Words; Their Use and Abuse

Though he was afterward informed of the untruth of these lines, Byron, plethoric as he was with poetic wealth and wit, could not willingly let them die; and so the witticism yet remains to mislead and provoke the laughter of his readers.

Again, there are authors who, to meet the necessities of rhyme, or to give music to a period, will pad out their sentences with meaningless expletives. They employ words as carpenters put false windows into houses; not to let in light upon their meaning, but for symmetry. Or, perhaps, they imagine that a certain degree of distension of the intellectual stomach is required to enable it to act with its full powers,—just as some of the Russian peasantry mix sawdust with the train oil they drink, or as hay and straw, as well as corn, are given to horses, to supply the necessary bulk. Thus Dr. Johnson, imitating Juvenal, says:

This, a lynx-eyed critic contended, was equivalent to saying: “Let observation, with extensive observation, observe mankind extensively.” If the Spartans, as we are told, fined a citizen because he used three words where two would have done as well, how would they have punished such prodigality of language?

It is an impressive truth which has often been noticed by moralists, that indulgence in verbal vice speedily leads to corresponding vices in conduct. If a man talk of any mean, sensual, or criminal practice in a familiar or flippant tone, the delicacy of his moral sense is almost sure to be lessened, he loses his horror of the vice, and, when tempted to do the deed, he is far more likely to yield. Many a man, without dreaming of such a result, has thus talked himself into vice, into sensuality, and even into ruin. The apostle James was so impressed with the significance of speech that he regarded it as an unerring sign of character. “If any man offend not in word,” he declares, “the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body.” Again he declares that “the tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison”; commenting upon which, Rev. F. W. Robertson observes: “The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is known; there are poisons so destructive that a single drop insinuated into the veins produces death in three seconds.... In that drop of venom which distils from the sting of the smallest insect, or the spikes of the nettle-leaf, there is concentrated the quintessence of a poison so subtle that the microscope cannot distinguish it, and yet so virulent that it can inflame the blood, irritate the whole constitution, and convert night and day into restless misery.” So, he adds, there are words of calumny and slander, apparently insignificant, yet so venomous and deadly that they not only inflame hearts and fever human existence, but poison human society at the very fountain springs of life. It was said with the deepest feeling of the utterers of such words, by one who had smarted under their sting: “Adders’ poison is under their lips.”

Who can estimate the amount of misery which has been produced in society by merely idle words, uttered without malice, and by words uttered in jest? A poet, whose name is unknown to us, has vividly painted the effects of such utterances:

How often have thoughtless words set empires ablaze, and kindled furious wars among nations! It was one of the virtues of George Washington that he knew how to be silent. John Adams said he had the most remarkable mouth he had ever seen; for he had the art of controlling his lips. One of the rules of conduct to which David Hume inflexibly adhered, was never to reply to any attack made upon him or his writings. It was creditable to him that he had no anxiety to have “the last word,”—that which in family circles has been pronounced to be “the most dangerous of infernal machines.”

It is not, however, in the realm of literature and morals only that the power of words is seen. Who is ignorant of their sway in the world of politics? Is not fluency of speech, in many communities, more than statesmanship? Are not brains, with a little tongue, often far less potent than “tongue with a garnish of brains”? Need any one be told that a talent for speech-making has stood in place of all other acquirements; that it is this which has made judges without law, and diplomatists without French; which has sent to the army brigadiers who knew not a cannon from a mortar, and to the legislature men who could not tell a bank note from a bill of exchange; which, according to Macaulay, made a Foreign Minister of Mr. Pitt, who never opened Vattel, and which was near making a Chancellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not work a sum in long division? “To be a man of the world,” says Corporal Bunting, a character in one of Bulwer’s novels, “you must know all the ins and outs of speechifying. It’s words that make another man’s mare go your road. Augh! that must have been a clever man as invented language. It is a marvel to think how much a man does in the way of cheating, if he only has the gift of the gab; wants a missus,—talks her over; wants your horse,—talks you out of it; wants a place,—talks himself into it.... Words make even them ’ere authors, poor creatures, in every man’s mouth. Augh! sir, take note of the words, and the things will take care of themselves.”

It is true that “lying words” are not always responsible for the mischief they do; that they often rebel and growl audibly against the service into which they are pressed, and testify against their taskmasters. The latent nature of a man struggles often through his own words, so that even truth itself comes blasted from his lips, and vulgarity, malignity, and littleness of soul, however anxiously cloaked, are betrayed by the very phrases and images of their opposites. “A satanic drop in the blood,” it has been said, “makes a clergyman preach diabolism from scriptural texts, and a philanthropist thunder hate from the rostrum of reform.”[9] But though the truth often leaks out through the most hypocritical words, it is yet true that they are successfully employed, as decoy ducks, to deceive, and the dupes who are cheated by them are legion. There are men fond of abstractions, whom words seem to enter and take possession of, as their lords and owners. Blind to every shape but a shadow, deaf to every sound but an echo, they invert the legitimate order, and regard things as the symbols of words, not words as the symbols of things. There is, in short, “a besotting intoxication which this verbal magic, if I may so call it, brings upon the mind of man.... Words are able to persuade men out of what they find and feel, to reverse the very impressions of sense, and to amuse men with fancies and paradoxes, even in spite of nature and experience.”[10]

All who are familiar with Dickens will recollect the reply of the shrewd Samuel Weller, when asked the meaning of the word monomania: “When a poor fellow takes a piece of goods from a shop, it is called theft; but if a wealthy lady does the same thing, it is called monomania.” There is biting satire as well as naïveté and dry humor in the reply, and it strikingly shows the moral power of language; how the same act may be made to appear in wholly different lights, according to the phraseology used to describe it. The same character may be made to look as spotless as an angel, or as black as “the sooty spirits that troop under Acheron’s flag,” through the lubricity of language. “Timidus,” says Seneca, “se cantum vocat; sordidus parcum.” Thousands who would shrink back with disgust or horror from a vice which has an ugly name, are led “first to endure, then pity, then embrace,” when men have thrown over it the mantle of an honorable appellation. A singular but most instructive dictionary might be compiled by taking one after another the honorable and the sacred words of a language, and showing for what infamies, basenesses, crimes, or follies, each has been made a pretext. Is there no meaning in the fact that, among the ancient Romans, the same word was employed to designate a crime and a great action, and that a softened expression for “a thief” was “a man of three letters” (f. u. r.)? Does it make no difference in our estimate of the gambler and his profession, whether we call him by the plain, unvarnished Saxon “blackleg,” or by the French epithet, “industrious chevalier”? Can any one doubt that in Italy, when poisoning was rifest, the crime was fearfully increased by the fact that, in place of this term, not to be breathed in ears polite, the death of some one was said to be “assisted”? Or can any one doubt the moral effect of a similar perversion of words in France, when a subtle poison, by which impatient heirs delivered themselves from persons who stood between them and the inheritance they coveted, was called “succession powder”?

Juvenal indignantly denounces the polished Romans for relieving the consciences of rich criminals by softening the names of their crimes; and Thucydides, in a well known passage of his history, tells how the morals of the Greeks of his day were sapped, and how they concealed the national deterioration, by perversions of the customary meanings of words. Unreasoning rashness, he says, passed as “manliness” and esprit de corps, and prudent caution for specious cowardice; sobermindedness was a mere “cloak for effeminacy,” and general prudence was “inefficient inertness.” The Athenians, at one time, were adepts in the art of coining agreeable names for disagreeable things. “Taxes” they called “subscriptions,” or “contributions”; the prison was “the house”; the executioner a “public servant”; and a general abolition of debt was “a disburdening ordinance.” Devices like these are common to all countries; and in our own, especially, one is startled to see what an amount of ingenuity has been expended in perfecting this “devil’s vocabulary,” and how successful the press has been in its efforts to transmute acts of wickedness into mere peccadilloes, and to empty words employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation they convey.

The use of classical names for vices has done no little harm to the public morals. We may say of these names, what Burke said with doubtful correctness of vices themselves, that “they lose half their deformity by losing all their grossness.” If any person is in doubt about the moral quality of an act, let him characterize it in plain Saxon, and he will see it in its true colors.

Some time ago a Wisconsin clergyman, being detected in stealing books from a bookstore, confessed the truth, and added that he left his former home in New Jersey under disgrace for a similar theft. This fact a New York paper noted under the head of “A Peculiar Misfortune.” About the same time a clerk in Richmond, Va., being sent to deposit several hundreds of dollars in a bank, ran away with the money to the North. Having been pursued, overtaken, and compelled to return the money, he was spoken of by “the chivalry” as the young man “who had lately met with an accident.” Is it not an alarming sign of the times, when, in the legislature of one of our largest eastern States, a member declares that he has been asked by another member for his vote, and told that he would get “five hundred reasons for giving it”; thus making the highest word in our language, that which signifies divinely given power of discrimination and choice, the synonym of bribery?

Perhaps no honorable term in the language has been more debased than “gentleman.” Originally the word meant a man born of a noble family, or gens, as the Romans called it; but as such persons were usually possessed of wealth and leisure, they were generally distinguished by greater refinement of manners than the working classes, and a more tasteful dress. As in the course of ages their riches and legal privileges diminished, and the gulf which separated them from the citizens of the trading towns was bridged by the increasing wealth and power of the latter, the term “gentleman” came at last to denote indiscriminately all persons who kept up the state and observed the social forms which had once characterized men of rank. To-day the term has sunk so low that the acutest lexicographer would be puzzled to tell its meaning. Not only does every person of decent exterior and deportment assume to be a gentleman, but the term is applied to the vilest criminals and the most contemptible miscreants, as well as to the poorest and most illiterate persons in the community.

In aristocratic England the artificial distinctions of society have so far disappeared that even the porter who lounges in his big chair, and condescends to show you out, is the “gentleman in the hall”; Jeames is the “gentleman in uniform”; while the valet is the “gentleman’s gentleman.” Even a half a century ago, George IV, who was so ignorant that he could hardly spell, and who in heart and soul was a thorough snob, was pronounced, upon the ground of his grand and suave manners, “the first gentleman of Europe.” But in the United States the term has been so emptied of its original meaning,—especially in some of the southern states, where society has hardly emerged from a feudal state, and where men who shoot each other in a street fray still babble of being “born gentlemen,” and of “dying like gentlemen,”—that most persons will think it is quite time for the abolition of that heartless conventionality, that pretentious cheat and barbarian, the gentleman. Cowper declared, a hundred years ago, in regard to duelling:

A southern newspaper stated some years ago that a “gentleman” was praising the town of Woodville, Mississippi, and remarked that “it was the most quiet, peaceable place he ever saw; there was no quarrelling or rowdyism, no fighting about the streets. If a gentleman insulted another, he was quietly shot down, and there was the last of it.” The gentle Isaiah Rynders, who acted as marshal at the time the pirate Hicks was executed in New York, had doubtless similar notions of gentility; for, after conversing a moment with the culprit, he said to the bystanders: “I asked the gentlemen if he desired to address the audience, but he declined.” In a similar spirit Booth, the assassin of Lincoln, when he was surrounded in the barn, where he was shot like a beast, offered to pledge his word “as a gentleman,” to come out and try to shoot one or two of his captors. When the Duke of Saxe-Weimar visited the United States about fifty years ago, he was asked by a hackman: “Are you the man that’s going to ride with me; for I am the gentleman that’s to drive?”

When a young man becomes a reckless spendthrift, how easy it is to gloss over his folly by talking of his “generosity,” his “big-heartedness,” and “contempt for trifles”; or, if he runs into the opposite vice of miserly meanness, how convenient to dignify it by the terms “economy” and “wise forecast of the future”! Many a man has blown out another’s brains in “an affair of honor,” who, if accused of murder, would have started back with horror. Many a person stakes his all on a public stock, or sells wheat or corn which he does not possess, in the expectation of a speedy fall, who would be thunderstruck if told that, while considering himself only a shrewd speculator, he is, in everything save decency of appearance, on a par with the haunter of a “hell,” and as much a gambler as if he were staking his money on rouge-et-noir or roulette. Hundreds of officials have been tempted to defraud the government by the fact that the harshest term applied to the offence is the rose-water one, “defaulting”; and men have plotted without compunction the downfall of the government, and plundered its treasury, as “secessionists,” who would have expected to dangle at the rope’s end, or to be shot down like dogs, had they regarded themselves as rebels or traitors. So Pistol objected to the odious word “steal,”—“convey the wise it call.” There are multitudes of persons who can sit for hours at a festive table, gorging themselves, Gargantua-like, “with links and chitterlings,” and guzzling whole bottles of champagne, under the impression that they are “jolly fellows,” “true epicureans,” and “connoisseurs in good living,” whose cheeks would tingle with indignation and shame if they were accused, in point-blank terms, of vices so disgusting as intemperance or gluttony. “I am not a slut,” boasts Audrey, in “As You Like It,” “though I thank the gods I am foul.”

Of all classes of men whose callings tempt them to juggle with words, none better than auctioneers understand how much significance lies in certain shades of expression. It is told of Robins, the famous London auctioneer, who in selling his wares revelled in an oriental luxury of expression, that in puffing an estate he described a certain ancient gallows as a “hanging wood.” At another time, having made the beauties of the earthly paradise which he was commissioned to sell too gorgeously enchanting, and finding it necessary to blur it by a fault or two, lest it should prove “too good for human nature’s daily food,” the Hafiz of the mart paused a moment, and reluctantly added: “But candor compels me to add, gentlemen, that there are two drawbacks to this splendid property,—the litter of the rose leaves and the noise of the nightingales.”

It is hardly possible to estimate the mischief which is done to society by the debasement of its language in the various ways we have indicated. When the only words we have by which to designate the personifications of nobleness, manliness, courtesy and truth are systematically applied to all that is contemptible and vile, who can doubt that these high qualities themselves will ultimately share in the debasement to which their proper names are subjected? Who does not see how vast a difference it must make in our estimate of any species of wickedness, whether we are wont to designate it, and to hear it designated, by some word which brings out its hatefulness, or by one which palliates and glosses over its foulness and deformity? How much better to characterize an ugly thing by an ugly word, that expresses moral condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of some coarseness, than to call evil good and good evil, to put darkness for light, and light for darkness, by the use of a term that throws a veil of sentiment over a sin! In reading the literature of former days, we are shocked occasionally by the bluntness and plain speaking of our fathers; but even their coarsest terms,—the “naked words, stript from their shirts,”—in which they denounced libertinism, were far less hurtful than the ceremonious delicacy which has taught men to abuse each other with the utmost politeness, to hide the loathsomeness of vice, and to express the most indecent ideas in the most modest terms.

It has been justly said that the corrupter of a language stabs straight at the very heart of his country. He commits a crime against every individual of a nation, for he poisons a stream from which all must drink; and the poison is more subtle and more dangerous, because more likely to escape detection, than the deadliest venom with which the destructive philosophy of our day is assailing the moral or the religious interests of humanity. “Let the words of a country,” says Milton in a letter to an Italian scholar, “be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare but, by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of servility?”

Sometimes the spirit which governs employers or employed, and other classes of men, in their mutual relations, is indicated by the names they give each other. Some years ago the legislature of Massachusetts made a law requiring that children of a certain age, employed in the factories of that State, should be sent to school a certain number of weeks in the year. While visiting the factories to ascertain whether this wise provision of the State government was complied with, an officer of the State inquired of the agent of one of the principal factories at New Bedford, whether it was the custom to do anything for the physical, intellectual, or moral welfare of the work people. The reply would not have been inappropriate from the master of a plantation, or the captain of a coolie ship: “We never do; as for myself, I regard my work people as I regard my machinery.... They must look out for themselves, as I do for myself. When my machinery gets old and useless, I reject it and get new: and these people are a part of my machinery.” Another agent in another part of the State replied to a similar question, that “he used his mill hands as he used his horse; as long as the horse was in good condition and rendered good service, he treated him well; otherwise he got rid of him as soon as he could, and what became of him afterward was no affair of his.”

But we need not multiply illustrations to show the moral power of words. As the eloquent James Martineau says: “Power they certainly have. They are alive with sweetness, with terror, with pity. They have eyes to look at you with strangeness or with response. They are even creative, and can wrap a world in darkness for us, or flood it with light. But in all this, they are not signs of the weakness of humanity: they are the very crown and blossom of its supreme strength; and the poet whom this faith possesses will, to the end of time, be master of the critic whom it deserts. The whole inner life of men moulds the forms of language, and is moulded by them in turn; and as surely pines when they are rudely treated as the plant whose vessels you bruise or try to replace with artificial tubes. The grouping of thought, the musical scale of feeling, the shading and harmonies of color in the spectrum of imagination, have all been building, as it were, the molecules of speech into their service; and if you heedlessly alter its dispositions, pulverize its crystals, fix its elastic media, and turn its transparent into opaque, you not only disturb expression, you dislodge the very things to be expressed. And in proportion as the idea or sentiment thus turned adrift is less of a mere personal characteristic, and has been gathering and shaping its elements from ages of various affection and experience, does it become less possible to replace it by any equivalents, or dispense with its function by any act of will.”

To conclude: there is one startling fact connected with words, which should make all men ponder what they utter. Not only is every wise and every idle word recorded in the book of divine remembrance, but modern science has shown that they produce an abiding impression on the globe we inhabit. Plunge your hand into the sea, and you raise its level, however imperceptibly, at the other side of the globe. In like manner, the pulsations of the air, once set in motion, never cease; its waves, raised by each sound, travel the entire round of earth’s and ocean’s surface; and in less than twenty-four hours, every atom of atmosphere takes up the altered movement resulting from that sound. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are written in imperishable characters all that man has spoken, or even whispered. Not a word that goes from the lips into the air can ever die, until the atmosphere which wraps our huge globe in its embrace has passed away forever, and the heavens are no more. There, till the heavens are rolled together as a scroll, will still live the jests of the profane, the curses of the ungodly, the scoffs of the atheist, “keeping company with the hours,” and circling the earth with the song of Miriam, the wailing of Jeremiah, the low prayer of Stephen, the thunders of Demosthenes, and the denunciations of Burke.