the obscurities which it involves, that are made
+at the present day. Thus in the _Preface_ to his _Tales from Chaucer_,
+having quoted some not very difficult lines from the earlier poet whom
+he was modernizing, he proceeds: “You have here a specimen of Chaucer’s
+language, which is so obsolete that his sense is scarce to be
+understood”. Nor was it merely thus with respect of Chaucer. These wits
+and poets of the Court of Charles the Second were conscious of a greater
+gulf between themselves and the Elizabethan era, separated from them by
+little more than fifty years, than any of which _we_ are aware,
+separated from it by nearly two centuries more. I do not mean merely
+that they felt themselves more removed from its tone and spirit; their
+altered circumstances might explain this; but I am convinced that they
+found a greater difficulty and strangeness in the language of Spenser
+and Shakespeare than we find now; that it sounded in many ways more
+uncouth, more old-fashioned, more abounding in obsolete terms than it
+does in our ears at the present. Only in this way can I explain the
+tone in which they are accustomed to speak of these worthies of the near
+past. I must again cite Dryden, the truest representative of literary
+England in its good and in its evil during the last half of the
+seventeenth century. Of Spenser, whose death was separated from his own
+birth by little more than thirty years, he speaks as of one belonging to
+quite a different epoch, counting it much to say, “Notwithstanding his
+obsolete language, he is still intelligible”{90}. Nay, hear what his
+judgment is of Shakespeare himself, so far as language is concerned: “It
+must be allowed to the present age that the tongue in general is so much
+refined since Shakespeare’s time, that many of his words and more of his
+phrases are scarce intelligible. And of those which we understand, some
+are ungrammatical, others coarse; and his whole style is so pestered
+with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is
+obscure”{91}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Nugget_, _Ingot_}
+
+Sometimes a word will emerge anew from the undercurrent of society, not
+indeed new, but yet to most seeming as new, its very existence having
+been altogether forgotten by the larger number of those speaking the
+language; although it must have somewhere lived on upon the lips of men.
+Thus, for instance, since the Californian and Australian discoveries of
+gold we hear often of a ‘nugget’ of gold; being a lump of the pure
+metal; and there has been some discussion whether the word has been born
+for the present necessity, or whether it be a recent malformation of
+‘ingot’, I am inclined to think that it is neither one nor the other. I
+would not indeed affirm that it may not be a popular recasting of
+‘ingot’; but only that it is not a recent one; for ‘nugget’ very nearly
+in its present form, occurs in our elder writers, being spelt ‘niggot’
+by them{92}. There can be little doubt of the identity of ‘niggot’ and
+‘nugget’; all the consonants, the _stamina_ of a word, being the same;
+while this early form ‘niggot’ makes more plausible their suggestion
+that ‘nugget’ is only ‘ingot’ disguised, seeing that there wants nothing
+but the very common transposition of the first two letters to bring that
+out of this{93}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words from Proper Names_}
+
+New words are often formed from the names of persons, actual or
+mythical. Some one has observed how interesting would be a complete
+collection, or a collection approaching to completeness, in any language
+of the names of _persons_ which have afterwards become names of
+_things_, from ‘nomina _appellativa_’ have become ‘nomina _realia_’{94}.
+Let me without confining myself to those of more recent introduction
+endeavour to enumerate as many as I can remember of the words which have
+by this method been introduced into our language. To begin with mythical
+antiquity--the Chimæra has given us ‘chimerical’, Hermes ‘hermetic’,
+Tantalus ‘to tantalize’, Hercules ‘herculean’, Proteus ‘protean’, Vulcan
+‘volcano’ and ‘volcanic’, and Dædalus ‘dedal’, if this word may on
+Spenser’s and Shelley’s authority be allowed. Gordius, the Phrygian king
+who tied that famous ‘gordian’ knot which Alexander cut, will supply a
+natural transition from mythical to historical. Here Mausolus, a king of
+Caria, has left us ‘mausoleum’, Academus ‘academy’, Epicurus ‘epicure’,
+Philip of Macedon a ‘philippic’, being such a discourse as Demosthenes
+once launched against the enemy of Greece, and Cicero ‘cicerone’.
+Mithridates, who had made himself poison-proof, gave us the now
+forgotten word ‘mithridate’, for antidote; as from Hippocrates we
+derived ‘hipocras’, or ‘ypocras’, a word often occurring in our early
+poets, being a wine supposed to be mingled after his receipt. Gentius, a
+king of Illyria, gave his name to the plant ‘gentian’, having been, it
+is said, the first to discover its virtues. A grammar used to be called
+a ‘donnat’, or ‘donet’ (Chaucer), from Donatus, a famous grammarian.
+Lazarus, perhaps an actual person, has given us ‘lazar’ and ‘lazaretto’;
+St. Veronica and the legend connected with her name, a ‘vernicle’;
+being a napkin with the Saviour’s face portrayed on it; Simon Magus
+‘simony’; Mahomet a ‘mammet’ or ‘maumet’, meaning an idol{95}, and
+‘mammetry’ or idolatry; ‘dunce’ is from Duns Scotus; while there is a
+legend that the ‘knot’ or sandpiper is named from Canute or Knute, with
+whom this bird was a special favourite. To come to more modern times,
+and not pausing at Ben Johnson’s ‘chaucerisms’, Bishop Hall’s
+‘scoganisms’, from Scogan, Edward the Fourth’s jester, or his
+‘aretinisms’, from an infamous writer, ‘a poisonous Italian ribald’ as
+Gabriel Harvey calls him, named Aretine; these being probably not
+intended even by their authors to endure; a Roman cobbler named Pasquin
+has given us the ‘pasquil’ or ‘pasquinade’; ‘patch’ in the sense of
+fool, and often so used by Shakespeare, was originally the proper name
+of a favourite fool of Cardinal Wolsey{96}; Colonel Negus in Queen
+Anne’s time first mixed the beverage which goes by his name; Lord Orrery
+was the first for whom an ‘orrery’ was constructed; and Lord Spencer
+first wore, or at least first brought into fashion, a ‘spencer’. Dahl, a
+Swede, introduced the cultivation of the ‘dahlia’, and M. Tabinet, a
+French Protestant refugee, the making of the stuff called ‘tabinet’ in
+Dublin; in ‘_tram_-road’, the second syllable of the name of Ou_tram_,
+the inventor, survives{97}. The ‘tontine’ was conceived by an Italian
+named Tonti; and another Italian, Galvani, first noted the phenomena of
+animal electricity or ‘galvanism’; while a third Italian, ‘Volta’, gave
+a name to the ‘voltaic’ battery. ‘Martinet’, ‘mackintosh’, ‘doyly’,
+‘brougham’, ‘to macadamize’, ‘to burke’, are all names of persons or
+from persons, and then transferred to things, on the score of some
+connection existing between the one and other{98}.
+
+Again the names of popular characters in literature, such as have taken
+strong hold on the national mind, give birth to a number of new words.
+Thus from Homer we have ‘mentor’ for a monitor; ‘stentorian’, for
+loud-voiced; and inasmuch as with all of Hector’s nobleness there is a
+certain amount of big talking about him, he has given us ‘to
+hector’{99}; while the medieval romances about the siege of Troy ascribe
+to Pandarus that shameful ministry out of which his name has past into
+the words ‘to pandar’ and ‘pandarism’. ‘Rodomontade’ is from Rodomont, a
+blustering and boasting hero of Boiardo, adopted by Ariosto;
+‘thrasonical’, from Thraso, the braggart of the Roman comedy. Cervantes
+has given us ‘quixotic’; Swift ‘lilliputian’; to Molière the French
+language owes ‘tartuffe’ and ‘tartufferie’. ‘Reynard’ too, which with us
+is a duplicate for fox, while in the French ‘renard’ has quite excluded
+the older ‘volpils’, was originally not the name of a kind, but the
+proper name of the fox-hero, the vulpine Ulysses, in that famous
+beast-epic of the middle ages, _Reineke Fuchs_; the immense popularity
+of which we gather from many evidences, from none more clearly than from
+this. ‘Chanticleer’ is in like manner the proper name of the cock, and
+‘Bruin’ of the bear in the same poem{100}. These have not made fortune
+to the same extent of actually putting out in any language the names
+which before existed, but still have become quite familiar to us all.
+
+We must not count as new words properly so called, although they may
+delay us for a minute, those comic words, most often comic combinations
+formed at will, and sometimes of enormous length, in which, as plays
+and displays of power, great writers ancient and modern have delighted.
+These for the most part are meant to do service for the moment, and
+then to pass away{101}. The inventors of them had themselves no
+intention of fastening them permanently on the language. Thus among
+the Greeks Aristophanes coined μελλονικιάω, to loiter like Nicias, with
+allusion to the delays with which this prudent commander sought to put
+off the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with not a few other familiar
+to every scholar. The humour of them sometimes consists in their
+enormous length, as in the ἀμφιπτολεμοπηδησίστρατος of Eupolis; the
+σπερμαγοραιολεκιθολαχανόπωλις of Aristophanes; sometimes in their
+mingled observance and transgression of the laws of the language, as in
+the ‘oculissimus’ of Plautus, a comic superlative of ‘oculus’;
+‘occisissimus’ of ‘occisus’; as in the ‘dosones’, ‘dabones’, which in
+Greek and in medieval Latin were names given to those who were ever
+promising, ever saying “I will give” but never performing their promise.
+Plautus with his exuberant wit, and exulting in his mastery and command
+of the Latin language, will compose four or five lines consisting
+entirely of comic combinations thrown off for the occasion{102}. Of the
+same character is Butler’s ‘cynarctomachy’, or battle of a dog and bear.
+Nor do I suppose that Fuller, when he used ‘to avunculize’, to imitate
+or follow in the steps of one’s uncle, or Cowper, when he suggested
+‘extraforaneous’ for out of doors, in the least intended them as lasting
+additions to the language.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_To Chouse_’}
+
+Sometimes a word springs up in a very curious way; here is one, not
+having, I suppose, any great currency except among schoolboys; yet being
+no invention of theirs, but a genuine English word, though of somewhat
+late birth in the language, I mean ‘to chouse’. It has a singular
+origin. The word is, as I have mentioned already, a Turkish one, and
+signifies ‘interpreter’. Such an interpreter or ‘chiaous’ (written
+‘chaus’ in Hackluyt, ‘chiaus’ in Massinger), being attached to the
+Turkish embassy in England, committed in the year 1609 an enormous fraud
+on the Turkish and Persian merchants resident in London. He succeeded in
+cheating them of a sum amounting to £4000--a sum very much greater at
+that day than at the present. From the vast dimensions of the fraud, and
+the notoriety which attended it, any one who cheated or defrauded was
+said ‘to chiaous’, ‘chause’, or ‘chouse’; to do, that is, as this
+‘chiaous’ had done{103}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Different Spelling of Words_}
+
+There is another very fruitful source of new words in a language, or
+perhaps rather another way in which it increases its vocabulary, for a
+question might arise whether the words thus produced ought to be called
+new. I mean through the splitting of single words into two or even more.
+The impulse and suggestion to this is in general first given by
+varieties in pronunciation, which are presently represented by varieties
+in spelling; but the result very often is that what at first were only
+precarious and arbitrary differences in this, come in the end to be
+regarded as entirely different words; they detach themselves from one
+another, not again to reunite; just as accidental varieties in fruits or
+flowers, produced at hazard, have yet permanently separated off, and
+settled into different kinds. They have each its own distinct domain of
+meaning, as by general agreement assigned to it; dividing the
+inheritance between them, which hitherto they held in common. No one who
+has not had his attention called to this matter, who has not watched and
+catalogued these words as they have come under his notice, would at all
+believe how numerous they are.
+
+{Sidenote: _Doublets_}
+
+Sometimes as the accent is placed on one syllable of a word or another,
+it comes to have different significations, and those so distinctly
+marked, that the separation may be regarded as complete. Examples of
+this are the following: ‘dívers’, and ‘divérse’; ‘cónjure’ and
+‘conjúre’; ‘ántic’ and ‘antíque’; ‘húman’ and ‘humáne’; ‘úrban’ and
+‘urbáne’; ‘géntle’ and ‘gentéel’; ‘cústom’ and ‘costúme’; ‘éssay’ and
+‘assáy’; ‘próperty’ and ‘propríety’. Or again, a word is pronounced with
+a full sound of its syllables, or somewhat more shortly: thus ‘spirit’
+and ‘sprite’; ‘blossom’ and ‘bloom’{104}; ‘personality’ and
+‘personalty’; ‘fantasy’ and ‘fancy’; ‘triumph’ and ‘trump’ (the
+_winning_ card{105}); ‘happily’ and ‘haply’; ‘waggon’ and ‘wain’;
+‘ordinance’ and ‘ordnance’; ‘shallop’ and ‘sloop’; ‘brabble’ and
+‘brawl’{106}; ‘syrup’ and ‘shrub’; ‘balsam’ and ‘balm’; ‘eremite’ and
+‘hermit’; ‘nighest’ and ‘next’; ‘poesy’ and ‘posy’; ‘fragile’ and
+‘frail’; ‘achievement’ and ‘hatchment’; ‘manœuvre’ and ‘manure’;--or
+with the dropping of the first syllable: ‘history’ and ‘story’;
+‘etiquette’ and ‘ticket’; ‘escheat’ and ‘cheat’; ‘estate’ and ‘state’;
+and, older probably than any of these, ‘other’ and ‘or’;--or with a
+dropping of the last syllable, as ‘Britany’ and ‘Britain’; ‘crony’ and
+‘crone’;--or without losing a syllable, with more or less stress laid on
+the close: ‘regiment’ and ‘regimen’; ‘corpse’ and ‘corps’; ‘bite’ and
+‘bit’; ‘sire’ and ‘sir’; ‘land’ or ‘laund’ and ‘lawn’; ‘suite’ and
+‘suit’; ‘swinge’ and ‘swing’; ‘gulph’ and ‘gulp’; ‘launch’ and ‘lance’;
+‘wealth’ and ‘weal’; ‘stripe’ and ‘strip’; ‘borne’ and ‘born’; ‘clothes’
+and ‘cloths’;--or a slight internal vowel change finds place, as between
+‘dent’ and ‘dint’; ‘rant’ and ‘rent’ (a ranting actor tears or _rends_ a
+passion to tatters){107}; ‘creak’ and ‘croak’; ‘float’ and ‘fleet’;
+‘sleek’ and ‘slick’; ‘sheen’ and ‘shine’; ‘shriek’ and ‘shrike’; ‘pick’
+and ‘peck’; ‘peak’, ‘pique’, and ‘pike’; ‘weald’ and ‘wold’; ‘drip’ and
+‘drop’; ‘wreathe’ and ‘writhe’; ‘spear’ and ‘spire’ (“the least _spire_
+of grass”, South); ‘trist’ and ‘trust’; ‘band’, ‘bend’ and ‘bond’;
+‘cope’, ‘cape’ and ‘cap’; ‘tip’ and ‘top’; ‘slent’ (now obsolete) and
+‘slant’; ‘sweep’ and ‘swoop’; ‘wrest’ and ‘wrist’; ‘gad’ (now surviving
+only in gadfly) and ‘goad’; ‘complement’ and ‘compliment’; ‘fitch’ and
+‘vetch’; ‘spike’ and ‘spoke’; ‘tamper’ and ‘temper’; ‘ragged’ and
+‘rugged’; ‘gargle’ and ‘gurgle’; ‘snake’ and ‘sneak’ (both crawl);
+‘deal’ and ‘dole’; ‘giggle’ and ‘gaggle’ (this last is now commonly
+spelt ‘cackle’); ‘sip’, ‘sop’, ‘soup’ and ‘sup’; ‘clack’, ‘click’ and
+‘clock’; ‘tetchy’ and ‘touchy’; ‘neat’ and ‘nett’; ‘stud’ and ‘steed’;
+‘then’ and ‘than’{108}; ‘grits’ and ‘grouts’; ‘spirt’ and ‘sprout’;
+‘cure’ and ‘care’{109}; ‘prune’ and ‘preen’; ‘mister’ and ‘master’;
+‘allay’ and ‘alloy’; ‘ghostly’ and ‘ghastly’{110}; ‘person’ and
+‘parson’; ‘cleft’ and ‘clift’, now written ‘cliff’; ‘travel’ and
+‘travail’; ‘truth’ and ‘troth’; ‘pennon’ and ‘pinion’; ‘quail’ and
+‘quell’; ‘quell’ and ‘kill’; ‘metal’ and ‘mettle’; ‘chagrin’ and
+‘shagreen’; ‘can’ and ‘ken’; ‘Francis’ and ‘Frances’{111}; ‘chivalry’
+and ‘cavalry’; ‘oaf’ and ‘elf’; ‘lose’ and ‘loose’; ‘taint’ and ‘tint’.
+Sometimes the difference is mainly or entirely in the initial
+consonants, as between ‘phial’ and ‘vial’; ‘pother’ and ‘bother’;
+‘bursar’ and ‘purser’; ‘thrice’ and ‘trice’{110}; ‘shatter’ and
+‘scatter’; ‘chattel’ and ‘cattle’; ‘chant’ and ‘cant’; ‘zealous’ and
+‘jealous’; ‘channel’ and ‘kennel’; ‘wise’ and ‘guise’; ‘quay’ and ‘key’;
+‘thrill’, ‘trill’ and ‘drill’;--or in the consonants in the middle of
+the word, as between ‘cancer’ and ‘canker’; ‘nipple’ and ‘nibble’;
+‘tittle’ and ‘title’; ‘price’ and ‘prize’; ‘consort’ and ‘concert’;--or
+there is a change in both, as between ‘pipe’ and ‘fife’.
+
+Or a word is spelt now with a final _k_ and now with a final _ch_; out
+of this variation two different words have been formed; with, it may be,
+other slight differences superadded; thus is it with ‘poke’ and ‘poach’;
+‘dyke’ and ‘ditch’; ‘stink’ and ‘stench’; ‘prick’ and ‘pritch’ (now
+obsolete); ‘break’ and ‘breach’; to which may be added ‘broach’; ‘lace’
+and ‘latch’; ‘stick’ and ‘stitch’; ‘lurk’ and ‘lurch’; ‘bank’ and
+‘bench’; ‘stark’ and ‘starch’; ‘wake’ and ‘watch’. So too _t_ and _d_
+are easily exchanged; as in ‘clod’ and ‘clot’; ‘vend’ and ‘vent’;
+‘brood’ and ‘brat’{112}; ‘halt’ and ‘hold’; ‘sad’ and ‘set’{113}; ‘card’
+and ‘chart’; ‘medley’ and ‘motley’. Or there has grown up, besides the
+rigorous and accurate pronunciation of a word, a popular as well; and
+this in the end has formed itself into another word; thus is it with
+‘housewife’ and ‘hussey’; ‘hanaper’ and ‘hamper’; ‘puisne’ and ‘puny’;
+‘patron’ and ‘pattern’; ‘spital’ (hospital) and ‘spittle’ (house of
+correction); ‘accompt’ and ‘account’; ‘donjon’ and ‘dungeon’; ‘nestle’
+and ‘nuzzle’{114} (now obsolete); ‘Egyptian’ and ‘gypsy’; ‘Bethlehem’
+and ‘Bedlam’; ‘exemplar’ and ‘sampler’; ‘dolphin’ and ‘dauphin’; ‘iota’
+and ‘jot’.
+
+Other changes cannot perhaps be reduced exactly under any of these
+heads; as between ‘ounce’ and ‘inch’; ‘errant’ and ‘arrant’; ‘slack’ and
+‘slake’; ‘slow’ and ‘slough’{115}; ‘bow’ and ‘bough’; ‘hew’ and
+‘hough’{115}; ‘dies’ and ‘dice’ (both plurals of ‘die’); ‘plunge’ and
+‘flounce’{115}; ‘staff’ and ‘stave’; ‘scull’ and ‘shoal’; ‘benefit’ and
+‘benefice’{116}. Or, it may be, the difference which constitutes the two
+forms of the word into two words is in the spelling only, and of a
+character to be appreciable only by the eye, escaping altogether the
+ear: thus it is with ‘draft’ and ‘draught’; ‘plain’ and ‘plane’; ‘coign’
+and ‘coin’; ‘flower’ and ‘flour’; ‘check’ and ‘cheque’; ‘straight’ and
+‘strait’; ‘ton’ and ‘tun’; ‘road’ and ‘rode’; ‘throw’ and ‘throe’;
+‘wrack’ and ‘rack’; ‘gait’ and ‘gate’; ‘hoard’ and ‘horde’{117}; ‘knoll’
+and ‘noll’; ‘chord’ and ‘cord’; ‘drachm’ and ‘dram’; ‘sergeant’ and
+‘serjeant’; ‘mask’ and ‘masque’; ‘villain’ and ‘villein’.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in Two Forms_}
+
+Now, if you will put the matter to proof, you will find, I believe, in
+every case that there has attached itself to the different forms of a
+word a modification of meaning more or less sensible, that each has won
+for itself an independent sphere of meaning, in which it, and it only,
+moves. For example, ‘divers’ implies difference only, but ‘diverse’
+difference with opposition; thus the several Evangelists narrate the
+same event in ‘divers’ manner, but not in ‘diverse’. ‘Antique’ is
+ancient, but ‘antic’, is now the ancient regarded as overlived, out of
+date, and so in our days grotesque, ridiculous; and then, with a
+dropping of the reference to age, the grotesque, the ridiculous alone.
+‘Human’ is what every man is, ‘humane’ is what every man ought to be;
+for Johnson’s suggestion that ‘humane’ is from the French feminine,
+‘humaine’, and ‘human’ from the masculine, cannot for an instant be
+admitted. ‘Ingenious’ expresses a mental, ‘ingenuous’ a moral,
+excellence{118}. A gardener ‘prunes’, or trims his trees, properly
+indeed his _vines_ alone (pro_vigner_), birds ‘preen’ or trim their
+feathers. We ‘allay’ wine with water; we ‘alloy’ gold with platina.
+‘Bloom’ is a finer and more delicate efflorescence even than ‘blossom’;
+thus the ‘bloom’, but not the ‘blossom’, of the cheek. It is now always
+‘clots’ of blood and ‘clods’ of earth; a ‘float’ of timber, and a
+‘fleet’ of ships; men ‘vend’ wares, and ‘vent’ complaints. A ‘curtsey’
+is one, and that merely an external, manifestation of ‘courtesy’.
+‘Gambling’ may be, as with a fearful irony it is called, _play_, but it
+is nearly as distant from ‘gambolling’ as hell is from heaven{119}. Nor
+would it be hard, in almost every pair or larger group of words which I
+have adduced, as in others which no doubt might be added to complete the
+list, to trace a difference of meaning which has obtained a more or less
+distinct recognition{120}.
+
+But my subject is inexhaustible; it has no limits except those, which
+indeed may be often narrow enough, imposed by my own ignorance on the
+one side; and on the other, by the necessity of consulting your
+patience, and of only choosing such matter as will admit a popular
+setting forth. These necessities, however, bid me to pause, and suggest
+that I should not look round for other quarters from whence accessions
+of new words are derived. Doubtless I should not be long without finding
+many such. I must satisfy myself for the rest with a very brief
+consideration of the _motives_ which, as they have been, are still at
+work among us, inducing us to seek for these augmentations of our
+vocabulary.
+
+And first, the desire of greater clearness is a frequent motive and
+inducement to this. It has been well and truly said: “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”{121}. The limits of their vocabulary are
+in fact for most men the limits of their knowledge; and in a great
+degree for us all. Of course I do not affirm that it is absolutely
+impossible to have our mental conceptions clearer and more distinct than
+our words; but it is very hard to have, and still harder to keep, them
+so. And therefore it is that men, conscious of this, so soon as ever
+they have learned to distinguish in their minds, are urged by an almost
+irresistible impulse to distinguish also in their words. They feel that
+nothing is made sure till this is done.
+
+{Sidenote: _Dissimilation of Words_}
+
+The sense that a word covers too large a space of meaning, is the
+frequent occasion of the introduction of another, which shall relieve
+it of a portion of this. Thus, there was a time when ‘witch’ was applied
+equally to male and female dealers in unlawful magical arts. Simon
+Magus, for example, and Elymas are both ‘witches’, in Wiclif’s _New
+Testament_ (Acts viii. 9; xiii. 8), and Posthumus in _Cymbeline_: but
+when the medieval Latin ‘sortiarius’ (not ‘sortitor’ as in Richardson),
+supplied another word, the French ‘sorcier’, and thus our English
+‘sorcerer’ (originally the “caster of lots”), then ‘witch’ gradually was
+confined to the hag, or female practiser of these arts, while ‘sorcerer’
+was applied to the male.
+
+New necessities, new evolutions of society into more complex conditions,
+evoke new words; which come forth, because they are required now; but
+did not formerly exist, because they were not required in the period
+preceding. For example, in Greece so long as the poet sang his own
+verses ‘singer’ (ἀοιδὸς) sufficiently expressed the double function;
+such a ‘singer’ was Homer, and such Homer describes Demodocus, the bard
+of the Phæacians; that double function, in fact, not being in his time
+contemplated as double, but each part of it so naturally completing the
+other, that no second word was required. When, however, in the division
+of labour one made the verses which another chaunted, then ‘poet’ or
+‘maker’, a word unknown in the Homeric age, arose. In like manner, when
+‘physicians’ were the only natural philosophers, the word covered this
+meaning as well as that other which it still retains; but when the
+investigation of nature and natural causes detached itself from the art
+of healing, became an independent study of itself, the name ‘physician’
+remained to that which was as the stock and stem of the art, while the
+new offshoot sought out a new name for itself.
+
+Another motive to the invention of new words, is the desire thereby to
+cut short lengthy{122} explanations, tedious circuits of language.
+Science is often an immense gainer by words, which say singly what it
+would have taken whole sentences otherwise to have said. Thus
+‘isothermal’ is quite of modern invention; but what a long story it
+would be to tell the meaning of ‘_isothermal_ lines’, all which is
+summed up in and saved by the word. We have long had the word
+‘assimilation’ in our dictionaries; ‘dissimilation’ has not yet found
+its way into them, but it speedily will. It will appear first, if it
+has not already appeared, in our books on language{123}. I express
+myself with this confidence, because the advance of philological
+enquiry has rendered it almost a matter of necessity that we should
+possess a word to designate a certain process, and no other word would
+designate it at all so well. There is a process of ‘assimilation’
+going on very extensively in language; it occurs where the organs of
+speech find themselves helped by changing a letter for another which
+has just occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not
+‘_adf_iance’ but ‘_aff_iance’, not ‘re_n_ow_m_’, as our ancestors did
+when the word ‘renommée’ was first naturalized, but ‘re_n_ow_n_’. At
+the same time there is another opposite process, where some letter
+would recur too often for euphony or comfort in speaking, if the
+strict form of the word were too closely held fast, and where
+consequently this letter is exchanged for some other, generally for
+some nearly allied; thus it is at least a reasonable suggestion, that
+‘cœ_r_uleum’ was once ‘cœ_l_uleum’, from cœlum: so too the Italians
+prefer ‘ve_l_e_n_o’ to ‘ve_n_e_n_o’; and we ‘cinnamo_n_’ to
+‘cinnamo_m_’ (the earlier form); in ‘turtle’ and ‘purple’ we have
+shrunk from the double ‘_r_’ of ‘turtur’ and ‘purpura’; and this
+process of _making unlike_, requiring a term to express it, will
+create, or indeed has created, the word ‘dissimilation’, which
+probably will in due time establish itself among us in far wider than
+its primary use.
+
+‘Watershed’ has only recently begun to appear in books of geography; and
+yet how convenient it must be admitted to be; how much more so than
+‘line of water parting’, which it has succeeded; meaning, as I need
+hardly tell you it does, not merely that which _sheds_ the waters, but
+that which _divides_ them (‘wasserscheide’); and being applied to that
+exact ridge and highest line in a mountain region, where the waters of
+that region separate off and divide, some to one side, and some to the
+other; as in the Rocky Mountains of North America there are streams
+rising within very few miles of one another, which flow severally east
+and west, and, if not in unbroken course, yet as affluents to larger
+rivers, fall at least severally into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It
+must be allowed, I think, that not merely geographical terminology, but
+geography itself, had a benefactor in him who first endowed it with so
+expressive and comprehensive a word, bringing before us a fact which we
+should scarcely have been aware of without it.
+
+There is another word which I have just employed, ‘affluent’, in the
+sense of a stream which does not flow into the sea, but joins a larger
+stream, as for instance, the Isis is an ‘affluent’ of the Thames, the
+Moselle of the Rhine. It is itself an example in the same kind of that
+whereof I have been speaking, having been only recently constituted a
+substantive, and employed in this sense, while yet its utility is
+obvious. ‘Confluents’ would perhaps be a fitter name, where the rivers,
+like the Missouri and the Mississippi, were of equal or nearly equal
+importance up to the time of their meeting{124}.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Selfishness_’, ‘_Suicide_’}
+
+Again, new words are coined out of the necessity which men feel of
+filling up gaps in the language. Thoughtful men, comparing their own
+language with that of other nations, become conscious of deficiencies,
+of important matters unexpressed in their own, and with more or less
+success proceed to supply the deficiency. For example, that sin of sins,
+the undue love of self, with the postponing of the interests of all
+others to our own, had for a long time no word to express it in English.
+Help was sought from the Greek, and from the Latin. ‘Philauty’
+(φιλαυτία) had been more than once attempted by our scholars; but found
+no popular acceptance. This failing, men turned to the Latin; one writer
+trying to supply the want by calling the man a ‘suist’, as one seeking
+_his own_ things (‘sua’), and the sin itself, ‘suicism’. The gap,
+however, was not really filled up, till some of the Puritan writers,
+drawing on our Saxon, devised ‘selfish’ and ‘selfishness’, words which
+to us seem obvious enough, but which yet are little more than two
+hundred [and fifty] years old{125}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Notices of New Words_}
+
+Before quitting this part of the subject, let me say a few words in
+conclusion on this deliberate introduction of words to supply felt
+omissions in a language, and the limits within which this or any other
+conscious interference with the development of a language is desirable
+or possible. By the time that a people begin to meditate upon their
+language, to be aware by a conscious reflective act either of its merits
+or deficiencies, by far the greater and more important part of its work
+is done; it is fixed in respect of its structure in immutable forms; the
+region in which any alteration or modification, addition to it, or
+substraction from it, deliberately devised and carried out, may be
+possible, is very limited indeed. Its great laws are too firmly
+established to admit of this; so that almost nothing can be taken from
+it, which it has got; almost nothing added to it, which it has _not_
+got. It will travel indeed in certain courses of change; but it would be
+as easy almost to alter the career of a planet as for man to alter
+these. This is sometimes a subject of regret with those who see what
+they believe manifest defects or blemishes in their language, and such
+as appear to them capable of remedy. And yet in fact this is well; since
+for once that these redressers of real or fancied wrongs, these
+suppliers of things lacking, would have mended, we may be tolerably
+confident that ten times, yea, a hundred times, they would have marred;
+letting go that which would have been well retained; retaining that
+which by a necessary law the language now dismisses and lets go; and in
+manifold ways interfering with those processes of a natural logic, which
+are here evermore at work. The genius of a language, unconsciously
+presiding over all its transformations, and conducting them to a
+definite issue, will have been a far truer, far safer guide, than the
+artificial wit, however subtle, of any single man, or of any association
+of men. For the genius of a language is the sense and inner conviction
+of all who speak it, as to what it ought to be, and the means by which
+it will best attain its objects; and granting that a pair of eyes, or
+two or three pairs of eyes may see much, yet millions of eyes will
+certainly see more.
+
+{Sidenote: _German Purists_}
+
+It is only with the words, and not with the forms and laws of a
+language, that any interference such as I have just supposed is
+possible. Something, indeed much, may here be done by wise masters, in
+the way of rejecting that which would deform, allowing and adopting that
+which will strengthen and enrich. Those who would purify or enrich a
+language, so long as they have kept within this their proper sphere,
+have often effected much, more than at first could have seemed possible.
+The history of the German language affords so much better illustration
+of this than our own would do, that I shall make no scruple in seeking
+my examples there. When the patriotic Germans began to wake up to a
+consciousness of the enormous encroachments which foreign languages,
+the Latin and French above all, had made on their native tongue, the
+lodgements which they had therein effected, and the danger which
+threatened it, namely, that it should cease to be German at all, but
+only a mingle-mangle, a variegated patchwork of many languages, without
+any unity or inner coherence at all, various societies were instituted
+among them, at the beginning and during the course of the seventeenth
+century, for the recovering of what was lost of their own, for the
+expelling of that which had intruded from abroad; and these with
+excellent effect.
+
+But more effectual than these societies were the efforts of single
+men, who in this merited well of their country{126}. In respect of
+words which are now entirely received by the whole nation, it is
+often possible to designate the writers who first substituted them
+for some affected Gallicism or unnecessary Latinism. Thus to Lessing
+his fellow-countrymen owe the substitution of ‘zartgefühl’ for
+‘delicatesse’, of ‘empfindsamkeit’ for ‘sentimentalität’, of
+‘wesenheit’ for ‘essence’. It was Voss (1786) who first employed
+‘alterthümlich’ for ‘antik’. Wieland too was the author or reviver of
+a multitude of excellent words, for which often he had to do earnest
+battle at the first; such were ‘seligkeit’, ‘anmuth’, ‘entzückung’,
+‘festlich’, ‘entwirren’, with many more. For ‘maskerade’, Campe would
+have fain substituted ‘larventanz’. It was a novelty when Büsching
+called his great work on geography ‘erdbeschreibung’ instead of
+‘geographie’; while ‘schnellpost’ instead of ‘diligence’, ‘zerrbild’
+for ‘carricatur’ are also of recent introduction. In regard of
+‘wörterbuch’ itself, J. Grimm tells us he can find no example of its
+use dating earlier than 1719.
+
+Yet at the same time it must be acknowledged that some of these
+reformers proceeded with more zeal than knowledge, while others did
+whatever in them lay to make the whole movement absurd--even as there
+ever hang on the skirts of a noble movement, be it in literature or
+politics or higher things yet, those who contribute their little all to
+bring ridicule and contempt upon it. Thus in the reaction against
+foreign interlopers which ensued, and in the zeal to purify the language
+from them, some went to such extravagant excesses as to desire to get
+rid of ‘testament’, ‘apostel’, which last Campe would have replaced by
+‘lehrbote’, with other words like these, consecrated by longest use, and
+to find native substitutes in their room; or they understood so little
+what words deserved to be called foreign, or how to draw the line
+between them and native, that they would fain have gotten rid of
+‘vater’, ‘mutter’, ‘wein’, ‘fenster’, ‘meister’, ‘kelch’{127}; the first
+three of which belong to the German language by just as good a right as
+they do to the Latin and the Greek; while the other three have been
+naturalized so long that to propose to expel them now was as if, having
+passed an alien act for the banishment of all foreigners, we should
+proceed to include under that name, and as such drive forth from the
+kingdom, the descendants of the French Protestants who found refuge here
+at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or even of the Flemings who
+settled among us in the time of our Edwards. One notable enthusiast in
+this line proposed to create an entirely new nomenclature for all the
+mythological personages of the Greek and the Roman pantheon, who, one
+would think, might have been allowed, if any, to retain their Greek and
+Latin names. So far however from this, they were to exchange these for
+equivalent German titles; Cupid was to be ‘Lustkind’, Flora ‘Bluminne’,
+Aurora ‘Röthin’; instead of Apollo schoolboys were to speak of
+‘Singhold’; instead of Pan of ‘Schaflieb’; instead of Jupiter of
+‘Helfevater’, with much else of the same kind. Let us beware (and the
+warning extends much further than to the matter in hand) of making a
+good cause ridiculous by our manner of supporting it, of assuming that
+exaggerations on one side can only be redressed by exaggerations as
+great upon the other.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{38} Thus Alexander Gil, head-master of St. Paul’s School, in his book,
+     _Logonomia Anglica_, 1621, _Preface_: Huc usque peregrinæ voces in
+     linguâ Anglicâ inauditæ. Tandem circa annum 1400 Galfridus
+     Chaucerus, infausto omine, vocabulis Gallicis et Latinis poësin
+     suam famosam reddidit. The whole passage, which is too long to
+     quote, as indeed the whole book, is curious. Gil was an earnest
+     advocate of phonetic spelling, and has adopted it in all his
+     English quotations in this book.
+
+{39} We may observe exactly the same in Plautus: a multitude of Greek
+     words are used by him, which the Latin language did not want, and
+     therefore refused to take up; thus ‘clepta’, ‘zamia’ (ζημία),
+     ‘danista’, ‘harpagare’, ‘apolactizare’, ‘nauclerus’, ‘strategus’,
+     ‘morologus’, ‘phylaca’, ‘malacus’, ‘sycophantia’, ‘euscheme’
+     (εὐσχήμως), ‘dulice’ (δουλικῶς), [so ‘scymnus’ by Lucretius], none
+     of which, I believe, are employed except by him; ‘mastigias’ and
+     ‘techna’ appear also in Terence. Yet only experience could show
+     that they were superfluous; and at the epoch of Latin literature in
+     which Plautus lived, it was well done to put them on trial.
+
+{40} [Modern poets have given ‘amort’ a new life; it is used by Keats,
+     by Bailey (_Festus_, xxx), and by Browning (_Sordello_, vi).]
+
+{41} [‘Bruit’ has been revived by Carlyle and Chas. Merivale. Its verbal
+     form is used by Cowper, Byron and Dickens.]
+
+{42} Let me here observe once for all that in adding the name of an
+     author, which I shall often do, to a word, I do not mean to affirm
+     the word in any way peculiar to him; although in some cases it may
+     be so; but only to give one authority for its use. [Coleridge uses
+     ‘eloign’.]
+
+{43} _Essay on English Poetry_, p. 93.
+
+{44} _Dedication of the Translation of the Æneid_.
+
+{45} [i.e. the promoters of Classical learning.]
+
+{46} We have notable evidence in some lines of Waller of the sense which
+     in his time scholars had of the rapidity with which the language
+     was changing under their hands. Looking back at what the last
+     hundred years had wrought of alteration in it, and very naturally
+     assuming that the next hundred would effect as much, he checked
+     with misgivings such as these his own hope of immortality:
+
+         “Who can hope his lines should long
+         Last in a daily changing tongue?
+         While they are new, envy prevails,
+         And as that dies, our language fails.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+         “Poets that lasting marble seek,
+         Must carve in Latin or in Greek:
+         _We_ write in sand; our language grows,
+         And like the tide our work o’erflows”.
+
+     Such were his misgivings as to the future, assuming that the rate
+     of change would continue what it had been. How little they have
+     been fulfilled, every one knows. In actual fact two centuries,
+     which have elapsed since he wrote, have hardly antiquated a word or
+     a phrase in his poems. If we care very little for them now, that is
+     to be explained by quite other causes--by the absence of all moral
+     earnestness from them.
+
+{47} In his _Art of English Poesy_, London, 1589, republished in
+     Haslewood’s _Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy_,
+     London, 1811, vol. i. pp. 122, 123; [and in Arber’s _English
+     Reprints_, 1869].
+
+{48} London, 1601. Besides this work Holland translated the whole of
+     Plutarch’s _Moralia_, the _Cyropœdia_ of Xenophon, Livy, Suetonius,
+     Ammianus Marcellinus, and Camden’s _Britannia_. His works make a
+     part of the “library of dullness” in Pope’s _Dunciad_:
+
+         “De Lyra there a dreadful front extends,
+         And here the groaning shelves _Philemon_ bends”--
+
+     very unjustly; the authors whom he has translated are all more or
+     less important, and his versions of them a mine of genuine
+     idiomatic English, neglected by most of our lexicographers, wrought
+     to a considerable extent, and with eminent advantage by Richardson;
+     yet capable, as it seems to me, of yielding much more than they
+     hitherto have yielded.
+
+{49} And so too in French it is surprising to find of how late
+     introduction are many words, which it seems as if the language
+     could never have done without. ‘Désintéressement’, ‘exactitude’,
+     ‘sagacité’, ‘bravoure’, were not introduced till late in the
+     seventeenth century. ‘Renaissance’, ‘emportement’, ‘sçavoir-faire’,
+     ‘indélébile’, ‘désagrément’, were all recent in 1675 (Bouhours);
+     ‘indévot’, ‘intolérance’, ‘impardonnable’, ‘irréligieux’, were
+     struggling into allowance at the end of the seventeenth century,
+     and were not established till the beginning of the eighteenth.
+     ‘Insidieux’ was invented by Malherbe; ‘frivolité’ does not appear
+     in the earlier editions of the _Dictionary of the Academy_; the
+     Abbé de St. Pierre was the first to employ ‘bienfaisance’, the
+     elder Balzac ‘féliciter’, Sarrasin ‘burlesque’. Mad. de Sevigné
+     exclaims against her daughter for employing ‘effervescence’ in a
+     letter (comment dites-vous cela, ma fille? Voilà un mot dont je
+     n’avais jamais ouï parler). ‘Demagogue’ was first hazarded by
+     Bossuet, and was counted so bold a novelty that it was long before
+     any ventured to follow him in its use. Somewhat earlier Montaigne
+     had introduced ‘diversion’ and ‘enfantillage’, though not without
+     being rebuked by cotemporaries on the score of the last.
+     Desfontaines was the first who employed ‘suicide’; Caron gave to
+     the language ‘avant-propos’, Ronsard ‘avidité’, Joachim Dubellay
+     ‘patrie’, Denis Sauvage ‘jurisconsulte’, Menage ‘gracieux’ (at
+     least so Voltaire affirms) and ‘prosateur’, Desportes ‘pudeur’,
+     Chapelain ‘urbanité’, and Etienne first brought in, apologizing at
+     the same time for the boldness of it, ‘analogie’ (si les oreilles
+     françoises peuvent porter ce mot). ‘Préliber’ (prælibare) is a word
+     of our own day; and it was Charles Nodier who, if he did not coin,
+     yet revived the obsolete ‘simplesse’.--See Génin, _Variations du
+     Langage Français_, pp. 308-19.
+
+{50} [Resuscitated in vain by Charles Lamb.]
+
+{51} J. Grimm (_Wörterbuch_, p. xxvi.): Fällt von ungefähr ein fremdes
+     wort in den brunnen einer sprache, so wird es so lange darin
+     umgetrieben, bis es ihre farbe annimmt, und seiner fremden art zum
+     trotze wie ein heimisches aussieht.
+
+{52} Have we here an explanation of the ‘battalia’ of Jeremy Taylor and
+     others? Did they, without reflecting on the matter, regard
+     ‘battalion’ as a word with a Greek neuter termination? It is
+     difficult to think they should have done so; yet more difficult to
+     suggest any other explanation. [‘Battalia’ was sometimes mistaken
+     as a plural, which indeed it was originally, the word being derived
+     through the Italian _battaglia_, from low Latin _battalia_, which
+     (like _biblia_, _gaudia_, etc.) was afterwards regarded as a
+     feminine singular (Skeat, _Principles_, ii, 230). But Shakespeare
+     used it as a singular, “Our _battalia_ trebles that account”
+     (_Rich. III_, v. 3, 11); and so Sir T. Browne, “The Roman
+     _battalia_ was ordered after this manner” (_Garden of Cyrus_, 1658,
+     p. 113).]
+
+{53} “And old heroës, which their world did daunt”.
+
+                                         _Sonnet on Scanderbeg._
+
+{54} [By J. H(ealey), 1610, who has “centones ... of diuerse colours”,
+     p. 605.]
+
+{55} [The identity of these two words, notwithstanding the analogy of
+     _corona_ and _crown_, is denied by Skeat, Kluge and Lutz.]
+
+{56} Skinner (_Etymologicon_, 1671) protests against the word
+     altogether, as purely French, and having no right to be considered
+     English at all.
+
+{57} It is curious how effectually the nationality of a word may by
+     these slight alterations in spelling be disguised. I have met an
+     excellent French and English scholar, to whom it was quite a
+     surprise to learn that ‘redingote’ was ‘riding-coat’.
+
+{58} [Compare French _marsouin_ (=German _meer-schwein_), “sea-pig”, the
+     dolphin; Breton _mor-houc’h_; Irish _mucc mara_, “pig of the sea”,
+     the dolphin (W. Stokes, _Irish Glossaries_, p. 118); French _truye
+     de mer_ (Cotgrave); old English _brun-swyne_ (_Prompt. Parv._),
+     “brown-pig”, the dolphin or seal.]
+
+{59} He is not indeed perfectly accurate in this statement, for the
+     Greeks spoke of ἐν κύκλῳ παιδεία and ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, but had no
+     such composite word as ἐγκυκλοπαδεία. We gather however from these
+     expressions, as from Lord Bacon’s using the term ‘circle-learning’
+     (=‘orbis doctrinæ’, Quintilian), that ‘encyclopædia’ did not exist
+     in their time. [But ‘encyclopedia’ occurs in Elyot, _Governour_,
+     1531, vol. i, p. 118 (ed. Croft); ‘encyclopædie’ in J. Sylvester,
+     _Workes_, 1621, p. 660.]
+
+{60} See the passages quoted in my paper, _On some Deficiencies in our
+     English Dictionaries_, p. 38.
+
+{61} [This prediction has been verified. ‘Ethos’ is used by Sir F.
+     Palgrave, 1851, and in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’, 1875. N.E.D.]
+
+{62} We may see the same progress in Greek words which were being
+     incorporated in the Latin. Thus Cicero writes ἀντίποδες (_Acad._
+     ii, 39, 123), but Seneca (_Ep._ 122), ‘antipodes’; that is, the
+     word for Cicero was still Greek, while in the period that elapsed
+     between him and Seneca, it had become Latin: so too Cicero wrote
+     εἴδωλον, the Younger Pliny ‘idolon’, and Tertullian ‘idolum’.
+
+{63} [This rash prophecy has not been fulfilled. English speakers are
+     still no more inclined to say ‘préstige’ than ‘pólice’.]
+
+{64} See in Coleridge’s _Table Talk_, p. 3, the amusing story of John
+     Kemble’s stately correction of the Prince of Wales for adhering to
+     the earlier pronunciation, ‘obl_ee_ge,’--“It will become your royal
+     mouth better to say obl_i_ge.”
+
+{65} “In this great _académy_ of mankind”.
+
+                              Butler, _To the Memory of Du Val_.
+
+{66} “‘Twixt that and reason what a nice _barrier_”.
+
+{67} [A fairly complete collection of these and similar semi-naturalized
+     foreign words will be found in _The Stanford Dictionary of
+     Anglicized Words_, edited by Dr. C. A. M. Fennell, 1892.]
+
+{68} [This is quite wrong. Mr. Fitzedward Hall shows that ‘inimical’ was
+     used by Gaule in 1652, as well as by Richardson in 1758 (_Modern
+     English_, p. 287). The N.E.D. quotes an instance of it from Udall
+     in 1643.]
+
+{69} [The word had been already naturalized by H. More, 1647, Cudworth,
+     1678, Tucker 1765, and Carlyle, 1831.--N.E.D.]
+
+{70} [The earliest citation for ‘abnormal’ in the N.E.D. is dated 1835.
+     The older word was ‘abnormous’. Curious to say it is unrelated to
+     ‘normal’ to which it has been assimilated, being merely an
+     alteration of ‘anomal-ous’.]
+
+{71} [Fuller says of ‘plunder’, “we first heard thereof in the Swedish
+     wars”, and that it came into England about 1642 (_Church History_,
+     bk. xi, sec. 4, par. 33). It certainly occurs under that date in
+     _Memoirs of the Verney Family_, “It is in danger of _plonderin_”
+     (vol. i, p. 71, also p. 151). It also occurs in a document dated
+     1643, “We must _plunder_ none but Roundheads” (_Camden Soc.
+     Miscellany_, iii, 31). Drummond (died 1649) has “Go fight and
+     _plunder_” (_Poems_, ed. Turnbull, p. 330). It appears in a
+     quotation from _The Bellman of London_ (no reference) given in
+     Timbs, _London and Westminster_, vol. i, p. 254.]
+
+{72} [It is rather from the old Dutch _trecker_, a ‘puller’. Very few
+     English words come to us from German.]
+
+{73} [So Skeat, _Etym. Dict._ But the Germans themselves take their
+     _schwindler_ (in the sense of cheat) to have been adopted from the
+     English ‘swindler’. Dr. Dunger asserts that it was introduced into
+     their language by Lichtenberg in his explanation of Hogarth’s
+     engravings, 1794-99 (_Englanderei in der Deutschen Sprache_, 1899,
+     p. 7).]
+
+{74} _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, 1650, p. 217.
+
+{75} [This word introduced as a ‘pure neologism’ by D’Israeli
+     (_Curiosities of Literature_, 1839, 11th ed. p. 384) as a companion
+     to ‘mother-tongue’, had been already used by Sir W. Temple in 1672
+     (Hall, _Mod. English_, p. 44). Nay, even by Tyndale, see T. L. K.
+     Oliphant, _The New English_, i, 439.]
+
+{76} [‘Folk-lore’ was introduced by Mr. W. J. Thoms, editor of _Notes
+     and Queries_, in 1846. Still later came ‘Folk-etymology’, the
+     earliest use of which in N.E.D. is given as 1883, but the editor’s
+     work bearing that title appeared in 1882.]
+
+{77} _Holy State_, b. 2, c. 6. There was a time when the Latin
+     promised to display, if not an equal, yet not a very inferior,
+     freedom in this forming of new words by the happy marriage of
+     old. But in this, as in so many respects, it seemed possessed at
+     the period of its highest culture with a timidity, which caused
+     it voluntarily to abdicate many of its own powers. Where do we
+     find in the Augustan period of the language so grand a pair of
+     epithets as these, occurring as they do in a single line of
+     Catullus: Ubi cerva _silvicultrix_, ubi aper _nemorivagus_? or
+     again, as his ‘fluentisonus’? Virgil’s vitisator (_Æn._ 7, 179)
+     is not his own, but derived from one of the earlier poets. Nay,
+     the language did not even retain those compound epithets which it
+     once had formed, but was content to let numbers of them drop:
+     ‘parcipromus’; ‘turpilucricupidus’, and many more, do not extend
+     beyond Plautus. On this matter Quintilian observes (i. 5, 70):
+     Res tota magis Græcos decet, nobis minus succedit; nec id fieri
+     naturâ puto, sed alienis favemus; ideoque cum κυρταύχενα mirati
+     sumus, _incurvicervicum_ vix a risu defendimus. Elsewhere he
+     complains, though not with reference to compound epithets, of the
+     little _generative_ power which existed in the Latin language,
+     that its continual losses were compensated by no equivalent gains
+     (viii. 6, 32): Deinde, tanquum consummata sint omnia, nihil
+     generare audemus ipsi, quum multa quotidie ab antiquis ficta
+     moriantur. Notwithstanding this complaint, it must be owned that
+     the silver age of the language, which sought to recover, and did
+     recover to some extent the abdicated energies of its earlier
+     times, reasserted among other powers that of combining words with
+     a certain measure of success.
+
+{78} [For Shakespearian compounds see Abbott’s _Shakespearian Grammar_,
+     pp. 317-20.]
+
+{79} [Writing in the year 1780 Bentham says: “The word it must be
+     acknowledged is a new one”.]
+
+{80} _Collection of Scarce Tracts_, edited by Sir W. Scott, vol. vii, p.
+     91.
+
+{81} [Hardly a novelty, as the word occurs in J. Gaule, Πῦς-μαντια,
+     1652, p. 30. See F. Hall, _Mod. English_, p. 131.]
+
+{82} [First used apparently by Grote, 1847, and Mrs. Gaskell, 1857,
+     N.E.D.]
+
+{83} See _Letters of Horace Walpole and Mann_, vol. ii. p. 396, quoted
+     in _Notes and Queries_, No. 225; and another proof of the novelty
+     of the word in Pegge’s _Anecdotes of the English Language_, 1814,
+     p. 38.
+
+{84} Postscript to his _Translation of the Æneid_.
+
+{85} Multa renascentur, quæ jam cecidere.
+
+                          _De A. P._ 46-72; cf. _Ep._ 2, 2, 115.
+
+{86} _Etymologicon vocum omnium antiquarum quæ usque a Wilhelmo Victore
+     invaluerunt, et jam ante parentum ætatem in usu esse desierunt._
+
+{87} [As a matter of fact the N.E.D. fails to give any quotation for
+     this word in the period named.]
+
+{88} [The verb ‘to advocate’ had long before been employed by Nash,
+     1598, Sanderson, 1624, and Heylin, 1657 (F. Hall, _Mod. English_,
+     p. 285).]
+
+{89} In like manner La Bruyère, in his _Caractères_, c. 14, laments the
+     extinction of a large number of French words which he names. At
+     least half of these have now free course in the language, as
+     ‘valeureux’, ‘haineux’, ‘peineux’, ‘fructueux’, ‘mensonger’,
+     ‘coutumier’, ‘vantard’, ‘courtois’, ‘jovial’, ‘fétoyer’,
+     ‘larmoyer’, ‘verdoyer’. Two or three of these may be rarely used,
+     but every one would be found in a dictionary of the living
+     language.
+
+{90} _Preface to Juvenal._
+
+{91} _Preface to Troilus and Cressida._ In justice to Dryden, and lest
+     it should be said that he had spoken poetic blasphemy, it ought not
+     to be forgotten that ‘pestered’ had not in his time at all so
+     offensive a sense as it would have now. It meant no more than
+     inconveniently crowded; thus Milton: “Confined and _pestered_ in
+     this pinfold here”.
+
+{92} Thus in North’s _Plutarch_, p. 499: “After the fire was quenched,
+     they found in _niggots_ of gold and silver mingled together, about
+     a thousand talents”; and again, p. 323: “There was brought a
+     marvellous great mass of treasure in _niggots_ of gold”. The word
+     has not found its way into our dictionaries or glossaries.
+
+{93} [‘Niggot’ rather stands for ‘ningot’, due to a coalescence of the
+     article in ‘an ingot’ (as if ‘a ningot’); just as, according to
+     some, in French _l’ingot_ became _lingot_.]
+
+{94} [Such collections were essayed in J. C. Hare’s _Two Essays in
+     English Philology_, 1873, “_Words derived from Names of Persons_”,
+     and in R. S. Charnock’s _Verba Nominalia_, pp. 326.]
+
+{95} [In a strangely similar way the stone-worshipper in the Malay
+     Peninsula gives to his sacred boulder the title of Mohammed (Tylor,
+     _Primitive Culture_, 3rd ed. ii. 254).]
+
+{96} [But Wolsey’s jester was most probably so called from his wearing a
+     varicoloured or patchwork coat; compare the Shakespearian use of
+     ‘motley’. Similarly the _maquereaux_ of the old French comedy were
+     clothed in a mottled dress like our harlequin, just as the Latin
+     _maccus_ or mime wore a _centunculus_ or patchwork coat, his name
+     being perhaps connected with _macus_ (in _macula_), a spot (Gozzi,
+     _Memoirs_, i, 38). In stage slang the harlequin was called
+     _patchy_, as his Latin counterpart was _centunculus_.]
+
+{97} [An error. Prof. Skeat shows that ‘tram’ was an old word in
+     Scottish and Northern English (_Etym. Dict._, 655 and 831).]
+
+{98} Several of these we have in common with the French. Of their own
+     they have ‘sardanapalisme’, any piece of profuse luxury, from
+     Sardanapalus; while for ‘lambiner’, to dally or loiter over a task,
+     they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the
+     sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish
+     movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of
+     Pascal’s _Provincial Letters_ will remember Escobar, the great
+     casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges for the
+     relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the
+     notoriety which he thus acquired he owes his introduction into the
+     French language; where ‘escobarder’ is used in the sense of to
+     equivocate, and ‘escobarderie’ of subterfuge or equivocation. The
+     name of an unpopular minister of finance, M. de Silhouette,
+     unpopular because he sought to cut down unnecessary expenses in the
+     state, was applied to whatever was cheap, and, as was implied,
+     unduly economical; it has survived in the black outline portrait
+     which is now called a ‘silhouette’. (Sismondi, _Histoire des
+     Français_, tom. xix, pp. 94, 95.) In the ‘mansarde’ roof we have
+     the name of Mansart, the architect who introduced it. I need hardly
+     add ‘guillotine’.
+
+{99} See Col. Mure, _Language and Literature of Ancient Greece_, vol. i,
+     p. 350.
+
+{100} See Génin, _Des Variations du Langage Français_, p. 12.
+
+{101} [Dr. Murray in the N.E.D. calls these by the convenient term
+      ‘nonce-words’.]
+
+{102} _Persa_, iv. 6, 20-23. At the same time these words may be earnest
+      enough; such was the ἐλαχιστότερος of St. Paul (Ephes. iii, 8);
+      just as in the Middle Ages some did not account it sufficient to
+      call themselves “fratres minores, minimi, postremi”, but coined
+      ‘postremissimi’ to express the depth of their “voluntary
+      humility”.
+
+{103} It is curious that a correspondent of Skinner (_Etymologicon_,
+      1671), although quite ignorant of this story, and indeed wholly
+      astray in his application, had suggested that ‘chouse’ might be
+      thus connected with the Turkish ‘chiaus’. I believe Gifford, in
+      his edition of Ben Jonson, was the first to clear up the matter. A
+      passage in _The Alchemist_ (Act i. Sc. 1) will have put him on the
+      right track. [But Dr. Murray notes that Gifford’s story, as given
+      above, has not hitherto been substantiated from any independent
+      source, and is so far open to doubt.]
+
+{104} [These are quite distinct words, though perhaps distantly
+      related.]
+
+{105} If there were any doubt about this matter, which indeed there is
+      not, a reference to Latimer’s famous _Sermon on Cards_ would
+      abundantly remove it, where ‘triumph’ and ‘trump’ are
+      interchangeably used.
+
+{106} [Dr. Murray does not regard these words as ultimately identical.]
+
+{107} [‘Rant’ (old Dutch _ranten_) has no connection with ‘rend’
+      (Anglo-Saxon _hrendan_) (Skeat).]
+
+{108} On these words see a learned discussion in _English Retraced_,
+      Cambridge, 1862.
+
+{109} [These are quite unconnected (Skeat).]
+
+{110} [Neither are these words to be confused with one another.]
+
+{111} The appropriating of ‘Franc_e_s’ to women and ‘Franc_i_s’ to men
+      is quite of modern introduction; it was formerly nearly as often
+      Sir Franc_e_s Drake as Sir Franc_i_s, while Fuller (_Holy State_,
+      b. iv, c. 14) speaks of Franc_i_s Brandon, eldest _daughter_ of
+      Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; and see Ben Jonson’s _New Inn_,
+      Act. ii, Sc. 1.
+
+{112} [Not connected.]
+
+{113} [‘Sad’ akin to ‘sated’ bears no relationship to ‘set’; neither
+      does ‘medley’ to ‘motley’.]
+
+{114} [On the connection of these words see my _Folk and their
+      Word-Lore_, p. 110.]
+
+{115} [Not connected, see Skeat.]
+
+{116} Were there need of proving that these both lie in ‘beneficium’,
+      which there is not, for in Wiclif’s translation of the Bible the
+      distinction is still latent (1 Tim. vi. 2), one might adduce a
+      singularly characteristic little trait of Papal policy, which once
+      turned upon the double use of this word. Pope Adrian the Fourth
+      writing to the Emperor Frederic the First to complain of certain
+      conduct of his, reminded the Emperor that he had placed the
+      imperial crown upon his head, and would willingly have conferred
+      even greater ‘beneficia’ upon him than this. Had the word been
+      allowed to pass, it would no doubt have been afterwards appealed
+      to as an admission on the Emperor’s part, that he held the Empire
+      as a feud or fief (for ‘beneficium’ was then the technical word
+      for this, though the meaning had much narrowed since) from the
+      Pope--the very point in dispute between them. The word was
+      indignantly repelled by the Emperor and the whole German nation,
+      whereupon the Pope appealed to the etymology, that ‘beneficium’
+      was but ‘bonum factum’, and protested that he meant no more than
+      to remind the Emperor of the ‘benefits’ which he had done him, and
+      which he would have willingly multiplied still more. [‘Benefice’
+      from Latin _beneficium_, and ‘benefit’ from Latin _bene-factum_,
+      are here confused.]
+
+{117} [‘Hoard’ (Anglo-Saxon _hord_) cannot be equated with ‘horde’ (from
+      Persian _órdú_).]
+
+{118} [These words have been differentiated in comparatively modern
+      times. ‘Ingenuity’ was once used for ‘ingenuousness’.]
+
+{119} [The words are really unconnected, ‘to gamble’ being ‘to gamle’ or
+      ‘game’, and ‘to gambol’ being akin to French _gambiller_, to fling
+      up the legs (_gambes_ or _jambes_) like a frisking lamb.]
+
+{120} The same happens in other languages. Thus in Greek ‘ἀνάθεμα’ and
+      ‘ἀνάθημα’ both signify that which is devoted, though in very
+      different senses, to the gods; ‘θάρσος’, boldness, and ‘θράσος’,
+      temerity, were no more at first than different spellings of the
+      same word; not otherwise is it with γρῖπος and γρῖφος, ἔθος and
+      ἦθος, βρύκω and βρύχω, while ὀβελὸς and ὀβολὸς, σορὸς and σωρὸς,
+      are probably the same words. So too in Latin ‘penna’ and ‘pinna’
+      differ only in form, and signify alike a ‘wing’; while yet ‘penna’
+      has come to be used for the wing of a bird, ‘pinna’ (its
+      diminutive ‘pinnaculum’, has given us ‘pinnacle’) for that of a
+      building. So is it with ‘Thrax’ a Thracian, and ‘Threx’ a
+      gladiator; with ‘codex’ and ‘caudex’; ‘forfex’ and ‘forceps’;
+      ‘anticus’ and ‘antiquus’; ‘celeber’ and ‘creber’; ‘infacetus’ and
+      ‘inficetus’; ‘providentia’, ‘prudentia’, and ‘provincia’;
+      ‘columen’ and ‘culmen’; ‘coitus’ and ‘cœtus’; ‘ægrimonia’ and
+      ‘ærumna’; ‘Lucina’ and ‘luna’; ‘navita’ and ‘nauta’; in German
+      with ‘rechtlich’ and ‘redlich’; ‘schlecht’ and ‘schlicht’;
+      ‘ahnden’ and ‘ahnen’; ‘biegsam’ and ‘beugsam’; ‘fürsehung’ and
+      ‘vorsehung’; ‘deich’ and ‘teich’; ‘trotz’ and ‘trutz’; ‘born’ and
+      ‘brunn’; ‘athem’ and ‘odem’; in French with ‘harnois’ the armour,
+      or ‘harness’, of a soldier, ‘harnais’ of a horse; with ‘Zéphire’
+      and ‘zéphir’, and with many more.
+
+{121} Coleridge, _Church and State_, p. 200.
+
+{122} [One hardly expects to find this otiose Americanism (first used by
+      J. Adams in 1759) in the work of a verbal purist, when ‘longish’
+      or the old ‘longsome’ were at hand. No one, as yet, has ventured
+      on ‘strengthy’ or ‘breadthy’ for somewhat strong or broad.]
+
+{123} [This prediction was correct. ‘Dissimilation’ is first found in
+      philological works published in the decade 1874-85. See N.E.D.]
+
+{124} [Coblenz, at the junction of the Moselle and Rhine (from
+      _Confluentes_), reminds us that the word was so used.]
+
+{125} A passage from Hacket’s _Life of Archbishop Williams_, part 2, p.
+      144, marks the first rise of this word, and the quarter from
+      whence it arose: “When they [the Presbyterians] saw that he was
+      not _selfish_ (it is a word of their own new mint), etc”. In
+      Whitlock’s _Zootomia_ (1654) there is another indication of it as
+      a novelty, p. 364: “If constancy may be tainted with this
+      _selfishness_ (to use our _new wordings_ of old and general
+      actings)”--It is he who in his striking essay, _The Grand
+      Schismatic, or Suist Anatomized_, puts forward his own words,
+      ‘suist’, and ‘suicism’, in lieu of those which have ultimately
+      been adopted. ‘Suicism’, let me observe, had not in his time the
+      obvious objection of resembling another word nearly, and being
+      liable to be confused with it; for ‘suicide’ did not then exist in
+      the language, nor indeed till some twenty years later. The coming
+      up of ‘suicide’ is marked by this passage in Phillips’ _New World
+      of Words_, 1671, 3rd ed.: “Nor less to be exploded is the word
+      ‘_suicide_’, which may as well seem to participate of _sus_ a sow,
+      as of the pronoun _sui_”. In the _Index_ to Jackson’s Works,
+      published two years later, it is still ‘_suicidium_’--“the horrid
+      _suicidium_ of the Jews at York”. ‘Suicide’ is apparently of much
+      later introduction into French. Génin (_Récréations Philol._ vol.
+      i, p. 194) places it about the year 1728, and makes the Abbé
+      Desfontaines its first sponsor. He is wrong, as the words just
+      quoted show, in supposing that we borrowed it from the French, or
+      that the word did not exist in English till the middle of last
+      century. The French sometimes complain that the fashion of suicide
+      was borrowed from England. It would seem at all events probable
+      that the word was so borrowed.
+
+      Let me urge here the advantage of a complete collection, or one as
+      nearly complete as the industry of the collectors would allow, of
+      all the notices in our literature, which mark, and would serve as
+      dates for, the first incoming of new words into the language.
+      These notices are of the most various kinds. Sometimes they are
+      protests and remonstrances, as that just quoted, against a new
+      word’s introduction; sometimes they are gratulations at the same;
+      while many hold themselves neuter as to approval or disapproval,
+      and merely state, or allow us to gather, the fact of a word’s
+      recent appearance. There are not a few of these notices in
+      Richardson’s _Dictionary_: thus one from Lord Bacon under ‘essay’;
+      from Swift under ‘banter’; from Sir Thomas Elyot under
+      ‘mansuetude’; from Lord Chesterfield under ‘flirtation’; from
+      Davies and Marlowe’s _Epigrams_ under ‘gull’; from Roger North
+      under ‘sham’ (Appendix); the third quotation from Dryden under
+      ‘mob’; one from the same under ‘philanthropy’, and again under
+      ‘witticism’, in which he claims the authorship of the word; that
+      from Evelyn under ‘miss’; and from Milton under ‘demagogue’. There
+      are also notices of the same kind in _Todd’s Johnson_. The work,
+      however, is one which no single scholar could hope to accomplish,
+      which could only be accomplished by many lovers of their native
+      tongue throwing into a common stock the results of their several
+      studies. The sources from which these illustrative passages might
+      be gathered cannot beforehand be enumerated, inasmuch as it is
+      difficult to say in what unexpected quarter they would not
+      sometimes be found, although some of these sources are obvious
+      enough. As a very slight sample of what might be done in this way
+      by the joint contributions of many, let me throw together
+      references to a few passages of the kind which I do not think have
+      found their way into any of our dictionaries. Thus add to that
+      which Richardson has quoted on ‘banter’, another from _The
+      Tatler_, No. 230. On ‘plunder’ there are two instructive passages
+      in Fuller’s _Church History_, b. xi, § 4, 33; and b. ix, § 4; and
+      one in Heylin’s _Animadversions_ thereupon, p. 196. On ‘admiralty’
+      see a note in Harington’s _Ariosto_, book 19; on ‘maturity’ Sir
+      Thomas Elyot’s _Governor_, b. i, c. 22; and on ‘industry’ the
+      same, b. i, c. 23; on ‘neophyte’ a notice in Fulke’s _Defence of
+      the English Bible_, Parker Society’s edition, p. 586; and on
+      ‘panorama’, and marking its recent introduction (it is not in
+      Johnson), a passage in Pegge’s _Anecdotes of the English
+      Language_, first published in 1803, but my reference is to the
+      edition of 1814, p. 306; on ‘accommodate’, and supplying a date
+      for its first coming into popular use, see Shakespeare’s _2 Henry
+      IV._ Act 3, Sc. 2; on ‘shrub’, Junius’ _Etymologicon_, s. v.
+      ‘syrup’; on ‘sentiment’ and ‘cajole’ Skinner, s. vv., in his
+      _Etymologicon_ (‘vox nuper civitate donata’); and on ‘opera’
+      Evelyn’s _Memoirs and Diary_, 1827, vol. i, pp. 189, 190. In such
+      a collection should be included those passages of our literature
+      which supply implicit evidence for the non-existence of a word up
+      to a certain moment. It may be urged that it is difficult, nay
+      impossible, to prove a negative; and yet a passage like this from
+      Bolingbroke makes certain that when it was written the word
+      ‘isolated’ did not exist in our language: “The events we are
+      witnesses of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very
+      often original, unprepared, signal and _unrelative_: if I may use
+      such a word for want of a better in English. In French I would say
+      _isolés_” (_Notes and Queries_, No. 226). Compare Lord
+      Chesterfield in a letter to Bishop Chenevix, of date March 12,
+      1767: “I have survived almost all my cotemporaries, and as I am
+      too old to make new acquaintances, I find myself _isolé_”. So,
+      too, it is pretty certain that ‘amphibious’ was not yet English,
+      when one writes (in 1618): “We are like those creatures called
+      ἀμφίβια, who live in water or on land”. Ζωολογία, the title of a
+      book published in 1649, makes it clear that ‘zoology’ was not yet
+      in our vocabulary, as ζωόφυτον (Jackson) proves the same for
+      ‘zoophyte’, and πολυθεϊσμος (Gell) for ‘polytheism’. One
+      precaution, let me observe, would be necessary in the collecting,
+      or rather in the adopting of any statements about the newness of a
+      word--for the passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not
+      the less to be noted--namely, that, where there is the least
+      motive for suspicion, no one’s affirmation ought to be accepted
+      simply and at once as to the novelty of a word; for all here are
+      liable to error. Thus more than one which Sir Thomas Elyot
+      indicates as new in his time, ‘magnanimity’ for example (_The
+      Governor_, 2, 14), are to be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed
+      of ‘sentiment’ that it had only recently obtained the rights of
+      English citizenship from the translators of French books, he was
+      altogether mistaken, this word being also one of continual
+      recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent gives in
+      _Notes and Queries_, No. 225, a useful catalogue of recent
+      neologies in our speech, which yet would require to be used with
+      caution, for there are at least half a dozen in the list which
+      have not the smallest right to be so considered.
+
+{126} There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this view (_Opera_,
+      vol. vi, part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and German, with this title,
+      _Considérations sur la Culture et la Perfection de la Langue
+      Allemande_.
+
+{127} _Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwörter im Deutschen_,
+      von. Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85-91.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
+
+
+I took occasion to observe at the commencement of my last lecture that
+it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux{128}
+and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as
+little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one
+another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies
+remain for ever without subtraction or addition. As I then undertook for
+my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own
+language had made, I shall consider in the present some of the losses,
+or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured.
+But it will be well here, by one or two remarks going before, to avert
+any possible misapprehensions of my meaning.
+
+It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in
+the end, perish. They run their course; not at all at the same rate, for
+the tendency to change is different in different languages, both from
+internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also from causes external
+to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and
+social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life,
+they have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude,
+their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has
+arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary,
+out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the
+materials of which they were composed more or less survive, but these
+now organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus
+for example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but a chief part
+of the words that composed it live on in the four daughter languages,
+French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; or the six, if we count the
+Provençal and Wallachian; not a few in our own. Still in their own
+proper being languages perish and pass away; there are dead records of
+what they were in books; not living men who speak them any more. Seeing
+then that they thus die, they must have had the germs of a possible
+decay and death in them from the beginning.
+
+{Sidenote: _Languages Gain and Lose_}
+
+Nor is this all; but in such mighty strong built fabrics as these, the
+causes which thus bring about their final dissolution must have been
+actually at work very long before the results began to be visible.
+Indeed, very often it is with them as with states, which, while in some
+respects they are knitting and strengthening, in others are already
+unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may be, still remote
+overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and in languages, it
+would be a serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and
+period is growth and gain, while all after is decay and loss. On the
+contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions
+is going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are
+being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during
+which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower,
+and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and
+gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a
+compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more;
+when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than
+those of life and order. It is from this moment the decline of a
+language may properly be dated. But until that crisis and turning point
+has arrived, we may be quite justified in speaking of the losses of a
+language, and may esteem them most real, without in the least thereby
+implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun. This
+may yet be far distant, and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and
+diminutions which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you will not
+conclude that I am seeking to present it to you as now travelling the
+downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my
+intention. If in some respects it is losing, in others it is gaining.
+Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting
+with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous
+or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. English
+is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only
+different in that it is passing into another stage of its development;
+only different, as the fruit is different from the flower, and the
+flower from the bud; having changed its merits, but not having
+renounced them; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, but more of
+usefulness; not, perhaps, serving the poet so well, but serving the
+historian and philosopher and theologian better than before.
+
+One observation more let me make, before entering on the special details
+of my subject. It is this. The losses and diminutions of a language
+differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions--namely, that they
+are of _two_ kinds, while its gains are only of _one_. Its gains are
+only in _words_; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a
+new _power_; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a
+new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in _powers_--in
+words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels
+onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of
+tenses which it once used; forgets its dual; is content with one
+termination both for masculine and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a
+peculiar feature of one language, but the universal law of all. “In all
+languages”, as has been well said, “there is a constant tendency to
+relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for
+every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and
+detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion”. For
+example, a vast number of languages had at an early period of their
+development, besides the singular and plural, a dual number, some even a
+trinal, which they have let go at a later. But what I mean by a language
+renouncing its powers will, I trust, be more clear to you before my
+lecture is concluded. This much I have here said on the matter, to
+explain and justify a division which I shall make, considering first the
+losses of the English language in _words_, and then in _powers_.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words become Extinct_}
+
+And first, there is going forward a continual extinction of the words in
+our language--as indeed in every other. When I speak of this, the dying
+out of words, I do not refer to mere _tentative_, experimental words,
+not a few of which I adduced in my last lecture, words offered to the
+language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as either
+belonged to the primitive stock of the language, or if not so, which had
+been domiciled in it long, that they might have been supposed to have
+found in it a lasting home. Thus not a few pure Anglo-Saxon words which
+lived on into the times of our early English, have subsequently dropped
+out of our vocabulary, sometimes leaving a gap which has never since
+been filled, but their places oftener taken by others which have come up
+in their room. Not to mention those of Chaucer and Wiclif, which are
+very numerous, many held their ground to far later periods, and yet have
+finally given way. That beautiful word ‘wanhope’ for despair, hope which
+has so _waned_ that now there is an entire _want_ of it, was in use down
+to the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of
+Gascoigne{129}. ‘Skinker’ for cupbearer, (an ungraceful word, no doubt)
+is used by Shakespeare and lasted till Dryden’s time and beyond.
+
+Spenser uses often ‘to welk’ (welken) in the sense of to fade, ‘to sty’
+for to mount, ‘to hery’ as to glorify or praise, ‘to halse’ as to
+embrace, ‘teene’ as vexation or grief: Shakespeare ‘to tarre’ as to
+provoke, ‘to sperr’ as to enclose or bar in; ‘to sag’ for to droop, or
+hang the head downward. Holland employs ‘geir’{130} for vulture
+(“vultures or _geirs_”), ‘specht’ for woodpecker, ‘reise’ for journey,
+‘frimm’ for lusty or strong. ‘To schimmer’ occurs in Bishop Hall; ‘to
+tind’, that is, to kindle, and surviving in ‘tinder’, is used by Bishop
+Sanderson; ‘to nimm’, or take, as late as by Fuller. A rogue is a
+‘skellum’ in Sir Thomas Urquhart. ‘Nesh’ in the sense of soft through
+moisture, ‘leer’ in that of empty, ‘eame’ in that of uncle, _mother’s_
+brother (the German ‘oheim’), good Saxon-English once, still live on in
+some of our provincial dialects; so does ‘flitter-mouse’ or
+‘flutter-mouse’ (mus volitans), where we should use bat. Indeed of those
+above named several do the same; it is so with ‘frimm’, with ‘to sag’,
+‘to nimm’. ‘Heft’ employed by Shakespeare in the sense of weight, is
+still employed in the same sense by our peasants in Hampshire{131}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Vigorous Compound Words_}
+
+A number of vigorous compounds we have dropped and let go. ‘Earsports’
+for entertainments of song or music (ἀκροάματα) is a constantly
+recurring word in Holland’s _Plutarch_. Were it not for Shakespeare, we
+should have quite forgotten that young men of hasty fiery valour were
+called ‘hotspurs’; and even now we regard the word rather as the proper
+name of one than that which would have been once alike the designation
+of all{132}. Fuller warns men that they should not ‘witwanton’ with God.
+Severe austere old men, such as, in Falstaff’s words would “hate us
+youth”, were ‘grimsirs’, or ‘grimsires’ once (Massinger). ‘Realmrape’
+(=usurpation), occurring in _The Mirror for Magistrates_, is a vigorous
+word. ‘Rootfast’ and ‘rootfastness’{133} were ill lost, being worthy to
+have lived; so too was Lord Brooke’s ‘bookhunger’; and Baxter’s
+‘word-warriors’, with which term he noted those whose strife was only
+about words. ‘Malingerer’ is familiar enough to military men, but I do
+not find it in our dictionaries; being the soldier who, out of _evil
+will_ (malin gré) to his work, shams and shirks and is not found in the
+ranks{134}.
+
+Those who would gladly have seen the Anglo-Saxon to have predominated
+over the Latin element in our language, even more than it actually has
+done, must note with regret that in many instances a word of the former
+stock had been dropped, and a Latin coined to supply its place; or where
+the two once existed side by side, the Saxon has died, and the Latin
+lived on. Thus Wiclif employed ‘soothsaw’, where we now use proverb;
+‘sourdough’, where we employ leaven; ‘wellwillingness’ for benevolence;
+‘againbuying’ for redemption; ‘againrising’ for resurrection;
+‘undeadliness’ for immortality; ‘uncunningness’ for ignorance;
+‘aftercomer’ for descendant; ‘greatdoingly’ for magnificently; ‘to
+afterthink’ (still in use in Lancashire) for to repent; ‘medeful’, which
+has given way to meritorious; ‘untellable’ for ineffable; ‘dearworth’
+for precious; Chaucer has ‘forword’ for promise; Sir John Cheke
+‘freshman’ for proselyte; ‘mooned’ for lunatic; ‘foreshewer’ for
+prophet; ‘hundreder’ for centurion; Jewel ‘foretalk’, where we now
+employ preface; Holland ‘sunstead’ where we use solstice; ‘leechcraft’
+instead of medicine; and another, ‘wordcraft’ for logic; ‘starconner’
+(Gascoigne) did service once, if not instead of astrologer, yet side by
+side with it; ‘halfgod’ (Golding) had the advantage over ‘demigod’, that
+it was all of one piece; ‘to eyebite’ (Holland) told its story at least
+as well as to fascinate; ‘shriftfather’ as confessor; ‘earshrift’
+(Cartwright) is only two syllables, while ‘auricular confession’ is
+eight; ‘waterfright’ is a better word than our awkward Greek
+hydrophobia. The lamprey (lambens petram) was called once the
+‘suckstone’ or the ‘lickstone’; and the anemone the ‘windflower’.
+‘Umstroke’, if it had lived on (it appears as late as Fuller, though
+our dictionaries know nothing of it), might have made ‘circumference’
+and ‘periphery’ unnecessary. ‘Wanhope’, as we saw just now, has given
+place to despair, ‘middler’ to mediator; and it would be easy to
+increase this list.
+
+{Sidenote: _Local and Provincial English_}
+
+I had occasion just now to notice the fact that many words survive in
+our provincial dialects, long after they have died out from the main
+body of the speech. The fact is one connected with so much of deep
+interest in the history of language that I cannot pass it thus slightly
+over. It is one which, rightly regarded, may assist to put us in a just
+point of view for estimating the character of the local and provincial
+in speech, and rescuing it from that unmerited contempt and neglect with
+which it is often regarded. I must here go somewhat further back than I
+could wish; but only so, only by looking at the matter in connexion with
+other phenomena of speech, can I hope to explain to you the worth and
+significance which local and provincial words and usages must oftentimes
+possess.
+
+Let us then first suppose a portion of those speaking a language to have
+been separated off from the main body of its speakers, either through
+their forsaking for one cause or other of their native seats, or by the
+intrusion of a hostile people, like a wedge, between them and the
+others, forcibly keeping them asunder, and cutting off their
+communications one with the other, as the Saxons intruded between the
+Britons of Cornwall and of Wales. In such a case it will inevitably
+happen that before very long differences of speech will begin to reveal
+themselves between those to whom even dialectic distinctions may have
+been once unknown. The divergences will be of various kinds. Idioms will
+come up in the separated body, which, not being recognized and allowed
+by those who remain the arbiters of the language, will be esteemed by
+them, should they come under their notice, violations of its law, or at
+any rate departures from its purity. Again, where a colony has gone
+forth into new seats, and exists under new conditions, it is probable
+that the necessities, physical and moral, rising out of these new
+conditions, will give birth to words, which there will be nothing to
+call out among those who continue in the old haunts of the nation.
+Intercourse with new tribes and people will bring in new words, as, for
+instance, contact with the Indian tribes of North America has given to
+American English a certain number of words hardly or not at all allowed
+or known by us; or as the presence of a large Dutch population at the
+Cape has given to the English spoken there many words, as ‘inspan’,
+‘outspan’{135}, ‘spoor’, of which our home English knows nothing.
+
+{Sidenote: _Antiquated English_}
+
+There is another cause, however, which will probably be more effectual
+than all these, namely, that words will in process of time be dropped by
+those who constitute the original stock of the nation, which will not be
+dropped by the offshoot; idioms which those have overlived, and have
+stored up in the unhonoured lumber-room of the past, will still be in
+use and currency among the smaller and separated section which has gone
+forth; and thus it will come to pass that what seems and in fact is the
+newer swarm, will have many older words, and very often an archaic air
+and old-world fashion both about the words they use, their way of
+pronouncing, their order and manner of combining them. Thus after the
+Conquest we know that our insular French gradually diverged from the
+French of the Continent. The Prioress in Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_
+could speak her French “full faire and fetishly”, but it was French, as
+the poet slyly adds,
+
+    “After the scole of Stratford atte bow,
+    For French of Paris was to hire unknowe”.
+
+One of our old chroniclers, writing in the reign of Elizabeth, informs
+us that by the English colonists within the Pale in Ireland numerous
+words were preserved in common use, “the dregs of the old ancient
+Chaucer English”, as he contemptuously calls it, which had become quite
+obsolete and forgotten in England itself. For example, they still called
+a spider an ‘attercop’--a word, by the way, still in popular use in the
+North;--a physician a ‘leech’, as in poetry he still is called; a
+dunghill was still for them a ‘mixen’; (the word is still common all
+over England in this sense;) a quadrangle or base court was a
+‘bawn’{136}; they employed ‘uncouth’ in the earlier sense of unknown.
+Nay more, their general manner of speech was so different, though
+containing English still, that Englishmen at their first coming over
+often found it hard or impossible to comprehend. We have another example
+of the same in what took place after the revocation of the Edict of
+Nantes, and the consequent formation of colonies of Protestant French
+emigrants in various places, especially in Amsterdam and other chief
+cities of Holland. There gradually grew up among these what came to be
+called ‘refugee French’, which within a generation or two diverged in
+several particulars from the classical language of France; its
+divergence being mainly occasioned by this, that it remained stationary,
+while the classical language was in motion; it retained usages and
+words, which the latter had dismissed{137}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Provincial English_}
+
+Nor is it otherwise in respect of our English provincialisms. It is true
+that our country people who in the main employ them, have not been
+separated by distance of space, nor yet by insurmountable obstacles
+intervening, from the main body of their fellow-countrymen; but they
+have been quite as effectually divided by deficient education. They have
+been, if not locally, yet intellectually, kept at a distance from the
+onward march of the nation’s mind; and of them also it is true that many
+of their words, idioms, turns of speech, which we are ready to set down
+as vulgarisms, solecisms of speech, violations of the primary rules of
+grammar, do merely attest that those who employ them have not kept
+abreast with the advance of the language and nation, but have been left
+behind by it. The usages are only local in the fact that, having once
+been employed by the whole body of the English people, they have now
+receded from the lips of all except those in some certain country
+districts, who have been more faithful than others to the tradition of
+the past{138}.
+
+It is thus in respect of a multitude of isolated words, which were
+excellent Anglo-Saxon, which were excellent early English, and which
+only are not excellent present English, because use, which is the
+supreme arbiter in these matters, has decided against their further
+employment. Several of these I enumerated just now. It is thus also with
+several grammatical forms and flexions. For instance, where we decline
+the plural of “I sing”, “we sing”, “ye sing”, “they sing”, there are
+parts of England in which they would decline, “we sin_gen_”, “ye
+sin_gen_”, “they sin_gen_”. This is not indeed the original form of the
+plural, but it is that form of it which, coming up about Chaucer’s time,
+was just going out in Spenser’s; he, though we must ever keep in mind
+that he does not fairly represent the language of his time, or indeed of
+any time, affecting a certain artificial archaism both in words and
+forms, continually uses it{139}. After him it becomes ever rarer, the
+last of whom I am aware as occasionally using it being Fuller, until it
+quite disappears.
+
+{Sidenote: _Earlier and Later English_}
+
+Of such as may now employ forms like these we must say, not that they
+violate the laws of the language, but only that they have taken their
+_permanent_ stand at a point which was only a point of transition, and
+which it has now left behind, and overlived. Thus, to take examples
+which you may hear at the present day in almost any part of England--a
+countryman will say, “He made me _afeard_”; or “The price of corn _ris_
+last market day”; or “I will _axe_ him his name”; or “I tell _ye_”. You
+would probably set these phrases down for barbarous English. They are
+not so at all; in one sense they are quite as good English as “He made
+me _afraid_”; or “The price of corn _rose_ last market day”; or “I will
+_ask_ him his name”. ‘Afeard’, used by Spenser, is the regular
+participle of the old verb to ‘affear’, still existing as a law term, as
+‘afraid’ is of to ‘affray’, and just as good English{140}; ‘ris’ or
+‘risse’ is an old præterite of ‘to rise’; to ‘axe’ is not a
+mispronunciation of ‘to ask’, but a genuine English form of the word,
+the form which in the earlier English it constantly assumed; in Wiclif’s
+Bible almost without exception; and indeed ‘axe’ occurs continually, I
+know not whether invariably, in Tyndale’s translation of the Scriptures;
+there was a time when ‘ye’ was an accusative, and to have used it as a
+nominative or vocative, the only permitted uses at present, would have
+been incorrect. Even such phrases as “Put _them_ things away”; or “The
+man _what_ owns the horse” are not bad, but only antiquated
+English{141}. Saying this, I would not in the least imply that these
+forms are open to you to employ, or that they would be good English for
+_you_. They would not; inasmuch as they are contrary to present use and
+custom, and these must be our standards in what we speak, and in what we
+write; just as in our buying and selling we are bound to employ the
+current coin of the realm, must not attempt to pass that which long
+since has been called in, whatever merits or intrinsic value it may
+possess. All which I affirm is that the phrases just brought forward
+represent past stages of the language, and are not barbarous violations
+of it.
+
+{Sidenote: _Luncheon_, _Nuncheon_}
+
+The same may be asserted of certain ways of pronouncing words, which are
+now in use among the lower classes, but not among the higher; as, for
+example, ‘contrāry’, ‘mischiēvous’, ‘blasphēmous’, instead of
+‘contrăry’, ‘mischiĕvous’, ‘blasphĕmous’. It would be abundantly easy to
+show by a multitude of quotations from our poets, and those reaching
+very far down, that these are merely the retention of the earlier
+pronunciation by the people, after the higher classes have abandoned
+it{142}. And on the strength of what has just been spoken, let me here
+suggest to you how well worth your while it will prove to be on the
+watch for provincial words and inflexions, local idioms and modes of
+pronunciation, and to take note of these. Count nothing in this kind
+beneath your notice. Do not at once ascribe anything which you hear to
+the ignorance or stupidity of the speaker. Thus if you hear ‘nuncheon’,
+do not at once set it down for a malformation of ‘luncheon’{143}, nor
+‘yeel’{144}, of ‘eel’. Lists and collections of provincial usage, such
+as I have suggested, always have their value. If you are not able to
+turn them to any profit yourselves, and they may not stand in close
+enough connexion with your own studies for this, yet there always are
+those who will thank you for them; and to whom the humblest of these
+collections, carefully and intelligently made, will be in one way or
+another of real assistance{145}. And there is the more need to urge this
+at the present, because, notwithstanding the tenacity with which our
+country folk cling to their old forms and usages, still these forms and
+usages must now be rapidly growing fewer; and there are forces, moral
+and material, at work in England, which will probably cause that of
+those which now survive the greater part will within the next fifty
+years have disappeared{146}.
+
+{Sidenote: _‘Its’ of Late Introduction_}
+
+Before quitting this subject, let me instance one example more of that
+which is commonly accounted ungrammatical usage, but which is really the
+retention of old grammar by some, where others have substituted new; I
+mean the constant application by our rustic population in the south, and
+I dare say through all parts of England, of ‘his’ to inanimate objects,
+and to these not personified, no less than to persons; where ‘its’ would
+be employed by others. This was once the manner of speech among all; for
+‘its’ is a word of very recent introduction, many would be surprised to
+learn of how recent introduction, into the language. You will look for
+it in vain through the whole of our Authorized Version of the Bible;
+the office which it now fulfils being there accomplished, as our rustics
+accomplish it at the present, by ‘his’ (Gen. i. 11; Exod. xxxvii. 17;
+Matt. v. 15) or ‘her’ (Jon. i. 15; Rev. xxii. 2) applied as freely to
+inanimate things as to persons, or else by ‘thereof’ (Ps. lxv. 10) or
+‘of it’ (Dan. vii. 5). Nor may Lev. xx. 5 be urged as invalidating this
+assertion; for reference to the exemplar edition of 1611, or indeed to
+any earlier editions of King James’ Bible, will show that in them the
+passage stood, “of _it_ own accord”{147}. ‘Its’ occurs very rarely in
+Shakespeare, in many of his plays it will not once be found. Milton also
+for the most part avoids it, and this, though in his time others freely
+allowed it. How soon all this was forgotten we have striking evidence in
+the fact that when Dryden, in one of his fault-finding moods with the
+great men of the preceding generation, is taking Ben Jonson to task for
+general inaccuracy in his English diction, among other counts of his
+indictment, he quotes this line from _Catiline_
+
+    “Though heaven should speak with all _his_ wrath at once”,
+
+and proceeds, “_heaven_ is ill syntax with _his_”; while in fact up to
+within forty or fifty years of the time when Dryden began to write, no
+other syntax was known; and to a much later date was exceedingly rare.
+Curious also, is it to note that in the earnest controversy which
+followed on Chatterton’s publication of the poems ascribed by him to a
+monk Rowlie, who should have lived in the fifteenth century, no one
+appealed to such lines as the following,
+
+    “Life and all _its_ goods I scorn”,
+
+as at once deciding that the poems were not of the age which they
+pretended. Warton, who denied, though with some hesitation, the
+antiquity of the poems, giving many and sufficient reasons for this
+denial, failed to take note of this little word; while yet there needed
+no more than to point it out, for the disposing of the whole question;
+the forgery at once was betrayed.
+
+{Sidenote: _American English_}
+
+What has been here affirmed concerning our provincial English, namely
+that it is often _old_ English rather than _bad_ English, may be
+affirmed with equal right of many so-called Americanisms. There are
+parts of America where ‘het’ is used, or was used a few years since, as
+the perfect of ‘to heat’; ‘holp’ as the perfect of ‘to help’; ‘stricken’
+as the participle of ‘to strike’. Again there are the words which have
+become obsolete during the last two hundred years, which have not become
+obsolete there, although many of them probably retain only a provincial
+existence. Thus ‘slick’, which indeed is only another form of ‘sleek’,
+was employed by our good writers of the seventeenth century{148}. Other
+words again, which have remained current on both sides of the Atlantic,
+have yet on our side receded from their original use, while they have
+remained true to it on the other. ‘Plunder’ is a word in point{149}.
+
+In the contemplation of facts like these it has been sometimes asked,
+whether a day will ever arrive when the language spoken on this side of
+the Atlantic and on the other, will divide into two languages, an old
+English and a new. We may confidently answer, No. Doubtless, if those
+who went out from us to people and subdue a new continent, had left our
+shores two or three centuries earlier than they did, when the language
+was very much farther removed from that ideal after which it was
+unconsciously striving, and in which, once reached, it has in great
+measure acquiesced; if they had not carried with them to their distant
+homes their English Bible, and what else of worth had been already
+uttered in the English tongue; if, having once left us, the intercourse
+between Old and New England had been entirely broken off, or only rare
+and partial; there would then have unfolded themselves differences
+between the language spoken here and there, which in tract of time
+accumulating and multiplying, might in the end have justified the
+regarding of the languages as no longer one and the same. It could not
+have failed but that such differences should have displayed themselves;
+for while there is a law of _necessity_ in the evolution of languages,
+while they pursue certain courses and in certain directions, from which
+they can be no more turned aside by the will of men than one of the
+heavenly bodies could be pushed from its orbit by any engines of ours,
+there is a law of _liberty_ no less; and this liberty must inevitably
+have made itself in many ways felt. In the political and social
+condition of America, so far removed from our own, in the many natural
+objects which are not the same with those which surround us here, in
+efforts independently carried out to rid the language of imperfections,
+or to unfold its latent powers, even in the different effects of soil
+and climate on the organs of speech, there would have been causes enough
+to have provoked in the course of time not immaterial divergencies of
+language.
+
+As it is, however, the joint operation of those three causes referred to
+already, namely, that the separation did not take place in the infancy
+or youth of the language, but only in its ripe manhood, that England and
+America owned a body of literature, to which they alike looked up and
+appealed as containing the authoritative standards of the language, that
+the intercourse between the one people and the other has been large and
+frequent, hereafter probably to be larger and more frequent still, has
+effectually wrought. It has been strong enough so to traverse, repress,
+and check all those causes which tended to divergence, that the
+_written_ language of educated men on both sides of the water remains
+precisely the same, their _spoken_ manifesting a few trivial
+differences of idiom; while even among those classes which do not
+consciously acknowledge any ideal standard of language, there are
+scarcely greater differences, in some respects far smaller, than exist
+between inhabitants of different provinces in this one island of
+England; and in the future we may reasonably anticipate that these
+differences, so far from multiplying, will rather diminish and
+disappear.
+
+{Sidenote: _Extinct English_}
+
+But I must return from this long digression. It seems often as if an
+almost unaccountable caprice presided over the fortunes of words, and
+determined which should live and which die. Thus in instances out of
+number a word lives on as a verb, but has ceased to be employed as a
+noun; we say ‘to embarrass’, but no longer an ‘embarrass’; ‘to revile’,
+but not, with Chapman and Milton, a ‘revile’; ‘to dispose’, but not a
+‘dispose’{150}; ‘to retire’ but not a ‘retire’; ‘to wed’, but not
+a ‘wed’; we say ‘to infest’, but use no longer the adjective ‘infest’.
+Or with a reversed fortune a word lives on as a noun, but has perished
+as a verb--thus as a noun substantive, a ‘slug’, but no longer ‘to slug’
+or render slothful; a ‘child’, but no longer ‘to child’, (“_childing_
+autumn”, Shakespeare); a ‘rape’, but not ‘to rape’ (South); a ‘rogue’,
+but not ‘to rogue’; ‘malice’, but not ‘to malice’; a ‘path’, but not ‘to
+path’; or as a noun adjective, ‘serene’, but not ‘to serene’, a beautiful
+word, which we have let go, as the French have ‘sereiner’{151}; ‘meek’,
+but not ‘to meek’ (Wiclif); ‘fond’, but not ‘to fond’ (Dryden); ‘dead’,
+but not ‘to dead’; ‘intricate’, but ‘to intricate’ (Jeremy Taylor) no
+longer.
+
+Or again, the affirmative remains, but the negative is gone; thus
+‘wisdom’, ‘bold’, ‘sad’, but not any more ‘unwisdom’, ‘unbold’, ‘unsad’
+(all in Wiclif); ‘cunning’, but not ‘uncunning’; ‘manhood’, ‘wit’,
+‘mighty’, ‘tall’, but not ‘unmanhood’, ‘unwit’, ‘unmighty’, ‘untall’
+(all in Chaucer); ‘buxom’, but not ‘unbuxom’ (Dryden); ‘hasty’, but not
+‘unhasty’ (Spenser); ‘blithe’, but not ‘unblithe’; ‘ease’, but not
+‘unease’ (Hacket); ‘repentance’, but not ‘unrepentance’; ‘remission’,
+but not ‘irremission’ (Donne); ‘science’, but not ‘nescience’
+(Glanvill){152}; ‘to know’, but not ‘to unknow’ (Wiclif); ‘to give’, but
+not ‘to ungive’. Or once more, with a curious variation from this, the
+negative survives, while the affirmative is gone; thus ‘wieldy’
+(Chaucer) survives only in ‘unwieldy’; ‘couth’ and ‘couthly’ (both in
+Spenser), only in ‘uncouth’ and ‘uncouthly’; ‘rule’ (Foxe) only in
+‘unruly’; ‘gainly’ (Henry More) in ‘ungainly’; these last two were both
+of them serviceable words, and have been ill lost{153}; ‘gainly’ is
+indeed still common in the West Riding of Yorkshire; ‘exorable’
+(Holland) and ‘evitable’ only in ‘inexorable’ and ‘inevitable’;
+‘faultless’ remains, but hardly ‘faultful’ (Shakespeare). In like
+manner ‘semble’ (Foxe) has, except as a technical law term,
+disappeared; while ‘dissemble’ continues. So also of other pairs one
+has been taken and one left; ‘height’, or ‘highth’, as Milton better
+spelt it, remains, but ‘lowth’ (Becon) is gone; ‘righteousness’, or
+‘rightwiseness’, as it would once more accurately have been written,
+for ‘righteous’ is a corruption of ‘rightwise’, remains, but its
+correspondent ‘wrongwiseness’ has been taken; ‘inroad’ continues, but
+‘outroad’ (Holland) has disappeared; ‘levant’ lives, but ‘ponent’
+(Holland) has died; ‘to extricate’ continues, but, as we saw just now,
+‘to intricate’ does not; ‘parricide’, but not ‘filicide’ (Holland).
+Again, of whole groups of words formed on some particular scheme it
+may be only a single specimen will survive. Thus ‘gainsay’, that is,
+again say, survives; but ‘gainstrive’ (Foxe), ‘gainstand’, ‘gaincope’
+(Golding), and other similarly formed words exist no longer. It is the
+same with ‘foolhardy’, which is but one, though now indeed the only
+one remaining, of at least five adjectives formed on the same
+principle; thus ‘foollarge’, quite as expressive a word as prodigal,
+occurs in Chaucer, and ‘foolhasty’, found also in him, lived on to the
+time of Holland; while ‘foolhappy’ is in Spencer; and ‘foolbold’ in
+Bale. ‘Steadfast’ remains, but ‘shamefast’, ‘rootfast’, ‘bedfast’
+(=bedridden), ‘homefast’, ‘housefast’, ‘masterfast’ (Skelton), with
+others, are all gone. ‘Exhort’ remains; but ‘dehort’ a word whose
+place neither ‘dissuade’ nor any other exactly supplies, has escaped
+us{154}. We have ‘twilight’, but ‘twibill’ = bipennis (Chapman) is
+extinct.
+
+Let me mention another real loss, where in like manner there remains in
+the present language something to remind us of that which is gone. The
+comparative ‘rather’ stands alone, having dropped on one side its
+positive ‘rathe’{155}, and on the other its superlative ‘rathest’.
+‘Rathe’, having the sense of early, though a graceful word, and not
+fallen quite out of popular remembrance, inasmuch as it is embalmed in
+the _Lycidas_ of Milton,
+
+    “And the _rathe_ primrose, which forsaken dies”,
+
+might still be suffered without remark to share the common lot of so many
+words which have perished, though worthy to have lived; but the disuse
+of ‘rathest’ has left a real gap in the language, and the more so,
+seeing that ‘liefest’ is gone too. ‘Rather’ expresses the Latin ‘potius’;
+but ‘rathest’ being out of use, we have no word, unless ‘soonest’ may
+be accepted as such, to express ‘potissimum’, or the preference not of
+one way over another or over certain others, but of one over all; which
+we therefore effect by aid of various circumlocutions. Nor has ‘rathest’
+been so long out of use, that it would be playing the antic to attempt
+to revive it. It occurs in the _Sermons_ of Bishop Sanderson, who in the
+opening of that beautiful sermon from the text, “When my father and my
+mother forsake me, the Lord taketh me up”, puts the consideration, “why
+these”, that is, father and mother, “are named the _rathest_, and the
+rest to be included in them”{156}.
+
+It is sometimes easy enough, but indeed oftener hard, and not seldom
+quite impossible, to trace the causes which have been at work to bring
+about that certain words, little by little, drop out of the language of
+men, come to be heard more and more rarely, and finally are not heard
+any more at all--to trace the motives which have induced a whole people
+thus to arrive at a tacit consent not to employ them any longer; for
+without this tacit consent they could never have thus become obsolete.
+That it is not accident, that there is a law here at work, however
+hidden it may be from us, is plain from the fact that certain families
+of words, words formed on certain patterns, have a tendency thus to fall
+into desuetude.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in ‘-some’_}
+
+Thus, I think, we may trace a tendency in words ending in ‘some’, the
+Anglo-Saxon and early English ‘sum’, the German ‘sam’ (‘friedsam’,
+‘seltsam’) to fall out of use. It is true that a vast number of these
+survive, as ‘gladsome’, ‘handsome’, ‘wearisome’, ‘buxom’ (this last
+spelt better ‘bucksome’, by our earlier writers, for its present
+spelling altogether disguises its true character, and the family to
+which it belongs); being the same word as the German ‘beugsam’ or
+‘biegsam’, bendable, compliant{157}; but a larger number of these words
+than can be ascribed to accident, many more than the due proportion of
+them, are either quite or nearly extinct. Thus in Wiclif’s Bible alone
+you might note the following, ‘lovesum’, ‘hatesum’, ‘lustsum’, ‘gilsum’
+(guilesome), ‘wealsum’, ‘heavysum’, ‘lightsum’, ‘delightsum’; of these
+‘lightsome’ long survived, and indeed still survives in provincial
+dialects; but of the others all save ‘delightsome’ are gone; and that,
+although used in our Authorized Version (Mal. iii, 12), is now only
+employed in poetry. So too ‘mightsome’ (see Coleridge’s _Glossary_),
+‘brightsome’ (Marlowe), ‘wieldsome’, and ‘unwieldsome’ (Golding),
+‘unlightsome’ (Milton), ‘healthsome’ (_Homilies_), ‘ugsome’ and
+‘ugglesome’ (both in Foxe), ‘laboursome’ (Shakespeare), ‘friendsome’,
+‘longsome’ (Bacon), ‘quietsome’, ‘mirksome’ (both in Spenser),
+‘toothsome’ (Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘gleesome’, ‘joysome’ (both in
+Browne’s _Pastorals_), ‘gaysome’ (_Mirror for Magistrates_), ‘roomsome’,
+‘bigsome’, ‘awesome’, ‘timersome’, ‘winsome’, ‘viewsome’, ‘dosome’
+(=prosperous), ‘flaysome’ (=fearful), ‘auntersome’ (=adventurous),
+‘clamorsome’ (all these still surviving in the North), ‘playsome’
+(employed by the historian Hume), ‘lissome’{158}, have nearly or quite
+disappeared from our English speech. They seem to have held their
+ground in Scotland in considerably larger numbers than in the south of
+the Island{159}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in ‘-ard’_}
+
+Neither can I esteem it a mere accident that of a group of depreciatory
+and contemptuous words ending in ‘ard’, at least one half should have
+dropped out of use; I refer to that group of which ‘dotard’, ‘laggard’,
+‘braggard’, now spelt ‘braggart’, ‘sluggard’, ‘buzzard’, ‘bastard’,
+‘wizard’, may be taken as surviving specimens; ‘blinkard’ (_Homilies_),
+‘dizzard’ (Burton), ‘dullard’ (Udal), ‘musard’ (Chaucer), ‘trichard’
+(_Political Songs_), ‘shreward’ (Robert of Gloucester), ‘ballard’ (a
+bald-headed man, Wiclif); ‘puggard’, ‘stinkard’ (Ben Jonson), ‘haggard’,
+a worthless hawk, as extinct.
+
+Thus too there is a very curious province of our language, in which we
+were once so rich, that extensive losses here have failed to make us
+poor; so many of its words still surviving, even after as many or more
+have disappeared. I refer to those double words which either contain
+within themselves a strong rhyming modulation, such for example as
+‘willy-nilly’, ‘hocus-pocus’, ‘helter-skelter’, ‘tag-rag’,
+‘namby-pamby’, ‘pell-mell’, ‘hodge-podge’; or with a slight difference
+from this, though belonging to the same group, those of which the
+characteristic feature is not this internal likeness with initial
+unlikeness, but initial likeness with internal unlikeness; not rhyming,
+but strongly alliterative, and in every case with a change of the
+interior vowel from a weak into a strong, generally from _i_ into _a_
+or _o_; as ‘shilly-shally’, ‘mingle-mangle’, ‘tittle-tattle’,
+‘prittle-prattle’, ‘riff-raff’, ‘see-saw’, ‘slip-slop’. No one who is
+not quite out of love with the homelier yet more vigorous portions of
+the language, but will acknowledge the life and strength which there is
+often in these and in others still current among us. But of the same
+sort what vast numbers have fallen out of use, some so fallen out of all
+remembrance that it may be difficult almost to find credence for them.
+Thus take of rhyming the following: ‘hugger-mugger’, ‘hurly-burly’,
+‘kicksy-wicksy’ (all in Shakespeare); ‘hibber-gibber’, ‘rusty-dusty’,
+‘horrel-lorrel’, ‘slaump paump’ (all in Gabriel Harvey), ‘royster-doyster’
+(Old Play), ‘hoddy-doddy’ (Ben Jonson); while of alliterative might be
+instanced these: ‘skimble-skamble’, ‘bibble-babble’ (both in
+Shakespeare), ‘twittle-twattle’, ‘kim-kam’ (both in Holland), ‘hab-nab’
+(Lilly), ‘trim-tram’, ‘trish-trash’, ‘swish-swash’ (all in Gabriel
+Harvey), ‘whim-wham’ (Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘mizz-mazz’ (Locke),
+‘snip-snap’ (Pope), ‘flim-flam’ (Swift), ‘tric-trac’, and others{160}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words under Ban_}
+
+Again, there was once a whole family of words whereof the greater number
+are now under ban; which seemed at one time to have been formed almost
+at pleasure, the only condition being that the combination should be a
+happy one--I mean all those singularly expressive words formed by a
+combination of verb and substantive, the former governing the latter; as
+‘telltale’, ‘scapegrace’, ‘turncoat’, ‘turntail’, ‘skinflint’,
+‘spendthrift’, ‘spitfire’, ‘lickspittle’, ‘daredevil’ (=wagehals),
+‘makebate’ (=störenfried), ‘marplot’, ‘killjoy’. These with a certain
+number of others, have held their ground, and may be said to be still
+more or less in use; but what a number more are forgotten; and yet,
+though not always elegant, they constituted a very vigorous portion of
+our language, and preserved some of its most genuine idioms{161}. It
+could not well be otherwise; they are almost all words of abuse, and the
+abusive words of a language are always among the most picturesque and
+vigorous and imaginative which it possesses. The whole man speaks out in
+them, and often the man under the influence of passion and excitement,
+which always lend force and fire to his speech. Let me remind you of a
+few of them; ‘smellfeast’, if not a better, is yet a more graphic, word
+than our foreign parasite; as graphic indeed for us as τρεχέδειπνος to
+Greek ears; ‘clawback’ (Hackett) is a stronger, if not a more graceful,
+word than flatterer or sycophant; ‘tosspot’ (Fuller), or less frequently
+‘reel-pot’ (Middleton), tells its own tale as well as drunkard; and
+‘pinchpenny’ (Holland), or ‘nipfarthing’ (Drant), as well as or better
+than miser. And then what a multitude more there are in like kind;
+‘spintext’, ‘lacklatin’, ‘mumblematins’, all applied to ignorant
+clerics; ‘bitesheep’ (a favourite word with Foxe) to such of these as
+were rather wolves tearing, than shepherds feeding, the flock;
+‘slip-string’ = pendard (Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘slip-gibbet’,
+‘scapegallows’; all names given to those who, however they might have
+escaped, were justly owed to the gallows, and might still “go upstairs
+to bed”.
+
+{Sidenote: _Obsolete Compounds_}
+
+How many of these words occur in Shakespeare. The following list makes
+no pretence to completeness; ‘martext’, ‘carrytale’, ‘pleaseman’,
+‘sneakcup’, ‘mumblenews’, ‘wantwit’, ‘lackbrain’, ‘lackbeard’,
+‘lacklove’, ‘ticklebrain’, ‘cutpurse’, ‘cutthroat’, ‘crackhemp’,
+‘breedbate’, ‘swinge-buckler’, ‘pickpurse’, ‘pickthank’, ‘picklock’,
+‘scarecrow’, ‘breakvow’, ‘breakpromise’, ‘makepeace’--this last and
+‘telltruth’ (Fuller) being the only ones in the whole collection wherein
+reprobation or contempt is not implied. Nor is the list exhausted yet;
+there are further ‘dingthrift’ = prodigal (Herrick), ‘wastegood’
+(Cotgrave), ‘stroygood’ (Golding), ‘wastethrift’ (Beaumont and
+Fletcher), ‘scapethrift’, ‘swashbuckler’ (both in Holinshed),
+‘shakebuckler’, ‘rinsepitcher’ (both in Bacon), ‘crackrope’ (Howell),
+‘waghalter’, ‘wagfeather’ (both in Cotgrave), ‘blabtale’ (Racket),
+‘getnothing’ (Adams), ‘findfault’ (Florio), ‘tearthroat’ (Gayton),
+‘marprelate’, ‘spitvenom’, ‘nipcheese’, ‘nipscreed’, ‘killman’
+(Chapman), ‘lackland’, ‘pickquarrel’, ‘pickfaults’, ‘pickpenny’ (Henry
+More), ‘makefray’ (Bishop Hall), ‘make-debate’ (Richardson’s _Letters_),
+‘kindlecoal’ (attise feu), ‘kindlefire’ (both in Gurnall), ‘turntippet’
+(Cranmer), ‘swillbowl’ (Stubbs), ‘smell-smock’, ‘cumberwold’ (Drayton),
+‘curryfavor’, ‘pinchfist’, ‘suckfist’, ‘hatepeace’ (Sylvester),
+‘hategood’ (Bunyan), ‘clutchfist’, ‘sharkgull’ (both in Middleton),
+‘makesport’ (Fuller), ‘hangdog’ (“Herod’s _hangdogs_ in the tapestry”,
+Pope), ‘catchpoll’, ‘makeshift’ (used not impersonally as now),
+‘pickgoose’ (“the bookworm was never but a _pickgoose_”){162}, ‘killcow’
+(these three last in Gabriel Harvey), ‘rakeshame’ (Milton, prose), with
+others which it will be convenient to omit. ‘Rakehell’, which used to be
+spelt ‘rakel’ or ‘rakle’ (Chaucer), a good English word, would be only
+through an error included in this list, although Cowper, when he writes
+‘rakehell’ (“_rake-hell_ baronet”) evidently regarded it as belonging to
+this group{163}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words become Vulgar_}
+
+Perhaps one of the most frequent causes which leads to the disuse of
+words is this: in some inexplicable way there comes to be attached
+something of ludicrous, or coarse, or vulgar to them, out of a feeling
+of which they are no longer used in earnest serious writing, and at the
+same time fall out of the discourse of those who desire to speak
+elegantly. Not indeed that this degradation which overtakes words is in
+all cases inexplicable. The unheroic character of most men’s minds, with
+their consequent intolerance of that heroic which they cannot
+understand, is constantly at work, too often with success, in taking
+down words of nobleness from their high pitch; and, as the most
+effectual way of doing this, in casting an air of mock-heroic about
+them. Thus ‘to dub’, a word resting on one of the noblest usages of
+chivalry, has now something of ludicrous about it; so too has ‘doughty’;
+they belong to that serio-comic, mock-heroic diction, the multiplication
+of which, as of all parodies on greatness, and the favour with which it
+is received, is always a sign of evil augury for a nation, is at present
+a sign of evil augury for our own.
+
+‘Pate’ in the sense of head is now comic or ignoble; it was not so once;
+as is plain from its occurrence in the Prayer Book Version of the Psalms
+(Ps. vii. 17); as little was ‘noddle’, which occurs in one of the few
+poetical passages in Hawes. The same may be said of ‘sconce’, in this
+sense at least; of ‘nowl’ or ‘noll’, which Wiclif uses; of ‘slops’ for
+trousers (Marlowe’s _Lucan_); of ‘cocksure’ (Rogers), of ‘smug’, which
+once meant no more than adorned (“the _smug_ bridegroom”, Shakespeare).
+‘To nap’ is now a word without dignity; while yet in Wiclif’s Bible it
+is said, “Lo he schall not _nappe_, nether slepe that kepeth Israel”
+(Ps. cxxi. 4). ‘To punch’, ‘to thump’, both of which, and in serious
+writing, occur in Spenser, could not now obtain the same use, nor yet
+‘to wag’, or ‘to buss’. Neither would any one now say that at Lystra
+Barnabas and Paul “rent their clothes and _skipped out_ among the
+people” (Acts xiv. 14), which is the language that Wiclif employs; nor
+yet that “the Lord _trounced_ Sisera and all his host” as it stands in
+the Bible of 1551. “A _sight_ of angels”, for which phrase see Cranmer’s
+Bible (Heb. xii. 22), would be felt as a vulgarism now. We should
+scarcely call now a delusion of Satan a “_flam_ of the devil” (Henry
+More). It is not otherwise in regard of phrases. “Through thick and
+thin”, occurring in Spenser, “cheek by jowl” in Dubartas{164}, do not
+now belong to serious poetry. In the glorious ballad of _Chevy Chase_, a
+noble warrior whose legs are hewn off, is described as being “in doleful
+dumps”; just as, in Holland’s _Livy_, the Romans are set forth as being
+“in the dumps” as a consequence of their disastrous defeat at Cannæ. In
+Golding’s _Ovid_, one fears that he will “go to pot”. In one of the
+beautiful letters of John Careless, preserved in Foxe’s _Martyrs_, a
+persecutor, who expects a recantation from him, is described as “in the
+wrong box”. And in the sermons of Barrow, who certainly intended to
+write an elevated style, and did not seek familiar, still less vulgar,
+expressions, we constantly meet such terms as ‘to rate’, ‘to snub’, ‘to
+gull’, ‘to pudder’, ‘dumpish’, and the like; which we may confidently
+affirm were not vulgar when he used them.
+
+Then too the advance of refinement causes words to be forgone, which are
+felt to speak too plainly. It is not here merely that one age has more
+delicate ears than another; and that matters are freely spoken of at one
+time which at another are withdrawn from conversation. This is
+something; but besides this, and even if this delicacy were at a
+standstill, there would still be a continual process going on, by which
+the words, which for a certain while have been employed to designate
+coarse or disagreeable facts or things, would be disallowed, or at all
+events relinquished to the lower class of society, and others adopted in
+their place. The former by long use being felt to have come into too
+direct and close relation with that which they designate, to summon it
+up too distinctly before the mind’s eye, they are thereupon exchanged
+for others, which, at first at least, indicate more lightly and
+allusively the offensive thing, rather hint and suggest than paint and
+describe it: although by and by these new will also in their turn be
+discarded, and for exactly the same reasons which brought about the
+dismissal of those which they themselves superseded. It lies in the
+necessity of things that I must leave this part of my subject, very
+curious as it is, without illustration{165}. But no one, even
+moderately acquainted with the early literature of the Reformation, can
+be ignorant of words freely used in it, which now are not merely coarse
+and as such under ban, but which no one would employ who did not mean to
+speak impurely and vilely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{Sidenote: _Lost Powers of a Language_}
+
+Thus much in respect of the words, and the character of the words, which
+we have lost or let go. Of these, indeed, if a language, as it travels
+onwards, loses some, it also acquires others, and probably many more
+than it loses; they are leaves on the tree of language, of which if some
+fall away, a new succession takes their place. But it is not so, as I
+already observed, with the _forms_ or _powers_ of a language, that is,
+with the various inflections, moods, duplicate or triplicate formation
+of tenses; which the speakers of a language come gradually to perceive
+that they can do without, and therefore cease to employ; seeking to
+suppress grammatical intricacies, and to obtain grammatical simplicity
+and so far as possible a pervading uniformity, sometimes even at the
+hazard of letting go what had real worth, and contributed to the more
+lively, if not to the clearer, setting forth of the inner thought or
+feeling of the mind. Here there is only loss, with no compensating gain;
+or, at all events, diminution only, and never addition. In regard of
+these inner forces and potencies of a language, there is no creative
+energy at work in its later periods, in any, indeed, but quite the
+earliest. They are not as the leaves, but may be likened to the stem and
+leading branches of a tree, whose shape, mould and direction are
+determined at a very early stage of its growth; and which age, or
+accident, or violence may diminish, but which can never be multiplied. I
+have already slightly referred to a notable example of this, namely, to
+the dropping of the dual number in the Greek language. Thus in all the
+New Testament it does not once occur, having quite fallen out of the
+common dialect in which that is composed. Elsewhere too it has been felt
+that the dual was not worth preserving, or at any rate, that no serious
+inconvenience would follow on its loss. There is no such number in the
+modern German, Danish or Swedish; in the old German and Norse there was.
+
+{Sidenote: _Extinction of Powers_}
+
+How many niceties, delicacies, subtleties of language, _we_, speakers of
+the English tongue, in the course of centuries have got rid of; how bare
+(whether too bare is another question) we have stripped ourselves; what
+simplicity for better or for worse reigns in the present English, as
+compared with the old Anglo-Saxon. That had six declensions, our present
+English but one; that had three genders, English, if we except one or
+two words, has none; that formed the genitive in a variety of ways, we
+only in one; and the same fact meets us, wherever we compare the
+grammars of the two languages. At the same time, it can scarcely be
+repeated too often, that in the estimate of the gain or loss thereupon
+ensuing, we must by no means put certainly to loss everything which the
+language has dismissed, any more than everything to gain which it has
+acquired. It is no real wealth in a language to have needless and
+superfluous forms. They are often an embarrassment and an encumbrance to
+it rather than a help. The Finnish language has fourteen cases. Without
+pretending to know exactly what it is able to effect, I yet feel
+confident that it cannot effect more, nor indeed so much, with its
+fourteen as the Greek is able to do with its five. It therefore seems to
+me that some words of Otfried Müller, in many ways admirable, do yet
+exaggerate the losses consequent on the reduction of the forms of a
+language. “It may be observed”, he says, “that in the lapse of ages,
+from the time that the progress of language can be observed, grammatical
+forms, such as the signs of cases, moods and tenses have never been
+increased in number, but have been constantly diminishing. The history
+of the Romance, as well as of the Germanic, languages shows in the
+clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and copious, has been
+gradually weakened and impoverished, until at last it preserves only a
+few fragments of its ancient inflections. Now there is no doubt that
+this luxuriance of grammatical forms is not an essential part of a
+language, considered merely as a vehicle of thought. It is well known
+that the Chinese language, which is merely a collection of radical words
+destitute of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical ideas
+with tolerable precision; and the English, which, from the mode of its
+formation by a mixture of different tongues, has been stripped of its
+grammatical inflections more completely than any other European
+language, seems, nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be distinguished
+by its energetic eloquence. All this must be admitted by every
+unprejudiced inquirer; but yet it cannot be overlooked, that this
+copiousness of grammatical forms, and the fine shades of meaning which
+they express, evince a nicety of observation, and a faculty of
+distinguishing, which unquestionably prove that the race of mankind
+among whom these languages arose was characterized by a remarkable
+correctness and subtlety of thought. Nor can any modern European, who
+forms in his mind a lively image of the classical languages in their
+ancient grammatical luxuriance, and compares them with his mother
+tongue, conceal from himself that in the ancient languages the words,
+with their inflections, clothed as it were with muscles and sinews, come
+forward like living bodies, full of expression and character, while in
+the modern tongues the words seem shrunk up into mere skeletons”{166}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in ‘-ess’_}
+
+Whether languages are as much impoverished by this process as is here
+assumed, may, I think, be a question. I will endeavour to give you some
+materials which shall assist you in forming your own judgment in the
+matter. And here I am sure that I shall do best in considering not forms
+which the language has relinquished long ago, but mainly such as it is
+relinquishing now; which, touching us more nearly, will have a far more
+lively interest for us all. For example, the female termination which
+we employ in certain words, such as from ‘heir’ ‘heiress’, from
+‘prophet’ ‘prophetess’, from ‘sorcerer’ ‘sorceress’, was once far more
+widely extended than at present; the words which retain it are daily
+becoming fewer. It has already fallen away in so many, and is evidently
+becoming of less frequent use in so many others, that, if we may augur
+of the future from the analogy of the past, it will one day altogether
+vanish from our tongue. Thus all these occur in Wiclif’s Bible;
+‘techeress’ as the female teacher (2 Chron. xxxv. 25); ‘friendess’
+(Prov. vii. 4); ‘servantess’ (Gen. xvi. 2); ‘leperess’ (=saltatrix,
+Ecclus. ix. 4); ‘daunceress’ (Ecclus. ix. 4); ‘neighbouress’ (Exod. iii.
+22); ‘sinneress’ (Luke vii. 37); ‘purpuress’ (Acts xvi. 14); ‘cousiness’
+(Luke i. 36); ‘slayeress’ (Tob. iii. 9); ‘devouress’ (Ezek. xxxvi. 13);
+‘spousess’ (Prov. v. 19); ‘thralless’ (Jer. xxxiv. 16); ‘dwelleress’
+(Jer. xxi. 13); ‘waileress’ (Jer. ix. 17); ‘cheseress’ (=electrix, Wisd.
+viii. 4); ‘singeress’, ‘breakeress’, ‘waiteress’, this last indeed
+having recently come up again. Add to these ‘chideress’, the female
+chider, ‘herdess’, ‘constabless’, ‘moveress’, ‘jangleress’, ‘soudaness’
+(=sultana), ‘guideress’, ‘charmeress’ (all in Chaucer); and others,
+which however we may have now let them fall, reached to far later
+periods of the language; thus ‘vanqueress’ (Fabyan); ‘poisoneress’
+(Greneway); ‘knightess’ (Udal); ‘pedleress’, ‘championess’, ‘vassaless’,
+‘avengeress’, ‘warriouress’, ‘victoress’, ‘creatress’ (all in Spenser);
+‘fornicatress’, ‘cloistress’, ‘jointress’ (all in Shakespeare);
+‘vowess’ (Holinshed); ‘ministress’, ‘flatteress’ (both in Holland);
+‘captainess’ (Sidney); ‘saintess’ (Sir T. Urquhart); ‘heroess’,
+‘dragoness’, ‘butleress’, ‘contendress’, ‘waggoness’, ‘rectress’ (all in
+Chapman); ‘shootress’ (Fairfax); ‘archeress’ (Fanshawe); ‘clientess’,
+‘pandress’ (both in Middleton); ‘papess’, ‘Jesuitess’ (Bishop Hall);
+‘incitress’ (Gayton); ‘soldieress’, ‘guardianess’, ‘votaress’ (all in
+Beaumont and Fletcher); ‘comfortress’, ‘fosteress’ (Ben Jonson);
+‘soveraintess’ (Sylvester); ‘preserveress’ (Daniel); ‘solicitress’,
+‘impostress’, ‘buildress’, ‘intrudress’ (all in Fuller); ‘favouress’
+(Hakewell); ‘commandress’ (Burton); ‘monarchess’, ‘discipless’ (Speed);
+‘auditress’, ‘cateress’, ‘chantress’, ‘tyranness’ (all in Milton);
+‘citess’, ‘divineress’ (both in Dryden); ‘deaness’ (Sterne);
+‘detractress’ (Addison); ‘hucksteress’ (Howell); ‘tutoress’
+(Shaftesbury); ‘farmeress’ (Lord Peterborough, _Letter to Pope_);
+‘laddess’, which however still survives in the contracted form of
+‘lass’{167}; with more which, I doubt not, it would not be very hard to
+bring together{168}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in ‘-ster’_}
+
+Exactly the same thing has happened with another feminine affix. I refer
+to ‘ster’, taking the place of ‘er’ where a feminine doer is
+intended{169}. ‘Spinner’ and ‘spinster’ are the only pair of such
+words, which still survive. There were formerly many such; thus ‘baker’
+had ‘bakester’, being the female who baked: ‘brewer’ ‘brewster’; ‘sewer’
+‘sewster’; ‘reader’ ‘readster’; ‘seamer’ ‘seamster’; ‘fruiterer’
+‘fruitester’; ‘tumbler’ ‘tumblester’; ‘hopper’ ‘hoppester’ (these last
+three in Chaucer; “the shippes _hoppesteres_”, about which so much
+difficulty has been made, are the ships _dancing_, i.e., on the
+waves){170}, ‘knitter’ ‘knitster’ (a word, I am told, still alive in
+Devon). Add to these ‘whitster’ (female bleacher, Shakespeare),
+‘kempster’ (pectrix), ‘dryster’ (siccatrix), ‘brawdster’, (I suppose
+embroideress){171}, and ‘salster’ (salinaria){172}. It is a singular
+example of the richness of a language in forms at the earlier stages of
+its existence, that not a few of the words which had, as we have just
+seen, a feminine termination in ‘ess’, had also a second in ‘ster’. Thus
+‘daunser’, beside ‘daunseress’, had also ‘daunster’ (Ecclus. ix. 4);
+‘wailer’, beside ‘waileress’, had ‘wailster’ (Jer. ix. 17); ‘dweller’
+‘dwelster’ (Jer. xxi. 13); and ‘singer’ ‘singster’ (2 Kin. xix. 35); so
+too, ‘chider’ had ‘chidester’ (Chaucer), as well as ‘chideress’,
+‘slayer’ ‘slayster’ (Tob. iii. 9), as well as ‘slayeress’, ‘chooser’
+‘chesister’, (Wisd. viii. 4), as well as ‘cheseress’, with others that
+might be named.
+
+{Sidenote: _Deceptive Analogies_}
+
+It is difficult to understand how Marsh, with these examples before him
+should affirm, “I find no positive evidence to show that the termination
+‘ster’ was ever regarded as a feminine termination in English”. It may
+be, and indeed has been, urged that the existence of such words as
+‘seamstr_ess_’, ‘songstr_ess_’, is decisive proof that the ending ‘ster’
+of itself was not counted sufficient to designate persons as female; for
+if, it has been said, ‘seam_ster_’ and ‘song_ster_’ had been felt to be
+already feminine, no one would have ever thought of doubling on this,
+and adding a second female termination; ‘seam_stress_’, ‘song_stress_’.
+But all which can justly be concluded from hence is, that when this
+final ‘ess’ was added to these already feminine forms, and examples of
+it will not, I think, be found till a comparatively late period of the
+language, the true principle and law of the words had been lost sight of
+and forgotten{173}. The same may be affirmed of such other of these
+feminine forms as are now applied to men, such as ‘gamester’,
+‘youngster’, ‘oldster’, ‘drugster’ (South), ‘huckster’, ‘hackster’,
+(=swordsman, Milton, prose), ‘teamster’, ‘throwster’, ‘rhymester’,
+‘punster’ (_Spectator_), ‘tapster’, ‘whipster’ (Shakespeare),
+‘trickster’. Either, like ‘teamster’, and ‘punster’, the words first
+came into being, when the true significance of this form was altogether
+lost{174}; or like ‘tapster’, which was female in Chaucer (“the gay
+_tapstere_”), as it is still in Dutch and Frisian, and distinguished
+from ‘tapper’, the _man_ who keeps the inn, or has charge of the tap, or
+as ‘bakester’, at this day used in Scotland for ‘baker’, as ‘dyester’
+for ‘dyer’, the word did originally belong of right and exclusively to
+women; but with the gradual transfer of the occupation to men, and an
+increasing forgetfulness of what this termination implied, there went
+also a transfer of the name{175}, just as in other words, and out of
+the same causes, the exact converse has found place; and ‘baker’ or
+‘brewer’, not ‘bakester’ or ‘brewster’{176}, would be now in England
+applied to the woman baking or brewing. So entirely has this power of
+the language died out, that it survives more apparently than really even
+in ‘spinner’ and ‘spinster’; seeing that ‘spinster’ has obtained now
+quite another meaning than that of a woman spinning, whom, as well as
+the man, we should call not a ‘spinster’, but a ‘spinner’{177}. It would
+indeed be hard to believe, if we had not constant experience of the
+fact, how soon and how easily the true law and significance of some
+form, which has never ceased to be in everybody’s mouth, may yet be lost
+sight of by all. No more curious chapter in the history of language
+could be written than one which should trace the violations of analogy,
+the transgressions of the most primary laws of a language, which follow
+hereupon; the plurals like ‘welkin’ (=wolken, the clouds){178},
+‘chicken’{179}, which are dealt with as singulars, the singulars, like
+‘riches’ (richesse){180}, ‘pease’ (pisum, pois){181}, ‘alms’,
+‘eaves’{182}, which are assumed to be plurals.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Genitival Inflexion ‘-s’_}
+
+There is one example of this, familiar to us all; probably so familiar
+that it would not be worth while adverting to it, if it did not
+illustrate, as no other word could, this forgetfulness which may
+overtake a whole people, of the true meaning of a grammatical form which
+they have never ceased to employ. I refer to the mistaken assumption
+that the ‘s’ of the genitive, as ‘the king’s countenance’, was merely a
+more rapid way of pronouncing ‘the king _his_ countenance’, and that the
+final ‘s’ in ‘king’s’ was in fact an elided ‘his’. This explanation for
+a long time prevailed almost universally; I believe there are many who
+accept it still. It was in vain that here and there a deeper knower of
+our tongue protested against this “monstrous syntax”, as Ben Jonson in
+his _Grammar_ justly calls it{183}. It was in vain that Wallis, another
+English scholar of the seventeenth century, pointed out in _his_ Grammar
+that the slightest examination of the facts revealed the untenable
+character of this explanation, seeing that we do not merely say “the
+_king’s_ countenance”, but “the _queen’s_ countenance”; and in this case
+the final ‘s’ cannot stand for ‘his’, for “the queen _his_ countenance”
+cannot be intended{184}; we do not say merely “the _child’s_ bread”, but
+“the _children’s_ bread”, where it is no less impossible to resolve the
+phrase into “the children _his_ bread”{185}. Despite of these protests
+the error held its ground. This much indeed of a plea it could make for
+itself, that such an actual employment of ‘his’ _had_ found its way
+into the language, as early as the fourteenth century, and had been in
+occasional, though rare use, from that time downward{186}. Yet this,
+which has only been elicited by the researches of recent scholars, does
+not in the least justify those who assumed that in the habitual ‘s’ of
+the genitive were to be found the remains of ‘his’--an error from which
+the books of scholars in the seventeenth, and in the early decades of
+the eighteenth, century are not a whit clearer than those of others.
+Spenser, Donne, Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, all fall into it; I cannot say
+confidently whether Milton does. Dryden more than once helps out his
+verse with an additional syllable gained by its aid. It has even forced
+its way into our Prayer Book itself, where in the “Prayer for all sorts
+and conditions of men”, added by Bishop Sanderson at the last revision
+of the Liturgy in 1661, we are bidden to say, “And this we beg for Jesus
+Christ _his_ sake”{187}. I need hardly tell you that this ‘s’ is in fact
+the one remnant of flexion surviving in the singular number of our
+English noun substantives; it is in all the Indo-Germanic languages the
+original sign of the genitive, or at any rate the earliest of which we
+can take cognizance; and just as in Latin ‘lapis’ makes ‘lapidis’ in the
+genitive, so ‘king’, ‘queen’, ‘child’, make severally ‘kings’, ‘queens’,
+‘childs’, the comma, an apparent note of elision, being a mere modern
+expedient, “a late refinement”, as Ash calls it{188}, to distinguish the
+genitive singular from the plural cases{189}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Adjectives in ‘-en’_}
+
+Notice another example of this willingness to dispense with inflection,
+of this endeavour on the part of the speakers of a language to reduce
+its forms to the fewest possible, consistent with the accurate
+communication of thought. Of our adjectives in ‘en’, formed on
+substantives, and expressing the material or substance of a thing, some
+have gone, others are going, out of use; while we content ourselves with
+the bare juxtaposition of the substantive itself, as sufficiently
+expressing our meaning. Thus instead of “_golden_ pin” we say “_gold_
+pin”; instead of “_earthen_ works” we say “_earth_ works”. ‘Golden’ and
+‘earthen’, it is true, still belong to our living speech, though mainly
+as part of our poetic diction, or of the solemn and thus stereotyped
+language of Scripture; but a whole company of such words have nearly or
+quite disappeared; some lately, some long ago. ‘Steelen’ and ‘flowren’
+belong only to the earliest period of the language; ‘rosen’ also went
+early. Chaucer is my latest authority for it (“_rosen_ chapelet”).
+‘Hairen’ is in Wiclif and in Chaucer; ‘stonen’ in the former (John iii.
+6){190}. ‘Silvern’ stood originally in Wiclif’s Bible (“_silverne_
+housis to Diane”, Acts xix. 24); but already in the second recension of
+this was exchanged for ‘silver’; ‘hornen’, still in provincial use, he
+also employs, and ‘clayen’ (Job iv. 19) no less. ‘Tinnen’ occurs in
+Sylvester’s _Du Bartas_; where also we meet with “Jove’s _milken_
+alley”, as a name for the _Via Lactea_, in Bacon also not “the _Milky_”,
+but “the _Milken_ Way”. In the coarse polemics of the Reformation the
+phrase, “_breaden_ god”, provoked by the Romish doctrine of
+transubstantiation, was of frequent employment, and occurs as late as in
+Oldham. “_Mothen_ parchments” is in Fulke; “_twiggen_ bottle” in
+Shakespeare; ‘_yewen_’, or, according to earlier spelling, “_ewghen_
+bow”, in Spenser; “_cedarn_ alley”, and “_azurn_ sheen” are both in
+Milton; “_boxen_ leaves” in Dryden; “a _treen_ cup” in Jeremy Taylor;
+“_eldern_ popguns” in Sir Thomas Overbury; “a _glassen_ breast”, in
+Whitlock; “a _reeden_ hat” in Coryat; ‘yarnen’ occurs in Turberville;
+‘furzen’ in Holland; ‘threaden’ in Shakespeare; and ‘bricken’, ‘papern’
+appear in our provincial glossaries as still in use.
+
+It is true that many of these adjectives still hold their ground; but
+it is curious to note how the roots which sustain even these are being
+gradually cut away from beneath them. Thus ‘brazen’ might at first sight
+seem as strongly established in the language as ever; it is far from so
+being; its supports are being cut from beneath it. Even now it only
+lives in a tropical and secondary sense, as ‘a _brazen_ face’; or if in
+a literal, in poetic diction or in the consecrated language of
+Scripture, as ‘the _brazen_ serpent’; otherwise we say ‘a _brass_
+farthing’, ‘a _brass_ candlestick’. It is the same with ‘oaten’,
+‘birchen’, ‘beechen’, ‘strawen’, and many more, whereof some are
+obsolescent, some obsolete, the language manifestly tending now, as it
+has tended for a long time past, to the getting quit of these, and to
+the satisfying of itself with an adjectival apposition of the
+substantive in their stead.
+
+{Sidenote: _Weak and Strong Præterites_}
+
+Let me illustrate by another example the way in which a language, as it
+travels onward, simplifies itself, approaches more and more to a
+grammatical and logical uniformity, seeks to do the same thing always in
+the same manner; where it has two or three ways of conducting a single
+operation, lets all of them go but one; and thus becomes, no doubt,
+easier to be mastered, more handy, more manageable; for its very riches
+were to many an embarrassment and a perplexity; but at the same time
+imposes limits and restraints on its own freedom of action, and is in
+danger of forfeiting elements of strength, variety and beauty, which it
+once possessed. I refer to the tendency of our verbs to let go their
+strong præterites, and to substitute weak ones in their room; or, where
+they have two or three præterites, to retain only one of them, and that
+invariably the weak one. Though many of us no doubt are familiar with
+the terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ præterites, which in all our better
+grammars have put out of use the wholly misleading terms, ‘irregular’
+and ‘regular’, I may perhaps as well remind you of the exact meaning of
+the terms. A strong præterite is one formed by an internal vowel change;
+for instance the verb ‘to _drive_’ forms the præterite ‘_drove_’ by an
+internal change of the vowel ‘i’ into ‘o’. But why, it may be asked,
+called ‘strong’? In respect of the vigour and indwelling energy in the
+word, enabling it to form its past tense from its own resources, and
+with no calling in of help from without. On the other hand ‘lift’ forms
+its præterite ‘lift_ed_’, not by any internal change, but by the
+addition of ‘ed’; ‘grieve’ in like manner has ‘griev_ed_’. Here are weak
+tenses; as strength was ascribed to the other verbs, so weakness to
+these, which can form their præterites only by external aid and
+addition. You will see at once that these strong præterites, while they
+witness to a vital energy in the words which are able to put them forth,
+do also, as must be allowed by all, contribute much to the variety and
+charm of a language{191}.
+
+The point, however, which I am urging now is this,--that these are
+becoming fewer every day; multitudes of them having disappeared, while
+others are in the act of disappearing. Nor is the balance redressed and
+compensation found in any new creations of the kind. The power of
+forming strong præterites is long ago extinct; probably no verb which
+has come into the language since the Conquest has asserted this power,
+while a whole legion have let it go. For example, ‘shape’ has now a weak
+præterite, ‘shaped’, it had once a strong one, ‘shope’; ‘bake’ has now a
+weak præterite, ‘baked’, it had once a strong one, ‘boke’; the præterite
+of ‘glide’ is now ‘glided’, it was once ‘glode’ or ‘glid’; ‘help’ makes
+now ‘helped’, it made once ‘halp’ and ‘holp’. ‘Creep’ made ‘crope’,
+still current in the north of England; ‘weep’ ‘wope’; ‘yell’ ‘yoll’
+(both in Chaucer); ‘seethe’ ‘soth’ or ‘sod’ (Gen. xxv. 29); ‘sheer’ in
+like manner once made ‘shore’; as ‘leap’ made ‘lope’; ‘wash’ ‘wishe’
+(Chaucer); ‘snow’ ‘snew’; ‘sow’ ‘sew’; ‘delve’ ‘dalf’ and ‘dolve’;
+‘sweat’ ‘swat’; ‘yield’ ‘yold’ (both in Spenser); ‘mete’ ‘mat’ (Wiclif);
+‘stretch’ ‘straught’; ‘melt’ ‘molt’; ‘wax’ ‘wex’ and ‘wox’; ‘laugh’
+‘leugh’; with others more than can be enumerated here{192}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Strong Præterites_}
+
+Observe further that where verbs have not actually renounced their
+strong præterites, and contented themselves with weak in their room,
+yet, once possessing two, or, it might be three of these strong, they
+now retain only one. The others, on the principle of dismissing whatever
+can be dismissed, they have let go. Thus ‘chide’ had once ‘chid’ and
+‘chode’, but though ‘chode’ is in our Bible (Gen. xxxi. 36), it has not
+maintained itself in our speech; ‘sling’ had ‘slung’ and ‘slang’ (1 Sam.
+xvii. 49); only ‘slung’ remains; ‘fling’ had once ‘flung’ and ‘flang’;
+‘strive’ had ‘strove’ and ‘strave’; ‘stick’ had ‘stuck’ and ‘stack’;
+‘hang’ had ‘hung’ and ‘hing’ (Golding); ‘tread’ had ‘trod’ and ‘trad’;
+‘choose’ had ‘chose’ and ‘chase’; ‘give’ had ‘gave’ and ‘gove’; ‘lead’
+had ‘led’ ‘lad’ and ‘lode’; ‘write’ had ‘wrote’ ‘writ’ and ‘wrate’. In
+all these cases, and more might easily be cited, only [of] the
+præterites which I have named the first remains in use.
+
+Observe too that in every instance where a conflict is now going on
+between weak and strong forms, which shall continue, the battle is not
+to the strong; on the contrary the weak is carrying the day, is getting
+the better of its stronger competitor. Thus ‘climbed’ is gaining the
+upper hand of ‘clomb’, ‘swelled’ of ‘swoll’, ‘hanged’ of ‘hung’. It is
+not too much to anticipate that a time will come, although it may be
+still far off, when all English verbs will form their præterites weakly;
+not without serious damage to the fulness and force which in this
+respect the language even now displays, and once far more eminently
+displayed{193}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Comparatives and Superlatives_}
+
+Take another proof of this tendency in our own language to drop its
+forms and renounce its own inherent powers; though here also the
+renunciation, threatening one day to be complete, is only partial at the
+present. I refer to the formation of our comparatives and superlatives;
+and I will ask you again to observe here that curious law of language,
+namely, that wherever there are two or more ways of attaining the same
+result, there is always a disposition to drop and dismiss all of these
+but one, so that the alternative or choice of ways once existing, shall
+not exist any more. If only it can attain a greater simplicity, it seems
+to grudge no self-impoverishment by which this result may be brought
+about. We have two ways of forming our comparatives and superlatives,
+one dwelling in the word itself, which we have inherited from our old
+Gothic stock, as ‘bright’, ‘bright_er_’, ‘bright_est_’, the other
+supplementary to this, by prefixing the auxiliaries ‘more’ and ‘most’.
+The first, organic we might call it, the indwelling power of the word to
+mark its own degrees, must needs be esteemed the more excellent way;
+which yet, already disallowed in almost all adjectives of more than two
+syllables in length, is daily becoming of narrower and more restrained
+application. Compare in this matter our present with our past. Wiclif
+for example forms such comparatives as ‘grievouser’, ‘gloriouser’,
+‘patienter’, ‘profitabler’, such superlatives as ‘grievousest’,
+‘famousest’; this last occurring also in Bacon. We meet in Tyndale,
+‘excellenter’, ‘miserablest’; in Shakespeare, ‘violentest’; in Gabriel
+Harvey, ‘vendiblest’, ‘substantialest’, ‘insolentest’; in Rogers,
+‘insufficienter’, ‘goldener’; in Beaumont and Fletcher, ‘valiantest’.
+Milton uses ‘virtuosest’, and in prose ‘vitiosest’, ‘elegantest’,
+‘artificialest’, ‘servilest’, ‘sheepishest’, ‘resolutest’, ‘sensualest’;
+Fuller has ‘fertilest’; Baxter ‘tediousest’; Butler ‘preciousest’,
+‘intolerablest’; Burnet ‘copiousest’, Gray ‘impudentest’. Of these
+forms, and it would be easy to adduce almost any number, we should
+hardly employ any now. In participles and adverbs in ‘ly’, these organic
+comparatives and superlatives hardly survive at all. We do not say
+‘willinger’ or ‘lovinger’, and still less ‘flourishingest’, or
+‘shiningest’, or ‘surmountingest’, all which Gabriel Harvey, a foremost
+master of the English of his time, employs; ‘plenteouslyer’, ‘fulliest’
+(Wiclif), ‘easiliest’ (Fuller), ‘plainliest’ (Dryden), would be all
+inadmissible at present.
+
+In the manifest tendency of English at the present moment to reduce the
+number of words in which this more vigorous scheme of expressing degrees
+is allowed, we must recognize an evidence that the energy which the
+language had in its youth is in some measure abating, and the stiffness
+of age overtaking it. Still it is with us here only as it is with all
+languages, in which at a certain time of their life auxiliary words,
+leaving the main word unaltered, are preferred to inflections of this
+last. Such preference makes itself ever more strongly felt; and, judging
+from analogy, I cannot doubt that a day, however distant now, will
+arrive, when the only way of forming comparatives and superlatives in
+the English language will be by prefixing ‘more’ and ‘most’; or, if the
+other survive, it will be in poetry alone.
+
+It will fare not otherwise, as I am bold to predict, with the flexional
+genitive, formed in ‘s’ or ‘es’ (see p. 161). This too will finally
+disappear altogether from the language, or will survive only in poetry,
+and as much an archaic form there as the ‘pictaï’ of Virgil. A time will
+come when it will not any longer be free to say, as now, either, “_the
+king’s sons_”, or “_the sons of the king_”, but when the latter will be
+the only admissible form. Tokens of this are already evident. The region
+in which the alternative forms are equally good is narrowing. We should
+not now any more write, “When _man’s son_ shall come” (Wiclif), but
+“When _the Son of man_ shall come”, nor yet, “_The hypocrite’s hope_
+shall perish” (Job viii. 13, Authorized Version), but, “_The hope of the
+hypocrite_ shall perish”; not with Barrow, “No man can be ignorant _of
+human life’s brevity and uncertainty_”, but “No man can be ignorant _of
+the brevity and uncertainty of human life_”. The consummation which I
+anticipate may be centuries off, but will assuredly arrive{194}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Lost Diminutives_}
+
+Then too diminutives are fast disappearing from the language. If we
+desire to express smallness, we prefer to do it by an auxiliary word;
+thus a little fist, and not a ‘fistock’ (Golding), a little lad, and not
+a ‘ladkin’, a little worm, rather than a ‘wormling’ (Sylvester). It is
+true that of diminutives very many still survive, in all our four
+terminations of such, as ‘hillock’, ‘streamlet’, ‘lambkin’, ‘gosling’;
+but those which have perished are many more. Where now is ‘kingling’
+(Holland), ‘whimling’ (Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘godling’, ‘loveling’,
+‘dwarfling’, ‘shepherdling’ (all in Sylvester), ‘chasteling’ (Bacon),
+‘niceling’ (Stubbs), ‘fosterling’ (Ben Johnson), and ‘masterling’? Where
+now ‘porelet’ (=paupercula, Isai. x. 30, Vulg.), ‘bundelet’, (both in
+Wiclif); ‘cushionet’ (Henry More), ‘havenet’, or little ‘haven’,
+‘pistolet’, ‘bulkin’ (Holland), and a hundred more? Even of those which
+remain many are putting off, or have long since put off, their
+diminutive sense; a ‘pocket’ being no longer a _small_ poke, nor a
+‘latchet’ a _small_ lace, nor a ‘trumpet’ a small _trump_, as once they
+were.
+
+{Sidenote: _Thou and Thee_}
+
+Once more--in the entire dropping among the higher classes of ‘thou’,
+except in poetry or in addresses to the Deity, and as a necessary
+consequence, the dropping also of the second singular of the verb with
+its strongly marked flexion, as ‘lovest’, ‘lovedst’, we have another
+example of a force once existing in the language, which has been, or is
+being, allowed to expire. In the seventeenth century ‘thou’ in English,
+as at the present ‘du’ in German, ‘tu’ in French, was the sign of
+familiarity, whether that familiarity was of love, or of contempt and
+scorn{195}. It was not unfrequently the latter. Thus at Sir Walter
+Raleigh’s trial (1603), Coke, when argument and evidence failed him,
+insulted the defendant by applying to him the term ‘thou’:--“All that
+Lord Cobham did was at _thy_ instigation, _thou_ viper, for I _thou_
+thee, _thou_ traitor”. And when Sir Toby Belch in _Twelfth Night_ is
+urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek to send a sufficiently provocative challenge
+to Viola, he suggests to him that he “taunt him with the licence of ink;
+if thou _thou’st_ him some thrice, it shall not be amiss”. To keep this
+in mind will throw much light on one peculiarity of the Quakers, and
+give a certain dignity to it, as once maintained, which at present it is
+very far from possessing. However needless and unwise their
+determination to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ the whole world was, yet this had a
+significance. It was not, as now to us it seems, and, through the silent
+changes which language has undergone, as now it indeed is, a gratuitous
+departure from the ordinary usage of society. Right or wrong, it meant
+something, and had an ethical motive: being indeed a testimony upon
+their parts, however misplaced, that they would not have high or great
+or rich men’s persons in admiration; nor give the observance to some
+which they withheld from others. It was a testimony too which cost them
+something; at present we can very little understand the amount of
+courage which this ‘thou-ing’ and ‘thee-ing’ of all men must have
+demanded on their parts, nor yet the amount of indignation and offence
+which it stirred up in them who were not aware of, or would not allow
+for, the scruples which obliged them to it{196}. It is, however, in its
+other aspect that we must chiefly regret the dying out of the use of
+‘thou’--that is, as the pledge of peculiar intimacy and special
+affection, as between husband and wife, parents and children, and such
+other as might be knit together by bands of more than common affection.
+
+{Sidenote: _Gender Words_}
+
+I have preferred during this lecture to find my theme in changes which
+are now going forward in English, but I cannot finish it without drawing
+one illustration from its remoter periods, and bidding you to note a
+force not now waning and failing from it, but extinct long ago. I
+cannot well pass it by; being as it is by far the boldest step which in
+this direction of simplification the English language has at any time
+taken. I refer to the renouncing of the distribution of its nouns into
+masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in German, or even into masculine
+and feminine, as in French; and with this, and as a necessary
+consequence of this, the dropping of any flexional modification in the
+adjectives connected with them. Natural _sex_ of course remains, being
+inherent in all language; but grammatical _gender_, with the exception
+of ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’, and perhaps one or two other fragmentary
+instances, the language has altogether forgone. An example will make
+clear the distinction between these. Thus it is not the word ‘poetess’
+which is _feminine_, but the person indicated who is _female_. So too
+‘daughter’, ‘queen’, are in English not _feminine_ nouns, but nouns
+designating _female_ persons. Take on the contrary ‘filia’ or ‘regina’,
+‘fille’ or ‘reine’; there you have _feminine_ nouns as well as _female_
+persons. I need hardly say to you that we did not inherit this
+simplicity from others, but, like the Danes, in so far as they have done
+the like, have made it for ourselves. Whether we turn to the Latin, or,
+which is for us more important, to the old Gothic, we find gender; and
+in all daughter languages which have descended from the Latin, in most
+of those which have descended from the ancient Gothic stock, it is fully
+established to this day. The practical, business-like character of the
+English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction, which in
+a vast proportion of words, that is, in all which are the signs of
+_inanimate_ objects, and as such incapable of sex, rested upon a
+fiction, and had no ground in the real nature of things. It is only by
+an act and effort of the imagination that sex, and thus gender, can be
+attributed to a table, a ship, or a tree; and there are aspects, this
+being one, in which the English is among the least imaginative of all
+languages even while it has been employed in some of the mightiest works
+of imagination which the world has ever seen{197}.
+
+What, it may be asked, is the meaning and explanation of all this? It is
+that at certain earlier periods of a nation’s life its genius is
+synthetic, and at later becomes analytic. At earlier periods all is by
+synthesis; and men love to contemplate the thing, and the mode of the
+thing, together, as a single idea, bound up in one. But a time arrives
+when the intellectual obtains the upper hand of the imaginative, when
+the tendency of those that speak the language is to analyse, to
+distinguish between these two, and not only to distinguish but to
+divide, to have one word for the thing itself, and another for the
+quality of the thing; and this, as it would appear, is true not of some
+languages only, but of all.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{128} [Apparently a slip for ‘ebb’]
+
+{129} It is still used in prose as late as the age of Henry VIII; see
+      the _State Papers_, vol. viii. p. 247. It was the latest survivor
+      of a whole group or family of words which continued much longer in
+      Scotland than with us; of which some perhaps continue there still;
+      these are but a few of them; ‘wanthrift’ for extravagance;
+      ‘wanluck’, misfortune; ‘wanlust’, languor; ‘wanwit’, folly;
+      ‘wangrace’, wickedness; ‘wantrust’ (Chaucer), distrust, [Also
+      ‘wan-ton’, devoid of breeding (_towen_). Compare German
+      _wahn-sinn_, insanity, and _wahn-witz_.]
+
+{130} We must not suppose that this still survives in ‘_gir_falcon’;
+      which wholly belongs to the Latin element of the language; being
+      the later Latin ‘gyrofalco’, and that, “a _gyrando_, quia diu
+      _gyrando_ acriter prædam insequitur”.
+
+{131} [‘Heft’, from ‘heave’ (_Winter’s Tale_, ii. 1, 45), is widely
+      diffused in the Three Kingdoms and in America. See E.D.D. _s.v._]
+
+{132} “Some _hot-spurs_ there were that gave counsel to go against them
+      with all their forces, and to fright and terrify them, if they
+      made slow haste”. (Holland’s _Livy_, p. 922.)
+
+{133} _State Papers_, vol. vi. p. 534.
+
+{134} [‘Malinger’, French _malingre_ (mistakenly derived above), stands
+      for old French _mal-heingre_ (maliciously or falsely ill, feigning
+      sickness), which is from Latin _male aeger_, with an intrusive
+      _n_--Scheler.]
+
+{135} [To which the late Boer War contributed many more, such as
+      ‘kopje’, ‘trek’, ‘slim’, ‘veldt’, etc.]
+
+{136} The only two writers of whom I am aware as subsequently using this
+      word are, both writing in Ireland and of Irish matters, Spenser
+      and Swift. The passages are both quoted in Richardson’s
+      _Dictionary_. [‘Bawn’ stands for the Irish _ba-dhun_ (not
+      _bábhun_, as in N.E.D.), or _bo-dhun_, literally ‘cow-fortress’, a
+      cattle enclosure (Irish _bo_, a cow). See P. W. Joyce, _Irish
+      Names of Places_, 1st ser. p. 297.]
+
+{137} There is an excellent account of this “refugee French” in Weiss’
+      _History of the Protestant Refugees of France_.
+
+{138} [Thus the Shakespearian word _renege_ (Latin _renegare_), to deny
+      (_Lear_ ii, 2) still lives in the mouths of the Irish peasantry. I
+      have heard a farmer’s wife denounce those who “_renege_ [_renaig_]
+      their religion”.]
+
+{139} With all its severity, there is some truth in Ben Johnson’s
+      observation: “Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no
+      language”. In this matter, however, Ben Jonson was at one with
+      him; for he does not hesitate to express his strong regret that
+      this form has not been retained. “The _persons_ plural” he says
+      (_English Grammar_, c. 17), “keep the termination of the first
+      _person_ singular. In former times, till about the reign of King
+      Henry VIII, they were wont to be formed by adding _en_; thus,
+      _loven_, _sayen_, _complainen_. But now (whatsoever is the cause)
+      it hath quite grown out of use, and that other so generally
+      prevailed, that I dare not presume to set this afoot again; albeit
+      (to tell you my opinion) I am persuaded that the lack hereof, well
+      considered, will be found a great blemish to our tongue. For
+      seeing _time_ and _person_ be as it were the right and left hand
+      of a verb, what can the maiming bring else, but a lameness to the
+      whole body”?
+
+{140} [The two words are often popularly confounded. When a good woman
+      said “I’m _afeerd_”, Mr. Pickwick exclaimed “_Afraid_”! (_Pickwick
+      Papers_, ch. v.). Chaucer, instructively, uses both in the one
+      sentence, “This wyf was not _affered_ ne _affrayed_” (_Shipman’s
+      Tale_, l. 400).]
+
+{141} Génin (_Récréations Philologiques_, vol. i. p. 71) says to the
+      same effect: “Il n’y a guères de faute de Français, je dis faute
+      générale, accréditée, qui n’ait sa raison d’être, et ne pût au
+      besoin produire ses lettres de noblesse; et souvent mieux en règle
+      que celles des locutions qui ont usurpé leur place au soleil”.
+
+{142} A single proof may in each case suffice:
+
+          “Our wills and fates do so _contráry_ run”.--_Shakespeare._
+
+          “Ne let _mischiévous_ witches with their charms”.--_Spenser._
+
+          “O argument _blasphémous_, false and proud”.--_Milton._
+
+      [These archaisms are still current in Ireland.]
+
+{143} I cannot doubt that this form which our country people in
+      Hampshire, as in many other parts, always employ, either retains
+      the original pronunciation, our received one being a modern
+      corruption; or else, as is more probable, that _we_ have made a
+      confusion between two originally different words, from which they
+      have kept clear. Thus in Howell’s _Vocabulary_, 1659, and in
+      Cotgrave’s _French and English Dictionary_ both words occur:
+      “nuncion or nuncheon, the afternoon’s repast”, (cf. _Hudibras_, i.
+      1, 346: “They took their breakfasts or their _nuncheons_”), and
+      “lunchion, a big piece” i.e. of bread; for both give the old
+      French ‘caribot’, which has this meaning, as the equivalent of
+      ‘luncheon’. It is clear that in this sense of lump or ‘big piece’
+      Gay uses ‘luncheon’:
+
+          “When hungry thou stood’st staring like an oaf,
+          I sliced the _luncheon_ from the barley loaf”;
+
+      and Miss Baker in her _Northamptonshire Glossary_ explains ‘lunch’
+      as “a large lump of bread, or other edible; ‘He helped himself to
+      a good _lunch_ of cake’”. We may note further that this ‘nuntion’
+      may possibly put us on the right track for arriving at the
+      etymology of the word. Richardson has called attention to the fact
+      that it is spelt “noon-shun” in Browne’s _Pastorals_, which must
+      at least suggest as possible and plausible that the ‘nuntion’ was
+      originally applied to the labourer’s slight meal, to which he
+      withdrew for the _shunning_ of the heat of the middle _noon_:
+      especially when in Lancashire we find a word of similar formation,
+      ‘noon-scape’, and in Norfolk ‘noon-miss’, for the time when
+      labourers rest after dinner. [It really stands for the older
+      English _none-schenche_, i.e. ‘noon-skink’ or noon-drink (see
+      Skeat, _Etym. Dict._, _s.v._), correlative to ‘noon-meat’ or
+      ‘nam-met’.] It is at any rate certain that the dignity to which
+      ‘lunch’ or ‘luncheon’ has now arrived, as when we read in the
+      newspapers of a “magnificent _luncheon_”, is altogether modern;
+      the word belonged a century ago to rustic life, and in literature
+      had not travelled beyond the “hobnailed pastorals” which professed
+      to describe that life.
+
+{144} See it so written, Holland’s _Pliny_, vol. ii. p. 428, and often.
+
+{145} As a proof of the excellent service which an accurate acquaintance
+      with provincial usages may render in the investigation of the
+      innumerable perplexing phenomena of the English language, I would
+      refer to the admirable article _On English Pronouns Personal_ in
+      _Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. i. p. 277.
+
+{146} [We now have the good fortune to possess a complete collection of
+      this valuable class of words in the splendid “English Dialect
+      Dictionary”, edited by Professor Joseph Wright of Oxford, which is
+      an essential supplement to all existing dictionaries of our
+      language.]
+
+{147} This last very curious usage, which served as a kind of
+      stepping-stone to ‘its’, and of which another example occurs in
+      the Geneva Version (Acts xii. 10), and three or four in
+      Shakespeare, has been abundantly illustrated by those who have
+      lately written on the early history of the word ‘its’; thus see
+      Craik, _On the English of Shakespeare_, p. 91; Marsh, _Manual of
+      the English Language_ (Eng. Edit.), p. 278; _Transactions of the
+      Philological Society_, vol. 1. p. 280; and my book _On the
+      Authorized Version of the New Testament_, p. 59.
+
+{148} Thus Fuller (_Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, vol. ii. p. 190): “Sure
+      I am this city [the New Jerusalem] as presented by the prophet,
+      was fairer, finer, _slicker_, smoother, more exact, than any
+      fabric the earth afforded”.
+
+{149} [In the United States ‘plunder’ is used for personal effects,
+      baggage and luggage (Webster). This is not noticed in the E.D.D.]
+
+{150} [But we have acquired, in some quarters, the abomination ‘an
+      invite’.]
+
+{151} How many words modern French has lost which are most vigorous and
+      admirable, the absence of which can only now be supplied by a
+      circumlocution or by some less excellent word--‘Oseur’,
+      ‘affranchisseur’ (Amyot), ‘mépriseur’, ‘murmurateur’,
+      ‘blandisseur’ (Bossuet), ‘abuseur’ (Rabelais), ‘désabusement’,
+      ‘rancœur’, are all obsolete at the present. So ‘désaimer’, to
+      cease to love (‘disamare’ in Italian), ‘guirlander’, ‘stériliser’,
+      ‘blandissant’, ‘ordonnément’ (Montaigne), with innumerable others.
+
+{152} [It has now attained a fair currency.]
+
+{153} [‘Gainly’ is still used by nineteenth century writers, 1855-86;
+      see N.E.D.]
+
+{154} [‘Dehort’ has been used in modern times by Southey (_Letters_,
+      1825, iii, 462), and Cheyne (_Isaiah, introd._ 1882, xx.)--N.E.D.]
+
+{155} [Tennyson has endeavoured to resuscitate the word--“_Rathe_ she
+      rose”--_Lancelot and Elaine_--but with no great success.]
+
+{156} For other passages in which ‘rathest’ occurs, see the _State
+      Papers_, vol. ii. pp. 92, 170.
+
+{157} [‘Buxom’ for old English _buc-sum_ or _buch-sum_, i.e. ‘bow-some’,
+      yielding, compliant, obedient. “Sara was _buxom_ to Abraham”, 1
+      Pet. iii, 6 (xiv. Cent. Version, ed. Pawes, p. 216).]
+
+{158} [‘Lissome’ for _lithe-some_, like Wessex _blissom_ for
+      _blithe-some_. Tennyson has “as _lissome_ as a hazel wand”--_The
+      Brook_, l. 70.]
+
+{159} Jamieson’s _Dictionary_ gives a large number of words with this
+      termination which I should suppose were always peculiar to
+      Scotland, as ‘bangsome’, i.e. quarrelsome, ‘freaksome’, ‘drysome’,
+      ‘grousome’ (the German ‘grausam’) [Now in common use as
+      ‘gruesome’.]
+
+{160} [A list of some of these reduplicated words was given by Dr. Booth
+      in his “Analytical Dictionary of the English Language”, 1835; but
+      a full collection of nearly six hundred was published by Mr. H. B.
+      Wheatley in the _Transactions of the Philological Society_ for
+      1865.]
+
+{161} Many languages have groups of words formed upon the same scheme,
+      although, singularly enough, they are altogether absent from the
+      Anglo-Saxon. (J. Grimm, _Deutsche Gramm._, vol. ii. p. 976). The
+      Spaniards have a great many very expressive words of this
+      formation. Thus with allusion to the great struggle in which
+      Christian Spain was engaged for so many centuries, a vaunting
+      braggart is a ‘matamoros’, a ‘slaymoor’; he is a ‘matasiete’, a
+      ‘slayseven’; a ‘perdonavidas’, a ‘sparelives’. Others may be added
+      to these, as ‘azotacalles’, ‘picapleytos’, ‘saltaparedes’,
+      ‘rompeesquinas’, ‘ganapan’, ‘cascatreguas’.
+
+{162} [This stands for ‘peak-goose’ (_peek goos_ in Ascham,
+      _Scholemaster_, 1570, p. 54, ed. Arber), a _goose_ that _peaks_ or
+      pines, used for a sickly, delicate person, and a simpleton. In
+      Chapman, Cotgrave and others it appears as ‘pea-goose’.]
+
+{163} The mistake is far earlier; long before Cowper wrote the sound
+      suggested first this sense, and then this spelling. Thus
+      Stanihurst, _Description of Ireland_, p. 28: “They are taken for
+      no better than _rakehels_, or _the devil’s black guard_”; and
+      often elsewhere.
+
+{164} [i.e. in Joshua Sylvester’s translation of “Du Bartas, his Diuine
+      Weekes and Workes”, 1621.]
+
+{165} As not, however, turning on a _very_ coarse matter, and
+      illustrating the subject with infinite wit and humour, I might
+      refer the Spanish scholar to the discussion between Don Quixote
+      and his squire on the dismissal of ‘regoldar’, from the language
+      of good society, and the substitution of ‘erutar’ in its room
+      (_Don Quixote_, 4. 7. 43). In a letter of Cicero to Pætus (_Fam._
+      ix. 22) there is a subtle and interesting disquisition on
+      forbidden words, and their philosophy.
+
+{166} _Literature of Greece_, p. 5.
+
+{167} [Notwithstanding the analogous instance of ‘abbess’ for ‘abbatess’
+      this account of ‘lass’ must be abandoned. It is the old English
+      _lasce_ (akin to Swedish _lösk_), meaning (1) one free or
+      disengaged, (2) an unmarried girl (N.E.D.)]
+
+{168} In Cotgrave’s _Dictionary_ I find ‘praiseress’, ‘commendress’,
+      ‘fluteress’, ‘possesseress’, ‘loveress’, but have never met them
+      in use.
+
+{169} On this termination see J. Grimm, _Deutsche Gramm._, vol. ii. p.
+      134; vol. iii. p. 339.
+
+{170} [_The Knightes Tale_, ed. Skeat, l. 2017.]
+
+{171} [Yes; so in N.E.D.]
+
+{172} I am indebted for these last four to a _Nominale_ in the _National
+      Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 216.
+
+{173} The earliest example which Richardson gives of ‘seamstress’ is
+      from Gay, of ‘songstress’, from Thomson. I find however
+      ‘sempstress’ in the translation of Olearius’ _Voyages and
+      Travels_, 1669, p. 43. It is quite certain that as late as Ben
+      Jonson, ‘seamster’ and ‘songster’ expressed the _female_ seamer
+      and singer; a single passage from his _Masque of Christmas_ is
+      evidence to this. One of the children of Christmas there is
+      “Wassel, like a neat _sempster_ and _songster_; _her_ page bearing
+      a brown bowl”. Compare a passage from _Holland’s Leaguer_, 1632:
+      “A _tyre-woman_ of phantastical ornaments, a _sempster_ for
+      ruffes, cuffes, smocks and waistcoats”.
+
+{174} This was about the time of Henry VIII. In proof of the confusion
+      which reigned on the subject in Shakespeare’s time, see his use of
+      ‘spinster’ as--‘spinner’, the _man_ spinning, _Henry VIII_, Act.
+      i. Sc. 2; and I have no doubt that it is the same in _Othello_,
+      Act i. Sc. 1. And a little later, in Howell’s _Vocabulary_, 1659,
+      ‘spinner’ and ‘spinster’ are _both_ referred to the male sex, and
+      the barbarous ‘spinstress’ invented for the female.
+
+{175} I have included ‘huckster’, as will be observed, in this list. I
+      certainly cannot produce any passage in which it is employed as
+      the _female_ pedlar. We have only, however, to keep in mind the
+      existence of the verb ‘to huck’, in the sense of to peddle (it is
+      used by Bishop Andrews), and at the same time not to let the
+      present spelling of ‘hawker’ mislead us, and we shall confidently
+      recognize ‘hucker’ (the German ‘höker’ or ‘höcker’), in hawker,
+      that is, the _man_ who ‘hucks’, ‘hawks’, or peddles, as in
+      ‘huckster’ the _female_ who does the same. When therefore Howell
+      and others employ ‘hucksteress’, they fall into the same barbarous
+      excess of expression, whereof we are all guilty, when we use
+      ‘seamstress’ and ‘songstress’.--The note stood thus in the third
+      edition. Since that was published, I have met in the _Nominale_
+      referred to p. 155, the following, “hæc auxiatrix, a _hukster_”.
+      [Huckster, xiii. cent. _huccster_, it may be noted is an older
+      word in the language than _hukker_ (hucker) and _to huck_, both
+      first appearing in the xiv. cent. N.E.D.]
+
+{176} [Preserved in the surnames Baxter and Brewster. See C. W.
+      Bardsley, _English Surnames_, 2nd ed. 364, 379.]
+
+{177} _Notes and Queries_, No. 157.
+
+{178} [‘Welkin’ is possibly a plural, but in Anglo-Saxon _wolcen_ is a
+      cloud, and the plural _wolcnu_.]
+
+{179} When Wallis wrote, it was only beginning to be forgotten that
+      ‘chick’ was the singular, and ‘chicken’ the plural: “_Sunt qui
+      dicunt_ in singulari ‘chicken’, et in plurali ‘chickens’”; and
+      even now the words are in many country parts correctly employed.
+      In Sussex, a correspondent writes, they would as soon think of
+      saying ‘oxens’ as ‘chickens’. [‘Chicken’ is properly a singular,
+      old English _cicen_, the _-en_ being a diminutival, not a plural,
+      suffix (as in ‘kitten’, ‘maiden’). Thus ‘chicken’ was originally
+      ‘a little chuck’ (or cock), out of which ‘chick’ was afterwards
+      developed.]
+
+{180} See Chaucer’s _Romaunt of the Rose_, 1032, where Richesse, “an
+      high lady of great noblesse”, is one of the persons of the
+      allegory; and compare Rev. xviii. 17, Authorized Version. This has
+      so entirely escaped the knowledge of Ben Jonson, English scholar
+      as he was, that in his _Grammar_ he cites ‘riches’ as an example
+      of an English word wanting a singular.
+
+{181} “Set shallow brooks to surging seas,
+      An orient pearl to a white _pease_”.
+
+                                        _Puttenham._
+
+{182} [‘Eaves’ (old English _efes_) from which an imaginary singular
+      ‘eave’ has sometimes been evolved, as when Tennyson speaks of a
+      ‘cottage-eave’ (_In Memoriam_, civ.), and Cotgrave of ‘an
+      house-eave’.]
+
+{183} It is curious that despite of this protest, one of his plays has
+      for its name, _Sejanus his Fall_.
+
+{184} Even this does not startle Addison, or cause him any misgiving; on
+      the contrary he boldly asserts (_Spectator_, No. 135), “The same
+      single letter ‘s’ on many occasions does the office of a whole
+      word, and represents the ‘his’ _or ‘her’_ of our forefathers”.
+
+{185} Nothing can be better than the way in which Wallis disposes of
+      this scheme, although less successful in showing what this ‘s’
+      does mean than in showing what it cannot mean (_Gramm. Ling.
+      Anglic._, c. 5); Qui autem arbitrantur illud s, loco _his_
+      adjunctum esse (priori scilicet parte per aphæresim abscissâ),
+      ideoque apostrophi notam semper vel pingendam esse, vel saltem
+      subintelligendam, omnino errant. Quamvis enim non negem quin
+      apostrophi nota commode nonnunquam affigi possit, ut ipsius
+      litteræ s usus distinctius, ubi opus est, percipiatur; ita tamen
+      semper fieri debere, aut etiam ideo fieri quia vocem _his_ innuat,
+      omnino nego. Adjungitur enim et fœminarum nominibus propriis, et
+      substantivis pluralibus, ubi vox _his_ sine solœcismo locum habere
+      non potest: atque etiam in possessivis _ours_, _yours_, _theirs_,
+      _hers_, ubi vocem _his_ innui nemo somniaret.
+
+{186} See the proofs in Marsh’s _Manual of the English Language_,
+      English Edit., pp. 280, 293.
+
+{187} I cannot think that it would exceed the authority of our
+      University Presses, if this were removed from the Prayer Books
+      which they put forth, as certainly it is supprest by many of the
+      clergy in the reading. Such a liberty they have already assumed
+      with the Bible. In all earlier editions of the Authorized Version
+      it stood at 1 Kin. xv. 24: “Nevertheless _Asa his_ heart was
+      perfect with the Lord”; it is “_Asa’s_ heart” now. In the same way
+      “_Mordecai his_ matters” (Esth. iii. 4) has been silently changed
+      into “_Mordecai’s_ matters”; and in some modern editions, but not
+      in all, “_Holofernes his_ head” (Judith xiii. 9) into
+      “_Holofernes’_ head”.
+
+{188} In a good note on the matter, p. 6, in the _Comprehensive Grammar_
+      prefixed to his _Dictionary_, London, 1775.
+
+{189} See Grimm. _Deut. Gramm._, vol. ii. pp. 609, 944.
+
+{190} The existence of ‘stony’--‘lapidosus’, ‘steinig’, does not make
+      ‘stonen’--‘lapideus’, ‘steinern’, superfluous, any more than
+      ‘earthy’ makes ‘earthen’. That part of the field in which the good
+      seed withered so quickly (Matt. xiii. 5) was ‘stony’. The vessels
+      which held the water that Christ turned into wine (John iii. 6)
+      were ‘stonen’.
+
+{191} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i, p. 1040): Dass die starke form
+      die ältere, kräftigere, innere; die schwache die spätere,
+      gehemmtere und mehr äusserliche sey, leuchtet ein. Elsewhere,
+      speaking generally of inflections by internal vowel change, he
+      characterizes them as a ‘chief beauty’ (hauptschönheit) of the
+      Teutonic languages. Marsh (_Manual of the English Language_, p.
+      233, English ed.) protests, though, as it seems to me, on no
+      sufficient grounds, against these terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, as
+      themselves fanciful and inappropriate.
+
+{192} The entire ignorance as to the past historic evolution of the
+      language, with which some have undertaken to write about it, is
+      curious. Thus the author of _Observations upon the English
+      Language_, without date, but published about 1730, treats all
+      these strong præterites as of recent introduction, counting ‘knew’
+      to have lately expelled ‘knowed’, ‘rose’ to have acted the same
+      part toward ‘rised’, and of course esteeming them as so many
+      barbarous violations of the laws of the language; and concluding
+      with the warning that “great care must be taken to prevent their
+      increase”!!--p. 24. Cobbett does not fall into this absurdity, yet
+      proposes in his _English Grammar_, that they should all be
+      abolished as inconvenient. [Now many others are rapidly becoming
+      obsolescent. How seldom do we hear ‘drank’, ‘shrank’, ‘sprang’,
+      ‘stank’.]
+
+{193} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i. p. 839): “Die starke flexion
+      stufenweise versinkt und ausstirbt, die schwache aber um sich
+      greift”. Cf. i. 994, 1040; ii. 5; iv. 509.
+
+{194} [See also J. C. Hare, _Two Essays in Eng. Philology_ i. 47-56.]
+
+{195} Thus Wallis (_Gramm. Ling. Anglic._, 1654): Singulari numero
+      siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, vel
+      familiariter blandientis. [For a good discussion of the old use of
+      ‘thou’, see the Hares, _Guesses at Truth_, 1847, pp. 169-90. Even
+      at the present day a Wessex matron has been known to resent the
+      too familiar address of an inferior with the words, “Who bist thou
+      _a-theein’_ of”? (_The Spectator_, 1904, Sept. 3, p. 319).]
+
+{196} What the actual position of the compellation ‘thou’ was at that
+      time, we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller’s
+      _Church History, Dedication of Book_ vii.: “In opposition
+      whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that _thou_ from
+      superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command; from
+      equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity; but from
+      inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack
+      of clownishness; if from affectation, a tone of contempt”.
+
+{197} See on this subject of the dropping of grammatical gender, Pott,
+      _Etymologische Forschungen_, part 2, pp. 404, _sqq._
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS
+
+
+I propose, according to the plan sketched out in my first lecture, to
+take for my subject in the present those changes which in the course of
+time have found place, or now are finding place, in the meaning of many
+among our English words; so that, whether we are aware of it or not, we
+employ them at this day in senses very different from those in which our
+forefathers employed them of old. You observe that it is not _obsolete_
+words, words quite fallen out of present use, which I propose to
+consider; but such, rather, as are still on the lips of men, but with
+meanings more or less removed from those which once they possessed. My
+subject is far more practical, has far more to do with your actual life,
+than if I had taken obsolete words, and considered them. These last have
+an interest indeed, but it is an interest of an antiquarian character.
+They constituted a part of the intellectual money with which our
+ancestors carried on the business of their life; but now they are rather
+medals for the cabinets and collections of the curious than current
+money for the needs and pleasures of all. Their wings are clipped, so
+that they are “_winged_ words” no more; the spark of thought or
+feeling, kindling from mind to mind, no longer runs along them, as along
+the electric wires of the soul.
+
+{Sidenote: _Obsolete Words_}
+
+And then, besides this, there is little or no danger that any should be
+misled by them. A reader lights for the first time on one of these
+obsolete English words, as ‘frampold’, or ‘garboil’, or ‘brangle’{198};
+he is at once conscious of his ignorance; he has recourse to a glossary,
+of if he guesses from the context at the word’s signification, still his
+guess is as a guess to him, and no more. But words that have changed
+their meaning have often a deceivableness about them; a reader not once
+doubts but that he knows their intention, has no misgiving but that they
+possess for him the same force which they possessed for their writer,
+and conveyed to _his_ contemporaries, when indeed it is quite otherwise.
+The old life has gone out of them and a new life entered in.
+
+Thus, for example, a reader of our day lights upon such a passage as the
+following (it is from the _Preface_ to Howell’s _Lexicon_, 1660):
+“Though the root of the English language be _Dutch_{199}, yet it may be
+said to have been inoculated afterwards on a French stock”. He may know
+that the Dutch is a sister language or dialect to our own; but this
+that it is the mother or root of it will certainly perplex him, and he
+will hardly know what to make of the assertion; perhaps he ascribes it
+to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly lowered in his esteem.
+But presently in the course of his reading he meets with the following
+statement, this time in Fuller’s _Holy War_, being a history of the
+Crusades: “The French, _Dutch_, Italian, and English were the four
+elemental nations, whereof this army [of the Crusaders] was compounded”.
+If the student has sufficient historical knowledge to know that in the
+time of the Crusades there were no Dutch in our use of the word, this
+statement would merely startle him; and probably before he had finished
+the chapter, having his attention once aroused, he would perceive that
+Fuller with the writers of his time used ‘Dutch’ for German; even as it
+was constantly so used up to the end of the seventeenth century; and as
+the Americans use it to this present day; what we call now a Dutchman
+being then a Hollander. But a young student might very possibly want
+that amount of previous knowledge, which should cause him to receive
+this announcement with misgiving and surprise; and thus he might carry
+away altogether a wrong impression, and rise from a perusal of the book,
+persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part in
+the Crusades, while the Germans took little or no part in them at all.
+
+{Sidenote: _Miscreant_}
+
+And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more often will it
+happen with the subtler changes which words have undergone. Out of this
+it will continually happen that they convey now much more blame and
+condemnation, or convey now much less, than formerly they did; or of a
+different kind; and a reader not aware of the altered value which they
+now possess, may be in continual danger of misreading his author, of
+misunderstanding his intentions, while he has no doubt whatever that he
+perfectly apprehends and takes it in. Thus when Shakespeare in _1 Henry
+VI_ makes the gallant York address Joan of Arc as a ‘miscreant’, how
+coarse a piece of invective this sounds; how unlike what the chivalrous
+soldier would have uttered; or what one might have supposed Shakespeare,
+even with his unworthy estimate of the holy warrior Maid, would have put
+into his mouth. But a ‘miscreant’ in Shakespeare’s time had nothing of
+the meaning which now it has. It was simply, in agreement with its
+etymology, a misbeliever, one who did not believe rightly the Articles
+of the Catholic Faith. And I need not remind you that this was the
+constant charge which the English brought against Joan,--namely, that
+she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such had fallen
+from the faith. On this plea they burnt her, and it is this which York
+means when he calls her a ‘miscreant’, and not what we should intend by
+the name.
+
+In reading of poetry above all what beauties are often missed, what
+forces lost, through this assumption that the present of a word is
+always equivalent to its past. How often the poet is wronged in our
+estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once
+would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the
+emphasis which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For
+example, Milton ascribes in _Comus_ the “_tinsel-slippered_ feet” to
+Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How comparatively poor an epithet this
+‘tinsel-slippered’ sounds for those who know of ‘tinsel’ only in its
+modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery, affecting a splendour
+which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning
+its derivation, bring it back to the French ‘étincelle’, and the Latin
+‘scintillula’; see in it, as Milton and the writers of his time saw,
+‘the sparkling’, and how exquisitely beautiful a title does this become
+applied to a goddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our
+mind’s eye the quick glitter and sparkle of the waves under the light of
+sun or moon{200}. It is Homer’s ‘silver-footed’ (ἀργυρόπεζα), not
+servilely transferred, but reproduced and made his own by the English
+poet, dealing as one great poet will do with another; who will not
+disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows will add often a further grace
+of his own.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Influence_’}
+
+Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even aware, that whenever the
+word ‘influence’ occurs in our English poetry, down to comparatively a
+modern date, there is always more or less remote allusions to invisible
+illapses of power, skyey, planetary effects, supposed to be exercised by
+the heavenly luminaries upon the lives of men{201}? How many a passage
+starts into new life and beauty and fulness of allusion, when this is
+present with us; even Milton’s
+
+          “store of ladies, whose bright eyes
+    Rain _influence_”,
+
+as spectators of the tournament, gain something, when we regard
+them--and using this language, he intended we should--as the luminaries
+of this lower sphere, shedding by their propitious presence strength and
+valour into the hearts of their knights.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Baffle_’}
+
+The word even in its present acceptation may yield, as here, a
+convenient and even a correct sense; we may fall into no positive
+misapprehension about it; and still, through ignorance of its past
+history and of the force which it once possessed, we may miss a great
+part of its significance. We are not _beside_ the meaning of our author,
+but we are _short_ of it. Thus in Beaumont and Fletcher’s _King and no
+King_, (Act iii. Sc. 2,) a cowardly braggart of a soldier describes the
+treatment he experienced, when like Parolles he was at length found out,
+and stripped of his lion’s skin:--“They hung me up by the heels and beat
+me with hazel sticks, ... that the whole kingdom took notice of me for a
+_baffled_, whipped fellow”. The word to which I wish here to call your
+attention is ‘baffled’. Were you reading this passage, there would
+probably be nothing here to cause you to pause; you would attach to
+‘baffled’ a sense which sorts very well with the context--“hung up by
+the heels and beaten, all his schemes of being thought much of were
+_baffled_ and defeated”. But “baffled” implies far more than this; it
+contains allusion to a custom in the days of chivalry, according to
+which a perjured or recreant knight was either in person, or more
+commonly in effigy, hung up by the heels, his scutcheon blotted, his
+spear broken, and he himself or his effigy made the mark and subject of
+all kinds of indignities; such a one being said to be ‘baffled’{202}.
+Twice in Spenser recreant knights are so dealt with. I can only quote a
+portion of the shorter passage, in which this infamous punishment is
+described:
+
+    “And after all, for greater infamy
+    He by the heels him hung upon a tree,
+    And _baffled_ so, that all which passéd by
+    The picture of his punishment might see”{203}.
+
+Probably when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, men were not so remote from
+the days of chivalry, or at any rate from the literature of chivalry,
+but that this custom was still fresh in their minds. How much more to
+them than to us, so long as we are ignorant of the same, would those
+words I just quoted have conveyed?
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Religion_’}
+
+There are several places in the Authorized Version of Scripture where
+those who are not aware of the changes which have taken place during the
+last two hundred and fifty years in our language, can hardly fail of
+being to a certain extent misled as to the intention of our Translators;
+or, if they are better acquainted with Greek than with early English,
+will be tempted to ascribe to them, though unjustly, an inexact
+rendering of the original. Thus the altered meaning of a word involves
+a serious misunderstanding in that well known statement of St. James,
+“Pure _religion_ and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to
+visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction”. “There”, exclaims
+one who wishes to set up St. James against St. Paul, that so he may
+escape the necessity of obeying either, “listen to what St. James says;
+there is nothing mystical in what he requires; instead of harping on
+faith as a condition necessary to salvation, he makes all religion to
+consist in practical deeds of kindness from one to another”. But let us
+pause for a moment. Did ‘religion’, when our translation was made, mean
+godliness? did it mean the _sum total_ of our duties towards God? for,
+of course, no one would deny that deeds of charity are a necessary part
+of our Christian duty, an evidence of the faith which is in us. There is
+abundant evidence to show that ‘religion’ did not mean this; that, like
+the Greek θρησκεία, for which it here stands, like the Latin ‘religio’,
+it meant the outward forms and embodiments in which the inward principle
+of piety arrayed itself, the _external service_ of God; and St. James is
+urging upon those to whom he is writing something of this kind: “Instead
+of the ceremonial services of the Jews, which consisted in divers
+washings and in other elements of this world, let our service, our
+θρησκεία, take a nobler shape, let it consist in deeds of pity and of
+love”--and it was this which our Translators intended, when they used
+‘religion’ here and ‘religious’ in the verse preceding. How little
+‘religion’ once meant godliness, how predominantly it was used for the
+_outward_ service of God, is plain from many passages in our
+_Homilies_, and from other contemporary literature.
+
+Again, there are words in our Liturgy which I have no doubt are commonly
+misunderstood. The mistake involves no serious error; yet still in our
+own language, and in words which we have constantly in our mouths, and
+at most solemn times, it is certainly better to be right than wrong. In
+the Litany we pray God that it would please Him, “to give and preserve
+to our use the _kindly_ fruits of the earth”. What meaning do we attach
+to this epithet, “the _kindly_ fruits of the earth”? Probably we
+understand by it those fruits in which the _kindness_ of God or of
+nature towards us finds its expression. This is no unworthy explanation,
+but still it is not the right one. The “_kindly_ fruits” are the
+“_natural_ fruits”, those which the earth according to its _kind_ should
+naturally bring forth, which it is appointed to produce. To show you how
+little ‘kindly’ meant once benignant, as it means now, I will instance
+an employment of it from Sir Thomas More’s _Life of Richard the Third_.
+He tells us that Richard calculated by murdering his two nephews in the
+Tower to make himself accounted “a _kindly_ king”--not certainly a
+‘kindly’ one in our present usage of the word{204}; but, having put them
+out of the way, that he should then be lineal heir of the Crown, and
+should thus be reckoned as king _by kind_ or natural descent; and such
+was of old the constant use of the word.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Worship_’}
+
+A phrase in one of our occasional Services “with my body I thee
+_worship_”, has sometimes offended those who are unacquainted with the
+early use of English words, and thus with the intention of the actual
+framers of that Service. Clearly in our modern sense of ‘worship’, this
+language would be unjustifiable. But ‘worship’ or ‘worthship’ meant
+‘honour’ in our early English, and ‘to worship’ to honour, this meaning
+of ‘worship’ still very harmlessly surviving in the title of “your
+worship”, addressed to the magistrate on the bench. So little was it
+restrained of old to the honour which man is bound to pay to God, that
+it was employed by Wiclif to express the honour which God will render to
+his faithful servants and friends. Thus our Lord’s declaration “If any
+man serve Me, him will my Father _honour_”, in Wiclif’s translation
+reads thus, “If any man serve Me, my Father shall _worship_ him”. I do
+not say that there is not sufficient reason to change the words, “with
+my body I thee _worship_”, if only there were any means of changing
+anything which is now antiquated and out of date in our services or
+arrangements. I think it would be very well if they were changed, liable
+as they are to misunderstanding and misconstruction now; but still they
+did not mean at the first, and therefore do not now really mean, any
+more than, “with my body I thee _honour_”, and so you may reply to any
+fault-finder here.
+
+Take another example of a very easy misapprehension, although not now
+from Scripture or the Prayer Book, Fuller, our Church historian, having
+occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims,
+“Oh the _painfulness_ of his preaching!” If we did not know the former
+uses of ‘painfulness’, we might take this for an exclamation wrung out
+at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his
+hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the _pain_ which he
+caused to others, but of the _pains_ which he bestowed himself: and I am
+persuaded, if we had more ‘painful’ preachers in the old sense of the
+word, that is, who _took_ pains themselves, we should have fewer
+‘painful’ ones in the modern sense, who _cause_ pain to their hearers.
+So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as “the _painful_ writer of two
+hundred books”--not meaning hereby that these books were painful in the
+reading, but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.
+
+Here is another easy misapprehension. Swift wrote a pamphlet, or, as he
+called it, a _Letter to the Lord Treasurer_, with this title, “A
+proposal for correcting, improving, and _ascertaining_ the English
+Tongue”. Who that brought a knowledge of present English, and no more,
+to this passage, would doubt that “_ascertaining_ the English Tongue”
+meant arriving at a certain knowledge of what it was? Swift, however,
+means something quite different from this. “_To ascertain_ the English
+tongue” is not with him to arrive at a subjective certainty in our own
+minds of what that tongue is, but to give an objective certainty to that
+tongue itself, so that henceforth it shall not alter nor change. For
+even Swift himself, with all his masculine sense, entertained a dream
+of this kind, as is more fully declared in the work itself{205}.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Treacle_’}
+
+In other places unacquaintance with the changes in a word’s usage will
+not so much mislead as leave you nearly or altogether at a loss in
+respect of the intention of an author whom you may be reading. It is
+evident that he has a meaning, but what it is you are unable to divine,
+even though all the words he employs are words in familiar employment to
+the present day. For example, the poet Waller is congratulating Charles
+the Second on his return from exile, and is describing the way in which
+all men, even those formerly most hostile to him, were now seeking his
+favour, and he writes:
+
+    “Offenders now, the chiefest, do begin
+    To strive for grace, and expiate their sin:
+    All winds blow fair that did the world embroil,
+    _Your vipers treacle yield_, and scorpions oil”.
+
+Many a reader before now has felt, as I cannot doubt, a moment’s
+perplexity at the now courtly poet’s assertion that “_vipers treacle
+yield_”--who yet has been too indolent, or who has not had the
+opportunity, to search out what his meaning might be. There is in fact
+allusion here to a curious piece of legendary lore. ‘Treacle’, or
+‘triacle’, as Chaucer wrote it, was originally a Greek word, and wrapped
+up in itself the once popular belief (an anticipation, by the way, of
+homœopathy), that a confection of the viper’s flesh was the most potent
+antidote against the viper’s bite{206}. Waller goes back to this the
+word’s old meaning, familiar enough in his time, for Milton speaks of
+“the sovran _treacle_ of sound doctrine”{207}, while “Venice treacle”,
+or “viper wine”, as it sometimes was called, was a common name for a
+supposed antidote against all poisons; and he would imply that regicides
+themselves began to be loyal, vipers not now yielding hurt any more, but
+rather healing for the old hurts which they themselves had inflicted. To
+trace the word down to its present use, it may be observed that,
+designating first this antidote, it then came to designate any antidote,
+then any medicinal confection or sweet syrup; and lastly that particular
+syrup, namely, the sweet syrup of molasses, to which alone it is now
+restricted.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Blackguard_’}
+
+I will draw on the writings of Fuller for one more example. In his _Holy
+War_, having enumerated the rabble rout of fugitive debtors, runaway
+slaves, thieves, adulterers, murderers, of men laden for one cause or
+another with heaviest censures of the Church, who swelled the ranks, and
+helped to make up the army, of the Crusaders, he exclaimed, “A
+lamentable case that the devil’s _black guard_ should be God’s
+soldiers”! What does he mean, we may ask, by “the devil’s _black
+guard_”? Nor is this a solitary mention of the “black guard”. On the
+contrary, the phrase is of very frequent recurrence in the early
+dramatists and others down to the time of Dryden, who gives as one of
+his stage directions in _Don Sebastian_, “Enter the captain of the
+rabble, with the _Black guard_”. What is this “black guard”? Has it any
+connexion with a word of our homeliest vernacular? We feel that probably
+it has so; yet at first sight the connexion is not very apparent, nor
+indeed the exact force of the phrase. Let me trace its history. In old
+times, the palaces of our kings and seats of our nobles were not so well
+and completely furnished as at the present day: and thus it was
+customary, when a royal progress was made, or when the great nobility
+exchanged one residence for another, that at such a removal all kitchen
+utensils, pots and pans, and even coals, should be also carried with
+them where they went. Those who accompanied and escorted these, the
+lowest, meanest, and dirtiest of the retainers, were called ‘the black
+guard’{208}; then any troop or company of ragamuffins; and lastly, when
+the origin of the word was lost sight of, and it was forgotten that it
+properly implied a company, a rabble rout, and not a single person, one
+would compliment another, not as belonging to, but as himself being, the
+‘blackguard’.
+
+The examples which I have adduced are, I am persuaded, sufficient to
+prove that it is not a useless and unprofitable study, nor yet one
+altogether without entertainment, to which I invite you; that on the
+contrary any one who desires to read with accuracy, and thus with
+advantage and pleasure, our earlier classics, who would avoid continual
+misapprehension in their perusal, and would not often fall short of, and
+often go astray from, their meaning, must needs bestow some attention on
+the altered significance of English words. And if this is so, we could
+not more usefully employ what remains of this present lecture than in
+seeking to indicate those changes which words most frequently undergo;
+and to trace as far as we can the causes, mental and moral, at work in
+the minds of men to bring these changes about, with the good and evil
+out of which they have sprung, and to which they bear witness.
+
+For indeed these changes to which words in the progress of time are
+submitted are not changes at random, but for the most part are obedient
+to certain laws, are capable of being distributed into certain classes,
+being the outward transcripts and witnesses of mental and moral
+processes inwardly going forward in those who bring them about. Many, it
+is true, will escape any classification of ours, the changes which have
+taken place in their meaning being, or at least seeming to us, the
+result of mere caprice; and not explicable by any principle which we can
+appeal to as habitually at work in the mind. But, admitting all this, a
+majority will still remain which are reducible to some law or other, and
+with these we will occupy ourselves now.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Duke_’, ‘_Corpse_’, ‘_Weed_’}
+
+And first, the meaning of a word oftentimes is gradually narrowed. It
+was once as a generic name, embracing many as yet unnamed species within
+itself, which all went by its common designation. By and bye it is found
+convenient that each of these should have its own more special sign
+allotted to it{209}. It is here just as in some newly enclosed country,
+where a single household will at first loosely occupy a whole district;
+while, as cultivation proceeds, this district is gradually parcelled out
+among a dozen or twenty, and under more accurate culture employs and
+sustains them all. Thus, for example, all food was once called ‘meat’;
+it is so in our Bible, and ‘horse-meat’ for fodder is still no unusual
+phrase; yet ‘meat’ is now a name given only to flesh. Any little book or
+writing was a ‘libel’ once; now only such a one as is scurrilous and
+injurious. Any leader was a ‘duke’ (dux); thus “_duke_ Hannibal” (Sir
+Thomas Eylot), “_duke_ Brennus” (Holland), “_duke_ Theseus”
+(Shakespeare), “_duke_ Amalek”, with other ‘dukes’ (Gen. xxxvi.). Any
+journey, by land as much as by sea, was a ‘voyage’. ‘Fairy’ was not a
+name restricted, as now, to the _Gothic_ mythology; thus “the _fairy_
+Egeria” (Sir J. Harrington). A ‘corpse’ might be quite as well living as
+dead{210}. ‘Weeds’ were whatever covered the earth or the person; while
+now as respects the earth, those only are ‘weeds’ which are noxious, or
+at least self-sown; as regards the person, we speak of no other ‘weeds’
+but the widow’s{211}. In each of these cases, the same contraction of
+meaning, the separating off and assigning to other words of large
+portions of this, has found place. ‘To starve’ (the German ‘sterben’,
+and generally spelt ‘sterve’ up to the middle of the seventeenth
+century), meant once to die any manner of death; thus Chaucer says,
+Christ “_sterved_ upon the cross for our redemption”; it now is
+restricted to the dying by cold or by hunger. Words not a few were once
+applied to both sexes alike, which are now restricted to the female. It
+is so even with ‘girl’, which was once a young person of either
+sex{212}; while other words in this list, such for instance as
+‘hoyden’{213} (Milton, prose), ‘shrew’ (Chaucer), ‘coquet’ (Phillips,
+_New World of Words_), ‘witch’ (Wiclif), ‘termagant’ (Bale), ‘scold’,
+‘jade’, ‘slut’ (Gower), must be regarded in their present exclusive
+appropriation to the female sex as evidences of men’s rudeness, and not
+of women’s deserts.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words used more accurately_}
+
+The necessities of an advancing civilization demand a greater precision
+and accuracy in the use of words having to do with weight, measure,
+number, size. Almost all such words as ‘acre’, ‘furlong’, ‘yard’,
+‘gallon’, ‘peck’, were once of a vague and unsettled use, and only at a
+later day, and in obedience to the requirements of commerce and social
+life, exact measures and designations. Thus every field was once an
+‘acre’; and this remains so still with the German ‘acker’, and in our
+“God’s acre”, as a name for a churchyard{214}; it was not till about the
+reign of Edward the First that ‘acre’ was commonly restricted to a
+determined measure and portion of land. Here and there even now a
+glebeland will be called “the acre”; and this, even while it contains
+not one but many of our measured acres. A ‘furlong’ was a ‘furrowlong’,
+or length of a furrow{215}. Any pole was a ‘yard’, and this vaguer use
+survives in ‘sail_yard_’, ‘hal_yard_’, and in other sea-terms. Every
+pitcher was a ‘galon’ (Mark xiv. 13, Wiclif), while a ‘peck’ was no more
+than a ‘poke’ or bag{216}. And the same has no doubt taken place in all
+other languages. I will only remind you how the Greek ‘drachm’ was at
+first a handful (δραχμή = ‘manipulus’, from δράσσω, to grasp); its
+later word for ‘ten thousand’ (μύριοι) implied in Homer’s time any great
+multitude; and with the accent on a different syllable always retained
+this meaning.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words used less accurately_}
+
+Opposite to this is a counter-process by which words of narrower
+intention gradually enlarge the domain of their meaning, becoming
+capable of much wider application than any which once they admitted.
+Instances in this kind are fewer than in that which we have just been
+considering. The main stream and course of human thoughts and human
+discourse tends the other way, to discerning, distinguishing, dividing;
+and then to the permanent fixing of the distinctions gained, by the aid
+of designations which shall keep apart for ever in word that which has
+been once severed and sundered in thought. Nor is it hard to perceive
+why this process should be the more frequent. Men are first struck with
+the likenesses between those things which are presented to them, with
+their points of resemblance; on the strength of which they bracket them
+under a common term. Further acquaintance reveals their points of
+unlikeness, the real dissimilarities which lurk under superficial
+resemblances, the need therefore of a different notation for objects
+which are essentially different. It is comparatively much rarer to
+discover real likeness under what at first appeared as unlikeness; and
+usually when a word moves forward, and from a specialty indicates now a
+generality, it is not in obedience to any such discovery of the true
+inner likeness of things,--the steps of successful generalizations being
+marked and secured in other ways. But this widening of a word’s meaning
+is too often a result of those elements of disorganization and decay
+which are at work in a language. Men forget a word’s history and
+etymology; its distinctive features are obliterated for them, with all
+which attached it to some thought or fact which by right was its own.
+Appropriated and restricted once to some striking specialty which it
+vigorously set out, it can now be used in a wider, vaguer, more
+unsettled way. It can be employed twenty times for once when it would
+have been possible formerly to employ it. Yet this is not gain, but pure
+loss. It has lost its place in the disciplined _army_ of words, and
+become one of a loose and disorderly _mob_.
+
+Let me instance the word ‘preposterous’. It is now no longer of any
+practical service at all in the language, being merely an ungraceful and
+slipshod synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to its old use;
+let it designate that one peculiar branch of absurdity which it
+designated once, namely the reversing of the true order of things, the
+putting of the last first, and, by consequence, of the first last, and
+of what excellent service the word would be capable. Thus it is
+‘preposterous’, in the most accurate use of the word, to put the cart
+before the horse, to expect wages before the work is done, to hang a man
+first and try him afterwards; and in this strict and accurate sense the
+word was always used by our elder writers{217}.
+
+In like manner ‘to prevaricate’ was never employed by good writers of
+the seventeenth century without nearer or more remote allusion to the
+uses of the word in the Roman law courts, where a ‘prævaricator’
+(properly a straddler with distorted legs) did not mean generally and
+loosely, as now with us, one who shuffles, quibbles, and evades; but one
+who plays false in a particular manner; who, undertaking, or being by
+his office bound, to prosecute a charge, is in secret collusion with the
+opposite party; and, betraying the cause which he affects to support, so
+manages the accusation as to obtain not the condemnation, but the
+acquittal, of the accused; a “feint pleader”, as, I think, in our old
+law language he would have been termed. How much force would the keeping
+of this in mind add to many passages in our elder divines.
+
+Or take ‘equivocal’, ‘equivocate’, ‘equivocation’. These words, which
+belonged at first to logic, have slipped down into common use, and in so
+doing have lost all the precision of their first employment.
+‘Equivocation’ is now almost any such dealing in ambiguous words with
+the intention of deceiving, as falls short of an actual lie; but
+according to its etymology and in its primary use ‘equivocation’, this
+fruitful mother of so much error, is the calling by the same name, of
+things essentially diverse, hiding intentionally or otherwise a real
+difference under a verbal resemblance{218}. Nor let it be urged in
+defence of its present looser use, that only so could it have served the
+needs of our ordinary conversation; on the contrary, had it retained its
+first use, how serviceable an implement of thought would it have been in
+detecting our own fallacies, or those of others; all which it can be now
+no longer.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Idea_’}
+
+What now is ‘idea’ for us? How infinite the fall of this word since the
+time when Milton sang of the Creator contemplating his newly created
+world,
+
+                  “how it showed,
+    Answering his great _idea_”,
+
+to its present use when this person “has an _idea_ that the train has
+started”, and the other “had no _idea_ that the dinner would be so bad”.
+But this word ‘idea’ is perhaps the worst case in the English language.
+Matters have not mended here since the times of Dr. Johnson; of whom
+Boswell tells us: “He was particularly indignant against the almost
+universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or _opinion_,
+when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something of which an
+image can be formed in the mind”. There is perhaps no word in the whole
+compass of English, so seldom used with any tolerable correctness; in
+none is the distance so immense between the frequent sublimity of the
+word in its proper use, and the triviality of it in its slovenly and its
+popular.
+
+This tendency in words to lose the sharp, rigidly defined outline of
+meaning which they once possessed, to become of wide, vague, loose
+application instead of fixed, definite, and precise, to mean almost
+anything, and so really to mean nothing, is among the most fatally
+effectual which are at work for the final ruin of a language, and, I do
+not fear to add, for the demoralization of those that speak it. It is
+one against which we shall all do well to watch; for there is none of us
+who cannot do something in keeping words close to their own proper
+meaning, and in resisting their encroachment on the domain of others.
+
+The causes which bring this mischief about are not hard to trace. We all
+know that when a piece of our silver money has long fulfilled its part,
+as “pale and common drudge ’tween man and man”, whatever it had at first
+of sharper outline and livelier impress is in the end wholly obliterated
+from it. So it is with words, above all with words of science and
+theology. These getting into general use, and passing often from mouth
+to mouth, lose the “image and superscription” which they had, before
+they descended from the school to the market-place, from the pulpit to
+the street. Being now caught up by those who understand imperfectly and
+thus incorrectly their true value, who will not be at the pains of
+understanding that, or who are incapable of doing so, they are obliged
+to accommodate themselves to the lower sphere in which they circulate,
+by laying aside much of the precision and accuracy and depth which once
+they had; they become weaker, shallower, more indefinite; till in the
+end, as exponents of thought and feeling, they cease to be of any
+service at all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Bombast_’, ‘_Garble_’}
+
+Sometimes a word does not merely narrow or extend its meaning, but
+altogether changes it; and this it does in more ways than one. Thus a
+secondary figurative sense will quite put out of use and extinguish the
+literal, until in the entire predominance of that it is altogether
+forgotten that it ever possessed any other. I may instance ‘bombast’ as
+a word about which this forgetfulness is nearly complete. What ‘bombast’
+now means is familiar to us all, namely inflated words, “full of sound
+and fury”, but “signifying nothing”. This, at present its sole meaning,
+was once only the secondary and superinduced; ‘bombast’ being properly
+the cotton plant, and then the cotton wadding with which garments were
+stuffed out and lined. You remember perhaps how Prince Hal addresses
+Falstaff, “How now, my sweet creature of _bombast_”; using the word in
+its literal sense; and another early poet has this line:
+
+    “Thy body’s bolstered out with _bombast_ and with bags”.
+
+‘Bombast’ was then transferred in a vigorous image to the big words
+without strength or solidity wherewith the discourses of some were
+stuffed out, and has now quite forgone any other meaning. So too ‘to
+garble’ was once “to cleanse from dross and dirt, as grocers do their
+spices, to pick or cull out”{219}. It is never used now in this its
+primary sense, and has indeed undergone this further change, that while
+once ‘to garble’ was to sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it
+is now to sift with a view of picking out the worst{220}. ‘Polite’ is
+another word which in the figurative sense has quite extinguished the
+literal. We still speak of ‘polished’ surfaces; but not any more, with
+Cudworth, of “_polite_ bodies, as looking glasses”. Neither do we now
+‘exonerate’ a ship (Burton); nor ‘stigmatize’, at least otherwise than
+figuratively, a ‘malefactor’ (the same); nor ‘corroborate’ our health
+(Sir Thomas Elyot).
+
+Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly progressive courses
+of change, itself a faithful index of changes going on in society and in
+the minds of men, till at length everything is changed about it. The
+process of this it is often very curious to observe; capable as not
+seldom it is of being watched step by step in its advances to the final
+consummation. There may be said to be three leading phases which the
+word successively presents, three steps in its history. At first it
+grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with its own natural
+meaning. Presently the word allows another meaning, one superinduced on
+the former, and foreign to its etymology, to share with the other in the
+possession of it, on the ground that where the former exists, the latter
+commonly co-exists with it. At the third step, the newly introduced
+meaning, not satisfied with its moiety, with dividing the possession of
+the word, has thrust out the original and rightful possessor altogether,
+and remains in sole and exclusive possession. The three successive
+stages may be represented by _a_, _ab_, _b_; in which series _b_, which
+was wanting altogether at the first stage, and was only admitted as
+secondary at the second, does at the third become primary and indeed
+alone.
+
+{Sidenote: _Gradual Change of Meaning_}
+
+We are not to suppose that in actual fact the transitions from one
+signification to another are so strongly and distinctly marked, as I
+have found it convenient to mark them here. Indeed it is hard to imagine
+anything more gradual, more subtle and imperceptible, than the process
+of change. The manner in which the new meaning first insinuates itself
+into the old, and then drives out the old, can only be compared to the
+process of petrifaction, as rightly understood--the water not gradually
+turning what is put into it to stone, as we generally take the operation
+to be; but successively displacing each several particle of that which
+is brought within its power, and depositing a stony particle, in its
+stead, till, in the end, while all appears to continue the same, all has
+in fact been thoroughly changed. It is precisely thus, by such slow,
+gradual, and subtle advances that the new meaning filters through and
+pervades the word, little by little displacing entirely that which it
+before possessed.
+
+No word would illustrate this process better than that old example,
+familiar probably to us all, of ‘villain’. The ‘villain’ is, first, the
+serf or peasant, ‘villanus’, because attached to the ‘villa’ or farm. He
+is, secondly, the peasant who, it is further taken for granted, will be
+churlish, selfish, dishonest, and generally of evil moral conditions,
+these having come to be assumed as always belonging to him, and to be
+permanently associated with his name, by those higher classes of society
+who in the main commanded the springs of language. At the third step,
+nothing of the meaning which the etymology suggests, nothing of ‘villa’,
+survives any longer; the peasant is wholly dismissed, and the evil moral
+conditions of him who is called by this name alone remain; so that the
+name would now in this its final stage be applied as freely to peer, if
+he deserved it, as to peasant. ‘Boor’ has had exactly the same history;
+being first the cultivator of the soil; then secondly, the cultivator of
+the soil who, it is assumed, will be coarse, rude, and unmannerly; and
+then thirdly, any one who is coarse, rude, and unmannerly{221}. So too
+‘pagan’; which is first villager, then heathen villager, and lastly
+heathen. You may trace the same progress in ‘churl’, ‘clown’, ‘antic’,
+and in numerous other words. The intrusive meaning might be likened in
+all these cases to the egg which the cuckoo lays in the sparrow’s nest;
+the young cuckoo first sharing the nest with its rightful occupants, but
+not resting till it has dislodged and ousted them altogether.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Gossip_’}
+
+I will illustrate by the aid of one word more this part of my subject. I
+called your attention in my last lecture to the true character of
+several words and forms in use among our country people, and claimed for
+them to be in many instances genuine English, though English now more
+or less antiquated and overlived. ‘Gossip’ is a word in point. I have
+myself heard this name given by our Hampshire peasantry to the sponsors
+in baptism, the godfathers and godmothers. I do not say that it is a
+usual word; but it is occasionally employed, and well understood. This
+is a perfectly correct employment of ‘gossip’, in fact its proper and
+original one, and involves moreover a very curious record of past
+beliefs. ‘Gossip’, or ‘gossib’, as Chaucer spelt it, is a compound word,
+made up of the name of ‘God’, and of an old Anglo-Saxon word, ‘sib’,
+still alive in Scotland, as all readers of Walter Scott will remember,
+and in some parts of England, and which means, akin; they were said to
+be ‘sib’, who are related to one another. But why, you may ask, was the
+name given to sponsors? Out of this reason;--in the middle ages it was
+the prevailing belief (and the Romish Church still affirms it), that
+those who stood as sponsors to the same child, besides contracting
+spiritual obligations on behalf of that child, also contracted spiritual
+affinity one with another; they became _sib_, or akin, in _God_; and
+thus ‘gossips’; hence ‘gossipred’, an old word, exactly analogous to
+‘kindred’. Out of this faith the Roman Catholic Church will not allow
+(unless indeed by dispensations procured for money), those who have
+stood as sponsors to the same child, afterwards to contract marriage
+with one another, affirming them too nearly related for this to be
+lawful.
+
+Take ‘gossip’ however in its ordinary present use, as one addicted to
+idle tittle-tattle, and it seems to bear no relation whatever to its
+etymology and first meaning. The same three steps, however, which we
+have traced before will bring us to its present use. ‘Gossips’ are,
+first, the sponsors, brought by the act of a common sponsorship into
+affinity and near familiarity with one another; secondly, these
+sponsors, who being thus brought together, allow themselves one with the
+other in familiar, and then in trivial and idle talk; thirdly, any who
+allow themselves in this trivial and idle talk,--called in French
+‘commérage’, from the fact that ‘commére’ has run through exactly the
+same stages as its English equivalent.
+
+It is plain that words which designate not things and persons only, but
+these as they are contemplated more or less in an ethical light, words
+which tinge with a moral sentiment what they designate, are peculiarly
+exposed to change; are constantly liable to take a new colouring, or to
+lose an old. The gauge and measure of praise or blame, honour or
+dishonour, admiration or abhorrence, which they convey, is so purely a
+mental and subjective one, that it is most difficult to take accurate
+note of its rise or of its fall, while yet there are causes continually
+at work leading it to the one or the other. There are words not a few,
+but ethical words above all, which have so imperceptibly drifted away
+from their former moorings, that although their position is now very
+different from that which they once occupied, scarcely one in a hundred
+of casual readers, whose attention has not been specially called to the
+subject, will have observed that they have moved at all. Here too we
+observe some words conveying less of praise or blame than once, and
+some more; while some have wholly shifted from the one to the other.
+Some were at one time words of slight, almost of offence, which have
+altogether ceased to be so now. Still these are rare by comparison with
+those which once were harmless, but now are harmless no more; which
+once, it may be, were terms of honour, but which now imply a slight or
+even a scorn. It is only too easy to perceive why these should exceed
+those in number.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Imp_’, ‘_Brat_’}
+
+Let us take an example or two. If any were to speak now of royal
+children as “royal _imps_”, it would sound, and with our present use of
+the word would be, impertinent and unbecoming enough; and yet ‘imp’ was
+once a name of dignity and honour, and not of slight or of undue
+familiarity. Thus Spenser addresses the Muses in this language,
+
+    “Ye sacred _imps_ that on Parnasso dwell”;
+
+and ‘imp’ was especially used of the scions of royal or illustrious
+houses. More than one epitaph, still existing, of our ancient nobility
+might be quoted, beginning in such language as this, “Here lies that
+noble _imp_”. Or what should we say of a poet who commenced a solemn
+poem in this fashion,
+
+    “Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord,
+    Oh Abraham’s _brats_, oh brood of blessed seed”?
+
+Could we conclude anything else but that he meant, by using low words on
+lofty occasions, to turn sacred things into ridicule? Yet this was very
+far from the intention of Gascoigne, the poet whose lines I have just
+quoted. “Abraham’s _brats_” was used by him in perfect good faith, and
+without the slightest feeling that anything ludicrous or contemptuous
+adhered to the word ‘brat’, as indeed in his time there did not, any
+more than adheres to ‘brood’, which is another form of the same word
+now{222}.
+
+Call a person ‘pragmatical’, and you now imply not merely that he is
+busy, but _over_-busy, officious, self-important, and pompous to boot.
+But it once meant nothing of the kind, and ‘pragmatical’ (like
+πραγματικός) was one engaged in affairs, being an honourable title,
+given to a man simply and industriously accomplishing the business which
+properly concerned him{223}. So too to say that a person ‘meddles’ or is
+a ‘meddler’ implies now that he interferes unduly in other men’s
+matters, without a call mixing himself up with them. This was not
+insinuated in the earlier uses of the word. On the contrary three of our
+earlier translations of the Bible have, “_Meddle_ with your own
+business” (1 Thess. iv. 11); and Barrow in one of his sermons draws at
+some length the distinction between ‘meddling’ and “being _meddlesome_”,
+and only condemns the latter.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Proser_’}
+
+Or take again the words, ‘to prose’ or a ‘proser’. It cannot indeed be
+affirmed that they convey any _moral_ condemnation, yet they certainly
+convey no compliment now; and are almost among the last which any one
+would desire should with justice be applied either to his talking or his
+writing. For ‘to prose’, as we all now know too well, is to talk or
+write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but
+once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a ‘proser’ the
+antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid
+and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would
+have ‘prosed’ and been a ‘proser’, in the language of our ancestors.
+Thus Drayton writes of his contemporary Nashe:
+
+    “And surely Nashe, though he a _proser_ were,
+      A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear”;
+
+that is, the ornament not of a ‘proser’, but of a poet. The tacit
+assumption that vigour, animation, rapid movement, with all the
+precipitation of the spirit, belong to verse rather than to prose, and
+are the exclusive possession of it, is that which must explain the
+changed uses of the word.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Knave_’}
+
+Still it is according to a word’s present signification that we must
+apply it now. It would be no excuse, having applied an insulting epithet
+to any, if we should afterwards plead that, tried by its etymology and
+primary usage, it had nothing offensive or insulting about it; although
+indeed Swift assures us that in his time such a plea was made and was
+allowed. “I remember”, he says, “at a trial in Kent, where Sir George
+Rooke was indicted for calling a gentleman ‘knave’ and ‘villain’, the
+lawyer for the defendant brought off his client by alleging that the
+words were not injurious; for ‘knave’ in the old and true signification
+imported only a servant{224}; and ‘villain’ in Latin is villicus, which
+is no more than a man employed in country labour, or rather a baily”.
+The lawyer may have deserved his success for his ingenuity and his
+boldness; though, if Swift reports him aright, not certainly on the
+ground of the strict accuracy either of his Anglo-Saxon or his Latin.
+
+The moral sense and conviction of men is often at work upon their words,
+giving them new turns in obedience to these convictions, of which their
+changed use will then remain a permanent record. Let me illustrate this
+by the history of our word ‘sycophant’. You probably are acquainted with
+the story which the Greek scholiasts invented by way of explaining a
+word of which they knew nothing, namely that the ‘sycophant’ was a
+“manifester of figs”, one who detected others in the act of exporting
+figs from Attica, an act forbidden, they asserted, by the Athenian law;
+and accused them to the people. Be this explanation worth what it may,
+the word obtained in Greek a more general sense; any accuser, and then
+any _false_ accuser, was a ‘sycophant’; and when the word was first
+adopted into the English language, it was in this meaning: thus an old
+English poet speaks of “the railing route of _sycophants_”; and Holland:
+“The poor man that hath nought to lose, is not afraid of the
+_sycophant_”. But it has not kept this meaning; a ‘sycophant’ is now a
+fawning flatterer; not one who speaks ill of you behind your back;
+rather one who speaks good of you before your face, but good which he
+does not in his heart believe. Yet how true a moral instinct has
+presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and
+the flatterer, although they seem so opposed to one another, how closely
+united they really are. They grow out of the same root. The same
+baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak evil of you behind your
+back, will lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your face;
+there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb, “Who flatters me
+before, spatters me behind”.
+
+{Sidenote: _Weakening of Words_}
+
+But it is not the moral sense only of men which is thus at work,
+modifying their words; but the immoral as well. If the good which men
+have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit
+there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant tendency--in
+too many cases it has been a successful one--to empty words employed in
+the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral
+reprobation which they once conveyed. Men’s too easy toleration of sin,
+the feebleness of their moral indignation against it, brings about that
+the blame which words expressed once, has in some of them become much
+weaker now than once, has from others vanished altogether. “To do a
+_shrewd_ turn”, was once to do a _wicked_ turn; and Chaucer, using
+‘shrewdness’ by which to translate the Latin ‘improbitas’, shows that it
+meant wickedness for him; nay, two murderers he calls two ‘shrews’,--for
+there were, as already noticed, male shrews once as well as female. But
+“a _shrewd_ turn” now, while it implies a certain amount of sharp
+dealing, yet implies nothing more; and ‘shrewdness’ is applied to men
+rather in their praise than in their dispraise. And not ‘shrewd’ and
+‘shrewdness’ only, but a multitude of other words,--I will only instance
+‘prank’ ‘flirt’, ‘luxury’, ‘luxurious’, ‘peevish’, ‘wayward’,
+‘loiterer’, ‘uncivil’,--conveyed once a much more earnest moral
+disapproval than now they do.
+
+But I must bring this lecture to a close. I have but opened to you
+paths, which you, if you are so minded, can follow up for yourselves. We
+have learned lately to speak of men’s ‘antecedents’{225}; the phrase is
+newly come up; and it is common to say that if we would know what a man
+really now is, we must know his ‘antecedents’, that is, what he has been
+in time past. This is quite as true about words. If we would know what
+they now are, we must know what they have been; we must know, if
+possible, the date and place of their birth, the successive stages of
+their subsequent history, the company which they have kept, all the road
+which they have travelled, and what has brought them to the point at
+which now we find them; we must know, in short, their antecedents.
+
+{Sidenote: _Changes of Meaning_}
+
+And let me say, without attempting to bring back school into these
+lectures which are out of school, that, seeking to do this, we might add
+an interest to our researches in the lexicon and the dictionary which
+otherwise they could never have; that taking such words, for example, as
+ἐκκλησία, or παλιγγενεσία, or εὐτραπελία, or σοφιστής, or σχολαστικός,
+in Greek; as ‘religio’, or ‘sacramentum’, or ‘urbanitas’, or
+‘superstitio’, in Latin; as ‘libertine’, or ‘casuistry’{226}, or
+‘humanity’, or ‘humorous’, or ‘danger’, or ‘romance’, in English, and
+endeavouring to trace the manner in which one meaning grew out of and
+superseded another, and how they arrived at that use in which they have
+finally rested (if indeed before our English words there is not a future
+still), we shall derive, I believe, amusement, I am sure, instruction;
+we shall feel that we are really getting something, increasing the moral
+and intellectual stores of our minds; furnishing ourselves with that
+which may hereafter be of service to ourselves, may be of service to
+others--than which there can be no feeling more pleasurable, none more
+delightful. I shall be glad and thankful, if you can feel as much in
+regard of that lecture, which I now bring to its end{227}.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{198} [‘Frampold’, peevish, perverse (_Merry Wives of Windsor_, 1598,
+      ii, 2, 94) is supposed to be another form of ‘from-polled’, as if
+      ‘wrong-headed’. ‘Garboil’, a tumult or hubbub, was originally
+      _garboyl_, and came from old French _garbouil_ (Italian
+      _garbuglio_). ‘Brangle’, a brawl, stands for ‘brandle’ from Old
+      Fr. _brandeler_, akin to ‘brandish’.]
+
+{199} [‘Dutch’ i.e. Teutonic, Mid. High-German _diutsch_, old
+      High-German _diut-isk_ from _diot_, people, and so the people-ish
+      or popular language the mother-tongue, founded on a primitive
+      _teuta_, ‘people’. See Kluge _s.v. Deutsch_.]
+
+{200} So in Herrick’s _Electra_:
+
+          “More white than are the whitest creams,
+          Or moonlight _tinselling_ the streams”.
+
+{201} [Hence also the epidemic of malefic power supposed to be
+      air-borne, ‘influenza’.]
+
+{202} See Holinshed’s _Chronicles_, vol. iii, pp. 827, 1218; Ann. 1513,
+      1570.
+
+{203} _Fairy Queen_, vi, 7, 27; cf. v. 3, 37.
+
+{204} [The two words are intimately related, ‘king’, contracted for
+      _kining_ (Anglo-Saxon _cyn-ing_), ‘son of the kin’ or ‘tribe’, one
+      of the people, cognate with _cynde_, true-born, native, ‘kind’,
+      and _cynd_, nature ‘kind’, whence ‘kindly’, natural.]
+
+{205} See Sir W. Scott’s edition of Swift’s _Works_, vol. ix, p. 139.
+
+{206} θηριακή, from θηρίον, a designation given to the viper, see Acts
+      xxviii, 4. ‘Theriac’ is only the more rigid form of the same word,
+      the scholarly, as distinguished from the popular, adoption of it.
+      Augustine (_Con. duas Epp. Pelag._ iii, 7): Sicut fieri consuevit
+      antidotum etiam de serpentibus contra venena serpentum.
+
+{207} And Chaucer, more solemnly still:
+
+          “Christ, which that is to every harm _triacle_”.
+
+      The _antidotal_ character of treacle comes out yet more in these
+      lines of Lydgate:
+
+              “There is no _venom_ so parlious in sharpnes,
+          As whan it hath of _treacle_ a likenes”.
+
+{208} “A slave that within these twenty years rode with the _black
+      guard_ in the Duke’s carriage, ’mongst spits and dripping pans”.
+      (Webster’s _White Devil_.) [First ed. 1612. “The Black Guard of
+      the King’s Kitchen” is mentioned in a State Paper of 1535
+      (N.E.D.).]
+
+{209} Génin (_Lexique de la Langue de Molière_, p. 367) says well: “En
+      augmentant le nombre des mots, il a fallu restreindre leur
+      signification, et faire aux nouveaux un apanage aux dépens des
+      anciens”.
+
+{210} [Accordingly there is nothing tautological in the “dead corpses”
+      of 2 Kings xix, 35, in the A.V.]
+
+{211} [‘Weed’, vegetable growth, Anglo-Saxon _weód_, is here confounded
+      with a perfectly distinct word ‘weed’, clothing, which is the
+      Anglo-Saxon _waéd_, a garment.]
+
+{212} And no less so in French with ‘dame’, by which form not ‘domina’
+      only, but ‘dominus’, was represented. Thus in early French poetry,
+      “_Dame_ Dieu” for “_Dominus_ Deus” continually occurs. We have
+      here the key to the French exclamation, or oath, as we now
+      perceive it to be, ‘Dame’! of which the dictionaries give no
+      account. See Génin’s _Variations du Langage Français_, p. 347.
+
+{213} [‘Hoyden’ seems to be derived from the old Dutch _heyden_, a
+      heathen, then a clownish, boorish fellow.]
+
+{214} [This “ancient Saxon phrase”, as Longfellow calls it, has not been
+      found in any old English writer, but has been adopted from the
+      Modern German. Neither is it known in the dialects, E.D.D.]
+
+{215} “A _furlong_, quasi _furrowlong_, being so much as a team in
+      England plougheth going forward, before they return back again”.
+      (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, p. 42.) [‘Furlong’ in St.
+      Luke xxiv, 13, already occurs in the Anglo-Saxon version of that
+      passage as _furlanga_.]
+
+{216} [Recent etymologists cannot see any connexion between ‘peck’ and
+      ‘poke’.]
+
+{217} [e. g. “One said thus _preposterously_: ‘when we had climbed the
+      clifs and were a shore’” (Puttenham, _Arte of Eng. Poesie_, 1589,
+      p. 181, ed. Arber). “It is a _preposterous_ order to teach first
+      and to learn after” (_Preface to Bible_, 1611). “Place not the
+      coming of the wise men, _preposterously_, before the appearance of
+      the star” (Abp. Secker, _Sermons_, iii, 85, ed. 1825).]
+
+{218} Thus Barrow: “Which [courage and constancy] he that wanteth is no
+      other than _equivocally_ a gentleman, as an image or a carcass is
+      a man”.
+
+{219} Phillips, _New World of Words_, 1706. [‘Garble’ comes through old
+      French _garbeler_, _grabeler_ (Italian _garbellare_) from Latin
+      _cribellare_, to sift, and that from _cribellum_, a sieve,
+      diminutive of _cribrum_.]
+
+{220} “But his [Gideon’s] army must be _garbled_, as too great for God
+      to give victory thereby; all the fearful return home by
+      proclamation” (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, b. ii, c. 8).
+
+{221} [Compare the transitions of meaning in French _manant_ = (1) a
+      dweller (where he was born--from _manoir_ to dwell), the
+      inhabitant of a homestead, (2) a countryman, (3) a clown or boor,
+      a coarse fellow.]
+
+{222} [These words lie totally apart. ‘Brat’, an infant, seems a
+      figurative use of ‘brat’, a rag or pinafore, just as ‘bantling’
+      comes from ‘band’, a swathe.]
+
+{223} “We cannot always be contemplative, or _pragmatical_ abroad: but
+      have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged
+      soul may leave off awhile her severe schooling”. (Milton,
+      _Tetrachordon_.)
+
+{224} [Anglo-Saxon _cnafa_, or _cnapa_, a boy.]
+
+{225} [Mr. Fitzedward Hall in 1873 says ‘antecedents’ is “not yet a
+      generation old” (_Mod. English_, 303). Landor in 1853 says “the
+      French have lately taught (it to) us” (_Last Fruit of an Old
+      Tree_, 176). De Quincey, in 1854 calls it “modern slang” (_Works_
+      xiv, 449); and the earliest quotation, 1841, given in the N.E.D.,
+      introduces it as “what the French call their antecedents”.]
+
+{226} See Whewell, _History of Moral Philosophy in England_, pp.
+      xxvii.-xxxii.
+
+{227} For a fuller treatment of the subject of this lecture, see my
+      _Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in senses
+      different from their present_, 2nd ed. London, 1859.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS
+
+
+When I announce to you that the subject of my lecture to-day will be
+English orthography, or the spelling of the words in our native
+language, with the alterations which this has undergone, you may perhaps
+think with yourselves that a weightier, or, if not a weightier, at all
+events a more interesting subject might have occupied this our
+concluding lecture. I cannot admit it to be wanting either in importance
+or in interest. Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage,
+as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far higher
+acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by
+faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure it ought as little to
+be this; and would never prove so in competent hands{228}. Let us then
+address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope that it may
+yield us both profit and pleasure.
+
+I know not who it was that said, “The invention of printing was very
+well; but, as compared to the invention of writing, it was no such great
+matter after all”. Whoever it was who made this observation, it is clear
+that for him use and familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which
+there is in that, whereat we probably have long ceased to wonder at
+all--the power, namely, of representing sounds by written signs, of
+reproducing for the eye that which existed at first only for the ear:
+nor was the estimate which he formed of the relative value of these two
+inventions other than a just one. Writing indeed stands more nearly on a
+level with speaking, and deserves rather to be compared with it, than
+with printing; which, with all its utility, is yet of altogether another
+and inferior type of greatness: or, if this is too much to claim for
+writing, it may at any rate be affirmed to stand midway between the
+other two, and to be as much superior to the one as it is inferior to
+the other.
+
+The intention of the written word, that which presides at its first
+formation, the end whereunto it is a mean, is by aid of symbols agreed
+on beforehand, to represent to the eye with as much accuracy as possible
+the spoken word.
+
+{Sidenote: _Imperfection of Writing_}
+
+It never fulfils this intention completely, and by degrees more and more
+imperfectly. Short as man’s spoken word often falls of his thought, his
+written word falls often as short of his spoken. Several causes
+contribute to this. In the first place, the marks of imperfection and
+infirmity cleave to writing, as to every other invention of man. All
+alphabets have been left incomplete. They have superfluous letters,
+letters, that is, which they do not want, because other letters already
+represent the sound which they represent; they have dubious letters,
+letters, that is, which say nothing certain about the sounds they stand
+for, because more than one sound is represented by them--our ‘c’ for
+instance, which sometimes has the sound of ‘s’, as in ‘_c_ity’,
+sometimes of ‘k’, as in ‘_c_at’; they are deficient in letters, that is,
+the language has elementary sounds which have no corresponding letters
+appropriated to them, and can only be represented by combinations of
+letters. All alphabets, I believe, have some of these faults, not a few
+of them have all, and more. This then is one reason of the imperfect
+reproduction of the spoken word by the written. But another is, that the
+human voice is so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is able to
+mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so infinitely to
+modify and vary these sounds, that were an alphabet complete as human
+art could make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of four and
+twenty letters, there would still remain a multitude of sounds which it
+could only approximately give back{229}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Alphabets Inadequate_}
+
+But there is a further cause for the divergence which comes gradually to
+find place between men’s spoken and their written words. What men do
+often, they will seek to do with the least possible trouble. There is
+nothing which they do oftener than repeat words; they will seek here
+then to save themselves pains; they will contract two or more syllables
+into one; (‘toto opere’ will become ‘topper’; ‘vuestra merced’, ‘usted’;
+and ‘topside the other way’, ‘topsy-turvey’{230}); they will slur over,
+and thus after a while cease to pronounce, certain letters; for hard
+letters they will substitute soft; for those which require a certain
+effort to pronounce, they will substitute those which require little or
+none. Under the operation of these causes a gulf between the written and
+spoken word will not merely exist; but it will have the tendency to grow
+ever wider and wider. This tendency indeed will be partially
+counterworked by approximations which from time to time will by silent
+consent be made of the written word to the spoken; here and there a
+letter dropped in speech will be dropped also in writing, as the ‘s’ in
+so many French words, where its absence is marked by a circumflex; a new
+shape, contracted or briefer, which a word has taken on the lips of men,
+will find its representation in their writing; as ‘chirurgeon’ will not
+merely be pronounced, but also spelt, ‘surgeon’, and ‘synodsman’
+‘sidesman’. Still for all this, and despite of these partial
+readjustments of the relations between the two, the anomalies will be
+infinite; there will be a multitude of written letters which have ceased
+to be sounded letters; a multitude of words will exist in one shape upon
+our lips, and in quite another in our books.
+
+It is inevitable that the question should arise--Shall these anomalies
+be meddled with? shall it be attempted to remove them, and bring writing
+and speech into harmony and consent--a harmony and consent which never
+indeed in actual fact at any period of the language existed, but which
+yet may be regarded as the object of written speech, as the idea which,
+however imperfectly realized, has, in the reduction of spoken sounds to
+written, floated before the minds of men? If the attempt is to be made,
+it is clear that it can only be made in one way. The alternative is not
+open, whether Mahomet shall go to the mountain, _or_ the mountain to
+Mahomet. The spoken word is the mountain; it will not stir; it will
+resist all interference. It feels its own superior rights, that it
+existed the first, that it is, so to say, the elder brother; and it will
+never be induced to change itself for the purpose of conforming and
+complying with the written word. Men will not be persuaded to pronounce
+‘wou_l_d’ and ‘de_b_t’, because they write ‘would’ and ‘debt’ severally
+with an ‘l’ and with a ‘b’: but what if they could be induced to write
+‘woud’ and ‘det’, because they pronounce so; and to deal in like manner
+with all other words, in which there exists at present a discrepancy
+between the word as it is spoken, and the word as it is written?
+
+{Sidenote: _Phonetic Systems_}
+
+Here we have the explanation of that which in the history of almost all
+literatures has repeated itself more than once, namely, the endeavour to
+introduce phonetic writing. It has certain plausibilities to rest on; it
+has its appeal to the unquestionable fact that the written word was
+intended to picture to the eye what the spoken word sounded in the ear.
+At the same time I believe that it would be impossible to introduce it;
+and, even if it _were_ possible, that it would be most undesirable, and
+this for two reasons; the first being that the losses consequent upon
+its introduction, would far outweigh the gains, even supposing those
+gains as great as the advocates of the scheme promise; the second, that
+these promised gains would themselves be only very partially realized,
+or not at all.
+
+{Sidenote: _Alphabets Imperfect_}
+
+In the first place, I believe it to be impossible. It is clear that such
+a scheme must begin with the reconstruction of the alphabet. The first
+thing that the phonographers have perceived is the necessity for the
+creation of a vast number of new signs, the poverty of all existing
+alphabets, at any rate of our own, not yielding a several sign for all
+the several sounds in the language. Our English phonographers have
+therefore had to invent ten of these new signs or letters, which are
+henceforth to take their place with our _a_, _b_, _c_, and to enjoy
+equal rights with them. Rejecting two (_q_, _x_), and adding ten, they
+have raised their alphabet from twenty-six letters to thirty-four. But
+to procure the reception of such a reconstructed alphabet is simply an
+impossibility, as much an impossibility as would be the reconstitution
+of the structure of the language in any points where it was manifestly
+deficient or illogical. Sciolists or scholars may sit down in their
+studies, and devise these new letters, and prove that we need them, and
+that the introduction of them would be a great gain, and a manifest
+improvement; and this may be all very true; but if they think they can
+induce a people to adopt them, they know little of the ways in which its
+alphabet is entwined with the whole innermost life of a people. One may
+freely own that all present alphabets are redundant here, are deficient
+there; our English perhaps is as greatly at fault as any, and with that
+we have chiefly to do. Unquestionably it has more letters than one to
+express one and the same sound; it has only one letter to express two or
+three sounds; it has sounds which are only capable of being expressed at
+all by awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the same time we must
+accept the fact, as we accept any other which it is out of our power to
+change--with regret, indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence: as one
+accepts the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or forty miles nearer
+to England--that it is so difficult to get round Cape Horn--that the
+climate of Africa is so fatal to European life. A people will no more
+quit their alphabet than they will quit their language; they will no
+more consent to modify the one _ab extra_ than the other. Cæsar avowed
+that with all his power he could not introduce a new word, and certainly
+Claudius could not introduce a new letter. Centuries may sanction the
+bringing in of a new one, or the dropping of an old. But to imagine that
+it is possible to suddenly introduce a group of ten new letters, as
+these reformers propose--they might just as feasibly propose that the
+English language should form its comparatives and superlatives on some
+entirely new scheme, say in Greek fashion, by the terminations ‘oteros’
+and ‘otatos’; or that we should agree to set up a dual; or that our
+substantives should return to our Anglo-Saxon declensions. Any one of
+these or like proposals would not betray a whit more ignorance of the
+eternal laws which regulate human language, and of the limits within
+which deliberate action upon it is possible, than does this of
+increasing our alphabet by ten entirely novel signs.
+
+But grant it possible, grant our six and twenty letters to have so
+little sacredness in them that Englishmen would endure a crowd of
+upstart interlopers to mix themselves on an equal footing with them,
+still this could only be from a sense of the greatness of the advantage
+to be derived from this introduction. Now the vast advantage claimed by
+the advocates of the system is, that it would facilitate the learning to
+read, and wholly save the labour of learning to spell, which “on the
+present plan occupies”, as they assure us, “at the very lowest
+calculation from three to five years”. Spelling, it is said, would no
+longer need to be learned at all; since whoever knew the sound, would
+necessarily know also the spelling, this being in all cases in perfect
+conformity with that. The anticipation of this gain rests upon two
+assumptions which are tacitly taken for granted, but both of them
+erroneous.
+
+The first of these assumptions is, that all men pronounce all words
+alike, so that whenever they come to spell a word, they will exactly
+agree as to what the outline of its sound is. Now we are sure men will
+not do this from the fact that, before there was any fixed and settled
+orthography in our language, when therefore everybody was more or less a
+phonographer, seeking to write down the word as it sounded to _him_,
+(for he had no other law to guide him,) the variations of spelling were
+infinite. Take for instance the word ‘sudden’; which does not seem to
+promise any great scope for variety. I have myself met with this word
+spelt in the following fifteen ways among our early writers: ‘sodain’,
+‘sodaine’, ‘sodan’, ‘sodayne’, ‘sodden’, ‘sodein’, ‘sodeine’, ‘soden’,
+‘sodeyn’, ‘suddain’, ‘suddaine’, ‘suddein’, ‘suddeine’, ‘sudden’,
+‘sudeyn’. Again, in how many ways was Raleigh’s name spelt, or
+Shakespeare’s? The same is evident from the spelling of uneducated
+persons in our own day. They have no other rule but the sound to guide
+them. How is it that they do not all spell alike; erroneously, it may
+be, as having only the sound for their guide, but still falling all into
+exactly the same errors? What is the actual fact? They not merely spell
+wrong, which might be laid to the charge of our perverse system of
+spelling, but with an inexhaustible diversity of error, and that too in
+the case of simplest words. Thus the little town of Woburn would seem to
+give small room for caprice in spelling, while yet the postmaster there
+has made, from the superscription of letters that have passed through
+his hands, a collection of two hundred and forty-four varieties of ways
+in which the place has been spelt{231}. It may be replied that these
+were all or nearly all from the letters of the ignorant and uneducated.
+Exactly so;--but it is for their sakes, and to place them on a level
+with the educated, or rather to accelerate their education by the
+omission of a useless yet troublesome discipline, that the change is
+proposed. I wish to show you that after the change they would be just as
+much, or almost as much, at a loss in their spelling as now.
+
+{Sidenote: _Pronouncing Dictionaries_}
+
+And another reason which would make it quite as necessary then to learn
+orthography as now, is the following. Pronunciation, as I have already
+noticed, is far too fine and subtle a thing to be more than approximated
+to, and indicated in the written letter. In a multitude of cases the
+difficulties which pronunciation presented would be sought to be
+overcome in different ways, and thus different spelling, would arise; or
+if not so, one would have to be arbitrarily selected, and would have
+need to be learned, just as much as the spelling of a word now has need
+to be learned. I will only ask you, in proof of this which I affirm, to
+turn to any Pronouncing Dictionary. That greatest of all absurdities, a
+Pronouncing Dictionary, may be of some service to you in this matter; it
+will certainly be of none in any other. When you mark the elaborate and
+yet ineffectual artifices by which it toils after the finer distinctions
+of articulation, seeks to reproduce in letters what exists, and can only
+exist, as the spoken tradition of pronunciation, acquired from lip to
+lip by the organ of the ear, capable of being learned, but incapable of
+being taught; or when you compare two of these dictionaries with one
+another, and mark the entirely different schemes and combinations of
+letters which they employ for representing the same sound to the eye;
+you will then perceive how idle the attempt to make the written in
+language commensurate with the sounded; you will own that not merely
+out of human caprice, ignorance, or indolence, the former falls short of
+and differs from the later; but that this lies in the necessity of
+things, in the fact that man’s _voice_ can effect so much more than ever
+his _letter_ can{232}. You will then perceive that there would be as
+much, or nearly as much, of the arbitrary in spelling which calls itself
+phonetic as in our present, that spelling would have to be learned just
+as really then as now. We should be unable to dismiss the spelling card
+even after the arrival of that great day, when, for example, those lines
+of Pope which hitherto we have thus spelt and read,
+
+    “But errs not nature from this gracious end,
+    From burning suns when livid deaths descend,
+    When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep
+    Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep”?
+
+when I say, instead of this they should present themselves to our eyes
+in the following attractive form:
+
+    “But ¿ erz not nɛtiur from ðis grɛcus end,
+    from burniŋ sunz when livid deθs dɨsend,
+    when erθkwɛks swolɵ, or when tempests swɨp
+    tounz tu wun grɛv, hɵl nɛconz tu ðe dɨp”.
+
+{Sidenote: _Losses of Phonetic Spelling_}
+
+The scheme would not then fulfil its promises. Its vaunted gains, when
+we come to look closely at them, disappear. And now for its losses.
+There are in every language a vast number of words, which the ear does
+not distinguish from one another, but which are at once distinguishable
+to the eye by the spelling. I will only instance a few which are the
+same parts of speech; thus ‘sun’ and ‘son’; ‘virge’ (‘virga’, now
+obsolete) and ‘verge’; ‘reign’, ‘rain’, and ‘rein’; ‘hair’ and ‘hare’;
+‘plate’ and ‘plait’; ‘moat’ and ‘mote’; ‘pear’ and ‘pair’; ‘pain’ and
+‘pane’; ‘raise’ and ‘raze’; ‘air’ and ‘heir’; ‘ark’ and ‘arc’; ‘mite’
+and ‘might’; ‘pour’ and ‘pore’; ‘veil’ and ‘vale’; ‘knight’ and ‘night’;
+‘knave’ and ‘nave’; ‘pier’ and ‘peer’; ‘rite’ and ‘right’; ‘site’ and
+‘sight’; ‘aisle’ and ‘isle’; ‘concent’ and ‘consent’; ‘signet’ and
+‘cygnet’. Now, of course, it is a real disadvantage, and may be the
+cause of serious confusion, that there should be words in spoken
+languages of entirely different origin and meaning which yet cannot in
+sound be differenced from one another. The phonographers simply propose
+to extend this disadvantage already cleaving to our spoken languages, to
+the written languages as well. It is fault enough in the French
+language, that ‘mère’ a mother, ‘mer’ the sea, ‘maire’ a mayor of a
+town, should have no perceptible difference between them in the spoken
+tongue; or again that in some there should be nothing to distinguish
+‘sans’, ‘sang’, ‘sent’, ‘sens’, ‘s’en’, ‘cent’; nor yet between ‘ver’,
+‘vert’, ‘verre’ and ‘vers’. Surely it is not very wise to propose
+gratuitously to extend the same fault to the written languages as well.
+
+This loss in so many instances of the power to discriminate between
+words, which however liable to confusion now in our spoken language, are
+liable to none in our written, would be serious enough; but far more
+serious than this would be the loss which would constantly ensue, of all
+which visibly connects a word with the past, which tells its history,
+and indicates the quarter from which it has been derived. In how many
+English words a letter silent to the ear, is yet most eloquent to the
+eye--the _g_ for instance in ‘deign’, ‘feign’, ‘reign’, ‘impugn’,
+telling as it does of ‘dignor’, ‘fingo’, ‘regno’, ‘impugno’; even as the
+_b_ in ‘debt’, ‘doubt’, is not idle, but tells of ‘debitum’ and
+‘dubium’{233}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Pronunciation Alters_}
+
+At present it is the written word which is in all languages their
+conservative element. In it is the abiding witness against the
+mutilations or other capricious changes in their shape which
+affectation, folly, ignorance, and half-knowledge would introduce. It is
+not indeed always able to hinder the final adoption of these corrupter
+forms, but does not fail to oppose to them a constant, and very often a
+successful, resistance. With the adoption of phonetic spelling, this
+witness would exist no longer; whatever was spoken would have also to be
+written, let it be never so barbarous, never so great a departure from
+the true form of the word. Nor is it merely probable that such a
+barbarizing process, such an adopting and sanctioning of a vulgarism,
+might take place, but among phonographers it already has taken place. We
+all probably are aware that there is a vulgar pronunciation of the word
+‘Eu_rope_’, as though it were ‘Eu_rup_’. Now it is quite possible that
+numerically more persons in England may pronounce the word in this
+manner than in the right; and therefore the phonographers are only true
+to their principles when they spell it in the fashion which they do,
+‘Eurup’, or indeed omitting the E at the beginning, ‘Urup’{234} with
+thus the life of the first syllable assailed no less than that of the
+second. What are the consequences? First its relations with the old
+mythology are at once and entirely broken off; secondly, its most
+probable etymology from two Greek words, signifying ‘broad’ and ‘face’,
+Europe being so called from the _Broad_ line or _face_ of coast which
+our continent presented to the Asiatic Greek, is totally obscured. But
+so far from the spelling servilely following the pronunciation, I should
+be bold to affirm that if ninety-nine out of every hundred persons in
+England chose to call Europe ‘Urup’, this would be a vulgarism still,
+against which the written word ought to maintain its protest, not
+sinking down to their level, but rather seeking to elevate them to its
+own{235}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Changes of Pronunciation_}
+
+And if there is much in orthography which is unsettled now, how much
+more would be unsettled then. Inasmuch as the pronunciation of words is
+continually altering, their spelling would of course have continually to
+alter too. For the fact that pronunciation is undergoing constant
+changes, although changes for the most part unmarked, or marked only by
+a few, would be abundantly easy to prove. Take a Pronouncing Dictionary
+of fifty or a hundred years ago; turn to almost any page, and you will
+observe schemes of pronunciation there recommended, which are now merely
+vulgarisms, or which have been dropped altogether. We gather from a
+discussion in Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_{236}, that in his time ‘great’
+was by some of the best speakers of the language pronounced ‘gr_ee_t’,
+not ‘gr_a_te’: Pope usually rhymes it with ‘cheat’, ‘complete’, and the
+like; thus in the _Dunciad_:
+
+    “Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the _great_,
+    There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines com_plete_”.
+
+Spenser’s constant use of the word a century and a half earlier, leaves
+no doubt that such was the invariable pronunciation of his time{237}.
+Again, Pope rhymes ‘obliged’ with ‘beseiged’; and it has only ceased to
+be ‘obl_ee_ged’ almost in our own time. Who now drinks a cup of ‘tay’?
+yet there is abundant evidence that this was the fashionable
+pronunciation in the first half of the last century; the word, that is,
+was still regarded as French: Locke writes it ‘thé’; and in Pope’s time,
+though no longer written, it was still pronounced so. Take this couplet
+of his in proof:
+
+    “Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms _obey_,
+    Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes _tea_”.
+
+So too a pronunciation which still survives, though scarcely among
+well-educated persons, I mean ‘Room’ for ‘Rome’, must have been in
+Shakespeare’s time the predominant one, else there would have been no
+point in that play on words where in _Julius Cæsar_ Cassius, complaining
+that in all _Rome_ there was not _room_ for a single man, exclaims,
+
+    “Now is it _Rome_ indeed, and _room_ enough”.
+
+Samuel Rogers too assures us that in his youth “everybody said
+‘Lonnon’{238} not ‘London’; that Fox said ‘Lonnon’ to the last”.
+
+The following quotation from Swift will prove to you that I have been
+only employing here an argument, which he employed long ago against the
+phonographers of his time. He exposes thus the futility of their
+scheme{239}: “Another cause which has contributed not a little to the
+maiming of our language, is a foolish opinion advanced of late years
+that we ought to spell exactly as we speak: which, besides the obvious
+inconvenience of utterly destroying our etymology, would be a thing we
+should never see an end of. Not only the several towns and counties of
+England have a different way of pronouncing, but even here in London
+they clip their words after one manner about the court, another in the
+city, and a third in the suburbs; and in a few years, it is probable,
+will all differ from themselves, as fancy or fashion shall direct; all
+which, reduced to writing, would entirely confound orthography”.
+
+This much I have thought good to say in respect of that entire
+revolution in English orthography, which some rash innovators have
+proposed. Let me, dismissing them and their innovations, call your
+attention now to those changes in spelling which are constantly going
+forward, at some periods more rapidly than at others, but which never
+wholly cease out of a language; while at the same time I endeavour to
+trace, where this is possible, the motives and inducements which bring
+them about. It is a subject which none can neglect, who desire to obtain
+even a tolerably accurate acquaintance with their native tongue. Some
+principles have been laid down in the course of what has been said
+already, that may help us to judge whether the changes which have found
+place in our own have been for better or for worse. We shall find, if I
+am not mistaken, of both kinds.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Grogram_’}
+
+There are alterations in spelling which are for the worse. Thus an
+altered spelling will sometimes obscure the origin of a word, concealing
+it from those who, but for this, would at once have known whence and
+what it was, and would have found both pleasure and profit in this
+knowledge. I need not say that in all those cases where the earlier
+spelling revealed the secret of the word, told its history, which the
+latter defaces or conceals, the change has been injurious, and is to be
+regretted; while, at the same time, where it has thoroughly established
+itself, there is nothing to do but to acquiesce in it: the attempt to
+undo it would be absurd. Thus, when ‘gro_c_er’ was spelt ‘gro_ss_er’, it
+was comparatively easy to see that he first had his name, because he
+sold his wares not by retail, but in the _gross_. ‘Co_x_comb’ tells us
+nothing now; but it did when spelt, as it used to be, ‘co_cks_comb’, the
+_comb_ of a _cock_ being then an ensign or token which the fool was
+accustomed to wear. In ‘grogra_m_’ we are entirely to seek for the
+derivation; but in ‘grogra_n_’ or ‘grogra_in_’, as earlier it was spelt,
+one could scarcely miss ‘grosgrain’, the stuff of a _coarse grain_ or
+woof. How many now understand ‘woodbin_e_’? but who could have helped
+understanding ‘woodbin_d_’ (Ben Jonson)? What a mischievous alteration
+in spelling is ‘d_i_vest’ instead of ‘d_e_vest’{240}. This change is so
+recent that I am tempted to ask whether it would not here be possible to
+return to the only intelligible spelling of this word.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Pigmy_’}
+
+‘P_i_gmy’ used formerly to be spelt ‘p_y_gmy’, and so long as it was so,
+no Greek scholar could see the word, but at once he knew that by it
+were indicated manikins whose measure in height was no greater than
+that of a man’s arm from the elbow to the closed _fist_{241}. Now he may
+know this in other ways; but the word itself, so long as he assumes it
+to be rightly spelt, tells him nothing. Or again, the old spelling,
+‘diam_ant_’, was preferable to the modern ‘diam_ond_’. It was
+preferable, because it told more of the quarter whence the word had
+reached us. ‘Diamant’ and ‘adamant’ are in fact only two different
+adoptions on the part of the English tongue, of one and the same Greek,
+which afterwards became a Latin word. The primary meaning of ‘adamant’
+is, as you know, the indomitable, and it was a name given at first to
+steel as the hardest of metals; but afterwards transferred{242} to the
+most precious among all the precious stones, as that which in power of
+resistance surpassed everything besides.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Cozen_’, ‘_Bless_’}
+
+Neither are new spellings to be commended, which obliterate or obscure
+the relationship of a word with others to which it is really allied;
+separating from one another, for those not thoroughly acquainted with
+the subject, words of the same family. Thus when ‘_j_aw’ was spelt
+‘_ch_aw’, no ne could miss its connexions with the verb ‘to chew’{243}.
+Now probably ninety-nine out of a hundred who use both words, are
+entirely unaware of any relationship between them. It is the same with
+‘cousin’ (consanguineus), and ‘to cozen’ or to deceive. I do not propose
+to determine which of these words should conform itself to the spelling
+of the other. There was great irregularity in the spelling of both from
+the first; yet for all this, it was then better than now, when a
+permanent distinction has established itself between them, keeping out
+of sight that ‘to cozen’ is in all likelihood to deceive under show of
+kindred and affinity; which if it be so, Shakespeare’s words,
+
+    “_Cousins_ indeed, and by their uncle _cozened_
+    Of comfort”{244},
+
+will be found to contain not a pun, but an etymology{245}. The real
+relation between ‘bliss’ and ‘to bless’ is in like manner at present
+obscured{246}.
+
+The omission of a letter, or the addition of a letter, may each
+effectually do its work in keeping out of sight the true character and
+origin of a word. Thus the omission of a letter. When the first syllable
+of ‘bran-new’ was spelt ‘bran_d_’ with a final ‘d’, ‘bran_d_-new’, how
+vigorous an image did the word contain. The ‘brand’ is the fire, and
+‘brand-new’ equivalent to ‘fire-new’ (Shakespeare), is that which is
+fresh and bright, as being newly come from the forge and fire. As now
+spelt, ‘bran-new’ conveys to us no image at all. Again, you have the
+word ‘scrip’--as a ‘scrip’ of paper, government ‘scrip’. Is this the
+same word with the Saxon ‘scrip’, a wallet, having in some strange
+manner obtained these meanings so different and so remote? Have we here
+only two different applications of one and the same word, or two
+homonyms, wholly different words, though spelt alike? We have only to
+note the way in which the first of these ‘scrips’ used to be written,
+namely with a final ‘t’, not ‘scrip’ but ‘scrip_t_’, and we are at once
+able to answer the question. This ‘script’ is a Latin, as the other is
+an Anglo-Saxon, word, and meant at first simply a _written_ (scripta)
+piece of paper--a circumstance which since the omission of the final ‘t’
+may easily escape our knowledge. ‘Afraid’ was spelt much better in old
+times with the double ‘ff’, than with the single ‘f’ as now. It was then
+clear that it was not another form of ‘afeared’, but wholly separate
+from it, the participle of the verb ‘to affray’, ‘affrayer’, or, as it
+is now written, ‘effrayer’{247}.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Whole_’, ‘_Hale_’, ‘_Heal_’}
+
+In the cases hitherto adduced, it has been the omission of a letter
+which has clouded and concealed the etymology. The intrusion of a letter
+sometimes does the same. Thus in the early editions of _Paradise Lost_,
+and in all writers of that time, you will find ‘scent’, an odour, spelt
+‘sent’. It was better so; there is no other noun substantive ‘sent’,
+with which it is in danger of being confounded; while its relation with
+‘sentio’, with ‘re_sent_’{248}, ‘dis_sent_’, and the like, is put out of
+sight by its novel spelling; the intrusive ‘_c_’, serves only to
+mislead. The same thing was attempted with ‘site’, ‘situate’,
+‘situation’, spelt for a time by many, ‘s_c_ite’, ‘s_c_ituate’,
+‘s_c_ituation’; but it did not continue with these. Again, ‘whole’, in
+Wiclif’s Bible, and indeed much later, occasionally as far down as
+Spenser, is spelt ‘hole’, without the ‘w’ at the beginning. The present
+orthography may have the advantage of at once distinguishing the word to
+the eye from any other; but at the same time the initial ‘w’, now
+prefixed, hides its relation to the verb ‘to heal’, with which it is
+closely allied. The ‘whole’ man is he whose hurt is ‘healed’ or
+covered{249} (we say of the convalescent that he ‘recovers’){250};
+‘whole’ being closely allied to ‘hale’ (integer), from which also by
+its modern spelling it is divided. ‘Wholesome’ has naturally followed
+the fortunes of ‘whole’; it was spelt ‘holsome’ once.
+
+Of ‘island’ too our present spelling is inferior to the old, inasmuch as
+it suggests a hybrid formation, as though the word were made up of the
+Latin ‘insula’, and the Saxon ‘land’. It is quite true that ‘isle’ _is_
+in relation with, and descent from, ‘insula’, ‘isola’, ‘île’; and hence
+probably the misspelling of ‘island’. This last however has nothing to
+do with ‘insula’, being identical with the German ‘eiland’, the
+Anglo-Saxon ‘ealand’{251} and signifying the sea-land, or land girt,
+round with the sea. And it is worthy of note that this ‘s’ in the first
+syllable of ‘island’ is quite of modern introduction. In all the earlier
+versions of the Scriptures, and in the Authorized Version as at first
+set forth, it is ‘iland’; while in proof that this is not accidental, it
+may be observed that, while ‘iland’ has not the ‘s’, ‘isle’ has it (see
+Rev. i. 9). ‘Iland’ indeed is the spelling which we meet with far down
+into the seventeenth century.
+
+{Sidenote: _Folk-etymologies_}
+
+What has just been said of ‘island’ leads me as by a natural transition
+to observe that one of the most frequent causes of alteration in the
+spelling of a word is a wrongly assumed derivation. It is then sought to
+bring the word into harmony with, and to make it by its spelling
+suggest, this derivation, which has been erroneously thrust upon it.
+Here is a subject which, followed out as it deserves, would form an
+interesting and instructive chapter in the history of language{252}. Let
+me offer one or two small contributions to it; noting first by the way
+how remarkable an evidence we have in this fact, of the manner in which
+not the learned only, but all persons learned and unlearned alike, crave
+to have these words not body only, but body and soul. What an
+attestation, I say, of this lies in the fact that where a word in its
+proper derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape and mould
+it into some other form, not enduring that it should be a mere inert
+sound without sense in their ears; and if they do not know its right
+origin, will rather put into it a wrong one, than that it should have
+for them no meaning, and suggest no derivation at all{253}.
+
+There is probably no language in which such a process has not been going
+forward; in which it is not the explanation, in a vast number of
+instances, of changes in spelling and even in form, which words have
+undergone. I will offer a few examples of it from foreign tongues,
+before adducing any from our own. ‘Pyramid’ is a word, the spelling of
+which was affected in the Greek by an erroneous assumption of its
+derivation; the consequences of this error surviving in our own word to
+the present day. It is spelt by us with a ‘y’ in the first syllable, as
+it was spelt with the υ corresponding in the Greek. But why was this? It
+was because the Greeks assumed that the pyramids were so named from
+their having the appearance of _flame_ going up into a point{254}, and
+so they spelt ‘pyramid’, that they might find πῦρ or ‘pyre’ in it; while
+in fact ‘pyramid’ has nothing to do with flame or fire at all; being, as
+those best qualified to speak on the matter declare to us, an Egyptian
+word of quite a different signification{255}, and the Coptic letters
+being much better represented by the diphthong ‘ei’ than by the letter
+‘y’, as no doubt, but for this mistaken notion of what the word was
+intended to mean, they would have been.
+
+Once more--the form ‘Hierosolyma’, wherein the Greeks reproduced the
+Hebrew ‘Jerusalem’, was intended in all probability to express that the
+city so called was the _sacred_ city of the _Solymi_{256}. At all events
+the intention not merely of reproducing the Hebrew word, but also of
+making it significant in Greek, of finding ἱερόν in it, is plainly
+discernible. For indeed the Greeks were exceedingly intolerant of
+foreign words, till they had laid aside their foreign appearance--of
+all words which they could not thus quicken with a Greek soul; and, with
+a very characteristic vanity, an ignoring of all other tongues but their
+own, assumed with no apparent misgivings that all words, from whatever
+quarter derived, were to be explained by Greek etymologies{257}.
+
+‘Tartar’ is another word, of which it is at least possible that a
+wrongly assumed derivation has modified the spelling, and indeed not
+the spelling only, but the very shape in which we now possess it. To
+many among us it may be known that the people designated by this
+appellation are not properly ‘Tartars’, but ‘Tatars’; and you sometimes
+perhaps have noted the omission of the ‘r’ on the part of those who are
+curious in their spelling. How, then, it may be asked, did the form
+‘Tartar’ arise? When the terrible hordes of middle Asia burst in upon
+civilized Europe in the thirteenth century, many beheld in the ravages
+of their innumerable cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word in the
+Revelation (chap. ix.) concerning the opening of the bottomless pit; and
+from this belief ensued the change of their name from ‘Tatars’ to
+‘Tartars’, which was thus put into closer relation with ‘Tartarus’ or
+hell, out of which their multitudes were supposed to have proceeded{258}.
+
+Another good example in the same kind is the German word ‘sündflut’, the
+Deluge, which is now so spelt as to signify a ‘sinflood’, the plague or
+_flood_ of waters brought on the world by the _sins_ of mankind; and
+probably some of us have before this admired the pregnant significance
+of the word. Yet the old High German word had originally no such
+intention; it was spelt ‘sinfluot’, that is, the great flood; and as
+late as Luther, indeed in Luther’s own translation of the Bible, is so
+spelt as to make plain that the notion of a ‘_sin_-flood’ had not yet
+found its way into, even as it had not affected the spelling of, the
+word{259}.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Currants_’}
+
+But to look now nearer home for our examples. The little raisins brought
+from Greece, which play so important a part in one of the national
+dishes of England, the Christmas plum-pudding, used to be called
+‘corinths’; and so you would find them in mercantile lists of a hundred
+years ago: either that for the most part they were shipped from Corinth,
+the principal commercial city in Greece, or because they grew in large
+abundance in the immediate district round about it. Their likeness in
+shape and size and general appearance to our own currants, working
+together with the ignorance of the great majority of English people
+about any such place as Corinth, soon brought the name ‘corinths’ into
+‘currants’, which now with a certain unfitness they bear; being not
+currants at all, but dried grapes, though grapes of diminutive
+size{260}.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Court-cards_’}
+
+‘_Court_-cards’, that is, the king, queen, and knave in each suit, were
+once ‘coat-cards’{261}; having their name from the long splendid ‘coat’
+(vestis talaris) with which they were arrayed. Probably ‘coat’ after a
+while did not perfectly convey its original meaning and intention; being
+no more in common use for the long garment reaching down to the heels;
+and then ‘coat’ was easily exchanged for ‘court’, as the word is now
+both spelt and pronounced, seeing that nowhere so fitly as in a Court
+should such splendidly arrayed personages be found. A public house in
+the neighbourhood of London having a few years since for its sign “The
+George _Canning_” is already “The George and _Cannon_”,--so rapidly do
+these transformations proceed, so soon is that forgotten which we
+suppose would never be forgotten. “Welsh _rarebit_” becomes “Welsh
+_rabbit_”{262}; and ‘_farced_’ or stuffed ‘meat’ becomes “forced meat”.
+Even the mere determination to make a word _look_ English, to put it
+into an English shape, without thereby so much as seeming to attain any
+result in the way of etymology, this is very often sufficient to bring
+about a change in its spelling, and even in its form{263}. It is thus
+that ‘sipahi’ has become ‘sepoy’; and only so could ‘weissager’ have
+taken its present form of ‘wiseacre’{264}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Transformation of Words_}
+
+It is not very uncommon for a word, while it is derived from one word,
+to receive a certain impulse and modification from another. This extends
+sometimes beyond the spelling, and in cases where it does so, would
+hardly belong to our present theme. Still I may notice an instance or
+two. Thus our ‘obsequies’ is the Latin ‘exequiæ’, but formed under a
+certain impulse of ‘obsequium’, and seeking to express and include the
+observant honour of that word. ‘To refuse’ is ‘recusare’, while yet it
+has derived the ‘f’ of its second syllable from ‘refutare’; it is a
+medley of the two{265}. The French ‘rame’, an oar, is ‘remus’, but that
+modified by an unconscious recollection of ‘ramus’. ‘Orange’ is no doubt
+a Persian word, which has reached us through the Arabic, and which the
+Spanish ‘naranja’ more nearly represents than any form of it existing in
+the other languages of Europe. But what so natural as to think of the
+orange as the _golden_ fruit, especially when the “_aurea_ mala” of the
+Hesperides were familiar to all antiquity? There cannot be a doubt that
+‘aurum’, ‘oro’, ‘or’, made themselves felt in the shapes which the word
+assumed in the languages of the West, and that here we have the
+explanation of the change in the first syllable, as in the low Latin
+‘aurantium’, ‘orangia’, and in the French ‘orange’, which has given us
+our own.
+
+It is foreign words, or words adopted from foreign languages, as might
+beforehand be expected, which are especially subjected to such
+transformations as these. The soul which the word once had in its own
+language, having, for as many as do not know that language, departed
+from it, or at least not being now any more to be recognized by such as
+employ the word, these are not satisfied till they have put another soul
+into it, and it has thus become alive to them again. Thus--to take first
+one or two very familiar instances, but which serve as well as any other
+to illustrate my position--the Bellerophon becomes for our sailors the
+‘Billy Ruffian’, for what can they know of the Greek mythology, or of
+the slayer of Chimæra? an iron steamer, the Hirondelle, now or lately
+plying on the Tyne, is the ‘Iron Devil’. ‘_Contre_ danse’, or dance in
+which the parties stand _face to face_ with one another, and which ought
+to have appeared in English as ‘_counter_ dance’, does become ‘_country_
+dance’{266}, as though it were the dance of the country folk and rural
+districts, as distinguished from the quadrille and waltz and more
+artificial dances of the town{267}. A well known rose, the “rose _des
+quatre saisons_”, or of the four seasons, becomes on the lips of some of
+our gardeners, the “rose of the _quarter sessions_”, though here it is
+probable that the eye has misled, rather than the ear. ‘Dent de lion’,
+(it is spelt ‘dentdelyon’ in our early writers) becomes ‘dandylion’,
+“_chaude_ melée”, or an affray in _hot_ blood, “_chance_-medley”{268},
+‘causey’ (chaussée) becomes ‘causeway’{269}, ‘rachitis’ ‘rickets’{270},
+and in French ‘mandragora’ ‘main de gloire’{271}.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Necromancy_’}
+
+‘Necromancy’ is another word which, if not now, yet for a long period
+was erroneously spelt, and indeed assumed a different shape, under the
+influence of an erroneous derivation; which, curiously enough, even now
+that it has been dismissed, has left behind it the marks of its
+presence, in our common phrase, “the _Black_ Art”. I need hardly remind
+you that ‘necromancy’ is a Greek word, which signifies, according to its
+proper meaning, a prophesying by aid of the dead, or that it rests on
+the presumed power of raising up by potent spells the dead, and
+compelling them to give answers about things to come. We all know that
+it was supposed possible to exercise such power; we have a very awful
+example of it in the story of the witch of Endor, and a very horrid one
+in Lucan{272}. But the Latin medieval writers, whose Greek was either
+little or none, spelt the word, ‘nigromantia’, as if its first syllables
+had been Latin: at the same time, not wholly forgetting the original
+meaning, but in fact getting round to it though by a wrong process, they
+understood the dead by these ‘nigri’, or blacks, whom they had brought
+into the word{273}. Down to a rather late period we find the forms,
+‘_negro_mancer’ and ‘_negro_mancy’ frequent in English.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words Misspelt_}
+
+‘Pleurisy’ used often to be spelt, (I do not think it is so now,)
+without an ‘e’ in the first syllable, evidently on the tacit assumption
+that it was from _plus pluris_{274}. When Shakespeare falls into an
+error, he “makes the offence gracious”; yet, I think, he would scarcely
+have written,
+
+    “For goodness growing to a _plurisy_
+    Dies of his own _too much_”,
+
+but that _he_ too derived ‘plurisy’ from _pluris_. This, even with the
+“small Latin and less Greek”, which Ben Jonson allows him, he scarcely
+would have done, had the word presented itself in that form, which by
+right of its descent from πλευρά (being a pain, stitch, or sickness _in
+the side_) it ought to have possessed. Those who for ‘crucible’ wrote
+‘chrysoble’ (Jeremy Taylor does so) must evidently have done this under
+the assumption that the Greek for _gold_, and not the Latin for _cross_,
+lay at the foundation of this word. ‘Anthymn’ instead of ‘anthem’
+(Barrow so spells the word), rests plainly on a wrong etymology, even as
+this spelling clearly betrays what that wrong etymology is. ‘Rhyme’ with
+a ‘y’ is a modern misspelling; and would never have been but for the
+undue influence which the Greek ‘rhythm’ has exercised upon it. Spenser
+and his cotemporaries spell it ‘rime’. ‘Abominable’ was by some
+etymologists of the seventeenth century spelt ‘abhominable’, as though
+it were that which departed from the human (ab homine) into the bestial
+or devilish.
+
+In all these words which I have adduced last, the correct spelling has
+in the end resumed its sway. It is not so with ‘frontisp_ie_ce’, which
+ought to be spelt ‘frontisp_i_ce’ (it was so by Milton and others),
+being the low Latin ‘frontispicium’, from ‘frons’ and ‘aspicio’, the
+forefront of the building, that part which presents itself to the view.
+It was only the entirely ungrounded notion that the word ‘piece’
+constitutes the last syllable, which has given rise to our present
+orthography{275}.
+
+{Sidenote: Wrong Spelling}
+
+You may, perhaps, wonder that I have dwelt so long on these details of
+spelling; that I have bestowed on them so much of my own attention,
+that I have claimed for them so much of yours; yet in truth I cannot
+regard them as unworthy of our very closest heed. For indeed of how much
+beyond itself is accurate or inaccurate spelling the certain indication.
+Thus when we meet ‘s_y_ren’, for ‘s_i_ren’, as so strangely often we do,
+almost always in newspapers, and often where we should hardly have
+expected (I met it lately in the _Quarterly Review_, and again in
+Gifford’s _Massinger_), how difficult it is not to be “judges of evil
+thoughts”, and to take this slovenly misspelling as the specimen and
+evidence of an inaccuracy and ignorance which reaches very far wider
+than the single word which is before us. But why is it that so much
+significance is ascribed to a wrong spelling? Because ignorance of a
+word’s spelling at once argues ignorance of its origin and derivation. I
+do not mean that one who spells rightly may not be ignorant of it too,
+but he who spells wrongly is certainly so. Thus, to recur to the example
+I have just adduced, he who for ‘s_i_ren’ writes ‘s_y_ren’, certainly
+knows nothing of the magic _cords_ (σειραί) of song, by which those fair
+enchantresses were supposed to draw those that heard them to their
+ruin{276}.
+
+Correct or incorrect orthography being, then, this note of accurate or
+inaccurate knowledge, we may confidently conclude where two spellings
+of a word exist, and are both employed by persons who generally write
+with precision and scholarship, that there must be something to account
+for this. It will generally be worth your while to inquire into the
+causes which enable both spellings to hold their ground and to find
+their supporters, not ascribing either one or the other to mere
+carelessness or error. It will in these cases often be found that two
+spellings exist, because two views of the word’s origin exist, and each
+of those spellings is the correct expression of one of these. The
+question therefore which way of spelling should continue, and wholly
+supersede the other, and which, while the alternative remains, we should
+ourselves employ, can only be settled by settling which of these
+etymologies deserves the preference. So is it, for example, with
+‘ch_y_mist’ and ‘ch_e_mist’, neither of which has obtained in our common
+use the complete mastery over the other{277}. It is not here, as in some
+other cases, that one is certainly right, the other as certainly wrong:
+but they severally represent two different etymologies of the word, and
+each is correct according to its own. If we are to spell ‘ch_y_mist’ and
+‘ch_y_mistry’, it is because these words are considered to be derived
+from the Greek word, χυμός, sap; and the chymic art will then have
+occupied itself first with distilling the juice and sap of plants, and
+will from this have derived its name. I have little doubt, however, that
+the other spelling, ‘ch_e_mist’, not ‘ch_y_mist’, is the correct one. It
+was not with the distillation of herbs, but with the amalgamation of
+metals, that chemistry occupied itself at its rise, and the word
+embodies a reference to Egypt, the land of Ham or ‘Cham’{278}, in which
+this art was first practised with success.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Satyr_’, ‘_Satire_’}
+
+Of how much confusion the spelling which used to be so common, ‘satyr’
+for ‘satire’, is at once the consequence, the expression, and again the
+cause; not indeed that this confusion first began with us{279}; for the
+same already found place in the Latin, where ‘satyricus’ was continually
+written for ‘satiricus’ out of a false assumption of the identity
+between the Roman _satire_ and the Greek _satyric_ drama. The Roman
+‘satira’,--I speak of things familiar to many of my hearers,--is
+properly a _full_ dish (lanx being understood)--a dish heaped up with
+various ingredients, a ‘farce’ (according to the original signification
+of that word), or hodge-podge; and the word was transferred from this to
+a form of poetry which at first admitted the utmost variety in the
+materials of which it was composed, and the shapes into which these
+materials were wrought up; being the only form of poetry which the
+Romans did _not_ borrow from the Greeks. Wholly different from this,
+having no one point of contact with it in its form, its history, or its
+intention, is the ‘satyric’ drama of Greece, so called because Silenus
+and the ‘Satyrs’ supplied the chorus; and in their naïve selfishness,
+and mere animal instincts, held up before men a mirror of what they
+would be, if only the divine, which is also the truly human, element of
+humanity, were withdrawn; what man, all that properly made him man being
+withdrawn, would prove.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Mid-wife_’, ‘_Nostril_’}
+
+And then what light, as we have already seen, does the older spelling of
+a word often cast upon its etymology; how often does it clear up the
+mystery, which would otherwise have hung about it, or which _had_ hung
+about it till some one had noticed and turned to profit this its earlier
+spelling. Thus ‘dirge’ is always spelt ‘dirige’ in early English. This
+‘dirige’ may be the first word in a Latin psalm or prayer once used at
+funerals; there is a reasonable probability that the explanation of the
+word is here; at any rate, if it is not here, it is nowhere{280}. The
+derivation of ‘mid-wife’ is uncertain, and has been the subject of
+discussion; but when we find it spelt ‘medewife’ and ‘meadwife’, in
+Wiclif’s Bible, this leaves hardly a doubt that it is the _wife_ or
+woman who acts for a _mead_ or reward{281}. In cases too where there
+was no mystery hanging about a word, how often does the early spelling
+make clear to all that which was before only known to those who had made
+the language their study. For example, if an early edition of Spenser
+should come into your hands, or a modern one in which the early spelling
+is retained, what continual lessons in English might you derive from it.
+Thus ‘nostril’ is always spelt by him and his cotemporaries
+‘nosethrill’; a little earlier it was ‘nosethirle’. Now ‘to thrill’ is
+the same as to drill or pierce; it is plain then here at once that the
+word signifies the orifice or opening with which the _nose_ is
+_thrilled_, drilled, or pierced. We might have read the word for ever in
+our modern spelling without being taught this. ‘Ell’ tells us nothing
+about itself; but in ‘eln’ used in Holland’s translation of Camden, we
+recognize ‘ulna’ at once.
+
+Again, the ‘morris’ or ‘morrice-dance’, which is alluded to so often by
+our early poets, as it is now spelt informs us nothing about itself; but
+read ‘_moriske_ dance’, as it is generally spelt by Holland and his
+cotemporaries, and you will scarcely fail to perceive that of which
+indeed there is no manner of doubt; namely, that it was so called either
+because it was really, or was supposed to be, a dance in use among the
+_moriscoes_ of Spain, and from thence introduced into England{282}.
+
+Again, philologers tell us, and no doubt rightly, that our ‘cray-fish’,
+or ‘craw-fish’, is the French ‘écrevisse’. This is true, but certainly
+it is not self-evident. Trace however the word through these successive
+spellings, ‘krevys’ (Lydgate), ‘crevish’ (Gascoigne), ‘craifish’
+(Holland), and the chasm between ‘cray-fish’ or ‘craw-fish’ and
+‘écrevisse’ is by aid of these three intermediate spellings bridged over
+at once; and in the fact of our Gothic ‘fish’ finding its way into this
+French word we see only another example of a law, which has been already
+abundantly illustrated in this lecture{283}.
+
+{Sidenote: ‘_Emmet_’, ‘_Ant_’}
+
+In other ways also an accurate taking note of the spelling of words, and
+of the successive changes which it has undergone, will often throw light
+upon them. Thus we may know, others having assured us of the fact, that
+‘ant’ and ‘emmet’ were originally only two different spellings of one
+and the same word; but we may be perplexed to understand how two forms
+of a word, now so different, could ever have diverged from a single
+root. When however we find the different spellings, ‘emmet’, ‘emet’,
+‘amet’, ‘amt’, ‘ant’, the gulf which appeared to separate ‘emmet’ from
+‘ant’ is bridged over at once, and we do not merely know on the
+assurance of others that these two are in fact identical, their
+differences being only superficial, but we perceive clearly in what
+manner they are so{284}.
+
+Even before any close examination of the matter, it is hard not to
+suspect that ‘runagate’ is in fact another form of ‘renegade’, slightly
+transformed, as so many words, to put an English signification into its
+first syllable; and then the meaning gradually modified in obedience to
+the new derivation which was assumed to be its original and true one.
+Our suspicion of this is very greatly strengthened (for we see how very
+closely the words approach one another), by the fact that ‘renega_d_e’
+is constantly spelt ‘renega_t_e’ in our old authors, while at the same
+time the denial of _faith_, which is now a necessary element in
+‘renegade’, and one differencing it inwardly from ‘runagate’, is
+altogether wanting in early use--the denial of _country_ and of the
+duties thereto owing being all that is implied in it. Thus it is
+constantly employed in Holland’s _Livy_ as a rendering of ‘perfuga’{285};
+while in the one passage where ‘runagate’ occurs in the Prayer Book
+Version of the Psalms (Ps. lxviii. 6), a reference to the original will
+show that the translators could only have employed it there on the
+ground that it also expressed rebel, revolter, and not runaway
+merely{286}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Assimilating Power of English_}
+
+I might easily occupy your attention much longer, so little barren or
+unfruitful does this subject of spelling appear likely to prove; but all
+things must have an end; and as I concluded my first lecture with a
+remarkable testimony borne by an illustrious German scholar to the
+merits of our English tongue, I will conclude my last with the words of
+another, not indeed a German, but still of the great Germanic stock;
+words resuming in themselves much of which we have been speaking upon
+this and upon former occasions: “As our bodies”, he says, “have hidden
+resources and expedients, to remove the obstacles which the very art of
+the physician puts in its way, so language, ruled by an indomitable
+inward principle, triumphs in some degree over the folly of grammarians.
+Look at the English, polluted by Danish and Norman conquests, distorted
+in its genuine and noble features by old and recent endeavours to mould
+it after the French fashion, invaded by a hostile entrance of Greek and
+Latin words, threatening by increasing hosts to overwhelm the indigenous
+terms. In these long contests against the combined power of so many
+forcible enemies, the language, it is true, has lost some of its power
+of inversion in the structure of sentences, the means of denoting the
+difference of gender, and the nice distinctions by inflection and
+termination--almost every word is attacked by the spasm of the accent
+and the drawing of consonants to wrong positions; yet the old English
+principle is not overpowered. Trampled down by the ignoble feet of
+strangers, its springs still retain force enough to restore itself. It
+lives and plays through all the veins of the language; it impregnates
+the innumerable strangers entering its dominions with its temper, and
+stains them with its colour, not unlike the Greek which in taking up
+oriental words, stripped them of their foreign costume, and bid them to
+appear as native Greeks”{287}.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{228} In proof that it need not be so, I would only refer to a paper,
+      _On Orthographical Expedients_, by Edwin Guest, Esq., in the
+      _Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. iii. p. 1.
+
+{229} [The scientific treatises on Phonetics of Mr. Alexander J. Ellis
+      and Dr. Henry Sweet have surmounted the difficulty of registering
+      sounds with great accuracy.]
+
+{230} I have not observed this noticed in our dictionaries as the
+      original form of the phrase. There is no doubt however of the
+      fact; see _Stanihurst’s Ireland_, p. 33, in Holinshed’s
+      _Chronicles_. [Rather from _torvien_, to throw,--Skeat].
+
+{231} _Notes and Queries_, No. 147.
+
+{232} See Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, Croker’s edit. 1848, p. 233.
+
+{233} [The _b_ was purposely foisted into these words by bookmen to
+      suggest their Latin derivation; it did not belong to them in
+      earlier English. The same may be said of the _g_, intruded into
+      ‘deign’ and ‘feign’.]
+
+{234} A chief phonographer writes to me to deny that this is the present
+      spelling (1856) of ‘Europe’. It was so when this paragraph was
+      written. [Most people would now consider [Yeuroap] as American
+      pronunciation.]
+
+{235} Quintilian has expressed himself with the true dignity of a
+      scholar on this matter (_Inst._ 1, 6, 45): Consuetudinem sermonis
+      vocabo _consensum eruditorum_; sicut vivendi consensum
+      bonorum.--How different from innovations like this the changes in
+      the spelling of German which J. Grimm, so far as his own example
+      may reach, _has_ introduced; and the still bolder and more
+      extensive ones which in the _Preface_ to his _Deutsches
+      Wörterbuch_, pp. liv.-lxii., he avows his desire to see
+      introduced;--as the employment of _f_, not merely where it is at
+      present used, but also wherever _v_ is now employed; the
+      substituting of the _v_, which would be thus disengaged, for _w_,
+      and the entire dismissal of _w_. They may be advisable, or they
+      may not; it is not for strangers to offer an opinion; but at any
+      rate they are not a seizing of the fluctuating, superficial
+      accidents of the present, and a seeking to give permanent
+      authority to these, but they all rest on a deep historic study of
+      the language, and of the true genius of the language.
+
+{236} Croker’s edit. 1848, pp. 57, 61, 233.
+
+{237} [An incorrect conclusion. Almost all ‘ea’ words were pronounced
+      ‘ai’ down to the eighteenth century. Thus ‘great’ was a true rhyme
+      to ‘cheat’ and ‘complete’, their ordinary pronunciation being
+      ‘grait’, ‘chait’, ‘complait’.]
+
+{238} [i.e. ‘Lunnun’.]
+
+{239} _A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English
+      Tongue_, 1711, Works, vol. ix, pp. 139-59.
+
+{240} [‘Devest’ was still in use till the end of the eighteenth century,
+      but ‘divest’ is already found in _King Lear_, 1605, i, 1, 50.]
+
+{241} Pygmæi, quasi _cubitales_ (Augustine).
+
+{242} First so used by Theophrastus in Greek, and by Pliny in
+      Latin.--The real identity of the two words explains Milton’s use
+      of ‘diamond’ in _Paradise Lost_, b. 7; and also in that sublime
+      passage in his _Apology for Smectymnuus_: “Then zeal, whose
+      substance is ethereal, arming in complete _diamond_”.--Diez
+      (_Wörterbuch d. Roman. Sprachen_, p. 123) supposes, not very
+      probably, that it was under a certain influence of ‘_dia_fano’,
+      the translucent, that ‘adamante’ was in the Italian, whence we
+      have derived the word, changed into ‘_dia_mante’.
+
+{243} [Similarly _jowl_ for _chowl_ or _chavel_.]
+
+{244} _Richard III_, Act iv, Sc. 4.
+
+{245} [For another account of this word, approved by Dr. Murray, see
+      _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 156.]
+
+{246} [‘Bliss’ representing the old English _bliths_ or _blidhs_,
+      blitheness, is really a quite distinct word from ‘bless’, standing
+      for _blets_, old English _blétsian_ (=_blóedsian_, to consecrate
+      with blood, _blód_), although the latter was by a folk-etymology
+      very frequently spelt ‘bliss’.]
+
+{247} [But ‘afraied’ is the earliest form of the word (1350), the verb
+      itself being at first spelt ‘afray’ (1325). N.E.D.]
+
+{248} How close this relationship was once, not merely in respect of
+      etymology, but also of significance, a passage like this will
+      prove: “Perchance, as vultures are said to smell the earthiness of
+      a dying corpse; so this bird of prey [the evil spirit which
+      personated Samuel, 1 Sam. xxviii. 41] _resented_ a worse than
+      earthly savor in the soul of Saul, as evidence of his death at
+      hand”. (Fuller, _The Profane State_, b. 5, c. 4.)
+
+{249} [There is an unfortunate confusion here between ‘heal’ to make
+      ‘hale’ or ‘[w]hole’ (Anglo-Saxon _hælan_) and the old (and
+      Provincial) English _hill_, to cover, _hilling_, covering,
+      _hellier_, a slater, akin to ‘hell’, the covered place, ‘helm’;
+      Icelandic _hylja_, to cover.]
+
+{250} [By a curious slip Dr. Trench here confounds ‘recover’, to
+      recuperate or regain health (derived through old French _recovrer_
+      from Latin _recuperare_), with a totally distinct word _re-cover_,
+      to cover or clothe over again, which comes from old French
+      _covrir_, Latin _co-operire_. It is just the difference between
+      ‘recovering’ a lost umbrella through the police and ‘recovering’ a
+      torn one at a shop. I pointed this out to the author in 1869, and
+      I think he altered the passage in his later editions.]
+
+{251} [‘Island’, though cognate with Anglo-Saxon _eá-land_ “water-land”
+      (German _ei-land_), is really identical with Anglo-Saxon
+      _íg-land_, i.e. “isle-land”, from _íg_, an island, the diminutive
+      of which survives in _eyot_ or _ait_.]
+
+{252} [The editor essayed to make a complete collection of this class of
+      words in his _Folk-etymology, a Dictionary of Words corrupted by
+      False Derivation or Mistaken Analogy_, 1882, and more recently in
+      a condensed form in _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, 1904.]
+
+{253} Diez looks with much favour on this process, and calls it, ein
+      sinnreiches mittel fremdlinge ganz heimisch zu machen.
+
+{254} Ammianus Marcellinus, xxii, 15, 28.
+
+{255} [The Greek _pyramis_ probably represents the Egyptian
+      _piri-m-ûisi_ (Maspero, _Dawn of Civilization_, 358), or
+      _pir-am-us_ (Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, i, 73), rather
+      than _pi-ram_, ‘the height’ (Birch, _Bunsen’s Egypt_, v, 763).]
+
+{256} Tacitus, _Hist._ v. 2.
+
+{257} Let me illustrate this by further instances in a note. Thus
+      βούτυρον, from which, through the Latin, our ‘butter’ has
+      descended to us, is borrowed (Pliny, _H.N._ xxviii. 9) from a
+      Scythian word, now to us unknown: yet it is sufficiently plain
+      that the Greeks so shaped and spelt it as to contain apparent
+      allusion to _cow_ and _cheese_; there is in βούτυρον an evident
+      feeling after βοῦς and τυρόν. Bozra, meaning citadel in Hebrew and
+      Phœnician, and the name, no doubt, which the citadel of Carthage
+      bore, becomes Βύρσα on Greek lips; and then the well known legend
+      of the ox-hide was invented upon the name; not having suggested
+      it, but being itself suggested by it. Herodian (v. 6) reproduces
+      the name of the Syrian goddess Astarte in a shape that is
+      significant also for Greek ears--Ἀστροάρχη, The Star-ruler, or
+      Star-queen. When the apostate and hellenizing Jews assumed Greek
+      names, ‘Eliakim’ or “Whom God has set”, became ‘Alcimus’ (ἄλκιμος)
+      or The Strong (1 Macc. vii. 5). Latin examples in like kind are
+      ‘com_i_ssatio’, spelt continually ‘com_e_ssatio’, and
+      ‘com_e_ssation’ by those who sought to naturalize it in England,
+      as though it were connected with ‘cŏmedo’, to eat, being indeed
+      the substantive from the verb ‘cōmissari’ (--κωμάζειν), to revel,
+      as Plutarch, whose Latin is in general not very accurate, long ago
+      correctly observed; and ‘orichalcum’, spelt often ‘_au_richalcum’,
+      as though it were a composite metal of mingled _gold_ and brass;
+      being indeed the _mountain_ brass (ὀρείχαλκος). The miracle play,
+      which is ‘mystère’, in French, whence our English ‘mystery’ was
+      originally written ‘mistère’, being properly derived from
+      ‘ministère’, and having its name because the clergy, the
+      _ministri_ Ecclesiæ, conducted it. This was forgotten, and it then
+      took its present form of ‘mystery’, as though so called because
+      the mysteries of the faith were in it set out.
+
+{258} We have here, in this bringing of the words by their supposed
+      etymology together, the explanation of the fact that Spenser
+      (_Fairy Queen_, i, 7, 44), Middleton (_Works_, vol. 5, pp. 524,
+      528, 538), and others employ ‘Tartary’ as equivalent to ‘Tartarus’
+      or hell.
+
+{259} For a full discussion of this matter and fixing of the period at
+      which ‘sinfluot’ became ‘sündflut’, see the _Theol. Stud. u.
+      Krit._ vol. ii, p. 613; and Delitzsch, _Genesis_, 2nd ed. vol. ii,
+      p. 210.
+
+{260} [The name of the small grape, originally _raisins de Corauntz_,
+      was transferred to the _ribes_ in the sixteenth century.]
+
+{261} Ben Jonson, _The New Inn_, Act i, Sc. i.
+
+{262} [On the contrary, it is the modern “Welsh _rarebit_” which has
+      been mistakenly evolved out of the older “Welsh _rabbit_” as I
+      have shown in _Folk-Etymology_, p. 431. Grose has both forms in
+      his _Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue_, 1785.]
+
+{263} ‘Leghorn’ is sometimes quoted as an example of this; but
+      erroneously; for, as Admiral Smyth has shown (_The Mediterranean_,
+      p. 409) ‘Livorno’ is itself rather the modern corruption, and
+      ‘Ligorno’ the name found on the earlier charts.
+
+{264} Exactly the same happens in other languages; thus ‘armbrust’, a
+      crossbow, _looks_ German enough, and yet has nothing to do with
+      ‘arm’ or ‘brust’, being a contraction of ‘arcubalista’, but a
+      contraction under these influences. As little has ‘abenteuer’
+      anything to do with ‘abend’ or ‘theuer’, however it may seem to be
+      connected with them, being indeed the Provençal ‘adventura’. And
+      ‘weissagen’ in its earlier forms had nothing in common with
+      ‘sagen’.
+
+{265} [So Diez. But Prof. Skeat and Scheler see no reason why it should
+      not be direct from French _refuser_ and Low Latin _refusare_, from
+      _refusus_, rejected.]
+
+{266} It is upon this word that De Quincey (_Life and Manners_, p. 70,
+      American Ed.) says excellently well: “It is in fact by such
+      corruptions, by off-sets upon an old stock, arising through
+      ignorance or mispronunciation originally, that every language is
+      frequently enriched; and new modifications of thought, unfolding
+      themselves in the progress of society, generate for themselves
+      concurrently appropriate expressions.... It must not be allowed to
+      weigh against a word once fairly naturalized by all, that
+      originally it crept in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription
+      is as strong a ground of legitimation in a case of this nature, as
+      it is in law. And the old axiom is applicable--Fieri non debuit,
+      factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much
+      of their wealth”. [_Works_, vol. xiv., p. 201.]
+
+{267} [The direct opposite is the fact. The French _contredanse_ was
+      borrowed from the English ‘country-dance’. See _The Folk and their
+      Word-Lore_, p. 153.]
+
+{268} [These words are not identical. They were in use as distinct words
+      in the fifteenth century. See N.E.D.]
+
+{269} [Dr. Murray has shown that ‘causeway’ is not a corruption of
+      ‘causey’ but a compound of that word with ‘way’.]
+
+{270} [Prof. Skeat has demonstrated that the supposed Greek ‘rachitis’,
+      inflammation of the back, is an ætiological invention to serve as
+      etymon of ‘rickets’, the condition of being rickety, a purely
+      native word. See also _Folk-Etymology_, 312.]
+
+{271} [See _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 124.]
+
+{272} _Phars._ vi. 720-830.
+
+{273} Thus in a _Vocabulary_, 1475: Nigromansia dicitur divinatio facta
+      _per nigros_.
+
+{274} [Dyce believed that it was really thus derived and distinct from
+      _pleurisy_, but it was evidently modelled upon that word (_Remarks
+      on Editions of Shakespeare_, p. 218).]
+
+{275} As ‘orthography’ itself means properly “_right_ spelling”, it might
+      be a curious question whether it is permissible to speak of an
+      _incorrect_ _ortho_graphy, that is of a _wrong_ _right_-spelling.
+      The question which would be thus started is one of not unfrequent
+      recurrence, and it is very worthy of observation how often, so
+      soon as we take note of etymologies, this _contradictio in
+      adjecto_ is found to occur. I will here adduce a few examples
+      from the Greek, the Latin, the German, and from our own tongue.
+      Thus the Greeks having no convenient word to express a rider,
+      apart from a rider _on a horse_, did not scruple to speak of the
+      _horse_man (ἱππεύς) upon an _elephant_. They often allowed
+      themselves in a like inaccuracy, where certainly there was no
+      necessity; as in using ἀνδριάς of the statue of a _woman_; where
+      it would have been quite as easy to have used εἱκών or ἄγαλμα. So
+      too their ‘table’ (τράπεζα = τετράπεζα) involved probably the
+      _four_ feet which commonly support one; yet they did not shrink
+      from speaking of a _three_-footed table (τρίπους τράπεζα), in
+      other words, a “_three_-footed _four_-footed”; much as though we
+      should speak of a “_three_-footed _quadru_ped”. Homer writes of a
+      ‘hecatomb’ not of a _hundred_, but of twelve, oxen; and elsewhere
+      of Hebe he says, in words not reproducible in English, νέκταρ
+      ἐωνοχόει. ‘Tetrarchs’ were often rulers of quite other than
+      _fourth_ parts of a land. Ἀκρατος had so come to stand for wine,
+      without any thought more of its signifying originally the
+      _unmingled_, that St. John speaks of ἄκρατος κεκερασμένος (Rev.
+      xiv. 10), or the unmingled mingled. Boxes in which precious
+      ointments were contained were so commonly of alabaster, that the
+      name came to be applied to them whether they were so or not; and
+      Theocritus celebrates “_golden_ alabasters”. Cicero having to
+      mention a water-clock is obliged to call it a _water_ _sun_dial
+      (solarium ex aquâ). Columella speaks of a “_vintage_ of honey”
+      (vindemia mellis), and Horace invites his friend to im_pede_, not
+      his _foot_, but his head, with myrtle (_caput_ im_ped_ire myrto).
+      Thus too a German writer who desired to tell of the golden shoes
+      with which the folly of Caligula adorned his horse could scarcely
+      avoid speaking of _golden_ hoof-_irons_. The same inner
+      contradiction is involved in such language as our own, a “_false_
+      _ver_dict”, a “_steel_ _cuirass_” (‘coriacea’ from corium,
+      leather), “antics new” (Harrington’s _Ariosto_), an “_erroneous_
+      _etymo_logy”, a “_corn_ _chandler_”; that is, a “_corn_
+      _candle_-maker”, “_rather_ _late_”, ‘rather’ being the
+      comparative of ‘rathe’, early, and thus “rather late” being
+      indeed “more early late”; and in others.
+
+{276} [‘Siren’ is now generally understood to have meant originally a
+      songstress, from the root _svar_, to sing or sound, seen in
+      _syrinx_, a flute, _su(r)-sur-us_, etc. See J. E. Harrison, _Myths
+      of the Odyssey_, p. 175.]
+
+{277} [‘Chymist’ seems to be the oldest form of the word in English; see
+      N.E.D.]
+
+{278} χημία, the name of Egypt; see Plutarch, _De Is. et Os._ c. 33.
+
+{279} We have a notable evidence how deeply rooted this error was, how
+      long this confusion endured, of the way in which it was shared by
+      the learned as well as the unlearned, in Milton’s _Apology for
+      Smectymnuus_, sect. 7, which everywhere presumes the identity of
+      the ‘satyr’ and the ‘satirist’. It was Isaac Casaubon who first
+      effectually dissipated it even for the learned world. The results
+      of his investigations were made popular for the unlearned reader
+      by Dryden, in the very instructive _Discourse on Satirical
+      Poetry_, prefixed to his translations of Juvenal; but the
+      confusion still survives, and ‘satyrs’ and ‘satires’, the Greek
+      ‘satyric’ drama, the Latin ‘satirical’ poetry, are still assumed
+      by most to have something to do with one another.
+
+{280} [‘Dirige’ was the first word of the antiphon at matins in the
+      Office for the Dead, taken from Psalm v, 9 (Vulg.), in which occur
+      the words “_dirige_ in conspectu tuo vitam meam”. See Skeat,
+      _Piers Plowman_, ii, 52. Hence also Scotch _dregy_, a dirge.]
+
+{281} [Incorrect: the ‘mid-wife’ is etymologically she that is _with_
+      (old English _mid_) a woman to help her in her hour of need, like
+      German _bei-frau_, Spanish _co-madre_, Icelandic _naer-kona_,
+      “near-woman”, Latin _ob-stetrix_, “by-stander”, all words for the
+      lying-in nurse. Compare German _mit-bruder_, a comrade.]
+
+{282}               “I have seen him
+      Caper upright, like a wild _Môrisco_,
+      Shaking the bloody darts, as he his bells”.
+
+                        Shakespeare, _2 Henry VI_ Act iii, Sc. 1.
+
+{283} In the reprinting of old books it is often very difficult to
+      determine how far the old shape in which words present themselves
+      should be retained, how far they should be conformed to present
+      usage. It is comparatively easy to lay down as a rule that in
+      books intended for popular use, wherever the form of the word is
+      not affected by the modernizing of the spelling, as where this
+      modernizing consists merely in the dropping of superfluous
+      letters, there it shall take place; as who would wish our Bibles
+      to be now printed letter for letter after the edition of 1611, or
+      Shakespeare with the orthography of the first folio; but wherever
+      more than the spelling, the actual shape, outline, and character
+      of the word has been affected by the changes which it has
+      undergone, that in all such cases the earlier form shall be held
+      fast. The rule is a judicious one; but when it is attempted to
+      carry it out, it is not always easy to draw the line, and to
+      determine what affects the form and essence of a word, and what
+      does not. About some words there can be no doubt; and therefore
+      when a modern editor of Fuller’s _Church History_ complacently
+      announces that he has allowed himself in such changes as ‘dirige’
+      into ‘dirge’, ‘barreter’ into ‘barrister’, ‘synonymas’ into
+      ‘synonymous’, ‘extempory’ into ‘extemporary’, ‘scited’ into
+      ‘situated’, ‘vancurrier’ into ‘avant-courier’; he at the same time
+      informs us that for all purposes of the study of the English
+      language (and few writers are for this more important than
+      Fuller), he has made his edition utterly worthless. Or again, when
+      modern editors of Shakespeare print, and that without giving any
+      intimation of the fact,
+
+          “Like quills upon the fretful _porcupine_”,
+
+      he having written, and in his first folio and quarto the words
+      standing,
+
+          “Like quills upon the fretful _porpentine_”,
+
+      this being the earlier, and in Shakespeare’s time the more common
+      form of the word [e.g. “the _purpentines_ nature” (Puttenham,
+      _Eng. Poesie_, 1589, p. 118, ed. Arber)], they must be considered
+      as taking a very unwarrantable liberty with his text; and no less,
+      when they substitute ‘Kenilworth’ for ‘Killingworth’, which he
+      wrote, and which was his, Marlowe’s, and generally the earlier
+      form of the name.
+
+{284} [Compare Latin _amita_, yielding old French _ante_, our ‘aunt’.]
+
+{285} “The Carthaginians shall restore and deliver back all the
+      _renegates_ [perfugas] and fugitives that have fled to their side
+      from us”.--p. 751.
+
+{286} [See further in _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 80.]
+
+{287} Halbertsma quoted by Bosworth, _Origin of the English and Germanic
+      Languages_, p. 39.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF WORDS
+
+
+                              PAGE
+    Abenteuer                  240
+    Abnormal                    72
+    Abominable                 245
+    Academy                     70
+    Accommodate                107
+    Acre                       193
+    Adamant                    230
+    Admiralty                  107
+    Advocate                    82
+    Æon                         72
+    Æsthetic                    72
+    Afeard                     126
+    Affluent                   104
+    Afraid                     127
+    Afterthink                 120
+    Alcimus                    237
+    Alcove                      16
+    Amphibious                 107
+    Analogie                    56
+    Ant                        253
+    Antecedents                210
+    Anthem                     245
+    Antipodes                   68
+    Apotheosis                  67
+    -ard                       141
+    Armbrust                   240
+    Arride                      58
+    Ascertain                  186
+    Ask                        126
+    Astarte                    237
+    Attercop                   123
+    Aurantium                  241
+    Aurichalcum                237
+    Avunculize                  91
+    Axe                        126
+
+    Baffle                     181
+    Baker, bakester            157
+    Banter                     106
+    Barrier                     70
+    Battalion                   61
+    Bawn                       123
+    Benefice, benefit           97
+    Bitesheep                  144
+    Black art                  243
+    Blackguard                 189
+    Blasphemous                128
+    Bless                      231
+    Bombast                    199
+    Book                        21
+    Boor                       202
+    Bozra                      237
+    Brangle                    177
+    Bran-new                   231
+    Brat                       205
+    Brazen                     164
+    Breaden                    163
+    Bruin                       89
+    Buffalo                     16
+    Butter                     237
+    Buxom                      139
+
+    Chagrin                     95
+    Chance-medley              243
+    Chanticleer                 89
+    Chemist, chemistry         248
+    Chicken                    158
+    Chouse                      91
+    Chymist, chymistry         248
+    Clawback                   144
+    Comissatio                 237
+    Commérage                  204
+    Confluent                  104
+    Congregational              79
+    Contrary                   128
+    Corpse                     191
+    Country dance              242
+    Court card                 239
+    Coxcomb                    229
+    Cozen                      231
+    Crawfish                   252
+    Creansur                    45
+    Criterion                   67
+    Crone, crony                93
+    Crucible                   245
+    Crusade                     62
+    Cuirass                    246
+    Currant                    239
+    Cynarctomachy               91
+
+    Dahlia                      88
+    Dame                       192
+    Dandylion                  243
+    Dearworth                  120
+    Dedal                       86
+    Dehort                     137
+    Demagogue                   55
+    Denominationalism           79
+    Depot                       69
+    Diamond                    230
+    Dirge                      250
+    Dissimilation              103
+    Divest                     229
+    Donat                       86
+    Dorter                      20
+    Dosones                     90
+    Doughty                    146
+    Drachm                     193
+    Dragoman                    12
+    Dub                        146
+    Duke                       191
+    Dumps                      147
+    Dutch                      177
+
+    Eame                       118
+    Earsport                   119
+    Eaves                      159
+    Educational                 79
+    Effervescence               55
+    Einseitig                   75
+    Eliakim                    237
+    Ell                        251
+    Emet                       253
+    Emotional                   79
+    Encyclopedia                67
+    Enfantillage                55
+    Equivocation               196
+    Erutar                     149
+    Escobarder                  88
+    -ess                       153
+    Europe                     224
+    Eyebite                    120
+
+    Fairy                      191
+    Farfalla                    15
+    Fatherland                  75
+    Flitter-mouse              118
+    Flota                       17
+    Folklore                    75
+    Foolhappy                  137
+    Foolhardy                  137
+    Foolhasty                  137
+    Foollarge                  137
+    Foretalk                   120
+    Fougue                      66
+    Fraischeur                  66
+    Frances                     95
+    Francis                     95
+    Frimm                      118
+    Frivolité                   55
+    Frontispiece               245
+    Furlong                    193
+
+    Gainly                     136
+    Gallon                     193
+    Galvanism                   88
+    Garble                     199
+    Geir                       118
+    Gentian                     86
+    Girdle                      21
+    Girfalcon                  118
+    Girl                       192
+    Glassen                    163
+    Gordian                     86
+    Gossip                     203
+    Great                      226
+    Grimsire                   119
+    Grocer                     229
+    Grogram                    229
+
+    Halfgod                    120
+    Hallow                      82
+    Handbook                    75
+    Hangdog                    145
+    Hector                      89
+    Heft                       118
+    Hermetic                    86
+    Hery                       118
+    Hierosolyma                236
+    Hipocras                    86
+    Hippodame                   64
+    His                        131
+    Hooker                      16
+    Hoppester                  155
+    Hotspur                    119
+    Hoyden                     192
+    Huck                       157
+    Huckster, huckstress       157
+    Hurricane                   14
+
+    Iceberg                     73
+    Icefield                    74
+    Idea                       197
+    Imp                        205
+    Influence                  181
+    International               78
+    Island                     234
+    Isle                       234
+    Isolated                   107
+    Isothermal                 102
+    Its                        130
+
+    Jaw                        230
+    Jeopardy                    82
+
+    Kenilworth                 253
+    Kindly                     184
+    Kirtle                      21
+    Knave                      207
+    Knitster                   155
+    Knot                        87
+
+    Lambiner                    88
+    Lass                       154
+    Lazar                       86
+    Leer                       118
+    Leghorn                    240
+    Libel                      191
+    Lifeguard                   74
+    Lissome                    140
+    London                     227
+    Lunch, luncheon            129
+
+    Malingerer                 119
+    Mammet, mammetry            87
+    Mandragora                 243
+    Mansarde                    89
+    Matachin                    17
+    Matamoros                  143
+    Mausoleum                   86
+    Meat                       191
+    Meddle, meddlesome         206
+    Middler                    121
+    Mid-wife                   250
+    Milken                     163
+    Mischievous                128
+    Miscreant                  179
+    Mithridate                  86
+    Mixen                      123
+    Morris dance               251
+    Mystery, mystère           237
+    Myth                        72
+
+    Nap                        147
+    Necromancy                 243
+    Negus                       87
+    Nemorivagus                 77
+    Neophyte                   107
+    Nesh                       118
+    Niggot                      85
+    Nimm                       118
+    Noonscape                  129
+    Noonshun                   129
+    Normal                      72
+    Nostril                    251
+    Nugget                      85
+    Nuncheon                   128
+
+    Oblige                      69
+    Obsequies                  241
+    Oculissimus                 90
+    Orange                     241
+    Orichalcum                 237
+    Ornamentation               72
+    Orrery                      87
+    Orthography                245
+
+    Pagan                      202
+    Painful, painfulness       186
+    Pandar, pandarism           89
+    Panorama                   107
+    Pasquinade                  87
+    Patch                       87
+    Pate                       146
+    Pease                      159
+    Peck                       193
+    Pester                      84
+    Philauty                   105
+    Photography                 72
+    Physician                  101
+    Pigmy                      229
+    Pinchpenny                 144
+    Pleurisy                   244
+    Plunder                73, 106
+    Poet                       101
+    Polite                     200
+    Polytheism                 107
+    Porcupine                  253
+    Porpoise                    63
+    Postremissimus              91
+    Potecary                    64
+    Prævaricator               196
+    Pragmatical                206
+    Préliber                    56
+    Preposterous               195
+    Prestige                    68
+    Prevaricate                196
+    Privado                     16
+    Prose, proser              206
+    Punctilio                   16
+    Punto                       16
+    Pyramid                    235
+
+    Quellio                     17
+    Quinsey                     63
+    Quirpo                      16
+    Quirry                      64
+
+    Rakehell                   145
+    Rame                       241
+    Rathe, rathest             138
+    Realmrape                  119
+    Recover                    233
+    Redingote                   63
+    Refuse                     241
+    Regoldar                   149
+    Religion                   183
+    Renegade                   254
+    Renown                     103
+    Resent                     233
+    Reynard                     89
+    Rhyme                      245
+    Riches                     159
+    Rickets                    243
+    Righteousness              137
+    Rodomontade                 89
+    Rome                       227
+    Rootfast                   119
+    Rosen                      162
+    Ruly                       136
+    Runagate                   254
+
+    Sag                        118
+    Sardanapalisme              88
+    Sash                        63
+    Satellites                  61
+    Satire, satirical          250
+    Satyr, satyric        249, 250
+    Scent                      232
+    Schimmer                   118
+    Scrip                      232
+    Seamster, seamstress  155, 156
+    Selfish, selfishness       105
+    Sentiment                  107
+    Sepoy                      240
+    Serene                     135
+    Shrewd, shrewdness         209
+    Silhouette                  88
+    Silvern                    163
+    Silvicultrix                77
+    Siren                      247
+    Skinker                    117
+    Skip                       147
+    Slick                      132
+    Smellfeast                 143
+    Smug                       146
+    Solidarity                  70
+    Songster, songstress  155, 156
+    Sorcerer                   101
+    Spencer                     88
+    Sperr                      118
+    Spheterize                  72
+    Spinner, spinster          156
+    Starconner                 120
+    Starvation                  80
+    Starve                     192
+    Stereotype                  72
+    Stonen                     163
+    Suckstone                  120
+    Sudden                     220
+    Suicide                    105
+    Suicism, suist             105
+    Sündflut                   238
+    Sunstead                   120
+    Swindler                    74
+    Sycophant                  208
+
+    Tabinet                     88
+    Tapster                    157
+    Tarre                      118
+    Tartar                     237
+    Tartary                    238
+    Tea                        227
+    Theriac                    187
+    Thou                       171
+    Thrasonical                 89
+    Tind                       118
+    Tinnen                     163
+    Tinsel                     180
+    Tinsel-slippered           180
+    Tontine                     88
+    Topsy-turvy                215
+    Tosspot                    144
+    Tram                        88
+    Treacle                    187
+    Trigger                     73
+    Trounce                    147
+    Turban                      13
+
+    Umstroke                   120
+    Uncouth                    124
+
+    Vancurrier                  64
+    Vicinage                    63
+    Villain               201, 208
+    Volcano                     86
+    Voltaic                     88
+    Voyage                     191
+
+    Wanhope                    117
+    Waterfright                120
+    Watershed                  103
+    Weed                       192
+    Welk                       118
+    Welkin                     158
+    Welsh rabbit               240
+    Whole                      234
+    Windflower                 120
+    Wiseacre                   240
+    Witch                      101
+    Witticism                  106
+    Witwanton                  119
+    Woburn                     220
+    Woodbine                   229
+    Worship                    185
+    Wörterbuch                 111
+
+    Yard                       193
+    Youngster                  156
+
+    Zoology                    107
+    Zoophyte                   107
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+{TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
+
+Variation in the spelling of the names Jonson/Johnson, Spenser/Spencer,
+and Ralegh/Raleigh is as in the original.
+
+The following have been left as they appear in the original:
+
+    fetisch
+    There are who venture
+    substraction
+    tanquum consummata (probable error for “tamquam consumpta”)
+    divergencies
+    In ‘grogra_m_’ we are entirely to seek
+
+The following obvious printing errors have been corrected:
+
+    LECTURE I
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    up words  n every quarter          in
+    el lagarto’                        removed quote mark
+    ‘trespasses’ might be substitued   substituted
+    matter than in our authorized      Authorized
+    Galations v. 19                    Galatians
+    artificial, made-up, facititious   factitious
+    such doublets is given by Pro f    Prof.
+
+    LECTURE II
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    masterpieces of antient            ancient
+    Ἡθος is a word at                  Ἠθος
+    at other times ‘vìrtue’.           vírtue
+    ‘hcáracter’ with Spenser;          charácter
+    perfectly well recognised          recognized
+    Shakesspeare than we find now      Shakespeare
+    ‘maumet’, meaning an idol{95}      added comma after footnote marker
+    ‘aretinisms’, from an,             removed comma after “an”
+    whith hitherto they held           which
+    Missouri and the Missisippi        Mississippi
+    things lacking, would have mended  added comma after “mended”
+    εἰδωλον                            εἴδωλον
+    “The word t  must be               it
+    we have in common with the French  added period after “French”
+    Language Français_, p. 12.         Langage
+    ἀνάθέμα                            ἀνάθεμα
+    ‘fursehung’ and ‘vorsehung’        fürsehung
+    ἀμφιβια                            ἀμφίβια
+    πολυθεισμος                        πολυθεϊσμος
+
+    LECTURE III
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    so dose ‘flitter-mouse’            does
+    is an old preterite                præterite
+    instrinsic value it may possess.   intrinsic
+    which it belongs; being the same   added “)” before semicolon
+    ‘guideress’; ‘charmeress’          changed semicolon to comma
+    superlatives as ‘griveousest’      grievousest
+    ‘dwarfling’, ‘sherperdling’        shepherdling
+    _contráry_ run”--_Shakespeare._    added period after quotes
+    their charms”.--_Spenser,_         changed comma to period
+    _bu h-sum_, i.e. ‘bow-some’,       buch-sum
+
+    LECTURE IV
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    Shakespeare in _I Henry VI_        changed I to 1
+    words justI quoted have conveyed?  I just
+    misapprehension in their persual   perusal
+    as by sea, was a ‘voyage’,         changed final comma to period
+    Langage Francais_, p. 347          Français
+    before they return back again.     added double quotes after “again”
+    1589, p. 181 (ed.                  181, ed.
+    _Preface to Bible_, 1611.          added “)” before period
+    Secker, _Sermons_, iii, 85 (ed.    85, ed.
+
+    LECTURE V
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    of the arbitary in spelling        arbitrary
+    ‘vert’, ‘verre’ and ‘vers’,        changed final comma to period
+    v corresponding in the Greek.      changed “v” to υ
+    and a very horried one             horrid
+    χ υμο                              χυμός
+    Croker’s edit. 1848, pp. 57        ‘5’ unclear in the original
+    the Provencal ‘adventura’.         Provençal
+    oua ‘aunt’.                        our
+
+    INDEX
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    Alcove 15                          16
+    Book 20                            21
+    Creansur 46                        45
+    Flota 16                           17
+    Galvanism 9                        88
+    Girdle 20                          21
+    Hooker 15                          16
+    Icefield 73                        74
+    Imp 215                            205
+    Kirtle 20                          21
+    Matachin 16                        17
+    Milken 162                         163
+    Postremissimus 90                  91
+    Quellio 16                         17
+    Rosen 161                          162
+    Silvern 162                        163
+    Stonen 162                         163
+    Tapster 156                        157
+}
+
+
+
+
+
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diff --git a/20900-0.zip b/20900-0.zip
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+Project Gutenberg's English Past and Present, by Richard Chenevix Trench
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: English Past and Present
+
+Author: Richard Chenevix Trench
+
+Editor: A. Smythe Palmer
+
+Release Date: March 25, 2007 [EBook #20900]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Amy Cunningham, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+{TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+All square brackets [] are from the original text. Braces {} ("curly
+brackets") are supplied by the transcriber. Characters that could not be
+displayed directly in Latin-1 are transcribed as follows:
+
+    {-e} e with macron above
+    {)e} e with breve above
+    {+} obelus (dagger) symbol
+
+In addition, a short passage on page 222 uses unusual phonetic symbols,
+which are transcribed with Latin-1 characters where possible and with
+letters in {braces} otherwise. The html version contains images of the
+original book's symbols.
+
+In the original book, the odd-numbered pages have unique headers,
+marked here as sidenotes.
+
+Obvious printing errors involving punctuation (such as missing single
+quotes), as well as alphabetization errors in the index, have been
+corrected without notes. Other corrections of printing errors, as well
+as notes regarding spelling variations, are listed at the end of this
+file.}
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+ENGLISH
+PAST AND PRESENT
+
+
+BY
+
+RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D.
+
+
+_Edited with Emendations_
+
+BY
+
+A. SMYTHE PALMER, D.D.
+
+
+_Author of 'The Folk and their Word-lore,' 'Folk-Etymology,'
+'Babylonian Influence on the Bible,' etc._
+
+
+{Illustration: Printer's Mark}
+
+
+LONDON
+
+GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LIMITED
+
+NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
+
+1905
+
+
+
+
+EDITOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+In editing the present volume I have thought it well to follow the same
+rule which I laid down for myself in editing _The Study of Words_, and
+have made no alteration in the text of Dr. Trench's work (the fifth
+edition). Any corrections or additions that seemed to be demanded owing
+to the progress of lexicographical knowledge have been reserved for the
+foot-notes, and these can always be distinguished from those in the
+original by the square brackets [thus] within which they are placed.
+
+On the whole more corrections have been required in _English Past and
+Present_ than in _The Study of Words_ owing to the sweeping statements
+which involve universal negatives--statements, e.g. that certain words
+either first came into use, or ceased to be employed, at a specific
+date. Nothing short of the combined researches of an army of
+co-operative workers, such as the _New English Dictionary_ commanded,
+could warrant the correctness of assertions of this kind, which imply an
+exhaustive acquaintance with a subject so immense as the entire range of
+English literature.
+
+Even the mistakes of a learned man are instructive to those who essay to
+follow in his steps, and it is not without use to point them out instead
+of ignoring or expunging them. Thus, when the Archbishop falls into the
+error (venial when he wrote) of assuming an etymological connexion
+between certain words which have a specious air of kinship--such as
+'care' and 'cura,' 'bloom' and 'blossom,' 'ghastly' and 'ghostly,'
+'brat' and 'brood,' 'slow' and 'slough'--he makes just the mistakes
+which we would be tempted to make ourselves had not Professor Skeat and
+Dr. Murray and the great German School of philologists taught us to know
+better. Our plan, therefore, has been to leave such errors in the text
+and point out the better way in the notes. In other words, we have
+treated the Archbishop's work as a classic, and the occasional
+emendations in the notes serve to mark the progress of half a century of
+etymological investigation. It is hardly necessary to point out that the
+chronological landmarks occurring here and there need an obvious
+equation of time to make them correct for the present year of grace,
+e.g. 'lately,' when it occurs, must be understood to mean at least fifty
+years ago, and a similar addition must be made to other time-points when
+they present themselves.
+
+                                          A. SMYTHE PALMER.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+
+A series of four lectures which I delivered last spring to the pupils of
+the King's College School, London, supplied the foundation to this
+present volume. These lectures, which I was obliged to prepare in haste,
+on a brief invitation, and under the pressure of other engagements,
+being subsequently enlarged and recast, were delivered in the autumn
+somewhat more nearly in their present shape to the pupils of the
+Training School, Winchester; with only those alterations, omissions and
+additions, which the difference in my hearers suggested as necessary or
+desirable. I have found it convenient to keep the lectures, as regards
+the persons presumed to be addressed, in that earlier form which I had
+sketched out at the first; and, inasmuch as it helps much to keep
+lectures vivid and real that one should have some well defined audience,
+if not actually before one, yet before the mind's eye, to suppose myself
+throughout addressing my first hearers. I have supposed myself, that is,
+addressing a body of young Englishmen, all with a fair amount of
+classical knowledge (in my explanations I have sometimes had others with
+less than theirs in my eye), not wholly unacquainted with modern
+languages; but not yet with any special designation as to their future
+work; having only as yet marked out to them the duty in general of
+living lives worthy of those who have England for their native country,
+and English for their native tongue. To lead such through a more
+intimate knowledge of this into a greater love of that, has been a
+principal aim which I have set before myself throughout.
+
+In a few places I have been obliged again to go over ground which I had
+before gone over in a little book, _On the Study of Words_; but I
+believe that I have never merely repeated myself, nor given to the
+readers of my former work and now of this any right to complain that I
+am compelling them to travel a second time by the same paths. At least
+it has been my endeavour, whenever I have found myself at points where
+the two books come necessarily into contact, that what was treated with
+any fulness before, should be here touched on more lightly; and only
+what there was slightly handled, should here be entered on at large.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    LECTURE I                                  PAGE
+    ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE                  1
+
+    LECTURE II
+    GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE                40
+
+    LECTURE III
+    DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE         113
+
+    LECTURE IV
+    CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS     176
+
+    LECTURE V
+    CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS    212
+
+    INDEX                                       257
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE
+
+
+"A very slight acquaintance with the history of our own language will
+teach us that the speech of Chaucer's age is not the speech of
+Skelton's, that there is a great difference between the language under
+Elizabeth and that under Charles the First, between that under Charles
+the First and Charles the Second, between that under Charles the Second
+and Queen Anne; that considerable changes had taken place between the
+beginning and the middle of the last century, and that Johnson and
+Fielding did not write altogether as we do now. For in the course of a
+nation's progress new ideas are evermore mounting above the horizon,
+while others are lost sight of and sink below it: others again change
+their form and aspect: others which seemed united, split into parts. And
+as it is with ideas, so it is with their symbols, words. New ones are
+perpetually coined to meet the demand of an advanced understanding, of
+new feelings that have sprung out of the decay of old ones, of ideas
+that have shot forth from the summit of the tree of our knowledge; old
+words meanwhile fall into disuse and become obsolete; others have their
+meaning narrowed and defined; synonyms diverge from each other and their
+property is parted between them; nay, whole classes of words will now
+and then be thrown overboard, as new feelings or perceptions of analogy
+gain ground. A history of the language in which all these vicissitudes
+should be pointed out, in which the introduction of every new word
+should be noted, so far as it is possible--and much may be done in this
+way by laborious and diligent and judicious research--in which such
+words as have become obsolete should be followed down to their final
+extinction, in which all the most remarkable words should be traced
+through their successive phases of meaning, and in which moreover the
+causes and occasions of these changes should be explained, such a work
+would not only abound in entertainment, but would throw more light on
+the development of the human mind than all the brainspun systems of
+metaphysics that ever were written".
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These words, which thus far are not my own, but the words of a greatly
+honoured friend and teacher, who, though we behold him now no more,
+still teaches, and will teach, by the wisdom of his writings, and the
+nobleness of his life (they are words of Archdeacon Hare), I have put in
+the forefront of my lectures; seeing that they anticipate in the way of
+masterly sketch all which I shall attempt to accomplish, and indeed draw
+out the lines of much more, to which I shall not venture so much as to
+put my hand. They are the more welcome to me, because they encourage me
+to believe that if, in choosing the English language, its past and its
+present, as the subject of that brief course of lectures which I am to
+deliver in this place, I have chosen a subject which in many ways
+transcends my powers, and lies beyond the range of my knowledge, it is
+yet one in itself of deepest interest, and of fully recognized value.
+Nor can I refrain from hoping that even with my imperfect handling, it
+is an argument which will find an answer and an echo in the hearts of
+all who hear me; which would have found this at any time; which will do
+so especially at the present. For these are times which naturally rouse
+into liveliest activity all our latent affections for the land of our
+birth. It is one of the compensations, indeed the greatest of all, for
+the wastefulness, the woe, the cruel losses of war{1}, that it causes
+and indeed compels a people to know itself a people; leading each one to
+esteem and prize most that which he has in common with his fellow
+countrymen, and not now any longer those things which separate and
+divide him from them.
+
+{Sidenote: _Love of our own Tongue_}
+
+And the love of our own language, what is it in fact, but the love of
+our country expressing itself in one particular direction? If the great
+acts of that nation to which we belong are precious to us, if we feel
+ourselves made greater by their greatness, summoned to a nobler life by
+the nobleness of Englishmen who have already lived and died, and have
+bequeathed to us a name which must not by us be made less, what exploits
+of theirs can well be nobler, what can more clearly point out their
+native land and ours as having fulfilled a glorious past, as being
+destined for a glorious future, than that they should have acquired for
+themselves and for those who come after them a clear, a strong, an
+harmonious, a noble language? For all this bears witness to corresponding
+merits in those that speak it, to clearness of mental vision, to
+strength, to harmony, to nobleness in them that have gradually formed
+and shaped it to be the utterance of their inmost life and being.
+
+To know of this language, the stages which it has gone through, the
+sources from which its riches have been derived, the gains which it is
+now making, the perils which have threatened or are threatening it, the
+losses which it has sustained, the capacities which may be yet latent in
+it, waiting to be evoked, the points in which it transcends other
+tongues, in which it comes short of them, all this may well be the
+object of worthy ambition to every one of us. So may we hope to be
+ourselves guardians of its purity, and not corrupters of it; to
+introduce, it may be, others into an intelligent knowledge of that, with
+which we shall have ourselves more than a merely superficial
+acquaintance; to bequeath it to those who come after us not worse than
+we received it ourselves. "Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna",--this
+should be our motto in respect at once of our country, and of our
+country's tongue.
+
+{Sidenote: _Duty to our own Tongue_}
+
+Nor shall we, I trust, any of us feel this subject to be alien or remote
+from the purposes which have brought us to study within these walls. It
+is true that we are mainly occupied here in studying other tongues than
+our own. The time we bestow upon it is small as compared with that
+bestowed on those others. And yet one of our main purposes in learning
+them is that we may better understand this. Nor ought any other to
+dispute with it the first and foremost place in our reverence, our
+gratitude, and our love. It has been well and worthily said by an
+illustrious German scholar: "The care of the national language I
+consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege
+of the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it
+the object of his unceasing concern, to preserve his language pure and
+entire, to speak it, so far as is in his power, in all its beauty and
+perfection.... A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must
+be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation
+which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half
+of her intellectual independence, and testifies her willingness to cease
+to exist"{2}.
+
+But this knowledge, like all other knowledge which is worth attaining,
+is only to be attained at the price of labour and pains. The language
+which at this day we speak is the result of processes which have been
+going forward for hundreds and for thousands of years. Nay more, it is
+not too much to affirm that processes modifying the English which at the
+present day we write and speak have been at work from the first day that
+man, being gifted with discourse of reason, projected his thought from
+out himself, and embodied and contemplated it in his word. Which things
+being so, if we would understand this language as it now is, we must
+know something of it as it has been; we must be able to measure, however
+roughly, the forces, which have been at work upon it, moulding and
+shaping it into the forms which it now wears.
+
+At the same time various prudential considerations must determine for us
+how far up we will endeavour to trace the course of its history. There
+are those who may seek to trace our language to the forests of Germany
+and Scandinavia, to investigate its relation to all the kindred tongues
+that were there spoken; again, to follow it up, till it and they are
+seen descending from an elder stock; nor once to pause, till they have
+assigned to it its place not merely in respect of that small group of
+languages which are immediately round it, but in respect of all the
+tongues and languages of the earth. I can imagine few studies of a more
+surpassing interest than this. Others, however, must be content with
+seeking such insight into their native language as may be within the
+reach of all who, unable to make this the subject of especial research,
+possessing neither that vast compass of knowledge, nor that immense
+apparatus of books, not being at liberty to dedicate to it that
+devotion almost of a life which, followed out to the full, it would
+require, have yet an intelligent interest in their mother tongue, and
+desire to learn as much of its growth and history and construction as
+may be reasonably deemed within their reach. To such as these I shall
+suppose myself to be speaking. It would be a piece of great presumption
+in me to undertake to speak to any other, or to assume any other ground
+than this for myself.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Past explains the Present_}
+
+I know there are some, who, when they are invited to enter at all upon
+the past history of the language, are inclined to make answer--"To what
+end such studies to us? Why cannot we leave them to a few antiquaries
+and grammarians? Sufficient to us to know the laws of our present
+English, to obtain an accurate acquaintance with the language as we now
+find it, without concerning ourselves with the phases through which it
+has previously past". This may sound plausible enough; and I can quite
+understand a real lover of his native tongue, who has not bestowed much
+thought upon the subject, arguing in this manner. And yet indeed such
+argument proceeds altogether on a mistake. One sufficient reason why we
+should occupy ourselves with the past of our language is, because the
+present is only intelligible in the light of the past, often of a very
+remote past indeed. There are anomalies out of number now existing in
+our language, which the pure logic of grammar is quite incapable of
+explaining; which nothing but a knowledge of its historic evolutions,
+and of the disturbing forces which have made themselves felt therein,
+will ever enable us to understand. Even as, again, unless we possess
+some knowledge of the past, it is impossible that we can ourselves
+advance a single step in the unfolding of the latent capabilities of the
+language, without the danger of committing some barbarous violation of
+its very primary laws.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The plan which I have laid down for myself, and to which I shall adhere,
+in this lecture and in those which will succeed it, is as follows. In
+this my first lecture I will ask you to consider the language as now it
+is, to decompose with me some specimens of it, to prove by these means,
+of what elements it is compact, and what functions in it these elements
+or component parts severally fulfil; nor shall I leave this subject
+without asking you to admire the happy marriage in our tongue of the
+languages of the north and south, an advantage which it alone among all
+the languages of Europe enjoys. Having thus presented to ourselves the
+body which we wish to submit to scrutiny, and having become acquainted,
+however slightly, with its composition, I shall invite you to go back
+with me, and trace some of the leading changes to which in time past it
+has been submitted, and through which it has arrived at what it now is;
+and these changes I shall contemplate under four aspects, dedicating a
+lecture to each;--changes which have resulted from the birth of new, or
+the reception of foreign, words;--changes consequent on the rejection or
+extinction of words or powers once possessed by the language;--changes
+through the altered meaning of words;--and lastly, as not unworthy of
+our attention, but often growing out of very deep roots, changes in the
+orthography of words.
+
+{Sidenote: _Alterations unobserved_}
+
+I shall everywhere seek to bring the subject down to our present time,
+and not merely call your attention to the changes which have been, but
+to those also which are now being, effected. I shall not account the
+fact that some are going on, so to speak, before our own eyes, a
+sufficient ground to excuse me from noticing them, but rather an
+additional reason for doing this. For indeed changes which are actually
+proceeding in our own time, and which we are ourselves helping to bring
+about, are the very ones which we are most likely to fail in observing.
+There is so much to hide the nature of them, and indeed their very
+existence, that, except it may be by a very few, they will often pass
+wholly unobserved. Loud and sudden revolutions attract and compel
+notice; but silent and gradual, although with issues far vaster in
+store, run their course, and it is only when their cycle is completed or
+nearly so, that men perceive what mighty transforming forces have been
+at work unnoticed in the very midst of themselves.
+
+Thus, to apply what I have just affirmed to this matter of language--how
+few aged persons, let them retain the fullest possession of their
+faculties, are conscious of any difference between the spoken language
+of their early youth, and that of their old age; that words and ways of
+using words are obsolete now, which were usual then; that many words are
+current now, which had no existence at that time. And yet it is certain
+that so it must be. A man may fairly be supposed to remember clearly and
+well for sixty years back; and it needs less than five of these sixties
+to bring us to the period of Spenser, and not more than eight to set us
+in the time of Chaucer and Wiclif. How great a change, what vast
+modifications in our language, within eight memories. No one,
+contemplating this whole term, will deny the immensity of the change.
+For all this, we may be tolerably sure that, had it been possible to
+interrogate a series of eight persons, such as together had filled up
+this time, intelligent men, but men whose attention had not been
+especially roused to this subject, each in his turn would have denied
+that there had been any change worth speaking of, perhaps any change at
+all, during his lifetime. And yet, having regard to the multitude of
+words which have fallen into disuse during these four or five hundred
+years, we are sure that there must have been some lives in this chain
+which saw those words in use at their commencement, and out of use
+before their close. And so too, of the multitude of words which have
+sprung up in this period, some, nay, a vast number, must have come into
+being within the limits of each of these lives. It cannot then be
+superfluous to direct attention to that which is actually going forward
+in our language. It is indeed that, which of all is most likely to be
+unobserved by us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With these preliminary remarks I proceed at once to the special subject
+of my lecture of to-day. And first, starting from the recognized fact
+that the English is not a simple but a composite language, made up of
+several elements, as are the people who speak it, I would suggest to you
+the profit and instruction which we might derive from seeking to
+resolve it into its component parts--from taking, that is, any passage
+of an English author, distributing the words of which it is made up
+according to the languages from which they are drawn; estimating the
+relative numbers and proportions, which these languages have severally
+lent us; as well as the character of the words which they have thrown
+into the common stock of our tongue.
+
+{Sidenote: _Proportions in English_}
+
+Thus, suppose the English language to be divided into a hundred parts;
+of these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon; thirty
+would be Latin (including of course the Latin which has come to us
+through the French); five would be Greek. We should thus have assigned
+ninety-five parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a residue,
+to be divided among all the other languages from which we have adopted
+isolated words{3}. And yet these are not few; from our wide extended
+colonial empire we come in contact with half the world; we have picked
+up words in every quarter, and, the English language possessing a
+singular power of incorporating foreign elements into itself, have not
+scrupled to make many of these our own{4}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Oriental Words_}
+
+Thus we have a certain number of Hebrew words, mostly, if not entirely,
+belonging to religious matters, as 'amen', 'cabala', 'cherub', 'ephod',
+'gehenna', 'hallelujah', 'hosanna', 'jubilee', 'leviathan', 'manna',
+'Messiah', 'sabbath', 'Satan', 'seraph', 'shibboleth', 'talmud'. The
+Arabic words in our language are more numerous; we have several
+arithmetical and astronomical terms, as 'algebra', 'almanack',
+'azimuth', 'cypher'{5}, 'nadir', 'talisman', 'zenith', 'zero'; and
+chemical, for the Arabs were the chemists, no less than the astronomers
+and arithmeticians of the middle ages; as 'alcohol', 'alembic',
+'alkali', 'elixir'. Add to these the names of animals, plants, fruits,
+or articles of merchandize first introduced by them to the notice of
+Western Europe; as 'amber', 'artichoke', 'barragan', 'camphor',
+'coffee', 'cotton', 'crimson', 'gazelle', 'giraffe', 'jar', 'jasmin',
+'lake' (lacca), 'lemon', 'lime', 'lute', 'mattress', 'mummy', 'saffron',
+'sherbet', 'shrub', 'sofa', 'sugar', 'syrup', 'tamarind'; and some
+further terms, 'admiral', 'amulet', 'arsenal', 'assassin', 'barbican',
+'caliph', 'caffre', 'carat', 'divan', 'dragoman'{6}, 'emir', 'fakir',
+'firman', 'harem', 'hazard', 'houri', 'magazine', 'mamaluke',
+'minaret', 'monsoon', 'mosque', 'nabob', 'razzia', 'sahara', 'simoom',
+'sirocco', 'sultan', 'tarif', 'vizier'; and I believe we shall have
+nearly completed the list. We have moreover a few Persian words, as
+'azure', 'bazaar', 'bezoar', 'caravan', 'caravanserai', 'chess',
+'dervish', 'lilac', 'orange', 'saraband', 'taffeta', 'tambour',
+'turban'; this last appearing in strange forms at its first introduction
+into the language, thus 'tolibant' (Puttenham), 'tulipant' (Herbert's
+_Travels_), 'turribant' (Spenser), 'turbat', 'turbant', and at length
+'turban'. We have also a few Turkish, such as 'chouse', 'janisary',
+'odalisque', 'sash', 'tulip'{7}. Of 'civet'{8} and 'scimitar'{9} I
+believe it can only be asserted that they are Eastern. The following are
+Hindostanee, 'avatar', 'bungalow', 'calico', 'chintz', 'cowrie', 'lac',
+'muslin', 'punch', 'rupee', 'toddy'. 'Tea', or 'tcha', as it was spelt
+at first, of course is Chinese, so too are 'junk' and 'satin'{10}.
+
+The New World has given us a certain number of words, Indian and
+other--'cacique' ('cassique', in Ralegh's _Guiana_), 'canoo',
+'chocolate', 'cocoa'{11}, 'condor', 'hamoc' ('hamaca' in Ralegh),
+'jalap', 'lama', 'maize' (Haytian), 'pampas', 'pemmican', 'potato'
+('batata' in our earlier voyagers), 'raccoon', 'sachem', 'squaw',
+'tobacco', 'tomahawk', 'tomata' (Mexican), 'wigwam'. If 'hurricane' is a
+word which Europe originally obtained from the Caribbean islanders{12},
+it should of course be included in this list{13}. A certain number of
+words also we have received, one by one, from various languages, which
+sometimes have not bestowed on us more than this single one. Thus
+'hussar' is Hungarian; 'caloyer', Romaic; 'mammoth', of some Siberian
+language;{14} 'tattoo', Polynesian; 'steppe', Tartarian; 'sago',
+'bamboo', 'rattan', 'ourang outang', are all, I believe, Malay words;
+'assegai'{15} 'zebra', 'chimpanzee', 'fetisch', belong to different
+African dialects; the last, however, having reached Europe through the
+channel of the Portuguese{16}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Italian Words_}
+
+{Sidenote: _Spanish, Dutch and Celtic Words_}
+
+To come nearer home--we have a certain number of Italian words, as
+'balcony', 'baldachin', 'balustrade', 'bandit', 'bravo', 'bust' (it was
+'busto' as first used in English, and therefore from the Italian, not
+from the French), 'cameo', 'canto', 'caricature', 'carnival', 'cartoon',
+'charlatan', 'concert', 'conversazione', 'cupola', 'ditto', 'doge',
+'domino'{17}, 'felucca', 'fresco', 'gazette', 'generalissimo', 'gondola',
+'gonfalon', 'grotto', ('grotta' is the earliest form in which we have it
+in English), 'gusto', 'harlequin'{18}, 'imbroglio', 'inamorato',
+'influenza', 'lava', 'malaria', 'manifesto', 'masquerade' ('mascarata'
+in Hacket), 'motto', 'nuncio', 'opera', 'oratorio', 'pantaloon',
+'parapet', 'pedantry', 'pianoforte', 'piazza', 'portico', 'proviso',
+'regatta', 'ruffian', 'scaramouch', 'sequin', 'seraglio', 'sirocco',
+'sonnet', 'stanza', 'stiletto', 'stucco', 'studio', 'terra-cotta',
+'umbrella', 'virtuoso', 'vista', 'volcano', 'zany'. 'Becco', and
+'cornuto', 'fantastico', 'magnifico', 'impress' (the armorial device
+upon shields, and appearing constantly in its Italian form 'impresa'),
+'saltimbanco' (=mountebank), all once common enough, are now obsolete.
+Sylvester uses often 'farfalla' for butterfly, but, as far as I know,
+this use is peculiar to him. If these are at all the whole number of our
+Italian words, and I cannot call to mind any other, the Spanish in the
+language are nearly as numerous; nor indeed would it be wonderful if
+they were more so; our points of contact with Spain, friendly and
+hostile, have been much more real than with Italy. Thus we have from the
+Spanish 'albino', 'alligator' (el lagarto), 'alcove'{19}, 'armada',
+'armadillo', 'barricade', 'bastinado', 'bravado', 'caiman', 'cambist',
+'camisado', 'carbonado', 'cargo', 'cigar', 'cochineal', 'Creole',
+'desperado', 'don', 'duenna', 'eldorado', 'embargo', 'flotilla', 'gala',
+'grandee', 'grenade', 'guerilla', 'hooker'{20}, 'infanta', 'jennet',
+'junto', 'merino', 'mosquito', 'mulatto', 'negro', 'olio', 'ombre',
+'palaver', 'parade', 'parasol', 'parroquet', 'peccadillo', 'picaroon',
+'platina', 'poncho', 'punctilio', (for a long time spelt 'puntillo', in
+English books), 'quinine', 'reformado', 'savannah', 'serenade',
+'sherry', 'stampede', 'stoccado', 'strappado', 'tornado', 'vanilla',
+'verandah'. 'Buffalo' also is Spanish; 'buff' or 'buffle' being the
+proper English word; 'caprice' too we probably obtained rather from
+Spain than Italy, as we find it written 'capricho' by those who used it
+first. Other Spanish words, once familiar, are now extinct. 'Punctilio'
+lives on, but not 'punto', which occurs in Bacon. 'Privado', signifying
+a prince's favourite, one admitted to his _privacy_ (no uncommon word in
+Jeremy Taylor and Fuller), has quite disappeared; so too has 'quirpo'
+(cuerpo), the name given to a jacket fitting close to the _body_;
+'quellio' (cuello), a ruff or _neck_-collar; and 'matachin', the title
+of a sword-dance; these are all frequent in our early dramatists; and
+'flota' was the constant name of the treasure-fleet from the Indies.
+'Intermess' is employed by Evelyn, and is the Spanish 'entremes', though
+not recognized as such in our dictionaries. 'Mandarin' and 'marmalade'
+are our only Portuguese words I can call to mind. A good many of our
+sea-terms are Dutch, as 'sloop', 'schooner', 'yacht', 'boom', 'skipper',
+'tafferel', 'to smuggle'; 'to wear', in the sense of veer, as when we
+say '_to wear_ a ship'; 'skates', too, and 'stiver', are Dutch. Celtic
+_things_ are for the most part designated among us by Celtic words; such
+as 'bard', 'kilt', 'clan', 'pibroch', 'plaid', 'reel'. Nor only such as
+these, which are all of them comparatively of modern introduction, but a
+considerable number, how large a number is yet a very unsettled
+question, of words which at a much earlier date found admission into our
+tongue, are derived from this quarter.
+
+Now, of course, I have no right to presume that any among us are
+equipped with that knowledge of other tongues, which shall enable us to
+detect of ourselves and at once the nationality of all or most of the
+words which we may meet--some of them greatly disguised, and having
+undergone manifold transformations in the process of their adoption
+among us; but only that we have such helps at command in the shape of
+dictionaries and the like, and so much diligence in their use, as will
+enable us to discover the quarter from which the words we may encounter
+have reached us; and I will confidently say that few studies of the
+kind will be more fruitful, will suggest more various matter of
+reflection, will more lead you into the secrets of the English tongue,
+than an analysis of a certain number of passages drawn from different
+authors, such as I have just now proposed. For this analysis you will
+take some passage of English verse or prose--say the first ten lines of
+_Paradise Lost_--or the Lord's Prayer--or the 23rd Psalm; you will
+distribute the whole body of words contained in that passage, of course
+not omitting the smallest, according to their nationalities--writing, it
+may be, A over every Anglo-Saxon word, L over every Latin, and so on
+with the others, if any other should occur in the portion which you have
+submitted to this examination. When this is done, you will count up the
+_number_ of those which each language contributes; again, you will note
+the _character_ of the words derived from each quarter.
+
+{Sidenote: _Two Shapes of Words_}
+
+Yet here, before I pass further, I would observe in respect of those
+which come from the Latin, that it will be desirable further to mark
+whether they are directly from it, and such might be marked L�, or only
+mediately from it, and to us directly from the French, which would be
+L�, or L at second hand--our English word being only in the second
+generation descended from the Latin, not the child, but the child's
+child. There is a rule that holds pretty constantly good, by which you
+may determine this point. It is this,--that if a word be directly from
+the Latin, it will not have undergone any alteration or modification in
+its form and shape, save only in the termination--'innocentia' will
+have become 'innocency', 'natio' will have become 'nation',
+'firmamentum' 'firmament', but nothing more. On the other hand, if it
+comes _through_ the French, it will generally be considerably altered in
+its passage. It will have undergone a process of lubrication; its
+sharply defined Latin outline will in good part have departed from it;
+thus 'crown' is from 'corona', but though 'couronne', and itself a
+dissyllable, 'coroune', in our earlier English; 'treasure' is from
+'thesaurus', but through 'tr�sor'; 'emperor' is the Latin 'imperator',
+but it was first 'empereur'. It will often happen that the substantive
+has past through this process, having reached us through the
+intervention of the French; while we have only felt at a later period
+our want of the adjective also, which we have proceeded to borrow direct
+from the Latin. Thus, 'people' is indeed 'populus', but it was 'peuple'
+first, while 'popular' is a direct transfer of a Latin vocable into our
+English glossary. So too 'enemy' is 'inimicus', but it was first
+softened in the French, and had its Latin physiognomy to a great degree
+obliterated, while 'inimical' is Latin throughout; 'parish' is
+'paroisse', but 'parochial' is 'parochialis'; 'chapter' is 'chapitre',
+but 'capitular' is 'capitularis'.
+
+{Sidenote: _Doublets_}
+
+Sometimes you will find in English what I may call the double adoption
+of a Latin word; which now makes part of our vocabulary in two shapes;
+'doppelg�ngers' the Germans would call such words{21}. There is first
+the elder word, which the French has given us; but which, before it
+gave, it had fashioned and moulded, cutting it short, it may be, by a
+syllable or more, for the French devours letters and syllables; and
+there is the later word which we borrowed immediately from the Latin. I
+will mention a few examples; 'secure' and 'sure', both from 'securus',
+but one directly, the other through the French; 'fidelity' and 'fealty',
+both from 'fidelitas', but one directly, the other at second-hand;
+'species' and 'spice', both from 'species', spices being properly only
+_kinds_ of aromatic drugs; 'blaspheme' and 'blame', both from
+'blasphemare'{22}, but 'blame' immediately from 'bl�mer'. Add to these
+'granary' and 'garner'; 'captain' (capitaneus) and 'chieftain';
+'tradition' and 'treason'; 'abyss' and 'abysm'; 'regal' and 'royal';
+'legal' and 'loyal'; 'cadence' and 'chance'; 'balsam' and 'balm';
+'hospital' and 'hotel'; 'digit' and 'doit'{23}; 'pagan' and 'paynim';
+'captive' and 'caitiff'; 'persecute' and 'pursue'; 'superficies' and
+'surface'; 'faction' and 'fashion'; 'particle' and 'parcel';
+'redemption' and 'ransom'; 'probe' and 'prove'; 'abbreviate' and
+'abridge'; 'dormitory' and 'dortoir' or 'dorter' (this last now
+obsolete, but not uncommon in Jeremy Taylor); 'desiderate' and 'desire';
+'fact' and 'feat'; 'major' and 'mayor'; 'radius' and 'ray'; 'pauper'
+and 'poor'; 'potion' and 'poison'; 'ration' and 'reason'; 'oration' and
+'orison'{24}. I have, in the instancing of these named always the Latin
+form before the French; but the reverse I suppose in every instance is
+the order in which the words were adopted by us; we had 'pursue' before
+'persecute', 'spice' before 'species', 'royalty' before 'regality', and
+so with the others{25}.
+
+The explanation of this greater change which the earlier form of the
+word has undergone, is not far to seek. Words which have been introduced
+into a language at an early period, when as yet writing is rare, and
+books are few or none, when therefore orthography is unfixed, or being
+purely phonetic, cannot properly be said to exist at all, such words for
+a long while live orally on the lips of men, before they are set down in
+writing; and out of this fact it is that we shall for the most part find
+them reshaped and remoulded by the people who have adopted them,
+entirely assimilated to _their_ language in form and termination, so as
+in a little while to be almost or quite indistinguishable from natives.
+On the other hand a most effectual check to this process, a process
+sometimes barbarizing and defacing, however it may be the only one which
+will make the newly brought in entirely homogeneous with the old and
+already existing, is imposed by the existence of a much written language
+and a full formed literature. The foreign word, being once adopted into
+these, can no longer undergo a thorough transformation. For the most
+part the utmost which use and familiarity can do with it now, is to
+cause the gradual dropping of the foreign termination. Yet this too is
+not unimportant; it often goes far to making a home for a word, and
+hindering it from wearing the appearance of a foreigner and
+stranger{26}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Analysis of English_}
+
+But to return from this digression--I said just now that you would learn
+very much from observing and calculating the proportions in which the
+words of one descent and those of another occur in any passage which you
+analyse. Thus examine the Lord's Prayer. It consists of exactly seventy
+words. You will find that only the following six claim the rights of
+Latin citizenship--'trespasses', 'trespass', 'temptation', 'deliver',
+'power', 'glory'. Nor would it be very difficult to substitute for any
+one of these a Saxon word. Thus for 'trespasses' might be substituted
+'sins'; for 'deliver' 'free'; for 'power' 'might'; for 'glory'
+'brightness'; which would only leave 'temptation', about which there
+could be the slightest difficulty, and 'trials', though we now ascribe
+to the word a somewhat different sense, would in fact exactly correspond
+to it. This is but a small percentage, six words in seventy, or less
+than ten in the hundred; and we often light upon a still smaller
+proportion. Thus take the first three verses of the 23rd Psalm:--"The
+Lord is my Shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing; He shall feed me in a
+green _pasture_, and lead me forth beside the waters of _comfort_; He
+shall _convert_ my soul, and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness
+for his Name's sake". Here are forty-five words, and only the three in
+italics are Latin; and for every one of these too it would be easy to
+substitute a word of Saxon origin; little more, that is, than the
+proportion of seven in the hundred; while, still stronger than this, in
+five verses out of Genesis, containing one hundred and thirty words,
+there are only five not Saxon, less, that is, than four in the hundred.
+
+Shall we therefore conclude that these are the proportions in which the
+Anglo-Saxon and Latin elements of the language stand to one another? If
+they are so, then my former proposal to express their relations by sixty
+and thirty was greatly at fault; and seventy and twenty, or even eighty
+and ten, would fall short of adequately representing the real
+predominance of the Saxon over the Latin element of the language. But it
+is not so; the Anglo-Saxon words by no means outnumber the Latin in the
+degree which the analysis of those passages would seem to imply. It is
+not that there are so many more Anglo-Saxon words, but that the words
+which there are, being words of more primary necessity, do therefore so
+much more frequently recur. The proportions which the analysis of the
+_dictionary_ that is, of the language _at rest_, would furnish, are very
+different from these which I have just instanced, and which the analysis
+of _sentences_, or of the language _in motion_, gives. Thus if we
+examine the total vocabulary of the English Bible, not more than sixty
+per cent. of the words are native; such are the results which the
+Concordance gives; but in the actual translation the native words are
+from ninety in some passages to ninety-six in others per cent{27}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon the Base of English_}
+
+The notice of this fact will lead us to some very important conclusions
+as to the _character_ of the words which the Saxon and the Latin
+severally furnish; and principally to this:--that while the English
+language is thus compact in the main of these two elements, we must not
+for all this regard these two as making, one and the other, exactly the
+same _kind_ of contributions to it. On the contrary their contributions
+are of very different character. The Anglo-Saxon is not so much, as I
+have just called it, one element of the English language, as the
+foundation of it, the basis. All its joints, its whole _articulation_,
+its sinews and its ligaments, the great body of articles, pronouns,
+conjunctions, prepositions, numerals, auxiliary verbs, all smaller words
+which serve to knit together and bind the larger into sentences, these,
+not to speak of the grammatical structure of the language, are
+exclusively Saxon. The Latin may contribute its tale of bricks, yea, of
+goodly and polished hewn stones, to the spiritual building; but the
+mortar, with all that holds and binds the different parts of it
+together, and constitutes them into a house, is Saxon throughout. I
+remember Selden in his _Table Talk_ using another comparison; but to the
+same effect: "If you look upon the language spoken in the Saxon time,
+and the language spoken now, you will find the difference to be just as
+if a man had a cloak which he wore plain in Queen Elizabeth's days, and
+since, here has put in a piece of red, and there a piece of blue, and
+here a piece of green, and there a piece of orange-tawny. We borrow
+words from the French, Italian, Latin, as every pedantic man pleases".
+
+{Sidenote: _Composite Languages_}
+
+I believe this to be the law which holds good in respect of all
+composite languages. However composite they may be, yet they are only so
+in regard of their words. There may be a medley in respect of these,
+some coming from one quarter, some from another; but there is never a
+mixture of grammatical forms and inflections. One or other language
+entirely predominates here, and everything has to conform and
+subordinate itself to the laws of this ruling and ascendant language.
+The Anglo-Saxon is the ruling language in our present English. Thus
+while it has thought good to drop its genders, even so the French
+substantives which come among us, must also leave theirs behind them; as
+in like manner the French verbs must renounce their own conjugations,
+and adapt themselves to ours{28}. I believe that a remarkable parallel
+to this might be found in the language of Persia, since the conquest of
+that country by the Arabs. The ancient Persian religion fell with the
+government, but the language remained totally unaffected by the
+revolution, in its grammatical structure and character. Arabic vocables,
+the only exotic words in Persian, are found in numbers varying with the
+object and quality, style and taste of the writers, but pages of pure
+idiomatic Persian may be written without employing a single word from
+the Arabic.
+
+At the same time the secondary or superinduced language, even while it
+is quite unable to force any of its forms on the language which receives
+its words, may yet compel that to renounce a portion of its own forms,
+by the impossibility which is practically found to exist of making them
+fit the new comers; and thus it may exert although not a positive, yet a
+negative, influence on the grammar of the other tongue. It has been so,
+as is generally admitted, in the instance of our own. "When the English
+language was inundated by a vast influx of French words, few, if any,
+French forms were received into its grammar; but the Saxon forms soon
+dropped away, because they did not suit the new roots; and the genius of
+the language, from having to deal with the newly imported words in a
+rude state, was induced to neglect the inflections of the native ones.
+This for instance led to the introduction of the _s_ as the universal
+termination of all plural nouns, which agreed with the usage of the
+French language, and was not alien from that of the Saxon, but was
+merely an extension of the termination of the ancient masculine to other
+classes of nouns"{29}.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Anglo-Saxon Element_}
+
+If you wish to convince yourselves by actual experience, of the fact
+which I just now asserted, namely, that the radical constitution of the
+language is Saxon, I would say, Try to compose a sentence, let it be
+only of ten or a dozen words, and the subject entirely of your choice,
+employing therein only words which are of a Latin derivation. I venture
+to say you will find it impossible, or next to impossible to do it;
+whichever way you turn, some obstacle will meet you in the face. And
+while it is thus with the Latin, whole pages might be written, I do not
+say in philosophy or theology or upon any abstruser subject, but on
+familiar matters of common everyday life, in which every word should be
+of Saxon extraction, not one of Latin; and these, pages in which, with
+the exercise of a little patience and ingenuity, all appearance of
+awkwardness and constraint should be avoided, so that it should never
+occur to the reader, unless otherwise informed, that the writer had
+submitted himself to this restraint and limitation in the words which he
+employed, and was only drawing them from one section of the English
+language. Sir Thomas Browne has given several long paragraphs so
+constructed. Take for instance the following, which is only a little
+fragment of one of them: "The first and foremost step to all good works
+is the dread and fear of the Lord of heaven and earth, which through
+the Holy Ghost enlighteneth the blindness of our sinful hearts to tread
+the ways of wisdom, and lead our feet into the land of blessing"{30}.
+This is not stiffer than the ordinary English of his time. I would
+suggest to you at your leisure to make these two experiments; you will
+find it, I think, exactly as I have here affirmed.
+
+While thus I bring before you the fact that it would be quite possible
+to write English, forgoing altogether the use of the Latin portion of
+the language, I would not have you therefore to conclude that this
+portion of the language is of little value, or that we could draw from
+the resources of our Teutonic tongue efficient substitutes for all the
+words which it has contributed to our glossary. I am persuaded that we
+could not; and, if we could, that it would not be desirable. I mention
+this, because there is sometimes a regret expressed that we have not
+kept our language more free from the admixture of Latin, a suggestion
+made that we should even now endeavour to keep under the Latin element
+of it, and as little as possible avail ourselves of it. I remember Lord
+Brougham urging upon the students at Glasgow as a help to writing good
+English, that they should do their best to rid their diction of
+long-tailed words in 'osity' and 'ation'{31}. He plainly intended to
+indicate by this phrase all learned Latin words, or words derived from
+the Latin. This exhortation is by no means superfluous; for doubtless
+there were writers of a former age, Samuel Johnson in the last century,
+Henry More and Sir Thomas Browne in the century preceding, who gave
+undue preponderance to the learned, or Latin, portion in our language;
+and very much of its charm, of its homely strength and beauty, of its
+most popular and truest idioms, would have perished from it, had they
+succeeded in persuading others to write as they had written.
+
+{Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon Aboriginal_}
+
+But for all this we could _almost_ as ill spare this side of the
+language as the other. It represents and supplies needs not less real
+than the other does. Philosophy and science and the arts of a high
+civilization find their utterance in the Latin words of our language,
+or, if not in the Latin, in the Greek, which for present purposes may be
+grouped with them. How they should have found utterance in the speech of
+rude tribes, which, never having cultivated the things, must needs have
+been without the words which should express those things. Granting too
+that, _coeteris paribus_, when a Latin and a Saxon word offer themselves
+to our choice, we shall generally do best to employ the Saxon, to speak
+of 'happiness' rather than 'felicity', 'almighty' rather than
+'omnipotent', a 'forerunner' rather than a 'precursor', still these
+latter must be regarded as much denizens in the language as the former,
+no alien interlopers, but possessing the rights of citizenship as fully
+as the most Saxon word of them all. One part of the language is not to
+be favoured at the expense of the other; the Saxon at the cost of the
+Latin, as little as the Latin at the cost of the Saxon. "Both are
+indispensable; and speaking generally without stopping to distinguish as
+to subject, both are _equally_ indispensable. Pathos, in situations
+which are homely, or at all connected with domestic affections,
+naturally moves by Saxon words. Lyrical emotion of every kind, which (to
+merit the name of _lyrical_) must be in the state of flux and reflux,
+or, generally, of agitation, also requires the Saxon element of our
+language. And why? Because the Saxon is the aboriginal element; the
+basis and not the superstructure: consequently it comprehends all the
+ideas which are natural to the heart of man and to the elementary
+situations of life. And although the Latin often furnishes us with
+duplicates of these ideas, yet the Saxon, or monosyllabic part, has the
+advantage of precedency in our use and knowledge; for it is the language
+of the nursery whether for rich or poor, in which great philological
+academy no toleration is given to words in 'osity' or 'ation'. There is
+therefore a great advantage, as regards the consecration to our
+feelings, settled by usage and custom upon the Saxon strands in the
+mixed yarn of our native tongue. And universally, this may be
+remarked--that wherever the passion of a poem is of that sort which
+_uses_, _presumes_, or _postulates_ the ideas, without seeking to extend
+them, Saxon will be the 'cocoon' (to speak by the language applied to
+silk-worms), which the poem spins for itself. But on the other hand,
+where the motion of the feeling is _by_ and _through_ the ideas, where
+(as in religious or meditative poetry--Young's, for instance, or
+Cowper's), the pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of
+the thinking, there the Latin will predominate; and so much so that,
+whilst the flesh, the blood, and the muscle, will be often almost
+exclusively Latin, the articulations only, or hinges of connection, will
+be the Anglo-Saxon".
+
+These words which I have just quoted are De Quincey's--whom I must needs
+esteem the greatest living master of our English tongue. And on the same
+matter Sir Francis Palgrave has expressed himself thus: "Upon the
+languages of Teutonic origin the Latin has exercised great influence,
+but most energetically on our own. The very early admixture of the
+_Langue d'Oil_, the never interrupted employment of the French as the
+language of education, and the nomenclature created by the scientific
+and literary cultivation of advancing and civilized society, have
+Romanized our speech; the warp may be Anglo-Saxon, but the woof is Roman
+as well as the embroidery, and these foreign materials have so entered
+into the texture, that were they plucked out, the web would be torn to
+rags, unravelled and destroyed"{32}.
+
+{Sidenote: _The English Bible_}
+
+I do not know where we could find a happier example of the preservation
+of the golden mean in this matter than in our Authorized Version of the
+Bible. One of the chief among the minor and secondary blessings which
+that Version has conferred on the nation or nations drawing spiritual
+life from it,--a blessing not small in itself, but only small by
+comparison with the infinitely higher blessings whereof it is the
+vehicle to them,--is the happy wisdom, the instinctive tact, with which
+its authors have steered between any futile mischievous attempt to
+ignore the full rights of the Latin part of the language on the one
+side, and on the other any burdening of their Version with such a
+multitude of learned Latin terms as should cause it to forfeit its
+homely character, and shut up large portions of it from the understanding
+of plain and unlearned men. There is a remarkable confession to this
+effect, to the wisdom, in fact, which guided them from above, to the
+providence that overruled their work, an honourable acknowledgement of
+the immense superiority in this respect of our English Version over the
+Romish, made by one now, unhappily, familiar with the latter, as once he
+was with our own. Among those who have recently abandoned the communion
+of the English Church one has exprest himself in deeply touching tones
+of lamentation over all, which in renouncing our translation, he feels
+himself to have forgone and lost. These are his words: "Who will not say
+that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible
+is not one of the great strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives
+on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of
+church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forgo. Its
+felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is
+part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness....
+The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of
+childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and
+trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative
+of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft and
+gentle and pure and penitent and good speaks to him for ever out of his
+English Bible.... It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed,
+and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land
+there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him,
+whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible"{33}.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Rhemish Bible_}
+
+Such are his touching words; and certainly one has only to compare this
+version of ours with the Rhemish, and the transcendent excellence of our
+own reveals itself at once. I am not extolling now its superior
+scholarship; its greater freedom from by-ends; as little would I urge
+the fact that one translation is from the original Greek, the other from
+the Latin Vulgate, and thus the translation of a translation, often
+reproducing the mistakes of that translation; but, putting aside all
+considerations such as these, I speak only here of the superiority of
+the diction in which the meaning, be it correct or incorrect, is
+conveyed to English readers. Thus I open the Rhemish version at
+Galatians v. 19, where the long list of the "works of the flesh", and of
+the "fruit of the Spirit", is given. But what could a mere English
+reader make of words such as these--'impudicity', 'ebrieties',
+'comessations', 'longanimity', all which occur in that passage? while
+our Version for 'ebrieties' has 'drunkenness', for 'comessations' has
+'revellings', and so also for 'longanimity' 'longsuffering'. Or set over
+against one another such phrases as these,--in the Rhemish, "the
+exemplars of the celestials" (Heb. ix. 23), but in ours, "the patterns
+of things in the heavens". Or suppose if, instead of the words _we_ read
+at Heb. xiii. 16, namely "To do good and to communicate forget not; for
+with such sacrifices God is well pleased", we read as follows, which are
+the words of the Rhemish, "Beneficence and communication do not forget;
+for with such hosts God is promerited"!--Who does not feel that if our
+Version had been composed in such Latin-English as this, had abounded in
+words like 'odible', 'suasible', 'exinanite', 'contristate',
+'postulations', 'coinquinations', 'agnition', 'zealatour', all, with
+many more of the same mint, in the Rhemish Version, our loss would have
+been great and enduring, one which would have searched into the whole
+religious life of our people, and been felt in the very depths of the
+national mind{34}?
+
+There was indeed something still deeper than love of sound and genuine
+English at work in our Translators, whether they were conscious of it or
+not, which hindered them from presenting the Scriptures to their
+fellow-countrymen dressed out in such a semi-Latin garb as this. The
+Reformation, which they were in this translation so mightily
+strengthening and confirming, was just a throwing off, on the part of
+the Teutonic nations, of that everlasting pupilage in which Rome would
+have held them; an assertion at length that they were come to full age,
+and that not through her, but directly through Christ, they would
+address themselves unto God. The use of the Latin language as the
+language of worship, as the language in which the Scriptures might alone
+be read, had been the great badge of servitude, even as the Latin habits
+of thought and feeling which it promoted had been the great helps to the
+continuance of this servitude, through long ages. It lay deep then in
+the very nature of their cause that the Reformers should develop the
+Saxon, or essentially national, element in the language; while it was
+just as natural that the Roman Catholic translators, if they must
+translate the Scriptures into English at all, should yet translate them
+into such English as should bear the nearest possible resemblance to the
+Latin Vulgate, which Rome with a very deep wisdom of this world would
+gladly have seen as the only one in the hands of the faithful.
+
+{Sidenote: _Future of the English Language_}
+
+Let me again, however, recur to the fact that what our Reformers did in
+this matter, they did without exaggeration; even as they had shown the
+same wise moderation in still higher matters. They gave to the Latin
+side of the language its rights, though they would not suffer it to
+encroach upon and usurp those of the Teutonic part of the language. It
+would be difficult not to believe, even if many outward signs said not
+the same, that great things are in store for the one language of Europe
+which thus serves as connecting link between the North and the South,
+between the languages spoken by the Teutonic nations of the North and by
+the Romance nations of the South; which holds on to and partakes of
+both; which is as a middle term between them{35}. There are who venture
+to hope that the English Church, being in like manner double-fronted,
+looking on the one side toward Rome, being herself truly Catholic,
+looking on the other towards the Protestant communions, being herself
+also protesting and reforming, may yet in the providence of God have an
+important part to play for the reconciling of a divided Christendom. And
+if this ever should be so, if, notwithstanding our sins and unworthiness,
+so blessed a task should be in store for her, it will not be a small
+help and assistance thereunto, that the language in which her mediation
+will be effected is one wherein both parties may claim their own, in
+which neither will feel that it is receiving the adjudication of a
+stranger, of one who must be an alien from its deeper thoughts and
+habits, because an alien from its words, but a language in which both
+must recognize very much of that which is deepest and most precious of
+their own.
+
+{Sidenote: _Jacob Grimm on English_}
+
+Nor is this prerogative which I have just claimed for our English the
+mere dream and fancy of patriotic vanity. The scholar who in our days is
+most profoundly acquainted with the great group of the Gothic languages
+in Europe, and a devoted lover, if ever there was such, of his native
+German, I mean Jacob Grimm, has expressed himself very nearly to the
+same effect, and given the palm over all to our English in words which
+you will not grudge to hear quoted, and with which I shall bring this
+lecture to a close. After ascribing to our language "a veritable power
+of expression, such as perhaps never stood at the command of any other
+language of men", he goes on to say, "Its highly spiritual genius, and
+wonderfully happy development and condition, have been the result of a
+surprisingly intimate union of the two noblest languages in modern
+Europe, the Teutonic and the Romance--It is well known in what relation
+these two stand to one another in the English tongue; the former
+supplying in far larger proportion the material groundwork, the latter
+the spiritual conceptions. In truth the English language, which by no
+mere accident has produced and upborne the greatest and most predominant
+poet of modern times, as distinguished from the ancient classical poetry
+(I can, of course, only mean Shakespeare), may with all right be called
+a world-language; and like the English people, appears destined
+hereafter to prevail with a sway more extensive even than its present
+over all the portions of the globe{36}. For in wealth, good sense, and
+closeness of structure no other of the languages at this day spoken
+deserves to be compared with it--not even our German, which is torn,
+even as we are torn, and must first rid itself of many defects, before
+it can enter boldly into the lists, as a competitor with the
+English"{37}.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{1} These lectures were first delivered during the Russian War. [See De
+    Quincey to the same effect, _Works_, 1862, vol. iv. pp. vii, 286.]
+
+{2} F. Schlegel, _History of Literature, Lecture 10_.
+
+{3} [If dictionary words be counted as apart from the spoken language,
+    the proportion of the component elements of English is very
+    different. M. M�ller quotes a calculation which makes the classical
+    element about 68 per cent, the Teutonic about 30, and miscellaneous
+    about 2 (_Science of Language_, 8th ed. i, 89). See Skeat,
+    _Principles of Eng. Etymology_, ii, 15 _seq._, and _infra_ p. 25.]
+
+{4} [What here follows should be compared with the fuller and more
+    accurate lists of words borrowed from foreign sources given by Prof.
+    Skeat in his larger _Etymolog. Dictionary_, 759 _seq._; and more
+    completely in his _Principles of Eng. Etymology_, 2nd ser. 294-440.]
+
+{5} Yet see J. Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_, p. 985.
+
+{6} The word hardly deserves to be called English, yet in Pope's time it
+    had made some progress toward naturalization. Of a real or pretended
+    polyglottist, who might thus have served as an universal
+    _interpreter_, he says:
+
+        "Pity you was not _druggerman_ at Babel".
+
+    'Truckman', or more commonly 'truchman', familiar to all readers of
+    our early literature, is only another form of this, one which
+    probably has come to us through 'turcimanno', the Italian form of
+    the word. [See my _Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 19].
+
+{7} ['Tulip', at first spelt _tulipan_, is really the same word as
+    _turban_ (_tulipant_ just above), which the flower was thought to
+    resemble (Persian _dulband_).]
+
+{8} [Ultimately from the Arabic _zab{-a}d_ (N.E.D.).]
+
+{9} [Apparently to be traced to the Persian _shim-sh�r_ or _sham-sh�r_
+    ("lion's-nail"), a crooked sword (Skeat).]
+
+{10} [Rather through the French from low Latin _satinus_ or _setinus_, a
+     fabric made of _seta_, silk. But Yule holds that it may be from
+     Zayton or Zaitun (in Fokien, China), an important emporium of
+     Western trade in the Middle Ages (_Hobson-Jobson_, 602).]
+
+{11} [Probably intended for _cacao_, which is Mexican. _Cocoa_, the nut,
+     is from Portuguese _coco_.]
+
+{12} See Washington Irving, _Life and Voyages of Columbus_, b. 8, c. 9.
+
+{13} [It is from the Haytian _Hurakan_, the storm-god (_The Folk and
+     their Word-Lore_, 90).]
+
+{14} [From old Russian _mammot_, whence modern Russian _mamant_.]
+
+{15} ['Assagai' is from the Arabic _az-_ (_al-_) _zagh{-a}yah_, 'the
+     _zag{-a}yah_', a Berber name for a lance (N.E.D.).]
+
+{16} [This puts the cart before the horse. 'Fetish' is really the
+     Portuguese word _feiti�o_, artificial, made-up, factitious (Latin
+     _factitius_), applied to African amulets or idols.]
+
+{17} ['Domino' is Spanish rather than Italian (Skeat, _Principles_, ii,
+     312).]
+
+{18} ['Harlequin' appears to be an older word in French than in Italian
+     (_ibid._).]
+
+{19} On the question whether this ought to have been included among the
+     Arabic, see Diez, _W�rterbuch d. Roman. Sprachen_, p. 10.
+
+{20} Not in our dictionaries; but a kind of coasting vessel well known
+     to seafaring men, the Spanish 'urca'; thus in Oldys' _Life of
+     Raleigh_: "Their galleons, galleasses, gallies, _urcas_, and zabras
+     were miserably shattered".
+
+{21} [A valuable list of such doublets is given by Prof. Skeat in his
+     large _Etymological Dictionary_, p. 772 _seq._]
+
+{22} This particular instance of double adoption, of 'dimorphism' as
+     Latham calls it, 'dittology' as Heyse, recurs in Italian,
+     'bestemmiare' and 'biasimare'; and in Spanish, 'blasfemar' and
+     'lastimar'.
+
+{23} ['Doit', a small coin (Dutch _duit_) has no relation to, 'digit'.
+     Was the author thinking of old French _doit_, a finger, from Latin
+     _digitus_?]
+
+{24} Somewhat different from this, yet itself also curious, is the
+     passing of an Anglo-Saxon word in two different forms into English,
+     and continuing in both; thus 'desk' and 'dish', both the
+     Anglo-Saxon 'disc' [a loan-word from Latin _discus_, Greek
+     _diskos_] the German 'tisch'; 'beech' and 'book', both the
+     Anglo-Saxon 'boc', our first books being _beechen_ tablets (see
+     Grimm, _W�rterbuch_, s. vv. 'Buch', 'Buche'); 'girdle' and
+     'kirtle'; both of them corresponding to the German 'g�rtel';
+     already in Anglo-Saxon a double spelling, 'gyrdel', 'cyrtel', had
+     prepared for the double words; so too 'haunch' and 'hinge'; 'lady'
+     and 'lofty' [these last three instances are not doublets at all,
+     being quite unrelated; see Skeat, s. vv.]; 'shirt', and 'skirt';
+     'black' and 'bleak'; 'pond' and 'pound'; 'deck' and 'thatch';
+     'deal' and 'dole'; 'weald' and 'wood'{+}; 'dew' and 'thaw'{+};
+     'wayward' and 'awkward'{+}; 'dune' and 'down'; 'hood' and 'hat'{+};
+     'ghost' and 'gust'{+}; 'evil' and 'ill'{+}; 'mouth' and 'moth'{+};
+     'hedge' and 'hay'.
+
+     [All these suggested doublets which I have obelized must be
+     dismissed as untenable.]
+
+{25} We have in the same way double adoptions from the Greek, one
+     direct, at least as regards the forms; one modified by its passage
+     through some other language; thus, 'adamant' and 'diamond';
+     'monastery' and 'minster'; 'scandal' and 'slander'; 'theriac' and
+     'treacle'; 'asphodel' and 'daffodil'; 'presbyter' and 'priest'.
+
+{26} The French itself has also a double adoption, or as perhaps we
+     should more accurately call it there, a double formation, from the
+     Latin, and such as quite bears out what has been said above: one
+     going far back in the history of the language, the other belonging
+     to a later and more literary period; on which subject there are
+     some admirable remarks by G�nin, _R�cr�ations Philologiques_, vol.
+     i. pp. 162-66; and see Fuchs, _Die Roman. Sprachen_, p. 125. Thus
+     from 'separare' is derived 'sevrer', to separate the child from its
+     mother's breast, to wean, but also 's�parer', without this special
+     sense; from 'pastor', 'p�tre', a shepherd in the literal, and
+     'pasteur' the same in a tropical, sense; from 'catena', 'cha�ne'
+     and 'cad�ne'; from 'fragilis', 'fr�le' and 'fragile'; from
+     'pensare', 'peser' and 'penser'; from 'gehenna', 'g�ne' and
+     'g�henne'; from 'captivus', 'ch�tif' and 'captif'; from 'nativus',
+     'na�f' and 'natif'; from 'designare', 'dessiner' and 'designer';
+     from 'decimare', 'd�mer' and 'd�cimer'; from 'consumere',
+     'consommer' and 'consumer'; from 'simulare', 'sembler' and
+     'simuler'; from the low Latin, 'disjejunare', 'd�ner' and
+     'd�je�ner'; from 'acceptare', 'acheter' and 'accepter'; from
+     'homo', 'on' and 'homme'; from 'paganus', 'payen' and 'paysan' [the
+     latter from 'pagensis']; from 'obedientia', 'ob�issance' and
+     'ob�dience'; from 'strictus', '�troit' and 'strict'; from
+     'sacramentum', 'serment' and 'sacrement'; from 'ministerium',
+     'm�tier' and 'minist�re'; from 'parabola', 'parole' and 'parabole';
+     from 'peregrinus', 'p�lerin' and 'p�r�grin'; from 'factio', 'fa�on'
+     and 'faction', and it has now adopted 'factio' in a third shape,
+     that is, in our English 'fashion'; from 'pietas', 'piti�' and
+     'pi�t�'; from 'capitulum', 'chapitre' and 'capitule', a botanical
+     term. So, too, in Italian, 'manco', maimed, and 'monco', maimed _of
+     a hand_; 'rifut�re', to refute, and 'rifiut�re', to refuse; 'dama'
+     and 'donna', both forms of 'domina'.
+
+{27} See Marsh, _Manual of the English Language_, Engl. Ed. p. 88 _seq._
+
+{28} W. Schlegel (_Indische Bibliothek_, vol. i. p. 284): Coeunt quidem
+     paullatim in novum corpus peregrina vocabula, sed grammatica
+     linguarum, unde petit� sunt, ratio perit.
+
+{29} J. Grimm, quoted in _The Philological Museum_ vol. i. p. 667.
+
+{30} _Works_, vol. iv. p. 202.
+
+{31} [These words are taken from the 'Whistlecraft' of John Hookham
+     Frere:--
+
+         "Don't confound the language of the nation
+         With long-tail'd words in _osity_ and _ation_".
+
+                                 (_Works_, 1872, vol. 1, p. 206).]
+
+{32} _History of Normandy and England_, vol. i, p. 78.
+
+{33} [F. W. Faber,] _Dublin Review_, June, 1853.
+
+{34} There is more on this matter in my book _On the Authorized Version
+     of the New Testament_, pp. 33-35.
+
+{35} See a paper _On the Probable Future Position of the English
+     Language_, by T. Watts, Esq., in the _Proceedings of the
+     Philological Society_, vol. iv, p. 207.
+
+{36} A little more than two centuries ago a poet, himself abundantly
+     deserving the title of 'well-languaged'; which a cotemporary or
+     near successor gave him, ventured in some remarkable lines timidly
+     to anticipate this. Speaking of his native tongue, which he himself
+     wrote with such vigour and purity, though wanting in the fiery
+     impulses which go to the making of a first-rate poet, Daniel
+     exclaims:--
+
+         "And who, in time, knows whither we may vent
+         The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
+         This gain of our best glory shall be sent,
+         To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
+         What worlds in the yet unform�d Occident
+         May come refined with the accents that are ours?
+         Or who can tell for what great work in hand
+         The greatness of our style is now ordained?
+         What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command,
+         What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained,
+         What mischief it may powerfully withstand,
+         And what fair ends may thereby be attained"?
+
+{37} _Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache_, Berlin, 1832, p. 5.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
+
+
+It is not for nothing that we speak of some languages as _living_, of
+others as _dead_. All spoken languages may be ranged in the first class;
+for as men will never consent to use a language without more or less
+modifying it in their use, will never so far forgo their own activity as
+to leave it exactly where they found it, it will therefore, so long as
+it is thus the utterance of human thought and feeling, inevitably show
+itself alive by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition,
+loss, progress, and decay. A living language therefore is one which
+abundantly deserves this name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is
+by living men, a _vital_ formative energy is still at work. It is one
+which is in course of actual evolution, which, if the life that animates
+it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it
+anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources,
+increasing its wealth; while at the same time it is casting off useless
+and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of which it
+finds no use, rejecting from itself by a re-active energy the foreign
+and heterogeneous, which may for a while have been forced upon it. I
+would not assert that in the process of all this it does not make
+mistakes; in the desire to simplify it may let go distinctions which
+were not useless, and which it would have been better to retain; the
+acquisitions which it makes are very far from being all gains; it
+sometimes rejects words as worthless, or suffers words to die out, which
+were most worthy to have lived. So far as it does this its life is not
+perfectly healthy; there are here signs, however remote, of
+disorganization, decay, and ultimate death; but still it lives, and even
+these misgrowths and malformations, the rejection of this good, the
+taking up into itself of that ill, all these errors are themselves the
+utterances and evidences of life. A dead language is the contrary of all
+this. It is dead, because books, and not now any generation of living
+men, are the guardians of it, and what they guard, they guard without
+change. Its course has been completely run, and it is now equally
+incapable of gaining and of losing. We may come to know it better; but
+in itself it is not, and never can be, other than it was when it ceased
+from the lips of men.
+
+{Sidenote: _English a Living Language_}
+
+Our own is, of course, a living language still. It is therefore gaining
+and losing. It is a tree in which the vital sap is circulating yet,
+ascending from the roots into the branches; and as this works, new
+leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping
+away. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some
+of the evidences of this life at work in it still. As I took for the
+subject of my first lecture the actual proportions in which the several
+elements of our composite English are now found in it, and the service
+which they were severally called on to perform, so I shall consider in
+this the _sources_ from which the English language has enriched its
+vocabulary, the _periods_ at which it has made the chief additions to
+this, the _character_ of the additions which at different periods it has
+made, and the _motives_ which induced it to seek them.
+
+I had occasion to mention in that lecture and indeed I dwelt with some
+emphasis on the fact, that the core, the radical constitution of our
+language, is Anglo-Saxon; so that, composite or mingled as it must be
+freely allowed to be, it is only such in respect to words, not in
+respect of construction, inflexions, or generally its grammatical forms.
+These are all of one piece; and whatever of new has come in has been
+compelled to conform itself to these. The framework is English; only a
+part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this filling in, of these
+its comparatively more recent accessions, I now propose to speak.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Norman Conquest_}
+
+The first great augmentation by foreign words of our Saxon vocabulary,
+setting aside those which the Danes brought us, was a consequence,
+although not an immediate one, of the battle of Hastings, and of the
+Norman domination which Duke William's victory established in our land.
+And here let me say in respect of that victory, in contradiction to the
+sentimental regrets of Thierry and others, and with the fullest
+acknowledgement of the immediate miseries which it entailed on the Saxon
+race, that it was really the making of England; a judgment, it is true,
+but a judgment and mercy in one. God never showed more plainly that He
+had great things in store for the people which should occupy this
+English soil, than when He brought hither that aspiring Norman race. At
+the same time the actual interpenetration of our Anglo-Saxon with any
+large amount of French words did not find place till very considerably
+later than this event, however it was a consequence of it. Some French
+words we find very soon after; but in the main the two streams of
+language continued for a long while separate and apart, even as the two
+nations remained aloof, a conquering and a conquered, and neither
+forgetting the fact.
+
+Time however softened the mutual antipathies. The Norman, after a while
+shut out from France, began more and more to feel that England was his
+home and sphere. The Saxon, recovering little by little from the extreme
+depression which had ensued on his defeat, became every day a more
+important element of the new English nation which was gradually forming
+from the coalition of the two races. His language partook of his
+elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority. French was no
+longer the only language in which a gentleman could speak, or a poet
+sing. At the same time the Saxon, now passing into the English language,
+required a vast addition to its vocabulary, if it were to serve all the
+needs of those who were willing to employ it now. How much was there of
+high culture, how many of the arts of life, of its refined pleasures,
+which had been strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no
+utterance in Saxon words. All this it was sought to supply from the
+French.
+
+We shall not err, I think, if we assume the great period of the
+incoming of French words into the English language to have been when the
+Norman nobility were exchanging their own language for the English; and
+I should be disposed with Tyrwhitt to believe that there is much
+exaggeration in attributing the large influx of these into English to
+one man's influence, namely to Chaucer's{38}. Doubtless he did much; he
+fell in with and furthered a tendency which already prevailed. But to
+suppose that the majority of French vocables which he employed in his
+poems had never been employed before, had been hitherto unfamiliar to
+English ears, is to suppose that his poems must have presented to his
+contemporaries an absurd patchwork of two languages, and leaves it
+impossible to explain how he should at once have become the popular poet
+of our nation.
+
+{Sidenote: _Influence of Chaucer_}
+
+That Chaucer largely developed the language in this direction is indeed
+plain. We have only to compare his English with that of another great
+master of the tongue, his contemporary Wiclif, to perceive how much more
+his diction is saturated with French words than is that of the Reformer.
+We may note too that many which he and others employed, and as it were
+proposed for admission, were not finally allowed and received; so that
+no doubt they went beyond the needs of the language, and were here in
+excess{39}. At the same time this can be regarded as no condemnation of
+their attempt. It was only by actual experience that it could be proved
+whether the language wanted those words or not, whether it could absorb
+them into itself, and assimilate them with all that it already was and
+had; or did not require, and would therefore in due time reject and put
+them away. And what happened then will happen in every attempt to
+transplant on a large scale the words of one language into another. Some
+will take root; others will not, but after a longer or briefer period
+will wither and die. Thus I observe in Chaucer such French words as
+these, 'misericorde', 'malure' (malheur), 'penible', 'ayel' (aieul),
+'tas', 'gipon', 'pierrie' (precious stones); none of which, and Wiclif's
+'creansur' (2 Kings iv. 1) as little, have permanently won a place in
+our tongue. For a long time 'mel', used often by Sylvester, struggled
+hard for a place in the language side by side with honey; 'roy' side by
+side with king; this last quite obtained one in Scotch. It is curious to
+mark some of these French adoptions keeping their ground to a
+comparatively late day, and yet finally extruded: seeming to have taken
+firm root, they have yet withered away in the end. Thus it has been, for
+example, with 'egal' (Puttenham); with 'ouvert', 'mot', 'ecurie',
+'baston', 'gite' (Holland); with 'rivage', 'jouissance', 'noblesse',
+'tort' (=wrong), 'accoil' (accuellir), 'sell' (=saddle), all occurring
+in Spenser; with 'to serr' (serrer), 'vive', 'reglement', used all by
+Bacon; and so with 'esperance', 'orgillous' (orgueilleux), 'rondeur',
+'scrimer' (=fencer), all in Shakespeare; with 'amort' (this also in
+Shakespeare){40}, and 'avie' (Holland). 'Maugre', 'congie', 'devoir',
+'dimes', 'sans', and 'bruit', used often in our Bible, were English
+once{41}; when we employ them now, it is with the sense that we are
+using foreign words. The same is true of 'dulce', 'aigredoulce'
+(=soursweet), of 'mur' for wall, of 'baine' for bath, of the verb 'to
+cass' (all in Holland), of 'volupty' (Sir Thomas Elyot), 'volunty'
+(Evelyn), 'medisance' (Montagu), 'petit' (South), 'aveugle', 'colline'
+(both in _State Papers_), and 'eloign' (Hacket){42}.
+
+We have seen when the great influx of French words took place--that is,
+from the time of the Conquest, although scantily and feebly at the
+first, to that of Chaucer. But with him our literature and language had
+made a burst, which they were not able to maintain. He has by Warton
+been well compared to some warm bright day in the very early spring,
+which seems to say that the winter is over and gone; but its promise is
+deceitful; the full bursting and blossoming of the springtime are yet
+far off. That struggle with France which began so gloriously, but ended
+so disastrously, even with the loss of our whole ill-won dominion there,
+the savagery of our wars of the Roses, wars which were a legacy
+bequeathed to us by that unrighteous conquest, leave a huge gap in our
+literary history, nearly a century during which very little was done for
+the cultivation of our native tongue, during which it could have made
+few important accessions to its wealth.
+
+{Sidenote: _Latin Importation_}
+
+The period however is notable as being that during which for the first
+time we received a large accession of Latin words. There was indeed
+already a small settlement of these, for the most part ecclesiastical,
+which had long since found their home in the bosom of the Anglo-Saxon
+itself, and had been entirely incorporated into it. The fact that we had
+received our Christianity from Rome, and that Latin was the constant
+language of the Church, sufficiently explains the incoming of these.
+Such were 'monk', 'bishop' (I put them in their present shapes, and do
+not concern myself whether they were originally Greek or no; they
+reached _us_ as Latin); 'provost', 'minster', 'cloister', 'candle',
+'psalter', 'mass', and the names of certain foreign animals, as
+'camel', or plants or other productions, as 'pepper', 'fig'; which are
+all, with slightly different orthography, Anglo-Saxon words. These,
+however, were entirely exceptional, and stood to the main body of the
+language not as the Romance element of it does now to the Gothic, one
+power over against another, but as the Spanish or Italian or Arabic
+words in it now stand to the whole present body of the language--and
+could not be affirmed to affect it more.
+
+So soon however as French words were imported largely, as I have just
+observed, into the language, and were found to coalesce kindly with the
+native growths, this very speedily suggested, as indeed it alone
+rendered possible, the going straight to the Latin, and drawing directly
+from it; and thus in the hundred years which followed Chaucer a large
+amount of Latin found its way, if not into our speech, yet at all events
+into our books--words which were not brought _through_ the French, for
+they are not, and have not at any time been, French, but yet words which
+would never have been introduced into English, if their way had not been
+prepared, if the French already domesticated among us had not bridged
+over, as it were, the gulf, that would have otherwise been too wide
+between them and the Saxon vocables of our tongue.
+
+In this period, a period of great depression of the national spirit, we
+may trace the attempt at a pedantic latinization of English quite as
+clearly at work as at later periods, subsequent to the revival of
+learning. It was now that a crop of such words as 'facundious',
+'tenebrous', 'solacious', 'pulcritude', 'consuetude' (all these occur in
+Hawes), with many more, long since rejected by the language, sprung up;
+while other words, good in themselves, and which have been since
+allowed, were yet employed in numbers quite out of proportion with the
+Saxon vocables with which they were mingled, and which they altogether
+overtopped and shadowed. Chaucer's hearty English feeling, his thorough
+sympathy with the people, the fact that, scholar as he was, he was yet
+the poet not of books but of life, and drew his best inspiration from
+life, all this had kept him, in the main, clear of this fault. But in
+others it is very manifest. Thus I must esteem the diction of Lydgate,
+Hawes, and the other versifiers who filled up the period between Chaucer
+and Surrey, immensely inferior to Chaucer's; being all stuck over with
+long and often ill-selected Latin words. The worst offenders in this
+line, as Campbell himself admits, were the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
+century. "The prevailing fault", he says, "of English diction, in the
+fifteenth century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation of
+anglicising Latin words. In this pedantry and use of "aureate terms" the
+Scottish versifiers went even beyond their brethren of the south....
+When they meant to be eloquent, they tore up words from the Latin, which
+never took root in the language, like children making a mock garden with
+flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither"{43}.
+
+To few indeed is the wisdom and discretion given, certainly it was
+given to none of those, to bear themselves in this hazardous enterprise
+according to the rules laid down by Dryden; who in the following
+admirable passage declares the motives that induced him to seek for
+foreign words, and the considerations that guided him in their
+selection: "If sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who
+shall hinder me to import them from a foreign country? I carry not out
+the treasure of the nation which is never to return, but what I bring
+from Italy I spend in England. Here it remains and here it circulates,
+for, if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand to another. I trade
+both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native
+language. We have enough in England to supply our necessity, but if we
+will have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by
+commerce. Poetry requires adornment, and that is not to be had from our
+old Teuton monosyllables; therefore if I find any elegant word in a
+classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by using it myself; and
+if the public approves of it, the bill passes. But every man cannot
+distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry: every man therefore is not fit
+to innovate. Upon the whole matter a poet must first be certain that the
+word he would introduce is beautiful in the Latin; and is to consider in
+the next place whether it will agree with the English idiom: after this,
+he ought to take the opinion of judicious friends, such as are learned
+in both languages; and lastly, since no man is infallible, let him use
+this licence very sparingly; for if too many foreign words are poured
+in upon us, it looks as if they were designed not to assist the natives,
+but to conquer them"{44}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Influence of the Reformation_}
+
+But this tendency to latinize our speech was likely to receive, and
+actually did receive, a new impulse from the revival of learning, and
+the familiar re-acquaintance with the great masterpieces of ancient
+literature which went along with this revival. Happily another movement
+accompanied, or at least followed hard on this; a movement in England
+essentially national; and which stirred our people at far deeper depths
+of their moral and spiritual life than any mere revival of learning
+could have ever done; I refer, of course, to the Reformation. It was
+only among the Germanic nations of Europe, as has often been remarked,
+that the Reformation struck lasting roots; it found its strength
+therefore in the Teutonic element of the national character, which also
+it in its turn further strengthened, purified, and called out. And thus,
+though Latin came in upon us now faster than ever, and in a certain
+measure also Greek, yet this was not without its redress and
+counterpoise, in the cotemporaneous unfolding of the more fundamentally
+popular side of the language. Popular preaching and discussion, the
+necessity of dealing with truths the most transcendent in a way to be
+understood not by scholars only, but by 'idiots' as well, all this
+served to evoke the native resources of our tongue; and thus the
+relative proportion between the one part of the language and the other
+was not dangerously disturbed, the balance was not destroyed; as it
+might well have been, if only the Humanists{45} had been at work, and
+not the Reformers as well.
+
+The revival of learning, which made itself first felt in Italy, extended
+to England, and was operative here, during the reigns of Henry the
+Eighth and his immediate successors. Having thus slightly anticipated in
+time, it afterwards ran exactly parallel with, the period during which
+our Reformation was working itself out. The epoch was in all respects
+one of immense mental and moral activity, and such never leave the
+language of a nation where they found it. Much is changed in it; much
+probably added; for the old garment of speech, which once served all
+needs, has grown too narrow, and serves them now no more. "Change in
+language is not, as in many natural products, continuous; it is not
+equable, but eminently by fits and starts"; and when the foundations of
+the national mind are heaving under the power of some new truth, greater
+and more important changes will find place in fifty years than in two
+centuries of calmer or more stagnant existence. Thus the activities and
+energies which the Reformation awakened among us here--and I need not
+tell you that these reached far beyond the domain of our directly
+religious life--caused mighty alterations in the English tongue{46}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Rise of New Words_}
+
+For example, the Reformation had its scholarly, we might say, its
+scholastic, as well as its popular, aspect. Add this fact to the fact of
+the revived interest in classical learning, and you will not wonder that
+a stream of Latin, now larger than ever, began to flow into our
+language. Thus Puttenham, writing in Queen Elizabeth's reign{47}, gives
+a long list of words which, as he declares, had been quite recently
+introduced into the language. Some of them are Greek, a few French and
+Italian, but very far the most are Latin. I will not give you his whole
+catalogue, but some specimens from it; it is difficult to understand
+concerning some of these, how the language should have managed to do
+without them so long; 'method', 'methodical', 'function', 'numerous',
+'penetrate', 'penetrable', 'indignity', 'savage', 'scientific',
+'delineation', 'dimension'--all which he notes to have recently come up;
+so too 'idiom', 'significative', 'compendious', 'prolix', 'figurative',
+'impression', 'inveigle', 'metrical'. All these he adduces with praise;
+others upon which he bestows equal commendation, have not held their
+ground, as 'placation', 'numerosity', 'harmonical'. Of those neologies
+which he disallowed, he only anticipated in some cases, as in
+'facundity', 'implete', 'attemptat' ('attentat'), the decision of a
+later day; other words which he condemned no less, as 'audacious',
+'compatible', 'egregious', have maintained their ground. These too have
+done the same; 'despicable', 'destruction', 'homicide', 'obsequious',
+'ponderous', 'portentous', 'prodigious', all of them by another writer a
+little earlier condemned as "inkhorn terms, smelling too much of the
+Latin".
+
+{Sidenote: _French Neologies_}
+
+It is curious to observe the "words of art", as he calls them, which
+Philemon Holland, a voluminous translator at the end of the sixteenth
+and beginning of the seventeenth century, counts it needful to explain
+in a sort of glossary which he appends to his translation of Pliny's
+_Natural History_{48}. One can hardly at the present day understand how
+any person who would care to consult the book at all would find any
+difficulty with words like the following, 'acrimony', 'austere', 'bulb',
+'consolidate', 'debility', 'dose', 'ingredient', 'opiate', 'propitious',
+'symptom', all which, however, as novelties he carefully explains. Some
+of the words in his glossary, it is true, are harder and more technical
+than these; but a vast proportion of them present no greater difficulty
+than those which I have adduced{49}.
+
+The period during which this naturalization of Latin words in the
+English Language was going actively forward, may be said to have
+continued till about the Restoration of Charles the Second. It first
+received a check from the coming up of French tastes, fashions, and
+habits of thought consequent on that event. The writers already formed
+before that period, such as Cudworth and Barrow, still continued to
+write their stately sentences, Latin in structure, and Latin in diction,
+but not so those of a younger generation. We may say of this influx of
+Latin that it left the language vastly more copious, with greatly
+enlarged capabilities, but perhaps somewhat burdened, and not always
+able to move gracefully under the weight of its new acquisitions; for as
+Dryden has somewhere truly said, it is easy enough to acquire foreign
+words, but to know what to do with them after you have acquired, is the
+difficulty.
+
+{Sidenote: _Pedantic Words_}
+
+It might have received indeed most serious injury, if _all_ the words
+which the great writers of this second Latin period of our language
+employed, and so proposed as candidates for admission into it, had
+received the stamp of popular allowance. But happily it was not so; it
+was here, as it had been before with the French importations, and with
+the earlier Latin of Lydgate and Occleve. The re-active powers of the
+language, enabling it to throw off that which was foreign to it, did not
+fail to display themselves now, as they had done on former occasions.
+The number of unsuccessful candidates for admission into, and permanent
+naturalization in, the language during this period, is enormous; and one
+may say that in almost all instances where the Alien Act has been
+enforced, the sentence of exclusion was a just one; it was such as the
+circumstances of the case abundantly bore out. Either the word was not
+idiomatic, or was not intelligible, or was not needed, or looked ill, or
+sounded ill, or some other valid reason existed against it. A lover of
+his native tongue will tremble to think what that tongue would have
+become, if all the vocables from the Latin and the Greek which were then
+introduced or endorsed by illustrious names, had been admitted on the
+strength of their recommendation; if 'torve' and 'tetric' (Fuller),
+'cecity' (Hooker), 'fastide' and 'trutinate' (_State Papers_),
+'immanity' (Shakespeare), 'insulse' and 'insulsity' (Milton, prose),
+'scelestick' (Feltham), 'splendidious' (Drayton), 'pervicacy' (Baxter),
+'stramineous', 'ardelion' (Burton), 'lepid' and 'sufflaminate' (Barrow),
+'facinorous' (Donne), 'immorigerous', 'clancular', 'ferity',
+'ustulation', 'stultiloquy', 'lipothymy' ({Greek: leipothymia}),
+'hyperaspist' (all in Jeremy Taylor), if 'mulierosity', 'subsannation',
+'coaxation', 'ludibundness', 'delinition', 'septemfluous', 'medioxumous',
+'mirificent', 'palmiferous' (all in Henry More), 'pauciloquy' and
+'multiloquy' (Beaumont, _Psyche_); if 'dyscolous' (Foxe), 'ataraxy'
+(Allestree), 'moliminously' (Cudworth), 'luciferously' (Sir Thomas
+Browne), 'immarcescible' (Bishop Hall), 'exility', 'spinosity',
+'incolumity', 'solertiousness', 'lucripetous', 'inopious', 'eluctate',
+'eximious' (all in Hacket), 'arride'{50} (ridiculed by Ben Johnson),
+with the hundreds of other words like these, and even more monstrous
+than are some of these, not to speak of such Italian as 'leggiadrous' (a
+favourite word in Beaumont's _Psyche_), 'amorevolous' (Hacket), had not
+been rejected and disallowed by the true instinct of the national mind.
+
+{Sidenote: _Naturalization of Words_}
+
+A great many too _were_ allowed and adopted, but not exactly in the shape
+in which they first were introduced among us; they were made to drop
+their foreign termination, or otherwise their foreign appearance, to
+conform themselves to English ways, and only so were finally incorporated
+into the great family of English words{51}. Thus of Greek words we have
+the following: 'pyramis' and 'pyramides', forms often employed by
+Shakespeare, became 'pyramid' and 'pyramids'; 'dosis' (Bacon) 'dose';
+'distichon' (Holland) 'distich'; 'hemistichion' (North) 'hemistich';
+'apog�on' (Fairfax) and 'apogeum' (Browne) 'apogee'; 'sumphonia'
+(Lodge) 'symphony'; 'prototypon' (Jackson) 'prototype'; 'synonymon'
+(Jeremy Taylor) or 'synonymum' (Hacket), and 'synonyma' (Milton, prose),
+became severally 'synonym' and 'synonyms'; 'syntaxis' (Fuller) became
+'syntax'; 'extasis' (Burton) 'ecstasy'; 'parallelogrammon' (Holland)
+'parallelogram'; 'programma' (Warton) 'program'; 'epitheton' (Cowell)
+'epithet'; 'epocha' (South) 'epoch'; 'biographia' (Dryden) 'biography';
+'apostata' (Massinger) 'apostate'; 'despota' (Fox) 'despot';
+'misanthropos' (Shakespeare) if 'misanthropi' (Bacon) 'misanthrope';
+'psalterion' (North) 'psaltery'; 'chasma' (Henry More) 'chasm'; 'idioma'
+and 'prosodia' (both in Daniel, prose) 'idiom' and 'prosody'; 'energia',
+'energy', and 'Sibylla', 'Sibyl' (both in Sidney); 'zoophyton' (Henry
+More) 'zoophyte'; 'enthousiasmos' (Sylvester) 'enthusiasm'; 'phantasma'
+(Donne) 'phantasm'; 'magnes' (Gabriel Harvey) 'magnet'; 'cynosura'
+(Donne) 'cynosure'; 'galaxias' (Fox) 'galaxy'; 'heros' (Henry More)
+'hero'; 'epitaphy' (Hawes) 'epitaph'.
+
+The same process has gone on in a multitude of Latin words, which
+testify by their terminations that they were, and were felt to be, Latin
+at their first employment; though now they are such no longer. Thus
+Bacon uses generally, I know not whether always, 'insecta' for
+'insects'; and 'chylus' for 'chyle'; Bishop Andrews 'nardus' for 'nard';
+Spenser 'zephyrus', and not 'zephyr'; so 'interstitium' (Fuller)
+preceded 'interstice'; 'philtrum' (Culverwell) 'philtre'; 'expansum'
+(Jeremy Taylor) 'expanse'; 'preludium' (Beaumont, _Psyche_), 'prelude';
+'precipitium' (Coryat) 'precipice'; 'aconitum' (Shakespeare) 'aconite';
+'balsamum' (Webster) 'balsam'; 'heliotropium' (Holland) 'heliotrope';
+'helleborum' (North) 'hellebore'; 'vehiculum' (Howe) 'vehicle';
+'troch�us' and 'spond�us' (Holland) 'trochee' and 'spondee'; and
+'machina' (Henry More) 'machine'. We have 'intervalla', not 'intervals',
+in Chillingworth; 'postulata', not 'postulates', in Swift; 'archiva',
+not 'archives', in Baxter; 'demagogi', not 'demagogues', in Hacket;
+'vestigium', not 'vestige', in Culverwell; 'pantomimus' in Lord Bacon
+for 'pantomime'; 'mystagogus' for 'mystagogue', in Jackson; 'atomi' in
+Lord Brooke for 'atoms'; '�dilis' (North) went before '�dile';
+'effigies' and 'statua' (both in Shakespeare) before 'effigy' and
+'statue'; 'abyssus' (Jackson) before 'abyss'; 'vestibulum' (Howe) before
+'vestibule'; 'symbolum' (Hammond) before 'symbol'; 'spectrum' (Burton)
+before 'spectre'; while only after a while 'qu�re' gave place to
+'query'; 'audite' (Hacket) to 'audit'; 'plaudite' (Henry More) to
+'plaudit'; and the low Latin 'mummia' (Webster) became 'mummy'. The
+widely extended change of such words as 'innocency', 'indolency',
+'temperancy', and the large family of words with the same termination,
+into 'innocence', 'indolence', 'temperance', and the like, can only be
+regarded as part of the same process of entire naturalization.
+
+The plural very often tells the secret of a word, and of the light in
+which it is regarded by those who employ it, when the singular, being
+less capable of modification, would have failed to do so; thus when
+Holland writes 'phalanges', 'bisontes', 'ide�', it is clear that
+'phalanx', 'bison', 'idea', were still Greek words for him; as 'dogma'
+was for Hammond, when he made its plural not 'dogmas', but 'dogmata'{52};
+and when Spenser uses 'heroes' as a trisyllable, it plainly is not yet
+thoroughly English for him{53}. 'Cento' is not English, but a Latin word
+used in English, so long as it makes its plural not 'centos', but
+'centones', as in the old anonymous translation of Augustin's _City of
+God_{54}; and 'specimen', while it makes its plural 'specimina' (Howe).
+Pope making, as he does, 'satellites' a quadrisyllable in the line
+
+    "Why Jove's _satellites_ are less than Jove",
+
+must have felt that he was still dealing with it as Latin; just as
+'terminus', a word which the necessities of railways have introduced
+among us, will not be truly naturalized till we use 'terminuses', and
+not 'termini' for its plural; nor 'phenomenon', till we have renounced
+'phenomena'. Sometimes it has been found convenient to retain both
+plurals, that formed according to the laws of the classical language,
+and that formed according to the laws of our own, only employing them in
+different senses; thus is it with 'indices' and 'indexes', 'genii' and
+'geniuses'.
+
+The same process has gone on with words from other languages, as from
+the Italian and the Spanish; thus 'bandetto' (Shakespeare), 'bandito'
+(Jeremy Taylor), becomes 'bandit'; 'ruffiano' (Coryat) 'ruffian';
+'concerto', 'concert'; 'busto' (Lord Chesterfield) 'bust'; 'caricatura'
+(Sir Thomas Browne) 'caricature'; 'princessa' (Hacket) 'princess';
+'scaramucha' (Dryden) 'scaramouch'; 'pedanteria' (Sidney) 'pedantry';
+'impresa' 'impress'; 'caprichio' (Shakespeare) becomes first 'caprich'
+(Butler), then 'caprice'; 'duello' (Shakespeare) 'duel'; 'alligarta'
+(Ben Jonson), 'alligator'; 'parroquito' (Webster) 'parroquet'; 'scalada'
+(Heylin) or 'escalado' (Holland) 'escalade'; 'granada' (Hacket)
+'grenade'; 'parada' (J. Taylor) 'parade'; 'emboscado' (Holland)
+'stoccado', 'barricado', 'renegado', 'hurricano' (all in Shakespeare),
+'brocado' (Hackluyt), 'palissado' (Howell), drop their foreign
+terminations, and severally become 'ambuscade', 'stockade', 'barricade',
+'renegade', 'hurricane', 'brocade', 'palisade'; 'croisado' in like
+manner (Bacon) becomes first 'croisade' (Jortin), and then 'crusade';
+'quinaquina' or 'quinquina', 'quinine'. Other slight modifications of
+spelling, not in the termination, but in the body of a word, will
+indicate in like manner its more entire incorporation into the English
+language. Thus 'shash', a Turkish word, becomes 'sash'; 'colone'
+(Burton) 'clown'{55}; 'restoration' was at first spelt 'rest_au_ration';
+and so long as 'vicinage' was spelt 'voisinage'{56} (Sanderson),
+'mirror' 'miroir' (Fuller), 'recoil' 'recule', or 'career' 'carriere'
+(both by Holland), they could scarcely be considered those purely
+English words which now they are{57}.
+
+Here and there even at this comparatively late period of the language
+awkward foreign words will be recast in a more thoroughly English mould;
+'chirurgeon' will become 'surgeon'; 'hemorrhoid', 'emerod'; 'squinancy'
+will become first 'squinzey' (Jeremy Taylor) and then 'quinsey';
+'porkpisce' (Spenser), that is sea-hog, or more accurately hogfish{58}
+will be 'porpesse', and then 'porpoise', as it is now. In other words
+the attempt will be made, but it will be now too late to be attended
+with success. 'Physiognomy' will not give place to 'visnomy', however
+Spenser and Shakespeare employ this briefer form; nor 'hippopotamus' to
+'hippodame', even at Spenser's bidding. In like manner the attempt to
+naturalize 'avant-courier' in the shape of 'vancurrier' has failed.
+Other words also we meet which have finally refused to take a more
+popular form, although such was once more or less current; or, if this
+is too much to say of all, yet hazarded by good authors. Thus Holland
+wrote 'cirque', but we 'circus'; 'cense', but we 'census'; 'interreign',
+but we 'interregnum'; Sylvester 'cest', but we 'cestus'; 'quirry', but
+we 'equerry'; 'colosse', but we still 'colossus'; Golding 'ure', but we
+'urus'; 'metropole', but we 'metropolis'; Dampier 'volcan', but this has
+not superseded 'volcano'; nor 'pagod' (Pope) 'pagoda'; nor 'skelet'
+(Holland) 'skeleton'; nor 'stimule' (Stubbs) 'stimulus'. Bolingbroke
+wrote 'exode', but we hold fast to 'exodus'; Burton 'funge', but we
+'fungus'; Henry More 'enigm', but we 'enigma'; 'analyse', but we
+'analysis'. 'Superfice' (Dryden) has not put 'superficies', nor
+'sacrary' (Hacket) 'sacrarium', nor 'limbeck' 'alembic', out of use.
+Chaucer's 'potecary' has given way to a more Greek formation
+'apothecary'. Yet these and the like must be regarded quite as
+exceptions; the tendency of things is altogether the other way.
+
+Looking at this process of the reception of foreign words, with their
+after assimilation in feature to our own, we may trace, as was to be
+expected, a certain conformity between the genius of our institutions
+and that of our language. It is the very character of our institutions
+to repel none, but rather to afford a shelter and a refuge to all, from
+whatever quarter they come; and after a longer or shorter while all the
+strangers and incomers have been incorporated into the English nation,
+within one or two generations have forgotten that they were ever ought
+else than members of it, have retained no other reminiscence of their
+foreign extraction than some slight difference of name, and that often
+disappearing or having disappeared. Exactly so has it been with the
+English language. No language has shown itself less exclusive; none has
+stood less upon niceties; none has thrown open its arms wider, with a
+fuller confidence, a confidence justified by experience, that it could
+make truly its own, assimilate and subdue to itself, whatever it
+received into its bosom; and in none has this experiment in a larger
+number of instances been successfully carried out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{Sidenote: _French at the Restoration_}
+
+Such are the two great enlargements from without of our vocabulary. All
+other are minor and subordinate. Thus the introduction of French tastes
+by Charles the Second and his courtiers returning from exile, to which I
+have just adverted, though it rather modified the structure of our
+sentences than the materials of our vocabulary, gave us some new words.
+In one of Dryden's plays, _Marriage � la Mode_, a lady full of
+affectation is introduced, who is always employing French idioms in
+preference to English, French words rather than native. It is not a
+little curious that of these, thus put into her mouth to render her
+ridiculous, not a few are excellent English now, and have nothing
+far-sought or affected about them: for so it frequently proves that what
+is laughed at in the beginning, is by all admitted and allowed at the
+last. For example, to speak of a person being in the 'good graces' of
+another has nothing in it ridiculous now; the words 'repartee',
+'embarrass', 'chagrin', 'grimace', do not sound novel and affected now
+as they all must plainly have done at the time when Dryden wrote.
+'Fougue' and 'fraischeur', which he himself employed--being, it is true,
+no frequent offender in this way--have not been justified by the same
+success.
+
+{Sidenote: _Greek Words Naturalized_}
+
+Nor indeed can it be said that this adoption and naturalization of
+foreign words ever ceases in a language. There are periods, as we have
+seen, when this goes forward much more largely than at others; when a
+language throws open, as it were, its doors, and welcomes strangers with
+an especial freedom; but there is never a time, when one by one these
+foreigners and strangers are not slipping into it. We do not for the
+most part observe the fact, at least not while it is actually doing.
+Time, the greatest of all innovators, manages his innovations so
+dexterously, spreads them over such vast periods, and therefore brings
+them about so gradually, that often, while effecting the mightiest
+changes, we have no suspicion that he is effecting any at all. Thus how
+imperceptible are the steps by which a foreign word is admitted into the
+full rights of an English one; the process of its incoming often
+eluding our notice altogether. There are numerous Greek words, for
+example which, quite unchanged in form, have in one way or another ended
+in finding a home and acceptance among us. We may in almost every
+instance trace step by step the naturalization of one of these; and the
+manner of this singularly confirms what has just been said. We can note
+it spelt for a while in Greek letters, and avowedly employed as a Greek
+and not an English vocable; then after it had thus obtained a certain
+allowance among us, and become not altogether unfamiliar, we note it
+exchanging its Greek for English letters, and finally obtaining
+recognition as a word which however drawn from a foreign source, is yet
+itself English. Thus 'acme', 'apotheosis', 'criterion', 'chrysalis',
+'encyclopedia', 'metropolis', 'opthalmia', 'pathos', 'phenomena', are
+all now English words, while yet South with many others always wrote
+{Greek: akm�}, Jeremy Taylor {Greek: apothe�sis} and {Greek: krit�rion},
+Henry More {Greek: chrysalis}, Ben Jonson speaks of 'the knowledge of
+the liberal arts, which the Greeks call {Greek: enkyklopadeian}'{59},
+Culverwell wrote {Greek: m�tropolis} and {Greek: ophthalmia}, Preston,
+{Greek: phainomena}--Sylvester ascribes to Baxter, not 'pathos', but
+{Greek: pathos}{60}. {Greek: �thos} is a word at the present moment
+preparing for a like passage from Greek characters to English, and
+certainly before long will be acknowledged as an English word{61}. The
+only cause which has hindered this for some time past is the misgiving
+whether it will not be read '{)e}thos,' and not '{-e}thos,' and thus not
+be the word intended.
+
+Let us trace a like process in some French word, which is at this moment
+becoming English. I know no better example than the French 'prestige'
+will afford. 'Prestige' has manifestly no equivalent in our own
+language; it expresses something which no single word in English, which
+only a long circumlocution, could express; namely, that magic influence
+on others, which past successes as the pledge and promise of future
+ones, breed. The word has thus naturally come to be of very frequent use
+by good English writers; for they do not feel that in employing it they
+are passing by as good or a better word of their own. At first all used
+it avowedly as French, writing it in italics to indicate this. At the
+present moment some write it so still, some do not; some, that is,
+regard it still as foreign, others consider that it has now become
+English, and obtained a settlement among us{62}. Little by little the
+number of those who write it in italics will become fewer and fewer,
+till they cease altogether. It will then only need that the accent
+should be shifted, in obedience to the tendencies of the English
+language, as far back in the word as it will go, that instead of
+'prest�ge', it should be pronounced 'pr�stige' even as within these few
+years instead of 'dep�t' we have learned to say 'd�pot', and its
+naturalization will be complete. I have little doubt that in twenty
+years it will be so pronounced by the majority of well educated
+Englishmen{63},--some pronounce it so already,--and that our present
+pronunciation will pass away in the same manner as 'obl_ee_ge', once
+universal, has past away, and everywhere given place to 'obl_i_ge'{64}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Shifting of Accents_}
+
+Let me here observe in passing, that the process of throwing the accent
+of a word back, by way of completing its naturalization, is one which we
+may note constantly going forward in our language. Thus, while Chaucer
+accentuates sometimes 'nat�re', he also accentuates elsewhere 'n�ture',
+while sometimes 'virt�e', at other times 'v�rtue'. 'Prostrate',
+'adverse', 'aspect', 'process', 'insult', 'impulse', 'pretext',
+'contrite', 'uproar', 'contest', had all their accent on the last
+syllable in Milton; they have it now on the first; 'ch�racter' was
+'char�cter' with Spenser; 'th�atre' was 'the�tre' with Sylvester; while
+'ac�demy' was accented 'acad�my' by Cowley and Butler{65}. 'Essay' was
+'ess�y' with Dryden and with Pope; the first closes an heroic line with
+the word; Pope does the same with 'barrier'{66} and 'effort'; therefore
+pronounced 'barr�er', 'eff�rt', by him.
+
+There are not a few other French words which like 'prestige' are at this
+moment hovering on the verge of English, hardly knowing whether they
+shall become such, or no. Such are 'ennui', 'exploitation', 'verve',
+'persiflage', 'badinage', 'chicane', 'finesse', and others; all of them
+often employed by us,--and it is out of such frequent employment that
+adoption proceeds,--because expressing shades of meaning not expressed
+by any words of our own{67}. Some of these, we may confidently
+anticipate, will complete their naturalization; others will after a time
+retreat again, and become for us avowedly French. 'Solidarity', a word
+which we owe to the French Communists, and which signifies a fellowship
+in gain and loss, in honour and dishonour, in victory and defeat, a
+being, so to speak, all in the same bottom, is so convenient, that
+unattractive as confessedly it is, it will be in vain to struggle
+against its reception. The newspapers already have it, and books will
+not long exclude it; not to say that it has established itself in
+German, and probably in other European languages as well.
+
+{Sidenote: _Greek in English_}
+
+Greek and Latin words also we still continue to adopt, although now no
+longer in troops and companies, but only one by one. With the lively
+interest which always has been felt in classical studies among us, and
+which will continue to be felt, so long as any greatness and nobleness
+survive in our land, it must needs be that accessions from these
+quarters would never cease altogether. I do not refer here to purely
+scientific terms; these, so long as they continue such, and do not pass
+beyond the threshold of the science or sciences for the use of which
+they were invented, being never heard on the lips, or employed in the
+writings, of any but the cultivators of these sciences, have no right to
+be properly called words at all. They are a kind of shorthand of the
+science, or algebraic notation; and will not find place in a dictionary
+of the language, constructed upon true principles, but rather in a
+technical dictionary apart by themselves. Of these, compelled by the
+advances of physical science, we have coined multitudes out of number in
+these later times, fashioning them mainly from the Greek, no other
+language within our reach yielding itself at all so easily to our needs.
+
+Of non-scientific words, both Greek and Latin, some have made their way
+among us quite in these latter times. Burke in the House of Commons is
+said to have been the first who employed the word 'inimical'{68}. He
+also launched the verb 'to spheterize' in the sense of to appropriate
+or make one's own; but this without success. Others have been more
+fortunate; '�sthetic' we have got indeed _through_ the Germans, but
+_from_ the Greeks. Tennyson has given allowance to '�on'{69}; and 'myth'
+is a deposit which wide and far-reaching controversies have left in the
+popular language. 'Photography' is an example of what I was just now
+speaking of--namely, a scientific word which has travelled beyond the
+limits of the science which it designates and which gave it birth.
+'Stereotype' is another word of the same character. It was invented--not
+the thing, but the word,--by Didot not very long since; but it is now
+absorbed into healthy general circulation, being current in a secondary
+and figurative sense. Ruskin has given to 'ornamentation' the sanction
+and authority of his name. 'Normal' and 'abnormal', not quite so new,
+are yet of recent introduction into the language{70}.
+
+{Sidenote: _German Importations_}
+
+When we consider the near affinity between the English and German
+languages, which, if not sisters, may at least be regarded as first
+cousins, it is somewhat remarkable that almost since the day when they
+parted company, each to fulfil its own destiny, there has been little
+further commerce between them in the matter of giving or taking. At any
+rate adoptions on our part from the German have been till within this
+period extremely rare. 'Crikesman' (Kriegsmann) and 'brandschat'
+(Brandschatz), with some other German words common enough in the _State
+Papers_ of the sixteenth century, found no permanent place in the
+language. The explanation lies in the fact that the literary activity of
+Germany did not begin till very late, nor our interest in it till later
+still, not indeed till the beginning of the present century. Yet
+'plunder', as I have mentioned elsewhere, was brought back from Germany
+about the beginning of our Civil Wars, by the soldiers who had served
+under Gustavus Adolphus and his captains{71}. And 'trigger', written
+'tricker' in _Hudibras_ is manifestly the German 'dr�cker'{72}, though
+none of our dictionaries have marked it as such; a word first appearing
+at the same period, it may have reached us through the same channel.
+'Iceberg' (eisberg) also we must have taken whole from the German, as,
+had we constructed the word for ourselves, we should have made it not
+'ice_berg_', but 'ice-_mountain_'. I have not found it in our earlier
+voyagers, often as they speak of the 'icefield', which yet is not
+exactly the same thing. An English 'swindler' is not exactly a German
+'schwindler', yet the notion of the 'nebulo', though more latent in the
+German, is common to both; and we must have drawn the word from
+Germany{73} (it is not an old one in our tongue) during the course of
+the last century. If '_life_-guard' was originally, as Richardson
+suggests, '_leib_-garde', or '_body_-guard', and from that transformed,
+by the determination of Englishmen to make it significant in English,
+into '_life_-guard', or guard defending the _life_ of the sovereign,
+this will be another word from the same quarter. Yet I have my doubts;
+'leibgarde' would scarcely have found its way hither before the
+accession of the House of Hanover, or at any rate before the arrival of
+Dutch William with his memorable guards; while 'lifeguard', in its
+present shape, is certainly an older word in the language; we hear often
+of the 'lifeguards' in our Civil Wars; as witness too Fuller's words:
+"The Cherethites were a kind of _lifegard_ to king David"{74}.
+
+Of late our German importations have been somewhat more numerous. With
+several German compound words we have been in recent times so well
+pleased, that we must needs adopt them into English, or imitate them in
+it. We have not always been very happy in those which we have selected
+for imitation or adoption. Thus we might have been satisfied with
+'manual', and not called back from its nine hundred years of oblivion
+that ugly and unnecessary word 'handbook'. And now we are threatened
+with 'word-building', as I see a book announced under the title of
+"Latin _word-building_", and, much worse than this, with 'stand-point'.
+'Einseitig' (itself a modern word, if I mistake not, or at any rate
+modern in its secondary application) has not, indeed, been adopted, but
+is evidently the pattern on which we have formed 'onesided'--a word to
+which a few years ago something of affectation was attached; so that any
+one who employed it at once gave evidence that he was more or less a
+dealer in German wares; it has however its manifest conveniences, and
+will hold its ground. 'Fatherland' (Vaterland) on the contrary will
+scarcely establish itself among us, the note of affectation will
+continue to cleave to it, and we shall go on contented with 'native
+country' to the end{75}. The most successful of these compounded words,
+borrowed recently from the German, is 'folk-lore', and the substitution
+of this for popular superstitions, must be esteemed, I think, an
+unquestionable gain{76}.
+
+To speak now of other sources from which the new words of a language are
+derived. Of course the period when absolutely new roots are generated
+will have past away, long before men begin by a reflective act to take
+any notice of processes going forward in the language which they speak.
+This pure productive energy, creative we might call it, belongs only to
+the earlier stages of a nation's existence,--to times quite out of the
+ken of history. It is only from materials already existing either in its
+own bosom, or in the bosom of other languages, that it can enrich itself
+in the later, or historical stages of its life.
+
+{Sidenote: _Compound Words_}
+
+And first, it can bring its own words into new combinations; it can join
+two, and sometimes even more than two, of the words which it already
+has, and form out of them a new one. Much more is wanted here than
+merely to attach two or more words to one another by a hyphen; this is
+not to make a new word: they must really coalesce and grow together.
+Different languages, and even the same language at different stages of
+its existence, will possess this power of forming new words by the
+combination of old in very different degrees. The eminent felicity of
+the Greek in this respect has been always acknowledged. "The joints of
+her compounded words", says Fuller, "are so naturally oiled, that they
+run nimbly on the tongue, which makes them though long, never tedious,
+because significant"{77}. Sir Philip Sidney boasts of the capability of
+our English language in this respect--that "it is particularly happy in
+the composition of two or three words together, near equal to the Greek".
+No one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, or to make
+manifest what may be effected by this marriage of words. Many of his
+compound epithets, as 'golden-tressed', 'tinsel-slippered', 'coral-paven',
+'flowry-kirtled', 'violet-embroidered', 'vermeil-tinctured', are
+themselves poems in miniature. Not unworthy to be set beside these are
+Sylvester's "_opal-coloured_ morn", Drayton's "_silver-sanded_ shore",
+and perhaps Marlowe's "_golden-fingered_ Ind"{78}.
+
+Our modern inventions in the same kind are for the most part very
+inferior: they could hardly fail to be so, seeing that the formative,
+plastic powers of a language are always waning and diminishing more and
+more. It may be, and indeed is, gaining in other respects, but in this
+it is losing; and thus it is not strange if its later births in this
+kind are less successful than its earlier. Among the poets of our own
+time Shelley has done more than any other to assert for the language
+that it has not quite renounced this power; while among writers of prose
+in these later days Jeremy Bentham has been at once one of the boldest,
+but at the same time one of the most unfortunate, of those who have
+issued this money from their mint. Still we ought not to forget, while
+we divert ourselves with the strange and formless progeny of his brain,
+that we owe 'international' to him--a word at once so convenient and
+supplying so real a need, that it was, and with manifest advantage, at
+once adopted by all{79}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Adjectives ending in al_}
+
+Another way in which languages increase their stock of vocables is by
+the forming of new words according to the analogy of formations, which
+in seemingly parallel cases have been already allowed. Thus long since
+upon certain substantives such as 'congregation', 'convention', were
+formed their adjectives, 'congregational', 'conventional'; yet these
+also at a comparatively modern period; 'congregational' first rising up
+in the Assembly of Divines, or during the time of the Commonwealth{80}.
+These having found admission into the language, it is attempted to repeat
+the process in the case of other words with the same ending. I confess
+the effect is often exceedingly disagreeable. We are now pretty well used
+to 'educational', and the word is sometimes serviceable enough; but I can
+perfectly remember when some twenty years ago an "_Educational_ Magazine"
+was started, the first impression on one's mind was, that a work having
+to do with education should not thus bear upon its front an offensive,
+or to say the best, a very dubious novelty in the English language{81}.
+These adjectives are now multiplying fast. We have 'inflexional',
+'seasonal', 'denominational', and, not content with this, in dissenting
+magazines at least, the monstrous birth, 'denominationalism'; 'emotional'
+is creeping into books{82}, 'sensational', and others as well, so that
+it is hard to say where this influx will stop, or whether all our words
+with this termination will not finally generate an adjective. Convenient
+as you may sometimes find these, I would yet certainly counsel you to
+abstain from all but the perfectly well recognized formations of this
+kind. There may be cases of exception; but for the most part Pope's
+advice is good, as certainly it is safe, that we be not among the last
+to use a word which is going out, nor among the first to employ one that
+is coming in.
+
+'Starvation' is another word of comparatively recent introduction,
+formed in like manner on the model of preceding formations of an
+apparently similar character--its first formers, indeed, not observing
+that they were putting a Latin termination to a Saxon word. Some have
+supposed it to have reached us from America. It has not however
+travelled from so great a distance, being a stranger indeed, yet not
+from beyond the Atlantic, but only from beyond the Tweed. It is an old
+Scottish word, but unknown in England, till used by Mr. Dundas, the
+first Viscount Melville, in an American debate in 1775. That it then
+jarred strangely on English ears is evident from the nickname,
+"_Starvation_ Dundas", which in consequence he obtained{83}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Revival of Words_}
+
+Again, languages enrich themselves, our own has done so, by recovering
+treasures which for a while had been lost by them or forgone. I do not
+mean that all which drops out of use _is_ loss; there are words which it
+is gain to be rid of; which it would be folly to wish to revive; of
+which Dryden, setting himself against an extravagant zeal in this
+direction, says in an ungracious comparison--they do "not deserve this
+redemption, any more than the crowds of men who daily die, or are slain
+for sixpence in a battle, merit to be restored to life, if a wish could
+revive them"{84}. There are others, however, which it is a real gain to
+draw back again from the temporary oblivion which had overtaken them;
+and this process of their setting and rising again, or of what, to use
+another image, we might call their suspended animation, is not so
+unfrequent as at first might be supposed.
+
+You may perhaps remember that Horace, tracing in a few memorable lines
+the history of words, while he notes that many once current have now
+dropped out of use, does not therefore count that of necessity their
+race is for ever run; on the contrary he confidently anticipates a
+_palingenesy_ for many among them{85}; and I am convinced that there has
+been such in the case of our English words to a far greater extent than
+we are generally aware. Words slip almost or quite as imperceptibly back
+into use as they once slipped out of it. Let me produce a few facts in
+evidence of this. In the contemporary gloss which an anonymous friend of
+Spenser's furnished to his _Shepherd's Calendar_, first published in
+1579, "for the exposition of old words", as he declares, he thinks it
+expedient to include in his list, the following, 'dapper', 'scathe',
+'askance', 'sere', 'embellish', 'bevy', 'forestall', 'fain', with not a
+few others quite as familiar as these. In Speght's _Chaucer_ (1667),
+there is a long list of "old and obscure words in Chaucer explained";
+including 'anthem', 'blithe', 'bland', 'chapelet', 'carol', 'deluge',
+'franchise', 'illusion', 'problem', 'recreant', 'sphere', 'tissue',
+'transcend', with very many easier than these. In Skinner's
+_Etymologicon_ (1671), there is another list of obsolete, words{86}, and
+among these he includes 'to dovetail', 'to interlace', 'elvish',
+'encombred', 'masquerade' (mascarade), 'oriental', 'plumage', 'pummel'
+(pomell), and 'stew', that is, for fish. Who will say of the verb 'to
+hallow' that it is now even obsolescent? and yet Wallis two hundred
+years ago observed--"It has almost gone out of use" (fer. desuevit). It
+would be difficult to find an example of the verb, 'to advocate',
+between Milton and Burke{87}. Franklin, a close observer in such
+matters, as he was himself an admirable master of English style,
+considered the word to have sprung up during his own residence in
+Europe. In this indeed he was mistaken; it had only during this period
+revived{88}. Johnson says of 'jeopardy' that it is a "word not now in
+use"; which certainly is not any longer true{89}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Dryden and Chaucer's English_}
+
+I am persuaded that in facility of being understood, Chaucer is not
+merely as near, but much nearer, to us than Dryden and his cotemporaries
+felt him to be to them. He and the writers of his time make exactly the
+same sort of complaints, only in still stronger language, about his
+archaic phraseology and the obscurities which it involves, that are made
+at the present day. Thus in the _Preface_ to his _Tales from Chaucer_,
+having quoted some not very difficult lines from the earlier poet whom
+he was modernizing, he proceeds: "You have here a specimen of Chaucer's
+language, which is so obsolete that his sense is scarce to be
+understood". Nor was it merely thus with respect of Chaucer. These wits
+and poets of the Court of Charles the Second were conscious of a greater
+gulf between themselves and the Elizabethan era, separated from them by
+little more than fifty years, than any of which _we_ are aware,
+separated from it by nearly two centuries more. I do not mean merely
+that they felt themselves more removed from its tone and spirit; their
+altered circumstances might explain this; but I am convinced that they
+found a greater difficulty and strangeness in the language of Spenser
+and Shakespeare than we find now; that it sounded in many ways more
+uncouth, more old-fashioned, more abounding in obsolete terms than it
+does in our ears at the present. Only in this way can I explain the
+tone in which they are accustomed to speak of these worthies of the near
+past. I must again cite Dryden, the truest representative of literary
+England in its good and in its evil during the last half of the
+seventeenth century. Of Spenser, whose death was separated from his own
+birth by little more than thirty years, he speaks as of one belonging to
+quite a different epoch, counting it much to say, "Notwithstanding his
+obsolete language, he is still intelligible"{90}. Nay, hear what his
+judgment is of Shakespeare himself, so far as language is concerned: "It
+must be allowed to the present age that the tongue in general is so much
+refined since Shakespeare's time, that many of his words and more of his
+phrases are scarce intelligible. And of those which we understand, some
+are ungrammatical, others coarse; and his whole style is so pestered
+with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is
+obscure"{91}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Nugget_, _Ingot_}
+
+Sometimes a word will emerge anew from the undercurrent of society, not
+indeed new, but yet to most seeming as new, its very existence having
+been altogether forgotten by the larger number of those speaking the
+language; although it must have somewhere lived on upon the lips of men.
+Thus, for instance, since the Californian and Australian discoveries of
+gold we hear often of a 'nugget' of gold; being a lump of the pure
+metal; and there has been some discussion whether the word has been born
+for the present necessity, or whether it be a recent malformation of
+'ingot', I am inclined to think that it is neither one nor the other. I
+would not indeed affirm that it may not be a popular recasting of
+'ingot'; but only that it is not a recent one; for 'nugget' very nearly
+in its present form, occurs in our elder writers, being spelt 'niggot'
+by them{92}. There can be little doubt of the identity of 'niggot' and
+'nugget'; all the consonants, the _stamina_ of a word, being the same;
+while this early form 'niggot' makes more plausible their suggestion
+that 'nugget' is only 'ingot' disguised, seeing that there wants nothing
+but the very common transposition of the first two letters to bring that
+out of this{93}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words from Proper Names_}
+
+New words are often formed from the names of persons, actual or
+mythical. Some one has observed how interesting would be a complete
+collection, or a collection approaching to completeness, in any language
+of the names of _persons_ which have afterwards become names of
+_things_, from 'nomina _appellativa_' have become 'nomina _realia_'{94}.
+Let me without confining myself to those of more recent introduction
+endeavour to enumerate as many as I can remember of the words which have
+by this method been introduced into our language. To begin with mythical
+antiquity--the Chim�ra has given us 'chimerical', Hermes 'hermetic',
+Tantalus 'to tantalize', Hercules 'herculean', Proteus 'protean', Vulcan
+'volcano' and 'volcanic', and D�dalus 'dedal', if this word may on
+Spenser's and Shelley's authority be allowed. Gordius, the Phrygian king
+who tied that famous 'gordian' knot which Alexander cut, will supply a
+natural transition from mythical to historical. Here Mausolus, a king of
+Caria, has left us 'mausoleum', Academus 'academy', Epicurus 'epicure',
+Philip of Macedon a 'philippic', being such a discourse as Demosthenes
+once launched against the enemy of Greece, and Cicero 'cicerone'.
+Mithridates, who had made himself poison-proof, gave us the now
+forgotten word 'mithridate', for antidote; as from Hippocrates we
+derived 'hipocras', or 'ypocras', a word often occurring in our early
+poets, being a wine supposed to be mingled after his receipt. Gentius, a
+king of Illyria, gave his name to the plant 'gentian', having been, it
+is said, the first to discover its virtues. A grammar used to be called
+a 'donnat', or 'donet' (Chaucer), from Donatus, a famous grammarian.
+Lazarus, perhaps an actual person, has given us 'lazar' and 'lazaretto';
+St. Veronica and the legend connected with her name, a 'vernicle';
+being a napkin with the Saviour's face portrayed on it; Simon Magus
+'simony'; Mahomet a 'mammet' or 'maumet', meaning an idol{95}, and
+'mammetry' or idolatry; 'dunce' is from Duns Scotus; while there is a
+legend that the 'knot' or sandpiper is named from Canute or Knute, with
+whom this bird was a special favourite. To come to more modern times,
+and not pausing at Ben Johnson's 'chaucerisms', Bishop Hall's
+'scoganisms', from Scogan, Edward the Fourth's jester, or his
+'aretinisms', from an infamous writer, 'a poisonous Italian ribald' as
+Gabriel Harvey calls him, named Aretine; these being probably not
+intended even by their authors to endure; a Roman cobbler named Pasquin
+has given us the 'pasquil' or 'pasquinade'; 'patch' in the sense of
+fool, and often so used by Shakespeare, was originally the proper name
+of a favourite fool of Cardinal Wolsey{96}; Colonel Negus in Queen
+Anne's time first mixed the beverage which goes by his name; Lord Orrery
+was the first for whom an 'orrery' was constructed; and Lord Spencer
+first wore, or at least first brought into fashion, a 'spencer'. Dahl, a
+Swede, introduced the cultivation of the 'dahlia', and M. Tabinet, a
+French Protestant refugee, the making of the stuff called 'tabinet' in
+Dublin; in '_tram_-road', the second syllable of the name of Ou_tram_,
+the inventor, survives{97}. The 'tontine' was conceived by an Italian
+named Tonti; and another Italian, Galvani, first noted the phenomena of
+animal electricity or 'galvanism'; while a third Italian, 'Volta', gave
+a name to the 'voltaic' battery. 'Martinet', 'mackintosh', 'doyly',
+'brougham', 'to macadamize', 'to burke', are all names of persons or
+from persons, and then transferred to things, on the score of some
+connection existing between the one and other{98}.
+
+Again the names of popular characters in literature, such as have taken
+strong hold on the national mind, give birth to a number of new words.
+Thus from Homer we have 'mentor' for a monitor; 'stentorian', for
+loud-voiced; and inasmuch as with all of Hector's nobleness there is a
+certain amount of big talking about him, he has given us 'to
+hector'{99}; while the medieval romances about the siege of Troy ascribe
+to Pandarus that shameful ministry out of which his name has past into
+the words 'to pandar' and 'pandarism'. 'Rodomontade' is from Rodomont, a
+blustering and boasting hero of Boiardo, adopted by Ariosto;
+'thrasonical', from Thraso, the braggart of the Roman comedy. Cervantes
+has given us 'quixotic'; Swift 'lilliputian'; to Moli�re the French
+language owes 'tartuffe' and 'tartufferie'. 'Reynard' too, which with us
+is a duplicate for fox, while in the French 'renard' has quite excluded
+the older 'volpils', was originally not the name of a kind, but the
+proper name of the fox-hero, the vulpine Ulysses, in that famous
+beast-epic of the middle ages, _Reineke Fuchs_; the immense popularity
+of which we gather from many evidences, from none more clearly than from
+this. 'Chanticleer' is in like manner the proper name of the cock, and
+'Bruin' of the bear in the same poem{100}. These have not made fortune
+to the same extent of actually putting out in any language the names
+which before existed, but still have become quite familiar to us all.
+
+We must not count as new words properly so called, although they may
+delay us for a minute, those comic words, most often comic combinations
+formed at will, and sometimes of enormous length, in which, as plays and
+displays of power, great writers ancient and modern have delighted.
+These for the most part are meant to do service for the moment, and then
+to pass away{101}. The inventors of them had themselves no intention of
+fastening them permanently on the language. Thus among the Greeks
+Aristophanes coined {Greek: mellonikia�}, to loiter like Nicias, with
+allusion to the delays with which this prudent commander sought to put
+off the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with not a few other familiar to
+every scholar. The humour of them sometimes consists in their enormous
+length, as in the {Greek: amphiptolemop�d�sistratos} of Eupolis; the
+{Greek: spermagoraiolekitholachanop�lis} of Aristophanes; sometimes in
+their mingled observance and transgression of the laws of the language,
+as in the 'oculissimus' of Plautus, a comic superlative of 'oculus';
+'occisissimus' of 'occisus'; as in the 'dosones', 'dabones', which in
+Greek and in medieval Latin were names given to those who were ever
+promising, ever saying "I will give" but never performing their promise.
+Plautus with his exuberant wit, and exulting in his mastery and command
+of the Latin language, will compose four or five lines consisting
+entirely of comic combinations thrown off for the occasion{102}. Of the
+same character is Butler's 'cynarctomachy', or battle of a dog and bear.
+Nor do I suppose that Fuller, when he used 'to avunculize', to imitate
+or follow in the steps of one's uncle, or Cowper, when he suggested
+'extraforaneous' for out of doors, in the least intended them as lasting
+additions to the language.
+
+{Sidenote: '_To Chouse_'}
+
+Sometimes a word springs up in a very curious way; here is one, not
+having, I suppose, any great currency except among schoolboys; yet being
+no invention of theirs, but a genuine English word, though of somewhat
+late birth in the language, I mean 'to chouse'. It has a singular
+origin. The word is, as I have mentioned already, a Turkish one, and
+signifies 'interpreter'. Such an interpreter or 'chiaous' (written
+'chaus' in Hackluyt, 'chiaus' in Massinger), being attached to the
+Turkish embassy in England, committed in the year 1609 an enormous fraud
+on the Turkish and Persian merchants resident in London. He succeeded in
+cheating them of a sum amounting to �4000--a sum very much greater at
+that day than at the present. From the vast dimensions of the fraud, and
+the notoriety which attended it, any one who cheated or defrauded was
+said 'to chiaous', 'chause', or 'chouse'; to do, that is, as this
+'chiaous' had done{103}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Different Spelling of Words_}
+
+There is another very fruitful source of new words in a language, or
+perhaps rather another way in which it increases its vocabulary, for a
+question might arise whether the words thus produced ought to be called
+new. I mean through the splitting of single words into two or even more.
+The impulse and suggestion to this is in general first given by
+varieties in pronunciation, which are presently represented by varieties
+in spelling; but the result very often is that what at first were only
+precarious and arbitrary differences in this, come in the end to be
+regarded as entirely different words; they detach themselves from one
+another, not again to reunite; just as accidental varieties in fruits or
+flowers, produced at hazard, have yet permanently separated off, and
+settled into different kinds. They have each its own distinct domain of
+meaning, as by general agreement assigned to it; dividing the
+inheritance between them, which hitherto they held in common. No one who
+has not had his attention called to this matter, who has not watched and
+catalogued these words as they have come under his notice, would at all
+believe how numerous they are.
+
+{Sidenote: _Doublets_}
+
+Sometimes as the accent is placed on one syllable of a word or another,
+it comes to have different significations, and those so distinctly
+marked, that the separation may be regarded as complete. Examples of
+this are the following: 'd�vers', and 'div�rse'; 'c�njure' and
+'conj�re'; '�ntic' and 'ant�que'; 'h�man' and 'hum�ne'; '�rban' and
+'urb�ne'; 'g�ntle' and 'gent�el'; 'c�stom' and 'cost�me'; '�ssay' and
+'ass�y'; 'pr�perty' and 'propr�ety'. Or again, a word is pronounced with
+a full sound of its syllables, or somewhat more shortly: thus 'spirit'
+and 'sprite'; 'blossom' and 'bloom'{104}; 'personality' and
+'personalty'; 'fantasy' and 'fancy'; 'triumph' and 'trump' (the
+_winning_ card{105}); 'happily' and 'haply'; 'waggon' and 'wain';
+'ordinance' and 'ordnance'; 'shallop' and 'sloop'; 'brabble' and
+'brawl'{106}; 'syrup' and 'shrub'; 'balsam' and 'balm'; 'eremite' and
+'hermit'; 'nighest' and 'next'; 'poesy' and 'posy'; 'fragile' and
+'frail'; 'achievement' and 'hatchment'; 'manoeuvre' and 'manure';--or
+with the dropping of the first syllable: 'history' and 'story';
+'etiquette' and 'ticket'; 'escheat' and 'cheat'; 'estate' and 'state';
+and, older probably than any of these, 'other' and 'or';--or with a
+dropping of the last syllable, as 'Britany' and 'Britain'; 'crony' and
+'crone';--or without losing a syllable, with more or less stress laid on
+the close: 'regiment' and 'regimen'; 'corpse' and 'corps'; 'bite' and
+'bit'; 'sire' and 'sir'; 'land' or 'laund' and 'lawn'; 'suite' and
+'suit'; 'swinge' and 'swing'; 'gulph' and 'gulp'; 'launch' and 'lance';
+'wealth' and 'weal'; 'stripe' and 'strip'; 'borne' and 'born'; 'clothes'
+and 'cloths';--or a slight internal vowel change finds place, as between
+'dent' and 'dint'; 'rant' and 'rent' (a ranting actor tears or _rends_ a
+passion to tatters){107}; 'creak' and 'croak'; 'float' and 'fleet';
+'sleek' and 'slick'; 'sheen' and 'shine'; 'shriek' and 'shrike'; 'pick'
+and 'peck'; 'peak', 'pique', and 'pike'; 'weald' and 'wold'; 'drip' and
+'drop'; 'wreathe' and 'writhe'; 'spear' and 'spire' ("the least _spire_
+of grass", South); 'trist' and 'trust'; 'band', 'bend' and 'bond';
+'cope', 'cape' and 'cap'; 'tip' and 'top'; 'slent' (now obsolete) and
+'slant'; 'sweep' and 'swoop'; 'wrest' and 'wrist'; 'gad' (now surviving
+only in gadfly) and 'goad'; 'complement' and 'compliment'; 'fitch' and
+'vetch'; 'spike' and 'spoke'; 'tamper' and 'temper'; 'ragged' and
+'rugged'; 'gargle' and 'gurgle'; 'snake' and 'sneak' (both crawl);
+'deal' and 'dole'; 'giggle' and 'gaggle' (this last is now commonly
+spelt 'cackle'); 'sip', 'sop', 'soup' and 'sup'; 'clack', 'click' and
+'clock'; 'tetchy' and 'touchy'; 'neat' and 'nett'; 'stud' and 'steed';
+'then' and 'than'{108}; 'grits' and 'grouts'; 'spirt' and 'sprout';
+'cure' and 'care'{109}; 'prune' and 'preen'; 'mister' and 'master';
+'allay' and 'alloy'; 'ghostly' and 'ghastly'{110}; 'person' and
+'parson'; 'cleft' and 'clift', now written 'cliff'; 'travel' and
+'travail'; 'truth' and 'troth'; 'pennon' and 'pinion'; 'quail' and
+'quell'; 'quell' and 'kill'; 'metal' and 'mettle'; 'chagrin' and
+'shagreen'; 'can' and 'ken'; 'Francis' and 'Frances'{111}; 'chivalry'
+and 'cavalry'; 'oaf' and 'elf'; 'lose' and 'loose'; 'taint' and 'tint'.
+Sometimes the difference is mainly or entirely in the initial
+consonants, as between 'phial' and 'vial'; 'pother' and 'bother';
+'bursar' and 'purser'; 'thrice' and 'trice'{110}; 'shatter' and
+'scatter'; 'chattel' and 'cattle'; 'chant' and 'cant'; 'zealous' and
+'jealous'; 'channel' and 'kennel'; 'wise' and 'guise'; 'quay' and 'key';
+'thrill', 'trill' and 'drill';--or in the consonants in the middle of
+the word, as between 'cancer' and 'canker'; 'nipple' and 'nibble';
+'tittle' and 'title'; 'price' and 'prize'; 'consort' and 'concert';--or
+there is a change in both, as between 'pipe' and 'fife'.
+
+Or a word is spelt now with a final _k_ and now with a final _ch_; out
+of this variation two different words have been formed; with, it may be,
+other slight differences superadded; thus is it with 'poke' and 'poach';
+'dyke' and 'ditch'; 'stink' and 'stench'; 'prick' and 'pritch' (now
+obsolete); 'break' and 'breach'; to which may be added 'broach'; 'lace'
+and 'latch'; 'stick' and 'stitch'; 'lurk' and 'lurch'; 'bank' and
+'bench'; 'stark' and 'starch'; 'wake' and 'watch'. So too _t_ and _d_
+are easily exchanged; as in 'clod' and 'clot'; 'vend' and 'vent';
+'brood' and 'brat'{112}; 'halt' and 'hold'; 'sad' and 'set'{113}; 'card'
+and 'chart'; 'medley' and 'motley'. Or there has grown up, besides the
+rigorous and accurate pronunciation of a word, a popular as well; and
+this in the end has formed itself into another word; thus is it with
+'housewife' and 'hussey'; 'hanaper' and 'hamper'; 'puisne' and 'puny';
+'patron' and 'pattern'; 'spital' (hospital) and 'spittle' (house of
+correction); 'accompt' and 'account'; 'donjon' and 'dungeon'; 'nestle'
+and 'nuzzle'{114} (now obsolete); 'Egyptian' and 'gypsy'; 'Bethlehem'
+and 'Bedlam'; 'exemplar' and 'sampler'; 'dolphin' and 'dauphin'; 'iota'
+and 'jot'.
+
+Other changes cannot perhaps be reduced exactly under any of these
+heads; as between 'ounce' and 'inch'; 'errant' and 'arrant'; 'slack' and
+'slake'; 'slow' and 'slough'{115}; 'bow' and 'bough'; 'hew' and
+'hough'{115}; 'dies' and 'dice' (both plurals of 'die'); 'plunge' and
+'flounce'{115}; 'staff' and 'stave'; 'scull' and 'shoal'; 'benefit' and
+'benefice'{116}. Or, it may be, the difference which constitutes the two
+forms of the word into two words is in the spelling only, and of a
+character to be appreciable only by the eye, escaping altogether the
+ear: thus it is with 'draft' and 'draught'; 'plain' and 'plane'; 'coign'
+and 'coin'; 'flower' and 'flour'; 'check' and 'cheque'; 'straight' and
+'strait'; 'ton' and 'tun'; 'road' and 'rode'; 'throw' and 'throe';
+'wrack' and 'rack'; 'gait' and 'gate'; 'hoard' and 'horde'{117}; 'knoll'
+and 'noll'; 'chord' and 'cord'; 'drachm' and 'dram'; 'sergeant' and
+'serjeant'; 'mask' and 'masque'; 'villain' and 'villein'.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in Two Forms_}
+
+Now, if you will put the matter to proof, you will find, I believe, in
+every case that there has attached itself to the different forms of a
+word a modification of meaning more or less sensible, that each has won
+for itself an independent sphere of meaning, in which it, and it only,
+moves. For example, 'divers' implies difference only, but 'diverse'
+difference with opposition; thus the several Evangelists narrate the
+same event in 'divers' manner, but not in 'diverse'. 'Antique' is
+ancient, but 'antic', is now the ancient regarded as overlived, out of
+date, and so in our days grotesque, ridiculous; and then, with a
+dropping of the reference to age, the grotesque, the ridiculous alone.
+'Human' is what every man is, 'humane' is what every man ought to be;
+for Johnson's suggestion that 'humane' is from the French feminine,
+'humaine', and 'human' from the masculine, cannot for an instant be
+admitted. 'Ingenious' expresses a mental, 'ingenuous' a moral,
+excellence{118}. A gardener 'prunes', or trims his trees, properly
+indeed his _vines_ alone (pro_vigner_), birds 'preen' or trim their
+feathers. We 'allay' wine with water; we 'alloy' gold with platina.
+'Bloom' is a finer and more delicate efflorescence even than 'blossom';
+thus the 'bloom', but not the 'blossom', of the cheek. It is now always
+'clots' of blood and 'clods' of earth; a 'float' of timber, and a
+'fleet' of ships; men 'vend' wares, and 'vent' complaints. A 'curtsey'
+is one, and that merely an external, manifestation of 'courtesy'.
+'Gambling' may be, as with a fearful irony it is called, _play_, but it
+is nearly as distant from 'gambolling' as hell is from heaven{119}. Nor
+would it be hard, in almost every pair or larger group of words which I
+have adduced, as in others which no doubt might be added to complete the
+list, to trace a difference of meaning which has obtained a more or less
+distinct recognition{120}.
+
+But my subject is inexhaustible; it has no limits except those, which
+indeed may be often narrow enough, imposed by my own ignorance on the
+one side; and on the other, by the necessity of consulting your
+patience, and of only choosing such matter as will admit a popular
+setting forth. These necessities, however, bid me to pause, and suggest
+that I should not look round for other quarters from whence accessions
+of new words are derived. Doubtless I should not be long without finding
+many such. I must satisfy myself for the rest with a very brief
+consideration of the _motives_ which, as they have been, are still at
+work among us, inducing us to seek for these augmentations of our
+vocabulary.
+
+And first, the desire of greater clearness is a frequent motive and
+inducement to this. It has been well and truly said: "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"{121}. The limits of their vocabulary are
+in fact for most men the limits of their knowledge; and in a great
+degree for us all. Of course I do not affirm that it is absolutely
+impossible to have our mental conceptions clearer and more distinct than
+our words; but it is very hard to have, and still harder to keep, them
+so. And therefore it is that men, conscious of this, so soon as ever
+they have learned to distinguish in their minds, are urged by an almost
+irresistible impulse to distinguish also in their words. They feel that
+nothing is made sure till this is done.
+
+{Sidenote: _Dissimilation of Words_}
+
+The sense that a word covers too large a space of meaning, is the
+frequent occasion of the introduction of another, which shall relieve
+it of a portion of this. Thus, there was a time when 'witch' was applied
+equally to male and female dealers in unlawful magical arts. Simon
+Magus, for example, and Elymas are both 'witches', in Wiclif's _New
+Testament_ (Acts viii. 9; xiii. 8), and Posthumus in _Cymbeline_: but
+when the medieval Latin 'sortiarius' (not 'sortitor' as in Richardson),
+supplied another word, the French 'sorcier', and thus our English
+'sorcerer' (originally the "caster of lots"), then 'witch' gradually was
+confined to the hag, or female practiser of these arts, while 'sorcerer'
+was applied to the male.
+
+New necessities, new evolutions of society into more complex conditions,
+evoke new words; which come forth, because they are required now; but
+did not formerly exist, because they were not required in the period
+preceding. For example, in Greece so long as the poet sang his own
+verses 'singer' ({Greek: aoidos}) sufficiently expressed the double
+function; such a 'singer' was Homer, and such Homer describes Demodocus,
+the bard of the Ph�acians; that double function, in fact, not being in
+his time contemplated as double, but each part of it so naturally
+completing the other, that no second word was required. When, however,
+in the division of labour one made the verses which another chaunted,
+then 'poet' or 'maker', a word unknown in the Homeric age, arose. In
+like manner, when 'physicians' were the only natural philosophers, the
+word covered this meaning as well as that other which it still retains;
+but when the investigation of nature and natural causes detached itself
+from the art of healing, became an independent study of itself, the
+name 'physician' remained to that which was as the stock and stem of the
+art, while the new offshoot sought out a new name for itself.
+
+Another motive to the invention of new words, is the desire thereby to
+cut short lengthy{122} explanations, tedious circuits of language.
+Science is often an immense gainer by words, which say singly what it
+would have taken whole sentences otherwise to have said. Thus
+'isothermal' is quite of modern invention; but what a long story it
+would be to tell the meaning of '_isothermal_ lines', all which is
+summed up in and saved by the word. We have long had the word
+'assimilation' in our dictionaries; 'dissimilation' has not yet found
+its way into them, but it speedily will. It will appear first, if it has
+not already appeared, in our books on language{123}. I express myself
+with this confidence, because the advance of philological enquiry has
+rendered it almost a matter of necessity that we should possess a word
+to designate a certain process, and no other word would designate it at
+all so well. There is a process of 'assimilation' going on very
+extensively in language; it occurs where the organs of speech find
+themselves helped by changing a letter for another which has just
+occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not '_adf_iance'
+but '_aff_iance', not 're_n_ow_m_', as our ancestors did when the word
+'renomm�e' was first naturalized, but 're_n_ow_n_'. At the same time
+there is another opposite process, where some letter would recur too
+often for euphony or comfort in speaking, if the strict form of the word
+were too closely held fast, and where consequently this letter is
+exchanged for some other, generally for some nearly allied; thus it is
+at least a reasonable suggestion, that 'coe_r_uleum' was once
+'coe_l_uleum', from coelum: so too the Italians prefer 've_l_e_n_o' to
+'ve_n_e_n_o'; and we 'cinnamo_n_' to 'cinnamo_m_' (the earlier form); in
+'turtle' and 'purple' we have shrunk from the double '_r_' of 'turtur'
+and 'purpura'; and this process of _making unlike_, requiring a term to
+express it, will create, or indeed has created, the word 'dissimilation',
+which probably will in due time establish itself among us in far wider
+than its primary use.
+
+'Watershed' has only recently begun to appear in books of geography; and
+yet how convenient it must be admitted to be; how much more so than
+'line of water parting', which it has succeeded; meaning, as I need
+hardly tell you it does, not merely that which _sheds_ the waters, but
+that which _divides_ them ('wasserscheide'); and being applied to that
+exact ridge and highest line in a mountain region, where the waters of
+that region separate off and divide, some to one side, and some to the
+other; as in the Rocky Mountains of North America there are streams
+rising within very few miles of one another, which flow severally east
+and west, and, if not in unbroken course, yet as affluents to larger
+rivers, fall at least severally into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It
+must be allowed, I think, that not merely geographical terminology, but
+geography itself, had a benefactor in him who first endowed it with so
+expressive and comprehensive a word, bringing before us a fact which we
+should scarcely have been aware of without it.
+
+There is another word which I have just employed, 'affluent', in the
+sense of a stream which does not flow into the sea, but joins a larger
+stream, as for instance, the Isis is an 'affluent' of the Thames, the
+Moselle of the Rhine. It is itself an example in the same kind of that
+whereof I have been speaking, having been only recently constituted a
+substantive, and employed in this sense, while yet its utility is
+obvious. 'Confluents' would perhaps be a fitter name, where the rivers,
+like the Missouri and the Mississippi, were of equal or nearly equal
+importance up to the time of their meeting{124}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Selfishness_', '_Suicide_'}
+
+Again, new words are coined out of the necessity which men feel of
+filling up gaps in the language. Thoughtful men, comparing their own
+language with that of other nations, become conscious of deficiencies,
+of important matters unexpressed in their own, and with more or less
+success proceed to supply the deficiency. For example, that sin of sins,
+the undue love of self, with the postponing of the interests of all
+others to our own, had for a long time no word to express it in English.
+Help was sought from the Greek, and from the Latin. 'Philauty' ({Greek:
+philautia}) had been more than once attempted by our scholars; but found
+no popular acceptance. This failing, men turned to the Latin; one writer
+trying to supply the want by calling the man a 'suist', as one seeking
+_his own_ things ('sua'), and the sin itself, 'suicism'. The gap,
+however, was not really filled up, till some of the Puritan writers,
+drawing on our Saxon, devised 'selfish' and 'selfishness', words which
+to us seem obvious enough, but which yet are little more than two
+hundred [and fifty] years old{125}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Notices of New Words_}
+
+Before quitting this part of the subject, let me say a few words in
+conclusion on this deliberate introduction of words to supply felt
+omissions in a language, and the limits within which this or any other
+conscious interference with the development of a language is desirable
+or possible. By the time that a people begin to meditate upon their
+language, to be aware by a conscious reflective act either of its merits
+or deficiencies, by far the greater and more important part of its work
+is done; it is fixed in respect of its structure in immutable forms; the
+region in which any alteration or modification, addition to it, or
+substraction from it, deliberately devised and carried out, may be
+possible, is very limited indeed. Its great laws are too firmly
+established to admit of this; so that almost nothing can be taken from
+it, which it has got; almost nothing added to it, which it has _not_
+got. It will travel indeed in certain courses of change; but it would be
+as easy almost to alter the career of a planet as for man to alter
+these. This is sometimes a subject of regret with those who see what
+they believe manifest defects or blemishes in their language, and such
+as appear to them capable of remedy. And yet in fact this is well; since
+for once that these redressers of real or fancied wrongs, these
+suppliers of things lacking, would have mended, we may be tolerably
+confident that ten times, yea, a hundred times, they would have marred;
+letting go that which would have been well retained; retaining that
+which by a necessary law the language now dismisses and lets go; and in
+manifold ways interfering with those processes of a natural logic, which
+are here evermore at work. The genius of a language, unconsciously
+presiding over all its transformations, and conducting them to a
+definite issue, will have been a far truer, far safer guide, than the
+artificial wit, however subtle, of any single man, or of any association
+of men. For the genius of a language is the sense and inner conviction
+of all who speak it, as to what it ought to be, and the means by which
+it will best attain its objects; and granting that a pair of eyes, or
+two or three pairs of eyes may see much, yet millions of eyes will
+certainly see more.
+
+{Sidenote: _German Purists_}
+
+It is only with the words, and not with the forms and laws of a
+language, that any interference such as I have just supposed is
+possible. Something, indeed much, may here be done by wise masters, in
+the way of rejecting that which would deform, allowing and adopting that
+which will strengthen and enrich. Those who would purify or enrich a
+language, so long as they have kept within this their proper sphere,
+have often effected much, more than at first could have seemed possible.
+The history of the German language affords so much better illustration
+of this than our own would do, that I shall make no scruple in seeking
+my examples there. When the patriotic Germans began to wake up to a
+consciousness of the enormous encroachments which foreign languages,
+the Latin and French above all, had made on their native tongue, the
+lodgements which they had therein effected, and the danger which
+threatened it, namely, that it should cease to be German at all, but
+only a mingle-mangle, a variegated patchwork of many languages, without
+any unity or inner coherence at all, various societies were instituted
+among them, at the beginning and during the course of the seventeenth
+century, for the recovering of what was lost of their own, for the
+expelling of that which had intruded from abroad; and these with
+excellent effect.
+
+But more effectual than these societies were the efforts of single men,
+who in this merited well of their country{126}. In respect of words
+which are now entirely received by the whole nation, it is often
+possible to designate the writers who first substituted them for some
+affected Gallicism or unnecessary Latinism. Thus to Lessing his
+fellow-countrymen owe the substitution of 'zartgef�hl' for 'delicatesse',
+of 'empfindsamkeit' for 'sentimentalit�t', of 'wesenheit' for 'essence'.
+It was Voss (1786) who first employed 'alterth�mlich' for 'antik'.
+Wieland too was the author or reviver of a multitude of excellent words,
+for which often he had to do earnest battle at the first; such were
+'seligkeit', 'anmuth', 'entz�ckung', 'festlich', 'entwirren', with many
+more. For 'maskerade', Campe would have fain substituted 'larventanz'.
+It was a novelty when B�sching called his great work on geography
+'erdbeschreibung' instead of 'geographie'; while 'schnellpost' instead
+of 'diligence', 'zerrbild' for 'carricatur' are also of recent
+introduction. In regard of 'w�rterbuch' itself, J. Grimm tells us he can
+find no example of its use dating earlier than 1719.
+
+Yet at the same time it must be acknowledged that some of these
+reformers proceeded with more zeal than knowledge, while others did
+whatever in them lay to make the whole movement absurd--even as there
+ever hang on the skirts of a noble movement, be it in literature or
+politics or higher things yet, those who contribute their little all to
+bring ridicule and contempt upon it. Thus in the reaction against
+foreign interlopers which ensued, and in the zeal to purify the language
+from them, some went to such extravagant excesses as to desire to get
+rid of 'testament', 'apostel', which last Campe would have replaced by
+'lehrbote', with other words like these, consecrated by longest use, and
+to find native substitutes in their room; or they understood so little
+what words deserved to be called foreign, or how to draw the line
+between them and native, that they would fain have gotten rid of
+'vater', 'mutter', 'wein', 'fenster', 'meister', 'kelch'{127}; the first
+three of which belong to the German language by just as good a right as
+they do to the Latin and the Greek; while the other three have been
+naturalized so long that to propose to expel them now was as if, having
+passed an alien act for the banishment of all foreigners, we should
+proceed to include under that name, and as such drive forth from the
+kingdom, the descendants of the French Protestants who found refuge here
+at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or even of the Flemings who
+settled among us in the time of our Edwards. One notable enthusiast in
+this line proposed to create an entirely new nomenclature for all the
+mythological personages of the Greek and the Roman pantheon, who, one
+would think, might have been allowed, if any, to retain their Greek and
+Latin names. So far however from this, they were to exchange these for
+equivalent German titles; Cupid was to be 'Lustkind', Flora 'Bluminne',
+Aurora 'R�thin'; instead of Apollo schoolboys were to speak of
+'Singhold'; instead of Pan of 'Schaflieb'; instead of Jupiter of
+'Helfevater', with much else of the same kind. Let us beware (and the
+warning extends much further than to the matter in hand) of making a
+good cause ridiculous by our manner of supporting it, of assuming that
+exaggerations on one side can only be redressed by exaggerations as
+great upon the other.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{38} Thus Alexander Gil, head-master of St. Paul's School, in his book,
+     _Logonomia Anglica_, 1621, _Preface_: Huc usque peregrin� voces in
+     lingu� Anglic� inaudit�. Tandem circa annum 1400 Galfridus
+     Chaucerus, infausto omine, vocabulis Gallicis et Latinis po�sin
+     suam famosam reddidit. The whole passage, which is too long to
+     quote, as indeed the whole book, is curious. Gil was an earnest
+     advocate of phonetic spelling, and has adopted it in all his
+     English quotations in this book.
+
+{39} We may observe exactly the same in Plautus: a multitude of Greek
+     words are used by him, which the Latin language did not want, and
+     therefore refused to take up; thus 'clepta', 'zamia' ({Greek:
+     z�mia}), 'danista', 'harpagare', 'apolactizare', 'nauclerus',
+     'strategus', 'morologus', 'phylaca', 'malacus', 'sycophantia',
+     'euscheme' ({Greek: eusch�m�s}), 'dulice' ({Greek: doulik�s}), [so
+     'scymnus' by Lucretius], none of which, I believe, are employed
+     except by him; 'mastigias' and 'techna' appear also in Terence. Yet
+     only experience could show that they were superfluous; and at the
+     epoch of Latin literature in which Plautus lived, it was well done
+     to put them on trial.
+
+{40} [Modern poets have given 'amort' a new life; it is used by Keats,
+     by Bailey (_Festus_, xxx), and by Browning (_Sordello_, vi).]
+
+{41} ['Bruit' has been revived by Carlyle and Chas. Merivale. Its verbal
+     form is used by Cowper, Byron and Dickens.]
+
+{42} Let me here observe once for all that in adding the name of an
+     author, which I shall often do, to a word, I do not mean to affirm
+     the word in any way peculiar to him; although in some cases it may
+     be so; but only to give one authority for its use. [Coleridge uses
+     'eloign'.]
+
+{43} _Essay on English Poetry_, p. 93.
+
+{44} _Dedication of the Translation of the �neid_.
+
+{45} [i.e. the promoters of Classical learning.]
+
+{46} We have notable evidence in some lines of Waller of the sense which
+     in his time scholars had of the rapidity with which the language
+     was changing under their hands. Looking back at what the last
+     hundred years had wrought of alteration in it, and very naturally
+     assuming that the next hundred would effect as much, he checked
+     with misgivings such as these his own hope of immortality:
+
+         "Who can hope his lines should long
+         Last in a daily changing tongue?
+         While they are new, envy prevails,
+         And as that dies, our language fails.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+         "Poets that lasting marble seek,
+         Must carve in Latin or in Greek:
+         _We_ write in sand; our language grows,
+         And like the tide our work o'erflows".
+
+     Such were his misgivings as to the future, assuming that the rate
+     of change would continue what it had been. How little they have
+     been fulfilled, every one knows. In actual fact two centuries,
+     which have elapsed since he wrote, have hardly antiquated a word or
+     a phrase in his poems. If we care very little for them now, that is
+     to be explained by quite other causes--by the absence of all moral
+     earnestness from them.
+
+{47} In his _Art of English Poesy_, London, 1589, republished in
+     Haslewood's _Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy_,
+     London, 1811, vol. i. pp. 122, 123; [and in Arber's _English
+     Reprints_, 1869].
+
+{48} London, 1601. Besides this work Holland translated the whole of
+     Plutarch's _Moralia_, the _Cyropoedia_ of Xenophon, Livy,
+     Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Camden's _Britannia_. His
+     works make a part of the "library of dullness" in Pope's _Dunciad_:
+
+         "De Lyra there a dreadful front extends,
+         And here the groaning shelves _Philemon_ bends"--
+
+     very unjustly; the authors whom he has translated are all more or
+     less important, and his versions of them a mine of genuine
+     idiomatic English, neglected by most of our lexicographers, wrought
+     to a considerable extent, and with eminent advantage by Richardson;
+     yet capable, as it seems to me, of yielding much more than they
+     hitherto have yielded.
+
+{49} And so too in French it is surprising to find of how late
+     introduction are many words, which it seems as if the language
+     could never have done without. 'D�sint�ressement', 'exactitude',
+     'sagacit�', 'bravoure', were not introduced till late in the
+     seventeenth century. 'Renaissance', 'emportement', 's�avoir-faire',
+     'ind�l�bile', 'd�sagr�ment', were all recent in 1675 (Bouhours);
+     'ind�vot', 'intol�rance', 'impardonnable', 'irr�ligieux', were
+     struggling into allowance at the end of the seventeenth century,
+     and were not established till the beginning of the eighteenth.
+     'Insidieux' was invented by Malherbe; 'frivolit�' does not appear
+     in the earlier editions of the _Dictionary of the Academy_; the
+     Abb� de St. Pierre was the first to employ 'bienfaisance', the
+     elder Balzac 'f�liciter', Sarrasin 'burlesque'. Mad. de Sevign�
+     exclaims against her daughter for employing 'effervescence' in a
+     letter (comment dites-vous cela, ma fille? Voil� un mot dont je
+     n'avais jamais ou� parler). 'Demagogue' was first hazarded by
+     Bossuet, and was counted so bold a novelty that it was long before
+     any ventured to follow him in its use. Somewhat earlier Montaigne
+     had introduced 'diversion' and 'enfantillage', though not without
+     being rebuked by cotemporaries on the score of the last.
+     Desfontaines was the first who employed 'suicide'; Caron gave to
+     the language 'avant-propos', Ronsard 'avidit�', Joachim Dubellay
+     'patrie', Denis Sauvage 'jurisconsulte', Menage 'gracieux' (at
+     least so Voltaire affirms) and 'prosateur', Desportes 'pudeur',
+     Chapelain 'urbanit�', and Etienne first brought in, apologizing at
+     the same time for the boldness of it, 'analogie' (si les oreilles
+     fran�oises peuvent porter ce mot). 'Pr�liber' (pr�libare) is a word
+     of our own day; and it was Charles Nodier who, if he did not coin,
+     yet revived the obsolete 'simplesse'.--See G�nin, _Variations du
+     Langage Fran�ais_, pp. 308-19.
+
+{50} [Resuscitated in vain by Charles Lamb.]
+
+{51} J. Grimm (_W�rterbuch_, p. xxvi.): F�llt von ungef�hr ein fremdes
+     wort in den brunnen einer sprache, so wird es so lange darin
+     umgetrieben, bis es ihre farbe annimmt, und seiner fremden art zum
+     trotze wie ein heimisches aussieht.
+
+{52} Have we here an explanation of the 'battalia' of Jeremy Taylor and
+     others? Did they, without reflecting on the matter, regard
+     'battalion' as a word with a Greek neuter termination? It is
+     difficult to think they should have done so; yet more difficult to
+     suggest any other explanation. ['Battalia' was sometimes mistaken
+     as a plural, which indeed it was originally, the word being derived
+     through the Italian _battaglia_, from low Latin _battalia_, which
+     (like _biblia_, _gaudia_, etc.) was afterwards regarded as a
+     feminine singular (Skeat, _Principles_, ii, 230). But Shakespeare
+     used it as a singular, "Our _battalia_ trebles that account"
+     (_Rich. III_, v. 3, 11); and so Sir T. Browne, "The Roman
+     _battalia_ was ordered after this manner" (_Garden of Cyrus_, 1658,
+     p. 113).]
+
+{53} "And old hero�s, which their world did daunt".
+
+                                         _Sonnet on Scanderbeg._
+
+{54} [By J. H(ealey), 1610, who has "centones ... of diuerse colours",
+     p. 605.]
+
+{55} [The identity of these two words, notwithstanding the analogy of
+     _corona_ and _crown_, is denied by Skeat, Kluge and Lutz.]
+
+{56} Skinner (_Etymologicon_, 1671) protests against the word
+     altogether, as purely French, and having no right to be considered
+     English at all.
+
+{57} It is curious how effectually the nationality of a word may by
+     these slight alterations in spelling be disguised. I have met an
+     excellent French and English scholar, to whom it was quite a
+     surprise to learn that 'redingote' was 'riding-coat'.
+
+{58} [Compare French _marsouin_ (=German _meer-schwein_), "sea-pig", the
+     dolphin; Breton _mor-houc'h_; Irish _mucc mara_, "pig of the sea",
+     the dolphin (W. Stokes, _Irish Glossaries_, p. 118); French _truye
+     de mer_ (Cotgrave); old English _brun-swyne_ (_Prompt. Parv._),
+     "brown-pig", the dolphin or seal.]
+
+{59} He is not indeed perfectly accurate in this statement, for the
+     Greeks spoke of {Greek: en kykl� paideia} and {Greek: enkyklios
+     paideia}, but had no such composite word as {Greek: enkyklopadeia}.
+     We gather however from these expressions, as from Lord Bacon's
+     using the term 'circle-learning' (='orbis doctrin�', Quintilian),
+     that 'encyclop�dia' did not exist in their time. [But
+     'encyclopedia' occurs in Elyot, _Governour_, 1531, vol. i, p. 118
+     (ed. Croft); 'encyclop�die' in J. Sylvester, _Workes_, 1621, p.
+     660.]
+
+{60} See the passages quoted in my paper, _On some Deficiencies in our
+     English Dictionaries_, p. 38.
+
+{61} [This prediction has been verified. 'Ethos' is used by Sir F.
+     Palgrave, 1851, and in the 'Encyclop�dia Britannica', 1875. N.E.D.]
+
+{62} We may see the same progress in Greek words which were being
+     incorporated in the Latin. Thus Cicero writes {Greek: antipodes}
+     (_Acad._ ii, 39, 123), but Seneca (_Ep._ 122), 'antipodes'; that
+     is, the word for Cicero was still Greek, while in the period that
+     elapsed between him and Seneca, it had become Latin: so too Cicero
+     wrote {Greek: eid�lon}, the Younger Pliny 'idolon', and Tertullian
+     'idolum'.
+
+{63} [This rash prophecy has not been fulfilled. English speakers are
+     still no more inclined to say 'pr�stige' than 'p�lice'.]
+
+{64} See in Coleridge's _Table Talk_, p. 3, the amusing story of John
+     Kemble's stately correction of the Prince of Wales for adhering to
+     the earlier pronunciation, 'obl_ee_ge,'--"It will become your royal
+     mouth better to say obl_i_ge."
+
+{65} "In this great _acad�my_ of mankind".
+
+                              Butler, _To the Memory of Du Val_.
+
+{66} "'Twixt that and reason what a nice _barrier_".
+
+{67} [A fairly complete collection of these and similar semi-naturalized
+     foreign words will be found in _The Stanford Dictionary of
+     Anglicized Words_, edited by Dr. C. A. M. Fennell, 1892.]
+
+{68} [This is quite wrong. Mr. Fitzedward Hall shows that 'inimical' was
+     used by Gaule in 1652, as well as by Richardson in 1758 (_Modern
+     English_, p. 287). The N.E.D. quotes an instance of it from Udall
+     in 1643.]
+
+{69} [The word had been already naturalized by H. More, 1647, Cudworth,
+     1678, Tucker 1765, and Carlyle, 1831.--N.E.D.]
+
+{70} [The earliest citation for 'abnormal' in the N.E.D. is dated 1835.
+     The older word was 'abnormous'. Curious to say it is unrelated to
+     'normal' to which it has been assimilated, being merely an
+     alteration of 'anomal-ous'.]
+
+{71} [Fuller says of 'plunder', "we first heard thereof in the Swedish
+     wars", and that it came into England about 1642 (_Church History_,
+     bk. xi, sec. 4, par. 33). It certainly occurs under that date in
+     _Memoirs of the Verney Family_, "It is in danger of _plonderin_"
+     (vol. i, p. 71, also p. 151). It also occurs in a document dated
+     1643, "We must _plunder_ none but Roundheads" (_Camden Soc.
+     Miscellany_, iii, 31). Drummond (died 1649) has "Go fight and
+     _plunder_" (_Poems_, ed. Turnbull, p. 330). It appears in a
+     quotation from _The Bellman of London_ (no reference) given in
+     Timbs, _London and Westminster_, vol. i, p. 254.]
+
+{72} [It is rather from the old Dutch _trecker_, a 'puller'. Very few
+     English words come to us from German.]
+
+{73} [So Skeat, _Etym. Dict._ But the Germans themselves take their
+     _schwindler_ (in the sense of cheat) to have been adopted from the
+     English 'swindler'. Dr. Dunger asserts that it was introduced into
+     their language by Lichtenberg in his explanation of Hogarth's
+     engravings, 1794-99 (_Englanderei in der Deutschen Sprache_, 1899,
+     p. 7).]
+
+{74} _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, 1650, p. 217.
+
+{75} [This word introduced as a 'pure neologism' by D'Israeli
+     (_Curiosities of Literature_, 1839, 11th ed. p. 384) as a companion
+     to 'mother-tongue', had been already used by Sir W. Temple in 1672
+     (Hall, _Mod. English_, p. 44). Nay, even by Tyndale, see T. L. K.
+     Oliphant, _The New English_, i, 439.]
+
+{76} ['Folk-lore' was introduced by Mr. W. J. Thoms, editor of _Notes
+     and Queries_, in 1846. Still later came 'Folk-etymology', the
+     earliest use of which in N.E.D. is given as 1883, but the editor's
+     work bearing that title appeared in 1882.]
+
+{77} _Holy State_, b. 2, c. 6. There was a time when the Latin
+     promised to display, if not an equal, yet not a very inferior,
+     freedom in this forming of new words by the happy marriage of
+     old. But in this, as in so many respects, it seemed possessed at
+     the period of its highest culture with a timidity, which caused
+     it voluntarily to abdicate many of its own powers. Where do we
+     find in the Augustan period of the language so grand a pair of
+     epithets as these, occurring as they do in a single line of
+     Catullus: Ubi cerva _silvicultrix_, ubi aper _nemorivagus_? or
+     again, as his 'fluentisonus'? Virgil's vitisator (_�n._ 7, 179)
+     is not his own, but derived from one of the earlier poets. Nay,
+     the language did not even retain those compound epithets which
+     it once had formed, but was content to let numbers of them drop:
+     'parcipromus'; 'turpilucricupidus', and many more, do not extend
+     beyond Plautus. On this matter Quintilian observes (i. 5, 70):
+     Res tota magis Gr�cos decet, nobis minus succedit; nec id fieri
+     natur� puto, sed alienis favemus; ideoque cum {Greek: kyrtauchena}
+     mirati sumus, _incurvicervicum_ vix a risu defendimus. Elsewhere
+     he complains, though not with reference to compound epithets, of
+     the little _generative_ power which existed in the Latin language,
+     that its continual losses were compensated by no equivalent gains
+     (viii. 6, 32): Deinde, tanquum consummata sint omnia, nihil
+     generare audemus ipsi, quum multa quotidie ab antiquis ficta
+     moriantur. Notwithstanding this complaint, it must be owned that
+     the silver age of the language, which sought to recover, and did
+     recover to some extent the abdicated energies of its earlier times,
+     reasserted among other powers that of combining words with a
+     certain measure of success.
+
+{78} [For Shakespearian compounds see Abbott's _Shakespearian Grammar_,
+     pp. 317-20.]
+
+{79} [Writing in the year 1780 Bentham says: "The word it must be
+     acknowledged is a new one".]
+
+{80} _Collection of Scarce Tracts_, edited by Sir W. Scott, vol. vii, p.
+     91.
+
+{81} [Hardly a novelty, as the word occurs in J. Gaule, {Greek:
+     Pys-mantia}, 1652, p. 30. See F. Hall, _Mod. English_, p. 131.]
+
+{82} [First used apparently by Grote, 1847, and Mrs. Gaskell, 1857,
+     N.E.D.]
+
+{83} See _Letters of Horace Walpole and Mann_, vol. ii. p. 396, quoted
+     in _Notes and Queries_, No. 225; and another proof of the novelty
+     of the word in Pegge's _Anecdotes of the English Language_, 1814,
+     p. 38.
+
+{84} Postscript to his _Translation of the �neid_.
+
+{85} Multa renascentur, qu� jam cecidere.
+
+                          _De A. P._ 46-72; cf. _Ep._ 2, 2, 115.
+
+{86} _Etymologicon vocum omnium antiquarum qu� usque a Wilhelmo Victore
+     invaluerunt, et jam ante parentum �tatem in usu esse desierunt._
+
+{87} [As a matter of fact the N.E.D. fails to give any quotation for
+     this word in the period named.]
+
+{88} [The verb 'to advocate' had long before been employed by Nash,
+     1598, Sanderson, 1624, and Heylin, 1657 (F. Hall, _Mod. English_,
+     p. 285).]
+
+{89} In like manner La Bruy�re, in his _Caract�res_, c. 14, laments the
+     extinction of a large number of French words which he names. At
+     least half of these have now free course in the language, as
+     'valeureux', 'haineux', 'peineux', 'fructueux', 'mensonger',
+     'coutumier', 'vantard', 'courtois', 'jovial', 'f�toyer',
+     'larmoyer', 'verdoyer'. Two or three of these may be rarely used,
+     but every one would be found in a dictionary of the living
+     language.
+
+{90} _Preface to Juvenal._
+
+{91} _Preface to Troilus and Cressida._ In justice to Dryden, and lest
+     it should be said that he had spoken poetic blasphemy, it ought not
+     to be forgotten that 'pestered' had not in his time at all so
+     offensive a sense as it would have now. It meant no more than
+     inconveniently crowded; thus Milton: "Confined and _pestered_ in
+     this pinfold here".
+
+{92} Thus in North's _Plutarch_, p. 499: "After the fire was quenched,
+     they found in _niggots_ of gold and silver mingled together, about
+     a thousand talents"; and again, p. 323: "There was brought a
+     marvellous great mass of treasure in _niggots_ of gold". The word
+     has not found its way into our dictionaries or glossaries.
+
+{93} ['Niggot' rather stands for 'ningot', due to a coalescence of the
+     article in 'an ingot' (as if 'a ningot'); just as, according to
+     some, in French _l'ingot_ became _lingot_.]
+
+{94} [Such collections were essayed in J. C. Hare's _Two Essays in
+     English Philology_, 1873, "_Words derived from Names of Persons_",
+     and in R. S. Charnock's _Verba Nominalia_, pp. 326.]
+
+{95} [In a strangely similar way the stone-worshipper in the Malay
+     Peninsula gives to his sacred boulder the title of Mohammed (Tylor,
+     _Primitive Culture_, 3rd ed. ii. 254).]
+
+{96} [But Wolsey's jester was most probably so called from his wearing a
+     varicoloured or patchwork coat; compare the Shakespearian use of
+     'motley'. Similarly the _maquereaux_ of the old French comedy were
+     clothed in a mottled dress like our harlequin, just as the Latin
+     _maccus_ or mime wore a _centunculus_ or patchwork coat, his name
+     being perhaps connected with _macus_ (in _macula_), a spot (Gozzi,
+     _Memoirs_, i, 38). In stage slang the harlequin was called
+     _patchy_, as his Latin counterpart was _centunculus_.]
+
+{97} [An error. Prof. Skeat shows that 'tram' was an old word in
+     Scottish and Northern English (_Etym. Dict._, 655 and 831).]
+
+{98} Several of these we have in common with the French. Of their own
+     they have 'sardanapalisme', any piece of profuse luxury, from
+     Sardanapalus; while for 'lambiner', to dally or loiter over a task,
+     they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the
+     sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish
+     movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of
+     Pascal's _Provincial Letters_ will remember Escobar, the great
+     casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges for the
+     relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the
+     notoriety which he thus acquired he owes his introduction into the
+     French language; where 'escobarder' is used in the sense of to
+     equivocate, and 'escobarderie' of subterfuge or equivocation. The
+     name of an unpopular minister of finance, M. de Silhouette,
+     unpopular because he sought to cut down unnecessary expenses in the
+     state, was applied to whatever was cheap, and, as was implied,
+     unduly economical; it has survived in the black outline portrait
+     which is now called a 'silhouette'. (Sismondi, _Histoire des
+     Fran�ais_, tom. xix, pp. 94, 95.) In the 'mansarde' roof we have
+     the name of Mansart, the architect who introduced it. I need hardly
+     add 'guillotine'.
+
+{99} See Col. Mure, _Language and Literature of Ancient Greece_, vol. i,
+     p. 350.
+
+{100} See G�nin, _Des Variations du Langage Fran�ais_, p. 12.
+
+{101} [Dr. Murray in the N.E.D. calls these by the convenient term
+      'nonce-words'.]
+
+{102} _Persa_, iv. 6, 20-23. At the same time these words may be earnest
+      enough; such was the {Greek: elachistoteros} of St. Paul (Ephes.
+      iii, 8); just as in the Middle Ages some did not account it
+      sufficient to call themselves "fratres minores, minimi, postremi",
+      but coined 'postremissimi' to express the depth of their
+      "voluntary humility".
+
+{103} It is curious that a correspondent of Skinner (_Etymologicon_,
+      1671), although quite ignorant of this story, and indeed wholly
+      astray in his application, had suggested that 'chouse' might be
+      thus connected with the Turkish 'chiaus'. I believe Gifford, in
+      his edition of Ben Jonson, was the first to clear up the matter. A
+      passage in _The Alchemist_ (Act i. Sc. 1) will have put him on the
+      right track. [But Dr. Murray notes that Gifford's story, as given
+      above, has not hitherto been substantiated from any independent
+      source, and is so far open to doubt.]
+
+{104} [These are quite distinct words, though perhaps distantly
+      related.]
+
+{105} If there were any doubt about this matter, which indeed there is
+      not, a reference to Latimer's famous _Sermon on Cards_ would
+      abundantly remove it, where 'triumph' and 'trump' are
+      interchangeably used.
+
+{106} [Dr. Murray does not regard these words as ultimately identical.]
+
+{107} ['Rant' (old Dutch _ranten_) has no connection with 'rend'
+      (Anglo-Saxon _hrendan_) (Skeat).]
+
+{108} On these words see a learned discussion in _English Retraced_,
+      Cambridge, 1862.
+
+{109} [These are quite unconnected (Skeat).]
+
+{110} [Neither are these words to be confused with one another.]
+
+{111} The appropriating of 'Franc_e_s' to women and 'Franc_i_s' to men
+      is quite of modern introduction; it was formerly nearly as often
+      Sir Franc_e_s Drake as Sir Franc_i_s, while Fuller (_Holy State_,
+      b. iv, c. 14) speaks of Franc_i_s Brandon, eldest _daughter_ of
+      Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; and see Ben Jonson's _New Inn_,
+      Act. ii, Sc. 1.
+
+{112} [Not connected.]
+
+{113} ['Sad' akin to 'sated' bears no relationship to 'set'; neither
+      does 'medley' to 'motley'.]
+
+{114} [On the connection of these words see my _Folk and their
+      Word-Lore_, p. 110.]
+
+{115} [Not connected, see Skeat.]
+
+{116} Were there need of proving that these both lie in 'beneficium',
+      which there is not, for in Wiclif's translation of the Bible the
+      distinction is still latent (1 Tim. vi. 2), one might adduce a
+      singularly characteristic little trait of Papal policy, which once
+      turned upon the double use of this word. Pope Adrian the Fourth
+      writing to the Emperor Frederic the First to complain of certain
+      conduct of his, reminded the Emperor that he had placed the
+      imperial crown upon his head, and would willingly have conferred
+      even greater 'beneficia' upon him than this. Had the word been
+      allowed to pass, it would no doubt have been afterwards appealed
+      to as an admission on the Emperor's part, that he held the Empire
+      as a feud or fief (for 'beneficium' was then the technical word
+      for this, though the meaning had much narrowed since) from the
+      Pope--the very point in dispute between them. The word was
+      indignantly repelled by the Emperor and the whole German nation,
+      whereupon the Pope appealed to the etymology, that 'beneficium'
+      was but 'bonum factum', and protested that he meant no more than
+      to remind the Emperor of the 'benefits' which he had done him, and
+      which he would have willingly multiplied still more. ['Benefice'
+      from Latin _beneficium_, and 'benefit' from Latin _bene-factum_,
+      are here confused.]
+
+{117} ['Hoard' (Anglo-Saxon _hord_) cannot be equated with 'horde' (from
+      Persian _�rd�_).]
+
+{118} [These words have been differentiated in comparatively modern
+      times. 'Ingenuity' was once used for 'ingenuousness'.]
+
+{119} [The words are really unconnected, 'to gamble' being 'to gamle' or
+      'game', and 'to gambol' being akin to French _gambiller_, to fling
+      up the legs (_gambes_ or _jambes_) like a frisking lamb.]
+
+{120} The same happens in other languages. Thus in Greek '{Greek:
+      anathema}' and '{Greek: anath�ma}' both signify that which is
+      devoted, though in very different senses, to the gods; '{Greek:
+      tharsos}', boldness, and '{Greek: thrasos}', temerity, were no
+      more at first than different spellings of the same word; not
+      otherwise is it with {Greek: gripos} and {Greek: griphos}, {Greek:
+      ethos} and {Greek: �thos}, {Greek: bryk�} and {Greek: brych�},
+      while {Greek: obelos} and {Greek: obolos}, {Greek: soros} and
+      {Greek: s�ros}, are probably the same words. So too in Latin
+      'penna' and 'pinna' differ only in form, and signify alike a
+      'wing'; while yet 'penna' has come to be used for the wing of a
+      bird, 'pinna' (its diminutive 'pinnaculum', has given us
+      'pinnacle') for that of a building. So is it with 'Thrax' a
+      Thracian, and 'Threx' a gladiator; with 'codex' and 'caudex';
+      'forfex' and 'forceps'; 'anticus' and 'antiquus'; 'celeber' and
+      'creber'; 'infacetus' and 'inficetus'; 'providentia', 'prudentia',
+      and 'provincia'; 'columen' and 'culmen'; 'coitus' and 'coetus';
+      '�grimonia' and '�rumna'; 'Lucina' and 'luna'; 'navita' and
+      'nauta'; in German with 'rechtlich' and 'redlich'; 'schlecht' and
+      'schlicht'; 'ahnden' and 'ahnen'; 'biegsam' and 'beugsam';
+      'f�rsehung' and 'vorsehung'; 'deich' and 'teich'; 'trotz' and
+      'trutz'; 'born' and 'brunn'; 'athem' and 'odem'; in French with
+      'harnois' the armour, or 'harness', of a soldier, 'harnais' of a
+      horse; with 'Z�phire' and 'z�phir', and with many more.
+
+{121} Coleridge, _Church and State_, p. 200.
+
+{122} [One hardly expects to find this otiose Americanism (first used by
+      J. Adams in 1759) in the work of a verbal purist, when 'longish'
+      or the old 'longsome' were at hand. No one, as yet, has ventured
+      on 'strengthy' or 'breadthy' for somewhat strong or broad.]
+
+{123} [This prediction was correct. 'Dissimilation' is first found in
+      philological works published in the decade 1874-85. See N.E.D.]
+
+{124} [Coblenz, at the junction of the Moselle and Rhine (from
+      _Confluentes_), reminds us that the word was so used.]
+
+{125} A passage from Hacket's _Life of Archbishop Williams_, part 2, p.
+      144, marks the first rise of this word, and the quarter from
+      whence it arose: "When they [the Presbyterians] saw that he was
+      not _selfish_ (it is a word of their own new mint), etc". In
+      Whitlock's _Zootomia_ (1654) there is another indication of it as
+      a novelty, p. 364: "If constancy may be tainted with this
+      _selfishness_ (to use our _new wordings_ of old and general
+      actings)"--It is he who in his striking essay, _The Grand
+      Schismatic, or Suist Anatomized_, puts forward his own words,
+      'suist', and 'suicism', in lieu of those which have ultimately
+      been adopted. 'Suicism', let me observe, had not in his time the
+      obvious objection of resembling another word nearly, and being
+      liable to be confused with it; for 'suicide' did not then exist in
+      the language, nor indeed till some twenty years later. The coming
+      up of 'suicide' is marked by this passage in Phillips' _New World
+      of Words_, 1671, 3rd ed.: "Nor less to be exploded is the word
+      '_suicide_', which may as well seem to participate of _sus_ a sow,
+      as of the pronoun _sui_". In the _Index_ to Jackson's Works,
+      published two years later, it is still '_suicidium_'--"the horrid
+      _suicidium_ of the Jews at York". 'Suicide' is apparently of much
+      later introduction into French. G�nin (_R�cr�ations Philol._ vol.
+      i, p. 194) places it about the year 1728, and makes the Abb�
+      Desfontaines its first sponsor. He is wrong, as the words just
+      quoted show, in supposing that we borrowed it from the French, or
+      that the word did not exist in English till the middle of last
+      century. The French sometimes complain that the fashion of suicide
+      was borrowed from England. It would seem at all events probable
+      that the word was so borrowed.
+
+      Let me urge here the advantage of a complete collection, or one as
+      nearly complete as the industry of the collectors would allow, of
+      all the notices in our literature, which mark, and would serve as
+      dates for, the first incoming of new words into the language.
+      These notices are of the most various kinds. Sometimes they are
+      protests and remonstrances, as that just quoted, against a new
+      word's introduction; sometimes they are gratulations at the same;
+      while many hold themselves neuter as to approval or disapproval,
+      and merely state, or allow us to gather, the fact of a word's
+      recent appearance. There are not a few of these notices in
+      Richardson's _Dictionary_: thus one from Lord Bacon under 'essay';
+      from Swift under 'banter'; from Sir Thomas Elyot under
+      'mansuetude'; from Lord Chesterfield under 'flirtation'; from
+      Davies and Marlowe's _Epigrams_ under 'gull'; from Roger North
+      under 'sham' (Appendix); the third quotation from Dryden under
+      'mob'; one from the same under 'philanthropy', and again under
+      'witticism', in which he claims the authorship of the word; that
+      from Evelyn under 'miss'; and from Milton under 'demagogue'. There
+      are also notices of the same kind in _Todd's Johnson_. The work,
+      however, is one which no single scholar could hope to accomplish,
+      which could only be accomplished by many lovers of their native
+      tongue throwing into a common stock the results of their several
+      studies. The sources from which these illustrative passages might
+      be gathered cannot beforehand be enumerated, inasmuch as it is
+      difficult to say in what unexpected quarter they would not
+      sometimes be found, although some of these sources are obvious
+      enough. As a very slight sample of what might be done in this way
+      by the joint contributions of many, let me throw together
+      references to a few passages of the kind which I do not think have
+      found their way into any of our dictionaries. Thus add to that
+      which Richardson has quoted on 'banter', another from _The
+      Tatler_, No. 230. On 'plunder' there are two instructive passages
+      in Fuller's _Church History_, b. xi, � 4, 33; and b. ix, � 4; and
+      one in Heylin's _Animadversions_ thereupon, p. 196. On 'admiralty'
+      see a note in Harington's _Ariosto_, book 19; on 'maturity' Sir
+      Thomas Elyot's _Governor_, b. i, c. 22; and on 'industry' the
+      same, b. i, c. 23; on 'neophyte' a notice in Fulke's _Defence of
+      the English Bible_, Parker Society's edition, p. 586; and on
+      'panorama', and marking its recent introduction (it is not in
+      Johnson), a passage in Pegge's _Anecdotes of the English
+      Language_, first published in 1803, but my reference is to the
+      edition of 1814, p. 306; on 'accommodate', and supplying a date
+      for its first coming into popular use, see Shakespeare's _2 Henry
+      IV._ Act 3, Sc. 2; on 'shrub', Junius' _Etymologicon_, s. v.
+      'syrup'; on 'sentiment' and 'cajole' Skinner, s. vv., in his
+      _Etymologicon_ ('vox nuper civitate donata'); and on 'opera'
+      Evelyn's _Memoirs and Diary_, 1827, vol. i, pp. 189, 190. In such
+      a collection should be included those passages of our literature
+      which supply implicit evidence for the non-existence of a word up
+      to a certain moment. It may be urged that it is difficult, nay
+      impossible, to prove a negative; and yet a passage like this from
+      Bolingbroke makes certain that when it was written the word
+      'isolated' did not exist in our language: "The events we are
+      witnesses of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very
+      often original, unprepared, signal and _unrelative_: if I may use
+      such a word for want of a better in English. In French I would say
+      _isol�s_" (_Notes and Queries_, No. 226). Compare Lord
+      Chesterfield in a letter to Bishop Chenevix, of date March 12,
+      1767: "I have survived almost all my cotemporaries, and as I am
+      too old to make new acquaintances, I find myself _isol�_". So,
+      too, it is pretty certain that 'amphibious' was not yet English,
+      when one writes (in 1618): "We are like those creatures called
+      {Greek: amphibia}, who live in water or on land". {Greek:
+      Z�ologia}, the title of a book published in 1649, makes it clear
+      that 'zoology' was not yet in our vocabulary, as {Greek:
+      z�ophyton} (Jackson) proves the same for 'zoophyte', and {Greek:
+      polytheismos} (Gell) for 'polytheism'. One precaution, let me
+      observe, would be necessary in the collecting, or rather in the
+      adopting of any statements about the newness of a word--for the
+      passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not the less to be
+      noted--namely, that, where there is the least motive for
+      suspicion, no one's affirmation ought to be accepted simply and at
+      once as to the novelty of a word; for all here are liable to
+      error. Thus more than one which Sir Thomas Elyot indicates as new
+      in his time, 'magnanimity' for example (_The Governor_, 2, 14),
+      are to be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed of 'sentiment'
+      that it had only recently obtained the rights of English
+      citizenship from the translators of French books, he was
+      altogether mistaken, this word being also one of continual
+      recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent gives in
+      _Notes and Queries_, No. 225, a useful catalogue of recent
+      neologies in our speech, which yet would require to be used with
+      caution, for there are at least half a dozen in the list which
+      have not the smallest right to be so considered.
+
+{126} There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this view (_Opera_,
+      vol. vi, part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and German, with this title,
+      _Consid�rations sur la Culture et la Perfection de la Langue
+      Allemande_.
+
+{127} _Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdw�rter im Deutschen_,
+      von. Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85-91.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
+
+
+I took occasion to observe at the commencement of my last lecture that
+it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux{128}
+and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as
+little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one
+another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies
+remain for ever without subtraction or addition. As I then undertook for
+my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own
+language had made, I shall consider in the present some of the losses,
+or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured.
+But it will be well here, by one or two remarks going before, to avert
+any possible misapprehensions of my meaning.
+
+It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in
+the end, perish. They run their course; not at all at the same rate, for
+the tendency to change is different in different languages, both from
+internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also from causes external
+to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and
+social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life,
+they have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude,
+their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has
+arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary,
+out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the
+materials of which they were composed more or less survive, but these
+now organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus
+for example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but a chief part
+of the words that composed it live on in the four daughter languages,
+French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; or the six, if we count the
+Proven�al and Wallachian; not a few in our own. Still in their own
+proper being languages perish and pass away; there are dead records of
+what they were in books; not living men who speak them any more. Seeing
+then that they thus die, they must have had the germs of a possible
+decay and death in them from the beginning.
+
+{Sidenote: _Languages Gain and Lose_}
+
+Nor is this all; but in such mighty strong built fabrics as these, the
+causes which thus bring about their final dissolution must have been
+actually at work very long before the results began to be visible.
+Indeed, very often it is with them as with states, which, while in some
+respects they are knitting and strengthening, in others are already
+unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may be, still remote
+overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and in languages, it
+would be a serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and
+period is growth and gain, while all after is decay and loss. On the
+contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions
+is going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are
+being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during
+which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower,
+and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and
+gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a
+compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more;
+when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than
+those of life and order. It is from this moment the decline of a
+language may properly be dated. But until that crisis and turning point
+has arrived, we may be quite justified in speaking of the losses of a
+language, and may esteem them most real, without in the least thereby
+implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun. This
+may yet be far distant, and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and
+diminutions which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you will not
+conclude that I am seeking to present it to you as now travelling the
+downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my
+intention. If in some respects it is losing, in others it is gaining.
+Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting
+with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous
+or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. English
+is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only
+different in that it is passing into another stage of its development;
+only different, as the fruit is different from the flower, and the
+flower from the bud; having changed its merits, but not having
+renounced them; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, but more of
+usefulness; not, perhaps, serving the poet so well, but serving the
+historian and philosopher and theologian better than before.
+
+One observation more let me make, before entering on the special details
+of my subject. It is this. The losses and diminutions of a language
+differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions--namely, that they
+are of _two_ kinds, while its gains are only of _one_. Its gains are
+only in _words_; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a
+new _power_; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a
+new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in _powers_--in
+words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels
+onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of
+tenses which it once used; forgets its dual; is content with one
+termination both for masculine and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a
+peculiar feature of one language, but the universal law of all. "In all
+languages", as has been well said, "there is a constant tendency to
+relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for
+every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and
+detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion". For
+example, a vast number of languages had at an early period of their
+development, besides the singular and plural, a dual number, some even a
+trinal, which they have let go at a later. But what I mean by a language
+renouncing its powers will, I trust, be more clear to you before my
+lecture is concluded. This much I have here said on the matter, to
+explain and justify a division which I shall make, considering first the
+losses of the English language in _words_, and then in _powers_.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words become Extinct_}
+
+And first, there is going forward a continual extinction of the words in
+our language--as indeed in every other. When I speak of this, the dying
+out of words, I do not refer to mere _tentative_, experimental words,
+not a few of which I adduced in my last lecture, words offered to the
+language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as either
+belonged to the primitive stock of the language, or if not so, which had
+been domiciled in it long, that they might have been supposed to have
+found in it a lasting home. Thus not a few pure Anglo-Saxon words which
+lived on into the times of our early English, have subsequently dropped
+out of our vocabulary, sometimes leaving a gap which has never since
+been filled, but their places oftener taken by others which have come up
+in their room. Not to mention those of Chaucer and Wiclif, which are
+very numerous, many held their ground to far later periods, and yet have
+finally given way. That beautiful word 'wanhope' for despair, hope which
+has so _waned_ that now there is an entire _want_ of it, was in use down
+to the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of
+Gascoigne{129}. 'Skinker' for cupbearer, (an ungraceful word, no doubt)
+is used by Shakespeare and lasted till Dryden's time and beyond.
+
+Spenser uses often 'to welk' (welken) in the sense of to fade, 'to sty'
+for to mount, 'to hery' as to glorify or praise, 'to halse' as to
+embrace, 'teene' as vexation or grief: Shakespeare 'to tarre' as to
+provoke, 'to sperr' as to enclose or bar in; 'to sag' for to droop, or
+hang the head downward. Holland employs 'geir'{130} for vulture
+("vultures or _geirs_"), 'specht' for woodpecker, 'reise' for journey,
+'frimm' for lusty or strong. 'To schimmer' occurs in Bishop Hall; 'to
+tind', that is, to kindle, and surviving in 'tinder', is used by Bishop
+Sanderson; 'to nimm', or take, as late as by Fuller. A rogue is a
+'skellum' in Sir Thomas Urquhart. 'Nesh' in the sense of soft through
+moisture, 'leer' in that of empty, 'eame' in that of uncle, _mother's_
+brother (the German 'oheim'), good Saxon-English once, still live on in
+some of our provincial dialects; so does 'flitter-mouse' or
+'flutter-mouse' (mus volitans), where we should use bat. Indeed of those
+above named several do the same; it is so with 'frimm', with 'to sag',
+'to nimm'. 'Heft' employed by Shakespeare in the sense of weight, is
+still employed in the same sense by our peasants in Hampshire{131}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Vigorous Compound Words_}
+
+A number of vigorous compounds we have dropped and let go. 'Earsports'
+for entertainments of song or music ({Greek: akroamata}) is a constantly
+recurring word in Holland's _Plutarch_. Were it not for Shakespeare, we
+should have quite forgotten that young men of hasty fiery valour were
+called 'hotspurs'; and even now we regard the word rather as the proper
+name of one than that which would have been once alike the designation
+of all{132}. Fuller warns men that they should not 'witwanton' with God.
+Severe austere old men, such as, in Falstaff's words would "hate us
+youth", were 'grimsirs', or 'grimsires' once (Massinger). 'Realmrape'
+(=usurpation), occurring in _The Mirror for Magistrates_, is a vigorous
+word. 'Rootfast' and 'rootfastness'{133} were ill lost, being worthy to
+have lived; so too was Lord Brooke's 'bookhunger'; and Baxter's
+'word-warriors', with which term he noted those whose strife was only
+about words. 'Malingerer' is familiar enough to military men, but I do
+not find it in our dictionaries; being the soldier who, out of _evil
+will_ (malin gr�) to his work, shams and shirks and is not found in the
+ranks{134}.
+
+Those who would gladly have seen the Anglo-Saxon to have predominated
+over the Latin element in our language, even more than it actually has
+done, must note with regret that in many instances a word of the former
+stock had been dropped, and a Latin coined to supply its place; or where
+the two once existed side by side, the Saxon has died, and the Latin
+lived on. Thus Wiclif employed 'soothsaw', where we now use proverb;
+'sourdough', where we employ leaven; 'wellwillingness' for benevolence;
+'againbuying' for redemption; 'againrising' for resurrection;
+'undeadliness' for immortality; 'uncunningness' for ignorance;
+'aftercomer' for descendant; 'greatdoingly' for magnificently; 'to
+afterthink' (still in use in Lancashire) for to repent; 'medeful', which
+has given way to meritorious; 'untellable' for ineffable; 'dearworth'
+for precious; Chaucer has 'forword' for promise; Sir John Cheke
+'freshman' for proselyte; 'mooned' for lunatic; 'foreshewer' for
+prophet; 'hundreder' for centurion; Jewel 'foretalk', where we now
+employ preface; Holland 'sunstead' where we use solstice; 'leechcraft'
+instead of medicine; and another, 'wordcraft' for logic; 'starconner'
+(Gascoigne) did service once, if not instead of astrologer, yet side by
+side with it; 'halfgod' (Golding) had the advantage over 'demigod', that
+it was all of one piece; 'to eyebite' (Holland) told its story at least
+as well as to fascinate; 'shriftfather' as confessor; 'earshrift'
+(Cartwright) is only two syllables, while 'auricular confession' is
+eight; 'waterfright' is a better word than our awkward Greek
+hydrophobia. The lamprey (lambens petram) was called once the
+'suckstone' or the 'lickstone'; and the anemone the 'windflower'.
+'Umstroke', if it had lived on (it appears as late as Fuller, though
+our dictionaries know nothing of it), might have made 'circumference'
+and 'periphery' unnecessary. 'Wanhope', as we saw just now, has given
+place to despair, 'middler' to mediator; and it would be easy to
+increase this list.
+
+{Sidenote: _Local and Provincial English_}
+
+I had occasion just now to notice the fact that many words survive in
+our provincial dialects, long after they have died out from the main
+body of the speech. The fact is one connected with so much of deep
+interest in the history of language that I cannot pass it thus slightly
+over. It is one which, rightly regarded, may assist to put us in a just
+point of view for estimating the character of the local and provincial
+in speech, and rescuing it from that unmerited contempt and neglect with
+which it is often regarded. I must here go somewhat further back than I
+could wish; but only so, only by looking at the matter in connexion with
+other phenomena of speech, can I hope to explain to you the worth and
+significance which local and provincial words and usages must oftentimes
+possess.
+
+Let us then first suppose a portion of those speaking a language to have
+been separated off from the main body of its speakers, either through
+their forsaking for one cause or other of their native seats, or by the
+intrusion of a hostile people, like a wedge, between them and the
+others, forcibly keeping them asunder, and cutting off their
+communications one with the other, as the Saxons intruded between the
+Britons of Cornwall and of Wales. In such a case it will inevitably
+happen that before very long differences of speech will begin to reveal
+themselves between those to whom even dialectic distinctions may have
+been once unknown. The divergences will be of various kinds. Idioms will
+come up in the separated body, which, not being recognized and allowed
+by those who remain the arbiters of the language, will be esteemed by
+them, should they come under their notice, violations of its law, or at
+any rate departures from its purity. Again, where a colony has gone
+forth into new seats, and exists under new conditions, it is probable
+that the necessities, physical and moral, rising out of these new
+conditions, will give birth to words, which there will be nothing to
+call out among those who continue in the old haunts of the nation.
+Intercourse with new tribes and people will bring in new words, as, for
+instance, contact with the Indian tribes of North America has given to
+American English a certain number of words hardly or not at all allowed
+or known by us; or as the presence of a large Dutch population at the
+Cape has given to the English spoken there many words, as 'inspan',
+'outspan'{135}, 'spoor', of which our home English knows nothing.
+
+{Sidenote: _Antiquated English_}
+
+There is another cause, however, which will probably be more effectual
+than all these, namely, that words will in process of time be dropped by
+those who constitute the original stock of the nation, which will not be
+dropped by the offshoot; idioms which those have overlived, and have
+stored up in the unhonoured lumber-room of the past, will still be in
+use and currency among the smaller and separated section which has gone
+forth; and thus it will come to pass that what seems and in fact is the
+newer swarm, will have many older words, and very often an archaic air
+and old-world fashion both about the words they use, their way of
+pronouncing, their order and manner of combining them. Thus after the
+Conquest we know that our insular French gradually diverged from the
+French of the Continent. The Prioress in Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_
+could speak her French "full faire and fetishly", but it was French, as
+the poet slyly adds,
+
+    "After the scole of Stratford atte bow,
+    For French of Paris was to hire unknowe".
+
+One of our old chroniclers, writing in the reign of Elizabeth, informs
+us that by the English colonists within the Pale in Ireland numerous
+words were preserved in common use, "the dregs of the old ancient
+Chaucer English", as he contemptuously calls it, which had become quite
+obsolete and forgotten in England itself. For example, they still called
+a spider an 'attercop'--a word, by the way, still in popular use in the
+North;--a physician a 'leech', as in poetry he still is called; a
+dunghill was still for them a 'mixen'; (the word is still common all
+over England in this sense;) a quadrangle or base court was a
+'bawn'{136}; they employed 'uncouth' in the earlier sense of unknown.
+Nay more, their general manner of speech was so different, though
+containing English still, that Englishmen at their first coming over
+often found it hard or impossible to comprehend. We have another example
+of the same in what took place after the revocation of the Edict of
+Nantes, and the consequent formation of colonies of Protestant French
+emigrants in various places, especially in Amsterdam and other chief
+cities of Holland. There gradually grew up among these what came to be
+called 'refugee French', which within a generation or two diverged in
+several particulars from the classical language of France; its
+divergence being mainly occasioned by this, that it remained stationary,
+while the classical language was in motion; it retained usages and
+words, which the latter had dismissed{137}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Provincial English_}
+
+Nor is it otherwise in respect of our English provincialisms. It is true
+that our country people who in the main employ them, have not been
+separated by distance of space, nor yet by insurmountable obstacles
+intervening, from the main body of their fellow-countrymen; but they
+have been quite as effectually divided by deficient education. They have
+been, if not locally, yet intellectually, kept at a distance from the
+onward march of the nation's mind; and of them also it is true that many
+of their words, idioms, turns of speech, which we are ready to set down
+as vulgarisms, solecisms of speech, violations of the primary rules of
+grammar, do merely attest that those who employ them have not kept
+abreast with the advance of the language and nation, but have been left
+behind by it. The usages are only local in the fact that, having once
+been employed by the whole body of the English people, they have now
+receded from the lips of all except those in some certain country
+districts, who have been more faithful than others to the tradition of
+the past{138}.
+
+It is thus in respect of a multitude of isolated words, which were
+excellent Anglo-Saxon, which were excellent early English, and which
+only are not excellent present English, because use, which is the
+supreme arbiter in these matters, has decided against their further
+employment. Several of these I enumerated just now. It is thus also with
+several grammatical forms and flexions. For instance, where we decline
+the plural of "I sing", "we sing", "ye sing", "they sing", there are
+parts of England in which they would decline, "we sin_gen_", "ye
+sin_gen_", "they sin_gen_". This is not indeed the original form of the
+plural, but it is that form of it which, coming up about Chaucer's time,
+was just going out in Spenser's; he, though we must ever keep in mind
+that he does not fairly represent the language of his time, or indeed of
+any time, affecting a certain artificial archaism both in words and
+forms, continually uses it{139}. After him it becomes ever rarer, the
+last of whom I am aware as occasionally using it being Fuller, until it
+quite disappears.
+
+{Sidenote: _Earlier and Later English_}
+
+Of such as may now employ forms like these we must say, not that they
+violate the laws of the language, but only that they have taken their
+_permanent_ stand at a point which was only a point of transition, and
+which it has now left behind, and overlived. Thus, to take examples
+which you may hear at the present day in almost any part of England--a
+countryman will say, "He made me _afeard_"; or "The price of corn _ris_
+last market day"; or "I will _axe_ him his name"; or "I tell _ye_". You
+would probably set these phrases down for barbarous English. They are
+not so at all; in one sense they are quite as good English as "He made
+me _afraid_"; or "The price of corn _rose_ last market day"; or "I will
+_ask_ him his name". 'Afeard', used by Spenser, is the regular
+participle of the old verb to 'affear', still existing as a law term, as
+'afraid' is of to 'affray', and just as good English{140}; 'ris' or
+'risse' is an old pr�terite of 'to rise'; to 'axe' is not a
+mispronunciation of 'to ask', but a genuine English form of the word,
+the form which in the earlier English it constantly assumed; in Wiclif's
+Bible almost without exception; and indeed 'axe' occurs continually, I
+know not whether invariably, in Tyndale's translation of the Scriptures;
+there was a time when 'ye' was an accusative, and to have used it as a
+nominative or vocative, the only permitted uses at present, would have
+been incorrect. Even such phrases as "Put _them_ things away"; or "The
+man _what_ owns the horse" are not bad, but only antiquated
+English{141}. Saying this, I would not in the least imply that these
+forms are open to you to employ, or that they would be good English for
+_you_. They would not; inasmuch as they are contrary to present use and
+custom, and these must be our standards in what we speak, and in what we
+write; just as in our buying and selling we are bound to employ the
+current coin of the realm, must not attempt to pass that which long
+since has been called in, whatever merits or intrinsic value it may
+possess. All which I affirm is that the phrases just brought forward
+represent past stages of the language, and are not barbarous violations
+of it.
+
+{Sidenote: _Luncheon_, _Nuncheon_}
+
+The same may be asserted of certain ways of pronouncing words, which are
+now in use among the lower classes, but not among the higher; as, for
+example, 'contr{-a}ry', 'mischi{-e}vous', 'blasph{-e}mous', instead of
+'contr{)a}ry', 'mischi{)e}vous', 'blasph{)e}mous'. It would be
+abundantly easy to show by a multitude of quotations from our poets, and
+those reaching very far down, that these are merely the retention of the
+earlier pronunciation by the people, after the higher classes have
+abandoned it{142}. And on the strength of what has just been spoken, let
+me here suggest to you how well worth your while it will prove to be on
+the watch for provincial words and inflexions, local idioms and modes of
+pronunciation, and to take note of these. Count nothing in this kind
+beneath your notice. Do not at once ascribe anything which you hear to
+the ignorance or stupidity of the speaker. Thus if you hear 'nuncheon',
+do not at once set it down for a malformation of 'luncheon'{143}, nor
+'yeel'{144}, of 'eel'. Lists and collections of provincial usage, such
+as I have suggested, always have their value. If you are not able to
+turn them to any profit yourselves, and they may not stand in close
+enough connexion with your own studies for this, yet there always are
+those who will thank you for them; and to whom the humblest of these
+collections, carefully and intelligently made, will be in one way or
+another of real assistance{145}. And there is the more need to urge this
+at the present, because, notwithstanding the tenacity with which our
+country folk cling to their old forms and usages, still these forms and
+usages must now be rapidly growing fewer; and there are forces, moral
+and material, at work in England, which will probably cause that of
+those which now survive the greater part will within the next fifty
+years have disappeared{146}.
+
+{Sidenote: _'Its' of Late Introduction_}
+
+Before quitting this subject, let me instance one example more of that
+which is commonly accounted ungrammatical usage, but which is really the
+retention of old grammar by some, where others have substituted new; I
+mean the constant application by our rustic population in the south, and
+I dare say through all parts of England, of 'his' to inanimate objects,
+and to these not personified, no less than to persons; where 'its' would
+be employed by others. This was once the manner of speech among all; for
+'its' is a word of very recent introduction, many would be surprised to
+learn of how recent introduction, into the language. You will look for
+it in vain through the whole of our Authorized Version of the Bible;
+the office which it now fulfils being there accomplished, as our rustics
+accomplish it at the present, by 'his' (Gen. i. 11; Exod. xxxvii. 17;
+Matt. v. 15) or 'her' (Jon. i. 15; Rev. xxii. 2) applied as freely to
+inanimate things as to persons, or else by 'thereof' (Ps. lxv. 10) or
+'of it' (Dan. vii. 5). Nor may Lev. xx. 5 be urged as invalidating this
+assertion; for reference to the exemplar edition of 1611, or indeed to
+any earlier editions of King James' Bible, will show that in them the
+passage stood, "of _it_ own accord"{147}. 'Its' occurs very rarely in
+Shakespeare, in many of his plays it will not once be found. Milton also
+for the most part avoids it, and this, though in his time others freely
+allowed it. How soon all this was forgotten we have striking evidence in
+the fact that when Dryden, in one of his fault-finding moods with the
+great men of the preceding generation, is taking Ben Jonson to task for
+general inaccuracy in his English diction, among other counts of his
+indictment, he quotes this line from _Catiline_
+
+    "Though heaven should speak with all _his_ wrath at once",
+
+and proceeds, "_heaven_ is ill syntax with _his_"; while in fact up to
+within forty or fifty years of the time when Dryden began to write, no
+other syntax was known; and to a much later date was exceedingly rare.
+Curious also, is it to note that in the earnest controversy which
+followed on Chatterton's publication of the poems ascribed by him to a
+monk Rowlie, who should have lived in the fifteenth century, no one
+appealed to such lines as the following,
+
+    "Life and all _its_ goods I scorn",
+
+as at once deciding that the poems were not of the age which they
+pretended. Warton, who denied, though with some hesitation, the
+antiquity of the poems, giving many and sufficient reasons for this
+denial, failed to take note of this little word; while yet there needed
+no more than to point it out, for the disposing of the whole question;
+the forgery at once was betrayed.
+
+{Sidenote: _American English_}
+
+What has been here affirmed concerning our provincial English, namely
+that it is often _old_ English rather than _bad_ English, may be
+affirmed with equal right of many so-called Americanisms. There are
+parts of America where 'het' is used, or was used a few years since, as
+the perfect of 'to heat'; 'holp' as the perfect of 'to help'; 'stricken'
+as the participle of 'to strike'. Again there are the words which have
+become obsolete during the last two hundred years, which have not become
+obsolete there, although many of them probably retain only a provincial
+existence. Thus 'slick', which indeed is only another form of 'sleek',
+was employed by our good writers of the seventeenth century{148}. Other
+words again, which have remained current on both sides of the Atlantic,
+have yet on our side receded from their original use, while they have
+remained true to it on the other. 'Plunder' is a word in point{149}.
+
+In the contemplation of facts like these it has been sometimes asked,
+whether a day will ever arrive when the language spoken on this side of
+the Atlantic and on the other, will divide into two languages, an old
+English and a new. We may confidently answer, No. Doubtless, if those
+who went out from us to people and subdue a new continent, had left our
+shores two or three centuries earlier than they did, when the language
+was very much farther removed from that ideal after which it was
+unconsciously striving, and in which, once reached, it has in great
+measure acquiesced; if they had not carried with them to their distant
+homes their English Bible, and what else of worth had been already
+uttered in the English tongue; if, having once left us, the intercourse
+between Old and New England had been entirely broken off, or only rare
+and partial; there would then have unfolded themselves differences
+between the language spoken here and there, which in tract of time
+accumulating and multiplying, might in the end have justified the
+regarding of the languages as no longer one and the same. It could not
+have failed but that such differences should have displayed themselves;
+for while there is a law of _necessity_ in the evolution of languages,
+while they pursue certain courses and in certain directions, from which
+they can be no more turned aside by the will of men than one of the
+heavenly bodies could be pushed from its orbit by any engines of ours,
+there is a law of _liberty_ no less; and this liberty must inevitably
+have made itself in many ways felt. In the political and social
+condition of America, so far removed from our own, in the many natural
+objects which are not the same with those which surround us here, in
+efforts independently carried out to rid the language of imperfections,
+or to unfold its latent powers, even in the different effects of soil
+and climate on the organs of speech, there would have been causes enough
+to have provoked in the course of time not immaterial divergencies of
+language.
+
+As it is, however, the joint operation of those three causes referred to
+already, namely, that the separation did not take place in the infancy
+or youth of the language, but only in its ripe manhood, that England and
+America owned a body of literature, to which they alike looked up and
+appealed as containing the authoritative standards of the language, that
+the intercourse between the one people and the other has been large and
+frequent, hereafter probably to be larger and more frequent still, has
+effectually wrought. It has been strong enough so to traverse, repress,
+and check all those causes which tended to divergence, that the
+_written_ language of educated men on both sides of the water remains
+precisely the same, their _spoken_ manifesting a few trivial
+differences of idiom; while even among those classes which do not
+consciously acknowledge any ideal standard of language, there are
+scarcely greater differences, in some respects far smaller, than exist
+between inhabitants of different provinces in this one island of
+England; and in the future we may reasonably anticipate that these
+differences, so far from multiplying, will rather diminish and
+disappear.
+
+{Sidenote: _Extinct English_}
+
+But I must return from this long digression. It seems often as if an
+almost unaccountable caprice presided over the fortunes of words, and
+determined which should live and which die. Thus in instances out of
+number a word lives on as a verb, but has ceased to be employed as a
+noun; we say 'to embarrass', but no longer an 'embarrass'; 'to revile',
+but not, with Chapman and Milton, a 'revile'; 'to dispose', but not a
+'dispose'{150}; 'to retire' but not a 'retire'; 'to wed', but not a
+'wed'; we say 'to infest', but use no longer the adjective 'infest'. Or
+with a reversed fortune a word lives on as a noun, but has perished as
+a verb--thus as a noun substantive, a 'slug', but no longer 'to slug'
+or render slothful; a 'child', but no longer 'to child', ("_childing_
+autumn", Shakespeare); a 'rape', but not 'to rape' (South); a 'rogue',
+but not 'to rogue'; 'malice', but not 'to malice'; a 'path', but not 'to
+path'; or as a noun adjective, 'serene', but not 'to serene', a beautiful
+word, which we have let go, as the French have 'sereiner'{151}; 'meek',
+but not 'to meek' (Wiclif); 'fond', but not 'to fond' (Dryden); 'dead',
+but not 'to dead'; 'intricate', but 'to intricate' (Jeremy Taylor) no
+longer.
+
+Or again, the affirmative remains, but the negative is gone; thus
+'wisdom', 'bold', 'sad', but not any more 'unwisdom', 'unbold', 'unsad'
+(all in Wiclif); 'cunning', but not 'uncunning'; 'manhood', 'wit',
+'mighty', 'tall', but not 'unmanhood', 'unwit', 'unmighty', 'untall'
+(all in Chaucer); 'buxom', but not 'unbuxom' (Dryden); 'hasty', but not
+'unhasty' (Spenser); 'blithe', but not 'unblithe'; 'ease', but not
+'unease' (Hacket); 'repentance', but not 'unrepentance'; 'remission',
+but not 'irremission' (Donne); 'science', but not 'nescience'
+(Glanvill){152}; 'to know', but not 'to unknow' (Wiclif); 'to give', but
+not 'to ungive'. Or once more, with a curious variation from this, the
+negative survives, while the affirmative is gone; thus 'wieldy'
+(Chaucer) survives only in 'unwieldy'; 'couth' and 'couthly' (both in
+Spenser), only in 'uncouth' and 'uncouthly'; 'rule' (Foxe) only in
+'unruly'; 'gainly' (Henry More) in 'ungainly'; these last two were both
+of them serviceable words, and have been ill lost{153}; 'gainly' is
+indeed still common in the West Riding of Yorkshire; 'exorable'
+(Holland) and 'evitable' only in 'inexorable' and 'inevitable';
+'faultless' remains, but hardly 'faultful' (Shakespeare). In like manner
+'semble' (Foxe) has, except as a technical law term, disappeared; while
+'dissemble' continues. So also of other pairs one has been taken and one
+left; 'height', or 'highth', as Milton better spelt it, remains, but
+'lowth' (Becon) is gone; 'righteousness', or 'rightwiseness', as it
+would once more accurately have been written, for 'righteous' is a
+corruption of 'rightwise', remains, but its correspondent 'wrongwiseness'
+has been taken; 'inroad' continues, but 'outroad' (Holland) has
+disappeared; 'levant' lives, but 'ponent' (Holland) has died; 'to
+extricate' continues, but, as we saw just now, 'to intricate' does not;
+'parricide', but not 'filicide' (Holland). Again, of whole groups of
+words formed on some particular scheme it may be only a single specimen
+will survive. Thus 'gainsay', that is, again say, survives; but
+'gainstrive' (Foxe), 'gainstand', 'gaincope' (Golding), and other
+similarly formed words exist no longer. It is the same with 'foolhardy',
+which is but one, though now indeed the only one remaining, of at least
+five adjectives formed on the same principle; thus 'foollarge', quite as
+expressive a word as prodigal, occurs in Chaucer, and 'foolhasty', found
+also in him, lived on to the time of Holland; while 'foolhappy' is in
+Spencer; and 'foolbold' in Bale. 'Steadfast' remains, but 'shamefast',
+'rootfast', 'bedfast' (=bedridden), 'homefast', 'housefast',
+'masterfast' (Skelton), with others, are all gone. 'Exhort' remains; but
+'dehort' a word whose place neither 'dissuade' nor any other exactly
+supplies, has escaped us{154}. We have 'twilight', but 'twibill' =
+bipennis (Chapman) is extinct.
+
+Let me mention another real loss, where in like manner there remains in
+the present language something to remind us of that which is gone. The
+comparative 'rather' stands alone, having dropped on one side its
+positive 'rathe'{155}, and on the other its superlative 'rathest'.
+'Rathe', having the sense of early, though a graceful word, and not
+fallen quite out of popular remembrance, inasmuch as it is embalmed in
+the _Lycidas_ of Milton,
+
+    "And the _rathe_ primrose, which forsaken dies",
+
+might still be suffered without remark to share the common lot of so many
+words which have perished, though worthy to have lived; but the disuse
+of 'rathest' has left a real gap in the language, and the more so,
+seeing that 'liefest' is gone too. 'Rather' expresses the Latin 'potius';
+but 'rathest' being out of use, we have no word, unless 'soonest' may be
+accepted as such, to express 'potissimum', or the preference not of one
+way over another or over certain others, but of one over all; which we
+therefore effect by aid of various circumlocutions. Nor has 'rathest'
+been so long out of use, that it would be playing the antic to attempt
+to revive it. It occurs in the _Sermons_ of Bishop Sanderson, who in the
+opening of that beautiful sermon from the text, "When my father and my
+mother forsake me, the Lord taketh me up", puts the consideration, "why
+these", that is, father and mother, "are named the _rathest_, and the
+rest to be included in them"{156}.
+
+It is sometimes easy enough, but indeed oftener hard, and not seldom
+quite impossible, to trace the causes which have been at work to bring
+about that certain words, little by little, drop out of the language of
+men, come to be heard more and more rarely, and finally are not heard
+any more at all--to trace the motives which have induced a whole people
+thus to arrive at a tacit consent not to employ them any longer; for
+without this tacit consent they could never have thus become obsolete.
+That it is not accident, that there is a law here at work, however
+hidden it may be from us, is plain from the fact that certain families
+of words, words formed on certain patterns, have a tendency thus to fall
+into desuetude.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in '-some'_}
+
+Thus, I think, we may trace a tendency in words ending in 'some', the
+Anglo-Saxon and early English 'sum', the German 'sam' ('friedsam',
+'seltsam') to fall out of use. It is true that a vast number of these
+survive, as 'gladsome', 'handsome', 'wearisome', 'buxom' (this last
+spelt better 'bucksome', by our earlier writers, for its present
+spelling altogether disguises its true character, and the family to
+which it belongs); being the same word as the German 'beugsam' or
+'biegsam', bendable, compliant{157}; but a larger number of these words
+than can be ascribed to accident, many more than the due proportion of
+them, are either quite or nearly extinct. Thus in Wiclif's Bible alone
+you might note the following, 'lovesum', 'hatesum', 'lustsum', 'gilsum'
+(guilesome), 'wealsum', 'heavysum', 'lightsum', 'delightsum'; of these
+'lightsome' long survived, and indeed still survives in provincial
+dialects; but of the others all save 'delightsome' are gone; and that,
+although used in our Authorized Version (Mal. iii, 12), is now only
+employed in poetry. So too 'mightsome' (see Coleridge's _Glossary_),
+'brightsome' (Marlowe), 'wieldsome', and 'unwieldsome' (Golding),
+'unlightsome' (Milton), 'healthsome' (_Homilies_), 'ugsome' and
+'ugglesome' (both in Foxe), 'laboursome' (Shakespeare), 'friendsome',
+'longsome' (Bacon), 'quietsome', 'mirksome' (both in Spenser),
+'toothsome' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'gleesome', 'joysome' (both in
+Browne's _Pastorals_), 'gaysome' (_Mirror for Magistrates_), 'roomsome',
+'bigsome', 'awesome', 'timersome', 'winsome', 'viewsome', 'dosome'
+(=prosperous), 'flaysome' (=fearful), 'auntersome' (=adventurous),
+'clamorsome' (all these still surviving in the North), 'playsome'
+(employed by the historian Hume), 'lissome'{158}, have nearly or quite
+disappeared from our English speech. They seem to have held their
+ground in Scotland in considerably larger numbers than in the south of
+the Island{159}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in '-ard'_}
+
+Neither can I esteem it a mere accident that of a group of depreciatory
+and contemptuous words ending in 'ard', at least one half should have
+dropped out of use; I refer to that group of which 'dotard', 'laggard',
+'braggard', now spelt 'braggart', 'sluggard', 'buzzard', 'bastard',
+'wizard', may be taken as surviving specimens; 'blinkard' (_Homilies_),
+'dizzard' (Burton), 'dullard' (Udal), 'musard' (Chaucer), 'trichard'
+(_Political Songs_), 'shreward' (Robert of Gloucester), 'ballard' (a
+bald-headed man, Wiclif); 'puggard', 'stinkard' (Ben Jonson), 'haggard',
+a worthless hawk, as extinct.
+
+Thus too there is a very curious province of our language, in which we
+were once so rich, that extensive losses here have failed to make us
+poor; so many of its words still surviving, even after as many or more
+have disappeared. I refer to those double words which either contain
+within themselves a strong rhyming modulation, such for example as
+'willy-nilly', 'hocus-pocus', 'helter-skelter', 'tag-rag', 'namby-pamby',
+'pell-mell', 'hodge-podge'; or with a slight difference from this,
+though belonging to the same group, those of which the characteristic
+feature is not this internal likeness with initial unlikeness, but
+initial likeness with internal unlikeness; not rhyming, but strongly
+alliterative, and in every case with a change of the interior vowel from
+a weak into a strong, generally from _i_ into _a_ or _o_; as
+'shilly-shally', 'mingle-mangle', 'tittle-tattle', 'prittle-prattle',
+'riff-raff', 'see-saw', 'slip-slop'. No one who is not quite out of love
+with the homelier yet more vigorous portions of the language, but will
+acknowledge the life and strength which there is often in these and in
+others still current among us. But of the same sort what vast numbers
+have fallen out of use, some so fallen out of all remembrance that it
+may be difficult almost to find credence for them. Thus take of rhyming
+the following: 'hugger-mugger', 'hurly-burly', 'kicksy-wicksy' (all in
+Shakespeare); 'hibber-gibber', 'rusty-dusty', 'horrel-lorrel', 'slaump
+paump' (all in Gabriel Harvey), 'royster-doyster' (Old Play),
+'hoddy-doddy' (Ben Jonson); while of alliterative might be instanced
+these: 'skimble-skamble', 'bibble-babble' (both in Shakespeare),
+'twittle-twattle', 'kim-kam' (both in Holland), 'hab-nab' (Lilly),
+'trim-tram', 'trish-trash', 'swish-swash' (all in Gabriel Harvey),
+'whim-wham' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'mizz-mazz' (Locke), 'snip-snap'
+(Pope), 'flim-flam' (Swift), 'tric-trac', and others{160}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words under Ban_}
+
+Again, there was once a whole family of words whereof the greater number
+are now under ban; which seemed at one time to have been formed almost
+at pleasure, the only condition being that the combination should be a
+happy one--I mean all those singularly expressive words formed by a
+combination of verb and substantive, the former governing the latter; as
+'telltale', 'scapegrace', 'turncoat', 'turntail', 'skinflint',
+'spendthrift', 'spitfire', 'lickspittle', 'daredevil' (=wagehals),
+'makebate' (=st�renfried), 'marplot', 'killjoy'. These with a certain
+number of others, have held their ground, and may be said to be still
+more or less in use; but what a number more are forgotten; and yet,
+though not always elegant, they constituted a very vigorous portion of
+our language, and preserved some of its most genuine idioms{161}. It
+could not well be otherwise; they are almost all words of abuse, and the
+abusive words of a language are always among the most picturesque and
+vigorous and imaginative which it possesses. The whole man speaks out in
+them, and often the man under the influence of passion and excitement,
+which always lend force and fire to his speech. Let me remind you of a
+few of them; 'smellfeast', if not a better, is yet a more graphic, word
+than our foreign parasite; as graphic indeed for us as {Greek:
+trechedeipnos} to Greek ears; 'clawback' (Hackett) is a stronger, if not
+a more graceful, word than flatterer or sycophant; 'tosspot' (Fuller),
+or less frequently 'reel-pot' (Middleton), tells its own tale as well as
+drunkard; and 'pinchpenny' (Holland), or 'nipfarthing' (Drant), as well
+as or better than miser. And then what a multitude more there are in
+like kind; 'spintext', 'lacklatin', 'mumblematins', all applied to
+ignorant clerics; 'bitesheep' (a favourite word with Foxe) to such of
+these as were rather wolves tearing, than shepherds feeding, the flock;
+'slip-string' = pendard (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'slip-gibbet',
+'scapegallows'; all names given to those who, however they might have
+escaped, were justly owed to the gallows, and might still "go upstairs
+to bed".
+
+{Sidenote: _Obsolete Compounds_}
+
+How many of these words occur in Shakespeare. The following list makes
+no pretence to completeness; 'martext', 'carrytale', 'pleaseman',
+'sneakcup', 'mumblenews', 'wantwit', 'lackbrain', 'lackbeard',
+'lacklove', 'ticklebrain', 'cutpurse', 'cutthroat', 'crackhemp',
+'breedbate', 'swinge-buckler', 'pickpurse', 'pickthank', 'picklock',
+'scarecrow', 'breakvow', 'breakpromise', 'makepeace'--this last and
+'telltruth' (Fuller) being the only ones in the whole collection wherein
+reprobation or contempt is not implied. Nor is the list exhausted yet;
+there are further 'dingthrift' = prodigal (Herrick), 'wastegood'
+(Cotgrave), 'stroygood' (Golding), 'wastethrift' (Beaumont and
+Fletcher), 'scapethrift', 'swashbuckler' (both in Holinshed),
+'shakebuckler', 'rinsepitcher' (both in Bacon), 'crackrope' (Howell),
+'waghalter', 'wagfeather' (both in Cotgrave), 'blabtale' (Racket),
+'getnothing' (Adams), 'findfault' (Florio), 'tearthroat' (Gayton),
+'marprelate', 'spitvenom', 'nipcheese', 'nipscreed', 'killman'
+(Chapman), 'lackland', 'pickquarrel', 'pickfaults', 'pickpenny' (Henry
+More), 'makefray' (Bishop Hall), 'make-debate' (Richardson's _Letters_),
+'kindlecoal' (attise feu), 'kindlefire' (both in Gurnall), 'turntippet'
+(Cranmer), 'swillbowl' (Stubbs), 'smell-smock', 'cumberwold' (Drayton),
+'curryfavor', 'pinchfist', 'suckfist', 'hatepeace' (Sylvester),
+'hategood' (Bunyan), 'clutchfist', 'sharkgull' (both in Middleton),
+'makesport' (Fuller), 'hangdog' ("Herod's _hangdogs_ in the tapestry",
+Pope), 'catchpoll', 'makeshift' (used not impersonally as now),
+'pickgoose' ("the bookworm was never but a _pickgoose_"){162}, 'killcow'
+(these three last in Gabriel Harvey), 'rakeshame' (Milton, prose), with
+others which it will be convenient to omit. 'Rakehell', which used to be
+spelt 'rakel' or 'rakle' (Chaucer), a good English word, would be only
+through an error included in this list, although Cowper, when he writes
+'rakehell' ("_rake-hell_ baronet") evidently regarded it as belonging to
+this group{163}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words become Vulgar_}
+
+Perhaps one of the most frequent causes which leads to the disuse of
+words is this: in some inexplicable way there comes to be attached
+something of ludicrous, or coarse, or vulgar to them, out of a feeling
+of which they are no longer used in earnest serious writing, and at the
+same time fall out of the discourse of those who desire to speak
+elegantly. Not indeed that this degradation which overtakes words is in
+all cases inexplicable. The unheroic character of most men's minds, with
+their consequent intolerance of that heroic which they cannot
+understand, is constantly at work, too often with success, in taking
+down words of nobleness from their high pitch; and, as the most
+effectual way of doing this, in casting an air of mock-heroic about
+them. Thus 'to dub', a word resting on one of the noblest usages of
+chivalry, has now something of ludicrous about it; so too has 'doughty';
+they belong to that serio-comic, mock-heroic diction, the multiplication
+of which, as of all parodies on greatness, and the favour with which it
+is received, is always a sign of evil augury for a nation, is at present
+a sign of evil augury for our own.
+
+'Pate' in the sense of head is now comic or ignoble; it was not so once;
+as is plain from its occurrence in the Prayer Book Version of the Psalms
+(Ps. vii. 17); as little was 'noddle', which occurs in one of the few
+poetical passages in Hawes. The same may be said of 'sconce', in this
+sense at least; of 'nowl' or 'noll', which Wiclif uses; of 'slops' for
+trousers (Marlowe's _Lucan_); of 'cocksure' (Rogers), of 'smug', which
+once meant no more than adorned ("the _smug_ bridegroom", Shakespeare).
+'To nap' is now a word without dignity; while yet in Wiclif's Bible it
+is said, "Lo he schall not _nappe_, nether slepe that kepeth Israel"
+(Ps. cxxi. 4). 'To punch', 'to thump', both of which, and in serious
+writing, occur in Spenser, could not now obtain the same use, nor yet
+'to wag', or 'to buss'. Neither would any one now say that at Lystra
+Barnabas and Paul "rent their clothes and _skipped out_ among the
+people" (Acts xiv. 14), which is the language that Wiclif employs; nor
+yet that "the Lord _trounced_ Sisera and all his host" as it stands in
+the Bible of 1551. "A _sight_ of angels", for which phrase see Cranmer's
+Bible (Heb. xii. 22), would be felt as a vulgarism now. We should
+scarcely call now a delusion of Satan a "_flam_ of the devil" (Henry
+More). It is not otherwise in regard of phrases. "Through thick and
+thin", occurring in Spenser, "cheek by jowl" in Dubartas{164}, do not
+now belong to serious poetry. In the glorious ballad of _Chevy Chase_, a
+noble warrior whose legs are hewn off, is described as being "in doleful
+dumps"; just as, in Holland's _Livy_, the Romans are set forth as being
+"in the dumps" as a consequence of their disastrous defeat at Cann�. In
+Golding's _Ovid_, one fears that he will "go to pot". In one of the
+beautiful letters of John Careless, preserved in Foxe's _Martyrs_, a
+persecutor, who expects a recantation from him, is described as "in the
+wrong box". And in the sermons of Barrow, who certainly intended to
+write an elevated style, and did not seek familiar, still less vulgar,
+expressions, we constantly meet such terms as 'to rate', 'to snub', 'to
+gull', 'to pudder', 'dumpish', and the like; which we may confidently
+affirm were not vulgar when he used them.
+
+Then too the advance of refinement causes words to be forgone, which are
+felt to speak too plainly. It is not here merely that one age has more
+delicate ears than another; and that matters are freely spoken of at one
+time which at another are withdrawn from conversation. This is
+something; but besides this, and even if this delicacy were at a
+standstill, there would still be a continual process going on, by which
+the words, which for a certain while have been employed to designate
+coarse or disagreeable facts or things, would be disallowed, or at all
+events relinquished to the lower class of society, and others adopted in
+their place. The former by long use being felt to have come into too
+direct and close relation with that which they designate, to summon it
+up too distinctly before the mind's eye, they are thereupon exchanged
+for others, which, at first at least, indicate more lightly and
+allusively the offensive thing, rather hint and suggest than paint and
+describe it: although by and by these new will also in their turn be
+discarded, and for exactly the same reasons which brought about the
+dismissal of those which they themselves superseded. It lies in the
+necessity of things that I must leave this part of my subject, very
+curious as it is, without illustration{165}. But no one, even
+moderately acquainted with the early literature of the Reformation, can
+be ignorant of words freely used in it, which now are not merely coarse
+and as such under ban, but which no one would employ who did not mean to
+speak impurely and vilely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{Sidenote: _Lost Powers of a Language_}
+
+Thus much in respect of the words, and the character of the words, which
+we have lost or let go. Of these, indeed, if a language, as it travels
+onwards, loses some, it also acquires others, and probably many more
+than it loses; they are leaves on the tree of language, of which if some
+fall away, a new succession takes their place. But it is not so, as I
+already observed, with the _forms_ or _powers_ of a language, that is,
+with the various inflections, moods, duplicate or triplicate formation
+of tenses; which the speakers of a language come gradually to perceive
+that they can do without, and therefore cease to employ; seeking to
+suppress grammatical intricacies, and to obtain grammatical simplicity
+and so far as possible a pervading uniformity, sometimes even at the
+hazard of letting go what had real worth, and contributed to the more
+lively, if not to the clearer, setting forth of the inner thought or
+feeling of the mind. Here there is only loss, with no compensating gain;
+or, at all events, diminution only, and never addition. In regard of
+these inner forces and potencies of a language, there is no creative
+energy at work in its later periods, in any, indeed, but quite the
+earliest. They are not as the leaves, but may be likened to the stem and
+leading branches of a tree, whose shape, mould and direction are
+determined at a very early stage of its growth; and which age, or
+accident, or violence may diminish, but which can never be multiplied. I
+have already slightly referred to a notable example of this, namely, to
+the dropping of the dual number in the Greek language. Thus in all the
+New Testament it does not once occur, having quite fallen out of the
+common dialect in which that is composed. Elsewhere too it has been felt
+that the dual was not worth preserving, or at any rate, that no serious
+inconvenience would follow on its loss. There is no such number in the
+modern German, Danish or Swedish; in the old German and Norse there was.
+
+{Sidenote: _Extinction of Powers_}
+
+How many niceties, delicacies, subtleties of language, _we_, speakers of
+the English tongue, in the course of centuries have got rid of; how bare
+(whether too bare is another question) we have stripped ourselves; what
+simplicity for better or for worse reigns in the present English, as
+compared with the old Anglo-Saxon. That had six declensions, our present
+English but one; that had three genders, English, if we except one or
+two words, has none; that formed the genitive in a variety of ways, we
+only in one; and the same fact meets us, wherever we compare the
+grammars of the two languages. At the same time, it can scarcely be
+repeated too often, that in the estimate of the gain or loss thereupon
+ensuing, we must by no means put certainly to loss everything which the
+language has dismissed, any more than everything to gain which it has
+acquired. It is no real wealth in a language to have needless and
+superfluous forms. They are often an embarrassment and an encumbrance to
+it rather than a help. The Finnish language has fourteen cases. Without
+pretending to know exactly what it is able to effect, I yet feel
+confident that it cannot effect more, nor indeed so much, with its
+fourteen as the Greek is able to do with its five. It therefore seems to
+me that some words of Otfried M�ller, in many ways admirable, do yet
+exaggerate the losses consequent on the reduction of the forms of a
+language. "It may be observed", he says, "that in the lapse of ages,
+from the time that the progress of language can be observed, grammatical
+forms, such as the signs of cases, moods and tenses have never been
+increased in number, but have been constantly diminishing. The history
+of the Romance, as well as of the Germanic, languages shows in the
+clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and copious, has been
+gradually weakened and impoverished, until at last it preserves only a
+few fragments of its ancient inflections. Now there is no doubt that
+this luxuriance of grammatical forms is not an essential part of a
+language, considered merely as a vehicle of thought. It is well known
+that the Chinese language, which is merely a collection of radical words
+destitute of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical ideas
+with tolerable precision; and the English, which, from the mode of its
+formation by a mixture of different tongues, has been stripped of its
+grammatical inflections more completely than any other European
+language, seems, nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be distinguished
+by its energetic eloquence. All this must be admitted by every
+unprejudiced inquirer; but yet it cannot be overlooked, that this
+copiousness of grammatical forms, and the fine shades of meaning which
+they express, evince a nicety of observation, and a faculty of
+distinguishing, which unquestionably prove that the race of mankind
+among whom these languages arose was characterized by a remarkable
+correctness and subtlety of thought. Nor can any modern European, who
+forms in his mind a lively image of the classical languages in their
+ancient grammatical luxuriance, and compares them with his mother
+tongue, conceal from himself that in the ancient languages the words,
+with their inflections, clothed as it were with muscles and sinews, come
+forward like living bodies, full of expression and character, while in
+the modern tongues the words seem shrunk up into mere skeletons"{166}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in '-ess'_}
+
+Whether languages are as much impoverished by this process as is here
+assumed, may, I think, be a question. I will endeavour to give you some
+materials which shall assist you in forming your own judgment in the
+matter. And here I am sure that I shall do best in considering not forms
+which the language has relinquished long ago, but mainly such as it is
+relinquishing now; which, touching us more nearly, will have a far more
+lively interest for us all. For example, the female termination which
+we employ in certain words, such as from 'heir' 'heiress', from
+'prophet' 'prophetess', from 'sorcerer' 'sorceress', was once far more
+widely extended than at present; the words which retain it are daily
+becoming fewer. It has already fallen away in so many, and is evidently
+becoming of less frequent use in so many others, that, if we may augur
+of the future from the analogy of the past, it will one day altogether
+vanish from our tongue. Thus all these occur in Wiclif's Bible;
+'techeress' as the female teacher (2 Chron. xxxv. 25); 'friendess'
+(Prov. vii. 4); 'servantess' (Gen. xvi. 2); 'leperess' (=saltatrix,
+Ecclus. ix. 4); 'daunceress' (Ecclus. ix. 4); 'neighbouress' (Exod. iii.
+22); 'sinneress' (Luke vii. 37); 'purpuress' (Acts xvi. 14); 'cousiness'
+(Luke i. 36); 'slayeress' (Tob. iii. 9); 'devouress' (Ezek. xxxvi. 13);
+'spousess' (Prov. v. 19); 'thralless' (Jer. xxxiv. 16); 'dwelleress'
+(Jer. xxi. 13); 'waileress' (Jer. ix. 17); 'cheseress' (=electrix, Wisd.
+viii. 4); 'singeress', 'breakeress', 'waiteress', this last indeed
+having recently come up again. Add to these 'chideress', the female
+chider, 'herdess', 'constabless', 'moveress', 'jangleress', 'soudaness'
+(=sultana), 'guideress', 'charmeress' (all in Chaucer); and others,
+which however we may have now let them fall, reached to far later
+periods of the language; thus 'vanqueress' (Fabyan); 'poisoneress'
+(Greneway); 'knightess' (Udal); 'pedleress', 'championess', 'vassaless',
+'avengeress', 'warriouress', 'victoress', 'creatress' (all in Spenser);
+'fornicatress', 'cloistress', 'jointress' (all in Shakespeare);
+'vowess' (Holinshed); 'ministress', 'flatteress' (both in Holland);
+'captainess' (Sidney); 'saintess' (Sir T. Urquhart); 'heroess',
+'dragoness', 'butleress', 'contendress', 'waggoness', 'rectress' (all in
+Chapman); 'shootress' (Fairfax); 'archeress' (Fanshawe); 'clientess',
+'pandress' (both in Middleton); 'papess', 'Jesuitess' (Bishop Hall);
+'incitress' (Gayton); 'soldieress', 'guardianess', 'votaress' (all in
+Beaumont and Fletcher); 'comfortress', 'fosteress' (Ben Jonson);
+'soveraintess' (Sylvester); 'preserveress' (Daniel); 'solicitress',
+'impostress', 'buildress', 'intrudress' (all in Fuller); 'favouress'
+(Hakewell); 'commandress' (Burton); 'monarchess', 'discipless' (Speed);
+'auditress', 'cateress', 'chantress', 'tyranness' (all in Milton);
+'citess', 'divineress' (both in Dryden); 'deaness' (Sterne);
+'detractress' (Addison); 'hucksteress' (Howell); 'tutoress'
+(Shaftesbury); 'farmeress' (Lord Peterborough, _Letter to Pope_);
+'laddess', which however still survives in the contracted form of
+'lass'{167}; with more which, I doubt not, it would not be very hard to
+bring together{168}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in '-ster'_}
+
+Exactly the same thing has happened with another feminine affix. I refer
+to 'ster', taking the place of 'er' where a feminine doer is
+intended{169}. 'Spinner' and 'spinster' are the only pair of such
+words, which still survive. There were formerly many such; thus 'baker'
+had 'bakester', being the female who baked: 'brewer' 'brewster'; 'sewer'
+'sewster'; 'reader' 'readster'; 'seamer' 'seamster'; 'fruiterer'
+'fruitester'; 'tumbler' 'tumblester'; 'hopper' 'hoppester' (these last
+three in Chaucer; "the shippes _hoppesteres_", about which so much
+difficulty has been made, are the ships _dancing_, i.e., on the
+waves){170}, 'knitter' 'knitster' (a word, I am told, still alive in
+Devon). Add to these 'whitster' (female bleacher, Shakespeare),
+'kempster' (pectrix), 'dryster' (siccatrix), 'brawdster', (I suppose
+embroideress){171}, and 'salster' (salinaria){172}. It is a singular
+example of the richness of a language in forms at the earlier stages of
+its existence, that not a few of the words which had, as we have just
+seen, a feminine termination in 'ess', had also a second in 'ster'. Thus
+'daunser', beside 'daunseress', had also 'daunster' (Ecclus. ix. 4);
+'wailer', beside 'waileress', had 'wailster' (Jer. ix. 17); 'dweller'
+'dwelster' (Jer. xxi. 13); and 'singer' 'singster' (2 Kin. xix. 35); so
+too, 'chider' had 'chidester' (Chaucer), as well as 'chideress',
+'slayer' 'slayster' (Tob. iii. 9), as well as 'slayeress', 'chooser'
+'chesister', (Wisd. viii. 4), as well as 'cheseress', with others that
+might be named.
+
+{Sidenote: _Deceptive Analogies_}
+
+It is difficult to understand how Marsh, with these examples before him
+should affirm, "I find no positive evidence to show that the termination
+'ster' was ever regarded as a feminine termination in English". It may
+be, and indeed has been, urged that the existence of such words as
+'seamstr_ess_', 'songstr_ess_', is decisive proof that the ending 'ster'
+of itself was not counted sufficient to designate persons as female; for
+if, it has been said, 'seam_ster_' and 'song_ster_' had been felt to be
+already feminine, no one would have ever thought of doubling on this,
+and adding a second female termination; 'seam_stress_', 'song_stress_'.
+But all which can justly be concluded from hence is, that when this
+final 'ess' was added to these already feminine forms, and examples of
+it will not, I think, be found till a comparatively late period of the
+language, the true principle and law of the words had been lost sight of
+and forgotten{173}. The same may be affirmed of such other of these
+feminine forms as are now applied to men, such as 'gamester',
+'youngster', 'oldster', 'drugster' (South), 'huckster', 'hackster',
+(=swordsman, Milton, prose), 'teamster', 'throwster', 'rhymester',
+'punster' (_Spectator_), 'tapster', 'whipster' (Shakespeare),
+'trickster'. Either, like 'teamster', and 'punster', the words first
+came into being, when the true significance of this form was altogether
+lost{174}; or like 'tapster', which was female in Chaucer ("the gay
+_tapstere_"), as it is still in Dutch and Frisian, and distinguished
+from 'tapper', the _man_ who keeps the inn, or has charge of the tap, or
+as 'bakester', at this day used in Scotland for 'baker', as 'dyester'
+for 'dyer', the word did originally belong of right and exclusively to
+women; but with the gradual transfer of the occupation to men, and an
+increasing forgetfulness of what this termination implied, there went
+also a transfer of the name{175}, just as in other words, and out of
+the same causes, the exact converse has found place; and 'baker' or
+'brewer', not 'bakester' or 'brewster'{176}, would be now in England
+applied to the woman baking or brewing. So entirely has this power of
+the language died out, that it survives more apparently than really even
+in 'spinner' and 'spinster'; seeing that 'spinster' has obtained now
+quite another meaning than that of a woman spinning, whom, as well as
+the man, we should call not a 'spinster', but a 'spinner'{177}. It would
+indeed be hard to believe, if we had not constant experience of the
+fact, how soon and how easily the true law and significance of some
+form, which has never ceased to be in everybody's mouth, may yet be lost
+sight of by all. No more curious chapter in the history of language
+could be written than one which should trace the violations of analogy,
+the transgressions of the most primary laws of a language, which follow
+hereupon; the plurals like 'welkin' (=wolken, the clouds){178},
+'chicken'{179}, which are dealt with as singulars, the singulars, like
+'riches' (richesse){180}, 'pease' (pisum, pois){181}, 'alms',
+'eaves'{182}, which are assumed to be plurals.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Genitival Inflexion '-s'_}
+
+There is one example of this, familiar to us all; probably so familiar
+that it would not be worth while adverting to it, if it did not
+illustrate, as no other word could, this forgetfulness which may
+overtake a whole people, of the true meaning of a grammatical form which
+they have never ceased to employ. I refer to the mistaken assumption
+that the 's' of the genitive, as 'the king's countenance', was merely a
+more rapid way of pronouncing 'the king _his_ countenance', and that the
+final 's' in 'king's' was in fact an elided 'his'. This explanation for
+a long time prevailed almost universally; I believe there are many who
+accept it still. It was in vain that here and there a deeper knower of
+our tongue protested against this "monstrous syntax", as Ben Jonson in
+his _Grammar_ justly calls it{183}. It was in vain that Wallis, another
+English scholar of the seventeenth century, pointed out in _his_ Grammar
+that the slightest examination of the facts revealed the untenable
+character of this explanation, seeing that we do not merely say "the
+_king's_ countenance", but "the _queen's_ countenance"; and in this case
+the final 's' cannot stand for 'his', for "the queen _his_ countenance"
+cannot be intended{184}; we do not say merely "the _child's_ bread", but
+"the _children's_ bread", where it is no less impossible to resolve the
+phrase into "the children _his_ bread"{185}. Despite of these protests
+the error held its ground. This much indeed of a plea it could make for
+itself, that such an actual employment of 'his' _had_ found its way
+into the language, as early as the fourteenth century, and had been in
+occasional, though rare use, from that time downward{186}. Yet this,
+which has only been elicited by the researches of recent scholars, does
+not in the least justify those who assumed that in the habitual 's' of
+the genitive were to be found the remains of 'his'--an error from which
+the books of scholars in the seventeenth, and in the early decades of
+the eighteenth, century are not a whit clearer than those of others.
+Spenser, Donne, Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, all fall into it; I cannot say
+confidently whether Milton does. Dryden more than once helps out his
+verse with an additional syllable gained by its aid. It has even forced
+its way into our Prayer Book itself, where in the "Prayer for all sorts
+and conditions of men", added by Bishop Sanderson at the last revision
+of the Liturgy in 1661, we are bidden to say, "And this we beg for Jesus
+Christ _his_ sake"{187}. I need hardly tell you that this 's' is in fact
+the one remnant of flexion surviving in the singular number of our
+English noun substantives; it is in all the Indo-Germanic languages the
+original sign of the genitive, or at any rate the earliest of which we
+can take cognizance; and just as in Latin 'lapis' makes 'lapidis' in the
+genitive, so 'king', 'queen', 'child', make severally 'kings', 'queens',
+'childs', the comma, an apparent note of elision, being a mere modern
+expedient, "a late refinement", as Ash calls it{188}, to distinguish the
+genitive singular from the plural cases{189}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Adjectives in '-en'_}
+
+Notice another example of this willingness to dispense with inflection,
+of this endeavour on the part of the speakers of a language to reduce
+its forms to the fewest possible, consistent with the accurate
+communication of thought. Of our adjectives in 'en', formed on
+substantives, and expressing the material or substance of a thing, some
+have gone, others are going, out of use; while we content ourselves with
+the bare juxtaposition of the substantive itself, as sufficiently
+expressing our meaning. Thus instead of "_golden_ pin" we say "_gold_
+pin"; instead of "_earthen_ works" we say "_earth_ works". 'Golden' and
+'earthen', it is true, still belong to our living speech, though mainly
+as part of our poetic diction, or of the solemn and thus stereotyped
+language of Scripture; but a whole company of such words have nearly or
+quite disappeared; some lately, some long ago. 'Steelen' and 'flowren'
+belong only to the earliest period of the language; 'rosen' also went
+early. Chaucer is my latest authority for it ("_rosen_ chapelet").
+'Hairen' is in Wiclif and in Chaucer; 'stonen' in the former (John iii.
+6){190}. 'Silvern' stood originally in Wiclif's Bible ("_silverne_
+housis to Diane", Acts xix. 24); but already in the second recension of
+this was exchanged for 'silver'; 'hornen', still in provincial use, he
+also employs, and 'clayen' (Job iv. 19) no less. 'Tinnen' occurs in
+Sylvester's _Du Bartas_; where also we meet with "Jove's _milken_
+alley", as a name for the _Via Lactea_, in Bacon also not "the _Milky_",
+but "the _Milken_ Way". In the coarse polemics of the Reformation the
+phrase, "_breaden_ god", provoked by the Romish doctrine of
+transubstantiation, was of frequent employment, and occurs as late as in
+Oldham. "_Mothen_ parchments" is in Fulke; "_twiggen_ bottle" in
+Shakespeare; '_yewen_', or, according to earlier spelling, "_ewghen_
+bow", in Spenser; "_cedarn_ alley", and "_azurn_ sheen" are both in
+Milton; "_boxen_ leaves" in Dryden; "a _treen_ cup" in Jeremy Taylor;
+"_eldern_ popguns" in Sir Thomas Overbury; "a _glassen_ breast", in
+Whitlock; "a _reeden_ hat" in Coryat; 'yarnen' occurs in Turberville;
+'furzen' in Holland; 'threaden' in Shakespeare; and 'bricken', 'papern'
+appear in our provincial glossaries as still in use.
+
+It is true that many of these adjectives still hold their ground; but
+it is curious to note how the roots which sustain even these are being
+gradually cut away from beneath them. Thus 'brazen' might at first sight
+seem as strongly established in the language as ever; it is far from so
+being; its supports are being cut from beneath it. Even now it only
+lives in a tropical and secondary sense, as 'a _brazen_ face'; or if in
+a literal, in poetic diction or in the consecrated language of
+Scripture, as 'the _brazen_ serpent'; otherwise we say 'a _brass_
+farthing', 'a _brass_ candlestick'. It is the same with 'oaten',
+'birchen', 'beechen', 'strawen', and many more, whereof some are
+obsolescent, some obsolete, the language manifestly tending now, as it
+has tended for a long time past, to the getting quit of these, and to
+the satisfying of itself with an adjectival apposition of the
+substantive in their stead.
+
+{Sidenote: _Weak and Strong Pr�terites_}
+
+Let me illustrate by another example the way in which a language, as it
+travels onward, simplifies itself, approaches more and more to a
+grammatical and logical uniformity, seeks to do the same thing always in
+the same manner; where it has two or three ways of conducting a single
+operation, lets all of them go but one; and thus becomes, no doubt,
+easier to be mastered, more handy, more manageable; for its very riches
+were to many an embarrassment and a perplexity; but at the same time
+imposes limits and restraints on its own freedom of action, and is in
+danger of forfeiting elements of strength, variety and beauty, which it
+once possessed. I refer to the tendency of our verbs to let go their
+strong pr�terites, and to substitute weak ones in their room; or, where
+they have two or three pr�terites, to retain only one of them, and that
+invariably the weak one. Though many of us no doubt are familiar with
+the terms 'strong' and 'weak' pr�terites, which in all our better
+grammars have put out of use the wholly misleading terms, 'irregular'
+and 'regular', I may perhaps as well remind you of the exact meaning of
+the terms. A strong pr�terite is one formed by an internal vowel change;
+for instance the verb 'to _drive_' forms the pr�terite '_drove_' by an
+internal change of the vowel 'i' into 'o'. But why, it may be asked,
+called 'strong'? In respect of the vigour and indwelling energy in the
+word, enabling it to form its past tense from its own resources, and
+with no calling in of help from without. On the other hand 'lift' forms
+its pr�terite 'lift_ed_', not by any internal change, but by the
+addition of 'ed'; 'grieve' in like manner has 'griev_ed_'. Here are weak
+tenses; as strength was ascribed to the other verbs, so weakness to
+these, which can form their pr�terites only by external aid and
+addition. You will see at once that these strong pr�terites, while they
+witness to a vital energy in the words which are able to put them forth,
+do also, as must be allowed by all, contribute much to the variety and
+charm of a language{191}.
+
+The point, however, which I am urging now is this,--that these are
+becoming fewer every day; multitudes of them having disappeared, while
+others are in the act of disappearing. Nor is the balance redressed and
+compensation found in any new creations of the kind. The power of
+forming strong pr�terites is long ago extinct; probably no verb which
+has come into the language since the Conquest has asserted this power,
+while a whole legion have let it go. For example, 'shape' has now a weak
+pr�terite, 'shaped', it had once a strong one, 'shope'; 'bake' has now a
+weak pr�terite, 'baked', it had once a strong one, 'boke'; the pr�terite
+of 'glide' is now 'glided', it was once 'glode' or 'glid'; 'help' makes
+now 'helped', it made once 'halp' and 'holp'. 'Creep' made 'crope',
+still current in the north of England; 'weep' 'wope'; 'yell' 'yoll'
+(both in Chaucer); 'seethe' 'soth' or 'sod' (Gen. xxv. 29); 'sheer' in
+like manner once made 'shore'; as 'leap' made 'lope'; 'wash' 'wishe'
+(Chaucer); 'snow' 'snew'; 'sow' 'sew'; 'delve' 'dalf' and 'dolve';
+'sweat' 'swat'; 'yield' 'yold' (both in Spenser); 'mete' 'mat' (Wiclif);
+'stretch' 'straught'; 'melt' 'molt'; 'wax' 'wex' and 'wox'; 'laugh'
+'leugh'; with others more than can be enumerated here{192}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Strong Pr�terites_}
+
+Observe further that where verbs have not actually renounced their
+strong pr�terites, and contented themselves with weak in their room,
+yet, once possessing two, or, it might be three of these strong, they
+now retain only one. The others, on the principle of dismissing whatever
+can be dismissed, they have let go. Thus 'chide' had once 'chid' and
+'chode', but though 'chode' is in our Bible (Gen. xxxi. 36), it has not
+maintained itself in our speech; 'sling' had 'slung' and 'slang' (1 Sam.
+xvii. 49); only 'slung' remains; 'fling' had once 'flung' and 'flang';
+'strive' had 'strove' and 'strave'; 'stick' had 'stuck' and 'stack';
+'hang' had 'hung' and 'hing' (Golding); 'tread' had 'trod' and 'trad';
+'choose' had 'chose' and 'chase'; 'give' had 'gave' and 'gove'; 'lead'
+had 'led' 'lad' and 'lode'; 'write' had 'wrote' 'writ' and 'wrate'. In
+all these cases, and more might easily be cited, only [of] the
+pr�terites which I have named the first remains in use.
+
+Observe too that in every instance where a conflict is now going on
+between weak and strong forms, which shall continue, the battle is not
+to the strong; on the contrary the weak is carrying the day, is getting
+the better of its stronger competitor. Thus 'climbed' is gaining the
+upper hand of 'clomb', 'swelled' of 'swoll', 'hanged' of 'hung'. It is
+not too much to anticipate that a time will come, although it may be
+still far off, when all English verbs will form their pr�terites weakly;
+not without serious damage to the fulness and force which in this
+respect the language even now displays, and once far more eminently
+displayed{193}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Comparatives and Superlatives_}
+
+Take another proof of this tendency in our own language to drop its
+forms and renounce its own inherent powers; though here also the
+renunciation, threatening one day to be complete, is only partial at the
+present. I refer to the formation of our comparatives and superlatives;
+and I will ask you again to observe here that curious law of language,
+namely, that wherever there are two or more ways of attaining the same
+result, there is always a disposition to drop and dismiss all of these
+but one, so that the alternative or choice of ways once existing, shall
+not exist any more. If only it can attain a greater simplicity, it seems
+to grudge no self-impoverishment by which this result may be brought
+about. We have two ways of forming our comparatives and superlatives,
+one dwelling in the word itself, which we have inherited from our old
+Gothic stock, as 'bright', 'bright_er_', 'bright_est_', the other
+supplementary to this, by prefixing the auxiliaries 'more' and 'most'.
+The first, organic we might call it, the indwelling power of the word to
+mark its own degrees, must needs be esteemed the more excellent way;
+which yet, already disallowed in almost all adjectives of more than two
+syllables in length, is daily becoming of narrower and more restrained
+application. Compare in this matter our present with our past. Wiclif
+for example forms such comparatives as 'grievouser', 'gloriouser',
+'patienter', 'profitabler', such superlatives as 'grievousest',
+'famousest'; this last occurring also in Bacon. We meet in Tyndale,
+'excellenter', 'miserablest'; in Shakespeare, 'violentest'; in Gabriel
+Harvey, 'vendiblest', 'substantialest', 'insolentest'; in Rogers,
+'insufficienter', 'goldener'; in Beaumont and Fletcher, 'valiantest'.
+Milton uses 'virtuosest', and in prose 'vitiosest', 'elegantest',
+'artificialest', 'servilest', 'sheepishest', 'resolutest', 'sensualest';
+Fuller has 'fertilest'; Baxter 'tediousest'; Butler 'preciousest',
+'intolerablest'; Burnet 'copiousest', Gray 'impudentest'. Of these
+forms, and it would be easy to adduce almost any number, we should
+hardly employ any now. In participles and adverbs in 'ly', these organic
+comparatives and superlatives hardly survive at all. We do not say
+'willinger' or 'lovinger', and still less 'flourishingest', or
+'shiningest', or 'surmountingest', all which Gabriel Harvey, a foremost
+master of the English of his time, employs; 'plenteouslyer', 'fulliest'
+(Wiclif), 'easiliest' (Fuller), 'plainliest' (Dryden), would be all
+inadmissible at present.
+
+In the manifest tendency of English at the present moment to reduce the
+number of words in which this more vigorous scheme of expressing degrees
+is allowed, we must recognize an evidence that the energy which the
+language had in its youth is in some measure abating, and the stiffness
+of age overtaking it. Still it is with us here only as it is with all
+languages, in which at a certain time of their life auxiliary words,
+leaving the main word unaltered, are preferred to inflections of this
+last. Such preference makes itself ever more strongly felt; and, judging
+from analogy, I cannot doubt that a day, however distant now, will
+arrive, when the only way of forming comparatives and superlatives in
+the English language will be by prefixing 'more' and 'most'; or, if the
+other survive, it will be in poetry alone.
+
+It will fare not otherwise, as I am bold to predict, with the flexional
+genitive, formed in 's' or 'es' (see p. 161). This too will finally
+disappear altogether from the language, or will survive only in poetry,
+and as much an archaic form there as the 'picta�' of Virgil. A time will
+come when it will not any longer be free to say, as now, either, "_the
+king's sons_", or "_the sons of the king_", but when the latter will be
+the only admissible form. Tokens of this are already evident. The region
+in which the alternative forms are equally good is narrowing. We should
+not now any more write, "When _man's son_ shall come" (Wiclif), but
+"When _the Son of man_ shall come", nor yet, "_The hypocrite's hope_
+shall perish" (Job viii. 13, Authorized Version), but, "_The hope of the
+hypocrite_ shall perish"; not with Barrow, "No man can be ignorant _of
+human life's brevity and uncertainty_", but "No man can be ignorant _of
+the brevity and uncertainty of human life_". The consummation which I
+anticipate may be centuries off, but will assuredly arrive{194}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Lost Diminutives_}
+
+Then too diminutives are fast disappearing from the language. If we
+desire to express smallness, we prefer to do it by an auxiliary word;
+thus a little fist, and not a 'fistock' (Golding), a little lad, and not
+a 'ladkin', a little worm, rather than a 'wormling' (Sylvester). It is
+true that of diminutives very many still survive, in all our four
+terminations of such, as 'hillock', 'streamlet', 'lambkin', 'gosling';
+but those which have perished are many more. Where now is 'kingling'
+(Holland), 'whimling' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'godling', 'loveling',
+'dwarfling', 'shepherdling' (all in Sylvester), 'chasteling' (Bacon),
+'niceling' (Stubbs), 'fosterling' (Ben Johnson), and 'masterling'? Where
+now 'porelet' (=paupercula, Isai. x. 30, Vulg.), 'bundelet', (both in
+Wiclif); 'cushionet' (Henry More), 'havenet', or little 'haven',
+'pistolet', 'bulkin' (Holland), and a hundred more? Even of those which
+remain many are putting off, or have long since put off, their
+diminutive sense; a 'pocket' being no longer a _small_ poke, nor a
+'latchet' a _small_ lace, nor a 'trumpet' a small _trump_, as once they
+were.
+
+{Sidenote: _Thou and Thee_}
+
+Once more--in the entire dropping among the higher classes of 'thou',
+except in poetry or in addresses to the Deity, and as a necessary
+consequence, the dropping also of the second singular of the verb with
+its strongly marked flexion, as 'lovest', 'lovedst', we have another
+example of a force once existing in the language, which has been, or is
+being, allowed to expire. In the seventeenth century 'thou' in English,
+as at the present 'du' in German, 'tu' in French, was the sign of
+familiarity, whether that familiarity was of love, or of contempt and
+scorn{195}. It was not unfrequently the latter. Thus at Sir Walter
+Raleigh's trial (1603), Coke, when argument and evidence failed him,
+insulted the defendant by applying to him the term 'thou':--"All that
+Lord Cobham did was at _thy_ instigation, _thou_ viper, for I _thou_
+thee, _thou_ traitor". And when Sir Toby Belch in _Twelfth Night_ is
+urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek to send a sufficiently provocative challenge
+to Viola, he suggests to him that he "taunt him with the licence of ink;
+if thou _thou'st_ him some thrice, it shall not be amiss". To keep this
+in mind will throw much light on one peculiarity of the Quakers, and
+give a certain dignity to it, as once maintained, which at present it is
+very far from possessing. However needless and unwise their
+determination to 'thee' and 'thou' the whole world was, yet this had a
+significance. It was not, as now to us it seems, and, through the silent
+changes which language has undergone, as now it indeed is, a gratuitous
+departure from the ordinary usage of society. Right or wrong, it meant
+something, and had an ethical motive: being indeed a testimony upon
+their parts, however misplaced, that they would not have high or great
+or rich men's persons in admiration; nor give the observance to some
+which they withheld from others. It was a testimony too which cost them
+something; at present we can very little understand the amount of
+courage which this 'thou-ing' and 'thee-ing' of all men must have
+demanded on their parts, nor yet the amount of indignation and offence
+which it stirred up in them who were not aware of, or would not allow
+for, the scruples which obliged them to it{196}. It is, however, in its
+other aspect that we must chiefly regret the dying out of the use of
+'thou'--that is, as the pledge of peculiar intimacy and special
+affection, as between husband and wife, parents and children, and such
+other as might be knit together by bands of more than common affection.
+
+{Sidenote: _Gender Words_}
+
+I have preferred during this lecture to find my theme in changes which
+are now going forward in English, but I cannot finish it without drawing
+one illustration from its remoter periods, and bidding you to note a
+force not now waning and failing from it, but extinct long ago. I
+cannot well pass it by; being as it is by far the boldest step which in
+this direction of simplification the English language has at any time
+taken. I refer to the renouncing of the distribution of its nouns into
+masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in German, or even into masculine
+and feminine, as in French; and with this, and as a necessary
+consequence of this, the dropping of any flexional modification in the
+adjectives connected with them. Natural _sex_ of course remains, being
+inherent in all language; but grammatical _gender_, with the exception
+of 'he', 'she', and 'it', and perhaps one or two other fragmentary
+instances, the language has altogether forgone. An example will make
+clear the distinction between these. Thus it is not the word 'poetess'
+which is _feminine_, but the person indicated who is _female_. So too
+'daughter', 'queen', are in English not _feminine_ nouns, but nouns
+designating _female_ persons. Take on the contrary 'filia' or 'regina',
+'fille' or 'reine'; there you have _feminine_ nouns as well as _female_
+persons. I need hardly say to you that we did not inherit this
+simplicity from others, but, like the Danes, in so far as they have done
+the like, have made it for ourselves. Whether we turn to the Latin, or,
+which is for us more important, to the old Gothic, we find gender; and
+in all daughter languages which have descended from the Latin, in most
+of those which have descended from the ancient Gothic stock, it is fully
+established to this day. The practical, business-like character of the
+English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction, which in
+a vast proportion of words, that is, in all which are the signs of
+_inanimate_ objects, and as such incapable of sex, rested upon a
+fiction, and had no ground in the real nature of things. It is only by
+an act and effort of the imagination that sex, and thus gender, can be
+attributed to a table, a ship, or a tree; and there are aspects, this
+being one, in which the English is among the least imaginative of all
+languages even while it has been employed in some of the mightiest works
+of imagination which the world has ever seen{197}.
+
+What, it may be asked, is the meaning and explanation of all this? It is
+that at certain earlier periods of a nation's life its genius is
+synthetic, and at later becomes analytic. At earlier periods all is by
+synthesis; and men love to contemplate the thing, and the mode of the
+thing, together, as a single idea, bound up in one. But a time arrives
+when the intellectual obtains the upper hand of the imaginative, when
+the tendency of those that speak the language is to analyse, to
+distinguish between these two, and not only to distinguish but to
+divide, to have one word for the thing itself, and another for the
+quality of the thing; and this, as it would appear, is true not of some
+languages only, but of all.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{128} [Apparently a slip for 'ebb']
+
+{129} It is still used in prose as late as the age of Henry VIII; see
+      the _State Papers_, vol. viii. p. 247. It was the latest survivor
+      of a whole group or family of words which continued much longer in
+      Scotland than with us; of which some perhaps continue there still;
+      these are but a few of them; 'wanthrift' for extravagance;
+      'wanluck', misfortune; 'wanlust', languor; 'wanwit', folly;
+      'wangrace', wickedness; 'wantrust' (Chaucer), distrust, [Also
+      'wan-ton', devoid of breeding (_towen_). Compare German
+      _wahn-sinn_, insanity, and _wahn-witz_.]
+
+{130} We must not suppose that this still survives in '_gir_falcon';
+      which wholly belongs to the Latin element of the language; being
+      the later Latin 'gyrofalco', and that, "a _gyrando_, quia diu
+      _gyrando_ acriter pr�dam insequitur".
+
+{131} ['Heft', from 'heave' (_Winter's Tale_, ii. 1, 45), is widely
+      diffused in the Three Kingdoms and in America. See E.D.D. _s.v._]
+
+{132} "Some _hot-spurs_ there were that gave counsel to go against them
+      with all their forces, and to fright and terrify them, if they
+      made slow haste". (Holland's _Livy_, p. 922.)
+
+{133} _State Papers_, vol. vi. p. 534.
+
+{134} ['Malinger', French _malingre_ (mistakenly derived above), stands
+      for old French _mal-heingre_ (maliciously or falsely ill, feigning
+      sickness), which is from Latin _male aeger_, with an intrusive
+      _n_--Scheler.]
+
+{135} [To which the late Boer War contributed many more, such as
+      'kopje', 'trek', 'slim', 'veldt', etc.]
+
+{136} The only two writers of whom I am aware as subsequently using this
+      word are, both writing in Ireland and of Irish matters, Spenser
+      and Swift. The passages are both quoted in Richardson's
+      _Dictionary_. ['Bawn' stands for the Irish _ba-dhun_ (not
+      _b�bhun_, as in N.E.D.), or _bo-dhun_, literally 'cow-fortress', a
+      cattle enclosure (Irish _bo_, a cow). See P. W. Joyce, _Irish
+      Names of Places_, 1st ser. p. 297.]
+
+{137} There is an excellent account of this "refugee French" in Weiss'
+      _History of the Protestant Refugees of France_.
+
+{138} [Thus the Shakespearian word _renege_ (Latin _renegare_), to deny
+      (_Lear_ ii, 2) still lives in the mouths of the Irish peasantry. I
+      have heard a farmer's wife denounce those who "_renege_ [_renaig_]
+      their religion".]
+
+{139} With all its severity, there is some truth in Ben Johnson's
+      observation: "Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no
+      language". In this matter, however, Ben Jonson was at one with
+      him; for he does not hesitate to express his strong regret that
+      this form has not been retained. "The _persons_ plural" he says
+      (_English Grammar_, c. 17), "keep the termination of the first
+      _person_ singular. In former times, till about the reign of King
+      Henry VIII, they were wont to be formed by adding _en_; thus,
+      _loven_, _sayen_, _complainen_. But now (whatsoever is the cause)
+      it hath quite grown out of use, and that other so generally
+      prevailed, that I dare not presume to set this afoot again; albeit
+      (to tell you my opinion) I am persuaded that the lack hereof, well
+      considered, will be found a great blemish to our tongue. For
+      seeing _time_ and _person_ be as it were the right and left hand
+      of a verb, what can the maiming bring else, but a lameness to the
+      whole body"?
+
+{140} [The two words are often popularly confounded. When a good woman
+      said "I'm _afeerd_", Mr. Pickwick exclaimed "_Afraid_"! (_Pickwick
+      Papers_, ch. v.). Chaucer, instructively, uses both in the one
+      sentence, "This wyf was not _affered_ ne _affrayed_" (_Shipman's
+      Tale_, l. 400).]
+
+{141} G�nin (_R�cr�ations Philologiques_, vol. i. p. 71) says to the
+      same effect: "Il n'y a gu�res de faute de Fran�ais, je dis faute
+      g�n�rale, accr�dit�e, qui n'ait sa raison d'�tre, et ne p�t au
+      besoin produire ses lettres de noblesse; et souvent mieux en r�gle
+      que celles des locutions qui ont usurp� leur place au soleil".
+
+{142} A single proof may in each case suffice:
+
+          "Our wills and fates do so _contr�ry_ run".--_Shakespeare._
+
+          "Ne let _mischi�vous_ witches with their charms".--_Spenser._
+
+          "O argument _blasph�mous_, false and proud".--_Milton._
+
+      [These archaisms are still current in Ireland.]
+
+{143} I cannot doubt that this form which our country people in
+      Hampshire, as in many other parts, always employ, either retains
+      the original pronunciation, our received one being a modern
+      corruption; or else, as is more probable, that _we_ have made a
+      confusion between two originally different words, from which they
+      have kept clear. Thus in Howell's _Vocabulary_, 1659, and in
+      Cotgrave's _French and English Dictionary_ both words occur:
+      "nuncion or nuncheon, the afternoon's repast", (cf. _Hudibras_, i.
+      1, 346: "They took their breakfasts or their _nuncheons_"), and
+      "lunchion, a big piece" i.e. of bread; for both give the old
+      French 'caribot', which has this meaning, as the equivalent of
+      'luncheon'. It is clear that in this sense of lump or 'big piece'
+      Gay uses 'luncheon':
+
+          "When hungry thou stood'st staring like an oaf,
+          I sliced the _luncheon_ from the barley loaf";
+
+      and Miss Baker in her _Northamptonshire Glossary_ explains 'lunch'
+      as "a large lump of bread, or other edible; 'He helped himself to
+      a good _lunch_ of cake'". We may note further that this 'nuntion'
+      may possibly put us on the right track for arriving at the
+      etymology of the word. Richardson has called attention to the fact
+      that it is spelt "noon-shun" in Browne's _Pastorals_, which must
+      at least suggest as possible and plausible that the 'nuntion' was
+      originally applied to the labourer's slight meal, to which he
+      withdrew for the _shunning_ of the heat of the middle _noon_:
+      especially when in Lancashire we find a word of similar formation,
+      'noon-scape', and in Norfolk 'noon-miss', for the time when
+      labourers rest after dinner. [It really stands for the older
+      English _none-schenche_, i.e. 'noon-skink' or noon-drink (see
+      Skeat, _Etym. Dict._, _s.v._), correlative to 'noon-meat' or
+      'nam-met'.] It is at any rate certain that the dignity to which
+      'lunch' or 'luncheon' has now arrived, as when we read in the
+      newspapers of a "magnificent _luncheon_", is altogether modern;
+      the word belonged a century ago to rustic life, and in literature
+      had not travelled beyond the "hobnailed pastorals" which professed
+      to describe that life.
+
+{144} See it so written, Holland's _Pliny_, vol. ii. p. 428, and often.
+
+{145} As a proof of the excellent service which an accurate acquaintance
+      with provincial usages may render in the investigation of the
+      innumerable perplexing phenomena of the English language, I would
+      refer to the admirable article _On English Pronouns Personal_ in
+      _Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. i. p. 277.
+
+{146} [We now have the good fortune to possess a complete collection of
+      this valuable class of words in the splendid "English Dialect
+      Dictionary", edited by Professor Joseph Wright of Oxford, which is
+      an essential supplement to all existing dictionaries of our
+      language.]
+
+{147} This last very curious usage, which served as a kind of
+      stepping-stone to 'its', and of which another example occurs in
+      the Geneva Version (Acts xii. 10), and three or four in
+      Shakespeare, has been abundantly illustrated by those who have
+      lately written on the early history of the word 'its'; thus see
+      Craik, _On the English of Shakespeare_, p. 91; Marsh, _Manual of
+      the English Language_ (Eng. Edit.), p. 278; _Transactions of the
+      Philological Society_, vol. 1. p. 280; and my book _On the
+      Authorized Version of the New Testament_, p. 59.
+
+{148} Thus Fuller (_Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, vol. ii. p. 190): "Sure
+      I am this city [the New Jerusalem] as presented by the prophet,
+      was fairer, finer, _slicker_, smoother, more exact, than any
+      fabric the earth afforded".
+
+{149} [In the United States 'plunder' is used for personal effects,
+      baggage and luggage (Webster). This is not noticed in the E.D.D.]
+
+{150} [But we have acquired, in some quarters, the abomination 'an
+      invite'.]
+
+{151} How many words modern French has lost which are most vigorous and
+      admirable, the absence of which can only now be supplied by a
+      circumlocution or by some less excellent word--'Oseur',
+      'affranchisseur' (Amyot), 'm�priseur', 'murmurateur',
+      'blandisseur' (Bossuet), 'abuseur' (Rabelais), 'd�sabusement',
+      'rancoeur', are all obsolete at the present. So 'd�saimer', to
+      cease to love ('disamare' in Italian), 'guirlander', 'st�riliser',
+      'blandissant', 'ordonn�ment' (Montaigne), with innumerable others.
+
+{152} [It has now attained a fair currency.]
+
+{153} ['Gainly' is still used by nineteenth century writers, 1855-86;
+      see N.E.D.]
+
+{154} ['Dehort' has been used in modern times by Southey (_Letters_,
+      1825, iii, 462), and Cheyne (_Isaiah, introd._ 1882, xx.)--N.E.D.]
+
+{155} [Tennyson has endeavoured to resuscitate the word--"_Rathe_ she
+      rose"--_Lancelot and Elaine_--but with no great success.]
+
+{156} For other passages in which 'rathest' occurs, see the _State
+      Papers_, vol. ii. pp. 92, 170.
+
+{157} ['Buxom' for old English _buc-sum_ or _buch-sum_, i.e. 'bow-some',
+      yielding, compliant, obedient. "Sara was _buxom_ to Abraham", 1
+      Pet. iii, 6 (xiv. Cent. Version, ed. Pawes, p. 216).]
+
+{158} ['Lissome' for _lithe-some_, like Wessex _blissom_ for
+      _blithe-some_. Tennyson has "as _lissome_ as a hazel wand"--_The
+      Brook_, l. 70.]
+
+{159} Jamieson's _Dictionary_ gives a large number of words with this
+      termination which I should suppose were always peculiar to
+      Scotland, as 'bangsome', i.e. quarrelsome, 'freaksome', 'drysome',
+      'grousome' (the German 'grausam') [Now in common use as
+      'gruesome'.]
+
+{160} [A list of some of these reduplicated words was given by Dr. Booth
+      in his "Analytical Dictionary of the English Language", 1835; but
+      a full collection of nearly six hundred was published by Mr. H. B.
+      Wheatley in the _Transactions of the Philological Society_ for
+      1865.]
+
+{161} Many languages have groups of words formed upon the same scheme,
+      although, singularly enough, they are altogether absent from the
+      Anglo-Saxon. (J. Grimm, _Deutsche Gramm._, vol. ii. p. 976). The
+      Spaniards have a great many very expressive words of this
+      formation. Thus with allusion to the great struggle in which
+      Christian Spain was engaged for so many centuries, a vaunting
+      braggart is a 'matamoros', a 'slaymoor'; he is a 'matasiete', a
+      'slayseven'; a 'perdonavidas', a 'sparelives'. Others may be added
+      to these, as 'azotacalles', 'picapleytos', 'saltaparedes',
+      'rompeesquinas', 'ganapan', 'cascatreguas'.
+
+{162} [This stands for 'peak-goose' (_peek goos_ in Ascham,
+      _Scholemaster_, 1570, p. 54, ed. Arber), a _goose_ that _peaks_ or
+      pines, used for a sickly, delicate person, and a simpleton. In
+      Chapman, Cotgrave and others it appears as 'pea-goose'.]
+
+{163} The mistake is far earlier; long before Cowper wrote the sound
+      suggested first this sense, and then this spelling. Thus
+      Stanihurst, _Description of Ireland_, p. 28: "They are taken for
+      no better than _rakehels_, or _the devil's black guard_"; and
+      often elsewhere.
+
+{164} [i.e. in Joshua Sylvester's translation of "Du Bartas, his Diuine
+      Weekes and Workes", 1621.]
+
+{165} As not, however, turning on a _very_ coarse matter, and
+      illustrating the subject with infinite wit and humour, I might
+      refer the Spanish scholar to the discussion between Don Quixote
+      and his squire on the dismissal of 'regoldar', from the language
+      of good society, and the substitution of 'erutar' in its room
+      (_Don Quixote_, 4. 7. 43). In a letter of Cicero to P�tus (_Fam._
+      ix. 22) there is a subtle and interesting disquisition on
+      forbidden words, and their philosophy.
+
+{166} _Literature of Greece_, p. 5.
+
+{167} [Notwithstanding the analogous instance of 'abbess' for 'abbatess'
+      this account of 'lass' must be abandoned. It is the old English
+      _lasce_ (akin to Swedish _l�sk_), meaning (1) one free or
+      disengaged, (2) an unmarried girl (N.E.D.)]
+
+{168} In Cotgrave's _Dictionary_ I find 'praiseress', 'commendress',
+      'fluteress', 'possesseress', 'loveress', but have never met them
+      in use.
+
+{169} On this termination see J. Grimm, _Deutsche Gramm._, vol. ii. p.
+      134; vol. iii. p. 339.
+
+{170} [_The Knightes Tale_, ed. Skeat, l. 2017.]
+
+{171} [Yes; so in N.E.D.]
+
+{172} I am indebted for these last four to a _Nominale_ in the _National
+      Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 216.
+
+{173} The earliest example which Richardson gives of 'seamstress' is
+      from Gay, of 'songstress', from Thomson. I find however
+      'sempstress' in the translation of Olearius' _Voyages and
+      Travels_, 1669, p. 43. It is quite certain that as late as Ben
+      Jonson, 'seamster' and 'songster' expressed the _female_ seamer
+      and singer; a single passage from his _Masque of Christmas_ is
+      evidence to this. One of the children of Christmas there is
+      "Wassel, like a neat _sempster_ and _songster_; _her_ page bearing
+      a brown bowl". Compare a passage from _Holland's Leaguer_, 1632:
+      "A _tyre-woman_ of phantastical ornaments, a _sempster_ for
+      ruffes, cuffes, smocks and waistcoats".
+
+{174} This was about the time of Henry VIII. In proof of the confusion
+      which reigned on the subject in Shakespeare's time, see his use of
+      'spinster' as--'spinner', the _man_ spinning, _Henry VIII_, Act.
+      i. Sc. 2; and I have no doubt that it is the same in _Othello_,
+      Act i. Sc. 1. And a little later, in Howell's _Vocabulary_, 1659,
+      'spinner' and 'spinster' are _both_ referred to the male sex, and
+      the barbarous 'spinstress' invented for the female.
+
+{175} I have included 'huckster', as will be observed, in this list. I
+      certainly cannot produce any passage in which it is employed as
+      the _female_ pedlar. We have only, however, to keep in mind the
+      existence of the verb 'to huck', in the sense of to peddle (it is
+      used by Bishop Andrews), and at the same time not to let the
+      present spelling of 'hawker' mislead us, and we shall confidently
+      recognize 'hucker' (the German 'h�ker' or 'h�cker'), in hawker,
+      that is, the _man_ who 'hucks', 'hawks', or peddles, as in
+      'huckster' the _female_ who does the same. When therefore Howell
+      and others employ 'hucksteress', they fall into the same barbarous
+      excess of expression, whereof we are all guilty, when we use
+      'seamstress' and 'songstress'.--The note stood thus in the third
+      edition. Since that was published, I have met in the _Nominale_
+      referred to p. 155, the following, "h�c auxiatrix, a _hukster_".
+      [Huckster, xiii. cent. _huccster_, it may be noted is an older
+      word in the language than _hukker_ (hucker) and _to huck_, both
+      first appearing in the xiv. cent. N.E.D.]
+
+{176} [Preserved in the surnames Baxter and Brewster. See C. W.
+      Bardsley, _English Surnames_, 2nd ed. 364, 379.]
+
+{177} _Notes and Queries_, No. 157.
+
+{178} ['Welkin' is possibly a plural, but in Anglo-Saxon _wolcen_ is a
+      cloud, and the plural _wolcnu_.]
+
+{179} When Wallis wrote, it was only beginning to be forgotten that
+      'chick' was the singular, and 'chicken' the plural: "_Sunt qui
+      dicunt_ in singulari 'chicken', et in plurali 'chickens'"; and
+      even now the words are in many country parts correctly employed.
+      In Sussex, a correspondent writes, they would as soon think of
+      saying 'oxens' as 'chickens'. ['Chicken' is properly a singular,
+      old English _cicen_, the _-en_ being a diminutival, not a plural,
+      suffix (as in 'kitten', 'maiden'). Thus 'chicken' was originally
+      'a little chuck' (or cock), out of which 'chick' was afterwards
+      developed.]
+
+{180} See Chaucer's _Romaunt of the Rose_, 1032, where Richesse, "an
+      high lady of great noblesse", is one of the persons of the
+      allegory; and compare Rev. xviii. 17, Authorized Version. This has
+      so entirely escaped the knowledge of Ben Jonson, English scholar
+      as he was, that in his _Grammar_ he cites 'riches' as an example
+      of an English word wanting a singular.
+
+{181} "Set shallow brooks to surging seas,
+      An orient pearl to a white _pease_".
+
+                                        _Puttenham._
+
+{182} ['Eaves' (old English _efes_) from which an imaginary singular
+      'eave' has sometimes been evolved, as when Tennyson speaks of a
+      'cottage-eave' (_In Memoriam_, civ.), and Cotgrave of 'an
+      house-eave'.]
+
+{183} It is curious that despite of this protest, one of his plays has
+      for its name, _Sejanus his Fall_.
+
+{184} Even this does not startle Addison, or cause him any misgiving; on
+      the contrary he boldly asserts (_Spectator_, No. 135), "The same
+      single letter 's' on many occasions does the office of a whole
+      word, and represents the 'his' _or 'her'_ of our forefathers".
+
+{185} Nothing can be better than the way in which Wallis disposes of
+      this scheme, although less successful in showing what this 's'
+      does mean than in showing what it cannot mean (_Gramm. Ling.
+      Anglic._, c. 5); Qui autem arbitrantur illud s, loco _his_
+      adjunctum esse (priori scilicet parte per aph�resim absciss�),
+      ideoque apostrophi notam semper vel pingendam esse, vel saltem
+      subintelligendam, omnino errant. Quamvis enim non negem quin
+      apostrophi nota commode nonnunquam affigi possit, ut ipsius
+      litter� s usus distinctius, ubi opus est, percipiatur; ita tamen
+      semper fieri debere, aut etiam ideo fieri quia vocem _his_ innuat,
+      omnino nego. Adjungitur enim et foeminarum nominibus propriis, et
+      substantivis pluralibus, ubi vox _his_ sine soloecismo locum
+      habere non potest: atque etiam in possessivis _ours_, _yours_,
+      _theirs_, _hers_, ubi vocem _his_ innui nemo somniaret.
+
+{186} See the proofs in Marsh's _Manual of the English Language_,
+      English Edit., pp. 280, 293.
+
+{187} I cannot think that it would exceed the authority of our
+      University Presses, if this were removed from the Prayer Books
+      which they put forth, as certainly it is supprest by many of the
+      clergy in the reading. Such a liberty they have already assumed
+      with the Bible. In all earlier editions of the Authorized Version
+      it stood at 1 Kin. xv. 24: "Nevertheless _Asa his_ heart was
+      perfect with the Lord"; it is "_Asa's_ heart" now. In the same way
+      "_Mordecai his_ matters" (Esth. iii. 4) has been silently changed
+      into "_Mordecai's_ matters"; and in some modern editions, but not
+      in all, "_Holofernes his_ head" (Judith xiii. 9) into
+      "_Holofernes'_ head".
+
+{188} In a good note on the matter, p. 6, in the _Comprehensive Grammar_
+      prefixed to his _Dictionary_, London, 1775.
+
+{189} See Grimm. _Deut. Gramm._, vol. ii. pp. 609, 944.
+
+{190} The existence of 'stony'--'lapidosus', 'steinig', does not make
+      'stonen'--'lapideus', 'steinern', superfluous, any more than
+      'earthy' makes 'earthen'. That part of the field in which the good
+      seed withered so quickly (Matt. xiii. 5) was 'stony'. The vessels
+      which held the water that Christ turned into wine (John iii. 6)
+      were 'stonen'.
+
+{191} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i, p. 1040): Dass die starke form
+      die �ltere, kr�ftigere, innere; die schwache die sp�tere,
+      gehemmtere und mehr �usserliche sey, leuchtet ein. Elsewhere,
+      speaking generally of inflections by internal vowel change, he
+      characterizes them as a 'chief beauty' (hauptsch�nheit) of the
+      Teutonic languages. Marsh (_Manual of the English Language_, p.
+      233, English ed.) protests, though, as it seems to me, on no
+      sufficient grounds, against these terms 'strong' and 'weak', as
+      themselves fanciful and inappropriate.
+
+{192} The entire ignorance as to the past historic evolution of the
+      language, with which some have undertaken to write about it, is
+      curious. Thus the author of _Observations upon the English
+      Language_, without date, but published about 1730, treats all
+      these strong pr�terites as of recent introduction, counting 'knew'
+      to have lately expelled 'knowed', 'rose' to have acted the same
+      part toward 'rised', and of course esteeming them as so many
+      barbarous violations of the laws of the language; and concluding
+      with the warning that "great care must be taken to prevent their
+      increase"!!--p. 24. Cobbett does not fall into this absurdity, yet
+      proposes in his _English Grammar_, that they should all be
+      abolished as inconvenient. [Now many others are rapidly becoming
+      obsolescent. How seldom do we hear 'drank', 'shrank', 'sprang',
+      'stank'.]
+
+{193} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i. p. 839): "Die starke flexion
+      stufenweise versinkt und ausstirbt, die schwache aber um sich
+      greift". Cf. i. 994, 1040; ii. 5; iv. 509.
+
+{194} [See also J. C. Hare, _Two Essays in Eng. Philology_ i. 47-56.]
+
+{195} Thus Wallis (_Gramm. Ling. Anglic._, 1654): Singulari numero
+      siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, vel
+      familiariter blandientis. [For a good discussion of the old use of
+      'thou', see the Hares, _Guesses at Truth_, 1847, pp. 169-90. Even
+      at the present day a Wessex matron has been known to resent the
+      too familiar address of an inferior with the words, "Who bist thou
+      _a-theein'_ of"? (_The Spectator_, 1904, Sept. 3, p. 319).]
+
+{196} What the actual position of the compellation 'thou' was at that
+      time, we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller's
+      _Church History, Dedication of Book_ vii.: "In opposition
+      whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that _thou_ from
+      superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command; from
+      equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity; but from
+      inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack
+      of clownishness; if from affectation, a tone of contempt".
+
+{197} See on this subject of the dropping of grammatical gender, Pott,
+      _Etymologische Forschungen_, part 2, pp. 404, _sqq._
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS
+
+
+I propose, according to the plan sketched out in my first lecture, to
+take for my subject in the present those changes which in the course of
+time have found place, or now are finding place, in the meaning of many
+among our English words; so that, whether we are aware of it or not, we
+employ them at this day in senses very different from those in which our
+forefathers employed them of old. You observe that it is not _obsolete_
+words, words quite fallen out of present use, which I propose to
+consider; but such, rather, as are still on the lips of men, but with
+meanings more or less removed from those which once they possessed. My
+subject is far more practical, has far more to do with your actual life,
+than if I had taken obsolete words, and considered them. These last have
+an interest indeed, but it is an interest of an antiquarian character.
+They constituted a part of the intellectual money with which our
+ancestors carried on the business of their life; but now they are rather
+medals for the cabinets and collections of the curious than current
+money for the needs and pleasures of all. Their wings are clipped, so
+that they are "_winged_ words" no more; the spark of thought or
+feeling, kindling from mind to mind, no longer runs along them, as along
+the electric wires of the soul.
+
+{Sidenote: _Obsolete Words_}
+
+And then, besides this, there is little or no danger that any should be
+misled by them. A reader lights for the first time on one of these
+obsolete English words, as 'frampold', or 'garboil', or 'brangle'{198};
+he is at once conscious of his ignorance; he has recourse to a glossary,
+of if he guesses from the context at the word's signification, still his
+guess is as a guess to him, and no more. But words that have changed
+their meaning have often a deceivableness about them; a reader not once
+doubts but that he knows their intention, has no misgiving but that they
+possess for him the same force which they possessed for their writer,
+and conveyed to _his_ contemporaries, when indeed it is quite otherwise.
+The old life has gone out of them and a new life entered in.
+
+Thus, for example, a reader of our day lights upon such a passage as the
+following (it is from the _Preface_ to Howell's _Lexicon_, 1660):
+"Though the root of the English language be _Dutch_{199}, yet it may be
+said to have been inoculated afterwards on a French stock". He may know
+that the Dutch is a sister language or dialect to our own; but this
+that it is the mother or root of it will certainly perplex him, and he
+will hardly know what to make of the assertion; perhaps he ascribes it
+to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly lowered in his esteem.
+But presently in the course of his reading he meets with the following
+statement, this time in Fuller's _Holy War_, being a history of the
+Crusades: "The French, _Dutch_, Italian, and English were the four
+elemental nations, whereof this army [of the Crusaders] was compounded".
+If the student has sufficient historical knowledge to know that in the
+time of the Crusades there were no Dutch in our use of the word, this
+statement would merely startle him; and probably before he had finished
+the chapter, having his attention once aroused, he would perceive that
+Fuller with the writers of his time used 'Dutch' for German; even as it
+was constantly so used up to the end of the seventeenth century; and as
+the Americans use it to this present day; what we call now a Dutchman
+being then a Hollander. But a young student might very possibly want
+that amount of previous knowledge, which should cause him to receive
+this announcement with misgiving and surprise; and thus he might carry
+away altogether a wrong impression, and rise from a perusal of the book,
+persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part in
+the Crusades, while the Germans took little or no part in them at all.
+
+{Sidenote: _Miscreant_}
+
+And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more often will it
+happen with the subtler changes which words have undergone. Out of this
+it will continually happen that they convey now much more blame and
+condemnation, or convey now much less, than formerly they did; or of a
+different kind; and a reader not aware of the altered value which they
+now possess, may be in continual danger of misreading his author, of
+misunderstanding his intentions, while he has no doubt whatever that he
+perfectly apprehends and takes it in. Thus when Shakespeare in _1 Henry
+VI_ makes the gallant York address Joan of Arc as a 'miscreant', how
+coarse a piece of invective this sounds; how unlike what the chivalrous
+soldier would have uttered; or what one might have supposed Shakespeare,
+even with his unworthy estimate of the holy warrior Maid, would have put
+into his mouth. But a 'miscreant' in Shakespeare's time had nothing of
+the meaning which now it has. It was simply, in agreement with its
+etymology, a misbeliever, one who did not believe rightly the Articles
+of the Catholic Faith. And I need not remind you that this was the
+constant charge which the English brought against Joan,--namely, that
+she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such had fallen
+from the faith. On this plea they burnt her, and it is this which York
+means when he calls her a 'miscreant', and not what we should intend by
+the name.
+
+In reading of poetry above all what beauties are often missed, what
+forces lost, through this assumption that the present of a word is
+always equivalent to its past. How often the poet is wronged in our
+estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once
+would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the
+emphasis which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For
+example, Milton ascribes in _Comus_ the "_tinsel-slippered_ feet" to
+Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How comparatively poor an epithet this
+'tinsel-slippered' sounds for those who know of 'tinsel' only in its
+modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery, affecting a splendour
+which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning
+its derivation, bring it back to the French '�tincelle', and the Latin
+'scintillula'; see in it, as Milton and the writers of his time saw,
+'the sparkling', and how exquisitely beautiful a title does this become
+applied to a goddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our
+mind's eye the quick glitter and sparkle of the waves under the light of
+sun or moon{200}. It is Homer's 'silver-footed' ({Greek: argyropeza}),
+not servilely transferred, but reproduced and made his own by the
+English poet, dealing as one great poet will do with another; who will
+not disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows will add often a further
+grace of his own.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Influence_'}
+
+Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even aware, that whenever the
+word 'influence' occurs in our English poetry, down to comparatively a
+modern date, there is always more or less remote allusions to invisible
+illapses of power, skyey, planetary effects, supposed to be exercised by
+the heavenly luminaries upon the lives of men{201}? How many a passage
+starts into new life and beauty and fulness of allusion, when this is
+present with us; even Milton's
+
+          "store of ladies, whose bright eyes
+    Rain _influence_",
+
+as spectators of the tournament, gain something, when we regard
+them--and using this language, he intended we should--as the luminaries
+of this lower sphere, shedding by their propitious presence strength and
+valour into the hearts of their knights.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Baffle_'}
+
+The word even in its present acceptation may yield, as here, a
+convenient and even a correct sense; we may fall into no positive
+misapprehension about it; and still, through ignorance of its past
+history and of the force which it once possessed, we may miss a great
+part of its significance. We are not _beside_ the meaning of our author,
+but we are _short_ of it. Thus in Beaumont and Fletcher's _King and no
+King_, (Act iii. Sc. 2,) a cowardly braggart of a soldier describes the
+treatment he experienced, when like Parolles he was at length found out,
+and stripped of his lion's skin:--"They hung me up by the heels and beat
+me with hazel sticks, ... that the whole kingdom took notice of me for a
+_baffled_, whipped fellow". The word to which I wish here to call your
+attention is 'baffled'. Were you reading this passage, there would
+probably be nothing here to cause you to pause; you would attach to
+'baffled' a sense which sorts very well with the context--"hung up by
+the heels and beaten, all his schemes of being thought much of were
+_baffled_ and defeated". But "baffled" implies far more than this; it
+contains allusion to a custom in the days of chivalry, according to
+which a perjured or recreant knight was either in person, or more
+commonly in effigy, hung up by the heels, his scutcheon blotted, his
+spear broken, and he himself or his effigy made the mark and subject of
+all kinds of indignities; such a one being said to be 'baffled'{202}.
+Twice in Spenser recreant knights are so dealt with. I can only quote a
+portion of the shorter passage, in which this infamous punishment is
+described:
+
+    "And after all, for greater infamy
+    He by the heels him hung upon a tree,
+    And _baffled_ so, that all which pass�d by
+    The picture of his punishment might see"{203}.
+
+Probably when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, men were not so remote from
+the days of chivalry, or at any rate from the literature of chivalry,
+but that this custom was still fresh in their minds. How much more to
+them than to us, so long as we are ignorant of the same, would those
+words I just quoted have conveyed?
+
+{Sidenote: '_Religion_'}
+
+There are several places in the Authorized Version of Scripture where
+those who are not aware of the changes which have taken place during the
+last two hundred and fifty years in our language, can hardly fail of
+being to a certain extent misled as to the intention of our Translators;
+or, if they are better acquainted with Greek than with early English,
+will be tempted to ascribe to them, though unjustly, an inexact
+rendering of the original. Thus the altered meaning of a word involves
+a serious misunderstanding in that well known statement of St. James,
+"Pure _religion_ and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to
+visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction". "There", exclaims
+one who wishes to set up St. James against St. Paul, that so he may
+escape the necessity of obeying either, "listen to what St. James says;
+there is nothing mystical in what he requires; instead of harping on
+faith as a condition necessary to salvation, he makes all religion to
+consist in practical deeds of kindness from one to another". But let us
+pause for a moment. Did 'religion', when our translation was made, mean
+godliness? did it mean the _sum total_ of our duties towards God? for,
+of course, no one would deny that deeds of charity are a necessary part
+of our Christian duty, an evidence of the faith which is in us. There is
+abundant evidence to show that 'religion' did not mean this; that, like
+the Greek {Greek: thr�skeia}, for which it here stands, like the Latin
+'religio', it meant the outward forms and embodiments in which the
+inward principle of piety arrayed itself, the _external service_ of God;
+and St. James is urging upon those to whom he is writing something of
+this kind: "Instead of the ceremonial services of the Jews, which
+consisted in divers washings and in other elements of this world, let
+our service, our {Greek: thr�skeia}, take a nobler shape, let it consist
+in deeds of pity and of love"--and it was this which our Translators
+intended, when they used 'religion' here and 'religious' in the verse
+preceding. How little 'religion' once meant godliness, how predominantly
+it was used for the _outward_ service of God, is plain from many
+passages in our _Homilies_, and from other contemporary literature.
+
+Again, there are words in our Liturgy which I have no doubt are commonly
+misunderstood. The mistake involves no serious error; yet still in our
+own language, and in words which we have constantly in our mouths, and
+at most solemn times, it is certainly better to be right than wrong. In
+the Litany we pray God that it would please Him, "to give and preserve
+to our use the _kindly_ fruits of the earth". What meaning do we attach
+to this epithet, "the _kindly_ fruits of the earth"? Probably we
+understand by it those fruits in which the _kindness_ of God or of
+nature towards us finds its expression. This is no unworthy explanation,
+but still it is not the right one. The "_kindly_ fruits" are the
+"_natural_ fruits", those which the earth according to its _kind_ should
+naturally bring forth, which it is appointed to produce. To show you how
+little 'kindly' meant once benignant, as it means now, I will instance
+an employment of it from Sir Thomas More's _Life of Richard the Third_.
+He tells us that Richard calculated by murdering his two nephews in the
+Tower to make himself accounted "a _kindly_ king"--not certainly a
+'kindly' one in our present usage of the word{204}; but, having put them
+out of the way, that he should then be lineal heir of the Crown, and
+should thus be reckoned as king _by kind_ or natural descent; and such
+was of old the constant use of the word.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Worship_'}
+
+A phrase in one of our occasional Services "with my body I thee
+_worship_", has sometimes offended those who are unacquainted with the
+early use of English words, and thus with the intention of the actual
+framers of that Service. Clearly in our modern sense of 'worship', this
+language would be unjustifiable. But 'worship' or 'worthship' meant
+'honour' in our early English, and 'to worship' to honour, this meaning
+of 'worship' still very harmlessly surviving in the title of "your
+worship", addressed to the magistrate on the bench. So little was it
+restrained of old to the honour which man is bound to pay to God, that
+it was employed by Wiclif to express the honour which God will render to
+his faithful servants and friends. Thus our Lord's declaration "If any
+man serve Me, him will my Father _honour_", in Wiclif's translation
+reads thus, "If any man serve Me, my Father shall _worship_ him". I do
+not say that there is not sufficient reason to change the words, "with
+my body I thee _worship_", if only there were any means of changing
+anything which is now antiquated and out of date in our services or
+arrangements. I think it would be very well if they were changed, liable
+as they are to misunderstanding and misconstruction now; but still they
+did not mean at the first, and therefore do not now really mean, any
+more than, "with my body I thee _honour_", and so you may reply to any
+fault-finder here.
+
+Take another example of a very easy misapprehension, although not now
+from Scripture or the Prayer Book, Fuller, our Church historian, having
+occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims,
+"Oh the _painfulness_ of his preaching!" If we did not know the former
+uses of 'painfulness', we might take this for an exclamation wrung out
+at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his
+hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the _pain_ which he
+caused to others, but of the _pains_ which he bestowed himself: and I am
+persuaded, if we had more 'painful' preachers in the old sense of the
+word, that is, who _took_ pains themselves, we should have fewer
+'painful' ones in the modern sense, who _cause_ pain to their hearers.
+So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as "the _painful_ writer of two
+hundred books"--not meaning hereby that these books were painful in the
+reading, but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.
+
+Here is another easy misapprehension. Swift wrote a pamphlet, or, as he
+called it, a _Letter to the Lord Treasurer_, with this title, "A
+proposal for correcting, improving, and _ascertaining_ the English
+Tongue". Who that brought a knowledge of present English, and no more,
+to this passage, would doubt that "_ascertaining_ the English Tongue"
+meant arriving at a certain knowledge of what it was? Swift, however,
+means something quite different from this. "_To ascertain_ the English
+tongue" is not with him to arrive at a subjective certainty in our own
+minds of what that tongue is, but to give an objective certainty to that
+tongue itself, so that henceforth it shall not alter nor change. For
+even Swift himself, with all his masculine sense, entertained a dream
+of this kind, as is more fully declared in the work itself{205}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Treacle_'}
+
+In other places unacquaintance with the changes in a word's usage will
+not so much mislead as leave you nearly or altogether at a loss in
+respect of the intention of an author whom you may be reading. It is
+evident that he has a meaning, but what it is you are unable to divine,
+even though all the words he employs are words in familiar employment to
+the present day. For example, the poet Waller is congratulating Charles
+the Second on his return from exile, and is describing the way in which
+all men, even those formerly most hostile to him, were now seeking his
+favour, and he writes:
+
+    "Offenders now, the chiefest, do begin
+    To strive for grace, and expiate their sin:
+    All winds blow fair that did the world embroil,
+    _Your vipers treacle yield_, and scorpions oil".
+
+Many a reader before now has felt, as I cannot doubt, a moment's
+perplexity at the now courtly poet's assertion that "_vipers treacle
+yield_"--who yet has been too indolent, or who has not had the
+opportunity, to search out what his meaning might be. There is in fact
+allusion here to a curious piece of legendary lore. 'Treacle', or
+'triacle', as Chaucer wrote it, was originally a Greek word, and wrapped
+up in itself the once popular belief (an anticipation, by the way, of
+homoeopathy), that a confection of the viper's flesh was the most potent
+antidote against the viper's bite{206}. Waller goes back to this the
+word's old meaning, familiar enough in his time, for Milton speaks of
+"the sovran _treacle_ of sound doctrine"{207}, while "Venice treacle",
+or "viper wine", as it sometimes was called, was a common name for a
+supposed antidote against all poisons; and he would imply that regicides
+themselves began to be loyal, vipers not now yielding hurt any more, but
+rather healing for the old hurts which they themselves had inflicted. To
+trace the word down to its present use, it may be observed that,
+designating first this antidote, it then came to designate any antidote,
+then any medicinal confection or sweet syrup; and lastly that particular
+syrup, namely, the sweet syrup of molasses, to which alone it is now
+restricted.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Blackguard_'}
+
+I will draw on the writings of Fuller for one more example. In his _Holy
+War_, having enumerated the rabble rout of fugitive debtors, runaway
+slaves, thieves, adulterers, murderers, of men laden for one cause or
+another with heaviest censures of the Church, who swelled the ranks, and
+helped to make up the army, of the Crusaders, he exclaimed, "A
+lamentable case that the devil's _black guard_ should be God's
+soldiers"! What does he mean, we may ask, by "the devil's _black
+guard_"? Nor is this a solitary mention of the "black guard". On the
+contrary, the phrase is of very frequent recurrence in the early
+dramatists and others down to the time of Dryden, who gives as one of
+his stage directions in _Don Sebastian_, "Enter the captain of the
+rabble, with the _Black guard_". What is this "black guard"? Has it any
+connexion with a word of our homeliest vernacular? We feel that probably
+it has so; yet at first sight the connexion is not very apparent, nor
+indeed the exact force of the phrase. Let me trace its history. In old
+times, the palaces of our kings and seats of our nobles were not so well
+and completely furnished as at the present day: and thus it was
+customary, when a royal progress was made, or when the great nobility
+exchanged one residence for another, that at such a removal all kitchen
+utensils, pots and pans, and even coals, should be also carried with
+them where they went. Those who accompanied and escorted these, the
+lowest, meanest, and dirtiest of the retainers, were called 'the black
+guard'{208}; then any troop or company of ragamuffins; and lastly, when
+the origin of the word was lost sight of, and it was forgotten that it
+properly implied a company, a rabble rout, and not a single person, one
+would compliment another, not as belonging to, but as himself being, the
+'blackguard'.
+
+The examples which I have adduced are, I am persuaded, sufficient to
+prove that it is not a useless and unprofitable study, nor yet one
+altogether without entertainment, to which I invite you; that on the
+contrary any one who desires to read with accuracy, and thus with
+advantage and pleasure, our earlier classics, who would avoid continual
+misapprehension in their perusal, and would not often fall short of, and
+often go astray from, their meaning, must needs bestow some attention on
+the altered significance of English words. And if this is so, we could
+not more usefully employ what remains of this present lecture than in
+seeking to indicate those changes which words most frequently undergo;
+and to trace as far as we can the causes, mental and moral, at work in
+the minds of men to bring these changes about, with the good and evil
+out of which they have sprung, and to which they bear witness.
+
+For indeed these changes to which words in the progress of time are
+submitted are not changes at random, but for the most part are obedient
+to certain laws, are capable of being distributed into certain classes,
+being the outward transcripts and witnesses of mental and moral
+processes inwardly going forward in those who bring them about. Many, it
+is true, will escape any classification of ours, the changes which have
+taken place in their meaning being, or at least seeming to us, the
+result of mere caprice; and not explicable by any principle which we can
+appeal to as habitually at work in the mind. But, admitting all this, a
+majority will still remain which are reducible to some law or other, and
+with these we will occupy ourselves now.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Duke_', '_Corpse_', '_Weed_'}
+
+And first, the meaning of a word oftentimes is gradually narrowed. It
+was once as a generic name, embracing many as yet unnamed species within
+itself, which all went by its common designation. By and bye it is found
+convenient that each of these should have its own more special sign
+allotted to it{209}. It is here just as in some newly enclosed country,
+where a single household will at first loosely occupy a whole district;
+while, as cultivation proceeds, this district is gradually parcelled out
+among a dozen or twenty, and under more accurate culture employs and
+sustains them all. Thus, for example, all food was once called 'meat';
+it is so in our Bible, and 'horse-meat' for fodder is still no unusual
+phrase; yet 'meat' is now a name given only to flesh. Any little book or
+writing was a 'libel' once; now only such a one as is scurrilous and
+injurious. Any leader was a 'duke' (dux); thus "_duke_ Hannibal" (Sir
+Thomas Eylot), "_duke_ Brennus" (Holland), "_duke_ Theseus"
+(Shakespeare), "_duke_ Amalek", with other 'dukes' (Gen. xxxvi.). Any
+journey, by land as much as by sea, was a 'voyage'. 'Fairy' was not a
+name restricted, as now, to the _Gothic_ mythology; thus "the _fairy_
+Egeria" (Sir J. Harrington). A 'corpse' might be quite as well living as
+dead{210}. 'Weeds' were whatever covered the earth or the person; while
+now as respects the earth, those only are 'weeds' which are noxious, or
+at least self-sown; as regards the person, we speak of no other 'weeds'
+but the widow's{211}. In each of these cases, the same contraction of
+meaning, the separating off and assigning to other words of large
+portions of this, has found place. 'To starve' (the German 'sterben',
+and generally spelt 'sterve' up to the middle of the seventeenth
+century), meant once to die any manner of death; thus Chaucer says,
+Christ "_sterved_ upon the cross for our redemption"; it now is
+restricted to the dying by cold or by hunger. Words not a few were once
+applied to both sexes alike, which are now restricted to the female. It
+is so even with 'girl', which was once a young person of either
+sex{212}; while other words in this list, such for instance as
+'hoyden'{213} (Milton, prose), 'shrew' (Chaucer), 'coquet' (Phillips,
+_New World of Words_), 'witch' (Wiclif), 'termagant' (Bale), 'scold',
+'jade', 'slut' (Gower), must be regarded in their present exclusive
+appropriation to the female sex as evidences of men's rudeness, and not
+of women's deserts.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words used more accurately_}
+
+The necessities of an advancing civilization demand a greater precision
+and accuracy in the use of words having to do with weight, measure,
+number, size. Almost all such words as 'acre', 'furlong', 'yard',
+'gallon', 'peck', were once of a vague and unsettled use, and only at a
+later day, and in obedience to the requirements of commerce and social
+life, exact measures and designations. Thus every field was once an
+'acre'; and this remains so still with the German 'acker', and in our
+"God's acre", as a name for a churchyard{214}; it was not till about the
+reign of Edward the First that 'acre' was commonly restricted to a
+determined measure and portion of land. Here and there even now a
+glebeland will be called "the acre"; and this, even while it contains
+not one but many of our measured acres. A 'furlong' was a 'furrowlong',
+or length of a furrow{215}. Any pole was a 'yard', and this vaguer use
+survives in 'sail_yard_', 'hal_yard_', and in other sea-terms. Every
+pitcher was a 'galon' (Mark xiv. 13, Wiclif), while a 'peck' was no more
+than a 'poke' or bag{216}. And the same has no doubt taken place in all
+other languages. I will only remind you how the Greek 'drachm' was at
+first a handful ({Greek: drachm�} = 'manipulus', from {Greek: drass�},
+to grasp); its later word for 'ten thousand' ({Greek: myrioi}) implied
+in Homer's time any great multitude; and with the accent on a different
+syllable always retained this meaning.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words used less accurately_}
+
+Opposite to this is a counter-process by which words of narrower
+intention gradually enlarge the domain of their meaning, becoming
+capable of much wider application than any which once they admitted.
+Instances in this kind are fewer than in that which we have just been
+considering. The main stream and course of human thoughts and human
+discourse tends the other way, to discerning, distinguishing, dividing;
+and then to the permanent fixing of the distinctions gained, by the aid
+of designations which shall keep apart for ever in word that which has
+been once severed and sundered in thought. Nor is it hard to perceive
+why this process should be the more frequent. Men are first struck with
+the likenesses between those things which are presented to them, with
+their points of resemblance; on the strength of which they bracket them
+under a common term. Further acquaintance reveals their points of
+unlikeness, the real dissimilarities which lurk under superficial
+resemblances, the need therefore of a different notation for objects
+which are essentially different. It is comparatively much rarer to
+discover real likeness under what at first appeared as unlikeness; and
+usually when a word moves forward, and from a specialty indicates now a
+generality, it is not in obedience to any such discovery of the true
+inner likeness of things,--the steps of successful generalizations being
+marked and secured in other ways. But this widening of a word's meaning
+is too often a result of those elements of disorganization and decay
+which are at work in a language. Men forget a word's history and
+etymology; its distinctive features are obliterated for them, with all
+which attached it to some thought or fact which by right was its own.
+Appropriated and restricted once to some striking specialty which it
+vigorously set out, it can now be used in a wider, vaguer, more
+unsettled way. It can be employed twenty times for once when it would
+have been possible formerly to employ it. Yet this is not gain, but pure
+loss. It has lost its place in the disciplined _army_ of words, and
+become one of a loose and disorderly _mob_.
+
+Let me instance the word 'preposterous'. It is now no longer of any
+practical service at all in the language, being merely an ungraceful and
+slipshod synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to its old use;
+let it designate that one peculiar branch of absurdity which it
+designated once, namely the reversing of the true order of things, the
+putting of the last first, and, by consequence, of the first last, and
+of what excellent service the word would be capable. Thus it is
+'preposterous', in the most accurate use of the word, to put the cart
+before the horse, to expect wages before the work is done, to hang a man
+first and try him afterwards; and in this strict and accurate sense the
+word was always used by our elder writers{217}.
+
+In like manner 'to prevaricate' was never employed by good writers of
+the seventeenth century without nearer or more remote allusion to the
+uses of the word in the Roman law courts, where a 'pr�varicator'
+(properly a straddler with distorted legs) did not mean generally and
+loosely, as now with us, one who shuffles, quibbles, and evades; but one
+who plays false in a particular manner; who, undertaking, or being by
+his office bound, to prosecute a charge, is in secret collusion with the
+opposite party; and, betraying the cause which he affects to support, so
+manages the accusation as to obtain not the condemnation, but the
+acquittal, of the accused; a "feint pleader", as, I think, in our old
+law language he would have been termed. How much force would the keeping
+of this in mind add to many passages in our elder divines.
+
+Or take 'equivocal', 'equivocate', 'equivocation'. These words, which
+belonged at first to logic, have slipped down into common use, and in so
+doing have lost all the precision of their first employment.
+'Equivocation' is now almost any such dealing in ambiguous words with
+the intention of deceiving, as falls short of an actual lie; but
+according to its etymology and in its primary use 'equivocation', this
+fruitful mother of so much error, is the calling by the same name, of
+things essentially diverse, hiding intentionally or otherwise a real
+difference under a verbal resemblance{218}. Nor let it be urged in
+defence of its present looser use, that only so could it have served the
+needs of our ordinary conversation; on the contrary, had it retained its
+first use, how serviceable an implement of thought would it have been in
+detecting our own fallacies, or those of others; all which it can be now
+no longer.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Idea_'}
+
+What now is 'idea' for us? How infinite the fall of this word since the
+time when Milton sang of the Creator contemplating his newly created
+world,
+
+                  "how it showed,
+    Answering his great _idea_",
+
+to its present use when this person "has an _idea_ that the train has
+started", and the other "had no _idea_ that the dinner would be so bad".
+But this word 'idea' is perhaps the worst case in the English language.
+Matters have not mended here since the times of Dr. Johnson; of whom
+Boswell tells us: "He was particularly indignant against the almost
+universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or _opinion_,
+when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something of which an
+image can be formed in the mind". There is perhaps no word in the whole
+compass of English, so seldom used with any tolerable correctness; in
+none is the distance so immense between the frequent sublimity of the
+word in its proper use, and the triviality of it in its slovenly and its
+popular.
+
+This tendency in words to lose the sharp, rigidly defined outline of
+meaning which they once possessed, to become of wide, vague, loose
+application instead of fixed, definite, and precise, to mean almost
+anything, and so really to mean nothing, is among the most fatally
+effectual which are at work for the final ruin of a language, and, I do
+not fear to add, for the demoralization of those that speak it. It is
+one against which we shall all do well to watch; for there is none of us
+who cannot do something in keeping words close to their own proper
+meaning, and in resisting their encroachment on the domain of others.
+
+The causes which bring this mischief about are not hard to trace. We all
+know that when a piece of our silver money has long fulfilled its part,
+as "pale and common drudge 'tween man and man", whatever it had at first
+of sharper outline and livelier impress is in the end wholly obliterated
+from it. So it is with words, above all with words of science and
+theology. These getting into general use, and passing often from mouth
+to mouth, lose the "image and superscription" which they had, before
+they descended from the school to the market-place, from the pulpit to
+the street. Being now caught up by those who understand imperfectly and
+thus incorrectly their true value, who will not be at the pains of
+understanding that, or who are incapable of doing so, they are obliged
+to accommodate themselves to the lower sphere in which they circulate,
+by laying aside much of the precision and accuracy and depth which once
+they had; they become weaker, shallower, more indefinite; till in the
+end, as exponents of thought and feeling, they cease to be of any
+service at all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{Sidenote: '_Bombast_', '_Garble_'}
+
+Sometimes a word does not merely narrow or extend its meaning, but
+altogether changes it; and this it does in more ways than one. Thus a
+secondary figurative sense will quite put out of use and extinguish the
+literal, until in the entire predominance of that it is altogether
+forgotten that it ever possessed any other. I may instance 'bombast' as
+a word about which this forgetfulness is nearly complete. What 'bombast'
+now means is familiar to us all, namely inflated words, "full of sound
+and fury", but "signifying nothing". This, at present its sole meaning,
+was once only the secondary and superinduced; 'bombast' being properly
+the cotton plant, and then the cotton wadding with which garments were
+stuffed out and lined. You remember perhaps how Prince Hal addresses
+Falstaff, "How now, my sweet creature of _bombast_"; using the word in
+its literal sense; and another early poet has this line:
+
+    "Thy body's bolstered out with _bombast_ and with bags".
+
+'Bombast' was then transferred in a vigorous image to the big words
+without strength or solidity wherewith the discourses of some were
+stuffed out, and has now quite forgone any other meaning. So too 'to
+garble' was once "to cleanse from dross and dirt, as grocers do their
+spices, to pick or cull out"{219}. It is never used now in this its
+primary sense, and has indeed undergone this further change, that while
+once 'to garble' was to sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it
+is now to sift with a view of picking out the worst{220}. 'Polite' is
+another word which in the figurative sense has quite extinguished the
+literal. We still speak of 'polished' surfaces; but not any more, with
+Cudworth, of "_polite_ bodies, as looking glasses". Neither do we now
+'exonerate' a ship (Burton); nor 'stigmatize', at least otherwise than
+figuratively, a 'malefactor' (the same); nor 'corroborate' our health
+(Sir Thomas Elyot).
+
+Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly progressive courses
+of change, itself a faithful index of changes going on in society and in
+the minds of men, till at length everything is changed about it. The
+process of this it is often very curious to observe; capable as not
+seldom it is of being watched step by step in its advances to the final
+consummation. There may be said to be three leading phases which the
+word successively presents, three steps in its history. At first it
+grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with its own natural
+meaning. Presently the word allows another meaning, one superinduced on
+the former, and foreign to its etymology, to share with the other in the
+possession of it, on the ground that where the former exists, the latter
+commonly co-exists with it. At the third step, the newly introduced
+meaning, not satisfied with its moiety, with dividing the possession of
+the word, has thrust out the original and rightful possessor altogether,
+and remains in sole and exclusive possession. The three successive
+stages may be represented by _a_, _ab_, _b_; in which series _b_, which
+was wanting altogether at the first stage, and was only admitted as
+secondary at the second, does at the third become primary and indeed
+alone.
+
+{Sidenote: _Gradual Change of Meaning_}
+
+We are not to suppose that in actual fact the transitions from one
+signification to another are so strongly and distinctly marked, as I
+have found it convenient to mark them here. Indeed it is hard to imagine
+anything more gradual, more subtle and imperceptible, than the process
+of change. The manner in which the new meaning first insinuates itself
+into the old, and then drives out the old, can only be compared to the
+process of petrifaction, as rightly understood--the water not gradually
+turning what is put into it to stone, as we generally take the operation
+to be; but successively displacing each several particle of that which
+is brought within its power, and depositing a stony particle, in its
+stead, till, in the end, while all appears to continue the same, all has
+in fact been thoroughly changed. It is precisely thus, by such slow,
+gradual, and subtle advances that the new meaning filters through and
+pervades the word, little by little displacing entirely that which it
+before possessed.
+
+No word would illustrate this process better than that old example,
+familiar probably to us all, of 'villain'. The 'villain' is, first, the
+serf or peasant, 'villanus', because attached to the 'villa' or farm. He
+is, secondly, the peasant who, it is further taken for granted, will be
+churlish, selfish, dishonest, and generally of evil moral conditions,
+these having come to be assumed as always belonging to him, and to be
+permanently associated with his name, by those higher classes of society
+who in the main commanded the springs of language. At the third step,
+nothing of the meaning which the etymology suggests, nothing of 'villa',
+survives any longer; the peasant is wholly dismissed, and the evil moral
+conditions of him who is called by this name alone remain; so that the
+name would now in this its final stage be applied as freely to peer, if
+he deserved it, as to peasant. 'Boor' has had exactly the same history;
+being first the cultivator of the soil; then secondly, the cultivator of
+the soil who, it is assumed, will be coarse, rude, and unmannerly; and
+then thirdly, any one who is coarse, rude, and unmannerly{221}. So too
+'pagan'; which is first villager, then heathen villager, and lastly
+heathen. You may trace the same progress in 'churl', 'clown', 'antic',
+and in numerous other words. The intrusive meaning might be likened in
+all these cases to the egg which the cuckoo lays in the sparrow's nest;
+the young cuckoo first sharing the nest with its rightful occupants, but
+not resting till it has dislodged and ousted them altogether.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Gossip_'}
+
+I will illustrate by the aid of one word more this part of my subject. I
+called your attention in my last lecture to the true character of
+several words and forms in use among our country people, and claimed for
+them to be in many instances genuine English, though English now more
+or less antiquated and overlived. 'Gossip' is a word in point. I have
+myself heard this name given by our Hampshire peasantry to the sponsors
+in baptism, the godfathers and godmothers. I do not say that it is a
+usual word; but it is occasionally employed, and well understood. This
+is a perfectly correct employment of 'gossip', in fact its proper and
+original one, and involves moreover a very curious record of past
+beliefs. 'Gossip', or 'gossib', as Chaucer spelt it, is a compound word,
+made up of the name of 'God', and of an old Anglo-Saxon word, 'sib',
+still alive in Scotland, as all readers of Walter Scott will remember,
+and in some parts of England, and which means, akin; they were said to
+be 'sib', who are related to one another. But why, you may ask, was the
+name given to sponsors? Out of this reason;--in the middle ages it was
+the prevailing belief (and the Romish Church still affirms it), that
+those who stood as sponsors to the same child, besides contracting
+spiritual obligations on behalf of that child, also contracted spiritual
+affinity one with another; they became _sib_, or akin, in _God_; and
+thus 'gossips'; hence 'gossipred', an old word, exactly analogous to
+'kindred'. Out of this faith the Roman Catholic Church will not allow
+(unless indeed by dispensations procured for money), those who have
+stood as sponsors to the same child, afterwards to contract marriage
+with one another, affirming them too nearly related for this to be
+lawful.
+
+Take 'gossip' however in its ordinary present use, as one addicted to
+idle tittle-tattle, and it seems to bear no relation whatever to its
+etymology and first meaning. The same three steps, however, which we
+have traced before will bring us to its present use. 'Gossips' are,
+first, the sponsors, brought by the act of a common sponsorship into
+affinity and near familiarity with one another; secondly, these
+sponsors, who being thus brought together, allow themselves one with the
+other in familiar, and then in trivial and idle talk; thirdly, any who
+allow themselves in this trivial and idle talk,--called in French
+'comm�rage', from the fact that 'comm�re' has run through exactly the
+same stages as its English equivalent.
+
+It is plain that words which designate not things and persons only, but
+these as they are contemplated more or less in an ethical light, words
+which tinge with a moral sentiment what they designate, are peculiarly
+exposed to change; are constantly liable to take a new colouring, or to
+lose an old. The gauge and measure of praise or blame, honour or
+dishonour, admiration or abhorrence, which they convey, is so purely a
+mental and subjective one, that it is most difficult to take accurate
+note of its rise or of its fall, while yet there are causes continually
+at work leading it to the one or the other. There are words not a few,
+but ethical words above all, which have so imperceptibly drifted away
+from their former moorings, that although their position is now very
+different from that which they once occupied, scarcely one in a hundred
+of casual readers, whose attention has not been specially called to the
+subject, will have observed that they have moved at all. Here too we
+observe some words conveying less of praise or blame than once, and
+some more; while some have wholly shifted from the one to the other.
+Some were at one time words of slight, almost of offence, which have
+altogether ceased to be so now. Still these are rare by comparison with
+those which once were harmless, but now are harmless no more; which
+once, it may be, were terms of honour, but which now imply a slight or
+even a scorn. It is only too easy to perceive why these should exceed
+those in number.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Imp_', '_Brat_'}
+
+Let us take an example or two. If any were to speak now of royal
+children as "royal _imps_", it would sound, and with our present use of
+the word would be, impertinent and unbecoming enough; and yet 'imp' was
+once a name of dignity and honour, and not of slight or of undue
+familiarity. Thus Spenser addresses the Muses in this language,
+
+    "Ye sacred _imps_ that on Parnasso dwell";
+
+and 'imp' was especially used of the scions of royal or illustrious
+houses. More than one epitaph, still existing, of our ancient nobility
+might be quoted, beginning in such language as this, "Here lies that
+noble _imp_". Or what should we say of a poet who commenced a solemn
+poem in this fashion,
+
+    "Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord,
+    Oh Abraham's _brats_, oh brood of blessed seed"?
+
+Could we conclude anything else but that he meant, by using low words on
+lofty occasions, to turn sacred things into ridicule? Yet this was very
+far from the intention of Gascoigne, the poet whose lines I have just
+quoted. "Abraham's _brats_" was used by him in perfect good faith, and
+without the slightest feeling that anything ludicrous or contemptuous
+adhered to the word 'brat', as indeed in his time there did not, any
+more than adheres to 'brood', which is another form of the same word
+now{222}.
+
+Call a person 'pragmatical', and you now imply not merely that he is
+busy, but _over_-busy, officious, self-important, and pompous to boot.
+But it once meant nothing of the kind, and 'pragmatical' (like {Greek:
+pragmatikos}) was one engaged in affairs, being an honourable title,
+given to a man simply and industriously accomplishing the business which
+properly concerned him{223}. So too to say that a person 'meddles' or is
+a 'meddler' implies now that he interferes unduly in other men's
+matters, without a call mixing himself up with them. This was not
+insinuated in the earlier uses of the word. On the contrary three of our
+earlier translations of the Bible have, "_Meddle_ with your own
+business" (1 Thess. iv. 11); and Barrow in one of his sermons draws at
+some length the distinction between 'meddling' and "being _meddlesome_",
+and only condemns the latter.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Proser_'}
+
+Or take again the words, 'to prose' or a 'proser'. It cannot indeed be
+affirmed that they convey any _moral_ condemnation, yet they certainly
+convey no compliment now; and are almost among the last which any one
+would desire should with justice be applied either to his talking or his
+writing. For 'to prose', as we all now know too well, is to talk or
+write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but
+once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a 'proser' the
+antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid
+and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would
+have 'prosed' and been a 'proser', in the language of our ancestors.
+Thus Drayton writes of his contemporary Nashe:
+
+    "And surely Nashe, though he a _proser_ were,
+      A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear";
+
+that is, the ornament not of a 'proser', but of a poet. The tacit
+assumption that vigour, animation, rapid movement, with all the
+precipitation of the spirit, belong to verse rather than to prose, and
+are the exclusive possession of it, is that which must explain the
+changed uses of the word.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Knave_'}
+
+Still it is according to a word's present signification that we must
+apply it now. It would be no excuse, having applied an insulting epithet
+to any, if we should afterwards plead that, tried by its etymology and
+primary usage, it had nothing offensive or insulting about it; although
+indeed Swift assures us that in his time such a plea was made and was
+allowed. "I remember", he says, "at a trial in Kent, where Sir George
+Rooke was indicted for calling a gentleman 'knave' and 'villain', the
+lawyer for the defendant brought off his client by alleging that the
+words were not injurious; for 'knave' in the old and true signification
+imported only a servant{224}; and 'villain' in Latin is villicus, which
+is no more than a man employed in country labour, or rather a baily".
+The lawyer may have deserved his success for his ingenuity and his
+boldness; though, if Swift reports him aright, not certainly on the
+ground of the strict accuracy either of his Anglo-Saxon or his Latin.
+
+The moral sense and conviction of men is often at work upon their words,
+giving them new turns in obedience to these convictions, of which their
+changed use will then remain a permanent record. Let me illustrate this
+by the history of our word 'sycophant'. You probably are acquainted with
+the story which the Greek scholiasts invented by way of explaining a
+word of which they knew nothing, namely that the 'sycophant' was a
+"manifester of figs", one who detected others in the act of exporting
+figs from Attica, an act forbidden, they asserted, by the Athenian law;
+and accused them to the people. Be this explanation worth what it may,
+the word obtained in Greek a more general sense; any accuser, and then
+any _false_ accuser, was a 'sycophant'; and when the word was first
+adopted into the English language, it was in this meaning: thus an old
+English poet speaks of "the railing route of _sycophants_"; and Holland:
+"The poor man that hath nought to lose, is not afraid of the
+_sycophant_". But it has not kept this meaning; a 'sycophant' is now a
+fawning flatterer; not one who speaks ill of you behind your back;
+rather one who speaks good of you before your face, but good which he
+does not in his heart believe. Yet how true a moral instinct has
+presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and
+the flatterer, although they seem so opposed to one another, how closely
+united they really are. They grow out of the same root. The same
+baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak evil of you behind your
+back, will lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your face;
+there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb, "Who flatters me
+before, spatters me behind".
+
+{Sidenote: _Weakening of Words_}
+
+But it is not the moral sense only of men which is thus at work,
+modifying their words; but the immoral as well. If the good which men
+have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit
+there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant tendency--in
+too many cases it has been a successful one--to empty words employed in
+the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral
+reprobation which they once conveyed. Men's too easy toleration of sin,
+the feebleness of their moral indignation against it, brings about that
+the blame which words expressed once, has in some of them become much
+weaker now than once, has from others vanished altogether. "To do a
+_shrewd_ turn", was once to do a _wicked_ turn; and Chaucer, using
+'shrewdness' by which to translate the Latin 'improbitas', shows that it
+meant wickedness for him; nay, two murderers he calls two 'shrews',--for
+there were, as already noticed, male shrews once as well as female. But
+"a _shrewd_ turn" now, while it implies a certain amount of sharp
+dealing, yet implies nothing more; and 'shrewdness' is applied to men
+rather in their praise than in their dispraise. And not 'shrewd' and
+'shrewdness' only, but a multitude of other words,--I will only instance
+'prank' 'flirt', 'luxury', 'luxurious', 'peevish', 'wayward',
+'loiterer', 'uncivil',--conveyed once a much more earnest moral
+disapproval than now they do.
+
+But I must bring this lecture to a close. I have but opened to you
+paths, which you, if you are so minded, can follow up for yourselves. We
+have learned lately to speak of men's 'antecedents'{225}; the phrase is
+newly come up; and it is common to say that if we would know what a man
+really now is, we must know his 'antecedents', that is, what he has been
+in time past. This is quite as true about words. If we would know what
+they now are, we must know what they have been; we must know, if
+possible, the date and place of their birth, the successive stages of
+their subsequent history, the company which they have kept, all the road
+which they have travelled, and what has brought them to the point at
+which now we find them; we must know, in short, their antecedents.
+
+{Sidenote: _Changes of Meaning_}
+
+And let me say, without attempting to bring back school into these
+lectures which are out of school, that, seeking to do this, we might add
+an interest to our researches in the lexicon and the dictionary which
+otherwise they could never have; that taking such words, for example, as
+{Greek: ekkl�sia}, or {Greek: palingenesia}, or {Greek: eutrapelia}, or
+{Greek: sophist�s}, or {Greek: scholastikos}, in Greek; as 'religio', or
+'sacramentum', or 'urbanitas', or 'superstitio', in Latin; as
+'libertine', or 'casuistry'{226}, or 'humanity', or 'humorous', or
+'danger', or 'romance', in English, and endeavouring to trace the manner
+in which one meaning grew out of and superseded another, and how they
+arrived at that use in which they have finally rested (if indeed before
+our English words there is not a future still), we shall derive, I
+believe, amusement, I am sure, instruction; we shall feel that we are
+really getting something, increasing the moral and intellectual stores
+of our minds; furnishing ourselves with that which may hereafter be of
+service to ourselves, may be of service to others--than which there can
+be no feeling more pleasurable, none more delightful. I shall be glad
+and thankful, if you can feel as much in regard of that lecture, which I
+now bring to its end{227}.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{198} ['Frampold', peevish, perverse (_Merry Wives of Windsor_, 1598,
+      ii, 2, 94) is supposed to be another form of 'from-polled', as if
+      'wrong-headed'. 'Garboil', a tumult or hubbub, was originally
+      _garboyl_, and came from old French _garbouil_ (Italian
+      _garbuglio_). 'Brangle', a brawl, stands for 'brandle' from Old
+      Fr. _brandeler_, akin to 'brandish'.]
+
+{199} ['Dutch' i.e. Teutonic, Mid. High-German _diutsch_, old
+      High-German _diut-isk_ from _diot_, people, and so the people-ish
+      or popular language the mother-tongue, founded on a primitive
+      _teuta_, 'people'. See Kluge _s.v. Deutsch_.]
+
+{200} So in Herrick's _Electra_:
+
+          "More white than are the whitest creams,
+          Or moonlight _tinselling_ the streams".
+
+{201} [Hence also the epidemic of malefic power supposed to be
+      air-borne, 'influenza'.]
+
+{202} See Holinshed's _Chronicles_, vol. iii, pp. 827, 1218; Ann. 1513,
+      1570.
+
+{203} _Fairy Queen_, vi, 7, 27; cf. v. 3, 37.
+
+{204} [The two words are intimately related, 'king', contracted for
+      _kining_ (Anglo-Saxon _cyn-ing_), 'son of the kin' or 'tribe', one
+      of the people, cognate with _cynde_, true-born, native, 'kind',
+      and _cynd_, nature 'kind', whence 'kindly', natural.]
+
+{205} See Sir W. Scott's edition of Swift's _Works_, vol. ix, p. 139.
+
+{206} {Greek: th�riak�}, from {Greek: th�rion}, a designation given to
+      the viper, see Acts xxviii, 4. 'Theriac' is only the more rigid
+      form of the same word, the scholarly, as distinguished from the
+      popular, adoption of it. Augustine (_Con. duas Epp. Pelag._ iii,
+      7): Sicut fieri consuevit antidotum etiam de serpentibus contra
+      venena serpentum.
+
+{207} And Chaucer, more solemnly still:
+
+          "Christ, which that is to every harm _triacle_".
+
+      The _antidotal_ character of treacle comes out yet more in these
+      lines of Lydgate:
+
+              "There is no _venom_ so parlious in sharpnes,
+          As whan it hath of _treacle_ a likenes".
+
+{208} "A slave that within these twenty years rode with the _black
+      guard_ in the Duke's carriage, 'mongst spits and dripping pans".
+      (Webster's _White Devil_.) [First ed. 1612. "The Black Guard of
+      the King's Kitchen" is mentioned in a State Paper of 1535
+      (N.E.D.).]
+
+{209} G�nin (_Lexique de la Langue de Moli�re_, p. 367) says well: "En
+      augmentant le nombre des mots, il a fallu restreindre leur
+      signification, et faire aux nouveaux un apanage aux d�pens des
+      anciens".
+
+{210} [Accordingly there is nothing tautological in the "dead corpses"
+      of 2 Kings xix, 35, in the A.V.]
+
+{211} ['Weed', vegetable growth, Anglo-Saxon _we�d_, is here confounded
+      with a perfectly distinct word 'weed', clothing, which is the
+      Anglo-Saxon _wa�d_, a garment.]
+
+{212} And no less so in French with 'dame', by which form not 'domina'
+      only, but 'dominus', was represented. Thus in early French poetry,
+      "_Dame_ Dieu" for "_Dominus_ Deus" continually occurs. We have
+      here the key to the French exclamation, or oath, as we now
+      perceive it to be, 'Dame'! of which the dictionaries give no
+      account. See G�nin's _Variations du Langage Fran�ais_, p. 347.
+
+{213} ['Hoyden' seems to be derived from the old Dutch _heyden_, a
+      heathen, then a clownish, boorish fellow.]
+
+{214} [This "ancient Saxon phrase", as Longfellow calls it, has not been
+      found in any old English writer, but has been adopted from the
+      Modern German. Neither is it known in the dialects, E.D.D.]
+
+{215} "A _furlong_, quasi _furrowlong_, being so much as a team in
+      England plougheth going forward, before they return back again".
+      (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, p. 42.) ['Furlong' in St.
+      Luke xxiv, 13, already occurs in the Anglo-Saxon version of that
+      passage as _furlanga_.]
+
+{216} [Recent etymologists cannot see any connexion between 'peck' and
+      'poke'.]
+
+{217} [e. g. "One said thus _preposterously_: 'when we had climbed the
+      clifs and were a shore'" (Puttenham, _Arte of Eng. Poesie_, 1589,
+      p. 181, ed. Arber). "It is a _preposterous_ order to teach first
+      and to learn after" (_Preface to Bible_, 1611). "Place not the
+      coming of the wise men, _preposterously_, before the appearance of
+      the star" (Abp. Secker, _Sermons_, iii, 85, ed. 1825).]
+
+{218} Thus Barrow: "Which [courage and constancy] he that wanteth is no
+      other than _equivocally_ a gentleman, as an image or a carcass is
+      a man".
+
+{219} Phillips, _New World of Words_, 1706. ['Garble' comes through old
+      French _garbeler_, _grabeler_ (Italian _garbellare_) from Latin
+      _cribellare_, to sift, and that from _cribellum_, a sieve,
+      diminutive of _cribrum_.]
+
+{220} "But his [Gideon's] army must be _garbled_, as too great for God
+      to give victory thereby; all the fearful return home by
+      proclamation" (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, b. ii, c. 8).
+
+{221} [Compare the transitions of meaning in French _manant_ = (1) a
+      dweller (where he was born--from _manoir_ to dwell), the
+      inhabitant of a homestead, (2) a countryman, (3) a clown or boor,
+      a coarse fellow.]
+
+{222} [These words lie totally apart. 'Brat', an infant, seems a
+      figurative use of 'brat', a rag or pinafore, just as 'bantling'
+      comes from 'band', a swathe.]
+
+{223} "We cannot always be contemplative, or _pragmatical_ abroad: but
+      have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged
+      soul may leave off awhile her severe schooling". (Milton,
+      _Tetrachordon_.)
+
+{224} [Anglo-Saxon _cnafa_, or _cnapa_, a boy.]
+
+{225} [Mr. Fitzedward Hall in 1873 says 'antecedents' is "not yet a
+      generation old" (_Mod. English_, 303). Landor in 1853 says "the
+      French have lately taught (it to) us" (_Last Fruit of an Old
+      Tree_, 176). De Quincey, in 1854 calls it "modern slang" (_Works_
+      xiv, 449); and the earliest quotation, 1841, given in the N.E.D.,
+      introduces it as "what the French call their antecedents".]
+
+{226} See Whewell, _History of Moral Philosophy in England_, pp.
+      xxvii.-xxxii.
+
+{227} For a fuller treatment of the subject of this lecture, see my
+      _Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in senses
+      different from their present_, 2nd ed. London, 1859.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS
+
+
+When I announce to you that the subject of my lecture to-day will be
+English orthography, or the spelling of the words in our native
+language, with the alterations which this has undergone, you may perhaps
+think with yourselves that a weightier, or, if not a weightier, at all
+events a more interesting subject might have occupied this our
+concluding lecture. I cannot admit it to be wanting either in importance
+or in interest. Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage,
+as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far higher
+acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by
+faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure it ought as little to
+be this; and would never prove so in competent hands{228}. Let us then
+address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope that it may
+yield us both profit and pleasure.
+
+I know not who it was that said, "The invention of printing was very
+well; but, as compared to the invention of writing, it was no such great
+matter after all". Whoever it was who made this observation, it is clear
+that for him use and familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which
+there is in that, whereat we probably have long ceased to wonder at
+all--the power, namely, of representing sounds by written signs, of
+reproducing for the eye that which existed at first only for the ear:
+nor was the estimate which he formed of the relative value of these two
+inventions other than a just one. Writing indeed stands more nearly on a
+level with speaking, and deserves rather to be compared with it, than
+with printing; which, with all its utility, is yet of altogether another
+and inferior type of greatness: or, if this is too much to claim for
+writing, it may at any rate be affirmed to stand midway between the
+other two, and to be as much superior to the one as it is inferior to
+the other.
+
+The intention of the written word, that which presides at its first
+formation, the end whereunto it is a mean, is by aid of symbols agreed
+on beforehand, to represent to the eye with as much accuracy as possible
+the spoken word.
+
+{Sidenote: _Imperfection of Writing_}
+
+It never fulfils this intention completely, and by degrees more and more
+imperfectly. Short as man's spoken word often falls of his thought, his
+written word falls often as short of his spoken. Several causes
+contribute to this. In the first place, the marks of imperfection and
+infirmity cleave to writing, as to every other invention of man. All
+alphabets have been left incomplete. They have superfluous letters,
+letters, that is, which they do not want, because other letters already
+represent the sound which they represent; they have dubious letters,
+letters, that is, which say nothing certain about the sounds they stand
+for, because more than one sound is represented by them--our 'c' for
+instance, which sometimes has the sound of 's', as in '_c_ity',
+sometimes of 'k', as in '_c_at'; they are deficient in letters, that is,
+the language has elementary sounds which have no corresponding letters
+appropriated to them, and can only be represented by combinations of
+letters. All alphabets, I believe, have some of these faults, not a few
+of them have all, and more. This then is one reason of the imperfect
+reproduction of the spoken word by the written. But another is, that the
+human voice is so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is able to
+mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so infinitely to
+modify and vary these sounds, that were an alphabet complete as human
+art could make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of four and
+twenty letters, there would still remain a multitude of sounds which it
+could only approximately give back{229}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Alphabets Inadequate_}
+
+But there is a further cause for the divergence which comes gradually to
+find place between men's spoken and their written words. What men do
+often, they will seek to do with the least possible trouble. There is
+nothing which they do oftener than repeat words; they will seek here
+then to save themselves pains; they will contract two or more syllables
+into one; ('toto opere' will become 'topper'; 'vuestra merced', 'usted';
+and 'topside the other way', 'topsy-turvey'{230}); they will slur over,
+and thus after a while cease to pronounce, certain letters; for hard
+letters they will substitute soft; for those which require a certain
+effort to pronounce, they will substitute those which require little or
+none. Under the operation of these causes a gulf between the written and
+spoken word will not merely exist; but it will have the tendency to grow
+ever wider and wider. This tendency indeed will be partially
+counterworked by approximations which from time to time will by silent
+consent be made of the written word to the spoken; here and there a
+letter dropped in speech will be dropped also in writing, as the 's' in
+so many French words, where its absence is marked by a circumflex; a new
+shape, contracted or briefer, which a word has taken on the lips of men,
+will find its representation in their writing; as 'chirurgeon' will not
+merely be pronounced, but also spelt, 'surgeon', and 'synodsman'
+'sidesman'. Still for all this, and despite of these partial
+readjustments of the relations between the two, the anomalies will be
+infinite; there will be a multitude of written letters which have ceased
+to be sounded letters; a multitude of words will exist in one shape upon
+our lips, and in quite another in our books.
+
+It is inevitable that the question should arise--Shall these anomalies
+be meddled with? shall it be attempted to remove them, and bring writing
+and speech into harmony and consent--a harmony and consent which never
+indeed in actual fact at any period of the language existed, but which
+yet may be regarded as the object of written speech, as the idea which,
+however imperfectly realized, has, in the reduction of spoken sounds to
+written, floated before the minds of men? If the attempt is to be made,
+it is clear that it can only be made in one way. The alternative is not
+open, whether Mahomet shall go to the mountain, _or_ the mountain to
+Mahomet. The spoken word is the mountain; it will not stir; it will
+resist all interference. It feels its own superior rights, that it
+existed the first, that it is, so to say, the elder brother; and it will
+never be induced to change itself for the purpose of conforming and
+complying with the written word. Men will not be persuaded to pronounce
+'wou_l_d' and 'de_b_t', because they write 'would' and 'debt' severally
+with an 'l' and with a 'b': but what if they could be induced to write
+'woud' and 'det', because they pronounce so; and to deal in like manner
+with all other words, in which there exists at present a discrepancy
+between the word as it is spoken, and the word as it is written?
+
+{Sidenote: _Phonetic Systems_}
+
+Here we have the explanation of that which in the history of almost all
+literatures has repeated itself more than once, namely, the endeavour to
+introduce phonetic writing. It has certain plausibilities to rest on; it
+has its appeal to the unquestionable fact that the written word was
+intended to picture to the eye what the spoken word sounded in the ear.
+At the same time I believe that it would be impossible to introduce it;
+and, even if it _were_ possible, that it would be most undesirable, and
+this for two reasons; the first being that the losses consequent upon
+its introduction, would far outweigh the gains, even supposing those
+gains as great as the advocates of the scheme promise; the second, that
+these promised gains would themselves be only very partially realized,
+or not at all.
+
+{Sidenote: _Alphabets Imperfect_}
+
+In the first place, I believe it to be impossible. It is clear that such
+a scheme must begin with the reconstruction of the alphabet. The first
+thing that the phonographers have perceived is the necessity for the
+creation of a vast number of new signs, the poverty of all existing
+alphabets, at any rate of our own, not yielding a several sign for all
+the several sounds in the language. Our English phonographers have
+therefore had to invent ten of these new signs or letters, which are
+henceforth to take their place with our _a_, _b_, _c_, and to enjoy
+equal rights with them. Rejecting two (_q_, _x_), and adding ten, they
+have raised their alphabet from twenty-six letters to thirty-four. But
+to procure the reception of such a reconstructed alphabet is simply an
+impossibility, as much an impossibility as would be the reconstitution
+of the structure of the language in any points where it was manifestly
+deficient or illogical. Sciolists or scholars may sit down in their
+studies, and devise these new letters, and prove that we need them, and
+that the introduction of them would be a great gain, and a manifest
+improvement; and this may be all very true; but if they think they can
+induce a people to adopt them, they know little of the ways in which its
+alphabet is entwined with the whole innermost life of a people. One may
+freely own that all present alphabets are redundant here, are deficient
+there; our English perhaps is as greatly at fault as any, and with that
+we have chiefly to do. Unquestionably it has more letters than one to
+express one and the same sound; it has only one letter to express two or
+three sounds; it has sounds which are only capable of being expressed at
+all by awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the same time we must
+accept the fact, as we accept any other which it is out of our power to
+change--with regret, indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence: as one
+accepts the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or forty miles nearer
+to England--that it is so difficult to get round Cape Horn--that the
+climate of Africa is so fatal to European life. A people will no more
+quit their alphabet than they will quit their language; they will no
+more consent to modify the one _ab extra_ than the other. C�sar avowed
+that with all his power he could not introduce a new word, and certainly
+Claudius could not introduce a new letter. Centuries may sanction the
+bringing in of a new one, or the dropping of an old. But to imagine that
+it is possible to suddenly introduce a group of ten new letters, as
+these reformers propose--they might just as feasibly propose that the
+English language should form its comparatives and superlatives on some
+entirely new scheme, say in Greek fashion, by the terminations 'oteros'
+and 'otatos'; or that we should agree to set up a dual; or that our
+substantives should return to our Anglo-Saxon declensions. Any one of
+these or like proposals would not betray a whit more ignorance of the
+eternal laws which regulate human language, and of the limits within
+which deliberate action upon it is possible, than does this of
+increasing our alphabet by ten entirely novel signs.
+
+But grant it possible, grant our six and twenty letters to have so
+little sacredness in them that Englishmen would endure a crowd of
+upstart interlopers to mix themselves on an equal footing with them,
+still this could only be from a sense of the greatness of the advantage
+to be derived from this introduction. Now the vast advantage claimed by
+the advocates of the system is, that it would facilitate the learning to
+read, and wholly save the labour of learning to spell, which "on the
+present plan occupies", as they assure us, "at the very lowest
+calculation from three to five years". Spelling, it is said, would no
+longer need to be learned at all; since whoever knew the sound, would
+necessarily know also the spelling, this being in all cases in perfect
+conformity with that. The anticipation of this gain rests upon two
+assumptions which are tacitly taken for granted, but both of them
+erroneous.
+
+The first of these assumptions is, that all men pronounce all words
+alike, so that whenever they come to spell a word, they will exactly
+agree as to what the outline of its sound is. Now we are sure men will
+not do this from the fact that, before there was any fixed and settled
+orthography in our language, when therefore everybody was more or less a
+phonographer, seeking to write down the word as it sounded to _him_,
+(for he had no other law to guide him,) the variations of spelling were
+infinite. Take for instance the word 'sudden'; which does not seem to
+promise any great scope for variety. I have myself met with this word
+spelt in the following fifteen ways among our early writers: 'sodain',
+'sodaine', 'sodan', 'sodayne', 'sodden', 'sodein', 'sodeine', 'soden',
+'sodeyn', 'suddain', 'suddaine', 'suddein', 'suddeine', 'sudden',
+'sudeyn'. Again, in how many ways was Raleigh's name spelt, or
+Shakespeare's? The same is evident from the spelling of uneducated
+persons in our own day. They have no other rule but the sound to guide
+them. How is it that they do not all spell alike; erroneously, it may
+be, as having only the sound for their guide, but still falling all into
+exactly the same errors? What is the actual fact? They not merely spell
+wrong, which might be laid to the charge of our perverse system of
+spelling, but with an inexhaustible diversity of error, and that too in
+the case of simplest words. Thus the little town of Woburn would seem to
+give small room for caprice in spelling, while yet the postmaster there
+has made, from the superscription of letters that have passed through
+his hands, a collection of two hundred and forty-four varieties of ways
+in which the place has been spelt{231}. It may be replied that these
+were all or nearly all from the letters of the ignorant and uneducated.
+Exactly so;--but it is for their sakes, and to place them on a level
+with the educated, or rather to accelerate their education by the
+omission of a useless yet troublesome discipline, that the change is
+proposed. I wish to show you that after the change they would be just as
+much, or almost as much, at a loss in their spelling as now.
+
+{Sidenote: _Pronouncing Dictionaries_}
+
+And another reason which would make it quite as necessary then to learn
+orthography as now, is the following. Pronunciation, as I have already
+noticed, is far too fine and subtle a thing to be more than approximated
+to, and indicated in the written letter. In a multitude of cases the
+difficulties which pronunciation presented would be sought to be
+overcome in different ways, and thus different spelling, would arise; or
+if not so, one would have to be arbitrarily selected, and would have
+need to be learned, just as much as the spelling of a word now has need
+to be learned. I will only ask you, in proof of this which I affirm, to
+turn to any Pronouncing Dictionary. That greatest of all absurdities, a
+Pronouncing Dictionary, may be of some service to you in this matter; it
+will certainly be of none in any other. When you mark the elaborate and
+yet ineffectual artifices by which it toils after the finer distinctions
+of articulation, seeks to reproduce in letters what exists, and can only
+exist, as the spoken tradition of pronunciation, acquired from lip to
+lip by the organ of the ear, capable of being learned, but incapable of
+being taught; or when you compare two of these dictionaries with one
+another, and mark the entirely different schemes and combinations of
+letters which they employ for representing the same sound to the eye;
+you will then perceive how idle the attempt to make the written in
+language commensurate with the sounded; you will own that not merely
+out of human caprice, ignorance, or indolence, the former falls short of
+and differs from the later; but that this lies in the necessity of
+things, in the fact that man's _voice_ can effect so much more than ever
+his _letter_ can{232}. You will then perceive that there would be as
+much, or nearly as much, of the arbitrary in spelling which calls itself
+phonetic as in our present, that spelling would have to be learned just
+as really then as now. We should be unable to dismiss the spelling card
+even after the arrival of that great day, when, for example, those lines
+of Pope which hitherto we have thus spelt and read,
+
+    "But errs not nature from this gracious end,
+    From burning suns when livid deaths descend,
+    When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep
+    Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep"?
+
+when I say, instead of this they should present themselves to our eyes
+in the following attractive form:
+
+    "But � erz not n[e]tiur from �is gr[e]cus end,
+    from burni[ng] sunz when livid de�s d[i]send,
+    when er�kw[e]ks swol[o], or when tempests sw[i]p
+    tounz tu wun gr[e]v, h[o]l n[e]conz tu �e d[i]p".
+
+{Sidenote: _Losses of Phonetic Spelling_}
+
+The scheme would not then fulfil its promises. Its vaunted gains, when
+we come to look closely at them, disappear. And now for its losses.
+There are in every language a vast number of words, which the ear does
+not distinguish from one another, but which are at once distinguishable
+to the eye by the spelling. I will only instance a few which are the
+same parts of speech; thus 'sun' and 'son'; 'virge' ('virga', now
+obsolete) and 'verge'; 'reign', 'rain', and 'rein'; 'hair' and 'hare';
+'plate' and 'plait'; 'moat' and 'mote'; 'pear' and 'pair'; 'pain' and
+'pane'; 'raise' and 'raze'; 'air' and 'heir'; 'ark' and 'arc'; 'mite'
+and 'might'; 'pour' and 'pore'; 'veil' and 'vale'; 'knight' and 'night';
+'knave' and 'nave'; 'pier' and 'peer'; 'rite' and 'right'; 'site' and
+'sight'; 'aisle' and 'isle'; 'concent' and 'consent'; 'signet' and
+'cygnet'. Now, of course, it is a real disadvantage, and may be the
+cause of serious confusion, that there should be words in spoken
+languages of entirely different origin and meaning which yet cannot in
+sound be differenced from one another. The phonographers simply propose
+to extend this disadvantage already cleaving to our spoken languages, to
+the written languages as well. It is fault enough in the French
+language, that 'm�re' a mother, 'mer' the sea, 'maire' a mayor of a
+town, should have no perceptible difference between them in the spoken
+tongue; or again that in some there should be nothing to distinguish
+'sans', 'sang', 'sent', 'sens', 's'en', 'cent'; nor yet between 'ver',
+'vert', 'verre' and 'vers'. Surely it is not very wise to propose
+gratuitously to extend the same fault to the written languages as well.
+
+This loss in so many instances of the power to discriminate between
+words, which however liable to confusion now in our spoken language, are
+liable to none in our written, would be serious enough; but far more
+serious than this would be the loss which would constantly ensue, of all
+which visibly connects a word with the past, which tells its history,
+and indicates the quarter from which it has been derived. In how many
+English words a letter silent to the ear, is yet most eloquent to the
+eye--the _g_ for instance in 'deign', 'feign', 'reign', 'impugn',
+telling as it does of 'dignor', 'fingo', 'regno', 'impugno'; even as the
+_b_ in 'debt', 'doubt', is not idle, but tells of 'debitum' and
+'dubium'{233}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Pronunciation Alters_}
+
+At present it is the written word which is in all languages their
+conservative element. In it is the abiding witness against the
+mutilations or other capricious changes in their shape which
+affectation, folly, ignorance, and half-knowledge would introduce. It is
+not indeed always able to hinder the final adoption of these corrupter
+forms, but does not fail to oppose to them a constant, and very often a
+successful, resistance. With the adoption of phonetic spelling, this
+witness would exist no longer; whatever was spoken would have also to be
+written, let it be never so barbarous, never so great a departure from
+the true form of the word. Nor is it merely probable that such a
+barbarizing process, such an adopting and sanctioning of a vulgarism,
+might take place, but among phonographers it already has taken place. We
+all probably are aware that there is a vulgar pronunciation of the word
+'Eu_rope_', as though it were 'Eu_rup_'. Now it is quite possible that
+numerically more persons in England may pronounce the word in this
+manner than in the right; and therefore the phonographers are only true
+to their principles when they spell it in the fashion which they do,
+'Eurup', or indeed omitting the E at the beginning, 'Urup'{234} with
+thus the life of the first syllable assailed no less than that of the
+second. What are the consequences? First its relations with the old
+mythology are at once and entirely broken off; secondly, its most
+probable etymology from two Greek words, signifying 'broad' and 'face',
+Europe being so called from the _Broad_ line or _face_ of coast which
+our continent presented to the Asiatic Greek, is totally obscured. But
+so far from the spelling servilely following the pronunciation, I should
+be bold to affirm that if ninety-nine out of every hundred persons in
+England chose to call Europe 'Urup', this would be a vulgarism still,
+against which the written word ought to maintain its protest, not
+sinking down to their level, but rather seeking to elevate them to its
+own{235}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Changes of Pronunciation_}
+
+And if there is much in orthography which is unsettled now, how much
+more would be unsettled then. Inasmuch as the pronunciation of words is
+continually altering, their spelling would of course have continually to
+alter too. For the fact that pronunciation is undergoing constant
+changes, although changes for the most part unmarked, or marked only by
+a few, would be abundantly easy to prove. Take a Pronouncing Dictionary
+of fifty or a hundred years ago; turn to almost any page, and you will
+observe schemes of pronunciation there recommended, which are now merely
+vulgarisms, or which have been dropped altogether. We gather from a
+discussion in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_{236}, that in his time 'great'
+was by some of the best speakers of the language pronounced 'gr_ee_t',
+not 'gr_a_te': Pope usually rhymes it with 'cheat', 'complete', and the
+like; thus in the _Dunciad_:
+
+    "Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the _great_,
+    There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines com_plete_".
+
+Spenser's constant use of the word a century and a half earlier, leaves
+no doubt that such was the invariable pronunciation of his time{237}.
+Again, Pope rhymes 'obliged' with 'beseiged'; and it has only ceased to
+be 'obl_ee_ged' almost in our own time. Who now drinks a cup of 'tay'?
+yet there is abundant evidence that this was the fashionable
+pronunciation in the first half of the last century; the word, that is,
+was still regarded as French: Locke writes it 'th�'; and in Pope's time,
+though no longer written, it was still pronounced so. Take this couplet
+of his in proof:
+
+    "Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms _obey_,
+    Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes _tea_".
+
+So too a pronunciation which still survives, though scarcely among
+well-educated persons, I mean 'Room' for 'Rome', must have been in
+Shakespeare's time the predominant one, else there would have been no
+point in that play on words where in _Julius C�sar_ Cassius, complaining
+that in all _Rome_ there was not _room_ for a single man, exclaims,
+
+    "Now is it _Rome_ indeed, and _room_ enough".
+
+Samuel Rogers too assures us that in his youth "everybody said
+'Lonnon'{238} not 'London'; that Fox said 'Lonnon' to the last".
+
+The following quotation from Swift will prove to you that I have been
+only employing here an argument, which he employed long ago against the
+phonographers of his time. He exposes thus the futility of their
+scheme{239}: "Another cause which has contributed not a little to the
+maiming of our language, is a foolish opinion advanced of late years
+that we ought to spell exactly as we speak: which, besides the obvious
+inconvenience of utterly destroying our etymology, would be a thing we
+should never see an end of. Not only the several towns and counties of
+England have a different way of pronouncing, but even here in London
+they clip their words after one manner about the court, another in the
+city, and a third in the suburbs; and in a few years, it is probable,
+will all differ from themselves, as fancy or fashion shall direct; all
+which, reduced to writing, would entirely confound orthography".
+
+This much I have thought good to say in respect of that entire
+revolution in English orthography, which some rash innovators have
+proposed. Let me, dismissing them and their innovations, call your
+attention now to those changes in spelling which are constantly going
+forward, at some periods more rapidly than at others, but which never
+wholly cease out of a language; while at the same time I endeavour to
+trace, where this is possible, the motives and inducements which bring
+them about. It is a subject which none can neglect, who desire to obtain
+even a tolerably accurate acquaintance with their native tongue. Some
+principles have been laid down in the course of what has been said
+already, that may help us to judge whether the changes which have found
+place in our own have been for better or for worse. We shall find, if I
+am not mistaken, of both kinds.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Grogram_'}
+
+There are alterations in spelling which are for the worse. Thus an
+altered spelling will sometimes obscure the origin of a word, concealing
+it from those who, but for this, would at once have known whence and
+what it was, and would have found both pleasure and profit in this
+knowledge. I need not say that in all those cases where the earlier
+spelling revealed the secret of the word, told its history, which the
+latter defaces or conceals, the change has been injurious, and is to be
+regretted; while, at the same time, where it has thoroughly established
+itself, there is nothing to do but to acquiesce in it: the attempt to
+undo it would be absurd. Thus, when 'gro_c_er' was spelt 'gro_ss_er', it
+was comparatively easy to see that he first had his name, because he
+sold his wares not by retail, but in the _gross_. 'Co_x_comb' tells us
+nothing now; but it did when spelt, as it used to be, 'co_cks_comb', the
+_comb_ of a _cock_ being then an ensign or token which the fool was
+accustomed to wear. In 'grogra_m_' we are entirely to seek for the
+derivation; but in 'grogra_n_' or 'grogra_in_', as earlier it was spelt,
+one could scarcely miss 'grosgrain', the stuff of a _coarse grain_ or
+woof. How many now understand 'woodbin_e_'? but who could have helped
+understanding 'woodbin_d_' (Ben Jonson)? What a mischievous alteration
+in spelling is 'd_i_vest' instead of 'd_e_vest'{240}. This change is so
+recent that I am tempted to ask whether it would not here be possible to
+return to the only intelligible spelling of this word.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Pigmy_'}
+
+'P_i_gmy' used formerly to be spelt 'p_y_gmy', and so long as it was so,
+no Greek scholar could see the word, but at once he knew that by it
+were indicated manikins whose measure in height was no greater than
+that of a man's arm from the elbow to the closed _fist_{241}. Now he may
+know this in other ways; but the word itself, so long as he assumes it
+to be rightly spelt, tells him nothing. Or again, the old spelling,
+'diam_ant_', was preferable to the modern 'diam_ond_'. It was
+preferable, because it told more of the quarter whence the word had
+reached us. 'Diamant' and 'adamant' are in fact only two different
+adoptions on the part of the English tongue, of one and the same Greek,
+which afterwards became a Latin word. The primary meaning of 'adamant'
+is, as you know, the indomitable, and it was a name given at first to
+steel as the hardest of metals; but afterwards transferred{242} to the
+most precious among all the precious stones, as that which in power of
+resistance surpassed everything besides.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Cozen_', '_Bless_'}
+
+Neither are new spellings to be commended, which obliterate or obscure
+the relationship of a word with others to which it is really allied;
+separating from one another, for those not thoroughly acquainted with
+the subject, words of the same family. Thus when '_j_aw' was spelt
+'_ch_aw', no ne could miss its connexions with the verb 'to chew'{243}.
+Now probably ninety-nine out of a hundred who use both words, are
+entirely unaware of any relationship between them. It is the same with
+'cousin' (consanguineus), and 'to cozen' or to deceive. I do not propose
+to determine which of these words should conform itself to the spelling
+of the other. There was great irregularity in the spelling of both from
+the first; yet for all this, it was then better than now, when a
+permanent distinction has established itself between them, keeping out
+of sight that 'to cozen' is in all likelihood to deceive under show of
+kindred and affinity; which if it be so, Shakespeare's words,
+
+    "_Cousins_ indeed, and by their uncle _cozened_
+    Of comfort"{244},
+
+will be found to contain not a pun, but an etymology{245}. The real
+relation between 'bliss' and 'to bless' is in like manner at present
+obscured{246}.
+
+The omission of a letter, or the addition of a letter, may each
+effectually do its work in keeping out of sight the true character and
+origin of a word. Thus the omission of a letter. When the first syllable
+of 'bran-new' was spelt 'bran_d_' with a final 'd', 'bran_d_-new', how
+vigorous an image did the word contain. The 'brand' is the fire, and
+'brand-new' equivalent to 'fire-new' (Shakespeare), is that which is
+fresh and bright, as being newly come from the forge and fire. As now
+spelt, 'bran-new' conveys to us no image at all. Again, you have the
+word 'scrip'--as a 'scrip' of paper, government 'scrip'. Is this the
+same word with the Saxon 'scrip', a wallet, having in some strange
+manner obtained these meanings so different and so remote? Have we here
+only two different applications of one and the same word, or two
+homonyms, wholly different words, though spelt alike? We have only to
+note the way in which the first of these 'scrips' used to be written,
+namely with a final 't', not 'scrip' but 'scrip_t_', and we are at once
+able to answer the question. This 'script' is a Latin, as the other is
+an Anglo-Saxon, word, and meant at first simply a _written_ (scripta)
+piece of paper--a circumstance which since the omission of the final 't'
+may easily escape our knowledge. 'Afraid' was spelt much better in old
+times with the double 'ff', than with the single 'f' as now. It was then
+clear that it was not another form of 'afeared', but wholly separate
+from it, the participle of the verb 'to affray', 'affrayer', or, as it
+is now written, 'effrayer'{247}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Whole_', '_Hale_', '_Heal_'}
+
+In the cases hitherto adduced, it has been the omission of a letter
+which has clouded and concealed the etymology. The intrusion of a letter
+sometimes does the same. Thus in the early editions of _Paradise Lost_,
+and in all writers of that time, you will find 'scent', an odour, spelt
+'sent'. It was better so; there is no other noun substantive 'sent',
+with which it is in danger of being confounded; while its relation with
+'sentio', with 're_sent_'{248}, 'dis_sent_', and the like, is put out of
+sight by its novel spelling; the intrusive '_c_', serves only to
+mislead. The same thing was attempted with 'site', 'situate',
+'situation', spelt for a time by many, 's_c_ite', 's_c_ituate',
+'s_c_ituation'; but it did not continue with these. Again, 'whole', in
+Wiclif's Bible, and indeed much later, occasionally as far down as
+Spenser, is spelt 'hole', without the 'w' at the beginning. The present
+orthography may have the advantage of at once distinguishing the word to
+the eye from any other; but at the same time the initial 'w', now
+prefixed, hides its relation to the verb 'to heal', with which it is
+closely allied. The 'whole' man is he whose hurt is 'healed' or
+covered{249} (we say of the convalescent that he 'recovers'){250};
+'whole' being closely allied to 'hale' (integer), from which also by
+its modern spelling it is divided. 'Wholesome' has naturally followed
+the fortunes of 'whole'; it was spelt 'holsome' once.
+
+Of 'island' too our present spelling is inferior to the old, inasmuch as
+it suggests a hybrid formation, as though the word were made up of the
+Latin 'insula', and the Saxon 'land'. It is quite true that 'isle' _is_
+in relation with, and descent from, 'insula', 'isola', '�le'; and hence
+probably the misspelling of 'island'. This last however has nothing to
+do with 'insula', being identical with the German 'eiland', the
+Anglo-Saxon 'ealand'{251} and signifying the sea-land, or land girt,
+round with the sea. And it is worthy of note that this 's' in the first
+syllable of 'island' is quite of modern introduction. In all the earlier
+versions of the Scriptures, and in the Authorized Version as at first
+set forth, it is 'iland'; while in proof that this is not accidental, it
+may be observed that, while 'iland' has not the 's', 'isle' has it (see
+Rev. i. 9). 'Iland' indeed is the spelling which we meet with far down
+into the seventeenth century.
+
+{Sidenote: _Folk-etymologies_}
+
+What has just been said of 'island' leads me as by a natural transition
+to observe that one of the most frequent causes of alteration in the
+spelling of a word is a wrongly assumed derivation. It is then sought to
+bring the word into harmony with, and to make it by its spelling
+suggest, this derivation, which has been erroneously thrust upon it.
+Here is a subject which, followed out as it deserves, would form an
+interesting and instructive chapter in the history of language{252}. Let
+me offer one or two small contributions to it; noting first by the way
+how remarkable an evidence we have in this fact, of the manner in which
+not the learned only, but all persons learned and unlearned alike, crave
+to have these words not body only, but body and soul. What an
+attestation, I say, of this lies in the fact that where a word in its
+proper derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape and mould
+it into some other form, not enduring that it should be a mere inert
+sound without sense in their ears; and if they do not know its right
+origin, will rather put into it a wrong one, than that it should have
+for them no meaning, and suggest no derivation at all{253}.
+
+There is probably no language in which such a process has not been going
+forward; in which it is not the explanation, in a vast number of
+instances, of changes in spelling and even in form, which words have
+undergone. I will offer a few examples of it from foreign tongues,
+before adducing any from our own. 'Pyramid' is a word, the spelling of
+which was affected in the Greek by an erroneous assumption of its
+derivation; the consequences of this error surviving in our own word to
+the present day. It is spelt by us with a 'y' in the first syllable, as
+it was spelt with the {Greek: y} corresponding in the Greek. But why was
+this? It was because the Greeks assumed that the pyramids were so named
+from their having the appearance of _flame_ going up into a point{254},
+and so they spelt 'pyramid', that they might find {Greek: pyr} or 'pyre'
+in it; while in fact 'pyramid' has nothing to do with flame or fire at
+all; being, as those best qualified to speak on the matter declare to
+us, an Egyptian word of quite a different signification{255}, and the
+Coptic letters being much better represented by the diphthong 'ei' than
+by the letter 'y', as no doubt, but for this mistaken notion of what the
+word was intended to mean, they would have been.
+
+Once more--the form 'Hierosolyma', wherein the Greeks reproduced the
+Hebrew 'Jerusalem', was intended in all probability to express that the
+city so called was the _sacred_ city of the _Solymi_{256}. At all events
+the intention not merely of reproducing the Hebrew word, but also of
+making it significant in Greek, of finding {Greek: hieron} in it, is
+plainly discernible. For indeed the Greeks were exceedingly intolerant
+of foreign words, till they had laid aside their foreign appearance--of
+all words which they could not thus quicken with a Greek soul; and, with
+a very characteristic vanity, an ignoring of all other tongues but their
+own, assumed with no apparent misgivings that all words, from whatever
+quarter derived, were to be explained by Greek etymologies{257}.
+
+'Tartar' is another word, of which it is at least possible that a
+wrongly assumed derivation has modified the spelling, and indeed not
+the spelling only, but the very shape in which we now possess it. To
+many among us it may be known that the people designated by this
+appellation are not properly 'Tartars', but 'Tatars'; and you sometimes
+perhaps have noted the omission of the 'r' on the part of those who are
+curious in their spelling. How, then, it may be asked, did the form
+'Tartar' arise? When the terrible hordes of middle Asia burst in upon
+civilized Europe in the thirteenth century, many beheld in the ravages
+of their innumerable cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word in the
+Revelation (chap. ix.) concerning the opening of the bottomless pit; and
+from this belief ensued the change of their name from 'Tatars' to
+'Tartars', which was thus put into closer relation with 'Tartarus' or
+hell, out of which their multitudes were supposed to have proceeded{258}.
+
+Another good example in the same kind is the German word 's�ndflut', the
+Deluge, which is now so spelt as to signify a 'sinflood', the plague or
+_flood_ of waters brought on the world by the _sins_ of mankind; and
+probably some of us have before this admired the pregnant significance
+of the word. Yet the old High German word had originally no such
+intention; it was spelt 'sinfluot', that is, the great flood; and as
+late as Luther, indeed in Luther's own translation of the Bible, is so
+spelt as to make plain that the notion of a '_sin_-flood' had not yet
+found its way into, even as it had not affected the spelling of, the
+word{259}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Currants_'}
+
+But to look now nearer home for our examples. The little raisins brought
+from Greece, which play so important a part in one of the national
+dishes of England, the Christmas plum-pudding, used to be called
+'corinths'; and so you would find them in mercantile lists of a hundred
+years ago: either that for the most part they were shipped from Corinth,
+the principal commercial city in Greece, or because they grew in large
+abundance in the immediate district round about it. Their likeness in
+shape and size and general appearance to our own currants, working
+together with the ignorance of the great majority of English people
+about any such place as Corinth, soon brought the name 'corinths' into
+'currants', which now with a certain unfitness they bear; being not
+currants at all, but dried grapes, though grapes of diminutive
+size{260}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Court-cards_'}
+
+'_Court_-cards', that is, the king, queen, and knave in each suit, were
+once 'coat-cards'{261}; having their name from the long splendid 'coat'
+(vestis talaris) with which they were arrayed. Probably 'coat' after a
+while did not perfectly convey its original meaning and intention; being
+no more in common use for the long garment reaching down to the heels;
+and then 'coat' was easily exchanged for 'court', as the word is now
+both spelt and pronounced, seeing that nowhere so fitly as in a Court
+should such splendidly arrayed personages be found. A public house in
+the neighbourhood of London having a few years since for its sign "The
+George _Canning_" is already "The George and _Cannon_",--so rapidly do
+these transformations proceed, so soon is that forgotten which we
+suppose would never be forgotten. "Welsh _rarebit_" becomes "Welsh
+_rabbit_"{262}; and '_farced_' or stuffed 'meat' becomes "forced meat".
+Even the mere determination to make a word _look_ English, to put it
+into an English shape, without thereby so much as seeming to attain any
+result in the way of etymology, this is very often sufficient to bring
+about a change in its spelling, and even in its form{263}. It is thus
+that 'sipahi' has become 'sepoy'; and only so could 'weissager' have
+taken its present form of 'wiseacre'{264}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Transformation of Words_}
+
+It is not very uncommon for a word, while it is derived from one word,
+to receive a certain impulse and modification from another. This extends
+sometimes beyond the spelling, and in cases where it does so, would
+hardly belong to our present theme. Still I may notice an instance or
+two. Thus our 'obsequies' is the Latin 'exequi�', but formed under a
+certain impulse of 'obsequium', and seeking to express and include the
+observant honour of that word. 'To refuse' is 'recusare', while yet it
+has derived the 'f' of its second syllable from 'refutare'; it is a
+medley of the two{265}. The French 'rame', an oar, is 'remus', but that
+modified by an unconscious recollection of 'ramus'. 'Orange' is no doubt
+a Persian word, which has reached us through the Arabic, and which the
+Spanish 'naranja' more nearly represents than any form of it existing in
+the other languages of Europe. But what so natural as to think of the
+orange as the _golden_ fruit, especially when the "_aurea_ mala" of the
+Hesperides were familiar to all antiquity? There cannot be a doubt that
+'aurum', 'oro', 'or', made themselves felt in the shapes which the word
+assumed in the languages of the West, and that here we have the
+explanation of the change in the first syllable, as in the low Latin
+'aurantium', 'orangia', and in the French 'orange', which has given us
+our own.
+
+It is foreign words, or words adopted from foreign languages, as might
+beforehand be expected, which are especially subjected to such
+transformations as these. The soul which the word once had in its own
+language, having, for as many as do not know that language, departed
+from it, or at least not being now any more to be recognized by such as
+employ the word, these are not satisfied till they have put another soul
+into it, and it has thus become alive to them again. Thus--to take first
+one or two very familiar instances, but which serve as well as any other
+to illustrate my position--the Bellerophon becomes for our sailors the
+'Billy Ruffian', for what can they know of the Greek mythology, or of
+the slayer of Chim�ra? an iron steamer, the Hirondelle, now or lately
+plying on the Tyne, is the 'Iron Devil'. '_Contre_ danse', or dance in
+which the parties stand _face to face_ with one another, and which ought
+to have appeared in English as '_counter_ dance', does become '_country_
+dance'{266}, as though it were the dance of the country folk and rural
+districts, as distinguished from the quadrille and waltz and more
+artificial dances of the town{267}. A well known rose, the "rose _des
+quatre saisons_", or of the four seasons, becomes on the lips of some of
+our gardeners, the "rose of the _quarter sessions_", though here it is
+probable that the eye has misled, rather than the ear. 'Dent de lion',
+(it is spelt 'dentdelyon' in our early writers) becomes 'dandylion',
+"_chaude_ mel�e", or an affray in _hot_ blood, "_chance_-medley"{268},
+'causey' (chauss�e) becomes 'causeway'{269}, 'rachitis' 'rickets'{270},
+and in French 'mandragora' 'main de gloire'{271}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Necromancy_'}
+
+'Necromancy' is another word which, if not now, yet for a long period
+was erroneously spelt, and indeed assumed a different shape, under the
+influence of an erroneous derivation; which, curiously enough, even now
+that it has been dismissed, has left behind it the marks of its
+presence, in our common phrase, "the _Black_ Art". I need hardly remind
+you that 'necromancy' is a Greek word, which signifies, according to its
+proper meaning, a prophesying by aid of the dead, or that it rests on
+the presumed power of raising up by potent spells the dead, and
+compelling them to give answers about things to come. We all know that
+it was supposed possible to exercise such power; we have a very awful
+example of it in the story of the witch of Endor, and a very horrid one
+in Lucan{272}. But the Latin medieval writers, whose Greek was either
+little or none, spelt the word, 'nigromantia', as if its first syllables
+had been Latin: at the same time, not wholly forgetting the original
+meaning, but in fact getting round to it though by a wrong process, they
+understood the dead by these 'nigri', or blacks, whom they had brought
+into the word{273}. Down to a rather late period we find the forms,
+'_negro_mancer' and '_negro_mancy' frequent in English.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words Misspelt_}
+
+'Pleurisy' used often to be spelt, (I do not think it is so now,)
+without an 'e' in the first syllable, evidently on the tacit assumption
+that it was from _plus pluris_{274}. When Shakespeare falls into an
+error, he "makes the offence gracious"; yet, I think, he would scarcely
+have written,
+
+    "For goodness growing to a _plurisy_
+    Dies of his own _too much_",
+
+but that _he_ too derived 'plurisy' from _pluris_. This, even with the
+"small Latin and less Greek", which Ben Jonson allows him, he scarcely
+would have done, had the word presented itself in that form, which by
+right of its descent from {Greek: pleura} (being a pain, stitch, or
+sickness _in the side_) it ought to have possessed. Those who for
+'crucible' wrote 'chrysoble' (Jeremy Taylor does so) must evidently have
+done this under the assumption that the Greek for _gold_, and not the
+Latin for _cross_, lay at the foundation of this word. 'Anthymn' instead
+of 'anthem' (Barrow so spells the word), rests plainly on a wrong
+etymology, even as this spelling clearly betrays what that wrong
+etymology is. 'Rhyme' with a 'y' is a modern misspelling; and would
+never have been but for the undue influence which the Greek 'rhythm' has
+exercised upon it. Spenser and his cotemporaries spell it 'rime'.
+'Abominable' was by some etymologists of the seventeenth century spelt
+'abhominable', as though it were that which departed from the human (ab
+homine) into the bestial or devilish.
+
+In all these words which I have adduced last, the correct spelling has
+in the end resumed its sway. It is not so with 'frontisp_ie_ce', which
+ought to be spelt 'frontisp_i_ce' (it was so by Milton and others),
+being the low Latin 'frontispicium', from 'frons' and 'aspicio', the
+forefront of the building, that part which presents itself to the view.
+It was only the entirely ungrounded notion that the word 'piece'
+constitutes the last syllable, which has given rise to our present
+orthography{275}.
+
+{Sidenote: Wrong Spelling}
+
+You may, perhaps, wonder that I have dwelt so long on these details of
+spelling; that I have bestowed on them so much of my own attention,
+that I have claimed for them so much of yours; yet in truth I cannot
+regard them as unworthy of our very closest heed. For indeed of how much
+beyond itself is accurate or inaccurate spelling the certain indication.
+Thus when we meet 's_y_ren', for 's_i_ren', as so strangely often we do,
+almost always in newspapers, and often where we should hardly have
+expected (I met it lately in the _Quarterly Review_, and again in
+Gifford's _Massinger_), how difficult it is not to be "judges of evil
+thoughts", and to take this slovenly misspelling as the specimen and
+evidence of an inaccuracy and ignorance which reaches very far wider
+than the single word which is before us. But why is it that so much
+significance is ascribed to a wrong spelling? Because ignorance of a
+word's spelling at once argues ignorance of its origin and derivation. I
+do not mean that one who spells rightly may not be ignorant of it too,
+but he who spells wrongly is certainly so. Thus, to recur to the example
+I have just adduced, he who for 's_i_ren' writes 's_y_ren', certainly
+knows nothing of the magic _cords_ ({Greek: seirai}) of song, by which
+those fair enchantresses were supposed to draw those that heard them to
+their ruin{276}.
+
+Correct or incorrect orthography being, then, this note of accurate or
+inaccurate knowledge, we may confidently conclude where two spellings
+of a word exist, and are both employed by persons who generally write
+with precision and scholarship, that there must be something to account
+for this. It will generally be worth your while to inquire into the
+causes which enable both spellings to hold their ground and to find
+their supporters, not ascribing either one or the other to mere
+carelessness or error. It will in these cases often be found that two
+spellings exist, because two views of the word's origin exist, and each
+of those spellings is the correct expression of one of these. The
+question therefore which way of spelling should continue, and wholly
+supersede the other, and which, while the alternative remains, we should
+ourselves employ, can only be settled by settling which of these
+etymologies deserves the preference. So is it, for example, with
+'ch_y_mist' and 'ch_e_mist', neither of which has obtained in our common
+use the complete mastery over the other{277}. It is not here, as in some
+other cases, that one is certainly right, the other as certainly wrong:
+but they severally represent two different etymologies of the word, and
+each is correct according to its own. If we are to spell 'ch_y_mist' and
+'ch_y_mistry', it is because these words are considered to be derived
+from the Greek word, {Greek: chymos}, sap; and the chymic art will then
+have occupied itself first with distilling the juice and sap of plants,
+and will from this have derived its name. I have little doubt, however,
+that the other spelling, 'ch_e_mist', not 'ch_y_mist', is the correct
+one. It was not with the distillation of herbs, but with the
+amalgamation of metals, that chemistry occupied itself at its rise, and
+the word embodies a reference to Egypt, the land of Ham or 'Cham'{278},
+in which this art was first practised with success.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Satyr_', '_Satire_'}
+
+Of how much confusion the spelling which used to be so common, 'satyr'
+for 'satire', is at once the consequence, the expression, and again the
+cause; not indeed that this confusion first began with us{279}; for the
+same already found place in the Latin, where 'satyricus' was continually
+written for 'satiricus' out of a false assumption of the identity
+between the Roman _satire_ and the Greek _satyric_ drama. The Roman
+'satira',--I speak of things familiar to many of my hearers,--is
+properly a _full_ dish (lanx being understood)--a dish heaped up with
+various ingredients, a 'farce' (according to the original signification
+of that word), or hodge-podge; and the word was transferred from this to
+a form of poetry which at first admitted the utmost variety in the
+materials of which it was composed, and the shapes into which these
+materials were wrought up; being the only form of poetry which the
+Romans did _not_ borrow from the Greeks. Wholly different from this,
+having no one point of contact with it in its form, its history, or its
+intention, is the 'satyric' drama of Greece, so called because Silenus
+and the 'Satyrs' supplied the chorus; and in their na�ve selfishness,
+and mere animal instincts, held up before men a mirror of what they
+would be, if only the divine, which is also the truly human, element of
+humanity, were withdrawn; what man, all that properly made him man being
+withdrawn, would prove.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Mid-wife_', '_Nostril_'}
+
+And then what light, as we have already seen, does the older spelling of
+a word often cast upon its etymology; how often does it clear up the
+mystery, which would otherwise have hung about it, or which _had_ hung
+about it till some one had noticed and turned to profit this its earlier
+spelling. Thus 'dirge' is always spelt 'dirige' in early English. This
+'dirige' may be the first word in a Latin psalm or prayer once used at
+funerals; there is a reasonable probability that the explanation of the
+word is here; at any rate, if it is not here, it is nowhere{280}. The
+derivation of 'mid-wife' is uncertain, and has been the subject of
+discussion; but when we find it spelt 'medewife' and 'meadwife', in
+Wiclif's Bible, this leaves hardly a doubt that it is the _wife_ or
+woman who acts for a _mead_ or reward{281}. In cases too where there
+was no mystery hanging about a word, how often does the early spelling
+make clear to all that which was before only known to those who had made
+the language their study. For example, if an early edition of Spenser
+should come into your hands, or a modern one in which the early spelling
+is retained, what continual lessons in English might you derive from it.
+Thus 'nostril' is always spelt by him and his cotemporaries
+'nosethrill'; a little earlier it was 'nosethirle'. Now 'to thrill' is
+the same as to drill or pierce; it is plain then here at once that the
+word signifies the orifice or opening with which the _nose_ is
+_thrilled_, drilled, or pierced. We might have read the word for ever in
+our modern spelling without being taught this. 'Ell' tells us nothing
+about itself; but in 'eln' used in Holland's translation of Camden, we
+recognize 'ulna' at once.
+
+Again, the 'morris' or 'morrice-dance', which is alluded to so often by
+our early poets, as it is now spelt informs us nothing about itself; but
+read '_moriske_ dance', as it is generally spelt by Holland and his
+cotemporaries, and you will scarcely fail to perceive that of which
+indeed there is no manner of doubt; namely, that it was so called either
+because it was really, or was supposed to be, a dance in use among the
+_moriscoes_ of Spain, and from thence introduced into England{282}.
+
+Again, philologers tell us, and no doubt rightly, that our 'cray-fish',
+or 'craw-fish', is the French '�crevisse'. This is true, but certainly
+it is not self-evident. Trace however the word through these successive
+spellings, 'krevys' (Lydgate), 'crevish' (Gascoigne), 'craifish'
+(Holland), and the chasm between 'cray-fish' or 'craw-fish' and
+'�crevisse' is by aid of these three intermediate spellings bridged over
+at once; and in the fact of our Gothic 'fish' finding its way into this
+French word we see only another example of a law, which has been already
+abundantly illustrated in this lecture{283}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Emmet_', '_Ant_'}
+
+In other ways also an accurate taking note of the spelling of words, and
+of the successive changes which it has undergone, will often throw light
+upon them. Thus we may know, others having assured us of the fact, that
+'ant' and 'emmet' were originally only two different spellings of one
+and the same word; but we may be perplexed to understand how two forms
+of a word, now so different, could ever have diverged from a single
+root. When however we find the different spellings, 'emmet', 'emet',
+'amet', 'amt', 'ant', the gulf which appeared to separate 'emmet' from
+'ant' is bridged over at once, and we do not merely know on the
+assurance of others that these two are in fact identical, their
+differences being only superficial, but we perceive clearly in what
+manner they are so{284}.
+
+Even before any close examination of the matter, it is hard not to
+suspect that 'runagate' is in fact another form of 'renegade', slightly
+transformed, as so many words, to put an English signification into its
+first syllable; and then the meaning gradually modified in obedience to
+the new derivation which was assumed to be its original and true one.
+Our suspicion of this is very greatly strengthened (for we see how very
+closely the words approach one another), by the fact that 'renega_d_e'
+is constantly spelt 'renega_t_e' in our old authors, while at the same
+time the denial of _faith_, which is now a necessary element in
+'renegade', and one differencing it inwardly from 'runagate', is
+altogether wanting in early use--the denial of _country_ and of the
+duties thereto owing being all that is implied in it. Thus it is
+constantly employed in Holland's _Livy_ as a rendering of 'perfuga'{285};
+while in the one passage where 'runagate' occurs in the Prayer Book
+Version of the Psalms (Ps. lxviii. 6), a reference to the original will
+show that the translators could only have employed it there on the
+ground that it also expressed rebel, revolter, and not runaway
+merely{286}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Assimilating Power of English_}
+
+I might easily occupy your attention much longer, so little barren or
+unfruitful does this subject of spelling appear likely to prove; but all
+things must have an end; and as I concluded my first lecture with a
+remarkable testimony borne by an illustrious German scholar to the
+merits of our English tongue, I will conclude my last with the words of
+another, not indeed a German, but still of the great Germanic stock;
+words resuming in themselves much of which we have been speaking upon
+this and upon former occasions: "As our bodies", he says, "have hidden
+resources and expedients, to remove the obstacles which the very art of
+the physician puts in its way, so language, ruled by an indomitable
+inward principle, triumphs in some degree over the folly of grammarians.
+Look at the English, polluted by Danish and Norman conquests, distorted
+in its genuine and noble features by old and recent endeavours to mould
+it after the French fashion, invaded by a hostile entrance of Greek and
+Latin words, threatening by increasing hosts to overwhelm the indigenous
+terms. In these long contests against the combined power of so many
+forcible enemies, the language, it is true, has lost some of its power
+of inversion in the structure of sentences, the means of denoting the
+difference of gender, and the nice distinctions by inflection and
+termination--almost every word is attacked by the spasm of the accent
+and the drawing of consonants to wrong positions; yet the old English
+principle is not overpowered. Trampled down by the ignoble feet of
+strangers, its springs still retain force enough to restore itself. It
+lives and plays through all the veins of the language; it impregnates
+the innumerable strangers entering its dominions with its temper, and
+stains them with its colour, not unlike the Greek which in taking up
+oriental words, stripped them of their foreign costume, and bid them to
+appear as native Greeks"{287}.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{228} In proof that it need not be so, I would only refer to a paper,
+      _On Orthographical Expedients_, by Edwin Guest, Esq., in the
+      _Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. iii. p. 1.
+
+{229} [The scientific treatises on Phonetics of Mr. Alexander J. Ellis
+      and Dr. Henry Sweet have surmounted the difficulty of registering
+      sounds with great accuracy.]
+
+{230} I have not observed this noticed in our dictionaries as the
+      original form of the phrase. There is no doubt however of the
+      fact; see _Stanihurst's Ireland_, p. 33, in Holinshed's
+      _Chronicles_. [Rather from _torvien_, to throw,--Skeat].
+
+{231} _Notes and Queries_, No. 147.
+
+{232} See Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, Croker's edit. 1848, p. 233.
+
+{233} [The _b_ was purposely foisted into these words by bookmen to
+      suggest their Latin derivation; it did not belong to them in
+      earlier English. The same may be said of the _g_, intruded into
+      'deign' and 'feign'.]
+
+{234} A chief phonographer writes to me to deny that this is the present
+      spelling (1856) of 'Europe'. It was so when this paragraph was
+      written. [Most people would now consider [Yeuroap] as American
+      pronunciation.]
+
+{235} Quintilian has expressed himself with the true dignity of a
+      scholar on this matter (_Inst._ 1, 6, 45): Consuetudinem sermonis
+      vocabo _consensum eruditorum_; sicut vivendi consensum
+      bonorum.--How different from innovations like this the changes in
+      the spelling of German which J. Grimm, so far as his own example
+      may reach, _has_ introduced; and the still bolder and more
+      extensive ones which in the _Preface_ to his _Deutsches
+      W�rterbuch_, pp. liv.-lxii., he avows his desire to see
+      introduced;--as the employment of _f_, not merely where it is at
+      present used, but also wherever _v_ is now employed; the
+      substituting of the _v_, which would be thus disengaged, for _w_,
+      and the entire dismissal of _w_. They may be advisable, or they
+      may not; it is not for strangers to offer an opinion; but at any
+      rate they are not a seizing of the fluctuating, superficial
+      accidents of the present, and a seeking to give permanent
+      authority to these, but they all rest on a deep historic study of
+      the language, and of the true genius of the language.
+
+{236} Croker's edit. 1848, pp. 57, 61, 233.
+
+{237} [An incorrect conclusion. Almost all 'ea' words were pronounced
+      'ai' down to the eighteenth century. Thus 'great' was a true rhyme
+      to 'cheat' and 'complete', their ordinary pronunciation being
+      'grait', 'chait', 'complait'.]
+
+{238} [i.e. 'Lunnun'.]
+
+{239} _A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English
+      Tongue_, 1711, Works, vol. ix, pp. 139-59.
+
+{240} ['Devest' was still in use till the end of the eighteenth century,
+      but 'divest' is already found in _King Lear_, 1605, i, 1, 50.]
+
+{241} Pygm�i, quasi _cubitales_ (Augustine).
+
+{242} First so used by Theophrastus in Greek, and by Pliny in
+      Latin.--The real identity of the two words explains Milton's use
+      of 'diamond' in _Paradise Lost_, b. 7; and also in that sublime
+      passage in his _Apology for Smectymnuus_: "Then zeal, whose
+      substance is ethereal, arming in complete _diamond_".--Diez
+      (_W�rterbuch d. Roman. Sprachen_, p. 123) supposes, not very
+      probably, that it was under a certain influence of '_dia_fano',
+      the translucent, that 'adamante' was in the Italian, whence we
+      have derived the word, changed into '_dia_mante'.
+
+{243} [Similarly _jowl_ for _chowl_ or _chavel_.]
+
+{244} _Richard III_, Act iv, Sc. 4.
+
+{245} [For another account of this word, approved by Dr. Murray, see
+      _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 156.]
+
+{246} ['Bliss' representing the old English _bliths_ or _blidhs_,
+      blitheness, is really a quite distinct word from 'bless', standing
+      for _blets_, old English _bl�tsian_ (=_bl�edsian_, to consecrate
+      with blood, _bl�d_), although the latter was by a folk-etymology
+      very frequently spelt 'bliss'.]
+
+{247} [But 'afraied' is the earliest form of the word (1350), the verb
+      itself being at first spelt 'afray' (1325). N.E.D.]
+
+{248} How close this relationship was once, not merely in respect of
+      etymology, but also of significance, a passage like this will
+      prove: "Perchance, as vultures are said to smell the earthiness of
+      a dying corpse; so this bird of prey [the evil spirit which
+      personated Samuel, 1 Sam. xxviii. 41] _resented_ a worse than
+      earthly savor in the soul of Saul, as evidence of his death at
+      hand". (Fuller, _The Profane State_, b. 5, c. 4.)
+
+{249} [There is an unfortunate confusion here between 'heal' to make
+      'hale' or '[w]hole' (Anglo-Saxon _h�lan_) and the old (and
+      Provincial) English _hill_, to cover, _hilling_, covering,
+      _hellier_, a slater, akin to 'hell', the covered place, 'helm';
+      Icelandic _hylja_, to cover.]
+
+{250} [By a curious slip Dr. Trench here confounds 'recover', to
+      recuperate or regain health (derived through old French _recovrer_
+      from Latin _recuperare_), with a totally distinct word _re-cover_,
+      to cover or clothe over again, which comes from old French
+      _covrir_, Latin _co-operire_. It is just the difference between
+      'recovering' a lost umbrella through the police and 'recovering' a
+      torn one at a shop. I pointed this out to the author in 1869, and
+      I think he altered the passage in his later editions.]
+
+{251} ['Island', though cognate with Anglo-Saxon _e�-land_ "water-land"
+      (German _ei-land_), is really identical with Anglo-Saxon
+      _�g-land_, i.e. "isle-land", from _�g_, an island, the diminutive
+      of which survives in _eyot_ or _ait_.]
+
+{252} [The editor essayed to make a complete collection of this class of
+      words in his _Folk-etymology, a Dictionary of Words corrupted by
+      False Derivation or Mistaken Analogy_, 1882, and more recently in
+      a condensed form in _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, 1904.]
+
+{253} Diez looks with much favour on this process, and calls it, ein
+      sinnreiches mittel fremdlinge ganz heimisch zu machen.
+
+{254} Ammianus Marcellinus, xxii, 15, 28.
+
+{255} [The Greek _pyramis_ probably represents the Egyptian
+      _piri-m-�isi_ (Maspero, _Dawn of Civilization_, 358), or
+      _pir-am-us_ (Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, i, 73), rather
+      than _pi-ram_, 'the height' (Birch, _Bunsen's Egypt_, v, 763).]
+
+{256} Tacitus, _Hist._ v. 2.
+
+{257} Let me illustrate this by further instances in a note. Thus
+      {Greek: boutyron}, from which, through the Latin, our 'butter' has
+      descended to us, is borrowed (Pliny, _H.N._ xxviii. 9) from a
+      Scythian word, now to us unknown: yet it is sufficiently plain
+      that the Greeks so shaped and spelt it as to contain apparent
+      allusion to _cow_ and _cheese_; there is in {Greek: boutyron} an
+      evident feeling after {Greek: bous} and {Greek: tyron}. Bozra,
+      meaning citadel in Hebrew and Phoenician, and the name, no doubt,
+      which the citadel of Carthage bore, becomes {Greek: Byrsa} on
+      Greek lips; and then the well known legend of the ox-hide was
+      invented upon the name; not having suggested it, but being itself
+      suggested by it. Herodian (v. 6) reproduces the name of the Syrian
+      goddess Astarte in a shape that is significant also for Greek
+      ears--{Greek: Astroarch�}, The Star-ruler, or Star-queen. When the
+      apostate and hellenizing Jews assumed Greek names, 'Eliakim' or
+      "Whom God has set", became 'Alcimus' ({Greek: alkimos}) or The
+      Strong (1 Macc. vii. 5). Latin examples in like kind are
+      'com_i_ssatio', spelt continually 'com_e_ssatio', and
+      'com_e_ssation' by those who sought to naturalize it in England,
+      as though it were connected with 'c{)o}medo', to eat, being indeed
+      the substantive from the verb 'c{-o}missari' (--{Greek:
+      k�mazein}), to revel, as Plutarch, whose Latin is in general not
+      very accurate, long ago correctly observed; and 'orichalcum',
+      spelt often '_au_richalcum', as though it were a composite metal
+      of mingled _gold_ and brass; being indeed the _mountain_ brass
+      ({Greek: oreichalkos}). The miracle play, which is 'myst�re', in
+      French, whence our English 'mystery' was originally written
+      'mist�re', being properly derived from 'minist�re', and having its
+      name because the clergy, the _ministri_ Ecclesi�, conducted it.
+      This was forgotten, and it then took its present form of
+      'mystery', as though so called because the mysteries of the faith
+      were in it set out.
+
+{258} We have here, in this bringing of the words by their supposed
+      etymology together, the explanation of the fact that Spenser
+      (_Fairy Queen_, i, 7, 44), Middleton (_Works_, vol. 5, pp. 524,
+      528, 538), and others employ 'Tartary' as equivalent to 'Tartarus'
+      or hell.
+
+{259} For a full discussion of this matter and fixing of the period at
+      which 'sinfluot' became 's�ndflut', see the _Theol. Stud. u.
+      Krit._ vol. ii, p. 613; and Delitzsch, _Genesis_, 2nd ed. vol. ii,
+      p. 210.
+
+{260} [The name of the small grape, originally _raisins de Corauntz_,
+      was transferred to the _ribes_ in the sixteenth century.]
+
+{261} Ben Jonson, _The New Inn_, Act i, Sc. i.
+
+{262} [On the contrary, it is the modern "Welsh _rarebit_" which has
+      been mistakenly evolved out of the older "Welsh _rabbit_" as I
+      have shown in _Folk-Etymology_, p. 431. Grose has both forms in
+      his _Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue_, 1785.]
+
+{263} 'Leghorn' is sometimes quoted as an example of this; but
+      erroneously; for, as Admiral Smyth has shown (_The Mediterranean_,
+      p. 409) 'Livorno' is itself rather the modern corruption, and
+      'Ligorno' the name found on the earlier charts.
+
+{264} Exactly the same happens in other languages; thus 'armbrust', a
+      crossbow, _looks_ German enough, and yet has nothing to do with
+      'arm' or 'brust', being a contraction of 'arcubalista', but a
+      contraction under these influences. As little has 'abenteuer'
+      anything to do with 'abend' or 'theuer', however it may seem to be
+      connected with them, being indeed the Proven�al 'adventura'. And
+      'weissagen' in its earlier forms had nothing in common with
+      'sagen'.
+
+{265} [So Diez. But Prof. Skeat and Scheler see no reason why it should
+      not be direct from French _refuser_ and Low Latin _refusare_, from
+      _refusus_, rejected.]
+
+{266} It is upon this word that De Quincey (_Life and Manners_, p. 70,
+      American Ed.) says excellently well: "It is in fact by such
+      corruptions, by off-sets upon an old stock, arising through
+      ignorance or mispronunciation originally, that every language is
+      frequently enriched; and new modifications of thought, unfolding
+      themselves in the progress of society, generate for themselves
+      concurrently appropriate expressions.... It must not be allowed to
+      weigh against a word once fairly naturalized by all, that
+      originally it crept in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription
+      is as strong a ground of legitimation in a case of this nature, as
+      it is in law. And the old axiom is applicable--Fieri non debuit,
+      factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much
+      of their wealth". [_Works_, vol. xiv., p. 201.]
+
+{267} [The direct opposite is the fact. The French _contredanse_ was
+      borrowed from the English 'country-dance'. See _The Folk and their
+      Word-Lore_, p. 153.]
+
+{268} [These words are not identical. They were in use as distinct words
+      in the fifteenth century. See N.E.D.]
+
+{269} [Dr. Murray has shown that 'causeway' is not a corruption of
+      'causey' but a compound of that word with 'way'.]
+
+{270} [Prof. Skeat has demonstrated that the supposed Greek 'rachitis',
+      inflammation of the back, is an �tiological invention to serve as
+      etymon of 'rickets', the condition of being rickety, a purely
+      native word. See also _Folk-Etymology_, 312.]
+
+{271} [See _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 124.]
+
+{272} _Phars._ vi. 720-830.
+
+{273} Thus in a _Vocabulary_, 1475: Nigromansia dicitur divinatio facta
+      _per nigros_.
+
+{274} [Dyce believed that it was really thus derived and distinct from
+      _pleurisy_, but it was evidently modelled upon that word (_Remarks
+      on Editions of Shakespeare_, p. 218).]
+
+{275} As 'orthography' itself means properly "_right_ spelling", it might
+      be a curious question whether it is permissible to speak of an
+      _incorrect_ _ortho_graphy, that is of a _wrong_ _right_-spelling.
+      The question which would be thus started is one of not unfrequent
+      recurrence, and it is very worthy of observation how often, so
+      soon as we take note of etymologies, this _contradictio in
+      adjecto_ is found to occur. I will here adduce a few examples from
+      the Greek, the Latin, the German, and from our own tongue. Thus
+      the Greeks having no convenient word to express a rider, apart
+      from a rider _on a horse_, did not scruple to speak of the
+      _horse_man ({Greek: hippeus}) upon an _elephant_. They often
+      allowed themselves in a like inaccuracy, where certainly there was
+      no necessity; as in using {Greek: andrias} of the statue of a
+      _woman_; where it would have been quite as easy to have used
+      {Greek: heik�n} or {Greek: agalma}. So too their 'table' ({Greek:
+      trapeza} = {Greek: tetrapeza}) involved probably the _four_ feet
+      which commonly support one; yet they did not shrink from speaking
+      of a _three_-footed table ({Greek: tripous trapeza}), in other
+      words, a "_three_-footed _four_-footed"; much as though we should
+      speak of a "_three_-footed _quadru_ped". Homer writes of a
+      'hecatomb' not of a _hundred_, but of twelve, oxen; and elsewhere
+      of Hebe he says, in words not reproducible in English, {Greek:
+      nektar e�nochoei}. 'Tetrarchs' were often rulers of quite other
+      than _fourth_ parts of a land. {Greek: Akratos} had so come to
+      stand for wine, without any thought more of its signifying
+      originally the _unmingled_, that St. John speaks of {Greek:
+      akratos kekerasmenos} (Rev. xiv. 10), or the unmingled mingled.
+      Boxes in which precious ointments were contained were so commonly
+      of alabaster, that the name came to be applied to them whether
+      they were so or not; and Theocritus celebrates "_golden_
+      alabasters". Cicero having to mention a water-clock is obliged to
+      call it a _water_ _sun_dial (solarium ex aqu�). Columella speaks
+      of a "_vintage_ of honey" (vindemia mellis), and Horace invites
+      his friend to im_pede_, not his _foot_, but his head, with myrtle
+      (_caput_ im_ped_ire myrto). Thus too a German writer who desired
+      to tell of the golden shoes with which the folly of Caligula
+      adorned his horse could scarcely avoid speaking of _golden_
+      hoof-_irons_. The same inner contradiction is involved in such
+      language as our own, a "_false_ _ver_dict", a "_steel_ _cuirass_"
+      ('coriacea' from corium, leather), "antics new" (Harrington's
+      _Ariosto_), an "_erroneous_ _etymo_logy", a "_corn_ _chandler_";
+      that is, a "_corn_ _candle_-maker", "_rather_ _late_", 'rather'
+      being the comparative of 'rathe', early, and thus "rather late"
+      being indeed "more early late"; and in others.
+
+{276} ['Siren' is now generally understood to have meant originally a
+      songstress, from the root _svar_, to sing or sound, seen in
+      _syrinx_, a flute, _su(r)-sur-us_, etc. See J. E. Harrison, _Myths
+      of the Odyssey_, p. 175.]
+
+{277} ['Chymist' seems to be the oldest form of the word in English; see
+      N.E.D.]
+
+{278} {Greek: ch�mia}, the name of Egypt; see Plutarch, _De Is. et Os._
+      c. 33.
+
+{279} We have a notable evidence how deeply rooted this error was, how
+      long this confusion endured, of the way in which it was shared by
+      the learned as well as the unlearned, in Milton's _Apology for
+      Smectymnuus_, sect. 7, which everywhere presumes the identity of
+      the 'satyr' and the 'satirist'. It was Isaac Casaubon who first
+      effectually dissipated it even for the learned world. The results
+      of his investigations were made popular for the unlearned reader
+      by Dryden, in the very instructive _Discourse on Satirical
+      Poetry_, prefixed to his translations of Juvenal; but the
+      confusion still survives, and 'satyrs' and 'satires', the Greek
+      'satyric' drama, the Latin 'satirical' poetry, are still assumed
+      by most to have something to do with one another.
+
+{280} ['Dirige' was the first word of the antiphon at matins in the
+      Office for the Dead, taken from Psalm v, 9 (Vulg.), in which occur
+      the words "_dirige_ in conspectu tuo vitam meam". See Skeat,
+      _Piers Plowman_, ii, 52. Hence also Scotch _dregy_, a dirge.]
+
+{281} [Incorrect: the 'mid-wife' is etymologically she that is _with_
+      (old English _mid_) a woman to help her in her hour of need, like
+      German _bei-frau_, Spanish _co-madre_, Icelandic _naer-kona_,
+      "near-woman", Latin _ob-stetrix_, "by-stander", all words for the
+      lying-in nurse. Compare German _mit-bruder_, a comrade.]
+
+{282}               "I have seen him
+      Caper upright, like a wild _M�risco_,
+      Shaking the bloody darts, as he his bells".
+
+                        Shakespeare, _2 Henry VI_ Act iii, Sc. 1.
+
+{283} In the reprinting of old books it is often very difficult to
+      determine how far the old shape in which words present themselves
+      should be retained, how far they should be conformed to present
+      usage. It is comparatively easy to lay down as a rule that in
+      books intended for popular use, wherever the form of the word is
+      not affected by the modernizing of the spelling, as where this
+      modernizing consists merely in the dropping of superfluous
+      letters, there it shall take place; as who would wish our Bibles
+      to be now printed letter for letter after the edition of 1611, or
+      Shakespeare with the orthography of the first folio; but wherever
+      more than the spelling, the actual shape, outline, and character
+      of the word has been affected by the changes which it has
+      undergone, that in all such cases the earlier form shall be held
+      fast. The rule is a judicious one; but when it is attempted to
+      carry it out, it is not always easy to draw the line, and to
+      determine what affects the form and essence of a word, and what
+      does not. About some words there can be no doubt; and therefore
+      when a modern editor of Fuller's _Church History_ complacently
+      announces that he has allowed himself in such changes as 'dirige'
+      into 'dirge', 'barreter' into 'barrister', 'synonymas' into
+      'synonymous', 'extempory' into 'extemporary', 'scited' into
+      'situated', 'vancurrier' into 'avant-courier'; he at the same time
+      informs us that for all purposes of the study of the English
+      language (and few writers are for this more important than
+      Fuller), he has made his edition utterly worthless. Or again, when
+      modern editors of Shakespeare print, and that without giving any
+      intimation of the fact,
+
+          "Like quills upon the fretful _porcupine_",
+
+      he having written, and in his first folio and quarto the words
+      standing,
+
+          "Like quills upon the fretful _porpentine_",
+
+      this being the earlier, and in Shakespeare's time the more common
+      form of the word [e.g. "the _purpentines_ nature" (Puttenham,
+      _Eng. Poesie_, 1589, p. 118, ed. Arber)], they must be considered
+      as taking a very unwarrantable liberty with his text; and no less,
+      when they substitute 'Kenilworth' for 'Killingworth', which he
+      wrote, and which was his, Marlowe's, and generally the earlier
+      form of the name.
+
+{284} [Compare Latin _amita_, yielding old French _ante_, our 'aunt'.]
+
+{285} "The Carthaginians shall restore and deliver back all the
+      _renegates_ [perfugas] and fugitives that have fled to their side
+      from us".--p. 751.
+
+{286} [See further in _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 80.]
+
+{287} Halbertsma quoted by Bosworth, _Origin of the English and Germanic
+      Languages_, p. 39.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF WORDS
+
+
+                              PAGE
+    Abenteuer                  240
+    Abnormal                    72
+    Abominable                 245
+    Academy                     70
+    Accommodate                107
+    Acre                       193
+    Adamant                    230
+    Admiralty                  107
+    Advocate                    82
+    �on                         72
+    �sthetic                    72
+    Afeard                     126
+    Affluent                   104
+    Afraid                     127
+    Afterthink                 120
+    Alcimus                    237
+    Alcove                      16
+    Amphibious                 107
+    Analogie                    56
+    Ant                        253
+    Antecedents                210
+    Anthem                     245
+    Antipodes                   68
+    Apotheosis                  67
+    -ard                       141
+    Armbrust                   240
+    Arride                      58
+    Ascertain                  186
+    Ask                        126
+    Astarte                    237
+    Attercop                   123
+    Aurantium                  241
+    Aurichalcum                237
+    Avunculize                  91
+    Axe                        126
+
+    Baffle                     181
+    Baker, bakester            157
+    Banter                     106
+    Barrier                     70
+    Battalion                   61
+    Bawn                       123
+    Benefice, benefit           97
+    Bitesheep                  144
+    Black art                  243
+    Blackguard                 189
+    Blasphemous                128
+    Bless                      231
+    Bombast                    199
+    Book                        21
+    Boor                       202
+    Bozra                      237
+    Brangle                    177
+    Bran-new                   231
+    Brat                       205
+    Brazen                     164
+    Breaden                    163
+    Bruin                       89
+    Buffalo                     16
+    Butter                     237
+    Buxom                      139
+
+    Chagrin                     95
+    Chance-medley              243
+    Chanticleer                 89
+    Chemist, chemistry         248
+    Chicken                    158
+    Chouse                      91
+    Chymist, chymistry         248
+    Clawback                   144
+    Comissatio                 237
+    Comm�rage                  204
+    Confluent                  104
+    Congregational              79
+    Contrary                   128
+    Corpse                     191
+    Country dance              242
+    Court card                 239
+    Coxcomb                    229
+    Cozen                      231
+    Crawfish                   252
+    Creansur                    45
+    Criterion                   67
+    Crone, crony                93
+    Crucible                   245
+    Crusade                     62
+    Cuirass                    246
+    Currant                    239
+    Cynarctomachy               91
+
+    Dahlia                      88
+    Dame                       192
+    Dandylion                  243
+    Dearworth                  120
+    Dedal                       86
+    Dehort                     137
+    Demagogue                   55
+    Denominationalism           79
+    Depot                       69
+    Diamond                    230
+    Dirge                      250
+    Dissimilation              103
+    Divest                     229
+    Donat                       86
+    Dorter                      20
+    Dosones                     90
+    Doughty                    146
+    Drachm                     193
+    Dragoman                    12
+    Dub                        146
+    Duke                       191
+    Dumps                      147
+    Dutch                      177
+
+    Eame                       118
+    Earsport                   119
+    Eaves                      159
+    Educational                 79
+    Effervescence               55
+    Einseitig                   75
+    Eliakim                    237
+    Ell                        251
+    Emet                       253
+    Emotional                   79
+    Encyclopedia                67
+    Enfantillage                55
+    Equivocation               196
+    Erutar                     149
+    Escobarder                  88
+    -ess                       153
+    Europe                     224
+    Eyebite                    120
+
+    Fairy                      191
+    Farfalla                    15
+    Fatherland                  75
+    Flitter-mouse              118
+    Flota                       17
+    Folklore                    75
+    Foolhappy                  137
+    Foolhardy                  137
+    Foolhasty                  137
+    Foollarge                  137
+    Foretalk                   120
+    Fougue                      66
+    Fraischeur                  66
+    Frances                     95
+    Francis                     95
+    Frimm                      118
+    Frivolit�                   55
+    Frontispiece               245
+    Furlong                    193
+
+    Gainly                     136
+    Gallon                     193
+    Galvanism                   88
+    Garble                     199
+    Geir                       118
+    Gentian                     86
+    Girdle                      21
+    Girfalcon                  118
+    Girl                       192
+    Glassen                    163
+    Gordian                     86
+    Gossip                     203
+    Great                      226
+    Grimsire                   119
+    Grocer                     229
+    Grogram                    229
+
+    Halfgod                    120
+    Hallow                      82
+    Handbook                    75
+    Hangdog                    145
+    Hector                      89
+    Heft                       118
+    Hermetic                    86
+    Hery                       118
+    Hierosolyma                236
+    Hipocras                    86
+    Hippodame                   64
+    His                        131
+    Hooker                      16
+    Hoppester                  155
+    Hotspur                    119
+    Hoyden                     192
+    Huck                       157
+    Huckster, huckstress       157
+    Hurricane                   14
+
+    Iceberg                     73
+    Icefield                    74
+    Idea                       197
+    Imp                        205
+    Influence                  181
+    International               78
+    Island                     234
+    Isle                       234
+    Isolated                   107
+    Isothermal                 102
+    Its                        130
+
+    Jaw                        230
+    Jeopardy                    82
+
+    Kenilworth                 253
+    Kindly                     184
+    Kirtle                      21
+    Knave                      207
+    Knitster                   155
+    Knot                        87
+
+    Lambiner                    88
+    Lass                       154
+    Lazar                       86
+    Leer                       118
+    Leghorn                    240
+    Libel                      191
+    Lifeguard                   74
+    Lissome                    140
+    London                     227
+    Lunch, luncheon            129
+
+    Malingerer                 119
+    Mammet, mammetry            87
+    Mandragora                 243
+    Mansarde                    89
+    Matachin                    17
+    Matamoros                  143
+    Mausoleum                   86
+    Meat                       191
+    Meddle, meddlesome         206
+    Middler                    121
+    Mid-wife                   250
+    Milken                     163
+    Mischievous                128
+    Miscreant                  179
+    Mithridate                  86
+    Mixen                      123
+    Morris dance               251
+    Mystery, myst�re           237
+    Myth                        72
+
+    Nap                        147
+    Necromancy                 243
+    Negus                       87
+    Nemorivagus                 77
+    Neophyte                   107
+    Nesh                       118
+    Niggot                      85
+    Nimm                       118
+    Noonscape                  129
+    Noonshun                   129
+    Normal                      72
+    Nostril                    251
+    Nugget                      85
+    Nuncheon                   128
+
+    Oblige                      69
+    Obsequies                  241
+    Oculissimus                 90
+    Orange                     241
+    Orichalcum                 237
+    Ornamentation               72
+    Orrery                      87
+    Orthography                245
+
+    Pagan                      202
+    Painful, painfulness       186
+    Pandar, pandarism           89
+    Panorama                   107
+    Pasquinade                  87
+    Patch                       87
+    Pate                       146
+    Pease                      159
+    Peck                       193
+    Pester                      84
+    Philauty                   105
+    Photography                 72
+    Physician                  101
+    Pigmy                      229
+    Pinchpenny                 144
+    Pleurisy                   244
+    Plunder                73, 106
+    Poet                       101
+    Polite                     200
+    Polytheism                 107
+    Porcupine                  253
+    Porpoise                    63
+    Postremissimus              91
+    Potecary                    64
+    Pr�varicator               196
+    Pragmatical                206
+    Pr�liber                    56
+    Preposterous               195
+    Prestige                    68
+    Prevaricate                196
+    Privado                     16
+    Prose, proser              206
+    Punctilio                   16
+    Punto                       16
+    Pyramid                    235
+
+    Quellio                     17
+    Quinsey                     63
+    Quirpo                      16
+    Quirry                      64
+
+    Rakehell                   145
+    Rame                       241
+    Rathe, rathest             138
+    Realmrape                  119
+    Recover                    233
+    Redingote                   63
+    Refuse                     241
+    Regoldar                   149
+    Religion                   183
+    Renegade                   254
+    Renown                     103
+    Resent                     233
+    Reynard                     89
+    Rhyme                      245
+    Riches                     159
+    Rickets                    243
+    Righteousness              137
+    Rodomontade                 89
+    Rome                       227
+    Rootfast                   119
+    Rosen                      162
+    Ruly                       136
+    Runagate                   254
+
+    Sag                        118
+    Sardanapalisme              88
+    Sash                        63
+    Satellites                  61
+    Satire, satirical          250
+    Satyr, satyric        249, 250
+    Scent                      232
+    Schimmer                   118
+    Scrip                      232
+    Seamster, seamstress  155, 156
+    Selfish, selfishness       105
+    Sentiment                  107
+    Sepoy                      240
+    Serene                     135
+    Shrewd, shrewdness         209
+    Silhouette                  88
+    Silvern                    163
+    Silvicultrix                77
+    Siren                      247
+    Skinker                    117
+    Skip                       147
+    Slick                      132
+    Smellfeast                 143
+    Smug                       146
+    Solidarity                  70
+    Songster, songstress  155, 156
+    Sorcerer                   101
+    Spencer                     88
+    Sperr                      118
+    Spheterize                  72
+    Spinner, spinster          156
+    Starconner                 120
+    Starvation                  80
+    Starve                     192
+    Stereotype                  72
+    Stonen                     163
+    Suckstone                  120
+    Sudden                     220
+    Suicide                    105
+    Suicism, suist             105
+    S�ndflut                   238
+    Sunstead                   120
+    Swindler                    74
+    Sycophant                  208
+
+    Tabinet                     88
+    Tapster                    157
+    Tarre                      118
+    Tartar                     237
+    Tartary                    238
+    Tea                        227
+    Theriac                    187
+    Thou                       171
+    Thrasonical                 89
+    Tind                       118
+    Tinnen                     163
+    Tinsel                     180
+    Tinsel-slippered           180
+    Tontine                     88
+    Topsy-turvy                215
+    Tosspot                    144
+    Tram                        88
+    Treacle                    187
+    Trigger                     73
+    Trounce                    147
+    Turban                      13
+
+    Umstroke                   120
+    Uncouth                    124
+
+    Vancurrier                  64
+    Vicinage                    63
+    Villain               201, 208
+    Volcano                     86
+    Voltaic                     88
+    Voyage                     191
+
+    Wanhope                    117
+    Waterfright                120
+    Watershed                  103
+    Weed                       192
+    Welk                       118
+    Welkin                     158
+    Welsh rabbit               240
+    Whole                      234
+    Windflower                 120
+    Wiseacre                   240
+    Witch                      101
+    Witticism                  106
+    Witwanton                  119
+    Woburn                     220
+    Woodbine                   229
+    Worship                    185
+    W�rterbuch                 111
+
+    Yard                       193
+    Youngster                  156
+
+    Zoology                    107
+    Zoophyte                   107
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+{TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+Variation in the spelling of the names Jonson/Johnson, Spenser/Spencer,
+and Ralegh/Raleigh is as in the original.
+
+The following have been left as they appear in the original:
+
+    fetisch
+    There are who venture
+    substraction
+    tanquum consummata (probable error for "tamquam consumpta")
+    divergencies
+    In 'grogra_m_' we are entirely to seek
+
+The following obvious printing errors have been corrected:
+
+    LECTURE I
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    up words  n every quarter          in
+    el lagarto'                        removed quote mark
+    'trespasses' might be substitued   substituted
+    matter than in our authorized      Authorized
+    Galations v. 19                    Galatians
+    artificial, made-up, facititious   factitious
+    such doublets is given by Pro f    Prof.
+
+    LECTURE II
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    masterpieces of antient            ancient
+    {Greek: H�thos} is a word at       �thos
+    at other times 'v�rtue'.           v�rtue
+    'hc�racter' with Spenser;          char�cter
+    perfectly well recognised          recognized
+    Shakesspeare than we find now      Shakespeare
+    'maumet', meaning an idol{95}      added comma after footnote marker
+    'aretinisms', from an,             removed comma after "an"
+    whith hitherto they held           which
+    Missouri and the Missisippi        Mississippi
+    things lacking, would have mended  added comma after "mended"
+    "The word t  must be               it
+    we have in common with the French  added period after "French"
+    Language Fran�ais_, p. 12.         Langage
+    'fursehung' and 'vorsehung'        f�rsehung
+
+    LECTURE III
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    so dose 'flitter-mouse'            does
+    is an old preterite                pr�terite
+    instrinsic value it may possess.   intrinsic
+    which it belongs; being the same   added ")" before semicolon
+    'guideress'; 'charmeress'          changed semicolon to comma
+    superlatives as 'griveousest'      grievousest
+    'dwarfling', 'sherperdling'        shepherdling
+    _contr�ry_ run"--_Shakespeare._    added period after quotes
+    their charms".--_Spenser,_         changed comma to period
+    _bu h-sum_, i.e. 'bow-some',       buch-sum
+
+    LECTURE IV
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    Shakespeare in _I Henry VI_        changed I to 1
+    words justI quoted have conveyed?  I just
+    misapprehension in their persual   perusal
+    as by sea, was a 'voyage',         changed final comma to period
+    Langage Francais_, p. 347          Fran�ais
+    before they return back again.     added double quotes after "again"
+    1589, p. 181 (ed.                  181, ed.
+    _Preface to Bible_, 1611.          added ")" before period
+    Secker, _Sermons_, iii, 85 (ed.    85, ed.
+
+    LECTURE V
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    of the arbitary in spelling        arbitrary
+    'vert', 'verre' and 'vers',        changed final comma to period
+    v corresponding in the Greek.      changed "v" to {Greek: y}
+    and a very horried one             horrid
+    {Greek: ch ymo}                    chymos
+    Croker's edit. 1848, pp. 57        '5' unclear in the original
+    the Provencal 'adventura'.         Proven�al
+    oua 'aunt'.                        our
+
+    INDEX
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    Alcove 15                          16
+    Book 20                            21
+    Creansur 46                        45
+    Flota 16                           17
+    Galvanism 9                        88
+    Girdle 20                          21
+    Hooker 15                          16
+    Icefield 73                        74
+    Imp 215                            205
+    Kirtle 20                          21
+    Matachin 16                        17
+    Milken 162                         163
+    Postremissimus 90                  91
+    Quellio 16                         17
+    Rosen 161                          162
+    Silvern 162                        163
+    Stonen 162                         163
+    Tapster 156                        157
+}
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of English Past and Present, by 
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+
+Project Gutenberg's English Past and Present, by Richard Chevenix Trench
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: English Past and Present
+
+Author: Richard Chevenix Trench
+
+Editor: A. Smythe Palmer
+
+Release Date: March 25, 2007 [EBook #20900]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Amy Cunningham, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="tnote">
+<h3>Transcriber’s Note</h3>
+
+<p>This e-text uses a number of special characters, including:</p>
+<ul><li>vowels with macrons: ā ē ō</li>
+<li>vowels with breves: ă ĕ ŏ</li>
+<li>accented Greek: ἀ ἔ ἦ ϊ ῦ ῳ</li>
+<li>phonetic symbols: <span title="e symbol">ɛ</span> <span title="i symbol">ɨ</span>
+<span title="o symbol">ɵ</span> <span title="ng symbol">ŋ</span></li></ul>
+
+<p>If these do not display correctly, make sure that your browser’s
+file encoding is set to UTF-8. You may also need to change your default
+font. For Greek words, the transliteration will appear if you move the
+mouse over the word: <span title="Greek: akmê">ἀκμή</span></p>
+
+<p>A short passage on page 222 uses some symbols that are not in Unicode;
+see the <a href="#phonetic">explanation</a> at the end of the text for
+images of the original symbols and the transcription scheme.</p>
+
+<p>In the original book, the odd-numbered pages have unique headers,
+represented here as sidenotes.</p>
+
+<p>Obvious printing errors involving punctuation (such as missing single
+quotes), as well as alphabetization errors in the index, have been
+corrected without notes. Other corrections of
+printing errors are noted using mouse-hover popups
+<ins class="correction" title="description of change">like this</ins>.
+Variation in the spelling of the names Jonson/Johnson, Spenser/Spencer,
+and Ralegh/Raleigh is as in the original.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h1>ENGLISH<br />
+PAST AND PRESENT<br /><br /></h1>
+
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D.<br /><br /></h2>
+
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Edited with Emendations</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">BY</p>
+
+<p class="center">A. SMYTHE PALMER, D.D.<br /><br /></p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Author of ‘The Folk and their Word-lore,’ ‘Folk-Etymology,’
+‘Babylonian Influence on the Bible,’ etc.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 114px;">
+<img src="images/pmark.png" width="114" height="153" alt="" title="Printer’s Mark" />
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">London</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">GEORGE ROUTLEDGE &amp; SONS, <span class="smcap">Limited</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">NEW YORK: E.&nbsp;P. DUTTON &amp; CO.</p>
+
+<p class="center">1905
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2>EDITOR’S PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>In editing the present volume I have thought it
+well to follow the same rule which I laid down for
+myself in editing <i>The Study of Words</i>, and have
+made no alteration in the text of Dr. Trench’s
+work (the fifth edition). Any corrections or additions
+that seemed to be demanded owing to the
+progress of lexicographical knowledge have been
+reserved for the foot-notes, and these can always
+be distinguished from those in the original by the
+square brackets [thus] within which they are placed.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole more corrections have been required
+in <i>English Past and Present</i> than in <i>The
+Study of Words</i> owing to the sweeping statements
+which involve universal negatives&mdash;statements,
+e.g. that certain words either first came into use,
+or ceased to be employed, at a specific date.
+Nothing short of the combined researches of an
+army of co-operative workers, such as the <i>New
+English Dictionary</i> commanded, could warrant the
+correctness of assertions of this kind, which imply
+an exhaustive acquaintance with a subject so immense
+as the entire range of English literature.</p>
+
+<p>Even the mistakes of a learned man are instructive
+to those who essay to follow in his steps, and
+it is not without use to point them out instead of
+ignoring or expunging them. Thus, when the
+Archbishop falls into the error (venial when he
+wrote) of assuming an etymological connexion
+between certain words which have a specious air
+of kinship&mdash;such as ‘care’ and ‘cura,’ ‘bloom’
+and ‘blossom,’ ‘ghastly’ and ‘ghostly,’
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span>‘brat’ and ‘brood,’ ‘slow’ and ‘slough’&mdash;he
+makes just the mistakes which we would be
+tempted to make ourselves had not Professor
+Skeat and Dr. Murray and the great German
+School of philologists taught us to know better.
+Our plan, therefore, has been to leave such errors in
+the text and point out the better way in the notes.
+In other words, we have treated the Archbishop’s
+work as a classic, and the occasional emendations
+in the notes serve to mark the progress of half a
+century of etymological investigation. It is hardly
+necessary to point out that the chronological landmarks
+occurring here and there need an obvious
+equation of time to make them correct for the
+present year of grace, e.g. ‘lately,’ when it occurs,
+must be understood to mean at least fifty years ago,
+and a similar addition must be made to other
+time-points when they present themselves.</p>
+
+<p class="signature"><span class="smcap">A. Smythe Palmer</span>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE_TO_THE_FIRST_EDITION" id="PREFACE_TO_THE_FIRST_EDITION"></a>PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION</h2>
+
+
+<p>A series of four lectures which I delivered last
+spring to the pupils of the King’s College School,
+London, supplied the foundation to this present
+volume. These lectures, which I was obliged to
+prepare in haste, on a brief invitation, and under
+the pressure of other engagements, being subsequently
+enlarged and recast, were delivered in the
+autumn somewhat more nearly in their present
+shape to the pupils of the Training School, Winchester;
+with only those alterations, omissions
+and additions, which the difference in my hearers
+suggested as necessary or desirable. I have found
+it convenient to keep the lectures, as regards the
+persons presumed to be addressed, in that earlier
+form which I had sketched out at the first; and,
+inasmuch as it helps much to keep lectures vivid
+and real that one should have some well defined
+audience, if not actually before one, yet before the
+mind’s eye, to suppose myself throughout addressing
+my first hearers. I have supposed myself, that
+is, addressing a body of young Englishmen, all with
+a fair amount of classical knowledge (in my explanations
+I have sometimes had others with less
+than theirs in my eye), not wholly unacquainted
+with modern languages; but not yet with any
+special designation as to their future work; having
+only as yet marked out to them the duty in general
+of living lives worthy of those who have England<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>
+for their native country, and English for their
+native tongue. To lead such through a more intimate
+knowledge of this into a greater love of that,
+has been a principal aim which I have set before
+myself throughout.</p>
+
+<p>In a few places I have been obliged again to go
+over ground which I had before gone over in a
+little book, <i>On the Study of Words</i>; but I believe
+that I have never merely repeated myself, nor
+given to the readers of my former work and now
+of this any right to complain that I am compelling
+them to travel a second time by the same paths.
+At least it has been my endeavour, whenever I
+have found myself at points where the two books
+come necessarily into contact, that what was
+treated with any fulness before, should be here
+touched on more lightly; and only what there was
+slightly handled, should here be entered on at large.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="chapter"><a href="#I">LECTURE I</a>
+  <span class="smaller right">PAGE</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#I">English a Composite Language</a></td>
+  <td class="right">1</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="chapter"><a href="#II">LECTURE II</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#II">Gains of the English Language</a></td>
+  <td class="right">40</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="chapter"><a href="#III">LECTURE III</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#III">Diminutions of the English Language</a></td>
+  <td class="right">113</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="chapter"><a href="#IV">LECTURE IV</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#IV">Changes in the Meaning of English Words</a></td>
+  <td class="right">176</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="chapter"><a href="#V">LECTURE V</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#V">Changes in the Spelling of English Words</a></td>
+  <td class="right">212</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Index">Index</a></td><td class="right">257</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2><a name="ENGLISH" id="ENGLISH"></a>ENGLISH<br />
+PAST AND PRESENT</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE</h3>
+
+
+<p>“A very slight acquaintance with the history
+of our own language will teach us that the speech
+of Chaucer’s age is not the speech of Skelton’s, that
+there is a great difference between the language
+under Elizabeth and that under Charles the
+First, between that under Charles the First and
+Charles the Second, between that under Charles
+the Second and Queen Anne; that considerable
+changes had taken place between the beginning
+and the middle of the last century, and that
+Johnson and Fielding did not write altogether
+as we do now. For in the course of a nation’s
+progress new ideas are evermore mounting above
+the horizon, while others are lost sight of and
+sink below it: others again change their form and
+aspect: others which seemed united, split into
+parts. And as it is with ideas, so it is with their
+symbols, words. New ones are perpetually coined<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
+to meet the demand of an advanced understanding,
+of new feelings that have sprung out of the
+decay of old ones, of ideas that have shot forth
+from the summit of the tree of our knowledge;
+old words meanwhile fall into disuse and become
+obsolete; others have their meaning narrowed
+and defined; synonyms diverge from each other
+and their property is parted between them; nay,
+whole classes of words will now and then be thrown
+overboard, as new feelings or perceptions of
+analogy gain ground. A history of the language
+in which all these vicissitudes should be pointed
+out, in which the introduction of every new word
+should be noted, so far as it is possible&mdash;and
+much may be done in this way by laborious and
+diligent and judicious research&mdash;in which such
+words as have become obsolete should be followed
+down to their final extinction, in which all the
+most remarkable words should be traced through
+their successive phases of meaning, and in which
+moreover the causes and occasions of these changes
+should be explained, such a work would not only
+abound in entertainment, but would throw more
+light on the development of the human mind
+than all the brainspun systems of metaphysics
+that ever were written”.</p>
+
+<hr class="small" />
+
+<p>These words, which thus far are not my own,
+but the words of a greatly honoured friend and
+teacher, who, though we behold him now no
+more, still teaches, and will teach, by the wisdom
+of his writings, and the nobleness of his life (they
+are words of Archdeacon Hare), I have put in
+the forefront of my lectures; seeing that they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
+anticipate in the way of masterly sketch all which
+I shall attempt to accomplish, and indeed draw
+out the lines of much more, to which I shall not
+venture so much as to put my hand. They are
+the more welcome to me, because they encourage
+me to believe that if, in choosing the English
+language, its past and its present, as the subject
+of that brief course of lectures which I am to
+deliver in this place, I have chosen a subject
+which in many ways transcends my powers, and
+lies beyond the range of my knowledge, it is yet one
+in itself of deepest interest, and of fully recognized
+value. Nor can I refrain from hoping that
+even with my imperfect handling, it is an argument
+which will find an answer and an echo in the
+hearts of all who hear me; which would have
+found this at any time; which will do so especially
+at the present. For these are times which naturally
+rouse into liveliest activity all our latent
+affections for the land of our birth. It is one
+of the compensations, indeed the greatest of all,
+for the wastefulness, the woe, the cruel losses of
+war<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>, that it causes and indeed compels a people
+to know itself a people; leading each one to
+esteem and prize most that which he has in common
+with his fellow countrymen, and not now any
+longer those things which separate and divide
+him from them.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Love of our own Tongue</i></div>
+
+<p>And the love of our own language, what is it in
+fact, but the love of our country expressing
+itself in one particular direction? If the great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
+acts of that nation to which we belong are precious
+to us, if we feel ourselves made greater by their
+greatness, summoned to a nobler life by the
+nobleness of Englishmen who have already lived
+and died, and have bequeathed to us a name
+which must not by us be made less, what exploits
+of theirs can well be nobler, what can more clearly
+point out their native land and ours as having
+fulfilled a glorious past, as being destined for a
+glorious future, than that they should have
+acquired for themselves and for those who come
+after them a clear, a strong, an harmonious, a
+noble language? For all this bears witness to
+corresponding merits in those that speak it, to
+clearness of mental vision, to strength, to harmony,
+to nobleness in them that have gradually formed
+and shaped it to be the utterance of their inmost
+life and being.</p>
+
+<p>To know of this language, the stages which it
+has gone through, the sources from which its
+riches have been derived, the gains which it is now
+making, the perils which have threatened or are
+threatening it, the losses which it has sustained,
+the capacities which may be yet latent in it,
+waiting to be evoked, the points in which it transcends
+other tongues, in which it comes short of
+them, all this may well be the object of worthy
+ambition to every one of us. So may we hope to
+be ourselves guardians of its purity, and not
+corrupters of it; to introduce, it may be, others
+into an intelligent knowledge of that, with which
+we shall have ourselves more than a merely superficial
+acquaintance; to bequeath it to those who
+come after us not worse than we received it our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>selves.
+“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”,&mdash;this
+should be our motto in respect at once of our
+country, and of our country’s tongue.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Duty to our own Tongue</i></div>
+
+<p>Nor shall we, I trust, any of us feel this subject
+to be alien or remote from the purposes which
+have brought us to study within these walls. It
+is true that we are mainly occupied here in
+studying other tongues than our own. The time
+we bestow upon it is small as compared with that
+bestowed on those others. And yet one of our
+main purposes in learning them is that we may
+better understand this. Nor ought any other to
+dispute with it the first and foremost place in our
+reverence, our gratitude, and our love. It has
+been well and worthily said by an illustrious German
+scholar: “The care of the national language
+I consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most
+important privilege of the higher orders of society.
+Every man of education should make it the object
+of his unceasing concern, to preserve his language
+pure and entire, to speak it, so far as is in his
+power, in all its beauty and perfection....
+A nation whose language becomes rude and
+barbarous, must be on the brink of barbarism in
+regard to everything else. A nation which allows
+her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last
+half of her intellectual independence, and testifies
+her willingness to cease to exist”<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>But this knowledge, like all other knowledge
+which is worth attaining, is only to be attained
+at the price of labour and pains. The language
+which at this day we speak is the result of pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>cesses
+which have been going forward for hundreds
+and for thousands of years. Nay more, it is not
+too much to affirm that processes modifying the
+English which at the present day we write and
+speak have been at work from the first day that
+man, being gifted with discourse of reason, projected
+his thought from out himself, and embodied
+and contemplated it in his word. Which things
+being so, if we would understand this language
+as it now is, we must know something of it as it
+has been; we must be able to measure, however
+roughly, the forces, which have been at work upon
+it, moulding and shaping it into the forms which
+it now wears.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time various prudential considerations
+must determine for us how far up we will
+endeavour to trace the course of its history. There
+are those who may seek to trace our language to the
+forests of Germany and Scandinavia, to investigate
+its relation to all the kindred tongues that
+were there spoken; again, to follow it up, till it
+and they are seen descending from an elder stock;
+nor once to pause, till they have assigned to it its
+place not merely in respect of that small group of
+languages which are immediately round it, but in
+respect of all the tongues and languages of the
+earth. I can imagine few studies of a more surpassing
+interest than this. Others, however, must
+be content with seeking such insight into their
+native language as may be within the reach of all
+who, unable to make this the subject of especial
+research, possessing neither that vast compass
+of knowledge, nor that immense apparatus of
+books, not being at liberty to dedicate to it that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
+devotion almost of a life which, followed out to
+the full, it would require, have yet an intelligent
+interest in their mother tongue, and desire to
+learn as much of its growth and history and
+construction as may be reasonably deemed within
+their reach. To such as these I shall suppose
+myself to be speaking. It would be a piece of
+great presumption in me to undertake to speak to
+any other, or to assume any other ground than
+this for myself.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>The Past explains the Present</i></div>
+
+<p>I know there are some, who, when they are
+invited to enter at all upon the past history of the
+language, are inclined to make answer&mdash;“To what
+end such studies to us? Why cannot we leave
+them to a few antiquaries and grammarians?
+Sufficient to us to know the laws of our present
+English, to obtain an accurate acquaintance with
+the language as we now find it, without concerning
+ourselves with the phases through which it has
+previously past”. This may sound plausible
+enough; and I can quite understand a real lover
+of his native tongue, who has not bestowed
+much thought upon the subject, arguing in this
+manner. And yet indeed such argument proceeds
+altogether on a mistake. One sufficient reason
+why we should occupy ourselves with the past of
+our language is, because the present is only intelligible
+in the light of the past, often of a very remote
+past indeed. There are anomalies out of number
+now existing in our language, which the pure logic
+of grammar is quite incapable of explaining;
+which nothing but a knowledge of its historic
+evolutions, and of the disturbing forces which have
+made themselves felt therein, will ever enable us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
+to understand. Even as, again, unless we possess
+some knowledge of the past, it is impossible that
+we can ourselves advance a single step in the
+unfolding of the latent capabilities of the language,
+without the danger of committing some barbarous
+violation of its very primary laws.</p>
+
+<hr class="small" />
+
+<p>The plan which I have laid down for myself,
+and to which I shall adhere, in this lecture and in
+those which will succeed it, is as follows. In this
+my first lecture I will ask you to consider the
+language as now it is, to decompose with me some
+specimens of it, to prove by these means, of what
+elements it is compact, and what functions in it
+these elements or component parts severally
+fulfil; nor shall I leave this subject without asking
+you to admire the happy marriage in our tongue of
+the languages of the north and south, an advantage
+which it alone among all the languages of Europe
+enjoys. Having thus presented to ourselves the
+body which we wish to submit to scrutiny,
+and having become acquainted, however slightly,
+with its composition, I shall invite you to go back
+with me, and trace some of the leading changes to
+which in time past it has been submitted, and
+through which it has arrived at what it now is; and
+these changes I shall contemplate under four
+aspects, dedicating a lecture to each;&mdash;changes
+which have resulted from the birth of new, or the
+reception of foreign, words;&mdash;changes consequent
+on the rejection or extinction of words or powers
+once possessed by the language;&mdash;changes through
+the altered meaning of words;&mdash;and lastly, as not
+unworthy of our attention, but often growing out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
+of very deep roots, changes in the orthography of
+words.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Alterations unobserved</i></div>
+
+<p>I shall everywhere seek to bring the subject
+down to our present time, and not merely call your
+attention to the changes which have been, but to
+those also which are now being, effected. I shall
+not account the fact that some are going on, so to
+speak, before our own eyes, a sufficient ground to
+excuse me from noticing them, but rather an additional
+reason for doing this. For indeed changes
+which are actually proceeding in our own time,
+and which we are ourselves helping to bring about,
+are the very ones which we are most likely to fail
+in observing. There is so much to hide the nature
+of them, and indeed their very existence, that,
+except it may be by a very few, they will often
+pass wholly unobserved. Loud and sudden revolutions
+attract and compel notice; but silent and
+gradual, although with issues far vaster in store,
+run their course, and it is only when their cycle
+is completed or nearly so, that men perceive what
+mighty transforming forces have been at work
+unnoticed in the very midst of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, to apply what I have just affirmed to this
+matter of language&mdash;how few aged persons, let
+them retain the fullest possession of their faculties,
+are conscious of any difference between the spoken
+language of their early youth, and that of their old
+age; that words and ways of using words are
+obsolete now, which were usual then; that many
+words are current now, which had no existence at
+that time. And yet it is certain that so it must be.
+A man may fairly be supposed to remember clearly
+and well for sixty years back; and it needs less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
+than five of these sixties to bring us to the period
+of Spenser, and not more than eight to set us in
+the time of Chaucer and Wiclif. How great a
+change, what vast modifications in our language,
+within eight memories. No one, contemplating
+this whole term, will deny the immensity of the
+change. For all this, we may be tolerably sure
+that, had it been possible to interrogate a series
+of eight persons, such as together had filled up
+this time, intelligent men, but men whose attention
+had not been especially roused to this subject,
+each in his turn would have denied that there had
+been any change worth speaking of, perhaps any
+change at all, during his lifetime. And yet,
+having regard to the multitude of words which
+have fallen into disuse during these four or five
+hundred years, we are sure that there must have
+been some lives in this chain which saw those
+words in use at their commencement, and out of
+use before their close. And so too, of the multitude
+of words which have sprung up in this period,
+some, nay, a vast number, must have come into
+being within the limits of each of these lives. It
+cannot then be superfluous to direct attention to
+that which is actually going forward in our language.
+It is indeed that, which of all is most
+likely to be unobserved by us.</p>
+
+<hr class="small" />
+
+<p>With these preliminary remarks I proceed at
+once to the special subject of my lecture of to-day.
+And first, starting from the recognized fact that
+the English is not a simple but a composite language,
+made up of several elements, as are the
+people who speak it, I would suggest to you the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+profit and instruction which we might derive from
+seeking to resolve it into its component parts&mdash;from
+taking, that is, any passage of an English
+author, distributing the words of which it is made
+up according to the languages from which they
+are drawn; estimating the relative numbers and
+proportions, which these languages have severally
+lent us; as well as the character of the words
+which they have thrown into the common stock
+of our tongue.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Proportions in English</i></div>
+
+<p>Thus, suppose the English language to be divided
+into a hundred parts; of these, to make a rough
+distribution, sixty would be Saxon; thirty would
+be Latin (including of course the Latin which has
+come to us through the French); five would be
+Greek. We should thus have assigned ninety-five
+parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a
+residue, to be divided among all the other languages
+from which we have adopted isolated
+words<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>. And yet these are not few; from our
+wide extended colonial empire we come in contact
+with half the world; we have picked up words
+<ins class="correction" title="missing ‘i’ in original">in</ins> every quarter, and, the English language
+possessing a singular power of incorporating
+foreign elements into itself, have not scrupled to
+make many of these our own<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Oriental Words</i></div>
+
+<p>Thus we have a certain number of Hebrew
+words, mostly, if not entirely, belonging to religious
+matters, as ‘amen’, ‘cabala’, ‘cherub’, ‘ephod’,
+‘gehenna’, ‘hallelujah’, ‘hosanna’, ‘jubilee’,
+‘leviathan’, ‘manna’, ‘Messiah’, ‘sabbath’,
+‘Satan’, ‘seraph’, ‘shibboleth’, ‘talmud’. The
+Arabic words in our language are more numerous;
+we have several arithmetical and astronomical
+terms, as ‘algebra’, ‘almanack’, ‘azimuth’,
+‘cypher’<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>, ‘nadir’, ‘talisman’, ‘zenith’, ‘zero’;
+and chemical, for the Arabs were the chemists,
+no less than the astronomers and arithmeticians
+of the middle ages; as ‘alcohol’, ‘alembic’,
+‘alkali’, ‘elixir’. Add to these the names of
+animals, plants, fruits, or articles of merchandize
+first introduced by them to the notice of Western
+Europe; as ‘amber’, ‘artichoke’, ‘barragan’,
+‘camphor’, ‘coffee’, ‘cotton’, ‘crimson’,
+‘gazelle’, ‘giraffe’, ‘jar’, ‘jasmin’, ‘lake’
+(lacca), ‘lemon’, ‘lime’, ‘lute’, ‘mattress’,
+‘mummy’, ‘saffron’, ‘sherbet’, ‘shrub’, ‘sofa’,
+‘sugar’, ‘syrup’, ‘tamarind’; and some further
+terms, ‘admiral’, ‘amulet’, ‘arsenal’, ‘assassin’,
+‘barbican’, ‘caliph’, ‘caffre’, ‘carat’, ‘divan’,
+‘dragoman’<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>, ‘emir’, ‘fakir’, ‘firman’,
+‘harem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>’,
+‘hazard’, ‘houri’, ‘magazine’, ‘mamaluke’,
+‘minaret’, ‘monsoon’, ‘mosque’, ‘nabob’,
+‘razzia’, ‘sahara’, ‘simoom’, ‘sirocco’, ‘sultan’,
+‘tarif’, ‘vizier’; and I believe we shall
+have nearly completed the list. We have moreover
+a few Persian words, as ‘azure’, ‘bazaar’,
+‘bezoar’, ‘caravan’, ‘caravanserai’, ‘chess’,
+‘dervish’, ‘lilac’, ‘orange’, ‘saraband’, ‘taffeta’,
+‘tambour’, ‘turban’; this last appearing
+in strange forms at its first introduction into the
+language, thus ‘tolibant’ (Puttenham), ‘tulipant’
+(Herbert’s <i>Travels</i>), ‘turribant’ (Spenser),
+‘turbat’, ‘turbant’, and at length ‘turban’.
+We have also a few Turkish, such as ‘chouse’,
+‘janisary’, ‘odalisque’, ‘sash’, ‘tulip’<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>. Of
+‘civet’<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> and
+‘scimitar’<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> I believe it can only be
+asserted that they are Eastern. The following
+are Hindostanee, ‘avatar’, ‘bungalow’, ‘calico’,
+‘chintz’, ‘cowrie’, ‘lac’, ‘muslin’, ‘punch’,
+‘rupee’, ‘toddy’. ‘Tea’, or ‘tcha’, as it was
+spelt at first, of course is Chinese, so too are ‘junk’
+and ‘satin’<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The New World has given us a certain number<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+of words, Indian and other&mdash;‘cacique’ (‘cassique’,
+in Ralegh’s <i>Guiana</i>), ‘canoo’, ‘chocolate’,
+‘cocoa’<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a>, ‘condor’, ‘hamoc’ (‘hamaca’ in Ralegh),
+‘jalap’, ‘lama’, ‘maize’ (Haytian), ‘pampas’,
+‘pemmican’, ‘potato’ (‘batata’ in our earlier
+voyagers), ‘raccoon’, ‘sachem’, ‘squaw’, ‘tobacco’,
+‘tomahawk’, ‘tomata’ (Mexican), ‘wigwam’.
+If ‘hurricane’ is a word which Europe
+originally obtained from the Caribbean islanders<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a>,
+it should of course be included in this list<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a>. A
+certain number of words also we have received,
+one by one, from various languages, which sometimes
+have not bestowed on us more than this
+single one. Thus ‘hussar’ is Hungarian; ‘caloyer’,
+Romaic; ‘mammoth’, of some Siberian
+language;<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> ‘tattoo’, Polynesian; ‘steppe’,
+Tartarian; ‘sago’, ‘bamboo’, ‘rattan’, ‘ourang
+outang’, are all, I believe, Malay words; ‘assegai’<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a>
+‘zebra’, ‘chimpanzee’,
+‘<ins class="correction" title="so in original">fetisch</ins>’, belong to
+different African dialects; the last, however, having
+reached Europe through the channel of the
+Portuguese<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Italian Words</i></div>
+
+<p>To come nearer home&mdash;we have a certain
+num<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>ber
+of Italian words, as ‘balcony’, ‘baldachin’,
+‘balustrade’, ‘bandit’, ‘bravo’, ‘bust’ (it was
+‘busto’ as first used in English, and therefore
+from the Italian, not from the French), ‘cameo’,
+‘canto’, ‘caricature’, ‘carnival’, ‘cartoon’,
+‘charlatan’, ‘concert’, ‘conversazione’, ‘cupola’,
+‘ditto’, ‘doge’, ‘domino’<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a>, ‘felucca’, ‘fresco’,
+‘gazette’, ‘generalissimo’, ‘gondola’, ‘gonfalon’,
+‘grotto’, (‘grotta’ is the earliest form in which
+we have it in English), ‘gusto’, ‘harlequin’<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a>,
+‘imbroglio’, ‘inamorato’, ‘influenza’, ‘lava’,
+‘malaria’, ‘manifesto’, ‘masquerade’ (‘mascarata’
+in Hacket), ‘motto’, ‘nuncio’, ‘opera’,
+‘oratorio’, ‘pantaloon’, ‘parapet’, ‘pedantry’,
+‘pianoforte’, ‘piazza’, ‘portico’, ‘proviso’, ‘regatta’,
+‘ruffian’, ‘scaramouch’, ‘sequin’,
+‘seraglio’, ‘sirocco’, ‘sonnet’, ‘stanza’, ‘stiletto’,
+‘stucco’, ‘studio’, ‘terra-cotta’, ‘umbrella’,
+‘virtuoso’, ‘vista’, ‘volcano’, ‘zany’.
+‘Becco’, and ‘cornuto’, ‘fantastico’, ‘magnifico’,
+‘impress’ (the armorial device upon shields, and
+appearing constantly in its Italian form ‘impresa’),
+‘saltimbanco’ (=&nbsp;mountebank), all once
+common enough, are now obsolete. Sylvester
+uses often ‘farfalla’ for butterfly, but, as far as I
+know, this use is peculiar to him.
+
+<span class="sidenote"><i>Spanish, Dutch and Celtic Words</i></span>
+
+If these are at
+all the whole number of our Italian words, and
+I cannot call to mind any other, the Spanish in the
+language are nearly as numerous; nor indeed
+would it be wonderful if they were more so;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
+our points of contact with Spain, friendly and
+hostile, have been much more real than with Italy.
+Thus we have from the Spanish ‘albino’, ‘alligator’
+(<ins class="correction" title="removed spurious quote mark after ‘lagarto’">el lagarto</ins>),
+‘alcove’<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a>, ‘armada’, ‘armadillo’,
+‘barricade’, ‘bastinado’, ‘bravado’, ‘caiman’,
+‘cambist’, ‘camisado’, ‘carbonado’,
+‘cargo’, ‘cigar’, ‘cochineal’, ‘Creole’, ‘desperado’,
+‘don’, ‘duenna’, ‘eldorado’, ‘embargo’,
+‘flotilla’, ‘gala’, ‘grandee’, ‘grenade’, ‘guerilla’,
+‘hooker’<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>, ‘infanta’, ‘jennet’, ‘junto’, ‘merino’,
+‘mosquito’, ‘mulatto’, ‘negro’, ‘olio’, ‘ombre’,
+‘palaver’, ‘parade’, ‘parasol’, ‘parroquet’,
+‘peccadillo’, ‘picaroon’, ‘platina’, ‘poncho’,
+‘punctilio’, (for a long time spelt ‘puntillo’,
+in English books), ‘quinine’, ‘reformado’,
+‘savannah’, ‘serenade’, ‘sherry’, ‘stampede’,
+‘stoccado’, ‘strappado’, ‘tornado’, ‘vanilla’,
+‘verandah’. ‘Buffalo’ also is Spanish; ‘buff’
+or ‘buffle’ being the proper English word;
+‘caprice’ too we probably obtained rather from
+Spain than Italy, as we find it written ‘capricho’
+by those who used it first. Other Spanish words,
+once familiar, are now extinct. ‘Punctilio’ lives
+on, but not ‘punto’, which occurs in Bacon.
+‘Privado’, signifying a prince’s favourite, one
+admitted to his <i>privacy</i> (no uncommon word in
+Jeremy Taylor and Fuller), has quite disappeared;
+so too has ‘quirpo’ (cuerpo), the name given to a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+jacket fitting close to the <i>body</i>; ‘quellio’ (cuello),
+a ruff or <i>neck</i>-collar; and ‘matachin’, the title of a
+sword-dance; these are all frequent in our early
+dramatists; and ‘flota’ was the constant name
+of the treasure-fleet from the Indies. ‘Intermess’
+is employed by Evelyn, and is the Spanish ‘entremes’,
+though not recognized as such in our
+dictionaries. ‘Mandarin’ and ‘marmalade’ are
+our only Portuguese words I can call to mind. A
+good many of our sea-terms are Dutch, as ‘sloop’,
+‘schooner’, ‘yacht’, ‘boom’, ‘skipper’, ‘tafferel’,
+‘to smuggle’; ‘to wear’, in the sense of veer, as
+when we say ‘<i>to wear</i> a ship’; ‘skates’, too, and
+‘stiver’, are Dutch. Celtic <i>things</i> are for the most
+part designated among us by Celtic words; such
+as ‘bard’, ‘kilt’, ‘clan’, ‘pibroch’, ‘plaid’,
+‘reel’. Nor only such as these, which are all of
+them comparatively of modern introduction, but a
+considerable number, how large a number is yet a
+very unsettled question, of words which at a much
+earlier date found admission into our tongue, are
+derived from this quarter.</p>
+
+<p>Now, of course, I have no right to presume that
+any among us are equipped with that knowledge
+of other tongues, which shall enable us to detect of
+ourselves and at once the nationality of all or most
+of the words which we may meet&mdash;some of them
+greatly disguised, and having undergone manifold
+transformations in the process of their adoption
+among us; but only that we have such helps at
+command in the shape of dictionaries and the
+like, and so much diligence in their use, as will
+enable us to discover the quarter from which the
+words we may encounter have reached us; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
+I will confidently say that few studies of the
+kind will be more fruitful, will suggest more various
+matter of reflection, will more lead you into the
+secrets of the English tongue, than an analysis of
+a certain number of passages drawn from different
+authors, such as I have just now proposed. For
+this analysis you will take some passage of English
+verse or prose&mdash;say the first ten lines of <i>Paradise
+Lost</i>&mdash;or the Lord’s Prayer&mdash;or the 23rd Psalm;
+you will distribute the whole body of words contained
+in that passage, of course not omitting the
+smallest, according to their nationalities&mdash;writing,
+it may be, A over every Anglo-Saxon word, L
+over every Latin, and so on with the others, if
+any other should occur in the portion which you
+have submitted to this examination. When this
+is done, you will count up the <i>number</i> of those
+which each language contributes; again, you will
+note the <i>character</i> of the words derived from each
+quarter.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Two Shapes of Words</i></div>
+
+<p>Yet here, before I pass further, I would observe
+in respect of those which come from the Latin, that
+it will be desirable further to mark whether they
+are directly from it, and such might be marked L&sup1;,
+or only mediately from it, and to us directly from
+the French, which would be L&sup2;, or L at second
+hand&mdash;our English word being only in the second
+generation descended from the Latin, not the child,
+but the child’s child. There is a rule that holds
+pretty constantly good, by which you may determine
+this point. It is this,&mdash;that if a word be
+directly from the Latin, it will not have undergone
+any alteration or modification in its form and
+shape, save only in the termination&mdash;‘innocentia’
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>will have become ‘innocency’, ‘natio’ will
+have become ‘nation’, ‘firmamentum’ ‘firmament’,
+but nothing more. On the other hand,
+if it comes <i>through</i> the French, it will generally be
+considerably altered in its passage. It will have
+undergone a process of lubrication; its sharply
+defined Latin outline will in good part have departed
+from it; thus ‘crown’ is from ‘corona’,
+but though ‘couronne’, and itself a dissyllable,
+‘coroune’, in our earlier English; ‘treasure’
+is from ‘thesaurus’, but through ‘trésor’; ‘emperor’
+is the Latin ‘imperator’, but it was first
+‘empereur’. It will often happen that the
+substantive has past through this process, having
+reached us through the intervention of the French;
+while we have only felt at a later period our want
+of the adjective also, which we have proceeded
+to borrow direct from the Latin. Thus, ‘people’
+is indeed ‘populus’, but it was ‘peuple’ first,
+while ‘popular’ is a direct transfer of a Latin
+vocable into our English glossary. So too ‘enemy’
+is ‘inimicus’, but it was first softened in the
+French, and had its Latin physiognomy to a great
+degree obliterated, while ‘inimical’ is Latin
+throughout; ‘parish’ is ‘paroisse’, but ‘parochial’
+is ‘parochialis’; ‘chapter’ is ‘chapitre’,
+but ‘capitular’ is ‘capitularis’.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Doublets</i></div>
+
+<p>Sometimes you will find in English what I may
+call the double adoption of a Latin word; which
+now makes part of our vocabulary in two shapes;
+‘doppelgängers’ the Germans would call such
+words<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a>.
+There is first the elder word, which
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+French has given us; but which, before it gave, it
+had fashioned and moulded, cutting it short, it
+may be, by a syllable or more, for the French
+devours letters and syllables; and there is the
+later word which we borrowed immediately from
+the Latin. I will mention a few examples; ‘secure’
+and ‘sure’, both from ‘securus’, but one
+directly, the other through the French; ‘fidelity’
+and ‘fealty’, both from ‘fidelitas’, but one
+directly, the other at second-hand; ‘species’
+and ‘spice’, both from ‘species’, spices being
+properly only <i>kinds</i> of aromatic drugs; ‘blaspheme’
+and ‘blame’, both from ‘blasphemare’<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a>, but
+‘blame’ immediately from ‘blâmer’. Add to
+these ‘granary’ and ‘garner’; ‘captain’ (capitaneus)
+and ‘chieftain’; ‘tradition’ and ‘treason’;
+‘abyss’ and ‘abysm’; ‘regal’ and
+‘royal’; ‘legal’ and ‘loyal’; ‘cadence’ and
+‘chance’; ‘balsam’ and ‘balm’; ‘hospital’ and
+‘hotel’; ‘digit’ and ‘doit’<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a>; ‘pagan’ and ‘paynim’;
+‘captive’ and ‘caitiff’; ‘persecute’ and
+‘pursue’; ‘superficies’ and ‘surface’; ‘faction’
+and ‘fashion’; ‘particle’ and ‘parcel’; ‘redemption’
+and ‘ransom’; ‘probe’ and ‘prove’; ‘abbreviate’
+and ‘abridge’; ‘dormitory’ and ‘dortoir’
+or ‘dorter’ (this last now obsolete, but not
+uncommon in Jeremy Taylor); ‘desiderate’ and
+‘desire’; ‘fact’ and ‘feat’; ‘major’ and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+‘mayor’; ‘radius’ and ‘ray’; ‘pauper’ and
+‘poor’; ‘potion’ and ‘poison’; ‘ration’ and
+‘reason’; ‘oration’ and ‘orison’<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a>. I have,
+in the instancing of these named always the Latin
+form before the French; but the reverse I suppose
+in every instance is the order in which the words
+were adopted by us; we had ‘pursue’ before
+‘persecute’, ‘spice’ before ‘species’, ‘royalty’
+before ‘regality’, and so with the others<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation of this greater change which
+the earlier form of the word has undergone, is not
+far to seek. Words which have been introduced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+into a language at an early period, when as yet
+writing is rare, and books are few or none, when
+therefore orthography is unfixed, or being purely
+phonetic, cannot properly be said to exist at all,
+such words for a long while live orally on the lips of
+men, before they are set down in writing; and out
+of this fact it is that we shall for the most part find
+them reshaped and remoulded by the people who
+have adopted them, entirely assimilated to <i>their</i>
+language in form and termination, so as in a little
+while to be almost or quite indistinguishable from
+natives. On the other hand a most effectual check
+to this process, a process sometimes barbarizing
+and defacing, however it may be the only one which
+will make the newly brought in entirely homogeneous
+with the old and already existing, is
+imposed by the existence of a much written language
+and a full formed literature. The foreign
+word, being once adopted into these, can no longer
+undergo a thorough transformation. For the
+most part the utmost which use and familiarity
+can do with it now, is to cause the gradual dropping
+of the foreign termination. Yet this too is not
+unimportant; it often goes far to making a home
+for a word, and hindering it from wearing the appearance
+of a foreigner and
+stranger<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Analysis of English</i></div>
+
+<p>But to return from this digression&mdash;I said just
+now that you would learn very much from observing
+and calculating the proportions in which the
+words of one descent and those of another occur in
+any passage which you analyse. Thus examine
+the Lord’s Prayer. It consists of exactly seventy
+words. You will find that only the following six
+claim the rights of Latin citizenship&mdash;‘trespasses’,
+‘trespass’, ‘temptation’, ‘deliver’, ‘power’,
+‘glory’. Nor would it be very difficult to substitute
+for any one of these a Saxon word. Thus
+for ‘trespasses’ might be
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘substitued’">substituted</ins> ‘sins’; for
+‘deliver’ ‘free’; for ‘power’ ‘might’; for ‘glory’
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>‘brightness’; which would only leave ‘temptation’,
+about which there could be the slightest
+difficulty, and ‘trials’, though we now ascribe to
+the word a somewhat different sense, would in fact
+exactly correspond to it. This is but a small percentage,
+six words in seventy, or less than ten in the
+hundred; and we often light upon a still smaller
+proportion. Thus take the first three verses of the
+23rd Psalm:&mdash;“The Lord is my Shepherd; therefore
+can I lack nothing; He shall feed me in a
+green <i>pasture</i>, and lead me forth beside the waters
+of <i>comfort</i>; He shall <i>convert</i> my soul, and bring me
+forth in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s
+sake”. Here are forty-five words, and only the
+three in italics are Latin; and for every one of
+these too it would be easy to substitute a word of
+Saxon origin; little more, that is, than the proportion
+of seven in the hundred; while, still
+stronger than this, in five verses out of Genesis,
+containing one hundred and thirty words, there are
+only five not Saxon, less, that is, than four in the
+hundred.</p>
+
+<p>Shall we therefore conclude that these are the
+proportions in which the Anglo-Saxon and Latin
+elements of the language stand to one another?
+If they are so, then my former proposal to express
+their relations by sixty and thirty was greatly at
+fault; and seventy and twenty, or even eighty and
+ten, would fall short of adequately representing the
+real predominance of the Saxon over the Latin
+element of the language. But it is not so; the
+Anglo-Saxon words by no means outnumber the
+Latin in the degree which the analysis of those
+passages would seem to imply. It is not that there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
+are so many more Anglo-Saxon words, but that
+the words which there are, being words of more
+primary necessity, do therefore so much more
+frequently recur. The proportions which the
+analysis of the <i>dictionary</i> that is, of the language
+<i>at rest</i>, would furnish, are very different from
+these which I have just instanced, and which the
+analysis of <i>sentences</i>, or of the language <i>in motion</i>,
+gives. Thus if we examine the total vocabulary
+of the English Bible, not more than sixty per cent.
+of the words are native; such are the results
+which the Concordance gives; but in the actual
+translation the native words are from ninety in
+some passages to ninety-six in others per cent<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Anglo-Saxon the Base of English</i></div>
+
+<p>The notice of this fact will lead us to some very
+important conclusions as to the <i>character</i> of the
+words which the Saxon and the Latin severally
+furnish; and principally to this:&mdash;that while the
+English language is thus compact in the main of
+these two elements, we must not for all this regard
+these two as making, one and the other, exactly
+the same <i>kind</i> of contributions to it. On the contrary
+their contributions are of very different character.
+The Anglo-Saxon is not so much, as I have
+just called it, one element of the English language,
+as the foundation of it, the basis. All
+its joints, its whole <i>articulation</i>, its sinews and its
+ligaments, the great body of articles, pronouns,
+conjunctions, prepositions, numerals, auxiliary
+verbs, all smaller words which serve to knit together
+and bind the larger into sentences, these,
+not to speak of the grammatical structure of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
+language, are exclusively Saxon. The Latin may
+contribute its tale of bricks, yea, of goodly and
+polished hewn stones, to the spiritual building;
+but the mortar, with all that holds and binds the
+different parts of it together, and constitutes them
+into a house, is Saxon throughout. I remember
+Selden in his <i>Table Talk</i> using another comparison;
+but to the same effect: “If you look upon
+the language spoken in the Saxon time, and the
+language spoken now, you will find the difference
+to be just as if a man had a cloak which he wore
+plain in Queen Elizabeth’s days, and since, here
+has put in a piece of red, and there a piece of
+blue, and here a piece of green, and there a piece of
+orange-tawny. We borrow words from the French,
+Italian, Latin, as every pedantic man pleases”.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Composite Languages</i></div>
+
+<p>I believe this to be the law which holds good in
+respect of all composite languages. However composite
+they may be, yet they are only so in regard
+of their words. There may be a medley in respect
+of these, some coming from one quarter, some
+from another; but there is never a mixture of
+grammatical forms and inflections. One or other
+language entirely predominates here, and everything
+has to conform and subordinate itself to the
+laws of this ruling and ascendant language. The
+Anglo-Saxon is the ruling language in our present
+English. Thus while it has thought good to drop
+its genders, even so the French substantives which
+come among us, must also leave theirs behind
+them; as in like manner the French verbs must
+renounce their own conjugations, and adapt themselves
+to ours<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a>.
+I believe that a remarkable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
+parallel to this might be found in the language of
+Persia, since the conquest of that country by the
+Arabs. The ancient Persian religion fell with the
+government, but the language remained totally
+unaffected by the revolution, in its grammatical
+structure and character. Arabic vocables, the
+only exotic words in Persian, are found in numbers
+varying with the object and quality, style and
+taste of the writers, but pages of pure idiomatic
+Persian may be written without employing a
+single word from the Arabic.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time the secondary or superinduced
+language, even while it is quite unable to force any
+of its forms on the language which receives its
+words, may yet compel that to renounce a portion
+of its own forms, by the impossibility which is
+practically found to exist of making them fit the
+new comers; and thus it may exert although not
+a positive, yet a negative, influence on the grammar
+of the other tongue. It has been so, as is generally
+admitted, in the instance of our own. “When the
+English language was inundated by a vast influx
+of French words, few, if any, French forms were
+received into its grammar; but the Saxon forms
+soon dropped away, because they did not suit the
+new roots; and the genius of the language, from
+having to deal with the newly imported words in
+a rude state, was induced to neglect the inflections
+of the native ones. This for instance led to the
+introduction of the <i>s</i> as the universal termination
+of all plural nouns, which agreed with the usage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+of the French language, and was not alien from
+that of the Saxon, but was merely an extension
+of the termination of the ancient masculine to
+other classes of nouns”<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>The Anglo-Saxon Element</i></div>
+
+<p>If you wish to convince yourselves by actual
+experience, of the fact which I just now asserted,
+namely, that the radical constitution of the language
+is Saxon, I would say, Try to compose a
+sentence, let it be only of ten or a dozen words,
+and the subject entirely of your choice, employing
+therein only words which are of a Latin derivation.
+I venture to say you will find it impossible, or
+next to impossible to do it; whichever way you
+turn, some obstacle will meet you in the face.
+And while it is thus with the Latin, whole pages
+might be written, I do not say in philosophy or
+theology or upon any abstruser subject, but on
+familiar matters of common everyday life, in
+which every word should be of Saxon extraction,
+not one of Latin; and these, pages in which,
+with the exercise of a little patience and ingenuity,
+all appearance of awkwardness and constraint
+should be avoided, so that it should never occur
+to the reader, unless otherwise informed, that the
+writer had submitted himself to this restraint and
+limitation in the words which he employed, and
+was only drawing them from one section of the
+English language. Sir Thomas Browne has given
+several long paragraphs so constructed. Take
+for instance the following, which is only a little
+fragment of one of them: “The first and foremost
+step to all good works is the dread and fear of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+Lord of heaven and earth, which through the Holy
+Ghost enlighteneth the blindness of our sinful
+hearts to tread the ways of wisdom, and lead our
+feet into the land of blessing”<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a>. This is not
+stiffer than the ordinary English of his time. I
+would suggest to you at your leisure to make these
+two experiments; you will find it, I think, exactly
+as I have here affirmed.</p>
+
+<p>While thus I bring before you the fact that it
+would be quite possible to write English, forgoing
+altogether the use of the Latin portion of the
+language, I would not have you therefore to conclude
+that this portion of the language is of little
+value, or that we could draw from the resources
+of our Teutonic tongue efficient substitutes for all
+the words which it has contributed to our glossary.
+I am persuaded that we could not; and, if we
+could, that it would not be desirable. I mention
+this, because there is sometimes a regret expressed
+that we have not kept our language more free
+from the admixture of Latin, a suggestion made
+that we should even now endeavour to keep under
+the Latin element of it, and as little as possible
+avail ourselves of it. I remember Lord Brougham
+urging upon the students at Glasgow as a help to
+writing good English, that they should do their
+best to rid their diction of long-tailed words in
+‘osity’ and ‘ation’<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a>. He plainly intended to indicate
+by this phrase all learned Latin words, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+words derived from the Latin. This exhortation
+is by no means superfluous; for doubtless there
+were writers of a former age, Samuel Johnson in
+the last century, Henry More and Sir Thomas
+Browne in the century preceding, who gave undue
+preponderance to the learned, or Latin, portion in
+our language; and very much of its charm, of its
+homely strength and beauty, of its most popular
+and truest idioms, would have perished from it,
+had they succeeded in persuading others to write
+as they had written.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Anglo-Saxon Aboriginal</i></div>
+
+<p>But for all this we could <i>almost</i> as ill spare this
+side of the language as the other. It represents
+and supplies needs not less real than the other
+does. Philosophy and science and the arts of a
+high civilization find their utterance in the Latin
+words of our language, or, if not in the Latin, in
+the Greek, which for present purposes may be
+grouped with them. How they should have
+found utterance in the speech of rude tribes,
+which, never having cultivated the things, must
+needs have been without the words which should
+express those things. Granting too that, <i>cœteris
+paribus</i>, when a Latin and a Saxon word offer
+themselves to our choice, we shall generally do
+best to employ the Saxon, to speak of ‘happiness’
+rather than ‘felicity’, ‘almighty’ rather than
+‘omnipotent’, a ‘forerunner’ rather than a ‘precursor’,
+still these latter must be regarded as much
+denizens in the language as the former, no alien
+interlopers, but possessing the rights of citizenship
+as fully as the most Saxon word of them all.
+One part of the language is not to be favoured at
+the expense of the other; the Saxon at the cost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+of the Latin, as little as the Latin at the cost of
+the Saxon. “Both are indispensable; and speaking
+generally without stopping to distinguish as to
+subject, both are <i>equally</i> indispensable. Pathos,
+in situations which are homely, or at all connected
+with domestic affections, naturally moves by Saxon
+words. Lyrical emotion of every kind, which (to
+merit the name of <i>lyrical</i>) must be in the state
+of flux and reflux, or, generally, of agitation, also
+requires the Saxon element of our language. And
+why? Because the Saxon is the aboriginal element;
+the basis and not the superstructure: consequently
+it comprehends all the ideas which are
+natural to the heart of man and to the elementary
+situations of life. And although the Latin often
+furnishes us with duplicates of these ideas, yet the
+Saxon, or monosyllabic part, has the advantage of
+precedency in our use and knowledge; for it is the
+language of the nursery whether for rich or poor,
+in which great philological academy no toleration
+is given to words in ‘osity’ or ‘ation’. There is
+therefore a great advantage, as regards the consecration
+to our feelings, settled by usage and custom
+upon the Saxon strands in the mixed yarn
+of our native tongue. And universally, this may
+be remarked&mdash;that wherever the passion of a
+poem is of that sort which <i>uses</i>, <i>presumes</i>, or
+<i>postulates</i> the ideas, without seeking to extend
+them, Saxon will be the ‘cocoon’ (to speak by
+the language applied to silk-worms), which the
+poem spins for itself. But on the other hand,
+where the motion of the feeling is <i>by</i> and <i>through</i>
+the ideas, where (as in religious or meditative
+poetry&mdash;Young’s, for instance, or Cowper’s), the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very
+tissues of the thinking, there the Latin will predominate;
+and so much so that, whilst the flesh, the
+blood, and the muscle, will be often almost exclusively
+Latin, the articulations only, or hinges
+of connection, will be the Anglo-Saxon”.</p>
+
+<p>These words which I have just quoted are De
+Quincey’s&mdash;whom I must needs esteem the greatest
+living master of our English tongue. And on the
+same matter Sir Francis Palgrave has expressed
+himself thus: “Upon the languages of Teutonic
+origin the Latin has exercised great influence, but
+most energetically on our own. The very early
+admixture of the <i>Langue d’Oil</i>, the never interrupted
+employment of the French as the language
+of education, and the nomenclature created by the
+scientific and literary cultivation of advancing and
+civilized society, have Romanized our speech; the
+warp may be Anglo-Saxon, but the woof is Roman
+as well as the embroidery, and these foreign materials
+have so entered into the texture, that were
+they plucked out, the web would be torn to rags,
+unravelled and destroyed”<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>The English Bible</i></div>
+
+<p>I do not know where we could find a happier
+example of the preservation of the golden mean
+in this matter than in our
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘authorized’">Authorized</ins> Version of the
+Bible. One of the chief among the minor and
+secondary blessings which that Version has conferred
+on the nation or nations drawing spiritual
+life from it,&mdash;a blessing not small in itself, but
+only small by comparison with the infinitely
+higher blessings whereof it is the vehicle to them,&mdash;is
+the happy wisdom, the instinctive tact, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
+which its authors have steered between any futile
+mischievous attempt to ignore the full rights of
+the Latin part of the language on the one side,
+and on the other any burdening of their Version
+with such a multitude of learned Latin terms as
+should cause it to forfeit its homely character,
+and shut up large portions of it from the understanding
+of plain and unlearned men. There is a
+remarkable confession to this effect, to the wisdom,
+in fact, which guided them from above, to
+the providence that overruled their work, an
+honourable acknowledgement of the immense
+superiority in this respect of our English Version
+over the Romish, made by one now, unhappily,
+familiar with the latter, as once he was with our
+own. Among those who have recently abandoned
+the communion of the English Church one has
+exprest himself in deeply touching tones of lamentation
+over all, which in renouncing our translation,
+he feels himself to have forgone and lost. These
+are his words: “Who will not say that the uncommon
+beauty and marvellous English of the
+Protestant Bible is not one of the great strongholds
+of heresy in this country? It lives on the
+ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like
+the sound of church bells, which the convert
+hardly knows how he can forgo. Its felicities
+often seem to be almost things rather than mere
+words. It is part of the national mind, and the
+anchor of national seriousness.... The memory
+of the dead passes into it. The potent
+traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its
+verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of
+a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>presentative
+of his best moments, and all that
+there has been about him of soft and gentle and
+pure and penitent and good speaks to him for
+ever out of his English Bible.... It is his
+sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and
+controversy never soiled. In the length and
+breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with
+one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual
+biography is not in his Saxon Bible”<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>The Rhemish Bible</i></div>
+
+<p>Such are his touching words; and certainly one
+has only to compare this version of ours with the
+Rhemish, and the transcendent excellence of our
+own reveals itself at once. I am not extolling
+now its superior scholarship; its greater freedom
+from by-ends; as little would I urge the fact that
+one translation is from the original Greek, the
+other from the Latin Vulgate, and thus the translation
+of a translation, often reproducing the mistakes
+of that translation; but, putting aside all
+considerations such as these, I speak only here of
+the superiority of the diction in which the meaning,
+be it correct or incorrect, is conveyed to English
+readers. Thus I open the Rhemish version at
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘Galations’">Galatians</ins>
+v. 19, where the long list of the “works
+of the flesh”, and of the “fruit of the Spirit”,
+is given. But what could a mere English reader
+make of words such as these&mdash;‘impudicity’,
+‘ebrieties’, ‘comessations’, ‘longanimity’, all
+which occur in that passage? while our Version for
+‘ebrieties’ has ‘drunkenness’, for ‘comessations’
+has ‘revellings’, and so also for ‘longanimity’
+‘longsuffering’. Or set over against one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+another such phrases as these,&mdash;in the Rhemish,
+“the exemplars of the celestials” (Heb. ix. 23),
+but in ours, “the patterns of things in the heavens”.
+Or suppose if, instead of the words <i>we</i> read at
+Heb. xiii. 16, namely “To do good and to communicate
+forget not; for with such sacrifices
+God is well pleased”, we read as follows, which
+are the words of the Rhemish, “Beneficence and
+communication do not forget; for with such hosts
+God is promerited”!&mdash;Who does not feel that if
+our Version had been composed in such Latin-English
+as this, had abounded in words like
+‘odible’, ‘suasible’, ‘exinanite’, ‘contristate’,
+‘postulations’, ‘coinquinations’, ‘agnition’, ‘zealatour’,
+all, with many more of the same mint,
+in the Rhemish Version, our loss would have been
+great and enduring, one which would have searched
+into the whole religious life of our people, and been
+felt in the very depths of the national mind<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a>?</p>
+
+<p>There was indeed something still deeper than
+love of sound and genuine English at work in our
+Translators, whether they were conscious of it or
+not, which hindered them from presenting the
+Scriptures to their fellow-countrymen dressed out
+in such a semi-Latin garb as this. The Reformation,
+which they were in this translation so
+mightily strengthening and confirming, was just a
+throwing off, on the part of the Teutonic nations,
+of that everlasting pupilage in which Rome would
+have held them; an assertion at length that they
+were come to full age, and that not through her,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
+but directly through Christ, they would address
+themselves unto God. The use of the Latin
+language as the language of worship, as the language
+in which the Scriptures might alone be
+read, had been the great badge of servitude, even
+as the Latin habits of thought and feeling which
+it promoted had been the great helps to the continuance
+of this servitude, through long ages. It
+lay deep then in the very nature of their cause
+that the Reformers should develop the Saxon, or
+essentially national, element in the language;
+while it was just as natural that the Roman Catholic
+translators, if they must translate the Scriptures
+into English at all, should yet translate
+them into such English as should bear the nearest
+possible resemblance to the Latin Vulgate, which
+Rome with a very deep wisdom of this world
+would gladly have seen as the only one in the
+hands of the faithful.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Future of the English Language</i></div>
+
+<p>Let me again, however, recur to the fact that
+what our Reformers did in this matter, they did
+without exaggeration; even as they had shown the
+same wise moderation in still higher matters.
+They gave to the Latin side of the language its
+rights, though they would not suffer it to encroach
+upon and usurp those of the Teutonic part of the
+language. It would be difficult not to believe,
+even if many outward signs said not the same,
+that great things are in store for the one language
+of Europe which thus serves as connecting link
+between the North and the South, between the
+languages spoken by the Teutonic nations of
+the North and by the Romance nations of the
+South; which holds on to and partakes of both;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+which is as a middle term between them<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a>.
+<ins class="correction" title="so in original">There
+are who</ins> venture to hope that the English Church,
+being in like manner double-fronted, looking on
+the one side toward Rome, being herself truly
+Catholic, looking on the other towards the Protestant
+communions, being herself also protesting
+and reforming, may yet in the providence of God
+have an important part to play for the reconciling
+of a divided Christendom. And if this ever
+should be so, if, notwithstanding our sins and
+unworthiness, so blessed a task should be in store
+for her, it will not be a small help and assistance
+thereunto, that the language in which her mediation
+will be effected is one wherein both parties
+may claim their own, in which neither will feel
+that it is receiving the adjudication of a stranger,
+of one who must be an alien from its deeper
+thoughts and habits, because an alien from its
+words, but a language in which both must recognize
+very much of that which is deepest and most
+precious of their own.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Jacob Grimm on English</i></div>
+
+<p>Nor is this prerogative which I have just claimed
+for our English the mere dream and fancy of
+patriotic vanity. The scholar who in our days
+is most profoundly acquainted with the great group
+of the Gothic languages in Europe, and a devoted
+lover, if ever there was such, of his native German,
+I mean Jacob Grimm, has expressed himself very
+nearly to the same effect, and given the palm over
+all to our English in words which you will not
+grudge to hear quoted, and with which I shall bring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+this lecture to a close. After ascribing to our
+language “a veritable power of expression, such
+as perhaps never stood at the command of any
+other language of men”, he goes on to say, “Its
+highly spiritual genius, and wonderfully happy
+development and condition, have been the result
+of a surprisingly intimate union of the two noblest
+languages in modern Europe, the Teutonic and the
+Romance&mdash;It is well known in what relation these
+two stand to one another in the English tongue;
+the former supplying in far larger proportion the
+material groundwork, the latter the spiritual conceptions.
+In truth the English language, which
+by no mere accident has produced and upborne
+the greatest and most predominant poet of modern
+times, as distinguished from the ancient classical
+poetry (I can, of course, only mean Shakespeare),
+may with all right be called a world-language;
+and like the English people, appears destined
+hereafter to prevail with a sway more extensive
+even than its present over all the portions of the
+globe<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a>.
+For in wealth, good sense, and
+closeness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+of structure no other of the languages at this day
+spoken deserves to be compared with it&mdash;not even
+our German, which is torn, even as we are torn,
+and must first rid itself of many defects, before
+it can enter boldly into the lists, as a competitor
+with the English”<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a>.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a>
+These lectures were first delivered during the Russian
+War. [See De Quincey to the same effect, <i>Works</i>, 1862,
+vol. iv. pp. vii, 286.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a>
+F. Schlegel, <i>History of Literature, Lecture 10</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a>
+[If dictionary words be counted as apart from the
+spoken language, the proportion of the component elements
+of English is very different. M. Müller quotes a
+calculation which makes the classical element about
+68 per cent, the Teutonic about 30, and miscellaneous
+about 2 (<i>Science of Language</i>, 8th ed. i, 89). See Skeat,
+<i>Principles of Eng. Etymology</i>, ii, 15 <i>seq.</i>, and <i>infra</i>
+<a href="#Page_25">p. 25</a>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a>
+[What here follows should be compared with the
+fuller and more accurate lists of words borrowed from
+foreign sources given by Prof. Skeat in his larger <i>Etymolog.
+Dictionary</i>, 759 <i>seq.</i>; and more completely in his <i>Principles
+of Eng. Etymology</i>, 2nd ser. 294-440.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a>
+Yet see J. Grimm, <i>Deutsche Mythologie</i>, p. 985.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a>
+The word hardly deserves to be called English, yet
+in Pope’s time it had made some progress toward naturalization.
+Of a real or pretended polyglottist, who
+might thus have served as an universal <i>interpreter</i>, he
+says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Pity you was not <i>druggerman</i> at Babel”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>‘Truckman’, or more commonly ‘truchman’, familiar
+to all readers of our early literature, is only another form
+of this, one which probably has come to us through
+‘turcimanno’, the Italian form of the word. [See my
+<i>Folk and their Word-Lore</i>, p. 19].</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a>
+[‘Tulip’, at first spelt <i>tulipan</i>, is really the same word
+as <i>turban</i> (<i>tulipant</i> just above), which the flower was
+thought to resemble (Persian <i>dulband</i>).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a>
+[Ultimately from the Arabic <i>zabād</i> (N.E.D.).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a>
+[Apparently to be traced to the Persian <i>shim-shír</i> or
+<i>sham-shír</i> (“lion’s-nail”), a crooked sword (Skeat).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a>
+[Rather through the French from low Latin <i>satinus</i>
+or <i>setinus</i>, a fabric made of <i>seta</i>, silk. But Yule holds
+that it may be from Zayton or Zaitun (in Fokien, China),
+an important emporium of Western trade in the Middle
+Ages (<i>Hobson-Jobson</i>, 602).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a>
+[Probably intended for <i>cacao</i>, which is Mexican.
+<i>Cocoa</i>, the nut, is from Portuguese <i>coco</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a>
+See Washington Irving, <i>Life and Voyages of Columbus</i>,
+b. 8, c. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a>
+[It is from the Haytian <i>Hurakan</i>, the storm-god
+(<i>The Folk and their Word-Lore</i>, 90).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a>
+[From old Russian <i>mammot</i>, whence modern Russian
+<i>mamant</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a>
+[‘Assagai’ is from the Arabic <i>az-</i> (<i>al-</i>) <i>zaghāyah</i>, ‘the
+<i>zagāyah</i>’, a Berber name for a lance (N.E.D.).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a>
+[This puts the cart before the horse. ‘Fetish’ is
+really the Portuguese word <i>feitiço</i>, artificial, made-up,
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘facititious’">factitious</ins>
+(Latin <i>factitius</i>), applied to African amulets
+or idols.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a>
+[‘Domino’ is Spanish rather than Italian (Skeat,
+<i>Principles</i>, ii, 312).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a>
+[‘Harlequin’ appears to be an older word in French
+than in Italian (<i>ibid.</i>).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a>
+On the question whether this ought to have been
+included among the Arabic, see Diez, <i>Wörterbuch d.
+Roman. Sprachen</i>, p. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a>
+Not in our dictionaries; but a kind of coasting
+vessel well known to seafaring men, the Spanish ‘urca’;
+thus in Oldys’ <i>Life of Raleigh</i>: “Their galleons, galleasses,
+gallies, <i>urcas</i>, and zabras were miserably shattered”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a>
+[A valuable list of such doublets is given by
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘Pro f’">Prof.</ins>
+Skeat in his large <i>Etymological Dictionary</i>, p. 772 <i>seq.</i>]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a>
+This particular instance of double adoption, of
+‘dimorphism’ as Latham calls it, ‘dittology’ as Heyse,
+recurs in Italian, ‘bestemmiare’ and ‘biasimare’; and
+in Spanish, ‘blasfemar’ and ‘lastimar’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a>
+[‘Doit’, a small coin (Dutch <i>duit</i>) has no relation to,
+‘digit’. Was the author thinking of old French <i>doit</i>,
+a finger, from Latin <i>digitus</i>?]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a>
+Somewhat different from this, yet itself also curious,
+is the passing of an Anglo-Saxon word in two different
+forms into English, and continuing in both; thus ‘desk’
+and ‘dish’, both the Anglo-Saxon ‘disc’ [a loan-word
+from Latin <i>discus</i>, Greek <i>diskos</i>] the German ‘tisch’;
+‘beech’ and ‘book’, both the Anglo-Saxon ‘boc’, our
+first books being <i>beechen</i> tablets (see Grimm, <i>Wörterbuch</i>,
+s. vv. ‘Buch’, ‘Buche’); ‘girdle’ and ‘kirtle’; both
+of them corresponding to the German ‘gürtel’; already
+in Anglo-Saxon a double spelling, ‘gyrdel’, ‘cyrtel’,
+had prepared for the double words; so too ‘haunch’
+and ‘hinge’; ‘lady’ and ‘lofty’ [these last three instances
+are not doublets at all, being quite unrelated; see Skeat,
+s. vv.]; ‘shirt’, and ‘skirt’; ‘black’ and ‘bleak’; ‘pond’
+and ‘pound’; ‘deck’ and ‘thatch’; ‘deal’ and ‘dole’;
+‘weald’ and ‘wood’†; ‘dew’ and ‘thaw’†; ‘wayward’
+and ‘awkward’†; ‘dune’ and ‘down’; ‘hood’ and
+‘hat’†; ‘ghost’ and ‘gust’†; ‘evil’ and ‘ill’†;
+‘mouth’ and ‘moth’†; ‘hedge’ and ‘hay’.</p>
+
+<p>[All these suggested doublets which I have obelized
+must be dismissed as untenable.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a>
+We have in the same way double adoptions from the
+Greek, one direct, at least as regards the forms; one
+modified by its passage through some other language;
+thus, ‘adamant’ and ‘diamond’; ‘monastery’ and
+‘minster’; ‘scandal’ and ‘slander’; ‘theriac’ and
+‘treacle’; ‘asphodel’ and ‘daffodil’; ‘presbyter’ and
+‘priest’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a>
+The French itself has also a double adoption, or as
+perhaps we should more accurately call it there, a double
+formation, from the Latin, and such as quite bears out
+what has been said above: one going far back in the
+history of the language, the other belonging to a later
+and more literary period; on which subject there are
+some admirable remarks by Génin, <i>Récréations Philologiques</i>,
+vol. i. pp. 162-66; and see Fuchs, <i>Die Roman.
+Sprachen</i>, p. 125. Thus from ‘separare’ is derived
+‘sevrer’, to separate the child from its mother’s breast,
+to wean, but also ‘séparer’, without this special sense;
+from ‘pastor’, ‘pâtre’, a shepherd in the literal, and
+‘pasteur’ the same in a tropical, sense; from ‘catena’,
+‘chaîne’ and ‘cadène’; from ‘fragilis’, ‘frêle’ and
+‘fragile’; from ‘pensare’, ‘peser’ and ‘penser’; from
+‘gehenna’, ‘gêne’ and ‘géhenne’; from ‘captivus’,
+‘chétif’ and ‘captif’; from ‘nativus’, ‘naïf’ and
+‘natif’; from ‘designare’, ‘dessiner’ and ‘designer’;
+from ‘decimare’, ‘dîmer’ and ‘décimer’; from ‘consumere’,
+‘consommer’ and ‘consumer’; from ‘simulare’,
+‘sembler’ and ‘simuler’; from the low Latin, ‘disjejunare’,
+‘dîner’ and ‘déjeûner’; from ‘acceptare’,
+‘acheter’ and ‘accepter’; from ‘homo’, ‘on’ and
+‘homme’; from ‘paganus’, ‘payen’ and ‘paysan’ [the
+latter from ‘pagensis’]; from ‘obedientia’, ‘obéissance’
+and ‘obédience’; from ‘strictus’, ‘étroit’ and ‘strict’;
+from ‘sacramentum’, ‘serment’ and ‘sacrement’;
+from ‘ministerium’, ‘métier’ and ‘ministère’; from
+‘parabola’, ‘parole’ and ‘parabole’; from ‘peregrinus’,
+‘pélerin’ and ‘pérégrin’; from ‘factio’, ‘façon’ and
+‘faction’, and it has now adopted ‘factio’ in a third
+shape, that is, in our English ‘fashion’; from ‘pietas’,
+‘pitié’ and ‘piété’; from ‘capitulum’, ‘chapitre’ and
+‘capitule’, a botanical term. So, too, in Italian, ‘manco’,
+maimed, and ‘monco’, maimed <i>of a hand</i>; ‘rifutáre’,
+to refute, and ‘rifiutáre’, to refuse; ‘dama’ and
+‘donna’, both forms of ‘domina’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a>
+See Marsh, <i>Manual of the English Language</i>, Engl.
+Ed. p. 88 <i>seq.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a>
+W. Schlegel (<i>Indische Bibliothek</i>, vol. i. p. 284):
+Coeunt quidem paullatim in novum corpus peregrina
+vocabula, sed grammatica linguarum, unde petitæ sunt,
+ratio perit.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a>
+J. Grimm, quoted in <i>The Philological Museum</i>
+vol. i. p. 667.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a>
+<i>Works</i>, vol. iv. p. 202.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a>
+[These words are taken from the ‘Whistlecraft’
+of John Hookham Frere:&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Don’t confound the language of the nation<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With long-tail’d words in <i>osity</i> and <i>ation</i>”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p class="citation">(<i>Works</i>, 1872, vol. 1, p. 206).]</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a>
+<i>History of Normandy and England</i>, vol. i, p. 78.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a>
+[F.&nbsp;W. Faber,] <i>Dublin Review</i>, June, 1853.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a>
+There is more on this matter in my book <i>On the
+Authorized Version of the New Testament</i>, pp. 33-35.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a>
+See a paper <i>On the Probable Future Position of the
+English Language</i>, by T. Watts, Esq., in the <i>Proceedings
+of the Philological Society</i>, vol. iv, p. 207.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a>
+A little more than two centuries ago a poet, himself
+abundantly deserving the title of ‘well-languaged’;
+which a cotemporary or near successor gave him, ventured
+in some remarkable lines timidly to anticipate this.
+Speaking of his native tongue, which he himself wrote
+with such vigour and purity, though wanting in the fiery
+impulses which go to the making of a first-rate poet,
+Daniel exclaims:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And who, in time, knows whither we may vent<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This gain of our best glory shall be sent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What worlds in the yet unformèd Occident<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May come refined with the accents that are ours?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or who can tell for what great work in hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The greatness of our style is now ordained?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What mischief it may powerfully withstand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And what fair ends may thereby be attained”?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a>
+<i>Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache</i>, Berlin, 1832, p. 5.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span></p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is not for nothing that we speak of some languages
+as <i>living</i>, of others as <i>dead</i>. All spoken
+languages may be ranged in the first class; for
+as men will never consent to use a language without
+more or less modifying it in their use, will never
+so far forgo their own activity as to leave it
+exactly where they found it, it will therefore,
+so long as it is thus the utterance of human thought
+and feeling, inevitably show itself alive by many
+infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition,
+loss, progress, and decay. A living language
+therefore is one which abundantly deserves this
+name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is by
+living men, a <i>vital</i> formative energy is still at
+work. It is one which is in course of actual evolution,
+which, if the life that animates it be a
+healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating
+to itself what it anywhere finds congenial to its
+own life, multiplying its resources, increasing its
+wealth; while at the same time it is casting off
+useless and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its
+vocabulary words of which it finds no use, rejecting
+from itself by a re-active energy the foreign
+and heterogeneous, which may for a while have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
+been forced upon it. I would not assert that in
+the process of all this it does not make mistakes;
+in the desire to simplify it may let go distinctions
+which were not useless, and which it would have
+been better to retain; the acquisitions which it
+makes are very far from being all gains; it sometimes
+rejects words as worthless, or suffers words
+to die out, which were most worthy to have lived.
+So far as it does this its life is not perfectly healthy;
+there are here signs, however remote, of disorganization,
+decay, and ultimate death; but still it
+lives, and even these misgrowths and malformations,
+the rejection of this good, the taking up
+into itself of that ill, all these errors are themselves
+the utterances and evidences of life. A
+dead language is the contrary of all this. It is
+dead, because books, and not now any generation
+of living men, are the guardians of it, and what
+they guard, they guard without change. Its
+course has been completely run, and it is now
+equally incapable of gaining and of losing. We
+may come to know it better; but in itself it is
+not, and never can be, other than it was when
+it ceased from the lips of men.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>English a Living Language</i></div>
+
+<p>Our own is, of course, a living language still.
+It is therefore gaining and losing. It is a tree in
+which the vital sap is circulating yet, ascending
+from the roots into the branches; and as this
+works, new leaves are continually being put forth
+by it, old are dying and dropping away. I propose
+for the subject of my present lecture to consider
+some of the evidences of this life at work in
+it still. As I took for the subject of my first lecture
+the actual proportions in which the several<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+elements of our composite English are now found
+in it, and the service which they were severally
+called on to perform, so I shall consider in this the
+<i>sources</i> from which the English language has enriched
+its vocabulary, the <i>periods</i> at which it has
+made the chief additions to this, the <i>character</i> of
+the additions which at different periods it has
+made, and the <i>motives</i> which induced it to seek them.</p>
+
+<p>I had occasion to mention in that lecture and
+indeed I dwelt with some emphasis on the fact,
+that the core, the radical constitution of our language,
+is Anglo-Saxon; so that, composite or
+mingled as it must be freely allowed to be, it is only
+such in respect to words, not in respect of construction,
+inflexions, or generally its grammatical
+forms. These are all of one piece; and whatever
+of new has come in has been compelled to conform
+itself to these. The framework is English; only
+a part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this
+filling in, of these its comparatively more recent
+accessions, I now propose to speak.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>The Norman Conquest</i></div>
+
+<p>The first great augmentation by foreign words
+of our Saxon vocabulary, setting aside those which
+the Danes brought us, was a consequence, although
+not an immediate one, of the battle of Hastings,
+and of the Norman domination which Duke
+William’s victory established in our land. And
+here let me say in respect of that victory, in contradiction
+to the sentimental regrets of Thierry and
+others, and with the fullest acknowledgement of
+the immediate miseries which it entailed on the
+Saxon race, that it was really the making of England;
+a judgment, it is true, but a judgment and
+mercy in one. God never showed more plainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
+that He had great things in store for the people
+which should occupy this English soil, than when
+He brought hither that aspiring Norman race.
+At the same time the actual interpenetration of
+our Anglo-Saxon with any large amount of French
+words did not find place till very considerably
+later than this event, however it was a consequence
+of it. Some French words we find very soon after;
+but in the main the two streams of language continued
+for a long while separate and apart, even
+as the two nations remained aloof, a conquering
+and a conquered, and neither forgetting the fact.</p>
+
+<p>Time however softened the mutual antipathies.
+The Norman, after a while shut out from France,
+began more and more to feel that England was
+his home and sphere. The Saxon, recovering
+little by little from the extreme depression which
+had ensued on his defeat, became every day a
+more important element of the new English nation
+which was gradually forming from the coalition
+of the two races. His language partook of his
+elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority.
+French was no longer the only language in which
+a gentleman could speak, or a poet sing. At
+the same time the Saxon, now passing into the
+English language, required a vast addition to its
+vocabulary, if it were to serve all the needs of
+those who were willing to employ it now. How
+much was there of high culture, how many of the
+arts of life, of its refined pleasures, which had been
+strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no
+utterance in Saxon words. All this it was sought
+to supply from the French.</p>
+
+<p>We shall not err, I think, if we assume the great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+period of the incoming of French words into the
+English language to have been when the Norman
+nobility were exchanging their own language for
+the English; and I should be disposed with Tyrwhitt
+to believe that there is much exaggeration in
+attributing the large influx of these into English
+to one man’s influence, namely to Chaucer’s<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a>.
+Doubtless he did much; he fell in with and furthered
+a tendency which already prevailed.
+But to suppose that the majority of French vocables
+which he employed in his poems had never
+been employed before, had been hitherto unfamiliar
+to English ears, is to suppose that his poems
+must have presented to his contemporaries an
+absurd patchwork of two languages, and leaves
+it impossible to explain how he should at once
+have become the popular poet of our nation.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Influence of Chaucer</i></div>
+
+<p>That Chaucer largely developed the language in
+this direction is indeed plain. We have only to
+compare his English with that of another great
+master of the tongue, his contemporary Wiclif, to
+perceive how much more his diction is saturated
+with French words than is that of the Reformer.
+We may note too that many which he and others
+employed, and as it were proposed for admission,
+were not finally allowed and received; so that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+no doubt they went beyond the needs of the language,
+and were here in excess<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a>. At the same
+time this can be regarded as no condemnation of
+their attempt. It was only by actual experience
+that it could be proved whether the language
+wanted those words or not, whether it could
+absorb them into itself, and assimilate them with
+all that it already was and had; or did not require,
+and would therefore in due time reject and put
+them away. And what happened then will happen
+in every attempt to transplant on a large scale
+the words of one language into another. Some
+will take root; others will not, but after a longer
+or briefer period will wither and die. Thus I
+observe in Chaucer such French words as these,
+‘misericorde’, ‘malure’ (malheur), ‘penible’,
+‘ayel’ (aieul), ‘tas’, ‘gipon’, ‘pierrie’ (precious
+stones); none of which, and Wiclif’s ‘creansur’
+(2 Kings iv. 1) as little, have permanently won a
+place in our tongue. For a long time ‘mel’,
+used often by Sylvester, struggled hard for a place
+in the language side by side with honey; ‘roy’
+side by side with king; this last quite obtained
+one in Scotch. It is curious to mark some of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+these French adoptions keeping their ground to
+a comparatively late day, and yet finally extruded:
+seeming to have taken firm root, they have yet
+withered away in the end. Thus it has been,
+for example, with ‘egal’ (Puttenham); with
+‘ouvert’, ‘mot’, ‘ecurie’, ‘baston’, ‘gite’
+(Holland); with ‘rivage’, ‘jouissance’, ‘noblesse’,
+‘tort’ (=&nbsp;wrong), ‘accoil’ (accuellir),
+‘sell’ (=&nbsp;saddle), all occurring in Spenser; with
+‘to serr’ (serrer), ‘vive’, ‘reglement’, used all by
+Bacon; and so with ‘esperance’, ‘orgillous’
+(orgueilleux), ‘rondeur’, ‘scrimer’ (=&nbsp;fencer),
+all in Shakespeare; with ‘amort’ (this also in
+Shakespeare)<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a>, and ‘avie’ (Holland). ‘Maugre’,
+‘congie’, ‘devoir’, ‘dimes’, ‘sans’, and ‘bruit’,
+used often in our Bible, were English once<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a>; when
+we employ them now, it is with the sense that we
+are using foreign words. The same is true of
+‘dulce’, ‘aigredoulce’ (=&nbsp;soursweet), of ‘mur’
+for wall, of ‘baine’ for bath, of the verb ‘to cass’
+(all in Holland), of ‘volupty’ (Sir Thomas Elyot),
+‘volunty’ (Evelyn), ‘medisance’ (Montagu),
+‘petit’ (South), ‘aveugle’, ‘colline’ (both in
+<i>State Papers</i>), and ‘eloign’ (Hacket)<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen when the great influx of French<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+words took place&mdash;that is, from the time of the
+Conquest, although scantily and feebly at the first,
+to that of Chaucer. But with him our literature
+and language had made a burst, which they were
+not able to maintain. He has by Warton been
+well compared to some warm bright day in the
+very early spring, which seems to say that the
+winter is over and gone; but its promise is deceitful;
+the full bursting and blossoming of the springtime
+are yet far off. That struggle with France
+which began so gloriously, but ended so disastrously,
+even with the loss of our whole ill-won
+dominion there, the savagery of our wars of the
+Roses, wars which were a legacy bequeathed to us
+by that unrighteous conquest, leave a huge gap in
+our literary history, nearly a century during which
+very little was done for the cultivation of our
+native tongue, during which it could have made
+few important accessions to its wealth.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Latin Importation</i></div>
+
+<p>The period however is notable as being that
+during which for the first time we received a large
+accession of Latin words. There was indeed
+already a small settlement of these, for the most
+part ecclesiastical, which had long since found their
+home in the bosom of the Anglo-Saxon itself, and
+had been entirely incorporated into it. The fact
+that we had received our Christianity from Rome,
+and that Latin was the constant language of the
+Church, sufficiently explains the incoming of these.
+Such were ‘monk’, ‘bishop’ (I put them in their
+present shapes, and do not concern myself whether
+they were originally Greek or no; they reached <i>us</i>
+as Latin); ‘provost’, ‘minster’, ‘cloister’,
+‘candle’, ‘psalter’, ‘mass’, and the names of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+certain foreign animals, as ‘camel’, or plants or
+other productions, as ‘pepper’, ‘fig’; which are
+all, with slightly different orthography, Anglo-Saxon
+words. These, however, were entirely
+exceptional, and stood to the main body of the
+language not as the Romance element of it does
+now to the Gothic, one power over against another,
+but as the Spanish or Italian or Arabic words in
+it now stand to the whole present body of the
+language&mdash;and could not be affirmed to affect it
+more.</p>
+
+<p>So soon however as French words were imported
+largely, as I have just observed, into the language,
+and were found to coalesce kindly with the native
+growths, this very speedily suggested, as indeed it
+alone rendered possible, the going straight to the
+Latin, and drawing directly from it; and thus in
+the hundred years which followed Chaucer a large
+amount of Latin found its way, if not into our
+speech, yet at all events into our books&mdash;words
+which were not brought <i>through</i> the French, for
+they are not, and have not at any time been,
+French, but yet words which would never have
+been introduced into English, if their way had not
+been prepared, if the French already domesticated
+among us had not bridged over, as it were, the
+gulf, that would have otherwise been too wide
+between them and the Saxon vocables of our
+tongue.</p>
+
+<p>In this period, a period of great depression of
+the national spirit, we may trace the attempt at a
+pedantic latinization of English quite as clearly at
+work as at later periods, subsequent to the revival
+of learning. It was now that a crop of such words<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+as ‘facundious’, ‘tenebrous’, ‘solacious’, ‘pulcritude’,
+‘consuetude’ (all these occur in Hawes),
+with many more, long since rejected by the language,
+sprung up; while other words, good in
+themselves, and which have been since allowed,
+were yet employed in numbers quite out of proportion
+with the Saxon vocables with which they
+were mingled, and which they altogether overtopped
+and shadowed. Chaucer’s hearty English
+feeling, his thorough sympathy with the people,
+the fact that, scholar as he was, he was yet the
+poet not of books but of life, and drew his best
+inspiration from life, all this had kept him, in the
+main, clear of this fault. But in others it is very
+manifest. Thus I must esteem the diction of
+Lydgate, Hawes, and the other versifiers who
+filled up the period between Chaucer and Surrey,
+immensely inferior to Chaucer’s; being all stuck
+over with long and often ill-selected Latin words.
+The worst offenders in this line, as Campbell himself
+admits, were the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
+century. “The prevailing fault”, he says, “of
+English diction, in the fifteenth century, is redundant
+ornament, and an affectation of anglicising
+Latin words. In this pedantry and use of “aureate
+terms” the Scottish versifiers went even
+beyond their brethren of the south.... When
+they meant to be eloquent, they tore up words
+from the Latin, which never took root in the language,
+like children making a mock garden with
+flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which
+speedily wither”<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>To few indeed is the wisdom and discretion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
+given, certainly it was given to none of those, to
+bear themselves in this hazardous enterprise
+according to the rules laid down by Dryden; who
+in the following admirable passage declares the
+motives that induced him to seek for foreign
+words, and the considerations that guided him
+in their selection: “If sounding words are not
+of our growth and manufacture, who shall hinder
+me to import them from a foreign country?
+I carry not out the treasure of the nation which
+is never to return, but what I bring from Italy
+I spend in England. Here it remains and here
+it circulates, for, if the coin be good, it will pass
+from one hand to another. I trade both with
+the living and the dead, for the enrichment of
+our native language. We have enough in England
+to supply our necessity, but if we will have things
+of magnificence and splendour, we must get them
+by commerce. Poetry requires adornment, and
+that is not to be had from our old Teuton monosyllables;
+therefore if I find any elegant word in a
+classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by
+using it myself; and if the public approves of it,
+the bill passes. But every man cannot distinguish
+betwixt pedantry and poetry: every man therefore
+is not fit to innovate. Upon the whole matter
+a poet must first be certain that the word he
+would introduce is beautiful in the Latin; and
+is to consider in the next place whether it will
+agree with the English idiom: after this, he ought
+to take the opinion of judicious friends, such as
+are learned in both languages; and lastly, since
+no man is infallible, let him use this licence very
+sparingly; for if too many foreign words are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+poured in upon us, it looks as if they were designed
+not to assist the natives, but to conquer them”<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Influence of the Reformation</i></div>
+
+<p>But this tendency to latinize our speech was
+likely to receive, and actually did receive, a new
+impulse from the revival of learning, and the
+familiar re-acquaintance with the great masterpieces
+of <ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘antient’">ancient</ins>
+literature which went along
+with this revival. Happily another movement
+accompanied, or at least followed hard on this;
+a movement in England essentially national;
+and which stirred our people at far deeper depths
+of their moral and spiritual life than any mere
+revival of learning could have ever done; I refer,
+of course, to the Reformation. It was only
+among the Germanic nations of Europe, as has
+often been remarked, that the Reformation struck
+lasting roots; it found its strength therefore in
+the Teutonic element of the national character,
+which also it in its turn further strengthened,
+purified, and called out. And thus, though Latin
+came in upon us now faster than ever, and in a
+certain measure also Greek, yet this was not
+without its redress and counterpoise, in the
+cotemporaneous unfolding of the more fundamentally
+popular side of the language. Popular
+preaching and discussion, the necessity of dealing
+with truths the most transcendent in a way to
+be understood not by scholars only, but by
+‘idiots’ as well, all this served to evoke the native
+resources of our tongue; and thus the relative
+proportion between the one part of the language
+and the other was not dangerously disturbed,
+the balance was not destroyed; as it might
+well<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+have been, if only the
+Humanists<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> had been at
+work, and not the Reformers as well.</p>
+
+<p>The revival of learning, which made itself first
+felt in Italy, extended to England, and was operative
+here, during the reigns of Henry the Eighth
+and his immediate successors. Having thus
+slightly anticipated in time, it afterwards ran
+exactly parallel with, the period during which
+our Reformation was working itself out. The
+epoch was in all respects one of immense mental
+and moral activity, and such never leave the
+language of a nation where they found it. Much
+is changed in it; much probably added; for the
+old garment of speech, which once served all
+needs, has grown too narrow, and serves them
+now no more. “Change in language is not, as
+in many natural products, continuous; it is not
+equable, but eminently by fits and starts”; and
+when the foundations of the national mind are
+heaving under the power of some new truth,
+greater and more important changes will find
+place in fifty years than in two centuries of calmer
+or more stagnant existence. Thus the activities
+and energies which the Reformation awakened
+among us here&mdash;and I need not tell you that these
+reached far beyond the domain of our directly
+religious life&mdash;caused mighty alterations in the
+English tongue<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Rise of New Words</i></div>
+
+<p>For example, the Reformation had its scholarly,
+we might say, its scholastic, as well as its popular,
+aspect. Add this fact to the fact of the revived
+interest in classical learning, and you will not
+wonder that a stream of Latin, now larger than
+ever, began to flow into our language. Thus
+Puttenham, writing in Queen Elizabeth’s
+reign<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a>,
+gives a long list of words which, as he declares,
+had been quite recently introduced into the
+language. Some of them are Greek, a few French
+and Italian, but very far the most are Latin.
+I will not give you his whole catalogue, but some
+specimens from it; it is difficult to understand
+concerning some of these, how the language
+should have managed to do without them so
+long; ‘method’, ‘methodical’, ‘function’, ‘nu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>merous’,
+‘penetrate’, ‘penetrable’, ‘indignity’,
+‘savage’, ‘scientific’, ‘delineation’, ‘dimension’&mdash;all
+which he notes to have recently come up;
+so too ‘idiom’, ‘significative’, ‘compendious’,
+‘prolix’, ‘figurative’, ‘impression’, ‘inveigle’,
+‘metrical’. All these he adduces with praise;
+others upon which he bestows equal commendation,
+have not held their ground, as ‘placation’,
+‘numerosity’, ‘harmonical’. Of those neologies
+which he disallowed, he only anticipated in some
+cases, as in ‘facundity’, ‘implete’, ‘attemptat’
+(‘attentat’), the decision of a later day; other
+words which he condemned no less, as ‘audacious’,
+‘compatible’, ‘egregious’, have maintained their
+ground. These too have done the same; ‘despicable’,
+‘destruction’, ‘homicide’, ‘obsequious’,
+‘ponderous’, ‘portentous’, ‘prodigious’, all of
+them by another writer a little earlier condemned
+as “inkhorn terms, smelling too much of the
+Latin”.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>French Neologies</i></div>
+
+<p>It is curious to observe the “words of art”,
+as he calls them, which Philemon Holland, a
+voluminous translator at the end of the sixteenth
+and beginning of the seventeenth century, counts
+it needful to explain in a sort of glossary which
+he appends to his translation of Pliny’s <i>Natural
+History</i><a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a>.
+One can hardly at the present day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+understand how any person who would care to
+consult the book at all would find any difficulty
+with words like the following, ‘acrimony’,
+‘austere’, ‘bulb’, ‘consolidate’, ‘debility’,
+‘dose’, ‘ingredient’, ‘opiate’, ‘propitious’,
+‘symptom’, all which, however, as novelties he
+carefully explains. Some of the words in his
+glossary, it is true, are harder and more technical
+than these; but a vast proportion of them present
+no greater difficulty than those which I have
+adduced<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The period during which this naturalization of
+Latin words in the English Language was going
+actively forward, may be said to have continued
+till about the Restoration of Charles the Second.
+It first received a check from the coming up of
+French tastes, fashions, and habits of thought
+consequent on that event. The writers already
+formed before that period, such as Cudworth
+and Barrow, still continued to write their stately
+sentences, Latin in structure, and Latin in diction,
+but not so those of a younger generation. We
+may say of this influx of Latin that it left
+the language vastly more copious, with greatly
+enlarged capabilities, but perhaps somewhat burdened,
+and not always able to move gracefully
+under the weight of its new acquisitions; for
+as Dryden has somewhere truly said, it is easy
+enough to acquire foreign words, but to know
+what to do with them after you have acquired,
+is the difficulty.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Pedantic Words</i></div>
+
+<p>It might have received indeed most serious
+injury, if <i>all</i> the words which the great writers
+of this second Latin period of our language employed,
+and so proposed as candidates for admission
+into it, had received the stamp of popular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+allowance. But happily it was not so; it was
+here, as it had been before with the French importations,
+and with the earlier Latin of Lydgate
+and Occleve. The re-active powers of the
+language, enabling it to throw off that which
+was foreign to it, did not fail to display themselves
+now, as they had done on former occasions.
+The number of unsuccessful candidates
+for admission into, and permanent naturalization
+in, the language during this period, is
+enormous; and one may say that in almost all
+instances where the Alien Act has been enforced,
+the sentence of exclusion was a just one; it was
+such as the circumstances of the case abundantly
+bore out. Either the word was not idiomatic,
+or was not intelligible, or was not needed, or
+looked ill, or sounded ill, or some other valid
+reason existed against it. A lover of his native
+tongue will tremble to think what that tongue
+would have become, if all the vocables from
+the Latin and the Greek which were then introduced
+or endorsed by illustrious names, had been
+admitted on the strength of their recommendation;
+if ‘torve’ and ‘tetric’ (Fuller), ‘cecity’
+(Hooker), ‘fastide’ and ‘trutinate’ (<i>State Papers</i>),
+‘immanity’ (Shakespeare), ‘insulse’ and ‘insulsity’
+(Milton, prose), ‘scelestick’ (Feltham),
+‘splendidious’ (Drayton), ‘pervicacy’ (Baxter),
+‘stramineous’, ‘ardelion’ (Burton), ‘lepid’ and
+‘sufflaminate’ (Barrow), ‘facinorous’ (Donne),
+‘immorigerous’, ‘clancular’, ‘ferity’, ‘ustulation’,
+‘stultiloquy’, ‘lipothymy’ (<span title="Greek: leipothymia">λειποθυμία</span>),
+‘hyperaspist’ (all in Jeremy Taylor), if ‘mulierosity’,
+‘subsannation’, ‘coaxation’, ‘ludibund<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>ness’,
+‘delinition’, ‘septemfluous’, ‘medioxumous’,
+‘mirificent’, ‘palmiferous’ (all in Henry
+More), ‘pauciloquy’ and ‘multiloquy’ (Beaumont,
+<i>Psyche</i>); if ‘dyscolous’ (Foxe), ‘ataraxy’
+(Allestree), ‘moliminously’ (Cudworth), ‘luciferously’
+(Sir Thomas Browne), ‘immarcescible’
+(Bishop Hall), ‘exility’, ‘spinosity’, ‘incolumity’,
+‘solertiousness’, ‘lucripetous’, ‘inopious’,
+‘eluctate’, ‘eximious’ (all in Hacket), ‘arride’<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a>
+(ridiculed by Ben Johnson), with the hundreds
+of other words like these, and even more monstrous
+than are some of these, not to speak of such
+Italian as ‘leggiadrous’ (a favourite word in
+Beaumont’s <i>Psyche</i>), ‘amorevolous’ (Hacket),
+had not been rejected and disallowed by the true
+instinct of the national mind.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Naturalization of Words</i></div>
+
+<p>A great many too <i>were</i> allowed and adopted,
+but not exactly in the shape in which they first
+were introduced among us; they were made to
+drop their foreign termination, or otherwise
+their foreign appearance, to conform themselves
+to English ways, and only so were finally incorporated
+into the great family of English words<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a>.
+Thus of Greek words we have the following:
+‘pyramis’ and ‘pyramides’, forms often employed
+by Shakespeare, became ‘pyramid’ and
+‘pyramids’; ‘dosis’ (Bacon) ‘dose’; ‘distichon’
+(Holland) ‘distich’; ‘hemistichion’ (North)
+‘hemistich’; ‘apogæon’ (Fairfax) and ‘apogeum’
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>(Browne) ‘apogee’; ‘sumphonia’ (Lodge) ‘symphony’;
+‘prototypon’ (Jackson) ‘prototype’;
+‘synonymon’ (Jeremy Taylor) or ‘synonymum’
+(Hacket), and ‘synonyma’ (Milton, prose),
+became severally ‘synonym’ and ‘synonyms’;
+‘syntaxis’ (Fuller) became ‘syntax’; ‘extasis’
+(Burton) ‘ecstasy’; ‘parallelogrammon’ (Holland)
+‘parallelogram’; ‘programma’ (Warton)
+‘program’; ‘epitheton’ (Cowell) ‘epithet’;
+‘epocha’ (South) ‘epoch’; ‘biographia’ (Dryden)
+‘biography’; ‘apostata’ (Massinger) ‘apostate’;
+‘despota’ (Fox) ‘despot’; ‘misanthropos’ (Shakespeare)
+if ‘misanthropi’ (Bacon) ‘misanthrope’;
+‘psalterion’ (North) ‘psaltery’; ‘chasma’ (Henry
+More) ‘chasm’; ‘idioma’ and ‘prosodia’ (both
+in Daniel, prose) ‘idiom’ and ‘prosody’; ‘energia’,
+‘energy’, and ‘Sibylla’, ‘Sibyl’ (both in
+Sidney); ‘zoophyton’ (Henry More) ‘zoophyte’;
+‘enthousiasmos’ (Sylvester) ‘enthusiasm’; ‘phantasma’
+(Donne) ‘phantasm’; ‘magnes’ (Gabriel
+Harvey) ‘magnet’; ‘cynosura’ (Donne) ‘cynosure’;
+‘galaxias’ (Fox) ‘galaxy’; ‘heros’ (Henry
+More) ‘hero’; ‘epitaphy’ (Hawes) ‘epitaph’.</p>
+
+<p>The same process has gone on in a multitude
+of Latin words, which testify by their terminations
+that they were, and were felt to be, Latin at
+their first employment; though now they are
+such no longer. Thus Bacon uses generally,
+I know not whether always, ‘insecta’ for ‘insects’;
+and ‘chylus’ for ‘chyle’; Bishop Andrews ‘nardus’
+for ‘nard’; Spenser ‘zephyrus’, and not ‘zephyr’;
+so ‘interstitium’ (Fuller) preceded ‘interstice’;
+‘philtrum’ (Culverwell) ‘philtre’; ‘expansum’
+(Jeremy Taylor) ‘expanse’; ‘preludium’ (Beau<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>mont,
+<i>Psyche</i>), ‘prelude’; ‘precipitium’ (Coryat)
+‘precipice’; ‘aconitum’ (Shakespeare) ‘aconite’;
+‘balsamum’ (Webster) ‘balsam’; ‘heliotropium’
+(Holland) ‘heliotrope’; ‘helleborum’ (North)
+‘hellebore’; ‘vehiculum’ (Howe) ‘vehicle’; ‘trochæus’
+and ‘spondæus’ (Holland) ‘trochee’
+and ‘spondee’; and ‘machina’ (Henry More)
+‘machine’. We have ‘intervalla’, not ‘intervals’,
+in Chillingworth; ‘postulata’, not ‘postulates’,
+in Swift; ‘archiva’, not ‘archives’, in
+Baxter; ‘demagogi’, not ‘demagogues’, in
+Hacket; ‘vestigium’, not ‘vestige’, in Culverwell;
+‘pantomimus’ in Lord Bacon for ‘pantomime’;
+‘mystagogus’ for ‘mystagogue’, in Jackson;
+‘atomi’ in Lord Brooke for ‘atoms’;
+‘ædilis’ (North) went before ‘ædile’; ‘effigies’
+and ‘statua’ (both in Shakespeare) before
+‘effigy’ and ‘statue’; ‘abyssus’ (Jackson) before
+‘abyss’; ‘vestibulum’ (Howe) before ‘vestibule’;
+‘symbolum’ (Hammond) before ‘symbol’;
+‘spectrum’ (Burton) before ‘spectre’; while only
+after a while ‘quære’ gave place to ‘query’;
+‘audite’ (Hacket) to ‘audit’; ‘plaudite’ (Henry
+More) to ‘plaudit’; and the low Latin ‘mummia’
+(Webster) became ‘mummy’. The widely extended
+change of such words as ‘innocency’,
+‘indolency’, ‘temperancy’, and the large family
+of words with the same termination, into ‘innocence’,
+‘indolence’, ‘temperance’, and the like,
+can only be regarded as part of the same process
+of entire naturalization.</p>
+
+<p>The plural very often tells the secret of a word,
+and of the light in which it is regarded by those
+who employ it, when the singular, being less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+capable of modification, would have failed to
+do so; thus when Holland writes ‘phalanges’,
+‘bisontes’, ‘ideæ’, it is clear that ‘phalanx’,
+‘bison’, ‘idea’, were still Greek words for him;
+as ‘dogma’ was for Hammond, when he made its
+plural not ‘dogmas’, but ‘dogmata’<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a>; and
+when Spenser uses ‘heroes’ as a trisyllable, it
+plainly is not yet thoroughly English for him<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a>.
+‘Cento’ is not English, but a Latin word used
+in English, so long as it makes its plural not
+‘centos’, but ‘centones’, as in the old anonymous
+translation of Augustin’s <i>City of God</i><a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a>;
+and ‘specimen’, while it makes its plural
+‘specimina’ (Howe). Pope making, as he does,
+‘satellites’ a quadrisyllable in the line</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Why Jove’s <i>satellites</i> are less than Jove”,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>must have felt that he was still dealing with it as
+Latin; just as ‘terminus’, a word which the
+necessities of railways have introduced among us,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+will not be truly naturalized till we use ‘terminuses’,
+and not ‘termini’ for its plural; nor
+‘phenomenon’, till we have renounced ‘phenomena’.
+Sometimes it has been found convenient
+to retain both plurals, that formed according
+to the laws of the classical language, and that
+formed according to the laws of our own, only
+employing them in different senses; thus is it with
+‘indices’ and ‘indexes’, ‘genii’ and ‘geniuses’.</p>
+
+<p>The same process has gone on with words
+from other languages, as from the Italian and
+the Spanish; thus ‘bandetto’ (Shakespeare),
+‘bandito’ (Jeremy Taylor), becomes ‘bandit’;
+‘ruffiano’ (Coryat) ‘ruffian’; ‘concerto’, ‘concert’;
+‘busto’ (Lord Chesterfield) ‘bust’;
+‘caricatura’ (Sir Thomas Browne) ‘caricature’;
+‘princessa’ (Hacket) ‘princess’; ‘scaramucha’
+(Dryden) ‘scaramouch’; ‘pedanteria’ (Sidney)
+‘pedantry’; ‘impresa’ ‘impress’; ‘caprichio’
+(Shakespeare) becomes first ‘caprich’ (Butler),
+then ‘caprice’; ‘duello’ (Shakespeare) ‘duel’;
+‘alligarta’ (Ben Jonson), ‘alligator’; ‘parroquito’
+(Webster) ‘parroquet’; ‘scalada’ (Heylin)
+or ‘escalado’ (Holland) ‘escalade’; ‘granada’
+(Hacket) ‘grenade’; ‘parada’ (J. Taylor)
+‘parade’; ‘emboscado’ (Holland) ‘stoccado’,
+‘barricado’, ‘renegado’, ‘hurricano’ (all in
+Shakespeare), ‘brocado’ (Hackluyt), ‘palissado’
+(Howell), drop their foreign terminations, and
+severally become ‘ambuscade’, ‘stockade’,
+‘barricade’, ‘renegade’, ‘hurricane’, ‘brocade’,
+‘palisade’; ‘croisado’ in like manner (Bacon)
+becomes first ‘croisade’ (Jortin), and then
+‘crusade’; ‘quinaquina’ or ‘quinquina’, ‘quinine’.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>Other slight modifications of spelling, not in
+the termination, but in the body of a word,
+will indicate in like manner its more entire
+incorporation into the English language.
+Thus ‘shash’, a Turkish word, becomes ‘sash’;
+‘colone’ (Burton) ‘clown’<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a>; ‘restoration’ was
+at first spelt ‘rest<i>au</i>ration’; and so long as
+‘vicinage’ was spelt ‘voisinage’<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> (Sanderson),
+‘mirror’ ‘miroir’ (Fuller), ‘recoil’ ‘recule’,
+or ‘career’ ‘carriere’ (both by Holland), they
+could scarcely be considered those purely English
+words which now they are<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there even at this comparatively late
+period of the language awkward foreign words will
+be recast in a more thoroughly English mould;
+‘chirurgeon’ will become ‘surgeon’; ‘hemorrhoid’,
+‘emerod’; ‘squinancy’ will become first
+‘squinzey’ (Jeremy Taylor) and then ‘quinsey’;
+‘porkpisce’ (Spenser), that is sea-hog, or more
+accurately hogfish<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> will be ‘porpesse’, and then
+‘porpoise’, as it is now. In other words the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+attempt will be made, but it will be now too late
+to be attended with success. ‘Physiognomy’ will
+not give place to ‘visnomy’, however Spenser and
+Shakespeare employ this briefer form; nor ‘hippopotamus’
+to ‘hippodame’, even at Spenser’s
+bidding. In like manner the attempt to naturalize
+‘avant-courier’ in the shape of ‘vancurrier’
+has failed. Other words also we meet which have
+finally refused to take a more popular form,
+although such was once more or less current; or,
+if this is too much to say of all, yet hazarded by
+good authors. Thus Holland wrote ‘cirque’, but
+we ‘circus’; ‘cense’, but we ‘census’; ‘interreign’,
+but we ‘interregnum’; Sylvester ‘cest’,
+but we ‘cestus’; ‘quirry’, but we ‘equerry’;
+‘colosse’, but we still ‘colossus’; Golding ‘ure’,
+but we ‘urus’; ‘metropole’, but we ‘metropolis’;
+Dampier ‘volcan’, but this has not superseded
+‘volcano’; nor ‘pagod’ (Pope) ‘pagoda’; nor
+‘skelet’ (Holland) ‘skeleton’; nor ‘stimule’
+(Stubbs) ‘stimulus’. Bolingbroke wrote ‘exode’,
+but we hold fast to ‘exodus’; Burton ‘funge’,
+but we ‘fungus’; Henry More ‘enigm’, but we
+‘enigma’; ‘analyse’, but we ‘analysis’. ‘Superfice’
+(Dryden) has not put ‘superficies’, nor ‘sacrary’
+(Hacket) ‘sacrarium’, nor ‘limbeck’
+‘alembic’, out of use. Chaucer’s ‘potecary’ has
+given way to a more Greek formation ‘apothecary’.
+Yet these and the like must be regarded quite as
+exceptions; the tendency of things is altogether
+the other way.</p>
+
+<p>Looking at this process of the reception of
+foreign words, with their after assimilation in
+feature to our own, we may trace, as was to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
+expected, a certain conformity between the genius
+of our institutions and that of our language. It
+is the very character of our institutions to repel
+none, but rather to afford a shelter and a refuge
+to all, from whatever quarter they come; and after
+a longer or shorter while all the strangers and
+incomers have been incorporated into the English
+nation, within one or two generations have forgotten
+that they were ever ought else than members
+of it, have retained no other reminiscence of
+their foreign extraction than some slight difference
+of name, and that often disappearing or having
+disappeared. Exactly so has it been with the
+English language. No language has shown itself
+less exclusive; none has stood less upon niceties;
+none has thrown open its arms wider, with a fuller
+confidence, a confidence justified by experience,
+that it could make truly its own, assimilate and
+subdue to itself, whatever it received into its
+bosom; and in none has this experiment in a
+larger number of instances been successfully
+carried out.</p>
+
+<hr class="small" />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>French at the Restoration</i></div>
+
+<p>Such are the two great enlargements from
+without of our vocabulary. All other are minor
+and subordinate. Thus the introduction of French
+tastes by Charles the Second and his courtiers
+returning from exile, to which I have just adverted,
+though it rather modified the structure of our sentences
+than the materials of our vocabulary, gave
+us some new words. In one of Dryden’s plays, <i>Marriage
+à la Mode</i>, a lady full of affectation is introduced,
+who is always employing French idioms
+in preference to English, French words rather<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+than native. It is not a little curious that of
+these, thus put into her mouth to render her
+ridiculous, not a few are excellent English now,
+and have nothing far-sought or affected about
+them: for so it frequently proves that what is
+laughed at in the beginning, is by all admitted
+and allowed at the last. For example, to speak
+of a person being in the ‘good graces’ of another
+has nothing in it ridiculous now; the words
+‘repartee’, ‘embarrass’, ‘chagrin’, ‘grimace’, do
+not sound novel and affected now as they all must
+plainly have done at the time when Dryden wrote.
+‘Fougue’ and ‘fraischeur’, which he himself employed&mdash;being,
+it is true, no frequent offender in
+this way&mdash;have not been justified by the same
+success.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Greek Words Naturalized</i></div>
+
+<p>Nor indeed can it be said that this adoption
+and naturalization of foreign words ever ceases in
+a language. There are periods, as we have seen,
+when this goes forward much more largely than at
+others; when a language throws open, as it were,
+its doors, and welcomes strangers with an especial
+freedom; but there is never a time, when one
+by one these foreigners and strangers are not
+slipping into it. We do not for the most part
+observe the fact, at least not while it is actually
+doing. Time, the greatest of all innovators,
+manages his innovations so dexterously, spreads
+them over such vast periods, and therefore brings
+them about so gradually, that often, while effecting
+the mightiest changes, we have no suspicion that
+he is effecting any at all. Thus how imperceptible
+are the steps by which a foreign word is admitted
+into the full rights of an English one; the process<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
+of its incoming often eluding our notice altogether.
+There are numerous Greek words, for example
+which, quite unchanged in form, have in one
+way or another ended in finding a home and
+acceptance among us. We may in almost every
+instance trace step by step the naturalization
+of one of these; and the manner of this singularly
+confirms what has just been said. We can note
+it spelt for a while in Greek letters, and avowedly
+employed as a Greek and not an English vocable;
+then after it had thus obtained a certain allowance
+among us, and become not altogether unfamiliar,
+we note it exchanging its Greek for English letters,
+and finally obtaining recognition as a word
+which however drawn from a foreign source, is
+yet itself English. Thus ‘acme’, ‘apotheosis’,
+‘criterion’, ‘chrysalis’, ‘encyclopedia’, ‘metropolis’,
+‘opthalmia’, ‘pathos’, ‘phenomena’,
+are all now English words, while yet South with
+many others always wrote <span title="Greek: akmê">ἀκμή</span>, Jeremy Taylor
+<span title="Greek: apotheôsis">ἀποθέωσις</span> and
+<span title="Greek: kritêrion">κριτήριον</span>, Henry More
+<span title="Greek: chrysalis">χρυσαλίς</span>,
+Ben Jonson speaks of ‘the knowledge of the
+liberal arts, which the Greeks call
+<span title="Greek: enkyklopadeian">ἐγκυκλοπαδείαν</span>’<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a>,
+Culverwell wrote <span title="Greek: mêtropolis">μητρόπολις</span>
+and <span title="Greek: ophthalmia">ὀφθαλμία</span>, Preston,
+<span title="Greek: phainomena">φαινόμενα</span>&mdash;Sylvester
+ascribes to Baxter,
+not ‘pathos’, but <span title="Greek: pathos">πάθος</span><a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a>.
+<ins class="correction" title="Greek: Êthos;
+original reads ‘Ἡθος’">Ἠθος</ins> is a word at
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+present moment preparing for a like passage
+from Greek characters to English, and certainly
+before long will be acknowledged as an English
+word<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a>.
+The only cause which has hindered
+this for some time past is the misgiving whether
+it will not be read ‘ĕthos,’ and not ‘ēthos,’
+and thus not be the word intended.</p>
+
+<p>Let us trace a like process in some French
+word, which is at this moment becoming English.
+I know no better example than the French ‘prestige’
+will afford. ‘Prestige’ has manifestly no
+equivalent in our own language; it expresses
+something which no single word in English, which
+only a long circumlocution, could express; namely,
+that magic influence on others, which past successes
+as the pledge and promise of future ones, breed.
+The word has thus naturally come to be of very
+frequent use by good English writers; for they do
+not feel that in employing it they are passing by
+as good or a better word of their own. At first
+all used it avowedly as French, writing it in italics
+to indicate this. At the present moment some
+write it so still, some do not; some, that is, regard
+it still as foreign, others consider that it has now
+become English, and obtained a settlement
+among us<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a>.
+Little by little the number of
+those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
+who write it in italics will become fewer and
+fewer, till they cease altogether. It will then
+only need that the accent should be shifted, in
+obedience to the tendencies of the English language,
+as far back in the word as it will go, that
+instead of ‘prestíge’, it should be pronounced
+‘préstige’ even as within these few years instead
+of ‘depót’ we have learned to say ‘dépot’, and its
+naturalization will be complete. I have little
+doubt that in twenty years it will be so pronounced
+by the majority of well educated
+Englishmen<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a>,&mdash;some
+pronounce it so already,&mdash;and that our
+present pronunciation will pass away in the
+same manner as ‘obl<i>ee</i>ge’, once universal, has
+past away, and everywhere given place to
+‘obl<i>i</i>ge’<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Shifting of Accents</i></div>
+
+<p>Let me here observe in passing, that the process
+of throwing the accent of a word back, by way
+of completing its naturalization, is one which
+we may note constantly going forward in our
+language. Thus, while Chaucer accentuates sometimes
+‘natúre’, he also accentuates elsewhere
+‘náture’, while sometimes ‘virtúe’, at other times
+‘<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘vìrtue’">vírtue</ins>’.
+‘Prostrate’, ‘adverse’, ‘aspect’, ‘process’,
+‘insult’, ‘impulse’, ‘pretext’, ‘contrite’,
+‘uproar’, ‘contest’, had all their accent on the
+last syllable in Milton; they have it now on the
+first; ‘cháracter’ was
+‘<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘hcáracter’">charácter</ins>’ with
+Spenser;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
+‘théatre’ was ‘theátre’ with Sylvester; while
+‘acádemy’ was accented ‘académy’ by Cowley
+and Butler<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a>. ‘Essay’ was ‘essáy’ with Dryden
+and with Pope; the first closes an heroic line
+with the word; Pope does the same with ‘barrier’<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a>
+and ‘effort’; therefore pronounced ‘barríer’,
+‘effórt’, by him.</p>
+
+<p>There are not a few other French words which
+like ‘prestige’ are at this moment hovering on the
+verge of English, hardly knowing whether they
+shall become such, or no. Such are ‘ennui’,
+‘exploitation’, ‘verve’, ‘persiflage’, ‘badinage’,
+‘chicane’, ‘finesse’, and others; all of them often
+employed by us,&mdash;and it is out of such frequent
+employment that adoption proceeds,&mdash;because
+expressing shades of meaning not expressed by any
+words of our own<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a>. Some of these, we may confidently
+anticipate, will complete their naturalization;
+others will after a time retreat again, and
+become for us avowedly French. ‘Solidarity’, a
+word which we owe to the French Communists,
+and which signifies a fellowship in gain and loss,
+in honour and dishonour, in victory and defeat, a
+being, so to speak, all in the same bottom, is so
+convenient, that unattractive as confessedly it is,
+it will be in vain to struggle against its reception.
+The newspapers already have it, and books will
+not long exclude it; not to say that it has esta<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>blished
+itself in German, and probably in other
+European languages as well.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Greek in English</i></div>
+
+<p>Greek and Latin words also we still continue to
+adopt, although now no longer in troops and companies,
+but only one by one. With the lively
+interest which always has been felt in classical
+studies among us, and which will continue to be
+felt, so long as any greatness and nobleness survive
+in our land, it must needs be that accessions
+from these quarters would never cease altogether.
+I do not refer here to purely scientific terms;
+these, so long as they continue such, and do not
+pass beyond the threshold of the science or sciences
+for the use of which they were invented, being
+never heard on the lips, or employed in the writings,
+of any but the cultivators of these sciences, have
+no right to be properly called words at all. They
+are a kind of shorthand of the science, or algebraic
+notation; and will not find place in a dictionary
+of the language, constructed upon true principles,
+but rather in a technical dictionary apart by themselves.
+Of these, compelled by the advances of
+physical science, we have coined multitudes out of
+number in these later times, fashioning them
+mainly from the Greek, no other language within
+our reach yielding itself at all so easily to our
+needs.</p>
+
+<p>Of non-scientific words, both Greek and Latin,
+some have made their way among us quite in
+these latter times. Burke in the House of Commons
+is said to have been the first who employed
+the word ‘inimical’<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a>.
+He also launched the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
+verb ‘to spheterize’ in the sense of to appropriate
+or make one’s own; but this without success.
+Others have been more fortunate; ‘æsthetic’ we
+have got indeed <i>through</i> the Germans, but <i>from</i>
+the Greeks. Tennyson has given allowance to
+‘æon’<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a>;
+and ‘myth’ is a deposit which wide
+and far-reaching controversies have left in the
+popular language. ‘Photography’ is an example
+of what I was just now speaking of&mdash;namely, a
+scientific word which has travelled beyond the
+limits of the science which it designates and which
+gave it birth. ‘Stereotype’ is another word of
+the same character. It was invented&mdash;not the
+thing, but the word,&mdash;by Didot not very long since;
+but it is now absorbed into healthy general circulation,
+being current in a secondary and figurative
+sense. Ruskin has given to ‘ornamentation’
+the sanction and authority of his name. ‘Normal’
+and ‘abnormal’, not quite so new, are yet of
+recent introduction into the language<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>German Importations</i></div>
+
+<p>When we consider the near affinity between
+the English and German languages, which, if not
+sisters, may at least be regarded as first cousins,
+it is somewhat remarkable that almost since the
+day when they parted company, each to fulfil its
+own destiny, there has been little further com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>merce
+between them in the matter of giving or
+taking. At any rate adoptions on our part
+from the German have been till within this period
+extremely rare. ‘Crikesman’ (Kriegsmann) and
+‘brandschat’ (Brandschatz), with some other
+German words common enough in the <i>State Papers</i>
+of the sixteenth century, found no permanent place
+in the language. The explanation lies in the
+fact that the literary activity of Germany did
+not begin till very late, nor our interest in it till
+later still, not indeed till the beginning of the
+present century. Yet ‘plunder’, as I have
+mentioned elsewhere, was brought back from
+Germany about the beginning of our Civil Wars,
+by the soldiers who had served under Gustavus
+Adolphus and his captains<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a>. And ‘trigger’,
+written ‘tricker’ in <i>Hudibras</i> is manifestly the
+German ‘drücker’<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a>, though none of our dictionaries
+have marked it as such; a word first appearing
+at the same period, it may have reached us through
+the same channel. ‘Iceberg’ (eisberg) also we
+must have taken whole from the German, as, had
+we constructed the word for ourselves, we should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+have made it not ‘ice<i>berg</i>’, but ‘ice-<i>mountain</i>’.
+I have not found it in our earlier voyagers, often
+as they speak of the ‘icefield’, which yet is not
+exactly the same thing. An English ‘swindler’
+is not exactly a German ‘schwindler’, yet the
+notion of the ‘nebulo’, though more latent in
+the German, is common to both; and we must
+have drawn the word from Germany<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> (it is not
+an old one in our tongue) during the course of the
+last century. If ‘<i>life</i>-guard’ was originally, as
+Richardson suggests, ‘<i>leib</i>-garde’, or ‘<i>body</i>-guard’,
+and from that transformed, by the
+determination of Englishmen to make it significant
+in English, into ‘<i>life</i>-guard’, or guard
+defending the <i>life</i> of the sovereign, this will
+be another word from the same quarter. Yet
+I have my doubts; ‘leibgarde’ would scarcely
+have found its way hither before the accession of
+the House of Hanover, or at any rate before the
+arrival of Dutch William with his memorable
+guards; while ‘lifeguard’, in its present shape,
+is certainly an older word in the language; we
+hear often of the ‘lifeguards’ in our Civil Wars;
+as witness too Fuller’s words: “The Cherethites
+were a kind of <i>lifegard</i> to king David”<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Of late our German importations have been
+somewhat more numerous. With several German
+compound words we have been in recent times
+so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+well pleased, that we must needs adopt them into
+English, or imitate them in it. We have not
+always been very happy in those which we have
+selected for imitation or adoption. Thus we might
+have been satisfied with ‘manual’, and not called
+back from its nine hundred years of oblivion that
+ugly and unnecessary word ‘handbook’. And
+now we are threatened with ‘word-building’, as
+I see a book announced under the title of “Latin
+<i>word-building</i>”, and, much worse than this, with
+‘stand-point’. ‘Einseitig’ (itself a modern word,
+if I mistake not, or at any rate modern in its
+secondary application) has not, indeed, been
+adopted, but is evidently the pattern on which we
+have formed ‘onesided’&mdash;a word to which a few
+years ago something of affectation was attached;
+so that any one who employed it at once gave
+evidence that he was more or less a dealer in
+German wares; it has however its manifest conveniences,
+and will hold its ground. ‘Fatherland’
+(Vaterland) on the contrary will scarcely establish
+itself among us, the note of affectation will continue
+to cleave to it, and we shall go on contented
+with ‘native country’ to the
+end<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a>. The most
+successful of these compounded words, borrowed
+recently from the German, is ‘folk-lore’, and the
+substitution of this for popular superstitions, must
+be esteemed, I think, an unquestionable
+gain<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To speak now of other sources from which the
+new words of a language are derived. Of course
+the period when absolutely new roots are generated
+will have past away, long before men begin
+by a reflective act to take any notice of processes
+going forward in the language which they speak.
+This pure productive energy, creative we might
+call it, belongs only to the earlier stages of a
+nation’s existence,&mdash;to times quite out of the ken
+of history. It is only from materials already
+existing either in its own bosom, or in the bosom
+of other languages, that it can enrich itself in the
+later, or historical stages of its life.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Compound Words</i></div>
+
+<p>And first, it can bring its own words into new
+combinations; it can join two, and sometimes
+even more than two, of the words which it already
+has, and form out of them a new one. Much
+more is wanted here than merely to attach two
+or more words to one another by a hyphen; this
+is not to make a new word: they must really
+coalesce and grow together. Different languages,
+and even the same language at different stages of
+its existence, will possess this power of forming
+new words by the combination of old in very
+different degrees. The eminent felicity of the
+Greek in this respect has been always acknowledged.
+“The joints of her compounded words”, says
+Fuller, “are so naturally oiled, that they run
+nimbly on the tongue, which makes them though
+long, never tedious, because
+significant”<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a>.
+Sir<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+Philip Sidney boasts of the capability of our
+English language in this respect&mdash;that “it is particularly
+happy in the composition of two or three
+words together, near equal to the Greek”. No
+one has done more than Milton to justify this
+praise, or to make manifest what may be effected
+by this marriage of words. Many of his compound
+epithets, as ‘golden-tressed’, ‘tinsel-slippered’,
+‘coral-paven’, ‘flowry-kirtled’, ‘violet-embroidered’,
+‘vermeil-tinctured’, are themselves poems<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+in miniature. Not unworthy to be set beside
+these are Sylvester’s “<i>opal-coloured</i> morn”, Drayton’s
+“<i>silver-sanded</i> shore”, and perhaps Marlowe’s
+“<i>golden-fingered</i> Ind”<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Our modern inventions in the same kind are for
+the most part very inferior: they could hardly
+fail to be so, seeing that the formative, plastic
+powers of a language are always waning and
+diminishing more and more. It may be, and
+indeed is, gaining in other respects, but in this
+it is losing; and thus it is not strange if its later
+births in this kind are less successful than its
+earlier. Among the poets of our own time Shelley
+has done more than any other to assert for the
+language that it has not quite renounced this
+power; while among writers of prose in these
+later days Jeremy Bentham has been at once one
+of the boldest, but at the same time one of the
+most unfortunate, of those who have issued this
+money from their mint. Still we ought not to
+forget, while we divert ourselves with the strange
+and formless progeny of his brain, that we owe
+‘international’ to him&mdash;a word at once so convenient
+and supplying so real a need, that it
+was, and with manifest advantage, at once adopted
+by all<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Adjectives ending in al</i></div>
+
+<p>Another way in which languages increase their
+stock of vocables is by the forming of new words
+according to the analogy of formations, which in
+seemingly parallel cases have been already allowed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
+Thus long since upon certain substantives such as
+‘congregation’, ‘convention’, were formed their
+adjectives, ‘congregational’, ‘conventional’; yet
+these also at a comparatively modern period; ‘congregational’
+first rising up in the Assembly of
+Divines, or during the time of the Commonwealth<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a>.
+These having found admission into the language,
+it is attempted to repeat the process in the case of
+other words with the same ending. I confess the
+effect is often exceedingly disagreeable. We are
+now pretty well used to ‘educational’, and the
+word is sometimes serviceable enough; but I can
+perfectly remember when some twenty years ago
+an “<i>Educational</i> Magazine” was started, the
+first impression on one’s mind was, that a work
+having to do with education should not thus
+bear upon its front an offensive, or to say the
+best, a very dubious novelty in the English language<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a>.
+These adjectives are now multiplying
+fast. We have ‘inflexional’, ‘seasonal’, ‘denominational’,
+and, not content with this, in dissenting
+magazines at least, the monstrous birth,
+‘denominationalism’; ‘emotional’ is creeping
+into books<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a>, ‘sensational’, and others as well,
+so that it is hard to say where this influx will stop,
+or whether all our words with this termination
+will not finally generate an adjective. Convenient
+as you may sometimes find these, I would yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+certainly counsel you to abstain from all but the
+perfectly well <ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘recognised’">recognized</ins>
+formations of this kind.
+There may be cases of exception; but for the
+most part Pope’s advice is good, as certainly it
+is safe, that we be not among the last to use a
+word which is going out, nor among the first to
+employ one that is coming in.</p>
+
+<p>‘Starvation’ is another word of comparatively
+recent introduction, formed in like manner on the
+model of preceding formations of an apparently
+similar character&mdash;its first formers, indeed, not
+observing that they were putting a Latin termination
+to a Saxon word. Some have supposed it to
+have reached us from America. It has not however
+travelled from so great a distance, being a
+stranger indeed, yet not from beyond the Atlantic,
+but only from beyond the Tweed. It is an old
+Scottish word, but unknown in England, till used
+by Mr. Dundas, the first Viscount Melville, in an
+American debate in 1775. That it then jarred
+strangely on English ears is evident from the nickname,
+“<i>Starvation</i> Dundas”, which in consequence
+he obtained<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Revival of Words</i></div>
+
+<p>Again, languages enrich themselves, our own has
+done so, by recovering treasures which for a while
+had been lost by them or forgone. I do not mean
+that all which drops out of use <i>is</i> loss; there are
+words which it is gain to be rid of; which it would
+be folly to wish to revive; of which Dryden,
+setting himself against an extravagant zeal in this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+direction, says in an ungracious comparison&mdash;they
+do “not deserve this redemption, any more than the
+crowds of men who daily die, or are slain for sixpence
+in a battle, merit to be restored to life, if a
+wish could revive them”<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a>. There are others,
+however, which it is a real gain to draw back
+again from the temporary oblivion which had
+overtaken them; and this process of their setting
+and rising again, or of what, to use another image,
+we might call their suspended animation, is not
+so unfrequent as at first might be supposed.</p>
+
+<p>You may perhaps remember that Horace, tracing
+in a few memorable lines the history of words,
+while he notes that many once current have now
+dropped out of use, does not therefore count that
+of necessity their race is for ever run; on the
+contrary he confidently anticipates a <i>palingenesy</i>
+for many among them<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a>; and I am convinced that
+there has been such in the case of our English
+words to a far greater extent than we are generally
+aware. Words slip almost or quite as imperceptibly
+back into use as they once slipped out of it.
+Let me produce a few facts in evidence of this. In
+the contemporary gloss which an anonymous
+friend of Spenser’s furnished to his <i>Shepherd’s
+Calendar</i>, first published in 1579, “for the exposition
+of old words”, as he declares, he thinks
+it expedient to include in his list, the following,
+‘dapper’, ‘scathe’, ‘askance’, ‘sere’, ‘embellish’,
+‘bevy’, ‘forestall’, ‘fain’, with not a few others
+quite as familiar as these. In Speght’s <i>Chaucer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span></i>
+(1667), there is a long list of “old and obscure
+words in Chaucer explained”; including ‘anthem’,
+‘blithe’, ‘bland’, ‘chapelet’, ‘carol’, ‘deluge’,
+‘franchise’, ‘illusion’, ‘problem’, ‘recreant’,
+‘sphere’, ‘tissue’, ‘transcend’, with very many
+easier than these. In Skinner’s <i>Etymologicon</i> (1671),
+there is another list of obsolete, words<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a>, and
+among these he includes ‘to dovetail’, ‘to interlace’,
+‘elvish’, ‘encombred’, ‘masquerade’ (mascarade),
+‘oriental’, ‘plumage’, ‘pummel’ (pomell),
+and ‘stew’, that is, for fish. Who will
+say of the verb ‘to hallow’ that it is now even
+obsolescent? and yet Wallis two hundred years ago
+observed&mdash;“It has almost gone out of use” (fer.
+desuevit). It would be difficult to find an example
+of the verb, ‘to advocate’, between Milton
+and Burke<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a>.
+Franklin, a close observer in such
+matters, as he was himself an admirable master
+of English style, considered the word to have
+sprung up during his own residence in Europe.
+In this indeed he was mistaken; it had only
+during this period revived<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a>. Johnson says of
+‘jeopardy’ that it is a “word not now in use”;
+which certainly is not any longer true<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Dryden and Chaucer’s English</i></div>
+
+<p>I am persuaded that in facility of being understood,
+Chaucer is not merely as near, but much
+nearer, to us than Dryden and his cotemporaries
+felt him to be to them. He and the writers of his
+time make exactly the same sort of complaints,
+only in still stronger language, about his archaic
+phraseology and the obscurities which it involves,
+that are made at the present day. Thus in the
+<i>Preface</i> to his <i>Tales from Chaucer</i>, having quoted
+some not very difficult lines from the earlier poet
+whom he was modernizing, he proceeds: “You
+have here a specimen of Chaucer’s language, which
+is so obsolete that his sense is scarce to be understood”.
+Nor was it merely thus with respect of
+Chaucer. These wits and poets of the Court of
+Charles the Second were conscious of a greater
+gulf between themselves and the Elizabethan era,
+separated from them by little more than fifty
+years, than any of which <i>we</i> are aware, separated
+from it by nearly two centuries more. I do not
+mean merely that they felt themselves more removed
+from its tone and spirit; their altered circumstances
+might explain this; but I am convinced
+that they found a greater difficulty and
+strangeness in the language of Spenser and
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘Shakesspeare’">Shakespeare</ins>
+than we find now; that it sounded in many
+ways more uncouth, more old-fashioned, more
+abounding in obsolete terms than it does in our
+ears at the present. Only in this way can I explain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+the tone in which they are accustomed to speak
+of these worthies of the near past. I must again
+cite Dryden, the truest representative of literary
+England in its good and in its evil during the last
+half of the seventeenth century. Of Spenser,
+whose death was separated from his own birth by
+little more than thirty years, he speaks as of one
+belonging to quite a different epoch, counting it
+much to say, “Notwithstanding his obsolete language,
+he is still intelligible”<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a>. Nay, hear what
+his judgment is of Shakespeare himself, so far as
+language is concerned: “It must be allowed to
+the present age that the tongue in general is
+so much refined since Shakespeare’s time, that
+many of his words and more of his phrases are
+scarce intelligible. And of those which we understand,
+some are ungrammatical, others coarse;
+and his whole style is so pestered with figurative
+expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure”<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Nugget</i>, <i>Ingot</i></div>
+
+<p>Sometimes a word will emerge anew from the
+undercurrent of society, not indeed new, but yet
+to most seeming as new, its very existence having
+been altogether forgotten by the larger number of
+those speaking the language; although it must
+have somewhere lived on upon the lips of men.
+Thus, for instance, since the Californian and Australian
+discoveries of gold we hear often of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+‘nugget’ of gold; being a lump of the pure metal;
+and there has been some discussion whether the
+word has been born for the present necessity, or
+whether it be a recent malformation of ‘ingot’,
+I am inclined to think that it is neither one nor
+the other. I would not indeed affirm that it may
+not be a popular recasting of ‘ingot’; but only
+that it is not a recent one; for ‘nugget’ very
+nearly in its present form, occurs in our elder
+writers, being spelt ‘niggot’ by them<a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a>. There
+can be little doubt of the identity of ‘niggot’ and
+‘nugget’; all the consonants, the <i>stamina</i> of a
+word, being the same; while this early form
+‘niggot’ makes more plausible their suggestion
+that ‘nugget’ is only ‘ingot’ disguised, seeing
+that there wants nothing but the very common
+transposition of the first two letters to bring that
+out of this<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words from Proper Names</i></div>
+
+<p>New words are often formed from the names
+of persons, actual or mythical. Some one has observed
+how interesting would be a complete collection,
+or a collection approaching to completeness,
+in any language of the names of <i>persons</i> which
+have afterwards become names of <i>things</i>, from
+‘nomina <i>appellativa</i>’ have become ‘nomina<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+<i>realia</i>’<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a>. Let me without confining myself to
+those of more recent introduction endeavour to
+enumerate as many as I can remember of the
+words which have by this method been introduced
+into our language. To begin with mythical
+antiquity&mdash;the Chimæra has given us ‘chimerical’,
+Hermes ‘hermetic’, Tantalus ‘to tantalize’,
+Hercules ‘herculean’, Proteus ‘protean’, Vulcan
+‘volcano’ and ‘volcanic’, and Dædalus ‘dedal’,
+if this word may on Spenser’s and Shelley’s authority
+be allowed. Gordius, the Phrygian king who
+tied that famous ‘gordian’ knot which Alexander
+cut, will supply a natural transition from mythical
+to historical. Here Mausolus, a king of Caria,
+has left us ‘mausoleum’, Academus ‘academy’,
+Epicurus ‘epicure’, Philip of Macedon a ‘philippic’,
+being such a discourse as Demosthenes once
+launched against the enemy of Greece, and Cicero
+‘cicerone’. Mithridates, who had made himself
+poison-proof, gave us the now forgotten word
+‘mithridate’, for antidote; as from Hippocrates
+we derived ‘hipocras’, or ‘ypocras’, a word often
+occurring in our early poets, being a wine supposed
+to be mingled after his receipt. Gentius, a king
+of Illyria, gave his name to the plant ‘gentian’,
+having been, it is said, the first to discover its
+virtues. A grammar used to be called a ‘donnat’,
+or ‘donet’ (Chaucer), from Donatus, a famous
+grammarian. Lazarus, perhaps an actual person,
+has given us ‘lazar’ and ‘lazaretto’; St. Vero<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>nica
+and the legend connected with her name,
+a ‘vernicle’; being a napkin with the Saviour’s
+face portrayed on it; Simon Magus ‘simony’; Mahomet
+a ‘mammet’ or ‘maumet’, meaning an
+<ins class="correction" title="comma not visible in original">idol<a
+name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a>,</ins>
+and ‘mammetry’ or idolatry; ‘dunce’ is from
+Duns Scotus; while there is a legend that the
+‘knot’ or sandpiper is named from Canute or
+Knute, with whom this bird was a special favourite.
+To come to more modern times, and not
+pausing at Ben Johnson’s ‘chaucerisms’, Bishop
+Hall’s ‘scoganisms’, from Scogan, Edward the
+Fourth’s jester, or his ‘aretinisms’, from
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘an,’">an</ins>
+infamous writer, ‘a poisonous Italian ribald’
+as Gabriel Harvey calls him, named Aretine;
+these being probably not intended even by their
+authors to endure; a Roman cobbler named
+Pasquin has given us the ‘pasquil’ or ‘pasquinade’;
+‘patch’ in the sense of fool, and often so
+used by Shakespeare, was originally the proper
+name of a favourite fool of Cardinal Wolsey<a name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a>;
+Colonel Negus in Queen Anne’s time first mixed
+the beverage which goes by his name; Lord
+Orrery was the first for whom an ‘orrery’ was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+constructed; and Lord Spencer first wore, or
+at least first brought into fashion, a ‘spencer’.
+Dahl, a Swede, introduced the cultivation of the
+‘dahlia’, and M. Tabinet, a French Protestant
+refugee, the making of the stuff called ‘tabinet’ in
+Dublin; in ‘<i>tram</i>-road’, the second syllable of the
+name of Ou<i>tram</i>, the inventor,
+survives<a name="FNanchor_97_97" id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a>. The
+‘tontine’ was conceived by an Italian named
+Tonti; and another Italian, Galvani, first noted
+the phenomena of animal electricity or ‘galvanism’;
+while a third Italian, ‘Volta’, gave a name
+to the ‘voltaic’ battery. ‘Martinet’, ‘mackintosh’,
+‘doyly’, ‘brougham’, ‘to macadamize’,
+‘to burke’, are all names of persons or
+from persons, and then transferred to things, on
+the score of some connection existing between
+the one and other<a name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Again the names of popular characters in
+literature, such as have taken strong hold on the
+national mind, give birth to a number of new words.
+Thus from Homer we have ‘mentor’ for a monitor;
+‘stentorian’, for loud-voiced; and inasmuch as with
+all of Hector’s nobleness there is a certain amount
+of big talking about him, he has given us ‘to
+hector’<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a>;
+while the medieval romances about
+the siege of Troy ascribe to Pandarus that shameful
+ministry out of which his name has past into
+the words ‘to pandar’ and ‘pandarism’. ‘Rodomontade’
+is from Rodomont, a blustering and
+boasting hero of Boiardo, adopted by Ariosto;
+‘thrasonical’, from Thraso, the braggart of the
+Roman comedy. Cervantes has given us ‘quixotic’;
+Swift ‘lilliputian’; to Molière the French
+language owes ‘tartuffe’ and ‘tartufferie’. ‘Reynard’
+too, which with us is a duplicate for fox,
+while in the French ‘renard’ has quite excluded
+the older ‘volpils’, was originally not the name
+of a kind, but the proper name of the fox-hero,
+the vulpine Ulysses, in that famous beast-epic of
+the middle ages, <i>Reineke Fuchs</i>; the immense
+popularity of which we gather from many evidences,
+from none more clearly than from this.
+‘Chanticleer’ is in like manner the proper name
+of the cock, and ‘Bruin’ of the bear in the same
+poem<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a>.
+These have not made fortune to
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+same extent of actually putting out in any language
+the names which before existed, but still
+have become quite familiar to us all.</p>
+
+<p>We must not count as new words properly so
+called, although they may delay us for a minute,
+those comic words, most often comic combinations
+formed at will, and sometimes of enormous length,
+in which, as plays and displays of power, great
+writers ancient and modern have delighted. These
+for the most part are meant to do service for the
+moment, and then to pass away<a name="FNanchor_101_101" id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a>. The inventors
+of them had themselves no intention of fastening
+them permanently on the language. Thus among
+the Greeks Aristophanes coined <span title="Greek: mellonikiaô">μελλονικιάω</span>, to
+loiter like Nicias, with allusion to the delays with
+which this prudent commander sought to put off
+the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with not a few
+other familiar to every scholar. The humour of
+them sometimes consists in their enormous length,
+as in the <span title="Greek: amphiptolemopêdêsistratos">ἀμφιπτολεμοπηδησίστρατος</span> of Eupolis;
+the <span title="Greek: spermagoraiolekitholachanopôlis">σπερμαγοραιολεκιθολαχανόπωλις</span> of Aristophanes;
+sometimes in their mingled observance
+and transgression of the laws of the language, as in
+the ‘oculissimus’ of Plautus, a comic superlative
+of ‘oculus’; ‘occisissimus’ of ‘occisus’; as in the
+‘dosones’, ‘dabones’, which in Greek and in
+medieval Latin were names given to those who
+were ever promising, ever saying “I will give”
+but never performing their promise. Plautus
+with his exuberant wit, and exulting in his mastery
+and command of the Latin language, will compose
+four or five lines consisting entirely of comic com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>binations
+thrown off for the occasion<a name="FNanchor_102_102" id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a>. Of the
+same character is Butler’s ‘cynarctomachy’, or
+battle of a dog and bear. Nor do I suppose that
+Fuller, when he used ‘to avunculize’, to imitate
+or follow in the steps of one’s uncle, or Cowper,
+when he suggested ‘extraforaneous’ for out of
+doors, in the least intended them as lasting additions
+to the language.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>To Chouse</i>’</div>
+
+<p>Sometimes a word springs up in a very curious
+way; here is one, not having, I suppose, any great
+currency except among schoolboys; yet being no
+invention of theirs, but a genuine English word,
+though of somewhat late birth in the language, I
+mean ‘to chouse’. It has a singular origin. The
+word is, as I have mentioned already, a Turkish
+one, and signifies ‘interpreter’. Such an interpreter
+or ‘chiaous’ (written ‘chaus’ in Hackluyt,
+‘chiaus’ in Massinger), being attached to the
+Turkish embassy in England, committed in the
+year 1609 an enormous fraud on the Turkish and
+Persian merchants resident in London. He succeeded
+in cheating them of a sum amounting to
+£4000&mdash;a sum very much greater at that day
+than at the present. From the vast dimensions of
+the fraud, and the notoriety which attended it,
+any one who cheated or defrauded was said ‘to
+chiaous’, ‘chause’, or ‘chouse’; to do, that is, as
+this ‘chiaous’ had done<a name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Different Spelling of Words</i></div>
+
+<p>There is another very fruitful source of new
+words in a language, or perhaps rather another
+way in which it increases its vocabulary, for a
+question might arise whether the words thus produced
+ought to be called new. I mean through
+the splitting of single words into two or even more.
+The impulse and suggestion to this is in general
+first given by varieties in pronunciation, which
+are presently represented by varieties in spelling;
+but the result very often is that what at first
+were only precarious and arbitrary differences in
+this, come in the end to be regarded as entirely
+different words; they detach themselves from one
+another, not again to reunite; just as accidental
+varieties in fruits or flowers, produced at hazard,
+have yet permanently separated off, and settled
+into different kinds. They have each its own distinct
+domain of meaning, as by general agreement
+assigned to it; dividing the inheritance between
+them, <ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘whith’">which</ins>
+hitherto they held in common. No
+one who has not had his attention called to this
+matter, who has not watched and catalogued these
+words as they have come under his notice, would
+at all believe how numerous they are.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Doublets</i></div>
+
+<p>Sometimes as the accent is placed on one syllable
+of a word or another, it comes to have different
+significations, and those so distinctly marked,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+that the separation may be regarded as complete.
+Examples of this are the following: ‘dívers’,
+and ‘divérse’; ‘cónjure’ and ‘conjúre’; ‘ántic’
+and ‘antíque’; ‘húman’ and ‘humáne’; ‘úrban’
+and ‘urbáne’; ‘géntle’ and ‘gentéel’; ‘cústom’
+and ‘costúme’; ‘éssay’ and ‘assáy’; ‘próperty’
+and ‘propríety’. Or again, a word is pronounced
+with a full sound of its syllables, or somewhat
+more shortly: thus ‘spirit’ and ‘sprite’; ‘blossom’
+and ‘bloom’<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a>; ‘personality’ and ‘personalty’;
+‘fantasy’ and ‘fancy’; ‘triumph’ and
+‘trump’ (the <i>winning</i>
+card<a name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a>); ‘happily’ and
+‘haply’; ‘waggon’ and ‘wain’; ‘ordinance’ and
+‘ordnance’; ‘shallop’ and ‘sloop’; ‘brabble’ and
+‘brawl’<a name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a>;
+‘syrup’ and ‘shrub’; ‘balsam’ and
+‘balm’; ‘eremite’ and ‘hermit’; ‘nighest’ and
+‘next’; ‘poesy’ and ‘posy’; ‘fragile’ and ‘frail’;
+‘achievement’ and ‘hatchment’; ‘manœuvre’
+and ‘manure’;&mdash;or with the dropping of the first
+syllable: ‘history’ and ‘story’; ‘etiquette’ and
+‘ticket’; ‘escheat’ and ‘cheat’; ‘estate’ and
+‘state’; and, older probably than any of these,
+‘other’ and ‘or’;&mdash;or with a dropping of the last
+syllable, as ‘Britany’ and ‘Britain’; ‘crony’ and
+‘crone’;&mdash;or without losing a syllable, with more
+or less stress laid on the close: ‘regiment’ and
+‘regimen’; ‘corpse’ and ‘corps’; ‘bite’ and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
+‘bit’; ‘sire’ and ‘sir’; ‘land’ or ‘laund’ and
+‘lawn’; ‘suite’ and ‘suit’; ‘swinge’ and ‘swing’;
+‘gulph’ and ‘gulp’; ‘launch’ and ‘lance’;
+‘wealth’ and ‘weal’; ‘stripe’ and ‘strip’;
+‘borne’ and ‘born’; ‘clothes’ and ‘cloths’;&mdash;or
+a slight internal vowel change finds place, as
+between ‘dent’ and ‘dint’; ‘rant’ and ‘rent’
+(a ranting actor tears or <i>rends</i> a passion to
+tatters)<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a>;
+‘creak’ and ‘croak’; ‘float’ and ‘fleet’;
+‘sleek’ and ‘slick’; ‘sheen’ and ‘shine’;
+‘shriek’ and ‘shrike’; ‘pick’ and ‘peck’;
+‘peak’, ‘pique’, and ‘pike’; ‘weald’ and ‘wold’;
+‘drip’ and ‘drop’; ‘wreathe’ and ‘writhe’;
+‘spear’ and ‘spire’ (“the least <i>spire</i> of grass”,
+South); ‘trist’ and ‘trust’; ‘band’, ‘bend’ and
+‘bond’; ‘cope’, ‘cape’ and ‘cap’; ‘tip’ and
+‘top’; ‘slent’ (now obsolete) and ‘slant’; ‘sweep’
+and ‘swoop’; ‘wrest’ and ‘wrist’; ‘gad’ (now
+surviving only in gadfly) and ‘goad’; ‘complement’
+and ‘compliment’; ‘fitch’ and ‘vetch’;
+‘spike’ and ‘spoke’; ‘tamper’ and ‘temper’;
+‘ragged’ and ‘rugged’; ‘gargle’ and ‘gurgle’;
+‘snake’ and ‘sneak’ (both crawl); ‘deal’ and
+‘dole’; ‘giggle’ and ‘gaggle’ (this last is now
+commonly spelt ‘cackle’); ‘sip’, ‘sop’, ‘soup’
+and ‘sup’; ‘clack’, ‘click’ and ‘clock’; ‘tetchy’
+and ‘touchy’; ‘neat’ and ‘nett’; ‘stud’ and
+‘steed’; ‘then’ and ‘than’<a name="FNanchor_108_108" id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a>; ‘grits’ and
+‘grouts’; ‘spirt’ and ‘sprout’; ‘cure’ and
+‘care’<a name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a>;
+‘prune’ and ‘preen’; ‘mister’ and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
+‘master’; ‘allay’ and ‘alloy’; ‘ghostly’ and
+‘ghastly’<a name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a>;
+‘person’ and ‘parson’; ‘cleft’
+and ‘clift’, now written ‘cliff’; ‘travel’ and
+‘travail’; ‘truth’ and ‘troth’; ‘pennon’ and
+‘pinion’; ‘quail’ and ‘quell’; ‘quell’ and
+‘kill’; ‘metal’ and ‘mettle’; ‘chagrin’ and
+‘shagreen’; ‘can’ and ‘ken’; ‘Francis’ and
+‘Frances’<a name="FNanchor_111_111" id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a>; ‘chivalry’ and ‘cavalry’; ‘oaf’
+and ‘elf’; ‘lose’ and ‘loose’; ‘taint’ and ‘tint’.
+Sometimes the difference is mainly or entirely
+in the initial consonants, as between ‘phial’ and
+‘vial’; ‘pother’ and ‘bother’; ‘bursar’ and
+‘purser’; ‘thrice’ and ‘trice’<a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a>; ‘shatter’ and
+‘scatter’; ‘chattel’ and ‘cattle’; ‘chant’
+and ‘cant’; ‘zealous’ and ‘jealous’; ‘channel’
+and ‘kennel’; ‘wise’ and ‘guise’; ‘quay’
+and ‘key’; ‘thrill’, ‘trill’ and ‘drill’;&mdash;or
+in the consonants in the middle of the word,
+as between ‘cancer’ and ‘canker’; ‘nipple’ and
+‘nibble’; ‘tittle’ and ‘title’; ‘price’ and ‘prize’;
+‘consort’ and ‘concert’;&mdash;or there is a change in
+both, as between ‘pipe’ and ‘fife’.</p>
+
+<p>Or a word is spelt now with a final <i>k</i> and now
+with a final <i>ch</i>; out of this variation two different
+words have been formed; with, it may be, other
+slight differences superadded; thus is it with
+‘poke’ and ‘poach’; ‘dyke’ and ‘ditch’; ‘stink’
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>and ‘stench’; ‘prick’ and ‘pritch’ (now obsolete);
+‘break’ and ‘breach’; to which may be
+added ‘broach’; ‘lace’ and ‘latch’; ‘stick’ and
+‘stitch’; ‘lurk’ and ‘lurch’; ‘bank’ and ‘bench’;
+‘stark’ and ‘starch’; ‘wake’ and ‘watch’.
+So too <i>t</i> and <i>d</i> are easily exchanged; as in ‘clod’
+and ‘clot’; ‘vend’ and ‘vent’; ‘brood’ and
+‘brat’<a name="FNanchor_112_112" id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a>;
+‘halt’ and ‘hold’; ‘sad’ and
+‘set’<a name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a>;
+‘card’ and ‘chart’; ‘medley’ and ‘motley’.
+Or there has grown up, besides the rigorous and
+accurate pronunciation of a word, a popular as
+well; and this in the end has formed itself into
+another word; thus is it with ‘housewife’ and
+‘hussey’; ‘hanaper’ and ‘hamper’; ‘puisne’
+and ‘puny’; ‘patron’ and ‘pattern’; ‘spital’
+(hospital) and ‘spittle’ (house of correction);
+‘accompt’ and ‘account’; ‘donjon’ and ‘dungeon’;
+‘nestle’ and ‘nuzzle’<a name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> (now obsolete);
+‘Egyptian’ and ‘gypsy’; ‘Bethlehem’ and
+‘Bedlam’; ‘exemplar’ and ‘sampler’; ‘dolphin’
+and ‘dauphin’; ‘iota’ and ‘jot’.</p>
+
+<p>Other changes cannot perhaps be reduced exactly
+under any of these heads; as between
+‘ounce’ and ‘inch’; ‘errant’ and ‘arrant’;
+‘slack’ and ‘slake’; ‘slow’ and
+‘slough’<a name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a>;
+‘bow’ and ‘bough’; ‘hew’ and ‘hough’<a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a>;
+‘dies’ and ‘dice’ (both plurals of ‘die’); ‘plunge’
+and ‘flounce’<a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a>; ‘staff’ and ‘stave’; ‘scull’
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>and
+‘shoal’; ‘benefit’ and
+‘benefice’<a name="FNanchor_116_116" id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a>. Or, it
+may be, the difference which constitutes the two
+forms of the word into two words is in the spelling
+only, and of a character to be appreciable only by
+the eye, escaping altogether the ear: thus it is
+with ‘draft’ and ‘draught’; ‘plain’ and ‘plane’;
+‘coign’ and ‘coin’; ‘flower’ and ‘flour’; ‘check’
+and ‘cheque’; ‘straight’ and ‘strait’; ‘ton’ and
+‘tun’; ‘road’ and ‘rode’; ‘throw’ and ‘throe’;
+‘wrack’ and ‘rack’; ‘gait’ and ‘gate’; ‘hoard’
+and ‘horde’<a name="FNanchor_117_117" id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a>; ‘knoll’ and ‘noll’; ‘chord’ and
+‘cord’; ‘drachm’ and ‘dram’; ‘sergeant’ and
+‘serjeant’; ‘mask’ and ‘masque’; ‘villain’ and
+‘villein’.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span></p>
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words in Two Forms</i></div>
+
+<p>Now, if you will put the matter to proof, you
+will find, I believe, in every case that there has
+attached itself to the different forms of a word a
+modification of meaning more or less sensible, that
+each has won for itself an independent sphere of
+meaning, in which it, and it only, moves. For
+example, ‘divers’ implies difference only, but
+‘diverse’ difference with opposition; thus the
+several Evangelists narrate the same event in
+‘divers’ manner, but not in ‘diverse’. ‘Antique’
+is ancient, but ‘antic’, is now the ancient
+regarded as overlived, out of date, and so in our
+days grotesque, ridiculous; and then, with a dropping
+of the reference to age, the grotesque, the
+ridiculous alone. ‘Human’ is what every man
+is, ‘humane’ is what every man ought to be; for
+Johnson’s suggestion that ‘humane’ is from the
+French feminine, ‘humaine’, and ‘human’ from
+the masculine, cannot for an instant be admitted.
+‘Ingenious’ expresses a mental, ‘ingenuous’ a
+moral, excellence<a name="FNanchor_118_118" id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a>. A gardener ‘prunes’, or
+trims his trees, properly indeed his <i>vines</i> alone
+(pro<i>vigner</i>), birds ‘preen’ or trim their feathers.
+We ‘allay’ wine with water; we ‘alloy’ gold
+with platina. ‘Bloom’ is a finer and more delicate
+efflorescence even than ‘blossom’; thus the
+‘bloom’, but not the ‘blossom’, of the cheek.
+It is now always ‘clots’ of blood and ‘clods’ of
+earth; a ‘float’ of timber, and a ‘fleet’ of ships;
+men ‘vend’ wares, and ‘vent’ complaints. A
+‘curtsey’ is one, and that merely an external,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+manifestation of ‘courtesy’. ‘Gambling’ may be,
+as with a fearful irony it is called, <i>play</i>, but it is
+nearly as distant from ‘gambolling’ as hell is
+from heaven<a name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a>. Nor would it be hard, in almost
+every pair or larger group of words which I have
+adduced, as in others which no doubt might be
+added to complete the list, to trace a difference of
+meaning which has obtained a more or less distinct
+recognition<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>But my subject is inexhaustible; it has no
+limits except those, which indeed may be often<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+narrow enough, imposed by my own ignorance on
+the one side; and on the other, by the necessity
+of consulting your patience, and of only choosing
+such matter as will admit a popular setting forth.
+These necessities, however, bid me to pause, and
+suggest that I should not look round for other
+quarters from whence accessions of new words are
+derived. Doubtless I should not be long without
+finding many such. I must satisfy myself for the
+rest with a very brief consideration of the <i>motives</i>
+which, as they have been, are still at work among
+us, inducing us to seek for these augmentations of
+our vocabulary.</p>
+
+<p>And first, the desire of greater clearness is a
+frequent motive and inducement to this. It has
+been well and truly said: “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”<a name="FNanchor_121_121" id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a>. The limits of their
+vocabulary are in fact for most men the limits of
+their knowledge; and in a great degree for us all.
+Of course I do not affirm that it is absolutely impossible
+to have our mental conceptions clearer
+and more distinct than our words; but it is very
+hard to have, and still harder to keep, them so.
+And therefore it is that men, conscious of this,
+so soon as ever they have learned to distinguish
+in their minds, are urged by an almost irresistible
+impulse to distinguish also in their words. They
+feel that nothing is made sure till this is done.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Dissimilation of Words</i></div>
+
+<p>The sense that a word covers too large a space
+of meaning, is the frequent occasion of the intro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>duction
+of another, which shall relieve it of a
+portion of this. Thus, there was a time when
+‘witch’ was applied equally to male and female
+dealers in unlawful magical arts. Simon Magus,
+for example, and Elymas are both ‘witches’, in
+Wiclif’s <i>New Testament</i> (Acts viii. 9; xiii. 8), and
+Posthumus in <i>Cymbeline</i>: but when the medieval
+Latin ‘sortiarius’ (not ‘sortitor’ as in Richardson),
+supplied another word, the French ‘sorcier’, and
+thus our English ‘sorcerer’ (originally the “caster
+of lots”), then ‘witch’ gradually was confined to
+the hag, or female practiser of these arts, while
+‘sorcerer’ was applied to the male.</p>
+
+<p>New necessities, new evolutions of society into
+more complex conditions, evoke new words; which
+come forth, because they are required now; but
+did not formerly exist, because they were not
+required in the period preceding. For example,
+in Greece so long as the poet sang his own verses
+‘singer’ (<span title="Greek: aoidos">ἀοιδὸς</span>)
+sufficiently expressed the double
+function; such a ‘singer’ was Homer, and such
+Homer describes Demodocus, the bard of the
+Phæacians; that double function, in fact, not
+being in his time contemplated as double, but
+each part of it so naturally completing the other,
+that no second word was required. When, however,
+in the division of labour one made the verses
+which another chaunted, then ‘poet’ or ‘maker’,
+a word unknown in the Homeric age, arose. In
+like manner, when ‘physicians’ were the only
+natural philosophers, the word covered this meaning
+as well as that other which it still retains;
+but when the investigation of nature and natural
+causes detached itself from the art of healing,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+became an independent study of itself, the name
+‘physician’ remained to that which was as the
+stock and stem of the art, while the new offshoot
+sought out a new name for itself.</p>
+
+<p>Another motive to the invention of new words,
+is the desire thereby to cut short
+lengthy<a name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a> explanations,
+tedious circuits of language. Science is often
+an immense gainer by words, which say singly
+what it would have taken whole sentences otherwise
+to have said. Thus ‘isothermal’ is quite of
+modern invention; but what a long story it would
+be to tell the meaning of ‘<i>isothermal</i> lines’, all
+which is summed up in and saved by the word.
+We have long had the word ‘assimilation’ in our
+dictionaries; ‘dissimilation’ has not yet found its
+way into them, but it speedily will. It will appear
+first, if it has not already appeared, in our books
+on language<a name="FNanchor_123_123" id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a>.
+I express myself with this confidence,
+because the advance of philological enquiry
+has rendered it almost a matter of necessity
+that we should possess a word to designate a certain
+process, and no other word would designate
+it at all so well. There is a process of ‘assimilation’
+going on very extensively in language; it
+occurs where the organs of speech find themselves
+helped by changing a letter for another which has
+just occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+we say not ‘<i>adf</i>iance’ but ‘<i>aff</i>iance’, not ‘re<i>n</i>ow<i>m</i>’,
+as our ancestors did when the word
+‘renommée’ was first naturalized, but ‘re<i>n</i>ow<i>n</i>’.
+At the same time there is another opposite process,
+where some letter would recur too often for euphony
+or comfort in speaking, if the strict form of the
+word were too closely held fast, and where consequently
+this letter is exchanged for some other,
+generally for some nearly allied; thus it is at
+least a reasonable suggestion, that ‘cœ<i>r</i>uleum’
+was once ‘cœ<i>l</i>uleum’, from cœlum: so too the
+Italians prefer ‘ve<i>l</i>e<i>n</i>o’ to ‘ve<i>n</i>e<i>n</i>o’; and we
+‘cinnamo<i>n</i>’ to ‘cinnamo<i>m</i>’ (the earlier form);
+in ‘turtle’ and ‘purple’ we have shrunk from
+the double ‘<i>r</i>’ of ‘turtur’ and ‘purpura’; and
+this process of <i>making unlike</i>, requiring a term to
+express it, will create, or indeed has created, the
+word ‘dissimilation’, which probably will in
+due time establish itself among us in far wider
+than its primary use.</p>
+
+<p>‘Watershed’ has only recently begun to appear
+in books of geography; and yet how convenient
+it must be admitted to be; how much more so
+than ‘line of water parting’, which it has succeeded;
+meaning, as I need hardly tell you it does,
+not merely that which <i>sheds</i> the waters, but that
+which <i>divides</i> them (‘wasserscheide’); and being
+applied to that exact ridge and highest line in a
+mountain region, where the waters of that region
+separate off and divide, some to one side, and some
+to the other; as in the Rocky Mountains of North
+America there are streams rising within very few
+miles of one another, which flow severally east and
+west, and, if not in unbroken course, yet as afflu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>ents
+to larger rivers, fall at least severally into the
+Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It must be allowed,
+I think, that not merely geographical terminology,
+but geography itself, had a benefactor in
+him who first endowed it with so expressive and
+comprehensive a word, bringing before us a fact
+which we should scarcely have been aware of
+without it.</p>
+
+<p>There is another word which I have just employed,
+‘affluent’, in the sense of a stream which
+does not flow into the sea, but joins a larger stream,
+as for instance, the Isis is an ‘affluent’ of the
+Thames, the Moselle of the Rhine. It is itself an
+example in the same kind of that whereof I have
+been speaking, having been only recently constituted
+a substantive, and employed in this sense,
+while yet its utility is obvious. ‘Confluents’
+would perhaps be a fitter name, where the rivers,
+like the Missouri and the
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘Missisippi’">Mississippi</ins>, were of equal
+or nearly equal importance up to the time of their
+meeting<a name="FNanchor_124_124" id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Selfishness</i>’, ‘<i>Suicide</i>’</div>
+
+<p>Again, new words are coined out of the necessity
+which men feel of filling up gaps in the language.
+Thoughtful men, comparing their own language
+with that of other nations, become conscious of
+deficiencies, of important matters unexpressed in
+their own, and with more or less success proceed
+to supply the deficiency. For example, that sin
+of sins, the undue love of self, with the postponing
+of the interests of all others to our own, had for a
+long time no word to express it in English. Help
+was sought from the Greek, and from the Latin.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
+‘Philauty’ (<span title="Greek: philautia">φιλαυτία</span>)
+had been more than once
+attempted by our scholars; but found no popular
+acceptance. This failing, men turned to the Latin;
+one writer trying to supply the want by calling
+the man a ‘suist’, as one seeking <i>his own</i> things
+(‘sua’), and the sin itself, ‘suicism’. The gap,
+however, was not really filled up, till some of the
+Puritan writers, drawing on our Saxon, devised
+‘selfish’ and ‘selfishness’, words which to us
+seem obvious enough, but which yet are little more
+than two hundred [and fifty] years
+old<a name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Notices of New Words</i></div>
+
+<p>Before quitting this part of the subject, let me
+say a few words in conclusion on this deliberate
+introduction of words to supply felt omissions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+in a language, and the limits within which this
+or any other conscious interference with the
+development of a language is desirable or possible.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+By the time that a people begin to meditate upon
+their language, to be aware by a conscious reflective
+act either of its merits or deficiencies, by far the
+greater and more important part of its work is
+done; it is fixed in respect of its structure in
+immutable forms; the region in which any alteration
+or modification, addition to it, or
+<ins class="correction" title="so in original">substraction</ins>
+from it, deliberately devised and carried out,
+may be possible, is very limited indeed. Its
+great laws are too firmly established to admit of
+this; so that almost nothing can be taken from
+it, which it has got; almost nothing added to it,
+which it has <i>not</i> got. It will travel indeed in
+certain courses of change; but it would be as
+easy almost to alter the career of a planet as for
+man to alter these. This is sometimes a subject
+of regret with those who see what they believe
+manifest defects or blemishes in their language,
+and such as appear to them capable of remedy.
+And yet in fact this is well; since for once that
+these redressers of real or fancied wrongs, these
+suppliers of things lacking, would have
+<ins class="correction" title="comma not visible in original">mended,</ins>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>we may be tolerably confident that ten times,
+yea, a hundred times, they would have marred;
+letting go that which would have been well retained;
+retaining that which by a necessary law
+the language now dismisses and lets go; and in
+manifold ways interfering with those processes
+of a natural logic, which are here evermore at
+work. The genius of a language, unconsciously
+presiding over all its transformations, and conducting
+them to a definite issue, will have been
+a far truer, far safer guide, than the artificial wit,
+however subtle, of any single man, or of any association
+of men. For the genius of a language is
+the sense and inner conviction of all who speak it,
+as to what it ought to be, and the means by which
+it will best attain its objects; and granting that
+a pair of eyes, or two or three pairs of eyes may
+see much, yet millions of eyes will certainly see
+more.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>German Purists</i></div>
+
+<p>It is only with the words, and not with the
+forms and laws of a language, that any interference
+such as I have just supposed is possible.
+Something, indeed much, may here be done by
+wise masters, in the way of rejecting that which
+would deform, allowing and adopting that which
+will strengthen and enrich. Those who would
+purify or enrich a language, so long as they have
+kept within this their proper sphere, have often
+effected much, more than at first could have
+seemed possible. The history of the German language
+affords so much better illustration of this
+than our own would do, that I shall make no
+scruple in seeking my examples there. When the
+patriotic Germans began to wake up to a conscious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>ness
+of the enormous encroachments which foreign
+languages, the Latin and French above all, had
+made on their native tongue, the lodgements which
+they had therein effected, and the danger which
+threatened it, namely, that it should cease to be
+German at all, but only a mingle-mangle, a variegated
+patchwork of many languages, without any
+unity or inner coherence at all, various societies
+were instituted among them, at the beginning
+and during the course of the seventeenth century,
+for the recovering of what was lost of their own,
+for the expelling of that which had intruded from
+abroad; and these with excellent effect.</p>
+
+<p>But more effectual than these societies were
+the efforts of single men, who in this merited well
+of their country<a name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a>. In respect of words which
+are now entirely received by the whole nation,
+it is often possible to designate the writers who
+first substituted them for some affected Gallicism
+or unnecessary Latinism. Thus to Lessing his
+fellow-countrymen owe the substitution of ‘zartgefühl’
+for ‘delicatesse’, of ‘empfindsamkeit’
+for ‘sentimentalität’, of ‘wesenheit’ for ‘essence’.
+It was Voss (1786) who first employed ‘alterthümlich’
+for ‘antik’. Wieland too was the author
+or reviver of a multitude of excellent words, for
+which often he had to do earnest battle at the
+first; such were ‘seligkeit’, ‘anmuth’, ‘entzückung’,
+‘festlich’, ‘entwirren’, with many
+more. For ‘maskerade’, Campe would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+fain substituted ‘larventanz’. It was a novelty
+when Büsching called his great work on geography
+‘erdbeschreibung’ instead of ‘geographie’;
+while ‘schnellpost’ instead of ‘diligence’, ‘zerrbild’
+for ‘carricatur’ are also of recent introduction.
+In regard of ‘wörterbuch’ itself, J.
+Grimm tells us he can find no example of its use
+dating earlier than 1719.</p>
+
+<p>Yet at the same time it must be acknowledged
+that some of these reformers proceeded with
+more zeal than knowledge, while others did whatever
+in them lay to make the whole movement
+absurd&mdash;even as there ever hang on the skirts
+of a noble movement, be it in literature or politics
+or higher things yet, those who contribute their
+little all to bring ridicule and contempt upon it.
+Thus in the reaction against foreign interlopers
+which ensued, and in the zeal to purify the language
+from them, some went to such extravagant
+excesses as to desire to get rid of ‘testament’,
+‘apostel’, which last Campe would have replaced
+by ‘lehrbote’, with other words like these, consecrated
+by longest use, and to find native substitutes
+in their room; or they understood so little
+what words deserved to be called foreign, or how
+to draw the line between them and native, that
+they would fain have gotten rid of ‘vater’, ‘mutter’,
+‘wein’, ‘fenster’, ‘meister’, ‘kelch’<a name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a>;
+the first three of which belong to the German
+language by just as good a right as they do to the
+Latin and the Greek; while the other three have
+been naturalized so long that to propose to expel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+them now was as if, having passed an alien act
+for the banishment of all foreigners, we should
+proceed to include under that name, and as such
+drive forth from the kingdom, the descendants of
+the French Protestants who found refuge here at
+the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or even of
+the Flemings who settled among us in the time of
+our Edwards. One notable enthusiast in this line
+proposed to create an entirely new nomenclature
+for all the mythological personages of the Greek
+and the Roman pantheon, who, one would think,
+might have been allowed, if any, to retain their
+Greek and Latin names. So far however from
+this, they were to exchange these for equivalent
+German titles; Cupid was to be ‘Lustkind’,
+Flora ‘Bluminne’, Aurora ‘Röthin’; instead
+of Apollo schoolboys were to speak of ‘Singhold’;
+instead of Pan of ‘Schaflieb’; instead of Jupiter of
+‘Helfevater’, with much else of the same kind.
+Let us beware (and the warning extends much
+further than to the matter in hand) of making a
+good cause ridiculous by our manner of supporting
+it, of assuming that exaggerations on one
+side can only be redressed by exaggerations as
+great upon the other.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a>
+Thus Alexander Gil, head-master of St. Paul’s
+School, in his book, <i>Logonomia Anglica</i>, 1621, <i>Preface</i>:
+Huc usque peregrinæ voces in linguâ Anglicâ inauditæ.
+Tandem circa annum 1400 Galfridus Chaucerus, infausto
+omine, vocabulis Gallicis et Latinis poësin suam famosam
+reddidit. The whole passage, which is too long to
+quote, as indeed the whole book, is curious. Gil was an
+earnest advocate of phonetic spelling, and has adopted it
+in all his English quotations in this book.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a>
+We may observe exactly the same in Plautus: a
+multitude of Greek words are used by him, which the
+Latin language did not want, and therefore refused to
+take up; thus ‘clepta’, ‘zamia’ (<span title="Greek: zêmia">ζημία</span>), ‘danista’,
+‘harpagare’, ‘apolactizare’, ‘nauclerus’, ‘strategus’,
+‘morologus’, ‘phylaca’, ‘malacus’, ‘sycophantia’,
+‘euscheme’ (<span title="Greek: euschêmôs">εὐσχήμως</span>),
+‘dulice’ (<span title="Greek: doulikôs">δουλικῶς</span>), [so ‘scymnus’
+by Lucretius], none of which, I believe, are employed
+except by him; ‘mastigias’ and ‘techna’ appear also
+in Terence. Yet only experience could show that they
+were superfluous; and at the epoch of Latin literature
+in which Plautus lived, it was well done to put them on
+trial.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a>
+[Modern poets have given ‘amort’ a new life; it is
+used by Keats, by Bailey (<i>Festus</i>, xxx), and by Browning
+(<i>Sordello</i>, vi).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a>
+[‘Bruit’ has been revived by Carlyle and Chas.
+Merivale. Its verbal form is used by Cowper, Byron
+and Dickens.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a>
+Let me here observe once for all that in adding the
+name of an author, which I shall often do, to a word, I
+do not mean to affirm the word in any way peculiar to
+him; although in some cases it may be so; but only to
+give one authority for its use. [Coleridge uses ‘eloign’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a>
+<i>Essay on English Poetry</i>, p. 93.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a>
+<i>Dedication of the Translation of the Æneid</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a>
+[i.e. the promoters of Classical learning.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a>
+We have notable evidence in some lines of Waller of
+the sense which in his time scholars had of the rapidity
+with which the language was changing under their hands.
+Looking back at what the last hundred years had wrought
+of alteration in it, and very naturally assuming that the
+next hundred would effect as much, he checked with
+misgivings such as these his own hope of immortality:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Who can hope his lines should long<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Last in a daily changing tongue?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While they are new, envy prevails,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And as that dies, our language fails.<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<span class="spaced">&nbsp;*&nbsp;*&nbsp;*&nbsp;*&nbsp;*</span>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Poets that lasting marble seek,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Must carve in Latin or in Greek:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>We</i> write in sand; our language grows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And like the tide our work o’erflows”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Such were his misgivings as to the future, assuming that
+the rate of change would continue what it had been. How
+little they have been fulfilled, every one knows. In actual
+fact two centuries, which have elapsed since he wrote,
+have hardly antiquated a word or a phrase in his poems.
+If we care very little for them now, that is to be explained
+by quite other causes&mdash;by the absence of all moral earnestness
+from them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a>
+In his <i>Art of English Poesy</i>, London, 1589, republished
+in Haslewood’s <i>Ancient Critical Essays upon
+English Poets and Poesy</i>, London, 1811, vol. i. pp. 122,
+123; [and in Arber’s <i>English Reprints</i>, 1869].</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a>
+London, 1601. Besides this work Holland translated
+the whole of Plutarch’s <i>Moralia</i>, the <i>Cyropœdia</i> of
+Xenophon, Livy, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and
+Camden’s <i>Britannia</i>. His works make a part of the
+“library of dullness” in Pope’s <i>Dunciad</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“De Lyra there a dreadful front extends,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And here the groaning shelves <i>Philemon</i> bends”&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>very unjustly; the authors whom he has translated are
+all more or less important, and his versions of them a mine
+of genuine idiomatic English, neglected by most of our
+lexicographers, wrought to a considerable extent, and
+with eminent advantage by Richardson; yet capable, as
+it seems to me, of yielding much more than they hitherto
+have yielded.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a>
+And so too in French it is surprising to find of how
+late introduction are many words, which it seems as if
+the language could never have done without. ‘Désintéressement’,
+‘exactitude’, ‘sagacité’, ‘bravoure’, were
+not introduced till late in the seventeenth century. ‘Renaissance’,
+‘emportement’, ‘sçavoir-faire’, ‘indélébile’,
+‘désagrément’, were all recent in 1675 (Bouhours);
+‘indévot’, ‘intolérance’, ‘impardonnable’, ‘irréligieux’,
+were struggling into allowance at the end of the
+seventeenth century, and were not established till the
+beginning of the eighteenth. ‘Insidieux’ was invented
+by Malherbe; ‘frivolité’ does not appear in the earlier
+editions of the <i>Dictionary of the Academy</i>; the Abbé de
+St. Pierre was the first to employ ‘bienfaisance’, the
+elder Balzac ‘féliciter’, Sarrasin ‘burlesque’. Mad.
+de Sevigné exclaims against her daughter for employing
+‘effervescence’ in a letter (comment dites-vous cela, ma
+fille? Voilà un mot dont je n’avais jamais ouï parler).
+‘Demagogue’ was first hazarded by Bossuet, and was
+counted so bold a novelty that it was long before any
+ventured to follow him in its use. Somewhat earlier
+Montaigne had introduced ‘diversion’ and ‘enfantillage’,
+though not without being rebuked by cotemporaries
+on the score of the last. Desfontaines was the first
+who employed ‘suicide’; Caron gave to the language
+‘avant-propos’, Ronsard ‘avidité’, Joachim Dubellay
+‘patrie’, Denis Sauvage ‘jurisconsulte’, Menage ‘gracieux’
+(at least so Voltaire affirms) and ‘prosateur’,
+Desportes ‘pudeur’, Chapelain ‘urbanité’, and Etienne
+first brought in, apologizing at the same time for the
+boldness of it, ‘analogie’ (si les oreilles françoises peuvent
+porter ce mot). ‘Préliber’ (prælibare) is a word
+of our own day; and it was Charles Nodier who, if he
+did not coin, yet revived the obsolete ‘simplesse’.&mdash;See
+Génin, <i>Variations du Langage Français</i>, pp. 308-19.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a>
+[Resuscitated in vain by Charles Lamb.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a>
+J. Grimm (<i>Wörterbuch</i>, p. xxvi.): Fällt von ungefähr
+ein fremdes wort in den brunnen einer sprache, so wird
+es so lange darin umgetrieben, bis es ihre farbe annimmt,
+und seiner fremden art zum trotze wie ein heimisches
+aussieht.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a>
+Have we here an explanation of the ‘battalia’ of
+Jeremy Taylor and others? Did they, without reflecting
+on the matter, regard ‘battalion’ as a word with a Greek
+neuter termination? It is difficult to think they should
+have done so; yet more difficult to suggest any other
+explanation. [‘Battalia’ was sometimes mistaken as a
+plural, which indeed it was originally, the word being
+derived through the Italian <i>battaglia</i>, from low Latin
+<i>battalia</i>, which (like <i>biblia</i>, <i>gaudia</i>, etc.) was afterwards
+regarded as a feminine singular (Skeat, <i>Principles</i>, ii,
+230). But Shakespeare used it as a singular, “Our
+<i>battalia</i> trebles that account” (<i>Rich. III</i>, v. 3, 11); and
+so Sir T. Browne, “The Roman <i>battalia</i> was ordered after
+this manner” (<i>Garden of Cyrus</i>, 1658, p. 113).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And old heroës, which their world did daunt”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p class="citation"><i>Sonnet on Scanderbeg.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a>
+[By J. H(ealey), 1610, who has “centones ... of
+diuerse colours”, p. 605.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a>
+[The identity of these two words, notwithstanding
+the analogy of <i>corona</i> and <i>crown</i>, is denied by Skeat,
+Kluge and Lutz.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a>
+Skinner (<i>Etymologicon</i>, 1671) protests against the
+word altogether, as purely French, and having no right
+to be considered English at all.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a>
+It is curious how effectually the nationality of a word
+may by these slight alterations in spelling be disguised.
+I have met an excellent French and English scholar, to
+whom it was quite a surprise to learn that ‘redingote’
+was ‘riding-coat’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a>
+[Compare French <i>marsouin</i> (=&nbsp;German <i>meer-schwein</i>),
+“sea-pig”, the dolphin; Breton <i>mor-houc’h</i>; Irish <i>mucc
+mara</i>, “pig of the sea”, the dolphin (W. Stokes, <i>Irish
+Glossaries</i>, p. 118); French <i>truye de mer</i> (Cotgrave); old
+English <i>brun-swyne</i> (<i>Prompt. Parv.</i>), “brown-pig”, the
+dolphin or seal.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a>
+He is not indeed perfectly accurate in this statement,
+for the Greeks spoke of <span title="Greek: en kyklô paideia">ἐν κύκλῳ παιδεία</span>
+and <span title="Greek: enkyklios paideia">ἐγκύκλιος
+παιδεία</span>, but had no such composite word as
+<span title="Greek: enkyklopadeia">ἐγκυκλοπαδεία</span>.
+We gather however from these expressions, as from
+Lord Bacon’s using the term ‘circle-learning’ (=‘orbis
+doctrinæ’, Quintilian), that ‘encyclopædia’ did
+not exist in their time. [But ‘encyclopedia’ occurs
+in Elyot, <i>Governour</i>, 1531, vol. i, p. 118 (ed. Croft);
+‘encyclopædie’ in J. Sylvester, <i>Workes</i>, 1621, p. 660.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a>
+See the passages quoted in my paper, <i>On some Deficiencies
+in our English Dictionaries</i>, p. 38.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a>
+[This prediction has been verified. ‘Ethos’ is used
+by Sir F. Palgrave, 1851, and in the ‘Encyclopædia
+Britannica’, 1875. N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a>
+We may see the same progress in Greek words which
+were being incorporated in the Latin. Thus Cicero writes
+<span title="Greek: antipodes">ἀντίποδες</span>
+(<i>Acad.</i> ii, 39, 123), but Seneca (<i>Ep.</i> 122),
+‘antipodes’; that is, the word for Cicero was still Greek,
+while in the period that elapsed between him and Seneca,
+it had become Latin: so too Cicero wrote
+<ins class="correction" title="Greek: eidôlon;
+original reads ‘εἰδωλον’">εἴδωλον</ins>, the
+Younger Pliny ‘idolon’, and Tertullian ‘idolum’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a>
+[This rash prophecy has not been fulfilled. English
+speakers are still no more inclined to say ‘préstige’ than
+‘pólice’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a>
+See in Coleridge’s <i>Table Talk</i>, p. 3, the amusing story
+of John Kemble’s stately correction of the Prince of
+Wales for adhering to the earlier pronunciation, ‘obl<i>ee</i>ge,’&mdash;“It
+will become your royal mouth better to say obl<i>i</i>ge.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“In this great <i>académy</i> of mankind”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="citation">Butler, <i>To the Memory of Du Val</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“‘Twixt that and reason what a nice <i>barrier</i>”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a>
+[A fairly complete collection of these and similar
+semi-naturalized foreign words will be found in <i>The
+Stanford Dictionary of Anglicized Words</i>, edited by Dr. C.
+A.&nbsp;M. Fennell, 1892.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a>
+[This is quite wrong. Mr. Fitzedward Hall shows
+that ‘inimical’ was used by Gaule in 1652, as well as by
+Richardson in 1758 (<i>Modern English</i>, p. 287). The
+N.E.D. quotes an instance of it from Udall in 1643.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a>
+[The word had been already naturalized by H. More,
+1647, Cudworth, 1678, Tucker 1765, and Carlyle, 1831.&mdash;N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a>
+[The earliest citation for ‘abnormal’ in the N.E.D.
+is dated 1835. The older word was ‘abnormous’.
+Curious to say it is unrelated to ‘normal’ to which it
+has been assimilated, being merely an alteration of
+‘anomal-ous’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a>
+[Fuller says of ‘plunder’, “we first heard thereof
+in the Swedish wars”, and that it came into England
+about 1642 (<i>Church History</i>, bk. xi, sec. 4, par. 33). It
+certainly occurs under that date in <i>Memoirs of the Verney
+Family</i>, “It is in danger of <i>plonderin</i>” (vol. i, p. 71,
+also p. 151). It also occurs in a document dated 1643,
+“We must <i>plunder</i> none but Roundheads” (<i>Camden
+Soc. Miscellany</i>, iii, 31). Drummond (died 1649) has
+“Go fight and <i>plunder</i>” (<i>Poems</i>, ed. Turnbull, p. 330).
+It appears in a quotation from <i>The Bellman of London</i>
+(no reference) given in Timbs, <i>London and Westminster</i>,
+vol. i, p. 254.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a>
+[It is rather from the old Dutch <i>trecker</i>, a ‘puller’.
+Very few English words come to us from German.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a>
+[So Skeat, <i>Etym. Dict.</i> But the Germans themselves
+take their <i>schwindler</i> (in the sense of cheat) to have been
+adopted from the English ‘swindler’. Dr. Dunger
+asserts that it was introduced into their language by
+Lichtenberg in his explanation of Hogarth’s engravings,
+1794-99 (<i>Englanderei in der Deutschen Sprache</i>, 1899, p. 7).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a>
+<i>Pisgah Sight of Palestine</i>, 1650, p. 217.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a>
+[This word introduced as a ‘pure neologism’ by
+D’Israeli (<i>Curiosities of Literature</i>, 1839, 11th ed. p. 384)
+as a companion to ‘mother-tongue’, had been already
+used by Sir W. Temple in 1672 (Hall, <i>Mod. English</i>, p. 44).
+Nay, even by Tyndale, see T.&nbsp;L.&nbsp;K. Oliphant, <i>The New
+English</i>, i, 439.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a>
+[‘Folk-lore’ was introduced by Mr. W.&nbsp;J. Thoms,
+editor of <i>Notes and Queries</i>, in 1846. Still later came
+‘Folk-etymology’, the earliest use of which in N.E.D.
+is given as 1883, but the editor’s work bearing that title
+appeared in 1882.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a>
+<i>Holy State</i>, b. 2, c. 6. There was a time when the
+Latin promised to display, if not an equal, yet not a very
+inferior, freedom in this forming of new words by the
+happy marriage of old. But in this, as in so many respects,
+it seemed possessed at the period of its highest
+culture with a timidity, which caused it voluntarily to
+abdicate many of its own powers. Where do we find
+in the Augustan period of the language so grand a pair
+of epithets as these, occurring as they do in a single line
+of Catullus: Ubi cerva <i>silvicultrix</i>, ubi aper <i>nemorivagus</i>?
+or again, as his ‘fluentisonus’? Virgil’s vitisator (<i>Æn.</i>
+7, 179) is not his own, but derived from one of the earlier
+poets. Nay, the language did not even retain those
+compound epithets which it once had formed, but was
+content to let numbers of them drop: ‘parcipromus’;
+‘turpilucricupidus’, and many more, do not extend
+beyond Plautus. On this matter Quintilian observes
+(i. 5, 70): Res tota magis Græcos decet, nobis minus
+succedit; nec id fieri naturâ puto, sed alienis favemus;
+ideoque cum <span title="Greek: kyrtauchena">κυρταύχενα</span> mirati sumus, <i>incurvicervicum</i>
+vix a risu defendimus. Elsewhere he complains, though
+not with reference to compound epithets, of the little
+<i>generative</i> power which existed in the Latin language,
+that its continual losses were compensated by no equivalent
+gains (viii. 6, 32): Deinde,
+<ins class="correction" title="so in original; probable error for ‘tamquam consumpta’">tanquum consummata</ins>
+sint omnia, nihil generare audemus ipsi, quum multa
+quotidie ab antiquis ficta moriantur. Notwithstanding
+this complaint, it must be owned that the silver age of
+the language, which sought to recover, and did recover
+to some extent the abdicated energies of its earlier times,
+reasserted among other powers that of combining words
+with a certain measure of success.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a>
+[For Shakespearian compounds see Abbott’s <i>Shakespearian
+Grammar</i>, pp. 317-20.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a>
+[Writing in the year 1780 Bentham says: “The word
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘t’">it</ins>
+must be acknowledged is a new one”.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a>
+<i>Collection of Scarce Tracts</i>, edited by Sir W. Scott,
+vol. vii, p. 91.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a>
+[Hardly a novelty, as the word occurs in J. Gaule,
+<span title="Greek: Pys-mantia">Πῦς-μαντια</span>,
+1652, p. 30. See F. Hall, <i>Mod. English</i>,
+p. 131.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a>
+[First used apparently by Grote, 1847, and Mrs.
+Gaskell, 1857, N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a>
+See <i>Letters of Horace Walpole and Mann</i>, vol. ii.
+p. 396, quoted in <i>Notes and Queries</i>, No. 225; and another
+proof of the novelty of the word in Pegge’s <i>Anecdotes of
+the English Language</i>, 1814, p. 38.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a>
+Postscript to his <i>Translation of the Æneid</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Multa renascentur, quæ jam cecidere.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="citation"><i>De A.&nbsp;P.</i> 46-72; cf. <i>Ep.</i> 2, 2, 115.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a>
+<i>Etymologicon vocum omnium antiquarum quæ usque
+a Wilhelmo Victore invaluerunt, et jam ante parentum
+ætatem in usu esse desierunt.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a>
+[As a matter of fact the N.E.D. fails to give any
+quotation for this word in the period named.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a>
+[The verb ‘to advocate’ had long before been employed
+by Nash, 1598, Sanderson, 1624, and Heylin, 1657
+(F. Hall, <i>Mod. English</i>, p. 285).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a>
+In like manner La Bruyère, in his <i>Caractères</i>, c. 14,
+laments the extinction of a large number of French words
+which he names. At least half of these have now free
+course in the language, as ‘valeureux’, ‘haineux’,
+‘peineux’, ‘fructueux’, ‘mensonger’, ‘coutumier’,
+‘vantard’, ‘courtois’, ‘jovial’, ‘fétoyer’, ‘larmoyer’,
+‘verdoyer’. Two or three of these may be rarely used,
+but every one would be found in a dictionary of the living
+language.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a>
+<i>Preface to Juvenal.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a>
+<i>Preface to Troilus and Cressida.</i> In justice to Dryden,
+and lest it should be said that he had spoken poetic
+blasphemy, it ought not to be forgotten that ‘pestered’
+had not in his time at all so offensive a sense as it would
+have now. It meant no more than inconveniently
+crowded; thus Milton: “Confined and <i>pestered</i> in this
+pinfold here”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a>
+Thus in North’s <i>Plutarch</i>, p. 499: “After the fire
+was quenched, they found in <i>niggots</i> of gold and silver
+mingled together, about a thousand talents”; and again,
+p. 323: “There was brought a marvellous great mass of
+treasure in <i>niggots</i> of gold”. The word has not found its
+way into our dictionaries or glossaries.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a>
+[‘Niggot’ rather stands for ‘ningot’, due to a coalescence
+of the article in ‘an ingot’ (as if ‘a ningot’);
+just as, according to some, in French <i>l’ingot</i> became
+<i>lingot</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a>
+[Such collections were essayed in J.&nbsp;C. Hare’s <i>Two
+Essays in English Philology</i>, 1873, “<i>Words derived
+from Names of Persons</i>”, and in R.&nbsp;S. Charnock’s <i>Verba
+Nominalia</i>, pp. 326.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a>
+[In a strangely similar way the stone-worshipper
+in the Malay Peninsula gives to his sacred boulder the
+title of Mohammed (Tylor, <i>Primitive Culture</i>, 3rd ed. ii.
+254).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a>
+[But Wolsey’s jester was most probably so called
+from his wearing a varicoloured or patchwork coat;
+compare the Shakespearian use of ‘motley’. Similarly
+the <i>maquereaux</i> of the old French comedy were clothed
+in a mottled dress like our harlequin, just as the Latin
+<i>maccus</i> or mime wore a <i>centunculus</i> or patchwork coat,
+his name being perhaps connected with <i>macus</i> (in <i>macula</i>),
+a spot (Gozzi, <i>Memoirs</i>, i, 38). In stage slang the harlequin
+was called <i>patchy</i>, as his Latin counterpart was <i>centunculus</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a>
+[An error. Prof. Skeat shows that ‘tram’ was an
+old word in Scottish and Northern English (<i>Etym. Dict.</i>, 655
+and 831).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a>
+Several of these we have in common with the
+<ins class="correction" title="period (full stop) missing in original">French.</ins>
+Of their own they have ‘sardanapalisme’, any piece of
+profuse luxury, from Sardanapalus; while for ‘lambiner’,
+to dally or loiter over a task, they are indebted to Denis
+Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the sixteenth century,
+whom his adversaries accused of sluggish movement and
+wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of Pascal’s
+<i>Provincial Letters</i> will remember Escobar, the great
+casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges
+for the relaxation of the moral law have there been made
+famous. To the notoriety which he thus acquired he
+owes his introduction into the French language; where
+‘escobarder’ is used in the sense of to equivocate, and
+‘escobarderie’ of subterfuge or equivocation. The name
+of an unpopular minister of finance, M. de Silhouette,
+unpopular because he sought to cut down unnecessary
+expenses in the state, was applied to whatever was cheap,
+and, as was implied, unduly economical; it has survived
+in the black outline portrait which is now called a ‘silhouette’.
+(Sismondi, <i>Histoire des Français</i>, tom. xix,
+pp. 94, 95.) In the ‘mansarde’ roof we have the name
+of Mansart, the architect who introduced it. I need
+hardly add ‘guillotine’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a>
+See Col. Mure, <i>Language and Literature of Ancient
+Greece</i>, vol. i, p. 350.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a>
+See Génin, <i>Des Variations du
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘Language’">Langage</ins> Français</i>,
+p. 12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a>
+[Dr. Murray in the N.E.D. calls these by the convenient
+term ‘nonce-words’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a>
+<i>Persa</i>, iv. 6, 20-23. At the same time these words
+may be earnest enough; such was the
+<span title="Greek: elachistoteros">ἐλαχιστότερος</span> of
+St. Paul (Ephes. iii, 8); just as in the Middle Ages some
+did not account it sufficient to call themselves “fratres
+minores, minimi, postremi”, but coined ‘postremissimi’
+to express the depth of their “voluntary humility”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a>
+It is curious that a correspondent of Skinner (<i>Etymologicon</i>,
+1671), although quite ignorant of this story, and
+indeed wholly astray in his application, had suggested
+that ‘chouse’ might be thus connected with the Turkish
+‘chiaus’. I believe Gifford, in his edition of Ben Jonson,
+was the first to clear up the matter. A passage in <i>The
+Alchemist</i> (Act i. Sc. 1) will have put him on the right
+track. [But Dr. Murray notes that Gifford’s story, as
+given above, has not hitherto been substantiated from
+any independent source, and is so far open to doubt.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a>
+[These are quite distinct words, though perhaps distantly
+related.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a>
+If there were any doubt about this matter, which
+indeed there is not, a reference to Latimer’s famous
+<i>Sermon on Cards</i> would abundantly remove it, where
+‘triumph’ and ‘trump’ are interchangeably used.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a>
+[Dr. Murray does not regard these words as ultimately
+identical.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a>
+[‘Rant’ (old Dutch <i>ranten</i>) has no connection with
+‘rend’ (Anglo-Saxon <i>hrendan</i>) (Skeat).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a>
+On these words see a learned discussion in <i>English
+Retraced</i>, Cambridge, 1862.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a>
+[These are quite unconnected (Skeat).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a>
+[Neither are these words to be confused with one
+another.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a>
+The appropriating of ‘Franc<i>e</i>s’ to women and
+‘Franc<i>i</i>s’ to men is quite of modern introduction; it was
+formerly nearly as often Sir Franc<i>e</i>s Drake as Sir Franc<i>i</i>s,
+while Fuller (<i>Holy State</i>, b. iv, c. 14) speaks of Franc<i>i</i>s
+Brandon, eldest <i>daughter</i> of Charles Brandon, Duke of
+Suffolk; and see Ben Jonson’s <i>New Inn</i>, Act. ii, Sc. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a>
+[Not connected.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a>
+[‘Sad’ akin to ‘sated’ bears no relationship to
+‘set’; neither does ‘medley’ to ‘motley’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a>
+[On the connection of these words see my <i>Folk and
+their Word-Lore</i>, p. 110.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a>
+[Not connected, see Skeat.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a>
+Were there need of proving that these both lie in
+‘beneficium’, which there is not, for in Wiclif’s translation
+of the Bible the distinction is still latent (1 Tim. vi. 2),
+one might adduce a singularly characteristic little trait
+of Papal policy, which once turned upon the double use
+of this word. Pope Adrian the Fourth writing to the
+Emperor Frederic the First to complain of certain conduct
+of his, reminded the Emperor that he had placed the
+imperial crown upon his head, and would willingly have
+conferred even greater ‘beneficia’ upon him than this.
+Had the word been allowed to pass, it would no doubt
+have been afterwards appealed to as an admission on the
+Emperor’s part, that he held the Empire as a feud or fief
+(for ‘beneficium’ was then the technical word for this,
+though the meaning had much narrowed since) from
+the Pope&mdash;the very point in dispute between them.
+The word was indignantly repelled by the Emperor and
+the whole German nation, whereupon the Pope appealed
+to the etymology, that ‘beneficium’ was but ‘bonum
+factum’, and protested that he meant no more than to
+remind the Emperor of the ‘benefits’ which he had done
+him, and which he would have willingly multiplied still
+more. [‘Benefice’ from Latin <i>beneficium</i>, and ‘benefit’
+from Latin <i>bene-factum</i>, are here confused.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a>
+[‘Hoard’ (Anglo-Saxon <i>hord</i>) cannot be equated with
+‘horde’ (from Persian <i>órdú</i>).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a>
+[These words have been differentiated in comparatively
+modern times. ‘Ingenuity’ was once used for
+‘ingenuousness’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a>
+[The words are really unconnected, ‘to gamble’
+being ‘to gamle’ or ‘game’, and ‘to gambol’ being akin
+to French <i>gambiller</i>, to fling up the legs (<i>gambes</i> or <i>jambes</i>)
+like a frisking lamb.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a>
+The same happens in other languages. Thus in
+Greek ‘<ins class="correction" title="Greek: anathema;
+original reads ‘ἀνάθέμα’">ἀνάθεμα</ins>’ and
+‘<span title="Greek: anathêma">ἀνάθημα</span>’ both signify that which
+is devoted, though in very different senses, to the gods;
+‘<span title="Greek: tharsos">θάρσος</span>’, boldness, and
+‘<span title="Greek: thrasos">θράσος</span>’, temerity, were no
+more at first than different spellings of the same word;
+not otherwise is it with
+<span title="Greek: gripos">γρῖπος</span> and
+<span title="Greek: griphos">γρῖφος</span>,
+<span title="Greek: ethos">ἔθος</span> and
+<span title="Greek: êthos">ἦθος</span>,
+<span title="Greek: brykô">βρύκω</span> and
+<span title="Greek: brychô">βρύχω</span>, while
+<span title="Greek: obelos">ὀβελὸς</span> and
+<span title="Greek: obolos">ὀβολὸς</span>,
+<span title="Greek: soros">σορὸς</span> and
+<span title="Greek: sôros">σωρὸς</span>,
+are probably the same words. So too in Latin
+‘penna’ and ‘pinna’ differ only in form, and signify
+alike a ‘wing’; while yet ‘penna’ has come to be used
+for the wing of a bird, ‘pinna’ (its diminutive ‘pinnaculum’,
+has given us ‘pinnacle’) for that of a building.
+So is it with ‘Thrax’ a Thracian, and ‘Threx’ a gladiator;
+with ‘codex’ and ‘caudex’; ‘forfex’ and ‘forceps’;
+‘anticus’ and ‘antiquus’; ‘celeber’ and ‘creber’; ‘infacetus’
+and ‘inficetus’; ‘providentia’, ‘prudentia’,
+and ‘provincia’; ‘columen’ and ‘culmen’; ‘coitus’ and
+‘cœtus’; ‘ægrimonia’ and ‘ærumna’; ‘Lucina’ and
+‘luna’; ‘navita’ and ‘nauta’; in German with ‘rechtlich’
+and ‘redlich’; ‘schlecht’ and ‘schlicht’; ‘ahnden’
+and ‘ahnen’; ‘biegsam’ and ‘beugsam’;
+‘<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘fursehung’">fürsehung</ins>’
+and ‘vorsehung’; ‘deich’ and ‘teich’; ‘trotz’ and
+‘trutz’; ‘born’ and ‘brunn’; ‘athem’ and ‘odem’;
+in French with ‘harnois’ the armour, or ‘harness’, of
+a soldier, ‘harnais’ of a horse; with ‘Zéphire’ and
+‘zéphir’, and with many more.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a>
+Coleridge, <i>Church and State</i>, p. 200.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a>
+[One hardly expects to find this otiose Americanism
+(first used by J. Adams in 1759) in the work of a verbal
+purist, when ‘longish’ or the old ‘longsome’ were at
+hand. No one, as yet, has ventured on ‘strengthy’ or
+‘breadthy’ for somewhat strong or broad.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a>
+[This prediction was correct. ‘Dissimilation’ is
+first found in philological works published in the decade
+1874-85. See N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a>
+[Coblenz, at the junction of the Moselle and Rhine
+(from <i>Confluentes</i>), reminds us that the word was so used.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a>
+A passage from Hacket’s <i>Life of Archbishop Williams</i>,
+part 2, p. 144, marks the first rise of this word, and the
+quarter from whence it arose: “When they [the Presbyterians]
+saw that he was not <i>selfish</i> (it is a word of their
+own new mint), etc”. In Whitlock’s <i>Zootomia</i> (1654)
+there is another indication of it as a novelty, p. 364:
+“If constancy may be tainted with this <i>selfishness</i> (to
+use our <i>new wordings</i> of old and general actings)”&mdash;It
+is he who in his striking essay, <i>The Grand Schismatic, or
+Suist Anatomized</i>, puts forward his own words, ‘suist’,
+and ‘suicism’, in lieu of those which have ultimately been
+adopted. ‘Suicism’, let me observe, had not in his time
+the obvious objection of resembling another word
+nearly, and being liable to be confused with it; for ‘suicide’
+did not then exist in the language, nor indeed till
+some twenty years later. The coming up of ‘suicide’ is
+marked by this passage in Phillips’ <i>New World of Words</i>,
+1671, 3rd ed.: “Nor less to be exploded is the word
+‘<i>suicide</i>’, which may as well seem to participate of <i>sus</i>
+a sow, as of the pronoun <i>sui</i>”. In the <i>Index</i> to Jackson’s
+Works, published two years later, it is still ‘<i>suicidium</i>’&mdash;“the
+horrid <i>suicidium</i> of the Jews at York”.
+‘Suicide’ is apparently of much later introduction into
+French. Génin (<i>Récréations Philol.</i> vol. i, p. 194) places
+it about the year 1728, and makes the Abbé Desfontaines
+its first sponsor. He is wrong, as the words just quoted
+show, in supposing that we borrowed it from the French,
+or that the word did not exist in English till the middle
+of last century. The French sometimes complain that
+the fashion of suicide was borrowed from England. It
+would seem at all events probable that the word was so
+borrowed.</p>
+
+<p>Let me urge here the advantage of a complete collection,
+or one as nearly complete as the industry of the collectors
+would allow, of all the notices in our literature, which
+mark, and would serve as dates for, the first incoming
+of new words into the language. These notices are of
+the most various kinds. Sometimes they are protests
+and remonstrances, as that just quoted, against a new
+word’s introduction; sometimes they are gratulations
+at the same; while many hold themselves neuter as to
+approval or disapproval, and merely state, or allow us to
+gather, the fact of a word’s recent appearance. There
+are not a few of these notices in Richardson’s <i>Dictionary</i>:
+thus one from Lord Bacon under ‘essay’; from Swift
+under ‘banter’; from Sir Thomas Elyot under ‘mansuetude’;
+from Lord Chesterfield under ‘flirtation’;
+from Davies and Marlowe’s <i>Epigrams</i> under ‘gull’; from
+Roger North under ‘sham’ (Appendix); the third quotation
+from Dryden under ‘mob’; one from the same under
+‘philanthropy’, and again under ‘witticism’, in which
+he claims the authorship of the word; that from Evelyn
+under ‘miss’; and from Milton under ‘demagogue’.
+There are also notices of the same kind in <i>Todd’s Johnson</i>.
+The work, however, is one which no single scholar could
+hope to accomplish, which could only be accomplished
+by many lovers of their native tongue throwing into a
+common stock the results of their several studies. The
+sources from which these illustrative passages might
+be gathered cannot beforehand be enumerated, inasmuch
+as it is difficult to say in what unexpected quarter they
+would not sometimes be found, although some of these
+sources are obvious enough. As a very slight sample
+of what might be done in this way by the joint contributions
+of many, let me throw together references to a few
+passages of the kind which I do not think have found
+their way into any of our dictionaries. Thus add to that
+which Richardson has quoted on ‘banter’, another from
+<i>The Tatler</i>, No. 230. On ‘plunder’ there are two instructive
+passages in Fuller’s <i>Church History</i>, b. xi, §&nbsp;4, 33;
+and b. ix, §&nbsp;4; and one in Heylin’s <i>Animadversions</i> thereupon,
+p. 196. On ‘admiralty’ see a note in Harington’s
+<i>Ariosto</i>, book 19; on ‘maturity’ Sir Thomas Elyot’s
+<i>Governor</i>, b. i, c. 22; and on ‘industry’ the same, b. i,
+c. 23; on ‘neophyte’ a notice in Fulke’s <i>Defence of the
+English Bible</i>, Parker Society’s edition, p. 586; and on
+‘panorama’, and marking its recent introduction (it is
+not in Johnson), a passage in Pegge’s <i>Anecdotes of the
+English Language</i>, first published in 1803, but my reference
+is to the edition of 1814, p. 306; on ‘accommodate’,
+and supplying a date for its first coming into popular
+use, see Shakespeare’s <i>2 Henry IV.</i> Act 3, Sc. 2; on
+‘shrub’, Junius’ <i>Etymologicon</i>, s. v. ‘syrup’; on ‘sentiment’
+and ‘cajole’ Skinner, s. vv., in his <i>Etymologicon</i>
+(‘vox nuper civitate donata’); and on ‘opera’ Evelyn’s
+<i>Memoirs and Diary</i>, 1827, vol. i, pp. 189, 190. In such
+a collection should be included those passages of our
+literature which supply implicit evidence for the non-existence
+of a word up to a certain moment. It may be
+urged that it is difficult, nay impossible, to prove a negative;
+and yet a passage like this from Bolingbroke makes
+certain that when it was written the word ‘isolated’ did
+not exist in our language: “The events we are witnesses
+of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very often
+original, unprepared, signal and <i>unrelative</i>: if I may use
+such a word for want of a better in English. In French
+I would say <i>isolés</i>” (<i>Notes and Queries</i>, No. 226). Compare
+Lord Chesterfield in a letter to Bishop Chenevix,
+of date March 12, 1767: “I have survived almost all
+my cotemporaries, and as I am too old to make new
+acquaintances, I find myself <i>isolé</i>”. So, too, it is pretty
+certain that ‘amphibious’ was not yet English, when one
+writes (in 1618): “We are like those creatures called
+<ins class="correction" title="Greek: amphibia;
+original reads ‘ἀμφιβια’">ἀμφίβια</ins>, who live in
+water or on land”. <span title="Greek: Zôologia">Ζωολογία</span>, the
+title of a book published in 1649, makes it clear that
+‘zoology’ was not yet in our vocabulary, as
+<span title="Greek: zôophyton">ζωόφυτον</span> (Jackson)
+proves the same for ‘zoophyte’, and
+<ins class="correction" title="Greek: polytheismos;
+original reads ‘πολυθεισμος’">πολυθεϊσμος</ins> (Gell)
+for ‘polytheism’. One precaution, let me observe,
+would be necessary in the collecting, or rather in the
+adopting of any statements about the newness of a word&mdash;for
+the passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought
+not the less to be noted&mdash;namely, that, where there is
+the least motive for suspicion, no one’s affirmation ought
+to be accepted simply and at once as to the novelty of a
+word; for all here are liable to error. Thus more than
+one which Sir Thomas Elyot indicates as new in his time,
+‘magnanimity’ for example (<i>The Governor</i>, 2, 14), are to
+be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed of ‘sentiment’
+that it had only recently obtained the rights of
+English citizenship from the translators of French books,
+he was altogether mistaken, this word being also one of
+continual recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent
+gives in <i>Notes and Queries</i>, No. 225, a useful
+catalogue of recent neologies in our speech, which yet
+would require to be used with caution, for there are at least
+half a dozen in the list which have not the smallest right
+to be so considered.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a>
+There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this
+view (<i>Opera</i>, vol. vi, part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and
+German, with this title, <i>Considérations sur la Culture
+et la Perfection de la Langue Allemande</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a>
+<i>Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwörter
+im Deutschen</i>, von. Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85-91.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span></p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE</h3>
+
+
+<p>I took occasion to observe at the commencement
+of my last lecture that it is the essential
+character of a living language to be in flux<a name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> and
+flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which
+constitute it as little continuing exactly the same,
+or in the same relations to one another, as do
+the atoms which at any one moment make up our
+bodies remain for ever without subtraction or addition.
+As I then undertook for my especial
+subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our
+own language had made, I shall consider in the
+present some of the losses, or at any rate diminutions,
+which during the same period it has endured.
+But it will be well here, by one or two remarks
+going before, to avert any possible misapprehensions
+of my meaning.</p>
+
+<p>It is certain that all languages must, or at least
+all languages do in the end, perish. They run their
+course; not at all at the same rate, for the tendency
+to change is different in different languages, both
+from internal causes (mechanism and the like), and
+also from causes external to the language, laid in
+the varying velocities of social progress and social
+decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or
+longer life, they have their youth, their manhood,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
+their old age, their decrepitude, their final dissolution.
+Not indeed that, even when this last hour
+has arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind
+them. On the contrary, out of their death
+a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms,
+the materials of which they were composed more
+or less survive, but these now organized in new
+shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus
+for example, the Latin perishes as a living language,
+but a chief part of the words that composed
+it live on in the four daughter languages, French,
+Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; or the six, if we
+count the Provençal and Wallachian; not a few
+in our own. Still in their own proper being languages
+perish and pass away; there are dead
+records of what they were in books; not living
+men who speak them any more. Seeing then
+that they thus die, they must have had the germs
+of a possible decay and death in them from the
+beginning.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Languages Gain and Lose</i></div>
+
+<p>Nor is this all; but in such mighty strong built
+fabrics as these, the causes which thus bring about
+their final dissolution must have been actually at
+work very long before the results began to be
+visible. Indeed, very often it is with them as
+with states, which, while in some respects they
+are knitting and strengthening, in others are
+already unfolding the seeds of their future and, it
+may be, still remote overthrow. Equally in these
+and those, in states and in languages, it would be a
+serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain
+point and period is growth and gain, while all after
+is decay and loss. On the contrary, there are long
+periods during which growth in some directions is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+going hand in hand with decay in others; losses
+in one kind are being compensated, or more than
+compensated, by gains in another; during which
+a language changes, but only as the bud changes
+into the flower, and the flower into the fruit. A
+time indeed arrives when the growth and gains,
+becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any
+longer a compensation for the losses and the
+decay; which are ever becoming more; when the
+forces of disorganization and death at work are
+stronger than those of life and order. It is from
+this moment the decline of a language may properly
+be dated. But until that crisis and turning
+point has arrived, we may be quite justified in
+speaking of the losses of a language, and may
+esteem them most real, without in the least thereby
+implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy
+has begun. This may yet be far distant,
+and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and
+diminutions which our own has undergone, or is
+undergoing, you will not conclude that I am seeking
+to present it to you as now travelling the
+downward course to dissolution and death. This
+is very far from my intention. If in some respects
+it is losing, in others it is gaining. Nor is everything
+which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the
+parting with a word in which there is no true
+help, the dropping of a cumbrous or superfluous
+form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain.
+English is undoubtedly becoming different from
+what it has been; but only different in that it is
+passing into another stage of its development;
+only different, as the fruit is different from the
+flower, and the flower from the bud; having<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+changed its merits, but not having renounced
+them; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, but
+more of usefulness; not, perhaps, serving the poet
+so well, but serving the historian and philosopher
+and theologian better than before.</p>
+
+<p>One observation more let me make, before entering
+on the special details of my subject. It is
+this. The losses and diminutions of a language differ
+in one respect from its gains and acquisitions&mdash;namely,
+that they are of <i>two</i> kinds, while its gains
+are only of <i>one</i>. Its gains are only in <i>words</i>; it
+never puts forth in the course of its evolution
+a new <i>power</i>; it never makes for itself a new case,
+or a new tense, or a new comparative. But its
+losses are both in words and in <i>powers</i>&mdash;in words
+of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it,
+as it travels onwards, cases which it once possessed;
+renounces the employment of tenses which it once
+used; forgets its dual; is content with one termination
+both for masculine and feminine, and so
+on. Nor is this a peculiar feature of one language,
+but the universal law of all. “In all languages”,
+as has been well said, “there is a constant
+tendency to relieve themselves of that precision
+which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade of
+meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction,
+and detect as it were a royal road to the interchange
+of opinion”. For example, a vast number
+of languages had at an early period of their development,
+besides the singular and plural, a dual number,
+some even a trinal, which they have let go at
+a later. But what I mean by a language renouncing
+its powers will, I trust, be more clear to you
+before my lecture is concluded. This much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
+I have here said on the matter, to explain and justify
+a division which I shall make, considering first
+the losses of the English language in <i>words</i>, and
+then in <i>powers</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words become Extinct</i></div>
+
+<p>And first, there is going forward a continual
+extinction of the words in our language&mdash;as indeed
+in every other. When I speak of this, the dying
+out of words, I do not refer to mere <i>tentative</i>,
+experimental words, not a few of which I adduced
+in my last lecture, words offered to the language,
+but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as
+either belonged to the primitive stock of the language,
+or if not so, which had been domiciled
+in it long, that they might have been supposed to
+have found in it a lasting home. Thus not a few
+pure Anglo-Saxon words which lived on into the
+times of our early English, have subsequently
+dropped out of our vocabulary, sometimes leaving
+a gap which has never since been filled, but their
+places oftener taken by others which have come up
+in their room. Not to mention those of Chaucer
+and Wiclif, which are very numerous, many held
+their ground to far later periods, and yet have
+finally given way. That beautiful word ‘wanhope’
+for despair, hope which has so <i>waned</i> that now
+there is an entire <i>want</i> of it, was in use down to
+the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the
+poems of Gascoigne<a name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a>.
+‘Skinker’ for
+cupbearer,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+(an ungraceful word, no doubt) is used by Shakespeare
+and lasted till Dryden’s time and beyond.</p>
+
+<p>Spenser uses often ‘to welk’ (welken) in the sense
+of to fade, ‘to sty’ for to mount, ‘to hery’ as to
+glorify or praise, ‘to halse’ as to embrace, ‘teene’
+as vexation or grief: Shakespeare ‘to tarre’ as to
+provoke, ‘to sperr’ as to enclose or bar in; ‘to
+sag’ for to droop, or hang the head downward.
+Holland employs ‘geir’<a name="FNanchor_130_130" id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a> for vulture (“vultures or
+<i>geirs</i>”), ‘specht’ for woodpecker, ‘reise’ for journey,
+‘frimm’ for lusty or strong. ‘To schimmer’
+occurs in Bishop Hall; ‘to tind’, that is, to kindle,
+and surviving in ‘tinder’, is used by Bishop Sanderson;
+‘to nimm’, or take, as late as by Fuller.
+A rogue is a ‘skellum’ in Sir Thomas Urquhart.
+‘Nesh’ in the sense of soft through moisture, ‘leer’
+in that of empty, ‘eame’ in that of uncle, <i>mother’s</i>
+brother (the German ‘oheim’), good Saxon-English
+once, still live on in some of our provincial
+dialects; so <ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘dose’">does</ins>
+‘flitter-mouse’ or ‘flutter-mouse’
+(mus volitans), where we should use bat. Indeed
+of those above named several do the same; it is
+so with ‘frimm’, with ‘to sag’, ‘to nimm’.
+‘Heft’ employed by Shakespeare in the sense of
+weight, is still employed in the same sense by our
+peasants in Hampshire<a name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a>.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span></p>
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Vigorous Compound Words</i></div>
+
+<p>A number of vigorous compounds we have
+dropped and let go. ‘Earsports’ for entertainments
+of song or music (<span title="Greek: akroamata">ἀκροάματα</span>) is a constantly
+recurring word in Holland’s <i>Plutarch</i>.
+Were it not for Shakespeare, we should have quite
+forgotten that young men of hasty fiery valour
+were called ‘hotspurs’; and even now we regard
+the word rather as the proper name of one than
+that which would have been once alike the designation
+of all<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a>. Fuller warns men that they should
+not ‘witwanton’ with God. Severe austere old
+men, such as, in Falstaff’s words would “hate us
+youth”, were ‘grimsirs’, or ‘grimsires’ once (Massinger).
+‘Realmrape’ (=&nbsp;usurpation), occurring
+in <i>The Mirror for Magistrates</i>, is a vigorous
+word. ‘Rootfast’ and ‘rootfastness’<a name="FNanchor_133_133" id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a> were ill
+lost, being worthy to have lived; so too was Lord
+Brooke’s ‘bookhunger’; and Baxter’s ‘word-warriors’,
+with which term he noted those whose
+strife was only about words. ‘Malingerer’ is
+familiar enough to military men, but I do not find
+it in our dictionaries; being the soldier who, out
+of <i>evil will</i> (malin gré) to his work, shams and
+shirks and is not found in the ranks<a name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Those who would gladly have seen the Anglo-Saxon
+to have predominated over the Latin ele<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>ment
+in our language, even more than it actually has
+done, must note with regret that in many instances
+a word of the former stock had been dropped, and
+a Latin coined to supply its place; or where the
+two once existed side by side, the Saxon has died,
+and the Latin lived on. Thus Wiclif employed
+‘soothsaw’, where we now use proverb; ‘sourdough’,
+where we employ leaven; ‘wellwillingness’
+for benevolence; ‘againbuying’ for redemption;
+‘againrising’ for resurrection; ‘undeadliness’ for
+immortality; ‘uncunningness’ for ignorance;
+‘aftercomer’ for descendant; ‘greatdoingly’ for
+magnificently; ‘to afterthink’ (still in use in Lancashire)
+for to repent; ‘medeful’, which has given
+way to meritorious; ‘untellable’ for ineffable;
+‘dearworth’ for precious; Chaucer has ‘forword’
+for promise; Sir John Cheke ‘freshman’ for proselyte;
+‘mooned’ for lunatic; ‘foreshewer’ for prophet;
+‘hundreder’ for centurion; Jewel ‘foretalk’,
+where we now employ preface; Holland ‘sunstead’
+where we use solstice; ‘leechcraft’ instead
+of medicine; and another, ‘wordcraft’ for logic;
+‘starconner’ (Gascoigne) did service once, if not
+instead of astrologer, yet side by side with it;
+‘halfgod’ (Golding) had the advantage over ‘demigod’,
+that it was all of one piece; ‘to eyebite’
+(Holland) told its story at least as well as to
+fascinate; ‘shriftfather’ as confessor; ‘earshrift’
+(Cartwright) is only two syllables, while ‘auricular
+confession’ is eight; ‘waterfright’ is a better word
+than our awkward Greek hydrophobia. The lamprey
+(lambens petram) was called once the ‘suckstone’
+or the ‘lickstone’; and the anemone the
+‘windflower’. ‘Umstroke’, if it had lived on (it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
+appears as late as Fuller, though our dictionaries
+know nothing of it), might have made ‘circumference’
+and ‘periphery’ unnecessary. ‘Wanhope’,
+as we saw just now, has given place to despair,
+‘middler’ to mediator; and it would be easy to
+increase this list.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Local and Provincial English</i></div>
+
+<p>I had occasion just now to notice the fact that
+many words survive in our provincial dialects,
+long after they have died out from the main body
+of the speech. The fact is one connected with so
+much of deep interest in the history of language
+that I cannot pass it thus slightly over. It is one
+which, rightly regarded, may assist to put us in a
+just point of view for estimating the character of
+the local and provincial in speech, and rescuing it
+from that unmerited contempt and neglect with
+which it is often regarded. I must here go somewhat
+further back than I could wish; but only so,
+only by looking at the matter in connexion with
+other phenomena of speech, can I hope to explain
+to you the worth and significance which local and
+provincial words and usages must oftentimes
+possess.</p>
+
+<p>Let us then first suppose a portion of those
+speaking a language to have been separated off
+from the main body of its speakers, either through
+their forsaking for one cause or other of their
+native seats, or by the intrusion of a hostile people,
+like a wedge, between them and the others, forcibly
+keeping them asunder, and cutting off their
+communications one with the other, as the Saxons
+intruded between the Britons of Cornwall and of
+Wales. In such a case it will inevitably happen
+that before very long differences of speech will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
+begin to reveal themselves between those to whom
+even dialectic distinctions may have been once
+unknown. The divergences will be of various
+kinds. Idioms will come up in the separated body,
+which, not being recognized and allowed by those
+who remain the arbiters of the language, will be
+esteemed by them, should they come under their
+notice, violations of its law, or at any rate departures
+from its purity. Again, where a colony has
+gone forth into new seats, and exists under new
+conditions, it is probable that the necessities, physical
+and moral, rising out of these new conditions,
+will give birth to words, which there will be nothing
+to call out among those who continue in the old
+haunts of the nation. Intercourse with new tribes
+and people will bring in new words, as, for instance,
+contact with the Indian tribes of North
+America has given to American English a certain
+number of words hardly or not at all allowed or
+known by us; or as the presence of a large Dutch
+population at the Cape has given to the English
+spoken there many words, as ‘inspan’, ‘outspan’<a name="FNanchor_135_135" id="FNanchor_135_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a>,
+‘spoor’, of which our home English knows nothing.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Antiquated English</i></div>
+
+<p>There is another cause, however, which will probably
+be more effectual than all these, namely,
+that words will in process of time be dropped by
+those who constitute the original stock of the
+nation, which will not be dropped by the offshoot;
+idioms which those have overlived, and have stored
+up in the unhonoured lumber-room of the past, will
+still be in use and currency among the smaller and
+separated section which has gone forth; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+thus it will come to pass that what seems and in
+fact is the newer swarm, will have many older
+words, and very often an archaic air and old-world
+fashion both about the words they use, their
+way of pronouncing, their order and manner of
+combining them. Thus after the Conquest we
+know that our insular French gradually diverged
+from the French of the Continent. The Prioress
+in Chaucer’s <i>Canterbury Tales</i> could speak her
+French “full faire and fetishly”, but it was French,
+as the poet slyly adds,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“After the scole of Stratford atte bow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For French of Paris was to hire unknowe”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>One of our old chroniclers, writing in the reign of
+Elizabeth, informs us that by the English colonists
+within the Pale in Ireland numerous words were
+preserved in common use, “the dregs of the old
+ancient Chaucer English”, as he contemptuously
+calls it, which had become quite obsolete and forgotten
+in England itself. For example, they still
+called a spider an ‘attercop’&mdash;a word, by the way,
+still in popular use in the North;&mdash;a physician a
+‘leech’, as in poetry he still is called; a dunghill
+was still for them a ‘mixen’; (the word is still
+common all over England in this sense;) a quadrangle
+or base court was a ‘bawn’<a name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a>;
+they em<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>ployed
+‘uncouth’ in the earlier sense of unknown.
+Nay more, their general manner of speech was so
+different, though containing English still, that
+Englishmen at their first coming over often found
+it hard or impossible to comprehend. We have
+another example of the same in what took place
+after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and
+the consequent formation of colonies of Protestant
+French emigrants in various places, especially in
+Amsterdam and other chief cities of Holland.
+There gradually grew up among these what came to
+be called ‘refugee French’, which within a generation
+or two diverged in several particulars from
+the classical language of France; its divergence
+being mainly occasioned by this, that it remained
+stationary, while the classical language was in
+motion; it retained usages and words, which the
+latter had dismissed<a name="FNanchor_137_137" id="FNanchor_137_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Provincial English</i></div>
+
+<p>Nor is it otherwise in respect of our English
+provincialisms. It is true that our country people
+who in the main employ them, have not been
+separated by distance of space, nor yet by insurmountable
+obstacles intervening, from the main
+body of their fellow-countrymen; but they have
+been quite as effectually divided by deficient
+education. They have been, if not locally, yet
+intellectually, kept at a distance from the onward
+march of the nation’s mind; and of them also it
+is true that many of their words, idioms, turns
+of speech, which we are ready to set down as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+vulgarisms, solecisms of speech, violations of the
+primary rules of grammar, do merely attest that
+those who employ them have not kept abreast
+with the advance of the language and nation, but
+have been left behind by it. The usages are only
+local in the fact that, having once been employed
+by the whole body of the English people, they
+have now receded from the lips of all except those
+in some certain country districts, who have been
+more faithful than others to the tradition of the
+past<a name="FNanchor_138_138" id="FNanchor_138_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>It is thus in respect of a multitude of isolated
+words, which were excellent Anglo-Saxon, which
+were excellent early English, and which only are
+not excellent present English, because use, which
+is the supreme arbiter in these matters, has
+decided against their further employment.
+Several of these I enumerated just now. It is
+thus also with several grammatical forms and
+flexions. For instance, where we decline the plural
+of “I sing”, “we sing”, “ye sing”, “they sing”,
+there are parts of England in which they would
+decline, “we sin<i>gen</i>”, “ye sin<i>gen</i>”, “they sin<i>gen</i>”.
+This is not indeed the original form of the plural,
+but it is that form of it which, coming up about
+Chaucer’s time, was just going out in Spenser’s;
+he, though we must ever keep in mind
+that he does not fairly represent the language of
+his time, or indeed of any time, affecting a certain
+artificial archaism both in words and forms,
+con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>tinually
+uses it<a name="FNanchor_139_139" id="FNanchor_139_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a>.
+After him it becomes ever
+rarer, the last of whom I am aware as occasionally
+using it being Fuller, until it quite disappears.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Earlier and Later English</i></div>
+
+<p>Of such as may now employ forms like these
+we must say, not that they violate the laws of the
+language, but only that they have taken their
+<i>permanent</i> stand at a point which was only a
+point of transition, and which it has now left behind,
+and overlived. Thus, to take examples which
+you may hear at the present day in almost any part
+of England&mdash;a countryman will say, “He made
+me <i>afeard</i>”; or “The price of corn <i>ris</i> last
+market day”; or “I will <i>axe</i> him his name”; or
+“I tell <i>ye</i>”. You would probably set these phrases
+down for barbarous English. They are not so at
+all; in one sense they are quite as good English
+as “He made me <i>afraid</i>”; or “The price of corn
+<i>rose</i> last market day”; or “I will <i>ask</i> him his
+name”. ‘Afeard’, used by Spenser, is the regular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+participle of the old verb to ‘affear’, still existing
+as a law term, as ‘afraid’ is of to ‘affray’, and
+just as good English<a name="FNanchor_140_140" id="FNanchor_140_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_140_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a>; ‘ris’ or ‘risse’ is an old
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘preterite’">præterite</ins>
+of ‘to rise’; to ‘axe’ is not a mispronunciation
+of ‘to ask’, but a genuine English form
+of the word, the form which in the earlier English
+it constantly assumed; in Wiclif’s Bible almost
+without exception; and indeed ‘axe’ occurs continually,
+I know not whether invariably, in Tyndale’s
+translation of the Scriptures; there was
+a time when ‘ye’ was an accusative, and to have
+used it as a nominative or vocative, the only permitted
+uses at present, would have been incorrect.
+Even such phrases as “Put <i>them</i> things away”; or
+“The man <i>what</i> owns the horse” are not bad,
+but only antiquated English<a name="FNanchor_141_141" id="FNanchor_141_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_141_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a>. Saying this, I
+would not in the least imply that these forms are
+open to you to employ, or that they would be good
+English for <i>you</i>. They would not; inasmuch as
+they are contrary to present use and custom, and
+these must be our standards in what we speak, and
+in what we write; just as in our buying and selling
+we are bound to employ the current coin of
+the realm, must not attempt to pass that which
+long since has been called in, whatever merits
+or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘instrinsic’">intrinsic</ins>
+value it may possess. All which I
+affirm is that the phrases just brought forward
+represent past stages of the language, and are not
+barbarous violations of it.</p>
+
+<p>The same may be asserted of certain ways of
+pronouncing words, which are now in use among
+the lower classes, but not among the higher; as,
+for example, ‘contrāry’, ‘mischiēvous’, ‘blasphēmous’,
+instead of ‘contrăry’, ‘mischiĕvous’, ‘blasphĕmous’.
+It would be abundantly easy to show
+by a multitude of quotations from our poets, and
+those reaching very far down, that these are merely
+the retention of the earlier pronunciation by the
+people, after the higher classes have abandoned
+it<a name="FNanchor_142_142" id="FNanchor_142_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a>.
+And on the strength of what has just been spoken,
+let me here suggest to you how well worth your
+while it will prove to be on the watch for provincial
+words and inflexions, local idioms and
+modes of pronunciation, and to take note of these.
+Count nothing in this kind beneath your notice.
+
+<span class="sidenote"><i>Luncheon</i>, <i>Nuncheon</i></span>
+
+Do not at once ascribe anything which you hear
+to the ignorance or stupidity of the speaker. Thus
+if you hear ‘nuncheon’, do not at once set it
+down for a malformation of
+‘luncheon’<a name="FNanchor_143_143" id="FNanchor_143_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a>,
+nor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
+‘yeel’<a name="FNanchor_144_144" id="FNanchor_144_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a>,
+of ‘eel’. Lists and collections of provincial
+usage, such as I have suggested, always have their
+value. If you are not able to turn them to any
+profit yourselves, and they may not stand in close
+enough connexion with your own studies for this,
+yet there always are those who will thank you for
+them; and to whom the humblest of these collec<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>tions,
+carefully and intelligently made, will be in
+one way or another of real assistance<a name="FNanchor_145_145" id="FNanchor_145_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a>. And there
+is the more need to urge this at the present,
+because, notwithstanding the tenacity with which
+our country folk cling to their old forms and
+usages, still these forms and usages must now be
+rapidly growing fewer; and there are forces, moral
+and material, at work in England, which will
+probably cause that of those which now survive
+the greater part will within the next fifty years have
+disappeared<a name="FNanchor_146_146" id="FNanchor_146_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>‘Its’ of Late Introduction</i></div>
+
+<p>Before quitting this subject, let me instance one
+example more of that which is commonly accounted
+ungrammatical usage, but which is really the retention
+of old grammar by some, where others
+have substituted new; I mean the constant application
+by our rustic population in the south, and
+I dare say through all parts of England, of ‘his’ to
+inanimate objects, and to these not personified, no
+less than to persons; where ‘its’ would be employed
+by others. This was once the manner of speech
+among all; for ‘its’ is a word of very recent
+introduction, many would be surprised to learn
+of how recent introduction, into the language.
+You will look for it in vain through the whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
+of our Authorized Version of the Bible; the office
+which it now fulfils being there accomplished, as
+our rustics accomplish it at the present, by ‘his’
+(Gen. i. 11; Exod. xxxvii. 17; Matt. v. 15) or
+‘her’ (Jon. i. 15; Rev. xxii. 2) applied as freely
+to inanimate things as to persons, or else by
+‘thereof’ (Ps. lxv. 10) or ‘of it’ (Dan. vii. 5). Nor
+may Lev. xx. 5 be urged as invalidating this assertion;
+for reference to the exemplar edition of 1611,
+or indeed to any earlier editions of King James’
+Bible, will show that in them the passage stood,
+“of <i>it</i> own accord”<a name="FNanchor_147_147" id="FNanchor_147_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a>. ‘Its’ occurs very rarely
+in Shakespeare, in many of his plays it will not
+once be found. Milton also for the most part
+avoids it, and this, though in his time others freely
+allowed it. How soon all this was forgotten we
+have striking evidence in the fact that when
+Dryden, in one of his fault-finding moods with
+the great men of the preceding generation, is
+taking Ben Jonson to task for general inaccuracy
+in his English diction, among other counts of his
+indictment, he quotes this line from <i>Catiline</i></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Though heaven should speak with all <i>his</i> wrath at once”,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and proceeds, “<i>heaven</i> is ill syntax with <i>his</i>”;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
+while in fact up to within forty or fifty years of
+the time when Dryden began to write, no other
+syntax was known; and to a much later date was
+exceedingly rare. Curious also, is it to note that
+in the earnest controversy which followed on Chatterton’s
+publication of the poems ascribed by him
+to a monk Rowlie, who should have lived in the
+fifteenth century, no one appealed to such lines
+as the following,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Life and all <i>its</i> goods I scorn”,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>as at once deciding that the poems were not of the
+age which they pretended. Warton, who denied,
+though with some hesitation, the antiquity of
+the poems, giving many and sufficient reasons for
+this denial, failed to take note of this little word;
+while yet there needed no more than to point it
+out, for the disposing of the whole question; the
+forgery at once was betrayed.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>American English</i></div>
+
+<p>What has been here affirmed concerning our
+provincial English, namely that it is often <i>old</i>
+English rather than <i>bad</i> English, may be affirmed
+with equal right of many so-called Americanisms.
+There are parts of America where ‘het’ is used,
+or was used a few years since, as the perfect of
+‘to heat’; ‘holp’ as the perfect of ‘to help’;
+‘stricken’ as the participle of ‘to strike’. Again
+there are the words which have become obsolete
+during the last two hundred years, which have not
+become obsolete there, although many of them
+probably retain only a provincial existence. Thus
+‘slick’, which indeed is only another form of
+‘sleek’, was employed by our good writers of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+seventeenth century<a name="FNanchor_148_148" id="FNanchor_148_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a>. Other words again, which
+have remained current on both sides of the
+Atlantic, have yet on our side receded from their
+original use, while they have remained true to it
+on the other. ‘Plunder’ is a word in point<a name="FNanchor_149_149" id="FNanchor_149_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_149_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>In the contemplation of facts like these it has
+been sometimes asked, whether a day will ever
+arrive when the language spoken on this side of
+the Atlantic and on the other, will divide into two
+languages, an old English and a new. We may
+confidently answer, No. Doubtless, if those who
+went out from us to people and subdue a new
+continent, had left our shores two or three centuries
+earlier than they did, when the language was
+very much farther removed from that ideal after
+which it was unconsciously striving, and in which,
+once reached, it has in great measure acquiesced;
+if they had not carried with them to their distant
+homes their English Bible, and what else of
+worth had been already uttered in the English
+tongue; if, having once left us, the intercourse
+between Old and New England had been entirely
+broken off, or only rare and partial; there would
+then have unfolded themselves differences between
+the language spoken here and there, which in
+tract of time accumulating and multiplying, might
+in the end have justified the regarding of the languages
+as no longer one and the same. It could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
+not have failed but that such differences should
+have displayed themselves; for while there is a
+law of <i>necessity</i> in the evolution of languages,
+while they pursue certain courses and in certain
+directions, from which they can be no more turned
+aside by the will of men than one of the heavenly
+bodies could be pushed from its orbit by any engines
+of ours, there is a law of <i>liberty</i> no less; and this
+liberty must inevitably have made itself in many
+ways felt. In the political and social condition
+of America, so far removed from our own, in the
+many natural objects which are not the same with
+those which surround us here, in efforts independently
+carried out to rid the language of imperfections,
+or to unfold its latent powers, even in the
+different effects of soil and climate on the organs
+of speech, there would have been causes enough to
+have provoked in the course of time not immaterial
+<ins class="correction" title="so in original">divergencies</ins> of language.</p>
+
+<p>As it is, however, the joint operation of those
+three causes referred to already, namely, that the
+separation did not take place in the infancy or
+youth of the language, but only in its ripe manhood,
+that England and America owned a body of
+literature, to which they alike looked up and appealed
+as containing the authoritative standards
+of the language, that the intercourse between the
+one people and the other has been large and frequent,
+hereafter probably to be larger and more
+frequent still, has effectually wrought. It has been
+strong enough so to traverse, repress, and check
+all those causes which tended to divergence, that
+the <i>written</i> language of educated men on both
+sides of the water remains precisely the same,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
+their <i>spoken</i> manifesting a few trivial differences of
+idiom; while even among those classes which do
+not consciously acknowledge any ideal standard of
+language, there are scarcely greater differences, in
+some respects far smaller, than exist between
+inhabitants of different provinces in this one island
+of England; and in the future we may reasonably
+anticipate that these differences, so far from multiplying,
+will rather diminish and disappear.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Extinct English</i></div>
+
+<p>But I must return from this long digression.
+It seems often as if an almost unaccountable
+caprice presided over the fortunes of words, and
+determined which should live and which die.
+Thus in instances out of number a word lives on
+as a verb, but has ceased to be employed as a
+noun; we say ‘to embarrass’, but no longer an
+‘embarrass’; ‘to revile’, but not, with Chapman
+and Milton, a ‘revile’; ‘to dispose’, but not a
+‘dispose’<a name="FNanchor_150_150" id="FNanchor_150_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a>; ‘to retire’ but not a ‘retire’; ‘to
+wed’, but not a ‘wed’; we say ‘to infest’, but use
+no longer the adjective ‘infest’. Or with a reversed
+fortune a word lives on as a noun, but has perished
+as a verb&mdash;thus as a noun substantive, a ‘slug’,
+but no longer ‘to slug’ or render slothful; a
+‘child’, but no longer ‘to child’, (“<i>childing</i>
+autumn”, Shakespeare); a ‘rape’, but not ‘to
+rape’ (South); a ‘rogue’, but not ‘to rogue’;
+‘malice’, but not ‘to malice’; a ‘path’, but not
+‘to path’; or as a noun adjective, ‘serene’, but
+not ‘to serene’, a beautiful word, which we have
+let go, as the French have ‘sereiner’<a name="FNanchor_151_151" id="FNanchor_151_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_151_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a>; ‘meek’,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>but not ‘to meek’ (Wiclif); ‘fond’, but not ‘to
+fond’ (Dryden); ‘dead’, but not ‘to dead’; ‘intricate’,
+but ‘to intricate’ (Jeremy Taylor) no longer.</p>
+
+<p>Or again, the affirmative remains, but the negative
+is gone; thus ‘wisdom’, ‘bold’, ‘sad’, but
+not any more ‘unwisdom’, ‘unbold’, ‘unsad’ (all
+in Wiclif); ‘cunning’, but not ‘uncunning’;
+‘manhood’, ‘wit’, ‘mighty’, ‘tall’, but not ‘unmanhood’,
+‘unwit’, ‘unmighty’, ‘untall’ (all in
+Chaucer); ‘buxom’, but not ‘unbuxom’ (Dryden);
+‘hasty’, but not ‘unhasty’ (Spenser); ‘blithe’,
+but not ‘unblithe’; ‘ease’, but not ‘unease’
+(Hacket); ‘repentance’, but not ‘unrepentance’;
+‘remission’, but not ‘irremission’ (Donne);
+‘science’, but not ‘nescience’ (Glanvill)<a name="FNanchor_152_152" id="FNanchor_152_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_152_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a>; ‘to know’,
+but not ‘to unknow’ (Wiclif); ‘to give’, but not
+‘to ungive’. Or once more, with a curious variation
+from this, the negative survives, while the
+affirmative is gone; thus ‘wieldy’ (Chaucer) survives
+only in ‘unwieldy’; ‘couth’ and ‘couthly’
+(both in Spenser), only in ‘uncouth’ and ‘uncouthly’;
+‘rule’ (Foxe) only in ‘unruly’; ‘gainly’
+(Henry More) in ‘ungainly’; these last two were
+both of them serviceable words, and have been ill
+lost<a name="FNanchor_153_153" id="FNanchor_153_153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a>;
+‘gainly’ is indeed still common in the
+West<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+Riding of Yorkshire; ‘exorable’ (Holland) and
+‘evitable’ only in ‘inexorable’ and ‘inevitable’;
+‘faultless’ remains, but hardly ‘faultful’ (Shakespeare).
+In like manner ‘semble’ (Foxe) has, except
+as a technical law term, disappeared; while
+‘dissemble’ continues. So also of other pairs one
+has been taken and one left; ‘height’, or ‘highth’,
+as Milton better spelt it, remains, but ‘lowth’
+(Becon) is gone; ‘righteousness’, or ‘rightwiseness’,
+as it would once more accurately have
+been written, for ‘righteous’ is a corruption of
+‘rightwise’, remains, but its correspondent ‘wrongwiseness’
+has been taken; ‘inroad’ continues, but
+‘outroad’ (Holland) has disappeared; ‘levant’
+lives, but ‘ponent’ (Holland) has died; ‘to extricate’
+continues, but, as we saw just now, ‘to
+intricate’ does not; ‘parricide’, but not ‘filicide’
+(Holland). Again, of whole groups of words
+formed on some particular scheme it may be
+only a single specimen will survive. Thus ‘gainsay’,
+that is, again say, survives; but ‘gainstrive’
+(Foxe), ‘gainstand’, ‘gaincope’ (Golding), and
+other similarly formed words exist no longer. It
+is the same with ‘foolhardy’, which is but one,
+though now indeed the only one remaining, of at
+least five adjectives formed on the same principle;
+thus ‘foollarge’, quite as expressive a word as
+prodigal, occurs in Chaucer, and ‘foolhasty’, found
+also in him, lived on to the time of Holland;
+while ‘foolhappy’ is in Spencer; and ‘foolbold’
+in Bale. ‘Steadfast’ remains, but ‘shamefast’,
+‘rootfast’, ‘bedfast’ (=&nbsp;bedridden), ‘homefast’,
+‘housefast’, ‘masterfast’ (Skelton), with others,
+are all gone. ‘Exhort’ remains; but ‘dehort’ a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+word whose place neither ‘dissuade’ nor any other
+exactly supplies, has escaped us<a name="FNanchor_154_154" id="FNanchor_154_154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a>. We have ‘twilight’,
+but ‘twibill’ = bipennis (Chapman) is
+extinct.</p>
+
+<p>Let me mention another real loss, where in like
+manner there remains in the present language
+something to remind us of that which is gone.
+The comparative ‘rather’ stands alone, having
+dropped on one side its positive ‘rathe’<a name="FNanchor_155_155" id="FNanchor_155_155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a>, and on the
+other its superlative ‘rathest’. ‘Rathe’, having
+the sense of early, though a graceful word, and not
+fallen quite out of popular remembrance, inasmuch
+as it is embalmed in the <i>Lycidas</i> of Milton,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And the <i>rathe</i> primrose, which forsaken dies”,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>might still be suffered without remark to share the
+common lot of so many words which have perished,
+though worthy to have lived; but the disuse
+of ‘rathest’ has left a real gap in the language,
+and the more so, seeing that ‘liefest’ is
+gone too. ‘Rather’ expresses the Latin ‘potius’;
+but ‘rathest’ being out of use, we have no word,
+unless ‘soonest’ may be accepted as such, to
+express ‘potissimum’, or the preference not of one
+way over another or over certain others, but of
+one over all; which we therefore effect by aid of
+various circumlocutions. Nor has ‘rathest’ been
+so long out of use, that it would be playing the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+antic to attempt to revive it. It occurs in the
+<i>Sermons</i> of Bishop Sanderson, who in the opening
+of that beautiful sermon from the text, “When my
+father and my mother forsake me, the Lord taketh
+me up”, puts the consideration, “why these”,
+that is, father and mother, “are named the <i>rathest</i>,
+and the rest to be included in them”<a name="FNanchor_156_156" id="FNanchor_156_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>It is sometimes easy enough, but indeed oftener
+hard, and not seldom quite impossible, to trace
+the causes which have been at work to bring about
+that certain words, little by little, drop out of the
+language of men, come to be heard more and more
+rarely, and finally are not heard any more at all&mdash;to
+trace the motives which have induced a whole
+people thus to arrive at a tacit consent not to employ
+them any longer; for without this tacit consent
+they could never have thus become obsolete.
+That it is not accident, that there is a law here at
+work, however hidden it may be from us, is plain
+from the fact that certain families of words, words
+formed on certain patterns, have a tendency thus
+to fall into desuetude.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words in ‘-some’</i></div>
+
+<p>Thus, I think, we may trace a tendency in words
+ending in ‘some’, the Anglo-Saxon and early English
+‘sum’, the German ‘sam’ (‘friedsam’, ‘seltsam’)
+to fall out of use. It is true that a vast number
+of these survive, as ‘gladsome’, ‘handsome’,
+‘wearisome’, ‘buxom’ (this last spelt better
+‘bucksome’, by our earlier writers, for its present
+spelling altogether disguises its true character, and
+the family to which it
+<ins class="correction" title="missing ‘)’ in original">belongs);</ins> being the same
+word as the German ‘beugsam’ or ‘biegsam’,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>bendable,
+compliant<a name="FNanchor_157_157" id="FNanchor_157_157"></a><a href="#Footnote_157_157" class="fnanchor">[157]</a>;
+but a larger number of these
+words than can be ascribed to accident, many
+more than the due proportion of them, are either
+quite or nearly extinct. Thus in Wiclif’s Bible
+alone you might note the following, ‘lovesum’,
+‘hatesum’, ‘lustsum’, ‘gilsum’ (guilesome), ‘wealsum’,
+‘heavysum’, ‘lightsum’, ‘delightsum’; of
+these ‘lightsome’ long survived, and indeed still
+survives in provincial dialects; but of the others
+all save ‘delightsome’ are gone; and that, although
+used in our Authorized Version (Mal. iii, 12), is
+now only employed in poetry. So too ‘mightsome’
+(see Coleridge’s <i>Glossary</i>), ‘brightsome’
+(Marlowe), ‘wieldsome’, and ‘unwieldsome’
+(Golding), ‘unlightsome’ (Milton), ‘healthsome’
+(<i>Homilies</i>), ‘ugsome’ and ‘ugglesome’ (both in
+Foxe), ‘laboursome’ (Shakespeare), ‘friendsome’,
+‘longsome’ (Bacon), ‘quietsome’, ‘mirksome’
+(both in Spenser), ‘toothsome’ (Beaumont and
+Fletcher), ‘gleesome’, ‘joysome’ (both in Browne’s
+<i>Pastorals</i>), ‘gaysome’ (<i>Mirror for Magistrates</i>),
+‘roomsome’, ‘bigsome’, ‘awesome’, ‘timersome’,
+‘winsome’, ‘viewsome’, ‘dosome’ (=&nbsp;prosperous),
+‘flaysome’ (=&nbsp;fearful), ‘auntersome’ (=&nbsp;adventurous),
+‘clamorsome’ (all these still surviving in
+the North), ‘playsome’ (employed by the historian
+Hume), ‘lissome’<a name="FNanchor_158_158" id="FNanchor_158_158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158_158" class="fnanchor">[158]</a>, have nearly or quite disappeared
+from our English speech. They seem to have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+held their ground in Scotland in considerably
+larger numbers than in the south of the Island<a name="FNanchor_159_159" id="FNanchor_159_159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159_159" class="fnanchor">[159]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words in ‘-ard’</i></div>
+
+<p>Neither can I esteem it a mere accident that of
+a group of depreciatory and contemptuous words
+ending in ‘ard’, at least one half should have
+dropped out of use; I refer to that group of
+which ‘dotard’, ‘laggard’, ‘braggard’, now spelt
+‘braggart’, ‘sluggard’, ‘buzzard’, ‘bastard’,
+‘wizard’, may be taken as surviving specimens;
+‘blinkard’ (<i>Homilies</i>), ‘dizzard’ (Burton), ‘dullard’
+(Udal), ‘musard’ (Chaucer), ‘trichard’
+(<i>Political Songs</i>), ‘shreward’ (Robert of Gloucester),
+‘ballard’ (a bald-headed man, Wiclif);
+‘puggard’, ‘stinkard’ (Ben Jonson), ‘haggard’,
+a worthless hawk, as extinct.</p>
+
+<p>Thus too there is a very curious province of our
+language, in which we were once so rich, that
+extensive losses here have failed to make us poor;
+so many of its words still surviving, even after as
+many or more have disappeared. I refer to those
+double words which either contain within themselves
+a strong rhyming modulation, such for example
+as ‘willy-nilly’, ‘hocus-pocus’, ‘helter-skelter’,
+‘tag-rag’, ‘namby-pamby’, ‘pell-mell’,
+‘hodge-podge’; or with a slight difference from this,
+though belonging to the same group, those of
+which the characteristic feature is not this internal
+likeness with initial unlikeness, but initial
+likeness with internal unlikeness; not rhyming,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
+but strongly alliterative, and in every case with a
+change of the interior vowel from a weak into a
+strong, generally from <i>i</i> into <i>a</i> or <i>o</i>; as ‘shilly-shally’,
+‘mingle-mangle’, ‘tittle-tattle’, ‘prittle-prattle’,
+‘riff-raff’, ‘see-saw’, ‘slip-slop’.
+No one who is not quite out of love with the homelier
+yet more vigorous portions of the language,
+but will acknowledge the life and strength which
+there is often in these and in others still current
+among us. But of the same sort what vast numbers
+have fallen out of use, some so fallen out of all
+remembrance that it may be difficult almost to
+find credence for them. Thus take of rhyming
+the following: ‘hugger-mugger’, ‘hurly-burly’,
+‘kicksy-wicksy’ (all in Shakespeare); ‘hibber-gibber’,
+‘rusty-dusty’, ‘horrel-lorrel’, ‘slaump
+paump’ (all in Gabriel Harvey), ‘royster-doyster’
+(Old Play), ‘hoddy-doddy’ (Ben Jonson); while
+of alliterative might be instanced these: ‘skimble-skamble’,
+‘bibble-babble’ (both in Shakespeare),
+‘twittle-twattle’, ‘kim-kam’ (both in Holland),
+‘hab-nab’ (Lilly), ‘trim-tram’, ‘trish-trash’,
+‘swish-swash’ (all in Gabriel Harvey), ‘whim-wham’
+(Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘mizz-mazz’
+(Locke), ‘snip-snap’ (Pope), ‘flim-flam’ (Swift),
+‘tric-trac’, and others<a name="FNanchor_160_160" id="FNanchor_160_160"></a><a href="#Footnote_160_160" class="fnanchor">[160]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words under Ban</i></div>
+
+<p>Again, there was once a whole family of words
+whereof the greater number are now under ban;
+which seemed at one time to have been formed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+almost at pleasure, the only condition being that
+the combination should be a happy one&mdash;I mean
+all those singularly expressive words formed by a
+combination of verb and substantive, the former
+governing the latter; as ‘telltale’, ‘scapegrace’,
+‘turncoat’, ‘turntail’, ‘skinflint’, ‘spendthrift’,
+‘spitfire’, ‘lickspittle’, ‘daredevil’ (=&nbsp;wagehals),
+‘makebate’ (=&nbsp;störenfried), ‘marplot’, ‘killjoy’.
+These with a certain number of others, have held
+their ground, and may be said to be still more or
+less in use; but what a number more are forgotten;
+and yet, though not always elegant, they
+constituted a very vigorous portion of our language,
+and preserved some of its most genuine
+idioms<a name="FNanchor_161_161" id="FNanchor_161_161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161_161" class="fnanchor">[161]</a>. It could not well be otherwise; they
+are almost all words of abuse, and the abusive
+words of a language are always among the most
+picturesque and vigorous and imaginative which
+it possesses. The whole man speaks out in them,
+and often the man under the influence of passion
+and excitement, which always lend force and fire
+to his speech. Let me remind you of a few of
+them; ‘smellfeast’, if not a better, is yet a more
+graphic, word than our foreign parasite; as gra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>phic
+indeed for us as <span title="Greek: trechedeipnos">τρεχέδειπνος</span>
+to Greek ears;
+‘clawback’ (Hackett) is a stronger, if not a more
+graceful, word than flatterer or sycophant; ‘tosspot’
+(Fuller), or less frequently ‘reel-pot’ (Middleton),
+tells its own tale as well as drunkard; and
+‘pinchpenny’ (Holland), or ‘nipfarthing’ (Drant),
+as well as or better than miser. And then what
+a multitude more there are in like kind; ‘spintext’,
+‘lacklatin’, ‘mumblematins’, all applied
+to ignorant clerics; ‘bitesheep’ (a favourite word
+with Foxe) to such of these as were rather wolves
+tearing, than shepherds feeding, the flock; ‘slip-string’
+= pendard (Beaumont and Fletcher),
+‘slip-gibbet’, ‘scapegallows’; all names given to
+those who, however they might have escaped, were
+justly owed to the gallows, and might still “go
+upstairs to bed”.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Obsolete Compounds</i></div>
+
+<p>How many of these words occur in Shakespeare.
+The following list makes no pretence to completeness;
+‘martext’, ‘carrytale’, ‘pleaseman’,
+‘sneakcup’, ‘mumblenews’, ‘wantwit’, ‘lackbrain’,
+‘lackbeard’, ‘lacklove’, ‘ticklebrain’,
+‘cutpurse’, ‘cutthroat’, ‘crackhemp’, ‘breedbate’,
+‘swinge-buckler’, ‘pickpurse’, ‘pickthank’,
+‘picklock’, ‘scarecrow’, ‘breakvow’,
+‘breakpromise’, ‘makepeace’&mdash;this last and ‘telltruth’
+(Fuller) being the only ones in the whole
+collection wherein reprobation or contempt is
+not implied. Nor is the list exhausted yet; there
+are further ‘dingthrift’ = prodigal (Herrick),
+‘wastegood’ (Cotgrave), ‘stroygood’ (Golding),
+‘wastethrift’ (Beaumont and Fletcher), ‘scapethrift’,
+‘swashbuckler’ (both in Holinshed),
+‘shakebuckler’, ‘rinsepitcher’ (both in Bacon),<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
+‘crackrope’ (Howell), ‘waghalter’, ‘wagfeather’
+(both in Cotgrave), ‘blabtale’ (Racket), ‘getnothing’
+(Adams), ‘findfault’ (Florio), ‘tearthroat’
+(Gayton), ‘marprelate’, ‘spitvenom’,
+‘nipcheese’, ‘nipscreed’, ‘killman’ (Chapman),
+‘lackland’, ‘pickquarrel’, ‘pickfaults’, ‘pickpenny’
+(Henry More), ‘makefray’ (Bishop Hall),
+‘make-debate’ (Richardson’s <i>Letters</i>), ‘kindlecoal’
+(attise feu), ‘kindlefire’ (both in Gurnall), ‘turntippet’
+(Cranmer), ‘swillbowl’ (Stubbs), ‘smell-smock’,
+‘cumberwold’ (Drayton), ‘curryfavor’,
+‘pinchfist’, ‘suckfist’, ‘hatepeace’ (Sylvester),
+‘hategood’ (Bunyan), ‘clutchfist’, ‘sharkgull’
+(both in Middleton), ‘makesport’ (Fuller), ‘hangdog’
+(“Herod’s <i>hangdogs</i> in the tapestry”, Pope),
+‘catchpoll’, ‘makeshift’ (used not impersonally
+as now), ‘pickgoose’ (“the bookworm was never
+but a <i>pickgoose</i>”)<a name="FNanchor_162_162" id="FNanchor_162_162"></a><a href="#Footnote_162_162" class="fnanchor">[162]</a>,
+‘killcow’ (these three last
+in Gabriel Harvey), ‘rakeshame’ (Milton, prose),
+with others which it will be convenient to omit.
+‘Rakehell’, which used to be spelt ‘rakel’ or
+‘rakle’ (Chaucer), a good English word, would be
+only through an error included in this list, although
+Cowper, when he writes ‘rakehell’ (“<i>rake-hell</i>
+baronet”) evidently regarded it as belonging to this
+group<a name="FNanchor_163_163" id="FNanchor_163_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163_163" class="fnanchor">[163]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words become Vulgar</i></div>
+
+<p>Perhaps one of the most frequent causes which
+leads to the disuse of words is this: in some inexplicable
+way there comes to be attached something
+of ludicrous, or coarse, or vulgar to them,
+out of a feeling of which they are no longer used
+in earnest serious writing, and at the same time
+fall out of the discourse of those who desire to
+speak elegantly. Not indeed that this degradation
+which overtakes words is in all cases inexplicable.
+The unheroic character of most men’s
+minds, with their consequent intolerance of that
+heroic which they cannot understand, is constantly
+at work, too often with success, in taking
+down words of nobleness from their high pitch;
+and, as the most effectual way of doing this, in
+casting an air of mock-heroic about them. Thus
+‘to dub’, a word resting on one of the noblest
+usages of chivalry, has now something of ludicrous
+about it; so too has ‘doughty’; they belong to
+that serio-comic, mock-heroic diction, the multiplication
+of which, as of all parodies on greatness,
+and the favour with which it is received, is always
+a sign of evil augury for a nation, is at present a
+sign of evil augury for our own.</p>
+
+<p>‘Pate’ in the sense of head is now comic or
+ignoble; it was not so once; as is plain from its
+occurrence in the Prayer Book Version of the
+Psalms (Ps. vii. 17); as little was ‘noddle’, which
+occurs in one of the few poetical passages in Hawes.
+The same may be said of ‘sconce’, in this sense
+at least; of ‘nowl’ or ‘noll’, which Wiclif uses;
+of ‘slops’ for trousers (Marlowe’s <i>Lucan</i>); of
+‘cocksure’ (Rogers), of ‘smug’, which once
+meant no more than adorned (“the <i>smug</i> bride<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>groom”,
+Shakespeare). ‘To nap’ is now a word
+without dignity; while yet in Wiclif’s Bible it
+is said, “Lo he schall not <i>nappe</i>, nether slepe that
+kepeth Israel” (Ps. cxxi. 4). ‘To punch’, ‘to
+thump’, both of which, and in serious writing, occur
+in Spenser, could not now obtain the same use,
+nor yet ‘to wag’, or ‘to buss’. Neither would
+any one now say that at Lystra Barnabas and
+Paul “rent their clothes and <i>skipped out</i> among
+the people” (Acts xiv. 14), which is the language
+that Wiclif employs; nor yet that “the Lord
+<i>trounced</i> Sisera and all his host” as it stands in
+the Bible of 1551. “A <i>sight</i> of angels”, for which
+phrase see Cranmer’s Bible (Heb. xii. 22), would
+be felt as a vulgarism now. We should scarcely
+call now a delusion of Satan a “<i>flam</i> of the devil”
+(Henry More). It is not otherwise in regard of
+phrases. “Through thick and thin”, occurring
+in Spenser, “cheek by jowl” in Dubartas<a name="FNanchor_164_164" id="FNanchor_164_164"></a><a href="#Footnote_164_164" class="fnanchor">[164]</a>, do not
+now belong to serious poetry. In the glorious
+ballad of <i>Chevy Chase</i>, a noble warrior whose legs
+are hewn off, is described as being “in doleful
+dumps”; just as, in Holland’s <i>Livy</i>, the Romans
+are set forth as being “in the dumps” as a consequence
+of their disastrous defeat at Cannæ. In
+Golding’s <i>Ovid</i>, one fears that he will “go to pot”.
+In one of the beautiful letters of John Careless,
+preserved in Foxe’s <i>Martyrs</i>, a persecutor, who
+expects a recantation from him, is described as
+“in the wrong box”. And in the sermons of
+Barrow, who certainly intended to write an elevated
+style, and did not seek familiar, still less vulgar,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+expressions, we constantly meet such terms as ‘to
+rate’, ‘to snub’, ‘to gull’, ‘to pudder’, ‘dumpish’,
+and the like; which we may confidently
+affirm were not vulgar when he used them.</p>
+
+<p>Then too the advance of refinement causes words
+to be forgone, which are felt to speak too plainly.
+It is not here merely that one age has more delicate
+ears than another; and that matters are
+freely spoken of at one time which at another
+are withdrawn from conversation. This is something;
+but besides this, and even if this delicacy
+were at a standstill, there would still be a continual
+process going on, by which the words,
+which for a certain while have been employed to
+designate coarse or disagreeable facts or things,
+would be disallowed, or at all events relinquished
+to the lower class of society, and others adopted in
+their place. The former by long use being felt
+to have come into too direct and close relation
+with that which they designate, to summon it up
+too distinctly before the mind’s eye, they are
+thereupon exchanged for others, which, at first at
+least, indicate more lightly and allusively the
+offensive thing, rather hint and suggest than paint
+and describe it: although by and by these new
+will also in their turn be discarded, and for exactly
+the same reasons which brought about the dismissal
+of those which they themselves superseded.
+It lies in the necessity of things that I must leave
+this part of my subject, very curious as it is, without
+illustration<a name="FNanchor_165_165" id="FNanchor_165_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165_165" class="fnanchor">[165]</a>.
+But no one, even moderately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
+acquainted with the early literature of the Reformation,
+can be ignorant of words freely used in it,
+which now are not merely coarse and as such
+under ban, but which no one would employ who
+did not mean to speak impurely and vilely.</p>
+
+<hr class="small" />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Lost Powers of a Language</i></div>
+
+<p>Thus much in respect of the words, and the
+character of the words, which we have lost or let
+go. Of these, indeed, if a language, as it travels
+onwards, loses some, it also acquires others, and
+probably many more than it loses; they are leaves
+on the tree of language, of which if some fall
+away, a new succession takes their place. But
+it is not so, as I already observed, with the <i>forms</i>
+or <i>powers</i> of a language, that is, with the various
+inflections, moods, duplicate or triplicate formation
+of tenses; which the speakers of a language come
+gradually to perceive that they can do without,
+and therefore cease to employ; seeking to suppress
+grammatical intricacies, and to obtain grammatical
+simplicity and so far as possible a pervading
+uniformity, sometimes even at the hazard of letting
+go what had real worth, and contributed to the
+more lively, if not to the clearer, setting forth of
+the inner thought or feeling of the mind. Here
+there is only loss, with no compensating gain; or,
+at all events, diminution only, and never addition.
+In regard of these inner forces and potencies of a
+language, there is no creative energy at work in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
+its later periods, in any, indeed, but quite the
+earliest. They are not as the leaves, but may be
+likened to the stem and leading branches of a
+tree, whose shape, mould and direction are determined
+at a very early stage of its growth; and
+which age, or accident, or violence may diminish,
+but which can never be multiplied. I have already
+slightly referred to a notable example of this,
+namely, to the dropping of the dual number in the
+Greek language. Thus in all the New Testament
+it does not once occur, having quite fallen out of
+the common dialect in which that is composed.
+Elsewhere too it has been felt that the dual was
+not worth preserving, or at any rate, that no
+serious inconvenience would follow on its loss.
+There is no such number in the modern German,
+Danish or Swedish; in the old German and Norse
+there was.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Extinction of Powers</i></div>
+
+<p>How many niceties, delicacies, subtleties of
+language, <i>we</i>, speakers of the English tongue,
+in the course of centuries have got rid of; how
+bare (whether too bare is another question) we
+have stripped ourselves; what simplicity for
+better or for worse reigns in the present English,
+as compared with the old Anglo-Saxon. That
+had six declensions, our present English but one;
+that had three genders, English, if we except
+one or two words, has none; that formed the
+genitive in a variety of ways, we only in one;
+and the same fact meets us, wherever we compare
+the grammars of the two languages. At the
+same time, it can scarcely be repeated too often,
+that in the estimate of the gain or loss thereupon
+ensuing, we must by no means put certainly to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
+loss everything which the language has dismissed,
+any more than everything to gain which it has
+acquired. It is no real wealth in a language to
+have needless and superfluous forms. They are
+often an embarrassment and an encumbrance
+to it rather than a help. The Finnish language
+has fourteen cases. Without pretending to know
+exactly what it is able to effect, I yet feel confident
+that it cannot effect more, nor indeed so much,
+with its fourteen as the Greek is able to do with
+its five. It therefore seems to me that some
+words of Otfried Müller, in many ways admirable,
+do yet exaggerate the losses consequent on the
+reduction of the forms of a language. “It may
+be observed”, he says, “that in the lapse of ages,
+from the time that the progress of language can
+be observed, grammatical forms, such as the
+signs of cases, moods and tenses have never been
+increased in number, but have been constantly
+diminishing. The history of the Romance, as
+well as of the Germanic, languages shows in the
+clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful
+and copious, has been gradually weakened and
+impoverished, until at last it preserves only a
+few fragments of its ancient inflections. Now
+there is no doubt that this luxuriance of grammatical
+forms is not an essential part of a language,
+considered merely as a vehicle of thought. It
+is well known that the Chinese language, which
+is merely a collection of radical words destitute
+of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical
+ideas with tolerable precision; and the
+English, which, from the mode of its formation
+by a mixture of different tongues, has been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+stripped of its grammatical inflections more
+completely than any other European language,
+seems, nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be
+distinguished by its energetic eloquence. All
+this must be admitted by every unprejudiced
+inquirer; but yet it cannot be overlooked, that
+this copiousness of grammatical forms, and the
+fine shades of meaning which they express, evince
+a nicety of observation, and a faculty of distinguishing,
+which unquestionably prove that the
+race of mankind among whom these languages
+arose was characterized by a remarkable correctness
+and subtlety of thought. Nor can any
+modern European, who forms in his mind a lively
+image of the classical languages in their ancient
+grammatical luxuriance, and compares them
+with his mother tongue, conceal from himself
+that in the ancient languages the words, with
+their inflections, clothed as it were with muscles
+and sinews, come forward like living bodies,
+full of expression and character, while in the
+modern tongues the words seem shrunk up into
+mere skeletons”<a name="FNanchor_166_166" id="FNanchor_166_166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166_166" class="fnanchor">[166]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words in ‘-ess’</i></div>
+
+<p>Whether languages are as much impoverished
+by this process as is here assumed, may, I think,
+be a question. I will endeavour to give you
+some materials which shall assist you in forming
+your own judgment in the matter. And here
+I am sure that I shall do best in considering not
+forms which the language has relinquished long
+ago, but mainly such as it is relinquishing now;
+which, touching us more nearly, will have a
+far more lively interest for us all. For example,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+the female termination which we employ in certain
+words, such as from ‘heir’ ‘heiress’, from
+‘prophet’ ‘prophetess’, from ‘sorcerer’ ‘sorceress’,
+was once far more widely extended than
+at present; the words which retain it are daily
+becoming fewer. It has already fallen away in
+so many, and is evidently becoming of less frequent
+use in so many others, that, if we may augur of
+the future from the analogy of the past, it will
+one day altogether vanish from our tongue.
+Thus all these occur in Wiclif’s Bible; ‘techeress’
+as the female teacher (2 Chron. xxxv. 25);
+‘friendess’ (Prov. vii. 4); ‘servantess’ (Gen.
+xvi. 2); ‘leperess’ (=&nbsp;saltatrix, Ecclus. ix.
+4); ‘daunceress’ (Ecclus. ix. 4); ‘neighbouress’
+(Exod. iii. 22); ‘sinneress’ (Luke vii. 37);
+‘purpuress’ (Acts xvi. 14); ‘cousiness’ (Luke i.
+36); ‘slayeress’ (Tob. iii. 9); ‘devouress’
+(Ezek. xxxvi. 13); ‘spousess’ (Prov. v. 19);
+‘thralless’ (Jer. xxxiv. 16); ‘dwelleress’ (Jer.
+xxi. 13); ‘waileress’ (Jer. ix. 17); ‘cheseress’
+(=&nbsp;electrix, Wisd. viii. 4); ‘singeress’, ‘breakeress’,
+‘waiteress’, this last indeed having recently
+come up again. Add to these ‘chideress’, the
+female chider, ‘herdess’, ‘constabless’, ‘moveress’,
+‘jangleress’, ‘soudaness’ (=&nbsp;sultana),
+<ins class="correction" title="original has semicolon instead of comma">‘guideress’,</ins>
+‘charmeress’ (all in Chaucer); and
+others, which however we may have now let
+them fall, reached to far later periods of
+the language; thus ‘vanqueress’ (Fabyan);
+‘poisoneress’ (Greneway); ‘knightess’ (Udal);
+‘pedleress’, ‘championess’, ‘vassaless’, ‘avengeress’,
+‘warriouress’, ‘victoress’, ‘creatress’
+(all in Spenser); ‘fornicatress’, ‘cloistress’, ‘join<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>tress’
+(all in Shakespeare); ‘vowess’ (Holinshed);
+‘ministress’, ‘flatteress’ (both in Holland);
+‘captainess’ (Sidney); ‘saintess’ (Sir T. Urquhart);
+‘heroess’, ‘dragoness’, ‘butleress’,
+‘contendress’, ‘waggoness’, ‘rectress’ (all in
+Chapman); ‘shootress’ (Fairfax); ‘archeress’
+(Fanshawe); ‘clientess’, ‘pandress’ (both in
+Middleton); ‘papess’, ‘Jesuitess’ (Bishop Hall);
+‘incitress’ (Gayton); ‘soldieress’, ‘guardianess’,
+‘votaress’ (all in Beaumont and Fletcher);
+‘comfortress’, ‘fosteress’ (Ben Jonson); ‘soveraintess’
+(Sylvester); ‘preserveress’ (Daniel);
+‘solicitress’, ‘impostress’, ‘buildress’, ‘intrudress’
+(all in Fuller); ‘favouress’ (Hakewell);
+‘commandress’ (Burton); ‘monarchess’, ‘discipless’
+(Speed); ‘auditress’, ‘cateress’, ‘chantress’,
+‘tyranness’ (all in Milton); ‘citess’,
+‘divineress’ (both in Dryden); ‘deaness’
+(Sterne); ‘detractress’ (Addison); ‘hucksteress’
+(Howell); ‘tutoress’ (Shaftesbury); ‘farmeress’
+(Lord Peterborough, <i>Letter to Pope</i>); ‘laddess’,
+which however still survives in the contracted
+form of ‘lass’<a name="FNanchor_167_167" id="FNanchor_167_167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167_167" class="fnanchor">[167]</a>; with more which, I doubt not,
+it would not be very hard to bring
+together<a name="FNanchor_168_168" id="FNanchor_168_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168_168" class="fnanchor">[168]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words in ‘-ster’</i></div>
+
+<p>Exactly the same thing has happened with
+another feminine affix. I refer to ‘ster’, taking
+the place of ‘er’ where a feminine doer is
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>tended<a name="FNanchor_169_169" id="FNanchor_169_169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169_169" class="fnanchor">[169]</a>.
+‘Spinner’ and ‘spinster’ are the
+only pair of such words, which still survive.
+There were formerly many such; thus ‘baker’
+had ‘bakester’, being the female who baked:
+‘brewer’ ‘brewster’; ‘sewer’ ‘sewster’; ‘reader’
+‘readster’; ‘seamer’ ‘seamster’; ‘fruiterer’
+‘fruitester’; ‘tumbler’ ‘tumblester’; ‘hopper’
+‘hoppester’ (these last three in Chaucer; “the
+shippes <i>hoppesteres</i>”, about which so much
+difficulty has been made, are the ships <i>dancing</i>,
+i.e., on the
+waves)<a name="FNanchor_170_170" id="FNanchor_170_170"></a><a href="#Footnote_170_170" class="fnanchor">[170]</a>,
+‘knitter’ ‘knitster’ (a word,
+I am told, still alive in Devon). Add to these
+‘whitster’ (female bleacher, Shakespeare), ‘kempster’
+(pectrix), ‘dryster’ (siccatrix), ‘brawdster’,
+(I suppose
+embroideress)<a name="FNanchor_171_171" id="FNanchor_171_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171_171" class="fnanchor">[171]</a>,
+and ‘salster’
+(salinaria)<a name="FNanchor_172_172" id="FNanchor_172_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172_172" class="fnanchor">[172]</a>.
+It is a singular example of the richness
+of a language in forms at the earlier stages of its
+existence, that not a few of the words which had,
+as we have just seen, a feminine termination in
+‘ess’, had also a second in ‘ster’. Thus ‘daunser’,
+beside ‘daunseress’, had also ‘daunster’
+(Ecclus. ix. 4); ‘wailer’, beside ‘waileress’,
+had ‘wailster’ (Jer. ix. 17); ‘dweller’ ‘dwelster’
+(Jer. xxi. 13); and ‘singer’ ‘singster’ (2 Kin.
+xix. 35); so too, ‘chider’ had ‘chidester’
+(Chaucer), as well as ‘chideress’, ‘slayer’ ‘slayster’
+(Tob. iii. 9), as well as ‘slayeress’, ‘chooser’
+‘chesister’, (Wisd. viii. 4), as well as ‘cheseress’,
+with others that might be named.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to understand how Marsh, with
+these examples before him should affirm, “I
+find no positive evidence to show that the termination
+‘ster’ was ever regarded as a feminine
+termination in English”. It may be, and indeed
+has been, urged that the existence of such words
+as ‘seamstr<i>ess</i>’, ‘songstr<i>ess</i>’, is decisive proof
+that the ending ‘ster’ of itself was not counted
+sufficient to designate persons as female; for if,
+it has been said, ‘seam<i>ster</i>’ and ‘song<i>ster</i>’ had
+been felt to be already feminine, no one would
+have ever thought of doubling on this, and adding
+a second female termination; ‘seam<i>stress</i>’, ‘song<i>stress</i>’.
+But all which can justly be concluded
+from hence is, that when this final ‘ess’ was
+added to these already feminine forms, and examples
+of it will not, I think, be found till a comparatively
+late period of the language, the true principle
+and law of the words had been lost sight of and
+forgotten<a name="FNanchor_173_173" id="FNanchor_173_173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173_173" class="fnanchor">[173]</a>.
+The same may be affirmed of such
+other of these feminine forms as are now applied
+to men, such as ‘gamester’, ‘youngster’, ‘oldster’,
+‘drugster’ (South), ‘huckster’, ‘hackster’,
+(=&nbsp;swordsman, Milton, prose), ‘teamster’,
+‘throw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>ster’,
+‘rhymester’, ‘punster’ (<i>Spectator</i>), ‘tapster’,
+‘whipster’ (Shakespeare), ‘trickster’.
+Either, like ‘teamster’, and ‘punster’, the
+words first came into being, when the true significance
+of this form was altogether
+lost<a name="FNanchor_174_174" id="FNanchor_174_174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174_174" class="fnanchor">[174]</a>; or like
+‘tapster’, which was female in Chaucer (“the
+gay <i>tapstere</i>”), as it is still in Dutch and Frisian,
+and distinguished from ‘tapper’, the <i>man</i> who
+keeps the inn, or has charge of the tap, or as
+‘bakester’, at this day used in Scotland for
+‘baker’, as ‘dyester’ for ‘dyer’, the word
+did originally belong of right and exclusively
+to women; but with the gradual transfer of the
+occupation to men, and an increasing forgetfulness
+of what this termination implied, there
+went also a transfer of the
+name<a name="FNanchor_175_175" id="FNanchor_175_175"></a><a href="#Footnote_175_175" class="fnanchor">[175]</a>,
+just as in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+other words, and out of the same causes, the
+exact converse has found place; and ‘baker’ or
+‘brewer’, not ‘bakester’ or
+‘brewster’<a name="FNanchor_176_176" id="FNanchor_176_176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176_176" class="fnanchor">[176]</a>, would
+be now in England applied to the woman baking
+or brewing. So entirely has this power of the
+language died out, that it survives more apparently
+than really even in ‘spinner’ and ‘spinster’;
+seeing that ‘spinster’ has obtained now quite
+another meaning than that of a woman spinning,
+whom, as well as the man, we should call not a
+‘spinster’, but a ‘spinner’<a name="FNanchor_177_177" id="FNanchor_177_177"></a><a href="#Footnote_177_177" class="fnanchor">[177]</a>.
+
+<span class="sidenote"><i>Deceptive Analogies</i></span>
+
+It would indeed
+be hard to believe, if we had not constant experience
+of the fact, how soon and how easily the true
+law and significance of some form, which has
+never ceased to be in everybody’s mouth, may
+yet be lost sight of by all. No more curious
+chapter in the history of language could be
+written than one which should trace the violations
+of analogy, the transgressions of the most primary
+laws of a language, which follow hereupon;
+the plurals like ‘welkin’
+(=&nbsp;wolken, the clouds)<a name="FNanchor_178_178" id="FNanchor_178_178"></a><a href="#Footnote_178_178" class="fnanchor">[178]</a>,
+‘chicken’<a name="FNanchor_179_179" id="FNanchor_179_179"></a><a href="#Footnote_179_179" class="fnanchor">[179]</a>,
+which are dealt with as
+singulars,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
+the singulars, like ‘riches’
+(richesse)<a name="FNanchor_180_180" id="FNanchor_180_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180_180" class="fnanchor">[180]</a>, ‘pease’
+(pisum, pois)<a name="FNanchor_181_181" id="FNanchor_181_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181_181" class="fnanchor">[181]</a>,
+‘alms’, ‘eaves’<a name="FNanchor_182_182" id="FNanchor_182_182"></a><a href="#Footnote_182_182" class="fnanchor">[182]</a>,
+which are
+assumed to be plurals.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>The Genitival Inflexion ‘-s’</i></div>
+
+<p>There is one example of this, familiar to us all;
+probably so familiar that it would not be worth
+while adverting to it, if it did not illustrate, as no
+other word could, this forgetfulness which may
+overtake a whole people, of the true meaning
+of a grammatical form which they have never
+ceased to employ. I refer to the mistaken assumption
+that the ‘s’ of the genitive, as ‘the king’s
+countenance’, was merely a more rapid way of
+pronouncing ‘the king <i>his</i> countenance’, and
+that the final ‘s’ in ‘king’s’ was in fact an
+elided ‘his’. This explanation for a long time
+prevailed almost universally; I believe there
+are many who accept it still. It was in vain
+that here and there a deeper knower of our tongue
+protested against this “monstrous syntax”,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>as
+Ben Jonson in his <i>Grammar</i> justly calls
+it<a name="FNanchor_183_183" id="FNanchor_183_183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183_183" class="fnanchor">[183]</a>.
+It was in vain that Wallis, another English
+scholar of the seventeenth century, pointed
+out in <i>his</i> Grammar that the slightest examination
+of the facts revealed the untenable
+character of this explanation, seeing that we
+do not merely say “the <i>king’s</i> countenance”,
+but “the <i>queen’s</i> countenance”; and in this case
+the final ‘s’ cannot stand for ‘his’, for “the
+queen <i>his</i> countenance” cannot be intended<a name="FNanchor_184_184" id="FNanchor_184_184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184_184" class="fnanchor">[184]</a>;
+we do not say merely “the <i>child’s</i> bread”, but
+“the <i>children’s</i> bread”, where it is no less impossible
+to resolve the phrase into “the children <i>his</i>
+bread”<a name="FNanchor_185_185" id="FNanchor_185_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185_185" class="fnanchor">[185]</a>. Despite of these protests the error
+held its ground. This much indeed of a plea it
+could make for itself, that such an actual employ<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>ment
+of ‘his’ <i>had</i> found its way into the language,
+as early as the fourteenth century, and had been
+in occasional, though rare use, from that time
+downward<a name="FNanchor_186_186" id="FNanchor_186_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186_186" class="fnanchor">[186]</a>. Yet this, which has only been
+elicited by the researches of recent scholars,
+does not in the least justify those who assumed
+that in the habitual ‘s’ of the genitive were to
+be found the remains of ‘his’&mdash;an error from
+which the books of scholars in the seventeenth,
+and in the early decades of the eighteenth, century
+are not a whit clearer than those of others. Spenser,
+Donne, Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, all fall into
+it; I cannot say confidently whether Milton does.
+Dryden more than once helps out his verse
+with an additional syllable gained by its aid.
+It has even forced its way into our Prayer Book
+itself, where in the “Prayer for all sorts and
+conditions of men”, added by Bishop Sanderson
+at the last revision of the Liturgy in 1661,
+we are bidden to say, “And this we beg for Jesus
+Christ <i>his</i> sake”<a name="FNanchor_187_187" id="FNanchor_187_187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187_187" class="fnanchor">[187]</a>. I need hardly tell you that
+this ‘s’ is in fact the one remnant of flexion
+surviving in the singular number of our English<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+noun substantives; it is in all the Indo-Germanic
+languages the original sign of the genitive, or
+at any rate the earliest of which we can take
+cognizance; and just as in Latin ‘lapis’ makes
+‘lapidis’ in the genitive, so ‘king’, ‘queen’,
+‘child’, make severally ‘kings’, ‘queens’,
+‘childs’, the comma, an apparent note of elision,
+being a mere modern expedient, “a late refinement”,
+as Ash calls it<a name="FNanchor_188_188" id="FNanchor_188_188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188_188" class="fnanchor">[188]</a>, to distinguish the genitive
+singular from the plural cases<a name="FNanchor_189_189" id="FNanchor_189_189"></a><a href="#Footnote_189_189" class="fnanchor">[189]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Adjectives in ‘-en’</i></div>
+
+<p>Notice another example of this willingness to
+dispense with inflection, of this endeavour on the
+part of the speakers of a language to reduce its
+forms to the fewest possible, consistent with the
+accurate communication of thought. Of our
+adjectives in ‘en’, formed on substantives, and
+expressing the material or substance of a thing,
+some have gone, others are going, out of use;
+while we content ourselves with the bare
+juxtaposition of the substantive itself, as sufficiently
+expressing our meaning. Thus instead of
+“<i>golden</i> pin” we say “<i>gold</i> pin”; instead of
+“<i>earthen</i> works” we say “<i>earth</i> works”. ‘Golden’
+and ‘earthen’, it is true, still belong to our
+living speech, though mainly as part of our poetic
+diction, or of the solemn and thus stereotyped
+language of Scripture; but a whole company of
+such words have nearly or quite disappeared;
+some lately, some long ago. ‘Steelen’ and
+‘flowren’ belong only to the earliest period of
+the language; ‘rosen’ also went early. Chaucer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
+is my latest authority for it (“<i>rosen</i> chapelet”).
+‘Hairen’ is in Wiclif and in Chaucer; ‘stonen’
+in the former (John iii. 6)<a name="FNanchor_190_190" id="FNanchor_190_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190_190" class="fnanchor">[190]</a>. ‘Silvern’ stood
+originally in Wiclif’s Bible (“<i>silverne</i> housis to
+Diane”, Acts xix. 24); but already in the second
+recension of this was exchanged for ‘silver’;
+‘hornen’, still in provincial use, he also employs,
+and ‘clayen’ (Job iv. 19) no less. ‘Tinnen’
+occurs in Sylvester’s <i>Du Bartas</i>; where also
+we meet with “Jove’s <i>milken</i> alley”, as a name
+for the <i>Via Lactea</i>, in Bacon also not “the
+<i>Milky</i>”, but “the <i>Milken</i> Way”. In the coarse
+polemics of the Reformation the phrase, “<i>breaden</i>
+god”, provoked by the Romish doctrine of transubstantiation,
+was of frequent employment, and
+occurs as late as in Oldham. “<i>Mothen</i> parchments”
+is in Fulke; “<i>twiggen</i> bottle” in
+Shakespeare; ‘<i>yewen</i>’, or, according to earlier
+spelling, “<i>ewghen</i> bow”, in Spenser; “<i>cedarn</i>
+alley”, and “<i>azurn</i> sheen” are both in Milton;
+“<i>boxen</i> leaves” in Dryden; “a <i>treen</i> cup” in
+Jeremy Taylor; “<i>eldern</i> popguns” in Sir Thomas
+Overbury; “a <i>glassen</i> breast”, in Whitlock;
+“a <i>reeden</i> hat” in Coryat; ‘yarnen’ occurs in
+Turberville; ‘furzen’ in Holland; ‘threaden’
+in Shakespeare; and ‘bricken’, ‘papern’ appear
+in our provincial glossaries as still in use.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that many of these adjectives still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
+hold their ground; but it is curious to note how
+the roots which sustain even these are being
+gradually cut away from beneath them. Thus
+‘brazen’ might at first sight seem as strongly
+established in the language as ever; it is far from
+so being; its supports are being cut from beneath
+it. Even now it only lives in a tropical and
+secondary sense, as ‘a <i>brazen</i> face’; or if in a
+literal, in poetic diction or in the consecrated
+language of Scripture, as ‘the <i>brazen</i> serpent’;
+otherwise we say ‘a <i>brass</i> farthing’, ‘a <i>brass</i>
+candlestick’. It is the same with ‘oaten’,
+‘birchen’, ‘beechen’, ‘strawen’, and many more,
+whereof some are obsolescent, some obsolete,
+the language manifestly tending now, as it has
+tended for a long time past, to the getting quit
+of these, and to the satisfying of itself with an
+adjectival apposition of the substantive in their
+stead.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Weak and Strong Præterites</i></div>
+
+<p>Let me illustrate by another example the way
+in which a language, as it travels onward, simplifies
+itself, approaches more and more to a grammatical
+and logical uniformity, seeks to do the same
+thing always in the same manner; where it
+has two or three ways of conducting a single
+operation, lets all of them go but one; and thus
+becomes, no doubt, easier to be mastered, more
+handy, more manageable; for its very riches
+were to many an embarrassment and a perplexity;
+but at the same time imposes limits and restraints
+on its own freedom of action, and is in danger
+of forfeiting elements of strength, variety and
+beauty, which it once possessed. I refer to
+the tendency of our verbs to let go their strong<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
+præterites, and to substitute weak ones in their
+room; or, where they have two or three præterites,
+to retain only one of them, and that invariably
+the weak one. Though many of us no doubt are
+familiar with the terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’
+præterites, which in all our better grammars have
+put out of use the wholly misleading terms,
+‘irregular’ and ‘regular’, I may perhaps as well
+remind you of the exact meaning of the terms.
+A strong præterite is one formed by an internal
+vowel change; for instance the verb ‘to <i>drive</i>’
+forms the præterite ‘<i>drove</i>’ by an internal change
+of the vowel ‘i’ into ‘o’. But why, it may be
+asked, called ‘strong’? In respect of the vigour
+and indwelling energy in the word, enabling it
+to form its past tense from its own resources, and
+with no calling in of help from without. On the
+other hand ‘lift’ forms its præterite ‘lift<i>ed</i>’,
+not by any internal change, but by the addition
+of ‘ed’; ‘grieve’ in like manner has ‘griev<i>ed</i>’.
+Here are weak tenses; as strength was ascribed
+to the other verbs, so weakness to these, which
+can form their præterites only by external aid
+and addition. You will see at once that these
+strong præterites, while they witness to a vital
+energy in the words which are able to put them
+forth, do also, as must be allowed by all, contribute
+much to the variety and charm of a
+language<a name="FNanchor_191_191" id="FNanchor_191_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191_191" class="fnanchor">[191]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The point, however, which I am urging now is
+this,&mdash;that these are becoming fewer every day;
+multitudes of them having disappeared, while
+others are in the act of disappearing. Nor is
+the balance redressed and compensation found
+in any new creations of the kind. The power
+of forming strong præterites is long ago extinct;
+probably no verb which has come into the language
+since the Conquest has asserted this power, while
+a whole legion have let it go. For example,
+‘shape’ has now a weak præterite, ‘shaped’,
+it had once a strong one, ‘shope’; ‘bake’ has
+now a weak præterite, ‘baked’, it had once a
+strong one, ‘boke’; the præterite of ‘glide’
+is now ‘glided’, it was once ‘glode’ or ‘glid’;
+‘help’ makes now ‘helped’, it made once ‘halp’
+and ‘holp’. ‘Creep’ made ‘crope’, still current
+in the north of England; ‘weep’ ‘wope’;
+‘yell’ ‘yoll’ (both in Chaucer); ‘seethe’ ‘soth’
+or ‘sod’ (Gen. xxv. 29); ‘sheer’ in like manner
+once made ‘shore’; as ‘leap’ made ‘lope’;
+‘wash’ ‘wishe’ (Chaucer); ‘snow’ ‘snew’;
+‘sow’ ‘sew’; ‘delve’ ‘dalf’ and ‘dolve’;
+‘sweat’ ‘swat’; ‘yield’ ‘yold’ (both in
+Spenser); ‘mete’ ‘mat’ (Wiclif); ‘stretch’
+‘straught’; ‘melt’ ‘molt’; ‘wax’ ‘wex’ and
+‘wox’; ‘laugh’ ‘leugh’; with others more
+than can be enumerated
+here<a name="FNanchor_192_192" id="FNanchor_192_192"></a><a href="#Footnote_192_192" class="fnanchor">[192]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Strong Præterites</i></div>
+
+<p>Observe further that where verbs have not
+actually renounced their strong præterites, and
+contented themselves with weak in their room,
+yet, once possessing two, or, it might be three of
+these strong, they now retain only one. The
+others, on the principle of dismissing whatever can
+be dismissed, they have let go. Thus ‘chide’ had
+once ‘chid’ and ‘chode’, but though ‘chode’
+is in our Bible (Gen. xxxi. 36), it has not maintained
+itself in our speech; ‘sling’ had ‘slung’ and
+‘slang’ (1 Sam. xvii. 49); only ‘slung’ remains;
+‘fling’ had once ‘flung’ and ‘flang’; ‘strive’
+had ‘strove’ and ‘strave’; ‘stick’ had ‘stuck’
+and ‘stack’; ‘hang’ had ‘hung’ and ‘hing’
+(Golding); ‘tread’ had ‘trod’ and ‘trad’;
+‘choose’ had ‘chose’ and ‘chase’; ‘give’
+had ‘gave’ and ‘gove’; ‘lead’ had ‘led’ ‘lad’
+and ‘lode’; ‘write’ had ‘wrote’ ‘writ’ and
+‘wrate’. In all these cases, and more might
+easily be cited, only [of] the præterites which I
+have named the first remains in use.</p>
+
+<p>Observe too that in every instance where a conflict
+is now going on between weak and strong
+forms, which shall continue, the battle is not to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
+the strong; on the contrary the weak is carrying
+the day, is getting the better of its stronger competitor.
+Thus ‘climbed’ is gaining the upper hand
+of ‘clomb’, ‘swelled’ of ‘swoll’, ‘hanged’ of
+‘hung’. It is not too much to anticipate that a
+time will come, although it may be still far off,
+when all English verbs will form their præterites
+weakly; not without serious damage to the fulness
+and force which in this respect the language even
+now displays, and once far more eminently displayed<a name="FNanchor_193_193" id="FNanchor_193_193"></a><a href="#Footnote_193_193" class="fnanchor">[193]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Comparatives and Superlatives</i></div>
+
+<p>Take another proof of this tendency in our own
+language to drop its forms and renounce its own
+inherent powers; though here also the renunciation,
+threatening one day to be complete, is only
+partial at the present. I refer to the formation
+of our comparatives and superlatives; and I will
+ask you again to observe here that curious law
+of language, namely, that wherever there are two
+or more ways of attaining the same result, there
+is always a disposition to drop and dismiss all of
+these but one, so that the alternative or choice of
+ways once existing, shall not exist any more. If
+only it can attain a greater simplicity, it seems
+to grudge no self-impoverishment by which this
+result may be brought about. We have two ways
+of forming our comparatives and superlatives, one
+dwelling in the word itself, which we have inherited
+from our old Gothic stock, as ‘bright’, ‘bright<i>er</i>’,
+‘bright<i>est</i>’, the other supplementary to this, by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+prefixing the auxiliaries ‘more’ and ‘most’. The
+first, organic we might call it, the indwelling power
+of the word to mark its own degrees, must needs
+be esteemed the more excellent way; which yet,
+already disallowed in almost all adjectives of more
+than two syllables in length, is daily becoming of
+narrower and more restrained application. Compare
+in this matter our present with our past.
+Wiclif for example forms such comparatives as
+‘grievouser’, ‘gloriouser’, ‘patienter’, ‘profitabler’,
+such superlatives as
+‘<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘griveousest’">grievousest</ins>’, ‘famousest’;
+this last occurring also in Bacon. We meet
+in Tyndale, ‘excellenter’, ‘miserablest’; in
+Shakespeare, ‘violentest’; in Gabriel Harvey,
+‘vendiblest’, ‘substantialest’, ‘insolentest’; in
+Rogers, ‘insufficienter’, ‘goldener’; in Beaumont
+and Fletcher, ‘valiantest’. Milton uses ‘virtuosest’,
+and in prose ‘vitiosest’, ‘elegantest’, ‘artificialest’,
+‘servilest’, ‘sheepishest’, ‘resolutest’,
+‘sensualest’; Fuller has ‘fertilest’; Baxter
+‘tediousest’; Butler ‘preciousest’, ‘intolerablest’;
+Burnet ‘copiousest’, Gray ‘impudentest’.
+Of these forms, and it would be easy to adduce
+almost any number, we should hardly employ any
+now. In participles and adverbs in ‘ly’, these
+organic comparatives and superlatives hardly
+survive at all. We do not say ‘willinger’ or
+‘lovinger’, and still less ‘flourishingest’, or
+‘shiningest’, or ‘surmountingest’, all which
+Gabriel Harvey, a foremost master of the English
+of his time, employs; ‘plenteouslyer’, ‘fulliest’
+(Wiclif), ‘easiliest’ (Fuller), ‘plainliest’ (Dryden),
+would be all inadmissible at present.</p>
+
+<p>In the manifest tendency of English at the pre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>sent
+moment to reduce the number of words in
+which this more vigorous scheme of expressing
+degrees is allowed, we must recognize an evidence
+that the energy which the language had in its
+youth is in some measure abating, and the stiffness
+of age overtaking it. Still it is with us here
+only as it is with all languages, in which at a
+certain time of their life auxiliary words, leaving
+the main word unaltered, are preferred to inflections
+of this last. Such preference makes itself
+ever more strongly felt; and, judging from analogy,
+I cannot doubt that a day, however distant
+now, will arrive, when the only way of forming
+comparatives and superlatives in the English
+language will be by prefixing ‘more’ and ‘most’;
+or, if the other survive, it will be in poetry alone.</p>
+
+<p>It will fare not otherwise, as I am bold to predict,
+with the flexional genitive, formed in ‘s’ or ‘es’
+(see <a href="#Page_161">p. 161</a>). This too will finally disappear altogether
+from the language, or will survive only in poetry,
+and as much an archaic form there as the ‘pictaï’
+of Virgil. A time will come when it will not any
+longer be free to say, as now, either, “<i>the king’s
+sons</i>”, or “<i>the sons of the king</i>”, but when the
+latter will be the only admissible form. Tokens
+of this are already evident. The region in which
+the alternative forms are equally good is
+narrowing. We should not now any more write,
+“When <i>man’s son</i> shall come” (Wiclif), but “When
+<i>the Son of man</i> shall come”, nor yet, “<i>The hypocrite’s
+hope</i> shall perish” (Job viii. 13, Authorized
+Version), but, “<i>The hope of the hypocrite</i>
+shall perish”; not with Barrow, “No man can
+be ignorant <i>of human life’s brevity and uncer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>tainty</i>”,
+but “No man can be ignorant <i>of the
+brevity and uncertainty of human life</i>”. The consummation
+which I anticipate may be centuries
+off, but will assuredly arrive<a name="FNanchor_194_194" id="FNanchor_194_194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194_194" class="fnanchor">[194]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Lost Diminutives</i></div>
+
+<p>Then too diminutives are fast disappearing
+from the language. If we desire to express smallness,
+we prefer to do it by an auxiliary word;
+thus a little fist, and not a ‘fistock’ (Golding), a
+little lad, and not a ‘ladkin’, a little worm, rather
+than a ‘wormling’ (Sylvester). It is true that of
+diminutives very many still survive, in all our four
+terminations of such, as ‘hillock’, ‘streamlet’,
+‘lambkin’, ‘gosling’; but those which have
+perished are many more. Where now is ‘kingling’
+(Holland), ‘whimling’ (Beaumont and Fletcher),
+‘godling’, ‘loveling’, ‘dwarfling’,
+‘<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘sherperdling’">shepherdling</ins>’
+(all in Sylvester), ‘chasteling’ (Bacon),
+‘niceling’ (Stubbs), ‘fosterling’ (Ben Johnson),
+and ‘masterling’? Where now ‘porelet’
+(=&nbsp;paupercula, Isai. x. 30, Vulg.), ‘bundelet’,
+(both in Wiclif); ‘cushionet’ (Henry More),
+‘havenet’, or little ‘haven’, ‘pistolet’, ‘bulkin’
+(Holland), and a hundred more? Even of those
+which remain many are putting off, or have long
+since put off, their diminutive sense; a ‘pocket’
+being no longer a <i>small</i> poke, nor a ‘latchet’ a
+<i>small</i> lace, nor a ‘trumpet’ a small <i>trump</i>, as
+once they were.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Thou and Thee</i></div>
+
+<p>Once more&mdash;in the entire dropping among the
+higher classes of ‘thou’, except in poetry or in
+addresses to the Deity, and as a necessary consequence,
+the dropping also of the second singular of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+the verb with its strongly marked flexion, as
+‘lovest’, ‘lovedst’, we have another example of a
+force once existing in the language, which has been,
+or is being, allowed to expire. In the seventeenth
+century ‘thou’ in English, as at the present ‘du’
+in German, ‘tu’ in French, was the sign of familiarity,
+whether that familiarity was of love, or of
+contempt and scorn<a name="FNanchor_195_195" id="FNanchor_195_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195_195" class="fnanchor">[195]</a>. It was not unfrequently
+the latter. Thus at Sir Walter Raleigh’s trial
+(1603), Coke, when argument and evidence failed
+him, insulted the defendant by applying to him
+the term ‘thou’:&mdash;“All that Lord Cobham did
+was at <i>thy</i> instigation, <i>thou</i> viper, for I <i>thou</i> thee,
+<i>thou</i> traitor”. And when Sir Toby Belch in
+<i>Twelfth Night</i> is urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek
+to send a sufficiently provocative challenge to
+Viola, he suggests to him that he “taunt him
+with the licence of ink; if thou <i>thou’st</i> him some
+thrice, it shall not be amiss”. To keep this in
+mind will throw much light on one peculiarity of
+the Quakers, and give a certain dignity to it, as
+once maintained, which at present it is very far
+from possessing. However needless and unwise
+their determination to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ the whole
+world was, yet this had a significance. It was not,
+as now to us it seems, and, through the silent
+changes which language has undergone, as now it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
+indeed is, a gratuitous departure from the ordinary
+usage of society. Right or wrong, it meant something,
+and had an ethical motive: being indeed
+a testimony upon their parts, however misplaced,
+that they would not have high or great or rich
+men’s persons in admiration; nor give the observance
+to some which they withheld from others.
+It was a testimony too which cost them something;
+at present we can very little understand the amount
+of courage which this ‘thou-ing’ and ‘thee-ing’ of
+all men must have demanded on their parts, nor
+yet the amount of indignation and offence which
+it stirred up in them who were not aware of, or
+would not allow for, the scruples which obliged
+them to it<a name="FNanchor_196_196" id="FNanchor_196_196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196_196" class="fnanchor">[196]</a>. It is, however, in its other aspect that
+we must chiefly regret the dying out of the use of
+‘thou’&mdash;that is, as the pledge of peculiar intimacy
+and special affection, as between husband and
+wife, parents and children, and such other as
+might be knit together by bands of more than
+common affection.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Gender Words</i></div>
+
+<p>I have preferred during this lecture to find my
+theme in changes which are now going forward
+in English, but I cannot finish it without drawing
+one illustration from its remoter periods, and
+bidding you to note a force not now waning and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
+failing from it, but extinct long ago. I cannot
+well pass it by; being as it is by far the boldest
+step which in this direction of simplification the
+English language has at any time taken. I refer to
+the renouncing of the distribution of its nouns
+into masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in German,
+or even into masculine and feminine, as in French;
+and with this, and as a necessary consequence of
+this, the dropping of any flexional modification in
+the adjectives connected with them. Natural <i>sex</i>
+of course remains, being inherent in all language;
+but grammatical <i>gender</i>, with the exception of ‘he’,
+‘she’, and ‘it’, and perhaps one or two other
+fragmentary instances, the language has altogether
+forgone. An example will make clear the distinction
+between these. Thus it is not the word
+‘poetess’ which is <i>feminine</i>, but the person indicated
+who is <i>female</i>. So too ‘daughter’, ‘queen’,
+are in English not <i>feminine</i> nouns, but nouns
+designating <i>female</i> persons. Take on the contrary
+‘filia’ or ‘regina’, ‘fille’ or ‘reine’; there
+you have <i>feminine</i> nouns as well as <i>female</i> persons.
+I need hardly say to you that we did not inherit
+this simplicity from others, but, like the Danes, in
+so far as they have done the like, have made it for
+ourselves. Whether we turn to the Latin, or,
+which is for us more important, to the old Gothic,
+we find gender; and in all daughter languages which
+have descended from the Latin, in most of those
+which have descended from the ancient Gothic
+stock, it is fully established to this day. The
+practical, business-like character of the English
+mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction,
+which in a vast proportion of words, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+is, in all which are the signs of <i>inanimate</i> objects,
+and as such incapable of sex, rested upon a fiction,
+and had no ground in the real nature of things.
+It is only by an act and effort of the imagination
+that sex, and thus gender, can be attributed to a
+table, a ship, or a tree; and there are aspects, this
+being one, in which the English is among the least
+imaginative of all languages even while it has been
+employed in some of the mightiest works of imagination
+which the world has ever seen<a name="FNanchor_197_197" id="FNanchor_197_197"></a><a href="#Footnote_197_197" class="fnanchor">[197]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>What, it may be asked, is the meaning and explanation
+of all this? It is that at certain earlier
+periods of a nation’s life its genius is synthetic,
+and at later becomes analytic. At earlier periods
+all is by synthesis; and men love to contemplate
+the thing, and the mode of the thing, together, as
+a single idea, bound up in one. But a time arrives
+when the intellectual obtains the upper hand of
+the imaginative, when the tendency of those
+that speak the language is to analyse, to distinguish
+between these two, and not only to distinguish
+but to divide, to have one word for the
+thing itself, and another for the quality of the
+thing; and this, as it would appear, is true not of
+some languages only, but of all.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a>
+[Apparently a slip for ‘ebb’]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a>
+It is still used in prose as late as the age of Henry
+VIII; see the <i>State Papers</i>, vol. viii. p. 247. It was the
+latest survivor of a whole group or family of words which
+continued much longer in Scotland than with us; of which
+some perhaps continue there still; these are but a few of
+them; ‘wanthrift’ for extravagance; ‘wanluck’, misfortune;
+‘wanlust’, languor; ‘wanwit’, folly; ‘wangrace’,
+wickedness; ‘wantrust’ (Chaucer), distrust,
+[Also ‘wan-ton’, devoid of breeding (<i>towen</i>). Compare
+German <i>wahn-sinn</i>, insanity, and <i>wahn-witz</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a>
+We must not suppose that this still survives in ‘<i>gir</i>falcon’;
+which wholly belongs to the Latin element of
+the language; being the later Latin ‘gyrofalco’, and that,
+“a <i>gyrando</i>, quia diu <i>gyrando</i> acriter prædam insequitur”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a>
+[‘Heft’, from ‘heave’ (<i>Winter’s Tale</i>, ii. 1, 45), is
+widely diffused in the Three Kingdoms and in America.
+See E.D.D. <i>s.v.</i>]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a>
+“Some <i>hot-spurs</i> there were that gave counsel to go
+against them with all their forces, and to fright and
+terrify them, if they made slow haste”. (Holland’s
+<i>Livy</i>, p. 922.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a>
+<i>State Papers</i>, vol. vi. p. 534.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a>
+[‘Malinger’, French <i>malingre</i> (mistakenly derived
+above), stands for old French <i>mal-heingre</i> (maliciously
+or falsely ill, feigning sickness), which is from Latin <i>male
+aeger</i>, with an intrusive <i>n</i>&mdash;Scheler.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a>
+[To which the late Boer War contributed many more,
+such as ‘kopje’, ‘trek’, ‘slim’, ‘veldt’, etc.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a>
+The only two writers of whom I am aware as subsequently
+using this word are, both writing in Ireland and
+of Irish matters, Spenser and Swift. The passages are
+both quoted in Richardson’s <i>Dictionary</i>. [‘Bawn’ stands
+for the Irish <i>ba-dhun</i> (not <i>bábhun</i>, as in N.E.D.), or <i>bo-dhun</i>,
+literally ‘cow-fortress’, a cattle enclosure (Irish
+<i>bo</i>, a cow). See P.&nbsp;W. Joyce, <i>Irish Names of Places</i>,
+1st ser. p. 297.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_137_137" id="Footnote_137_137"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_137_137"><span class="label">[137]</span></a>
+There is an excellent account of this “refugee
+French” in Weiss’ <i>History of the Protestant Refugees of
+France</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_138_138" id="Footnote_138_138"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_138_138"><span class="label">[138]</span></a>
+[Thus the Shakespearian word <i>renege</i> (Latin <i>renegare</i>),
+to deny (<i>Lear</i> ii, 2) still lives in the mouths of the Irish
+peasantry. I have heard a farmer’s wife denounce those
+who “<i>renege</i> [<i>renaig</i>] their religion”.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_139_139" id="Footnote_139_139"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_139_139"><span class="label">[139]</span></a>
+With all its severity, there is some truth in Ben
+Johnson’s observation: “Spenser, in affecting the ancients,
+writ no language”. In this matter, however, Ben Jonson
+was at one with him; for he does not hesitate to express
+his strong regret that this form has not been retained.
+“The <i>persons</i> plural” he says (<i>English Grammar</i>, c. 17),
+“keep the termination of the first <i>person</i> singular. In
+former times, till about the reign of King Henry VIII,
+they were wont to be formed by adding <i>en</i>; thus, <i>loven</i>,
+<i>sayen</i>, <i>complainen</i>. But now (whatsoever is the cause)
+it hath quite grown out of use, and that other so generally
+prevailed, that I dare not presume to set this afoot again;
+albeit (to tell you my opinion) I am persuaded that the
+lack hereof, well considered, will be found a great blemish
+to our tongue. For seeing <i>time</i> and <i>person</i> be as it were
+the right and left hand of a verb, what can the maiming
+bring else, but a lameness to the whole body”?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_140_140" id="Footnote_140_140"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_140_140"><span class="label">[140]</span></a>
+[The two words are often popularly confounded.
+When a good woman said “I’m <i>afeerd</i>”, Mr. Pickwick
+exclaimed “<i>Afraid</i>”! (<i>Pickwick Papers</i>, ch. v.). Chaucer,
+instructively, uses both in the one sentence, “This wyf
+was not <i>affered</i> ne <i>affrayed</i>” (<i>Shipman’s Tale</i>, l. 400).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_141_141" id="Footnote_141_141"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_141_141"><span class="label">[141]</span></a>
+Génin (<i>Récréations Philologiques</i>, vol. i. p. 71) says to
+the same effect: “Il n’y a guères de faute de Français, je
+dis faute générale, accréditée, qui n’ait sa raison d’être,
+et ne pût au besoin produire ses lettres de noblesse; et
+souvent mieux en règle que celles des locutions qui ont
+usurpé leur place au soleil”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_142_142" id="Footnote_142_142"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_142_142"><span class="label">[142]</span></a>
+A single proof may in each case suffice:</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Our wills and fates do so <i>contráry</i>
+<ins class="correction" title="period (full stop) missing in original">run”.</ins>&mdash;<i>Shakespeare.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Ne let <i>mischiévous</i> witches with their
+charms”.&mdash;<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘Spenser,’"><i>Spenser.</i></ins><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“O argument <i>blasphémous</i>, false and proud”.&mdash;<i>Milton.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>[These archaisms are still current in Ireland.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_143_143" id="Footnote_143_143"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_143_143"><span class="label">[143]</span></a>
+I cannot doubt that this form which our country
+people in Hampshire, as in many other parts, always
+employ, either retains the original pronunciation, our
+received one being a modern corruption; or else, as is
+more probable, that <i>we</i> have made a confusion between
+two originally different words, from which they have
+kept clear. Thus in Howell’s <i>Vocabulary</i>, 1659, and in
+Cotgrave’s <i>French and English Dictionary</i> both words
+occur: “nuncion or nuncheon, the afternoon’s repast”,
+(cf. <i>Hudibras</i>, i. 1, 346: “They took their breakfasts or
+their <i>nuncheons</i>”), and “lunchion, a big piece” i.e. of
+bread; for both give the old French ‘caribot’, which has
+this meaning, as the equivalent of ‘luncheon’. It is
+clear that in this sense of lump or ‘big piece’ Gay uses
+‘luncheon’:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“When hungry thou stood’st staring like an oaf,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I sliced the <i>luncheon</i> from the barley loaf”;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and Miss Baker in her <i>Northamptonshire Glossary</i> explains
+‘lunch’ as “a large lump of bread, or other edible; ‘He
+helped himself to a good <i>lunch</i> of cake’”. We may note
+further that this ‘nuntion’ may possibly put us on the
+right track for arriving at the etymology of the word.
+Richardson has called attention to the fact that it is spelt
+“noon-shun” in Browne’s <i>Pastorals</i>, which must at least
+suggest as possible and plausible that the ‘nuntion’
+was originally applied to the labourer’s slight meal, to
+which he withdrew for the <i>shunning</i> of the heat of the
+middle <i>noon</i>: especially when in Lancashire we find a
+word of similar formation, ‘noon-scape’, and in Norfolk
+‘noon-miss’, for the time when labourers rest after
+dinner. [It really stands for the older English <i>none-schenche</i>,
+i.e. ‘noon-skink’ or noon-drink (see Skeat,
+<i>Etym. Dict.</i>, <i>s.v.</i>), correlative to ‘noon-meat’ or ‘nam-met’.]
+It is at any rate certain that the dignity to which
+‘lunch’ or ‘luncheon’ has now arrived, as when we
+read in the newspapers of a “magnificent <i>luncheon</i>”, is
+altogether modern; the word belonged a century ago to
+rustic life, and in literature had not travelled beyond
+the “hobnailed pastorals” which professed to describe
+that life.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_144_144" id="Footnote_144_144"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_144_144"><span class="label">[144]</span></a>
+See it so written, Holland’s <i>Pliny</i>, vol. ii. p. 428,
+and often.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_145_145" id="Footnote_145_145"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_145_145"><span class="label">[145]</span></a>
+As a proof of the excellent service which an accurate
+acquaintance with provincial usages may render in the
+investigation of the innumerable perplexing phenomena
+of the English language, I would refer to the admirable
+article <i>On English Pronouns Personal</i> in <i>Transactions
+of the Philological Society</i>, vol. i. p. 277.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146_146" id="Footnote_146_146"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_146_146"><span class="label">[146]</span></a>
+[We now have the good fortune to possess a complete
+collection of this valuable class of words in the splendid
+“English Dialect Dictionary”, edited by Professor
+Joseph Wright of Oxford, which is an essential supplement
+to all existing dictionaries of our language.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_147_147" id="Footnote_147_147"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_147_147"><span class="label">[147]</span></a>
+This last very curious usage, which served as a kind
+of stepping-stone to ‘its’, and of which another example
+occurs in the Geneva Version (Acts xii. 10), and three or
+four in Shakespeare, has been abundantly illustrated by
+those who have lately written on the early history of the
+word ‘its’; thus see Craik, <i>On the English of Shakespeare</i>,
+p. 91; Marsh, <i>Manual of the English Language</i> (Eng. Edit.),
+p. 278; <i>Transactions of the Philological Society</i>, vol. 1.
+p. 280; and my book <i>On the Authorized Version of the
+New Testament</i>, p. 59.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_148_148" id="Footnote_148_148"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_148_148"><span class="label">[148]</span></a>
+Thus Fuller (<i>Pisgah Sight of Palestine</i>, vol. ii. p.
+190): “Sure I am this city [the New Jerusalem] as presented
+by the prophet, was fairer, finer, <i>slicker</i>, smoother,
+more exact, than any fabric the earth afforded”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_149_149" id="Footnote_149_149"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_149_149"><span class="label">[149]</span></a>
+[In the United States ‘plunder’ is used for personal
+effects, baggage and luggage (Webster). This is not noticed
+in the E.D.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_150_150" id="Footnote_150_150"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_150_150"><span class="label">[150]</span></a>
+[But we have acquired, in some quarters, the abomination
+‘an invite’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_151_151" id="Footnote_151_151"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_151_151"><span class="label">[151]</span></a>
+How many words modern French has lost which are
+most vigorous and admirable, the absence of which can
+only now be supplied by a circumlocution or by some less
+excellent word&mdash;‘Oseur’, ‘affranchisseur’ (Amyot), ‘mépriseur’,
+‘murmurateur’, ‘blandisseur’ (Bossuet), ‘abuseur’
+(Rabelais), ‘désabusement’, ‘rancœur’, are all
+obsolete at the present. So ‘désaimer’, to cease to love
+(‘disamare’ in Italian), ‘guirlander’, ‘stériliser’, ‘blandissant’,
+‘ordonnément’ (Montaigne), with innumerable
+others.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_152_152" id="Footnote_152_152"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_152_152"><span class="label">[152]</span></a>
+[It has now attained a fair currency.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_153_153" id="Footnote_153_153"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_153_153"><span class="label">[153]</span></a>
+[‘Gainly’ is still used by nineteenth century writers,
+1855-86; see N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_154_154" id="Footnote_154_154"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_154_154"><span class="label">[154]</span></a>
+[‘Dehort’ has been used in modern times by Southey
+(<i>Letters</i>, 1825, iii, 462), and Cheyne (<i>Isaiah, introd.</i> 1882,
+xx.)&mdash;N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_155_155" id="Footnote_155_155"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_155_155"><span class="label">[155]</span></a>
+[Tennyson has endeavoured to resuscitate the word&mdash;“<i>Rathe</i>
+she rose”&mdash;<i>Lancelot and Elaine</i>&mdash;but with no
+great success.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_156_156" id="Footnote_156_156"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_156_156"><span class="label">[156]</span></a>
+For other passages in which ‘rathest’ occurs, see
+the <i>State Papers</i>, vol. ii. pp. 92, 170.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_157_157" id="Footnote_157_157"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_157_157"><span class="label">[157]</span></a>
+[‘Buxom’ for old English <i>buc-sum</i> or
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘bu h-sum’"><i>buch-sum</i></ins>, i.e.
+‘bow-some’, yielding, compliant, obedient. “Sara was
+<i>buxom</i> to Abraham”, 1 Pet. iii, 6 (xiv. Cent. Version, ed.
+Pawes, p. 216).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_158_158" id="Footnote_158_158"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_158_158"><span class="label">[158]</span></a>
+[‘Lissome’ for <i>lithe-some</i>, like Wessex <i>blissom</i> for
+<i>blithe-some</i>. Tennyson has “as <i>lissome</i> as a hazel wand”&mdash;<i>The
+Brook</i>, l. 70.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_159_159" id="Footnote_159_159"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_159_159"><span class="label">[159]</span></a>
+Jamieson’s <i>Dictionary</i> gives a large number of words
+with this termination which I should suppose were always
+peculiar to Scotland, as ‘bangsome’, i.e. quarrelsome,
+‘freaksome’, ‘drysome’, ‘grousome’ (the German
+‘grausam’) [Now in common use as ‘gruesome’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_160_160" id="Footnote_160_160"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_160_160"><span class="label">[160]</span></a>
+[A list of some of these reduplicated words was given
+by Dr. Booth in his “Analytical Dictionary of the English
+Language”, 1835; but a full collection of nearly six
+hundred was published by Mr. H.&nbsp;B. Wheatley in the
+<i>Transactions of the Philological Society</i> for 1865.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_161_161" id="Footnote_161_161"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_161_161"><span class="label">[161]</span></a>
+Many languages have groups of words formed upon
+the same scheme, although, singularly enough, they are
+altogether absent from the Anglo-Saxon. (J. Grimm,
+<i>Deutsche Gramm.</i>, vol. ii. p. 976). The Spaniards have
+a great many very expressive words of this formation.
+Thus with allusion to the great struggle in which Christian
+Spain was engaged for so many centuries, a vaunting
+braggart is a ‘matamoros’, a ‘slaymoor’; he is a ‘matasiete’,
+a ‘slayseven’; a ‘perdonavidas’, a ‘sparelives’.
+Others may be added to these, as ‘azotacalles’, ‘picapleytos’,
+‘saltaparedes’, ‘rompeesquinas’, ‘ganapan’,
+‘cascatreguas’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_162_162" id="Footnote_162_162"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_162_162"><span class="label">[162]</span></a>
+[This stands for ‘peak-goose’ (<i>peek goos</i> in Ascham,
+<i>Scholemaster</i>, 1570, p. 54, ed. Arber), a <i>goose</i> that <i>peaks</i>
+or pines, used for a sickly, delicate person, and a simpleton.
+In Chapman, Cotgrave and others it appears as ‘pea-goose’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_163_163" id="Footnote_163_163"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_163_163"><span class="label">[163]</span></a>
+The mistake is far earlier; long before Cowper wrote
+the sound suggested first this sense, and then this spelling.
+Thus Stanihurst, <i>Description of Ireland</i>, p. 28: “They
+are taken for no better than <i>rakehels</i>, or <i>the devil’s black
+guard</i>”; and often elsewhere.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_164_164" id="Footnote_164_164"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_164_164"><span class="label">[164]</span></a>
+[i.e. in Joshua Sylvester’s translation of “Du Bartas,
+his Diuine Weekes and Workes”, 1621.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_165_165" id="Footnote_165_165"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_165_165"><span class="label">[165]</span></a>
+As not, however, turning on a <i>very</i> coarse matter,
+and illustrating the subject with infinite wit and humour,
+I might refer the Spanish scholar to the discussion between
+Don Quixote and his squire on the dismissal of
+‘regoldar’, from the language of good society, and the
+substitution of ‘erutar’ in its room (<i>Don Quixote</i>, 4. 7.
+43). In a letter of Cicero to Pætus (<i>Fam.</i> ix. 22) there
+is a subtle and interesting disquisition on forbidden words,
+and their philosophy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_166_166" id="Footnote_166_166"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_166_166"><span class="label">[166]</span></a>
+<i>Literature of Greece</i>, p. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_167_167" id="Footnote_167_167"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_167_167"><span class="label">[167]</span></a>
+[Notwithstanding the analogous instance of ‘abbess’
+for ‘abbatess’ this account of ‘lass’ must be abandoned.
+It is the old English <i>lasce</i> (akin to Swedish <i>lösk</i>), meaning
+(1) one free or disengaged, (2) an unmarried girl (N.E.D.)]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_168_168" id="Footnote_168_168"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_168_168"><span class="label">[168]</span></a>
+In Cotgrave’s <i>Dictionary</i> I find ‘praiseress’, ‘commendress’,
+‘fluteress’, ‘possesseress’, ‘loveress’, but
+have never met them in use.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_169_169" id="Footnote_169_169"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_169_169"><span class="label">[169]</span></a>
+On this termination see J. Grimm, <i>Deutsche Gramm.</i>,
+vol. ii. p. 134; vol. iii. p. 339.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_170_170" id="Footnote_170_170"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_170_170"><span class="label">[170]</span></a>
+[<i>The Knightes Tale</i>, ed. Skeat, l. 2017.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_171_171" id="Footnote_171_171"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_171_171"><span class="label">[171]</span></a>
+[Yes; so in N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_172_172" id="Footnote_172_172"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_172_172"><span class="label">[172]</span></a>
+I am indebted for these last four to a <i>Nominale</i> in
+the <i>National Antiquities</i>, vol. i. p. 216.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_173_173" id="Footnote_173_173"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_173_173"><span class="label">[173]</span></a>
+The earliest example which Richardson gives of
+‘seamstress’ is from Gay, of ‘songstress’, from Thomson.
+I find however ‘sempstress’ in the translation of
+Olearius’ <i>Voyages and Travels</i>, 1669, p. 43. It is quite
+certain that as late as Ben Jonson, ‘seamster’ and
+‘songster’ expressed the <i>female</i> seamer and singer; a
+single passage from his <i>Masque of Christmas</i> is evidence
+to this. One of the children of Christmas there is
+“Wassel, like a neat <i>sempster</i> and <i>songster</i>; <i>her</i> page
+bearing a brown bowl”. Compare a passage from
+<i>Holland’s Leaguer</i>, 1632: “A <i>tyre-woman</i> of phantastical
+ornaments, a <i>sempster</i> for ruffes, cuffes, smocks and
+waistcoats”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_174_174" id="Footnote_174_174"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_174_174"><span class="label">[174]</span></a>
+This was about the time of Henry VIII. In proof
+of the confusion which reigned on the subject in Shakespeare’s
+time, see his use of ‘spinster’ as&mdash;‘spinner’,
+the <i>man</i> spinning, <i>Henry VIII</i>, Act. i. Sc. 2; and I have
+no doubt that it is the same in <i>Othello</i>, Act i. Sc. 1. And
+a little later, in Howell’s <i>Vocabulary</i>, 1659, ‘spinner’ and
+‘spinster’ are <i>both</i> referred to the male sex, and the
+barbarous ‘spinstress’ invented for the female.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_175_175" id="Footnote_175_175"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_175_175"><span class="label">[175]</span></a>
+I have included ‘huckster’, as will be observed, in
+this list. I certainly cannot produce any passage in
+which it is employed as the <i>female</i> pedlar. We have only,
+however, to keep in mind the existence of the verb ‘to
+huck’, in the sense of to peddle (it is used by Bishop
+Andrews), and at the same time not to let the present
+spelling of ‘hawker’ mislead us, and we shall confidently
+recognize ‘hucker’ (the German ‘höker’ or ‘höcker’),
+in hawker, that is, the <i>man</i> who ‘hucks’, ‘hawks’, or
+peddles, as in ‘huckster’ the <i>female</i> who does the same.
+When therefore Howell and others employ ‘hucksteress’,
+they fall into the same barbarous excess of expression,
+whereof we are all guilty, when we use ‘seamstress’ and
+‘songstress’.&mdash;The note stood thus in the third edition.
+Since that was published, I have met in the <i>Nominale</i>
+referred to p. 155, the following, “hæc auxiatrix, a
+<i>hukster</i>”. [Huckster, xiii. cent. <i>huccster</i>, it may be noted
+is an older word in the language than <i>hukker</i> (hucker) and
+<i>to huck</i>, both first appearing in the xiv. cent. N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_176_176" id="Footnote_176_176"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_176_176"><span class="label">[176]</span></a>
+[Preserved in the surnames Baxter and Brewster.
+See C.&nbsp;W. Bardsley, <i>English Surnames</i>, 2nd ed. 364, 379.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_177_177" id="Footnote_177_177"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_177_177"><span class="label">[177]</span></a>
+<i>Notes and Queries</i>, No. 157.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_178_178" id="Footnote_178_178"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_178_178"><span class="label">[178]</span></a>
+[‘Welkin’ is possibly a plural, but in Anglo-Saxon
+<i>wolcen</i> is a cloud, and the plural <i>wolcnu</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_179_179" id="Footnote_179_179"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_179_179"><span class="label">[179]</span></a>
+When Wallis wrote, it was only beginning to be
+forgotten that ‘chick’ was the singular, and ‘chicken’
+the plural: “<i>Sunt qui dicunt</i> in singulari ‘chicken’, et
+in plurali ‘chickens’”; and even now the words are in
+many country parts correctly employed. In Sussex,
+a correspondent writes, they would as soon think of saying
+‘oxens’ as ‘chickens’. [‘Chicken’ is properly a
+singular, old English <i>cicen</i>, the <i>-en</i> being a diminutival,
+not a plural, suffix (as in ‘kitten’, ‘maiden’). Thus
+‘chicken’ was originally ‘a little chuck’ (or cock), out
+of which ‘chick’ was afterwards developed.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_180_180" id="Footnote_180_180"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_180_180"><span class="label">[180]</span></a>
+See Chaucer’s <i>Romaunt of the Rose</i>, 1032, where
+Richesse, “an high lady of great noblesse”, is one of
+the persons of the allegory; and compare Rev. xviii. 17,
+Authorized Version. This has so entirely escaped the
+knowledge of Ben Jonson, English scholar as he was,
+that in his <i>Grammar</i> he cites ‘riches’ as an example of
+an English word wanting a singular.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_181_181" id="Footnote_181_181"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_181_181"><span class="label">[181]</span></a></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Set shallow brooks to surging seas,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An orient pearl to a white <i>pease</i>”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="citation"><i>Puttenham.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_182_182" id="Footnote_182_182"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_182_182"><span class="label">[182]</span></a>
+[‘Eaves’ (old English <i>efes</i>) from which an imaginary
+singular ‘eave’ has sometimes been evolved, as when
+Tennyson speaks of a ‘cottage-eave’ (<i>In Memoriam</i>,
+civ.), and Cotgrave of ‘an house-eave’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_183_183" id="Footnote_183_183"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_183_183"><span class="label">[183]</span></a>
+It is curious that despite of this protest, one of his
+plays has for its name, <i>Sejanus his Fall</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_184_184" id="Footnote_184_184"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_184_184"><span class="label">[184]</span></a>
+Even this does not startle Addison, or cause him any
+misgiving; on the contrary he boldly asserts (<i>Spectator</i>,
+No. 135), “The same single letter ‘s’ on many occasions
+does the office of a whole word, and represents the ‘his’
+<i>or ‘her’</i> of our forefathers”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_185_185" id="Footnote_185_185"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_185_185"><span class="label">[185]</span></a>
+Nothing can be better than the way in which Wallis
+disposes of this scheme, although less successful in showing
+what this ‘s’ does mean than in showing what it cannot
+mean (<i>Gramm. Ling. Anglic.</i>, c. 5); Qui autem arbitrantur
+illud s, loco <i>his</i> adjunctum esse (priori scilicet parte per
+aphæresim abscissâ), ideoque apostrophi notam semper vel
+pingendam esse, vel saltem subintelligendam, omnino
+errant. Quamvis enim non negem quin apostrophi nota
+commode nonnunquam affigi possit, ut ipsius litteræ
+s usus distinctius, ubi opus est, percipiatur; ita tamen
+semper fieri debere, aut etiam ideo fieri quia vocem <i>his</i>
+innuat, omnino nego. Adjungitur enim et fœminarum
+nominibus propriis, et substantivis pluralibus, ubi vox
+<i>his</i> sine solœcismo locum habere non potest: atque etiam
+in possessivis <i>ours</i>, <i>yours</i>, <i>theirs</i>, <i>hers</i>, ubi vocem <i>his</i>
+innui nemo somniaret.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_186_186" id="Footnote_186_186"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_186_186"><span class="label">[186]</span></a>
+See the proofs in Marsh’s <i>Manual of the English
+Language</i>, English Edit., pp. 280, 293.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_187_187" id="Footnote_187_187"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_187_187"><span class="label">[187]</span></a>
+I cannot think that it would exceed the authority
+of our University Presses, if this were removed from the
+Prayer Books which they put forth, as certainly it is supprest
+by many of the clergy in the reading. Such a liberty
+they have already assumed with the Bible. In all earlier
+editions of the Authorized Version it stood at 1 Kin. xv.
+24: “Nevertheless <i>Asa his</i> heart was perfect with the
+Lord”; it is “<i>Asa’s</i> heart” now. In the same way
+“<i>Mordecai his</i> matters” (Esth. iii. 4) has been silently
+changed into “<i>Mordecai’s</i> matters”; and in some modern
+editions, but not in all, “<i>Holofernes his</i> head” (Judith
+xiii. 9) into “<i>Holofernes’</i> head”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_188_188" id="Footnote_188_188"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_188_188"><span class="label">[188]</span></a>
+In a good note on the matter, p. 6, in the <i>Comprehensive
+Grammar</i> prefixed to his <i>Dictionary</i>, London, 1775.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_189_189" id="Footnote_189_189"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_189_189"><span class="label">[189]</span></a>
+See Grimm. <i>Deut. Gramm.</i>, vol. ii. pp. 609, 944.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_190_190" id="Footnote_190_190"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_190_190"><span class="label">[190]</span></a>
+The existence of ‘stony’&mdash;‘lapidosus’, ‘steinig’,
+does not make ‘stonen’&mdash;‘lapideus’, ‘steinern’,
+superfluous, any more than ‘earthy’ makes ‘earthen’.
+That part of the field in which the good seed withered so
+quickly (Matt. xiii. 5) was ‘stony’. The vessels which
+held the water that Christ turned into wine (John iii. 6)
+were ‘stonen’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_191_191" id="Footnote_191_191"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_191_191"><span class="label">[191]</span></a>
+J. Grimm (<i>Deutsche Gramm.</i> vol. i, p. 1040): Dass
+die starke form die ältere, kräftigere, innere; die schwache
+die spätere, gehemmtere und mehr äusserliche sey, leuchtet
+ein. Elsewhere, speaking generally of inflections by
+internal vowel change, he characterizes them as a ‘chief
+beauty’ (hauptschönheit) of the Teutonic languages.
+Marsh (<i>Manual of the English Language</i>, p. 233, English
+ed.) protests, though, as it seems to me, on no sufficient
+grounds, against these terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, as
+themselves fanciful and inappropriate.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_192_192" id="Footnote_192_192"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_192_192"><span class="label">[192]</span></a>
+The entire ignorance as to the past historic evolution
+of the language, with which some have undertaken to
+write about it, is curious. Thus the author of <i>Observations
+upon the English Language</i>, without date, but published
+about 1730, treats all these strong præterites as of
+recent introduction, counting ‘knew’ to have lately
+expelled ‘knowed’, ‘rose’ to have acted the same part
+toward ‘rised’, and of course esteeming them as so many
+barbarous violations of the laws of the language; and
+concluding with the warning that “great care must be
+taken to prevent their increase”!!&mdash;p. 24. Cobbett
+does not fall into this absurdity, yet proposes in his
+<i>English Grammar</i>, that they should all be abolished as
+inconvenient. [Now many others are rapidly becoming
+obsolescent. How seldom do we hear ‘drank’, ‘shrank’,
+‘sprang’, ‘stank’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_193_193" id="Footnote_193_193"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_193_193"><span class="label">[193]</span></a>
+J. Grimm (<i>Deutsche Gramm.</i> vol. i. p. 839): “Die
+starke flexion stufenweise versinkt und ausstirbt, die
+schwache aber um sich greift”. Cf. i. 994, 1040; ii. 5;
+iv. 509.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_194_194" id="Footnote_194_194"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_194_194"><span class="label">[194]</span></a>
+[See also J.&nbsp;C. Hare, <i>Two Essays in Eng. Philology</i>
+i. 47-56.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_195_195" id="Footnote_195_195"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_195_195"><span class="label">[195]</span></a>
+Thus Wallis (<i>Gramm. Ling. Anglic.</i>, 1654): Singulari
+numero siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud
+esse solet, vel familiariter blandientis. [For a good discussion
+of the old use of ‘thou’, see the Hares, <i>Guesses at
+Truth</i>, 1847, pp. 169-90. Even at the present day a
+Wessex matron has been known to resent the too familiar
+address of an inferior with the words, “Who bist thou
+<i>a-theein’</i> of”? (<i>The Spectator</i>, 1904, Sept. 3, p. 319).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_196_196" id="Footnote_196_196"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_196_196"><span class="label">[196]</span></a>
+What the actual position of the compellation ‘thou’
+was at that time, we may perhaps best learn from this
+passage in Fuller’s <i>Church History, Dedication of Book</i>
+vii.: “In opposition whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker
+usage] we maintain that <i>thou</i> from superiors to inferiors
+is proper, as a sign of command; from equals to equals is
+passable, as a note of familiarity; but from inferiors to
+superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of
+clownishness; if from affectation, a tone of contempt”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_197_197" id="Footnote_197_197"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_197_197"><span class="label">[197]</span></a>
+See on this subject of the dropping of grammatical
+gender, Pott, <i>Etymologische Forschungen</i>, part 2, pp. 404,
+<i>sqq.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span></p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS</h3>
+
+
+<p>I propose, according to the plan sketched out
+in my first lecture, to take for my subject in the
+present those changes which in the course of time
+have found place, or now are finding place, in
+the meaning of many among our English words;
+so that, whether we are aware of it or not, we
+employ them at this day in senses very different
+from those in which our forefathers employed
+them of old. You observe that it is not <i>obsolete</i>
+words, words quite fallen out of present use,
+which I propose to consider; but such, rather, as
+are still on the lips of men, but with meanings
+more or less removed from those which once they
+possessed. My subject is far more practical,
+has far more to do with your actual life, than if
+I had taken obsolete words, and considered them.
+These last have an interest indeed, but it is an
+interest of an antiquarian character. They constituted
+a part of the intellectual money with
+which our ancestors carried on the business of
+their life; but now they are rather medals for the
+cabinets and collections of the curious than current
+money for the needs and pleasures of all.
+Their wings are clipped, so that they are “<i>winged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span></i>
+words” no more; the spark of thought or feeling,
+kindling from mind to mind, no longer runs along
+them, as along the electric wires of the soul.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Obsolete Words</i></div>
+
+<p>And then, besides this, there is little or no danger
+that any should be misled by them. A reader
+lights for the first time on one of these obsolete
+English words, as ‘frampold’, or ‘garboil’, or
+‘brangle’<a name="FNanchor_198_198" id="FNanchor_198_198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198_198" class="fnanchor">[198]</a>; he is at once conscious of his ignorance;
+he has recourse to a glossary, of if he guesses
+from the context at the word’s signification, still
+his guess is as a guess to him, and no more. But
+words that have changed their meaning have
+often a deceivableness about them; a reader not
+once doubts but that he knows their intention, has
+no misgiving but that they possess for him the
+same force which they possessed for their writer,
+and conveyed to <i>his</i> contemporaries, when indeed
+it is quite otherwise. The old life has gone out
+of them and a new life entered in.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, for example, a reader of our day lights
+upon such a passage as the following (it is from
+the <i>Preface</i> to Howell’s <i>Lexicon</i>, 1660): “Though
+the root of the English language be <i>Dutch</i><a name="FNanchor_199_199" id="FNanchor_199_199"></a><a href="#Footnote_199_199" class="fnanchor">[199]</a>, yet
+it may be said to have been inoculated afterwards
+on a French stock”. He may know that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
+Dutch is a sister language or dialect to our own;
+but this that it is the mother or root of it will
+certainly perplex him, and he will hardly know
+what to make of the assertion; perhaps he ascribes
+it to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly
+lowered in his esteem. But presently in the
+course of his reading he meets with the following
+statement, this time in Fuller’s <i>Holy War</i>, being
+a history of the Crusades: “The French, <i>Dutch</i>,
+Italian, and English were the four elemental
+nations, whereof this army [of the Crusaders] was
+compounded”. If the student has sufficient
+historical knowledge to know that in the time of
+the Crusades there were no Dutch in our use of
+the word, this statement would merely startle
+him; and probably before he had finished the
+chapter, having his attention once aroused, he
+would perceive that Fuller with the writers of his
+time used ‘Dutch’ for German; even as it was
+constantly so used up to the end of the seventeenth
+century; and as the Americans use it to this
+present day; what we call now a Dutchman
+being then a Hollander. But a young student
+might very possibly want that amount of previous
+knowledge, which should cause him to receive
+this announcement with misgiving and surprise;
+and thus he might carry away altogether a wrong
+impression, and rise from a perusal of the book,
+persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played
+an important part in the Crusades, while the
+Germans took little or no part in them at all.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Miscreant</i></div>
+
+<p>And as it is here with an historic fact, so still
+more often will it happen with the subtler changes
+which words have undergone. Out of this it
+will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+continually happen that they convey now much
+more blame and condemnation, or convey now
+much less, than formerly they did; or of a different
+kind; and a reader not aware of the altered value
+which they now possess, may be in continual
+danger of misreading his author, of misunderstanding
+his intentions, while he has no doubt
+whatever that he perfectly apprehends and takes
+it in. Thus when Shakespeare in
+<i><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘I’">1</ins> Henry VI</i>
+makes the gallant York address Joan of Arc as
+a ‘miscreant’, how coarse a piece of invective
+this sounds; how unlike what the chivalrous
+soldier would have uttered; or what one might
+have supposed Shakespeare, even with his unworthy
+estimate of the holy warrior Maid, would
+have put into his mouth. But a ‘miscreant’
+in Shakespeare’s time had nothing of the meaning
+which now it has. It was simply, in agreement
+with its etymology, a misbeliever, one who did
+not believe rightly the Articles of the Catholic
+Faith. And I need not remind you that this
+was the constant charge which the English brought
+against Joan,&mdash;namely, that she was a dealer
+in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such had
+fallen from the faith. On this plea they burnt
+her, and it is this which York means when he
+calls her a ‘miscreant’, and not what we should
+intend by the name.</p>
+
+<p>In reading of poetry above all what beauties
+are often missed, what forces lost, through this
+assumption that the present of a word is always
+equivalent to its past. How often the poet is
+wronged in our estimation; that seeming to us
+now flat and pointless, which at once would
+lose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
+this character, did we know how to read into some
+word the emphasis which it once had, but which
+now has departed from it. For example, Milton
+ascribes in <i>Comus</i> the “<i>tinsel-slippered</i> feet” to
+Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How comparatively
+poor an epithet this ‘tinsel-slippered’
+sounds for those who know of ‘tinsel’ only in its
+modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery,
+affecting a splendour which it does not really possess.
+But learn its earlier use by learning its derivation,
+bring it back to the French ‘étincelle’, and the
+Latin ‘scintillula’; see in it, as Milton and the
+writers of his time saw, ‘the sparkling’, and how
+exquisitely beautiful a title does this become applied
+to a goddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up
+before our mind’s eye the quick glitter and sparkle
+of the waves under the light of sun or
+moon<a name="FNanchor_200_200" id="FNanchor_200_200"></a><a href="#Footnote_200_200" class="fnanchor">[200]</a>.
+It is Homer’s ‘silver-footed’ (<span title="Greek: argyropeza">ἀργυρόπεζα</span>), not
+servilely transferred, but reproduced and made
+his own by the English poet, dealing as one
+great poet will do with another; who will not
+disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows will
+add often a further grace of his own.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Influence</i>’</div>
+
+<p>Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even
+aware, that whenever the word ‘influence’ occurs
+in our English poetry, down to comparatively a
+modern date, there is always more or less remote
+allusions to invisible illapses of power, skyey,
+planetary effects, supposed to be exercised by the
+heavenly luminaries upon the lives of
+men<a name="FNanchor_201_201" id="FNanchor_201_201"></a><a href="#Footnote_201_201" class="fnanchor">[201]</a>?
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+How many a passage starts into new life and
+beauty and fulness of allusion, when this is present
+with us; even Milton’s</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">“store of ladies, whose bright eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rain <i>influence</i>”,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>as spectators of the tournament, gain something,
+when we regard them&mdash;and using this language,
+he intended we should&mdash;as the luminaries of this
+lower sphere, shedding by their propitious presence
+strength and valour into the hearts of their
+knights.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Baffle</i>’</div>
+
+<p>The word even in its present acceptation may
+yield, as here, a convenient and even a correct
+sense; we may fall into no positive misapprehension
+about it; and still, through ignorance of its
+past history and of the force which it once possessed,
+we may miss a great part of its significance.
+We are not <i>beside</i> the meaning of our author,
+but we are <i>short</i> of it. Thus in Beaumont and
+Fletcher’s <i>King and no King</i>, (Act iii. Sc. 2,) a
+cowardly braggart of a soldier describes the treatment
+he experienced, when like Parolles he was at
+length found out, and stripped of his lion’s skin:&mdash;“They
+hung me up by the heels and beat me with
+hazel sticks, ... that the whole kingdom took
+notice of me for a <i>baffled</i>, whipped fellow”. The
+word to which I wish here to call your attention
+is ‘baffled’. Were you reading this passage, there
+would probably be nothing here to cause you to
+pause; you would attach to ‘baffled’ a sense
+which sorts very well with the context&mdash;“hung up
+by the heels and beaten, all his schemes of being
+thought much of were <i>baffled</i> and defeated”. But
+“baffled” implies far more than this; it contains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+allusion to a custom in the days of chivalry,
+according to which a perjured or recreant knight
+was either in person, or more commonly in effigy,
+hung up by the heels, his scutcheon blotted, his
+spear broken, and he himself or his effigy made
+the mark and subject of all kinds of indignities;
+such a one being said to be ‘baffled’<a name="FNanchor_202_202" id="FNanchor_202_202"></a><a href="#Footnote_202_202" class="fnanchor">[202]</a>. Twice
+in Spenser recreant knights are so dealt with. I
+can only quote a portion of the shorter passage,
+in which this infamous punishment is described:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And after all, for greater infamy<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He by the heels him hung upon a tree,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And <i>baffled</i> so, that all which passéd by<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The picture of his punishment might
+see”<a name="FNanchor_203_203" id="FNanchor_203_203"></a><a href="#Footnote_203_203" class="fnanchor">[203]</a>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Probably when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, men
+were not so remote from the days of chivalry,
+or at any rate from the literature of chivalry, but
+that this custom was still fresh in their minds.
+How much more to them than to us, so long as
+we are ignorant of the same, would those words
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘justI’">I just</ins>
+quoted have conveyed?</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Religion</i>’</div>
+
+<p>There are several places in the Authorized Version
+of Scripture where those who are not aware
+of the changes which have taken place during the
+last two hundred and fifty years in our language,
+can hardly fail of being to a certain extent misled
+as to the intention of our Translators; or, if they
+are better acquainted with Greek than with early
+English, will be tempted to ascribe to them, though
+unjustly, an inexact rendering of the original.
+Thus the altered meaning of a word involves a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
+serious misunderstanding in that well known
+statement of St. James, “Pure <i>religion</i> and undefiled
+before God and the Father is this, to visit
+the fatherless and widows in their affliction”.
+“There”, exclaims one who wishes to set up St.
+James against St. Paul, that so he may escape
+the necessity of obeying either, “listen to what
+St. James says; there is nothing mystical in what
+he requires; instead of harping on faith as a condition
+necessary to salvation, he makes all religion
+to consist in practical deeds of kindness from one
+to another”. But let us pause for a moment.
+Did ‘religion’, when our translation was made,
+mean godliness? did it mean the <i>sum total</i> of our
+duties towards God? for, of course, no one would
+deny that deeds of charity are a necessary part of
+our Christian duty, an evidence of the faith which
+is in us. There is abundant evidence to show
+that ‘religion’ did not mean this; that, like the
+Greek <span title="Greek: thrêskeia">θρησκεία</span>,
+for which it here stands, like the
+Latin ‘religio’, it meant the outward forms and
+embodiments in which the inward principle of
+piety arrayed itself, the <i>external service</i> of God;
+and St. James is urging upon those to whom he
+is writing something of this kind: “Instead of
+the ceremonial services of the Jews, which consisted
+in divers washings and in other elements of
+this world, let our service, our
+<span title="Greek: thrêskeia">θρησκεία</span>, take a
+nobler shape, let it consist in deeds of pity and
+of love”&mdash;and it was this which our Translators
+intended, when they used ‘religion’ here and
+‘religious’ in the verse preceding. How little
+‘religion’ once meant godliness, how predominantly
+it was used for the <i>outward</i> service of God, is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
+plain from many passages in our <i>Homilies</i>, and
+from other contemporary literature.</p>
+
+<p>Again, there are words in our Liturgy which
+I have no doubt are commonly misunderstood.
+The mistake involves no serious error; yet still in
+our own language, and in words which we have
+constantly in our mouths, and at most solemn
+times, it is certainly better to be right than wrong.
+In the Litany we pray God that it would please
+Him, “to give and preserve to our use the <i>kindly</i>
+fruits of the earth”. What meaning do we
+attach to this epithet, “the <i>kindly</i> fruits of the
+earth”? Probably we understand by it those
+fruits in which the <i>kindness</i> of God or of nature
+towards us finds its expression. This is no unworthy
+explanation, but still it is not the right
+one. The “<i>kindly</i> fruits” are the “<i>natural</i>
+fruits”, those which the earth according to its
+<i>kind</i> should naturally bring forth, which it is appointed
+to produce. To show you how little
+‘kindly’ meant once benignant, as it means now,
+I will instance an employment of it from Sir Thomas
+More’s <i>Life of Richard the Third</i>. He tells us that
+Richard calculated by murdering his two nephews
+in the Tower to make himself accounted “a
+<i>kindly</i> king”&mdash;not certainly a ‘kindly’ one in
+our present usage of the word<a name="FNanchor_204_204" id="FNanchor_204_204"></a><a href="#Footnote_204_204" class="fnanchor">[204]</a>; but, having put
+them out of the way, that he should then be lineal
+heir of the Crown, and should thus be reckoned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+as king <i>by kind</i> or natural descent; and such was
+of old the constant use of the word.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Worship</i>’</div>
+
+<p>A phrase in one of our occasional Services
+“with my body I thee <i>worship</i>”, has sometimes
+offended those who are unacquainted with the
+early use of English words, and thus with the
+intention of the actual framers of that Service.
+Clearly in our modern sense of ‘worship’, this
+language would be unjustifiable. But ‘worship’
+or ‘worthship’ meant ‘honour’ in our early
+English, and ‘to worship’ to honour, this meaning
+of ‘worship’ still very harmlessly surviving in the
+title of “your worship”, addressed to the magistrate
+on the bench. So little was it restrained of
+old to the honour which man is bound to pay to
+God, that it was employed by Wiclif to express
+the honour which God will render to his faithful
+servants and friends. Thus our Lord’s declaration
+“If any man serve Me, him will my Father <i>honour</i>”,
+in Wiclif’s translation reads thus, “If any man
+serve Me, my Father shall <i>worship</i> him”. I do
+not say that there is not sufficient reason to change
+the words, “with my body I thee <i>worship</i>”, if
+only there were any means of changing anything
+which is now antiquated and out of date in our
+services or arrangements. I think it would be
+very well if they were changed, liable as they are
+to misunderstanding and misconstruction now;
+but still they did not mean at the first, and therefore
+do not now really mean, any more than, “with
+my body I thee <i>honour</i>”, and so you may reply to
+any fault-finder here.</p>
+
+<p>Take another example of a very easy misapprehension,
+although not now from Scripture or the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+Prayer Book, Fuller, our Church historian, having
+occasion to speak of some famous divine that was
+lately dead, exclaims, “Oh the <i>painfulness</i> of his
+preaching!” If we did not know the former uses
+of ‘painfulness’, we might take this for an exclamation
+wrung out at the recollection of the tediousness
+which he inflicted on his hearers. Far from
+it; the words are a record not of the <i>pain</i> which
+he caused to others, but of the <i>pains</i> which he
+bestowed himself: and I am persuaded, if we had
+more ‘painful’ preachers in the old sense of the
+word, that is, who <i>took</i> pains themselves, we should
+have fewer ‘painful’ ones in the modern sense,
+who <i>cause</i> pain to their hearers. So too Bishop
+Grosthead is recorded as “the <i>painful</i> writer of
+two hundred books”&mdash;not meaning hereby that
+these books were painful in the reading, but that
+he was laborious and painful in their composing.</p>
+
+<p>Here is another easy misapprehension. Swift
+wrote a pamphlet, or, as he called it, a <i>Letter to the
+Lord Treasurer</i>, with this title, “A proposal for
+correcting, improving, and <i>ascertaining</i> the English
+Tongue”. Who that brought a knowledge
+of present English, and no more, to this passage,
+would doubt that “<i>ascertaining</i> the English
+Tongue” meant arriving at a certain knowledge
+of what it was? Swift, however, means something
+quite different from this. “<i>To ascertain</i> the English
+tongue” is not with him to arrive at a subjective
+certainty in our own minds of what that
+tongue is, but to give an objective certainty to
+that tongue itself, so that henceforth it shall
+not alter nor change. For even Swift himself,
+with all his masculine sense, entertained a dream<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
+of this kind, as is more fully declared in the work
+itself<a name="FNanchor_205_205" id="FNanchor_205_205"></a><a href="#Footnote_205_205" class="fnanchor">[205]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Treacle</i>’</div>
+
+<p>In other places unacquaintance with the changes
+in a word’s usage will not so much mislead as
+leave you nearly or altogether at a loss in respect
+of the intention of an author whom you may be
+reading. It is evident that he has a meaning, but
+what it is you are unable to divine, even though
+all the words he employs are words in familiar
+employment to the present day. For example,
+the poet Waller is congratulating Charles the
+Second on his return from exile, and is describing
+the way in which all men, even those formerly
+most hostile to him, were now seeking his favour,
+and he writes:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Offenders now, the chiefest, do begin<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To strive for grace, and expiate their sin:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All winds blow fair that did the world embroil,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Your vipers treacle yield</i>, and scorpions oil”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Many a reader before now has felt, as I cannot
+doubt, a moment’s perplexity at the now courtly
+poet’s assertion that “<i>vipers treacle yield</i>”&mdash;who
+yet has been too indolent, or who has not had the
+opportunity, to search out what his meaning might
+be. There is in fact allusion here to a curious
+piece of legendary lore. ‘Treacle’, or ‘triacle’,
+as Chaucer wrote it, was originally a Greek word,
+and wrapped up in itself the once popular belief
+(an anticipation, by the way, of homœopathy), that
+a confection of the viper’s flesh was the most
+potent antidote against the viper’s
+bite<a name="FNanchor_206_206" id="FNanchor_206_206"></a><a href="#Footnote_206_206" class="fnanchor">[206]</a>.
+Waller<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
+goes back to this the word’s old meaning, familiar
+enough in his time, for Milton speaks of “the
+sovran <i>treacle</i> of sound
+doctrine”<a name="FNanchor_207_207" id="FNanchor_207_207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207_207" class="fnanchor">[207]</a>, while “Venice
+treacle”, or “viper wine”, as it sometimes was
+called, was a common name for a supposed antidote
+against all poisons; and he would imply that
+regicides themselves began to be loyal, vipers not
+now yielding hurt any more, but rather healing
+for the old hurts which they themselves had
+inflicted. To trace the word down to its present
+use, it may be observed that, designating first
+this antidote, it then came to designate any
+antidote, then any medicinal confection or sweet
+syrup; and lastly that particular syrup, namely,
+the sweet syrup of molasses, to which alone it is
+now restricted.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Blackguard</i>’</div>
+
+<p>I will draw on the writings of Fuller for one
+more example. In his <i>Holy War</i>, having enumerated
+the rabble rout of fugitive debtors, runaway
+slaves, thieves, adulterers, murderers, of men
+laden for one cause or another with heaviest censures
+of the Church, who swelled the ranks, and
+helped to make up the army, of the Crusaders,
+he exclaimed, “A lamentable case that the
+devil’s <i>black guard</i> should be God’s soldiers”!
+What does he mean, we may ask, by “the devil’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
+<i>black guard</i>”? Nor is this a solitary mention of the
+“black guard”. On the contrary, the phrase is
+of very frequent recurrence in the early dramatists
+and others down to the time of Dryden,
+who gives as one of his stage directions in <i>Don
+Sebastian</i>, “Enter the captain of the rabble, with
+the <i>Black guard</i>”. What is this “black guard”?
+Has it any connexion with a word of our homeliest
+vernacular? We feel that probably it has so;
+yet at first sight the connexion is not very apparent,
+nor indeed the exact force of the phrase.
+Let me trace its history. In old times, the palaces
+of our kings and seats of our nobles were not so
+well and completely furnished as at the present
+day: and thus it was customary, when a royal
+progress was made, or when the great nobility
+exchanged one residence for another, that at such
+a removal all kitchen utensils, pots and pans, and
+even coals, should be also carried with them
+where they went. Those who accompanied and
+escorted these, the lowest, meanest, and dirtiest
+of the retainers, were called ‘the black guard’<a name="FNanchor_208_208" id="FNanchor_208_208"></a><a href="#Footnote_208_208" class="fnanchor">[208]</a>;
+then any troop or company of ragamuffins; and
+lastly, when the origin of the word was lost sight
+of, and it was forgotten that it properly implied
+a company, a rabble rout, and not a single person,
+one would compliment another, not as belonging
+to, but as himself being, the ‘blackguard’.</p>
+
+<p>The examples which I have adduced are, I am
+persuaded, sufficient to prove that it is not a use<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>less
+and unprofitable study, nor yet one altogether
+without entertainment, to which I invite you;
+that on the contrary any one who desires to read
+with accuracy, and thus with advantage and
+pleasure, our earlier classics, who would avoid
+continual misapprehension in their
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘persual’">perusal</ins>, and
+would not often fall short of, and often go astray
+from, their meaning, must needs bestow some
+attention on the altered significance of English
+words. And if this is so, we could not more
+usefully employ what remains of this present
+lecture than in seeking to indicate those changes
+which words most frequently undergo; and to
+trace as far as we can the causes, mental and
+moral, at work in the minds of men to bring these
+changes about, with the good and evil out of
+which they have sprung, and to which they bear
+witness.</p>
+
+<p>For indeed these changes to which words in
+the progress of time are submitted are not changes
+at random, but for the most part are obedient to
+certain laws, are capable of being distributed into
+certain classes, being the outward transcripts and
+witnesses of mental and moral processes inwardly
+going forward in those who bring them about.
+Many, it is true, will escape any classification of
+ours, the changes which have taken place in their
+meaning being, or at least seeming to us, the
+result of mere caprice; and not explicable by any
+principle which we can appeal to as habitually at
+work in the mind. But, admitting all this, a
+majority will still remain which are reducible to
+some law or other, and with these we will occupy
+ourselves now.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Duke</i>’, ‘<i>Corpse</i>’, ‘<i>Weed</i>’</div>
+
+<p>And first, the meaning of a word oftentimes
+is gradually narrowed. It was once as a generic
+name, embracing many as yet unnamed species
+within itself, which all went by its common designation.
+By and bye it is found convenient that
+each of these should have its own more special
+sign allotted to it<a name="FNanchor_209_209" id="FNanchor_209_209"></a><a href="#Footnote_209_209" class="fnanchor">[209]</a>. It is here just as in some
+newly enclosed country, where a single household
+will at first loosely occupy a whole district; while,
+as cultivation proceeds, this district is gradually
+parcelled out among a dozen or twenty, and under
+more accurate culture employs and sustains them
+all. Thus, for example, all food was once called
+‘meat’; it is so in our Bible, and ‘horse-meat’ for
+fodder is still no unusual phrase; yet ‘meat’ is
+now a name given only to flesh. Any little book
+or writing was a ‘libel’ once; now only such a
+one as is scurrilous and injurious. Any leader
+was a ‘duke’ (dux); thus “<i>duke</i> Hannibal” (Sir
+Thomas Eylot), “<i>duke</i> Brennus” (Holland),
+“<i>duke</i> Theseus” (Shakespeare), “<i>duke</i> Amalek”,
+with other ‘dukes’ (Gen. xxxvi.). Any journey,
+by land as much as by sea, was a
+<ins class="correction" title="comma instead of period (full stop) in original">‘voyage’.</ins>
+‘Fairy’ was not a name restricted, as now, to the
+<i>Gothic</i> mythology; thus “the <i>fairy</i> Egeria” (Sir
+J. Harrington). A ‘corpse’ might be quite as well
+living as dead<a name="FNanchor_210_210" id="FNanchor_210_210"></a><a href="#Footnote_210_210" class="fnanchor">[210]</a>. ‘Weeds’ were whatever covered
+the earth or the person; while now as respects<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+the earth, those only are ‘weeds’ which are
+noxious, or at least self-sown; as regards the
+person, we speak of no other ‘weeds’ but the
+widow’s<a name="FNanchor_211_211" id="FNanchor_211_211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211_211" class="fnanchor">[211]</a>. In each of these cases, the same contraction
+of meaning, the separating off and assigning
+to other words of large portions of this, has
+found place. ‘To starve’ (the German ‘sterben’,
+and generally spelt ‘sterve’ up to the middle of
+the seventeenth century), meant once to die any
+manner of death; thus Chaucer says, Christ “<i>sterved</i>
+upon the cross for our redemption”; it now is
+restricted to the dying by cold or by hunger.
+Words not a few were once applied to both sexes
+alike, which are now restricted to the female.
+It is so even with ‘girl’, which was once a young
+person of either sex<a name="FNanchor_212_212" id="FNanchor_212_212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212_212" class="fnanchor">[212]</a>; while other words in this
+list, such for instance as ‘hoyden’<a name="FNanchor_213_213" id="FNanchor_213_213"></a><a href="#Footnote_213_213" class="fnanchor">[213]</a> (Milton, prose),
+‘shrew’ (Chaucer), ‘coquet’ (Phillips, <i>New World
+of Words</i>), ‘witch’ (Wiclif), ‘termagant’ (Bale),
+‘scold’, ‘jade’, ‘slut’ (Gower), must be regarded
+in their present exclusive appropriation to the
+female sex as evidences of men’s rudeness, and
+not of women’s deserts.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words used more accurately</i></div>
+
+<p>The necessities of an advancing civilization<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
+demand a greater precision and accuracy in the
+use of words having to do with weight, measure,
+number, size. Almost all such words as ‘acre’,
+‘furlong’, ‘yard’, ‘gallon’, ‘peck’, were once of a
+vague and unsettled use, and only at a later day,
+and in obedience to the requirements of commerce
+and social life, exact measures and designations.
+Thus every field was once an ‘acre’; and this
+remains so still with the German ‘acker’, and in
+our “God’s acre”, as a name for a churchyard<a name="FNanchor_214_214" id="FNanchor_214_214"></a><a href="#Footnote_214_214" class="fnanchor">[214]</a>;
+it was not till about the reign of Edward the First
+that ‘acre’ was commonly restricted to a determined
+measure and portion of land. Here and
+there even now a glebeland will be called “the
+acre”; and this, even while it contains not one
+but many of our measured acres. A ‘furlong’
+was a ‘furrowlong’, or length of a furrow<a name="FNanchor_215_215" id="FNanchor_215_215"></a><a href="#Footnote_215_215" class="fnanchor">[215]</a>.
+Any pole was a ‘yard’, and this vaguer use survives
+in ‘sail<i>yard</i>’, ‘hal<i>yard</i>’, and in other sea-terms.
+Every pitcher was a ‘galon’ (Mark xiv. 13,
+Wiclif), while a ‘peck’ was no more than a ‘poke’
+or bag<a name="FNanchor_216_216" id="FNanchor_216_216"></a><a href="#Footnote_216_216" class="fnanchor">[216]</a>. And the same has no doubt taken place
+in all other languages. I will only remind you
+how the Greek ‘drachm’ was at first a handful
+(<span title="Greek: drachmê">δραχμή</span> = ‘manipulus’, from
+<span title="Greek: drassô">δράσσω</span>, to
+grasp);<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+its later word for ‘ten thousand’
+(<span title="Greek: myrioi">μύριοι</span>) implied
+in Homer’s time any great multitude; and with
+the accent on a different syllable always retained
+this meaning.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words used less accurately</i></div>
+
+<p>Opposite to this is a counter-process by which
+words of narrower intention gradually enlarge the
+domain of their meaning, becoming capable of
+much wider application than any which once they
+admitted. Instances in this kind are fewer than
+in that which we have just been considering. The
+main stream and course of human thoughts and
+human discourse tends the other way, to discerning,
+distinguishing, dividing; and then to the permanent
+fixing of the distinctions gained, by the
+aid of designations which shall keep apart for ever
+in word that which has been once severed and sundered
+in thought. Nor is it hard to perceive why
+this process should be the more frequent. Men
+are first struck with the likenesses between those
+things which are presented to them, with their
+points of resemblance; on the strength of which
+they bracket them under a common term. Further
+acquaintance reveals their points of unlikeness,
+the real dissimilarities which lurk under superficial
+resemblances, the need therefore of a different
+notation for objects which are essentially different.
+It is comparatively much rarer to discover real
+likeness under what at first appeared as unlikeness;
+and usually when a word moves forward, and from
+a specialty indicates now a generality, it is not in
+obedience to any such discovery of the true inner
+likeness of things,&mdash;the steps of successful generalizations
+being marked and secured in other
+ways. But this widening of a word’s meaning is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
+too often a result of those elements of disorganization
+and decay which are at work in a language.
+Men forget a word’s history and etymology; its
+distinctive features are obliterated for them, with
+all which attached it to some thought or fact which
+by right was its own. Appropriated and restricted
+once to some striking specialty which it vigorously
+set out, it can now be used in a wider, vaguer,
+more unsettled way. It can be employed twenty
+times for once when it would have been possible
+formerly to employ it. Yet this is not gain, but
+pure loss. It has lost its place in the disciplined
+<i>army</i> of words, and become one of a loose and
+disorderly <i>mob</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Let me instance the word ‘preposterous’. It is
+now no longer of any practical service at all in the
+language, being merely an ungraceful and slipshod
+synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to
+its old use; let it designate that one peculiar
+branch of absurdity which it designated once,
+namely the reversing of the true order of things,
+the putting of the last first, and, by consequence, of
+the first last, and of what excellent service the
+word would be capable. Thus it is ‘preposterous’,
+in the most accurate use of the word, to put the cart
+before the horse, to expect wages before the work is
+done, to hang a man first and try him afterwards;
+and in this strict and accurate sense the word was
+always used by our elder writers<a name="FNanchor_217_217" id="FNanchor_217_217"></a><a href="#Footnote_217_217" class="fnanchor">[217]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In like manner ‘to prevaricate’ was never
+employed by good writers of the seventeenth
+century without nearer or more remote allusion
+to the uses of the word in the Roman law courts,
+where a ‘prævaricator’ (properly a straddler with
+distorted legs) did not mean generally and loosely,
+as now with us, one who shuffles, quibbles, and
+evades; but one who plays false in a particular
+manner; who, undertaking, or being by his office
+bound, to prosecute a charge, is in secret collusion
+with the opposite party; and, betraying the cause
+which he affects to support, so manages the accusation
+as to obtain not the condemnation, but the
+acquittal, of the accused; a “feint pleader”, as,
+I think, in our old law language he would have
+been termed. How much force would the keeping
+of this in mind add to many passages in our
+elder divines.</p>
+
+<p>Or take ‘equivocal’, ‘equivocate’, ‘equivocation’.
+These words, which belonged at first to
+logic, have slipped down into common use, and in
+so doing have lost all the precision of their first
+employment. ‘Equivocation’ is now almost any
+such dealing in ambiguous words with the intention
+of deceiving, as falls short of an actual lie;
+but according to its etymology and in its primary
+use ‘equivocation’, this fruitful mother of so much
+error, is the calling by the same name, of things
+essentially diverse, hiding intentionally or otherwise
+a real difference under a verbal
+resemblance<a name="FNanchor_218_218" id="FNanchor_218_218"></a><a href="#Footnote_218_218" class="fnanchor">[218]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
+Nor let it be urged in defence of its present looser
+use, that only so could it have served the needs
+of our ordinary conversation; on the contrary,
+had it retained its first use, how serviceable an
+implement of thought would it have been in detecting
+our own fallacies, or those of others; all which
+it can be now no longer.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Idea</i>’</div>
+
+<p>What now is ‘idea’ for us? How infinite the
+fall of this word since the time when Milton sang
+of the Creator contemplating his newly created
+world,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">“how it showed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Answering his great <i>idea</i>”,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>to its present use when this person “has an <i>idea</i>
+that the train has started”, and the other “had
+no <i>idea</i> that the dinner would be so bad”. But
+this word ‘idea’ is perhaps the worst case in the
+English language. Matters have not mended
+here since the times of Dr. Johnson; of whom
+Boswell tells us: “He was particularly indignant
+against the almost universal use of the word <i>idea</i>
+in the sense of <i>notion</i> or <i>opinion</i>, when it is clear
+that <i>idea</i> can only signify something of which an
+image can be formed in the mind”. There is
+perhaps no word in the whole compass of English,
+so seldom used with any tolerable correctness;
+in none is the distance so immense between the
+frequent sublimity of the word in its proper use,
+and the triviality of it in its slovenly and its
+popular.</p>
+
+<p>This tendency in words to lose the sharp, rigidly
+defined outline of meaning which they once possessed,
+to become of wide, vague, loose application
+instead of fixed, definite, and precise, to mean<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>
+almost anything, and so really to mean nothing,
+is among the most fatally effectual which are at
+work for the final ruin of a language, and, I do not
+fear to add, for the demoralization of those that
+speak it. It is one against which we shall all do
+well to watch; for there is none of us who cannot
+do something in keeping words close to their own
+proper meaning, and in resisting their encroachment
+on the domain of others.</p>
+
+<p>The causes which bring this mischief about are
+not hard to trace. We all know that when a
+piece of our silver money has long fulfilled its
+part, as “pale and common drudge ’tween man and
+man”, whatever it had at first of sharper outline
+and livelier impress is in the end wholly obliterated
+from it. So it is with words, above all with words
+of science and theology. These getting into general
+use, and passing often from mouth to mouth, lose
+the “image and superscription” which they had,
+before they descended from the school to the
+market-place, from the pulpit to the street. Being
+now caught up by those who understand imperfectly
+and thus incorrectly their true value,
+who will not be at the pains of understanding
+that, or who are incapable of doing so, they are
+obliged to accommodate themselves to the lower
+sphere in which they circulate, by laying aside
+much of the precision and accuracy and depth
+which once they had; they become weaker, shallower,
+more indefinite; till in the end, as exponents
+of thought and feeling, they cease to be of
+any service at all.</p>
+
+<hr class="small" />
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Bombast</i>’, ‘<i>Garble</i>’</div>
+
+<p>Sometimes a word does not merely narrow or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+extend its meaning, but altogether changes it;
+and this it does in more ways than one. Thus a
+secondary figurative sense will quite put out of
+use and extinguish the literal, until in the entire
+predominance of that it is altogether forgotten
+that it ever possessed any other. I may instance
+‘bombast’ as a word about which this forgetfulness
+is nearly complete. What ‘bombast’ now
+means is familiar to us all, namely inflated words,
+“full of sound and fury”, but “signifying nothing”.
+This, at present its sole meaning, was once
+only the secondary and superinduced; ‘bombast’
+being properly the cotton plant, and then the cotton
+wadding with which garments were stuffed out
+and lined. You remember perhaps how Prince
+Hal addresses Falstaff, “How now, my sweet
+creature of <i>bombast</i>”; using the word in its literal
+sense; and another early poet has this line:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Thy body’s bolstered out with <i>bombast</i> and with bags”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>‘Bombast’ was then transferred in a vigorous
+image to the big words without strength or solidity
+wherewith the discourses of some were stuffed
+out, and has now quite forgone any other meaning.
+So too ‘to garble’ was once “to cleanse
+from dross and dirt, as grocers do their spices, to
+pick or cull out”<a name="FNanchor_219_219" id="FNanchor_219_219"></a><a href="#Footnote_219_219" class="fnanchor">[219]</a>. It is never used now in this
+its primary sense, and has indeed undergone this
+further change, that while once ‘to garble’ was to
+sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it is now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+to sift with a view of picking out the worst<a name="FNanchor_220_220" id="FNanchor_220_220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220_220" class="fnanchor">[220]</a>.
+‘Polite’ is another word which in the figurative
+sense has quite extinguished the literal. We still
+speak of ‘polished’ surfaces; but not any more,
+with Cudworth, of “<i>polite</i> bodies, as looking
+glasses”. Neither do we now ‘exonerate’ a ship
+(Burton); nor ‘stigmatize’, at least otherwise
+than figuratively, a ‘malefactor’ (the same); nor
+‘corroborate’ our health (Sir Thomas Elyot).</p>
+
+<p>Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly
+progressive courses of change, itself a faithful
+index of changes going on in society and in the
+minds of men, till at length everything is changed
+about it. The process of this it is often very
+curious to observe; capable as not seldom it is of
+being watched step by step in its advances to the
+final consummation. There may be said to be
+three leading phases which the word successively
+presents, three steps in its history. At first it
+grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with
+its own natural meaning. Presently the word
+allows another meaning, one superinduced on the
+former, and foreign to its etymology, to share
+with the other in the possession of it, on the
+ground that where the former exists, the latter
+commonly co-exists with it. At the third step,
+the newly introduced meaning, not satisfied with
+its moiety, with dividing the possession of the
+word, has thrust out the original and rightful possessor
+altogether, and remains in sole and exclu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>sive
+possession. The three successive stages may
+be represented by <i>a</i>, <i>ab</i>, <i>b</i>; in which series <i>b</i>,
+which was wanting altogether at the first stage,
+and was only admitted as secondary at the second,
+does at the third become primary and indeed
+alone.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Gradual Change of Meaning</i></div>
+
+<p>We are not to suppose that in actual fact the
+transitions from one signification to another are so
+strongly and distinctly marked, as I have found it
+convenient to mark them here. Indeed it is hard
+to imagine anything more gradual, more subtle and
+imperceptible, than the process of change. The
+manner in which the new meaning first insinuates
+itself into the old, and then drives out the old, can
+only be compared to the process of petrifaction, as
+rightly understood&mdash;the water not gradually turning
+what is put into it to stone, as we generally
+take the operation to be; but successively displacing
+each several particle of that which is
+brought within its power, and depositing a stony
+particle, in its stead, till, in the end, while all
+appears to continue the same, all has in fact been
+thoroughly changed. It is precisely thus, by such
+slow, gradual, and subtle advances that the new
+meaning filters through and pervades the word,
+little by little displacing entirely that which it
+before possessed.</p>
+
+<p>No word would illustrate this process better than
+that old example, familiar probably to us all, of
+‘villain’. The ‘villain’ is, first, the serf or peasant,
+‘villanus’, because attached to the ‘villa’ or
+farm. He is, secondly, the peasant who, it is
+further taken for granted, will be churlish, selfish,
+dishonest, and generally of evil moral conditions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
+these having come to be assumed as always belonging
+to him, and to be permanently associated
+with his name, by those higher classes of society
+who in the main commanded the springs of language.
+At the third step, nothing of the meaning
+which the etymology suggests, nothing of
+‘villa’, survives any longer; the peasant is wholly
+dismissed, and the evil moral conditions of him
+who is called by this name alone remain; so that
+the name would now in this its final stage be applied
+as freely to peer, if he deserved it, as to
+peasant. ‘Boor’ has had exactly the same history;
+being first the cultivator of the soil; then
+secondly, the cultivator of the soil who, it is assumed,
+will be coarse, rude, and unmannerly;
+and then thirdly, any one who is coarse, rude, and
+unmannerly<a name="FNanchor_221_221" id="FNanchor_221_221"></a><a href="#Footnote_221_221" class="fnanchor">[221]</a>. So too ‘pagan’; which is first villager,
+then heathen villager, and lastly heathen.
+You may trace the same progress in ‘churl’,
+‘clown’, ‘antic’, and in numerous other words.
+The intrusive meaning might be likened in all
+these cases to the egg which the cuckoo lays in the
+sparrow’s nest; the young cuckoo first sharing
+the nest with its rightful occupants, but not resting
+till it has dislodged and ousted them altogether.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Gossip</i>’</div>
+
+<p>I will illustrate by the aid of one word more
+this part of my subject. I called your attention
+in my last lecture to the true character of several
+words and forms in use among our country people,
+and claimed for them to be in many instances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
+genuine English, though English now more or
+less antiquated and overlived. ‘Gossip’ is a word
+in point. I have myself heard this name given
+by our Hampshire peasantry to the sponsors in
+baptism, the godfathers and godmothers. I do
+not say that it is a usual word; but it is occasionally
+employed, and well understood. This is
+a perfectly correct employment of ‘gossip’, in fact
+its proper and original one, and involves moreover
+a very curious record of past beliefs. ‘Gossip’,
+or ‘gossib’, as Chaucer spelt it, is a compound
+word, made up of the name of ‘God’, and of an old
+Anglo-Saxon word, ‘sib’, still alive in Scotland, as
+all readers of Walter Scott will remember, and in
+some parts of England, and which means, akin;
+they were said to be ‘sib’, who are related to one
+another. But why, you may ask, was the name
+given to sponsors? Out of this reason;&mdash;in the
+middle ages it was the prevailing belief (and the
+Romish Church still affirms it), that those who
+stood as sponsors to the same child, besides contracting
+spiritual obligations on behalf of that child,
+also contracted spiritual affinity one with another;
+they became <i>sib</i>, or akin, in <i>God</i>; and thus ‘gossips’;
+hence ‘gossipred’, an old word, exactly
+analogous to ‘kindred’. Out of this faith the
+Roman Catholic Church will not allow (unless
+indeed by dispensations procured for money),
+those who have stood as sponsors to the same
+child, afterwards to contract marriage with one
+another, affirming them too nearly related for this
+to be lawful.</p>
+
+<p>Take ‘gossip’ however in its ordinary present
+use, as one addicted to idle tittle-tattle, and it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
+seems to bear no relation whatever to its etymology
+and first meaning. The same three steps, however,
+which we have traced before will bring us to
+its present use. ‘Gossips’ are, first, the sponsors,
+brought by the act of a common sponsorship into
+affinity and near familiarity with one another;
+secondly, these sponsors, who being thus brought
+together, allow themselves one with the other in
+familiar, and then in trivial and idle talk; thirdly,
+any who allow themselves in this trivial and idle
+talk,&mdash;called in French ‘commérage’, from the
+fact that ‘commére’ has run through exactly the
+same stages as its English equivalent.</p>
+
+<p>It is plain that words which designate not things
+and persons only, but these as they are contemplated
+more or less in an ethical light, words which
+tinge with a moral sentiment what they designate,
+are peculiarly exposed to change; are constantly
+liable to take a new colouring, or to lose an old.
+The gauge and measure of praise or blame, honour
+or dishonour, admiration or abhorrence, which they
+convey, is so purely a mental and subjective one,
+that it is most difficult to take accurate note of
+its rise or of its fall, while yet there are causes
+continually at work leading it to the one or the
+other. There are words not a few, but ethical
+words above all, which have so imperceptibly
+drifted away from their former moorings, that
+although their position is now very different from
+that which they once occupied, scarcely one in a
+hundred of casual readers, whose attention has
+not been specially called to the subject, will have
+observed that they have moved at all. Here too
+we observe some words conveying less of praise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
+or blame than once, and some more; while some
+have wholly shifted from the one to the other.
+Some were at one time words of slight, almost of
+offence, which have altogether ceased to be so
+now. Still these are rare by comparison with
+those which once were harmless, but now are
+harmless no more; which once, it may be, were
+terms of honour, but which now imply a slight or
+even a scorn. It is only too easy to perceive
+why these should exceed those in number.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Imp</i>’, ‘<i>Brat</i>’</div>
+
+<p>Let us take an example or two. If any were
+to speak now of royal children as “royal <i>imps</i>”,
+it would sound, and with our present use of the
+word would be, impertinent and unbecoming
+enough; and yet ‘imp’ was once a name of dignity
+and honour, and not of slight or of undue
+familiarity. Thus Spenser addresses the Muses
+in this language,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Ye sacred <i>imps</i> that on Parnasso dwell”;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and ‘imp’ was especially used of the scions of
+royal or illustrious houses. More than one epitaph,
+still existing, of our ancient nobility might
+be quoted, beginning in such language as this,
+“Here lies that noble <i>imp</i>”. Or what should we
+say of a poet who commenced a solemn poem in
+this fashion,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh Abraham’s <i>brats</i>, oh brood of blessed seed”?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Could we conclude anything else but that he meant,
+by using low words on lofty occasions, to turn
+sacred things into ridicule? Yet this was very
+far from the intention of Gascoigne, the poet
+whose lines I have just quoted. “Abraham’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
+<i>brats</i>” was used by him in perfect good faith, and
+without the slightest feeling that anything ludicrous
+or contemptuous adhered to the word
+‘brat’, as indeed in his time there did not, any
+more than adheres to ‘brood’, which is another
+form of the same word now<a name="FNanchor_222_222" id="FNanchor_222_222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222_222" class="fnanchor">[222]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Call a person ‘pragmatical’, and you now imply
+not merely that he is busy, but <i>over</i>-busy,
+officious, self-important, and pompous to boot.
+But it once meant nothing of the kind, and ‘pragmatical’
+(like <span title="Greek: pragmatikos">πραγματικός</span>) was one engaged
+in affairs, being an honourable title, given to a
+man simply and industriously accomplishing
+the business which properly concerned him<a name="FNanchor_223_223" id="FNanchor_223_223"></a><a href="#Footnote_223_223" class="fnanchor">[223]</a>.
+So too to say that a person ‘meddles’ or is a
+‘meddler’ implies now that he interferes unduly
+in other men’s matters, without a call mixing himself
+up with them. This was not insinuated in
+the earlier uses of the word. On the contrary
+three of our earlier translations of the Bible have,
+“<i>Meddle</i> with your own business” (1 Thess. iv.
+11); and Barrow in one of his sermons draws at
+some length the distinction between ‘meddling’
+and “being <i>meddlesome</i>”, and only condemns
+the latter.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Proser</i>’</div>
+
+<p>Or take again the words, ‘to prose’ or a ‘proser’.
+It cannot indeed be affirmed that they convey
+any <i>moral</i> condemnation, yet they certainly con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>vey
+no compliment now; and are almost among
+the last which any one would desire should with
+justice be applied either to his talking or his
+writing. For ‘to prose’, as we all now know too
+well, is to talk or write heavily and tediously,
+without spirit and without animation; but once
+it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and
+a ‘proser’ the antithesis of a versifier or a poet.
+It will follow that the most rapid and liveliest
+writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse
+would have ‘prosed’ and been a ‘proser’, in
+the language of our ancestors. Thus Drayton
+writes of his contemporary Nashe:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“And surely Nashe, though he a <i>proser</i> were,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear”;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>that is, the ornament not of a ‘proser’, but of a
+poet. The tacit assumption that vigour, animation,
+rapid movement, with all the precipitation
+of the spirit, belong to verse rather than to prose,
+and are the exclusive possession of it, is that
+which must explain the changed uses of the word.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Knave</i>’</div>
+
+<p>Still it is according to a word’s present signification
+that we must apply it now. It would be
+no excuse, having applied an insulting epithet to
+any, if we should afterwards plead that, tried by
+its etymology and primary usage, it had nothing
+offensive or insulting about it; although indeed
+Swift assures us that in his time such a plea was
+made and was allowed. “I remember”, he says,
+“at a trial in Kent, where Sir George Rooke was
+indicted for calling a gentleman ‘knave’ and
+‘villain’, the lawyer for the defendant brought off
+his client by alleging that the words were not
+injurious; for ‘knave’ in the old and true signi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>fication
+imported only a servant<a name="FNanchor_224_224" id="FNanchor_224_224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224_224" class="fnanchor">[224]</a>; and ‘villain’
+in Latin is villicus, which is no more than a man
+employed in country labour, or rather a baily”.
+The lawyer may have deserved his success for
+his ingenuity and his boldness; though, if Swift
+reports him aright, not certainly on the ground
+of the strict accuracy either of his Anglo-Saxon
+or his Latin.</p>
+
+<p>The moral sense and conviction of men is often
+at work upon their words, giving them new turns
+in obedience to these convictions, of which their
+changed use will then remain a permanent record.
+Let me illustrate this by the history of our word
+‘sycophant’. You probably are acquainted with
+the story which the Greek scholiasts invented by
+way of explaining a word of which they knew
+nothing, namely that the ‘sycophant’ was a
+“manifester of figs”, one who detected others in
+the act of exporting figs from Attica, an act forbidden,
+they asserted, by the Athenian law; and
+accused them to the people. Be this explanation
+worth what it may, the word obtained in Greek
+a more general sense; any accuser, and then any
+<i>false</i> accuser, was a ‘sycophant’; and when the
+word was first adopted into the English language,
+it was in this meaning: thus an old English poet
+speaks of “the railing route of <i>sycophants</i>”;
+and Holland: “The poor man that hath nought
+to lose, is not afraid of the <i>sycophant</i>”. But it
+has not kept this meaning; a ‘sycophant’ is
+now a fawning flatterer; not one who speaks
+ill of you behind your back; rather one who
+speaks good of you before your face, but good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>
+which he does not in his heart believe. Yet how
+true a moral instinct has presided over the changed
+signification of the word. The calumniator
+and the flatterer, although they seem so opposed
+to one another, how closely united they really
+are. They grow out of the same root. The
+same baseness of spirit which shall lead one to
+speak evil of you behind your back, will lead him
+to fawn on you and flatter you before your face;
+there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb,
+“Who flatters me before, spatters me behind”.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Weakening of Words</i></div>
+
+<p>But it is not the moral sense only of men which
+is thus at work, modifying their words; but
+the immoral as well. If the good which men
+have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and
+leaves its deposit there, so does also the evil.
+Thus we may trace a constant tendency&mdash;in too
+many cases it has been a successful one&mdash;to empty
+words employed in the condemnation of evil,
+of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation
+which they once conveyed. Men’s too
+easy toleration of sin, the feebleness of their
+moral indignation against it, brings about that
+the blame which words expressed once, has in
+some of them become much weaker now than once,
+has from others vanished altogether. “To do a
+<i>shrewd</i> turn”, was once to do a <i>wicked</i> turn;
+and Chaucer, using ‘shrewdness’ by which to
+translate the Latin ‘improbitas’, shows that it
+meant wickedness for him; nay, two murderers
+he calls two ‘shrews’,&mdash;for there were, as already
+noticed, male shrews once as well as female.
+But “a <i>shrewd</i> turn” now, while it implies a certain
+amount of sharp dealing, yet implies nothing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>
+more; and ‘shrewdness’ is applied to men rather
+in their praise than in their dispraise. And not
+‘shrewd’ and ‘shrewdness’ only, but a multitude
+of other words,&mdash;I will only instance ‘prank’
+‘flirt’, ‘luxury’, ‘luxurious’, ‘peevish’, ‘wayward’,
+‘loiterer’, ‘uncivil’,&mdash;conveyed once a
+much more earnest moral disapproval than now
+they do.</p>
+
+<p>But I must bring this lecture to a close. I
+have but opened to you paths, which you, if you
+are so minded, can follow up for yourselves. We
+have learned lately to speak of men’s
+‘antecedents’<a name="FNanchor_225_225" id="FNanchor_225_225"></a><a href="#Footnote_225_225" class="fnanchor">[225]</a>;
+the phrase is newly come up; and it
+is common to say that if we would know what
+a man really now is, we must know his ‘antecedents’,
+that is, what he has been in time past.
+This is quite as true about words. If we would
+know what they now are, we must know what
+they have been; we must know, if possible, the
+date and place of their birth, the successive stages
+of their subsequent history, the company which
+they have kept, all the road which they have
+travelled, and what has brought them to the point
+at which now we find them; we must know, in
+short, their antecedents.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Changes of Meaning</i></div>
+
+<p>And let me say, without attempting to bring
+back school into these lectures which are out of
+school, that, seeking to do this, we might add an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
+interest to our researches in the lexicon and the
+dictionary which otherwise they could never have;
+that taking such words, for example, as
+<span title="Greek: ekklêsia">ἐκκλησία</span>,
+or <span title="Greek: palingenesia">παλιγγενεσία</span>, or
+<span title="Greek: eutrapelia">εὐτραπελία</span>, or
+<span title="Greek: sophistês">σοφιστής</span>, or
+<span title="Greek: scholastikos">σχολαστικός</span>, in Greek;
+as ‘religio’, or ‘sacramentum’,
+or ‘urbanitas’, or ‘superstitio’, in
+Latin; as ‘libertine’, or
+‘casuistry’<a name="FNanchor_226_226" id="FNanchor_226_226"></a><a href="#Footnote_226_226" class="fnanchor">[226]</a>, or ‘humanity’,
+or ‘humorous’, or ‘danger’, or ‘romance’,
+in English, and endeavouring to trace the manner
+in which one meaning grew out of and superseded
+another, and how they arrived at that use in
+which they have finally rested (if indeed before
+our English words there is not a future still), we
+shall derive, I believe, amusement, I am sure,
+instruction; we shall feel that we are really getting
+something, increasing the moral and intellectual
+stores of our minds; furnishing ourselves
+with that which may hereafter be of service to
+ourselves, may be of service to others&mdash;than
+which there can be no feeling more pleasurable,
+none more delightful. I shall be glad and
+thankful, if you can feel as much in regard of
+that lecture, which I now bring to its
+end<a name="FNanchor_227_227" id="FNanchor_227_227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227_227" class="fnanchor">[227]</a>.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_198_198" id="Footnote_198_198"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_198_198"><span class="label">[198]</span></a>
+[‘Frampold’, peevish, perverse (<i>Merry Wives of
+Windsor</i>, 1598, ii, 2, 94) is supposed to be another form
+of ‘from-polled’, as if ‘wrong-headed’. ‘Garboil’, a
+tumult or hubbub, was originally <i>garboyl</i>, and came from
+old French <i>garbouil</i> (Italian <i>garbuglio</i>). ‘Brangle’, a
+brawl, stands for ‘brandle’ from Old Fr. <i>brandeler</i>,
+akin to ‘brandish’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_199_199" id="Footnote_199_199"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_199_199"><span class="label">[199]</span></a>
+[‘Dutch’ i.e. Teutonic, Mid. High-German <i>diutsch</i>,
+old High-German <i>diut-isk</i> from <i>diot</i>, people, and so the
+people-ish or popular language the mother-tongue, founded
+on a primitive <i>teuta</i>, ‘people’. See Kluge <i>s.v. Deutsch</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_200_200" id="Footnote_200_200"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_200_200"><span class="label">[200]</span></a>
+So in Herrick’s <i>Electra</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“More white than are the whitest creams,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or moonlight <i>tinselling</i> the streams”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_201_201" id="Footnote_201_201"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_201_201"><span class="label">[201]</span></a>
+[Hence also the epidemic of malefic power supposed
+to be air-borne, ‘influenza’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_202_202" id="Footnote_202_202"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_202_202"><span class="label">[202]</span></a>
+See Holinshed’s <i>Chronicles</i>, vol. iii, pp. 827, 1218;
+Ann. 1513, 1570.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_203_203" id="Footnote_203_203"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_203_203"><span class="label">[203]</span></a>
+<i>Fairy Queen</i>, vi, 7, 27; cf. v. 3, 37.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_204_204" id="Footnote_204_204"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_204_204"><span class="label">[204]</span></a>
+[The two words are intimately related, ‘king’, contracted
+for <i>kining</i> (Anglo-Saxon <i>cyn-ing</i>), ‘son of the
+kin’ or ‘tribe’, one of the people, cognate with <i>cynde</i>,
+true-born, native, ‘kind’, and <i>cynd</i>, nature ‘kind’,
+whence ‘kindly’, natural.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_205_205" id="Footnote_205_205"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_205_205"><span class="label">[205]</span></a>
+See Sir W. Scott’s edition of Swift’s <i>Works</i>, vol. ix,
+p. 139.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_206_206" id="Footnote_206_206"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_206_206"><span class="label">[206]</span></a>
+<span title="Greek: thêriakê">θηριακή</span>, from
+<span title="Greek: thêrion">θηρίον</span>, a designation given to the
+viper, see Acts xxviii, 4. ‘Theriac’ is only the more
+rigid form of the same word, the scholarly, as distinguished
+from the popular, adoption of it. Augustine (<i>Con. duas
+Epp. Pelag.</i> iii, 7): Sicut fieri consuevit antidotum etiam
+de serpentibus contra venena serpentum.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_207_207" id="Footnote_207_207"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_207_207"><span class="label">[207]</span></a>
+And Chaucer, more solemnly still:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Christ, which that is to every harm <i>triacle</i>”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The <i>antidotal</i> character of treacle comes out yet more in
+these lines of Lydgate:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">“There is no <i>venom</i> so parlious in sharpnes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As whan it hath of <i>treacle</i> a likenes”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_208_208" id="Footnote_208_208"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_208_208"><span class="label">[208]</span></a>
+“A slave that within these twenty years rode with
+the <i>black guard</i> in the Duke’s carriage, ’mongst spits and
+dripping pans”. (Webster’s <i>White Devil</i>.) [First ed.
+1612. “The Black Guard of the King’s Kitchen” is
+mentioned in a State Paper of 1535 (N.E.D.).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_209_209" id="Footnote_209_209"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_209_209"><span class="label">[209]</span></a>
+Génin (<i>Lexique de la Langue de Molière</i>, p. 367)
+says well: “En augmentant le nombre des mots, il a
+fallu restreindre leur signification, et faire aux nouveaux
+un apanage aux dépens des anciens”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_210_210" id="Footnote_210_210"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_210_210"><span class="label">[210]</span></a>
+[Accordingly there is nothing tautological in the
+“dead corpses” of 2 Kings xix, 35, in the A.V.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_211_211" id="Footnote_211_211"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_211_211"><span class="label">[211]</span></a>
+[‘Weed’, vegetable growth, Anglo-Saxon <i>weód</i>, is
+here confounded with a perfectly distinct word ‘weed’,
+clothing, which is the Anglo-Saxon <i>waéd</i>, a garment.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_212_212" id="Footnote_212_212"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_212_212"><span class="label">[212]</span></a>
+And no less so in French with ‘dame’, by which
+form not ‘domina’ only, but ‘dominus’, was represented.
+Thus in early French poetry, “<i>Dame</i> Dieu” for “<i>Dominus</i>
+Deus” continually occurs. We have here the key to
+the French exclamation, or oath, as we now perceive it
+to be, ‘Dame’! of which the dictionaries give no account.
+See Génin’s <i>Variations du Langage
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘Francais’">Français</ins></i>, p. 347.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_213_213" id="Footnote_213_213"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_213_213"><span class="label">[213]</span></a>
+[‘Hoyden’ seems to be derived from the old Dutch
+<i>heyden</i>, a heathen, then a clownish, boorish fellow.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_214_214" id="Footnote_214_214"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_214_214"><span class="label">[214]</span></a>
+[This “ancient Saxon phrase”, as Longfellow calls
+it, has not been found in any old English writer, but has
+been adopted from the Modern German. Neither is it
+known in the dialects, E.D.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_215_215" id="Footnote_215_215"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_215_215"><span class="label">[215]</span></a>
+“A <i>furlong</i>, quasi <i>furrowlong</i>, being so much as a
+team in England plougheth going forward, before they
+return back <ins class="correction" title="missing quote mark in original">again”.</ins>
+(Fuller, <i>Pisgah Sight of Palestine</i>,
+p. 42.) [‘Furlong’ in St. Luke xxiv, 13, already occurs
+in the Anglo-Saxon version of that passage as <i>furlanga</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_216_216" id="Footnote_216_216"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_216_216"><span class="label">[216]</span></a>
+[Recent etymologists cannot see any connexion
+between ‘peck’ and ‘poke’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_217_217" id="Footnote_217_217"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_217_217"><span class="label">[217]</span></a>
+[e.&nbsp;g. “One said thus <i>preposterously</i>: ‘when we had
+climbed the clifs and were a shore’” (Puttenham, <i>Arte of
+Eng. Poesie</i>, 1589, p. <ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘181 (ed.’">181, ed.</ins>
+Arber). “It is a <i>preposterous</i>
+order to teach first and to learn after” (<i>Preface
+to Bible</i>, <ins class="correction" title="missing ‘)’ in original">1611).</ins>
+“Place not the coming of the wise men,
+<i>preposterously</i>, before the appearance of the star” (Abp.
+Secker, <i>Sermons</i>, iii,
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘85 (ed.’">85, ed.</ins> 1825).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_218_218" id="Footnote_218_218"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_218_218"><span class="label">[218]</span></a>
+Thus Barrow: “Which [courage and constancy]
+he that wanteth is no other than <i>equivocally</i> a gentleman,
+as an image or a carcass is a man”.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_219_219" id="Footnote_219_219"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_219_219"><span class="label">[219]</span></a>
+Phillips, <i>New World of Words</i>, 1706. [‘Garble’ comes
+through old French <i>garbeler</i>, <i>grabeler</i> (Italian <i>garbellare</i>)
+from Latin <i>cribellare</i>, to sift, and that from <i>cribellum</i>, a
+sieve, diminutive of <i>cribrum</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_220_220" id="Footnote_220_220"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_220_220"><span class="label">[220]</span></a>
+“But his [Gideon’s] army must be <i>garbled</i>, as too
+great for God to give victory thereby; all the fearful
+return home by proclamation” (Fuller, <i>Pisgah Sight
+of Palestine</i>, b. ii, c. 8).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_221_221" id="Footnote_221_221"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_221_221"><span class="label">[221]</span></a>
+[Compare the transitions of meaning in French
+<i>manant</i> = (1) a dweller (where he was born&mdash;from <i>manoir</i>
+to dwell), the inhabitant of a homestead, (2) a countryman,
+(3) a clown or boor, a coarse fellow.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_222_222" id="Footnote_222_222"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_222_222"><span class="label">[222]</span></a>
+[These words lie totally apart. ‘Brat’, an infant,
+seems a figurative use of ‘brat’, a rag or pinafore, just
+as ‘bantling’ comes from ‘band’, a swathe.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_223_223" id="Footnote_223_223"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_223_223"><span class="label">[223]</span></a>
+“We cannot always be contemplative, or <i>pragmatical</i>
+abroad: but have need of some delightful intermissions,
+wherein the enlarged soul may leave off awhile
+her severe schooling”. (Milton, <i>Tetrachordon</i>.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_224_224" id="Footnote_224_224"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_224_224"><span class="label">[224]</span></a>
+[Anglo-Saxon <i>cnafa</i>, or <i>cnapa</i>, a boy.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_225_225" id="Footnote_225_225"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_225_225"><span class="label">[225]</span></a>
+[Mr. Fitzedward Hall in 1873 says ‘antecedents’ is
+“not yet a generation old” (<i>Mod. English</i>, 303). Landor
+in 1853 says “the French have lately taught (it to) us”
+(<i>Last Fruit of an Old Tree</i>, 176). De Quincey, in 1854
+calls it “modern slang” (<i>Works</i> xiv, 449); and the
+earliest quotation, 1841, given in the N.E.D., introduces
+it as “what the French call their antecedents”.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_226_226" id="Footnote_226_226"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_226_226"><span class="label">[226]</span></a>
+See Whewell, <i>History of Moral Philosophy in England</i>,
+pp. xxvii.-xxxii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_227_227" id="Footnote_227_227"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_227_227"><span class="label">[227]</span></a>
+For a fuller treatment of the subject of this lecture,
+see my <i>Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in
+senses different from their present</i>, 2nd ed. London, 1859.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span></p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS</h3>
+
+
+<p>When I announce to you that the subject of my
+lecture to-day will be English orthography, or
+the spelling of the words in our native language,
+with the alterations which this has undergone,
+you may perhaps think with yourselves that a
+weightier, or, if not a weightier, at all events a
+more interesting subject might have occupied
+this our concluding lecture. I cannot admit it to
+be wanting either in importance or in interest.
+Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well
+engage, as it often has engaged, the attention of
+those with far higher acquirements than any
+which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by
+faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure
+it ought as little to be this; and would never
+prove so in competent hands<a name="FNanchor_228_228" id="FNanchor_228_228"></a><a href="#Footnote_228_228" class="fnanchor">[228]</a>. Let us then
+address ourselves to this matter, not without
+good hope that it may yield us both profit and
+pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>I know not who it was that said, “The inven<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>tion
+of printing was very well; but, as compared
+to the invention of writing, it was no such great
+matter after all”. Whoever it was who made
+this observation, it is clear that for him use and
+familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which
+there is in that, whereat we probably have long
+ceased to wonder at all&mdash;the power, namely, of
+representing sounds by written signs, of reproducing
+for the eye that which existed at first only
+for the ear: nor was the estimate which he formed
+of the relative value of these two inventions other
+than a just one. Writing indeed stands more
+nearly on a level with speaking, and deserves
+rather to be compared with it, than with printing;
+which, with all its utility, is yet of altogether
+another and inferior type of greatness: or, if
+this is too much to claim for writing, it may at
+any rate be affirmed to stand midway between
+the other two, and to be as much superior to the
+one as it is inferior to the other.</p>
+
+<p>The intention of the written word, that which
+presides at its first formation, the end whereunto
+it is a mean, is by aid of symbols agreed on
+beforehand, to represent to the eye with as much
+accuracy as possible the spoken word.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Imperfection of Writing</i></div>
+
+<p>It never fulfils this intention completely, and
+by degrees more and more imperfectly. Short as
+man’s spoken word often falls of his thought, his
+written word falls often as short of his spoken.
+Several causes contribute to this. In the first
+place, the marks of imperfection and infirmity
+cleave to writing, as to every other invention of
+man. All alphabets have been left incomplete.
+They have superfluous letters, letters, that is,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
+which they do not want, because other letters
+already represent the sound which they represent;
+they have dubious letters, letters, that is, which
+say nothing certain about the sounds they stand
+for, because more than one sound is represented
+by them&mdash;our ‘c’ for instance, which sometimes
+has the sound of ‘s’, as in ‘<i>c</i>ity’, sometimes of
+‘k’, as in ‘<i>c</i>at’; they are deficient in letters,
+that is, the language has elementary sounds which
+have no corresponding letters appropriated to
+them, and can only be represented by combinations
+of letters. All alphabets, I believe, have some
+of these faults, not a few of them have all, and more.
+This then is one reason of the imperfect reproduction
+of the spoken word by the written. But
+another is, that the human voice is so wonderfully
+fine and flexible an organ, is able to mark
+such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so
+infinitely to modify and vary these sounds, that
+were an alphabet complete as human art could
+make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of
+four and twenty letters, there would still remain
+a multitude of sounds which it could only approximately
+give back<a name="FNanchor_229_229" id="FNanchor_229_229"></a><a href="#Footnote_229_229" class="fnanchor">[229]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Alphabets Inadequate</i></div>
+
+<p>But there is a further cause for the divergence
+which comes gradually to find place between men’s
+spoken and their written words. What men
+do often, they will seek to do with the least possible
+trouble. There is nothing which they do
+oftener than repeat words; they will seek here
+then to save themselves pains; they will contract<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
+two or more syllables into one; (‘toto opere’
+will become ‘topper’; ‘vuestra merced’, ‘usted’;
+and ‘topside the other way’, ‘topsy-turvey’<a name="FNanchor_230_230" id="FNanchor_230_230"></a><a href="#Footnote_230_230" class="fnanchor">[230]</a>);
+they will slur over, and thus after a while cease
+to pronounce, certain letters; for hard letters
+they will substitute soft; for those which require
+a certain effort to pronounce, they will substitute
+those which require little or none. Under the
+operation of these causes a gulf between the
+written and spoken word will not merely exist;
+but it will have the tendency to grow ever wider
+and wider. This tendency indeed will be partially
+counterworked by approximations which from
+time to time will by silent consent be made of the
+written word to the spoken; here and there a
+letter dropped in speech will be dropped also in
+writing, as the ‘s’ in so many French words,
+where its absence is marked by a circumflex; a
+new shape, contracted or briefer, which a word has
+taken on the lips of men, will find its representation
+in their writing; as ‘chirurgeon’ will not
+merely be pronounced, but also spelt, ‘surgeon’,
+and ‘synodsman’ ‘sidesman’. Still for all this,
+and despite of these partial readjustments of the
+relations between the two, the anomalies will be
+infinite; there will be a multitude of written
+letters which have ceased to be sounded letters;
+a multitude of words will exist in one shape upon
+our lips, and in quite another in our books.</p>
+
+<p>It is inevitable that the question should arise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>&mdash;Shall
+these anomalies be meddled with? shall it
+be attempted to remove them, and bring writing
+and speech into harmony and consent&mdash;a harmony
+and consent which never indeed in actual fact at
+any period of the language existed, but which yet
+may be regarded as the object of written speech,
+as the idea which, however imperfectly realized,
+has, in the reduction of spoken sounds to written,
+floated before the minds of men? If the attempt
+is to be made, it is clear that it can only be made
+in one way. The alternative is not open, whether
+Mahomet shall go to the mountain, <i>or</i> the mountain
+to Mahomet. The spoken word is the mountain;
+it will not stir; it will resist all interference. It
+feels its own superior rights, that it existed
+the first, that it is, so to say, the elder brother;
+and it will never be induced to change itself for
+the purpose of conforming and complying with the
+written word. Men will not be persuaded to pronounce
+‘wou<i>l</i>d’ and ‘de<i>b</i>t’, because they write
+‘would’ and ‘debt’ severally with an ‘l’ and with
+a ‘b’: but what if they could be induced to write
+‘woud’ and ‘det’, because they pronounce so;
+and to deal in like manner with all other words, in
+which there exists at present a discrepancy between
+the word as it is spoken, and the word as it is
+written?</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Phonetic Systems</i></div>
+
+<p>Here we have the explanation of that which in
+the history of almost all literatures has repeated
+itself more than once, namely, the endeavour to
+introduce phonetic writing. It has certain plausibilities
+to rest on; it has its appeal to the unquestionable
+fact that the written word was intended
+to picture to the eye what the spoken word sounded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+in the ear. At the same time I believe that it
+would be impossible to introduce it; and, even
+if it <i>were</i> possible, that it would be most undesirable,
+and this for two reasons; the first being
+that the losses consequent upon its introduction,
+would far outweigh the gains, even supposing those
+gains as great as the advocates of the scheme promise;
+the second, that these promised gains would
+themselves be only very partially realized, or not
+at all.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Alphabets Imperfect</i></div>
+
+<p>In the first place, I believe it to be impossible.
+It is clear that such a scheme must begin with
+the reconstruction of the alphabet. The first
+thing that the phonographers have perceived is
+the necessity for the creation of a vast number of
+new signs, the poverty of all existing alphabets,
+at any rate of our own, not yielding a several sign
+for all the several sounds in the language. Our
+English phonographers have therefore had to
+invent ten of these new signs or letters, which are
+henceforth to take their place with our <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>c</i>, and
+to enjoy equal rights with them. Rejecting two
+(<i>q</i>, <i>x</i>), and adding ten, they have raised their alphabet
+from twenty-six letters to thirty-four. But
+to procure the reception of such a reconstructed
+alphabet is simply an impossibility, as much an
+impossibility as would be the reconstitution of
+the structure of the language in any points where
+it was manifestly deficient or illogical. Sciolists
+or scholars may sit down in their studies, and devise
+these new letters, and prove that we need them,
+and that the introduction of them would be a great
+gain, and a manifest improvement; and this
+may be all very true; but if they think they can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
+induce a people to adopt them, they know little of
+the ways in which its alphabet is entwined with
+the whole innermost life of a people. One may
+freely own that all present alphabets are redundant
+here, are deficient there; our English perhaps
+is as greatly at fault as any, and with that
+we have chiefly to do. Unquestionably it has
+more letters than one to express one and the same
+sound; it has only one letter to express two or
+three sounds; it has sounds which are only capable
+of being expressed at all by awkward and roundabout
+expedients. Yet at the same time we must
+accept the fact, as we accept any other which it
+is out of our power to change&mdash;with regret, indeed,
+but with a perfect acquiescence: as one accepts
+the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or forty
+miles nearer to England&mdash;that it is so difficult to
+get round Cape Horn&mdash;that the climate of Africa
+is so fatal to European life. A people will no more
+quit their alphabet than they will quit their language;
+they will no more consent to modify the
+one <i>ab extra</i> than the other. Cæsar avowed that
+with all his power he could not introduce a new
+word, and certainly Claudius could not introduce
+a new letter. Centuries may sanction the bringing
+in of a new one, or the dropping of an old.
+But to imagine that it is possible to suddenly
+introduce a group of ten new letters, as these
+reformers propose&mdash;they might just as feasibly
+propose that the English language should form
+its comparatives and superlatives on some entirely
+new scheme, say in Greek fashion, by the terminations
+‘oteros’ and ‘otatos’; or that we should
+agree to set up a dual; or that our substantives<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
+should return to our Anglo-Saxon declensions.
+Any one of these or like proposals would not
+betray a whit more ignorance of the eternal laws
+which regulate human language, and of the limits
+within which deliberate action upon it is possible,
+than does this of increasing our alphabet by ten
+entirely novel signs.</p>
+
+<p>But grant it possible, grant our six and twenty
+letters to have so little sacredness in them that
+Englishmen would endure a crowd of upstart
+interlopers to mix themselves on an equal footing
+with them, still this could only be from a sense of
+the greatness of the advantage to be derived from
+this introduction. Now the vast advantage
+claimed by the advocates of the system is, that it
+would facilitate the learning to read, and wholly
+save the labour of learning to spell, which “on the
+present plan occupies”, as they assure us, “at
+the very lowest calculation from three to five
+years”. Spelling, it is said, would no longer need
+to be learned at all; since whoever knew the
+sound, would necessarily know also the spelling,
+this being in all cases in perfect conformity with
+that. The anticipation of this gain rests upon two
+assumptions which are tacitly taken for granted,
+but both of them erroneous.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these assumptions is, that all men
+pronounce all words alike, so that whenever they
+come to spell a word, they will exactly agree as to
+what the outline of its sound is. Now we are sure
+men will not do this from the fact that, before
+there was any fixed and settled orthography in our
+language, when therefore everybody was more or
+less a phonographer, seeking to write down the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
+word as it sounded to <i>him</i>, (for he had no other
+law to guide him,) the variations of spelling were
+infinite. Take for instance the word ‘sudden’;
+which does not seem to promise any great scope
+for variety. I have myself met with this word spelt
+in the following fifteen ways among our early
+writers: ‘sodain’, ‘sodaine’, ‘sodan’, ‘sodayne’,
+‘sodden’, ‘sodein’, ‘sodeine’, ‘soden’, ‘sodeyn’,
+‘suddain’, ‘suddaine’, ‘suddein’, ‘suddeine’,
+‘sudden’, ‘sudeyn’. Again, in how many
+ways was Raleigh’s name spelt, or Shakespeare’s?
+The same is evident from the spelling
+of uneducated persons in our own day. They
+have no other rule but the sound to guide them.
+How is it that they do not all spell alike; erroneously,
+it may be, as having only the sound for their guide,
+but still falling all into exactly the same errors?
+What is the actual fact? They not merely spell
+wrong, which might be laid to the charge of our
+perverse system of spelling, but with an inexhaustible
+diversity of error, and that too in the
+case of simplest words. Thus the little town of
+Woburn would seem to give small room for caprice
+in spelling, while yet the postmaster there has
+made, from the superscription of letters that have
+passed through his hands, a collection of two
+hundred and forty-four varieties of ways in which
+the place has been spelt<a name="FNanchor_231_231" id="FNanchor_231_231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231_231" class="fnanchor">[231]</a>. It may be replied that
+these were all or nearly all from the letters of the
+ignorant and uneducated. Exactly so;&mdash;but it is
+for their sakes, and to place them on a level with
+the educated, or rather to accelerate their education
+by the omission of a useless yet troublesome dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>cipline,
+that the change is proposed. I wish to
+show you that after the change they would be just
+as much, or almost as much, at a loss in their
+spelling as now.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Pronouncing Dictionaries</i></div>
+
+<p>And another reason which would make it quite
+as necessary then to learn orthography as now, is
+the following. Pronunciation, as I have already
+noticed, is far too fine and subtle a thing to be
+more than approximated to, and indicated in the
+written letter. In a multitude of cases the difficulties
+which pronunciation presented would be
+sought to be overcome in different ways, and thus
+different spelling, would arise; or if not so, one
+would have to be arbitrarily selected, and would
+have need to be learned, just as much as the
+spelling of a word now has need to be learned. I
+will only ask you, in proof of this which I affirm,
+to turn to any Pronouncing Dictionary. That
+greatest of all absurdities, a Pronouncing Dictionary,
+may be of some service to you in this
+matter; it will certainly be of none in any other.
+When you mark the elaborate and yet ineffectual
+artifices by which it toils after the finer distinctions
+of articulation, seeks to reproduce in letters
+what exists, and can only exist, as the spoken
+tradition of pronunciation, acquired from lip to
+lip by the organ of the ear, capable of being
+learned, but incapable of being taught; or when
+you compare two of these dictionaries with one
+another, and mark the entirely different schemes
+and combinations of letters which they employ for
+representing the same sound to the eye; you
+will then perceive how idle the attempt to make
+the written in language commensurate with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
+sounded; you will own that not merely out of
+human caprice, ignorance, or indolence, the former
+falls short of and differs from the later; but that
+this lies in the necessity of things, in the fact
+that man’s <i>voice</i> can effect so much more than
+ever his <i>letter</i>
+can<a name="FNanchor_232_232" id="FNanchor_232_232"></a><a href="#Footnote_232_232" class="fnanchor">[232]</a>.
+You will then perceive that
+there would be as much, or nearly as much, of
+the <ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘arbitary’">arbitrary</ins>
+in spelling which calls itself phonetic
+as in our present, that spelling would have
+to be learned just as really then as now. We
+should be unable to dismiss the spelling card even
+after the arrival of that great day, when, for example,
+those lines of Pope which hitherto we have
+thus spelt and read,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“But errs not nature from this gracious end,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From burning suns when livid deaths descend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep”?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>when I say, instead of this they should present
+themselves to our eyes in the following attractive
+form:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<a name="poem" id="poem"></a>
+<span class="i0">“But ¿ erz not n<span title="e symbol">ɛ</span>tiur
+  from ðis gr<span title="e symbol">ɛ</span>cus end,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">from burni<span title="ng symbol">ŋ</span> sunz when
+  livid deθs d<span title="i symbol">ɨ</span>send,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">when erθkw<span title="e symbol">ɛ</span>ks
+  swol<span title="o symbol">ɵ</span>, or when tempests sw<span title="i symbol">ɨ</span>p<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">tounz tu wun gr<span title="e symbol">ɛ</span>v,
+  h<span title="o symbol">ɵ</span>l n<span title="e symbol">ɛ</span>conz
+  tu ðe d<span title="i symbol">ɨ</span>p”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="tnote2">
+<p style="text-align:left;"><a href="#phonetic">Transcriber’s note
+regarding phonetic symbols</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Losses of Phonetic Spelling</i></div>
+
+<p>The scheme would not then fulfil its promises.
+Its vaunted gains, when we come to look closely
+at them, disappear. And now for its losses. There
+are in every language a vast number of words,
+which the ear does not distinguish from one
+another, but which are at once distinguishable to
+the eye by the spelling. I will only instance a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
+few which are the same parts of speech; thus
+‘sun’ and ‘son’; ‘virge’ (‘virga’, now obsolete)
+and ‘verge’; ‘reign’, ‘rain’, and ‘rein’; ‘hair’ and
+‘hare’; ‘plate’ and ‘plait’; ‘moat’ and ‘mote’;
+‘pear’ and ‘pair’; ‘pain’ and ‘pane’; ‘raise’ and
+‘raze’; ‘air’ and ‘heir’; ‘ark’ and ‘arc’; ‘mite’
+and ‘might’; ‘pour’ and ‘pore’; ‘veil’ and ‘vale’;
+‘knight’ and ‘night’; ‘knave’ and ‘nave’; ‘pier’
+and ‘peer’; ‘rite’ and ‘right’; ‘site’ and ‘sight’;
+‘aisle’ and ‘isle’; ‘concent’ and ‘consent’;
+‘signet’ and ‘cygnet’. Now, of course, it is a real
+disadvantage, and may be the cause of serious
+confusion, that there should be words in spoken
+languages of entirely different origin and meaning
+which yet cannot in sound be differenced from one
+another. The phonographers simply propose to
+extend this disadvantage already cleaving to our
+spoken languages, to the written languages as well.
+It is fault enough in the French language, that
+‘mère’ a mother, ‘mer’ the sea, ‘maire’ a mayor
+of a town, should have no perceptible difference
+between them in the spoken tongue; or again that
+in some there should be nothing to distinguish
+‘sans’, ‘sang’, ‘sent’, ‘sens’, ‘s’en’, ‘cent’; nor
+yet between ‘ver’, ‘vert’, ‘verre’ and
+<ins class="correction" title="comma instead of period (full stop) in original">‘vers’.</ins>
+Surely it is not very wise to propose gratuitously to
+extend the same fault to the written languages as
+well.</p>
+
+<p>This loss in so many instances of the power to
+discriminate between words, which however liable
+to confusion now in our spoken language, are
+liable to none in our written, would be serious
+enough; but far more serious than this would be
+the loss which would constantly ensue, of all which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
+visibly connects a word with the past, which tells
+its history, and indicates the quarter from which
+it has been derived. In how many English words
+a letter silent to the ear, is yet most eloquent to
+the eye&mdash;the <i>g</i> for instance in ‘deign’, ‘feign’,
+‘reign’, ‘impugn’, telling as it does of ‘dignor’,
+‘fingo’, ‘regno’, ‘impugno’; even as the <i>b</i> in
+‘debt’, ‘doubt’, is not idle, but tells of ‘debitum’
+and ‘dubium’<a name="FNanchor_233_233" id="FNanchor_233_233"></a><a href="#Footnote_233_233" class="fnanchor">[233]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Pronunciation Alters</i></div>
+
+<p>At present it is the written word which is in all
+languages their conservative element. In it is the
+abiding witness against the mutilations or other
+capricious changes in their shape which affectation,
+folly, ignorance, and half-knowledge would introduce.
+It is not indeed always able to hinder the
+final adoption of these corrupter forms, but does
+not fail to oppose to them a constant, and very
+often a successful, resistance. With the adoption
+of phonetic spelling, this witness would exist no
+longer; whatever was spoken would have also to
+be written, let it be never so barbarous, never so
+great a departure from the true form of the word.
+Nor is it merely probable that such a barbarizing
+process, such an adopting and sanctioning of a
+vulgarism, might take place, but among phonographers
+it already has taken place. We all probably
+are aware that there is a vulgar pronunciation of
+the word ‘Eu<i>rope</i>’, as though it were ‘Eu<i>rup</i>’.
+Now it is quite possible that numerically more
+persons in England may pronounce the word
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
+this manner than in the right; and therefore the
+phonographers are only true to their principles
+when they spell it in the fashion which they do,
+‘Eurup’, or indeed omitting the E at the beginning,
+‘Urup’<a name="FNanchor_234_234" id="FNanchor_234_234"></a><a href="#Footnote_234_234" class="fnanchor">[234]</a>
+with thus the life of the first syllable
+assailed no less than that of the second. What
+are the consequences? First its relations with
+the old mythology are at once and entirely broken
+off; secondly, its most probable etymology from
+two Greek words, signifying ‘broad’ and ‘face’,
+Europe being so called from the <i>Broad</i> line or <i>face</i>
+of coast which our continent presented to the
+Asiatic Greek, is totally obscured. But so far from
+the spelling servilely following the pronunciation, I
+should be bold to affirm that if ninety-nine out of
+every hundred persons in England chose to call
+Europe ‘Urup’, this would be a vulgarism still,
+against which the written word ought to maintain
+its protest, not sinking down to their level, but
+rather seeking to elevate them to its own<a name="FNanchor_235_235" id="FNanchor_235_235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235_235" class="fnanchor">[235]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Changes of Pronunciation</i></div>
+
+<p>And if there is much in orthography which is
+unsettled now, how much more would be unsettled
+then. Inasmuch as the pronunciation of words is
+continually altering, their spelling would of course
+have continually to alter too. For the fact that
+pronunciation is undergoing constant changes,
+although changes for the most part unmarked, or
+marked only by a few, would be abundantly easy
+to prove. Take a Pronouncing Dictionary of fifty
+or a hundred years ago; turn to almost any page,
+and you will observe schemes of pronunciation
+there recommended, which are now merely vulgarisms,
+or which have been dropped altogether.
+We gather from a discussion in Boswell’s <i>Life of
+Johnson</i><a name="FNanchor_236_236" id="FNanchor_236_236"></a><a href="#Footnote_236_236" class="fnanchor">[236]</a>,
+that in his time ‘great’ was by some
+of the best speakers of the language pronounced
+‘gr<i>ee</i>t’, not ‘gr<i>a</i>te’: Pope usually rhymes it with
+‘cheat’, ‘complete’, and the like; thus in the
+<i>Dunciad</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the <i>great</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines com<i>plete</i>”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Spenser’s constant use of the word a century and
+a half earlier, leaves no doubt that such was the
+invariable pronunciation of his
+time<a name="FNanchor_237_237" id="FNanchor_237_237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237_237" class="fnanchor">[237]</a>. Again,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+Pope rhymes ‘obliged’ with ‘beseiged’; and it
+has only ceased to be ‘obl<i>ee</i>ged’ almost in our own
+time. Who now drinks a cup of ‘tay’? yet there
+is abundant evidence that this was the fashionable
+pronunciation in the first half of the last century;
+the word, that is, was still regarded as French:
+Locke writes it ‘thé’; and in Pope’s time, though
+no longer written, it was still pronounced so.
+Take this couplet of his in proof:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms <i>obey</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes <i>tea</i>”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So too a pronunciation which still survives,
+though scarcely among well-educated persons,
+I mean ‘Room’ for ‘Rome’, must have been in
+Shakespeare’s time the predominant one, else
+there would have been no point in that play on
+words where in <i>Julius Cæsar</i> Cassius, complaining
+that in all <i>Rome</i> there was not <i>room</i> for a single
+man, exclaims,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Now is it <i>Rome</i> indeed, and <i>room</i> enough”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Samuel Rogers too assures us that in his youth
+“everybody said ‘Lonnon’<a name="FNanchor_238_238" id="FNanchor_238_238"></a><a href="#Footnote_238_238" class="fnanchor">[238]</a> not ‘London’; that
+Fox said ‘Lonnon’ to the last”.</p>
+
+<p>The following quotation from Swift will prove
+to you that I have been only employing here an
+argument, which he employed long ago against
+the phonographers of his time. He exposes thus
+the futility of their scheme<a name="FNanchor_239_239" id="FNanchor_239_239"></a><a href="#Footnote_239_239" class="fnanchor">[239]</a>: “Another cause
+which has contributed not a little to the maiming
+of our language, is a foolish opinion advanced of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
+late years that we ought to spell exactly as we
+speak: which, besides the obvious inconvenience
+of utterly destroying our etymology, would be a
+thing we should never see an end of. Not only
+the several towns and counties of England have
+a different way of pronouncing, but even here in
+London they clip their words after one manner
+about the court, another in the city, and a third
+in the suburbs; and in a few years, it is probable,
+will all differ from themselves, as fancy or fashion
+shall direct; all which, reduced to writing, would
+entirely confound orthography”.</p>
+
+<p>This much I have thought good to say in respect
+of that entire revolution in English orthography,
+which some rash innovators have proposed.
+Let me, dismissing them and their innovations,
+call your attention now to those changes in spelling
+which are constantly going forward, at some
+periods more rapidly than at others, but which
+never wholly cease out of a language; while at
+the same time I endeavour to trace, where this is
+possible, the motives and inducements which bring
+them about. It is a subject which none can
+neglect, who desire to obtain even a tolerably accurate
+acquaintance with their native tongue.
+Some principles have been laid down in the course
+of what has been said already, that may help us
+to judge whether the changes which have found
+place in our own have been for better or for worse.
+We shall find, if I am not mistaken, of both kinds.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Grogram</i>’</div>
+
+<p>There are alterations in spelling which are for
+the worse. Thus an altered spelling will sometimes
+obscure the origin of a word, concealing it
+from those who, but for this, would at once have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
+known whence and what it was, and would have
+found both pleasure and profit in this knowledge.
+I need not say that in all those cases where the
+earlier spelling revealed the secret of the word,
+told its history, which the latter defaces or conceals,
+the change has been injurious, and is to be
+regretted; while, at the same time, where it has
+thoroughly established itself, there is nothing to
+do but to acquiesce in it: the attempt to undo
+it would be absurd. Thus, when ‘gro<i>c</i>er’ was
+spelt ‘gro<i>ss</i>er’, it was comparatively easy to see
+that he first had his name, because he sold his
+wares not by retail, but in the <i>gross</i>. ‘Co<i>x</i>comb’
+tells us nothing now; but it did when spelt, as
+it used to be, ‘co<i>cks</i>comb’, the <i>comb</i> of a <i>cock</i>
+being then an ensign or token which the fool was
+accustomed to wear. In ‘grogra<i>m</i>’ we are
+<ins class="correction" title="so in original">entirely</ins>
+to seek for the derivation; but in ‘grogra<i>n</i>’
+or ‘grogra<i>in</i>’, as earlier it was spelt, one could
+scarcely miss ‘grosgrain’, the stuff of a <i>coarse
+grain</i> or woof. How many now understand ‘woodbin<i>e</i>’?
+but who could have helped understanding
+‘woodbin<i>d</i>’ (Ben Jonson)? What a mischievous
+alteration in spelling is ‘d<i>i</i>vest’ instead
+of ‘d<i>e</i>vest’<a name="FNanchor_240_240" id="FNanchor_240_240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240_240" class="fnanchor">[240]</a>. This change is so recent that
+I am tempted to ask whether it would not here
+be possible to return to the only intelligible spelling
+of this word.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Pigmy</i>’</div>
+
+<p>‘P<i>i</i>gmy’ used formerly to be spelt ‘p<i>y</i>gmy’,
+and so long as it was so, no Greek scholar could
+see the word, but at once he knew that by it were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>
+indicated manikins whose measure in height was
+no greater than that of a man’s arm from the
+elbow to the closed <i>fist</i><a name="FNanchor_241_241" id="FNanchor_241_241"></a><a href="#Footnote_241_241" class="fnanchor">[241]</a>. Now he may know
+this in other ways; but the word itself, so long
+as he assumes it to be rightly spelt, tells him
+nothing. Or again, the old spelling, ‘diam<i>ant</i>’,
+was preferable to the modern ‘diam<i>ond</i>’. It
+was preferable, because it told more of the quarter
+whence the word had reached us. ‘Diamant’
+and ‘adamant’ are in fact only two different
+adoptions on the part of the English tongue, of
+one and the same Greek, which afterwards became
+a Latin word. The primary meaning of ‘adamant’
+is, as you know, the indomitable, and it
+was a name given at first to steel as the hardest
+of metals; but afterwards transferred<a name="FNanchor_242_242" id="FNanchor_242_242"></a><a href="#Footnote_242_242" class="fnanchor">[242]</a> to the most
+precious among all the precious stones, as that
+which in power of resistance surpassed everything
+besides.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Cozen</i>’, ‘<i>Bless</i>’</div>
+
+<p>Neither are new spellings to be commended,
+which obliterate or obscure the relationship of a
+word with others to which it is really allied; separating
+from one another, for those not thoroughly
+acquainted with the subject, words of the same
+family. Thus when ‘<i>j</i>aw’ was spelt ‘<i>ch</i>aw’, no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+ne could miss its connexions with the verb ‘to
+chew’<a name="FNanchor_243_243" id="FNanchor_243_243"></a><a href="#Footnote_243_243" class="fnanchor">[243]</a>. Now probably ninety-nine out of a
+hundred who use both words, are entirely unaware
+of any relationship between them. It is the same
+with ‘cousin’ (consanguineus), and ‘to cozen’ or
+to deceive. I do not propose to determine which
+of these words should conform itself to the spelling
+of the other. There was great irregularity in
+the spelling of both from the first; yet for all this,
+it was then better than now, when a permanent
+distinction has established itself between them,
+keeping out of sight that ‘to cozen’ is in all likelihood
+to deceive under show of kindred and affinity;
+which if it be so, Shakespeare’s words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“<i>Cousins</i> indeed, and by their uncle <i>cozened</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of
+comfort”<a name="FNanchor_244_244" id="FNanchor_244_244"></a><a href="#Footnote_244_244" class="fnanchor">[244]</a>,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>will be found to contain not a pun, but an
+etymology<a name="FNanchor_245_245" id="FNanchor_245_245"></a><a href="#Footnote_245_245" class="fnanchor">[245]</a>.
+The real relation between ‘bliss’ and
+‘to bless’ is in like manner at present
+obscured<a name="FNanchor_246_246" id="FNanchor_246_246"></a><a href="#Footnote_246_246" class="fnanchor">[246]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The omission of a letter, or the addition of a
+letter, may each effectually do its work in keeping
+out of sight the true character and origin of
+a word. Thus the omission of a letter. When
+the first syllable of ‘bran-new’ was spelt ‘bran<i>d</i>’
+with a final ‘d’, ‘bran<i>d</i>-new’, how vigorous an
+image did the word contain. The ‘brand’ is the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+fire, and ‘brand-new’ equivalent to ‘fire-new’
+(Shakespeare), is that which is fresh and bright,
+as being newly come from the forge and fire. As
+now spelt, ‘bran-new’ conveys to us no image at all.
+Again, you have the word ‘scrip’&mdash;as a ‘scrip’
+of paper, government ‘scrip’. Is this the same
+word with the Saxon ‘scrip’, a wallet, having in
+some strange manner obtained these meanings so
+different and so remote? Have we here only two
+different applications of one and the same word,
+or two homonyms, wholly different words, though
+spelt alike? We have only to note the way in
+which the first of these ‘scrips’ used to be written,
+namely with a final ‘t’, not ‘scrip’ but ‘scrip<i>t</i>’,
+and we are at once able to answer the question.
+This ‘script’ is a Latin, as the other is an Anglo-Saxon,
+word, and meant at first simply a <i>written</i>
+(scripta) piece of paper&mdash;a circumstance which
+since the omission of the final ‘t’ may easily escape
+our knowledge. ‘Afraid’ was spelt much better
+in old times with the double ‘ff’, than with the
+single ‘f’ as now. It was then clear that it was
+not another form of ‘afeared’, but wholly separate
+from it, the participle of the verb ‘to affray’,
+‘affrayer’, or, as it is now written, ‘effrayer’<a name="FNanchor_247_247" id="FNanchor_247_247"></a><a href="#Footnote_247_247" class="fnanchor">[247]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Whole</i>’, ‘<i>Hale</i>’, ‘<i>Heal</i>’</div>
+
+<p>In the cases hitherto adduced, it has been the
+omission of a letter which has clouded and concealed
+the etymology. The intrusion of a letter
+sometimes does the same. Thus in the early editions
+of <i>Paradise Lost</i>, and in all writers of that
+time, you will find ‘scent’, an odour, spelt ‘sent’.
+It was better so; there is no other noun sub<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>stantive
+‘sent’, with which it is in danger of
+being confounded; while its relation with ‘sentio’,
+with ‘re<i>sent</i>’<a name="FNanchor_248_248" id="FNanchor_248_248"></a><a href="#Footnote_248_248" class="fnanchor">[248]</a>,
+‘dis<i>sent</i>’, and the like, is put out
+of sight by its novel spelling; the intrusive ‘<i>c</i>’,
+serves only to mislead. The same thing was
+attempted with ‘site’, ‘situate’, ‘situation’,
+spelt for a time by many, ‘s<i>c</i>ite’, ‘s<i>c</i>ituate’,
+‘s<i>c</i>ituation’; but it did not continue with these.
+Again, ‘whole’, in Wiclif’s Bible, and indeed much
+later, occasionally as far down as Spenser, is spelt
+‘hole’, without the ‘w’ at the beginning. The
+present orthography may have the advantage of at
+once distinguishing the word to the eye from any
+other; but at the same time the initial ‘w’, now
+prefixed, hides its relation to the verb ‘to heal’,
+with which it is closely allied. The ‘whole’ man
+is he whose hurt is ‘healed’ or
+covered<a name="FNanchor_249_249" id="FNanchor_249_249"></a><a href="#Footnote_249_249" class="fnanchor">[249]</a> (we say
+of the convalescent that he
+‘recovers’)<a name="FNanchor_250_250" id="FNanchor_250_250"></a><a href="#Footnote_250_250" class="fnanchor">[250]</a>; ‘whole’
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>being closely allied to ‘hale’ (integer), from which
+also by its modern spelling it is divided. ‘Wholesome’
+has naturally followed the fortunes of
+‘whole’; it was spelt ‘holsome’ once.</p>
+
+<p>Of ‘island’ too our present spelling is inferior to
+the old, inasmuch as it suggests a hybrid formation,
+as though the word were made up of the
+Latin ‘insula’, and the Saxon ‘land’. It is quite
+true that ‘isle’ <i>is</i> in relation with, and descent
+from, ‘insula’, ‘isola’, ‘île’; and hence probably
+the misspelling of ‘island’. This last however has
+nothing to do with ‘insula’, being identical with
+the German ‘eiland’, the Anglo-Saxon ‘ealand’<a name="FNanchor_251_251" id="FNanchor_251_251"></a><a href="#Footnote_251_251" class="fnanchor">[251]</a>
+and signifying the sea-land, or land girt, round
+with the sea. And it is worthy of note that this
+‘s’ in the first syllable of ‘island’ is quite of
+modern introduction. In all the earlier versions
+of the Scriptures, and in the Authorized Version
+as at first set forth, it is ‘iland’; while in proof
+that this is not accidental, it may be observed
+that, while ‘iland’ has not the ‘s’, ‘isle’ has it
+(see Rev. i. 9). ‘Iland’ indeed is the spelling
+which we meet with far down into the seventeenth
+century.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Folk-etymologies</i></div>
+
+<p>What has just been said of ‘island’ leads me as
+by a natural transition to observe that one of the
+most frequent causes of alteration in the spelling
+of a word is a wrongly assumed derivation. It is
+then sought to bring the word into harmony with,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>
+and to make it by its spelling suggest, this derivation,
+which has been erroneously thrust upon it.
+Here is a subject which, followed out as it deserves,
+would form an interesting and instructive chapter
+in the history of language<a name="FNanchor_252_252" id="FNanchor_252_252"></a><a href="#Footnote_252_252" class="fnanchor">[252]</a>.
+Let me offer one or
+two small contributions to it; noting first by the
+way how remarkable an evidence we have in this
+fact, of the manner in which not the learned only,
+but all persons learned and unlearned alike, crave
+to have these words not body only, but
+body and soul. What an attestation, I say, of
+this lies in the fact that where a word in its proper
+derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape
+and mould it into some other form, not enduring
+that it should be a mere inert sound without sense
+in their ears; and if they do not know its right
+origin, will rather put into it a wrong one, than
+that it should have for them no meaning, and
+suggest no derivation at all<a name="FNanchor_253_253" id="FNanchor_253_253"></a><a href="#Footnote_253_253" class="fnanchor">[253]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>There is probably no language in which such a
+process has not been going forward; in which it is
+not the explanation, in a vast number of instances,
+of changes in spelling and even in form, which
+words have undergone. I will offer a few examples
+of it from foreign tongues, before adducing
+any from our own. ‘Pyramid’ is a word, the
+spelling of which was affected in the Greek by an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
+erroneous assumption of its derivation; the
+consequences of this error surviving in our own
+word to the present day. It is spelt by us with
+a ‘y’ in the first syllable, as it was spelt with the
+<ins class="correction" title="Greek: y;
+original reads ‘v’">υ</ins> corresponding in the Greek. But why was this?
+It was because the Greeks assumed that the pyramids
+were so named from their having the appearance
+of <i>flame</i> going up into a
+point<a name="FNanchor_254_254" id="FNanchor_254_254"></a><a href="#Footnote_254_254" class="fnanchor">[254]</a>, and so they
+spelt ‘pyramid’, that they might find <span title="Greek: pyr">πῦρ</span> or
+‘pyre’ in it; while in fact ‘pyramid’ has nothing
+to do with flame or fire at all; being, as those best
+qualified to speak on the matter declare to us, an
+Egyptian word of quite a different
+signification<a name="FNanchor_255_255" id="FNanchor_255_255"></a><a href="#Footnote_255_255" class="fnanchor">[255]</a>,
+and the Coptic letters being much better represented
+by the diphthong ‘ei’ than by the letter ‘y’,
+as no doubt, but for this mistaken notion of what
+the word was intended to mean, they would have
+been.</p>
+
+<p>Once more&mdash;the form ‘Hierosolyma’, wherein
+the Greeks reproduced the Hebrew ‘Jerusalem’,
+was intended in all probability to express that the
+city so called was the <i>sacred</i> city of the
+<i>Solymi</i><a name="FNanchor_256_256" id="FNanchor_256_256"></a><a href="#Footnote_256_256" class="fnanchor">[256]</a>.
+At all events the intention not merely of reproducing
+the Hebrew word, but also of making it
+significant in Greek, of finding <span title="Greek: hieron">ἱερόν</span> in it, is
+plainly discernible. For indeed the Greeks were
+exceedingly intolerant of foreign words, till
+they had laid aside their foreign appearance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>&mdash;of
+all words which they could not thus quicken
+with a Greek soul; and, with a very characteristic
+vanity, an ignoring of all other tongues but their
+own, assumed with no apparent misgivings that
+all words, from whatever quarter derived, were
+to be explained by Greek
+etymologies<a name="FNanchor_257_257" id="FNanchor_257_257"></a><a href="#Footnote_257_257" class="fnanchor">[257]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>‘Tartar’ is another word, of which it is at least
+possible that a wrongly assumed derivation has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>
+modified the spelling, and indeed not the spelling
+only, but the very shape in which we now possess
+it. To many among us it may be known that the
+people designated by this appellation are not properly
+‘Tartars’, but ‘Tatars’; and you sometimes
+perhaps have noted the omission of the ‘r’ on the
+part of those who are curious in their spelling.
+How, then, it may be asked, did the form ‘Tartar’
+arise? When the terrible hordes of middle Asia
+burst in upon civilized Europe in the thirteenth
+century, many beheld in the ravages of their innumerable
+cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word
+in the Revelation (chap. ix.) concerning the opening
+of the bottomless pit; and from this belief
+ensued the change of their name from ‘Tatars’ to
+‘Tartars’, which was thus put into closer relation
+with ‘Tartarus’ or hell, out of which their multitudes
+were supposed to have proceeded<a name="FNanchor_258_258" id="FNanchor_258_258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258_258" class="fnanchor">[258]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Another good example in the same kind is the
+German word ‘sündflut’, the Deluge, which is
+now so spelt as to signify a ‘sinflood’, the plague
+or <i>flood</i> of waters brought on the world by the
+<i>sins</i> of mankind; and probably some of us have
+before this admired the pregnant significance of
+the word. Yet the old High German word had
+originally no such intention; it was spelt ‘sinfluot’,
+that is, the great flood; and as late as Luther,
+indeed in Luther’s own translation of the Bible,
+is so spelt as to make plain that the notion of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
+‘<i>sin</i>-flood’ had not yet found its way into, even
+as it had not affected the spelling of, the
+word<a name="FNanchor_259_259" id="FNanchor_259_259"></a><a href="#Footnote_259_259" class="fnanchor">[259]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Currants</i>’</div>
+
+<p>But to look now nearer home for our examples.
+The little raisins brought from Greece, which play
+so important a part in one of the national dishes
+of England, the Christmas plum-pudding, used to
+be called ‘corinths’; and so you would find them
+in mercantile lists of a hundred years ago: either
+that for the most part they were shipped from
+Corinth, the principal commercial city in Greece,
+or because they grew in large abundance in the
+immediate district round about it. Their likeness
+in shape and size and general appearance to our
+own currants, working together with the ignorance
+of the great majority of English people about any
+such place as Corinth, soon brought the name
+‘corinths’ into ‘currants’, which now with a
+certain unfitness they bear; being not currants at
+all, but dried grapes, though grapes of diminutive
+size<a name="FNanchor_260_260" id="FNanchor_260_260"></a><a href="#Footnote_260_260" class="fnanchor">[260]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Court-cards</i>’</div>
+
+<p>‘<i>Court</i>-cards’, that is, the king, queen, and
+knave in each suit, were once
+‘coat-cards’<a name="FNanchor_261_261" id="FNanchor_261_261"></a><a href="#Footnote_261_261" class="fnanchor">[261]</a>;
+having their name from the long splendid ‘coat’
+(vestis talaris) with which they were arrayed.
+Probably ‘coat’ after a while did not perfectly
+convey its original meaning and intention; being
+no more in common use for the long garment
+reach<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>ing
+down to the heels; and then ‘coat’ was easily
+exchanged for ‘court’, as the word is now both
+spelt and pronounced, seeing that nowhere so
+fitly as in a Court should such splendidly arrayed
+personages be found. A public house in the
+neighbourhood of London having a few years
+since for its sign “The George <i>Canning</i>” is already
+“The George and <i>Cannon</i>”,&mdash;so rapidly do these
+transformations proceed, so soon is that forgotten
+which we suppose would never be forgotten.
+“Welsh <i>rarebit</i>” becomes
+“Welsh <i>rabbit</i>”<a name="FNanchor_262_262" id="FNanchor_262_262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262_262" class="fnanchor">[262]</a>;
+and ‘<i>farced</i>’ or stuffed ‘meat’ becomes “forced
+meat”. Even the mere determination to make a
+word <i>look</i> English, to put it into an English shape,
+without thereby so much as seeming to attain
+any result in the way of etymology, this is very
+often sufficient to bring about a change in its
+spelling, and even in its
+form<a name="FNanchor_263_263" id="FNanchor_263_263"></a><a href="#Footnote_263_263" class="fnanchor">[263]</a>. It is thus that
+‘sipahi’ has become ‘sepoy’; and only so could
+‘weissager’ have taken its present form of
+‘wiseacre’<a name="FNanchor_264_264" id="FNanchor_264_264"></a><a href="#Footnote_264_264" class="fnanchor">[264]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Transformation of Words</i></div>
+
+<p>It is not very uncommon for a word, while it is
+derived from one word, to receive a certain impulse
+and modification from another. This extends
+sometimes beyond the spelling, and in cases where
+it does so, would hardly belong to our present
+theme. Still I may notice an instance or two.
+Thus our ‘obsequies’ is the Latin ‘exequiæ’,
+but formed under a certain impulse of ‘obsequium’,
+and seeking to express and include the observant
+honour of that word. ‘To refuse’ is ‘recusare’,
+while yet it has derived the ‘f’ of its second
+syllable from ‘refutare’; it is a medley of the
+two<a name="FNanchor_265_265" id="FNanchor_265_265"></a><a href="#Footnote_265_265" class="fnanchor">[265]</a>. The French ‘rame’, an oar, is ‘remus’,
+but that modified by an unconscious recollection
+of ‘ramus’. ‘Orange’ is no doubt a Persian
+word, which has reached us through the Arabic,
+and which the Spanish ‘naranja’ more nearly
+represents than any form of it existing in the
+other languages of Europe. But what so natural
+as to think of the orange as the <i>golden</i> fruit,
+especially when the “<i>aurea</i> mala” of the Hesperides
+were familiar to all antiquity? There
+cannot be a doubt that ‘aurum’, ‘oro’, ‘or’,
+made themselves felt in the shapes which the
+word assumed in the languages of the West, and
+that here we have the explanation of the change
+in the first syllable, as in the low Latin ‘aurantium’,
+‘orangia’, and in the French ‘orange’,
+which has given us our own.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is foreign words, or words adopted from
+foreign languages, as might beforehand be expected,
+which are especially subjected to such
+transformations as these. The soul which the
+word once had in its own language, having, for as
+many as do not know that language, departed
+from it, or at least not being now any more to be
+recognized by such as employ the word, these are
+not satisfied till they have put another soul into it,
+and it has thus become alive to them again. Thus&mdash;to
+take first one or two very familiar instances,
+but which serve as well as any other to illustrate
+my position&mdash;the Bellerophon becomes for our
+sailors the ‘Billy Ruffian’, for what can they know
+of the Greek mythology, or of the slayer of Chimæra?
+an iron steamer, the Hirondelle, now or
+lately plying on the Tyne, is the ‘Iron Devil’.
+‘<i>Contre</i> danse’, or dance in which the parties
+stand <i>face to face</i> with one another, and which
+ought to have appeared in English as ‘<i>counter</i>
+dance’, does become
+‘<i>country</i> dance’<a name="FNanchor_266_266" id="FNanchor_266_266"></a><a href="#Footnote_266_266" class="fnanchor">[266]</a>, as though
+it were the dance of the country folk and rural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>
+districts, as distinguished from the quadrille
+and waltz and more artificial dances of the
+town<a name="FNanchor_267_267" id="FNanchor_267_267"></a><a href="#Footnote_267_267" class="fnanchor">[267]</a>.
+A well known rose, the “rose <i>des quatre saisons</i>”,
+or of the four seasons, becomes on the lips of
+some of our gardeners, the “rose of the <i>quarter
+sessions</i>”, though here it is probable that the eye
+has misled, rather than the ear. ‘Dent de lion’,
+(it is spelt ‘dentdelyon’ in our early writers)
+becomes ‘dandylion’, “<i>chaude</i> melée”, or an
+affray in <i>hot</i> blood,
+“<i>chance</i>-medley”<a name="FNanchor_268_268" id="FNanchor_268_268"></a><a href="#Footnote_268_268" class="fnanchor">[268]</a>, ‘causey’
+(chaussée) becomes
+‘causeway’<a name="FNanchor_269_269" id="FNanchor_269_269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269_269" class="fnanchor">[269]</a>, ‘rachitis’
+‘rickets’<a name="FNanchor_270_270" id="FNanchor_270_270"></a><a href="#Footnote_270_270" class="fnanchor">[270]</a>,
+and in French ‘mandragora’ ‘main
+de gloire’<a name="FNanchor_271_271" id="FNanchor_271_271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271_271" class="fnanchor">[271]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Necromancy</i>’</div>
+
+<p>‘Necromancy’ is another word which, if not
+now, yet for a long period was erroneously spelt,
+and indeed assumed a different shape, under the
+influence of an erroneous derivation; which,
+curiously enough, even now that it has been dismissed,
+has left behind it the marks of its presence,
+in our common phrase, “the <i>Black</i> Art”.
+I need hardly remind you that ‘necromancy’ is a
+Greek word, which signifies, according to its
+proper meaning, a prophesying by aid of the dead,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>
+or that it rests on the presumed power of raising
+up by potent spells the dead, and compelling
+them to give answers about things to come. We
+all know that it was supposed possible to exercise
+such power; we have a very awful example of it
+in the story of the witch of Endor, and a very
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘horried’">horrid</ins>
+one in Lucan<a name="FNanchor_272_272" id="FNanchor_272_272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272_272" class="fnanchor">[272]</a>.
+But the Latin medieval
+writers, whose Greek was either little or none,
+spelt the word, ‘nigromantia’, as if its first syllables
+had been Latin: at the same time, not wholly
+forgetting the original meaning, but in fact getting
+round to it though by a wrong process, they
+understood the dead by these ‘nigri’, or blacks,
+whom they had brought into the word<a name="FNanchor_273_273" id="FNanchor_273_273"></a><a href="#Footnote_273_273" class="fnanchor">[273]</a>. Down
+to a rather late period we find the forms, ‘<i>negro</i>mancer’
+and ‘<i>negro</i>mancy’ frequent in English.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Words Misspelt</i></div>
+
+<p>‘Pleurisy’ used often to be spelt, (I do not
+think it is so now,) without an ‘e’ in the first
+syllable, evidently on the tacit assumption that
+it was from <i>plus pluris</i><a name="FNanchor_274_274" id="FNanchor_274_274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274_274" class="fnanchor">[274]</a>. When Shakespeare
+falls into an error, he “makes the offence gracious”;
+yet, I think, he would scarcely have written,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“For goodness growing to a <i>plurisy</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dies of his own <i>too much</i>”,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but that <i>he</i> too derived ‘plurisy’ from <i>pluris</i>.
+This, even with the “small Latin and less Greek”,
+which Ben Jonson allows him, he scarcely would
+have done, had the word presented itself in that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>
+form, which by right of its descent from <span title="Greek: pleura">πλευρά</span>
+(being a pain, stitch, or sickness <i>in the side</i>) it
+ought to have possessed. Those who for ‘crucible’
+wrote ‘chrysoble’ (Jeremy Taylor does so)
+must evidently have done this under the assumption
+that the Greek for <i>gold</i>, and not the Latin
+for <i>cross</i>, lay at the foundation of this word.
+‘Anthymn’ instead of ‘anthem’ (Barrow so spells
+the word), rests plainly on a wrong etymology,
+even as this spelling clearly betrays what that
+wrong etymology is. ‘Rhyme’ with a ‘y’ is a
+modern misspelling; and would never have been
+but for the undue influence which the Greek
+‘rhythm’ has exercised upon it. Spenser and his
+cotemporaries spell it ‘rime’. ‘Abominable’ was
+by some etymologists of the seventeenth century
+spelt ‘abhominable’, as though it were that which
+departed from the human (ab homine) into the
+bestial or devilish.</p>
+
+<p>In all these words which I have adduced last,
+the correct spelling has in the end resumed its
+sway. It is not so with ‘frontisp<i>ie</i>ce’, which
+ought to be spelt ‘frontisp<i>i</i>ce’ (it was so by
+Milton and others), being the low Latin ‘frontispicium’,
+from ‘frons’ and ‘aspicio’, the forefront
+of the building, that part which presents
+itself to the view. It was only the entirely
+ungrounded notion that the word ‘piece’ constitutes
+the last syllable, which has given rise to
+our present orthography<a name="FNanchor_275_275" id="FNanchor_275_275"></a><a href="#Footnote_275_275" class="fnanchor">[275]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Wrong Spelling</div>
+
+<p>You may, perhaps, wonder that I have dwelt
+so long on these details of spelling; that I have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>
+bestowed on them so much of my own attention,
+that I have claimed for them so much of yours;
+yet in truth I cannot regard them as unworthy
+of our very closest heed. For indeed of how
+much beyond itself is accurate or inaccurate
+spelling the certain indication. Thus when we
+meet ‘s<i>y</i>ren’, for ‘s<i>i</i>ren’, as so strangely often
+we do, almost always in newspapers, and often
+where we should hardly have expected (I met
+it lately in the <i>Quarterly Review</i>, and again in
+Gifford’s <i>Massinger</i>), how difficult it is not to be
+“judges of evil thoughts”, and to take this
+slovenly misspelling as the specimen and evidence
+of an inaccuracy and ignorance which reaches
+very far wider than the single word which is
+before us. But why is it that so much significance
+is ascribed to a wrong spelling? Because ignorance
+of a word’s spelling at once argues ignorance
+of its origin and derivation. I do not mean
+that one who spells rightly may not be ignorant
+of it too, but he who spells wrongly is certainly
+so. Thus, to recur to the example I have just
+adduced, he who for ‘s<i>i</i>ren’ writes ‘s<i>y</i>ren’,
+certainly knows nothing of the magic <i>cords</i>
+(<span title="Greek: seirai">σειραί</span>) of song,
+by which those fair enchantresses
+were supposed to draw those that heard them
+to their ruin<a name="FNanchor_276_276" id="FNanchor_276_276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276_276" class="fnanchor">[276]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Correct or incorrect orthography being, then,
+this note of accurate or inaccurate knowledge,
+we may confidently conclude where two spellings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span>
+of a word exist, and are both employed by persons
+who generally write with precision and scholarship,
+that there must be something to account for this.
+It will generally be worth your while to inquire
+into the causes which enable both spellings to
+hold their ground and to find their supporters,
+not ascribing either one or the other to mere
+carelessness or error. It will in these cases often
+be found that two spellings exist, because two
+views of the word’s origin exist, and each of those
+spellings is the correct expression of one of these.
+The question therefore which way of spelling
+should continue, and wholly supersede the other,
+and which, while the alternative remains, we
+should ourselves employ, can only be settled by
+settling which of these etymologies deserves the
+preference. So is it, for example, with ‘ch<i>y</i>mist’
+and ‘ch<i>e</i>mist’, neither of which has obtained in
+our common use the complete mastery over the
+other<a name="FNanchor_277_277" id="FNanchor_277_277"></a><a href="#Footnote_277_277" class="fnanchor">[277]</a>. It is not here, as in some other cases,
+that one is certainly right, the other as certainly
+wrong: but they severally represent two different
+etymologies of the word, and each is correct
+according to its own. If we are to spell ‘ch<i>y</i>mist’
+and ‘ch<i>y</i>mistry’, it is because these words are
+considered to be derived from the Greek word,
+<ins class="correction" title="Greek: chymos;
+original reads ‘χ υμο’">χυμός</ins>,
+sap; and the chymic art will then have
+occupied itself first with distilling the juice and
+sap of plants, and will from this have derived its
+name. I have little doubt, however, that the
+other spelling, ‘ch<i>e</i>mist’, not ‘ch<i>y</i>mist’, is the
+correct one. It was not with the distillation of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>
+herbs, but with the amalgamation of metals,
+that chemistry occupied itself at its rise, and
+the word embodies a reference to Egypt, the land
+of Ham or ‘Cham’<a name="FNanchor_278_278" id="FNanchor_278_278"></a><a href="#Footnote_278_278" class="fnanchor">[278]</a>, in which this art was first
+practised with success.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Satyr</i>’, ‘<i>Satire</i>’</div>
+
+<p>Of how much confusion the spelling which used
+to be so common, ‘satyr’ for ‘satire’, is at once
+the consequence, the expression, and again the
+cause; not indeed that this confusion first began
+with us<a name="FNanchor_279_279" id="FNanchor_279_279"></a><a href="#Footnote_279_279" class="fnanchor">[279]</a>; for the same already found place in
+the Latin, where ‘satyricus’ was continually
+written for ‘satiricus’ out of a false assumption
+of the identity between the Roman <i>satire</i> and
+the Greek <i>satyric</i> drama. The Roman ‘satira’,&mdash;I
+speak of things familiar to many of my hearers,&mdash;is
+properly a <i>full</i> dish (lanx being understood)&mdash;a
+dish heaped up with various ingredients, a ‘farce’
+(according to the original signification of that
+word), or hodge-podge; and the word was
+transferred from this to a form of poetry which
+at first admitted the utmost variety in the mate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>rials
+of which it was composed, and the shapes
+into which these materials were wrought up;
+being the only form of poetry which the Romans
+did <i>not</i> borrow from the Greeks. Wholly different
+from this, having no one point of contact with
+it in its form, its history, or its intention, is the
+‘satyric’ drama of Greece, so called because
+Silenus and the ‘Satyrs’ supplied the chorus;
+and in their naïve selfishness, and mere animal
+instincts, held up before men a mirror of what
+they would be, if only the divine, which is also
+the truly human, element of humanity, were withdrawn;
+what man, all that properly made him
+man being withdrawn, would prove.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Mid-wife</i>’, ‘<i>Nostril</i>’</div>
+
+<p>And then what light, as we have already seen,
+does the older spelling of a word often cast upon
+its etymology; how often does it clear up the
+mystery, which would otherwise have hung about
+it, or which <i>had</i> hung about it till some one had
+noticed and turned to profit this its earlier spelling.
+Thus ‘dirge’ is always spelt ‘dirige’ in early
+English. This ‘dirige’ may be the first word in
+a Latin psalm or prayer once used at funerals;
+there is a reasonable probability that the explanation
+of the word is here; at any rate, if it is not
+here, it is nowhere<a name="FNanchor_280_280" id="FNanchor_280_280"></a><a href="#Footnote_280_280" class="fnanchor">[280]</a>.
+The derivation of ‘mid-wife’
+is uncertain, and has been the subject of
+discussion; but when we find it spelt ‘medewife’
+and ‘meadwife’, in Wiclif’s Bible, this leaves
+hardly a doubt that it is the <i>wife</i> or woman who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span>
+acts for a <i>mead</i> or
+reward<a name="FNanchor_281_281" id="FNanchor_281_281"></a><a href="#Footnote_281_281" class="fnanchor">[281]</a>.
+In cases too where
+there was no mystery hanging about a word,
+how often does the early spelling make clear
+to all that which was before only known to those
+who had made the language their study. For
+example, if an early edition of Spenser should
+come into your hands, or a modern one in which
+the early spelling is retained, what continual
+lessons in English might you derive from it. Thus
+‘nostril’ is always spelt by him and his cotemporaries
+‘nosethrill’; a little earlier it was
+‘nosethirle’. Now ‘to thrill’ is the same as
+to drill or pierce; it is plain then here at once
+that the word signifies the orifice or opening
+with which the <i>nose</i> is <i>thrilled</i>, drilled, or pierced.
+We might have read the word for ever in our
+modern spelling without being taught this.
+‘Ell’ tells us nothing about itself; but in ‘eln’
+used in Holland’s translation of Camden, we
+recognize ‘ulna’ at once.</p>
+
+<p>Again, the ‘morris’ or ‘morrice-dance’, which
+is alluded to so often by our early poets, as it is
+now spelt informs us nothing about itself; but
+read ‘<i>moriske</i> dance’, as it is generally spelt by
+Holland and his cotemporaries, and you will
+scarcely fail to perceive that of which indeed
+there is no manner of doubt; namely, that it
+was so called either because it was really, or was
+supposed to be, a dance in use among the <i>moriscoes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span></i>
+of Spain, and from thence introduced into
+England<a name="FNanchor_282_282" id="FNanchor_282_282"></a><a href="#Footnote_282_282" class="fnanchor">[282]</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Again, philologers tell us, and no doubt rightly,
+that our ‘cray-fish’, or ‘craw-fish’, is the
+French ‘écrevisse’. This is true, but certainly
+it is not self-evident. Trace however the word
+through these successive spellings, ‘krevys’ (Lydgate),
+‘crevish’ (Gascoigne), ‘craifish’ (Holland),
+and the chasm between ‘cray-fish’ or ‘craw-fish’
+and ‘écrevisse’ is by aid of these three intermediate
+spellings bridged over at once; and in
+the fact of our Gothic ‘fish’ finding its way into
+this French word we see only another example
+of a law, which has been already abundantly
+illustrated in this lecture<a name="FNanchor_283_283" id="FNanchor_283_283"></a><a href="#Footnote_283_283" class="fnanchor">[283]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">‘<i>Emmet</i>’, ‘<i>Ant</i>’</div>
+
+<p>In other ways also an accurate taking note of
+the spelling of words, and of the successive changes
+which it has undergone, will often throw light
+upon them. Thus we may know, others having
+assured us of the fact, that ‘ant’ and ‘emmet’
+were originally only two different spellings of one
+and the same word; but we may be perplexed
+to understand how two forms of a word, now so
+different, could ever have diverged from a single
+root. When however we find the different spellings,
+‘emmet’, ‘emet’, ‘amet’, ‘amt’, ‘ant’,
+the gulf which appeared to separate ‘emmet’
+from ‘ant’ is bridged over at once, and we do
+not merely know on the assurance of others
+that these two are in fact identical, their differences
+being only superficial, but we perceive
+clearly in what manner they are so<a name="FNanchor_284_284" id="FNanchor_284_284"></a><a href="#Footnote_284_284" class="fnanchor">[284]</a>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Even before any close examination of the
+matter, it is hard not to suspect that ‘runagate’
+is in fact another form of ‘renegade’, slightly
+transformed, as so many words, to put an English
+signification into its first syllable; and then the
+meaning gradually modified in obedience to the
+new derivation which was assumed to be its
+original and true one. Our suspicion of this is
+very greatly strengthened (for we see how very
+closely the words approach one another), by the
+fact that ‘renega<i>d</i>e’ is constantly spelt ‘renega<i>t</i>e’
+in our old authors, while at the same time the
+denial of <i>faith</i>, which is now a necessary element
+in ‘renegade’, and one differencing it inwardly
+from ‘runagate’, is altogether wanting in early
+use&mdash;the denial of <i>country</i> and of the duties thereto
+owing being all that is implied in it. Thus it is
+constantly employed in Holland’s <i>Livy</i> as a
+rendering of ‘perfuga’<a name="FNanchor_285_285" id="FNanchor_285_285"></a><a href="#Footnote_285_285" class="fnanchor">[285]</a>;
+while in the one passage
+where ‘runagate’ occurs in the Prayer Book
+Version of the Psalms (Ps. lxviii. 6), a reference
+to the original will show that the translators
+could only have employed it there on the ground
+that it also expressed rebel, revolter, and not
+runaway merely<a name="FNanchor_286_286" id="FNanchor_286_286"></a><a href="#Footnote_286_286" class="fnanchor">[286]</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>Assimilating Power of English</i></div>
+
+<p>I might easily occupy your attention much
+longer, so little barren or unfruitful does this
+subject of spelling appear likely to prove; but
+all things must have an end; and as I concluded
+my first lecture with a remarkable testimony<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>
+borne by an illustrious German scholar to the
+merits of our English tongue, I will conclude my
+last with the words of another, not indeed a
+German, but still of the great Germanic stock;
+words resuming in themselves much of which
+we have been speaking upon this and upon
+former occasions: “As our bodies”, he says,
+“have hidden resources and expedients, to remove
+the obstacles which the very art of the physician
+puts in its way, so language, ruled by an indomitable
+inward principle, triumphs in some degree
+over the folly of grammarians. Look at the
+English, polluted by Danish and Norman conquests,
+distorted in its genuine and noble features
+by old and recent endeavours to mould it after
+the French fashion, invaded by a hostile entrance
+of Greek and Latin words, threatening by increasing
+hosts to overwhelm the indigenous terms.
+In these long contests against the combined power
+of so many forcible enemies, the language, it is
+true, has lost some of its power of inversion in
+the structure of sentences, the means of denoting
+the difference of gender, and the nice distinctions
+by inflection and termination&mdash;almost every
+word is attacked by the spasm of the accent and
+the drawing of consonants to wrong positions;
+yet the old English principle is not overpowered.
+Trampled down by the ignoble feet of strangers,
+its springs still retain force enough to restore
+itself. It lives and plays through all the veins
+of the language; it impregnates the innumerable
+strangers entering its dominions with its temper,
+and stains them with its colour, not unlike the
+Greek which in taking up oriental words, stripped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
+them of their foreign costume, and bid them to
+appear as native Greeks”<a name="FNanchor_287_287" id="FNanchor_287_287"></a><a href="#Footnote_287_287" class="fnanchor">[287]</a>.</p>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_228_228" id="Footnote_228_228"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_228_228"><span class="label">[228]</span></a>
+In proof that it need not be so, I would only refer to
+a paper, <i>On Orthographical Expedients</i>, by Edwin Guest,
+Esq., in the <i>Transactions of the Philological Society</i>,
+vol. iii. p. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_229_229" id="Footnote_229_229"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_229_229"><span class="label">[229]</span></a>
+[The scientific treatises on Phonetics of Mr. Alexander
+J. Ellis and Dr. Henry Sweet have surmounted the difficulty
+of registering sounds with great accuracy.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_230_230" id="Footnote_230_230"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_230_230"><span class="label">[230]</span></a>
+I have not observed this noticed in our dictionaries
+as the original form of the phrase. There is no doubt
+however of the fact; see <i>Stanihurst’s Ireland</i>, p. 33, in
+Holinshed’s <i>Chronicles</i>. [Rather from <i>torvien</i>, to throw,&mdash;Skeat].</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_231_231" id="Footnote_231_231"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_231_231"><span class="label">[231]</span></a>
+<i>Notes and Queries</i>, No. 147.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_232_232" id="Footnote_232_232"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_232_232"><span class="label">[232]</span></a>
+See Boswell’s <i>Life of Johnson</i>, Croker’s edit. 1848,
+p. 233.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_233_233" id="Footnote_233_233"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_233_233"><span class="label">[233]</span></a>
+[The <i>b</i> was purposely foisted into these words by
+bookmen to suggest their Latin derivation; it did not
+belong to them in earlier English. The same may be
+said of the <i>g</i>, intruded into ‘deign’ and ‘feign’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_234_234" id="Footnote_234_234"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_234_234"><span class="label">[234]</span></a>
+A chief phonographer writes to me to deny that this
+is the present spelling (1856) of ‘Europe’. It was so
+when this paragraph was written. [Most people would
+now consider [Yeuroap] as American pronunciation.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_235_235" id="Footnote_235_235"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_235_235"><span class="label">[235]</span></a>
+Quintilian has expressed himself with the true dignity
+of a scholar on this matter (<i>Inst.</i> 1, 6, 45): Consuetudinem
+sermonis vocabo <i>consensum eruditorum</i>; sicut vivendi
+consensum bonorum.&mdash;How different from innovations
+like this the changes in the spelling of German which
+J. Grimm, so far as his own example may reach, <i>has</i>
+introduced; and the still bolder and more extensive ones
+which in the <i>Preface</i> to his <i>Deutsches Wörterbuch</i>, pp.
+liv.-lxii., he avows his desire to see introduced;&mdash;as the
+employment of <i>f</i>, not merely where it is at present used,
+but also wherever <i>v</i> is now employed; the substituting
+of the <i>v</i>, which would be thus disengaged, for <i>w</i>, and the
+entire dismissal of <i>w</i>. They may be advisable, or they
+may not; it is not for strangers to offer an opinion; but
+at any rate they are not a seizing of the fluctuating,
+superficial accidents of the present, and a seeking to give
+permanent authority to these, but they all rest on a deep
+historic study of the language, and of the true genius of
+the language.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_236_236" id="Footnote_236_236"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_236_236"><span class="label">[236]</span></a>
+Croker’s edit. 1848, pp.
+<ins class="correction" title="‘5’ is unclear in original">57</ins>,
+61, 233.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_237_237" id="Footnote_237_237"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_237_237"><span class="label">[237]</span></a>
+[An incorrect conclusion. Almost all ‘ea’ words
+were pronounced ‘ai’ down to the eighteenth century.
+Thus ‘great’ was a true rhyme to ‘cheat’ and ‘complete’,
+their ordinary pronunciation being ‘grait’,
+‘chait’, ‘complait’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_238_238" id="Footnote_238_238"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_238_238"><span class="label">[238]</span></a>
+[i.e. ‘Lunnun’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_239_239" id="Footnote_239_239"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_239_239"><span class="label">[239]</span></a>
+<i>A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining
+the English Tongue</i>, 1711, Works, vol. ix, pp. 139-59.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_240_240" id="Footnote_240_240"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_240_240"><span class="label">[240]</span></a>
+[‘Devest’ was still in use till the end of the eighteenth
+century, but ‘divest’ is already found in <i>King
+Lear</i>, 1605, i, 1, 50.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_241_241" id="Footnote_241_241"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_241_241"><span class="label">[241]</span></a>
+Pygmæi, quasi <i>cubitales</i> (Augustine).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_242_242" id="Footnote_242_242"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_242_242"><span class="label">[242]</span></a>
+First so used by Theophrastus in Greek, and by Pliny
+in Latin.&mdash;The real identity of the two words explains
+Milton’s use of ‘diamond’ in <i>Paradise Lost</i>, b. 7; and
+also in that sublime passage in his <i>Apology for Smectymnuus</i>:
+“Then zeal, whose substance is ethereal, arming
+in complete <i>diamond</i>”.&mdash;Diez (<i>Wörterbuch d. Roman.
+Sprachen</i>, p. 123) supposes, not very probably, that it
+was under a certain influence of ‘<i>dia</i>fano’, the translucent,
+that ‘adamante’ was in the Italian, whence we
+have derived the word, changed into ‘<i>dia</i>mante’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_243_243" id="Footnote_243_243"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_243_243"><span class="label">[243]</span></a>
+[Similarly <i>jowl</i> for <i>chowl</i> or <i>chavel</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_244_244" id="Footnote_244_244"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_244_244"><span class="label">[244]</span></a>
+<i>Richard III</i>, Act iv, Sc. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_245_245" id="Footnote_245_245"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_245_245"><span class="label">[245]</span></a>
+[For another account of this word, approved by Dr.
+Murray, see <i>The Folk and their Word-Lore</i>, p. 156.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_246_246" id="Footnote_246_246"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_246_246"><span class="label">[246]</span></a>
+[‘Bliss’ representing the old English <i>bliths</i> or <i>blidhs</i>,
+blitheness, is really a quite distinct word from ‘bless’,
+standing for <i>blets</i>, old English <i>blétsian</i> (=<i>blóedsian</i>, to
+consecrate with blood, <i>blód</i>), although the latter was by
+a folk-etymology very frequently spelt ‘bliss’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_247_247" id="Footnote_247_247"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_247_247"><span class="label">[247]</span></a>
+[But ‘afraied’ is the earliest form of the word (1350),
+the verb itself being at first spelt ‘afray’ (1325). N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_248_248" id="Footnote_248_248"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_248_248"><span class="label">[248]</span></a>
+How close this relationship was once, not merely in
+respect of etymology, but also of significance, a passage
+like this will prove: “Perchance, as vultures are said to
+smell the earthiness of a dying corpse; so this bird of
+prey [the evil spirit which personated Samuel, 1 Sam.
+xxviii. 41] <i>resented</i> a worse than earthly savor in the soul
+of Saul, as evidence of his death at hand”. (Fuller,
+<i>The Profane State</i>, b. 5, c. 4.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_249_249" id="Footnote_249_249"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_249_249"><span class="label">[249]</span></a>
+[There is an unfortunate confusion here between
+‘heal’ to make ‘hale’ or ‘[w]hole’ (Anglo-Saxon <i>hælan</i>)
+and the old (and Provincial) English <i>hill</i>, to cover, <i>hilling</i>,
+covering, <i>hellier</i>, a slater, akin to ‘hell’, the covered
+place, ‘helm’; Icelandic <i>hylja</i>, to cover.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_250_250" id="Footnote_250_250"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_250_250"><span class="label">[250]</span></a>
+[By a curious slip Dr. Trench here confounds ‘recover’,
+to recuperate or regain health (derived through
+old French <i>recovrer</i> from Latin <i>recuperare</i>), with a totally
+distinct word <i>re-cover</i>, to cover or clothe over again,
+which comes from old French <i>covrir</i>, Latin <i>co-operire</i>.
+It is just the difference between ‘recovering’ a lost
+umbrella through the police and ‘recovering’ a torn one
+at a shop. I pointed this out to the author in 1869, and
+I think he altered the passage in his later editions.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_251_251" id="Footnote_251_251"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_251_251"><span class="label">[251]</span></a>
+[‘Island’, though cognate with Anglo-Saxon <i>eá-land</i>
+“water-land” (German <i>ei-land</i>), is really identical with
+Anglo-Saxon <i>íg-land</i>, i.e. “isle-land”, from <i>íg</i>, an island,
+the diminutive of which survives in <i>eyot</i> or <i>ait</i>.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_252_252" id="Footnote_252_252"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_252_252"><span class="label">[252]</span></a>
+[The editor essayed to make a complete collection
+of this class of words in his <i>Folk-etymology, a Dictionary
+of Words corrupted by False Derivation or Mistaken Analogy</i>,
+1882, and more recently in a condensed form in <i>The
+Folk and their Word-Lore</i>, 1904.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_253_253" id="Footnote_253_253"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_253_253"><span class="label">[253]</span></a>
+Diez looks with much favour on this process, and
+calls it, ein sinnreiches mittel fremdlinge ganz heimisch
+zu machen.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_254_254" id="Footnote_254_254"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_254_254"><span class="label">[254]</span></a>
+Ammianus Marcellinus, xxii, 15, 28.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_255_255" id="Footnote_255_255"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_255_255"><span class="label">[255]</span></a>
+[The Greek <i>pyramis</i> probably represents the Egyptian
+<i>piri-m-ûisi</i> (Maspero, <i>Dawn of Civilization</i>, 358), or
+<i>pir-am-us</i> (Brugsch, <i>Egypt under the Pharaohs</i>, i, 73),
+rather than <i>pi-ram</i>, ‘the height’ (Birch, <i>Bunsen’s Egypt</i>,
+v, 763).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_256_256" id="Footnote_256_256"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_256_256"><span class="label">[256]</span></a>
+Tacitus, <i>Hist.</i> v. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_257_257" id="Footnote_257_257"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_257_257"><span class="label">[257]</span></a>
+Let me illustrate this by further instances in a note.
+Thus <span title="Greek: boutyron">βούτυρον</span>, from which, through the Latin, our
+‘butter’ has descended to us, is borrowed (Pliny, <i>H.N.</i>
+xxviii. 9) from a Scythian word, now to us unknown:
+yet it is sufficiently plain that the Greeks so shaped and
+spelt it as to contain apparent allusion to <i>cow</i> and <i>cheese</i>;
+there is in <span title="Greek: boutyron">βούτυρον</span> an evident
+feeling after <span title="Greek: bous">βοῦς</span> and
+<span title="Greek: tyron">τυρόν</span>. Bozra, meaning citadel in Hebrew and Phœnician,
+and the name, no doubt, which the citadel of Carthage
+bore, becomes <span title="Greek: Byrsa">Βύρσα</span> on Greek lips; and then the well
+known legend of the ox-hide was invented upon the
+name; not having suggested it, but being itself suggested
+by it. Herodian (v. 6) reproduces the name of the
+Syrian goddess Astarte in a shape that is significant also
+for Greek ears&mdash;<span title="Greek: Astroarchê">Ἀστροάρχη</span>,
+The Star-ruler, or Star-queen.
+When the apostate and hellenizing Jews assumed
+Greek names, ‘Eliakim’ or “Whom God has set”,
+became ‘Alcimus’ (<span title="Greek: alkimos">ἄλκιμος</span>) or The Strong (1 Macc.
+vii. 5). Latin examples in like kind are ‘com<i>i</i>ssatio’,
+spelt continually ‘com<i>e</i>ssatio’, and ‘com<i>e</i>ssation’ by
+those who sought to naturalize it in England, as though
+it were connected with ‘cŏmedo’, to eat, being indeed
+the substantive from the verb ‘cōmissari’
+(&mdash;<span title="Greek: kômazein">κωμάζειν</span>),
+to revel, as Plutarch, whose Latin is in general not very
+accurate, long ago correctly observed; and ‘orichalcum’,
+spelt often ‘<i>au</i>richalcum’, as though it were a
+composite metal of mingled <i>gold</i> and brass; being indeed
+the <i>mountain</i> brass (<span title="Greek: oreichalkos">ὀρείχαλκος</span>). The miracle play,
+which is ‘mystère’, in French, whence our English
+‘mystery’ was originally written ‘mistère’, being properly
+derived from ‘ministère’, and having its name
+because the clergy, the <i>ministri</i> Ecclesiæ, conducted it.
+This was forgotten, and it then took its present form of
+‘mystery’, as though so called because the mysteries
+of the faith were in it set out.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_258_258" id="Footnote_258_258"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_258_258"><span class="label">[258]</span></a>
+We have here, in this bringing of the words by their
+supposed etymology together, the explanation of the fact
+that Spenser (<i>Fairy Queen</i>, i, 7, 44), Middleton (<i>Works</i>,
+vol. 5, pp. 524, 528, 538), and others employ ‘Tartary’
+as equivalent to ‘Tartarus’ or hell.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_259_259" id="Footnote_259_259"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_259_259"><span class="label">[259]</span></a>
+For a full discussion of this matter and fixing of the
+period at which ‘sinfluot’ became ‘sündflut’, see the
+<i>Theol. Stud. u. Krit.</i> vol. ii, p. 613; and Delitzsch, <i>Genesis</i>,
+2nd ed. vol. ii, p. 210.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_260_260" id="Footnote_260_260"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_260_260"><span class="label">[260]</span></a>
+[The name of the small grape, originally <i>raisins de
+Corauntz</i>, was transferred to the <i>ribes</i> in the sixteenth
+century.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_261_261" id="Footnote_261_261"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_261_261"><span class="label">[261]</span></a>
+Ben Jonson, <i>The New Inn</i>, Act i, Sc. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_262_262" id="Footnote_262_262"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_262_262"><span class="label">[262]</span></a>
+[On the contrary, it is the modern “Welsh <i>rarebit</i>”
+which has been mistakenly evolved out of the older
+“Welsh <i>rabbit</i>” as I have shown in <i>Folk-Etymology</i>,
+p. 431. Grose has both forms in his <i>Dictionary of the
+Vulgar Tongue</i>, 1785.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_263_263" id="Footnote_263_263"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_263_263"><span class="label">[263]</span></a>
+‘Leghorn’ is sometimes quoted as an example of
+this; but erroneously; for, as Admiral Smyth has shown
+(<i>The Mediterranean</i>, p. 409) ‘Livorno’ is itself rather the
+modern corruption, and ‘Ligorno’ the name found on the
+earlier charts.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_264_264" id="Footnote_264_264"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_264_264"><span class="label">[264]</span></a>
+Exactly the same happens in other languages; thus
+‘armbrust’, a crossbow, <i>looks</i> German enough, and yet
+has nothing to do with ‘arm’ or ‘brust’, being a contraction
+of ‘arcubalista’, but a contraction under these
+influences. As little has ‘abenteuer’ anything to do
+with ‘abend’ or ‘theuer’, however it may seem to be
+connected with them, being indeed the
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘Provencal’">Provençal</ins> ‘adventura’.
+And ‘weissagen’ in its earlier forms had nothing
+in common with ‘sagen’.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_265_265" id="Footnote_265_265"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_265_265"><span class="label">[265]</span></a>
+[So Diez. But Prof. Skeat and Scheler see no reason
+why it should not be direct from French <i>refuser</i> and
+Low Latin <i>refusare</i>, from <i>refusus</i>, rejected.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_266_266" id="Footnote_266_266"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_266_266"><span class="label">[266]</span></a>
+It is upon this word that De Quincey (<i>Life and
+Manners</i>, p. 70, American Ed.) says excellently well:
+“It is in fact by such corruptions, by off-sets upon an
+old stock, arising through ignorance or mispronunciation
+originally, that every language is frequently enriched;
+and new modifications of thought, unfolding themselves
+in the progress of society, generate for themselves concurrently
+appropriate expressions.... It must not
+be allowed to weigh against a word once fairly naturalized
+by all, that originally it crept in upon an abuse or a
+corruption. Prescription is as strong a ground of legitimation
+in a case of this nature, as it is in law. And the
+old axiom is applicable&mdash;Fieri non debuit, factum valet.
+Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much
+of their wealth”. [<i>Works</i>, vol. xiv., p. 201.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_267_267" id="Footnote_267_267"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_267_267"><span class="label">[267]</span></a>
+[The direct opposite is the fact. The French <i>contredanse</i>
+was borrowed from the English ‘country-dance’.
+See <i>The Folk and their Word-Lore</i>, p. 153.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_268_268" id="Footnote_268_268"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_268_268"><span class="label">[268]</span></a>
+[These words are not identical. They were in use as
+distinct words in the fifteenth century. See N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_269_269" id="Footnote_269_269"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_269_269"><span class="label">[269]</span></a>
+[Dr. Murray has shown that ‘causeway’ is not a
+corruption of ‘causey’ but a compound of that word with
+‘way’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_270_270" id="Footnote_270_270"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_270_270"><span class="label">[270]</span></a>
+[Prof. Skeat has demonstrated that the supposed
+Greek ‘rachitis’, inflammation of the back, is an ætiological
+invention to serve as etymon of ‘rickets’, the
+condition of being rickety, a purely native word. See
+also <i>Folk-Etymology</i>, 312.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_271_271" id="Footnote_271_271"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_271_271"><span class="label">[271]</span></a>
+[See <i>The Folk and their Word-Lore</i>, p. 124.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_272_272" id="Footnote_272_272"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_272_272"><span class="label">[272]</span></a>
+<i>Phars.</i> vi. 720-830.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_273_273" id="Footnote_273_273"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_273_273"><span class="label">[273]</span></a>
+Thus in a <i>Vocabulary</i>, 1475: Nigromansia dicitur
+divinatio facta <i>per nigros</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_274_274" id="Footnote_274_274"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_274_274"><span class="label">[274]</span></a>
+[Dyce believed that it was really thus derived and
+distinct from <i>pleurisy</i>, but it was evidently modelled
+upon that word (<i>Remarks on Editions of Shakespeare</i>,
+p. 218).]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_275_275" id="Footnote_275_275"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_275_275"><span class="label">[275]</span></a>
+As ‘orthography’ itself means properly “<i>right</i>
+spelling”, it might be a curious question whether it is
+permissible to speak of an <i>incorrect</i> <i>ortho</i>graphy, that is
+of a <i>wrong</i> <i>right</i>-spelling. The question which would be
+thus started is one of not unfrequent recurrence, and it
+is very worthy of observation how often, so soon as we
+take note of etymologies, this <i>contradictio in adjecto</i> is
+found to occur. I will here adduce a few examples from
+the Greek, the Latin, the German, and from our own
+tongue. Thus the Greeks having no convenient word
+to express a rider, apart from a rider <i>on a horse</i>, did not
+scruple to speak of the <i>horse</i>man (<span title="Greek: hippeus">ἱππεύς</span>) upon an <i>elephant</i>.
+They often allowed themselves in a like inaccuracy, where
+certainly there was no necessity; as in using <span title="Greek: andrias">ἀνδριάς</span> of
+the statue of a <i>woman</i>; where it would have been quite
+as easy to have used <span title="Greek: heikôn">εἱκών</span> or
+<span title="Greek: agalma">ἄγαλμα</span>. So too their
+‘table’ (<span title="Greek: trapeza">τράπεζα</span> =
+<span title="Greek: tetrapeza">τετράπεζα</span>) involved probably the
+<i>four</i> feet which commonly support one; yet they did not
+shrink from speaking of a <i>three</i>-footed table
+(<span title="Greek: tripous trapeza">τρίπους τράπεζα</span>),
+in other words, a “<i>three</i>-footed <i>four</i>-footed”; much as
+though we should speak of a “<i>three</i>-footed <i>quadru</i>ped”.
+Homer writes of a ‘hecatomb’ not of a <i>hundred</i>, but of
+twelve, oxen; and elsewhere of Hebe he says, in words
+not reproducible in English,
+<span title="Greek: nektar eônochoei">νέκταρ ἐωνοχόει</span>. ‘Tetrarchs’
+were often rulers of quite other than <i>fourth</i> parts of a
+land. <span title="Greek: Akratos">Ἀκρατος</span>
+had so come to stand for wine, without
+any thought more of its signifying originally the <i>unmingled</i>,
+that St. John speaks of
+<span title="Greek: akratos kekerasmenos">ἄκρατος κεκερασμένος</span> (Rev.
+xiv. 10), or the unmingled mingled. Boxes in which
+precious ointments were contained were so commonly of
+alabaster, that the name came to be applied to them
+whether they were so or not; and Theocritus celebrates
+“<i>golden</i> alabasters”. Cicero having to mention a water-clock
+is obliged to call it a <i>water</i> <i>sun</i>dial (solarium ex
+aquâ). Columella speaks of a “<i>vintage</i> of honey” (vindemia
+mellis), and Horace invites his friend to im<i>pede</i>, not
+his <i>foot</i>, but his head, with myrtle (<i>caput</i> im<i>ped</i>ire myrto).
+Thus too a German writer who desired to tell of the golden
+shoes with which the folly of Caligula adorned his horse
+could scarcely avoid speaking of <i>golden</i> hoof-<i>irons</i>. The
+same inner contradiction is involved in such language as
+our own, a “<i>false</i> <i>ver</i>dict”, a “<i>steel</i> <i>cuirass</i>” (‘coriacea’
+from corium, leather), “antics new” (Harrington’s
+<i>Ariosto</i>), an “<i>erroneous</i> <i>etymo</i>logy”, a “<i>corn</i> <i>chandler</i>”;
+that is, a “<i>corn</i> <i>candle</i>-maker”, “<i>rather</i> <i>late</i>”, ‘rather’
+being the comparative of ‘rathe’, early, and thus “rather
+late” being indeed “more early late”; and in others.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_276_276" id="Footnote_276_276"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_276_276"><span class="label">[276]</span></a>
+[‘Siren’ is now generally understood to have meant
+originally a songstress, from the root <i>svar</i>, to sing or
+sound, seen in <i>syrinx</i>, a flute, <i>su(r)-sur-us</i>, etc. See J.&nbsp;E.
+Harrison, <i>Myths of the Odyssey</i>, p. 175.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_277_277" id="Footnote_277_277"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_277_277"><span class="label">[277]</span></a>
+[‘Chymist’ seems to be the oldest form of the word
+in English; see N.E.D.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_278_278" id="Footnote_278_278"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_278_278"><span class="label">[278]</span></a>
+<span title="Greek: chêmia">χημία</span>, the name of Egypt; see Plutarch, <i>De Is. et
+Os.</i> c. 33.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_279_279" id="Footnote_279_279"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_279_279"><span class="label">[279]</span></a>
+We have a notable evidence how deeply rooted this
+error was, how long this confusion endured, of the way in
+which it was shared by the learned as well as the
+unlearned, in Milton’s <i>Apology for Smectymnuus</i>, sect. 7,
+which everywhere presumes the identity of the ‘satyr’
+and the ‘satirist’. It was Isaac Casaubon who first
+effectually dissipated it even for the learned world. The
+results of his investigations were made popular for the
+unlearned reader by Dryden, in the very instructive
+<i>Discourse on Satirical Poetry</i>, prefixed to his translations
+of Juvenal; but the confusion still survives, and ‘satyrs’
+and ‘satires’, the Greek ‘satyric’ drama, the Latin
+‘satirical’ poetry, are still assumed by most to have
+something to do with one another.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_280_280" id="Footnote_280_280"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_280_280"><span class="label">[280]</span></a>
+[‘Dirige’ was the first word of the antiphon at matins
+in the Office for the Dead, taken from Psalm v, 9 (Vulg.),
+in which occur the words “<i>dirige</i> in conspectu tuo vitam
+meam”. See Skeat, <i>Piers Plowman</i>, ii, 52. Hence also
+Scotch <i>dregy</i>, a dirge.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_281_281" id="Footnote_281_281"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_281_281"><span class="label">[281]</span></a>
+[Incorrect: the ‘mid-wife’ is etymologically she
+that is <i>with</i> (old English <i>mid</i>) a woman to help her in her
+hour of need, like German <i>bei-frau</i>, Spanish <i>co-madre</i>,
+Icelandic <i>naer-kona</i>, “near-woman”, Latin <i>ob-stetrix</i>,
+“by-stander”, all words for the lying-in nurse. Compare
+German <i>mit-bruder</i>, a comrade.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_282_282" id="Footnote_282_282"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_282_282"><span class="label">[282]</span></a></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">“I have seen him<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Caper upright, like a wild <i>Môrisco</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shaking the bloody darts, as he his bells”.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="citation">Shakespeare, <i>2 Henry VI</i> Act iii, Sc. 1.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_283_283" id="Footnote_283_283"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_283_283"><span class="label">[283]</span></a>
+In the reprinting of old books it is often very difficult
+to determine how far the old shape in which words present
+themselves should be retained, how far they should be
+conformed to present usage. It is comparatively easy
+to lay down as a rule that in books intended for popular
+use, wherever the form of the word is not affected by the
+modernizing of the spelling, as where this modernizing
+consists merely in the dropping of superfluous letters,
+there it shall take place; as who would wish our Bibles
+to be now printed letter for letter after the edition of
+1611, or Shakespeare with the orthography of the first
+folio; but wherever more than the spelling, the actual
+shape, outline, and character of the word has been
+affected by the changes which it has undergone, that in
+all such cases the earlier form shall be held fast. The
+rule is a judicious one; but when it is attempted to carry
+it out, it is not always easy to draw the line, and to
+determine what affects the form and essence of a word,
+and what does not. About some words there can be no
+doubt; and therefore when a modern editor of Fuller’s
+<i>Church History</i> complacently announces that he has
+allowed himself in such changes as ‘dirige’ into ‘dirge’,
+‘barreter’ into ‘barrister’, ‘synonymas’ into ‘synonymous’,
+‘extempory’ into ‘extemporary’, ‘scited’
+into ‘situated’, ‘vancurrier’ into ‘avant-courier’; he
+at the same time informs us that for all purposes of the
+study of the English language (and few writers are for
+this more important than Fuller), he has made his edition
+utterly worthless. Or again, when modern editors of
+Shakespeare print, and that without giving any intimation
+of the fact,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Like quills upon the fretful <i>porcupine</i>”,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he having written, and in his first folio and quarto the
+words standing,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“Like quills upon the fretful <i>porpentine</i>”,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>this being the earlier, and in Shakespeare’s time the more
+common form of the word [e.g. “the <i>purpentines</i> nature”
+(Puttenham, <i>Eng. Poesie</i>, 1589, p. 118, ed. Arber)], they
+must be considered as taking a very unwarrantable liberty
+with his text; and no less, when they substitute ‘Kenilworth’
+for ‘Killingworth’, which he wrote, and which was
+his, Marlowe’s, and generally the earlier form of the name.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_284_284" id="Footnote_284_284"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_284_284"><span class="label">[284]</span></a>
+[Compare Latin <i>amita</i>, yielding old French <i>ante</i>,
+<ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘oua’">our</ins> ‘aunt’.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_285_285" id="Footnote_285_285"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_285_285"><span class="label">[285]</span></a>
+“The Carthaginians shall restore and deliver back all
+the <i>renegates</i> [perfugas] and fugitives that have fled to
+their side from us”.&mdash;p. 751.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_286_286" id="Footnote_286_286"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_286_286"><span class="label">[286]</span></a>
+[See further in <i>The Folk and their Word-Lore</i>, p. 80.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_287_287" id="Footnote_287_287"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_287_287"><span class="label">[287]</span></a>
+Halbertsma quoted by Bosworth, <i>Origin of the
+English and Germanic Languages</i>, p. 39.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span></p></div>
+
+
+<hr class="chapter" />
+<h2><a name="Index" id="Index"></a>INDEX OF WORDS</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="Index">
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td class="right"><span class="smaller">PAGE</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Abenteuer</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_264_264">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Abnormal</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Abominable</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Academy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Accommodate</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Acre</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Adamant</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_230">230</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Admiralty</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Advocate</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Æon</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Æsthetic</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Afeard</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_126">126</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Affluent</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Afraid</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Afterthink</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Alcimus</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_257_257">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Alcove</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘15’"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Amphibious</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Analogie</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_49_49">56</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ant</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_253">253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Antecedents</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Anthem</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Antipodes</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_62_62">68</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Apotheosis</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>-ard</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Armbrust</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_264_264">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Arride</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ascertain</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ask</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_126">126</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Astarte</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_257_257">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Attercop</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Aurantium</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_241">241</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Aurichalcum</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_257_257">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Avunculize</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_91">91</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Axe</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_126">126</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Baffle</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Baker, bakester</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_157">157</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Banter</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">106</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Barrier</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Battalion</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_52_52">61</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bawn</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Benefice, benefit</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_97">97</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bitesheep</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Black art</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Blackguard</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_189">189</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Blasphemous</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bless</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bombast</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_199">199</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Book</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘20’"><a href="#Footnote_24_24">21</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Boor</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_202">202</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bozra</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_257_257">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Brangle</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bran-new</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Brat</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Brazen</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_164">164</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Breaden</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bruin</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Buffalo</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Butter</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_257_257">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Buxom</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_139">139</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
+Chagrin</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_95">95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chance-medley</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chanticleer</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chemist, chemistry</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_248">248</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chicken</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chouse</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_91">91</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chymist, chymistry</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_248">248</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Clawback</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Comissatio</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_257_257">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Commérage</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_204">204</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Confluent</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Congregational</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Contrary</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Corpse</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Country dance</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_242">242</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Court card</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_239">239</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Coxcomb</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cozen</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Crawfish</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Creansur</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘46’"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Criterion</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Crone, crony</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Crucible</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Crusade</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_62">62</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cuirass</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_275_275">246</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Currant</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_239">239</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cynarctomachy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_91">91</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Dahlia</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dame</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_212_212">192</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dandylion</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dearworth</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dedal</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dehort</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Demagogue</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_49_49">55</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Denominationalism</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Depot</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_69">69</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Diamond</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_230">230</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dirge</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dissimilation</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Divest</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Donat</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dorter</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_20">20</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dosones</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Doughty</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Drachm</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dragoman</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_12">12</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dub</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Duke</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dumps</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dutch</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Eame</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Earsport</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Eaves</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Educational</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Effervescence</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_49_49">55</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Einseitig</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Eliakim</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_257_257">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ell</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_251">251</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Emet</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_253">253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Emotional</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Encyclopedia</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Enfantillage</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_49_49">55</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Equivocation</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_196">196</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Erutar</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_165_165">149</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Escobarder</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_98_98">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>-ess</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_153">153</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Europe</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_224">224</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Eyebite</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Fairy</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Farfalla</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Fatherland</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Flitter-mouse</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Flota</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘16’"><a href="#Page_17">17</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Folklore</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Foolhappy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Foolhardy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Foolhasty</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Foollarge</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Foretalk</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Fougue</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Fraischeur</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Frances</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_95">95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Francis</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_95">95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Frimm</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Frivolité</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_49_49">55</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Frontispiece</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Furlong</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Gainly</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Gallon</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Galvanism</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘9’"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Garble</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_199">199</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Geir</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Gentian</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Girdle</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘20’"><a href="#Footnote_24_24">21</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Girfalcon</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_130_130">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Girl</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Glassen</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Gordian</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Gossip</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_203">203</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Great</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Grimsire</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Grocer</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Grogram</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Halfgod</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hallow</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Handbook</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hangdog</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hector</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heft</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hermetic</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hery</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hierosolyma</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_236">236</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hipocras</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hippodame</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>His</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_131">131</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hooker</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘15’"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hoppester</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hotspur</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hoyden</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Huck</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_175_175">157</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Huckster, huckstress</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_175_175">157</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hurricane</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Iceberg</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Icefield</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘73’"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Idea</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_197">197</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Imp</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘215’"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Influence</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>International</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_78">78</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Island</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Isle</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Isolated</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Isothermal</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Its</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_130">130</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Jaw</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_230">230</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Jeopardy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Kenilworth</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Footnote_283_283">253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Kindly</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_184">184</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Kirtle</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘20’"><a href="#Footnote_24_24">21</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Knave</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_207">207</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Knitster</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Knot</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Lambiner</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Footnote_98_98">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lass</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_154">154</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lazar</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Leer</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Leghorn</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_263_263">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Libel</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lifeguard</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lissome</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_140">140</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>London</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_227">227</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lunch, luncheon</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Malingerer</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mammet, mammetry</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mandragora</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mansarde</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_98_98">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Matachin</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘16’"><a href="#Page_17">17</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Matamoros</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_161_161">143</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mausoleum</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Meat</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Meddle, meddlesome</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Middler</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mid-wife</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Milken</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘162’"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mischievous</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Miscreant</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mithridate</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mixen</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Morris dance</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_251">251</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mystery, mystère</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_257_257">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Myth</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Nap</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Necromancy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Negus</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Nemorivagus</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_77_77">77</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Neophyte</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Nesh</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Niggot</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Nimm</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Noonscape</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_143_143">129</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Noonshun</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_143_143">129</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Normal</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Nostril</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_251">251</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Nugget</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Nuncheon</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Oblige</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_69">69</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Obsequies</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_241">241</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Oculissimus</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Orange</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_241">241</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Orichalcum</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_257_257">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ornamentation</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Orrery</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Orthography</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_275_275">245</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Pagan</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_202">202</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Painful, painfulness</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pandar, pandarism</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Panorama</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pasquinade</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Patch</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pate</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pease</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Peck</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pester</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_91_91">84</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Philauty</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Photography</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Physician</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pigmy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pinchpenny</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pleurisy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Plunder</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Footnote_125_125">106</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Poet</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Polite</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_200">200</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Polytheism</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Porcupine</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_283_283">253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Porpoise</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Postremissimus</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘90’"><a href="#Footnote_102_102">91</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Potecary</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Prævaricator</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_196">196</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pragmatical</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Préliber</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_49_49">56</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Preposterous</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Prestige</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_68">68</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Prevaricate</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_196">196</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Privado</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Prose, proser</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Punctilio</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Punto</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pyramid</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Quellio</td>
+  <td class="right section"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘16’"><a href="#Page_17">17</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Quinsey</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Quirpo</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Quirry</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Rakehell</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rame</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_241">241</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rathe, rathest</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Realmrape</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Recover</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_233">233</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Redingote</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_57_57">63</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Refuse</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_241">241</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Regoldar</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_165_165">149</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Religion</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_183">183</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Renegade</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Renown</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Resent</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_233">233</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Reynard</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rhyme</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Riches</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rickets</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Righteousness</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rodomontade</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rome</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_227">227</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rootfast</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rosen</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘161’"><a href="#Page_162">162</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ruly</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Runagate</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Sag</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sardanapalisme</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_98_98">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sash</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Satellites</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_61">61</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Satire, satirical</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Satyr, satyric</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Scent</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_232">232</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Schimmer</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Scrip</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_232">232</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Seamster, seamstress</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Selfish, selfishness</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sentiment</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sepoy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Serene</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Shrewd, shrewdness</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_209">209</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Silhouette</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_98_98">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Silvern</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘162’"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Silvicultrix</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_77_77">77</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Siren</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_247">247</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Skinker</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Skip</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Slick</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_132">132</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Smellfeast</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_143">143</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Smug</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Solidarity</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Songster, songstress</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sorcerer</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Spencer</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sperr</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Spheterize</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Spinner, spinster</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Starconner</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Starvation</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Starve</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Stereotype</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Stonen</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘162’"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Suckstone</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sudden</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_220">220</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Suicide</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">105</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Suicism, suist</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sündflut</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_238">238</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sunstead</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Swindler</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sycophant</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_208">208</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Tabinet</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tapster</td>
+  <td class="right"><ins class="correction" title="original reads ‘156’"><a href="#Page_157">157</a></ins></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tarre</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tartar</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_237">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tartary</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_258_258">238</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tea</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_227">227</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Theriac</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_206_206">187</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Thou</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_171">171</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Thrasonical</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tind</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tinnen</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tinsel</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tinsel-slippered</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tontine</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Topsy-turvy</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tosspot</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tram</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Treacle</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_187">187</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Trigger</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Trounce</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Turban</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Umstroke</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Uncouth</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_124">124</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Vancurrier</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Vicinage</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Villain</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Volcano</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Voltaic</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Voyage</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Wanhope</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Waterfright</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Watershed</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Weed</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Welk</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Welkin</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Welsh rabbit</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Whole</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Windflower</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Wiseacre</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Witch</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Witticism</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">106</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Witwanton</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Woburn</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_220">220</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Woodbine</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Worship</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Wörterbuch</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Yard</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Youngster</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="section">Zoology</td>
+  <td class="right section"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Zoophyte</td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Footnote_125_125">107</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h4>THE END.</h4>
+
+
+<p class="center">Butler &amp; Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.</p>
+
+<div class="tnote">
+<h3><a name="phonetic" id="phonetic"></a>Transcription of Phonetic Symbols</h3>
+
+<p>In the phonetic passage on page 222, the symbols <span title="e symbol">ɛ</span>
+and <span title="ng symbol">ŋ</span> are as in
+the original.  For the other symbols, the following transcription
+scheme has been used:</p>
+
+<table cellspacing="5" summary="phonetic symbols">
+<tr><td class="center"><b>Symbol:</b></td>
+  <td class="center"><b>Transcribed as:</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="center">
+    <img src="images/ques.png" alt="backwards question mark" title="question symbol" /></td>
+  <td class="center">¿</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="center">
+    <img src="images/i.png" alt="upside-down r with a dot over it" title="i symbol" /></td>
+  <td class="center"><span title="i symbol">ɨ</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="center"><img src="images/o.png"
+     alt="o with a loop" title="o symbol" /></td>
+  <td class="center"><span title="o symbol">ɵ</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="center"><img src="images/th.png"
+     alt="theta with a flattened left side" title="th symbol" /></td>
+  <td class="center">θ</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="center"><img src="images/dh.png"
+     alt="theta with a flattened right side" title="dh symbol" /></td>
+  <td class="center">ð</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><a href="#poem">Return to text</a></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's English Past and Present, by Richard Chenevix Trench
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: English Past and Present
+
+Author: Richard Chenevix Trench
+
+Editor: A. Smythe Palmer
+
+Release Date: March 25, 2007 [EBook #20900]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Amy Cunningham, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+{TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+All square brackets [] are from the original text. Braces {} ("curly
+brackets") are supplied by the transcriber. Characters that could not be
+displayed directly in ASCII are transcribed as follows:
+
+    {=e}  e with macron (horizontal line) above
+    {)e}  e with breve above
+    {+}   obelus (dagger) symbol
+    e/    e with acute accent (only used where the accent is necessary
+          to understanding the author's meaning)
+
+In addition, a short passage on page 222 uses unusual phonetic symbols,
+which are transcribed with letters in {braces}. The html version
+contains images of the original book's symbols.
+
+In the original book, the odd-numbered pages have unique headers,
+marked here as sidenotes.
+
+Obvious printing errors involving punctuation (such as missing single
+quotes), as well as alphabetization errors in the index, have been
+corrected without notes. Other corrections of printing errors, as well
+as notes regarding spelling variations, are listed at the end of this
+file.}
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+ENGLISH
+PAST AND PRESENT
+
+
+BY
+
+RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D.
+
+
+_Edited with Emendations_
+
+BY
+
+A. SMYTHE PALMER, D.D.
+
+
+_Author of 'The Folk and their Word-lore,' 'Folk-Etymology,'
+'Babylonian Influence on the Bible,' etc._
+
+
+{Illustration: Printer's Mark}
+
+
+LONDON
+
+GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LIMITED
+
+NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
+
+1905
+
+
+
+
+EDITOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+In editing the present volume I have thought it well to follow the same
+rule which I laid down for myself in editing _The Study of Words_, and
+have made no alteration in the text of Dr. Trench's work (the fifth
+edition). Any corrections or additions that seemed to be demanded owing
+to the progress of lexicographical knowledge have been reserved for the
+foot-notes, and these can always be distinguished from those in the
+original by the square brackets [thus] within which they are placed.
+
+On the whole more corrections have been required in _English Past and
+Present_ than in _The Study of Words_ owing to the sweeping statements
+which involve universal negatives--statements, e.g. that certain words
+either first came into use, or ceased to be employed, at a specific
+date. Nothing short of the combined researches of an army of
+co-operative workers, such as the _New English Dictionary_ commanded,
+could warrant the correctness of assertions of this kind, which imply an
+exhaustive acquaintance with a subject so immense as the entire range of
+English literature.
+
+Even the mistakes of a learned man are instructive to those who essay to
+follow in his steps, and it is not without use to point them out instead
+of ignoring or expunging them. Thus, when the Archbishop falls into the
+error (venial when he wrote) of assuming an etymological connexion
+between certain words which have a specious air of kinship--such as
+'care' and 'cura,' 'bloom' and 'blossom,' 'ghastly' and 'ghostly,'
+'brat' and 'brood,' 'slow' and 'slough'--he makes just the mistakes
+which we would be tempted to make ourselves had not Professor Skeat and
+Dr. Murray and the great German School of philologists taught us to know
+better. Our plan, therefore, has been to leave such errors in the text
+and point out the better way in the notes. In other words, we have
+treated the Archbishop's work as a classic, and the occasional
+emendations in the notes serve to mark the progress of half a century of
+etymological investigation. It is hardly necessary to point out that the
+chronological landmarks occurring here and there need an obvious
+equation of time to make them correct for the present year of grace,
+e.g. 'lately,' when it occurs, must be understood to mean at least fifty
+years ago, and a similar addition must be made to other time-points when
+they present themselves.
+
+                                          A. SMYTHE PALMER.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+
+A series of four lectures which I delivered last spring to the pupils of
+the King's College School, London, supplied the foundation to this
+present volume. These lectures, which I was obliged to prepare in haste,
+on a brief invitation, and under the pressure of other engagements,
+being subsequently enlarged and recast, were delivered in the autumn
+somewhat more nearly in their present shape to the pupils of the
+Training School, Winchester; with only those alterations, omissions and
+additions, which the difference in my hearers suggested as necessary or
+desirable. I have found it convenient to keep the lectures, as regards
+the persons presumed to be addressed, in that earlier form which I had
+sketched out at the first; and, inasmuch as it helps much to keep
+lectures vivid and real that one should have some well defined audience,
+if not actually before one, yet before the mind's eye, to suppose myself
+throughout addressing my first hearers. I have supposed myself, that is,
+addressing a body of young Englishmen, all with a fair amount of
+classical knowledge (in my explanations I have sometimes had others with
+less than theirs in my eye), not wholly unacquainted with modern
+languages; but not yet with any special designation as to their future
+work; having only as yet marked out to them the duty in general of
+living lives worthy of those who have England for their native country,
+and English for their native tongue. To lead such through a more
+intimate knowledge of this into a greater love of that, has been a
+principal aim which I have set before myself throughout.
+
+In a few places I have been obliged again to go over ground which I had
+before gone over in a little book, _On the Study of Words_; but I
+believe that I have never merely repeated myself, nor given to the
+readers of my former work and now of this any right to complain that I
+am compelling them to travel a second time by the same paths. At least
+it has been my endeavour, whenever I have found myself at points where
+the two books come necessarily into contact, that what was treated with
+any fulness before, should be here touched on more lightly; and only
+what there was slightly handled, should here be entered on at large.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    LECTURE I                                  PAGE
+    ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE                  1
+
+    LECTURE II
+    GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE                40
+
+    LECTURE III
+    DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE         113
+
+    LECTURE IV
+    CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS     176
+
+    LECTURE V
+    CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS    212
+
+    INDEX                                       257
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE
+
+
+"A very slight acquaintance with the history of our own language will
+teach us that the speech of Chaucer's age is not the speech of
+Skelton's, that there is a great difference between the language under
+Elizabeth and that under Charles the First, between that under Charles
+the First and Charles the Second, between that under Charles the Second
+and Queen Anne; that considerable changes had taken place between the
+beginning and the middle of the last century, and that Johnson and
+Fielding did not write altogether as we do now. For in the course of a
+nation's progress new ideas are evermore mounting above the horizon,
+while others are lost sight of and sink below it: others again change
+their form and aspect: others which seemed united, split into parts. And
+as it is with ideas, so it is with their symbols, words. New ones are
+perpetually coined to meet the demand of an advanced understanding, of
+new feelings that have sprung out of the decay of old ones, of ideas
+that have shot forth from the summit of the tree of our knowledge; old
+words meanwhile fall into disuse and become obsolete; others have their
+meaning narrowed and defined; synonyms diverge from each other and their
+property is parted between them; nay, whole classes of words will now
+and then be thrown overboard, as new feelings or perceptions of analogy
+gain ground. A history of the language in which all these vicissitudes
+should be pointed out, in which the introduction of every new word
+should be noted, so far as it is possible--and much may be done in this
+way by laborious and diligent and judicious research--in which such
+words as have become obsolete should be followed down to their final
+extinction, in which all the most remarkable words should be traced
+through their successive phases of meaning, and in which moreover the
+causes and occasions of these changes should be explained, such a work
+would not only abound in entertainment, but would throw more light on
+the development of the human mind than all the brainspun systems of
+metaphysics that ever were written".
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These words, which thus far are not my own, but the words of a greatly
+honoured friend and teacher, who, though we behold him now no more,
+still teaches, and will teach, by the wisdom of his writings, and the
+nobleness of his life (they are words of Archdeacon Hare), I have put in
+the forefront of my lectures; seeing that they anticipate in the way of
+masterly sketch all which I shall attempt to accomplish, and indeed draw
+out the lines of much more, to which I shall not venture so much as to
+put my hand. They are the more welcome to me, because they encourage me
+to believe that if, in choosing the English language, its past and its
+present, as the subject of that brief course of lectures which I am to
+deliver in this place, I have chosen a subject which in many ways
+transcends my powers, and lies beyond the range of my knowledge, it is
+yet one in itself of deepest interest, and of fully recognized value.
+Nor can I refrain from hoping that even with my imperfect handling, it
+is an argument which will find an answer and an echo in the hearts of
+all who hear me; which would have found this at any time; which will do
+so especially at the present. For these are times which naturally rouse
+into liveliest activity all our latent affections for the land of our
+birth. It is one of the compensations, indeed the greatest of all, for
+the wastefulness, the woe, the cruel losses of war{1}, that it causes
+and indeed compels a people to know itself a people; leading each one to
+esteem and prize most that which he has in common with his fellow
+countrymen, and not now any longer those things which separate and
+divide him from them.
+
+{Sidenote: _Love of our own Tongue_}
+
+And the love of our own language, what is it in fact, but the love of
+our country expressing itself in one particular direction? If the great
+acts of that nation to which we belong are precious to us, if we feel
+ourselves made greater by their greatness, summoned to a nobler life by
+the nobleness of Englishmen who have already lived and died, and have
+bequeathed to us a name which must not by us be made less, what exploits
+of theirs can well be nobler, what can more clearly point out their
+native land and ours as having fulfilled a glorious past, as being
+destined for a glorious future, than that they should have acquired for
+themselves and for those who come after them a clear, a strong, an
+harmonious, a noble language? For all this bears witness to
+corresponding merits in those that speak it, to clearness of mental
+vision, to strength, to harmony, to nobleness in them that have
+gradually formed and shaped it to be the utterance of their inmost life
+and being.
+
+To know of this language, the stages which it has gone through, the
+sources from which its riches have been derived, the gains which it is
+now making, the perils which have threatened or are threatening it, the
+losses which it has sustained, the capacities which may be yet latent in
+it, waiting to be evoked, the points in which it transcends other
+tongues, in which it comes short of them, all this may well be the
+object of worthy ambition to every one of us. So may we hope to be
+ourselves guardians of its purity, and not corrupters of it; to
+introduce, it may be, others into an intelligent knowledge of that, with
+which we shall have ourselves more than a merely superficial
+acquaintance; to bequeath it to those who come after us not worse than
+we received it ourselves. "Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna",--this
+should be our motto in respect at once of our country, and of our
+country's tongue.
+
+{Sidenote: _Duty to our own Tongue_}
+
+Nor shall we, I trust, any of us feel this subject to be alien or remote
+from the purposes which have brought us to study within these walls. It
+is true that we are mainly occupied here in studying other tongues than
+our own. The time we bestow upon it is small as compared with that
+bestowed on those others. And yet one of our main purposes in learning
+them is that we may better understand this. Nor ought any other to
+dispute with it the first and foremost place in our reverence, our
+gratitude, and our love. It has been well and worthily said by an
+illustrious German scholar: "The care of the national language I
+consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege
+of the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it
+the object of his unceasing concern, to preserve his language pure and
+entire, to speak it, so far as is in his power, in all its beauty and
+perfection.... A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must
+be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation
+which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half
+of her intellectual independence, and testifies her willingness to cease
+to exist"{2}.
+
+But this knowledge, like all other knowledge which is worth attaining,
+is only to be attained at the price of labour and pains. The language
+which at this day we speak is the result of processes which have been
+going forward for hundreds and for thousands of years. Nay more, it is
+not too much to affirm that processes modifying the English which at the
+present day we write and speak have been at work from the first day that
+man, being gifted with discourse of reason, projected his thought from
+out himself, and embodied and contemplated it in his word. Which things
+being so, if we would understand this language as it now is, we must
+know something of it as it has been; we must be able to measure, however
+roughly, the forces, which have been at work upon it, moulding and
+shaping it into the forms which it now wears.
+
+At the same time various prudential considerations must determine for us
+how far up we will endeavour to trace the course of its history. There
+are those who may seek to trace our language to the forests of Germany
+and Scandinavia, to investigate its relation to all the kindred tongues
+that were there spoken; again, to follow it up, till it and they are
+seen descending from an elder stock; nor once to pause, till they have
+assigned to it its place not merely in respect of that small group of
+languages which are immediately round it, but in respect of all the
+tongues and languages of the earth. I can imagine few studies of a more
+surpassing interest than this. Others, however, must be content with
+seeking such insight into their native language as may be within the
+reach of all who, unable to make this the subject of especial research,
+possessing neither that vast compass of knowledge, nor that immense
+apparatus of books, not being at liberty to dedicate to it that
+devotion almost of a life which, followed out to the full, it would
+require, have yet an intelligent interest in their mother tongue, and
+desire to learn as much of its growth and history and construction as
+may be reasonably deemed within their reach. To such as these I shall
+suppose myself to be speaking. It would be a piece of great presumption
+in me to undertake to speak to any other, or to assume any other ground
+than this for myself.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Past explains the Present_}
+
+I know there are some, who, when they are invited to enter at all upon
+the past history of the language, are inclined to make answer--"To what
+end such studies to us? Why cannot we leave them to a few antiquaries
+and grammarians? Sufficient to us to know the laws of our present
+English, to obtain an accurate acquaintance with the language as we now
+find it, without concerning ourselves with the phases through which it
+has previously past". This may sound plausible enough; and I can quite
+understand a real lover of his native tongue, who has not bestowed much
+thought upon the subject, arguing in this manner. And yet indeed such
+argument proceeds altogether on a mistake. One sufficient reason why we
+should occupy ourselves with the past of our language is, because the
+present is only intelligible in the light of the past, often of a very
+remote past indeed. There are anomalies out of number now existing in
+our language, which the pure logic of grammar is quite incapable of
+explaining; which nothing but a knowledge of its historic evolutions,
+and of the disturbing forces which have made themselves felt therein,
+will ever enable us to understand. Even as, again, unless we possess
+some knowledge of the past, it is impossible that we can ourselves
+advance a single step in the unfolding of the latent capabilities of the
+language, without the danger of committing some barbarous violation of
+its very primary laws.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The plan which I have laid down for myself, and to which I shall adhere,
+in this lecture and in those which will succeed it, is as follows. In
+this my first lecture I will ask you to consider the language as now it
+is, to decompose with me some specimens of it, to prove by these means,
+of what elements it is compact, and what functions in it these elements
+or component parts severally fulfil; nor shall I leave this subject
+without asking you to admire the happy marriage in our tongue of the
+languages of the north and south, an advantage which it alone among all
+the languages of Europe enjoys. Having thus presented to ourselves the
+body which we wish to submit to scrutiny, and having become acquainted,
+however slightly, with its composition, I shall invite you to go back
+with me, and trace some of the leading changes to which in time past it
+has been submitted, and through which it has arrived at what it now is;
+and these changes I shall contemplate under four aspects, dedicating a
+lecture to each;--changes which have resulted from the birth of new, or
+the reception of foreign, words;--changes consequent on the rejection or
+extinction of words or powers once possessed by the language;--changes
+through the altered meaning of words;--and lastly, as not unworthy of
+our attention, but often growing out of very deep roots, changes in the
+orthography of words.
+
+{Sidenote: _Alterations unobserved_}
+
+I shall everywhere seek to bring the subject down to our present time,
+and not merely call your attention to the changes which have been, but
+to those also which are now being, effected. I shall not account the
+fact that some are going on, so to speak, before our own eyes, a
+sufficient ground to excuse me from noticing them, but rather an
+additional reason for doing this. For indeed changes which are actually
+proceeding in our own time, and which we are ourselves helping to bring
+about, are the very ones which we are most likely to fail in observing.
+There is so much to hide the nature of them, and indeed their very
+existence, that, except it may be by a very few, they will often pass
+wholly unobserved. Loud and sudden revolutions attract and compel
+notice; but silent and gradual, although with issues far vaster in
+store, run their course, and it is only when their cycle is completed or
+nearly so, that men perceive what mighty transforming forces have been
+at work unnoticed in the very midst of themselves.
+
+Thus, to apply what I have just affirmed to this matter of language--how
+few aged persons, let them retain the fullest possession of their
+faculties, are conscious of any difference between the spoken language
+of their early youth, and that of their old age; that words and ways of
+using words are obsolete now, which were usual then; that many words are
+current now, which had no existence at that time. And yet it is certain
+that so it must be. A man may fairly be supposed to remember clearly and
+well for sixty years back; and it needs less than five of these sixties
+to bring us to the period of Spenser, and not more than eight to set us
+in the time of Chaucer and Wiclif. How great a change, what vast
+modifications in our language, within eight memories. No one,
+contemplating this whole term, will deny the immensity of the change.
+For all this, we may be tolerably sure that, had it been possible to
+interrogate a series of eight persons, such as together had filled up
+this time, intelligent men, but men whose attention had not been
+especially roused to this subject, each in his turn would have denied
+that there had been any change worth speaking of, perhaps any change at
+all, during his lifetime. And yet, having regard to the multitude of
+words which have fallen into disuse during these four or five hundred
+years, we are sure that there must have been some lives in this chain
+which saw those words in use at their commencement, and out of use
+before their close. And so too, of the multitude of words which have
+sprung up in this period, some, nay, a vast number, must have come into
+being within the limits of each of these lives. It cannot then be
+superfluous to direct attention to that which is actually going forward
+in our language. It is indeed that, which of all is most likely to be
+unobserved by us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With these preliminary remarks I proceed at once to the special subject
+of my lecture of to-day. And first, starting from the recognized fact
+that the English is not a simple but a composite language, made up of
+several elements, as are the people who speak it, I would suggest to you
+the profit and instruction which we might derive from seeking to
+resolve it into its component parts--from taking, that is, any passage
+of an English author, distributing the words of which it is made up
+according to the languages from which they are drawn; estimating the
+relative numbers and proportions, which these languages have severally
+lent us; as well as the character of the words which they have thrown
+into the common stock of our tongue.
+
+{Sidenote: _Proportions in English_}
+
+Thus, suppose the English language to be divided into a hundred parts;
+of these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon; thirty
+would be Latin (including of course the Latin which has come to us
+through the French); five would be Greek. We should thus have assigned
+ninety-five parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a residue,
+to be divided among all the other languages from which we have adopted
+isolated words{3}. And yet these are not few; from our wide extended
+colonial empire we come in contact with half the world; we have picked
+up words in every quarter, and, the English language possessing a
+singular power of incorporating foreign elements into itself, have not
+scrupled to make many of these our own{4}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Oriental Words_}
+
+Thus we have a certain number of Hebrew words, mostly, if not entirely,
+belonging to religious matters, as 'amen', 'cabala', 'cherub', 'ephod',
+'gehenna', 'hallelujah', 'hosanna', 'jubilee', 'leviathan', 'manna',
+'Messiah', 'sabbath', 'Satan', 'seraph', 'shibboleth', 'talmud'. The
+Arabic words in our language are more numerous; we have several
+arithmetical and astronomical terms, as 'algebra', 'almanack',
+'azimuth', 'cypher'{5}, 'nadir', 'talisman', 'zenith', 'zero'; and
+chemical, for the Arabs were the chemists, no less than the astronomers
+and arithmeticians of the middle ages; as 'alcohol', 'alembic',
+'alkali', 'elixir'. Add to these the names of animals, plants, fruits,
+or articles of merchandize first introduced by them to the notice of
+Western Europe; as 'amber', 'artichoke', 'barragan', 'camphor',
+'coffee', 'cotton', 'crimson', 'gazelle', 'giraffe', 'jar', 'jasmin',
+'lake' (lacca), 'lemon', 'lime', 'lute', 'mattress', 'mummy', 'saffron',
+'sherbet', 'shrub', 'sofa', 'sugar', 'syrup', 'tamarind'; and some
+further terms, 'admiral', 'amulet', 'arsenal', 'assassin', 'barbican',
+'caliph', 'caffre', 'carat', 'divan', 'dragoman'{6}, 'emir', 'fakir',
+'firman', 'harem', 'hazard', 'houri', 'magazine', 'mamaluke',
+'minaret', 'monsoon', 'mosque', 'nabob', 'razzia', 'sahara', 'simoom',
+'sirocco', 'sultan', 'tarif', 'vizier'; and I believe we shall have
+nearly completed the list. We have moreover a few Persian words, as
+'azure', 'bazaar', 'bezoar', 'caravan', 'caravanserai', 'chess',
+'dervish', 'lilac', 'orange', 'saraband', 'taffeta', 'tambour',
+'turban'; this last appearing in strange forms at its first introduction
+into the language, thus 'tolibant' (Puttenham), 'tulipant' (Herbert's
+_Travels_), 'turribant' (Spenser), 'turbat', 'turbant', and at length
+'turban'. We have also a few Turkish, such as 'chouse', 'janisary',
+'odalisque', 'sash', 'tulip'{7}. Of 'civet'{8} and 'scimitar'{9} I
+believe it can only be asserted that they are Eastern. The following are
+Hindostanee, 'avatar', 'bungalow', 'calico', 'chintz', 'cowrie', 'lac',
+'muslin', 'punch', 'rupee', 'toddy'. 'Tea', or 'tcha', as it was spelt
+at first, of course is Chinese, so too are 'junk' and 'satin'{10}.
+
+The New World has given us a certain number of words, Indian and
+other--'cacique' ('cassique', in Ralegh's _Guiana_), 'canoo',
+'chocolate', 'cocoa'{11}, 'condor', 'hamoc' ('hamaca' in Ralegh),
+'jalap', 'lama', 'maize' (Haytian), 'pampas', 'pemmican', 'potato'
+('batata' in our earlier voyagers), 'raccoon', 'sachem', 'squaw',
+'tobacco', 'tomahawk', 'tomata' (Mexican), 'wigwam'. If 'hurricane' is a
+word which Europe originally obtained from the Caribbean islanders{12},
+it should of course be included in this list{13}. A certain number of
+words also we have received, one by one, from various languages, which
+sometimes have not bestowed on us more than this single one. Thus
+'hussar' is Hungarian; 'caloyer', Romaic; 'mammoth', of some Siberian
+language;{14} 'tattoo', Polynesian; 'steppe', Tartarian; 'sago',
+'bamboo', 'rattan', 'ourang outang', are all, I believe, Malay words;
+'assegai'{15} 'zebra', 'chimpanzee', 'fetisch', belong to different
+African dialects; the last, however, having reached Europe through the
+channel of the Portuguese{16}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Italian Words_}
+
+{Sidenote: _Spanish, Dutch and Celtic Words_}
+
+To come nearer home--we have a certain number of Italian words, as
+'balcony', 'baldachin', 'balustrade', 'bandit', 'bravo', 'bust' (it was
+'busto' as first used in English, and therefore from the Italian, not
+from the French), 'cameo', 'canto', 'caricature', 'carnival', 'cartoon',
+'charlatan', 'concert', 'conversazione', 'cupola', 'ditto', 'doge',
+'domino'{17}, 'felucca', 'fresco', 'gazette', 'generalissimo',
+'gondola', 'gonfalon', 'grotto', ('grotta' is the earliest form in which
+we have it in English), 'gusto', 'harlequin'{18}, 'imbroglio',
+'inamorato', 'influenza', 'lava', 'malaria', 'manifesto', 'masquerade'
+('mascarata' in Hacket), 'motto', 'nuncio', 'opera', 'oratorio',
+'pantaloon', 'parapet', 'pedantry', 'pianoforte', 'piazza', 'portico',
+'proviso', 'regatta', 'ruffian', 'scaramouch', 'sequin', 'seraglio',
+'sirocco', 'sonnet', 'stanza', 'stiletto', 'stucco', 'studio',
+'terra-cotta', 'umbrella', 'virtuoso', 'vista', 'volcano', 'zany'.
+'Becco', and 'cornuto', 'fantastico', 'magnifico', 'impress' (the
+armorial device upon shields, and appearing constantly in its Italian
+form 'impresa'), 'saltimbanco' (=mountebank), all once common enough,
+are now obsolete. Sylvester uses often 'farfalla' for butterfly, but, as
+far as I know, this use is peculiar to him. If these are at all the
+whole number of our Italian words, and I cannot call to mind any other,
+the Spanish in the language are nearly as numerous; nor indeed would it
+be wonderful if they were more so; our points of contact with Spain,
+friendly and hostile, have been much more real than with Italy. Thus we
+have from the Spanish 'albino', 'alligator' (el lagarto), 'alcove'{19},
+'armada', 'armadillo', 'barricade', 'bastinado', 'bravado', 'caiman',
+'cambist', 'camisado', 'carbonado', 'cargo', 'cigar', 'cochineal',
+'Creole', 'desperado', 'don', 'duenna', 'eldorado', 'embargo',
+'flotilla', 'gala', 'grandee', 'grenade', 'guerilla', 'hooker'{20},
+'infanta', 'jennet', 'junto', 'merino', 'mosquito', 'mulatto', 'negro',
+'olio', 'ombre', 'palaver', 'parade', 'parasol', 'parroquet',
+'peccadillo', 'picaroon', 'platina', 'poncho', 'punctilio', (for a long
+time spelt 'puntillo', in English books), 'quinine', 'reformado',
+'savannah', 'serenade', 'sherry', 'stampede', 'stoccado', 'strappado',
+'tornado', 'vanilla', 'verandah'. 'Buffalo' also is Spanish; 'buff' or
+'buffle' being the proper English word; 'caprice' too we probably
+obtained rather from Spain than Italy, as we find it written 'capricho'
+by those who used it first. Other Spanish words, once familiar, are now
+extinct. 'Punctilio' lives on, but not 'punto', which occurs in Bacon.
+'Privado', signifying a prince's favourite, one admitted to his
+_privacy_ (no uncommon word in Jeremy Taylor and Fuller), has quite
+disappeared; so too has 'quirpo' (cuerpo), the name given to a jacket
+fitting close to the _body_; 'quellio' (cuello), a ruff or _neck_-collar;
+and 'matachin', the title of a sword-dance; these are all frequent in
+our early dramatists; and 'flota' was the constant name of the
+treasure-fleet from the Indies. 'Intermess' is employed by Evelyn, and
+is the Spanish 'entremes', though not recognized as such in our
+dictionaries. 'Mandarin' and 'marmalade' are our only Portuguese words I
+can call to mind. A good many of our sea-terms are Dutch, as 'sloop',
+'schooner', 'yacht', 'boom', 'skipper', 'tafferel', 'to smuggle'; 'to
+wear', in the sense of veer, as when we say '_to wear_ a ship';
+'skates', too, and 'stiver', are Dutch. Celtic _things_ are for the most
+part designated among us by Celtic words; such as 'bard', 'kilt',
+'clan', 'pibroch', 'plaid', 'reel'. Nor only such as these, which are
+all of them comparatively of modern introduction, but a considerable
+number, how large a number is yet a very unsettled question, of words
+which at a much earlier date found admission into our tongue, are
+derived from this quarter.
+
+Now, of course, I have no right to presume that any among us are
+equipped with that knowledge of other tongues, which shall enable us to
+detect of ourselves and at once the nationality of all or most of the
+words which we may meet--some of them greatly disguised, and having
+undergone manifold transformations in the process of their adoption
+among us; but only that we have such helps at command in the shape of
+dictionaries and the like, and so much diligence in their use, as will
+enable us to discover the quarter from which the words we may encounter
+have reached us; and I will confidently say that few studies of the
+kind will be more fruitful, will suggest more various matter of
+reflection, will more lead you into the secrets of the English tongue,
+than an analysis of a certain number of passages drawn from different
+authors, such as I have just now proposed. For this analysis you will
+take some passage of English verse or prose--say the first ten lines of
+_Paradise Lost_--or the Lord's Prayer--or the 23rd Psalm; you will
+distribute the whole body of words contained in that passage, of course
+not omitting the smallest, according to their nationalities--writing, it
+may be, A over every Anglo-Saxon word, L over every Latin, and so on
+with the others, if any other should occur in the portion which you have
+submitted to this examination. When this is done, you will count up the
+_number_ of those which each language contributes; again, you will note
+the _character_ of the words derived from each quarter.
+
+{Sidenote: _Two Shapes of Words_}
+
+Yet here, before I pass further, I would observe in respect of those
+which come from the Latin, that it will be desirable further to mark
+whether they are directly from it, and such might be marked L1, or only
+mediately from it, and to us directly from the French, which would be
+L2, or L at second hand--our English word being only in the second
+generation descended from the Latin, not the child, but the child's
+child. There is a rule that holds pretty constantly good, by which you
+may determine this point. It is this,--that if a word be directly from
+the Latin, it will not have undergone any alteration or modification in
+its form and shape, save only in the termination--'innocentia' will
+have become 'innocency', 'natio' will have become 'nation',
+'firmamentum' 'firmament', but nothing more. On the other hand, if it
+comes _through_ the French, it will generally be considerably altered in
+its passage. It will have undergone a process of lubrication; its
+sharply defined Latin outline will in good part have departed from it;
+thus 'crown' is from 'corona', but though 'couronne', and itself a
+dissyllable, 'coroune', in our earlier English; 'treasure' is from
+'thesaurus', but through 'tresor'; 'emperor' is the Latin 'imperator',
+but it was first 'empereur'. It will often happen that the substantive
+has past through this process, having reached us through the
+intervention of the French; while we have only felt at a later period
+our want of the adjective also, which we have proceeded to borrow direct
+from the Latin. Thus, 'people' is indeed 'populus', but it was 'peuple'
+first, while 'popular' is a direct transfer of a Latin vocable into our
+English glossary. So too 'enemy' is 'inimicus', but it was first
+softened in the French, and had its Latin physiognomy to a great degree
+obliterated, while 'inimical' is Latin throughout; 'parish' is
+'paroisse', but 'parochial' is 'parochialis'; 'chapter' is 'chapitre',
+but 'capitular' is 'capitularis'.
+
+{Sidenote: _Doublets_}
+
+Sometimes you will find in English what I may call the double adoption
+of a Latin word; which now makes part of our vocabulary in two shapes;
+'doppelgaengers' the Germans would call such words{21}. There is first
+the elder word, which the French has given us; but which, before it
+gave, it had fashioned and moulded, cutting it short, it may be, by a
+syllable or more, for the French devours letters and syllables; and
+there is the later word which we borrowed immediately from the Latin. I
+will mention a few examples; 'secure' and 'sure', both from 'securus',
+but one directly, the other through the French; 'fidelity' and 'fealty',
+both from 'fidelitas', but one directly, the other at second-hand;
+'species' and 'spice', both from 'species', spices being properly only
+_kinds_ of aromatic drugs; 'blaspheme' and 'blame', both from
+'blasphemare'{22}, but 'blame' immediately from 'blamer'. Add to these
+'granary' and 'garner'; 'captain' (capitaneus) and 'chieftain';
+'tradition' and 'treason'; 'abyss' and 'abysm'; 'regal' and 'royal';
+'legal' and 'loyal'; 'cadence' and 'chance'; 'balsam' and 'balm';
+'hospital' and 'hotel'; 'digit' and 'doit'{23}; 'pagan' and 'paynim';
+'captive' and 'caitiff'; 'persecute' and 'pursue'; 'superficies' and
+'surface'; 'faction' and 'fashion'; 'particle' and 'parcel';
+'redemption' and 'ransom'; 'probe' and 'prove'; 'abbreviate' and
+'abridge'; 'dormitory' and 'dortoir' or 'dorter' (this last now
+obsolete, but not uncommon in Jeremy Taylor); 'desiderate' and 'desire';
+'fact' and 'feat'; 'major' and 'mayor'; 'radius' and 'ray'; 'pauper'
+and 'poor'; 'potion' and 'poison'; 'ration' and 'reason'; 'oration' and
+'orison'{24}. I have, in the instancing of these named always the Latin
+form before the French; but the reverse I suppose in every instance is
+the order in which the words were adopted by us; we had 'pursue' before
+'persecute', 'spice' before 'species', 'royalty' before 'regality', and
+so with the others{25}.
+
+The explanation of this greater change which the earlier form of the
+word has undergone, is not far to seek. Words which have been introduced
+into a language at an early period, when as yet writing is rare, and
+books are few or none, when therefore orthography is unfixed, or being
+purely phonetic, cannot properly be said to exist at all, such words for
+a long while live orally on the lips of men, before they are set down in
+writing; and out of this fact it is that we shall for the most part find
+them reshaped and remoulded by the people who have adopted them,
+entirely assimilated to _their_ language in form and termination, so as
+in a little while to be almost or quite indistinguishable from natives.
+On the other hand a most effectual check to this process, a process
+sometimes barbarizing and defacing, however it may be the only one which
+will make the newly brought in entirely homogeneous with the old and
+already existing, is imposed by the existence of a much written language
+and a full formed literature. The foreign word, being once adopted into
+these, can no longer undergo a thorough transformation. For the most
+part the utmost which use and familiarity can do with it now, is to
+cause the gradual dropping of the foreign termination. Yet this too is
+not unimportant; it often goes far to making a home for a word, and
+hindering it from wearing the appearance of a foreigner and
+stranger{26}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Analysis of English_}
+
+But to return from this digression--I said just now that you would learn
+very much from observing and calculating the proportions in which the
+words of one descent and those of another occur in any passage which you
+analyse. Thus examine the Lord's Prayer. It consists of exactly seventy
+words. You will find that only the following six claim the rights of
+Latin citizenship--'trespasses', 'trespass', 'temptation', 'deliver',
+'power', 'glory'. Nor would it be very difficult to substitute for any
+one of these a Saxon word. Thus for 'trespasses' might be substituted
+'sins'; for 'deliver' 'free'; for 'power' 'might'; for 'glory'
+'brightness'; which would only leave 'temptation', about which there
+could be the slightest difficulty, and 'trials', though we now ascribe
+to the word a somewhat different sense, would in fact exactly correspond
+to it. This is but a small percentage, six words in seventy, or less
+than ten in the hundred; and we often light upon a still smaller
+proportion. Thus take the first three verses of the 23rd Psalm:--"The
+Lord is my Shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing; He shall feed me in a
+green _pasture_, and lead me forth beside the waters of _comfort_; He
+shall _convert_ my soul, and bring me forth in the paths of
+righteousness for his Name's sake". Here are forty-five words, and only
+the three in italics are Latin; and for every one of these too it would
+be easy to substitute a word of Saxon origin; little more, that is, than
+the proportion of seven in the hundred; while, still stronger than this,
+in five verses out of Genesis, containing one hundred and thirty words,
+there are only five not Saxon, less, that is, than four in the hundred.
+
+Shall we therefore conclude that these are the proportions in which the
+Anglo-Saxon and Latin elements of the language stand to one another? If
+they are so, then my former proposal to express their relations by sixty
+and thirty was greatly at fault; and seventy and twenty, or even eighty
+and ten, would fall short of adequately representing the real
+predominance of the Saxon over the Latin element of the language. But it
+is not so; the Anglo-Saxon words by no means outnumber the Latin in the
+degree which the analysis of those passages would seem to imply. It is
+not that there are so many more Anglo-Saxon words, but that the words
+which there are, being words of more primary necessity, do therefore so
+much more frequently recur. The proportions which the analysis of the
+_dictionary_ that is, of the language _at rest_, would furnish, are very
+different from these which I have just instanced, and which the analysis
+of _sentences_, or of the language _in motion_, gives. Thus if we
+examine the total vocabulary of the English Bible, not more than sixty
+per cent. of the words are native; such are the results which the
+Concordance gives; but in the actual translation the native words are
+from ninety in some passages to ninety-six in others per cent{27}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon the Base of English_}
+
+The notice of this fact will lead us to some very important conclusions
+as to the _character_ of the words which the Saxon and the Latin
+severally furnish; and principally to this:--that while the English
+language is thus compact in the main of these two elements, we must not
+for all this regard these two as making, one and the other, exactly the
+same _kind_ of contributions to it. On the contrary their contributions
+are of very different character. The Anglo-Saxon is not so much, as I
+have just called it, one element of the English language, as the
+foundation of it, the basis. All its joints, its whole _articulation_,
+its sinews and its ligaments, the great body of articles, pronouns,
+conjunctions, prepositions, numerals, auxiliary verbs, all smaller words
+which serve to knit together and bind the larger into sentences, these,
+not to speak of the grammatical structure of the language, are
+exclusively Saxon. The Latin may contribute its tale of bricks, yea, of
+goodly and polished hewn stones, to the spiritual building; but the
+mortar, with all that holds and binds the different parts of it
+together, and constitutes them into a house, is Saxon throughout. I
+remember Selden in his _Table Talk_ using another comparison; but to the
+same effect: "If you look upon the language spoken in the Saxon time,
+and the language spoken now, you will find the difference to be just as
+if a man had a cloak which he wore plain in Queen Elizabeth's days, and
+since, here has put in a piece of red, and there a piece of blue, and
+here a piece of green, and there a piece of orange-tawny. We borrow
+words from the French, Italian, Latin, as every pedantic man pleases".
+
+{Sidenote: _Composite Languages_}
+
+I believe this to be the law which holds good in respect of all
+composite languages. However composite they may be, yet they are only so
+in regard of their words. There may be a medley in respect of these,
+some coming from one quarter, some from another; but there is never a
+mixture of grammatical forms and inflections. One or other language
+entirely predominates here, and everything has to conform and
+subordinate itself to the laws of this ruling and ascendant language.
+The Anglo-Saxon is the ruling language in our present English. Thus
+while it has thought good to drop its genders, even so the French
+substantives which come among us, must also leave theirs behind them; as
+in like manner the French verbs must renounce their own conjugations,
+and adapt themselves to ours{28}. I believe that a remarkable parallel
+to this might be found in the language of Persia, since the conquest of
+that country by the Arabs. The ancient Persian religion fell with the
+government, but the language remained totally unaffected by the
+revolution, in its grammatical structure and character. Arabic vocables,
+the only exotic words in Persian, are found in numbers varying with the
+object and quality, style and taste of the writers, but pages of pure
+idiomatic Persian may be written without employing a single word from
+the Arabic.
+
+At the same time the secondary or superinduced language, even while it
+is quite unable to force any of its forms on the language which receives
+its words, may yet compel that to renounce a portion of its own forms,
+by the impossibility which is practically found to exist of making them
+fit the new comers; and thus it may exert although not a positive, yet a
+negative, influence on the grammar of the other tongue. It has been so,
+as is generally admitted, in the instance of our own. "When the English
+language was inundated by a vast influx of French words, few, if any,
+French forms were received into its grammar; but the Saxon forms soon
+dropped away, because they did not suit the new roots; and the genius of
+the language, from having to deal with the newly imported words in a
+rude state, was induced to neglect the inflections of the native ones.
+This for instance led to the introduction of the _s_ as the universal
+termination of all plural nouns, which agreed with the usage of the
+French language, and was not alien from that of the Saxon, but was
+merely an extension of the termination of the ancient masculine to other
+classes of nouns"{29}.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Anglo-Saxon Element_}
+
+If you wish to convince yourselves by actual experience, of the fact
+which I just now asserted, namely, that the radical constitution of the
+language is Saxon, I would say, Try to compose a sentence, let it be
+only of ten or a dozen words, and the subject entirely of your choice,
+employing therein only words which are of a Latin derivation. I venture
+to say you will find it impossible, or next to impossible to do it;
+whichever way you turn, some obstacle will meet you in the face. And
+while it is thus with the Latin, whole pages might be written, I do not
+say in philosophy or theology or upon any abstruser subject, but on
+familiar matters of common everyday life, in which every word should be
+of Saxon extraction, not one of Latin; and these, pages in which, with
+the exercise of a little patience and ingenuity, all appearance of
+awkwardness and constraint should be avoided, so that it should never
+occur to the reader, unless otherwise informed, that the writer had
+submitted himself to this restraint and limitation in the words which he
+employed, and was only drawing them from one section of the English
+language. Sir Thomas Browne has given several long paragraphs so
+constructed. Take for instance the following, which is only a little
+fragment of one of them: "The first and foremost step to all good works
+is the dread and fear of the Lord of heaven and earth, which through
+the Holy Ghost enlighteneth the blindness of our sinful hearts to tread
+the ways of wisdom, and lead our feet into the land of blessing"{30}.
+This is not stiffer than the ordinary English of his time. I would
+suggest to you at your leisure to make these two experiments; you will
+find it, I think, exactly as I have here affirmed.
+
+While thus I bring before you the fact that it would be quite possible
+to write English, forgoing altogether the use of the Latin portion of
+the language, I would not have you therefore to conclude that this
+portion of the language is of little value, or that we could draw from
+the resources of our Teutonic tongue efficient substitutes for all the
+words which it has contributed to our glossary. I am persuaded that we
+could not; and, if we could, that it would not be desirable. I mention
+this, because there is sometimes a regret expressed that we have not
+kept our language more free from the admixture of Latin, a suggestion
+made that we should even now endeavour to keep under the Latin element
+of it, and as little as possible avail ourselves of it. I remember Lord
+Brougham urging upon the students at Glasgow as a help to writing good
+English, that they should do their best to rid their diction of
+long-tailed words in 'osity' and 'ation'{31}. He plainly intended to
+indicate by this phrase all learned Latin words, or words derived from
+the Latin. This exhortation is by no means superfluous; for doubtless
+there were writers of a former age, Samuel Johnson in the last century,
+Henry More and Sir Thomas Browne in the century preceding, who gave
+undue preponderance to the learned, or Latin, portion in our language;
+and very much of its charm, of its homely strength and beauty, of its
+most popular and truest idioms, would have perished from it, had they
+succeeded in persuading others to write as they had written.
+
+{Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon Aboriginal_}
+
+But for all this we could _almost_ as ill spare this side of the
+language as the other. It represents and supplies needs not less real
+than the other does. Philosophy and science and the arts of a high
+civilization find their utterance in the Latin words of our language,
+or, if not in the Latin, in the Greek, which for present purposes may be
+grouped with them. How they should have found utterance in the speech of
+rude tribes, which, never having cultivated the things, must needs have
+been without the words which should express those things. Granting too
+that, _coeteris paribus_, when a Latin and a Saxon word offer themselves
+to our choice, we shall generally do best to employ the Saxon, to speak
+of 'happiness' rather than 'felicity', 'almighty' rather than
+'omnipotent', a 'forerunner' rather than a 'precursor', still these
+latter must be regarded as much denizens in the language as the former,
+no alien interlopers, but possessing the rights of citizenship as fully
+as the most Saxon word of them all. One part of the language is not to
+be favoured at the expense of the other; the Saxon at the cost of the
+Latin, as little as the Latin at the cost of the Saxon. "Both are
+indispensable; and speaking generally without stopping to distinguish as
+to subject, both are _equally_ indispensable. Pathos, in situations
+which are homely, or at all connected with domestic affections,
+naturally moves by Saxon words. Lyrical emotion of every kind, which (to
+merit the name of _lyrical_) must be in the state of flux and reflux,
+or, generally, of agitation, also requires the Saxon element of our
+language. And why? Because the Saxon is the aboriginal element; the
+basis and not the superstructure: consequently it comprehends all the
+ideas which are natural to the heart of man and to the elementary
+situations of life. And although the Latin often furnishes us with
+duplicates of these ideas, yet the Saxon, or monosyllabic part, has the
+advantage of precedency in our use and knowledge; for it is the language
+of the nursery whether for rich or poor, in which great philological
+academy no toleration is given to words in 'osity' or 'ation'. There is
+therefore a great advantage, as regards the consecration to our
+feelings, settled by usage and custom upon the Saxon strands in the
+mixed yarn of our native tongue. And universally, this may be
+remarked--that wherever the passion of a poem is of that sort which
+_uses_, _presumes_, or _postulates_ the ideas, without seeking to extend
+them, Saxon will be the 'cocoon' (to speak by the language applied to
+silk-worms), which the poem spins for itself. But on the other hand,
+where the motion of the feeling is _by_ and _through_ the ideas, where
+(as in religious or meditative poetry--Young's, for instance, or
+Cowper's), the pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of
+the thinking, there the Latin will predominate; and so much so that,
+whilst the flesh, the blood, and the muscle, will be often almost
+exclusively Latin, the articulations only, or hinges of connection, will
+be the Anglo-Saxon".
+
+These words which I have just quoted are De Quincey's--whom I must needs
+esteem the greatest living master of our English tongue. And on the same
+matter Sir Francis Palgrave has expressed himself thus: "Upon the
+languages of Teutonic origin the Latin has exercised great influence,
+but most energetically on our own. The very early admixture of the
+_Langue d'Oil_, the never interrupted employment of the French as the
+language of education, and the nomenclature created by the scientific
+and literary cultivation of advancing and civilized society, have
+Romanized our speech; the warp may be Anglo-Saxon, but the woof is Roman
+as well as the embroidery, and these foreign materials have so entered
+into the texture, that were they plucked out, the web would be torn to
+rags, unravelled and destroyed"{32}.
+
+{Sidenote: _The English Bible_}
+
+I do not know where we could find a happier example of the preservation
+of the golden mean in this matter than in our Authorized Version of the
+Bible. One of the chief among the minor and secondary blessings which
+that Version has conferred on the nation or nations drawing spiritual
+life from it,--a blessing not small in itself, but only small by
+comparison with the infinitely higher blessings whereof it is the
+vehicle to them,--is the happy wisdom, the instinctive tact, with which
+its authors have steered between any futile mischievous attempt to
+ignore the full rights of the Latin part of the language on the one
+side, and on the other any burdening of their Version with such a
+multitude of learned Latin terms as should cause it to forfeit its
+homely character, and shut up large portions of it from the
+understanding of plain and unlearned men. There is a remarkable
+confession to this effect, to the wisdom, in fact, which guided them
+from above, to the providence that overruled their work, an honourable
+acknowledgement of the immense superiority in this respect of our
+English Version over the Romish, made by one now, unhappily, familiar
+with the latter, as once he was with our own. Among those who have
+recently abandoned the communion of the English Church one has exprest
+himself in deeply touching tones of lamentation over all, which in
+renouncing our translation, he feels himself to have forgone and lost.
+These are his words: "Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and
+marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the great
+strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the ear, like a music
+that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the
+convert hardly knows how he can forgo. Its felicities often seem to be
+almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind,
+and the anchor of national seriousness.... The memory of the dead passes
+into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its
+verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden
+beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and
+all that there has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and
+penitent and good speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible.... It
+is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never
+soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant
+with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is
+not in his Saxon Bible"{33}.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Rhemish Bible_}
+
+Such are his touching words; and certainly one has only to compare this
+version of ours with the Rhemish, and the transcendent excellence of our
+own reveals itself at once. I am not extolling now its superior
+scholarship; its greater freedom from by-ends; as little would I urge
+the fact that one translation is from the original Greek, the other from
+the Latin Vulgate, and thus the translation of a translation, often
+reproducing the mistakes of that translation; but, putting aside all
+considerations such as these, I speak only here of the superiority of
+the diction in which the meaning, be it correct or incorrect, is
+conveyed to English readers. Thus I open the Rhemish version at
+Galatians v. 19, where the long list of the "works of the flesh", and of
+the "fruit of the Spirit", is given. But what could a mere English
+reader make of words such as these--'impudicity', 'ebrieties',
+'comessations', 'longanimity', all which occur in that passage? while
+our Version for 'ebrieties' has 'drunkenness', for 'comessations' has
+'revellings', and so also for 'longanimity' 'longsuffering'. Or set over
+against one another such phrases as these,--in the Rhemish, "the
+exemplars of the celestials" (Heb. ix. 23), but in ours, "the patterns
+of things in the heavens". Or suppose if, instead of the words _we_ read
+at Heb. xiii. 16, namely "To do good and to communicate forget not; for
+with such sacrifices God is well pleased", we read as follows, which are
+the words of the Rhemish, "Beneficence and communication do not forget;
+for with such hosts God is promerited"!--Who does not feel that if our
+Version had been composed in such Latin-English as this, had abounded in
+words like 'odible', 'suasible', 'exinanite', 'contristate',
+'postulations', 'coinquinations', 'agnition', 'zealatour', all, with
+many more of the same mint, in the Rhemish Version, our loss would have
+been great and enduring, one which would have searched into the whole
+religious life of our people, and been felt in the very depths of the
+national mind{34}?
+
+There was indeed something still deeper than love of sound and genuine
+English at work in our Translators, whether they were conscious of it or
+not, which hindered them from presenting the Scriptures to their
+fellow-countrymen dressed out in such a semi-Latin garb as this. The
+Reformation, which they were in this translation so mightily
+strengthening and confirming, was just a throwing off, on the part of
+the Teutonic nations, of that everlasting pupilage in which Rome would
+have held them; an assertion at length that they were come to full age,
+and that not through her, but directly through Christ, they would
+address themselves unto God. The use of the Latin language as the
+language of worship, as the language in which the Scriptures might alone
+be read, had been the great badge of servitude, even as the Latin habits
+of thought and feeling which it promoted had been the great helps to the
+continuance of this servitude, through long ages. It lay deep then in
+the very nature of their cause that the Reformers should develop the
+Saxon, or essentially national, element in the language; while it was
+just as natural that the Roman Catholic translators, if they must
+translate the Scriptures into English at all, should yet translate them
+into such English as should bear the nearest possible resemblance to the
+Latin Vulgate, which Rome with a very deep wisdom of this world would
+gladly have seen as the only one in the hands of the faithful.
+
+{Sidenote: _Future of the English Language_}
+
+Let me again, however, recur to the fact that what our Reformers did in
+this matter, they did without exaggeration; even as they had shown the
+same wise moderation in still higher matters. They gave to the Latin
+side of the language its rights, though they would not suffer it to
+encroach upon and usurp those of the Teutonic part of the language. It
+would be difficult not to believe, even if many outward signs said not
+the same, that great things are in store for the one language of Europe
+which thus serves as connecting link between the North and the South,
+between the languages spoken by the Teutonic nations of the North and by
+the Romance nations of the South; which holds on to and partakes of
+both; which is as a middle term between them{35}. There are who venture
+to hope that the English Church, being in like manner double-fronted,
+looking on the one side toward Rome, being herself truly Catholic,
+looking on the other towards the Protestant communions, being herself
+also protesting and reforming, may yet in the providence of God have an
+important part to play for the reconciling of a divided Christendom. And
+if this ever should be so, if, notwithstanding our sins and unworthiness,
+so blessed a task should be in store for her, it will not be a small
+help and assistance thereunto, that the language in which her mediation
+will be effected is one wherein both parties may claim their own, in
+which neither will feel that it is receiving the adjudication of a
+stranger, of one who must be an alien from its deeper thoughts and
+habits, because an alien from its words, but a language in which both
+must recognize very much of that which is deepest and most precious of
+their own.
+
+{Sidenote: _Jacob Grimm on English_}
+
+Nor is this prerogative which I have just claimed for our English the
+mere dream and fancy of patriotic vanity. The scholar who in our days is
+most profoundly acquainted with the great group of the Gothic languages
+in Europe, and a devoted lover, if ever there was such, of his native
+German, I mean Jacob Grimm, has expressed himself very nearly to the
+same effect, and given the palm over all to our English in words which
+you will not grudge to hear quoted, and with which I shall bring this
+lecture to a close. After ascribing to our language "a veritable power
+of expression, such as perhaps never stood at the command of any other
+language of men", he goes on to say, "Its highly spiritual genius, and
+wonderfully happy development and condition, have been the result of a
+surprisingly intimate union of the two noblest languages in modern
+Europe, the Teutonic and the Romance--It is well known in what relation
+these two stand to one another in the English tongue; the former
+supplying in far larger proportion the material groundwork, the latter
+the spiritual conceptions. In truth the English language, which by no
+mere accident has produced and upborne the greatest and most predominant
+poet of modern times, as distinguished from the ancient classical poetry
+(I can, of course, only mean Shakespeare), may with all right be called
+a world-language; and like the English people, appears destined
+hereafter to prevail with a sway more extensive even than its present
+over all the portions of the globe{36}. For in wealth, good sense, and
+closeness of structure no other of the languages at this day spoken
+deserves to be compared with it--not even our German, which is torn,
+even as we are torn, and must first rid itself of many defects, before
+it can enter boldly into the lists, as a competitor with the
+English"{37}.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{1} These lectures were first delivered during the Russian War. [See De
+    Quincey to the same effect, _Works_, 1862, vol. iv. pp. vii, 286.]
+
+{2} F. Schlegel, _History of Literature, Lecture 10_.
+
+{3} [If dictionary words be counted as apart from the spoken language,
+    the proportion of the component elements of English is very
+    different. M. Mueller quotes a calculation which makes the classical
+    element about 68 per cent, the Teutonic about 30, and miscellaneous
+    about 2 (_Science of Language_, 8th ed. i, 89). See Skeat,
+    _Principles of Eng. Etymology_, ii, 15 _seq._, and _infra_ p. 25.]
+
+{4} [What here follows should be compared with the fuller and more
+    accurate lists of words borrowed from foreign sources given by Prof.
+    Skeat in his larger _Etymolog. Dictionary_, 759 _seq._; and more
+    completely in his _Principles of Eng. Etymology_, 2nd ser. 294-440.]
+
+{5} Yet see J. Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_, p. 985.
+
+{6} The word hardly deserves to be called English, yet in Pope's time it
+    had made some progress toward naturalization. Of a real or pretended
+    polyglottist, who might thus have served as an universal
+    _interpreter_, he says:
+
+        "Pity you was not _druggerman_ at Babel".
+
+    'Truckman', or more commonly 'truchman', familiar to all readers of
+    our early literature, is only another form of this, one which
+    probably has come to us through 'turcimanno', the Italian form of
+    the word. [See my _Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 19].
+
+{7} ['Tulip', at first spelt _tulipan_, is really the same word as
+    _turban_ (_tulipant_ just above), which the flower was thought to
+    resemble (Persian _dulband_).]
+
+{8} [Ultimately from the Arabic _zab{-a}d_ (N.E.D.).]
+
+{9} [Apparently to be traced to the Persian _shim-shir_ or _sham-shir_
+    ("lion's-nail"), a crooked sword (Skeat).]
+
+{10} [Rather through the French from low Latin _satinus_ or _setinus_, a
+     fabric made of _seta_, silk. But Yule holds that it may be from
+     Zayton or Zaitun (in Fokien, China), an important emporium of
+     Western trade in the Middle Ages (_Hobson-Jobson_, 602).]
+
+{11} [Probably intended for _cacao_, which is Mexican. _Cocoa_, the nut,
+     is from Portuguese _coco_.]
+
+{12} See Washington Irving, _Life and Voyages of Columbus_, b. 8, c. 9.
+
+{13} [It is from the Haytian _Hurakan_, the storm-god (_The Folk and
+     their Word-Lore_, 90).]
+
+{14} [From old Russian _mammot_, whence modern Russian _mamant_.]
+
+{15} ['Assagai' is from the Arabic _az-_ (_al-_) _zagh{-a}yah_, 'the
+     _zag{-a}yah_', a Berber name for a lance (N.E.D.).]
+
+{16} [This puts the cart before the horse. 'Fetish' is really the
+     Portuguese word _feitico_, artificial, made-up, factitious (Latin
+     _factitius_), applied to African amulets or idols.]
+
+{17} ['Domino' is Spanish rather than Italian (Skeat, _Principles_, ii,
+     312).]
+
+{18} ['Harlequin' appears to be an older word in French than in Italian
+     (_ibid._).]
+
+{19} On the question whether this ought to have been included among the
+     Arabic, see Diez, _Woerterbuch d. Roman. Sprachen_, p. 10.
+
+{20} Not in our dictionaries; but a kind of coasting vessel well known
+     to seafaring men, the Spanish 'urca'; thus in Oldys' _Life of
+     Raleigh_: "Their galleons, galleasses, gallies, _urcas_, and zabras
+     were miserably shattered".
+
+{21} [A valuable list of such doublets is given by Prof. Skeat in his
+     large _Etymological Dictionary_, p. 772 _seq._]
+
+{22} This particular instance of double adoption, of 'dimorphism' as
+     Latham calls it, 'dittology' as Heyse, recurs in Italian,
+     'bestemmiare' and 'biasimare'; and in Spanish, 'blasfemar' and
+     'lastimar'.
+
+{23} ['Doit', a small coin (Dutch _duit_) has no relation to, 'digit'.
+     Was the author thinking of old French _doit_, a finger, from Latin
+     _digitus_?]
+
+{24} Somewhat different from this, yet itself also curious, is the
+     passing of an Anglo-Saxon word in two different forms into English,
+     and continuing in both; thus 'desk' and 'dish', both the
+     Anglo-Saxon 'disc' [a loan-word from Latin _discus_, Greek
+     _diskos_] the German 'tisch'; 'beech' and 'book', both the
+     Anglo-Saxon 'boc', our first books being _beechen_ tablets (see
+     Grimm, _Woerterbuch_, s. vv. 'Buch', 'Buche'); 'girdle' and
+     'kirtle'; both of them corresponding to the German 'guertel';
+     already in Anglo-Saxon a double spelling, 'gyrdel', 'cyrtel', had
+     prepared for the double words; so too 'haunch' and 'hinge'; 'lady'
+     and 'lofty' [these last three instances are not doublets at all,
+     being quite unrelated; see Skeat, s. vv.]; 'shirt', and 'skirt';
+     'black' and 'bleak'; 'pond' and 'pound'; 'deck' and 'thatch';
+     'deal' and 'dole'; 'weald' and 'wood'{+}; 'dew' and 'thaw'{+};
+     'wayward' and 'awkward'{+}; 'dune' and 'down'; 'hood' and 'hat'{+};
+     'ghost' and 'gust'{+}; 'evil' and 'ill'{+}; 'mouth' and 'moth'{+};
+     'hedge' and 'hay'.
+
+     [All these suggested doublets which I have obelized must be
+     dismissed as untenable.]
+
+{25} We have in the same way double adoptions from the Greek, one
+     direct, at least as regards the forms; one modified by its passage
+     through some other language; thus, 'adamant' and 'diamond';
+     'monastery' and 'minster'; 'scandal' and 'slander'; 'theriac' and
+     'treacle'; 'asphodel' and 'daffodil'; 'presbyter' and 'priest'.
+
+{26} The French itself has also a double adoption, or as perhaps we
+     should more accurately call it there, a double formation, from the
+     Latin, and such as quite bears out what has been said above: one
+     going far back in the history of the language, the other belonging
+     to a later and more literary period; on which subject there are
+     some admirable remarks by Genin, _Recreations Philologiques_, vol.
+     i. pp. 162-66; and see Fuchs, _Die Roman. Sprachen_, p. 125. Thus
+     from 'separare' is derived 'sevrer', to separate the child from its
+     mother's breast, to wean, but also 'separer', without this special
+     sense; from 'pastor', 'patre', a shepherd in the literal, and
+     'pasteur' the same in a tropical, sense; from 'catena', 'chaine'
+     and 'cadene'; from 'fragilis', 'frele' and 'fragile'; from
+     'pensare', 'peser' and 'penser'; from 'gehenna', 'gene' and
+     'gehenne'; from 'captivus', 'chetif' and 'captif'; from 'nativus',
+     'naif' and 'natif'; from 'designare', 'dessiner' and 'designer';
+     from 'decimare', 'dimer' and 'decimer'; from 'consumere',
+     'consommer' and 'consumer'; from 'simulare', 'sembler' and
+     'simuler'; from the low Latin, 'disjejunare', 'diner' and
+     'dejeuner'; from 'acceptare', 'acheter' and 'accepter'; from
+     'homo', 'on' and 'homme'; from 'paganus', 'payen' and 'paysan' [the
+     latter from 'pagensis']; from 'obedientia', 'obeissance' and
+     'obedience'; from 'strictus', 'etroit' and 'strict'; from
+     'sacramentum', 'serment' and 'sacrement'; from 'ministerium',
+     'metier' and 'ministere'; from 'parabola', 'parole' and 'parabole';
+     from 'peregrinus', 'pelerin' and 'peregrin'; from 'factio', 'facon'
+     and 'faction', and it has now adopted 'factio' in a third shape,
+     that is, in our English 'fashion'; from 'pietas', 'pitie' and
+     'piete'; from 'capitulum', 'chapitre' and 'capitule', a botanical
+     term. So, too, in Italian, 'manco', maimed, and 'monco', maimed _of
+     a hand_; 'rifutare', to refute, and 'rifiutare', to refuse; 'dama'
+     and 'donna', both forms of 'domina'.
+
+{27} See Marsh, _Manual of the English Language_, Engl. Ed. p. 88 _seq._
+
+{28} W. Schlegel (_Indische Bibliothek_, vol. i. p. 284): Coeunt quidem
+     paullatim in novum corpus peregrina vocabula, sed grammatica
+     linguarum, unde petitae sunt, ratio perit.
+
+{29} J. Grimm, quoted in _The Philological Museum_ vol. i. p. 667.
+
+{30} _Works_, vol. iv. p. 202.
+
+{31} [These words are taken from the 'Whistlecraft' of John Hookham
+     Frere:--
+
+         "Don't confound the language of the nation
+         With long-tail'd words in _osity_ and _ation_".
+
+                                 (_Works_, 1872, vol. 1, p. 206).]
+
+{32} _History of Normandy and England_, vol. i, p. 78.
+
+{33} [F. W. Faber,] _Dublin Review_, June, 1853.
+
+{34} There is more on this matter in my book _On the Authorized Version
+     of the New Testament_, pp. 33-35.
+
+{35} See a paper _On the Probable Future Position of the English
+     Language_, by T. Watts, Esq., in the _Proceedings of the
+     Philological Society_, vol. iv, p. 207.
+
+{36} A little more than two centuries ago a poet, himself abundantly
+     deserving the title of 'well-languaged'; which a cotemporary or
+     near successor gave him, ventured in some remarkable lines timidly
+     to anticipate this. Speaking of his native tongue, which he himself
+     wrote with such vigour and purity, though wanting in the fiery
+     impulses which go to the making of a first-rate poet, Daniel
+     exclaims:--
+
+         "And who, in time, knows whither we may vent
+         The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
+         This gain of our best glory shall be sent,
+         To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
+         What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
+         May come refined with the accents that are ours?
+         Or who can tell for what great work in hand
+         The greatness of our style is now ordained?
+         What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command,
+         What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained,
+         What mischief it may powerfully withstand,
+         And what fair ends may thereby be attained"?
+
+{37} _Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache_, Berlin, 1832, p. 5.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
+
+
+It is not for nothing that we speak of some languages as _living_, of
+others as _dead_. All spoken languages may be ranged in the first class;
+for as men will never consent to use a language without more or less
+modifying it in their use, will never so far forgo their own activity as
+to leave it exactly where they found it, it will therefore, so long as
+it is thus the utterance of human thought and feeling, inevitably show
+itself alive by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition,
+loss, progress, and decay. A living language therefore is one which
+abundantly deserves this name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is
+by living men, a _vital_ formative energy is still at work. It is one
+which is in course of actual evolution, which, if the life that animates
+it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it
+anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources,
+increasing its wealth; while at the same time it is casting off useless
+and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of which it
+finds no use, rejecting from itself by a re-active energy the foreign
+and heterogeneous, which may for a while have been forced upon it. I
+would not assert that in the process of all this it does not make
+mistakes; in the desire to simplify it may let go distinctions which
+were not useless, and which it would have been better to retain; the
+acquisitions which it makes are very far from being all gains; it
+sometimes rejects words as worthless, or suffers words to die out, which
+were most worthy to have lived. So far as it does this its life is not
+perfectly healthy; there are here signs, however remote, of
+disorganization, decay, and ultimate death; but still it lives, and even
+these misgrowths and malformations, the rejection of this good, the
+taking up into itself of that ill, all these errors are themselves the
+utterances and evidences of life. A dead language is the contrary of all
+this. It is dead, because books, and not now any generation of living
+men, are the guardians of it, and what they guard, they guard without
+change. Its course has been completely run, and it is now equally
+incapable of gaining and of losing. We may come to know it better; but
+in itself it is not, and never can be, other than it was when it ceased
+from the lips of men.
+
+{Sidenote: _English a Living Language_}
+
+Our own is, of course, a living language still. It is therefore gaining
+and losing. It is a tree in which the vital sap is circulating yet,
+ascending from the roots into the branches; and as this works, new
+leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping
+away. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some
+of the evidences of this life at work in it still. As I took for the
+subject of my first lecture the actual proportions in which the several
+elements of our composite English are now found in it, and the service
+which they were severally called on to perform, so I shall consider in
+this the _sources_ from which the English language has enriched its
+vocabulary, the _periods_ at which it has made the chief additions to
+this, the _character_ of the additions which at different periods it has
+made, and the _motives_ which induced it to seek them.
+
+I had occasion to mention in that lecture and indeed I dwelt with some
+emphasis on the fact, that the core, the radical constitution of our
+language, is Anglo-Saxon; so that, composite or mingled as it must be
+freely allowed to be, it is only such in respect to words, not in
+respect of construction, inflexions, or generally its grammatical forms.
+These are all of one piece; and whatever of new has come in has been
+compelled to conform itself to these. The framework is English; only a
+part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this filling in, of these
+its comparatively more recent accessions, I now propose to speak.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Norman Conquest_}
+
+The first great augmentation by foreign words of our Saxon vocabulary,
+setting aside those which the Danes brought us, was a consequence,
+although not an immediate one, of the battle of Hastings, and of the
+Norman domination which Duke William's victory established in our land.
+And here let me say in respect of that victory, in contradiction to the
+sentimental regrets of Thierry and others, and with the fullest
+acknowledgement of the immediate miseries which it entailed on the Saxon
+race, that it was really the making of England; a judgment, it is true,
+but a judgment and mercy in one. God never showed more plainly that He
+had great things in store for the people which should occupy this
+English soil, than when He brought hither that aspiring Norman race. At
+the same time the actual interpenetration of our Anglo-Saxon with any
+large amount of French words did not find place till very considerably
+later than this event, however it was a consequence of it. Some French
+words we find very soon after; but in the main the two streams of
+language continued for a long while separate and apart, even as the two
+nations remained aloof, a conquering and a conquered, and neither
+forgetting the fact.
+
+Time however softened the mutual antipathies. The Norman, after a while
+shut out from France, began more and more to feel that England was his
+home and sphere. The Saxon, recovering little by little from the extreme
+depression which had ensued on his defeat, became every day a more
+important element of the new English nation which was gradually forming
+from the coalition of the two races. His language partook of his
+elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority. French was no
+longer the only language in which a gentleman could speak, or a poet
+sing. At the same time the Saxon, now passing into the English language,
+required a vast addition to its vocabulary, if it were to serve all the
+needs of those who were willing to employ it now. How much was there of
+high culture, how many of the arts of life, of its refined pleasures,
+which had been strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no
+utterance in Saxon words. All this it was sought to supply from the
+French.
+
+We shall not err, I think, if we assume the great period of the
+incoming of French words into the English language to have been when the
+Norman nobility were exchanging their own language for the English; and
+I should be disposed with Tyrwhitt to believe that there is much
+exaggeration in attributing the large influx of these into English to
+one man's influence, namely to Chaucer's{38}. Doubtless he did much; he
+fell in with and furthered a tendency which already prevailed. But to
+suppose that the majority of French vocables which he employed in his
+poems had never been employed before, had been hitherto unfamiliar to
+English ears, is to suppose that his poems must have presented to his
+contemporaries an absurd patchwork of two languages, and leaves it
+impossible to explain how he should at once have become the popular poet
+of our nation.
+
+{Sidenote: _Influence of Chaucer_}
+
+That Chaucer largely developed the language in this direction is indeed
+plain. We have only to compare his English with that of another great
+master of the tongue, his contemporary Wiclif, to perceive how much more
+his diction is saturated with French words than is that of the Reformer.
+We may note too that many which he and others employed, and as it were
+proposed for admission, were not finally allowed and received; so that
+no doubt they went beyond the needs of the language, and were here in
+excess{39}. At the same time this can be regarded as no condemnation of
+their attempt. It was only by actual experience that it could be proved
+whether the language wanted those words or not, whether it could absorb
+them into itself, and assimilate them with all that it already was and
+had; or did not require, and would therefore in due time reject and put
+them away. And what happened then will happen in every attempt to
+transplant on a large scale the words of one language into another. Some
+will take root; others will not, but after a longer or briefer period
+will wither and die. Thus I observe in Chaucer such French words as
+these, 'misericorde', 'malure' (malheur), 'penible', 'ayel' (aieul),
+'tas', 'gipon', 'pierrie' (precious stones); none of which, and Wiclif's
+'creansur' (2 Kings iv. 1) as little, have permanently won a place in
+our tongue. For a long time 'mel', used often by Sylvester, struggled
+hard for a place in the language side by side with honey; 'roy' side by
+side with king; this last quite obtained one in Scotch. It is curious to
+mark some of these French adoptions keeping their ground to a
+comparatively late day, and yet finally extruded: seeming to have taken
+firm root, they have yet withered away in the end. Thus it has been, for
+example, with 'egal' (Puttenham); with 'ouvert', 'mot', 'ecurie',
+'baston', 'gite' (Holland); with 'rivage', 'jouissance', 'noblesse',
+'tort' (=wrong), 'accoil' (accuellir), 'sell' (=saddle), all occurring
+in Spenser; with 'to serr' (serrer), 'vive', 'reglement', used all by
+Bacon; and so with 'esperance', 'orgillous' (orgueilleux), 'rondeur',
+'scrimer' (=fencer), all in Shakespeare; with 'amort' (this also in
+Shakespeare){40}, and 'avie' (Holland). 'Maugre', 'congie', 'devoir',
+'dimes', 'sans', and 'bruit', used often in our Bible, were English
+once{41}; when we employ them now, it is with the sense that we are
+using foreign words. The same is true of 'dulce', 'aigredoulce'
+(=soursweet), of 'mur' for wall, of 'baine' for bath, of the verb 'to
+cass' (all in Holland), of 'volupty' (Sir Thomas Elyot), 'volunty'
+(Evelyn), 'medisance' (Montagu), 'petit' (South), 'aveugle', 'colline'
+(both in _State Papers_), and 'eloign' (Hacket){42}.
+
+We have seen when the great influx of French words took place--that is,
+from the time of the Conquest, although scantily and feebly at the
+first, to that of Chaucer. But with him our literature and language had
+made a burst, which they were not able to maintain. He has by Warton
+been well compared to some warm bright day in the very early spring,
+which seems to say that the winter is over and gone; but its promise is
+deceitful; the full bursting and blossoming of the springtime are yet
+far off. That struggle with France which began so gloriously, but ended
+so disastrously, even with the loss of our whole ill-won dominion there,
+the savagery of our wars of the Roses, wars which were a legacy
+bequeathed to us by that unrighteous conquest, leave a huge gap in our
+literary history, nearly a century during which very little was done for
+the cultivation of our native tongue, during which it could have made
+few important accessions to its wealth.
+
+{Sidenote: _Latin Importation_}
+
+The period however is notable as being that during which for the first
+time we received a large accession of Latin words. There was indeed
+already a small settlement of these, for the most part ecclesiastical,
+which had long since found their home in the bosom of the Anglo-Saxon
+itself, and had been entirely incorporated into it. The fact that we had
+received our Christianity from Rome, and that Latin was the constant
+language of the Church, sufficiently explains the incoming of these.
+Such were 'monk', 'bishop' (I put them in their present shapes, and do
+not concern myself whether they were originally Greek or no; they
+reached _us_ as Latin); 'provost', 'minster', 'cloister', 'candle',
+'psalter', 'mass', and the names of certain foreign animals, as
+'camel', or plants or other productions, as 'pepper', 'fig'; which are
+all, with slightly different orthography, Anglo-Saxon words. These,
+however, were entirely exceptional, and stood to the main body of the
+language not as the Romance element of it does now to the Gothic, one
+power over against another, but as the Spanish or Italian or Arabic
+words in it now stand to the whole present body of the language--and
+could not be affirmed to affect it more.
+
+So soon however as French words were imported largely, as I have just
+observed, into the language, and were found to coalesce kindly with the
+native growths, this very speedily suggested, as indeed it alone
+rendered possible, the going straight to the Latin, and drawing directly
+from it; and thus in the hundred years which followed Chaucer a large
+amount of Latin found its way, if not into our speech, yet at all events
+into our books--words which were not brought _through_ the French, for
+they are not, and have not at any time been, French, but yet words which
+would never have been introduced into English, if their way had not been
+prepared, if the French already domesticated among us had not bridged
+over, as it were, the gulf, that would have otherwise been too wide
+between them and the Saxon vocables of our tongue.
+
+In this period, a period of great depression of the national spirit, we
+may trace the attempt at a pedantic latinization of English quite as
+clearly at work as at later periods, subsequent to the revival of
+learning. It was now that a crop of such words as 'facundious',
+'tenebrous', 'solacious', 'pulcritude', 'consuetude' (all these occur in
+Hawes), with many more, long since rejected by the language, sprung up;
+while other words, good in themselves, and which have been since
+allowed, were yet employed in numbers quite out of proportion with the
+Saxon vocables with which they were mingled, and which they altogether
+overtopped and shadowed. Chaucer's hearty English feeling, his thorough
+sympathy with the people, the fact that, scholar as he was, he was yet
+the poet not of books but of life, and drew his best inspiration from
+life, all this had kept him, in the main, clear of this fault. But in
+others it is very manifest. Thus I must esteem the diction of Lydgate,
+Hawes, and the other versifiers who filled up the period between Chaucer
+and Surrey, immensely inferior to Chaucer's; being all stuck over with
+long and often ill-selected Latin words. The worst offenders in this
+line, as Campbell himself admits, were the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
+century. "The prevailing fault", he says, "of English diction, in the
+fifteenth century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation of
+anglicising Latin words. In this pedantry and use of "aureate terms" the
+Scottish versifiers went even beyond their brethren of the south....
+When they meant to be eloquent, they tore up words from the Latin, which
+never took root in the language, like children making a mock garden with
+flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither"{43}.
+
+To few indeed is the wisdom and discretion given, certainly it was
+given to none of those, to bear themselves in this hazardous enterprise
+according to the rules laid down by Dryden; who in the following
+admirable passage declares the motives that induced him to seek for
+foreign words, and the considerations that guided him in their
+selection: "If sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who
+shall hinder me to import them from a foreign country? I carry not out
+the treasure of the nation which is never to return, but what I bring
+from Italy I spend in England. Here it remains and here it circulates,
+for, if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand to another. I trade
+both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native
+language. We have enough in England to supply our necessity, but if we
+will have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by
+commerce. Poetry requires adornment, and that is not to be had from our
+old Teuton monosyllables; therefore if I find any elegant word in a
+classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by using it myself; and
+if the public approves of it, the bill passes. But every man cannot
+distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry: every man therefore is not fit
+to innovate. Upon the whole matter a poet must first be certain that the
+word he would introduce is beautiful in the Latin; and is to consider in
+the next place whether it will agree with the English idiom: after this,
+he ought to take the opinion of judicious friends, such as are learned
+in both languages; and lastly, since no man is infallible, let him use
+this licence very sparingly; for if too many foreign words are poured
+in upon us, it looks as if they were designed not to assist the natives,
+but to conquer them"{44}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Influence of the Reformation_}
+
+But this tendency to latinize our speech was likely to receive, and
+actually did receive, a new impulse from the revival of learning, and
+the familiar re-acquaintance with the great masterpieces of ancient
+literature which went along with this revival. Happily another movement
+accompanied, or at least followed hard on this; a movement in England
+essentially national; and which stirred our people at far deeper depths
+of their moral and spiritual life than any mere revival of learning
+could have ever done; I refer, of course, to the Reformation. It was
+only among the Germanic nations of Europe, as has often been remarked,
+that the Reformation struck lasting roots; it found its strength
+therefore in the Teutonic element of the national character, which also
+it in its turn further strengthened, purified, and called out. And thus,
+though Latin came in upon us now faster than ever, and in a certain
+measure also Greek, yet this was not without its redress and
+counterpoise, in the cotemporaneous unfolding of the more fundamentally
+popular side of the language. Popular preaching and discussion, the
+necessity of dealing with truths the most transcendent in a way to be
+understood not by scholars only, but by 'idiots' as well, all this
+served to evoke the native resources of our tongue; and thus the
+relative proportion between the one part of the language and the other
+was not dangerously disturbed, the balance was not destroyed; as it
+might well have been, if only the Humanists{45} had been at work, and
+not the Reformers as well.
+
+The revival of learning, which made itself first felt in Italy, extended
+to England, and was operative here, during the reigns of Henry the
+Eighth and his immediate successors. Having thus slightly anticipated in
+time, it afterwards ran exactly parallel with, the period during which
+our Reformation was working itself out. The epoch was in all respects
+one of immense mental and moral activity, and such never leave the
+language of a nation where they found it. Much is changed in it; much
+probably added; for the old garment of speech, which once served all
+needs, has grown too narrow, and serves them now no more. "Change in
+language is not, as in many natural products, continuous; it is not
+equable, but eminently by fits and starts"; and when the foundations of
+the national mind are heaving under the power of some new truth, greater
+and more important changes will find place in fifty years than in two
+centuries of calmer or more stagnant existence. Thus the activities and
+energies which the Reformation awakened among us here--and I need not
+tell you that these reached far beyond the domain of our directly
+religious life--caused mighty alterations in the English tongue{46}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Rise of New Words_}
+
+For example, the Reformation had its scholarly, we might say, its
+scholastic, as well as its popular, aspect. Add this fact to the fact of
+the revived interest in classical learning, and you will not wonder that
+a stream of Latin, now larger than ever, began to flow into our
+language. Thus Puttenham, writing in Queen Elizabeth's reign{47}, gives
+a long list of words which, as he declares, had been quite recently
+introduced into the language. Some of them are Greek, a few French and
+Italian, but very far the most are Latin. I will not give you his whole
+catalogue, but some specimens from it; it is difficult to understand
+concerning some of these, how the language should have managed to do
+without them so long; 'method', 'methodical', 'function', 'numerous',
+'penetrate', 'penetrable', 'indignity', 'savage', 'scientific',
+'delineation', 'dimension'--all which he notes to have recently come up;
+so too 'idiom', 'significative', 'compendious', 'prolix', 'figurative',
+'impression', 'inveigle', 'metrical'. All these he adduces with praise;
+others upon which he bestows equal commendation, have not held their
+ground, as 'placation', 'numerosity', 'harmonical'. Of those neologies
+which he disallowed, he only anticipated in some cases, as in
+'facundity', 'implete', 'attemptat' ('attentat'), the decision of a
+later day; other words which he condemned no less, as 'audacious',
+'compatible', 'egregious', have maintained their ground. These too have
+done the same; 'despicable', 'destruction', 'homicide', 'obsequious',
+'ponderous', 'portentous', 'prodigious', all of them by another writer a
+little earlier condemned as "inkhorn terms, smelling too much of the
+Latin".
+
+{Sidenote: _French Neologies_}
+
+It is curious to observe the "words of art", as he calls them, which
+Philemon Holland, a voluminous translator at the end of the sixteenth
+and beginning of the seventeenth century, counts it needful to explain
+in a sort of glossary which he appends to his translation of Pliny's
+_Natural History_{48}. One can hardly at the present day understand how
+any person who would care to consult the book at all would find any
+difficulty with words like the following, 'acrimony', 'austere', 'bulb',
+'consolidate', 'debility', 'dose', 'ingredient', 'opiate', 'propitious',
+'symptom', all which, however, as novelties he carefully explains. Some
+of the words in his glossary, it is true, are harder and more technical
+than these; but a vast proportion of them present no greater difficulty
+than those which I have adduced{49}.
+
+The period during which this naturalization of Latin words in the
+English Language was going actively forward, may be said to have
+continued till about the Restoration of Charles the Second. It first
+received a check from the coming up of French tastes, fashions, and
+habits of thought consequent on that event. The writers already formed
+before that period, such as Cudworth and Barrow, still continued to
+write their stately sentences, Latin in structure, and Latin in diction,
+but not so those of a younger generation. We may say of this influx of
+Latin that it left the language vastly more copious, with greatly
+enlarged capabilities, but perhaps somewhat burdened, and not always
+able to move gracefully under the weight of its new acquisitions; for as
+Dryden has somewhere truly said, it is easy enough to acquire foreign
+words, but to know what to do with them after you have acquired, is the
+difficulty.
+
+{Sidenote: _Pedantic Words_}
+
+It might have received indeed most serious injury, if _all_ the words
+which the great writers of this second Latin period of our language
+employed, and so proposed as candidates for admission into it, had
+received the stamp of popular allowance. But happily it was not so; it
+was here, as it had been before with the French importations, and with
+the earlier Latin of Lydgate and Occleve. The re-active powers of the
+language, enabling it to throw off that which was foreign to it, did not
+fail to display themselves now, as they had done on former occasions.
+The number of unsuccessful candidates for admission into, and permanent
+naturalization in, the language during this period, is enormous; and one
+may say that in almost all instances where the Alien Act has been
+enforced, the sentence of exclusion was a just one; it was such as the
+circumstances of the case abundantly bore out. Either the word was not
+idiomatic, or was not intelligible, or was not needed, or looked ill, or
+sounded ill, or some other valid reason existed against it. A lover of
+his native tongue will tremble to think what that tongue would have
+become, if all the vocables from the Latin and the Greek which were then
+introduced or endorsed by illustrious names, had been admitted on the
+strength of their recommendation; if 'torve' and 'tetric' (Fuller),
+'cecity' (Hooker), 'fastide' and 'trutinate' (_State Papers_),
+'immanity' (Shakespeare), 'insulse' and 'insulsity' (Milton, prose),
+'scelestick' (Feltham), 'splendidious' (Drayton), 'pervicacy' (Baxter),
+'stramineous', 'ardelion' (Burton), 'lepid' and 'sufflaminate' (Barrow),
+'facinorous' (Donne), 'immorigerous', 'clancular', 'ferity',
+'ustulation', 'stultiloquy', 'lipothymy' ({Greek: leipothymia}),
+'hyperaspist' (all in Jeremy Taylor), if 'mulierosity', 'subsannation',
+'coaxation', 'ludibundness', 'delinition', 'septemfluous', 'medioxumous',
+'mirificent', 'palmiferous' (all in Henry More), 'pauciloquy' and
+'multiloquy' (Beaumont, _Psyche_); if 'dyscolous' (Foxe), 'ataraxy'
+(Allestree), 'moliminously' (Cudworth), 'luciferously' (Sir Thomas
+Browne), 'immarcescible' (Bishop Hall), 'exility', 'spinosity',
+'incolumity', 'solertiousness', 'lucripetous', 'inopious', 'eluctate',
+'eximious' (all in Hacket), 'arride'{50} (ridiculed by Ben Johnson),
+with the hundreds of other words like these, and even more monstrous
+than are some of these, not to speak of such Italian as 'leggiadrous' (a
+favourite word in Beaumont's _Psyche_), 'amorevolous' (Hacket), had not
+been rejected and disallowed by the true instinct of the national mind.
+
+{Sidenote: _Naturalization of Words_}
+
+A great many too _were_ allowed and adopted, but not exactly in the shape
+in which they first were introduced among us; they were made to drop
+their foreign termination, or otherwise their foreign appearance, to
+conform themselves to English ways, and only so were finally incorporated
+into the great family of English words{51}. Thus of Greek words we have
+the following: 'pyramis' and 'pyramides', forms often employed by
+Shakespeare, became 'pyramid' and 'pyramids'; 'dosis' (Bacon) 'dose';
+'distichon' (Holland) 'distich'; 'hemistichion' (North) 'hemistich';
+'apogaeon' (Fairfax) and 'apogeum' (Browne) 'apogee'; 'sumphonia'
+(Lodge) 'symphony'; 'prototypon' (Jackson) 'prototype'; 'synonymon'
+(Jeremy Taylor) or 'synonymum' (Hacket), and 'synonyma' (Milton, prose),
+became severally 'synonym' and 'synonyms'; 'syntaxis' (Fuller) became
+'syntax'; 'extasis' (Burton) 'ecstasy'; 'parallelogrammon' (Holland)
+'parallelogram'; 'programma' (Warton) 'program'; 'epitheton' (Cowell)
+'epithet'; 'epocha' (South) 'epoch'; 'biographia' (Dryden) 'biography';
+'apostata' (Massinger) 'apostate'; 'despota' (Fox) 'despot';
+'misanthropos' (Shakespeare) if 'misanthropi' (Bacon) 'misanthrope';
+'psalterion' (North) 'psaltery'; 'chasma' (Henry More) 'chasm'; 'idioma'
+and 'prosodia' (both in Daniel, prose) 'idiom' and 'prosody'; 'energia',
+'energy', and 'Sibylla', 'Sibyl' (both in Sidney); 'zoophyton' (Henry
+More) 'zoophyte'; 'enthousiasmos' (Sylvester) 'enthusiasm'; 'phantasma'
+(Donne) 'phantasm'; 'magnes' (Gabriel Harvey) 'magnet'; 'cynosura'
+(Donne) 'cynosure'; 'galaxias' (Fox) 'galaxy'; 'heros' (Henry More)
+'hero'; 'epitaphy' (Hawes) 'epitaph'.
+
+The same process has gone on in a multitude of Latin words, which
+testify by their terminations that they were, and were felt to be, Latin
+at their first employment; though now they are such no longer. Thus
+Bacon uses generally, I know not whether always, 'insecta' for
+'insects'; and 'chylus' for 'chyle'; Bishop Andrews 'nardus' for 'nard';
+Spenser 'zephyrus', and not 'zephyr'; so 'interstitium' (Fuller)
+preceded 'interstice'; 'philtrum' (Culverwell) 'philtre'; 'expansum'
+(Jeremy Taylor) 'expanse'; 'preludium' (Beaumont, _Psyche_), 'prelude';
+'precipitium' (Coryat) 'precipice'; 'aconitum' (Shakespeare) 'aconite';
+'balsamum' (Webster) 'balsam'; 'heliotropium' (Holland) 'heliotrope';
+'helleborum' (North) 'hellebore'; 'vehiculum' (Howe) 'vehicle';
+'trochaeus' and 'spondaeus' (Holland) 'trochee' and 'spondee'; and
+'machina' (Henry More) 'machine'. We have 'intervalla', not 'intervals',
+in Chillingworth; 'postulata', not 'postulates', in Swift; 'archiva',
+not 'archives', in Baxter; 'demagogi', not 'demagogues', in Hacket;
+'vestigium', not 'vestige', in Culverwell; 'pantomimus' in Lord Bacon
+for 'pantomime'; 'mystagogus' for 'mystagogue', in Jackson; 'atomi' in
+Lord Brooke for 'atoms'; 'aedilis' (North) went before 'aedile';
+'effigies' and 'statua' (both in Shakespeare) before 'effigy' and
+'statue'; 'abyssus' (Jackson) before 'abyss'; 'vestibulum' (Howe) before
+'vestibule'; 'symbolum' (Hammond) before 'symbol'; 'spectrum' (Burton)
+before 'spectre'; while only after a while 'quaere' gave place to
+'query'; 'audite' (Hacket) to 'audit'; 'plaudite' (Henry More) to
+'plaudit'; and the low Latin 'mummia' (Webster) became 'mummy'. The
+widely extended change of such words as 'innocency', 'indolency',
+'temperancy', and the large family of words with the same termination,
+into 'innocence', 'indolence', 'temperance', and the like, can only be
+regarded as part of the same process of entire naturalization.
+
+The plural very often tells the secret of a word, and of the light in
+which it is regarded by those who employ it, when the singular, being
+less capable of modification, would have failed to do so; thus when
+Holland writes 'phalanges', 'bisontes', 'ideae', it is clear that
+'phalanx', 'bison', 'idea', were still Greek words for him; as 'dogma'
+was for Hammond, when he made its plural not 'dogmas', but 'dogmata'{52};
+and when Spenser uses 'heroes' as a trisyllable, it plainly is not yet
+thoroughly English for him{53}. 'Cento' is not English, but a Latin word
+used in English, so long as it makes its plural not 'centos', but
+'centones', as in the old anonymous translation of Augustin's _City of
+God_{54}; and 'specimen', while it makes its plural 'specimina' (Howe).
+Pope making, as he does, 'satellites' a quadrisyllable in the line
+
+    "Why Jove's _satellites_ are less than Jove",
+
+must have felt that he was still dealing with it as Latin; just as
+'terminus', a word which the necessities of railways have introduced
+among us, will not be truly naturalized till we use 'terminuses', and
+not 'termini' for its plural; nor 'phenomenon', till we have renounced
+'phenomena'. Sometimes it has been found convenient to retain both
+plurals, that formed according to the laws of the classical language,
+and that formed according to the laws of our own, only employing them in
+different senses; thus is it with 'indices' and 'indexes', 'genii' and
+'geniuses'.
+
+The same process has gone on with words from other languages, as from
+the Italian and the Spanish; thus 'bandetto' (Shakespeare), 'bandito'
+(Jeremy Taylor), becomes 'bandit'; 'ruffiano' (Coryat) 'ruffian';
+'concerto', 'concert'; 'busto' (Lord Chesterfield) 'bust'; 'caricatura'
+(Sir Thomas Browne) 'caricature'; 'princessa' (Hacket) 'princess';
+'scaramucha' (Dryden) 'scaramouch'; 'pedanteria' (Sidney) 'pedantry';
+'impresa' 'impress'; 'caprichio' (Shakespeare) becomes first 'caprich'
+(Butler), then 'caprice'; 'duello' (Shakespeare) 'duel'; 'alligarta'
+(Ben Jonson), 'alligator'; 'parroquito' (Webster) 'parroquet'; 'scalada'
+(Heylin) or 'escalado' (Holland) 'escalade'; 'granada' (Hacket)
+'grenade'; 'parada' (J. Taylor) 'parade'; 'emboscado' (Holland)
+'stoccado', 'barricado', 'renegado', 'hurricano' (all in Shakespeare),
+'brocado' (Hackluyt), 'palissado' (Howell), drop their foreign
+terminations, and severally become 'ambuscade', 'stockade', 'barricade',
+'renegade', 'hurricane', 'brocade', 'palisade'; 'croisado' in like
+manner (Bacon) becomes first 'croisade' (Jortin), and then 'crusade';
+'quinaquina' or 'quinquina', 'quinine'. Other slight modifications of
+spelling, not in the termination, but in the body of a word, will
+indicate in like manner its more entire incorporation into the English
+language. Thus 'shash', a Turkish word, becomes 'sash'; 'colone'
+(Burton) 'clown'{55}; 'restoration' was at first spelt 'rest_au_ration';
+and so long as 'vicinage' was spelt 'voisinage'{56} (Sanderson),
+'mirror' 'miroir' (Fuller), 'recoil' 'recule', or 'career' 'carriere'
+(both by Holland), they could scarcely be considered those purely
+English words which now they are{57}.
+
+Here and there even at this comparatively late period of the language
+awkward foreign words will be recast in a more thoroughly English mould;
+'chirurgeon' will become 'surgeon'; 'hemorrhoid', 'emerod'; 'squinancy'
+will become first 'squinzey' (Jeremy Taylor) and then 'quinsey';
+'porkpisce' (Spenser), that is sea-hog, or more accurately hogfish{58}
+will be 'porpesse', and then 'porpoise', as it is now. In other words
+the attempt will be made, but it will be now too late to be attended
+with success. 'Physiognomy' will not give place to 'visnomy', however
+Spenser and Shakespeare employ this briefer form; nor 'hippopotamus' to
+'hippodame', even at Spenser's bidding. In like manner the attempt to
+naturalize 'avant-courier' in the shape of 'vancurrier' has failed.
+Other words also we meet which have finally refused to take a more
+popular form, although such was once more or less current; or, if this
+is too much to say of all, yet hazarded by good authors. Thus Holland
+wrote 'cirque', but we 'circus'; 'cense', but we 'census'; 'interreign',
+but we 'interregnum'; Sylvester 'cest', but we 'cestus'; 'quirry', but
+we 'equerry'; 'colosse', but we still 'colossus'; Golding 'ure', but we
+'urus'; 'metropole', but we 'metropolis'; Dampier 'volcan', but this has
+not superseded 'volcano'; nor 'pagod' (Pope) 'pagoda'; nor 'skelet'
+(Holland) 'skeleton'; nor 'stimule' (Stubbs) 'stimulus'. Bolingbroke
+wrote 'exode', but we hold fast to 'exodus'; Burton 'funge', but we
+'fungus'; Henry More 'enigm', but we 'enigma'; 'analyse', but we
+'analysis'. 'Superfice' (Dryden) has not put 'superficies', nor
+'sacrary' (Hacket) 'sacrarium', nor 'limbeck' 'alembic', out of use.
+Chaucer's 'potecary' has given way to a more Greek formation
+'apothecary'. Yet these and the like must be regarded quite as
+exceptions; the tendency of things is altogether the other way.
+
+Looking at this process of the reception of foreign words, with their
+after assimilation in feature to our own, we may trace, as was to be
+expected, a certain conformity between the genius of our institutions
+and that of our language. It is the very character of our institutions
+to repel none, but rather to afford a shelter and a refuge to all, from
+whatever quarter they come; and after a longer or shorter while all the
+strangers and incomers have been incorporated into the English nation,
+within one or two generations have forgotten that they were ever ought
+else than members of it, have retained no other reminiscence of their
+foreign extraction than some slight difference of name, and that often
+disappearing or having disappeared. Exactly so has it been with the
+English language. No language has shown itself less exclusive; none has
+stood less upon niceties; none has thrown open its arms wider, with a
+fuller confidence, a confidence justified by experience, that it could
+make truly its own, assimilate and subdue to itself, whatever it
+received into its bosom; and in none has this experiment in a larger
+number of instances been successfully carried out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{Sidenote: _French at the Restoration_}
+
+Such are the two great enlargements from without of our vocabulary. All
+other are minor and subordinate. Thus the introduction of French tastes
+by Charles the Second and his courtiers returning from exile, to which I
+have just adverted, though it rather modified the structure of our
+sentences than the materials of our vocabulary, gave us some new words.
+In one of Dryden's plays, _Marriage a la Mode_, a lady full of
+affectation is introduced, who is always employing French idioms in
+preference to English, French words rather than native. It is not a
+little curious that of these, thus put into her mouth to render her
+ridiculous, not a few are excellent English now, and have nothing
+far-sought or affected about them: for so it frequently proves that what
+is laughed at in the beginning, is by all admitted and allowed at the
+last. For example, to speak of a person being in the 'good graces' of
+another has nothing in it ridiculous now; the words 'repartee',
+'embarrass', 'chagrin', 'grimace', do not sound novel and affected now
+as they all must plainly have done at the time when Dryden wrote.
+'Fougue' and 'fraischeur', which he himself employed--being, it is true,
+no frequent offender in this way--have not been justified by the same
+success.
+
+{Sidenote: _Greek Words Naturalized_}
+
+Nor indeed can it be said that this adoption and naturalization of
+foreign words ever ceases in a language. There are periods, as we have
+seen, when this goes forward much more largely than at others; when a
+language throws open, as it were, its doors, and welcomes strangers with
+an especial freedom; but there is never a time, when one by one these
+foreigners and strangers are not slipping into it. We do not for the most
+part observe the fact, at least not while it is actually doing. Time,
+the greatest of all innovators, manages his innovations so dexterously,
+spreads them over such vast periods, and therefore brings them about so
+gradually, that often, while effecting the mightiest changes, we have no
+suspicion that he is effecting any at all. Thus how imperceptible are
+the steps by which a foreign word is admitted into the full rights of an
+English one; the process of its incoming often eluding our notice
+altogether. There are numerous Greek words, for example which, quite
+unchanged in form, have in one way or another ended in finding a home
+and acceptance among us. We may in almost every instance trace step by
+step the naturalization of one of these; and the manner of this
+singularly confirms what has just been said. We can note it spelt for a
+while in Greek letters, and avowedly employed as a Greek and not an
+English vocable; then after it had thus obtained a certain allowance
+among us, and become not altogether unfamiliar, we note it exchanging
+its Greek for English letters, and finally obtaining recognition as a
+word which however drawn from a foreign source, is yet itself English.
+Thus 'acme', 'apotheosis', 'criterion', 'chrysalis', 'encyclopedia',
+'metropolis', 'opthalmia', 'pathos', 'phenomena', are all now English
+words, while yet South with many others always wrote {Greek: akme:},
+Jeremy Taylor {Greek: apotheo:sis} and {Greek: krite:rion}, Henry More
+{Greek: chrysalis}, Ben Jonson speaks of 'the knowledge of the liberal
+arts, which the Greeks call {Greek: enkyklopadeian}'{59}, Culverwell
+wrote {Greek: me:tropolis} and {Greek: ophthalmia}, Preston, {Greek:
+phainomena}--Sylvester ascribes to Baxter, not 'pathos', but {Greek:
+pathos}{60}. {Greek: E:thos} is a word at the present moment preparing
+for a like passage from Greek characters to English, and certainly
+before long will be acknowledged as an English word{61}. The only cause
+which has hindered this for some time past is the misgiving whether it
+will not be read '{)e}thos,' and not '{-e}thos,' and thus not be the
+word intended.
+
+Let us trace a like process in some French word, which is at this moment
+becoming English. I know no better example than the French 'prestige'
+will afford. 'Prestige' has manifestly no equivalent in our own
+language; it expresses something which no single word in English, which
+only a long circumlocution, could express; namely, that magic influence
+on others, which past successes as the pledge and promise of future
+ones, breed. The word has thus naturally come to be of very frequent use
+by good English writers; for they do not feel that in employing it they
+are passing by as good or a better word of their own. At first all used
+it avowedly as French, writing it in italics to indicate this. At the
+present moment some write it so still, some do not; some, that is,
+regard it still as foreign, others consider that it has now become
+English, and obtained a settlement among us{62}. Little by little the
+number of those who write it in italics will become fewer and fewer,
+till they cease altogether. It will then only need that the accent
+should be shifted, in obedience to the tendencies of the English
+language, as far back in the word as it will go, that instead of
+'presti/ge', it should be pronounced 'pre/stige' even as within these
+few years instead of 'depo/t' we have learned to say 'de/pot', and its
+naturalization will be complete. I have little doubt that in twenty
+years it will be so pronounced by the majority of well educated
+Englishmen{63},--some pronounce it so already,--and that our present
+pronunciation will pass away in the same manner as 'obl_ee_ge', once
+universal, has past away, and everywhere given place to 'obl_i_ge'{64}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Shifting of Accents_}
+
+Let me here observe in passing, that the process of throwing the accent
+of a word back, by way of completing its naturalization, is one which we
+may note constantly going forward in our language. Thus, while Chaucer
+accentuates sometimes 'natu/re', he also accentuates elsewhere
+'na/ture', while sometimes 'virtu/e', at other times 'vi/rtue'.
+'Prostrate', 'adverse', 'aspect', 'process', 'insult', 'impulse',
+'pretext', 'contrite', 'uproar', 'contest', had all their accent on the
+last syllable in Milton; they have it now on the first; 'cha/racter' was
+'chara/cter' with Spenser; 'the/atre' was 'thea/tre' with Sylvester;
+while 'aca/demy' was accented 'acade/my' by Cowley and Butler{65}.
+'Essay' was 'essa/y' with Dryden and with Pope; the first closes an
+heroic line with the word; Pope does the same with 'barrier'{66} and
+'effort'; therefore pronounced 'barri/er', 'effo/rt', by him.
+
+There are not a few other French words which like 'prestige' are at this
+moment hovering on the verge of English, hardly knowing whether they
+shall become such, or no. Such are 'ennui', 'exploitation', 'verve',
+'persiflage', 'badinage', 'chicane', 'finesse', and others; all of them
+often employed by us,--and it is out of such frequent employment that
+adoption proceeds,--because expressing shades of meaning not expressed
+by any words of our own{67}. Some of these, we may confidently
+anticipate, will complete their naturalization; others will after a time
+retreat again, and become for us avowedly French. 'Solidarity', a word
+which we owe to the French Communists, and which signifies a fellowship
+in gain and loss, in honour and dishonour, in victory and defeat, a
+being, so to speak, all in the same bottom, is so convenient, that
+unattractive as confessedly it is, it will be in vain to struggle
+against its reception. The newspapers already have it, and books will
+not long exclude it; not to say that it has established itself in
+German, and probably in other European languages as well.
+
+{Sidenote: _Greek in English_}
+
+Greek and Latin words also we still continue to adopt, although now no
+longer in troops and companies, but only one by one. With the lively
+interest which always has been felt in classical studies among us, and
+which will continue to be felt, so long as any greatness and nobleness
+survive in our land, it must needs be that accessions from these
+quarters would never cease altogether. I do not refer here to purely
+scientific terms; these, so long as they continue such, and do not pass
+beyond the threshold of the science or sciences for the use of which
+they were invented, being never heard on the lips, or employed in the
+writings, of any but the cultivators of these sciences, have no right to
+be properly called words at all. They are a kind of shorthand of the
+science, or algebraic notation; and will not find place in a dictionary
+of the language, constructed upon true principles, but rather in a
+technical dictionary apart by themselves. Of these, compelled by the
+advances of physical science, we have coined multitudes out of number in
+these later times, fashioning them mainly from the Greek, no other
+language within our reach yielding itself at all so easily to our needs.
+
+Of non-scientific words, both Greek and Latin, some have made their way
+among us quite in these latter times. Burke in the House of Commons is
+said to have been the first who employed the word 'inimical'{68}. He
+also launched the verb 'to spheterize' in the sense of to appropriate
+or make one's own; but this without success. Others have been more
+fortunate; 'aesthetic' we have got indeed _through_ the Germans, but
+_from_ the Greeks. Tennyson has given allowance to 'aeon'{69}; and
+'myth' is a deposit which wide and far-reaching controversies have left
+in the popular language. 'Photography' is an example of what I was just
+now speaking of--namely, a scientific word which has travelled beyond
+the limits of the science which it designates and which gave it birth.
+'Stereotype' is another word of the same character. It was invented--not
+the thing, but the word,--by Didot not very long since; but it is now
+absorbed into healthy general circulation, being current in a secondary
+and figurative sense. Ruskin has given to 'ornamentation' the sanction
+and authority of his name. 'Normal' and 'abnormal', not quite so new,
+are yet of recent introduction into the language{70}.
+
+{Sidenote: _German Importations_}
+
+When we consider the near affinity between the English and German
+languages, which, if not sisters, may at least be regarded as first
+cousins, it is somewhat remarkable that almost since the day when they
+parted company, each to fulfil its own destiny, there has been little
+further commerce between them in the matter of giving or taking. At any
+rate adoptions on our part from the German have been till within this
+period extremely rare. 'Crikesman' (Kriegsmann) and 'brandschat'
+(Brandschatz), with some other German words common enough in the _State
+Papers_ of the sixteenth century, found no permanent place in the
+language. The explanation lies in the fact that the literary activity of
+Germany did not begin till very late, nor our interest in it till later
+still, not indeed till the beginning of the present century. Yet
+'plunder', as I have mentioned elsewhere, was brought back from Germany
+about the beginning of our Civil Wars, by the soldiers who had served
+under Gustavus Adolphus and his captains{71}. And 'trigger', written
+'tricker' in _Hudibras_ is manifestly the German 'druecker'{72}, though
+none of our dictionaries have marked it as such; a word first appearing
+at the same period, it may have reached us through the same channel.
+'Iceberg' (eisberg) also we must have taken whole from the German, as,
+had we constructed the word for ourselves, we should have made it not
+'ice_berg_', but 'ice-_mountain_'. I have not found it in our earlier
+voyagers, often as they speak of the 'icefield', which yet is not
+exactly the same thing. An English 'swindler' is not exactly a German
+'schwindler', yet the notion of the 'nebulo', though more latent in the
+German, is common to both; and we must have drawn the word from
+Germany{73} (it is not an old one in our tongue) during the course of
+the last century. If '_life_-guard' was originally, as Richardson
+suggests, '_leib_-garde', or '_body_-guard', and from that transformed,
+by the determination of Englishmen to make it significant in English,
+into '_life_-guard', or guard defending the _life_ of the sovereign,
+this will be another word from the same quarter. Yet I have my doubts;
+'leibgarde' would scarcely have found its way hither before the
+accession of the House of Hanover, or at any rate before the arrival of
+Dutch William with his memorable guards; while 'lifeguard', in its
+present shape, is certainly an older word in the language; we hear often
+of the 'lifeguards' in our Civil Wars; as witness too Fuller's words:
+"The Cherethites were a kind of _lifegard_ to king David"{74}.
+
+Of late our German importations have been somewhat more numerous. With
+several German compound words we have been in recent times so well
+pleased, that we must needs adopt them into English, or imitate them in
+it. We have not always been very happy in those which we have selected
+for imitation or adoption. Thus we might have been satisfied with
+'manual', and not called back from its nine hundred years of oblivion
+that ugly and unnecessary word 'handbook'. And now we are threatened
+with 'word-building', as I see a book announced under the title of
+"Latin _word-building_", and, much worse than this, with 'stand-point'.
+'Einseitig' (itself a modern word, if I mistake not, or at any rate
+modern in its secondary application) has not, indeed, been adopted, but
+is evidently the pattern on which we have formed 'onesided'--a word to
+which a few years ago something of affectation was attached; so that any
+one who employed it at once gave evidence that he was more or less a
+dealer in German wares; it has however its manifest conveniences, and
+will hold its ground. 'Fatherland' (Vaterland) on the contrary will
+scarcely establish itself among us, the note of affectation will
+continue to cleave to it, and we shall go on contented with 'native
+country' to the end{75}. The most successful of these compounded words,
+borrowed recently from the German, is 'folk-lore', and the substitution
+of this for popular superstitions, must be esteemed, I think, an
+unquestionable gain{76}.
+
+To speak now of other sources from which the new words of a language are
+derived. Of course the period when absolutely new roots are generated
+will have past away, long before men begin by a reflective act to take
+any notice of processes going forward in the language which they speak.
+This pure productive energy, creative we might call it, belongs only to
+the earlier stages of a nation's existence,--to times quite out of the
+ken of history. It is only from materials already existing either in its
+own bosom, or in the bosom of other languages, that it can enrich itself
+in the later, or historical stages of its life.
+
+{Sidenote: _Compound Words_}
+
+And first, it can bring its own words into new combinations; it can join
+two, and sometimes even more than two, of the words which it already
+has, and form out of them a new one. Much more is wanted here than
+merely to attach two or more words to one another by a hyphen; this is
+not to make a new word: they must really coalesce and grow together.
+Different languages, and even the same language at different stages of
+its existence, will possess this power of forming new words by the
+combination of old in very different degrees. The eminent felicity of
+the Greek in this respect has been always acknowledged. "The joints of
+her compounded words", says Fuller, "are so naturally oiled, that they
+run nimbly on the tongue, which makes them though long, never tedious,
+because significant"{77}. Sir Philip Sidney boasts of the capability of
+our English language in this respect--that "it is particularly happy in
+the composition of two or three words together, near equal to the Greek".
+No one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, or to make
+manifest what may be effected by this marriage of words. Many of his
+compound epithets, as 'golden-tressed', 'tinsel-slippered', 'coral-paven',
+'flowry-kirtled', 'violet-embroidered', 'vermeil-tinctured', are
+themselves poems in miniature. Not unworthy to be set beside these are
+Sylvester's "_opal-coloured_ morn", Drayton's "_silver-sanded_ shore",
+and perhaps Marlowe's "_golden-fingered_ Ind"{78}.
+
+Our modern inventions in the same kind are for the most part very
+inferior: they could hardly fail to be so, seeing that the formative,
+plastic powers of a language are always waning and diminishing more and
+more. It may be, and indeed is, gaining in other respects, but in this
+it is losing; and thus it is not strange if its later births in this
+kind are less successful than its earlier. Among the poets of our own
+time Shelley has done more than any other to assert for the language
+that it has not quite renounced this power; while among writers of prose
+in these later days Jeremy Bentham has been at once one of the boldest,
+but at the same time one of the most unfortunate, of those who have
+issued this money from their mint. Still we ought not to forget, while
+we divert ourselves with the strange and formless progeny of his brain,
+that we owe 'international' to him--a word at once so convenient and
+supplying so real a need, that it was, and with manifest advantage, at
+once adopted by all{79}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Adjectives ending in al_}
+
+Another way in which languages increase their stock of vocables is by
+the forming of new words according to the analogy of formations, which
+in seemingly parallel cases have been already allowed. Thus long since
+upon certain substantives such as 'congregation', 'convention', were
+formed their adjectives, 'congregational', 'conventional'; yet these
+also at a comparatively modern period; 'congregational' first rising up
+in the Assembly of Divines, or during the time of the Commonwealth{80}.
+These having found admission into the language, it is attempted to repeat
+the process in the case of other words with the same ending. I confess
+the effect is often exceedingly disagreeable. We are now pretty well used
+to 'educational', and the word is sometimes serviceable enough; but I can
+perfectly remember when some twenty years ago an "_Educational_ Magazine"
+was started, the first impression on one's mind was, that a work having
+to do with education should not thus bear upon its front an offensive,
+or to say the best, a very dubious novelty in the English language{81}.
+These adjectives are now multiplying fast. We have 'inflexional',
+'seasonal', 'denominational', and, not content with this, in dissenting
+magazines at least, the monstrous birth, 'denominationalism'; 'emotional'
+is creeping into books{82}, 'sensational', and others as well, so that
+it is hard to say where this influx will stop, or whether all our words
+with this termination will not finally generate an adjective. Convenient
+as you may sometimes find these, I would yet certainly counsel you to
+abstain from all but the perfectly well recognized formations of this
+kind. There may be cases of exception; but for the most part Pope's
+advice is good, as certainly it is safe, that we be not among the last
+to use a word which is going out, nor among the first to employ one that
+is coming in.
+
+'Starvation' is another word of comparatively recent introduction,
+formed in like manner on the model of preceding formations of an
+apparently similar character--its first formers, indeed, not observing
+that they were putting a Latin termination to a Saxon word. Some have
+supposed it to have reached us from America. It has not however
+travelled from so great a distance, being a stranger indeed, yet not
+from beyond the Atlantic, but only from beyond the Tweed. It is an old
+Scottish word, but unknown in England, till used by Mr. Dundas, the
+first Viscount Melville, in an American debate in 1775. That it then
+jarred strangely on English ears is evident from the nickname,
+"_Starvation_ Dundas", which in consequence he obtained{83}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Revival of Words_}
+
+Again, languages enrich themselves, our own has done so, by recovering
+treasures which for a while had been lost by them or forgone. I do not
+mean that all which drops out of use _is_ loss; there are words which it
+is gain to be rid of; which it would be folly to wish to revive; of
+which Dryden, setting himself against an extravagant zeal in this
+direction, says in an ungracious comparison--they do "not deserve this
+redemption, any more than the crowds of men who daily die, or are slain
+for sixpence in a battle, merit to be restored to life, if a wish could
+revive them"{84}. There are others, however, which it is a real gain to
+draw back again from the temporary oblivion which had overtaken them;
+and this process of their setting and rising again, or of what, to use
+another image, we might call their suspended animation, is not so
+unfrequent as at first might be supposed.
+
+You may perhaps remember that Horace, tracing in a few memorable lines
+the history of words, while he notes that many once current have now
+dropped out of use, does not therefore count that of necessity their
+race is for ever run; on the contrary he confidently anticipates a
+_palingenesy_ for many among them{85}; and I am convinced that there has
+been such in the case of our English words to a far greater extent than
+we are generally aware. Words slip almost or quite as imperceptibly back
+into use as they once slipped out of it. Let me produce a few facts in
+evidence of this. In the contemporary gloss which an anonymous friend of
+Spenser's furnished to his _Shepherd's Calendar_, first published in
+1579, "for the exposition of old words", as he declares, he thinks it
+expedient to include in his list, the following, 'dapper', 'scathe',
+'askance', 'sere', 'embellish', 'bevy', 'forestall', 'fain', with not a
+few others quite as familiar as these. In Speght's _Chaucer_ (1667),
+there is a long list of "old and obscure words in Chaucer explained";
+including 'anthem', 'blithe', 'bland', 'chapelet', 'carol', 'deluge',
+'franchise', 'illusion', 'problem', 'recreant', 'sphere', 'tissue',
+'transcend', with very many easier than these. In Skinner's
+_Etymologicon_ (1671), there is another list of obsolete, words{86}, and
+among these he includes 'to dovetail', 'to interlace', 'elvish',
+'encombred', 'masquerade' (mascarade), 'oriental', 'plumage', 'pummel'
+(pomell), and 'stew', that is, for fish. Who will say of the verb 'to
+hallow' that it is now even obsolescent? and yet Wallis two hundred
+years ago observed--"It has almost gone out of use" (fer. desuevit). It
+would be difficult to find an example of the verb, 'to advocate',
+between Milton and Burke{87}. Franklin, a close observer in such
+matters, as he was himself an admirable master of English style,
+considered the word to have sprung up during his own residence in
+Europe. In this indeed he was mistaken; it had only during this period
+revived{88}. Johnson says of 'jeopardy' that it is a "word not now in
+use"; which certainly is not any longer true{89}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Dryden and Chaucer's English_}
+
+I am persuaded that in facility of being understood, Chaucer is not
+merely as near, but much nearer, to us than Dryden and his cotemporaries
+felt him to be to them. He and the writers of his time make exactly the
+same sort of complaints, only in still stronger language, about his
+archaic phraseology and the obscurities which it involves, that are made
+at the present day. Thus in the _Preface_ to his _Tales from Chaucer_,
+having quoted some not very difficult lines from the earlier poet whom
+he was modernizing, he proceeds: "You have here a specimen of Chaucer's
+language, which is so obsolete that his sense is scarce to be
+understood". Nor was it merely thus with respect of Chaucer. These wits
+and poets of the Court of Charles the Second were conscious of a greater
+gulf between themselves and the Elizabethan era, separated from them by
+little more than fifty years, than any of which _we_ are aware,
+separated from it by nearly two centuries more. I do not mean merely
+that they felt themselves more removed from its tone and spirit; their
+altered circumstances might explain this; but I am convinced that they
+found a greater difficulty and strangeness in the language of Spenser
+and Shakespeare than we find now; that it sounded in many ways more
+uncouth, more old-fashioned, more abounding in obsolete terms than it
+does in our ears at the present. Only in this way can I explain the
+tone in which they are accustomed to speak of these worthies of the near
+past. I must again cite Dryden, the truest representative of literary
+England in its good and in its evil during the last half of the
+seventeenth century. Of Spenser, whose death was separated from his own
+birth by little more than thirty years, he speaks as of one belonging to
+quite a different epoch, counting it much to say, "Notwithstanding his
+obsolete language, he is still intelligible"{90}. Nay, hear what his
+judgment is of Shakespeare himself, so far as language is concerned: "It
+must be allowed to the present age that the tongue in general is so much
+refined since Shakespeare's time, that many of his words and more of his
+phrases are scarce intelligible. And of those which we understand, some
+are ungrammatical, others coarse; and his whole style is so pestered
+with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is
+obscure"{91}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Nugget_, _Ingot_}
+
+Sometimes a word will emerge anew from the undercurrent of society, not
+indeed new, but yet to most seeming as new, its very existence having
+been altogether forgotten by the larger number of those speaking the
+language; although it must have somewhere lived on upon the lips of men.
+Thus, for instance, since the Californian and Australian discoveries of
+gold we hear often of a 'nugget' of gold; being a lump of the pure
+metal; and there has been some discussion whether the word has been born
+for the present necessity, or whether it be a recent malformation of
+'ingot', I am inclined to think that it is neither one nor the other. I
+would not indeed affirm that it may not be a popular recasting of
+'ingot'; but only that it is not a recent one; for 'nugget' very nearly
+in its present form, occurs in our elder writers, being spelt 'niggot'
+by them{92}. There can be little doubt of the identity of 'niggot' and
+'nugget'; all the consonants, the _stamina_ of a word, being the same;
+while this early form 'niggot' makes more plausible their suggestion
+that 'nugget' is only 'ingot' disguised, seeing that there wants nothing
+but the very common transposition of the first two letters to bring that
+out of this{93}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words from Proper Names_}
+
+New words are often formed from the names of persons, actual or
+mythical. Some one has observed how interesting would be a complete
+collection, or a collection approaching to completeness, in any language
+of the names of _persons_ which have afterwards become names of
+_things_, from 'nomina _appellativa_' have become 'nomina _realia_'{94}.
+Let me without confining myself to those of more recent introduction
+endeavour to enumerate as many as I can remember of the words which have
+by this method been introduced into our language. To begin with mythical
+antiquity--the Chimaera has given us 'chimerical', Hermes 'hermetic',
+Tantalus 'to tantalize', Hercules 'herculean', Proteus 'protean', Vulcan
+'volcano' and 'volcanic', and Daedalus 'dedal', if this word may on
+Spenser's and Shelley's authority be allowed. Gordius, the Phrygian king
+who tied that famous 'gordian' knot which Alexander cut, will supply a
+natural transition from mythical to historical. Here Mausolus, a king of
+Caria, has left us 'mausoleum', Academus 'academy', Epicurus 'epicure',
+Philip of Macedon a 'philippic', being such a discourse as Demosthenes
+once launched against the enemy of Greece, and Cicero 'cicerone'.
+Mithridates, who had made himself poison-proof, gave us the now
+forgotten word 'mithridate', for antidote; as from Hippocrates we
+derived 'hipocras', or 'ypocras', a word often occurring in our early
+poets, being a wine supposed to be mingled after his receipt. Gentius, a
+king of Illyria, gave his name to the plant 'gentian', having been, it
+is said, the first to discover its virtues. A grammar used to be called
+a 'donnat', or 'donet' (Chaucer), from Donatus, a famous grammarian.
+Lazarus, perhaps an actual person, has given us 'lazar' and 'lazaretto';
+St. Veronica and the legend connected with her name, a 'vernicle';
+being a napkin with the Saviour's face portrayed on it; Simon Magus
+'simony'; Mahomet a 'mammet' or 'maumet', meaning an idol{95}, and
+'mammetry' or idolatry; 'dunce' is from Duns Scotus; while there is a
+legend that the 'knot' or sandpiper is named from Canute or Knute, with
+whom this bird was a special favourite. To come to more modern times,
+and not pausing at Ben Johnson's 'chaucerisms', Bishop Hall's
+'scoganisms', from Scogan, Edward the Fourth's jester, or his
+'aretinisms', from an infamous writer, 'a poisonous Italian ribald' as
+Gabriel Harvey calls him, named Aretine; these being probably not
+intended even by their authors to endure; a Roman cobbler named Pasquin
+has given us the 'pasquil' or 'pasquinade'; 'patch' in the sense of
+fool, and often so used by Shakespeare, was originally the proper name
+of a favourite fool of Cardinal Wolsey{96}; Colonel Negus in Queen
+Anne's time first mixed the beverage which goes by his name; Lord Orrery
+was the first for whom an 'orrery' was constructed; and Lord Spencer
+first wore, or at least first brought into fashion, a 'spencer'. Dahl, a
+Swede, introduced the cultivation of the 'dahlia', and M. Tabinet, a
+French Protestant refugee, the making of the stuff called 'tabinet' in
+Dublin; in '_tram_-road', the second syllable of the name of Ou_tram_,
+the inventor, survives{97}. The 'tontine' was conceived by an Italian
+named Tonti; and another Italian, Galvani, first noted the phenomena of
+animal electricity or 'galvanism'; while a third Italian, 'Volta', gave
+a name to the 'voltaic' battery. 'Martinet', 'mackintosh', 'doyly',
+'brougham', 'to macadamize', 'to burke', are all names of persons or
+from persons, and then transferred to things, on the score of some
+connection existing between the one and other{98}.
+
+Again the names of popular characters in literature, such as have taken
+strong hold on the national mind, give birth to a number of new words.
+Thus from Homer we have 'mentor' for a monitor; 'stentorian', for
+loud-voiced; and inasmuch as with all of Hector's nobleness there is a
+certain amount of big talking about him, he has given us 'to
+hector'{99}; while the medieval romances about the siege of Troy ascribe
+to Pandarus that shameful ministry out of which his name has past into
+the words 'to pandar' and 'pandarism'. 'Rodomontade' is from Rodomont, a
+blustering and boasting hero of Boiardo, adopted by Ariosto;
+'thrasonical', from Thraso, the braggart of the Roman comedy. Cervantes
+has given us 'quixotic'; Swift 'lilliputian'; to Moliere the French
+language owes 'tartuffe' and 'tartufferie'. 'Reynard' too, which with us
+is a duplicate for fox, while in the French 'renard' has quite excluded
+the older 'volpils', was originally not the name of a kind, but the
+proper name of the fox-hero, the vulpine Ulysses, in that famous
+beast-epic of the middle ages, _Reineke Fuchs_; the immense popularity
+of which we gather from many evidences, from none more clearly than from
+this. 'Chanticleer' is in like manner the proper name of the cock, and
+'Bruin' of the bear in the same poem{100}. These have not made fortune
+to the same extent of actually putting out in any language the names
+which before existed, but still have become quite familiar to us all.
+
+We must not count as new words properly so called, although they may
+delay us for a minute, those comic words, most often comic combinations
+formed at will, and sometimes of enormous length, in which, as plays and
+displays of power, great writers ancient and modern have delighted.
+These for the most part are meant to do service for the moment, and then
+to pass away{101}. The inventors of them had themselves no intention of
+fastening them permanently on the language. Thus among the Greeks
+Aristophanes coined {Greek: mellonikiao:}, to loiter like Nicias, with
+allusion to the delays with which this prudent commander sought to put
+off the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with not a few other familiar to
+every scholar. The humour of them sometimes consists in their enormous
+length, as in the {Greek: amphiptolemope:de:sistratos} of Eupolis; the
+{Greek: spermagoraiolekitholachanopo:lis} of Aristophanes; sometimes in
+their mingled observance and transgression of the laws of the language,
+as in the 'oculissimus' of Plautus, a comic superlative of 'oculus';
+'occisissimus' of 'occisus'; as in the 'dosones', 'dabones', which in
+Greek and in medieval Latin were names given to those who were ever
+promising, ever saying "I will give" but never performing their promise.
+Plautus with his exuberant wit, and exulting in his mastery and command
+of the Latin language, will compose four or five lines consisting
+entirely of comic combinations thrown off for the occasion{102}. Of the
+same character is Butler's 'cynarctomachy', or battle of a dog and bear.
+Nor do I suppose that Fuller, when he used 'to avunculize', to imitate
+or follow in the steps of one's uncle, or Cowper, when he suggested
+'extraforaneous' for out of doors, in the least intended them as lasting
+additions to the language.
+
+{Sidenote: '_To Chouse_'}
+
+Sometimes a word springs up in a very curious way; here is one, not
+having, I suppose, any great currency except among schoolboys; yet being
+no invention of theirs, but a genuine English word, though of somewhat
+late birth in the language, I mean 'to chouse'. It has a singular
+origin. The word is, as I have mentioned already, a Turkish one, and
+signifies 'interpreter'. Such an interpreter or 'chiaous' (written
+'chaus' in Hackluyt, 'chiaus' in Massinger), being attached to the
+Turkish embassy in England, committed in the year 1609 an enormous fraud
+on the Turkish and Persian merchants resident in London. He succeeded in
+cheating them of a sum amounting to 4000 pounds--a sum very much greater
+at that day than at the present. From the vast dimensions of the fraud,
+and the notoriety which attended it, any one who cheated or defrauded
+was said 'to chiaous', 'chause', or 'chouse'; to do, that is, as this
+'chiaous' had done{103}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Different Spelling of Words_}
+
+There is another very fruitful source of new words in a language, or
+perhaps rather another way in which it increases its vocabulary, for a
+question might arise whether the words thus produced ought to be called
+new. I mean through the splitting of single words into two or even more.
+The impulse and suggestion to this is in general first given by
+varieties in pronunciation, which are presently represented by varieties
+in spelling; but the result very often is that what at first were only
+precarious and arbitrary differences in this, come in the end to be
+regarded as entirely different words; they detach themselves from one
+another, not again to reunite; just as accidental varieties in fruits or
+flowers, produced at hazard, have yet permanently separated off, and
+settled into different kinds. They have each its own distinct domain of
+meaning, as by general agreement assigned to it; dividing the
+inheritance between them, which hitherto they held in common. No one who
+has not had his attention called to this matter, who has not watched and
+catalogued these words as they have come under his notice, would at all
+believe how numerous they are.
+
+{Sidenote: _Doublets_}
+
+Sometimes as the accent is placed on one syllable of a word or another,
+it comes to have different significations, and those so distinctly
+marked, that the separation may be regarded as complete. Examples of
+this are the following: 'di/vers', and 'dive/rse'; 'co/njure' and
+'conju/re'; 'a/ntic' and 'anti/que'; 'hu/man' and 'huma/ne'; 'u/rban'
+and 'urba/ne'; 'ge/ntle' and 'gente/el'; 'cu/stom' and 'costu/me';
+'e/ssay' and 'assa/y'; 'pro/perty' and 'propri/ety'. Or again, a word is
+pronounced with a full sound of its syllables, or somewhat more shortly:
+thus 'spirit' and 'sprite'; 'blossom' and 'bloom'{104}; 'personality'
+and 'personalty'; 'fantasy' and 'fancy'; 'triumph' and 'trump' (the
+_winning_ card{105}); 'happily' and 'haply'; 'waggon' and 'wain';
+'ordinance' and 'ordnance'; 'shallop' and 'sloop'; 'brabble' and
+'brawl'{106}; 'syrup' and 'shrub'; 'balsam' and 'balm'; 'eremite' and
+'hermit'; 'nighest' and 'next'; 'poesy' and 'posy'; 'fragile' and
+'frail'; 'achievement' and 'hatchment'; 'manoeuvre' and 'manure';--or
+with the dropping of the first syllable: 'history' and 'story';
+'etiquette' and 'ticket'; 'escheat' and 'cheat'; 'estate' and 'state';
+and, older probably than any of these, 'other' and 'or';--or with a
+dropping of the last syllable, as 'Britany' and 'Britain'; 'crony' and
+'crone';--or without losing a syllable, with more or less stress laid on
+the close: 'regiment' and 'regimen'; 'corpse' and 'corps'; 'bite' and
+'bit'; 'sire' and 'sir'; 'land' or 'laund' and 'lawn'; 'suite' and
+'suit'; 'swinge' and 'swing'; 'gulph' and 'gulp'; 'launch' and 'lance';
+'wealth' and 'weal'; 'stripe' and 'strip'; 'borne' and 'born'; 'clothes'
+and 'cloths';--or a slight internal vowel change finds place, as between
+'dent' and 'dint'; 'rant' and 'rent' (a ranting actor tears or _rends_ a
+passion to tatters){107}; 'creak' and 'croak'; 'float' and 'fleet';
+'sleek' and 'slick'; 'sheen' and 'shine'; 'shriek' and 'shrike'; 'pick'
+and 'peck'; 'peak', 'pique', and 'pike'; 'weald' and 'wold'; 'drip' and
+'drop'; 'wreathe' and 'writhe'; 'spear' and 'spire' ("the least _spire_
+of grass", South); 'trist' and 'trust'; 'band', 'bend' and 'bond';
+'cope', 'cape' and 'cap'; 'tip' and 'top'; 'slent' (now obsolete) and
+'slant'; 'sweep' and 'swoop'; 'wrest' and 'wrist'; 'gad' (now surviving
+only in gadfly) and 'goad'; 'complement' and 'compliment'; 'fitch' and
+'vetch'; 'spike' and 'spoke'; 'tamper' and 'temper'; 'ragged' and
+'rugged'; 'gargle' and 'gurgle'; 'snake' and 'sneak' (both crawl);
+'deal' and 'dole'; 'giggle' and 'gaggle' (this last is now commonly
+spelt 'cackle'); 'sip', 'sop', 'soup' and 'sup'; 'clack', 'click' and
+'clock'; 'tetchy' and 'touchy'; 'neat' and 'nett'; 'stud' and 'steed';
+'then' and 'than'{108}; 'grits' and 'grouts'; 'spirt' and 'sprout';
+'cure' and 'care'{109}; 'prune' and 'preen'; 'mister' and 'master';
+'allay' and 'alloy'; 'ghostly' and 'ghastly'{110}; 'person' and
+'parson'; 'cleft' and 'clift', now written 'cliff'; 'travel' and
+'travail'; 'truth' and 'troth'; 'pennon' and 'pinion'; 'quail' and
+'quell'; 'quell' and 'kill'; 'metal' and 'mettle'; 'chagrin' and
+'shagreen'; 'can' and 'ken'; 'Francis' and 'Frances'{111}; 'chivalry'
+and 'cavalry'; 'oaf' and 'elf'; 'lose' and 'loose'; 'taint' and 'tint'.
+Sometimes the difference is mainly or entirely in the initial
+consonants, as between 'phial' and 'vial'; 'pother' and 'bother';
+'bursar' and 'purser'; 'thrice' and 'trice'{110}; 'shatter' and
+'scatter'; 'chattel' and 'cattle'; 'chant' and 'cant'; 'zealous' and
+'jealous'; 'channel' and 'kennel'; 'wise' and 'guise'; 'quay' and 'key';
+'thrill', 'trill' and 'drill';--or in the consonants in the middle of
+the word, as between 'cancer' and 'canker'; 'nipple' and 'nibble';
+'tittle' and 'title'; 'price' and 'prize'; 'consort' and 'concert';--or
+there is a change in both, as between 'pipe' and 'fife'.
+
+Or a word is spelt now with a final _k_ and now with a final _ch_; out
+of this variation two different words have been formed; with, it may be,
+other slight differences superadded; thus is it with 'poke' and 'poach';
+'dyke' and 'ditch'; 'stink' and 'stench'; 'prick' and 'pritch' (now
+obsolete); 'break' and 'breach'; to which may be added 'broach'; 'lace'
+and 'latch'; 'stick' and 'stitch'; 'lurk' and 'lurch'; 'bank' and
+'bench'; 'stark' and 'starch'; 'wake' and 'watch'. So too _t_ and _d_
+are easily exchanged; as in 'clod' and 'clot'; 'vend' and 'vent';
+'brood' and 'brat'{112}; 'halt' and 'hold'; 'sad' and 'set'{113}; 'card'
+and 'chart'; 'medley' and 'motley'. Or there has grown up, besides the
+rigorous and accurate pronunciation of a word, a popular as well; and
+this in the end has formed itself into another word; thus is it with
+'housewife' and 'hussey'; 'hanaper' and 'hamper'; 'puisne' and 'puny';
+'patron' and 'pattern'; 'spital' (hospital) and 'spittle' (house of
+correction); 'accompt' and 'account'; 'donjon' and 'dungeon'; 'nestle'
+and 'nuzzle'{114} (now obsolete); 'Egyptian' and 'gypsy'; 'Bethlehem'
+and 'Bedlam'; 'exemplar' and 'sampler'; 'dolphin' and 'dauphin'; 'iota'
+and 'jot'.
+
+Other changes cannot perhaps be reduced exactly under any of these
+heads; as between 'ounce' and 'inch'; 'errant' and 'arrant'; 'slack' and
+'slake'; 'slow' and 'slough'{115}; 'bow' and 'bough'; 'hew' and
+'hough'{115}; 'dies' and 'dice' (both plurals of 'die'); 'plunge' and
+'flounce'{115}; 'staff' and 'stave'; 'scull' and 'shoal'; 'benefit' and
+'benefice'{116}. Or, it may be, the difference which constitutes the two
+forms of the word into two words is in the spelling only, and of a
+character to be appreciable only by the eye, escaping altogether the
+ear: thus it is with 'draft' and 'draught'; 'plain' and 'plane'; 'coign'
+and 'coin'; 'flower' and 'flour'; 'check' and 'cheque'; 'straight' and
+'strait'; 'ton' and 'tun'; 'road' and 'rode'; 'throw' and 'throe';
+'wrack' and 'rack'; 'gait' and 'gate'; 'hoard' and 'horde'{117}; 'knoll'
+and 'noll'; 'chord' and 'cord'; 'drachm' and 'dram'; 'sergeant' and
+'serjeant'; 'mask' and 'masque'; 'villain' and 'villein'.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in Two Forms_}
+
+Now, if you will put the matter to proof, you will find, I believe, in
+every case that there has attached itself to the different forms of a
+word a modification of meaning more or less sensible, that each has won
+for itself an independent sphere of meaning, in which it, and it only,
+moves. For example, 'divers' implies difference only, but 'diverse'
+difference with opposition; thus the several Evangelists narrate the
+same event in 'divers' manner, but not in 'diverse'. 'Antique' is
+ancient, but 'antic', is now the ancient regarded as overlived, out of
+date, and so in our days grotesque, ridiculous; and then, with a
+dropping of the reference to age, the grotesque, the ridiculous alone.
+'Human' is what every man is, 'humane' is what every man ought to be;
+for Johnson's suggestion that 'humane' is from the French feminine,
+'humaine', and 'human' from the masculine, cannot for an instant be
+admitted. 'Ingenious' expresses a mental, 'ingenuous' a moral,
+excellence{118}. A gardener 'prunes', or trims his trees, properly
+indeed his _vines_ alone (pro_vigner_), birds 'preen' or trim their
+feathers. We 'allay' wine with water; we 'alloy' gold with platina.
+'Bloom' is a finer and more delicate efflorescence even than 'blossom';
+thus the 'bloom', but not the 'blossom', of the cheek. It is now always
+'clots' of blood and 'clods' of earth; a 'float' of timber, and a
+'fleet' of ships; men 'vend' wares, and 'vent' complaints. A 'curtsey'
+is one, and that merely an external, manifestation of 'courtesy'.
+'Gambling' may be, as with a fearful irony it is called, _play_, but it
+is nearly as distant from 'gambolling' as hell is from heaven{119}. Nor
+would it be hard, in almost every pair or larger group of words which I
+have adduced, as in others which no doubt might be added to complete the
+list, to trace a difference of meaning which has obtained a more or less
+distinct recognition{120}.
+
+But my subject is inexhaustible; it has no limits except those, which
+indeed may be often narrow enough, imposed by my own ignorance on the
+one side; and on the other, by the necessity of consulting your
+patience, and of only choosing such matter as will admit a popular
+setting forth. These necessities, however, bid me to pause, and suggest
+that I should not look round for other quarters from whence accessions
+of new words are derived. Doubtless I should not be long without finding
+many such. I must satisfy myself for the rest with a very brief
+consideration of the _motives_ which, as they have been, are still at
+work among us, inducing us to seek for these augmentations of our
+vocabulary.
+
+And first, the desire of greater clearness is a frequent motive and
+inducement to this. It has been well and truly said: "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"{121}. The limits of their vocabulary are
+in fact for most men the limits of their knowledge; and in a great
+degree for us all. Of course I do not affirm that it is absolutely
+impossible to have our mental conceptions clearer and more distinct than
+our words; but it is very hard to have, and still harder to keep, them
+so. And therefore it is that men, conscious of this, so soon as ever
+they have learned to distinguish in their minds, are urged by an almost
+irresistible impulse to distinguish also in their words. They feel that
+nothing is made sure till this is done.
+
+{Sidenote: _Dissimilation of Words_}
+
+The sense that a word covers too large a space of meaning, is the
+frequent occasion of the introduction of another, which shall relieve
+it of a portion of this. Thus, there was a time when 'witch' was applied
+equally to male and female dealers in unlawful magical arts. Simon
+Magus, for example, and Elymas are both 'witches', in Wiclif's _New
+Testament_ (Acts viii. 9; xiii. 8), and Posthumus in _Cymbeline_: but
+when the medieval Latin 'sortiarius' (not 'sortitor' as in Richardson),
+supplied another word, the French 'sorcier', and thus our English
+'sorcerer' (originally the "caster of lots"), then 'witch' gradually was
+confined to the hag, or female practiser of these arts, while 'sorcerer'
+was applied to the male.
+
+New necessities, new evolutions of society into more complex conditions,
+evoke new words; which come forth, because they are required now; but
+did not formerly exist, because they were not required in the period
+preceding. For example, in Greece so long as the poet sang his own
+verses 'singer' ({Greek: aoidos}) sufficiently expressed the double
+function; such a 'singer' was Homer, and such Homer describes Demodocus,
+the bard of the Phaeacians; that double function, in fact, not being in
+his time contemplated as double, but each part of it so naturally
+completing the other, that no second word was required. When, however,
+in the division of labour one made the verses which another chaunted,
+then 'poet' or 'maker', a word unknown in the Homeric age, arose. In
+like manner, when 'physicians' were the only natural philosophers, the
+word covered this meaning as well as that other which it still retains;
+but when the investigation of nature and natural causes detached itself
+from the art of healing, became an independent study of itself, the
+name 'physician' remained to that which was as the stock and stem of the
+art, while the new offshoot sought out a new name for itself.
+
+Another motive to the invention of new words, is the desire thereby to
+cut short lengthy{122} explanations, tedious circuits of language.
+Science is often an immense gainer by words, which say singly what it
+would have taken whole sentences otherwise to have said. Thus
+'isothermal' is quite of modern invention; but what a long story it
+would be to tell the meaning of '_isothermal_ lines', all which is
+summed up in and saved by the word. We have long had the word
+'assimilation' in our dictionaries; 'dissimilation' has not yet found
+its way into them, but it speedily will. It will appear first, if it has
+not already appeared, in our books on language{123}. I express myself
+with this confidence, because the advance of philological enquiry has
+rendered it almost a matter of necessity that we should possess a word
+to designate a certain process, and no other word would designate it at
+all so well. There is a process of 'assimilation' going on very
+extensively in language; it occurs where the organs of speech find
+themselves helped by changing a letter for another which has just
+occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not '_adf_iance'
+but '_aff_iance', not 're_n_ow_m_', as our ancestors did when the word
+'renommee' was first naturalized, but 're_n_ow_n_'. At the same time
+there is another opposite process, where some letter would recur too
+often for euphony or comfort in speaking, if the strict form of the word
+were too closely held fast, and where consequently this letter is
+exchanged for some other, generally for some nearly allied; thus it is
+at least a reasonable suggestion, that 'coe_r_uleum' was once
+'coe_l_uleum', from coelum: so too the Italians prefer 've_l_e_n_o' to
+'ve_n_e_n_o'; and we 'cinnamo_n_' to 'cinnamo_m_' (the earlier form); in
+'turtle' and 'purple' we have shrunk from the double '_r_' of 'turtur'
+and 'purpura'; and this process of _making unlike_, requiring a term to
+express it, will create, or indeed has created, the word 'dissimilation',
+which probably will in due time establish itself among us in far wider
+than its primary use.
+
+'Watershed' has only recently begun to appear in books of geography; and
+yet how convenient it must be admitted to be; how much more so than
+'line of water parting', which it has succeeded; meaning, as I need
+hardly tell you it does, not merely that which _sheds_ the waters, but
+that which _divides_ them ('wasserscheide'); and being applied to that
+exact ridge and highest line in a mountain region, where the waters of
+that region separate off and divide, some to one side, and some to the
+other; as in the Rocky Mountains of North America there are streams
+rising within very few miles of one another, which flow severally east
+and west, and, if not in unbroken course, yet as affluents to larger
+rivers, fall at least severally into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It
+must be allowed, I think, that not merely geographical terminology, but
+geography itself, had a benefactor in him who first endowed it with so
+expressive and comprehensive a word, bringing before us a fact which we
+should scarcely have been aware of without it.
+
+There is another word which I have just employed, 'affluent', in the
+sense of a stream which does not flow into the sea, but joins a larger
+stream, as for instance, the Isis is an 'affluent' of the Thames, the
+Moselle of the Rhine. It is itself an example in the same kind of that
+whereof I have been speaking, having been only recently constituted a
+substantive, and employed in this sense, while yet its utility is
+obvious. 'Confluents' would perhaps be a fitter name, where the rivers,
+like the Missouri and the Mississippi, were of equal or nearly equal
+importance up to the time of their meeting{124}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Selfishness_', '_Suicide_'}
+
+Again, new words are coined out of the necessity which men feel of
+filling up gaps in the language. Thoughtful men, comparing their own
+language with that of other nations, become conscious of deficiencies,
+of important matters unexpressed in their own, and with more or less
+success proceed to supply the deficiency. For example, that sin of sins,
+the undue love of self, with the postponing of the interests of all
+others to our own, had for a long time no word to express it in English.
+Help was sought from the Greek, and from the Latin. 'Philauty' ({Greek:
+philautia}) had been more than once attempted by our scholars; but found
+no popular acceptance. This failing, men turned to the Latin; one writer
+trying to supply the want by calling the man a 'suist', as one seeking
+_his own_ things ('sua'), and the sin itself, 'suicism'. The gap,
+however, was not really filled up, till some of the Puritan writers,
+drawing on our Saxon, devised 'selfish' and 'selfishness', words which
+to us seem obvious enough, but which yet are little more than two
+hundred [and fifty] years old{125}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Notices of New Words_}
+
+Before quitting this part of the subject, let me say a few words in
+conclusion on this deliberate introduction of words to supply felt
+omissions in a language, and the limits within which this or any other
+conscious interference with the development of a language is desirable
+or possible. By the time that a people begin to meditate upon their
+language, to be aware by a conscious reflective act either of its merits
+or deficiencies, by far the greater and more important part of its work
+is done; it is fixed in respect of its structure in immutable forms; the
+region in which any alteration or modification, addition to it, or
+substraction from it, deliberately devised and carried out, may be
+possible, is very limited indeed. Its great laws are too firmly
+established to admit of this; so that almost nothing can be taken from
+it, which it has got; almost nothing added to it, which it has _not_
+got. It will travel indeed in certain courses of change; but it would be
+as easy almost to alter the career of a planet as for man to alter
+these. This is sometimes a subject of regret with those who see what
+they believe manifest defects or blemishes in their language, and such
+as appear to them capable of remedy. And yet in fact this is well; since
+for once that these redressers of real or fancied wrongs, these
+suppliers of things lacking, would have mended, we may be tolerably
+confident that ten times, yea, a hundred times, they would have marred;
+letting go that which would have been well retained; retaining that
+which by a necessary law the language now dismisses and lets go; and in
+manifold ways interfering with those processes of a natural logic, which
+are here evermore at work. The genius of a language, unconsciously
+presiding over all its transformations, and conducting them to a
+definite issue, will have been a far truer, far safer guide, than the
+artificial wit, however subtle, of any single man, or of any association
+of men. For the genius of a language is the sense and inner conviction
+of all who speak it, as to what it ought to be, and the means by which
+it will best attain its objects; and granting that a pair of eyes, or
+two or three pairs of eyes may see much, yet millions of eyes will
+certainly see more.
+
+{Sidenote: _German Purists_}
+
+It is only with the words, and not with the forms and laws of a
+language, that any interference such as I have just supposed is
+possible. Something, indeed much, may here be done by wise masters, in
+the way of rejecting that which would deform, allowing and adopting that
+which will strengthen and enrich. Those who would purify or enrich a
+language, so long as they have kept within this their proper sphere,
+have often effected much, more than at first could have seemed possible.
+The history of the German language affords so much better illustration
+of this than our own would do, that I shall make no scruple in seeking
+my examples there. When the patriotic Germans began to wake up to a
+consciousness of the enormous encroachments which foreign languages,
+the Latin and French above all, had made on their native tongue, the
+lodgements which they had therein effected, and the danger which
+threatened it, namely, that it should cease to be German at all, but
+only a mingle-mangle, a variegated patchwork of many languages, without
+any unity or inner coherence at all, various societies were instituted
+among them, at the beginning and during the course of the seventeenth
+century, for the recovering of what was lost of their own, for the
+expelling of that which had intruded from abroad; and these with
+excellent effect.
+
+But more effectual than these societies were the efforts of single men,
+who in this merited well of their country{126}. In respect of words
+which are now entirely received by the whole nation, it is often possible
+to designate the writers who first substituted them for some affected
+Gallicism or unnecessary Latinism. Thus to Lessing his fellow-countrymen
+owe the substitution of 'zartgefuehl' for 'delicatesse', of
+'empfindsamkeit' for 'sentimentalitaet', of 'wesenheit' for 'essence'.
+It was Voss (1786) who first employed 'alterthuemlich' for 'antik'.
+Wieland too was the author or reviver of a multitude of excellent words,
+for which often he had to do earnest battle at the first; such were
+'seligkeit', 'anmuth', 'entzueckung', 'festlich', 'entwirren', with many
+more. For 'maskerade', Campe would have fain substituted 'larventanz'.
+It was a novelty when Buesching called his great work on geography
+'erdbeschreibung' instead of 'geographie'; while 'schnellpost' instead
+of 'diligence', 'zerrbild' for 'carricatur' are also of recent
+introduction. In regard of 'woerterbuch' itself, J. Grimm tells us he
+can find no example of its use dating earlier than 1719.
+
+Yet at the same time it must be acknowledged that some of these
+reformers proceeded with more zeal than knowledge, while others did
+whatever in them lay to make the whole movement absurd--even as there
+ever hang on the skirts of a noble movement, be it in literature or
+politics or higher things yet, those who contribute their little all to
+bring ridicule and contempt upon it. Thus in the reaction against
+foreign interlopers which ensued, and in the zeal to purify the language
+from them, some went to such extravagant excesses as to desire to get
+rid of 'testament', 'apostel', which last Campe would have replaced by
+'lehrbote', with other words like these, consecrated by longest use, and
+to find native substitutes in their room; or they understood so little
+what words deserved to be called foreign, or how to draw the line
+between them and native, that they would fain have gotten rid of
+'vater', 'mutter', 'wein', 'fenster', 'meister', 'kelch'{127}; the first
+three of which belong to the German language by just as good a right as
+they do to the Latin and the Greek; while the other three have been
+naturalized so long that to propose to expel them now was as if, having
+passed an alien act for the banishment of all foreigners, we should
+proceed to include under that name, and as such drive forth from the
+kingdom, the descendants of the French Protestants who found refuge here
+at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or even of the Flemings who
+settled among us in the time of our Edwards. One notable enthusiast in
+this line proposed to create an entirely new nomenclature for all the
+mythological personages of the Greek and the Roman pantheon, who, one
+would think, might have been allowed, if any, to retain their Greek and
+Latin names. So far however from this, they were to exchange these for
+equivalent German titles; Cupid was to be 'Lustkind', Flora 'Bluminne',
+Aurora 'Roethin'; instead of Apollo schoolboys were to speak of
+'Singhold'; instead of Pan of 'Schaflieb'; instead of Jupiter of
+'Helfevater', with much else of the same kind. Let us beware (and the
+warning extends much further than to the matter in hand) of making a
+good cause ridiculous by our manner of supporting it, of assuming that
+exaggerations on one side can only be redressed by exaggerations as
+great upon the other.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{38} Thus Alexander Gil, head-master of St. Paul's School, in his book,
+     _Logonomia Anglica_, 1621, _Preface_: Huc usque peregrinae voces in
+     lingua Anglica inauditae. Tandem circa annum 1400 Galfridus
+     Chaucerus, infausto omine, vocabulis Gallicis et Latinis poesin
+     suam famosam reddidit. The whole passage, which is too long to
+     quote, as indeed the whole book, is curious. Gil was an earnest
+     advocate of phonetic spelling, and has adopted it in all his
+     English quotations in this book.
+
+{39} We may observe exactly the same in Plautus: a multitude of Greek
+     words are used by him, which the Latin language did not want, and
+     therefore refused to take up; thus 'clepta', 'zamia' ({Greek:
+     ze:mia}), 'danista', 'harpagare', 'apolactizare', 'nauclerus',
+     'strategus', 'morologus', 'phylaca', 'malacus', 'sycophantia',
+     'euscheme' ({Greek: eusche:mo:s}), 'dulice' ({Greek: douliko:s}),
+     [so 'scymnus' by Lucretius], none of which, I believe, are employed
+     except by him; 'mastigias' and 'techna' appear also in Terence. Yet
+     only experience could show that they were superfluous; and at the
+     epoch of Latin literature in which Plautus lived, it was well done
+     to put them on trial.
+
+{40} [Modern poets have given 'amort' a new life; it is used by Keats,
+     by Bailey (_Festus_, xxx), and by Browning (_Sordello_, vi).]
+
+{41} ['Bruit' has been revived by Carlyle and Chas. Merivale. Its verbal
+     form is used by Cowper, Byron and Dickens.]
+
+{42} Let me here observe once for all that in adding the name of an
+     author, which I shall often do, to a word, I do not mean to affirm
+     the word in any way peculiar to him; although in some cases it may
+     be so; but only to give one authority for its use. [Coleridge uses
+     'eloign'.]
+
+{43} _Essay on English Poetry_, p. 93.
+
+{44} _Dedication of the Translation of the Aeneid_.
+
+{45} [i.e. the promoters of Classical learning.]
+
+{46} We have notable evidence in some lines of Waller of the sense which
+     in his time scholars had of the rapidity with which the language
+     was changing under their hands. Looking back at what the last
+     hundred years had wrought of alteration in it, and very naturally
+     assuming that the next hundred would effect as much, he checked
+     with misgivings such as these his own hope of immortality:
+
+         "Who can hope his lines should long
+         Last in a daily changing tongue?
+         While they are new, envy prevails,
+         And as that dies, our language fails.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+         "Poets that lasting marble seek,
+         Must carve in Latin or in Greek:
+         _We_ write in sand; our language grows,
+         And like the tide our work o'erflows".
+
+     Such were his misgivings as to the future, assuming that the rate
+     of change would continue what it had been. How little they have
+     been fulfilled, every one knows. In actual fact two centuries,
+     which have elapsed since he wrote, have hardly antiquated a word or
+     a phrase in his poems. If we care very little for them now, that is
+     to be explained by quite other causes--by the absence of all moral
+     earnestness from them.
+
+{47} In his _Art of English Poesy_, London, 1589, republished in
+     Haslewood's _Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy_,
+     London, 1811, vol. i. pp. 122, 123; [and in Arber's _English
+     Reprints_, 1869].
+
+{48} London, 1601. Besides this work Holland translated the whole of
+     Plutarch's _Moralia_, the _Cyropoedia_ of Xenophon, Livy,
+     Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Camden's _Britannia_. His
+     works make a part of the "library of dullness" in Pope's _Dunciad_:
+
+         "De Lyra there a dreadful front extends,
+         And here the groaning shelves _Philemon_ bends"--
+
+     very unjustly; the authors whom he has translated are all more or
+     less important, and his versions of them a mine of genuine
+     idiomatic English, neglected by most of our lexicographers, wrought
+     to a considerable extent, and with eminent advantage by Richardson;
+     yet capable, as it seems to me, of yielding much more than they
+     hitherto have yielded.
+
+{49} And so too in French it is surprising to find of how late
+     introduction are many words, which it seems as if the language
+     could never have done without. 'Desinteressement', 'exactitude',
+     'sagacite', 'bravoure', were not introduced till late in the
+     seventeenth century. 'Renaissance', 'emportement', 'scavoir-faire',
+     'indelebile', 'desagrement', were all recent in 1675 (Bouhours);
+     'indevot', 'intolerance', 'impardonnable', 'irreligieux', were
+     struggling into allowance at the end of the seventeenth century,
+     and were not established till the beginning of the eighteenth.
+     'Insidieux' was invented by Malherbe; 'frivolite' does not appear
+     in the earlier editions of the _Dictionary of the Academy_; the
+     Abbe de St. Pierre was the first to employ 'bienfaisance', the
+     elder Balzac 'feliciter', Sarrasin 'burlesque'. Mad. de Sevigne
+     exclaims against her daughter for employing 'effervescence' in a
+     letter (comment dites-vous cela, ma fille? Voila un mot dont je
+     n'avais jamais oui parler). 'Demagogue' was first hazarded by
+     Bossuet, and was counted so bold a novelty that it was long before
+     any ventured to follow him in its use. Somewhat earlier Montaigne
+     had introduced 'diversion' and 'enfantillage', though not without
+     being rebuked by cotemporaries on the score of the last.
+     Desfontaines was the first who employed 'suicide'; Caron gave to
+     the language 'avant-propos', Ronsard 'avidite', Joachim Dubellay
+     'patrie', Denis Sauvage 'jurisconsulte', Menage 'gracieux' (at
+     least so Voltaire affirms) and 'prosateur', Desportes 'pudeur',
+     Chapelain 'urbanite', and Etienne first brought in, apologizing at
+     the same time for the boldness of it, 'analogie' (si les oreilles
+     francoises peuvent porter ce mot). 'Preliber' (praelibare) is a
+     word of our own day; and it was Charles Nodier who, if he did not
+     coin, yet revived the obsolete 'simplesse'.--See Genin, _Variations
+     du Langage Francais_, pp. 308-19.
+
+{50} [Resuscitated in vain by Charles Lamb.]
+
+{51} J. Grimm (_Woerterbuch_, p. xxvi.): Faellt von ungefaehr ein
+     fremdes wort in den brunnen einer sprache, so wird es so lange
+     darin umgetrieben, bis es ihre farbe annimmt, und seiner fremden
+     art zum trotze wie ein heimisches aussieht.
+
+{52} Have we here an explanation of the 'battalia' of Jeremy Taylor and
+     others? Did they, without reflecting on the matter, regard
+     'battalion' as a word with a Greek neuter termination? It is
+     difficult to think they should have done so; yet more difficult to
+     suggest any other explanation. ['Battalia' was sometimes mistaken
+     as a plural, which indeed it was originally, the word being derived
+     through the Italian _battaglia_, from low Latin _battalia_, which
+     (like _biblia_, _gaudia_, etc.) was afterwards regarded as a
+     feminine singular (Skeat, _Principles_, ii, 230). But Shakespeare
+     used it as a singular, "Our _battalia_ trebles that account"
+     (_Rich. III_, v. 3, 11); and so Sir T. Browne, "The Roman
+     _battalia_ was ordered after this manner" (_Garden of Cyrus_, 1658,
+     p. 113).]
+
+{53} "And old hero{:e}s, which their world did daunt".
+
+                                         _Sonnet on Scanderbeg._
+
+{54} [By J. H(ealey), 1610, who has "centones ... of diuerse colours",
+     p. 605.]
+
+{55} [The identity of these two words, notwithstanding the analogy of
+     _corona_ and _crown_, is denied by Skeat, Kluge and Lutz.]
+
+{56} Skinner (_Etymologicon_, 1671) protests against the word
+     altogether, as purely French, and having no right to be considered
+     English at all.
+
+{57} It is curious how effectually the nationality of a word may by
+     these slight alterations in spelling be disguised. I have met an
+     excellent French and English scholar, to whom it was quite a
+     surprise to learn that 'redingote' was 'riding-coat'.
+
+{58} [Compare French _marsouin_ (=German _meer-schwein_), "sea-pig", the
+     dolphin; Breton _mor-houc'h_; Irish _mucc mara_, "pig of the sea",
+     the dolphin (W. Stokes, _Irish Glossaries_, p. 118); French _truye
+     de mer_ (Cotgrave); old English _brun-swyne_ (_Prompt. Parv._),
+     "brown-pig", the dolphin or seal.]
+
+{59} He is not indeed perfectly accurate in this statement, for the
+     Greeks spoke of {Greek: en kyklo: paideia} and {Greek: enkyklios
+     paideia}, but had no such composite word as {Greek: enkyklopadeia}.
+     We gather however from these expressions, as from Lord Bacon's
+     using the term 'circle-learning' (='orbis doctrinae', Quintilian),
+     that 'encyclopaedia' did not exist in their time. [But
+     'encyclopedia' occurs in Elyot, _Governour_, 1531, vol. i, p. 118
+     (ed. Croft); 'encyclopaedie' in J. Sylvester, _Workes_, 1621, p.
+     660.]
+
+{60} See the passages quoted in my paper, _On some Deficiencies in our
+     English Dictionaries_, p. 38.
+
+{61} [This prediction has been verified. 'Ethos' is used by Sir F.
+     Palgrave, 1851, and in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica', 1875.
+     N.E.D.]
+
+{62} We may see the same progress in Greek words which were being
+     incorporated in the Latin. Thus Cicero writes {Greek: antipodes}
+     (_Acad._ ii, 39, 123), but Seneca (_Ep._ 122), 'antipodes'; that
+     is, the word for Cicero was still Greek, while in the period that
+     elapsed between him and Seneca, it had become Latin: so too Cicero
+     wrote {Greek: eido:lon}, the Younger Pliny 'idolon', and Tertullian
+     'idolum'.
+
+{63} [This rash prophecy has not been fulfilled. English speakers are
+     still no more inclined to say 'pre/stige' than 'po/lice'.]
+
+{64} See in Coleridge's _Table Talk_, p. 3, the amusing story of John
+     Kemble's stately correction of the Prince of Wales for adhering to
+     the earlier pronunciation, 'obl_ee_ge,'--"It will become your royal
+     mouth better to say obl_i_ge."
+
+{65} "In this great _acade/my_ of mankind".
+
+                              Butler, _To the Memory of Du Val_.
+
+{66} "'Twixt that and reason what a nice _barrier_".
+
+{67} [A fairly complete collection of these and similar semi-naturalized
+     foreign words will be found in _The Stanford Dictionary of
+     Anglicized Words_, edited by Dr. C. A. M. Fennell, 1892.]
+
+{68} [This is quite wrong. Mr. Fitzedward Hall shows that 'inimical' was
+     used by Gaule in 1652, as well as by Richardson in 1758 (_Modern
+     English_, p. 287). The N.E.D. quotes an instance of it from Udall
+     in 1643.]
+
+{69} [The word had been already naturalized by H. More, 1647, Cudworth,
+     1678, Tucker 1765, and Carlyle, 1831.--N.E.D.]
+
+{70} [The earliest citation for 'abnormal' in the N.E.D. is dated 1835.
+     The older word was 'abnormous'. Curious to say it is unrelated to
+     'normal' to which it has been assimilated, being merely an
+     alteration of 'anomal-ous'.]
+
+{71} [Fuller says of 'plunder', "we first heard thereof in the Swedish
+     wars", and that it came into England about 1642 (_Church History_,
+     bk. xi, sec. 4, par. 33). It certainly occurs under that date in
+     _Memoirs of the Verney Family_, "It is in danger of _plonderin_"
+     (vol. i, p. 71, also p. 151). It also occurs in a document dated
+     1643, "We must _plunder_ none but Roundheads" (_Camden Soc.
+     Miscellany_, iii, 31). Drummond (died 1649) has "Go fight and
+     _plunder_" (_Poems_, ed. Turnbull, p. 330). It appears in a
+     quotation from _The Bellman of London_ (no reference) given in
+     Timbs, _London and Westminster_, vol. i, p. 254.]
+
+{72} [It is rather from the old Dutch _trecker_, a 'puller'. Very few
+     English words come to us from German.]
+
+{73} [So Skeat, _Etym. Dict._ But the Germans themselves take their
+     _schwindler_ (in the sense of cheat) to have been adopted from the
+     English 'swindler'. Dr. Dunger asserts that it was introduced into
+     their language by Lichtenberg in his explanation of Hogarth's
+     engravings, 1794-99 (_Englanderei in der Deutschen Sprache_, 1899,
+     p. 7).]
+
+{74} _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, 1650, p. 217.
+
+{75} [This word introduced as a 'pure neologism' by D'Israeli
+     (_Curiosities of Literature_, 1839, 11th ed. p. 384) as a companion
+     to 'mother-tongue', had been already used by Sir W. Temple in 1672
+     (Hall, _Mod. English_, p. 44). Nay, even by Tyndale, see T. L. K.
+     Oliphant, _The New English_, i, 439.]
+
+{76} ['Folk-lore' was introduced by Mr. W. J. Thoms, editor of _Notes
+     and Queries_, in 1846. Still later came 'Folk-etymology', the
+     earliest use of which in N.E.D. is given as 1883, but the editor's
+     work bearing that title appeared in 1882.]
+
+{77} _Holy State_, b. 2, c. 6. There was a time when the Latin
+     promised to display, if not an equal, yet not a very inferior,
+     freedom in this forming of new words by the happy marriage of
+     old. But in this, as in so many respects, it seemed possessed at
+     the period of its highest culture with a timidity, which caused
+     it voluntarily to abdicate many of its own powers. Where do we
+     find in the Augustan period of the language so grand a pair of
+     epithets as these, occurring as they do in a single line of
+     Catullus: Ubi cerva _silvicultrix_, ubi aper _nemorivagus_? or
+     again, as his 'fluentisonus'? Virgil's vitisator (_Aen._ 7, 179)
+     is not his own, but derived from one of the earlier poets. Nay,
+     the language did not even retain those compound epithets which
+     it once had formed, but was content to let numbers of them drop:
+     'parcipromus'; 'turpilucricupidus', and many more, do not extend
+     beyond Plautus. On this matter Quintilian observes (i. 5, 70):
+     Res tota magis Graecos decet, nobis minus succedit; nec id fieri
+     natura puto, sed alienis favemus; ideoque cum {Greek: kyrtauchena}
+     mirati sumus, _incurvicervicum_ vix a risu defendimus. Elsewhere
+     he complains, though not with reference to compound epithets, of
+     the little _generative_ power which existed in the Latin language,
+     that its continual losses were compensated by no equivalent gains
+     (viii. 6, 32): Deinde, tanquum consummata sint omnia, nihil
+     generare audemus ipsi, quum multa quotidie ab antiquis ficta
+     moriantur. Notwithstanding this complaint, it must be owned that
+     the silver age of the language, which sought to recover, and did
+     recover to some extent the abdicated energies of its earlier times,
+     reasserted among other powers that of combining words with a
+     certain measure of success.
+
+{78} [For Shakespearian compounds see Abbott's _Shakespearian Grammar_,
+     pp. 317-20.]
+
+{79} [Writing in the year 1780 Bentham says: "The word it must be
+     acknowledged is a new one".]
+
+{80} _Collection of Scarce Tracts_, edited by Sir W. Scott, vol. vii, p.
+     91.
+
+{81} [Hardly a novelty, as the word occurs in J. Gaule, {Greek:
+     Pys-mantia}, 1652, p. 30. See F. Hall, _Mod. English_, p. 131.]
+
+{82} [First used apparently by Grote, 1847, and Mrs. Gaskell, 1857,
+     N.E.D.]
+
+{83} See _Letters of Horace Walpole and Mann_, vol. ii. p. 396, quoted
+     in _Notes and Queries_, No. 225; and another proof of the novelty
+     of the word in Pegge's _Anecdotes of the English Language_, 1814,
+     p. 38.
+
+{84} Postscript to his _Translation of the Aeneid_.
+
+{85} Multa renascentur, quae jam cecidere.
+
+                          _De A. P._ 46-72; cf. _Ep._ 2, 2, 115.
+
+{86} _Etymologicon vocum omnium antiquarum quae usque a Wilhelmo Victore
+     invaluerunt, et jam ante parentum aetatem in usu esse desierunt._
+
+{87} [As a matter of fact the N.E.D. fails to give any quotation for
+     this word in the period named.]
+
+{88} [The verb 'to advocate' had long before been employed by Nash,
+     1598, Sanderson, 1624, and Heylin, 1657 (F. Hall, _Mod. English_,
+     p. 285).]
+
+{89} In like manner La Bruyere, in his _Caracteres_, c. 14, laments the
+     extinction of a large number of French words which he names. At
+     least half of these have now free course in the language, as
+     'valeureux', 'haineux', 'peineux', 'fructueux', 'mensonger',
+     'coutumier', 'vantard', 'courtois', 'jovial', 'fetoyer',
+     'larmoyer', 'verdoyer'. Two or three of these may be rarely used,
+     but every one would be found in a dictionary of the living
+     language.
+
+{90} _Preface to Juvenal._
+
+{91} _Preface to Troilus and Cressida._ In justice to Dryden, and lest
+     it should be said that he had spoken poetic blasphemy, it ought not
+     to be forgotten that 'pestered' had not in his time at all so
+     offensive a sense as it would have now. It meant no more than
+     inconveniently crowded; thus Milton: "Confined and _pestered_ in
+     this pinfold here".
+
+{92} Thus in North's _Plutarch_, p. 499: "After the fire was quenched,
+     they found in _niggots_ of gold and silver mingled together, about
+     a thousand talents"; and again, p. 323: "There was brought a
+     marvellous great mass of treasure in _niggots_ of gold". The word
+     has not found its way into our dictionaries or glossaries.
+
+{93} ['Niggot' rather stands for 'ningot', due to a coalescence of the
+     article in 'an ingot' (as if 'a ningot'); just as, according to
+     some, in French _l'ingot_ became _lingot_.]
+
+{94} [Such collections were essayed in J. C. Hare's _Two Essays in
+     English Philology_, 1873, "_Words derived from Names of Persons_",
+     and in R. S. Charnock's _Verba Nominalia_, pp. 326.]
+
+{95} [In a strangely similar way the stone-worshipper in the Malay
+     Peninsula gives to his sacred boulder the title of Mohammed (Tylor,
+     _Primitive Culture_, 3rd ed. ii. 254).]
+
+{96} [But Wolsey's jester was most probably so called from his wearing a
+     varicoloured or patchwork coat; compare the Shakespearian use of
+     'motley'. Similarly the _maquereaux_ of the old French comedy were
+     clothed in a mottled dress like our harlequin, just as the Latin
+     _maccus_ or mime wore a _centunculus_ or patchwork coat, his name
+     being perhaps connected with _macus_ (in _macula_), a spot (Gozzi,
+     _Memoirs_, i, 38). In stage slang the harlequin was called
+     _patchy_, as his Latin counterpart was _centunculus_.]
+
+{97} [An error. Prof. Skeat shows that 'tram' was an old word in
+     Scottish and Northern English (_Etym. Dict._, 655 and 831).]
+
+{98} Several of these we have in common with the French. Of their own
+     they have 'sardanapalisme', any piece of profuse luxury, from
+     Sardanapalus; while for 'lambiner', to dally or loiter over a task,
+     they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the
+     sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish
+     movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of
+     Pascal's _Provincial Letters_ will remember Escobar, the great
+     casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges for the
+     relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the
+     notoriety which he thus acquired he owes his introduction into the
+     French language; where 'escobarder' is used in the sense of to
+     equivocate, and 'escobarderie' of subterfuge or equivocation. The
+     name of an unpopular minister of finance, M. de Silhouette,
+     unpopular because he sought to cut down unnecessary expenses in the
+     state, was applied to whatever was cheap, and, as was implied,
+     unduly economical; it has survived in the black outline portrait
+     which is now called a 'silhouette'. (Sismondi, _Histoire des
+     Francais_, tom. xix, pp. 94, 95.) In the 'mansarde' roof we have
+     the name of Mansart, the architect who introduced it. I need hardly
+     add 'guillotine'.
+
+{99} See Col. Mure, _Language and Literature of Ancient Greece_, vol. i,
+     p. 350.
+
+{100} See Genin, _Des Variations du Langage Francais_, p. 12.
+
+{101} [Dr. Murray in the N.E.D. calls these by the convenient term
+      'nonce-words'.]
+
+{102} _Persa_, iv. 6, 20-23. At the same time these words may be earnest
+      enough; such was the {Greek: elachistoteros} of St. Paul (Ephes.
+      iii, 8); just as in the Middle Ages some did not account it
+      sufficient to call themselves "fratres minores, minimi, postremi",
+      but coined 'postremissimi' to express the depth of their
+      "voluntary humility".
+
+{103} It is curious that a correspondent of Skinner (_Etymologicon_,
+      1671), although quite ignorant of this story, and indeed wholly
+      astray in his application, had suggested that 'chouse' might be
+      thus connected with the Turkish 'chiaus'. I believe Gifford, in
+      his edition of Ben Jonson, was the first to clear up the matter. A
+      passage in _The Alchemist_ (Act i. Sc. 1) will have put him on the
+      right track. [But Dr. Murray notes that Gifford's story, as given
+      above, has not hitherto been substantiated from any independent
+      source, and is so far open to doubt.]
+
+{104} [These are quite distinct words, though perhaps distantly
+      related.]
+
+{105} If there were any doubt about this matter, which indeed there is
+      not, a reference to Latimer's famous _Sermon on Cards_ would
+      abundantly remove it, where 'triumph' and 'trump' are
+      interchangeably used.
+
+{106} [Dr. Murray does not regard these words as ultimately identical.]
+
+{107} ['Rant' (old Dutch _ranten_) has no connection with 'rend'
+      (Anglo-Saxon _hrendan_) (Skeat).]
+
+{108} On these words see a learned discussion in _English Retraced_,
+      Cambridge, 1862.
+
+{109} [These are quite unconnected (Skeat).]
+
+{110} [Neither are these words to be confused with one another.]
+
+{111} The appropriating of 'Franc_e_s' to women and 'Franc_i_s' to men
+      is quite of modern introduction; it was formerly nearly as often
+      Sir Franc_e_s Drake as Sir Franc_i_s, while Fuller (_Holy State_,
+      b. iv, c. 14) speaks of Franc_i_s Brandon, eldest _daughter_ of
+      Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; and see Ben Jonson's _New Inn_,
+      Act. ii, Sc. 1.
+
+{112} [Not connected.]
+
+{113} ['Sad' akin to 'sated' bears no relationship to 'set'; neither
+      does 'medley' to 'motley'.]
+
+{114} [On the connection of these words see my _Folk and their
+      Word-Lore_, p. 110.]
+
+{115} [Not connected, see Skeat.]
+
+{116} Were there need of proving that these both lie in 'beneficium',
+      which there is not, for in Wiclif's translation of the Bible the
+      distinction is still latent (1 Tim. vi. 2), one might adduce a
+      singularly characteristic little trait of Papal policy, which once
+      turned upon the double use of this word. Pope Adrian the Fourth
+      writing to the Emperor Frederic the First to complain of certain
+      conduct of his, reminded the Emperor that he had placed the
+      imperial crown upon his head, and would willingly have conferred
+      even greater 'beneficia' upon him than this. Had the word been
+      allowed to pass, it would no doubt have been afterwards appealed
+      to as an admission on the Emperor's part, that he held the Empire
+      as a feud or fief (for 'beneficium' was then the technical word
+      for this, though the meaning had much narrowed since) from the
+      Pope--the very point in dispute between them. The word was
+      indignantly repelled by the Emperor and the whole German nation,
+      whereupon the Pope appealed to the etymology, that 'beneficium'
+      was but 'bonum factum', and protested that he meant no more than
+      to remind the Emperor of the 'benefits' which he had done him, and
+      which he would have willingly multiplied still more. ['Benefice'
+      from Latin _beneficium_, and 'benefit' from Latin _bene-factum_,
+      are here confused.]
+
+{117} ['Hoard' (Anglo-Saxon _hord_) cannot be equated with 'horde' (from
+      Persian _ordu_).]
+
+{118} [These words have been differentiated in comparatively modern
+      times. 'Ingenuity' was once used for 'ingenuousness'.]
+
+{119} [The words are really unconnected, 'to gamble' being 'to gamle' or
+      'game', and 'to gambol' being akin to French _gambiller_, to fling
+      up the legs (_gambes_ or _jambes_) like a frisking lamb.]
+
+{120} The same happens in other languages. Thus in Greek '{Greek:
+      anathema}' and '{Greek: anathe:ma}' both signify that which is
+      devoted, though in very different senses, to the gods; '{Greek:
+      tharsos}', boldness, and '{Greek: thrasos}', temerity, were no
+      more at first than different spellings of the same word; not
+      otherwise is it with {Greek: gripos} and {Greek: griphos}, {Greek:
+      ethos} and {Greek: e:thos}, {Greek: bryko:} and {Greek: brycho:},
+      while {Greek: obelos} and {Greek: obolos}, {Greek: soros} and
+      {Greek: so:ros}, are probably the same words. So too in Latin
+      'penna' and 'pinna' differ only in form, and signify alike a
+      'wing'; while yet 'penna' has come to be used for the wing of a
+      bird, 'pinna' (its diminutive 'pinnaculum', has given us
+      'pinnacle') for that of a building. So is it with 'Thrax' a
+      Thracian, and 'Threx' a gladiator; with 'codex' and 'caudex';
+      'forfex' and 'forceps'; 'anticus' and 'antiquus'; 'celeber' and
+      'creber'; 'infacetus' and 'inficetus'; 'providentia', 'prudentia',
+      and 'provincia'; 'columen' and 'culmen'; 'coitus' and 'coetus';
+      'aegrimonia' and 'aerumna'; 'Lucina' and 'luna'; 'navita' and
+      'nauta'; in German with 'rechtlich' and 'redlich'; 'schlecht' and
+      'schlicht'; 'ahnden' and 'ahnen'; 'biegsam' and 'beugsam';
+      'fuersehung' and 'vorsehung'; 'deich' and 'teich'; 'trotz' and
+      'trutz'; 'born' and 'brunn'; 'athem' and 'odem'; in French with
+      'harnois' the armour, or 'harness', of a soldier, 'harnais' of a
+      horse; with 'Zephire' and 'zephir', and with many more.
+
+{121} Coleridge, _Church and State_, p. 200.
+
+{122} [One hardly expects to find this otiose Americanism (first used by
+      J. Adams in 1759) in the work of a verbal purist, when 'longish'
+      or the old 'longsome' were at hand. No one, as yet, has ventured
+      on 'strengthy' or 'breadthy' for somewhat strong or broad.]
+
+{123} [This prediction was correct. 'Dissimilation' is first found in
+      philological works published in the decade 1874-85. See N.E.D.]
+
+{124} [Coblenz, at the junction of the Moselle and Rhine (from
+      _Confluentes_), reminds us that the word was so used.]
+
+{125} A passage from Hacket's _Life of Archbishop Williams_, part 2, p.
+      144, marks the first rise of this word, and the quarter from
+      whence it arose: "When they [the Presbyterians] saw that he was
+      not _selfish_ (it is a word of their own new mint), etc". In
+      Whitlock's _Zootomia_ (1654) there is another indication of it as
+      a novelty, p. 364: "If constancy may be tainted with this
+      _selfishness_ (to use our _new wordings_ of old and general
+      actings)"--It is he who in his striking essay, _The Grand
+      Schismatic, or Suist Anatomized_, puts forward his own words,
+      'suist', and 'suicism', in lieu of those which have ultimately
+      been adopted. 'Suicism', let me observe, had not in his time the
+      obvious objection of resembling another word nearly, and being
+      liable to be confused with it; for 'suicide' did not then exist in
+      the language, nor indeed till some twenty years later. The coming
+      up of 'suicide' is marked by this passage in Phillips' _New World
+      of Words_, 1671, 3rd ed.: "Nor less to be exploded is the word
+      '_suicide_', which may as well seem to participate of _sus_ a sow,
+      as of the pronoun _sui_". In the _Index_ to Jackson's Works,
+      published two years later, it is still '_suicidium_'--"the horrid
+      _suicidium_ of the Jews at York". 'Suicide' is apparently of much
+      later introduction into French. Genin (_Recreations Philol._ vol.
+      i, p. 194) places it about the year 1728, and makes the Abbe
+      Desfontaines its first sponsor. He is wrong, as the words just
+      quoted show, in supposing that we borrowed it from the French, or
+      that the word did not exist in English till the middle of last
+      century. The French sometimes complain that the fashion of suicide
+      was borrowed from England. It would seem at all events probable
+      that the word was so borrowed.
+
+      Let me urge here the advantage of a complete collection, or one as
+      nearly complete as the industry of the collectors would allow, of
+      all the notices in our literature, which mark, and would serve as
+      dates for, the first incoming of new words into the language.
+      These notices are of the most various kinds. Sometimes they are
+      protests and remonstrances, as that just quoted, against a new
+      word's introduction; sometimes they are gratulations at the same;
+      while many hold themselves neuter as to approval or disapproval,
+      and merely state, or allow us to gather, the fact of a word's
+      recent appearance. There are not a few of these notices in
+      Richardson's _Dictionary_: thus one from Lord Bacon under 'essay';
+      from Swift under 'banter'; from Sir Thomas Elyot under
+      'mansuetude'; from Lord Chesterfield under 'flirtation'; from
+      Davies and Marlowe's _Epigrams_ under 'gull'; from Roger North
+      under 'sham' (Appendix); the third quotation from Dryden under
+      'mob'; one from the same under 'philanthropy', and again under
+      'witticism', in which he claims the authorship of the word; that
+      from Evelyn under 'miss'; and from Milton under 'demagogue'. There
+      are also notices of the same kind in _Todd's Johnson_. The work,
+      however, is one which no single scholar could hope to accomplish,
+      which could only be accomplished by many lovers of their native
+      tongue throwing into a common stock the results of their several
+      studies. The sources from which these illustrative passages might
+      be gathered cannot beforehand be enumerated, inasmuch as it is
+      difficult to say in what unexpected quarter they would not
+      sometimes be found, although some of these sources are obvious
+      enough. As a very slight sample of what might be done in this way
+      by the joint contributions of many, let me throw together
+      references to a few passages of the kind which I do not think have
+      found their way into any of our dictionaries. Thus add to that
+      which Richardson has quoted on 'banter', another from _The
+      Tatler_, No. 230. On 'plunder' there are two instructive passages
+      in Fuller's _Church History_, b. xi, Section 4, 33; and b. ix,
+      Section 4; and one in Heylin's _Animadversions_ thereupon, p. 196.
+      On 'admiralty' see a note in Harington's _Ariosto_, book 19; on
+      'maturity' Sir Thomas Elyot's _Governor_, b. i, c. 22; and on
+      'industry' the same, b. i, c. 23; on 'neophyte' a notice in
+      Fulke's _Defence of the English Bible_, Parker Society's edition,
+      p. 586; and on 'panorama', and marking its recent introduction (it
+      is not in Johnson), a passage in Pegge's _Anecdotes of the English
+      Language_, first published in 1803, but my reference is to the
+      edition of 1814, p. 306; on 'accommodate', and supplying a date
+      for its first coming into popular use, see Shakespeare's _2 Henry
+      IV._ Act 3, Sc. 2; on 'shrub', Junius' _Etymologicon_, s. v.
+      'syrup'; on 'sentiment' and 'cajole' Skinner, s. vv., in his
+      _Etymologicon_ ('vox nuper civitate donata'); and on 'opera'
+      Evelyn's _Memoirs and Diary_, 1827, vol. i, pp. 189, 190. In such
+      a collection should be included those passages of our literature
+      which supply implicit evidence for the non-existence of a word up
+      to a certain moment. It may be urged that it is difficult, nay
+      impossible, to prove a negative; and yet a passage like this from
+      Bolingbroke makes certain that when it was written the word
+      'isolated' did not exist in our language: "The events we are
+      witnesses of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very
+      often original, unprepared, signal and _unrelative_: if I may use
+      such a word for want of a better in English. In French I would say
+      _isoles_" (_Notes and Queries_, No. 226). Compare Lord
+      Chesterfield in a letter to Bishop Chenevix, of date March 12,
+      1767: "I have survived almost all my cotemporaries, and as I am
+      too old to make new acquaintances, I find myself _isole_". So,
+      too, it is pretty certain that 'amphibious' was not yet English,
+      when one writes (in 1618): "We are like those creatures called
+      {Greek: amphibia}, who live in water or on land". {Greek:
+      Zo:ologia}, the title of a book published in 1649, makes it clear
+      that 'zoology' was not yet in our vocabulary, as {Greek:
+      zo:ophyton} (Jackson) proves the same for 'zoophyte', and {Greek:
+      polytheismos} (Gell) for 'polytheism'. One precaution, let me
+      observe, would be necessary in the collecting, or rather in the
+      adopting of any statements about the newness of a word--for the
+      passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not the less to be
+      noted--namely, that, where there is the least motive for
+      suspicion, no one's affirmation ought to be accepted simply and at
+      once as to the novelty of a word; for all here are liable to
+      error. Thus more than one which Sir Thomas Elyot indicates as new
+      in his time, 'magnanimity' for example (_The Governor_, 2, 14),
+      are to be met in Chaucer. When Skinner affirmed of 'sentiment'
+      that it had only recently obtained the rights of English
+      citizenship from the translators of French books, he was
+      altogether mistaken, this word being also one of continual
+      recurrence in Chaucer. An intelligent correspondent gives in
+      _Notes and Queries_, No. 225, a useful catalogue of recent
+      neologies in our speech, which yet would require to be used with
+      caution, for there are at least half a dozen in the list which
+      have not the smallest right to be so considered.
+
+{126} There is an admirable Essay by Leibnitz with this view (_Opera_,
+      vol. vi, part 2, pp. 6-51) in French and German, with this title,
+      _Considerations sur la Culture et la Perfection de la Langue
+      Allemande_.
+
+{127} _Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwoerter im Deutschen_,
+      von. Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85-91.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
+
+
+I took occasion to observe at the commencement of my last lecture that
+it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux{128}
+and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as
+little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one
+another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies
+remain for ever without subtraction or addition. As I then undertook for
+my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own
+language had made, I shall consider in the present some of the losses,
+or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured.
+But it will be well here, by one or two remarks going before, to avert
+any possible misapprehensions of my meaning.
+
+It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in
+the end, perish. They run their course; not at all at the same rate, for
+the tendency to change is different in different languages, both from
+internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also from causes external
+to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and
+social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life,
+they have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude,
+their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has
+arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary,
+out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the
+materials of which they were composed more or less survive, but these
+now organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus
+for example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but a chief part
+of the words that composed it live on in the four daughter languages,
+French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese; or the six, if we count the
+Provencal and Wallachian; not a few in our own. Still in their own
+proper being languages perish and pass away; there are dead records of
+what they were in books; not living men who speak them any more. Seeing
+then that they thus die, they must have had the germs of a possible
+decay and death in them from the beginning.
+
+{Sidenote: _Languages Gain and Lose_}
+
+Nor is this all; but in such mighty strong built fabrics as these, the
+causes which thus bring about their final dissolution must have been
+actually at work very long before the results began to be visible.
+Indeed, very often it is with them as with states, which, while in some
+respects they are knitting and strengthening, in others are already
+unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may be, still remote
+overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and in languages, it
+would be a serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and
+period is growth and gain, while all after is decay and loss. On the
+contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions
+is going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are
+being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during
+which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower,
+and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and
+gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a
+compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more;
+when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than
+those of life and order. It is from this moment the decline of a
+language may properly be dated. But until that crisis and turning point
+has arrived, we may be quite justified in speaking of the losses of a
+language, and may esteem them most real, without in the least thereby
+implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun. This
+may yet be far distant, and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and
+diminutions which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you will not
+conclude that I am seeking to present it to you as now travelling the
+downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my
+intention. If in some respects it is losing, in others it is gaining.
+Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting
+with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous
+or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. English
+is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only
+different in that it is passing into another stage of its development;
+only different, as the fruit is different from the flower, and the
+flower from the bud; having changed its merits, but not having
+renounced them; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, but more of
+usefulness; not, perhaps, serving the poet so well, but serving the
+historian and philosopher and theologian better than before.
+
+One observation more let me make, before entering on the special details
+of my subject. It is this. The losses and diminutions of a language
+differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions--namely, that they
+are of _two_ kinds, while its gains are only of _one_. Its gains are
+only in _words_; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a
+new _power_; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a
+new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in _powers_--in
+words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels
+onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of
+tenses which it once used; forgets its dual; is content with one
+termination both for masculine and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a
+peculiar feature of one language, but the universal law of all. "In all
+languages", as has been well said, "there is a constant tendency to
+relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for
+every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and
+detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion". For
+example, a vast number of languages had at an early period of their
+development, besides the singular and plural, a dual number, some even a
+trinal, which they have let go at a later. But what I mean by a language
+renouncing its powers will, I trust, be more clear to you before my
+lecture is concluded. This much I have here said on the matter, to
+explain and justify a division which I shall make, considering first the
+losses of the English language in _words_, and then in _powers_.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words become Extinct_}
+
+And first, there is going forward a continual extinction of the words in
+our language--as indeed in every other. When I speak of this, the dying
+out of words, I do not refer to mere _tentative_, experimental words,
+not a few of which I adduced in my last lecture, words offered to the
+language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as either
+belonged to the primitive stock of the language, or if not so, which had
+been domiciled in it long, that they might have been supposed to have
+found in it a lasting home. Thus not a few pure Anglo-Saxon words which
+lived on into the times of our early English, have subsequently dropped
+out of our vocabulary, sometimes leaving a gap which has never since
+been filled, but their places oftener taken by others which have come up
+in their room. Not to mention those of Chaucer and Wiclif, which are
+very numerous, many held their ground to far later periods, and yet have
+finally given way. That beautiful word 'wanhope' for despair, hope which
+has so _waned_ that now there is an entire _want_ of it, was in use down
+to the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of
+Gascoigne{129}. 'Skinker' for cupbearer, (an ungraceful word, no doubt)
+is used by Shakespeare and lasted till Dryden's time and beyond.
+
+Spenser uses often 'to welk' (welken) in the sense of to fade, 'to sty'
+for to mount, 'to hery' as to glorify or praise, 'to halse' as to
+embrace, 'teene' as vexation or grief: Shakespeare 'to tarre' as to
+provoke, 'to sperr' as to enclose or bar in; 'to sag' for to droop, or
+hang the head downward. Holland employs 'geir'{130} for vulture
+("vultures or _geirs_"), 'specht' for woodpecker, 'reise' for journey,
+'frimm' for lusty or strong. 'To schimmer' occurs in Bishop Hall; 'to
+tind', that is, to kindle, and surviving in 'tinder', is used by Bishop
+Sanderson; 'to nimm', or take, as late as by Fuller. A rogue is a
+'skellum' in Sir Thomas Urquhart. 'Nesh' in the sense of soft through
+moisture, 'leer' in that of empty, 'eame' in that of uncle, _mother's_
+brother (the German 'oheim'), good Saxon-English once, still live on in
+some of our provincial dialects; so does 'flitter-mouse' or
+'flutter-mouse' (mus volitans), where we should use bat. Indeed of those
+above named several do the same; it is so with 'frimm', with 'to sag',
+'to nimm'. 'Heft' employed by Shakespeare in the sense of weight, is
+still employed in the same sense by our peasants in Hampshire{131}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Vigorous Compound Words_}
+
+A number of vigorous compounds we have dropped and let go. 'Earsports'
+for entertainments of song or music ({Greek: akroamata}) is a constantly
+recurring word in Holland's _Plutarch_. Were it not for Shakespeare, we
+should have quite forgotten that young men of hasty fiery valour were
+called 'hotspurs'; and even now we regard the word rather as the proper
+name of one than that which would have been once alike the designation
+of all{132}. Fuller warns men that they should not 'witwanton' with God.
+Severe austere old men, such as, in Falstaff's words would "hate us
+youth", were 'grimsirs', or 'grimsires' once (Massinger). 'Realmrape'
+(=usurpation), occurring in _The Mirror for Magistrates_, is a vigorous
+word. 'Rootfast' and 'rootfastness'{133} were ill lost, being worthy to
+have lived; so too was Lord Brooke's 'bookhunger'; and Baxter's
+'word-warriors', with which term he noted those whose strife was only
+about words. 'Malingerer' is familiar enough to military men, but I do
+not find it in our dictionaries; being the soldier who, out of _evil
+will_ (malin gre) to his work, shams and shirks and is not found in the
+ranks{134}.
+
+Those who would gladly have seen the Anglo-Saxon to have predominated
+over the Latin element in our language, even more than it actually has
+done, must note with regret that in many instances a word of the former
+stock had been dropped, and a Latin coined to supply its place; or where
+the two once existed side by side, the Saxon has died, and the Latin
+lived on. Thus Wiclif employed 'soothsaw', where we now use proverb;
+'sourdough', where we employ leaven; 'wellwillingness' for benevolence;
+'againbuying' for redemption; 'againrising' for resurrection;
+'undeadliness' for immortality; 'uncunningness' for ignorance;
+'aftercomer' for descendant; 'greatdoingly' for magnificently; 'to
+afterthink' (still in use in Lancashire) for to repent; 'medeful', which
+has given way to meritorious; 'untellable' for ineffable; 'dearworth'
+for precious; Chaucer has 'forword' for promise; Sir John Cheke
+'freshman' for proselyte; 'mooned' for lunatic; 'foreshewer' for
+prophet; 'hundreder' for centurion; Jewel 'foretalk', where we now
+employ preface; Holland 'sunstead' where we use solstice; 'leechcraft'
+instead of medicine; and another, 'wordcraft' for logic; 'starconner'
+(Gascoigne) did service once, if not instead of astrologer, yet side by
+side with it; 'halfgod' (Golding) had the advantage over 'demigod', that
+it was all of one piece; 'to eyebite' (Holland) told its story at least
+as well as to fascinate; 'shriftfather' as confessor; 'earshrift'
+(Cartwright) is only two syllables, while 'auricular confession' is
+eight; 'waterfright' is a better word than our awkward Greek
+hydrophobia. The lamprey (lambens petram) was called once the
+'suckstone' or the 'lickstone'; and the anemone the 'windflower'.
+'Umstroke', if it had lived on (it appears as late as Fuller, though
+our dictionaries know nothing of it), might have made 'circumference'
+and 'periphery' unnecessary. 'Wanhope', as we saw just now, has given
+place to despair, 'middler' to mediator; and it would be easy to
+increase this list.
+
+{Sidenote: _Local and Provincial English_}
+
+I had occasion just now to notice the fact that many words survive in
+our provincial dialects, long after they have died out from the main
+body of the speech. The fact is one connected with so much of deep
+interest in the history of language that I cannot pass it thus slightly
+over. It is one which, rightly regarded, may assist to put us in a just
+point of view for estimating the character of the local and provincial
+in speech, and rescuing it from that unmerited contempt and neglect with
+which it is often regarded. I must here go somewhat further back than I
+could wish; but only so, only by looking at the matter in connexion with
+other phenomena of speech, can I hope to explain to you the worth and
+significance which local and provincial words and usages must oftentimes
+possess.
+
+Let us then first suppose a portion of those speaking a language to have
+been separated off from the main body of its speakers, either through
+their forsaking for one cause or other of their native seats, or by the
+intrusion of a hostile people, like a wedge, between them and the
+others, forcibly keeping them asunder, and cutting off their
+communications one with the other, as the Saxons intruded between the
+Britons of Cornwall and of Wales. In such a case it will inevitably
+happen that before very long differences of speech will begin to reveal
+themselves between those to whom even dialectic distinctions may have
+been once unknown. The divergences will be of various kinds. Idioms will
+come up in the separated body, which, not being recognized and allowed
+by those who remain the arbiters of the language, will be esteemed by
+them, should they come under their notice, violations of its law, or at
+any rate departures from its purity. Again, where a colony has gone
+forth into new seats, and exists under new conditions, it is probable
+that the necessities, physical and moral, rising out of these new
+conditions, will give birth to words, which there will be nothing to
+call out among those who continue in the old haunts of the nation.
+Intercourse with new tribes and people will bring in new words, as, for
+instance, contact with the Indian tribes of North America has given to
+American English a certain number of words hardly or not at all allowed
+or known by us; or as the presence of a large Dutch population at the
+Cape has given to the English spoken there many words, as 'inspan',
+'outspan'{135}, 'spoor', of which our home English knows nothing.
+
+{Sidenote: _Antiquated English_}
+
+There is another cause, however, which will probably be more effectual
+than all these, namely, that words will in process of time be dropped by
+those who constitute the original stock of the nation, which will not be
+dropped by the offshoot; idioms which those have overlived, and have
+stored up in the unhonoured lumber-room of the past, will still be in
+use and currency among the smaller and separated section which has gone
+forth; and thus it will come to pass that what seems and in fact is the
+newer swarm, will have many older words, and very often an archaic air
+and old-world fashion both about the words they use, their way of
+pronouncing, their order and manner of combining them. Thus after the
+Conquest we know that our insular French gradually diverged from the
+French of the Continent. The Prioress in Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_
+could speak her French "full faire and fetishly", but it was French, as
+the poet slyly adds,
+
+    "After the scole of Stratford atte bow,
+    For French of Paris was to hire unknowe".
+
+One of our old chroniclers, writing in the reign of Elizabeth, informs
+us that by the English colonists within the Pale in Ireland numerous
+words were preserved in common use, "the dregs of the old ancient
+Chaucer English", as he contemptuously calls it, which had become quite
+obsolete and forgotten in England itself. For example, they still called
+a spider an 'attercop'--a word, by the way, still in popular use in the
+North;--a physician a 'leech', as in poetry he still is called; a
+dunghill was still for them a 'mixen'; (the word is still common all
+over England in this sense;) a quadrangle or base court was a
+'bawn'{136}; they employed 'uncouth' in the earlier sense of unknown.
+Nay more, their general manner of speech was so different, though
+containing English still, that Englishmen at their first coming over
+often found it hard or impossible to comprehend. We have another example
+of the same in what took place after the revocation of the Edict of
+Nantes, and the consequent formation of colonies of Protestant French
+emigrants in various places, especially in Amsterdam and other chief
+cities of Holland. There gradually grew up among these what came to be
+called 'refugee French', which within a generation or two diverged in
+several particulars from the classical language of France; its
+divergence being mainly occasioned by this, that it remained stationary,
+while the classical language was in motion; it retained usages and
+words, which the latter had dismissed{137}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Provincial English_}
+
+Nor is it otherwise in respect of our English provincialisms. It is true
+that our country people who in the main employ them, have not been
+separated by distance of space, nor yet by insurmountable obstacles
+intervening, from the main body of their fellow-countrymen; but they
+have been quite as effectually divided by deficient education. They have
+been, if not locally, yet intellectually, kept at a distance from the
+onward march of the nation's mind; and of them also it is true that many
+of their words, idioms, turns of speech, which we are ready to set down
+as vulgarisms, solecisms of speech, violations of the primary rules of
+grammar, do merely attest that those who employ them have not kept
+abreast with the advance of the language and nation, but have been left
+behind by it. The usages are only local in the fact that, having once
+been employed by the whole body of the English people, they have now
+receded from the lips of all except those in some certain country
+districts, who have been more faithful than others to the tradition of
+the past{138}.
+
+It is thus in respect of a multitude of isolated words, which were
+excellent Anglo-Saxon, which were excellent early English, and which
+only are not excellent present English, because use, which is the
+supreme arbiter in these matters, has decided against their further
+employment. Several of these I enumerated just now. It is thus also with
+several grammatical forms and flexions. For instance, where we decline
+the plural of "I sing", "we sing", "ye sing", "they sing", there are
+parts of England in which they would decline, "we sin_gen_", "ye
+sin_gen_", "they sin_gen_". This is not indeed the original form of the
+plural, but it is that form of it which, coming up about Chaucer's time,
+was just going out in Spenser's; he, though we must ever keep in mind
+that he does not fairly represent the language of his time, or indeed of
+any time, affecting a certain artificial archaism both in words and
+forms, continually uses it{139}. After him it becomes ever rarer, the
+last of whom I am aware as occasionally using it being Fuller, until it
+quite disappears.
+
+{Sidenote: _Earlier and Later English_}
+
+Of such as may now employ forms like these we must say, not that they
+violate the laws of the language, but only that they have taken their
+_permanent_ stand at a point which was only a point of transition, and
+which it has now left behind, and overlived. Thus, to take examples
+which you may hear at the present day in almost any part of England--a
+countryman will say, "He made me _afeard_"; or "The price of corn _ris_
+last market day"; or "I will _axe_ him his name"; or "I tell _ye_". You
+would probably set these phrases down for barbarous English. They are
+not so at all; in one sense they are quite as good English as "He made
+me _afraid_"; or "The price of corn _rose_ last market day"; or "I will
+_ask_ him his name". 'Afeard', used by Spenser, is the regular
+participle of the old verb to 'affear', still existing as a law term, as
+'afraid' is of to 'affray', and just as good English{140}; 'ris' or
+'risse' is an old praeterite of 'to rise'; to 'axe' is not a
+mispronunciation of 'to ask', but a genuine English form of the word,
+the form which in the earlier English it constantly assumed; in Wiclif's
+Bible almost without exception; and indeed 'axe' occurs continually, I
+know not whether invariably, in Tyndale's translation of the Scriptures;
+there was a time when 'ye' was an accusative, and to have used it as a
+nominative or vocative, the only permitted uses at present, would have
+been incorrect. Even such phrases as "Put _them_ things away"; or "The
+man _what_ owns the horse" are not bad, but only antiquated
+English{141}. Saying this, I would not in the least imply that these
+forms are open to you to employ, or that they would be good English for
+_you_. They would not; inasmuch as they are contrary to present use and
+custom, and these must be our standards in what we speak, and in what we
+write; just as in our buying and selling we are bound to employ the
+current coin of the realm, must not attempt to pass that which long
+since has been called in, whatever merits or intrinsic value it may
+possess. All which I affirm is that the phrases just brought forward
+represent past stages of the language, and are not barbarous violations
+of it.
+
+{Sidenote: _Luncheon_, _Nuncheon_}
+
+The same may be asserted of certain ways of pronouncing words, which are
+now in use among the lower classes, but not among the higher; as, for
+example, 'contr{-a}ry', 'mischi{-e}vous', 'blasph{-e}mous', instead of
+'contr{)a}ry', 'mischi{)e}vous', 'blasph{)e}mous'. It would be
+abundantly easy to show by a multitude of quotations from our poets, and
+those reaching very far down, that these are merely the retention of the
+earlier pronunciation by the people, after the higher classes have
+abandoned it{142}. And on the strength of what has just been spoken, let
+me here suggest to you how well worth your while it will prove to be on
+the watch for provincial words and inflexions, local idioms and modes of
+pronunciation, and to take note of these. Count nothing in this kind
+beneath your notice. Do not at once ascribe anything which you hear to
+the ignorance or stupidity of the speaker. Thus if you hear 'nuncheon',
+do not at once set it down for a malformation of 'luncheon'{143}, nor
+'yeel'{144}, of 'eel'. Lists and collections of provincial usage, such
+as I have suggested, always have their value. If you are not able to
+turn them to any profit yourselves, and they may not stand in close
+enough connexion with your own studies for this, yet there always are
+those who will thank you for them; and to whom the humblest of these
+collections, carefully and intelligently made, will be in one way or
+another of real assistance{145}. And there is the more need to urge this
+at the present, because, notwithstanding the tenacity with which our
+country folk cling to their old forms and usages, still these forms and
+usages must now be rapidly growing fewer; and there are forces, moral
+and material, at work in England, which will probably cause that of
+those which now survive the greater part will within the next fifty
+years have disappeared{146}.
+
+{Sidenote: _'Its' of Late Introduction_}
+
+Before quitting this subject, let me instance one example more of that
+which is commonly accounted ungrammatical usage, but which is really the
+retention of old grammar by some, where others have substituted new; I
+mean the constant application by our rustic population in the south, and
+I dare say through all parts of England, of 'his' to inanimate objects,
+and to these not personified, no less than to persons; where 'its' would
+be employed by others. This was once the manner of speech among all; for
+'its' is a word of very recent introduction, many would be surprised to
+learn of how recent introduction, into the language. You will look for
+it in vain through the whole of our Authorized Version of the Bible;
+the office which it now fulfils being there accomplished, as our rustics
+accomplish it at the present, by 'his' (Gen. i. 11; Exod. xxxvii. 17;
+Matt. v. 15) or 'her' (Jon. i. 15; Rev. xxii. 2) applied as freely to
+inanimate things as to persons, or else by 'thereof' (Ps. lxv. 10) or
+'of it' (Dan. vii. 5). Nor may Lev. xx. 5 be urged as invalidating this
+assertion; for reference to the exemplar edition of 1611, or indeed to
+any earlier editions of King James' Bible, will show that in them the
+passage stood, "of _it_ own accord"{147}. 'Its' occurs very rarely in
+Shakespeare, in many of his plays it will not once be found. Milton also
+for the most part avoids it, and this, though in his time others freely
+allowed it. How soon all this was forgotten we have striking evidence in
+the fact that when Dryden, in one of his fault-finding moods with the
+great men of the preceding generation, is taking Ben Jonson to task for
+general inaccuracy in his English diction, among other counts of his
+indictment, he quotes this line from _Catiline_
+
+    "Though heaven should speak with all _his_ wrath at once",
+
+and proceeds, "_heaven_ is ill syntax with _his_"; while in fact up to
+within forty or fifty years of the time when Dryden began to write, no
+other syntax was known; and to a much later date was exceedingly rare.
+Curious also, is it to note that in the earnest controversy which
+followed on Chatterton's publication of the poems ascribed by him to a
+monk Rowlie, who should have lived in the fifteenth century, no one
+appealed to such lines as the following,
+
+    "Life and all _its_ goods I scorn",
+
+as at once deciding that the poems were not of the age which they
+pretended. Warton, who denied, though with some hesitation, the
+antiquity of the poems, giving many and sufficient reasons for this
+denial, failed to take note of this little word; while yet there needed
+no more than to point it out, for the disposing of the whole question;
+the forgery at once was betrayed.
+
+{Sidenote: _American English_}
+
+What has been here affirmed concerning our provincial English, namely
+that it is often _old_ English rather than _bad_ English, may be
+affirmed with equal right of many so-called Americanisms. There are
+parts of America where 'het' is used, or was used a few years since, as
+the perfect of 'to heat'; 'holp' as the perfect of 'to help'; 'stricken'
+as the participle of 'to strike'. Again there are the words which have
+become obsolete during the last two hundred years, which have not become
+obsolete there, although many of them probably retain only a provincial
+existence. Thus 'slick', which indeed is only another form of 'sleek',
+was employed by our good writers of the seventeenth century{148}. Other
+words again, which have remained current on both sides of the Atlantic,
+have yet on our side receded from their original use, while they have
+remained true to it on the other. 'Plunder' is a word in point{149}.
+
+In the contemplation of facts like these it has been sometimes asked,
+whether a day will ever arrive when the language spoken on this side of
+the Atlantic and on the other, will divide into two languages, an old
+English and a new. We may confidently answer, No. Doubtless, if those
+who went out from us to people and subdue a new continent, had left our
+shores two or three centuries earlier than they did, when the language
+was very much farther removed from that ideal after which it was
+unconsciously striving, and in which, once reached, it has in great
+measure acquiesced; if they had not carried with them to their distant
+homes their English Bible, and what else of worth had been already
+uttered in the English tongue; if, having once left us, the intercourse
+between Old and New England had been entirely broken off, or only rare
+and partial; there would then have unfolded themselves differences
+between the language spoken here and there, which in tract of time
+accumulating and multiplying, might in the end have justified the
+regarding of the languages as no longer one and the same. It could not
+have failed but that such differences should have displayed themselves;
+for while there is a law of _necessity_ in the evolution of languages,
+while they pursue certain courses and in certain directions, from which
+they can be no more turned aside by the will of men than one of the
+heavenly bodies could be pushed from its orbit by any engines of ours,
+there is a law of _liberty_ no less; and this liberty must inevitably
+have made itself in many ways felt. In the political and social
+condition of America, so far removed from our own, in the many natural
+objects which are not the same with those which surround us here, in
+efforts independently carried out to rid the language of imperfections,
+or to unfold its latent powers, even in the different effects of soil
+and climate on the organs of speech, there would have been causes enough
+to have provoked in the course of time not immaterial divergencies of
+language.
+
+As it is, however, the joint operation of those three causes referred to
+already, namely, that the separation did not take place in the infancy
+or youth of the language, but only in its ripe manhood, that England and
+America owned a body of literature, to which they alike looked up and
+appealed as containing the authoritative standards of the language, that
+the intercourse between the one people and the other has been large and
+frequent, hereafter probably to be larger and more frequent still, has
+effectually wrought. It has been strong enough so to traverse, repress,
+and check all those causes which tended to divergence, that the
+_written_ language of educated men on both sides of the water remains
+precisely the same, their _spoken_ manifesting a few trivial
+differences of idiom; while even among those classes which do not
+consciously acknowledge any ideal standard of language, there are
+scarcely greater differences, in some respects far smaller, than exist
+between inhabitants of different provinces in this one island of
+England; and in the future we may reasonably anticipate that these
+differences, so far from multiplying, will rather diminish and
+disappear.
+
+{Sidenote: _Extinct English_}
+
+But I must return from this long digression. It seems often as if an
+almost unaccountable caprice presided over the fortunes of words, and
+determined which should live and which die. Thus in instances out of
+number a word lives on as a verb, but has ceased to be employed as a
+noun; we say 'to embarrass', but no longer an 'embarrass'; 'to revile',
+but not, with Chapman and Milton, a 'revile'; 'to dispose', but not a
+'dispose'{150}; 'to retire' but not a 'retire'; 'to wed', but not a
+'wed'; we say 'to infest', but use no longer the adjective 'infest'. Or
+with a reversed fortune a word lives on as a noun, but has perished as
+a verb--thus as a noun substantive, a 'slug', but no longer 'to slug' or
+render slothful; a 'child', but no longer 'to child', ("_childing_
+autumn", Shakespeare); a 'rape', but not 'to rape' (South); a 'rogue',
+but not 'to rogue'; 'malice', but not 'to malice'; a 'path', but not 'to
+path'; or as a noun adjective, 'serene', but not 'to serene', a beautiful
+word, which we have let go, as the French have 'sereiner'{151}; 'meek',
+but not 'to meek' (Wiclif); 'fond', but not 'to fond' (Dryden); 'dead',
+but not 'to dead'; 'intricate', but 'to intricate' (Jeremy Taylor) no
+longer.
+
+Or again, the affirmative remains, but the negative is gone; thus
+'wisdom', 'bold', 'sad', but not any more 'unwisdom', 'unbold', 'unsad'
+(all in Wiclif); 'cunning', but not 'uncunning'; 'manhood', 'wit',
+'mighty', 'tall', but not 'unmanhood', 'unwit', 'unmighty', 'untall'
+(all in Chaucer); 'buxom', but not 'unbuxom' (Dryden); 'hasty', but not
+'unhasty' (Spenser); 'blithe', but not 'unblithe'; 'ease', but not
+'unease' (Hacket); 'repentance', but not 'unrepentance'; 'remission',
+but not 'irremission' (Donne); 'science', but not 'nescience'
+(Glanvill){152}; 'to know', but not 'to unknow' (Wiclif); 'to give', but
+not 'to ungive'. Or once more, with a curious variation from this, the
+negative survives, while the affirmative is gone; thus 'wieldy'
+(Chaucer) survives only in 'unwieldy'; 'couth' and 'couthly' (both in
+Spenser), only in 'uncouth' and 'uncouthly'; 'rule' (Foxe) only in
+'unruly'; 'gainly' (Henry More) in 'ungainly'; these last two were both
+of them serviceable words, and have been ill lost{153}; 'gainly' is
+indeed still common in the West Riding of Yorkshire; 'exorable'
+(Holland) and 'evitable' only in 'inexorable' and 'inevitable';
+'faultless' remains, but hardly 'faultful' (Shakespeare). In like manner
+'semble' (Foxe) has, except as a technical law term, disappeared; while
+'dissemble' continues. So also of other pairs one has been taken and one
+left; 'height', or 'highth', as Milton better spelt it, remains, but
+'lowth' (Becon) is gone; 'righteousness', or 'rightwiseness', as it
+would once more accurately have been written, for 'righteous' is a
+corruption of 'rightwise', remains, but its correspondent 'wrongwiseness'
+has been taken; 'inroad' continues, but 'outroad' (Holland) has
+disappeared; 'levant' lives, but 'ponent' (Holland) has died; 'to
+extricate' continues, but, as we saw just now, 'to intricate' does not;
+'parricide', but not 'filicide' (Holland). Again, of whole groups of
+words formed on some particular scheme it may be only a single specimen
+will survive. Thus 'gainsay', that is, again say, survives; but
+'gainstrive' (Foxe), 'gainstand', 'gaincope' (Golding), and other
+similarly formed words exist no longer. It is the same with 'foolhardy',
+which is but one, though now indeed the only one remaining, of at least
+five adjectives formed on the same principle; thus 'foollarge', quite as
+expressive a word as prodigal, occurs in Chaucer, and 'foolhasty', found
+also in him, lived on to the time of Holland; while 'foolhappy' is in
+Spencer; and 'foolbold' in Bale. 'Steadfast' remains, but 'shamefast',
+'rootfast', 'bedfast' (=bedridden), 'homefast', 'housefast',
+'masterfast' (Skelton), with others, are all gone. 'Exhort' remains; but
+'dehort' a word whose place neither 'dissuade' nor any other exactly
+supplies, has escaped us{154}. We have 'twilight', but 'twibill' =
+bipennis (Chapman) is extinct.
+
+Let me mention another real loss, where in like manner there remains in
+the present language something to remind us of that which is gone. The
+comparative 'rather' stands alone, having dropped on one side its
+positive 'rathe'{155}, and on the other its superlative 'rathest'.
+'Rathe', having the sense of early, though a graceful word, and not
+fallen quite out of popular remembrance, inasmuch as it is embalmed in
+the _Lycidas_ of Milton,
+
+    "And the _rathe_ primrose, which forsaken dies",
+
+might still be suffered without remark to share the common lot of so many
+words which have perished, though worthy to have lived; but the disuse
+of 'rathest' has left a real gap in the language, and the more so,
+seeing that 'liefest' is gone too. 'Rather' expresses the Latin 'potius';
+but 'rathest' being out of use, we have no word, unless 'soonest' may be
+accepted as such, to express 'potissimum', or the preference not of one
+way over another or over certain others, but of one over all; which we
+therefore effect by aid of various circumlocutions. Nor has 'rathest'
+been so long out of use, that it would be playing the antic to attempt
+to revive it. It occurs in the _Sermons_ of Bishop Sanderson, who in the
+opening of that beautiful sermon from the text, "When my father and my
+mother forsake me, the Lord taketh me up", puts the consideration, "why
+these", that is, father and mother, "are named the _rathest_, and the
+rest to be included in them"{156}.
+
+It is sometimes easy enough, but indeed oftener hard, and not seldom
+quite impossible, to trace the causes which have been at work to bring
+about that certain words, little by little, drop out of the language of
+men, come to be heard more and more rarely, and finally are not heard
+any more at all--to trace the motives which have induced a whole people
+thus to arrive at a tacit consent not to employ them any longer; for
+without this tacit consent they could never have thus become obsolete.
+That it is not accident, that there is a law here at work, however
+hidden it may be from us, is plain from the fact that certain families
+of words, words formed on certain patterns, have a tendency thus to fall
+into desuetude.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in '-some'_}
+
+Thus, I think, we may trace a tendency in words ending in 'some', the
+Anglo-Saxon and early English 'sum', the German 'sam' ('friedsam',
+'seltsam') to fall out of use. It is true that a vast number of these
+survive, as 'gladsome', 'handsome', 'wearisome', 'buxom' (this last
+spelt better 'bucksome', by our earlier writers, for its present
+spelling altogether disguises its true character, and the family to
+which it belongs); being the same word as the German 'beugsam' or
+'biegsam', bendable, compliant{157}; but a larger number of these words
+than can be ascribed to accident, many more than the due proportion of
+them, are either quite or nearly extinct. Thus in Wiclif's Bible alone
+you might note the following, 'lovesum', 'hatesum', 'lustsum', 'gilsum'
+(guilesome), 'wealsum', 'heavysum', 'lightsum', 'delightsum'; of these
+'lightsome' long survived, and indeed still survives in provincial
+dialects; but of the others all save 'delightsome' are gone; and that,
+although used in our Authorized Version (Mal. iii, 12), is now only
+employed in poetry. So too 'mightsome' (see Coleridge's _Glossary_),
+'brightsome' (Marlowe), 'wieldsome', and 'unwieldsome' (Golding),
+'unlightsome' (Milton), 'healthsome' (_Homilies_), 'ugsome' and
+'ugglesome' (both in Foxe), 'laboursome' (Shakespeare), 'friendsome',
+'longsome' (Bacon), 'quietsome', 'mirksome' (both in Spenser),
+'toothsome' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'gleesome', 'joysome' (both in
+Browne's _Pastorals_), 'gaysome' (_Mirror for Magistrates_), 'roomsome',
+'bigsome', 'awesome', 'timersome', 'winsome', 'viewsome', 'dosome'
+(=prosperous), 'flaysome' (=fearful), 'auntersome' (=adventurous),
+'clamorsome' (all these still surviving in the North), 'playsome'
+(employed by the historian Hume), 'lissome'{158}, have nearly or quite
+disappeared from our English speech. They seem to have held their
+ground in Scotland in considerably larger numbers than in the south of
+the Island{159}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in '-ard'_}
+
+Neither can I esteem it a mere accident that of a group of depreciatory
+and contemptuous words ending in 'ard', at least one half should have
+dropped out of use; I refer to that group of which 'dotard', 'laggard',
+'braggard', now spelt 'braggart', 'sluggard', 'buzzard', 'bastard',
+'wizard', may be taken as surviving specimens; 'blinkard' (_Homilies_),
+'dizzard' (Burton), 'dullard' (Udal), 'musard' (Chaucer), 'trichard'
+(_Political Songs_), 'shreward' (Robert of Gloucester), 'ballard' (a
+bald-headed man, Wiclif); 'puggard', 'stinkard' (Ben Jonson), 'haggard',
+a worthless hawk, as extinct.
+
+Thus too there is a very curious province of our language, in which we
+were once so rich, that extensive losses here have failed to make us
+poor; so many of its words still surviving, even after as many or more
+have disappeared. I refer to those double words which either contain
+within themselves a strong rhyming modulation, such for example as
+'willy-nilly', 'hocus-pocus', 'helter-skelter', 'tag-rag', 'namby-pamby',
+'pell-mell', 'hodge-podge'; or with a slight difference from this,
+though belonging to the same group, those of which the characteristic
+feature is not this internal likeness with initial unlikeness, but
+initial likeness with internal unlikeness; not rhyming, but strongly
+alliterative, and in every case with a change of the interior vowel from
+a weak into a strong, generally from _i_ into _a_ or _o_; as
+'shilly-shally', 'mingle-mangle', 'tittle-tattle', 'prittle-prattle',
+'riff-raff', 'see-saw', 'slip-slop'. No one who is not quite out of love
+with the homelier yet more vigorous portions of the language, but will
+acknowledge the life and strength which there is often in these and in
+others still current among us. But of the same sort what vast numbers
+have fallen out of use, some so fallen out of all remembrance that it
+may be difficult almost to find credence for them. Thus take of rhyming
+the following: 'hugger-mugger', 'hurly-burly', 'kicksy-wicksy' (all in
+Shakespeare); 'hibber-gibber', 'rusty-dusty', 'horrel-lorrel', 'slaump
+paump' (all in Gabriel Harvey), 'royster-doyster' (Old Play),
+'hoddy-doddy' (Ben Jonson); while of alliterative might be instanced
+these: 'skimble-skamble', 'bibble-babble' (both in Shakespeare),
+'twittle-twattle', 'kim-kam' (both in Holland), 'hab-nab' (Lilly),
+'trim-tram', 'trish-trash', 'swish-swash' (all in Gabriel Harvey),
+'whim-wham' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'mizz-mazz' (Locke), 'snip-snap'
+(Pope), 'flim-flam' (Swift), 'tric-trac', and others{160}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words under Ban_}
+
+Again, there was once a whole family of words whereof the greater number
+are now under ban; which seemed at one time to have been formed almost
+at pleasure, the only condition being that the combination should be a
+happy one--I mean all those singularly expressive words formed by a
+combination of verb and substantive, the former governing the latter; as
+'telltale', 'scapegrace', 'turncoat', 'turntail', 'skinflint',
+'spendthrift', 'spitfire', 'lickspittle', 'daredevil' (=wagehals),
+'makebate' (=stoerenfried), 'marplot', 'killjoy'. These with a certain
+number of others, have held their ground, and may be said to be still
+more or less in use; but what a number more are forgotten; and yet,
+though not always elegant, they constituted a very vigorous portion of
+our language, and preserved some of its most genuine idioms{161}. It
+could not well be otherwise; they are almost all words of abuse, and the
+abusive words of a language are always among the most picturesque and
+vigorous and imaginative which it possesses. The whole man speaks out in
+them, and often the man under the influence of passion and excitement,
+which always lend force and fire to his speech. Let me remind you of a
+few of them; 'smellfeast', if not a better, is yet a more graphic, word
+than our foreign parasite; as graphic indeed for us as {Greek:
+trechedeipnos} to Greek ears; 'clawback' (Hackett) is a stronger, if not
+a more graceful, word than flatterer or sycophant; 'tosspot' (Fuller),
+or less frequently 'reel-pot' (Middleton), tells its own tale as well as
+drunkard; and 'pinchpenny' (Holland), or 'nipfarthing' (Drant), as well
+as or better than miser. And then what a multitude more there are in
+like kind; 'spintext', 'lacklatin', 'mumblematins', all applied to
+ignorant clerics; 'bitesheep' (a favourite word with Foxe) to such of
+these as were rather wolves tearing, than shepherds feeding, the flock;
+'slip-string' = pendard (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'slip-gibbet',
+'scapegallows'; all names given to those who, however they might have
+escaped, were justly owed to the gallows, and might still "go upstairs
+to bed".
+
+{Sidenote: _Obsolete Compounds_}
+
+How many of these words occur in Shakespeare. The following list makes
+no pretence to completeness; 'martext', 'carrytale', 'pleaseman',
+'sneakcup', 'mumblenews', 'wantwit', 'lackbrain', 'lackbeard',
+'lacklove', 'ticklebrain', 'cutpurse', 'cutthroat', 'crackhemp',
+'breedbate', 'swinge-buckler', 'pickpurse', 'pickthank', 'picklock',
+'scarecrow', 'breakvow', 'breakpromise', 'makepeace'--this last and
+'telltruth' (Fuller) being the only ones in the whole collection wherein
+reprobation or contempt is not implied. Nor is the list exhausted yet;
+there are further 'dingthrift' = prodigal (Herrick), 'wastegood'
+(Cotgrave), 'stroygood' (Golding), 'wastethrift' (Beaumont and
+Fletcher), 'scapethrift', 'swashbuckler' (both in Holinshed),
+'shakebuckler', 'rinsepitcher' (both in Bacon), 'crackrope' (Howell),
+'waghalter', 'wagfeather' (both in Cotgrave), 'blabtale' (Racket),
+'getnothing' (Adams), 'findfault' (Florio), 'tearthroat' (Gayton),
+'marprelate', 'spitvenom', 'nipcheese', 'nipscreed', 'killman'
+(Chapman), 'lackland', 'pickquarrel', 'pickfaults', 'pickpenny' (Henry
+More), 'makefray' (Bishop Hall), 'make-debate' (Richardson's _Letters_),
+'kindlecoal' (attise feu), 'kindlefire' (both in Gurnall), 'turntippet'
+(Cranmer), 'swillbowl' (Stubbs), 'smell-smock', 'cumberwold' (Drayton),
+'curryfavor', 'pinchfist', 'suckfist', 'hatepeace' (Sylvester),
+'hategood' (Bunyan), 'clutchfist', 'sharkgull' (both in Middleton),
+'makesport' (Fuller), 'hangdog' ("Herod's _hangdogs_ in the tapestry",
+Pope), 'catchpoll', 'makeshift' (used not impersonally as now),
+'pickgoose' ("the bookworm was never but a _pickgoose_"){162}, 'killcow'
+(these three last in Gabriel Harvey), 'rakeshame' (Milton, prose), with
+others which it will be convenient to omit. 'Rakehell', which used to be
+spelt 'rakel' or 'rakle' (Chaucer), a good English word, would be only
+through an error included in this list, although Cowper, when he writes
+'rakehell' ("_rake-hell_ baronet") evidently regarded it as belonging to
+this group{163}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words become Vulgar_}
+
+Perhaps one of the most frequent causes which leads to the disuse of
+words is this: in some inexplicable way there comes to be attached
+something of ludicrous, or coarse, or vulgar to them, out of a feeling
+of which they are no longer used in earnest serious writing, and at the
+same time fall out of the discourse of those who desire to speak
+elegantly. Not indeed that this degradation which overtakes words is in
+all cases inexplicable. The unheroic character of most men's minds, with
+their consequent intolerance of that heroic which they cannot
+understand, is constantly at work, too often with success, in taking
+down words of nobleness from their high pitch; and, as the most
+effectual way of doing this, in casting an air of mock-heroic about
+them. Thus 'to dub', a word resting on one of the noblest usages of
+chivalry, has now something of ludicrous about it; so too has 'doughty';
+they belong to that serio-comic, mock-heroic diction, the multiplication
+of which, as of all parodies on greatness, and the favour with which it
+is received, is always a sign of evil augury for a nation, is at present
+a sign of evil augury for our own.
+
+'Pate' in the sense of head is now comic or ignoble; it was not so once;
+as is plain from its occurrence in the Prayer Book Version of the Psalms
+(Ps. vii. 17); as little was 'noddle', which occurs in one of the few
+poetical passages in Hawes. The same may be said of 'sconce', in this
+sense at least; of 'nowl' or 'noll', which Wiclif uses; of 'slops' for
+trousers (Marlowe's _Lucan_); of 'cocksure' (Rogers), of 'smug', which
+once meant no more than adorned ("the _smug_ bridegroom", Shakespeare).
+'To nap' is now a word without dignity; while yet in Wiclif's Bible it
+is said, "Lo he schall not _nappe_, nether slepe that kepeth Israel"
+(Ps. cxxi. 4). 'To punch', 'to thump', both of which, and in serious
+writing, occur in Spenser, could not now obtain the same use, nor yet
+'to wag', or 'to buss'. Neither would any one now say that at Lystra
+Barnabas and Paul "rent their clothes and _skipped out_ among the
+people" (Acts xiv. 14), which is the language that Wiclif employs; nor
+yet that "the Lord _trounced_ Sisera and all his host" as it stands in
+the Bible of 1551. "A _sight_ of angels", for which phrase see Cranmer's
+Bible (Heb. xii. 22), would be felt as a vulgarism now. We should
+scarcely call now a delusion of Satan a "_flam_ of the devil" (Henry
+More). It is not otherwise in regard of phrases. "Through thick and
+thin", occurring in Spenser, "cheek by jowl" in Dubartas{164}, do not
+now belong to serious poetry. In the glorious ballad of _Chevy Chase_, a
+noble warrior whose legs are hewn off, is described as being "in doleful
+dumps"; just as, in Holland's _Livy_, the Romans are set forth as being
+"in the dumps" as a consequence of their disastrous defeat at Cannae. In
+Golding's _Ovid_, one fears that he will "go to pot". In one of the
+beautiful letters of John Careless, preserved in Foxe's _Martyrs_, a
+persecutor, who expects a recantation from him, is described as "in the
+wrong box". And in the sermons of Barrow, who certainly intended to
+write an elevated style, and did not seek familiar, still less vulgar,
+expressions, we constantly meet such terms as 'to rate', 'to snub', 'to
+gull', 'to pudder', 'dumpish', and the like; which we may confidently
+affirm were not vulgar when he used them.
+
+Then too the advance of refinement causes words to be forgone, which are
+felt to speak too plainly. It is not here merely that one age has more
+delicate ears than another; and that matters are freely spoken of at one
+time which at another are withdrawn from conversation. This is
+something; but besides this, and even if this delicacy were at a
+standstill, there would still be a continual process going on, by which
+the words, which for a certain while have been employed to designate
+coarse or disagreeable facts or things, would be disallowed, or at all
+events relinquished to the lower class of society, and others adopted in
+their place. The former by long use being felt to have come into too
+direct and close relation with that which they designate, to summon it
+up too distinctly before the mind's eye, they are thereupon exchanged
+for others, which, at first at least, indicate more lightly and
+allusively the offensive thing, rather hint and suggest than paint and
+describe it: although by and by these new will also in their turn be
+discarded, and for exactly the same reasons which brought about the
+dismissal of those which they themselves superseded. It lies in the
+necessity of things that I must leave this part of my subject, very
+curious as it is, without illustration{165}. But no one, even
+moderately acquainted with the early literature of the Reformation, can
+be ignorant of words freely used in it, which now are not merely coarse
+and as such under ban, but which no one would employ who did not mean to
+speak impurely and vilely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{Sidenote: _Lost Powers of a Language_}
+
+Thus much in respect of the words, and the character of the words, which
+we have lost or let go. Of these, indeed, if a language, as it travels
+onwards, loses some, it also acquires others, and probably many more
+than it loses; they are leaves on the tree of language, of which if some
+fall away, a new succession takes their place. But it is not so, as I
+already observed, with the _forms_ or _powers_ of a language, that is,
+with the various inflections, moods, duplicate or triplicate formation
+of tenses; which the speakers of a language come gradually to perceive
+that they can do without, and therefore cease to employ; seeking to
+suppress grammatical intricacies, and to obtain grammatical simplicity
+and so far as possible a pervading uniformity, sometimes even at the
+hazard of letting go what had real worth, and contributed to the more
+lively, if not to the clearer, setting forth of the inner thought or
+feeling of the mind. Here there is only loss, with no compensating gain;
+or, at all events, diminution only, and never addition. In regard of
+these inner forces and potencies of a language, there is no creative
+energy at work in its later periods, in any, indeed, but quite the
+earliest. They are not as the leaves, but may be likened to the stem and
+leading branches of a tree, whose shape, mould and direction are
+determined at a very early stage of its growth; and which age, or
+accident, or violence may diminish, but which can never be multiplied. I
+have already slightly referred to a notable example of this, namely, to
+the dropping of the dual number in the Greek language. Thus in all the
+New Testament it does not once occur, having quite fallen out of the
+common dialect in which that is composed. Elsewhere too it has been felt
+that the dual was not worth preserving, or at any rate, that no serious
+inconvenience would follow on its loss. There is no such number in the
+modern German, Danish or Swedish; in the old German and Norse there was.
+
+{Sidenote: _Extinction of Powers_}
+
+How many niceties, delicacies, subtleties of language, _we_, speakers of
+the English tongue, in the course of centuries have got rid of; how bare
+(whether too bare is another question) we have stripped ourselves; what
+simplicity for better or for worse reigns in the present English, as
+compared with the old Anglo-Saxon. That had six declensions, our present
+English but one; that had three genders, English, if we except one or
+two words, has none; that formed the genitive in a variety of ways, we
+only in one; and the same fact meets us, wherever we compare the
+grammars of the two languages. At the same time, it can scarcely be
+repeated too often, that in the estimate of the gain or loss thereupon
+ensuing, we must by no means put certainly to loss everything which the
+language has dismissed, any more than everything to gain which it has
+acquired. It is no real wealth in a language to have needless and
+superfluous forms. They are often an embarrassment and an encumbrance to
+it rather than a help. The Finnish language has fourteen cases. Without
+pretending to know exactly what it is able to effect, I yet feel
+confident that it cannot effect more, nor indeed so much, with its
+fourteen as the Greek is able to do with its five. It therefore seems to
+me that some words of Otfried Mueller, in many ways admirable, do yet
+exaggerate the losses consequent on the reduction of the forms of a
+language. "It may be observed", he says, "that in the lapse of ages,
+from the time that the progress of language can be observed, grammatical
+forms, such as the signs of cases, moods and tenses have never been
+increased in number, but have been constantly diminishing. The history
+of the Romance, as well as of the Germanic, languages shows in the
+clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and copious, has been
+gradually weakened and impoverished, until at last it preserves only a
+few fragments of its ancient inflections. Now there is no doubt that
+this luxuriance of grammatical forms is not an essential part of a
+language, considered merely as a vehicle of thought. It is well known
+that the Chinese language, which is merely a collection of radical words
+destitute of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical ideas
+with tolerable precision; and the English, which, from the mode of its
+formation by a mixture of different tongues, has been stripped of its
+grammatical inflections more completely than any other European
+language, seems, nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be distinguished
+by its energetic eloquence. All this must be admitted by every
+unprejudiced inquirer; but yet it cannot be overlooked, that this
+copiousness of grammatical forms, and the fine shades of meaning which
+they express, evince a nicety of observation, and a faculty of
+distinguishing, which unquestionably prove that the race of mankind
+among whom these languages arose was characterized by a remarkable
+correctness and subtlety of thought. Nor can any modern European, who
+forms in his mind a lively image of the classical languages in their
+ancient grammatical luxuriance, and compares them with his mother
+tongue, conceal from himself that in the ancient languages the words,
+with their inflections, clothed as it were with muscles and sinews, come
+forward like living bodies, full of expression and character, while in
+the modern tongues the words seem shrunk up into mere skeletons"{166}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in '-ess'_}
+
+Whether languages are as much impoverished by this process as is here
+assumed, may, I think, be a question. I will endeavour to give you some
+materials which shall assist you in forming your own judgment in the
+matter. And here I am sure that I shall do best in considering not forms
+which the language has relinquished long ago, but mainly such as it is
+relinquishing now; which, touching us more nearly, will have a far more
+lively interest for us all. For example, the female termination which
+we employ in certain words, such as from 'heir' 'heiress', from
+'prophet' 'prophetess', from 'sorcerer' 'sorceress', was once far more
+widely extended than at present; the words which retain it are daily
+becoming fewer. It has already fallen away in so many, and is evidently
+becoming of less frequent use in so many others, that, if we may augur
+of the future from the analogy of the past, it will one day altogether
+vanish from our tongue. Thus all these occur in Wiclif's Bible;
+'techeress' as the female teacher (2 Chron. xxxv. 25); 'friendess'
+(Prov. vii. 4); 'servantess' (Gen. xvi. 2); 'leperess' (=saltatrix,
+Ecclus. ix. 4); 'daunceress' (Ecclus. ix. 4); 'neighbouress' (Exod. iii.
+22); 'sinneress' (Luke vii. 37); 'purpuress' (Acts xvi. 14); 'cousiness'
+(Luke i. 36); 'slayeress' (Tob. iii. 9); 'devouress' (Ezek. xxxvi. 13);
+'spousess' (Prov. v. 19); 'thralless' (Jer. xxxiv. 16); 'dwelleress'
+(Jer. xxi. 13); 'waileress' (Jer. ix. 17); 'cheseress' (=electrix, Wisd.
+viii. 4); 'singeress', 'breakeress', 'waiteress', this last indeed
+having recently come up again. Add to these 'chideress', the female
+chider, 'herdess', 'constabless', 'moveress', 'jangleress', 'soudaness'
+(=sultana), 'guideress', 'charmeress' (all in Chaucer); and others,
+which however we may have now let them fall, reached to far later
+periods of the language; thus 'vanqueress' (Fabyan); 'poisoneress'
+(Greneway); 'knightess' (Udal); 'pedleress', 'championess', 'vassaless',
+'avengeress', 'warriouress', 'victoress', 'creatress' (all in Spenser);
+'fornicatress', 'cloistress', 'jointress' (all in Shakespeare);
+'vowess' (Holinshed); 'ministress', 'flatteress' (both in Holland);
+'captainess' (Sidney); 'saintess' (Sir T. Urquhart); 'heroess',
+'dragoness', 'butleress', 'contendress', 'waggoness', 'rectress' (all in
+Chapman); 'shootress' (Fairfax); 'archeress' (Fanshawe); 'clientess',
+'pandress' (both in Middleton); 'papess', 'Jesuitess' (Bishop Hall);
+'incitress' (Gayton); 'soldieress', 'guardianess', 'votaress' (all in
+Beaumont and Fletcher); 'comfortress', 'fosteress' (Ben Jonson);
+'soveraintess' (Sylvester); 'preserveress' (Daniel); 'solicitress',
+'impostress', 'buildress', 'intrudress' (all in Fuller); 'favouress'
+(Hakewell); 'commandress' (Burton); 'monarchess', 'discipless' (Speed);
+'auditress', 'cateress', 'chantress', 'tyranness' (all in Milton);
+'citess', 'divineress' (both in Dryden); 'deaness' (Sterne);
+'detractress' (Addison); 'hucksteress' (Howell); 'tutoress'
+(Shaftesbury); 'farmeress' (Lord Peterborough, _Letter to Pope_);
+'laddess', which however still survives in the contracted form of
+'lass'{167}; with more which, I doubt not, it would not be very hard to
+bring together{168}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words in '-ster'_}
+
+Exactly the same thing has happened with another feminine affix. I refer
+to 'ster', taking the place of 'er' where a feminine doer is
+intended{169}. 'Spinner' and 'spinster' are the only pair of such
+words, which still survive. There were formerly many such; thus 'baker'
+had 'bakester', being the female who baked: 'brewer' 'brewster'; 'sewer'
+'sewster'; 'reader' 'readster'; 'seamer' 'seamster'; 'fruiterer'
+'fruitester'; 'tumbler' 'tumblester'; 'hopper' 'hoppester' (these last
+three in Chaucer; "the shippes _hoppesteres_", about which so much
+difficulty has been made, are the ships _dancing_, i.e., on the
+waves){170}, 'knitter' 'knitster' (a word, I am told, still alive in
+Devon). Add to these 'whitster' (female bleacher, Shakespeare),
+'kempster' (pectrix), 'dryster' (siccatrix), 'brawdster', (I suppose
+embroideress){171}, and 'salster' (salinaria){172}. It is a singular
+example of the richness of a language in forms at the earlier stages of
+its existence, that not a few of the words which had, as we have just
+seen, a feminine termination in 'ess', had also a second in 'ster'. Thus
+'daunser', beside 'daunseress', had also 'daunster' (Ecclus. ix. 4);
+'wailer', beside 'waileress', had 'wailster' (Jer. ix. 17); 'dweller'
+'dwelster' (Jer. xxi. 13); and 'singer' 'singster' (2 Kin. xix. 35); so
+too, 'chider' had 'chidester' (Chaucer), as well as 'chideress',
+'slayer' 'slayster' (Tob. iii. 9), as well as 'slayeress', 'chooser'
+'chesister', (Wisd. viii. 4), as well as 'cheseress', with others that
+might be named.
+
+{Sidenote: _Deceptive Analogies_}
+
+It is difficult to understand how Marsh, with these examples before him
+should affirm, "I find no positive evidence to show that the termination
+'ster' was ever regarded as a feminine termination in English". It may
+be, and indeed has been, urged that the existence of such words as
+'seamstr_ess_', 'songstr_ess_', is decisive proof that the ending 'ster'
+of itself was not counted sufficient to designate persons as female; for
+if, it has been said, 'seam_ster_' and 'song_ster_' had been felt to be
+already feminine, no one would have ever thought of doubling on this,
+and adding a second female termination; 'seam_stress_', 'song_stress_'.
+But all which can justly be concluded from hence is, that when this
+final 'ess' was added to these already feminine forms, and examples of
+it will not, I think, be found till a comparatively late period of the
+language, the true principle and law of the words had been lost sight of
+and forgotten{173}. The same may be affirmed of such other of these
+feminine forms as are now applied to men, such as 'gamester',
+'youngster', 'oldster', 'drugster' (South), 'huckster', 'hackster',
+(=swordsman, Milton, prose), 'teamster', 'throwster', 'rhymester',
+'punster' (_Spectator_), 'tapster', 'whipster' (Shakespeare),
+'trickster'. Either, like 'teamster', and 'punster', the words first
+came into being, when the true significance of this form was altogether
+lost{174}; or like 'tapster', which was female in Chaucer ("the gay
+_tapstere_"), as it is still in Dutch and Frisian, and distinguished
+from 'tapper', the _man_ who keeps the inn, or has charge of the tap, or
+as 'bakester', at this day used in Scotland for 'baker', as 'dyester'
+for 'dyer', the word did originally belong of right and exclusively to
+women; but with the gradual transfer of the occupation to men, and an
+increasing forgetfulness of what this termination implied, there went
+also a transfer of the name{175}, just as in other words, and out of
+the same causes, the exact converse has found place; and 'baker' or
+'brewer', not 'bakester' or 'brewster'{176}, would be now in England
+applied to the woman baking or brewing. So entirely has this power of
+the language died out, that it survives more apparently than really even
+in 'spinner' and 'spinster'; seeing that 'spinster' has obtained now
+quite another meaning than that of a woman spinning, whom, as well as
+the man, we should call not a 'spinster', but a 'spinner'{177}. It would
+indeed be hard to believe, if we had not constant experience of the
+fact, how soon and how easily the true law and significance of some
+form, which has never ceased to be in everybody's mouth, may yet be lost
+sight of by all. No more curious chapter in the history of language
+could be written than one which should trace the violations of analogy,
+the transgressions of the most primary laws of a language, which follow
+hereupon; the plurals like 'welkin' (=wolken, the clouds){178},
+'chicken'{179}, which are dealt with as singulars, the singulars, like
+'riches' (richesse){180}, 'pease' (pisum, pois){181}, 'alms',
+'eaves'{182}, which are assumed to be plurals.
+
+{Sidenote: _The Genitival Inflexion '-s'_}
+
+There is one example of this, familiar to us all; probably so familiar
+that it would not be worth while adverting to it, if it did not
+illustrate, as no other word could, this forgetfulness which may
+overtake a whole people, of the true meaning of a grammatical form which
+they have never ceased to employ. I refer to the mistaken assumption
+that the 's' of the genitive, as 'the king's countenance', was merely a
+more rapid way of pronouncing 'the king _his_ countenance', and that the
+final 's' in 'king's' was in fact an elided 'his'. This explanation for
+a long time prevailed almost universally; I believe there are many who
+accept it still. It was in vain that here and there a deeper knower of
+our tongue protested against this "monstrous syntax", as Ben Jonson in
+his _Grammar_ justly calls it{183}. It was in vain that Wallis, another
+English scholar of the seventeenth century, pointed out in _his_ Grammar
+that the slightest examination of the facts revealed the untenable
+character of this explanation, seeing that we do not merely say "the
+_king's_ countenance", but "the _queen's_ countenance"; and in this case
+the final 's' cannot stand for 'his', for "the queen _his_ countenance"
+cannot be intended{184}; we do not say merely "the _child's_ bread", but
+"the _children's_ bread", where it is no less impossible to resolve the
+phrase into "the children _his_ bread"{185}. Despite of these protests
+the error held its ground. This much indeed of a plea it could make for
+itself, that such an actual employment of 'his' _had_ found its way
+into the language, as early as the fourteenth century, and had been in
+occasional, though rare use, from that time downward{186}. Yet this,
+which has only been elicited by the researches of recent scholars, does
+not in the least justify those who assumed that in the habitual 's' of
+the genitive were to be found the remains of 'his'--an error from which
+the books of scholars in the seventeenth, and in the early decades of
+the eighteenth, century are not a whit clearer than those of others.
+Spenser, Donne, Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, all fall into it; I cannot say
+confidently whether Milton does. Dryden more than once helps out his
+verse with an additional syllable gained by its aid. It has even forced
+its way into our Prayer Book itself, where in the "Prayer for all sorts
+and conditions of men", added by Bishop Sanderson at the last revision
+of the Liturgy in 1661, we are bidden to say, "And this we beg for Jesus
+Christ _his_ sake"{187}. I need hardly tell you that this 's' is in fact
+the one remnant of flexion surviving in the singular number of our
+English noun substantives; it is in all the Indo-Germanic languages the
+original sign of the genitive, or at any rate the earliest of which we
+can take cognizance; and just as in Latin 'lapis' makes 'lapidis' in the
+genitive, so 'king', 'queen', 'child', make severally 'kings', 'queens',
+'childs', the comma, an apparent note of elision, being a mere modern
+expedient, "a late refinement", as Ash calls it{188}, to distinguish the
+genitive singular from the plural cases{189}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Adjectives in '-en'_}
+
+Notice another example of this willingness to dispense with inflection,
+of this endeavour on the part of the speakers of a language to reduce
+its forms to the fewest possible, consistent with the accurate
+communication of thought. Of our adjectives in 'en', formed on
+substantives, and expressing the material or substance of a thing, some
+have gone, others are going, out of use; while we content ourselves with
+the bare juxtaposition of the substantive itself, as sufficiently
+expressing our meaning. Thus instead of "_golden_ pin" we say "_gold_
+pin"; instead of "_earthen_ works" we say "_earth_ works". 'Golden' and
+'earthen', it is true, still belong to our living speech, though mainly
+as part of our poetic diction, or of the solemn and thus stereotyped
+language of Scripture; but a whole company of such words have nearly or
+quite disappeared; some lately, some long ago. 'Steelen' and 'flowren'
+belong only to the earliest period of the language; 'rosen' also went
+early. Chaucer is my latest authority for it ("_rosen_ chapelet").
+'Hairen' is in Wiclif and in Chaucer; 'stonen' in the former (John iii.
+6){190}. 'Silvern' stood originally in Wiclif's Bible ("_silverne_
+housis to Diane", Acts xix. 24); but already in the second recension of
+this was exchanged for 'silver'; 'hornen', still in provincial use, he
+also employs, and 'clayen' (Job iv. 19) no less. 'Tinnen' occurs in
+Sylvester's _Du Bartas_; where also we meet with "Jove's _milken_
+alley", as a name for the _Via Lactea_, in Bacon also not "the _Milky_",
+but "the _Milken_ Way". In the coarse polemics of the Reformation the
+phrase, "_breaden_ god", provoked by the Romish doctrine of
+transubstantiation, was of frequent employment, and occurs as late as in
+Oldham. "_Mothen_ parchments" is in Fulke; "_twiggen_ bottle" in
+Shakespeare; '_yewen_', or, according to earlier spelling, "_ewghen_
+bow", in Spenser; "_cedarn_ alley", and "_azurn_ sheen" are both in
+Milton; "_boxen_ leaves" in Dryden; "a _treen_ cup" in Jeremy Taylor;
+"_eldern_ popguns" in Sir Thomas Overbury; "a _glassen_ breast", in
+Whitlock; "a _reeden_ hat" in Coryat; 'yarnen' occurs in Turberville;
+'furzen' in Holland; 'threaden' in Shakespeare; and 'bricken', 'papern'
+appear in our provincial glossaries as still in use.
+
+It is true that many of these adjectives still hold their ground; but
+it is curious to note how the roots which sustain even these are being
+gradually cut away from beneath them. Thus 'brazen' might at first sight
+seem as strongly established in the language as ever; it is far from so
+being; its supports are being cut from beneath it. Even now it only
+lives in a tropical and secondary sense, as 'a _brazen_ face'; or if in
+a literal, in poetic diction or in the consecrated language of
+Scripture, as 'the _brazen_ serpent'; otherwise we say 'a _brass_
+farthing', 'a _brass_ candlestick'. It is the same with 'oaten',
+'birchen', 'beechen', 'strawen', and many more, whereof some are
+obsolescent, some obsolete, the language manifestly tending now, as it
+has tended for a long time past, to the getting quit of these, and to
+the satisfying of itself with an adjectival apposition of the
+substantive in their stead.
+
+{Sidenote: _Weak and Strong Praeterites_}
+
+Let me illustrate by another example the way in which a language, as it
+travels onward, simplifies itself, approaches more and more to a
+grammatical and logical uniformity, seeks to do the same thing always in
+the same manner; where it has two or three ways of conducting a single
+operation, lets all of them go but one; and thus becomes, no doubt,
+easier to be mastered, more handy, more manageable; for its very riches
+were to many an embarrassment and a perplexity; but at the same time
+imposes limits and restraints on its own freedom of action, and is in
+danger of forfeiting elements of strength, variety and beauty, which it
+once possessed. I refer to the tendency of our verbs to let go their
+strong praeterites, and to substitute weak ones in their room; or,
+where they have two or three praeterites, to retain only one of them,
+and that invariably the weak one. Though many of us no doubt are
+familiar with the terms 'strong' and 'weak' praeterites, which in all
+our better grammars have put out of use the wholly misleading terms,
+'irregular' and 'regular', I may perhaps as well remind you of the exact
+meaning of the terms. A strong praeterite is one formed by an internal
+vowel change; for instance the verb 'to _drive_' forms the praeterite
+'_drove_' by an internal change of the vowel 'i' into 'o'. But why, it
+may be asked, called 'strong'? In respect of the vigour and indwelling
+energy in the word, enabling it to form its past tense from its own
+resources, and with no calling in of help from without. On the other
+hand 'lift' forms its praeterite 'lift_ed_', not by any internal change,
+but by the addition of 'ed'; 'grieve' in like manner has 'griev_ed_'.
+Here are weak tenses; as strength was ascribed to the other verbs, so
+weakness to these, which can form their praeterites only by external aid
+and addition. You will see at once that these strong praeterites, while
+they witness to a vital energy in the words which are able to put them
+forth, do also, as must be allowed by all, contribute much to the
+variety and charm of a language{191}.
+
+The point, however, which I am urging now is this,--that these are
+becoming fewer every day; multitudes of them having disappeared, while
+others are in the act of disappearing. Nor is the balance redressed and
+compensation found in any new creations of the kind. The power of
+forming strong praeterites is long ago extinct; probably no verb which
+has come into the language since the Conquest has asserted this power,
+while a whole legion have let it go. For example, 'shape' has now a weak
+praeterite, 'shaped', it had once a strong one, 'shope'; 'bake' has now
+a weak praeterite, 'baked', it had once a strong one, 'boke'; the
+praeterite of 'glide' is now 'glided', it was once 'glode' or 'glid';
+'help' makes now 'helped', it made once 'halp' and 'holp'. 'Creep' made
+'crope', still current in the north of England; 'weep' 'wope'; 'yell'
+'yoll' (both in Chaucer); 'seethe' 'soth' or 'sod' (Gen. xxv. 29);
+'sheer' in like manner once made 'shore'; as 'leap' made 'lope'; 'wash'
+'wishe' (Chaucer); 'snow' 'snew'; 'sow' 'sew'; 'delve' 'dalf' and
+'dolve'; 'sweat' 'swat'; 'yield' 'yold' (both in Spenser); 'mete' 'mat'
+(Wiclif); 'stretch' 'straught'; 'melt' 'molt'; 'wax' 'wex' and 'wox';
+'laugh' 'leugh'; with others more than can be enumerated here{192}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Strong Praeterites_}
+
+Observe further that where verbs have not actually renounced their
+strong praeterites, and contented themselves with weak in their room,
+yet, once possessing two, or, it might be three of these strong, they
+now retain only one. The others, on the principle of dismissing whatever
+can be dismissed, they have let go. Thus 'chide' had once 'chid' and
+'chode', but though 'chode' is in our Bible (Gen. xxxi. 36), it has not
+maintained itself in our speech; 'sling' had 'slung' and 'slang' (1 Sam.
+xvii. 49); only 'slung' remains; 'fling' had once 'flung' and 'flang';
+'strive' had 'strove' and 'strave'; 'stick' had 'stuck' and 'stack';
+'hang' had 'hung' and 'hing' (Golding); 'tread' had 'trod' and 'trad';
+'choose' had 'chose' and 'chase'; 'give' had 'gave' and 'gove'; 'lead'
+had 'led' 'lad' and 'lode'; 'write' had 'wrote' 'writ' and 'wrate'. In
+all these cases, and more might easily be cited, only [of] the
+praeterites which I have named the first remains in use.
+
+Observe too that in every instance where a conflict is now going on
+between weak and strong forms, which shall continue, the battle is not
+to the strong; on the contrary the weak is carrying the day, is getting
+the better of its stronger competitor. Thus 'climbed' is gaining the
+upper hand of 'clomb', 'swelled' of 'swoll', 'hanged' of 'hung'. It is
+not too much to anticipate that a time will come, although it may be
+still far off, when all English verbs will form their praeterites
+weakly; not without serious damage to the fulness and force which in
+this respect the language even now displays, and once far more eminently
+displayed{193}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Comparatives and Superlatives_}
+
+Take another proof of this tendency in our own language to drop its
+forms and renounce its own inherent powers; though here also the
+renunciation, threatening one day to be complete, is only partial at the
+present. I refer to the formation of our comparatives and superlatives;
+and I will ask you again to observe here that curious law of language,
+namely, that wherever there are two or more ways of attaining the same
+result, there is always a disposition to drop and dismiss all of these
+but one, so that the alternative or choice of ways once existing, shall
+not exist any more. If only it can attain a greater simplicity, it seems
+to grudge no self-impoverishment by which this result may be brought
+about. We have two ways of forming our comparatives and superlatives,
+one dwelling in the word itself, which we have inherited from our old
+Gothic stock, as 'bright', 'bright_er_', 'bright_est_', the other
+supplementary to this, by prefixing the auxiliaries 'more' and 'most'.
+The first, organic we might call it, the indwelling power of the word to
+mark its own degrees, must needs be esteemed the more excellent way;
+which yet, already disallowed in almost all adjectives of more than two
+syllables in length, is daily becoming of narrower and more restrained
+application. Compare in this matter our present with our past. Wiclif
+for example forms such comparatives as 'grievouser', 'gloriouser',
+'patienter', 'profitabler', such superlatives as 'grievousest',
+'famousest'; this last occurring also in Bacon. We meet in Tyndale,
+'excellenter', 'miserablest'; in Shakespeare, 'violentest'; in Gabriel
+Harvey, 'vendiblest', 'substantialest', 'insolentest'; in Rogers,
+'insufficienter', 'goldener'; in Beaumont and Fletcher, 'valiantest'.
+Milton uses 'virtuosest', and in prose 'vitiosest', 'elegantest',
+'artificialest', 'servilest', 'sheepishest', 'resolutest', 'sensualest';
+Fuller has 'fertilest'; Baxter 'tediousest'; Butler 'preciousest',
+'intolerablest'; Burnet 'copiousest', Gray 'impudentest'. Of these
+forms, and it would be easy to adduce almost any number, we should
+hardly employ any now. In participles and adverbs in 'ly', these organic
+comparatives and superlatives hardly survive at all. We do not say
+'willinger' or 'lovinger', and still less 'flourishingest', or
+'shiningest', or 'surmountingest', all which Gabriel Harvey, a foremost
+master of the English of his time, employs; 'plenteouslyer', 'fulliest'
+(Wiclif), 'easiliest' (Fuller), 'plainliest' (Dryden), would be all
+inadmissible at present.
+
+In the manifest tendency of English at the present moment to reduce the
+number of words in which this more vigorous scheme of expressing degrees
+is allowed, we must recognize an evidence that the energy which the
+language had in its youth is in some measure abating, and the stiffness
+of age overtaking it. Still it is with us here only as it is with all
+languages, in which at a certain time of their life auxiliary words,
+leaving the main word unaltered, are preferred to inflections of this
+last. Such preference makes itself ever more strongly felt; and, judging
+from analogy, I cannot doubt that a day, however distant now, will
+arrive, when the only way of forming comparatives and superlatives in
+the English language will be by prefixing 'more' and 'most'; or, if the
+other survive, it will be in poetry alone.
+
+It will fare not otherwise, as I am bold to predict, with the flexional
+genitive, formed in 's' or 'es' (see p. 161). This too will finally
+disappear altogether from the language, or will survive only in poetry,
+and as much an archaic form there as the 'pictai' of Virgil. A time will
+come when it will not any longer be free to say, as now, either, "_the
+king's sons_", or "_the sons of the king_", but when the latter will be
+the only admissible form. Tokens of this are already evident. The region
+in which the alternative forms are equally good is narrowing. We should
+not now any more write, "When _man's son_ shall come" (Wiclif), but
+"When _the Son of man_ shall come", nor yet, "_The hypocrite's hope_
+shall perish" (Job viii. 13, Authorized Version), but, "_The hope of the
+hypocrite_ shall perish"; not with Barrow, "No man can be ignorant _of
+human life's brevity and uncertainty_", but "No man can be ignorant _of
+the brevity and uncertainty of human life_". The consummation which I
+anticipate may be centuries off, but will assuredly arrive{194}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Lost Diminutives_}
+
+Then too diminutives are fast disappearing from the language. If we
+desire to express smallness, we prefer to do it by an auxiliary word;
+thus a little fist, and not a 'fistock' (Golding), a little lad, and not
+a 'ladkin', a little worm, rather than a 'wormling' (Sylvester). It is
+true that of diminutives very many still survive, in all our four
+terminations of such, as 'hillock', 'streamlet', 'lambkin', 'gosling';
+but those which have perished are many more. Where now is 'kingling'
+(Holland), 'whimling' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'godling', 'loveling',
+'dwarfling', 'shepherdling' (all in Sylvester), 'chasteling' (Bacon),
+'niceling' (Stubbs), 'fosterling' (Ben Johnson), and 'masterling'? Where
+now 'porelet' (=paupercula, Isai. x. 30, Vulg.), 'bundelet', (both in
+Wiclif); 'cushionet' (Henry More), 'havenet', or little 'haven',
+'pistolet', 'bulkin' (Holland), and a hundred more? Even of those which
+remain many are putting off, or have long since put off, their
+diminutive sense; a 'pocket' being no longer a _small_ poke, nor a
+'latchet' a _small_ lace, nor a 'trumpet' a small _trump_, as once they
+were.
+
+{Sidenote: _Thou and Thee_}
+
+Once more--in the entire dropping among the higher classes of 'thou',
+except in poetry or in addresses to the Deity, and as a necessary
+consequence, the dropping also of the second singular of the verb with
+its strongly marked flexion, as 'lovest', 'lovedst', we have another
+example of a force once existing in the language, which has been, or is
+being, allowed to expire. In the seventeenth century 'thou' in English,
+as at the present 'du' in German, 'tu' in French, was the sign of
+familiarity, whether that familiarity was of love, or of contempt and
+scorn{195}. It was not unfrequently the latter. Thus at Sir Walter
+Raleigh's trial (1603), Coke, when argument and evidence failed him,
+insulted the defendant by applying to him the term 'thou':--"All that
+Lord Cobham did was at _thy_ instigation, _thou_ viper, for I _thou_
+thee, _thou_ traitor". And when Sir Toby Belch in _Twelfth Night_ is
+urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek to send a sufficiently provocative challenge
+to Viola, he suggests to him that he "taunt him with the licence of ink;
+if thou _thou'st_ him some thrice, it shall not be amiss". To keep this
+in mind will throw much light on one peculiarity of the Quakers, and
+give a certain dignity to it, as once maintained, which at present it is
+very far from possessing. However needless and unwise their
+determination to 'thee' and 'thou' the whole world was, yet this had a
+significance. It was not, as now to us it seems, and, through the silent
+changes which language has undergone, as now it indeed is, a gratuitous
+departure from the ordinary usage of society. Right or wrong, it meant
+something, and had an ethical motive: being indeed a testimony upon
+their parts, however misplaced, that they would not have high or great
+or rich men's persons in admiration; nor give the observance to some
+which they withheld from others. It was a testimony too which cost them
+something; at present we can very little understand the amount of
+courage which this 'thou-ing' and 'thee-ing' of all men must have
+demanded on their parts, nor yet the amount of indignation and offence
+which it stirred up in them who were not aware of, or would not allow
+for, the scruples which obliged them to it{196}. It is, however, in its
+other aspect that we must chiefly regret the dying out of the use of
+'thou'--that is, as the pledge of peculiar intimacy and special
+affection, as between husband and wife, parents and children, and such
+other as might be knit together by bands of more than common affection.
+
+{Sidenote: _Gender Words_}
+
+I have preferred during this lecture to find my theme in changes which
+are now going forward in English, but I cannot finish it without drawing
+one illustration from its remoter periods, and bidding you to note a
+force not now waning and failing from it, but extinct long ago. I
+cannot well pass it by; being as it is by far the boldest step which in
+this direction of simplification the English language has at any time
+taken. I refer to the renouncing of the distribution of its nouns into
+masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in German, or even into masculine
+and feminine, as in French; and with this, and as a necessary
+consequence of this, the dropping of any flexional modification in the
+adjectives connected with them. Natural _sex_ of course remains, being
+inherent in all language; but grammatical _gender_, with the exception
+of 'he', 'she', and 'it', and perhaps one or two other fragmentary
+instances, the language has altogether forgone. An example will make
+clear the distinction between these. Thus it is not the word 'poetess'
+which is _feminine_, but the person indicated who is _female_. So too
+'daughter', 'queen', are in English not _feminine_ nouns, but nouns
+designating _female_ persons. Take on the contrary 'filia' or 'regina',
+'fille' or 'reine'; there you have _feminine_ nouns as well as _female_
+persons. I need hardly say to you that we did not inherit this
+simplicity from others, but, like the Danes, in so far as they have done
+the like, have made it for ourselves. Whether we turn to the Latin, or,
+which is for us more important, to the old Gothic, we find gender; and
+in all daughter languages which have descended from the Latin, in most
+of those which have descended from the ancient Gothic stock, it is fully
+established to this day. The practical, business-like character of the
+English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction, which in
+a vast proportion of words, that is, in all which are the signs of
+_inanimate_ objects, and as such incapable of sex, rested upon a
+fiction, and had no ground in the real nature of things. It is only by
+an act and effort of the imagination that sex, and thus gender, can be
+attributed to a table, a ship, or a tree; and there are aspects, this
+being one, in which the English is among the least imaginative of all
+languages even while it has been employed in some of the mightiest works
+of imagination which the world has ever seen{197}.
+
+What, it may be asked, is the meaning and explanation of all this? It is
+that at certain earlier periods of a nation's life its genius is
+synthetic, and at later becomes analytic. At earlier periods all is by
+synthesis; and men love to contemplate the thing, and the mode of the
+thing, together, as a single idea, bound up in one. But a time arrives
+when the intellectual obtains the upper hand of the imaginative, when
+the tendency of those that speak the language is to analyse, to
+distinguish between these two, and not only to distinguish but to
+divide, to have one word for the thing itself, and another for the
+quality of the thing; and this, as it would appear, is true not of some
+languages only, but of all.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{128} [Apparently a slip for 'ebb']
+
+{129} It is still used in prose as late as the age of Henry VIII; see
+      the _State Papers_, vol. viii. p. 247. It was the latest survivor
+      of a whole group or family of words which continued much longer in
+      Scotland than with us; of which some perhaps continue there still;
+      these are but a few of them; 'wanthrift' for extravagance;
+      'wanluck', misfortune; 'wanlust', languor; 'wanwit', folly;
+      'wangrace', wickedness; 'wantrust' (Chaucer), distrust, [Also
+      'wan-ton', devoid of breeding (_towen_). Compare German
+      _wahn-sinn_, insanity, and _wahn-witz_.]
+
+{130} We must not suppose that this still survives in '_gir_falcon';
+      which wholly belongs to the Latin element of the language; being
+      the later Latin 'gyrofalco', and that, "a _gyrando_, quia diu
+      _gyrando_ acriter praedam insequitur".
+
+{131} ['Heft', from 'heave' (_Winter's Tale_, ii. 1, 45), is widely
+      diffused in the Three Kingdoms and in America. See E.D.D. _s.v._]
+
+{132} "Some _hot-spurs_ there were that gave counsel to go against them
+      with all their forces, and to fright and terrify them, if they
+      made slow haste". (Holland's _Livy_, p. 922.)
+
+{133} _State Papers_, vol. vi. p. 534.
+
+{134} ['Malinger', French _malingre_ (mistakenly derived above), stands
+      for old French _mal-heingre_ (maliciously or falsely ill, feigning
+      sickness), which is from Latin _male aeger_, with an intrusive
+      _n_--Scheler.]
+
+{135} [To which the late Boer War contributed many more, such as
+      'kopje', 'trek', 'slim', 'veldt', etc.]
+
+{136} The only two writers of whom I am aware as subsequently using this
+      word are, both writing in Ireland and of Irish matters, Spenser
+      and Swift. The passages are both quoted in Richardson's
+      _Dictionary_. ['Bawn' stands for the Irish _ba-dhun_ (not
+      _babhun_, as in N.E.D.), or _bo-dhun_, literally 'cow-fortress', a
+      cattle enclosure (Irish _bo_, a cow). See P. W. Joyce, _Irish
+      Names of Places_, 1st ser. p. 297.]
+
+{137} There is an excellent account of this "refugee French" in Weiss'
+      _History of the Protestant Refugees of France_.
+
+{138} [Thus the Shakespearian word _renege_ (Latin _renegare_), to deny
+      (_Lear_ ii, 2) still lives in the mouths of the Irish peasantry. I
+      have heard a farmer's wife denounce those who "_renege_ [_renaig_]
+      their religion".]
+
+{139} With all its severity, there is some truth in Ben Johnson's
+      observation: "Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no
+      language". In this matter, however, Ben Jonson was at one with
+      him; for he does not hesitate to express his strong regret that
+      this form has not been retained. "The _persons_ plural" he says
+      (_English Grammar_, c. 17), "keep the termination of the first
+      _person_ singular. In former times, till about the reign of King
+      Henry VIII, they were wont to be formed by adding _en_; thus,
+      _loven_, _sayen_, _complainen_. But now (whatsoever is the cause)
+      it hath quite grown out of use, and that other so generally
+      prevailed, that I dare not presume to set this afoot again; albeit
+      (to tell you my opinion) I am persuaded that the lack hereof, well
+      considered, will be found a great blemish to our tongue. For
+      seeing _time_ and _person_ be as it were the right and left hand
+      of a verb, what can the maiming bring else, but a lameness to the
+      whole body"?
+
+{140} [The two words are often popularly confounded. When a good woman
+      said "I'm _afeerd_", Mr. Pickwick exclaimed "_Afraid_"! (_Pickwick
+      Papers_, ch. v.). Chaucer, instructively, uses both in the one
+      sentence, "This wyf was not _affered_ ne _affrayed_" (_Shipman's
+      Tale_, l. 400).]
+
+{141} Genin (_Recreations Philologiques_, vol. i. p. 71) says to the
+      same effect: "Il n'y a gueres de faute de Francais, je dis faute
+      generale, accreditee, qui n'ait sa raison d'etre, et ne put au
+      besoin produire ses lettres de noblesse; et souvent mieux en regle
+      que celles des locutions qui ont usurpe leur place au soleil".
+
+{142} A single proof may in each case suffice:
+
+          "Our wills and fates do so _contra/ry_ run".--_Shakespeare._
+
+          "Ne let _mischie/vous_ witches with their charms".--_Spenser._
+
+          "O argument _blasphe/mous_, false and proud".--_Milton._
+
+      [These archaisms are still current in Ireland.]
+
+{143} I cannot doubt that this form which our country people in
+      Hampshire, as in many other parts, always employ, either retains
+      the original pronunciation, our received one being a modern
+      corruption; or else, as is more probable, that _we_ have made a
+      confusion between two originally different words, from which they
+      have kept clear. Thus in Howell's _Vocabulary_, 1659, and in
+      Cotgrave's _French and English Dictionary_ both words occur:
+      "nuncion or nuncheon, the afternoon's repast", (cf. _Hudibras_, i.
+      1, 346: "They took their breakfasts or their _nuncheons_"), and
+      "lunchion, a big piece" i.e. of bread; for both give the old
+      French 'caribot', which has this meaning, as the equivalent of
+      'luncheon'. It is clear that in this sense of lump or 'big piece'
+      Gay uses 'luncheon':
+
+          "When hungry thou stood'st staring like an oaf,
+          I sliced the _luncheon_ from the barley loaf";
+
+      and Miss Baker in her _Northamptonshire Glossary_ explains 'lunch'
+      as "a large lump of bread, or other edible; 'He helped himself to
+      a good _lunch_ of cake'". We may note further that this 'nuntion'
+      may possibly put us on the right track for arriving at the
+      etymology of the word. Richardson has called attention to the fact
+      that it is spelt "noon-shun" in Browne's _Pastorals_, which must
+      at least suggest as possible and plausible that the 'nuntion' was
+      originally applied to the labourer's slight meal, to which he
+      withdrew for the _shunning_ of the heat of the middle _noon_:
+      especially when in Lancashire we find a word of similar formation,
+      'noon-scape', and in Norfolk 'noon-miss', for the time when
+      labourers rest after dinner. [It really stands for the older
+      English _none-schenche_, i.e. 'noon-skink' or noon-drink (see
+      Skeat, _Etym. Dict._, _s.v._), correlative to 'noon-meat' or
+      'nam-met'.] It is at any rate certain that the dignity to which
+      'lunch' or 'luncheon' has now arrived, as when we read in the
+      newspapers of a "magnificent _luncheon_", is altogether modern;
+      the word belonged a century ago to rustic life, and in literature
+      had not travelled beyond the "hobnailed pastorals" which professed
+      to describe that life.
+
+{144} See it so written, Holland's _Pliny_, vol. ii. p. 428, and often.
+
+{145} As a proof of the excellent service which an accurate acquaintance
+      with provincial usages may render in the investigation of the
+      innumerable perplexing phenomena of the English language, I would
+      refer to the admirable article _On English Pronouns Personal_ in
+      _Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. i. p. 277.
+
+{146} [We now have the good fortune to possess a complete collection of
+      this valuable class of words in the splendid "English Dialect
+      Dictionary", edited by Professor Joseph Wright of Oxford, which is
+      an essential supplement to all existing dictionaries of our
+      language.]
+
+{147} This last very curious usage, which served as a kind of
+      stepping-stone to 'its', and of which another example occurs in
+      the Geneva Version (Acts xii. 10), and three or four in
+      Shakespeare, has been abundantly illustrated by those who have
+      lately written on the early history of the word 'its'; thus see
+      Craik, _On the English of Shakespeare_, p. 91; Marsh, _Manual of
+      the English Language_ (Eng. Edit.), p. 278; _Transactions of the
+      Philological Society_, vol. 1. p. 280; and my book _On the
+      Authorized Version of the New Testament_, p. 59.
+
+{148} Thus Fuller (_Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, vol. ii. p. 190): "Sure
+      I am this city [the New Jerusalem] as presented by the prophet,
+      was fairer, finer, _slicker_, smoother, more exact, than any
+      fabric the earth afforded".
+
+{149} [In the United States 'plunder' is used for personal effects,
+      baggage and luggage (Webster). This is not noticed in the E.D.D.]
+
+{150} [But we have acquired, in some quarters, the abomination 'an
+      invite'.]
+
+{151} How many words modern French has lost which are most vigorous and
+      admirable, the absence of which can only now be supplied by a
+      circumlocution or by some less excellent word--'Oseur',
+      'affranchisseur' (Amyot), 'mepriseur', 'murmurateur',
+      'blandisseur' (Bossuet), 'abuseur' (Rabelais), 'desabusement',
+      'rancoeur', are all obsolete at the present. So 'desaimer', to
+      cease to love ('disamare' in Italian), 'guirlander', 'steriliser',
+      'blandissant', 'ordonnement' (Montaigne), with innumerable others.
+
+{152} [It has now attained a fair currency.]
+
+{153} ['Gainly' is still used by nineteenth century writers, 1855-86;
+      see N.E.D.]
+
+{154} ['Dehort' has been used in modern times by Southey (_Letters_,
+      1825, iii, 462), and Cheyne (_Isaiah, introd._ 1882, xx.)--N.E.D.]
+
+{155} [Tennyson has endeavoured to resuscitate the word--"_Rathe_ she
+      rose"--_Lancelot and Elaine_--but with no great success.]
+
+{156} For other passages in which 'rathest' occurs, see the _State
+      Papers_, vol. ii. pp. 92, 170.
+
+{157} ['Buxom' for old English _buc-sum_ or _buch-sum_, i.e. 'bow-some',
+      yielding, compliant, obedient. "Sara was _buxom_ to Abraham", 1
+      Pet. iii, 6 (xiv. Cent. Version, ed. Pawes, p. 216).]
+
+{158} ['Lissome' for _lithe-some_, like Wessex _blissom_ for
+      _blithe-some_. Tennyson has "as _lissome_ as a hazel wand"--_The
+      Brook_, l. 70.]
+
+{159} Jamieson's _Dictionary_ gives a large number of words with this
+      termination which I should suppose were always peculiar to
+      Scotland, as 'bangsome', i.e. quarrelsome, 'freaksome', 'drysome',
+      'grousome' (the German 'grausam') [Now in common use as
+      'gruesome'.]
+
+{160} [A list of some of these reduplicated words was given by Dr. Booth
+      in his "Analytical Dictionary of the English Language", 1835; but
+      a full collection of nearly six hundred was published by Mr. H. B.
+      Wheatley in the _Transactions of the Philological Society_ for
+      1865.]
+
+{161} Many languages have groups of words formed upon the same scheme,
+      although, singularly enough, they are altogether absent from the
+      Anglo-Saxon. (J. Grimm, _Deutsche Gramm._, vol. ii. p. 976). The
+      Spaniards have a great many very expressive words of this
+      formation. Thus with allusion to the great struggle in which
+      Christian Spain was engaged for so many centuries, a vaunting
+      braggart is a 'matamoros', a 'slaymoor'; he is a 'matasiete', a
+      'slayseven'; a 'perdonavidas', a 'sparelives'. Others may be added
+      to these, as 'azotacalles', 'picapleytos', 'saltaparedes',
+      'rompeesquinas', 'ganapan', 'cascatreguas'.
+
+{162} [This stands for 'peak-goose' (_peek goos_ in Ascham,
+      _Scholemaster_, 1570, p. 54, ed. Arber), a _goose_ that _peaks_ or
+      pines, used for a sickly, delicate person, and a simpleton. In
+      Chapman, Cotgrave and others it appears as 'pea-goose'.]
+
+{163} The mistake is far earlier; long before Cowper wrote the sound
+      suggested first this sense, and then this spelling. Thus
+      Stanihurst, _Description of Ireland_, p. 28: "They are taken for
+      no better than _rakehels_, or _the devil's black guard_"; and
+      often elsewhere.
+
+{164} [i.e. in Joshua Sylvester's translation of "Du Bartas, his Diuine
+      Weekes and Workes", 1621.]
+
+{165} As not, however, turning on a _very_ coarse matter, and
+      illustrating the subject with infinite wit and humour, I might
+      refer the Spanish scholar to the discussion between Don Quixote
+      and his squire on the dismissal of 'regoldar', from the language
+      of good society, and the substitution of 'erutar' in its room
+      (_Don Quixote_, 4. 7. 43). In a letter of Cicero to Paetus (_Fam._
+      ix. 22) there is a subtle and interesting disquisition on
+      forbidden words, and their philosophy.
+
+{166} _Literature of Greece_, p. 5.
+
+{167} [Notwithstanding the analogous instance of 'abbess' for 'abbatess'
+      this account of 'lass' must be abandoned. It is the old English
+      _lasce_ (akin to Swedish _loesk_), meaning (1) one free or
+      disengaged, (2) an unmarried girl (N.E.D.)]
+
+{168} In Cotgrave's _Dictionary_ I find 'praiseress', 'commendress',
+      'fluteress', 'possesseress', 'loveress', but have never met them
+      in use.
+
+{169} On this termination see J. Grimm, _Deutsche Gramm._, vol. ii. p.
+      134; vol. iii. p. 339.
+
+{170} [_The Knightes Tale_, ed. Skeat, l. 2017.]
+
+{171} [Yes; so in N.E.D.]
+
+{172} I am indebted for these last four to a _Nominale_ in the _National
+      Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 216.
+
+{173} The earliest example which Richardson gives of 'seamstress' is
+      from Gay, of 'songstress', from Thomson. I find however
+      'sempstress' in the translation of Olearius' _Voyages and
+      Travels_, 1669, p. 43. It is quite certain that as late as Ben
+      Jonson, 'seamster' and 'songster' expressed the _female_ seamer
+      and singer; a single passage from his _Masque of Christmas_ is
+      evidence to this. One of the children of Christmas there is
+      "Wassel, like a neat _sempster_ and _songster_; _her_ page bearing
+      a brown bowl". Compare a passage from _Holland's Leaguer_, 1632:
+      "A _tyre-woman_ of phantastical ornaments, a _sempster_ for
+      ruffes, cuffes, smocks and waistcoats".
+
+{174} This was about the time of Henry VIII. In proof of the confusion
+      which reigned on the subject in Shakespeare's time, see his use of
+      'spinster' as--'spinner', the _man_ spinning, _Henry VIII_, Act.
+      i. Sc. 2; and I have no doubt that it is the same in _Othello_,
+      Act i. Sc. 1. And a little later, in Howell's _Vocabulary_, 1659,
+      'spinner' and 'spinster' are _both_ referred to the male sex, and
+      the barbarous 'spinstress' invented for the female.
+
+{175} I have included 'huckster', as will be observed, in this list. I
+      certainly cannot produce any passage in which it is employed as
+      the _female_ pedlar. We have only, however, to keep in mind the
+      existence of the verb 'to huck', in the sense of to peddle (it is
+      used by Bishop Andrews), and at the same time not to let the
+      present spelling of 'hawker' mislead us, and we shall confidently
+      recognize 'hucker' (the German 'hoeker' or 'hoecker'), in hawker,
+      that is, the _man_ who 'hucks', 'hawks', or peddles, as in
+      'huckster' the _female_ who does the same. When therefore Howell
+      and others employ 'hucksteress', they fall into the same barbarous
+      excess of expression, whereof we are all guilty, when we use
+      'seamstress' and 'songstress'.--The note stood thus in the third
+      edition. Since that was published, I have met in the _Nominale_
+      referred to p. 155, the following, "haec auxiatrix, a _hukster_".
+      [Huckster, xiii. cent. _huccster_, it may be noted is an older
+      word in the language than _hukker_ (hucker) and _to huck_, both
+      first appearing in the xiv. cent. N.E.D.]
+
+{176} [Preserved in the surnames Baxter and Brewster. See C. W.
+      Bardsley, _English Surnames_, 2nd ed. 364, 379.]
+
+{177} _Notes and Queries_, No. 157.
+
+{178} ['Welkin' is possibly a plural, but in Anglo-Saxon _wolcen_ is a
+      cloud, and the plural _wolcnu_.]
+
+{179} When Wallis wrote, it was only beginning to be forgotten that
+      'chick' was the singular, and 'chicken' the plural: "_Sunt qui
+      dicunt_ in singulari 'chicken', et in plurali 'chickens'"; and
+      even now the words are in many country parts correctly employed.
+      In Sussex, a correspondent writes, they would as soon think of
+      saying 'oxens' as 'chickens'. ['Chicken' is properly a singular,
+      old English _cicen_, the _-en_ being a diminutival, not a plural,
+      suffix (as in 'kitten', 'maiden'). Thus 'chicken' was originally
+      'a little chuck' (or cock), out of which 'chick' was afterwards
+      developed.]
+
+{180} See Chaucer's _Romaunt of the Rose_, 1032, where Richesse, "an
+      high lady of great noblesse", is one of the persons of the
+      allegory; and compare Rev. xviii. 17, Authorized Version. This has
+      so entirely escaped the knowledge of Ben Jonson, English scholar
+      as he was, that in his _Grammar_ he cites 'riches' as an example
+      of an English word wanting a singular.
+
+{181} "Set shallow brooks to surging seas,
+      An orient pearl to a white _pease_".
+
+                                        _Puttenham._
+
+{182} ['Eaves' (old English _efes_) from which an imaginary singular
+      'eave' has sometimes been evolved, as when Tennyson speaks of a
+      'cottage-eave' (_In Memoriam_, civ.), and Cotgrave of 'an
+      house-eave'.]
+
+{183} It is curious that despite of this protest, one of his plays has
+      for its name, _Sejanus his Fall_.
+
+{184} Even this does not startle Addison, or cause him any misgiving; on
+      the contrary he boldly asserts (_Spectator_, No. 135), "The same
+      single letter 's' on many occasions does the office of a whole
+      word, and represents the 'his' _or 'her'_ of our forefathers".
+
+{185} Nothing can be better than the way in which Wallis disposes of
+      this scheme, although less successful in showing what this 's'
+      does mean than in showing what it cannot mean (_Gramm. Ling.
+      Anglic._, c. 5); Qui autem arbitrantur illud s, loco _his_
+      adjunctum esse (priori scilicet parte per aphaeresim abscissa),
+      ideoque apostrophi notam semper vel pingendam esse, vel saltem
+      subintelligendam, omnino errant. Quamvis enim non negem quin
+      apostrophi nota commode nonnunquam affigi possit, ut ipsius
+      litterae s usus distinctius, ubi opus est, percipiatur; ita tamen
+      semper fieri debere, aut etiam ideo fieri quia vocem _his_ innuat,
+      omnino nego. Adjungitur enim et foeminarum nominibus propriis, et
+      substantivis pluralibus, ubi vox _his_ sine soloecismo locum
+      habere non potest: atque etiam in possessivis _ours_, _yours_,
+      _theirs_, _hers_, ubi vocem _his_ innui nemo somniaret.
+
+{186} See the proofs in Marsh's _Manual of the English Language_,
+      English Edit., pp. 280, 293.
+
+{187} I cannot think that it would exceed the authority of our
+      University Presses, if this were removed from the Prayer Books
+      which they put forth, as certainly it is supprest by many of the
+      clergy in the reading. Such a liberty they have already assumed
+      with the Bible. In all earlier editions of the Authorized Version
+      it stood at 1 Kin. xv. 24: "Nevertheless _Asa his_ heart was
+      perfect with the Lord"; it is "_Asa's_ heart" now. In the same way
+      "_Mordecai his_ matters" (Esth. iii. 4) has been silently changed
+      into "_Mordecai's_ matters"; and in some modern editions, but not
+      in all, "_Holofernes his_ head" (Judith xiii. 9) into
+      "_Holofernes'_ head".
+
+{188} In a good note on the matter, p. 6, in the _Comprehensive Grammar_
+      prefixed to his _Dictionary_, London, 1775.
+
+{189} See Grimm. _Deut. Gramm._, vol. ii. pp. 609, 944.
+
+{190} The existence of 'stony'--'lapidosus', 'steinig', does not make
+      'stonen'--'lapideus', 'steinern', superfluous, any more than
+      'earthy' makes 'earthen'. That part of the field in which the good
+      seed withered so quickly (Matt. xiii. 5) was 'stony'. The vessels
+      which held the water that Christ turned into wine (John iii. 6)
+      were 'stonen'.
+
+{191} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i, p. 1040): Dass die starke form
+      die aeltere, kraeftigere, innere; die schwache die spaetere,
+      gehemmtere und mehr aeusserliche sey, leuchtet ein. Elsewhere,
+      speaking generally of inflections by internal vowel change, he
+      characterizes them as a 'chief beauty' (hauptschoenheit) of the
+      Teutonic languages. Marsh (_Manual of the English Language_, p.
+      233, English ed.) protests, though, as it seems to me, on no
+      sufficient grounds, against these terms 'strong' and 'weak', as
+      themselves fanciful and inappropriate.
+
+{192} The entire ignorance as to the past historic evolution of the
+      language, with which some have undertaken to write about it, is
+      curious. Thus the author of _Observations upon the English
+      Language_, without date, but published about 1730, treats all
+      these strong praeterites as of recent introduction, counting
+      'knew' to have lately expelled 'knowed', 'rose' to have acted the
+      same part toward 'rised', and of course esteeming them as so many
+      barbarous violations of the laws of the language; and concluding
+      with the warning that "great care must be taken to prevent their
+      increase"!!--p. 24. Cobbett does not fall into this absurdity, yet
+      proposes in his _English Grammar_, that they should all be
+      abolished as inconvenient. [Now many others are rapidly becoming
+      obsolescent. How seldom do we hear 'drank', 'shrank', 'sprang',
+      'stank'.]
+
+{193} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i. p. 839): "Die starke flexion
+      stufenweise versinkt und ausstirbt, die schwache aber um sich
+      greift". Cf. i. 994, 1040; ii. 5; iv. 509.
+
+{194} [See also J. C. Hare, _Two Essays in Eng. Philology_ i. 47-56.]
+
+{195} Thus Wallis (_Gramm. Ling. Anglic._, 1654): Singulari numero
+      siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, vel
+      familiariter blandientis. [For a good discussion of the old use of
+      'thou', see the Hares, _Guesses at Truth_, 1847, pp. 169-90. Even
+      at the present day a Wessex matron has been known to resent the
+      too familiar address of an inferior with the words, "Who bist thou
+      _a-theein'_ of"? (_The Spectator_, 1904, Sept. 3, p. 319).]
+
+{196} What the actual position of the compellation 'thou' was at that
+      time, we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller's
+      _Church History, Dedication of Book_ vii.: "In opposition
+      whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that _thou_ from
+      superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command; from
+      equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity; but from
+      inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack
+      of clownishness; if from affectation, a tone of contempt".
+
+{197} See on this subject of the dropping of grammatical gender, Pott,
+      _Etymologische Forschungen_, part 2, pp. 404, _sqq._
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS
+
+
+I propose, according to the plan sketched out in my first lecture, to
+take for my subject in the present those changes which in the course of
+time have found place, or now are finding place, in the meaning of many
+among our English words; so that, whether we are aware of it or not, we
+employ them at this day in senses very different from those in which our
+forefathers employed them of old. You observe that it is not _obsolete_
+words, words quite fallen out of present use, which I propose to
+consider; but such, rather, as are still on the lips of men, but with
+meanings more or less removed from those which once they possessed. My
+subject is far more practical, has far more to do with your actual life,
+than if I had taken obsolete words, and considered them. These last have
+an interest indeed, but it is an interest of an antiquarian character.
+They constituted a part of the intellectual money with which our
+ancestors carried on the business of their life; but now they are rather
+medals for the cabinets and collections of the curious than current
+money for the needs and pleasures of all. Their wings are clipped, so
+that they are "_winged_ words" no more; the spark of thought or
+feeling, kindling from mind to mind, no longer runs along them, as along
+the electric wires of the soul.
+
+{Sidenote: _Obsolete Words_}
+
+And then, besides this, there is little or no danger that any should be
+misled by them. A reader lights for the first time on one of these
+obsolete English words, as 'frampold', or 'garboil', or 'brangle'{198};
+he is at once conscious of his ignorance; he has recourse to a glossary,
+of if he guesses from the context at the word's signification, still his
+guess is as a guess to him, and no more. But words that have changed
+their meaning have often a deceivableness about them; a reader not once
+doubts but that he knows their intention, has no misgiving but that they
+possess for him the same force which they possessed for their writer,
+and conveyed to _his_ contemporaries, when indeed it is quite otherwise.
+The old life has gone out of them and a new life entered in.
+
+Thus, for example, a reader of our day lights upon such a passage as the
+following (it is from the _Preface_ to Howell's _Lexicon_, 1660):
+"Though the root of the English language be _Dutch_{199}, yet it may be
+said to have been inoculated afterwards on a French stock". He may know
+that the Dutch is a sister language or dialect to our own; but this
+that it is the mother or root of it will certainly perplex him, and he
+will hardly know what to make of the assertion; perhaps he ascribes it
+to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly lowered in his esteem.
+But presently in the course of his reading he meets with the following
+statement, this time in Fuller's _Holy War_, being a history of the
+Crusades: "The French, _Dutch_, Italian, and English were the four
+elemental nations, whereof this army [of the Crusaders] was compounded".
+If the student has sufficient historical knowledge to know that in the
+time of the Crusades there were no Dutch in our use of the word, this
+statement would merely startle him; and probably before he had finished
+the chapter, having his attention once aroused, he would perceive that
+Fuller with the writers of his time used 'Dutch' for German; even as it
+was constantly so used up to the end of the seventeenth century; and as
+the Americans use it to this present day; what we call now a Dutchman
+being then a Hollander. But a young student might very possibly want
+that amount of previous knowledge, which should cause him to receive
+this announcement with misgiving and surprise; and thus he might carry
+away altogether a wrong impression, and rise from a perusal of the book,
+persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part in
+the Crusades, while the Germans took little or no part in them at all.
+
+{Sidenote: _Miscreant_}
+
+And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more often will it
+happen with the subtler changes which words have undergone. Out of this
+it will continually happen that they convey now much more blame and
+condemnation, or convey now much less, than formerly they did; or of a
+different kind; and a reader not aware of the altered value which they
+now possess, may be in continual danger of misreading his author, of
+misunderstanding his intentions, while he has no doubt whatever that he
+perfectly apprehends and takes it in. Thus when Shakespeare in _1 Henry
+VI_ makes the gallant York address Joan of Arc as a 'miscreant', how
+coarse a piece of invective this sounds; how unlike what the chivalrous
+soldier would have uttered; or what one might have supposed Shakespeare,
+even with his unworthy estimate of the holy warrior Maid, would have put
+into his mouth. But a 'miscreant' in Shakespeare's time had nothing of
+the meaning which now it has. It was simply, in agreement with its
+etymology, a misbeliever, one who did not believe rightly the Articles
+of the Catholic Faith. And I need not remind you that this was the
+constant charge which the English brought against Joan,--namely, that
+she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such had fallen
+from the faith. On this plea they burnt her, and it is this which York
+means when he calls her a 'miscreant', and not what we should intend by
+the name.
+
+In reading of poetry above all what beauties are often missed, what
+forces lost, through this assumption that the present of a word is
+always equivalent to its past. How often the poet is wronged in our
+estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once
+would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the
+emphasis which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For
+example, Milton ascribes in _Comus_ the "_tinsel-slippered_ feet" to
+Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How comparatively poor an epithet this
+'tinsel-slippered' sounds for those who know of 'tinsel' only in its
+modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery, affecting a splendour
+which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning
+its derivation, bring it back to the French 'etincelle', and the Latin
+'scintillula'; see in it, as Milton and the writers of his time saw,
+'the sparkling', and how exquisitely beautiful a title does this become
+applied to a goddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our
+mind's eye the quick glitter and sparkle of the waves under the light of
+sun or moon{200}. It is Homer's 'silver-footed' ({Greek: argyropeza}),
+not servilely transferred, but reproduced and made his own by the
+English poet, dealing as one great poet will do with another; who will
+not disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows will add often a further
+grace of his own.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Influence_'}
+
+Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even aware, that whenever the
+word 'influence' occurs in our English poetry, down to comparatively a
+modern date, there is always more or less remote allusions to invisible
+illapses of power, skyey, planetary effects, supposed to be exercised by
+the heavenly luminaries upon the lives of men{201}? How many a passage
+starts into new life and beauty and fulness of allusion, when this is
+present with us; even Milton's
+
+          "store of ladies, whose bright eyes
+    Rain _influence_",
+
+as spectators of the tournament, gain something, when we regard
+them--and using this language, he intended we should--as the luminaries
+of this lower sphere, shedding by their propitious presence strength and
+valour into the hearts of their knights.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Baffle_'}
+
+The word even in its present acceptation may yield, as here, a
+convenient and even a correct sense; we may fall into no positive
+misapprehension about it; and still, through ignorance of its past
+history and of the force which it once possessed, we may miss a great
+part of its significance. We are not _beside_ the meaning of our author,
+but we are _short_ of it. Thus in Beaumont and Fletcher's _King and no
+King_, (Act iii. Sc. 2,) a cowardly braggart of a soldier describes the
+treatment he experienced, when like Parolles he was at length found out,
+and stripped of his lion's skin:--"They hung me up by the heels and beat
+me with hazel sticks, ... that the whole kingdom took notice of me for a
+_baffled_, whipped fellow". The word to which I wish here to call your
+attention is 'baffled'. Were you reading this passage, there would
+probably be nothing here to cause you to pause; you would attach to
+'baffled' a sense which sorts very well with the context--"hung up by
+the heels and beaten, all his schemes of being thought much of were
+_baffled_ and defeated". But "baffled" implies far more than this; it
+contains allusion to a custom in the days of chivalry, according to
+which a perjured or recreant knight was either in person, or more
+commonly in effigy, hung up by the heels, his scutcheon blotted, his
+spear broken, and he himself or his effigy made the mark and subject of
+all kinds of indignities; such a one being said to be 'baffled'{202}.
+Twice in Spenser recreant knights are so dealt with. I can only quote a
+portion of the shorter passage, in which this infamous punishment is
+described:
+
+    "And after all, for greater infamy
+    He by the heels him hung upon a tree,
+    And _baffled_ so, that all which passed by
+    The picture of his punishment might see"{203}.
+
+Probably when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, men were not so remote from
+the days of chivalry, or at any rate from the literature of chivalry,
+but that this custom was still fresh in their minds. How much more to
+them than to us, so long as we are ignorant of the same, would those
+words I just quoted have conveyed?
+
+{Sidenote: '_Religion_'}
+
+There are several places in the Authorized Version of Scripture where
+those who are not aware of the changes which have taken place during the
+last two hundred and fifty years in our language, can hardly fail of
+being to a certain extent misled as to the intention of our Translators;
+or, if they are better acquainted with Greek than with early English,
+will be tempted to ascribe to them, though unjustly, an inexact
+rendering of the original. Thus the altered meaning of a word involves
+a serious misunderstanding in that well known statement of St. James,
+"Pure _religion_ and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to
+visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction". "There", exclaims
+one who wishes to set up St. James against St. Paul, that so he may
+escape the necessity of obeying either, "listen to what St. James says;
+there is nothing mystical in what he requires; instead of harping on
+faith as a condition necessary to salvation, he makes all religion to
+consist in practical deeds of kindness from one to another". But let us
+pause for a moment. Did 'religion', when our translation was made, mean
+godliness? did it mean the _sum total_ of our duties towards God? for,
+of course, no one would deny that deeds of charity are a necessary part
+of our Christian duty, an evidence of the faith which is in us. There is
+abundant evidence to show that 'religion' did not mean this; that, like
+the Greek {Greek: thre:skeia}, for which it here stands, like the Latin
+'religio', it meant the outward forms and embodiments in which the
+inward principle of piety arrayed itself, the _external service_ of God;
+and St. James is urging upon those to whom he is writing something of
+this kind: "Instead of the ceremonial services of the Jews, which
+consisted in divers washings and in other elements of this world, let
+our service, our {Greek: thre:skeia}, take a nobler shape, let it
+consist in deeds of pity and of love"--and it was this which our
+Translators intended, when they used 'religion' here and 'religious' in
+the verse preceding. How little 'religion' once meant godliness, how
+predominantly it was used for the _outward_ service of God, is plain
+from many passages in our _Homilies_, and from other contemporary
+literature.
+
+Again, there are words in our Liturgy which I have no doubt are commonly
+misunderstood. The mistake involves no serious error; yet still in our
+own language, and in words which we have constantly in our mouths, and
+at most solemn times, it is certainly better to be right than wrong. In
+the Litany we pray God that it would please Him, "to give and preserve
+to our use the _kindly_ fruits of the earth". What meaning do we attach
+to this epithet, "the _kindly_ fruits of the earth"? Probably we
+understand by it those fruits in which the _kindness_ of God or of
+nature towards us finds its expression. This is no unworthy explanation,
+but still it is not the right one. The "_kindly_ fruits" are the
+"_natural_ fruits", those which the earth according to its _kind_ should
+naturally bring forth, which it is appointed to produce. To show you how
+little 'kindly' meant once benignant, as it means now, I will instance
+an employment of it from Sir Thomas More's _Life of Richard the Third_.
+He tells us that Richard calculated by murdering his two nephews in the
+Tower to make himself accounted "a _kindly_ king"--not certainly a
+'kindly' one in our present usage of the word{204}; but, having put them
+out of the way, that he should then be lineal heir of the Crown, and
+should thus be reckoned as king _by kind_ or natural descent; and such
+was of old the constant use of the word.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Worship_'}
+
+A phrase in one of our occasional Services "with my body I thee
+_worship_", has sometimes offended those who are unacquainted with the
+early use of English words, and thus with the intention of the actual
+framers of that Service. Clearly in our modern sense of 'worship', this
+language would be unjustifiable. But 'worship' or 'worthship' meant
+'honour' in our early English, and 'to worship' to honour, this meaning
+of 'worship' still very harmlessly surviving in the title of "your
+worship", addressed to the magistrate on the bench. So little was it
+restrained of old to the honour which man is bound to pay to God, that
+it was employed by Wiclif to express the honour which God will render to
+his faithful servants and friends. Thus our Lord's declaration "If any
+man serve Me, him will my Father _honour_", in Wiclif's translation
+reads thus, "If any man serve Me, my Father shall _worship_ him". I do
+not say that there is not sufficient reason to change the words, "with
+my body I thee _worship_", if only there were any means of changing
+anything which is now antiquated and out of date in our services or
+arrangements. I think it would be very well if they were changed, liable
+as they are to misunderstanding and misconstruction now; but still they
+did not mean at the first, and therefore do not now really mean, any
+more than, "with my body I thee _honour_", and so you may reply to any
+fault-finder here.
+
+Take another example of a very easy misapprehension, although not now
+from Scripture or the Prayer Book, Fuller, our Church historian, having
+occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims,
+"Oh the _painfulness_ of his preaching!" If we did not know the former
+uses of 'painfulness', we might take this for an exclamation wrung out
+at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his
+hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the _pain_ which he
+caused to others, but of the _pains_ which he bestowed himself: and I am
+persuaded, if we had more 'painful' preachers in the old sense of the
+word, that is, who _took_ pains themselves, we should have fewer
+'painful' ones in the modern sense, who _cause_ pain to their hearers.
+So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as "the _painful_ writer of two
+hundred books"--not meaning hereby that these books were painful in the
+reading, but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.
+
+Here is another easy misapprehension. Swift wrote a pamphlet, or, as he
+called it, a _Letter to the Lord Treasurer_, with this title, "A
+proposal for correcting, improving, and _ascertaining_ the English
+Tongue". Who that brought a knowledge of present English, and no more,
+to this passage, would doubt that "_ascertaining_ the English Tongue"
+meant arriving at a certain knowledge of what it was? Swift, however,
+means something quite different from this. "_To ascertain_ the English
+tongue" is not with him to arrive at a subjective certainty in our own
+minds of what that tongue is, but to give an objective certainty to that
+tongue itself, so that henceforth it shall not alter nor change. For
+even Swift himself, with all his masculine sense, entertained a dream
+of this kind, as is more fully declared in the work itself{205}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Treacle_'}
+
+In other places unacquaintance with the changes in a word's usage will
+not so much mislead as leave you nearly or altogether at a loss in
+respect of the intention of an author whom you may be reading. It is
+evident that he has a meaning, but what it is you are unable to divine,
+even though all the words he employs are words in familiar employment to
+the present day. For example, the poet Waller is congratulating Charles
+the Second on his return from exile, and is describing the way in which
+all men, even those formerly most hostile to him, were now seeking his
+favour, and he writes:
+
+    "Offenders now, the chiefest, do begin
+    To strive for grace, and expiate their sin:
+    All winds blow fair that did the world embroil,
+    _Your vipers treacle yield_, and scorpions oil".
+
+Many a reader before now has felt, as I cannot doubt, a moment's
+perplexity at the now courtly poet's assertion that "_vipers treacle
+yield_"--who yet has been too indolent, or who has not had the
+opportunity, to search out what his meaning might be. There is in fact
+allusion here to a curious piece of legendary lore. 'Treacle', or
+'triacle', as Chaucer wrote it, was originally a Greek word, and wrapped
+up in itself the once popular belief (an anticipation, by the way, of
+homoeopathy), that a confection of the viper's flesh was the most potent
+antidote against the viper's bite{206}. Waller goes back to this the
+word's old meaning, familiar enough in his time, for Milton speaks of
+"the sovran _treacle_ of sound doctrine"{207}, while "Venice treacle",
+or "viper wine", as it sometimes was called, was a common name for a
+supposed antidote against all poisons; and he would imply that regicides
+themselves began to be loyal, vipers not now yielding hurt any more, but
+rather healing for the old hurts which they themselves had inflicted. To
+trace the word down to its present use, it may be observed that,
+designating first this antidote, it then came to designate any antidote,
+then any medicinal confection or sweet syrup; and lastly that particular
+syrup, namely, the sweet syrup of molasses, to which alone it is now
+restricted.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Blackguard_'}
+
+I will draw on the writings of Fuller for one more example. In his _Holy
+War_, having enumerated the rabble rout of fugitive debtors, runaway
+slaves, thieves, adulterers, murderers, of men laden for one cause or
+another with heaviest censures of the Church, who swelled the ranks, and
+helped to make up the army, of the Crusaders, he exclaimed, "A
+lamentable case that the devil's _black guard_ should be God's
+soldiers"! What does he mean, we may ask, by "the devil's _black
+guard_"? Nor is this a solitary mention of the "black guard". On the
+contrary, the phrase is of very frequent recurrence in the early
+dramatists and others down to the time of Dryden, who gives as one of
+his stage directions in _Don Sebastian_, "Enter the captain of the
+rabble, with the _Black guard_". What is this "black guard"? Has it any
+connexion with a word of our homeliest vernacular? We feel that probably
+it has so; yet at first sight the connexion is not very apparent, nor
+indeed the exact force of the phrase. Let me trace its history. In old
+times, the palaces of our kings and seats of our nobles were not so well
+and completely furnished as at the present day: and thus it was
+customary, when a royal progress was made, or when the great nobility
+exchanged one residence for another, that at such a removal all kitchen
+utensils, pots and pans, and even coals, should be also carried with
+them where they went. Those who accompanied and escorted these, the
+lowest, meanest, and dirtiest of the retainers, were called 'the black
+guard'{208}; then any troop or company of ragamuffins; and lastly, when
+the origin of the word was lost sight of, and it was forgotten that it
+properly implied a company, a rabble rout, and not a single person, one
+would compliment another, not as belonging to, but as himself being, the
+'blackguard'.
+
+The examples which I have adduced are, I am persuaded, sufficient to
+prove that it is not a useless and unprofitable study, nor yet one
+altogether without entertainment, to which I invite you; that on the
+contrary any one who desires to read with accuracy, and thus with
+advantage and pleasure, our earlier classics, who would avoid continual
+misapprehension in their perusal, and would not often fall short of, and
+often go astray from, their meaning, must needs bestow some attention on
+the altered significance of English words. And if this is so, we could
+not more usefully employ what remains of this present lecture than in
+seeking to indicate those changes which words most frequently undergo;
+and to trace as far as we can the causes, mental and moral, at work in
+the minds of men to bring these changes about, with the good and evil
+out of which they have sprung, and to which they bear witness.
+
+For indeed these changes to which words in the progress of time are
+submitted are not changes at random, but for the most part are obedient
+to certain laws, are capable of being distributed into certain classes,
+being the outward transcripts and witnesses of mental and moral
+processes inwardly going forward in those who bring them about. Many, it
+is true, will escape any classification of ours, the changes which have
+taken place in their meaning being, or at least seeming to us, the
+result of mere caprice; and not explicable by any principle which we can
+appeal to as habitually at work in the mind. But, admitting all this, a
+majority will still remain which are reducible to some law or other, and
+with these we will occupy ourselves now.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Duke_', '_Corpse_', '_Weed_'}
+
+And first, the meaning of a word oftentimes is gradually narrowed. It
+was once as a generic name, embracing many as yet unnamed species within
+itself, which all went by its common designation. By and bye it is found
+convenient that each of these should have its own more special sign
+allotted to it{209}. It is here just as in some newly enclosed country,
+where a single household will at first loosely occupy a whole district;
+while, as cultivation proceeds, this district is gradually parcelled out
+among a dozen or twenty, and under more accurate culture employs and
+sustains them all. Thus, for example, all food was once called 'meat';
+it is so in our Bible, and 'horse-meat' for fodder is still no unusual
+phrase; yet 'meat' is now a name given only to flesh. Any little book or
+writing was a 'libel' once; now only such a one as is scurrilous and
+injurious. Any leader was a 'duke' (dux); thus "_duke_ Hannibal" (Sir
+Thomas Eylot), "_duke_ Brennus" (Holland), "_duke_ Theseus"
+(Shakespeare), "_duke_ Amalek", with other 'dukes' (Gen. xxxvi.). Any
+journey, by land as much as by sea, was a 'voyage'. 'Fairy' was not a
+name restricted, as now, to the _Gothic_ mythology; thus "the _fairy_
+Egeria" (Sir J. Harrington). A 'corpse' might be quite as well living as
+dead{210}. 'Weeds' were whatever covered the earth or the person; while
+now as respects the earth, those only are 'weeds' which are noxious, or
+at least self-sown; as regards the person, we speak of no other 'weeds'
+but the widow's{211}. In each of these cases, the same contraction of
+meaning, the separating off and assigning to other words of large
+portions of this, has found place. 'To starve' (the German 'sterben',
+and generally spelt 'sterve' up to the middle of the seventeenth
+century), meant once to die any manner of death; thus Chaucer says,
+Christ "_sterved_ upon the cross for our redemption"; it now is
+restricted to the dying by cold or by hunger. Words not a few were once
+applied to both sexes alike, which are now restricted to the female. It
+is so even with 'girl', which was once a young person of either
+sex{212}; while other words in this list, such for instance as
+'hoyden'{213} (Milton, prose), 'shrew' (Chaucer), 'coquet' (Phillips,
+_New World of Words_), 'witch' (Wiclif), 'termagant' (Bale), 'scold',
+'jade', 'slut' (Gower), must be regarded in their present exclusive
+appropriation to the female sex as evidences of men's rudeness, and not
+of women's deserts.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words used more accurately_}
+
+The necessities of an advancing civilization demand a greater precision
+and accuracy in the use of words having to do with weight, measure,
+number, size. Almost all such words as 'acre', 'furlong', 'yard',
+'gallon', 'peck', were once of a vague and unsettled use, and only at a
+later day, and in obedience to the requirements of commerce and social
+life, exact measures and designations. Thus every field was once an
+'acre'; and this remains so still with the German 'acker', and in our
+"God's acre", as a name for a churchyard{214}; it was not till about the
+reign of Edward the First that 'acre' was commonly restricted to a
+determined measure and portion of land. Here and there even now a
+glebeland will be called "the acre"; and this, even while it contains
+not one but many of our measured acres. A 'furlong' was a 'furrowlong',
+or length of a furrow{215}. Any pole was a 'yard', and this vaguer use
+survives in 'sail_yard_', 'hal_yard_', and in other sea-terms. Every
+pitcher was a 'galon' (Mark xiv. 13, Wiclif), while a 'peck' was no more
+than a 'poke' or bag{216}. And the same has no doubt taken place in all
+other languages. I will only remind you how the Greek 'drachm' was at
+first a handful ({Greek: drachme:} = 'manipulus', from {Greek: drasso:},
+to grasp); its later word for 'ten thousand' ({Greek: myrioi}) implied
+in Homer's time any great multitude; and with the accent on a different
+syllable always retained this meaning.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words used less accurately_}
+
+Opposite to this is a counter-process by which words of narrower
+intention gradually enlarge the domain of their meaning, becoming
+capable of much wider application than any which once they admitted.
+Instances in this kind are fewer than in that which we have just been
+considering. The main stream and course of human thoughts and human
+discourse tends the other way, to discerning, distinguishing, dividing;
+and then to the permanent fixing of the distinctions gained, by the aid
+of designations which shall keep apart for ever in word that which has
+been once severed and sundered in thought. Nor is it hard to perceive
+why this process should be the more frequent. Men are first struck with
+the likenesses between those things which are presented to them, with
+their points of resemblance; on the strength of which they bracket them
+under a common term. Further acquaintance reveals their points of
+unlikeness, the real dissimilarities which lurk under superficial
+resemblances, the need therefore of a different notation for objects
+which are essentially different. It is comparatively much rarer to
+discover real likeness under what at first appeared as unlikeness; and
+usually when a word moves forward, and from a specialty indicates now a
+generality, it is not in obedience to any such discovery of the true
+inner likeness of things,--the steps of successful generalizations being
+marked and secured in other ways. But this widening of a word's meaning
+is too often a result of those elements of disorganization and decay
+which are at work in a language. Men forget a word's history and
+etymology; its distinctive features are obliterated for them, with all
+which attached it to some thought or fact which by right was its own.
+Appropriated and restricted once to some striking specialty which it
+vigorously set out, it can now be used in a wider, vaguer, more
+unsettled way. It can be employed twenty times for once when it would
+have been possible formerly to employ it. Yet this is not gain, but pure
+loss. It has lost its place in the disciplined _army_ of words, and
+become one of a loose and disorderly _mob_.
+
+Let me instance the word 'preposterous'. It is now no longer of any
+practical service at all in the language, being merely an ungraceful and
+slipshod synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to its old use;
+let it designate that one peculiar branch of absurdity which it
+designated once, namely the reversing of the true order of things, the
+putting of the last first, and, by consequence, of the first last, and
+of what excellent service the word would be capable. Thus it is
+'preposterous', in the most accurate use of the word, to put the cart
+before the horse, to expect wages before the work is done, to hang a man
+first and try him afterwards; and in this strict and accurate sense the
+word was always used by our elder writers{217}.
+
+In like manner 'to prevaricate' was never employed by good writers of
+the seventeenth century without nearer or more remote allusion to the
+uses of the word in the Roman law courts, where a 'praevaricator'
+(properly a straddler with distorted legs) did not mean generally and
+loosely, as now with us, one who shuffles, quibbles, and evades; but one
+who plays false in a particular manner; who, undertaking, or being by
+his office bound, to prosecute a charge, is in secret collusion with the
+opposite party; and, betraying the cause which he affects to support, so
+manages the accusation as to obtain not the condemnation, but the
+acquittal, of the accused; a "feint pleader", as, I think, in our old
+law language he would have been termed. How much force would the keeping
+of this in mind add to many passages in our elder divines.
+
+Or take 'equivocal', 'equivocate', 'equivocation'. These words, which
+belonged at first to logic, have slipped down into common use, and in so
+doing have lost all the precision of their first employment.
+'Equivocation' is now almost any such dealing in ambiguous words with
+the intention of deceiving, as falls short of an actual lie; but
+according to its etymology and in its primary use 'equivocation', this
+fruitful mother of so much error, is the calling by the same name, of
+things essentially diverse, hiding intentionally or otherwise a real
+difference under a verbal resemblance{218}. Nor let it be urged in
+defence of its present looser use, that only so could it have served the
+needs of our ordinary conversation; on the contrary, had it retained its
+first use, how serviceable an implement of thought would it have been in
+detecting our own fallacies, or those of others; all which it can be now
+no longer.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Idea_'}
+
+What now is 'idea' for us? How infinite the fall of this word since the
+time when Milton sang of the Creator contemplating his newly created
+world,
+
+                  "how it showed,
+    Answering his great _idea_",
+
+to its present use when this person "has an _idea_ that the train has
+started", and the other "had no _idea_ that the dinner would be so bad".
+But this word 'idea' is perhaps the worst case in the English language.
+Matters have not mended here since the times of Dr. Johnson; of whom
+Boswell tells us: "He was particularly indignant against the almost
+universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or _opinion_,
+when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something of which an
+image can be formed in the mind". There is perhaps no word in the whole
+compass of English, so seldom used with any tolerable correctness; in
+none is the distance so immense between the frequent sublimity of the
+word in its proper use, and the triviality of it in its slovenly and its
+popular.
+
+This tendency in words to lose the sharp, rigidly defined outline of
+meaning which they once possessed, to become of wide, vague, loose
+application instead of fixed, definite, and precise, to mean almost
+anything, and so really to mean nothing, is among the most fatally
+effectual which are at work for the final ruin of a language, and, I do
+not fear to add, for the demoralization of those that speak it. It is
+one against which we shall all do well to watch; for there is none of us
+who cannot do something in keeping words close to their own proper
+meaning, and in resisting their encroachment on the domain of others.
+
+The causes which bring this mischief about are not hard to trace. We all
+know that when a piece of our silver money has long fulfilled its part,
+as "pale and common drudge 'tween man and man", whatever it had at first
+of sharper outline and livelier impress is in the end wholly obliterated
+from it. So it is with words, above all with words of science and
+theology. These getting into general use, and passing often from mouth
+to mouth, lose the "image and superscription" which they had, before
+they descended from the school to the market-place, from the pulpit to
+the street. Being now caught up by those who understand imperfectly and
+thus incorrectly their true value, who will not be at the pains of
+understanding that, or who are incapable of doing so, they are obliged
+to accommodate themselves to the lower sphere in which they circulate,
+by laying aside much of the precision and accuracy and depth which once
+they had; they become weaker, shallower, more indefinite; till in the
+end, as exponents of thought and feeling, they cease to be of any
+service at all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+{Sidenote: '_Bombast_', '_Garble_'}
+
+Sometimes a word does not merely narrow or extend its meaning, but
+altogether changes it; and this it does in more ways than one. Thus a
+secondary figurative sense will quite put out of use and extinguish the
+literal, until in the entire predominance of that it is altogether
+forgotten that it ever possessed any other. I may instance 'bombast' as
+a word about which this forgetfulness is nearly complete. What 'bombast'
+now means is familiar to us all, namely inflated words, "full of sound
+and fury", but "signifying nothing". This, at present its sole meaning,
+was once only the secondary and superinduced; 'bombast' being properly
+the cotton plant, and then the cotton wadding with which garments were
+stuffed out and lined. You remember perhaps how Prince Hal addresses
+Falstaff, "How now, my sweet creature of _bombast_"; using the word in
+its literal sense; and another early poet has this line:
+
+    "Thy body's bolstered out with _bombast_ and with bags".
+
+'Bombast' was then transferred in a vigorous image to the big words
+without strength or solidity wherewith the discourses of some were
+stuffed out, and has now quite forgone any other meaning. So too 'to
+garble' was once "to cleanse from dross and dirt, as grocers do their
+spices, to pick or cull out"{219}. It is never used now in this its
+primary sense, and has indeed undergone this further change, that while
+once 'to garble' was to sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it
+is now to sift with a view of picking out the worst{220}. 'Polite' is
+another word which in the figurative sense has quite extinguished the
+literal. We still speak of 'polished' surfaces; but not any more, with
+Cudworth, of "_polite_ bodies, as looking glasses". Neither do we now
+'exonerate' a ship (Burton); nor 'stigmatize', at least otherwise than
+figuratively, a 'malefactor' (the same); nor 'corroborate' our health
+(Sir Thomas Elyot).
+
+Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly progressive courses
+of change, itself a faithful index of changes going on in society and in
+the minds of men, till at length everything is changed about it. The
+process of this it is often very curious to observe; capable as not
+seldom it is of being watched step by step in its advances to the final
+consummation. There may be said to be three leading phases which the
+word successively presents, three steps in its history. At first it
+grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with its own natural
+meaning. Presently the word allows another meaning, one superinduced on
+the former, and foreign to its etymology, to share with the other in the
+possession of it, on the ground that where the former exists, the latter
+commonly co-exists with it. At the third step, the newly introduced
+meaning, not satisfied with its moiety, with dividing the possession of
+the word, has thrust out the original and rightful possessor altogether,
+and remains in sole and exclusive possession. The three successive
+stages may be represented by _a_, _ab_, _b_; in which series _b_, which
+was wanting altogether at the first stage, and was only admitted as
+secondary at the second, does at the third become primary and indeed
+alone.
+
+{Sidenote: _Gradual Change of Meaning_}
+
+We are not to suppose that in actual fact the transitions from one
+signification to another are so strongly and distinctly marked, as I
+have found it convenient to mark them here. Indeed it is hard to imagine
+anything more gradual, more subtle and imperceptible, than the process
+of change. The manner in which the new meaning first insinuates itself
+into the old, and then drives out the old, can only be compared to the
+process of petrifaction, as rightly understood--the water not gradually
+turning what is put into it to stone, as we generally take the operation
+to be; but successively displacing each several particle of that which
+is brought within its power, and depositing a stony particle, in its
+stead, till, in the end, while all appears to continue the same, all has
+in fact been thoroughly changed. It is precisely thus, by such slow,
+gradual, and subtle advances that the new meaning filters through and
+pervades the word, little by little displacing entirely that which it
+before possessed.
+
+No word would illustrate this process better than that old example,
+familiar probably to us all, of 'villain'. The 'villain' is, first, the
+serf or peasant, 'villanus', because attached to the 'villa' or farm. He
+is, secondly, the peasant who, it is further taken for granted, will be
+churlish, selfish, dishonest, and generally of evil moral conditions,
+these having come to be assumed as always belonging to him, and to be
+permanently associated with his name, by those higher classes of society
+who in the main commanded the springs of language. At the third step,
+nothing of the meaning which the etymology suggests, nothing of 'villa',
+survives any longer; the peasant is wholly dismissed, and the evil moral
+conditions of him who is called by this name alone remain; so that the
+name would now in this its final stage be applied as freely to peer, if
+he deserved it, as to peasant. 'Boor' has had exactly the same history;
+being first the cultivator of the soil; then secondly, the cultivator of
+the soil who, it is assumed, will be coarse, rude, and unmannerly; and
+then thirdly, any one who is coarse, rude, and unmannerly{221}. So too
+'pagan'; which is first villager, then heathen villager, and lastly
+heathen. You may trace the same progress in 'churl', 'clown', 'antic',
+and in numerous other words. The intrusive meaning might be likened in
+all these cases to the egg which the cuckoo lays in the sparrow's nest;
+the young cuckoo first sharing the nest with its rightful occupants, but
+not resting till it has dislodged and ousted them altogether.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Gossip_'}
+
+I will illustrate by the aid of one word more this part of my subject. I
+called your attention in my last lecture to the true character of
+several words and forms in use among our country people, and claimed for
+them to be in many instances genuine English, though English now more
+or less antiquated and overlived. 'Gossip' is a word in point. I have
+myself heard this name given by our Hampshire peasantry to the sponsors
+in baptism, the godfathers and godmothers. I do not say that it is a
+usual word; but it is occasionally employed, and well understood. This
+is a perfectly correct employment of 'gossip', in fact its proper and
+original one, and involves moreover a very curious record of past
+beliefs. 'Gossip', or 'gossib', as Chaucer spelt it, is a compound word,
+made up of the name of 'God', and of an old Anglo-Saxon word, 'sib',
+still alive in Scotland, as all readers of Walter Scott will remember,
+and in some parts of England, and which means, akin; they were said to
+be 'sib', who are related to one another. But why, you may ask, was the
+name given to sponsors? Out of this reason;--in the middle ages it was
+the prevailing belief (and the Romish Church still affirms it), that
+those who stood as sponsors to the same child, besides contracting
+spiritual obligations on behalf of that child, also contracted spiritual
+affinity one with another; they became _sib_, or akin, in _God_; and
+thus 'gossips'; hence 'gossipred', an old word, exactly analogous to
+'kindred'. Out of this faith the Roman Catholic Church will not allow
+(unless indeed by dispensations procured for money), those who have
+stood as sponsors to the same child, afterwards to contract marriage
+with one another, affirming them too nearly related for this to be
+lawful.
+
+Take 'gossip' however in its ordinary present use, as one addicted to
+idle tittle-tattle, and it seems to bear no relation whatever to its
+etymology and first meaning. The same three steps, however, which we
+have traced before will bring us to its present use. 'Gossips' are,
+first, the sponsors, brought by the act of a common sponsorship into
+affinity and near familiarity with one another; secondly, these
+sponsors, who being thus brought together, allow themselves one with the
+other in familiar, and then in trivial and idle talk; thirdly, any who
+allow themselves in this trivial and idle talk,--called in French
+'commerage', from the fact that 'commere' has run through exactly the
+same stages as its English equivalent.
+
+It is plain that words which designate not things and persons only, but
+these as they are contemplated more or less in an ethical light, words
+which tinge with a moral sentiment what they designate, are peculiarly
+exposed to change; are constantly liable to take a new colouring, or to
+lose an old. The gauge and measure of praise or blame, honour or
+dishonour, admiration or abhorrence, which they convey, is so purely a
+mental and subjective one, that it is most difficult to take accurate
+note of its rise or of its fall, while yet there are causes continually
+at work leading it to the one or the other. There are words not a few,
+but ethical words above all, which have so imperceptibly drifted away
+from their former moorings, that although their position is now very
+different from that which they once occupied, scarcely one in a hundred
+of casual readers, whose attention has not been specially called to the
+subject, will have observed that they have moved at all. Here too we
+observe some words conveying less of praise or blame than once, and
+some more; while some have wholly shifted from the one to the other.
+Some were at one time words of slight, almost of offence, which have
+altogether ceased to be so now. Still these are rare by comparison with
+those which once were harmless, but now are harmless no more; which
+once, it may be, were terms of honour, but which now imply a slight or
+even a scorn. It is only too easy to perceive why these should exceed
+those in number.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Imp_', '_Brat_'}
+
+Let us take an example or two. If any were to speak now of royal
+children as "royal _imps_", it would sound, and with our present use of
+the word would be, impertinent and unbecoming enough; and yet 'imp' was
+once a name of dignity and honour, and not of slight or of undue
+familiarity. Thus Spenser addresses the Muses in this language,
+
+    "Ye sacred _imps_ that on Parnasso dwell";
+
+and 'imp' was especially used of the scions of royal or illustrious
+houses. More than one epitaph, still existing, of our ancient nobility
+might be quoted, beginning in such language as this, "Here lies that
+noble _imp_". Or what should we say of a poet who commenced a solemn
+poem in this fashion,
+
+    "Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord,
+    Oh Abraham's _brats_, oh brood of blessed seed"?
+
+Could we conclude anything else but that he meant, by using low words on
+lofty occasions, to turn sacred things into ridicule? Yet this was very
+far from the intention of Gascoigne, the poet whose lines I have just
+quoted. "Abraham's _brats_" was used by him in perfect good faith, and
+without the slightest feeling that anything ludicrous or contemptuous
+adhered to the word 'brat', as indeed in his time there did not, any
+more than adheres to 'brood', which is another form of the same word
+now{222}.
+
+Call a person 'pragmatical', and you now imply not merely that he is
+busy, but _over_-busy, officious, self-important, and pompous to boot.
+But it once meant nothing of the kind, and 'pragmatical' (like {Greek:
+pragmatikos}) was one engaged in affairs, being an honourable title,
+given to a man simply and industriously accomplishing the business which
+properly concerned him{223}. So too to say that a person 'meddles' or is
+a 'meddler' implies now that he interferes unduly in other men's
+matters, without a call mixing himself up with them. This was not
+insinuated in the earlier uses of the word. On the contrary three of our
+earlier translations of the Bible have, "_Meddle_ with your own
+business" (1 Thess. iv. 11); and Barrow in one of his sermons draws at
+some length the distinction between 'meddling' and "being _meddlesome_",
+and only condemns the latter.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Proser_'}
+
+Or take again the words, 'to prose' or a 'proser'. It cannot indeed be
+affirmed that they convey any _moral_ condemnation, yet they certainly
+convey no compliment now; and are almost among the last which any one
+would desire should with justice be applied either to his talking or his
+writing. For 'to prose', as we all now know too well, is to talk or
+write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but
+once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a 'proser' the
+antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid
+and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would
+have 'prosed' and been a 'proser', in the language of our ancestors.
+Thus Drayton writes of his contemporary Nashe:
+
+    "And surely Nashe, though he a _proser_ were,
+      A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear";
+
+that is, the ornament not of a 'proser', but of a poet. The tacit
+assumption that vigour, animation, rapid movement, with all the
+precipitation of the spirit, belong to verse rather than to prose, and
+are the exclusive possession of it, is that which must explain the
+changed uses of the word.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Knave_'}
+
+Still it is according to a word's present signification that we must
+apply it now. It would be no excuse, having applied an insulting epithet
+to any, if we should afterwards plead that, tried by its etymology and
+primary usage, it had nothing offensive or insulting about it; although
+indeed Swift assures us that in his time such a plea was made and was
+allowed. "I remember", he says, "at a trial in Kent, where Sir George
+Rooke was indicted for calling a gentleman 'knave' and 'villain', the
+lawyer for the defendant brought off his client by alleging that the
+words were not injurious; for 'knave' in the old and true signification
+imported only a servant{224}; and 'villain' in Latin is villicus, which
+is no more than a man employed in country labour, or rather a baily".
+The lawyer may have deserved his success for his ingenuity and his
+boldness; though, if Swift reports him aright, not certainly on the
+ground of the strict accuracy either of his Anglo-Saxon or his Latin.
+
+The moral sense and conviction of men is often at work upon their words,
+giving them new turns in obedience to these convictions, of which their
+changed use will then remain a permanent record. Let me illustrate this
+by the history of our word 'sycophant'. You probably are acquainted with
+the story which the Greek scholiasts invented by way of explaining a
+word of which they knew nothing, namely that the 'sycophant' was a
+"manifester of figs", one who detected others in the act of exporting
+figs from Attica, an act forbidden, they asserted, by the Athenian law;
+and accused them to the people. Be this explanation worth what it may,
+the word obtained in Greek a more general sense; any accuser, and then
+any _false_ accuser, was a 'sycophant'; and when the word was first
+adopted into the English language, it was in this meaning: thus an old
+English poet speaks of "the railing route of _sycophants_"; and Holland:
+"The poor man that hath nought to lose, is not afraid of the
+_sycophant_". But it has not kept this meaning; a 'sycophant' is now a
+fawning flatterer; not one who speaks ill of you behind your back;
+rather one who speaks good of you before your face, but good which he
+does not in his heart believe. Yet how true a moral instinct has
+presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and
+the flatterer, although they seem so opposed to one another, how closely
+united they really are. They grow out of the same root. The same
+baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak evil of you behind your
+back, will lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your face;
+there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb, "Who flatters me
+before, spatters me behind".
+
+{Sidenote: _Weakening of Words_}
+
+But it is not the moral sense only of men which is thus at work,
+modifying their words; but the immoral as well. If the good which men
+have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit
+there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant tendency--in
+too many cases it has been a successful one--to empty words employed in
+the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral
+reprobation which they once conveyed. Men's too easy toleration of sin,
+the feebleness of their moral indignation against it, brings about that
+the blame which words expressed once, has in some of them become much
+weaker now than once, has from others vanished altogether. "To do a
+_shrewd_ turn", was once to do a _wicked_ turn; and Chaucer, using
+'shrewdness' by which to translate the Latin 'improbitas', shows that it
+meant wickedness for him; nay, two murderers he calls two 'shrews',--for
+there were, as already noticed, male shrews once as well as female. But
+"a _shrewd_ turn" now, while it implies a certain amount of sharp
+dealing, yet implies nothing more; and 'shrewdness' is applied to men
+rather in their praise than in their dispraise. And not 'shrewd' and
+'shrewdness' only, but a multitude of other words,--I will only instance
+'prank' 'flirt', 'luxury', 'luxurious', 'peevish', 'wayward',
+'loiterer', 'uncivil',--conveyed once a much more earnest moral
+disapproval than now they do.
+
+But I must bring this lecture to a close. I have but opened to you
+paths, which you, if you are so minded, can follow up for yourselves. We
+have learned lately to speak of men's 'antecedents'{225}; the phrase is
+newly come up; and it is common to say that if we would know what a man
+really now is, we must know his 'antecedents', that is, what he has been
+in time past. This is quite as true about words. If we would know what
+they now are, we must know what they have been; we must know, if
+possible, the date and place of their birth, the successive stages of
+their subsequent history, the company which they have kept, all the road
+which they have travelled, and what has brought them to the point at
+which now we find them; we must know, in short, their antecedents.
+
+{Sidenote: _Changes of Meaning_}
+
+And let me say, without attempting to bring back school into these
+lectures which are out of school, that, seeking to do this, we might add
+an interest to our researches in the lexicon and the dictionary which
+otherwise they could never have; that taking such words, for example, as
+{Greek: ekkle:sia}, or {Greek: palingenesia}, or {Greek: eutrapelia}, or
+{Greek: sophiste:s}, or {Greek: scholastikos}, in Greek; as 'religio',
+or 'sacramentum', or 'urbanitas', or 'superstitio', in Latin; as
+'libertine', or 'casuistry'{226}, or 'humanity', or 'humorous', or
+'danger', or 'romance', in English, and endeavouring to trace the manner
+in which one meaning grew out of and superseded another, and how they
+arrived at that use in which they have finally rested (if indeed before
+our English words there is not a future still), we shall derive, I
+believe, amusement, I am sure, instruction; we shall feel that we are
+really getting something, increasing the moral and intellectual stores
+of our minds; furnishing ourselves with that which may hereafter be of
+service to ourselves, may be of service to others--than which there can
+be no feeling more pleasurable, none more delightful. I shall be glad
+and thankful, if you can feel as much in regard of that lecture, which I
+now bring to its end{227}.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{198} ['Frampold', peevish, perverse (_Merry Wives of Windsor_, 1598,
+      ii, 2, 94) is supposed to be another form of 'from-polled', as if
+      'wrong-headed'. 'Garboil', a tumult or hubbub, was originally
+      _garboyl_, and came from old French _garbouil_ (Italian
+      _garbuglio_). 'Brangle', a brawl, stands for 'brandle' from Old
+      Fr. _brandeler_, akin to 'brandish'.]
+
+{199} ['Dutch' i.e. Teutonic, Mid. High-German _diutsch_, old
+      High-German _diut-isk_ from _diot_, people, and so the people-ish
+      or popular language the mother-tongue, founded on a primitive
+      _teuta_, 'people'. See Kluge _s.v. Deutsch_.]
+
+{200} So in Herrick's _Electra_:
+
+          "More white than are the whitest creams,
+          Or moonlight _tinselling_ the streams".
+
+{201} [Hence also the epidemic of malefic power supposed to be
+      air-borne, 'influenza'.]
+
+{202} See Holinshed's _Chronicles_, vol. iii, pp. 827, 1218; Ann. 1513,
+      1570.
+
+{203} _Fairy Queen_, vi, 7, 27; cf. v. 3, 37.
+
+{204} [The two words are intimately related, 'king', contracted for
+      _kining_ (Anglo-Saxon _cyn-ing_), 'son of the kin' or 'tribe', one
+      of the people, cognate with _cynde_, true-born, native, 'kind',
+      and _cynd_, nature 'kind', whence 'kindly', natural.]
+
+{205} See Sir W. Scott's edition of Swift's _Works_, vol. ix, p. 139.
+
+{206} {Greek: the:riake:}, from {Greek: the:rion}, a designation given
+      to the viper, see Acts xxviii, 4. 'Theriac' is only the more rigid
+      form of the same word, the scholarly, as distinguished from the
+      popular, adoption of it. Augustine (_Con. duas Epp. Pelag._ iii,
+      7): Sicut fieri consuevit antidotum etiam de serpentibus contra
+      venena serpentum.
+
+{207} And Chaucer, more solemnly still:
+
+          "Christ, which that is to every harm _triacle_".
+
+      The _antidotal_ character of treacle comes out yet more in these
+      lines of Lydgate:
+
+              "There is no _venom_ so parlious in sharpnes,
+          As whan it hath of _treacle_ a likenes".
+
+{208} "A slave that within these twenty years rode with the _black
+      guard_ in the Duke's carriage, 'mongst spits and dripping pans".
+      (Webster's _White Devil_.) [First ed. 1612. "The Black Guard of
+      the King's Kitchen" is mentioned in a State Paper of 1535
+      (N.E.D.).]
+
+{209} Genin (_Lexique de la Langue de Moliere_, p. 367) says well: "En
+      augmentant le nombre des mots, il a fallu restreindre leur
+      signification, et faire aux nouveaux un apanage aux depens des
+      anciens".
+
+{210} [Accordingly there is nothing tautological in the "dead corpses"
+      of 2 Kings xix, 35, in the A.V.]
+
+{211} ['Weed', vegetable growth, Anglo-Saxon _weod_, is here confounded
+      with a perfectly distinct word 'weed', clothing, which is the
+      Anglo-Saxon _waed_, a garment.]
+
+{212} And no less so in French with 'dame', by which form not 'domina'
+      only, but 'dominus', was represented. Thus in early French poetry,
+      "_Dame_ Dieu" for "_Dominus_ Deus" continually occurs. We have
+      here the key to the French exclamation, or oath, as we now
+      perceive it to be, 'Dame'! of which the dictionaries give no
+      account. See Genin's _Variations du Langage Francais_, p. 347.
+
+{213} ['Hoyden' seems to be derived from the old Dutch _heyden_, a
+      heathen, then a clownish, boorish fellow.]
+
+{214} [This "ancient Saxon phrase", as Longfellow calls it, has not been
+      found in any old English writer, but has been adopted from the
+      Modern German. Neither is it known in the dialects, E.D.D.]
+
+{215} "A _furlong_, quasi _furrowlong_, being so much as a team in
+      England plougheth going forward, before they return back again".
+      (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, p. 42.) ['Furlong' in St.
+      Luke xxiv, 13, already occurs in the Anglo-Saxon version of that
+      passage as _furlanga_.]
+
+{216} [Recent etymologists cannot see any connexion between 'peck' and
+      'poke'.]
+
+{217} [e. g. "One said thus _preposterously_: 'when we had climbed the
+      clifs and were a shore'" (Puttenham, _Arte of Eng. Poesie_, 1589,
+      p. 181, ed. Arber). "It is a _preposterous_ order to teach first
+      and to learn after" (_Preface to Bible_, 1611). "Place not the
+      coming of the wise men, _preposterously_, before the appearance of
+      the star" (Abp. Secker, _Sermons_, iii, 85, ed. 1825).]
+
+{218} Thus Barrow: "Which [courage and constancy] he that wanteth is no
+      other than _equivocally_ a gentleman, as an image or a carcass is
+      a man".
+
+{219} Phillips, _New World of Words_, 1706. ['Garble' comes through old
+      French _garbeler_, _grabeler_ (Italian _garbellare_) from Latin
+      _cribellare_, to sift, and that from _cribellum_, a sieve,
+      diminutive of _cribrum_.]
+
+{220} "But his [Gideon's] army must be _garbled_, as too great for God
+      to give victory thereby; all the fearful return home by
+      proclamation" (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, b. ii, c. 8).
+
+{221} [Compare the transitions of meaning in French _manant_ = (1) a
+      dweller (where he was born--from _manoir_ to dwell), the
+      inhabitant of a homestead, (2) a countryman, (3) a clown or boor,
+      a coarse fellow.]
+
+{222} [These words lie totally apart. 'Brat', an infant, seems a
+      figurative use of 'brat', a rag or pinafore, just as 'bantling'
+      comes from 'band', a swathe.]
+
+{223} "We cannot always be contemplative, or _pragmatical_ abroad: but
+      have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged
+      soul may leave off awhile her severe schooling". (Milton,
+      _Tetrachordon_.)
+
+{224} [Anglo-Saxon _cnafa_, or _cnapa_, a boy.]
+
+{225} [Mr. Fitzedward Hall in 1873 says 'antecedents' is "not yet a
+      generation old" (_Mod. English_, 303). Landor in 1853 says "the
+      French have lately taught (it to) us" (_Last Fruit of an Old
+      Tree_, 176). De Quincey, in 1854 calls it "modern slang" (_Works_
+      xiv, 449); and the earliest quotation, 1841, given in the N.E.D.,
+      introduces it as "what the French call their antecedents".]
+
+{226} See Whewell, _History of Moral Philosophy in England_, pp.
+      xxvii.-xxxii.
+
+{227} For a fuller treatment of the subject of this lecture, see my
+      _Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in senses
+      different from their present_, 2nd ed. London, 1859.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS
+
+
+When I announce to you that the subject of my lecture to-day will be
+English orthography, or the spelling of the words in our native
+language, with the alterations which this has undergone, you may perhaps
+think with yourselves that a weightier, or, if not a weightier, at all
+events a more interesting subject might have occupied this our
+concluding lecture. I cannot admit it to be wanting either in importance
+or in interest. Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage,
+as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far higher
+acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by
+faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure it ought as little to
+be this; and would never prove so in competent hands{228}. Let us then
+address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope that it may
+yield us both profit and pleasure.
+
+I know not who it was that said, "The invention of printing was very
+well; but, as compared to the invention of writing, it was no such great
+matter after all". Whoever it was who made this observation, it is clear
+that for him use and familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which
+there is in that, whereat we probably have long ceased to wonder at
+all--the power, namely, of representing sounds by written signs, of
+reproducing for the eye that which existed at first only for the ear:
+nor was the estimate which he formed of the relative value of these two
+inventions other than a just one. Writing indeed stands more nearly on a
+level with speaking, and deserves rather to be compared with it, than
+with printing; which, with all its utility, is yet of altogether another
+and inferior type of greatness: or, if this is too much to claim for
+writing, it may at any rate be affirmed to stand midway between the
+other two, and to be as much superior to the one as it is inferior to
+the other.
+
+The intention of the written word, that which presides at its first
+formation, the end whereunto it is a mean, is by aid of symbols agreed
+on beforehand, to represent to the eye with as much accuracy as possible
+the spoken word.
+
+{Sidenote: _Imperfection of Writing_}
+
+It never fulfils this intention completely, and by degrees more and more
+imperfectly. Short as man's spoken word often falls of his thought, his
+written word falls often as short of his spoken. Several causes
+contribute to this. In the first place, the marks of imperfection and
+infirmity cleave to writing, as to every other invention of man. All
+alphabets have been left incomplete. They have superfluous letters,
+letters, that is, which they do not want, because other letters already
+represent the sound which they represent; they have dubious letters,
+letters, that is, which say nothing certain about the sounds they stand
+for, because more than one sound is represented by them--our 'c' for
+instance, which sometimes has the sound of 's', as in '_c_ity',
+sometimes of 'k', as in '_c_at'; they are deficient in letters, that is,
+the language has elementary sounds which have no corresponding letters
+appropriated to them, and can only be represented by combinations of
+letters. All alphabets, I believe, have some of these faults, not a few
+of them have all, and more. This then is one reason of the imperfect
+reproduction of the spoken word by the written. But another is, that the
+human voice is so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is able to
+mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so infinitely to
+modify and vary these sounds, that were an alphabet complete as human
+art could make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of four and
+twenty letters, there would still remain a multitude of sounds which it
+could only approximately give back{229}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Alphabets Inadequate_}
+
+But there is a further cause for the divergence which comes gradually to
+find place between men's spoken and their written words. What men do
+often, they will seek to do with the least possible trouble. There is
+nothing which they do oftener than repeat words; they will seek here
+then to save themselves pains; they will contract two or more syllables
+into one; ('toto opere' will become 'topper'; 'vuestra merced', 'usted';
+and 'topside the other way', 'topsy-turvey'{230}); they will slur over,
+and thus after a while cease to pronounce, certain letters; for hard
+letters they will substitute soft; for those which require a certain
+effort to pronounce, they will substitute those which require little or
+none. Under the operation of these causes a gulf between the written and
+spoken word will not merely exist; but it will have the tendency to grow
+ever wider and wider. This tendency indeed will be partially
+counterworked by approximations which from time to time will by silent
+consent be made of the written word to the spoken; here and there a
+letter dropped in speech will be dropped also in writing, as the 's' in
+so many French words, where its absence is marked by a circumflex; a new
+shape, contracted or briefer, which a word has taken on the lips of men,
+will find its representation in their writing; as 'chirurgeon' will not
+merely be pronounced, but also spelt, 'surgeon', and 'synodsman'
+'sidesman'. Still for all this, and despite of these partial
+readjustments of the relations between the two, the anomalies will be
+infinite; there will be a multitude of written letters which have ceased
+to be sounded letters; a multitude of words will exist in one shape upon
+our lips, and in quite another in our books.
+
+It is inevitable that the question should arise--Shall these anomalies
+be meddled with? shall it be attempted to remove them, and bring writing
+and speech into harmony and consent--a harmony and consent which never
+indeed in actual fact at any period of the language existed, but which
+yet may be regarded as the object of written speech, as the idea which,
+however imperfectly realized, has, in the reduction of spoken sounds to
+written, floated before the minds of men? If the attempt is to be made,
+it is clear that it can only be made in one way. The alternative is not
+open, whether Mahomet shall go to the mountain, _or_ the mountain to
+Mahomet. The spoken word is the mountain; it will not stir; it will
+resist all interference. It feels its own superior rights, that it
+existed the first, that it is, so to say, the elder brother; and it will
+never be induced to change itself for the purpose of conforming and
+complying with the written word. Men will not be persuaded to pronounce
+'wou_l_d' and 'de_b_t', because they write 'would' and 'debt' severally
+with an 'l' and with a 'b': but what if they could be induced to write
+'woud' and 'det', because they pronounce so; and to deal in like manner
+with all other words, in which there exists at present a discrepancy
+between the word as it is spoken, and the word as it is written?
+
+{Sidenote: _Phonetic Systems_}
+
+Here we have the explanation of that which in the history of almost all
+literatures has repeated itself more than once, namely, the endeavour to
+introduce phonetic writing. It has certain plausibilities to rest on; it
+has its appeal to the unquestionable fact that the written word was
+intended to picture to the eye what the spoken word sounded in the ear.
+At the same time I believe that it would be impossible to introduce it;
+and, even if it _were_ possible, that it would be most undesirable, and
+this for two reasons; the first being that the losses consequent upon
+its introduction, would far outweigh the gains, even supposing those
+gains as great as the advocates of the scheme promise; the second, that
+these promised gains would themselves be only very partially realized,
+or not at all.
+
+{Sidenote: _Alphabets Imperfect_}
+
+In the first place, I believe it to be impossible. It is clear that such
+a scheme must begin with the reconstruction of the alphabet. The first
+thing that the phonographers have perceived is the necessity for the
+creation of a vast number of new signs, the poverty of all existing
+alphabets, at any rate of our own, not yielding a several sign for all
+the several sounds in the language. Our English phonographers have
+therefore had to invent ten of these new signs or letters, which are
+henceforth to take their place with our _a_, _b_, _c_, and to enjoy
+equal rights with them. Rejecting two (_q_, _x_), and adding ten, they
+have raised their alphabet from twenty-six letters to thirty-four. But
+to procure the reception of such a reconstructed alphabet is simply an
+impossibility, as much an impossibility as would be the reconstitution
+of the structure of the language in any points where it was manifestly
+deficient or illogical. Sciolists or scholars may sit down in their
+studies, and devise these new letters, and prove that we need them, and
+that the introduction of them would be a great gain, and a manifest
+improvement; and this may be all very true; but if they think they can
+induce a people to adopt them, they know little of the ways in which its
+alphabet is entwined with the whole innermost life of a people. One may
+freely own that all present alphabets are redundant here, are deficient
+there; our English perhaps is as greatly at fault as any, and with that
+we have chiefly to do. Unquestionably it has more letters than one to
+express one and the same sound; it has only one letter to express two or
+three sounds; it has sounds which are only capable of being expressed at
+all by awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the same time we must
+accept the fact, as we accept any other which it is out of our power to
+change--with regret, indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence: as one
+accepts the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or forty miles nearer
+to England--that it is so difficult to get round Cape Horn--that the
+climate of Africa is so fatal to European life. A people will no more
+quit their alphabet than they will quit their language; they will no
+more consent to modify the one _ab extra_ than the other. Caesar avowed
+that with all his power he could not introduce a new word, and certainly
+Claudius could not introduce a new letter. Centuries may sanction the
+bringing in of a new one, or the dropping of an old. But to imagine that
+it is possible to suddenly introduce a group of ten new letters, as
+these reformers propose--they might just as feasibly propose that the
+English language should form its comparatives and superlatives on some
+entirely new scheme, say in Greek fashion, by the terminations 'oteros'
+and 'otatos'; or that we should agree to set up a dual; or that our
+substantives should return to our Anglo-Saxon declensions. Any one of
+these or like proposals would not betray a whit more ignorance of the
+eternal laws which regulate human language, and of the limits within
+which deliberate action upon it is possible, than does this of
+increasing our alphabet by ten entirely novel signs.
+
+But grant it possible, grant our six and twenty letters to have so
+little sacredness in them that Englishmen would endure a crowd of
+upstart interlopers to mix themselves on an equal footing with them,
+still this could only be from a sense of the greatness of the advantage
+to be derived from this introduction. Now the vast advantage claimed by
+the advocates of the system is, that it would facilitate the learning to
+read, and wholly save the labour of learning to spell, which "on the
+present plan occupies", as they assure us, "at the very lowest
+calculation from three to five years". Spelling, it is said, would no
+longer need to be learned at all; since whoever knew the sound, would
+necessarily know also the spelling, this being in all cases in perfect
+conformity with that. The anticipation of this gain rests upon two
+assumptions which are tacitly taken for granted, but both of them
+erroneous.
+
+The first of these assumptions is, that all men pronounce all words
+alike, so that whenever they come to spell a word, they will exactly
+agree as to what the outline of its sound is. Now we are sure men will
+not do this from the fact that, before there was any fixed and settled
+orthography in our language, when therefore everybody was more or less a
+phonographer, seeking to write down the word as it sounded to _him_,
+(for he had no other law to guide him,) the variations of spelling were
+infinite. Take for instance the word 'sudden'; which does not seem to
+promise any great scope for variety. I have myself met with this word
+spelt in the following fifteen ways among our early writers: 'sodain',
+'sodaine', 'sodan', 'sodayne', 'sodden', 'sodein', 'sodeine', 'soden',
+'sodeyn', 'suddain', 'suddaine', 'suddein', 'suddeine', 'sudden',
+'sudeyn'. Again, in how many ways was Raleigh's name spelt, or
+Shakespeare's? The same is evident from the spelling of uneducated
+persons in our own day. They have no other rule but the sound to guide
+them. How is it that they do not all spell alike; erroneously, it may
+be, as having only the sound for their guide, but still falling all into
+exactly the same errors? What is the actual fact? They not merely spell
+wrong, which might be laid to the charge of our perverse system of
+spelling, but with an inexhaustible diversity of error, and that too in
+the case of simplest words. Thus the little town of Woburn would seem to
+give small room for caprice in spelling, while yet the postmaster there
+has made, from the superscription of letters that have passed through
+his hands, a collection of two hundred and forty-four varieties of ways
+in which the place has been spelt{231}. It may be replied that these
+were all or nearly all from the letters of the ignorant and uneducated.
+Exactly so;--but it is for their sakes, and to place them on a level
+with the educated, or rather to accelerate their education by the
+omission of a useless yet troublesome discipline, that the change is
+proposed. I wish to show you that after the change they would be just as
+much, or almost as much, at a loss in their spelling as now.
+
+{Sidenote: _Pronouncing Dictionaries_}
+
+And another reason which would make it quite as necessary then to learn
+orthography as now, is the following. Pronunciation, as I have already
+noticed, is far too fine and subtle a thing to be more than approximated
+to, and indicated in the written letter. In a multitude of cases the
+difficulties which pronunciation presented would be sought to be
+overcome in different ways, and thus different spelling, would arise; or
+if not so, one would have to be arbitrarily selected, and would have
+need to be learned, just as much as the spelling of a word now has need
+to be learned. I will only ask you, in proof of this which I affirm, to
+turn to any Pronouncing Dictionary. That greatest of all absurdities, a
+Pronouncing Dictionary, may be of some service to you in this matter; it
+will certainly be of none in any other. When you mark the elaborate and
+yet ineffectual artifices by which it toils after the finer distinctions
+of articulation, seeks to reproduce in letters what exists, and can only
+exist, as the spoken tradition of pronunciation, acquired from lip to
+lip by the organ of the ear, capable of being learned, but incapable of
+being taught; or when you compare two of these dictionaries with one
+another, and mark the entirely different schemes and combinations of
+letters which they employ for representing the same sound to the eye;
+you will then perceive how idle the attempt to make the written in
+language commensurate with the sounded; you will own that not merely
+out of human caprice, ignorance, or indolence, the former falls short of
+and differs from the later; but that this lies in the necessity of
+things, in the fact that man's _voice_ can effect so much more than ever
+his _letter_ can{232}. You will then perceive that there would be as
+much, or nearly as much, of the arbitrary in spelling which calls itself
+phonetic as in our present, that spelling would have to be learned just
+as really then as now. We should be unable to dismiss the spelling card
+even after the arrival of that great day, when, for example, those lines
+of Pope which hitherto we have thus spelt and read,
+
+    "But errs not nature from this gracious end,
+    From burning suns when livid deaths descend,
+    When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep
+    Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep"?
+
+when I say, instead of this they should present themselves to our eyes
+in the following attractive form:
+
+    "But {?} erz not n{e}tiur from {dh}is gr{e}cus end,
+    from burni{ng} sunz when livid de{th}s d{i}send,
+    when er{th}kw{e}ks swol{o}, or when tempests sw{i}p
+    tounz tu wun gr{e}v, h{o}l n{e}conz tu {dh}e d{i}p".
+
+{Sidenote: _Losses of Phonetic Spelling_}
+
+The scheme would not then fulfil its promises. Its vaunted gains, when
+we come to look closely at them, disappear. And now for its losses.
+There are in every language a vast number of words, which the ear does
+not distinguish from one another, but which are at once distinguishable
+to the eye by the spelling. I will only instance a few which are the
+same parts of speech; thus 'sun' and 'son'; 'virge' ('virga', now
+obsolete) and 'verge'; 'reign', 'rain', and 'rein'; 'hair' and 'hare';
+'plate' and 'plait'; 'moat' and 'mote'; 'pear' and 'pair'; 'pain' and
+'pane'; 'raise' and 'raze'; 'air' and 'heir'; 'ark' and 'arc'; 'mite'
+and 'might'; 'pour' and 'pore'; 'veil' and 'vale'; 'knight' and 'night';
+'knave' and 'nave'; 'pier' and 'peer'; 'rite' and 'right'; 'site' and
+'sight'; 'aisle' and 'isle'; 'concent' and 'consent'; 'signet' and
+'cygnet'. Now, of course, it is a real disadvantage, and may be the
+cause of serious confusion, that there should be words in spoken
+languages of entirely different origin and meaning which yet cannot in
+sound be differenced from one another. The phonographers simply propose
+to extend this disadvantage already cleaving to our spoken languages, to
+the written languages as well. It is fault enough in the French
+language, that 'mere' a mother, 'mer' the sea, 'maire' a mayor of a
+town, should have no perceptible difference between them in the spoken
+tongue; or again that in some there should be nothing to distinguish
+'sans', 'sang', 'sent', 'sens', 's'en', 'cent'; nor yet between 'ver',
+'vert', 'verre' and 'vers'. Surely it is not very wise to propose
+gratuitously to extend the same fault to the written languages as well.
+
+This loss in so many instances of the power to discriminate between
+words, which however liable to confusion now in our spoken language, are
+liable to none in our written, would be serious enough; but far more
+serious than this would be the loss which would constantly ensue, of all
+which visibly connects a word with the past, which tells its history,
+and indicates the quarter from which it has been derived. In how many
+English words a letter silent to the ear, is yet most eloquent to the
+eye--the _g_ for instance in 'deign', 'feign', 'reign', 'impugn',
+telling as it does of 'dignor', 'fingo', 'regno', 'impugno'; even as the
+_b_ in 'debt', 'doubt', is not idle, but tells of 'debitum' and
+'dubium'{233}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Pronunciation Alters_}
+
+At present it is the written word which is in all languages their
+conservative element. In it is the abiding witness against the
+mutilations or other capricious changes in their shape which
+affectation, folly, ignorance, and half-knowledge would introduce. It is
+not indeed always able to hinder the final adoption of these corrupter
+forms, but does not fail to oppose to them a constant, and very often a
+successful, resistance. With the adoption of phonetic spelling, this
+witness would exist no longer; whatever was spoken would have also to be
+written, let it be never so barbarous, never so great a departure from
+the true form of the word. Nor is it merely probable that such a
+barbarizing process, such an adopting and sanctioning of a vulgarism,
+might take place, but among phonographers it already has taken place. We
+all probably are aware that there is a vulgar pronunciation of the word
+'Eu_rope_', as though it were 'Eu_rup_'. Now it is quite possible that
+numerically more persons in England may pronounce the word in this
+manner than in the right; and therefore the phonographers are only true
+to their principles when they spell it in the fashion which they do,
+'Eurup', or indeed omitting the E at the beginning, 'Urup'{234} with
+thus the life of the first syllable assailed no less than that of the
+second. What are the consequences? First its relations with the old
+mythology are at once and entirely broken off; secondly, its most
+probable etymology from two Greek words, signifying 'broad' and 'face',
+Europe being so called from the _Broad_ line or _face_ of coast which
+our continent presented to the Asiatic Greek, is totally obscured. But
+so far from the spelling servilely following the pronunciation, I should
+be bold to affirm that if ninety-nine out of every hundred persons in
+England chose to call Europe 'Urup', this would be a vulgarism still,
+against which the written word ought to maintain its protest, not
+sinking down to their level, but rather seeking to elevate them to its
+own{235}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Changes of Pronunciation_}
+
+And if there is much in orthography which is unsettled now, how much
+more would be unsettled then. Inasmuch as the pronunciation of words is
+continually altering, their spelling would of course have continually to
+alter too. For the fact that pronunciation is undergoing constant
+changes, although changes for the most part unmarked, or marked only by
+a few, would be abundantly easy to prove. Take a Pronouncing Dictionary
+of fifty or a hundred years ago; turn to almost any page, and you will
+observe schemes of pronunciation there recommended, which are now merely
+vulgarisms, or which have been dropped altogether. We gather from a
+discussion in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_{236}, that in his time 'great'
+was by some of the best speakers of the language pronounced 'gr_ee_t',
+not 'gr_a_te': Pope usually rhymes it with 'cheat', 'complete', and the
+like; thus in the _Dunciad_:
+
+    "Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the _great_,
+    There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines com_plete_".
+
+Spenser's constant use of the word a century and a half earlier, leaves
+no doubt that such was the invariable pronunciation of his time{237}.
+Again, Pope rhymes 'obliged' with 'beseiged'; and it has only ceased to
+be 'obl_ee_ged' almost in our own time. Who now drinks a cup of 'tay'?
+yet there is abundant evidence that this was the fashionable
+pronunciation in the first half of the last century; the word, that is,
+was still regarded as French: Locke writes it 'the'; and in Pope's time,
+though no longer written, it was still pronounced so. Take this couplet
+of his in proof:
+
+    "Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms _obey_,
+    Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes _tea_".
+
+So too a pronunciation which still survives, though scarcely among
+well-educated persons, I mean 'Room' for 'Rome', must have been in
+Shakespeare's time the predominant one, else there would have been no
+point in that play on words where in _Julius Caesar_ Cassius,
+complaining that in all _Rome_ there was not _room_ for a single man,
+exclaims,
+
+    "Now is it _Rome_ indeed, and _room_ enough".
+
+Samuel Rogers too assures us that in his youth "everybody said
+'Lonnon'{238} not 'London'; that Fox said 'Lonnon' to the last".
+
+The following quotation from Swift will prove to you that I have been
+only employing here an argument, which he employed long ago against the
+phonographers of his time. He exposes thus the futility of their
+scheme{239}: "Another cause which has contributed not a little to the
+maiming of our language, is a foolish opinion advanced of late years
+that we ought to spell exactly as we speak: which, besides the obvious
+inconvenience of utterly destroying our etymology, would be a thing we
+should never see an end of. Not only the several towns and counties of
+England have a different way of pronouncing, but even here in London
+they clip their words after one manner about the court, another in the
+city, and a third in the suburbs; and in a few years, it is probable,
+will all differ from themselves, as fancy or fashion shall direct; all
+which, reduced to writing, would entirely confound orthography".
+
+This much I have thought good to say in respect of that entire
+revolution in English orthography, which some rash innovators have
+proposed. Let me, dismissing them and their innovations, call your
+attention now to those changes in spelling which are constantly going
+forward, at some periods more rapidly than at others, but which never
+wholly cease out of a language; while at the same time I endeavour to
+trace, where this is possible, the motives and inducements which bring
+them about. It is a subject which none can neglect, who desire to obtain
+even a tolerably accurate acquaintance with their native tongue. Some
+principles have been laid down in the course of what has been said
+already, that may help us to judge whether the changes which have found
+place in our own have been for better or for worse. We shall find, if I
+am not mistaken, of both kinds.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Grogram_'}
+
+There are alterations in spelling which are for the worse. Thus an
+altered spelling will sometimes obscure the origin of a word, concealing
+it from those who, but for this, would at once have known whence and
+what it was, and would have found both pleasure and profit in this
+knowledge. I need not say that in all those cases where the earlier
+spelling revealed the secret of the word, told its history, which the
+latter defaces or conceals, the change has been injurious, and is to be
+regretted; while, at the same time, where it has thoroughly established
+itself, there is nothing to do but to acquiesce in it: the attempt to
+undo it would be absurd. Thus, when 'gro_c_er' was spelt 'gro_ss_er', it
+was comparatively easy to see that he first had his name, because he
+sold his wares not by retail, but in the _gross_. 'Co_x_comb' tells us
+nothing now; but it did when spelt, as it used to be, 'co_cks_comb', the
+_comb_ of a _cock_ being then an ensign or token which the fool was
+accustomed to wear. In 'grogra_m_' we are entirely to seek for the
+derivation; but in 'grogra_n_' or 'grogra_in_', as earlier it was spelt,
+one could scarcely miss 'grosgrain', the stuff of a _coarse grain_ or
+woof. How many now understand 'woodbin_e_'? but who could have helped
+understanding 'woodbin_d_' (Ben Jonson)? What a mischievous alteration
+in spelling is 'd_i_vest' instead of 'd_e_vest'{240}. This change is so
+recent that I am tempted to ask whether it would not here be possible to
+return to the only intelligible spelling of this word.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Pigmy_'}
+
+'P_i_gmy' used formerly to be spelt 'p_y_gmy', and so long as it was so,
+no Greek scholar could see the word, but at once he knew that by it
+were indicated manikins whose measure in height was no greater than
+that of a man's arm from the elbow to the closed _fist_{241}. Now he may
+know this in other ways; but the word itself, so long as he assumes it
+to be rightly spelt, tells him nothing. Or again, the old spelling,
+'diam_ant_', was preferable to the modern 'diam_ond_'. It was
+preferable, because it told more of the quarter whence the word had
+reached us. 'Diamant' and 'adamant' are in fact only two different
+adoptions on the part of the English tongue, of one and the same Greek,
+which afterwards became a Latin word. The primary meaning of 'adamant'
+is, as you know, the indomitable, and it was a name given at first to
+steel as the hardest of metals; but afterwards transferred{242} to the
+most precious among all the precious stones, as that which in power of
+resistance surpassed everything besides.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Cozen_', '_Bless_'}
+
+Neither are new spellings to be commended, which obliterate or obscure
+the relationship of a word with others to which it is really allied;
+separating from one another, for those not thoroughly acquainted with
+the subject, words of the same family. Thus when '_j_aw' was spelt
+'_ch_aw', no ne could miss its connexions with the verb 'to chew'{243}.
+Now probably ninety-nine out of a hundred who use both words, are
+entirely unaware of any relationship between them. It is the same with
+'cousin' (consanguineus), and 'to cozen' or to deceive. I do not propose
+to determine which of these words should conform itself to the spelling
+of the other. There was great irregularity in the spelling of both from
+the first; yet for all this, it was then better than now, when a
+permanent distinction has established itself between them, keeping out
+of sight that 'to cozen' is in all likelihood to deceive under show of
+kindred and affinity; which if it be so, Shakespeare's words,
+
+    "_Cousins_ indeed, and by their uncle _cozened_
+    Of comfort"{244},
+
+will be found to contain not a pun, but an etymology{245}. The real
+relation between 'bliss' and 'to bless' is in like manner at present
+obscured{246}.
+
+The omission of a letter, or the addition of a letter, may each
+effectually do its work in keeping out of sight the true character and
+origin of a word. Thus the omission of a letter. When the first syllable
+of 'bran-new' was spelt 'bran_d_' with a final 'd', 'bran_d_-new', how
+vigorous an image did the word contain. The 'brand' is the fire, and
+'brand-new' equivalent to 'fire-new' (Shakespeare), is that which is
+fresh and bright, as being newly come from the forge and fire. As now
+spelt, 'bran-new' conveys to us no image at all. Again, you have the
+word 'scrip'--as a 'scrip' of paper, government 'scrip'. Is this the
+same word with the Saxon 'scrip', a wallet, having in some strange
+manner obtained these meanings so different and so remote? Have we here
+only two different applications of one and the same word, or two
+homonyms, wholly different words, though spelt alike? We have only to
+note the way in which the first of these 'scrips' used to be written,
+namely with a final 't', not 'scrip' but 'scrip_t_', and we are at once
+able to answer the question. This 'script' is a Latin, as the other is
+an Anglo-Saxon, word, and meant at first simply a _written_ (scripta)
+piece of paper--a circumstance which since the omission of the final 't'
+may easily escape our knowledge. 'Afraid' was spelt much better in old
+times with the double 'ff', than with the single 'f' as now. It was then
+clear that it was not another form of 'afeared', but wholly separate
+from it, the participle of the verb 'to affray', 'affrayer', or, as it
+is now written, 'effrayer'{247}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Whole_', '_Hale_', '_Heal_'}
+
+In the cases hitherto adduced, it has been the omission of a letter
+which has clouded and concealed the etymology. The intrusion of a letter
+sometimes does the same. Thus in the early editions of _Paradise Lost_,
+and in all writers of that time, you will find 'scent', an odour, spelt
+'sent'. It was better so; there is no other noun substantive 'sent',
+with which it is in danger of being confounded; while its relation with
+'sentio', with 're_sent_'{248}, 'dis_sent_', and the like, is put out of
+sight by its novel spelling; the intrusive '_c_', serves only to
+mislead. The same thing was attempted with 'site', 'situate',
+'situation', spelt for a time by many, 's_c_ite', 's_c_ituate',
+'s_c_ituation'; but it did not continue with these. Again, 'whole', in
+Wiclif's Bible, and indeed much later, occasionally as far down as
+Spenser, is spelt 'hole', without the 'w' at the beginning. The present
+orthography may have the advantage of at once distinguishing the word to
+the eye from any other; but at the same time the initial 'w', now
+prefixed, hides its relation to the verb 'to heal', with which it is
+closely allied. The 'whole' man is he whose hurt is 'healed' or
+covered{249} (we say of the convalescent that he 'recovers'){250};
+'whole' being closely allied to 'hale' (integer), from which also by
+its modern spelling it is divided. 'Wholesome' has naturally followed
+the fortunes of 'whole'; it was spelt 'holsome' once.
+
+Of 'island' too our present spelling is inferior to the old, inasmuch as
+it suggests a hybrid formation, as though the word were made up of the
+Latin 'insula', and the Saxon 'land'. It is quite true that 'isle' _is_
+in relation with, and descent from, 'insula', 'isola', 'ile'; and hence
+probably the misspelling of 'island'. This last however has nothing to
+do with 'insula', being identical with the German 'eiland', the
+Anglo-Saxon 'ealand'{251} and signifying the sea-land, or land girt,
+round with the sea. And it is worthy of note that this 's' in the first
+syllable of 'island' is quite of modern introduction. In all the earlier
+versions of the Scriptures, and in the Authorized Version as at first
+set forth, it is 'iland'; while in proof that this is not accidental, it
+may be observed that, while 'iland' has not the 's', 'isle' has it (see
+Rev. i. 9). 'Iland' indeed is the spelling which we meet with far down
+into the seventeenth century.
+
+{Sidenote: _Folk-etymologies_}
+
+What has just been said of 'island' leads me as by a natural transition
+to observe that one of the most frequent causes of alteration in the
+spelling of a word is a wrongly assumed derivation. It is then sought to
+bring the word into harmony with, and to make it by its spelling
+suggest, this derivation, which has been erroneously thrust upon it.
+Here is a subject which, followed out as it deserves, would form an
+interesting and instructive chapter in the history of language{252}. Let
+me offer one or two small contributions to it; noting first by the way
+how remarkable an evidence we have in this fact, of the manner in which
+not the learned only, but all persons learned and unlearned alike, crave
+to have these words not body only, but body and soul. What an
+attestation, I say, of this lies in the fact that where a word in its
+proper derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape and mould
+it into some other form, not enduring that it should be a mere inert
+sound without sense in their ears; and if they do not know its right
+origin, will rather put into it a wrong one, than that it should have
+for them no meaning, and suggest no derivation at all{253}.
+
+There is probably no language in which such a process has not been going
+forward; in which it is not the explanation, in a vast number of
+instances, of changes in spelling and even in form, which words have
+undergone. I will offer a few examples of it from foreign tongues,
+before adducing any from our own. 'Pyramid' is a word, the spelling of
+which was affected in the Greek by an erroneous assumption of its
+derivation; the consequences of this error surviving in our own word to
+the present day. It is spelt by us with a 'y' in the first syllable, as
+it was spelt with the {Greek: y} corresponding in the Greek. But why was
+this? It was because the Greeks assumed that the pyramids were so named
+from their having the appearance of _flame_ going up into a point{254},
+and so they spelt 'pyramid', that they might find {Greek: pyr} or 'pyre'
+in it; while in fact 'pyramid' has nothing to do with flame or fire at
+all; being, as those best qualified to speak on the matter declare to
+us, an Egyptian word of quite a different signification{255}, and the
+Coptic letters being much better represented by the diphthong 'ei' than
+by the letter 'y', as no doubt, but for this mistaken notion of what the
+word was intended to mean, they would have been.
+
+Once more--the form 'Hierosolyma', wherein the Greeks reproduced the
+Hebrew 'Jerusalem', was intended in all probability to express that the
+city so called was the _sacred_ city of the _Solymi_{256}. At all events
+the intention not merely of reproducing the Hebrew word, but also of
+making it significant in Greek, of finding {Greek: hieron} in it, is
+plainly discernible. For indeed the Greeks were exceedingly intolerant
+of foreign words, till they had laid aside their foreign appearance--of
+all words which they could not thus quicken with a Greek soul; and, with
+a very characteristic vanity, an ignoring of all other tongues but their
+own, assumed with no apparent misgivings that all words, from whatever
+quarter derived, were to be explained by Greek etymologies{257}.
+
+'Tartar' is another word, of which it is at least possible that a
+wrongly assumed derivation has modified the spelling, and indeed not
+the spelling only, but the very shape in which we now possess it. To
+many among us it may be known that the people designated by this
+appellation are not properly 'Tartars', but 'Tatars'; and you sometimes
+perhaps have noted the omission of the 'r' on the part of those who are
+curious in their spelling. How, then, it may be asked, did the form
+'Tartar' arise? When the terrible hordes of middle Asia burst in upon
+civilized Europe in the thirteenth century, many beheld in the ravages
+of their innumerable cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word in the
+Revelation (chap. ix.) concerning the opening of the bottomless pit; and
+from this belief ensued the change of their name from 'Tatars' to
+'Tartars', which was thus put into closer relation with 'Tartarus' or
+hell, out of which their multitudes were supposed to have proceeded{258}.
+
+Another good example in the same kind is the German word 'suendflut',
+the Deluge, which is now so spelt as to signify a 'sinflood', the plague
+or _flood_ of waters brought on the world by the _sins_ of mankind; and
+probably some of us have before this admired the pregnant significance
+of the word. Yet the old High German word had originally no such
+intention; it was spelt 'sinfluot', that is, the great flood; and as
+late as Luther, indeed in Luther's own translation of the Bible, is so
+spelt as to make plain that the notion of a '_sin_-flood' had not yet
+found its way into, even as it had not affected the spelling of, the
+word{259}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Currants_'}
+
+But to look now nearer home for our examples. The little raisins brought
+from Greece, which play so important a part in one of the national
+dishes of England, the Christmas plum-pudding, used to be called
+'corinths'; and so you would find them in mercantile lists of a hundred
+years ago: either that for the most part they were shipped from Corinth,
+the principal commercial city in Greece, or because they grew in large
+abundance in the immediate district round about it. Their likeness in
+shape and size and general appearance to our own currants, working
+together with the ignorance of the great majority of English people
+about any such place as Corinth, soon brought the name 'corinths' into
+'currants', which now with a certain unfitness they bear; being not
+currants at all, but dried grapes, though grapes of diminutive
+size{260}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Court-cards_'}
+
+'_Court_-cards', that is, the king, queen, and knave in each suit, were
+once 'coat-cards'{261}; having their name from the long splendid 'coat'
+(vestis talaris) with which they were arrayed. Probably 'coat' after a
+while did not perfectly convey its original meaning and intention; being
+no more in common use for the long garment reaching down to the heels;
+and then 'coat' was easily exchanged for 'court', as the word is now
+both spelt and pronounced, seeing that nowhere so fitly as in a Court
+should such splendidly arrayed personages be found. A public house in
+the neighbourhood of London having a few years since for its sign "The
+George _Canning_" is already "The George and _Cannon_",--so rapidly do
+these transformations proceed, so soon is that forgotten which we
+suppose would never be forgotten. "Welsh _rarebit_" becomes "Welsh
+_rabbit_"{262}; and '_farced_' or stuffed 'meat' becomes "forced meat".
+Even the mere determination to make a word _look_ English, to put it
+into an English shape, without thereby so much as seeming to attain any
+result in the way of etymology, this is very often sufficient to bring
+about a change in its spelling, and even in its form{263}. It is thus
+that 'sipahi' has become 'sepoy'; and only so could 'weissager' have
+taken its present form of 'wiseacre'{264}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Transformation of Words_}
+
+It is not very uncommon for a word, while it is derived from one word,
+to receive a certain impulse and modification from another. This extends
+sometimes beyond the spelling, and in cases where it does so, would
+hardly belong to our present theme. Still I may notice an instance or
+two. Thus our 'obsequies' is the Latin 'exequiae', but formed under a
+certain impulse of 'obsequium', and seeking to express and include the
+observant honour of that word. 'To refuse' is 'recusare', while yet it
+has derived the 'f' of its second syllable from 'refutare'; it is a
+medley of the two{265}. The French 'rame', an oar, is 'remus', but that
+modified by an unconscious recollection of 'ramus'. 'Orange' is no doubt
+a Persian word, which has reached us through the Arabic, and which the
+Spanish 'naranja' more nearly represents than any form of it existing in
+the other languages of Europe. But what so natural as to think of the
+orange as the _golden_ fruit, especially when the "_aurea_ mala" of the
+Hesperides were familiar to all antiquity? There cannot be a doubt that
+'aurum', 'oro', 'or', made themselves felt in the shapes which the word
+assumed in the languages of the West, and that here we have the
+explanation of the change in the first syllable, as in the low Latin
+'aurantium', 'orangia', and in the French 'orange', which has given us
+our own.
+
+It is foreign words, or words adopted from foreign languages, as might
+beforehand be expected, which are especially subjected to such
+transformations as these. The soul which the word once had in its own
+language, having, for as many as do not know that language, departed
+from it, or at least not being now any more to be recognized by such as
+employ the word, these are not satisfied till they have put another soul
+into it, and it has thus become alive to them again. Thus--to take first
+one or two very familiar instances, but which serve as well as any other
+to illustrate my position--the Bellerophon becomes for our sailors the
+'Billy Ruffian', for what can they know of the Greek mythology, or of
+the slayer of Chimaera? an iron steamer, the Hirondelle, now or lately
+plying on the Tyne, is the 'Iron Devil'. '_Contre_ danse', or dance in
+which the parties stand _face to face_ with one another, and which ought
+to have appeared in English as '_counter_ dance', does become '_country_
+dance'{266}, as though it were the dance of the country folk and rural
+districts, as distinguished from the quadrille and waltz and more
+artificial dances of the town{267}. A well known rose, the "rose _des
+quatre saisons_", or of the four seasons, becomes on the lips of some of
+our gardeners, the "rose of the _quarter sessions_", though here it is
+probable that the eye has misled, rather than the ear. 'Dent de lion',
+(it is spelt 'dentdelyon' in our early writers) becomes 'dandylion',
+"_chaude_ melee", or an affray in _hot_ blood, "_chance_-medley"{268},
+'causey' (chaussee) becomes 'causeway'{269}, 'rachitis' 'rickets'{270},
+and in French 'mandragora' 'main de gloire'{271}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Necromancy_'}
+
+'Necromancy' is another word which, if not now, yet for a long period
+was erroneously spelt, and indeed assumed a different shape, under the
+influence of an erroneous derivation; which, curiously enough, even now
+that it has been dismissed, has left behind it the marks of its
+presence, in our common phrase, "the _Black_ Art". I need hardly remind
+you that 'necromancy' is a Greek word, which signifies, according to its
+proper meaning, a prophesying by aid of the dead, or that it rests on
+the presumed power of raising up by potent spells the dead, and
+compelling them to give answers about things to come. We all know that
+it was supposed possible to exercise such power; we have a very awful
+example of it in the story of the witch of Endor, and a very horrid one
+in Lucan{272}. But the Latin medieval writers, whose Greek was either
+little or none, spelt the word, 'nigromantia', as if its first syllables
+had been Latin: at the same time, not wholly forgetting the original
+meaning, but in fact getting round to it though by a wrong process, they
+understood the dead by these 'nigri', or blacks, whom they had brought
+into the word{273}. Down to a rather late period we find the forms,
+'_negro_mancer' and '_negro_mancy' frequent in English.
+
+{Sidenote: _Words Misspelt_}
+
+'Pleurisy' used often to be spelt, (I do not think it is so now,)
+without an 'e' in the first syllable, evidently on the tacit assumption
+that it was from _plus pluris_{274}. When Shakespeare falls into an
+error, he "makes the offence gracious"; yet, I think, he would scarcely
+have written,
+
+    "For goodness growing to a _plurisy_
+    Dies of his own _too much_",
+
+but that _he_ too derived 'plurisy' from _pluris_. This, even with the
+"small Latin and less Greek", which Ben Jonson allows him, he scarcely
+would have done, had the word presented itself in that form, which by
+right of its descent from {Greek: pleura} (being a pain, stitch, or
+sickness _in the side_) it ought to have possessed. Those who for
+'crucible' wrote 'chrysoble' (Jeremy Taylor does so) must evidently have
+done this under the assumption that the Greek for _gold_, and not the
+Latin for _cross_, lay at the foundation of this word. 'Anthymn' instead
+of 'anthem' (Barrow so spells the word), rests plainly on a wrong
+etymology, even as this spelling clearly betrays what that wrong
+etymology is. 'Rhyme' with a 'y' is a modern misspelling; and would
+never have been but for the undue influence which the Greek 'rhythm' has
+exercised upon it. Spenser and his cotemporaries spell it 'rime'.
+'Abominable' was by some etymologists of the seventeenth century spelt
+'abhominable', as though it were that which departed from the human (ab
+homine) into the bestial or devilish.
+
+In all these words which I have adduced last, the correct spelling has
+in the end resumed its sway. It is not so with 'frontisp_ie_ce', which
+ought to be spelt 'frontisp_i_ce' (it was so by Milton and others),
+being the low Latin 'frontispicium', from 'frons' and 'aspicio', the
+forefront of the building, that part which presents itself to the view.
+It was only the entirely ungrounded notion that the word 'piece'
+constitutes the last syllable, which has given rise to our present
+orthography{275}.
+
+{Sidenote: Wrong Spelling}
+
+You may, perhaps, wonder that I have dwelt so long on these details of
+spelling; that I have bestowed on them so much of my own attention,
+that I have claimed for them so much of yours; yet in truth I cannot
+regard them as unworthy of our very closest heed. For indeed of how much
+beyond itself is accurate or inaccurate spelling the certain indication.
+Thus when we meet 's_y_ren', for 's_i_ren', as so strangely often we do,
+almost always in newspapers, and often where we should hardly have
+expected (I met it lately in the _Quarterly Review_, and again in
+Gifford's _Massinger_), how difficult it is not to be "judges of evil
+thoughts", and to take this slovenly misspelling as the specimen and
+evidence of an inaccuracy and ignorance which reaches very far wider
+than the single word which is before us. But why is it that so much
+significance is ascribed to a wrong spelling? Because ignorance of a
+word's spelling at once argues ignorance of its origin and derivation. I
+do not mean that one who spells rightly may not be ignorant of it too,
+but he who spells wrongly is certainly so. Thus, to recur to the example
+I have just adduced, he who for 's_i_ren' writes 's_y_ren', certainly
+knows nothing of the magic _cords_ ({Greek: seirai}) of song, by which
+those fair enchantresses were supposed to draw those that heard them to
+their ruin{276}.
+
+Correct or incorrect orthography being, then, this note of accurate or
+inaccurate knowledge, we may confidently conclude where two spellings
+of a word exist, and are both employed by persons who generally write
+with precision and scholarship, that there must be something to account
+for this. It will generally be worth your while to inquire into the
+causes which enable both spellings to hold their ground and to find
+their supporters, not ascribing either one or the other to mere
+carelessness or error. It will in these cases often be found that two
+spellings exist, because two views of the word's origin exist, and each
+of those spellings is the correct expression of one of these. The
+question therefore which way of spelling should continue, and wholly
+supersede the other, and which, while the alternative remains, we should
+ourselves employ, can only be settled by settling which of these
+etymologies deserves the preference. So is it, for example, with
+'ch_y_mist' and 'ch_e_mist', neither of which has obtained in our common
+use the complete mastery over the other{277}. It is not here, as in some
+other cases, that one is certainly right, the other as certainly wrong:
+but they severally represent two different etymologies of the word, and
+each is correct according to its own. If we are to spell 'ch_y_mist' and
+'ch_y_mistry', it is because these words are considered to be derived
+from the Greek word, {Greek: chymos}, sap; and the chymic art will then
+have occupied itself first with distilling the juice and sap of plants,
+and will from this have derived its name. I have little doubt, however,
+that the other spelling, 'ch_e_mist', not 'ch_y_mist', is the correct
+one. It was not with the distillation of herbs, but with the
+amalgamation of metals, that chemistry occupied itself at its rise, and
+the word embodies a reference to Egypt, the land of Ham or 'Cham'{278},
+in which this art was first practised with success.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Satyr_', '_Satire_'}
+
+Of how much confusion the spelling which used to be so common, 'satyr'
+for 'satire', is at once the consequence, the expression, and again the
+cause; not indeed that this confusion first began with us{279}; for the
+same already found place in the Latin, where 'satyricus' was continually
+written for 'satiricus' out of a false assumption of the identity
+between the Roman _satire_ and the Greek _satyric_ drama. The Roman
+'satira',--I speak of things familiar to many of my hearers,--is
+properly a _full_ dish (lanx being understood)--a dish heaped up with
+various ingredients, a 'farce' (according to the original signification
+of that word), or hodge-podge; and the word was transferred from this to
+a form of poetry which at first admitted the utmost variety in the
+materials of which it was composed, and the shapes into which these
+materials were wrought up; being the only form of poetry which the
+Romans did _not_ borrow from the Greeks. Wholly different from this,
+having no one point of contact with it in its form, its history, or its
+intention, is the 'satyric' drama of Greece, so called because Silenus
+and the 'Satyrs' supplied the chorus; and in their naive selfishness,
+and mere animal instincts, held up before men a mirror of what they
+would be, if only the divine, which is also the truly human, element of
+humanity, were withdrawn; what man, all that properly made him man being
+withdrawn, would prove.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Mid-wife_', '_Nostril_'}
+
+And then what light, as we have already seen, does the older spelling of
+a word often cast upon its etymology; how often does it clear up the
+mystery, which would otherwise have hung about it, or which _had_ hung
+about it till some one had noticed and turned to profit this its earlier
+spelling. Thus 'dirge' is always spelt 'dirige' in early English. This
+'dirige' may be the first word in a Latin psalm or prayer once used at
+funerals; there is a reasonable probability that the explanation of the
+word is here; at any rate, if it is not here, it is nowhere{280}. The
+derivation of 'mid-wife' is uncertain, and has been the subject of
+discussion; but when we find it spelt 'medewife' and 'meadwife', in
+Wiclif's Bible, this leaves hardly a doubt that it is the _wife_ or
+woman who acts for a _mead_ or reward{281}. In cases too where there
+was no mystery hanging about a word, how often does the early spelling
+make clear to all that which was before only known to those who had made
+the language their study. For example, if an early edition of Spenser
+should come into your hands, or a modern one in which the early spelling
+is retained, what continual lessons in English might you derive from it.
+Thus 'nostril' is always spelt by him and his cotemporaries
+'nosethrill'; a little earlier it was 'nosethirle'. Now 'to thrill' is
+the same as to drill or pierce; it is plain then here at once that the
+word signifies the orifice or opening with which the _nose_ is
+_thrilled_, drilled, or pierced. We might have read the word for ever in
+our modern spelling without being taught this. 'Ell' tells us nothing
+about itself; but in 'eln' used in Holland's translation of Camden, we
+recognize 'ulna' at once.
+
+Again, the 'morris' or 'morrice-dance', which is alluded to so often by
+our early poets, as it is now spelt informs us nothing about itself; but
+read '_moriske_ dance', as it is generally spelt by Holland and his
+cotemporaries, and you will scarcely fail to perceive that of which
+indeed there is no manner of doubt; namely, that it was so called either
+because it was really, or was supposed to be, a dance in use among the
+_moriscoes_ of Spain, and from thence introduced into England{282}.
+
+Again, philologers tell us, and no doubt rightly, that our 'cray-fish',
+or 'craw-fish', is the French 'ecrevisse'. This is true, but certainly
+it is not self-evident. Trace however the word through these successive
+spellings, 'krevys' (Lydgate), 'crevish' (Gascoigne), 'craifish'
+(Holland), and the chasm between 'cray-fish' or 'craw-fish' and
+'ecrevisse' is by aid of these three intermediate spellings bridged over
+at once; and in the fact of our Gothic 'fish' finding its way into this
+French word we see only another example of a law, which has been already
+abundantly illustrated in this lecture{283}.
+
+{Sidenote: '_Emmet_', '_Ant_'}
+
+In other ways also an accurate taking note of the spelling of words, and
+of the successive changes which it has undergone, will often throw light
+upon them. Thus we may know, others having assured us of the fact, that
+'ant' and 'emmet' were originally only two different spellings of one
+and the same word; but we may be perplexed to understand how two forms
+of a word, now so different, could ever have diverged from a single
+root. When however we find the different spellings, 'emmet', 'emet',
+'amet', 'amt', 'ant', the gulf which appeared to separate 'emmet' from
+'ant' is bridged over at once, and we do not merely know on the
+assurance of others that these two are in fact identical, their
+differences being only superficial, but we perceive clearly in what
+manner they are so{284}.
+
+Even before any close examination of the matter, it is hard not to
+suspect that 'runagate' is in fact another form of 'renegade', slightly
+transformed, as so many words, to put an English signification into its
+first syllable; and then the meaning gradually modified in obedience to
+the new derivation which was assumed to be its original and true one.
+Our suspicion of this is very greatly strengthened (for we see how very
+closely the words approach one another), by the fact that 'renega_d_e'
+is constantly spelt 'renega_t_e' in our old authors, while at the same
+time the denial of _faith_, which is now a necessary element in
+'renegade', and one differencing it inwardly from 'runagate', is
+altogether wanting in early use--the denial of _country_ and of the
+duties thereto owing being all that is implied in it. Thus it is
+constantly employed in Holland's _Livy_ as a rendering of 'perfuga'{285};
+while in the one passage where 'runagate' occurs in the Prayer Book
+Version of the Psalms (Ps. lxviii. 6), a reference to the original will
+show that the translators could only have employed it there on the
+ground that it also expressed rebel, revolter, and not runaway
+merely{286}.
+
+{Sidenote: _Assimilating Power of English_}
+
+I might easily occupy your attention much longer, so little barren or
+unfruitful does this subject of spelling appear likely to prove; but all
+things must have an end; and as I concluded my first lecture with a
+remarkable testimony borne by an illustrious German scholar to the
+merits of our English tongue, I will conclude my last with the words of
+another, not indeed a German, but still of the great Germanic stock;
+words resuming in themselves much of which we have been speaking upon
+this and upon former occasions: "As our bodies", he says, "have hidden
+resources and expedients, to remove the obstacles which the very art of
+the physician puts in its way, so language, ruled by an indomitable
+inward principle, triumphs in some degree over the folly of grammarians.
+Look at the English, polluted by Danish and Norman conquests, distorted
+in its genuine and noble features by old and recent endeavours to mould
+it after the French fashion, invaded by a hostile entrance of Greek and
+Latin words, threatening by increasing hosts to overwhelm the indigenous
+terms. In these long contests against the combined power of so many
+forcible enemies, the language, it is true, has lost some of its power
+of inversion in the structure of sentences, the means of denoting the
+difference of gender, and the nice distinctions by inflection and
+termination--almost every word is attacked by the spasm of the accent
+and the drawing of consonants to wrong positions; yet the old English
+principle is not overpowered. Trampled down by the ignoble feet of
+strangers, its springs still retain force enough to restore itself. It
+lives and plays through all the veins of the language; it impregnates
+the innumerable strangers entering its dominions with its temper, and
+stains them with its colour, not unlike the Greek which in taking up
+oriental words, stripped them of their foreign costume, and bid them to
+appear as native Greeks"{287}.
+
+
+{FOOTNOTES}
+
+{228} In proof that it need not be so, I would only refer to a paper,
+      _On Orthographical Expedients_, by Edwin Guest, Esq., in the
+      _Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. iii. p. 1.
+
+{229} [The scientific treatises on Phonetics of Mr. Alexander J. Ellis
+      and Dr. Henry Sweet have surmounted the difficulty of registering
+      sounds with great accuracy.]
+
+{230} I have not observed this noticed in our dictionaries as the
+      original form of the phrase. There is no doubt however of the
+      fact; see _Stanihurst's Ireland_, p. 33, in Holinshed's
+      _Chronicles_. [Rather from _torvien_, to throw,--Skeat].
+
+{231} _Notes and Queries_, No. 147.
+
+{232} See Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, Croker's edit. 1848, p. 233.
+
+{233} [The _b_ was purposely foisted into these words by bookmen to
+      suggest their Latin derivation; it did not belong to them in
+      earlier English. The same may be said of the _g_, intruded into
+      'deign' and 'feign'.]
+
+{234} A chief phonographer writes to me to deny that this is the present
+      spelling (1856) of 'Europe'. It was so when this paragraph was
+      written. [Most people would now consider [Yeuroap] as American
+      pronunciation.]
+
+{235} Quintilian has expressed himself with the true dignity of a
+      scholar on this matter (_Inst._ 1, 6, 45): Consuetudinem sermonis
+      vocabo _consensum eruditorum_; sicut vivendi consensum
+      bonorum.--How different from innovations like this the changes in
+      the spelling of German which J. Grimm, so far as his own example
+      may reach, _has_ introduced; and the still bolder and more
+      extensive ones which in the _Preface_ to his _Deutsches
+      Woerterbuch_, pp. liv.-lxii., he avows his desire to see
+      introduced;--as the employment of _f_, not merely where it is at
+      present used, but also wherever _v_ is now employed; the
+      substituting of the _v_, which would be thus disengaged, for _w_,
+      and the entire dismissal of _w_. They may be advisable, or they
+      may not; it is not for strangers to offer an opinion; but at any
+      rate they are not a seizing of the fluctuating, superficial
+      accidents of the present, and a seeking to give permanent
+      authority to these, but they all rest on a deep historic study of
+      the language, and of the true genius of the language.
+
+{236} Croker's edit. 1848, pp. 57, 61, 233.
+
+{237} [An incorrect conclusion. Almost all 'ea' words were pronounced
+      'ai' down to the eighteenth century. Thus 'great' was a true rhyme
+      to 'cheat' and 'complete', their ordinary pronunciation being
+      'grait', 'chait', 'complait'.]
+
+{238} [i.e. 'Lunnun'.]
+
+{239} _A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English
+      Tongue_, 1711, Works, vol. ix, pp. 139-59.
+
+{240} ['Devest' was still in use till the end of the eighteenth century,
+      but 'divest' is already found in _King Lear_, 1605, i, 1, 50.]
+
+{241} Pygmaei, quasi _cubitales_ (Augustine).
+
+{242} First so used by Theophrastus in Greek, and by Pliny in
+      Latin.--The real identity of the two words explains Milton's use
+      of 'diamond' in _Paradise Lost_, b. 7; and also in that sublime
+      passage in his _Apology for Smectymnuus_: "Then zeal, whose
+      substance is ethereal, arming in complete _diamond_".--Diez
+      (_Woerterbuch d. Roman. Sprachen_, p. 123) supposes, not very
+      probably, that it was under a certain influence of '_dia_fano',
+      the translucent, that 'adamante' was in the Italian, whence we
+      have derived the word, changed into '_dia_mante'.
+
+{243} [Similarly _jowl_ for _chowl_ or _chavel_.]
+
+{244} _Richard III_, Act iv, Sc. 4.
+
+{245} [For another account of this word, approved by Dr. Murray, see
+      _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 156.]
+
+{246} ['Bliss' representing the old English _bliths_ or _blidhs_,
+      blitheness, is really a quite distinct word from 'bless', standing
+      for _blets_, old English _bletsian_ (=_bloedsian_, to consecrate
+      with blood, _blod_), although the latter was by a folk-etymology
+      very frequently spelt 'bliss'.]
+
+{247} [But 'afraied' is the earliest form of the word (1350), the verb
+      itself being at first spelt 'afray' (1325). N.E.D.]
+
+{248} How close this relationship was once, not merely in respect of
+      etymology, but also of significance, a passage like this will
+      prove: "Perchance, as vultures are said to smell the earthiness of
+      a dying corpse; so this bird of prey [the evil spirit which
+      personated Samuel, 1 Sam. xxviii. 41] _resented_ a worse than
+      earthly savor in the soul of Saul, as evidence of his death at
+      hand". (Fuller, _The Profane State_, b. 5, c. 4.)
+
+{249} [There is an unfortunate confusion here between 'heal' to make
+      'hale' or '[w]hole' (Anglo-Saxon _haelan_) and the old (and
+      Provincial) English _hill_, to cover, _hilling_, covering,
+      _hellier_, a slater, akin to 'hell', the covered place, 'helm';
+      Icelandic _hylja_, to cover.]
+
+{250} [By a curious slip Dr. Trench here confounds 'recover', to
+      recuperate or regain health (derived through old French _recovrer_
+      from Latin _recuperare_), with a totally distinct word _re-cover_,
+      to cover or clothe over again, which comes from old French
+      _covrir_, Latin _co-operire_. It is just the difference between
+      'recovering' a lost umbrella through the police and 'recovering' a
+      torn one at a shop. I pointed this out to the author in 1869, and
+      I think he altered the passage in his later editions.]
+
+{251} ['Island', though cognate with Anglo-Saxon _ea-land_ "water-land"
+      (German _ei-land_), is really identical with Anglo-Saxon
+      _ig-land_, i.e. "isle-land", from _ig_, an island, the diminutive
+      of which survives in _eyot_ or _ait_.]
+
+{252} [The editor essayed to make a complete collection of this class of
+      words in his _Folk-etymology, a Dictionary of Words corrupted by
+      False Derivation or Mistaken Analogy_, 1882, and more recently in
+      a condensed form in _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, 1904.]
+
+{253} Diez looks with much favour on this process, and calls it, ein
+      sinnreiches mittel fremdlinge ganz heimisch zu machen.
+
+{254} Ammianus Marcellinus, xxii, 15, 28.
+
+{255} [The Greek _pyramis_ probably represents the Egyptian
+      _piri-m-uisi_ (Maspero, _Dawn of Civilization_, 358), or
+      _pir-am-us_ (Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, i, 73), rather
+      than _pi-ram_, 'the height' (Birch, _Bunsen's Egypt_, v, 763).]
+
+{256} Tacitus, _Hist._ v. 2.
+
+{257} Let me illustrate this by further instances in a note. Thus
+      {Greek: boutyron}, from which, through the Latin, our 'butter' has
+      descended to us, is borrowed (Pliny, _H.N._ xxviii. 9) from a
+      Scythian word, now to us unknown: yet it is sufficiently plain
+      that the Greeks so shaped and spelt it as to contain apparent
+      allusion to _cow_ and _cheese_; there is in {Greek: boutyron} an
+      evident feeling after {Greek: bous} and {Greek: tyron}. Bozra,
+      meaning citadel in Hebrew and Phoenician, and the name, no doubt,
+      which the citadel of Carthage bore, becomes {Greek: Byrsa} on
+      Greek lips; and then the well known legend of the ox-hide was
+      invented upon the name; not having suggested it, but being itself
+      suggested by it. Herodian (v. 6) reproduces the name of the Syrian
+      goddess Astarte in a shape that is significant also for Greek
+      ears--{Greek: Astroarche:}, The Star-ruler, or Star-queen. When
+      the apostate and hellenizing Jews assumed Greek names, 'Eliakim'
+      or "Whom God has set", became 'Alcimus' ({Greek: alkimos}) or The
+      Strong (1 Macc. vii. 5). Latin examples in like kind are
+      'com_i_ssatio', spelt continually 'com_e_ssatio', and
+      'com_e_ssation' by those who sought to naturalize it in England,
+      as though it were connected with 'c{)o}medo', to eat, being indeed
+      the substantive from the verb 'c{-o}missari' (--{Greek:
+      ko:mazein}), to revel, as Plutarch, whose Latin is in general not
+      very accurate, long ago correctly observed; and 'orichalcum',
+      spelt often '_au_richalcum', as though it were a composite metal
+      of mingled _gold_ and brass; being indeed the _mountain_ brass
+      ({Greek: oreichalkos}). The miracle play, which is 'mystere', in
+      French, whence our English 'mystery' was originally written
+      'mistere', being properly derived from 'ministere', and having its
+      name because the clergy, the _ministri_ Ecclesiae, conducted it.
+      This was forgotten, and it then took its present form of
+      'mystery', as though so called because the mysteries of the faith
+      were in it set out.
+
+{258} We have here, in this bringing of the words by their supposed
+      etymology together, the explanation of the fact that Spenser
+      (_Fairy Queen_, i, 7, 44), Middleton (_Works_, vol. 5, pp. 524,
+      528, 538), and others employ 'Tartary' as equivalent to 'Tartarus'
+      or hell.
+
+{259} For a full discussion of this matter and fixing of the period at
+      which 'sinfluot' became 'suendflut', see the _Theol. Stud. u.
+      Krit._ vol. ii, p. 613; and Delitzsch, _Genesis_, 2nd ed. vol. ii,
+      p. 210.
+
+{260} [The name of the small grape, originally _raisins de Corauntz_,
+      was transferred to the _ribes_ in the sixteenth century.]
+
+{261} Ben Jonson, _The New Inn_, Act i, Sc. i.
+
+{262} [On the contrary, it is the modern "Welsh _rarebit_" which has
+      been mistakenly evolved out of the older "Welsh _rabbit_" as I
+      have shown in _Folk-Etymology_, p. 431. Grose has both forms in
+      his _Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue_, 1785.]
+
+{263} 'Leghorn' is sometimes quoted as an example of this; but
+      erroneously; for, as Admiral Smyth has shown (_The Mediterranean_,
+      p. 409) 'Livorno' is itself rather the modern corruption, and
+      'Ligorno' the name found on the earlier charts.
+
+{264} Exactly the same happens in other languages; thus 'armbrust', a
+      crossbow, _looks_ German enough, and yet has nothing to do with
+      'arm' or 'brust', being a contraction of 'arcubalista', but a
+      contraction under these influences. As little has 'abenteuer'
+      anything to do with 'abend' or 'theuer', however it may seem to be
+      connected with them, being indeed the Provencal 'adventura'. And
+      'weissagen' in its earlier forms had nothing in common with
+      'sagen'.
+
+{265} [So Diez. But Prof. Skeat and Scheler see no reason why it should
+      not be direct from French _refuser_ and Low Latin _refusare_, from
+      _refusus_, rejected.]
+
+{266} It is upon this word that De Quincey (_Life and Manners_, p. 70,
+      American Ed.) says excellently well: "It is in fact by such
+      corruptions, by off-sets upon an old stock, arising through
+      ignorance or mispronunciation originally, that every language is
+      frequently enriched; and new modifications of thought, unfolding
+      themselves in the progress of society, generate for themselves
+      concurrently appropriate expressions.... It must not be allowed to
+      weigh against a word once fairly naturalized by all, that
+      originally it crept in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription
+      is as strong a ground of legitimation in a case of this nature, as
+      it is in law. And the old axiom is applicable--Fieri non debuit,
+      factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much
+      of their wealth". [_Works_, vol. xiv., p. 201.]
+
+{267} [The direct opposite is the fact. The French _contredanse_ was
+      borrowed from the English 'country-dance'. See _The Folk and their
+      Word-Lore_, p. 153.]
+
+{268} [These words are not identical. They were in use as distinct words
+      in the fifteenth century. See N.E.D.]
+
+{269} [Dr. Murray has shown that 'causeway' is not a corruption of
+      'causey' but a compound of that word with 'way'.]
+
+{270} [Prof. Skeat has demonstrated that the supposed Greek 'rachitis',
+      inflammation of the back, is an aetiological invention to serve as
+      etymon of 'rickets', the condition of being rickety, a purely
+      native word. See also _Folk-Etymology_, 312.]
+
+{271} [See _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 124.]
+
+{272} _Phars._ vi. 720-830.
+
+{273} Thus in a _Vocabulary_, 1475: Nigromansia dicitur divinatio facta
+      _per nigros_.
+
+{274} [Dyce believed that it was really thus derived and distinct from
+      _pleurisy_, but it was evidently modelled upon that word (_Remarks
+      on Editions of Shakespeare_, p. 218).]
+
+{275} As 'orthography' itself means properly "_right_ spelling", it might
+      be a curious question whether it is permissible to speak of an
+      _incorrect_ _ortho_graphy, that is of a _wrong_ _right_-spelling.
+      The question which would be thus started is one of not unfrequent
+      recurrence, and it is very worthy of observation how often, so
+      soon as we take note of etymologies, this _contradictio in
+      adjecto_ is found to occur. I will here adduce a few examples
+      from the Greek, the Latin, the German, and from our own tongue.
+      Thus the Greeks having no convenient word to express a rider,
+      apart from a rider _on a horse_, did not scruple to speak of the
+      _horse_man ({Greek: hippeus}) upon an _elephant_. They often
+      allowed themselves in a like inaccuracy, where certainly there
+      was no necessity; as in using {Greek: andrias} of the statue of a
+      _woman_; where it would have been quite as easy to have used
+      {Greek: heiko:n} or {Greek: agalma}. So too their 'table'
+      ({Greek: trapeza} = {Greek: tetrapeza}) involved probably the
+      _four_ feet which commonly support one; yet they did not shrink
+      from speaking of a _three_-footed table ({Greek: tripous
+      trapeza}), in other words, a "_three_-footed _four_-footed"; much
+      as though we should speak of a "_three_-footed _quadru_ped".
+      Homer writes of a 'hecatomb' not of a _hundred_, but of twelve,
+      oxen; and elsewhere of Hebe he says, in words not reproducible in
+      English, {Greek: nektar eo:nochoei}. 'Tetrarchs' were often
+      rulers of quite other than _fourth_ parts of a land. {Greek:
+      Akratos} had so come to stand for wine, without any thought more
+      of its signifying originally the _unmingled_, that St. John
+      speaks of {Greek: akratos kekerasmenos} (Rev. xiv. 10), or the
+      unmingled mingled. Boxes in which precious ointments were
+      contained were so commonly of alabaster, that the name came to be
+      applied to them whether they were so or not; and Theocritus
+      celebrates "_golden_ alabasters". Cicero having to mention a
+      water-clock is obliged to call it a _water_ _sun_dial (solarium
+      ex aqua). Columella speaks of a "_vintage_ of honey" (vindemia
+      mellis), and Horace invites his friend to im_pede_, not his
+      _foot_, but his head, with myrtle (_caput_ im_ped_ire myrto).
+      Thus too a German writer who desired to tell of the golden shoes
+      with which the folly of Caligula adorned his horse could scarcely
+      avoid speaking of _golden_ hoof-_irons_. The same inner
+      contradiction is involved in such language as our own, a "_false_
+      _ver_dict", a "_steel_ _cuirass_" ('coriacea' from corium,
+      leather), "antics new" (Harrington's _Ariosto_), an "_erroneous_
+      _etymo_logy", a "_corn_ _chandler_"; that is, a "_corn_
+      _candle_-maker", "_rather_ _late_", 'rather' being the
+      comparative of 'rathe', early, and thus "rather late" being
+      indeed "more early late"; and in others.
+
+{276} ['Siren' is now generally understood to have meant originally a
+      songstress, from the root _svar_, to sing or sound, seen in
+      _syrinx_, a flute, _su(r)-sur-us_, etc. See J. E. Harrison, _Myths
+      of the Odyssey_, p. 175.]
+
+{277} ['Chymist' seems to be the oldest form of the word in English; see
+      N.E.D.]
+
+{278} {Greek: che:mia}, the name of Egypt; see Plutarch, _De Is. et Os._
+      c. 33.
+
+{279} We have a notable evidence how deeply rooted this error was, how
+      long this confusion endured, of the way in which it was shared by
+      the learned as well as the unlearned, in Milton's _Apology for
+      Smectymnuus_, sect. 7, which everywhere presumes the identity of
+      the 'satyr' and the 'satirist'. It was Isaac Casaubon who first
+      effectually dissipated it even for the learned world. The results
+      of his investigations were made popular for the unlearned reader
+      by Dryden, in the very instructive _Discourse on Satirical
+      Poetry_, prefixed to his translations of Juvenal; but the
+      confusion still survives, and 'satyrs' and 'satires', the Greek
+      'satyric' drama, the Latin 'satirical' poetry, are still assumed
+      by most to have something to do with one another.
+
+{280} ['Dirige' was the first word of the antiphon at matins in the
+      Office for the Dead, taken from Psalm v, 9 (Vulg.), in which occur
+      the words "_dirige_ in conspectu tuo vitam meam". See Skeat,
+      _Piers Plowman_, ii, 52. Hence also Scotch _dregy_, a dirge.]
+
+{281} [Incorrect: the 'mid-wife' is etymologically she that is _with_
+      (old English _mid_) a woman to help her in her hour of need, like
+      German _bei-frau_, Spanish _co-madre_, Icelandic _naer-kona_,
+      "near-woman", Latin _ob-stetrix_, "by-stander", all words for the
+      lying-in nurse. Compare German _mit-bruder_, a comrade.]
+
+{282}               "I have seen him
+      Caper upright, like a wild _Morisco_,
+      Shaking the bloody darts, as he his bells".
+
+                        Shakespeare, _2 Henry VI_ Act iii, Sc. 1.
+
+{283} In the reprinting of old books it is often very difficult to
+      determine how far the old shape in which words present themselves
+      should be retained, how far they should be conformed to present
+      usage. It is comparatively easy to lay down as a rule that in
+      books intended for popular use, wherever the form of the word is
+      not affected by the modernizing of the spelling, as where this
+      modernizing consists merely in the dropping of superfluous
+      letters, there it shall take place; as who would wish our Bibles
+      to be now printed letter for letter after the edition of 1611, or
+      Shakespeare with the orthography of the first folio; but wherever
+      more than the spelling, the actual shape, outline, and character
+      of the word has been affected by the changes which it has
+      undergone, that in all such cases the earlier form shall be held
+      fast. The rule is a judicious one; but when it is attempted to
+      carry it out, it is not always easy to draw the line, and to
+      determine what affects the form and essence of a word, and what
+      does not. About some words there can be no doubt; and therefore
+      when a modern editor of Fuller's _Church History_ complacently
+      announces that he has allowed himself in such changes as 'dirige'
+      into 'dirge', 'barreter' into 'barrister', 'synonymas' into
+      'synonymous', 'extempory' into 'extemporary', 'scited' into
+      'situated', 'vancurrier' into 'avant-courier'; he at the same time
+      informs us that for all purposes of the study of the English
+      language (and few writers are for this more important than
+      Fuller), he has made his edition utterly worthless. Or again, when
+      modern editors of Shakespeare print, and that without giving any
+      intimation of the fact,
+
+          "Like quills upon the fretful _porcupine_",
+
+      he having written, and in his first folio and quarto the words
+      standing,
+
+          "Like quills upon the fretful _porpentine_",
+
+      this being the earlier, and in Shakespeare's time the more common
+      form of the word [e.g. "the _purpentines_ nature" (Puttenham,
+      _Eng. Poesie_, 1589, p. 118, ed. Arber)], they must be considered
+      as taking a very unwarrantable liberty with his text; and no less,
+      when they substitute 'Kenilworth' for 'Killingworth', which he
+      wrote, and which was his, Marlowe's, and generally the earlier
+      form of the name.
+
+{284} [Compare Latin _amita_, yielding old French _ante_, our 'aunt'.]
+
+{285} "The Carthaginians shall restore and deliver back all the
+      _renegates_ [perfugas] and fugitives that have fled to their side
+      from us".--p. 751.
+
+{286} [See further in _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 80.]
+
+{287} Halbertsma quoted by Bosworth, _Origin of the English and Germanic
+      Languages_, p. 39.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF WORDS
+
+
+                              PAGE
+    Abenteuer                  240
+    Abnormal                    72
+    Abominable                 245
+    Academy                     70
+    Accommodate                107
+    Acre                       193
+    Adamant                    230
+    Admiralty                  107
+    Advocate                    82
+    Aeon                        72
+    Aesthetic                   72
+    Afeard                     126
+    Affluent                   104
+    Afraid                     127
+    Afterthink                 120
+    Alcimus                    237
+    Alcove                      16
+    Amphibious                 107
+    Analogie                    56
+    Ant                        253
+    Antecedents                210
+    Anthem                     245
+    Antipodes                   68
+    Apotheosis                  67
+    -ard                       141
+    Armbrust                   240
+    Arride                      58
+    Ascertain                  186
+    Ask                        126
+    Astarte                    237
+    Attercop                   123
+    Aurantium                  241
+    Aurichalcum                237
+    Avunculize                  91
+    Axe                        126
+
+    Baffle                     181
+    Baker, bakester            157
+    Banter                     106
+    Barrier                     70
+    Battalion                   61
+    Bawn                       123
+    Benefice, benefit           97
+    Bitesheep                  144
+    Black art                  243
+    Blackguard                 189
+    Blasphemous                128
+    Bless                      231
+    Bombast                    199
+    Book                        21
+    Boor                       202
+    Bozra                      237
+    Brangle                    177
+    Bran-new                   231
+    Brat                       205
+    Brazen                     164
+    Breaden                    163
+    Bruin                       89
+    Buffalo                     16
+    Butter                     237
+    Buxom                      139
+
+    Chagrin                     95
+    Chance-medley              243
+    Chanticleer                 89
+    Chemist, chemistry         248
+    Chicken                    158
+    Chouse                      91
+    Chymist, chymistry         248
+    Clawback                   144
+    Comissatio                 237
+    Commerage                  204
+    Confluent                  104
+    Congregational              79
+    Contrary                   128
+    Corpse                     191
+    Country dance              242
+    Court card                 239
+    Coxcomb                    229
+    Cozen                      231
+    Crawfish                   252
+    Creansur                    45
+    Criterion                   67
+    Crone, crony                93
+    Crucible                   245
+    Crusade                     62
+    Cuirass                    246
+    Currant                    239
+    Cynarctomachy               91
+
+    Dahlia                      88
+    Dame                       192
+    Dandylion                  243
+    Dearworth                  120
+    Dedal                       86
+    Dehort                     137
+    Demagogue                   55
+    Denominationalism           79
+    Depot                       69
+    Diamond                    230
+    Dirge                      250
+    Dissimilation              103
+    Divest                     229
+    Donat                       86
+    Dorter                      20
+    Dosones                     90
+    Doughty                    146
+    Drachm                     193
+    Dragoman                    12
+    Dub                        146
+    Duke                       191
+    Dumps                      147
+    Dutch                      177
+
+    Eame                       118
+    Earsport                   119
+    Eaves                      159
+    Educational                 79
+    Effervescence               55
+    Einseitig                   75
+    Eliakim                    237
+    Ell                        251
+    Emet                       253
+    Emotional                   79
+    Encyclopedia                67
+    Enfantillage                55
+    Equivocation               196
+    Erutar                     149
+    Escobarder                  88
+    -ess                       153
+    Europe                     224
+    Eyebite                    120
+
+    Fairy                      191
+    Farfalla                    15
+    Fatherland                  75
+    Flitter-mouse              118
+    Flota                       17
+    Folklore                    75
+    Foolhappy                  137
+    Foolhardy                  137
+    Foolhasty                  137
+    Foollarge                  137
+    Foretalk                   120
+    Fougue                      66
+    Fraischeur                  66
+    Frances                     95
+    Francis                     95
+    Frimm                      118
+    Frivolite                   55
+    Frontispiece               245
+    Furlong                    193
+
+    Gainly                     136
+    Gallon                     193
+    Galvanism                   88
+    Garble                     199
+    Geir                       118
+    Gentian                     86
+    Girdle                      21
+    Girfalcon                  118
+    Girl                       192
+    Glassen                    163
+    Gordian                     86
+    Gossip                     203
+    Great                      226
+    Grimsire                   119
+    Grocer                     229
+    Grogram                    229
+
+    Halfgod                    120
+    Hallow                      82
+    Handbook                    75
+    Hangdog                    145
+    Hector                      89
+    Heft                       118
+    Hermetic                    86
+    Hery                       118
+    Hierosolyma                236
+    Hipocras                    86
+    Hippodame                   64
+    His                        131
+    Hooker                      16
+    Hoppester                  155
+    Hotspur                    119
+    Hoyden                     192
+    Huck                       157
+    Huckster, huckstress       157
+    Hurricane                   14
+
+    Iceberg                     73
+    Icefield                    74
+    Idea                       197
+    Imp                        205
+    Influence                  181
+    International               78
+    Island                     234
+    Isle                       234
+    Isolated                   107
+    Isothermal                 102
+    Its                        130
+
+    Jaw                        230
+    Jeopardy                    82
+
+    Kenilworth                 253
+    Kindly                     184
+    Kirtle                      21
+    Knave                      207
+    Knitster                   155
+    Knot                        87
+
+    Lambiner                    88
+    Lass                       154
+    Lazar                       86
+    Leer                       118
+    Leghorn                    240
+    Libel                      191
+    Lifeguard                   74
+    Lissome                    140
+    London                     227
+    Lunch, luncheon            129
+
+    Malingerer                 119
+    Mammet, mammetry            87
+    Mandragora                 243
+    Mansarde                    89
+    Matachin                    17
+    Matamoros                  143
+    Mausoleum                   86
+    Meat                       191
+    Meddle, meddlesome         206
+    Middler                    121
+    Mid-wife                   250
+    Milken                     163
+    Mischievous                128
+    Miscreant                  179
+    Mithridate                  86
+    Mixen                      123
+    Morris dance               251
+    Mystery, mystere           237
+    Myth                        72
+
+    Nap                        147
+    Necromancy                 243
+    Negus                       87
+    Nemorivagus                 77
+    Neophyte                   107
+    Nesh                       118
+    Niggot                      85
+    Nimm                       118
+    Noonscape                  129
+    Noonshun                   129
+    Normal                      72
+    Nostril                    251
+    Nugget                      85
+    Nuncheon                   128
+
+    Oblige                      69
+    Obsequies                  241
+    Oculissimus                 90
+    Orange                     241
+    Orichalcum                 237
+    Ornamentation               72
+    Orrery                      87
+    Orthography                245
+
+    Pagan                      202
+    Painful, painfulness       186
+    Pandar, pandarism           89
+    Panorama                   107
+    Pasquinade                  87
+    Patch                       87
+    Pate                       146
+    Pease                      159
+    Peck                       193
+    Pester                      84
+    Philauty                   105
+    Photography                 72
+    Physician                  101
+    Pigmy                      229
+    Pinchpenny                 144
+    Pleurisy                   244
+    Plunder                73, 106
+    Poet                       101
+    Polite                     200
+    Polytheism                 107
+    Porcupine                  253
+    Porpoise                    63
+    Postremissimus              91
+    Potecary                    64
+    Praevaricator              196
+    Pragmatical                206
+    Preliber                    56
+    Preposterous               195
+    Prestige                    68
+    Prevaricate                196
+    Privado                     16
+    Prose, proser              206
+    Punctilio                   16
+    Punto                       16
+    Pyramid                    235
+
+    Quellio                     17
+    Quinsey                     63
+    Quirpo                      16
+    Quirry                      64
+
+    Rakehell                   145
+    Rame                       241
+    Rathe, rathest             138
+    Realmrape                  119
+    Recover                    233
+    Redingote                   63
+    Refuse                     241
+    Regoldar                   149
+    Religion                   183
+    Renegade                   254
+    Renown                     103
+    Resent                     233
+    Reynard                     89
+    Rhyme                      245
+    Riches                     159
+    Rickets                    243
+    Righteousness              137
+    Rodomontade                 89
+    Rome                       227
+    Rootfast                   119
+    Rosen                      162
+    Ruly                       136
+    Runagate                   254
+
+    Sag                        118
+    Sardanapalisme              88
+    Sash                        63
+    Satellites                  61
+    Satire, satirical          250
+    Satyr, satyric        249, 250
+    Scent                      232
+    Schimmer                   118
+    Scrip                      232
+    Seamster, seamstress  155, 156
+    Selfish, selfishness       105
+    Sentiment                  107
+    Sepoy                      240
+    Serene                     135
+    Shrewd, shrewdness         209
+    Silhouette                  88
+    Silvern                    163
+    Silvicultrix                77
+    Siren                      247
+    Skinker                    117
+    Skip                       147
+    Slick                      132
+    Smellfeast                 143
+    Smug                       146
+    Solidarity                  70
+    Songster, songstress  155, 156
+    Sorcerer                   101
+    Spencer                     88
+    Sperr                      118
+    Spheterize                  72
+    Spinner, spinster          156
+    Starconner                 120
+    Starvation                  80
+    Starve                     192
+    Stereotype                  72
+    Stonen                     163
+    Suckstone                  120
+    Sudden                     220
+    Suicide                    105
+    Suicism, suist             105
+    Suendflut                  238
+    Sunstead                   120
+    Swindler                    74
+    Sycophant                  208
+
+    Tabinet                     88
+    Tapster                    157
+    Tarre                      118
+    Tartar                     237
+    Tartary                    238
+    Tea                        227
+    Theriac                    187
+    Thou                       171
+    Thrasonical                 89
+    Tind                       118
+    Tinnen                     163
+    Tinsel                     180
+    Tinsel-slippered           180
+    Tontine                     88
+    Topsy-turvy                215
+    Tosspot                    144
+    Tram                        88
+    Treacle                    187
+    Trigger                     73
+    Trounce                    147
+    Turban                      13
+
+    Umstroke                   120
+    Uncouth                    124
+
+    Vancurrier                  64
+    Vicinage                    63
+    Villain               201, 208
+    Volcano                     86
+    Voltaic                     88
+    Voyage                     191
+
+    Wanhope                    117
+    Waterfright                120
+    Watershed                  103
+    Weed                       192
+    Welk                       118
+    Welkin                     158
+    Welsh rabbit               240
+    Whole                      234
+    Windflower                 120
+    Wiseacre                   240
+    Witch                      101
+    Witticism                  106
+    Witwanton                  119
+    Woburn                     220
+    Woodbine                   229
+    Worship                    185
+    Woerterbuch                111
+
+    Yard                       193
+    Youngster                  156
+
+    Zoology                    107
+    Zoophyte                   107
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+{TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+Variation in the spelling of the names Jonson/Johnson, Spenser/Spencer,
+and Ralegh/Raleigh is as in the original.
+
+The following have been left as they appear in the original:
+
+    fetisch
+    There are who venture
+    substraction
+    tanquum consummata (probable error for "tamquam consumpta")
+    divergencies
+    In 'grogra_m_' we are entirely to seek
+
+The following obvious printing errors have been corrected:
+
+    LECTURE I
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    up words  n every quarter          in
+    el lagarto'                        removed quote mark
+    'trespasses' might be substitued   substituted
+    matter than in our authorized      Authorized
+    Galations v. 19                    Galatians
+    artificial, made-up, facititious   factitious
+    such doublets is given by Pro f    Prof.
+
+    LECTURE II
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    masterpieces of antient            ancient
+    {Greek: He:thos} is a word at      E:thos
+    'hca/racter' with Spenser;         chara/cter
+    perfectly well recognised          recognized
+    Shakesspeare than we find now      Shakespeare
+    'maumet', meaning an idol{95}      added comma after footnote marker
+    'aretinisms', from an,             removed comma after "an"
+    whith hitherto they held           which
+    Missouri and the Missisippi        Mississippi
+    things lacking, would have mended  added comma after "mended"
+    "The word t  must be               it
+    we have in common with the French  added period after "French"
+    Language Francais_, p. 12.         Langage
+    'fursehung' and 'vorsehung'        fuersehung
+
+    LECTURE III
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    so dose 'flitter-mouse'            does
+    is an old preterite                praeterite
+    instrinsic value it may possess.   intrinsic
+    which it belongs; being the same   added ")" before semicolon
+    'guideress'; 'charmeress'          changed semicolon to comma
+    superlatives as 'griveousest'      grievousest
+    'dwarfling', 'sherperdling'        shepherdling
+    _contra/ry_ run"--_Shakespeare._   added period after quotes
+    their charms".--_Spenser,_         changed comma to period
+    _bu h-sum_, i.e. 'bow-some',       buch-sum
+
+    LECTURE IV
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    Shakespeare in _I Henry VI_        changed I to 1
+    words justI quoted have conveyed?  I just
+    misapprehension in their persual   perusal
+    as by sea, was a 'voyage',         changed final comma to period
+    before they return back again.     added double quotes after "again"
+    1589, p. 181 (ed.                  181, ed.
+    _Preface to Bible_, 1611.          added ")" before period
+    Secker, _Sermons_, iii, 85 (ed.    85, ed.
+
+    LECTURE V
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    of the arbitary in spelling        arbitrary
+    'vert', 'verre' and 'vers',        changed final comma to period
+    v corresponding in the Greek.      changed "v" to {Greek: y}
+    and a very horried one             horrid
+    {Greek: ch ymo}                    chymos
+    Croker's edit. 1848, pp. 57        '5' unclear in the original
+    oua 'aunt'.                        our
+
+    INDEX
+
+    _ORIGINAL TEXT_                    _CHANGE_
+    Alcove 15                          16
+    Book 20                            21
+    Creansur 46                        45
+    Flota 16                           17
+    Galvanism 9                        88
+    Girdle 20                          21
+    Hooker 15                          16
+    Icefield 73                        74
+    Imp 215                            205
+    Kirtle 20                          21
+    Matachin 16                        17
+    Milken 162                         163
+    Postremissimus 90                  91
+    Quellio 16                         17
+    Rosen 161                          162
+    Silvern 162                        163
+    Stonen 162                         163
+    Tapster 156                        157
+}
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of English Past and Present, by 
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