VI
NEW WORDS AND OLD
Not long before the opening of the splendid exhibition which, for the short space of six months, made Chicago the most interesting city in the world, its leading literary journal editorially rejoiced that English was becoming a world-language, but sorrowed also that it was sadly in danger of corruption, especially from the piebald jargon of our so-called dialect stories. Not long before the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria a notorious sensation-monger of London, having founded a review in which to exploit himself, proclaimed that English was in a parlous state, and that something ought to be done at once or the language would surely die. The Chicago editor was grieved at the sorry condition of our language in the United States, while the London editor wept over its wretched plight in Great Britain. The American journalist called upon us to take pattern by the British; and the British journalist cried out for an Academy like that of the French to lay down laws for the speaking of our mother-tongue—intending perhaps to propose later the revival of the pillory or of the ducking-stool for those who shall infringe the stringent provisions of the new code.
There is nothing novel in these shrill outbreaks, which serve only to alarm the timid and to reveal an unhesitating ignorance of the history of our language. The same kind of protest has been made constantly ever since English has been recognized as a tongue worthy of preservation and protection; and it would be easy to supply parallels without number, some of them five hundred years old. A single example will probably suffice. In Steele’s ‘Tatler’ Swift wrote a letter denouncing “the deplorable ignorance that for some years hath reigned among our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual corruption of our style.” Here we find the ‘Tatler’ (of London) in the first decade of the eighteenth century saying exactly what the ‘Dial’ (of Chicago) echoed in the last decade of the nineteenth. But the earlier writer had an excuse the later writer was without; Swift wrote before the history of our language was understood.
We know now that growth is a condition of life; and that only a dead language is rigid. We know now that it is dangerous to elevate the literary diction too far above the speech of the plain people. We have found out that nobody in Rome ever spoke Ciceronian Latin; Cicero did not speak it himself; he did not even write it naturally; he wrote it with an effort and not always to his own satisfaction at the first attempt. We have discovered that there was a wide gap between the elegance of the orator’s polished periods and the uncouth bluntness of the vulgar tongue of the Roman people; and we believe that this divergence was broader than that between the perfect style of Hawthorne, for example, and the every-day dialect of Salem or of Concord.
By experts like Whitney we are told that there has been less structural modification of our language in the second half of the nineteenth century than in any other fifty-year period of its existence. Our vocabulary has been enormously enriched, but the skeleton of our speech has been only a little developed. With the decrease in illiteracy the conserving force of the printing-press must always hereafter make change increasingly difficult—even in the obvious cases where improvement is possible. The indirect influence of the novelist and the direct influence of the schoolmaster—very powerful each of them and almost irresistible when united—will always be exerted on the side of the conservatives. To seize these facts firmly and to understand their applications is to have ready always an ample answer for all those who chatter about the impending corruption of our noble tongue.
But we may go further. The study of history shows us that the future of English is dependent not on the watchfulness of its guardians, not upon the increasing richness and flexibility of its vocabulary, not upon the modification of its syntax, not upon the needed reform of its orthography; it is not dependent upon any purity or any corruption of the language itself. The future of the English language is dependent upon the future of the two great peoples that speak it; it is dependent upon the strength, the energy, the vigor, and the virtue of the British and the Americans. A language is but the instrument of those who use it; and English has flourished and spread not because of its own merits, many as they are, but because of the forthputting qualities of the masterful English stock. It must rise and fall with us who speak it. “No speech can do more than express the ideas of those who employ it at the time,” so a recent historian of our language has reminded us. “It cannot live upon its past meanings, or upon the past conceptions of great men that have been recorded in it, any more than the race which uses it can live upon its past glory or its past achievements.”
When we have once possessed ourselves of the inexorable fact that it is not in our power to warp the development of our language by any conscious effort, we can listen with amused toleration to the excited outcries of those who are constantly protesting against this or that word or phrase or usage which may seem to them new and therefore unjustifiable. We discover also that the self-appointed legislators who lay down the law thus peremptorily are often emphatic in exact proportion to their ignorance of the history of the language.
“Every word we speak,” so Dr. Holmes told us, “is the medal of a dead thought or feeling, struck in the die of some human experience, worn smooth by innumerable contacts, and always transferred warm from one to another.” We must admit that these chance medalists of language have not always been gifted artists or skilled craftsmen, so the words of their striking are sometimes misshapen; nor have they always respected the standard, so there is counterfeit coin in circulation sometimes. Even when the word is sterling and well minted, be it new or old,
Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary,
the coin itself is sometimes locked up in the reserve, to be misrepresented by a shabby paper promise to pay. So fierce is the popular demand for an increased per capita that the verbal currency is ever in danger of debasement. This is the apparent justification of the self-appointed tellers who busy themselves with touchstones of their own and who venture to throw out much false coin. Their tests are trustworthy now and again; but more often than not the pieces they have nailed to the counter are of full weight and ought to pass current.
“There is a purism,” Whitney said, “which, while it seeks to maintain the integrity of the language, in effect stifles its growth; to be too fearful of new words and phrases, new meanings, familiar and colloquial expressions, is little less fatal to the well-being of a spoken tongue than to rush into the opposite extreme.” And Professor Lounsbury goes further and asserts that our language is not to-day in danger from the agencies commonly supposed to be corrupting it, but rather “from ignorant efforts made to preserve what is called its purity.” And elsewhere the same inexpugnable authority reminds us that “the history of language is the history of corruptions,” and that “the purest of speakers uses every day, with perfect propriety, words and forms which, looked at from the point of view of the past, are improper, if not scandalous.”
There would be both interest and instruction in a list of the many words securely intrenched in our own vocabulary to-day which were bitterly assaulted on their first appearance. Swift praises himself for his valiant effort against certain of these intruders: “I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of mob and banter, but have been plainly borne down by numbers and betrayed by those who promised to assist me.” Puttenham (or whoever it was that wrote the anonymous ‘Arte of English Poesie,’ published in 1589) admitted the need of certain words to which the purists might justly object, and then adds that “many other like words borrowed out of the Latin and French were not so well to be allowed by us,” citing then, among those of which he disapproved, audacious, egregious, and compatible. In the ‘Poetaster,’ acted in 1601, Ben Jonson satirized Marston’s verbal innovations, and among the words he reviled are clumsy, inflate, spurious, conscious, strenuous, defunct, retrograde, and reciprocal; and in his ‘Discoveries’ Jonson shrewdly remarked that “a man coins not a new word without some peril and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured.”
Puttenham wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, Jonson at the beginning of the seventeenth, Swift at the beginning of the eighteenth; and at the beginning of the nineteenth we find Lady Holland declaring influential to be a detestable word and asserting that she had tried in vain to get Sheridan to forego it.
At the end of the nineteenth century the battle was still raging over standpoint, for example, and over reliable and over lengthy, and over a score of others, all of which bid fair to establish themselves ultimately because they supply a demand more or less insistent. The fate is more doubtful of photo for photograph and of phone for telephone; they both strike us now as vulgarisms, just as mob (and for the same reason) struck Swift as vulgar; and it may be that in time they will live down this stigma of illegitimacy just as mob has survived it. Then there is the misbegotten verb, to enthuse, in my sight the most hideous of vocables. What is to be its fate? Altho I have detected it in the careful columns of the ‘Nation,’ it has not as yet been adopted by any acknowledged master of English; none the less, I fear me greatly, it has all the vitality of other ill weeds. And is bike going to get itself recognized as a substitute for bicycle, both as verb and as noun? It seems to be possible, since a monosyllable has always an advantage over a trisyllable in our impatient mouths.
Swift objected sharply to the curtailing of words “when we are already overloaded with monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our language.” Then he wittily characterizes the process by which mob had been made, cab was to be made, and photo is now in the making: “Thus we cram one syllable and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened her mice after she had bit off their legs to prevent them from running away; and if ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer the end: for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them.” Swift was rash enough to assert that speculation, operation, preliminaries, ambassador, communication, and battalion were words newly introduced, and also to prophesy that they were too poly-syllabic to be able to endure many more campaigns. As it happens no attempt has been made to shorten any one of them except speculation, and it can hardly be maintained that spec has established itself. Certainly it has not disestablished speculation, as mob has driven out mobile vulgus.
Dryden declared that he traded “both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language”; but he denied that he Latinized too much; and most of the Gallicisms he attempted have not won acceptance. Lowell thought that Dryden did not add a single word to the language, unless “he first used magnetism in its present sense of moral attraction.” Dr. Holmes also discovered that it is not enough to make a new word when it is needed and to fashion it fitly; its fortune still depends on public caprice or popular instinct. “I’ve sometimes made new words,” he told a friend; “I made chrysocracy, thinking it would take its place, but it didn’t; plutocracy, meaning the same thing, was adopted instead.” But anesthesia is a word of Dr. Holmes’s making which has won its way not only in English but in most of the other modern languages. It may be doubted whether a like fortune will follow another word to be found quoted in one of his letters, aproposity, a bilingual hybrid not without analogues in our language.
It is with surprise that in Stevenson’s very Scotch romance ‘David Balfour’ we happen upon another malformation—come-at-able, hitherto supposed to be Yankee in its origin and in its aroma. Elsewhere in the same story we read “you claim to be innocent,” a form which the cockney critics are wont to call American. Stevenson in this novel uses both the modern jeopardize and the ancient enjeopardy. Just why to jeopardize should have driven to jeopard out of use, it is not easy to declare, nor why leniency is supplanting lenity. As drunk seems to suggest total intoxication, it is possible to discover the cause of the increasing tendency to say “I have drank.” No defense is easy of in our midst for in the midst of us, and yet it will prevail inevitably, for it is a convenient short-cut. Dr. Holmes confessed to Richard Grant White that he had used it once, and that Edward Everett (who had also once fallen from grace) made him see the error of his ways. It is to be found twice in Stevenson’s ‘Amateur Emigrant,’ and again in the ‘Res Judicatæ’ of Mr. Augustine Birrell, a brisk essayist, altho not an impeccable stylist.
It is nothing against a noun that it is new. To call it a neologism is but begging the question. Of necessity every word was new once. It was “struck in the die of human experience,” to come back to Dr. Holmes’s figure; and it is at its best before it is “worn smooth by innumerable contacts.” Lowell thought it was a chief element of Shakspere’s greatness that “he found words ready to his use, original and untarnished—types of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions.” He “found a language already established but not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mongers.” For the same reason Mérimée delighted in Russian, because it was “young, the pedants not having had time to spoil it; it is admirably fit for poetry.”
This native relish for the uncontaminated word it was that led Hugo and Gautier to ransack all sorts of special vocabularies. This thirst for the unhackneyed epithet it is that urges Mr. Rudyard Kipling to avail himself of the technical terms of trade, which serve his purpose, not merely because they are exact, but also because they are unexpected. The device is dangerous, no doubt, but a writer of delicate perceptions can find his advantage in it. Perhaps George Eliot was a little too fond of injecting into fiction the terminology of science, but there was nothing blameworthy in the desire to enlarge the vocabulary which should be at the command of the novelist. Professor Dowden records that when she used in a story words and phrases like dynamic and natural selection, the reviewer pricked up his delicate ears and shied; and he makes bold to suggest that “if the thoroughbred critic could only be led close up to dynamic, he would find that dynamic would not bite.” Every lover of our language will sympathize with Professor Dowden’s assertion that “a protest of common sense is really called for against the affectation which professes to find obscurity in words because they are trisyllabic or because they carry with them scientific associations. Language, the instrument of literary art, is an instrument of ever-extending range, and the truest pedantry, in an age when the air is saturated with scientific thought, would be to reject those accessions to the language which are the special gain of the time.”
Where George Eliot erred—if err she did at all in this matter—was in the use of scientific terms inappropriately, or, so to say, boastfully, whereby she aroused an association of ideas foreign to the purpose in hand. Every writer needs to consider most carefully both the obvious and the remote associations of the phrases he employs, that these may intensify the thought he wishes to convey. A word is known by the company it has kept. Especially must a poet have a keen nose for the fragrant word, or else his stanzas will lack savor. The magic of his art lies largely in the syllables he selects, in their sound and in their color. Not their meanings merely are important to him, but their suggestions also—not what they denote more than what they connote. An American psychologist has recently told us that every word has not only its own note but also its overtones. With unconscious foresight, the great poets have always acted on this theory.
Perhaps this is a reason why the poets have ever been ready to rescue a cast-off word from the rubbish-heap of the past. Professor Earle (of Oxford) declares that “it has been one of the most interesting features of the new vigor and independence of American literature, that it has often displayed in a surprising manner what springs of novelty there are in reserve and to be elicited by novel combinations”—a statement more complimentary in its intent than felicitous in its phrasing. And Professor Earle praises Emerson and Lowell and Holmes for their skill in enriching our modern English with the old words locked up out of sight in the treasuries of the past. Lowell said of Emerson that “his eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself.”
Of course this effort to recover the scattered pearls of speech, dropped by the wayside in the course of the centuries, is peculiar neither to the United States nor to the nineteenth century—altho perhaps it has been carried further in our country and in our time than anywhere else. Modern Greek has recalled to its aid as much old Greek as it can assimilate. Sallust was accused by an acrid critic of having made a list of obsolete words, which he strove deliberately to reintroduce into Latin. This is, in effect, what Spenser sought to do with Chaucer’s vocabulary; and it is curious to reflect that, owing, it may be, in part, to the example set by the author of the ‘Faerie Queene,’ the language of the ‘Canterbury Tales’ is far less strange, less remote, less archaic to us to-day than it was to the Elizabethans.
A rapid consumption of the vocabulary is going on constantly. Words are swiftly worn out and used up and thrown aside. New words are made or borrowed to fill the vacancies; and old words are impressed into service and forced to do double duty. No sooner is a new dictionary completed than the editor sets about his inevitable supplement. And the dictionary is not only of necessity incomplete: it is also inadequate in its definitions, for it may happen that a word will take on an added meaning while the big book is at the bindery. Our language is fluctuating always; and now one word and now another has expanded its content or has shrunk away into insignificance. No definition is surely stable for long. When Cotton Mather wrote in defense of his own style disgust was fairly equivalent to dislike; “and if a more massy way of writing be never so much disgusted at this day, a better gust will come on.”
Once upon a time to aggravate meant to increase an offense; now it is often used as tho it meant to irritate. Formerly calculated—as in the sentence “it was calculated to do harm”—implied a deliberate intention to injure; now the idea of intention has been eliminated and the sentence is held to be roughly equivalent to “it was likely to do harm.” Verbal is slowly getting itself accepted as synonymous with oral, in antithesis to written. Lurid was really pale, wan, ghastly; but how often of late has it been employed as tho it signified red or ruddy or bloody?
At first these new uses of these old words were slovenly and inadmissible inaccuracies, but by sheer insistence they are winning their pardon, until at last they will gain authority as they broaden down from precedent to precedent. It is well to be off with the old word before you are on with the new; and no writer who respects his mother-tongue is ever in haste to take up with words thus wrested from the primitive propriety.
But, as Dryden declared when justifying his modernizing of Chaucer’s vocabulary, “Words are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to be removed; customs are changed, and even statutes are silently repealed when the reason ceases for which they were enacted.” It was Dryden’s “Cousin Swift” who once declared that “a nice man is a man of nasty ideas”—an assertion which I venture to believe to be wholly incomprehensible to-day to the young ladies of England in whose mouths nice means agreeable and nasty means disagreeable. Nice has suffered this inexplicable metamorphosis in the United States as well as in Great Britain, but nasty has not yet been emptied of its original offensiveness here as it has over there. And even in British speech the transformation is relatively recent; I think Stevenson was guilty of an anachronism in ‘Weir of Hermiston’ when he put it in the mouth of a young Scot.
If the Scotch have followed the evil example of the English in misusing nasty, the English in turn have twisted the ilk of North Britain to serve their own ends. Of that ilk is a phrase added to a man’s surname to show that this name and the name of his estate are the same; thus Bradwardine of Bradwardine would be called “Bradwardine of that ilk.” But it is not uncommon now to see a phrase like “people of that ilk,” meaning obviously “people of that sort.”
In like manner awful and terrible and elegant have been so misused as mere intensives that a careful writer now strikes them out when they come off the end of his pen in their original meaning. So quite no longer implies completely but is almost synonymous with somewhat—quite poor meaning somewhat poor and quite good meaning pretty good. Unique is getting to imply merely excellent or perhaps only unusual; its exact etymological value is departing forever. Creole, which should be applied only to Caucasian natives of tropical countries born of Latin parents, is beginning to carry with it in the vulgar tongue of to-day a vague suspicion of negro blood.
While the perversion of nice and nasty is British, there is an American perversion of dirt not unlike it. To most Americans, I think, dirt suggests earth or soil or clay or dust; to most Americans, I think, dirt no longer carries with it any suggestion of dirtiness. I have heard a mother send her little boy off to make mud-pies on condition that he used only “clean dirt”; and I know that a lawn-tennis ground of compacted earth is called a dirt court. Yet, tho the noun has thus been defecated, the adjective keeps its earlier force; and there even lingers something of the pristine value in the noun itself when it is employed in the picturesque idiom of the Rocky Mountains, where to be guilty of an underhand injury against any one is to do him dirt. Lovers of Western verse will recall how the frequenters of Casey’s table d’hôte went to see “Modjesky as Cameel,” and how they sat in silence until the break occurs between the lover and his mistress:
At that Three-fingered Hoover says: “I’ll chip into this game,
And see if Red Hoss Mountain cannot reconstruct the same.
I won’t set by and see the feelin’s of a lady hurt—
Gol durn a critter, anyhow, that does a woman dirt!”
Here no doubt, we have crossed the confines of slang; but having done so, I venture upon an anecdote which will serve to show how completely sometimes the newer meaning of a word substitutes itself for the older. Two friends of mine were in a train of the elevated railroad, passing through that formerly craggy part of upper New York which was once called Shantytown and which now prefers to be known as Harlem. One of them drew the attention of the other to the capering young capricorns that sported over the blasted rocks by the side of the lofty track. “Just look at those kids,” were the words he used. He was overheard by a boy of the streets sitting in the next seat, who glanced out of the window at once, but failed to discover the children he expected to behold. Whereupon he promptly looked up and corrected my friend. “Them’s not kids,” declared the urchin of Manhattan; “them’s little goats!” In the mind of this native youngster there was no doubt at all as to the meaning of the word kid; to him it meant child; and he would have scorned any explanation that it ever had meant young goat.
In ignorance is certainty, and with increase of wisdom comes hesitancy. For example, what does the word romantic really mean? Few adjectives are harder worked in the history of modern literature; and no two of those who use it would agree upon its exact context. It suggests one set of circumstances to the student of English literature, a second set to a student of German literature, and a third to a student of French literature; while every student of comparative literature must echo Professor Kuno Francke’s longing for “the formation of an international league for the suppression of the terms both romanticism and classicism.”
Other words there are almost as ambiguous—philology, for example, and college and chapel. By classical philology we understand the study of all that survives of the civilizations of Greece and Rome, their languages, their literature, their laws, their arts. But has Romance philology or Germanic philology so broad a basis? Has English philology? To nine out of ten of us, this use of the word now seems to put stress on the study of linguistics as against the study of literature; to ninety-nine out of a hundred, I think, philologist suggests the narrow student of linguistics; and therefore the wider meaning seems likely soon to fall into innocuous desuetude.
The change in the application of college is still in process of accomplishment. In England a college was a place of instruction, sometimes independent (as Eton College, in which case it is really a high school) and sometimes a component part of a university (in which case the rest of the organization is not infrequently non-existent). An English university is not unlike a federation of colleges; and the relation of Merton and Magdalen to Oxford is not unlike that of Massachusetts and Virginia to the United States. In America college and university were long carelessly confused, as tho they were interconvertible terms; but of late a sharp distinction is being set up—a distinction quite different from that obtaining in England. In this new American usage, a college is a place where undergraduates are trained, and a university is a place where graduate-students are guided in research. Thus the college gives breadth, and the university adds depth. Thus the college provides general culture and the university provides the opportunity of specialization. If we accept this distinction,—and it has been accepted by all those who discuss the higher education in America,—we are forced to admit that the most of the self-styled universities of this country should be called colleges; and we are allowed to observe that the college and the university can exist side by side in the same institution, as at Harvard and at Columbia. We are forced also to admit that what is known in Great Britain as “University Extension” cannot fairly retain that title here in the United States, since its object is not the extension of university work, as we now understand the word university here; it is at most the extension of college work.
While this modification of the meaning of college is being made in America, a modification of chapel has been made in England. At first chapel described a subordinate part of a church, devoted to special services. By natural extension it came to denote a smaller edifice subsidiary to a large church, as Grace Church, in New York, was once a chapel of Trinity Church. But in the nineteenth century chapel came to be applied in England especially to the humbler meeting-houses of the various sects of dissenters, while church is reserved for the places of worship of the established religion. Thus Sir Walter Besant classifies the population of a riverside parish in London into those who go to church and those who go to chapel, having no doubt that all his British readers will understand the former to be Episcopalians and the latter Methodists or the like.
This is a Briticism not likely ever to be adopted in America. But another Briticism bids fair to have a better fortune. Living as they do on a little group of islands, the British naturally are in the habit of referring to the rest of Europe as the Continent. They run across the Channel to take a little tour “on the Continent.” They speak of the pronunciation of Latin that obtains everywhere but in Great Britain and Ireland as the continental pronunciation. When they wish to differentiate their authors, for instance, from the French and the German and the Italians, they lump these last together as the continental authors. The division of Europe into continental and British is so convenient that it is certain to be adopted on this side of the Atlantic. Already has a New York literary review, after having had a series of papers on “Living Critics” (in which were included both British writers and American), followed it with a series of “Living Continental Critics” (in which the chief critics of France, Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia were considered). Yet there is no logic in this use of the word over here, since we Americans are not insular; and since North America is a continent just as Europe is. As it happens, the word continental in a wholly contradictory meaning is glorious in the history of the United States. Who does not know how,
In their ragged regimentals,
Stood the old Continentals,
Yielding not?
None the less will the convenience of this British use of the word outweigh its lack of logic in America—as convenience has so often overridden far more serious considerations. Language is only a tool, after all; and it must ever be shaped to fit the hand that uses it. This is why another illogical misuse of a word will get itself recognized as legitimate sooner or later—the limitations of American to mean only that which belongs to the United States. When we speak of American ideas we intend to exclude not only the ideas of South America but also those of Mexico and of Canada; we are really arrogating to ourselves a supremacy so overwhelming as to warrant our ignoring altogether all the other peoples having a right to share in the adjective. Our reason for this is that there is no national adjective available for us. We can speak of Mexican ideas and of Canadian ideas; but we cannot—or at least we do not and we will not—speak of United Statesian ideas. And this appropriation to ourselves of an adjective really the property of all the inhabitants of the continent seems to be perfectly acceptable to the only other group of those inhabitants speaking our language,—the English colonists to the north of us. On both sides of the Niagara River the smaller brother of the gigantic Horseshoe cataract is known as the “American fall.” Even in the last century the British employed American to indicate the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies; and Dr. Johnson wrote in 1775: “That the Americans are able to bear taxation is indubitable.” But our ownership of American as a national adjective, if tolerated by the Canadians and the British, is not admitted by those who do not speak our language. Probably to both the Italians and the Spaniards South America rather than North is the part of the world that rises in the mental vision when the word American is suddenly pronounced.
Another distinction not unlike this, but logical as well as convenient, is getting itself recognized. This distinction results from accepting the obvious fact that the literature of the English language has nowadays two independent divisions—that produced in the British Isles and that produced in the United States. The writers of both nations speak the English language, and therefore their works—whensoever these rise to the level of literature—belong to English literature. We are wont to call one division American literature, and we are beginning to see that logic will soon force us to call the other division British literature. Mr. Stedman has dealt with the poetry of the English language of the past sixty years in two volumes, one on the ‘Victorian Poets,’ and the other on the ‘Poets of America,’ and this serves to show how sharp is the line of separation. With his customary carefulness of epithet, Mr. Stedman in the preface to the earlier volume always uses British as the antithesis of American, reserving English as the broader adjective to cover both branches of our literature. Probably the many collections of the ‘British Poets,’ the ‘British Novelists,’ the ‘British Theater,’ were so called to allow the inclusion of works produced in the sister kingdoms; it is well to remember that Scott and Moore were neither of them Englishmen. There is a certain piquancy in the fact that the adjective British, available in the beginning of the nineteenth century because it included the Scotch and the Irish, is even more useful at the end of the nineteenth century because it differentiates the English, Scotch, and Irish, taken all together, from the Americans.
Telegram was denounced as a mismade word, and cablegram was rejected with abhorrence by all defenders of purity. Yet the firm establishment of telegraph and telephone made certain the ultimate acceptance of telegram. But cablegram is still on probation, and may fail of admission in the end, perhaps, because a part of the word seems to be better fitted for its purpose than the whole. A message received by the telegraph under the ocean is often curtly called a cable, as when a man says, “I’ve just had a cable from my wife in Paris.” This, I think, is rather American than British; but it is akin to the British use of wire as synonymous with both telegram and to telegraph. An Englishman invites you to a house-party, and writes that he will meet you at the station “on a wire,” intending to convey to you his desire that you should telegraph him the hour of your arrival. In a short story by Mr. Henry James, that most conscientious of recorders of British speech, he tells us that after wires and counterwires one of the characters of his tale was at last able to arrive at the house where the action takes place. The locution is hot from the verbal foundry; and it seems to imply what an American writer would have expressed by saying that there had been “telegraphing to and fro.”
American, probably, is the verb to process, and also its past participle processed. When new methods of photo-engraving were introduced here in the United States, a black-and-white artist would express a preference either to have his drawing engraved on wood or have it reproduced mechanically by a photo-engraving process; and as he needed a brief word to describe this latter act, one was promptly forthcoming, and he asked, “Is this thing of mine to be engraved or processed?” The word half-tone seems also to be of American manufacture; and it describes one of these methods of photo-engraving. It is not only a noun, but also, on occasions, a verb; and the artist will ask if his wash-drawing is to be half-toned. Of necessity the several improvements in the art of photo-engraving brought with them a variety of new terms absolutely essential in the terminology of the craft, most of them remaining hidden in the technical vocabulary, altho now and again one or another has thrust itself up into the general language.
Any attempt to declare the British or the American origin of an idiom is most precarious; and he who ventures upon it has need of double caution. When a friend of mine asked the boy at the door of the club if it was still raining, and was answered, “No, sir; it’s fairing up now,” he was at first inclined to think that he had captured an Americanism hitherto unknown and delightfully fresh; but he consulted the Century Dictionary, only to find that it was a Scoticism,—there was even a quotation from Stevenson’s ‘Inland Voyage,’—and that it was not uncommon in the southwestern states. And when Captain Mahan brought out the difference between preparation for war and preparedness for war, this friend was ready to credit the naval historian with the devising not only of a most valuable distinction but also of a most useful word; but a dip into the Century Dictionary again revealed that a Scotchman had not waited for an American to use the word, and that it had been employed by Bain, not even as tho it was a novelty.
Once in the pages of Hawthorne, who was affluent in words and artistically adroit in his management of them, I met a phrase that pleased me mightily, “a heterogeny of things”; and I find heterogeny duly collected in the Century Dictionary but without any quotation from Hawthorne. Another word of Hawthorne’s in the ‘Blithedale Romance’ is improvability: “In my own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world’s improvability than it deserved.” This I fancy may be Hawthorne’s very own; but it is in the Century Dictionary, all the same, and without any indication of its origin. Quite possibly the New England romancer disinterred it from some forgotten tome of the “somniferous school of literature,” as he had humorously entitled the writings of his theological ancestors.
There is a word of Abraham Lincoln’s that I long for the right to use. Mr. Noah Brooks has recorded that he once heard the President speak of a certain man as interruptious. This adjective conveys a delicate shade of meaning not discoverable in any other; it may not be inscribed in the bead-roll of the King’s English, but it was a specimen of the President’s English; and has any Speech from the Throne in this century really rivaled the force and felicity of the Second Inaugural?
It was not the liberator of the negro but one of the freedmen themselves who made offhand use of a delicious word, for which it is probably hopeless for us to expect acceptance, however useful the new term might prove. During a debate in the legislature of South Carolina in the Reconstruction days, a sable ally of the carpet-baggers rose to repel the taunts of his opponents, declaring energetically that he hurled back with scorn all their insinuendos. The word holds a middle ground between insinuation and innuendo; and between the two it has scant chance of survival. But it is an amusing attempt, for all its failure; and it would have given pleasure to the author of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ And how many of Lewis Carroll’s own verbal innovations, wantonly manufactured for his sport, are likely to get themselves admitted into the language of literature? Chortle stands the best chance of them all, I think; and I believe that many a man has said that he chortled, with no thought of the British bard who ingeniously devised the quaint vocable.
So Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s burgle seems to be winning its way into general use. At first those who employed it followed the example of the comic lyrist, and did so with humorous intent; but of late it is beginning to serve those who are wholly devoid of humor. Perhaps the verb to burgle (from the noun burglar) supplied the analogy on which was made the verb to ush (from the noun usher). With my own ears I once heard a well-known clergyman in New York express the thanks of the congregation to “the gentlemen who ush for us.”
It is well that strange uses like these do not win early acceptance into our speech—that there should be alert challengers at the portal to cry “Halt!” and to examine a newcomer’s credentials. It is well also that the stranger should have leave to prove his usefulness and so in time gain admittance even to the inner sanctuary of the language. John Dryden discussed the reception into English of new words and phrases with the sturdy common sense which was one of the characteristics most endearing him to us as a true type of the man of letters who was also a man of the world. “It is obvious,” he wrote in his ‘Defense of the Epilog,’ “that we have admitted many, some of which we wanted, and therefore our language is the richer for them, as it would be by importation of bullion; others are rather ornamental than necessary; yet by their admission the language is become more courtly and our thoughts are better dressed.”
Historians of the language have had no difficulty in bringing together a mass of quotations from the British writers of the eighteenth century to show that they were then possessed of the belief that it was feasible and necessary to set bounds to the growth of English. They were afraid that the changes going on in the language would make it “impossible for succeeding ages to read or appreciate the literature produced.” In his interesting and instructive lecture on the ‘Evolution of English Lexicography,’ Dr. Murray remarks that “to us of a later age, with our fuller knowledge of the history of language, and our wider experience of its fortunes, when it has to be applied to entirely new fields of knowledge, such as have been opened to us since the birth of modern science, this notion seems childlike and pathetic. But it was eminently characteristic of the eighteenth century.”
It is small wonder therefore that this absurd notion infected two of the most characteristic figures of the eighteenth century—Johnson and Franklin. Dr. Johnson set forth in the plan of his dictionary that “one great end of this undertaking is to fix the English language.” Even so shrewd a student of all things as was Franklin seems to have accepted this current fallacy. When he acknowledged the dedication of Noah Webster’s ‘Dissertations on the English Language,’ he declared that he could not “but applaud your zeal for preserving the purity of our language, both in its expressions and pronunciation.” Then, as tho to prove to us, once for all, the futility of all efforts to “fix the language” and to “preserve its purity,” Franklin picks out half a dozen novelties of phrase and begs that Webster will use his “authority in reprobating them.” Among these innovations that Franklin disapproved of are improved, noticed, advocated, progressed, and opposed.
This letter to Webster was written in 1789; and already in 1760 Franklin had yielded to certain of David Hume’s criticisms upon his parts of speech: “I thank you for your friendly admonition relating to some unusual words in the pamphlet. It will be of service to me. The pejorate and the colonize, since they are not in common use here, I give up as bad; for certainly in writings intended for persuasion and for general information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression in the least obscure is a fault. The unshakable, too, tho clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing new words, where we are already possessed of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally wrong, as it tends to change the language.”
With all his intellect and all his insight and all his common sense—and with this most precious quality Franklin was better furnished than either Johnson or Dryden—he could not foresee that to notice and to advocate and to colonize were words without which the English language could not do its work in the world. And when he gives up unshakable “as rather low” he stands confessed as a contemporary of the men whom Fielding and Goldsmith girded at. In spite of the example of Steele and Addison, in spite of his own vigorous directness in ‘Poor Richard’ and in all his political pamphlets, Franklin feels that there is and that there ought to be a wide gap between the English that is spoken and the English that is written. He did not perceive that spoken English, with all its hazardous expressions, its clipped words, its violent metaphors, its picturesque slang, its slovenly clumsiness, is none the less the proving-ground of the literary vocabulary, which is forever tending to self-exhaustion.
Nobody has better stated the wiser attitude of a writer toward the tools of his trade than Professor Harry Thurston Peck in his incisive discussion of ‘What is Good English?’ He begins by noting that “the English language, as a whole, is the richest of all modern tongues, and it is not to be bounded by the comparatively narrow limits of its literature. There exists, as well, the easy, fluent usage of conversation, and there is also the strong, simple, homely speech of the common people, rooted in plain Saxon, smacking of the soil, and having a sturdy power about it that is unsurpassable for downright force and blunt directness.” And Professor Peck, having pointed out how an artist in words is free to avail himself of the term he needs from books or from life, declares that “the writer of the best English is he whose language responds exactly to his mood and thought, now thundering and surging with the majestic words whose immediate ancestry is Roman, now rippling and singing with the smooth harmonies of later speech, now forging ahead with the irresistible energy of the Saxon, and now laughing and wantoning in the easy lightness of our modern phrase.”